The Poison Maiden

Prologue

‘What will you have to say for yourself when the wind no longer stirs your hair? When your gullet is dry and you can utter no word, your bloodless face is white and your eyes are set in their gloomy sockets? When your mouth cannot be moistened and inside it your tongue stiffens against the roof of your mouth? When blood no longer courses in your veins? When your neck cannot bend or your arms embrace? When your foot cannot take a step? What does that putrid dead body reply now? Let him say what vain glory has to offer him now. .’

I listened to Prior Stephen’s funeral homily on the man I had killed as I nestled in the shadow of the great rood screen in the cavernous nave of Grey Friars, the Franciscan house that lies between Stinking Lane near the Shambles to the south and the Priory of St Bartholomew to the north. I, Mathilde de Clairebon, also known as Mathilde of Westminster, in the Year of Our Lord 1360, the thirty-third year of the reign of Edward III, am still killing to protect myself. I have no choice. I am old and wasted, well past my sixtieth summer. My courses have long dried. My blood is sluggish, my bones ache, my muscles protest, but that is only the flower; the stem is still as strong and tenacious as ever, as is the root that defines me. The great Aquinas, quoting Aristotle, claims that ‘being’ is only being when it relates. Our relationships, he argues, define us, bring us into being and, in so many cases, make us murderers or the victims of murder. I am no different. I, Mathilde, formerly handmaid, henchwoman, counsellor, physician and even lover of Isabella, once Queen of England. Now I’m a relic, a survivor. Two years after my mistress died, I shelter amongst these cold grey stones. Isabella lies buried here in her marble sarcophagus, a majestic table tomb that stands in the choir to the right of the high altar. They buried her in her wedding dress, clutching the heart of her husband, Edward II, whose reign she so brutally ended. However, as in life so in death: Isabella also lies near the tomb of her great love, Mortimer of Wigmore, hand-fast in life, soul-fast in eternity.

The new father prior, the deliverer of sermons of doom, his fur-lined cowl framing a narrow, anxious face, favours me. He allows me to write my memories, my confession in a cipher only God and I understand. So close, so subtle is the cipher that even the most skilled clerk in the king’s secret chancery cannot understand it. They could spend their time in purgatory trying to break it, yet still fail. Oh, the king would love to know! He hungers for my secrets, whetted by his own mother’s fevered babblings as she lay in that cold, grim chamber at Castle Rising with the babewyns, griffins, gargoyles and other stone-sculpted grotesques staring down at her from the walls. She talked to those from the past. Names I knew well. I have watched them parade and posture in the sun before slipping into the dark: Philip IV, le Bel, the beautiful King of France; his helpmates, those demons incarnate, Marigny, Plaisans and Nogaret. Other sinister shadows gather. Chief amongst these is Clement V, pope, usurer and destroyer, shit-ting blood as he died, his corpse abruptly bursting into flames as it lay before the high altar of some church. Next to him, Edward of England screaming at the cross after his beloved Gaveston was executed. They all congregate: pictures, legends, frescoes in my mind. So many memories! Streets, havens of darkness, torchlight glinting on the weapons of hooded, visored assassins as they slip through a doorway intent on murder. Battlements prepared for war, packed with armures de fer, pots of flame brightening the darkness, the ominous silence broken by the creak of leather and the clatter of armour. Men, hearts full of fury, determined to hold fast against the dark mass of enemy approaching the walls. Churches with their hallowed light and shifting gloom; before their rood screens, coffins containing the corpses of the murdered, all draped in black and ringed by purple candles, tended by bedesmen telling their paternosters whilst in the shadow-filled transepts the priest is silently garrotted by those who plan more murder. Soaring castles overlooking battlefields soaked in bloody snow. Forests and woods alive with men moving silently round those they’ve left hanging from the outstretched branches of oak and sycamore. Towns burning. Gallows set up before cathedral doors. The pestilence slinking across a blighted landscape. The dead choking filthy ditches. The living on their knees in desperate prayer as Abaddon, the Angel of the Bottomless Pit, cuts the cords and empties the sack of God’s anger on to the land. I have also lived in a world of secrets, of amorous lechery thronged by the Judases and Losengiers, those betrayers of courtly love.

