Whiter than the Lily

10

Helewise had not expected that Josse would return from his journey to Galiena’s kin the next day; even for one who travelled as quickly as Josse did when need pressed, it would have been asking too much. She would, however, have welcomed his presence at Hawkenlye that day for it was the day they buried Galiena.

It was the third day since the girl’s death. The weather continued hot but now there was humidity in the air that spoke of a possibility of storms ahead. Small black biting flies had appeared — clouds of them — and it was not the time of year to leave a dead body unburied.

They interred her in the Abbey’s burial ground and, joined by the grieving husband, the servant lad and the woman, Aebba, the Hawkenlye community prayed all together for her soul.

Later, Helewise was sitting alone in her room when there was a knock at the door and, in answer to her quiet ‘Come in’, Sister Euphemia appeared.

‘I hope I am not disturbing you, my lady?’ the infirmarer asked.

Since Helewise sat before a table quite empty of ledgers, documents, parchments or anything else, the question was courteous but superfluous. ‘Not at all, Sister. I was thinking about Galiena.’

‘I have been, too.’ Sister Euphemia paused, then, as if only after reflection, went on, ‘I’ve had an idea.’

‘Oh, yes?’ Helewise looked up into the infirmarer’s lined face.

‘About how it came to be that she came to us to help her conceive when she was already pregnant.’

‘Yes, that’s rather what I thought you meant,’ Helewise murmured.

‘See,’ Sister Euphemia said, eagerness creeping into her voice, ‘I’ve been looking at it logically. If a couple that consists of an old man and a young wife have a job getting her with child, then you’d probably jump to the conclusion that the fault lay with the old man. Wouldn’t you?’

‘Well, you might,’ Helewise allowed. ‘It would seem the more likely explanation.’

‘Exactly! Well, supposing that’s what Galiena thought too? She knew a bit about herbs, so we’re told, so maybe she also understood the workings of her own body rather better than many young women. She might have known herself to be fit, healthy and regular in her courses and, that being the case, she’d have reckoned that the problem was with her old husband’s seed.’ Leaning forward confidentially, she said in a whisper, ‘They do say the vigour goes out of it when a man comes towards the end of a long, active life, if you take my meaning, my lady.’

From the way the infirmarer stressed active, Helewise was all too afraid that she did. Banishing firmly from her mind the picture of Ambrose in a succession of beds with a succession of women, bouncing away as if his very life depended on it, she said, ‘Indeed, Sister. Do go on.’

‘Well, what if this young wife truly wants to have a child, both to please her husband and for her own sake, and decides to take matters into her own hands? She was a comely girl, Galiena, and I would judge also a bright one. I don’t imagine she’d have found it too difficult to find someone suitable. Then all she has to do is admit the young man discreetly into her arms — swearing him to secrecy, naturally — and go on doing so until he’s done the trick for her and she knows herself to be pregnant. Then comes the really clever bit!’

Helewise, who had already guessed, did not want to spoil the infirmarer’s moment and so she said encouragingly, ‘Yes? And what is that?’

‘The lass begs to come here, to Hawkenlye, she takes the waters, prays a bit and goes off armed with a couple of Sister Tiphaine’s concoctions. She hurries back home, where she encourages old Ambrose into her bed as often as he’s willing to be persuaded, then, before a month’s passed, says, oh! How wonderful! I’ve missed my courses, my breasts are swelling like ripe fruit, I must be pregnant! Thank the Lord for Hawkenlye!’

Helewise nodded slowly. ‘And if the baby were to arrive a few weeks early she would merely say, as doubtless many a woman does, that the child was a little premature.’

‘Exactly!’ The infirmarer folded her arms, her face triumphant. ‘What do you think, my lady?’

‘I think it is entirely possible and quite likely,’ Helewise said. ‘But tell me, Sister, do you have anything to support this interpretation of events?’

‘Nothing whatsoever,’ Sister Euphemia replied cheerfully. ‘Other than two decades of experience of human beings.’

Helewise gave her a warm smile. She both admired and loved the infirmarer; for her skill, her tender care of her patients, for her wisdom. Most of all for the fact that, although she had seen the depths to which people could sink and the terrible harm they were capable of doing to one another, she did not condemn. She was happy to leave that to God and, even so, Helewise thought, Sister Euphemia would always expect God to understand that sometimes men and women just couldn’t help themselves and hope that He would not deal with them too harshly.

