A Mortal Bane

by Roberta Gellis

  “Don’ y’ do it, dearie,” Dulcie cried, shoving on the shutter. “He’s been locked up too long, he has. He’s gone all horny in th’ brain.”

  “Hush,” Magdalene said, barely choking back a laugh and putting her fingers over Dulcie’s lips. Then she added loudly, “Brother Paulinus is very holy. He does not wish to use our services.”

  Dulcie looked at her inquiringly, but since Magdalene had said what she did to pacify Brother Paulinus, she made no attempt to explain, only rushed to open the back door. As soon as she saw the sacristan, she had remembered what had happened the night before, which, half asleep as she was, had at first slipped her mind. It did not happen, she told herself, pretending to fumble at the lock with the large key. Last night was a night like any other, quiet. We worked; we talked; we had no guests. I am frightened only because the brother is so angry, because I do not understand what could have brought the sacristan of the priory here at this hour.

  The lock gave. Magdalene pulled at the latch and the door flew open, almost striking her. She jumped back with a cry.

  “I am so sorry Dulcie misspoke to you,” she gasped. “She is deaf and did not understand what you were saying to her. What can I do for you, Brother Paulinus?”

  “What can you do for me? Nothing, you filthy whore! To save your own soul, you can confess your crime and prepare to pay for it!”

  Magdalene’s jaw snapped shut. Despite many encounters with the monk over the years she had lived and worked in the Old Priory Guesthouse, and the fact that he was not alone in insulting her because of her profession, she could not quite come to terms with Brother Paulinus. Good intentions never held in his presence, and she never managed to act properly submissive. She did not know why others who said virtually the same things did not irritate her half as much.

  “Crime?” she repeated, raising her brows. “Everything I and my women do, including eat and breathe, is a crime to you, Brother Paulinus.” Only, this time there had been a crime, a real, terrible crime, not one of Brother Paulinus’s imaginary lewdnesses. Ignoring the sudden, cold hollow that formed under her breast, Magdalene kept her voice calm and indifferent. “Whoring may be a sin, but that is upon my soul; it is not a crime in Southwark.”

  “Murder is a crime anywhere!” Brother Paulinus roared.

  “Murder!” Magdalene did not try to hide the shudder that traveled over her. “Why do you speak of murder?”

  “A man has been murdered on the north porch of our church, only feet away from desecrating the holy precinct.”

  “How dreadful!” Magdalene breathed, tears coming to her eyes as she remembered the pleasant man who was dead. But she could do nothing for him now and quickly found an excuse for the tears. “How sad, that one should come to harm so near God’s sanctuary. I am sorry, but why carry this news to us with such urgency that you wake us near dawn?”

  “Because it is your doing!”

  “No!” Magdalene’s lips thinned to a narrow line. “In this house there is no violence. True, we cause the ‘little death,’ but that brings joy and both man and woman rise from that ‘death’ refreshed.”

  “Blasphemy! How dare you speak of rising from death in terms of fornication?”

  He waved his staff in rage, and Magdalene backed away down the corridor. He followed, but the staff struck a wall and he set it upright before him with a curse.

  Before she could speak, he shouted, “No! I know your tricks. I will not let you distract me. The murdered man came from your house and he died on the porch of mine. We are men of God. We do not kill. You are creatures of the devil, so corrupt that it drove you to madness when the man you had soiled with sin wished to cleanse himself. You crept out and stabbed him—and doubtless stole his purse, too.”

  Magdalene shook her head. “I do not know what you are talking about, Brother Paulinus. No man who visits this house ever comes to bodily harm through me or my women. We would soon be ruined if those who came here were robbed or died. Nor do we corrupt. A guest comes to us of his own free will. We do not sit by the gate or hang from the windows tempting passersby. I grieve that a man is dead, but it is nothing to do with me or mine.”

  “The man had to come from your house! The porter did not recognize him. Brother Godwine swears that the dead man never came through the gate, nor his horse, either. So he must have come from the back gate—from your house. Someone from your house followed him and stabbed him to death.”