I may be dried and shrivelled as an ancient plum. My hair is grey and wiry, my skin a leathery brown; nevertheless, I have lived life to the full, drunk, even guzzled from the goblet of life. So why do I write? Well, every soul has its song, the very essence of its being, and this is mine. My confession to God. My discourse with myself. After all, aren’t the most intimate and enjoyable conversations those we have with ourselves? I have seen history unfold. I have watched in mounting apprehension God’s justice come to fruition. I have, the good Lord assoil me, witnessed the effect of that hideous curse Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Temple, hurled from the roaring flames and bellowing foulsome smoke that burnt his flesh to a cinder on the Ile-de-France and sent his soul fluttering like a dove towards God. A few words screamed out, yet that curse spread like a thick shower of arrows up and across God’s heaven, barbs cutting the air before falling on their victims. All this was helped by my mistress. She who became the Virago Ferrea — the Iron Virago, Isabella la Belle, the new Jezebel, the Destroyer of Kings, the Usurper of Princes, the Ouster of Thrones, the Shatterer of Lives, God’s anger incarnate. Isabella, mother of the one I call the Accursed, her son Edward III, bloody-handed, falcon-faced and hawk-hearted. Age has steeped him deep in villainy. He has drenched Europe in blood, blackened God’s sky with the sooty smoke of funeral pyres. Gog and Magog have risen and stalked the world. Edward and the Annihilation, the Great Pestilence, siblings who have roamed the earth hand in hand. Once I was a famous physician who witnessed all this; now I am a recluse, a pensioner no better than a servant girl. How times change! Fortune’s wheel spins so dizzily. Edward ordered me here to be with Isabella, his beloved mother, now interred beneath that cold, ornate sarcophagus.

‘As in life, so in death, Mathilde,’ he mocked, full red lips curling in derision. ‘Look at you,’ he hissed. ‘Grey-haired, grey-eyed, grey-souled. Yes, Grey Friars will suit you well. You have my permission to stay there. I could give you more, greater reward?’ He smiled and stroked my hair as if I was one of his limner hounds.

At the time I steeled myself. I stared over his shoulder at his Luparii, his wolf-men, the knights and clerks of the king’s secret chamber. They would have cut my throat if Edward had lifted a finger. Yet he dare not do that; well, at least not publicly. He probably knows what pledges I have lodged with powerful churchmen up and down this kingdom. They protect me. I smile, they have no choice! I know all about their secret lives. Edward recognises this. On that particular day he curled his finger round one strand of my hair, tightened it and pulled.

‘Mathilde,’ he whispered, ‘they say you were once beautiful.’

‘Sire, they say the same about yourself!’

‘Ever quick.’ He tugged on my hair again, then withdrew his hand. ‘Swift as a lurcher!’ he breathed. ‘I can see the traces of what you once were. Mother told me: your hair black as night, fair-skinned, tender-eyed, slender and willowy as a wand.’

‘Vanity of vanities,’ I mocked. ‘All things pass, sire.’

‘Then tell me, Mathilde,’ the king leaned closer so I could smell the fresh fragrance from his quilted jacket; his gold-ringed fingers edged towards my hands, the skin now dark and spotted like that of a toad, ‘tell me whom you trust.’

‘Put not your trust in princes,’ I quoted. ‘In mortal man in whom there is no help.’

The king drew back, amber eyes gleaming, lips whitespittled like those of an angry cat.

‘See,’ he quoted menacingly back, ‘they lie and wait for your life, powerful men band against you.’

‘I shall hide my face from them,’ I retorted, ‘and see what becomes of them, for they are a deceitful brood with no loyalty in them.’

‘Take your psalms, take your prayers!’ Edward taunted. ‘Go and wait for your God. Shelter in the shadow of Mother’s tomb, but remember, Mathilde, one day I will know the truth.’

‘What is truth?’ I smiled. ‘Pilate asked the same question, though he didn’t wait for an answer. In that way, perhaps,’ I taunted, ‘you do differ from him.’

‘I am no Pilate!’ he yelled. ‘No innocent blood sullies my hands.’

He would have struck me, but his gaze caught the gift, Isabella’s gift, I always wear: a silver brooch with a Celtic cross studded with gems that clasps my cloak. Edward’s clenched fist, his main de fer, hovered over me.

‘Go,’ he whispered. ‘I withdraw my love from you.’

He is so desperate to know the truth! Especially as he has wasted so many opportunities to discover it. He killed gentle Mortimer, gave him ‘a fair trial’, or so he proclaimed it: Mortimer was gagged throughout before being hanged at the elms overlooking Tyburn stream. Isabella never forgave her son for that, and Edward always regretted it. He could have learnt so much! My mistress certainly reminded him of that. For twenty-eight years she baited and taunted her ‘beloved son’ about her secrets. On her deathbed she deepened the murky, mysterious gloom by babbling feverishly about her life. She betrayed herself in words and phrases that flew like darts to sting the king’s pride.

