The Sanctuary Sparrow

Chapter Nine

Dame Juliana tapped her way down the broad wooden treads of the stairs to the hall in good time on the following morning, determined to greet Brother Cadfael when he came after breakfast with all the presence and assurance of a healthy old lady in full command of her household, even if she had to prepare her seat and surroundings in advance and keep her walking-stick handy. He knew that she was no such matter, and she knew that he knew it. She had a foot in the grave, and sometimes felt it sinking under her and drawing her in. But this was a final game they played together, in respect and admiration if not in love or even liking.

Walter was off to his workshop with his son this morning. Juliana sat enthroned in her corner by the stairs, cushioned against the wall, eyeing them all, tolerant of all, content with none. Her long life, longer than any woman should be called upon to sustain, trailed behind her like a heavy bridal train dragging at the shoulders of a child bride, holding her back, weighing her down, making every step a burden.

As soon as Rannilt had washed the few platters and set the bread-dough to rise, she brought some sewing to a stool in the hall doorway, to have the full light. A decent, drab brown gown, with a jagged tear above its hem. The girl was making a neat job of mending it. Her eyes were young. Juliana’s were very old, but one part of her that had not mouldered. She could see the very stitches the maid put in, small and precise as they were.

‘Susanna’s gown?’ she said sharply. ‘How did she come to get a rent like that? And the hems washed out too! In my day we made things last until they wore thin as cobweb before we thought of discarding them. No such husbandry these days. Rend and mend and throw away to the beggars! Spendthrifts all!’

Plainly nothing was going to be right for the old woman today, she was determined to make her carping authority felt by everyone. It was better, on such days, to say nothing, or if answers were demanded, make them as short and submissive as possible.

Rannilt was glad when Brother Cadfael came in through the passage with dressings in his scrip for the ulcer that was again threatening to erupt on the old woman’s ankle. The thin, eroded skin parted at the least touch or graze. He found his patient reared erect and still in her corner, waiting for him, silent and thoughtful for once, but at his coming she roused herself to maintain, in the presence of this friendly enemy, her reputation for tartness, obstinacy and grim wit, and for taking always, with all her kin, the contrary way. Whoever said black, Juliana would say white.

‘You should keep this foot up,’ said Cadfael, cleaning the small but ugly lesion with a pad of linen, and applying a new dressing. ‘As you know very well, and have been told all too often. I wonder if I should not rather be telling you to stamp about upon it day-long - then you might do the opposite and let it heal.’

‘I kept my room yesterday,’ she said shortly, ‘and am heartily sick of it now. How do I know what they get up to behind my back while I’m shut away up there? Here at least I can see what goes on and speak up if I see cause - as I will, to the end of my days.’

‘Small doubt!’ agreed Cadfael, rolling his bandage over the wound and finishing it neatly. ‘I’ve never known you baulk your fancy yet, and never expect to. Now, how is it with your breathing? No more chest pains? No giddiness?’

She would not have considered she had had her full dues unless she had indulged a few sharp complaints of a pain here, or a cramp there, and she did not grudge it that most of them he brushed away no less bluntly. It was all a means of beguiling the endless hours of the day that seemed so long in passing, but once past, rushed away out of mind like water slipping through the fingers.

Rannilt finished her mending, and carried off the gown into Susanna’s chamber, to put it away in the press; and presently Susanna came in from the kitchen and stopped to pass the time of day civilly with Cadfael, and enquire of him how he thought the old woman did, and whether she should continue to take the draught he had prescribed for her after her seizure.

They were thus occupied when Daniel and Margery came in together from the shop. Side by side they entered, and there was something ceremonious in their approach, particularly in their silence, where they had certainly been talking together in low, intent tones on the threshold. They barely greeted Cadfael, not with any incivility, but rather as if their minds were fixed on something else, and their concentration on it must not be allowed to flag for a moment. Cadfael caught the tension and so, he thought, did Juliana. Only Susanna seemed to notice nothing strange, and did not stiffen in response.

The presence of someone not belonging to the clan was possibly an inconvenience, but Margery did not intend to be deflected or to put off what she was braced to say.

‘We have been discussing matters, Daniel and I,’ she announced, and for a person who looked so soft and pliable her voice was remarkably firm and resolute. ‘You’ll understand, Susanna, that with Daniel’s marriage there are sure to be changes in the order here. You have borne the burden of the house nobly all these years... ‘ That was unwise, perhaps; it was all those years that had dried and faded what must once have been close to beauty, their signature was all too plain in Susanna’s face. ‘But now you can resign it and take your leisure and no reproach to you, it’s well earned. I begin to know my way about the house, I shall soon get used to the order of the day here, and I am ready to take my proper place as Daniel’s wife. I think, and he thinks too, that I should take charge of the keys now.’