  “No one went to the church from this house last night,” Magdalene said calmly. “And it is impossible for a horse to pass through the gate. It is too low and narrow. Last night was a night like any other. Sabina sang; Letice, Ella, and I embroidered. No one even went out after dark.”

  “You forget.” Sabina’s rich voice came from behind Magdalene. “I went out just around Compline. I sat in the garden and listened to the singing from the church.”

  Magdalene’s heart leapt into her throat and choked any protest. Was Sabina still so shaken that she felt she had to confess? She turned to face her woman and saw that Letice was standing beside Sabina, holding her sister whore’s arm.

  “You must have seen the man leave the house and go to the church,” Paulinus snapped, smiling in triumph. “You must have seen someone follow him. Which of the women was it?”

  Sabina gently removed her arm from Letice’s grasp and came closer, close enough for Paulinus to see her sealed eyes and that there was nothing behind the closed lids. He gasped and recoiled. Sabina smiled.

  “I saw nothing. I am blind. But my ears are very good. No one came out of the house while I sat in the garden, and certainly no horse passed me.”

  Magdalene let her breath ease out, but carefully. She did not want Paulinus to suspect she had been holding it.

  “You are lying,” Paulinus thundered, “adding to the black sin that stains your soul. You can still save yourself from damnation, from burning in an eternal fire, by confession.”

  “I am not lying,” Sabina said. “As you said, I would be a fool to lie and add to the burden of sin on my soul. This is the truth, every word. I sat alone in the garden from Compline until after the service was over, and no one came out of the house or passed through the garden with or without a horse while I was there.”

  This, Magdalene was sure, was perfectly true and she decided to add her own true lie. “None of my women had friends who stayed overnight last night,” she said. “I know, because I collect the charges for their lodging.”

  “If you do not tell the truth, you will all be damned! You!” He pointed at Letice. “Abandon the sinking souls of these other women. Save yourself. Tell me who followed the poor murdered man and slew him.”

  Letice stared back, shaking her head.

  “Contumacious woman, speak! I command you!”

  “I wish your command could take effect,” Magdalene said, struggling to maintain her gravity. “But I am afraid you will have as little success as that king who ordered the tide to stay. Letice is mute from birth and cannot speak.”

  “Is there no one in this house that is whole? The deaf, the mute, the blind—” His voice checked suddenly and his eyes gleamed. “And the weak-minded,” he added softly. “Where is your madwoman, whore? She will tell me the truth.”

  Magdalene’s heart sank. Ella had not responded either to the ringing bell or to the voices in the corridor. She might be asleep; more likely she had heard the monk’s angry shouts and was hiding in her bedchamber with the covers over her head.

  “Brother Paulinus, you know the prior has given special dispensation to Ella not to be questioned by the priest. However many years since her birth, she is still a child—”

  “A child as steeped in sin as any of you!” The sacristan’s eyes gleamed and a satisfied smile pulled his lips thinner. “The prior is not here, and the priory is in my charge until he returns. Where is your madwoman kept?”

  “Ella is not a madwoman and is not ‘kept’ anywhere,” Magdalene snapped, considering whether she should refuse
to allow him to question Ella. She dismissed the idea almost as soon as it came to her. A refusal to let Ella answer questions about matters of simple fact—rather than complex concepts, like the state of her soul—must raise suspicion even in less prejudiced minds than that of Brother Paulinus. She shrugged. “She is asleep in her chamber. I will awaken her and bring her to you.”

  “Stay!” Brother Paulinus ordered as she started to go to Ella’s doorway. “You will not put words in her mouth. I will go within and question her where she cannot see the signs you make to enforce her silence.”

  Magdalene felt the jaws of a vise closing on her throat. Had she relaxed her will, she would have panted like a terrified beast. Fool, she said to herself, you have been in much worse danger. Even if Ella admits there was still a guest in the house when she went to bed, no one can prove the dead man was that guest. She began a slow gesture toward Ella’s doorway, trying to remember whether Ella knew that the guest had intended to stay the night. More frightening was the fact that they would not know what Ella had told him and he could use her words to set traps for them. Unless….