I am old. I consider myself cunning. In truth, I can be as foolish as the next. I thought Edward would leave me buried alive in Grey Friars, for both I and the prior are solemnly bound by the king’s own writ. I am never to leave here. I was wrong. Edward is, if anything, his mother’s son, so any struggle with him is a l’outrance, to the death. In this case, mine. He decided that if he could not learn my secrets, perhaps he should close my mouth for ever so that no one else could either. So, back to that funeral of the man I killed. An anchorite arrived here, a self-proclaimed recluse, a hermit who called himself Rahomer. I was suspicious about him from the start. For fifty years I have dealt with the Judas coven, the traitors, the suborners, the perverters of the truth, spies of every countenance and kind. Despite Rahomer’s mildly ascetic looks, scrawny hair and watery eyes, I recognised the cuckoo in the nest. He did his best with his sanctimonious gaze, the prim set to his lips, his hands ever clutched in prayer. I am a physician; I study signs and symptoms. Rahomer was slender, a man who, by the colour and texture of his skin, the set of his teeth and the smoothness of his fingers, was a child more of this world than the next. The good brothers had no choice but to accept him. Anyone who came with letters close, confirmed by the secret seal of the king, carried complete royal approval for his arrival at Grey Friars.

Our pigeon-toed hermit made himself at home. He was granted the ancient anker-hold built into the south chancel wall of the priory church. It has two windows. The internal one overlooks the sanctuary; the other gazes out over God’s Acre with its decaying forest of crosses and headstones. Rahomer, dressed in brown and white like a pied friar, wandered everywhere, paternoster beads wrapped round his fingers. He proclaimed he was a lay brother dedicated to a stricter rule, so the Franciscans simply accepted him for what he pretended to be. Prior Stephen was different. From the occasional sharp glance at our sanctimonious toad’s pious gestures, Father Prior was not convinced. I certainly wasn’t. Now and again I drew Rahomer into conversation. I acted the witless old woman who wandered the friary eager to talk to anyone. I asked if he had ever read the Anciente Rewle, a spiritual reflection on the life of an anchorite. He replied that he had, but he stumbled over the words and his shifty eyes never met mine.

Now my chamber at Grey Friars is a cavernous, stark cell with crumbling stone walls, a stained raftered ceiling and a dusty floor covered with rushes. It stands off the small cloisters overlooking some wasteland, a deserted, quiet place. I would often sit near the cloister garth studying the grotesque faces of the gargoyles and wondering who they reminded me of. The good brothers were ever courteous. They left me alone. Master Rahomer did not. On occasions I’d return to find my papers had been disturbed. Someone had entered my chamber secretly, carefully sifting my belongings. I suspected, by mere logic, our self-proclaimed holy anchorite, so I brought him under closer scrutiny.

Rahomer was accustomed to receive visitors at the anker-hold window overlooking God’s Acre, men and women desperate for spiritual advice. They must have been, to consult that reed shaking in the wind. Ecclesiasticus is correct — pride and arrogance lie at the root of all sin. In my experience they are also the cause of many a spy being hanged. Master Rahomer concluded I was what I looked, a grey-haired, stooped old crone. Isn’t it strange how people dismiss the old as if they don’t even exist? He never reflected about me. I did about him. He had one constant visitor, a man garbed in brown fustian, obviously a royal clerk despite this clumsy disguise. Such intrusion I expected; murder I did not.

The anchorite arrived around the Feast of St Peter ad Vincula; by Michaelmas he was trying to kill me. Rahomer was a malicious soul, biding his time and striking silently. I eat in my own chamber; the refectorian leaves my food on a stone ledge outside. On that particular day I had attended solemn high mass. Afterwards I waited until the sanctuary was empty so I could approach Isabella’s tomb and talk to her, as is my custom, so I was delayed in my returning. When I did, I picked up the tray and studied the platter carefully. I have a horror of rats, a relic of the Great Pestilence as well as hideous imprisonment in a French dungeon. I recognised traces of my old enemy: the splayed five-clawed toes, the slight gnaw marks, the hard black pellets; my tray had certainly been visited by vermin. I was surprised: the refectorian always covered the platters with wooden lids, but on that occasion two of these were missing. I decided not to eat and left the food to be collected. I was about to enter my chamber when I heard a scuffling, a scrabbling in the far corner of the hollow-stone gallery leading down to the small cloisters. I plucked a walking cane from my chamber and went over to investigate. I poked and prodded. The scrabbling was repeated, followed by a hideous squealing, and a brown rat, thickset and furred, sped out of the shadows only to roll on its side, paws thrashing the air. It had been poisoned.