The shock was absolute. Perhaps Margery had known that it would be. Every trace of colour drained out of Susanna’s face, leaving her dull and opaque as clay, and then as swiftly the burning red flooded back, rising into her very brow. The wide grey eyes stared hard and flat as steel. For long moments she did not speak; Cadfael thought she could not. He might have stolen silently away and left them to their fight, if he had not been concerned for its possible effect on Dame Juliana. She was sitting quite still and mute, but two small, sharp points of high colour had appeared on her cheek bones, and her eyes were unusually bright. Or again, he might in any case have stayed, unobtrusive in the shadows, having more than his fair share of human curiosity.

Susanna had recovered her breath and the blood to man her tongue. Fire kindled behind her eyes, like a vivid sunset through a pane of horn.

‘You are very kind, sister, but I do not choose to quit my charge so lightly. I have done nothing to be displaced, and I do not give way. Am I a slave, to be put to work as long as I’m needed, and then thrown out at the door? With nothing? Nothing! This house is my home, I have kept it, I will keep it: my stores, my kitchen, my linen-presses, all are mine. You are welcome here as my brother’s bride,’ she said, cooling formidably, ‘but you come new into an old rule, in which I bear the keys.’

The quarrels of women are at all times liable to be bitter, ferocious and waged without quarter, especially when they bear upon the matriarchal prerogative. Yet Cadfael found it surprising that Susanna should have been so shaken out of her normal daunting calm. Perhaps this challenge had come earlier than she had expected, but surely she could have foreseen it and need not, for that one long moment, have stood so mute and stricken. She was ablaze now, claws bared and eyes sharp as daggers.

‘I understand your reluctance,’ said Margery, growing sweet as her opponent grew bitter. ‘Never think there is any implied complaint, oh, no, I know you have set me an exemplary excellence to match. But see, a wife without a function is a vain thing, but a daughter who has borne her share of the burden already may relinquish it with all honour, and leave it to younger hands. I have been used to working, I cannot go idle. Daniel and I have talked this over, and he agrees with me. It is my right!’ If she did not nudge him in the ribs, the effect was the same.

‘So we have talked it over and I stand by Margery,’ he said stoutly. ‘She is my wife, it’s right she should have the managing of this house which will be hers and mine. I’m my father’s heir, shop and business come to me, and this household comes to Margery just as surely, and the sooner she can take it upon her, the better for us all. Good God, sister, you must have known it. Why should you object?’

‘Why should I object? To be dismissed all in a moment like a thieving servant? I, who have carried you all, fed you, mended for you, saved for you, held up the house over you, if you had but the wit to know it or the grace to admit it. And my thanks is to be shoved aside into a corner to moulder, is it, or to fetch and carry and scrub and scour at the orders of a newcomer? No, that I won’t do! Let your wife clerk and count for you, as she claims she did for her father, and leave my stores, my kitchen, my keys to me. Do you think I’ll surrender tamely the only reason for living left to me? This family has denied me any other.’

Walter, if he had anticipated any of this, had been wise to keep well away from it, safe in his shop. But the likelihood was that he had never been warned or consulted, and was expendable until this dispute was settled.

‘But you knew,’ cried Daniel, impatiently brushing aside her lifelong grievance, seldom if ever mentioned so plainly before, ‘you knew I should be marrying, and surely you had the sense to know my wife would expect her proper place in the house. You’ve had your day, you’ve no complaint. Of course the wife has precedence and requires the keys. And shall have them, too!’

Susanna turned her shoulder on him and appealed with flashing eyes to her grandmother, who had sat silent this while, but followed every word and every look. Her face was grim and controlled as ever, but her breathing was rapid and shallow, and Cadfael had closed his fingers on her wrist to feel the beat of her blood there, but it remained firm and measured. Her thin grey lips were set in a somewhat bitter smile.

‘Madam grandmother, do you speak up! Your word still counts here as mine, it seems, cannot. Have I been so useless to you that you, also, want to discard me? Have I not done well by you all, all this while?’

‘No one has found fault with you,’ said Juliana shortly. ‘That is not the issue. I doubt if this chit of Daniel’s can match you, or do the half as well, but I suppose she has the goodwill and the perseverance to learn, if it has to be by her errors. What she has, and so I tell you, girl, is the right of the argument. The household rule is owing to her, and she will have to have it. I can say no other, like it or lump it. You may as well make it short and final, for it must happen.’ And she rapped her stick sharply on the floor to make a period to the judgement.