‘I never underestimate your experience, Sister,’ she said. ‘But I do not know how we should set about proving this theory of yours, though.’

‘I’m not sure we should try,’ the infirmarer replied. ‘The poor girl’s dead. Perhaps we ought to let her secrets die with her.’

‘Yes,’ Helewise said slowly. ‘It is only that I am thinking of whoever it is whose child she carried. If we are right and there was a lover, what will he be thinking now? Will he be waiting for her, expecting her return, worrying that, having got her pregnant, he is now to be dismissed totally from her life?’

‘He may not have wanted anything but to bed her,’ the infirmarer said shrewdly.

‘That is, of course, possible. Still, I cannot but help picturing him.’

‘You’ve a kind heart, my lady,’ Sister Euphemia said. ‘If you’re right, news will spread to the young lad soon enough, I would guess. Anyway, how on earth would we set about finding him to tell him?’

‘You are quite right, Sister, it would be impossible. And, indeed, we may have imagined it all wrong; Galiena may have been innocently pregnant by her husband and just not realised.’

‘Hmm. It’s always possible, as I said at the time.’ Disbelief was written all over the infirmarer’s face but she managed not to express it.

‘Thank you for bringing your thoughts to me,’ Helewise said. ‘As always, you reason soundly.’

‘That’s kind of you, my lady. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must return to my patients.’

‘Of course.’

Helewise sat deep in thought for some time after Sister Euphemia had gone. Then, making up her mind, she went to seek out three people.

First she found Ambrose. After burying Galiena, he had gone down to the Vale with Brother Firmin; he seemed to find comfort in the old monk’s kindly and undemanding company. Ambrose had announced that, together with his two servants who were attending him, he would like to stay on at Hawkenlye for a few days and he was welcomed as a guest with nobody asking him for an explanation. He had been offered the comfort of a bed up in the Abbey guest quarters, but he preferred, he said, to put up in the simpler accommodation down in the Vale with the monks and the pilgrims who had come to take the waters. A space had been found for him with the lay brothers, while Aebba and the young manservant were lodged in the pilgrims’ shelter.

When Helewise went to see Ambrose, he was sitting beside Brother Firmin and the carpenter, Brother Urse, while Brother Urse mended a rickety bench and Brother Firmin helped by handing him the tools. Seeing her approach, Ambrose got up and came to meet her.

‘My lady Abbess, were you looking for me?’ he asked.

‘Indeed. I was thinking, my lord, that nobody has yet informed your household of your wife’s death. Perhaps you would like to arrange to do this?’

‘It is a charitable thought, my lady,’ he answered gravely. Thinking for a moment, he said, ‘I could send the lad, I suppose, although I hesitate to make him the bearer of such bad news, for he is rough in his ways.’

‘I will ask two of the brothers, if you would prefer,’ Helewise offered, ashamed even as she spoke of her duplicity. ‘Safer, in any case, for two to ride together than for you to send your lad by himself.’

Ambrose studied her closely. Keeping her expression wide-eyed and innocent, she stared right back. Then abruptly he nodded. ‘Very well, my lady. Thank you.’

Then, as if such brief consideration of matters he preferred not to dwell on were more than enough, he gave her a brief bow and returned to the bench-mending.

Helewise next sought out Brother Saul and Brother Augustus. ‘Come with me,’ she said to them, ‘I have a job for you.’

As they walked either side of her back up to the Abbey, she explained.

‘I have told the lord Ambrose that I am sending you to his manor of Ryemarsh to inform his household of his wife’s death,’ she said quietly; there was nobody else on the path but, all the same, she felt the need to keep her voice down. ‘But in fact I want you to act as my eyes, if you will.’

‘What do you wish us to see for you, my lady?’ Saul asked.

She paused, trying to think how to phrase it tactfully while not giving away her suspicions; nobody but herself, the infirmarer, Sister Caliste and Josse knew that Galiena had been pregnant and she intended to keep it that way.

‘I wish,’ she said eventually, ‘that you try to gain an impression of the sort of life that was lived at Ryemarsh when Galiena was alive. Whether Ambrose and his wife were happy together, whether they entertained many visitors, whether either of them had close friends. Men or women.’ She tried to sound casual. ‘That sort of thing,’ she added lamely.

‘You want us to ask some clever questions of the servants and have a bit of a nose around?’ Augustus asked.