I returned to the tray. The bread and cheese had been left covered. I examined both but could detect no taint. The potage of meat and diced vegetables was cold. I sniffed the bowl, and immediately recognised an old acquaintance: the magnificent glistening purple monkshood. Its red berry smell conceals the most deadly poison, particularly the juice crushed from the roots and seeds. If consumed, monkshood scours the organs of the belly like a sharpened steel rasp. Master Rahomer, and I was sure it was he, had chosen well. What could I do? I am no pug-nosed brawler in a London runnel. My opponent had a soul as narrow as a coffin, hard black with malice, and a conscience unbending as iron. He intended to kill me, yet to whom could I appeal? Who would defend me?

Before Vespers that very evening, I stole round to the anker-hold. Rahomer was standing at the ledge, hacking at his teeth with a toothpick. His surprise and consternation at my abrupt appearance were both his judge and jury. I gabbled about how unwell I felt. Rahomer smiled, nodded understandingly and added that perhaps I should retire. I did, but not to my chamber. I returned to Isabella’s tomb. I leaned against the statues carved on its side and whispered my terrors and fears. I do not dread death; it is just that my confession must be made before I go. I crouched there in the shadows and waited for the reply. It came, Isabella’s voice echoing through my soul.

‘Mathilde, ma petite, I cannot defend you now. Nobody can, except yourself. This man will kill you, so strike first, strike hard!’

I went into God’s Acre and harvested a yew tree, its needles soft and fat, the berries shining red. I mixed up a paste. The following morning I stood by the priory postern gate and bought a bowl of sweetmeats from a baker taking a tray down to a nearby tavern. I mixed in the yew paste and left the bowl on the anker-hold ledge as a gift from some visitor or pilgrim. Rahomer ate it before Nones. He was ill before Vespers and dead before Matins the following morning. Sic transit gloria mundi — thus passes the glory of the world. To all intents and purposes Rahomer died of a falling sickness, a sudden failure of the heart. His corpse was dressed for burial and placed under a purple drape on a funeral trestle before the great rood screen. Father Prior sang the requiem mass and delivered that sermon. I listened to it scrupulously and helped shoulder Rahomer’s corpse out to be buried in the poor man’s plot. One day I will join him there, though at God’s invitation, not the king’s. I wondered if I should ask Father Prior to send a copy of his funeral homily to the court, but decided against it. You don’t cast pearls before swine!

Three days later Father Prior summoned me to a meeting in his wood-panelled chamber. I sat on a faldstool, aware of the faces of angels, saints and demons staring down at me from the paintings, frescoes and triptychs that decorated his parlour. He sat in a window seat, threading Ave beads through his fingers, a youngish-looking man, certainly a good one. I, Mathilde of Westminster, have, in the words of the old proverb, ‘lain down with wolves and woke howling’. I can recognise a wolf when I see one! Father Prior, however, was a good shepherd; he was truly concerned for me. He referred obliquely to the sudden death of Master Rahomer. I rose, walked over and pressed my fingers against his lips. He looked startled.

‘Father Stephen,’ I begged, ‘please do not ask about him. What you don’t know cannot harm you.’

He gently removed my hand. ‘Be careful, Mathilde. Tomorrow, the Feast of St Dionysius, Magister Theobald, Advocatus Regis, one of the king’s most skilled lawyers, a priest of the Royal Chapel, is coming here to question you.’

‘Father,’ I stepped back and smiled, ‘he’ll not be the first.’

Magister Theobald swept into Grey Friars shortly after the Jesus mass. He demanded to see me in my own chamber with its thick walls and narrow windows; an eavesdropper would certainly have found it difficult to listen in. He was a porky man, with a balding head, his plump face shining with oil from the ripe fruits of good living. An urbane, cynical soul with pebble-black eyes and sensuous jutting lips under a sharp, hooked nose. He settled himself on the great chair that Father Prior had provided, while I, like some sinner come to judgement, perched on a cushioned footstool. He was arrogant, so I waited. A man deeply impressed by himself, Master Theobald had only one uncertainty: why someone as important as himself had been chosen to question someone like me. He soon discovered the reason.

‘Magister,’ I began, ‘why are you here? Why do you want to question me? On what authority?’

‘My child. .’

‘I’m not your child.’

‘My daughter. .’

‘I’m certainly not that, Magister, nor your sister, nor your mother.’

‘Mistress. .’ Magister Theobald breathed in deeply, nostrils flaring, eyes rounded. ‘According to the law-’

‘According to canon law,’ I interrupted, ‘this is church land. I am a relict in a priory of the Franciscan order.’

‘Why are you a recluse, Mathilde?’ Theobald shifted his ground.

‘Because I chose to be. Do you want to hear my confession?’

‘Why, Mathilde, are you in God’s grace?’

