The Chatter of the Maidens

Chapter One

Josse d’Acquin lay sweating and groaning, wracked with pain and delirious with fever.

His body might have been safe in his bed at New Winnowlands, snug under covers that had been clean when he lay down even if they were now soaked in his sweat, but his mind was not recognising the fact. As far as his brain was aware, he was attempting to climb a harsh rock face, a heavy weight on his bare back and his arm extended below him as he tried to support the weight of a large pig.

The pig, for some reason known only to itself, was periodically lunging upwards, swinging level with Josse and burying its yellow fangs into the hot skin of Josse’s upper right arm.

Josse cried out, writhing in the damp bed linen, his aching legs tangling in the twisted sheet. The pig attacked again, fastening its teeth into Josse’s arm and letting go with its trotters so that its full and not inconsiderable weight hung entirely from Josse’s agonised flesh.

The pig looked at Josse and winked a surprisingly blue eye, and suddenly it began to rain, cold, delicious drops of water that splashed down abundantly, dislodging the grinning pig and bringing blessed, cooling relief for the pain. .

And Josse’s maidservant, Ella, with the air of one talking to herself, said quietly, ‘There, there, Master, just you rest easy, now, give that wound a chance to mend’ — she bent down to wring out the cloth in the icy water, then replaced it on Josse’s arm — ‘. . and, presently, I’ll bring you summat to drink and see if you’re up to me spooning you some broth.’

Awake and sensible now — or so he thought — Josse watched as the pig trotted away to the far corner of the bedchamber, where it circled a few times like a dog settling in its kennel, then lay down and began to whistle.

‘Ella, there’s a pig in the corner,’ Josse said. Funny, though, his words didn’t seem to have come out right. It sounded as if he had been groaning. He tried again. ‘Pig, Ella!’ he repeated.

Startled at hearing him speak, she looked up, flashed him a brief, shy smile, then swiftly returned to her wringing and bathing; she was a chronically self-conscious, unconfident woman, and Josse sometimes reflected that he could probably count the number of words she had ever addressed him of her own volition on the fingers of his two hands.

He tried again. Struggling to sit up — which proved unwise as it made his head swim so violently that he thought he would be sick — he waved his uninjured arm in the general direction of the pig. Following his pointing finger with his eyes, he began to say, ‘The pig, Ella. .’

Only to find that it had disappeared.

Ella gently took hold of his left arm and laid it back on the bed, pulling up the covers and arranging them around his chest. He wished she wouldn’t, he was far too hot anyway, without being tucked up like a sickly child.

‘I’ll be back directly,’ she assured him in a voice hardly above a whisper, then picked up her cloth and bowl and backed away from the bed and towards the door as if he were royalty.

Josse lay and listened to her heavy tread as she hurried down the narrow stair that led down to the hall. He heard her shout out to Will to inform him that he wasn’t to let on to the Master — silly woman, did she imagine that having a sore arm meant Josse had gone deaf, too? — but she was that worried, she feared Sir Josse was nigh on ready to expire of the fever. .

‘Fever,’ he murmured aloud. ‘Fever.’

It was actually quite a relief to know that he had a severe fever. Fevers brought delirium, didn’t they? And sweats, and dizziness that made you want to throw up, and weird dreams, and visions of imaginary pigs in the bedchamber.

Fever. That was all right, then.

For a short and rather dreadful time, Josse had been afraid he was going mad.

When he next woke, he judged it to be a little before dawn; there was a pearly quality to the darkness, which, if it couldn’t exactly be called light, seemed to suggest that the coming of the day wasn’t far off.

Josse lay and thought about dawns he had witnessed. But it demanded too much concentration in his weakened state; instead, he let his mind drift.

He realised that he felt different; the world had lost that strange, unreal quality that it had had for the past. . the past how long? Was it days, or was it weeks? For the life of him, Josse couldn’t decide.

