Fortune Like the Moon

Chapter Eighteen

They put Olivar in the infirmary.

When Helewise had finished her prayer for Gunnora, he had straightened up, looked around him with an expression that suggested he didn’t quite recall where he was, then, remembering, had slowly slumped to the ground. His face in his hands, he said, in a tone which had torn into the souls of both those who heard, ‘She is gone. What is there left for me now?’

He had suffered some sort of collapse. Josse and Helewise, at a loss to know what to do, had half led, half dragged him up the hill to Sister Euphemia. Observing his extreme distress, she had prescribed a draught of her poppy mixture, strengthened with a little precious mandrake root. ‘It is best that he sleeps, for now,’ she said. ‘To give him some of the blessed oblivion is, I fear, really all that I can do.’ Her round face creased in concern. ‘It’s only a temporary solution, mind,’ she added practically, ‘the poor soul will find nothing changed for the better when he wakes.’

She found a corner of the infirmary for him, where he could lie screened by thin hangings, a little apart from the sights, sounds, and smells of the other patients. One of the nursing sisters placed a shallow bowl of full-blown roses by his head, and their powerful scent soon wove itself through the air. ‘Roses are good for grief,’ Sister Euphemia remarked, nodding her approval. As Olivar gradually relaxed into sleep, she stood over him for some minutes. Then, with a tender touch of her hand on his shoulder, left him.

Brother Firmin had presented himself and announced, although Sister Euphemia had given no indication of either wanting or needing assistance, that he had come to help her. He had brought a cup of the healing spring water for the patient. He waited patiently while Olivar was settled down, then, observing that Olivar had in fact gone to sleep, sent one of the sisters to fetch him a stool, which he placed at the foot of Olivar’s bed.

‘I will remain here,’ he announced to Sister Euphemia. ‘Yes, sister, I know full well that the young man sleeps. But it may be of help to him, in some way, that somebody is with him.’

Then, putting the cup of spring water carefully beside the roses, he closed his eyes, and, lips moving in silent prayer, he settled himself down to his vigil.

* * *

Josse had sought out Brother Saul and asked if he would make the journey to Rotherbridge. Brice had to be notified, and, this time, Josse felt that it was acceptable to ask another to set out on the errand. Josse had a suspicion that Abbess Helewise might prefer it if he were to stay at the abbey. He was trying, haltingly, to explain this to Brother Saul, when the brother put out a hand to touch Josse’s arm and said, ‘There is no need. I understand.’

Abbess Helewise, Sister Euphemia, Brother Firmin, Brother Saul, the unknown sister who had brought the roses, all of them, Josse reflected, so eager to help, so full of compassion, with willing hands, willing legs, hurrying to do what was asked of them, often before it had even been asked …

For the first time, it dawned on him what a good place Hawkenlye Abbey was.

* * *

Josse asked Abbess Helewise, ‘How did you know?’

They were back in Helewise’s room. She was sitting straight-backed in her usual place, but he had the impression that the effort of appearing normal was costing her dear.

She turned to look at him. She raised her bandaged right hand, waved it at him, then, with a wince, lowered it into her lap.

He shook his head incredulously. ‘You ran your finger round the edge of the plinth? To see, I imagine, if it had enough of an edge to cut someone’s throat?’

‘I did.’

‘Abbess Helewise, how reckless!’

‘Don’t you start,’ she flashed back, ‘I’ve already been reprimanded for my irresponsibility by Sister Euphemia, thank you very much.’

She managed to look both indignant and pathetic at the same time. Knowing her as he was beginning to, he knew the latter was not intentional; it was, he decided, the combination of her pale but resolute face and that damned great wad of wrapping on her hand.

‘Does it hurt?’ he enquired kindly.

‘It does.’

I’ll wager, he thought. It would have hurt badly enough before we staggered up here with a semi-conscious man. The dear Lord knows how that little adventure must have affected her.

He remembered his original question. ‘Actually, that wasn’t what I meant.’ It was better to change the subject, he thought, to talk about Olivar and Gunnora, than to risk undermining her courage by his sympathy. Not that it was easy to ignore her state; her face was very pale, and the wide brow beneath the starched white linen headdress was beaded with sweat. ‘I really wanted to know what made you suspect what happened,’ he ploughed on, ‘when I’d been doing my utmost to convince you that Milon was lying through his teeth and had killed Gunnora after all.’