  She forced her lips into a slow smile. “Alone?” she asked archly. “In a closed bedchamber with a known whore?” She lowered her eyes and found a soft laugh. “Oh, very well.” Her smile broadened. “That is her room.”

  “You would not dare!” Paulinus exclaimed.

  “Dare what, Brother Sacristan?” Magdalene asked blandly. “Speak the truth?”

  He glared at them. Magdalene managed to look puzzled. She knew that behind her Letice and Sabrina were wearing broad grins.

  “I will leave the door open, but none of you are to stand where the madwoman can see you.”

  “You desire that we stand witness to your questioning?” Magdalene asked.

  The sacristan snarled an affirmative and stamped through the doorway, shouting, “Get up at once. You cannot pretend to have been asleep. I know you heard us.”

  The women heard Ella utter a squeak of alarm, echoed by Brother Paulinus’s cry of consternation.

  “Cover yourself,” he roared.

  “You told me to get up at once,” Ella protested. “Everyone sleeps naked. Why did you not look away if you did not wish to see me?”

  All three women bit their lips. The danger that Ella might expose what they wished to conceal remained, but Brother Paulinus was going to discover that questioning her required a special touch.

  “Where were you last night?” he asked sharply.

  “Why, here, in bed,” Ella replied. “We never go out at night unless it is very hot and Magdalene lets us sit in the garden.”

  “And who was with you?”

  “No one.”

  Magdalene and her women held their breath, but Ella did not, as she might well have done, go on to explain that she had wanted the last guest but that he had chosen Sabina. Letice took one of Magdalene’s hands, Sabina took the other. All prayed that Ella had forgotten.

  “You must not lie to a priest,” the sacristan said, not shouting but slowly and carefully so that she would understand. “If you lie to me, you will be damned and burn for eternity, your flesh will be torn with nail-studded whips, your limbs will be broken and you will be forced to walk on them. Torments I cannot even name will be applied to you if you do not speak the truth to me.”

  Magdalene’s hands tightened on those of her women and she heard Sabina muttering a litany of curses under her breath. They could hear Ella sobbing. Tears formed in Magdalene’s eyes. The poor child would have nightmares.

  “I am telling the truth. I had no friend with me last night. Earlier—” She stopped abruptly, remembering that she was not supposed to speak about the men who visited them.

  “So there was a man here.” There was a vicious satisfaction in the sacristan’s voice.

  Magdalene edged to the door frame and peeped in, hoping that Ella would catch a glimpse of her and be less frightened. Poor Ella was trembling, and crystal tears rolled down her cheeks.

  “A…a friend was with me f-for a little while,” she stammered.

  “Oh, a friend? A man you do not know, had never seen before in your life, and will never see again? That kind of friend?”

  “Oh, no,” Ella said, blinking with surprise. “I know him very well. He has been my friend for a long time, several years, I think. And if nothing unusual happens, I will see him again on Friday.”

  There was a moment of silence, the sacristan being taken aback, but then he asked, “And your friend’s name?”

  To give a name, Ella knew, was absolutely forbidden, but the question did not trouble her. She would not need to lie. She never could remember the men’s names.

  “I do not recall his name,” she said earnestly. “Magdalene might be able to tell you, or she might not. Some men do not give their names. I—”

  “A friend of many years who still will not tell you his name?” He started to say he did not believe her and add to his threats about the results of lying to a priest, but Ella’s light laugh stopped him.

  “I was just going to tell you. I call him Poppe, and he calls me Little Flower. He brings me pretty things. See, I will show you. He brought me a blue hair ribbon yesterday.”

  The sacristan ground his teeth. “I suppose you do not know what this friend looks like either?”