Saul began a reproof: ‘Gus! You must not-’, but Helewise put a hand on his arm to stop him. Giving Saul a smile, she then turned to Augustus and said, ‘Yes, Gus. That is precisely what I want.’

Josse returned to Hawkenlye the next day. He left New Winnowlands early and was riding through the Abbey gates as the community were in church for Sext. Leaving Horace in the stables — a young lay brother rather nervously took the big horse’s reins in Sister Martha’s absence — Josse decided that, while he waited, he would stroll off down to the Vale to stretch his legs.

There was a group of pilgrims in the shelter or, more accurately, just outside it, sitting in the shade of the chestnut trees. The noon sun was strong and all of them — there were five men, seven women and four children — looked exhausted by the sultry heat. Josse nodded a greeting and walked on to the monks’ shelter.

There he found Ambrose. The woman Aebba was with him; it seemed that she had just brought him fresh linen. She gave Josse a quick and, he thought, somewhat furtive glance then, at a nod from Ambrose, she hurried out of the shelter and off up the path towards the Abbey.

Josse said straight away, ‘I have visited your late wife’s kinfolk, my lord, and told them the news. They were greatly saddened, of course, and they send their condolences to you.’

Ambrose studied him. ‘Thank you, Josse,’ he said quietly. He sighed. ‘She is buried now, my poor young wife. The nuns will pray for her soul.’

‘God will hear,’ Josse said softly. ‘Rest assured of that.’

‘Hm.’ There was a pause, then Ambrose said, ‘I am staying on in the Vale for a few days. I find that it is peaceful here.’

And, Josse thought, you are loath to return to a home where there will never again be the light tread of Galiena’s swift feet. ‘I understand,’ he murmured. ‘I, too, always find solace in the very air of Hawkenlye. Especially down here in the Vale, where the pace of life seems less urgent.’

Ambrose smiled faintly. ‘It is the Abbess Helewise, I judge, who drives the ship forward,’ he remarked. ‘Down here, the monks have but to pray, care for the small needs of the pilgrims and perform what light duties crop up.’

Josse, too, smiled. ‘Aye. The Abbess told me when I first met her how dear old Brother Firmin once famously announced that the nuns were the Marthas and the monks the Marys. I am not sure,’ he added, lowering his voice, ‘that the Abbess, in her heart of hearts, entirely approves of a division of labour whereby the women do the work and the men gaze in rapt adoration on the wonders of the Lord.’

‘It’s the way of the world, Josse,’ Ambrose said. ‘Within the home, anyway, a good wife will work quietly and unobtrusively while her husband idles away his day in activities that really only serve to pass the time.’

He was, Josse was sure, describing his own life. His tone was ironic and, Josse realised, probably concealed grief. No wonder the poor man did not want to go home.

He said tentatively, ‘My lord, there is no limit on the length of stay here, you know.’

Ambrose looked up at him sharply. ‘You are suggesting I become a monk, Josse?’

‘No! I merely meant to imply that nobody here will urge you to leave until — unless — you are ready.’

Ambrose’s harsh expression softened. ‘Thank you. I did not mean to be offensive.’

‘You did not offend.’

They sat in fairly companionable silence for a few moments, looking out at the peaceful scene before them. Then, as a group of monks appeared in the Abbey’s rear gateway, setting out on the path down to the Vale, Ambrose said, ‘The Abbess has sent two of the brethren to Ryemarsh with instructions to tell my household of my wife’s death.’

‘A kind gesture,’ Josse observed.

‘Indeed. Most considerate.’

Was anything to be read in Ambrose’s strangely expressionless tone? Josse wondered. Did he suspect — as Josse, who knew the Abbess so well, instantly did — that there might be more to the offer than its superficial purpose?

I need to speak to her, Josse thought …

He turned to Ambrose. ‘I see that the community have finished Sext,’ he said. ‘If you will excuse me, I will go and report to the Abbess.’

‘Please, do so.’ Ambrose looked at him briefly, then resumed his silent contemplation of the view down the Vale.

With a hurried bow, Josse left the shelter and hurried away.

He tapped lightly on her half-opened door and her instant ‘Come in, Sir Josse!’ told him that, once again, she had known it was him.

‘It is the sound of your spurs, as I have told you before,’ she said as he entered the room; her head was bent over a heavy ledger and she had not even looked up.

‘Good day to you, my lady,’ he said.

She raised her head and her grey eyes met his. ‘Good day, Sir Josse. How are Galiena’s parents? Are they prostrated by the dreadful news?’