‘I went down to speak to Brother Firmin about the resumption of our services for pilgrims,’ she began. ‘The devotions, and the distribution of the healing waters. Life has to go on, you know, and we’ve had so few visitors since the murders. There will be unnecessary suffering, all the time we do not throw open our doors to those in need. While I was down in the valley, I thought it was about time I made a visit to the shrine. I have been guilty of allowing my worldly preoccupations to interfere with my devotions,’ she said sternly.

Josse was about to say that he was quite sure the Lord would understand, but something about her expression made him change his mind. ‘Quite so,’ he muttered.

She shot him a glance, as if not entirely convinced by his bland reply. ‘I went into the shrine’ — fortunately, it didn’t seem that she was going to pursue it — ‘and I knelt to pray, right in front of the Blessed Mother’s statue. I noticed that the plinth seemed to be very shiny, as if someone had recently been polishing it.’ She bowed her head. ‘I know that I should have been concentrating on my prayers to Our Lady,’ she said, ‘but, as I said, I am easily distracted at present.’

‘Understandable,’ he remarked. ‘Wouldn’t any abbess be, with two suspicious deaths among her nuns?’

‘The very time an abbess needs to pray hardest for help!’

Oh, dear. She wasn’t in the mood for understanding. Didn’t, apparently, want to be released from her self-accusation. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘You were thinking how shiny the plinth was.’

‘Yes. I got up and had a closer look, and I could see a stain of some sort running underneath it, right at the point where it adjoins the rock wall into which it’s set. I touched the place, and the stain felt dry, sort of crusty. So I moistened the tip of my finger in the holy water and rubbed again. What came off was, I was almost sure, blood. I repeated the action, this time getting a good sample. Then there was no doubt.’

‘And you began to see what might have happened?’

‘I did. I thought of the steep, slippery steps, and, in my mind’s eye, I pictured that terrible wound in Gunnora’s neck. I saw that perfectly symmetrical cut. I’d always puzzled over that, hadn’t you?’

‘Aye.’

‘I mean, if you’re slitting someone’s throat, even with an accomplice holding them, surely you haven’t the time to make such a perfect cut?’

‘And nobody did,’ he said. ‘It was done by her falling against a circular edge. It is sharp enough?’

‘It is,’ she said with feeling. ‘I ran my forefinger gently around it, and almost sliced off the top joint. We must have it seen to — I must go and tell Brother Saul to close the shrine until we’ve done so, and he ought to send word to the silversmith immediately.’ She half-rose, as if she were going to go racing down to the vale there and then.

‘I’ll see to all that,’ Josse said hurriedly. ‘You have my word, Abbess.’

She looked doubtful.

‘My word,’ he repeated.

She bowed her head in acknowledgement, sinking back into her chair. ‘It’s sharper than any blade, you know, the edge of that plinth,’ she said. ‘For some reason, the silversmith cut off the skin of silver so that it overlapped the wooden platform. Only by a little. But it was enough to slice through flesh and sinew.’

‘She would have built up a great deal of momentum in her fall,’ Josse said. ‘Those steps are quite high, and she’d fallen from the top. Right on to that perilously sharp circle of metal.’ He shuddered.

Helewise must have noticed. ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? And just imagine that poor man, Olivar, trying to clean up. Believing it was his fault, that the woman he loved so devotedly was dead because of him.’

‘The only small amount of logic there may be behind that is that it was he who requested the meeting,’ Josse pointed out.

‘But I don’t think it was. When we were talking, he and I, down in the shrine, he said that it wasn’t what he wanted, that secret tryst. Furtive, he called it. I had the impression it was something they’d agreed on before she even came to Hawkenlye, that, one day, they’d meet up and she would leave again. Only he, I think, was envisaging arriving at the main gates for her, having me ceremoniously put her hand in his. Going to the shrine was, I’m almost certain, her suggestion.’

‘Why did she change her mind?’ Josse asked, although not in any real expectation of an answer. ‘Olivar’s a fine-looking man, a man of substance, what’s more, and she surely had no doubt of his love?’

Helewise was looking at him, one eyebrow raised in faint irony. ‘Don’t you recall what I said to you, in the course of our very first meeting?’