I hurt my arm, he recalled. It had been hurt before — I was cut with a sword — and then it got better. I was treated, very expertly. .

Thinking about that brought a pain of another sort. A pain in his heart, in his memory. He abandoned those particular recollections.

The wound had been mending well, he thought instead. Or so I believed. I went out riding — did I? Is that right? Aye. Riding. With. . He frowned, trying to remember his friend’s name. Man with a wolfhound, wanted me to ride out with him, see the beast go through its paces. . And I took that ditch, down at the bottom of my own orchard, and old Horace spooked at something and very nearly threw me, except that I managed to hold on. But the jolting and wrenching tore into that cut of mine. And something must have happened to it, some foul air must have got at the open wound, because it went bad.

As full recollection returned — it was to prove only temporary — Josse remembered that the friend with the wolfhound was his neighbour, Brice, and that the pain in his infected cut had been so terrible, so unrelenting, that he had begged Will to lop the arm off and be done with it.

Remembering how bad the agony had been was not a good thing at all, Josse was quickly realising. Whatever reason there had been for the pain’s having abated somewhat now no longer applied; with the speed of an incoming tide on a flat shore, it came racing back.

And, as if that were not enough, accompanying it was a sudden heat in his blood that felt like being on fire.

Trying to call out whilst gritting his teeth, Josse yelled for Will. Or Ella. Or anyone. .

Brice of Rotherbridge, who owned the manor adjoining Winnowlands, had felt quite strongly about being roused from his bed before it was entirely light. Stomping down the hall to enquire of his man the reason for the summons, he had been informed that Josse d’Acquin’s Will was outside, at his wits’ end over his master’s sickness, not knowing where to turn or what to do, and. .

Brice had waited to hear no more. Flinging on his cloak, forcing his feet into his boots, he had been mounted on his horse, out of his own courtyard and riding into Josse’s in a shorter time than he would have thought possible.

Creeping into Josse’s bedchamber — it soon became apparent that there was no need for stealth, because Josse was not only awake but crying out with pain — Brice was horrified at the state of his friend.

He leaned over the bed — it smelt of sweat and sickness — and put a hand on Josse’s forehead. ‘He’s burning up!’ he cried, turning to look at Will, then at Ella. ‘How long has he been like this?’

Ella, sensing an accusation, buried her face in her apron and would not reply, but Will stood his ground. Squaring his shoulders, he said, ‘It were that day you went hunting together, sir. The Master nearly took a fall, and it tore open that cut in his arm, and-’

‘Yes, yes, yes, I know that, I was there!’ Brice interrupted. ‘I meant how long has he had this fever?’ Anger rising suddenly, he shouted, ‘Don’t you understand about fevers, either of you? Your master may be dying, and there you stand, useless as a pair of gargoyles and marginally more ugly!’

At this, Ella burst into tears and ran from the room. With one anxious glance after her, Will turned back to face Brice and said, ‘There’s no call for that, Sir Brice. Ella, she’s been wearing herself to a shadow, caring for Master, day, night, all the time. And it’s a’cause we don’t know what we should rightly do that I came to ask you.’ He was glaring back at Brice as ferociously as Brice was glaring at him; it was as a very obvious afterthought that he added, ‘Sir.’

Brice’s anger had gone as quickly as it had come. A hand on Will’s shoulder, he said, ‘I am sorry, Will. Please attribute my rudeness to anxiety. Apologise to Ella for me, too, please.’ Will gave a brief nod of acknowledgement. ‘Now,’ — Brice turned back to Josse — ‘what are we to do?’

Close beside him, Will whispered, ‘We’ve sent for the priest, an’ all.’

‘Father Anselm? Great glory, Will, do you expect your master to die?’

‘Ssshhh!’ Will hissed, although Josse seemed to be too far lost in his own world of pain to hear. ‘No, Sir Brice, indeed I do not, leastways, not if there’s anything me and Ella can do to prevent it. No, truth is, I do hear tell that the priest has some knowledge of healing, well, more’n me and Ella have.’