‘They are, my lady, although there is a rare strength in Audra, her mother, that I am sure will see them all through their grief. But there is much that I have to tell you.’

Drawing up the stool that was kept behind the door for visitors, he sat carefully down — it was rather a small stool — and told the Abbess all that he had learned.

‘Adopted!’ she breathed when at last he had finished. ‘Well, I suppose it is not so rare an occurrence. Raelf and his first wife were desperate for a child and, presumably, found some fecund family with a baby to spare.’ She sighed. ‘It is a tragic irony, is it not, that Galiena should have come to us for treatment for the same complaint, in Raelf’s first wife, that led to the girl’s adoption?’

‘Yes,’ he said slowly, following her line of thought, ‘except that Galiena was not barren.’

‘Yes, I know,’ she began, ‘I just meant …’ But, apparently deciding that line of discussion was not worth the bother, she said instead, lowering her voice, ‘Sister Euphemia postulates the existence of a young lover, who was engaged to do Ambrose’s work for him.’

‘Does she?’ Josse raised his eyebrows. The infirmarer’s suggestion was uncomfortably close to suspicions he had entertained himself and, after a moment’s thought, he decided to share them with the Abbess.

Getting up, he went to the door, opened it and looked outside, then closed it again. Then, stepping up to her table and leaning across it so that he could speak in a whisper, he said, ‘My lady, as I believe I told you, it was my neighbour, Brice of Rotherbridge, who took me to Ryemarsh.’

‘Yes, you did tell me. I thought I recognised the name and later I recalled from where. He, too, lost a young wife, did he not?’

‘Aye. When first I came to this region, his young wife Dillian had recently been killed by being thrown from a horse. They were involved, if you remember, in that business of the nun who died in the Vale.’

‘I remember,’ she said shortly. ‘So, Sir Josse, you were saying, this Brice introduced you to Ambrose and his wife?’

‘Aye. We dined at Rotherbridge and afterwards I was quite surprised when Brice said there were some friends he wanted me to meet. It was they who wanted to meet me, if I may say so without seeming to brag, because of my knowledge of Hawkenlye, but whatever the reason, I noticed that Brice was acting strangely.’

‘Strangely?’

‘Aye. He was tense, excited, as if he were expecting some thrilling event.’

‘And was he?’

He wondered if she were being deliberately obtuse; for sure, she was not helping him to put his vague suspicions into words. ‘Well, I’m probably guilty of accusing the innocent — and one of them is dead, so I’m speaking ill of the dead as well — but I did think that Brice might be behaving like a young lad in love because he was going to see Galiena.’

‘I see.’ Her expression gave away nothing of what she was thinking. ‘And when they were together, what did you think then?’

He shook his head. ‘I really don’t know. They seemed totally at ease with each other and, as far as I could tell, they spoke of everyday matters. Still, they might have been acting. After all, Ambrose was present, as well as me.’

‘I always thought,’ said the Abbess in a small voice, ‘that Galiena Ryemarsh was a woman quite capable of dissimulation.’

‘Did you?’ He was surprised at her words. ‘I can’t say that I did.’ But, as he spoke, he remembered — she had said something once before to the effect that men and women reacted differently to Galiena.

Now she was looking down at her hands as if she did not want to meet his eyes. ‘I have sent Brother Saul and young Augustus over to Ryemarsh,’ she said, ‘to-’

‘Aye, I know,’ he interrupted. ‘I have been to see Ambrose and he told me.’ He hesitated, then said, ‘I felt, my lady, that possibly you had some ulterior purpose in sending them?’

‘I did,’ she admitted. ‘Having had my discussion with Sister Euphemia, I wanted to see if they could discover what sort of a life went on at Ryemarsh.’

‘And whether anyone happened to notice the clandestine presence of a virile man such as Brice of Rotherbridge?’ he suggested.

She looked shamefaced. ‘I should not be suspecting such a thing, I suppose, but somehow we have to account for her pregnancy. I am sure that she knew she carried a child,’ she said with sudden vehemence. ‘She was, as we all keep saying, a skilled herbalist and an intelligent woman. And we must not forget that she utterly refused to have a physical examination.’ There was a short pause. Then she went on more quietly, ‘I hope by sending Saul and Augustus off on this enquiry — and it is with this that I justify my actions to myself — to discover who could possibly have wanted her dead.’