Most of it, would have been the honest reply; she had, he recalled, said quite a lot. But then he thought he knew what she meant. ‘I do. Gunnora, you said, was not apparently bothered by the vow of chastity.’

‘Indeed.’ She leaned forward, as if eager for his understanding. ‘I have noted it before in young women — not only young ones — who enter the convent. While in the world, they do not question the ways of the world; they know what their duty as women — as wives — is, and has to be. Whether they like it or not is irrelevant. But then, when they take the veil, suddenly all that changes. The realisation that, from the very day they join us, they will for ever more sleep alone, comes to some women, I assure you, as nothing but a vast relief. Gunnora, I strongly suspect, experienced that realisation. She did not want to be any man’s wife. Certainly not Brice’s, whom she never loved, and, she discovered, not Olivar’s either.’

‘Whom she did love?’ Josse asked. He was reeling slightly from what the Abbess had just told him. He wondered if she would have spoken so freely were she not suffering from shock.

‘Did she?’ Helewise leaned back in her chair. ‘I’m not so sure. I asked the same question of that poor young man, and he said that, in return for all his protestations, she once — once! — said she thought she loved him.’

More fool him, was Josse’s instant thought, for pursuing her so singlemindedly.

But he didn’t say it aloud.

‘Her death was an accident, pure and simple,’ he said decisively after a moment. ‘I can’t think that there is any necessity for him to be arrested and put on trial, since, as I see it, there’s no question of his being responsible for her death. And, with the remains of the bloodstains under the plinth, what really happened can be proved. Do you agree, Abbess?’

‘Yes, Josse, indeed I do.’ It was, he noticed abstractedly, the first time she had called him simply by his given name. It was a timely moment for a move to more intimate terms between the two of them. ‘We shall have to make our reports on the two deaths to both the Church and the secular authorities, I suppose,’ she went on, ‘but, like you, I feel that there is no guilt attached to Olivar. He is innocent of blame over Gunnora’s death.’ She paused, frowning. ‘But I do not think we shall ever convince him of that.’

‘We must!’ he said, horrified. ‘The poor man’s life won’t be worth living, unless we do!’

The cool grey eyes looked on him with mild pity. ‘Do you think he’ll ever find it worth living anyway, without her?’

‘Of course! He’s young, and she’s not worth grieving for! She-’

‘Every one of us is worth grieving for,’ she said quietly. ‘Yes, I know what you think of her, you who hadn’t even met her.’ He heard no reproof in her words. ‘I feel the same. She was cold, she was calculating, she used people and she was not worthy of Olivar’s love and devotion. But he thinks she was. He has waited several years to claim her, and his love seems to have grown despite the absence of any encouragement from her. Why, he hadn’t even seen her, until the night of her death, for the year or more that she had been with us here!’

‘I don’t understand,’ Josse admitted. He stared at her. ‘Do you?’

‘No.’ She dropped her head into the palm of her unbandaged hand, kneading at her temple with her knuckles. ‘Not really. Not that it makes any difference.’

‘Does your head ache?’ he asked sympathetically.

‘A little.’

He stood up, moving round to her side of the table. ‘Why not lie down?’ he suggested. ‘You’ve lost a lot of blood, you’ve solved a murder that wasn’t, you’re in pain from both your hurt finger and your head. Don’t you think it’s time, my dear Abbess Helewise, to admit you’re only human, and need a good, long sleep?’

Her head flew up at his words, and he thought she was going to tick him off for his presumption. But then, to his great surprise, she began to laugh. ‘I don’t see what’s funny,’ he said, quite offended. ‘I was only trying to help.’

‘Oh, Josse, I know!’ She had recovered her solemnity. ‘Between you and that old hen Euphemia, I don’t think I stand a chance of staying here at my post for the rest of the day. So I think I might just give in. I must admit, the thought of lying down somewhere quiet, with a pleasant breeze to cool me, and one of Sister Euphemia’s cold lavender compresses on my forehead, is increasingly appealing…’ She stood up, too quickly, and he caught her as she toppled.

‘Told you so,’ he murmured close to her wimpled and veiled ear.

‘I shall pretend I didn’t hear that,’ she remarked. Then, with her not inconsiderable weight leaning against him — she was, he’d noticed, broad-shouldered as well as tall — he helped her out of the room and across to the infirmary.