Brice was frowning. ‘Likely the good Father will hurry your master’s passage into the next world rather than heal him,’ he muttered. ‘He’s a blood letter, Will. Believes a good bleeding is the cure for everything from an overheated imagination to a dose of the pox.’

‘I’m sorry, sir, I only thought-’ Will began.

Again, Brice dropped a reassuring touch on Will’s shoulder. ‘You did what you thought best, Will, and no man can be asked to do more. No, I know what we must do for our Sir Josse here.’ He smiled briefly as the solution came to him. ‘Will, have you a cart long enough to let a tall man lie down comfortably? And a steady horse to pull it?’

‘Aye, Sir Brice, that we have.’

‘Then, please, go and prepare it. Put in pillows and blankets, whatever you think, and water for drinking and for bathing the patient’s burning skin.’

Puzzlement on his face, Will said, ‘How far are we going, sir? To what place?’

And, as Brice told him, a smile began to light up Will’s face too.

Josse, coming fleetingly out of his delirium, was surprised to see three men standing round his bed. Will he would have expected to see — Will and Ella had been unstinting in their care of him — but what was Brice doing?

And, even more unexpected, why was he receiving a call from Father Anselm?

‘. . must insist that I be allowed to treat him as I see fit,’ the priest was saying in his precise way, thrusting a bowl of what looked horribly like leeches in Brice’s face.

‘Like you treated old Sir Alard’s servant a few years back? Bled him till he was white as the driven snow?’ Brice yelled.

‘It was necessary,’ Father Anselm protested, ‘as indeed it is now!’

‘Alard’s man wouldn’t agree with you,’ Brice shouted back, ‘even if he could, from beyond the grave!’ As Josse watched, he gave a nod to Will and, approaching Josse’s left as Will went round to his right, added to the priest, ‘However, if you really do want to be of assistance, you can help us carry him downstairs to that cart out in the courtyard, and. . ’

But just then, as Will and Brice began to lift him, Josse’s attention was distracted. Because, gentle as his manservant and his friend undoubtedly were, the least movement was excruciating for Josse.

And being lifted, manoeuvred out of bed, across the room, down the stairs and out to the waiting cart involved rather a lot more than the least movement.

As they edged their way round the bend in the stairs, Josse passed out.

He came round to find himself looking up into a clear, spring sky, with the sun warm on his face and a skylark singing its heart out somewhere nearby.

He was in a cart and, beside him, Will was dozing, eyes closed, arms folded across his broad chest. Between Will’s knees stood a pail of water; aware all at once of how desperately thirsty he was, Josse tried to call out.

By the time Will woke up and heard, Josse’s desperation had grown so much that, humiliatingly, he felt like weeping; Will, tutting at his own carelessness and referring to himself by names not heard in polite society, gave him cup after cup of cool water, sponging his face and neck for good measure.

When Josse had been settled back down again, thirst slaked, it occurred to him to wonder where they were headed.

‘Will?’

Instantly Will stiffened to attention. ‘Master?’

‘Will, where are we going?’

A beaming smile lit Will’s face. ‘Why, Master, we’re going to the nuns. It were Sir Brice suggested it, and for the life of me I can’t think why me and Ella didn’t come up with it ourselves.’

‘The nuns,’ Josse repeated, thinking happily of shady cloisters, capable, attentive hands, clean, crisp linen and herby-smelling medicaments. ‘The nuns of Hawkenlye Abbey.’

‘Aye,’ Will said, nodding for emphasis. ‘That infirmarer sister, what’s her name-?’

‘Sister Euphemia,’ Josse supplied.

‘Aye, her,’ Will agreed. ‘We’re off to see her, sir.’ And, with a firm confidence which Josse entirely shared, Will added, ‘She’ll put you right in no time.’