‘If I am, I ask God to keep me there. If I am not, I ask him to return me there. Do you want to hear my confession?’

Magister Theobald moved uneasily. He became more formal.

‘You are Mathilde de Clairebon, born near Bretigny?’

‘You know I am.’

‘You joined your uncle, Sir Reginald de Deynecourt, senior preceptor in the Order of the Temple. He was a physician general in Paris?’

‘You know that too.’

‘You acquired whatever medical knowledge you have-’

‘You make it sound like an insult!’

‘You did not attend a faculty of medicine?’

‘My knowledge of medicine is as great as any practitioner. It is based on observation and treatment.’ I smiled. ‘Take yourself, Magister Theobald. You like claret, hence the vein streaks in your nose and cheeks. You sit uneasy on cushions and wince slightly when you move: piles? The veins in your arse are extended. You have difficulty at the stool. You should drink more water and eat fresh fruit and vegetables not smothered in some rich sauce. You have wax in your right ear and sometimes the catarrh, hence you find it difficult to hear. You act as if you are confident, yet if so, why are your fingernails so frayed? What do you want me to tell you, Magister? How juice extracted from a bucket full of snails covered in treacle and hung over a basin during the night will cure a sore throat?’ I laughed. ‘There are practitioners of physic who would recommend that. Or if you have the gout, take a young puppy all of one colour, cut him in half and lay one side hot, the flesh steaming, against the soreness? Or a field mouse, skinned and made into a small pie, then eaten, its warm skin bound against the throat for nine days, will cure a cough? I can distil such a potion, though the cure will kill.’

Magister Theobald held up a hand. ‘Mistress, you were in Paris when Philip le Bel destroyed the Templars?’

‘Yes.’

‘He destroyed your uncle?’

‘Of course. I had to flee. My uncle thought the safest place was in the household of Philip IV’s daughter Isabella. She was about to travel to England to marry her betrothed, Edward, Prince of Wales.’

‘Were you safe?’

‘Philip and his coven, Marigny, Nogaret and Plaisans, overlooked me until it was too late.’

‘And you,’ Magister Theobald pointed a finger, ‘you waged war against them?’

‘I had no choice, as I would against any man who threatened me.’

Magister Theobald pursed his lips at that.

‘Do you believe the Templar curse?’

I stared back.

‘Were you not helped by a former Templar?’ Magister Theobald stared down at the small scrolls half concealed by the folds of his robe. ‘Ah yes, that’s his name: Bertrand Demontaigu — the priest-knight.’

I caught my breath. Just the mention of his name by another made me start.

‘You loved him?’

‘Yes,’ I replied slowly. ‘I say that because he is now beyond all temporal power.’

‘He was a priest?’

‘I loved him, Magister. Where is the sin, the crime in that?’ I leaned forward. ‘Have you ever loved, I mean truly loved?’

‘I am a priest.’

‘Where in scripture does it say that that stops you from loving?’

‘A scholar,’ Magister Theobald mocked. ‘Mathilde, you should have entered religion!’

‘I never left it.’

‘Taken vows.’

‘I have, as solemn as any sworn by you.’

‘Mathilde, Mathilde.’ Magister Theobald rose to his feet and walked across to stand over me. ‘Why do you not speak to the king?’

‘Is that why you are here, Magister, to learn what I know? To urge me to confess?’

‘To confess?’

‘Come, Magister.’ I gestured with my fingers. He leaned down, and I whispered in his ear one petty hint about Isabella’s great secrets. He drew away, pale, eyes all startled.

‘I don’t believe-’

‘Oh do, my child,’ I teased, ‘believe me. If you told the king what I have just told you, you would not live to see the first Sunday of Advent next.’ I shrugged. ‘An unfortunate accident, a contagion or something you ate, squeezing itself down your throat and depositing in your belly a feast of toads that, as you die, will rumble like a fire blocked in a chimney.’

Magister Theobald backed away and sat down.

‘I’m trying to protect you, Magister. Go back and report that I am as obdurate as ever.’

The king’s advocate wiped the sheen of sweat from his face. ‘The old queen,’ he muttered, ‘she babbled so much when she died.’

‘Leave that!’

‘One thing.’ Magister Theobald drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. ‘The Poison Maiden — who was she?’

‘Ah,’ I smiled, getting to my feet, ‘tell his Grace the Poison Maiden is not far from me, or indeed from him.’

Magister Theobald stared back, perplexed.

‘My child,’ I bowed, ‘I have said enough.’

I left and returned to the sanctuary, where I knelt beside her tomb, cooling my hot face against the marble. I stared down the nave and thought of the Poison Maiden. It was time to return to my confession.