Susanna stood gnawing at her lips and looking from face to face of all these three who were united against her. She was calm now, the anger that filled her had cooled into bitter scorn.

‘Very well,’ she said abruptly. ‘Under protest I’ll do what’s required of me. But not today. I have been the mistress here for years, I will not be turned out in the middle of my day’s work, without time to make up my accounts. She shall not be able to pick flies here and there, and say, this was left unfinished, or, she never told me there was a new pan needed, or, here’s a sheet was left wanting mending. No! Margery shall have a full inventory tomorrow, when I’ll hand over my charge. She shall have it listed what stocks she inherits, to the last salt fish in the last barrel. She shall start with a fair, clean leaf before her. I have my pride, even if no other regards it.’ She turned fully to Margery, whose round fair face seemed distracted between satisfied complacency and discomfort, as if she did not quite know, at this moment, whether to be glad or sorry of her victory. ‘Tomorrow morning you shall have the keys. Since the store-room is entered through my chamber, you may also wish to have me move from there, and take that room yourself. Then you may. From tomorrow I won’t stand in your way.’

She turned and walked away out of the hall door and round towards the kitchen, and the bunch of keys at her waist rang as if she had deliberately set them jangling in a last derisive spurt of defiance. She left a charged silence behind her, which Juliana was the first one bold enough to break.

‘Well, children, make yourselves content,’ she said, eyeing her grandson and his bride sardonically. ‘You have what you wanted, make the most of it. There’s hard work and much thought goes into running a household.’

Margery hastened to ingratiate herself with thanks and promises. The old woman listened tolerantly, but with that chill smile so unnervingly like Susanna’s still on her lips. ‘There, be off now, and let Daniel get back to his work. Brother Cadfael, I can see, is none too pleased with seeing me roused. I’m likely to be getting some fresh potion poured into me to settle me down, through the three of you and your squabbles.’

They went gladly enough, they had much to say to each other privately. Cadfael saw the spreading grey pallor round Juliana’s mouth as soon as she relaxed her obstinate self-control and lay back against her cushions. He fetched water from the cooling jar, and shook out a dose of the powdered oak mistletoe for her to take. She looked up at him over the cup with a sour grin.

‘Well, say it! Tell me my granddaughter has been shabbily used!’

‘There is no need for me to say it,’ said Cadfael, standing back to study her the better and finding her hands steady, her breath even, and her countenance as hardy as ever, ‘since you know it yourself.’

‘And too late to mend it. But I’ve allowed her the one day she wanted. I could have denied her even that. When I gave her the keys, years ago, you don’t think they were the only ones? What, leave myself unfurnished? No, I can still poke into corners, if I choose. And I do, sometimes.’

Cadfael was packing his dressings and unguents back into his scrip, but with an eye still intent on her. ‘And do you mean to give up both bunches to Daniel’s wife now? If you had meant mischief, you could have handed them to her before your granddaughter’s face.’

‘My mischief is almost over,’ said Juliana, suddenly sombre. ‘All keys will be wrested from me soon, if I don’t give them up willingly. But these I’ll keep yet a day or two. I still have a use for them.’

This was her house, her family. Whatever boiled within it, ripe for eruption, was hers to deal with. No outsider need come near.

In the middle of the morning, when Susanna and Rannilt were both busy in the kitchen, and would certainly be occupied for some time, and the men were at work in the shop, Juliana sent the only remaining witness, Margery, to fetch her a measure of a strong wine she favoured for mulling from a vintner’s a satisfactory distance away across the town. When she had the hall to herself, she rose, bearing down heavily on her stick, and felt beneath her full skirt for the keys she kept hidden in a bag-pocket there.

Susanna’s chamber door was open. A narrow rear door gave quick access here to the strip of yard which separated the kitchen from the house. Faintly Juliana could hear the voices of the two women, their words indistinguishable, their tones revealing. Susanna was cool, short and dry as always. The girl sounded anxious, grieved, solicitous. Juliana knew well enough about that truant day when the chit had come home hastily and in the dark. No one had told her, but she knew. The sharpness of her senses neither denied nor spared her anything. Shabbily used, and too late to mend! The girl had been listening, appalled, to the quarrel in the hall, and felt for the mistress who had shown her kindness. Young things are easily moved to generous indignation and sympathy. The old have no such easy grace.

The store-room with its heavy vats of salted food, jars of oil, crocks of flour and oatmeal and dry goods, tubs of fat, bunches of dried herbs, shared the width of the hall with Susanna’s chamber, and opened out of it. This door was locked. Juliana fitted the key Baldwin Peche had cut for her before ever she gave up the original, and opened the door and went in, into the myriad fat, spicy, aromatic, salt smells of the pantry.