Her words reminded him of Sister Tiphaine’s potion. ‘My lady, I quite forgot to ask, and I deeply apologise. You are well?’ He peered anxiously at her. ‘You have suffered no ill effects from the remedy?’

She laughed, quickly suppressing it. ‘Sir Josse, I am fine,’ she assured him. ‘As I was quite sure I would be.’

‘It was a rash act,’ he grumbled.

‘I disagree,’ she replied, and he thought her tone was slightly frosty.

‘But-’ he began. Then he made himself stop. He did not want to argue with her. Anyway, she was Abbess here. He reminded himself that she was not accountable to him. ‘I am sorry,’ he said again.

And, more kindly now, she replied, ‘You are forgiven.’

‘So,’ he said after a slightly awkward pause, ‘we wait for Saul and Gussie to report on what they may find at Ryemarsh.’

‘Indeed.’

He moved away from her table and resumed his seat on the stool. ‘There is one final thing to tell you of my visit to Readingbrooke,’ he said. Strange, he thought, how the very thought of what he was about to say sent a faint shiver of dread through him.

‘What is it?’ She was staring at him curiously. ‘Sir Josse, you look quite worried! Whatever is it that you would tell me?’

‘Oh — my lady, I can’t say why it affects me so, but they told me the place where Galiena originally came from.’

‘And?’

‘It’s some small settlement over to the east of the Marsh and it’s called Deadfall.’

‘Deadfall?’

The name, he observed, did not seem to hold any fears for her. ‘Aye.’

‘And for some reason this disturbs you?’

‘Aye. The trouble is, I can’t understand why.’ He frowned deeply. ‘I have puzzled at it constantly and I know that, at some time, somebody told me something about the place. Something terrible.’

Her tone brisk, she said, ‘You have kin in Lewes, have you not?’ He nodded. ‘And I believe you told me that you spent some of your childhood there?’

‘Aye.’

‘Could it be that you heard tell of Deadfall then? Since the name appears to frighten you, perhaps somebody told a tale by the fireside on a winter’s night, a tale of ghosts and demons?’

He began to smile at her somewhat simplistic explanation but then, out of the shadows of the past, suddenly he remembered.

Had she not been an Abbess, he might have kissed her for having jogged his memory.

‘My lady, how clever!’ he exclaimed. ‘But it was not exactly as you suggest.’

‘It was only a flippant guess,’ she muttered.

‘It was my aunt’s maid,’ he said, hardly hearing her. ‘Or, in fact, the maid’s young man. He’d been at sea and he had stories of all sorts of places. He told of Breton kings and drowned cities, of Welsh dragons and wizards who could tell the future, of heroes battling for the hand of beautiful maidens. He told of raids on England’s east coast and of the ancient people who were here before the Romans came. He came from one of the ports on the edge of the Great Marsh and he knew of the old, deserted salt workings there. He’d picked up some colourful local tales, some of which I think, with hindsight, were based on much older legends. There was one about a Roman soldier-’ He broke off. ‘But no. It is Deadfall in which we are interested.’

‘Well?’ She was, understandably, beginning to sound impatient.

But still he was reticent. He’d been a child back then and the sailor’s over-graphic tale had turned his stomach. No wonder he had reacted to the mention of the name; he’d lost his dinner the last time he heard it.

The Abbess was waiting.

He drew a breath and said, ‘There was a pirate captain, so the story went, who caught a king unawares, slaughtered him, stuck his head on a pole and raped his daughter. Excuse me, my lady.’

‘It’s all right, Sir Josse, I asked you for the tale. Go on.’

‘Well, the king’s people gave him a fitting farewell, in a long ship buried in the sands of the foreshore, but that was not enough. They set a trap for the pirate and, when he sprang it, they found him and took him away.’

‘And?’

He swallowed. ‘They told him that they were a people who always avenged a wrong done to one of their own. Then they flayed him alive and impaled him on a pole at low tide. He did not die until several hours later, when the sea at high tide finally covered his face.’

‘A triple death,’ she murmured.

He wondered what she meant. ‘What did you say, my lady?’

‘Oh — nothing. And this event took place at Deadfall?’

‘Aye.’ One more thing suddenly came to mind. ‘The king that the pirate murdered was a Saxon.’

And, with a nod, the memory of the ancient tales and legends told to her long ago by her grandfather filling her mind, she said, ‘Yes. I thought he might have been.’