  “Of course I know what he looks like,” Ella said indignantly. She had never been told not to describe the men she lay with. “He has good strong thighs with hard muscles, and a little round belly. But it is not all soft and flabby; it is firm and nice to kiss, with a line of hair growing down from his navel—that is nice, too, a neat little split, not bulging out like some. And the hair around his rod is—

  “Stop!” the sacristan roared, finding his voice, which seemed to have been suspended by shock. “Harlot! Whore!”

  Ella said meekly, “Yes?”

  Magdalene slid back out of sight, she, Letice, and Sabina pressing their hands against their mouths and grinding their teeth to hold back whoops of laughter. They were safe now. Ella’s mind was fixed on Master Buchuinte. The sacristan probably could not get her to think of anything else.

  “I meant his face,” the sacristan snarled. “What does his face look like?”

  “Face?” Ella repeated blankly. “It is a face like any other, not specially pretty nor specially ugly. A nice face; it smiles a lot.”

  Even the sacristan could see that she was trying to be helpful and describe the man, but it did not really matter what he looked like. The detailed description she had given of his body had already eliminated the possibility that she had slept with the dead man. The corpse, washed and prepared for burial, had been lean and hard.

  “A nice smile,” Ella continued brightly. “His lips are nice, too. Firm and not wet—

  “Enough. Now tell me what you did last night.”

  Momentarily, tension again seized Magdalene, and then Ella’s little-girl voice, sounding rather doubtful, said, “Poppe was here from about Nones until near Vespers. I am not sure I remember everything we did, but first—”

  Magdalene breathed again, bit her lip again when Brother Paulinus shouted, “No, not that. I mean, what did you do after your ‘friend’ left you?”

  “Oh, that is easy. I ate my evening meal and then Magdalene sent me to bed. I fell asleep right away.”

  There had been one danger point. Ella might have remembered flirting with the dead man, but Magdalene hoped she had put it out of her mind because she had been scolded for it. Apparently she had. Now there was only the possibility that the sacristan would not believe her and would tell her that another man had been there and ask more specific questions. But their luck held. Brother Paulinus had had enough of questioning Ella. She heard him mutter, “Stupid bitch,” and then the swish of his staff. Ella cried out, and Magdalene leapt into the room and seized the staff as he raised it again.

  “Ella has done nothing to deserve being beaten,” she cried. “She answered your questions as well as she cou
ld. You cannot beat her because she did not say what you wished to hear.”

  Paulinus yanked at the staff, but Letice and Sabina had also laid hold of it, and the sacristan’s breath drew in sharply at the expressions on their faces. The mute began to twist the staff, the blind woman following her motion. With a gasp of mingled rage and fear, Brother Paulinus let it go before they tore it from his hand. He pushed past them, then past Dulcie, who was about to enter the room carrying a large, heavy pan with a long handle.

  “How dare you!” he shrieked, turning to glare at them. “Your bold evil-doing is a result of the prior’s leniency. But you cannot threaten me or escape punishment for your crime.” He strode on, then stopped at the door and turned, smiling this time. “You have undone yourselves.” His voice was replete with satisfaction. “I have a friend close to the Bishop of Winchester, who is here in Southwark. He will tell the bishop what you have done. Threats! Whoring! Murder! You are already damned. Now I will see you all hanged.”

  Chapter Three

  20 April 1139

  Old Priory Guesthouse

  As the sacristan went out the door, all five women stood paralyzed, staring after him. When he slammed it behind him, Letice rushed to take Ella in her arms, brushing back her hair and kissing her.

  “Why?” Ella sobbed. “Why did he hit me? I did not lie to him. I did not!”

  “No, love,” Magdalene said. “You told the truth and you did not deserve to be hurt. You are a good girl, and he—despite being in holy orders—is a bad man. Do not cry, love. Come, wash your face and mouth and I will find a sweet for you to break your fast. Forget him.”

  She went and hugged Ella, too, and the girl blinked away her tears and smiled.

  “Are you all right now?” Magdalene asked. Ella nodded. “And can you wash and dress by yourself, or do you want Letice to help you?”

  “I can do it.”

  “Good, love. And when you are ready, go to Dulcie in the kitchen. She will give you a honey cake and milk.”