She was within for perhaps ten minutes, hardly more. She was ensconced in her cushioned corner under the staircase and the door locked again securely by the time Margery came back with her wine, and the spices needed to mull it to her liking for her indulgence at bedtime.

‘I have been telling this youngster,’ said Brother Anselm, fitting together curved shards of wood with the adroit delicacy appropriate to the handling of beloved flesh wounded, ‘that should he consider taking vows as a novice here, his tenure would be assured. A life of dedication to the music of worship - what better could he seek, gifted as he is? And the world would withdraw its hand from him, and leave him in peace.’

Liliwin kept his fair head bent discreetly over the small mortar in which he was industriously grinding resins for the precentor’s gum, and said never a word, but the colour rose in his neck and mounted his cheek and brow to the hair-line. What was offered might be a life secured and at peace, but it was not the life he wanted. Whatever went on inside that vulnerable and anxious head of his, there was not the ghost of a vocation for the monastic life there. Even if he escaped his present peril, even if he won his Rannilt and took her away with him, after more of the world’s battering he might end as a small vagrant rogue, and she as what? His partner in some enforced thievery, picking pockets at fair and market in order to keep them both alive? Or worse, as his breadwinner by dubious means when all else failed? We have more to answer for here, thought Brother Cadfael, watching the work in silence, than the rights and wrongs of one local charge of robbery and assault. What we send out from here, in the end, must be armed against fate in something better than motley.

‘A fast learner, too,’ said Anselm critically, ‘and very biddable.’

‘Where he’s busy with what he loves, no doubt,’ agreed Cadfael, and grinned at seeing Liliwin’s brief, flashing glance, which met his eyes and instantly avoided them, returning dutifully to the work in hand. Try teaching him his letters instead of the neums, and he may be less ardent.’

‘No, you mistake, he has an appetite for either. I could teach him the elements of Latin if I had him for one year.’

Liliwin kept his head down and his mouth shut, grateful enough, and from the heart, for such praise, greedy to benefit by such generous teaching, enlarged and comforted by such simple kindness, and desirous of gratifying his tutor in return, if only he could. Now that his innocence began to be accepted as a probability, however uncertain as yet, these good people began also to make plans for his future. But his place was not here, but with his little dark girl, wherever their joint wanderings might take them about the world. Either that or out of the world, if the forty days of grace ebbed out without true vindication.

When the light faded too far to allow the fine work to continue, Brother Anselm bade him take the organetto and play and sing by ear to show off his skills to Brother Cadfael. And when Liliwin somewhat forgot himself and launched into a love song, innocent enough but disturbing within these walls, Anselm showed no sign of perturbation, but praised the melody and the verses, but the melody above all, and noted it down briskly to be translated to the glory of God.

The Vesper bell silenced their private pleasure. Liliwin put away the organetto with hasty gentleness, and followed to pluck Cadfael by the sleeve.

‘Did you see her? Rannilt? She came to no harm by me?’

‘I saw her. She was mending a gown, altogether composed and in no trouble. You did her no harm. Yesterday, I hear, she was singing at her work.’

Liliwin released him with a thankful sigh and a whisper of gratitude for such news. And Cadfael went in to Vespers reflecting that he had told but the more welcome half of truth, and wondering if Rannilt felt much like singing this evening. For she had overheard the battle that sent Susanna away defeated, displaced, robbed of the only realm a parsimonious grandmother and sire had left her. And Susanna was the mistress who, if she had never shown her much warmth, had nevertheless kept her from cold, hunger and blows and, above all, had sent her to her strange marriage, so heretically blessed, and witnessed only by the saints whose relics sanctified her marriage bed. Tomorrow Susanna would give up the keys of her realm to a young rival. The little Welsh girl had a partisan heart, quicker to grief even than to joy. No, she would not feel like singing until tomorrow was over.

Rannilt crouched unsleeping on her pallet in the kitchen until all the house lights had been put out, except one, on which her attention was fixed. A miserly household goes early to bed to save lights and fuel, banking down the hearth-fire in the hall under small rubble, and snuffing all the candles and lamps. It was barely Compline, only just dark, but the young pair, quite full of each other now and cooing like doves, were happy enough to withdraw to their bed, and the others habitually fell asleep with the sun and awoke with it. Only in the store-room, showing a narrow chink of light downhill towards the kitchen, was there a candle still burning.

Rannilt had taken off neither shoes nor gown, but sat hugging herself for warmth and watching that meagre slit of light. When it was the only waking sign remaining, she got up and stole out across the few yards of hard-stamped earth between, and pressed herself against the narrow door that led into Susanna’s chamber.

Her lady was there within awake, tireless, proud, going between her chamber and the store, hard at work as she had sworn, resolute to render account of every jar of honey, every grain of flour, every drop of oil or flake of fat. Rannilt burned and bled for her, but also she went in awe of her, she dared not go in and cry aloud her grief and indignation.

The steps that moved about within were soft, brisk and purposeful. All Susanna’s movements were so, she did everything quickly, nothing in apparent haste, but now it did seem to Rannilt’s anxious ear that there was something of bridled desperation about the way she took those few sharp paces here and there, about her last housewifely survey in this burgage. The slight went deep with her, as well it might.

The faint gleam of light vanished from the slit window of the store-room, and reappeared at the chink of the shutter of the bedchamber. Rannilt heard the door between closed, and the key turned in the lock. Even on this last night Susanna would not sleep without first securing the safety of her charge. But surely now she had finished, and would go to her bed and take what rest she could.

The light went out. Rannilt froze into stillness in the listening silence, and after a long moment heard the inner door into the hall opened.

On the instant there was a sharp, brief sound, a subdued cry that was barely audible, but so charged with dismay and anger that Rannilt put a hand to the latch of the door against which she stood pressed, half in the desire to hold fast to something solid and familiar, half wishful to go in and see what could have provoked so desolate and frustrated a sound. The door gave to her touch. Distant within the hall she heard a voice, the words indistinguishable, but the grim tones unmistakably those of Dame Juliana. And Susanna’s voice replying, bitter and low. Two muted murmurs, full of resentment and conflict, but private as pillow confidences between man and wife.

Trembling, Rannilt pushed open the door, and crept across towards the open door into the hall, feeling her way in the dark. There was a feeble gleam of light high within the hall, it seemed to her to be shining from the head of the stairs. The old woman would not let anything happen in this house without prying and scolding. As though she had not done enough already, discarding her granddaughter and siding with the newcomer!

Susanna had half-closed the door of her room behind her, and Rannilt could see only the shadowy outline of her left side, from shoulder to hems, where she stood some three or four paces into the hall. But the voices had words now.

‘Hush, speak low!’ hissed the old woman, fiercely peremptory. ‘No need to wake the sleepers. You and I are enough to be watching out the night.’

She must be standing at the head of the stairs, with her small night-lamp in one hand and shielded by the other, Rannilt judged. She did not want to rouse any other member of the household.

‘One more, madam, than is needed!’

‘Should I leave you lone to your task, and you still hard at work so late? Such diligence! So strict in your accounting, and so careful in your providing!’

‘Neither you nor she, grandmother, shall be able to claim that I left one measure of flour or one drop of honey unaccounted for,’ said Susanna bitingly.

‘Nor one grain of oatmeal?’ there was a small, almost stealthy quiver of laughter from the head of the stairs. ‘Excellent housewifery, my girl, to find your crock still above half-full, and Easter already past! I give you your due, you have managed your affairs well.’

‘I learned from you, grandmother.’ Susanna had vanished from the chink of the door, taking a step towards the foot of the staircase. It seemed to Rannilt that she was now standing quite still, looking up at the old woman above her, and spitting her soft, bitter protest directly into the ancient face peering down at her in the dimness. What light the small lamp gave cast her shadow along the boards of the floor, a wide black barrier across the doorway. By the shape of the shadow, Susanna had wrapped her cloak about her, as well she might, working late in the chill of the night. ‘It is at your orders, grandmother,’ she said, low and clearly, ‘that I am surrendering my affairs. What did you mean to do with me now? Had you still a place prepared for me? A nunnery, perhaps?’

The shadow across the doorway was suddenly convulsed, as though she had flung out her arms and spread the cloak wide.

After those bitterly discreet exchanges the screech that tore the silence was so terrifying that Rannilt forgot herself, and started forward, hurling the inner door wide and bursting into the hall. She saw Dame Juliana, at the head of the stairs, shaken and convulsed as the black shadow had been, the lamp tilting and dripping oil in her left hand, her right clutching and clawing at her breast. The mouth that had just uttered that dreadful shriek was wrenched side long, the cheek above drawn out of shape. All this Rannilt saw in one brief glimpse, before the old woman lurched forward and fell headlong down the stairs, to crash to the floor below, and the lamp, flying from her hand, spat a jet of burning oil along the boards at Susanna’s feet, and went out.