The Dragon of Handale (35 page)

Pay attention, she warned herself when she heard a step outside.

Desiderata had followed her.

For some reason, she went cold.

The nun, her tight wimple framing her face as if it were in a vise, flitted past the window. A black wraith. Now there, now gone.

Hildegard went decisively to the door and flung it wide without waiting for her to open it. “Why, Desiderata!” she exclaimed. “I was just leaving. Have you come to clean the poor boy’s house? I’m afraid he was like most men and it needs a thorough scrubbing.” I can play her game, she thought when she saw the nun give a start and two pink spots appear on her cheeks.

“I believe the servants will be expected to clear up after him,” she said, dithering. “I hope it’s not too bad?”

“I’ll leave it to your expert supervision!” Hildegard swept out before she could reply and was out of earshot before the nun could stop her.

As she turned the corner onto the garth, she nearly bumped into Mariana. “Someone is already at the house,” she explained. “Let’s go elsewhere to talk. Follow me.”

C
HAPTER
32

Mariana was white-faced.

“So what are you going to do?” Hildegard watched as the nun paced back and forth across the floor of the mortuary. She had sent the attendant nun at vigil to the main buildings on an invented errand that no one would disturb them.

Mariana was aware of that. She made no answer. Instead, she began to tear in silence at her clothes. She ground her nails into the palms of her hands. She made no sound and her silent rage, slowly building, was worse than any ranting might have been. Her chest began to heave as she struggled for breath. Her mouth worked. Still no sound. Hildegard waited and watched, aware that her greatest kindness would be to allow Mariana to come to terms with the situation herself. And then be there for her.

The nun ripped off her head covering. She let the black fabric drop to the floor. Everything she did was in slow motion. After the head covering came the wimple. Her fingers groped behind her neck for the ties and she tore them loose. With a slow, dreamlike movement, she freed her hair from its constraints.

It was a gold colour, and it bristled due to the savage cut the Order demanded. She ran both hands over it, rubbed it hard, then put her head in her heads and began to weep.

Still she did not speak. Instead, she uttered a long, low moan and began to pull at her habit, tearing the tough fabric, wrenching it to free herself from its touch, as if it were contaminated with Venice poison. Kicking off her leather sandals, she fell suddenly to her knees in her shift and rocked back and forth, her arms clasped tightly around herself as she struggled for breath.

A word escaped her. Nothing more than a gasp.

Hildegard crouched beside her but did not interrupt her. She listened to the words that were now beginning to pour from the nun’s lips. Obscenities, curses, and those two words, over and over, “My baby, my baby…” on and on.

Hildegard rose to her feet. It was an ironic choice of place in which to give the nun the information that had been denied her. A death house. The two corpses still lay shrouded on the trestles, waiting for the coroner and burial.

Its incongruity could not be helped. She had expected Mariana to react strongly, and this was the best place possible, a private place where she could freely express her grief. And the dead cannot hear.

Then the nun began to howl. Her words became a long, unbroken scream. A curse on the man who had betrayed her. Curse after curse. The roof hollow reverberated with his name. Even the candles seemed to flicker with the energy of her rage. It seemed as if the sound would never stop.

Hildegard went to the door and looked out. The grey buildings that had contained Mariana’s anguish for so long were unchanged. She had half-expected to see them crumble at this rage against the misery that had existed within their walls for so long.

When she turned back, Mariana was weeping without making a sound. The first instance of her grief had abated. Tears glistened on her eyelashes.

Hildegard went to kneel beside her again. “Is there anything you want to ask me, Mariana?”

Mariana raised a wet face towards her. ‘How could he lie about me? Why would he hate me so much?” She tightened her lips in bewilderment. “I gave him everything. Like a fool. Like a blind, trusting fool. And all the time I meant nothing to him—”

“I’m sure he did not plan it like that.”

“Sure? How can you be sure? How can either of us know anything about the mind of a man like that? He used me for his own pleasure and cared not one whit for me. He consigned me to a living hell. I broke my vows because of him, because I believed his lies. I believed he loved me. I imagined I loved him. I allowed him to absolve me from sin, when all the time I knew he was wrong. So I’m as much to blame; I accept that. But it was he, older, with such authority, such power—”

“And you were just a young girl, no more than nineteen, knowing little of the world, and—”

“And trusting him to take care of me—because I thought he loved me—because of my vanity? It must have been my wickedness, my lewdness, that led him astray—”

“Don’t shoulder all the blame yourself, Mariana. He was your superior, a man you were supposed to revere, and he seduced you, led you where he wanted you to go—”

“I thought he knew everything about godliness, understood everything, loved everything. Loved me.”

“When he was still lord bishop of the diocese—I mean still alive, available—then you might have asked him what had prompted him to forget his vows so completely, but even if he understood the darkest corners of his own mind, he still might have been unable or unwilling to explain. Everything comes down to speculation. It leads nowhere. It’s best not to tread that path. He simply and weakly succumbed to desire.”

Mariana nodded. She regained some vigour. Her eyes were beginning to clear. She leaned back on her heels. “Things must be arranged with gentleness. My…” She hesitated. “My son must be told the truth very carefully. And then a visit must be arranged.” She clasped her hands to her breast. “I’ll meet him! Hold him in my arms! A living, breathing creature! Is it a miracle? I cannot believe”—she held out one trembling hand—“I cannot believe that this blood flowing through my veins also flows through his. Flesh of my flesh, my beloved child.”

Hildegard’s first impression of Mariana had been of a fierce, cold woman, unbalanced by the harshness of the regimen at Handale, but now she saw a side that must have been hidden for years.

After some little time when they had knelt together and talked about her son, a three-year-old in the care of monks at Furness Abbey, her eyes shone with love for the little creature she had held once, briefly, after giving birth in the sordid conditions of a penitential cell.

She was already making plans when, rearranging her torn garments, they left the mortuary together.

Hildegard had promised to accompany Mariana to Basilda’s parlour. To be an advocate if she needed one. Already, Mariana had made the big decision to leave the Order. To regain custody of her child. To plan a future that would be free of lies and punishment.

The prioress was in her chair, as usual. Mariana told her what had changed. She uttered no words of recrimination against Basilda. None would have been appropriate, as what had happened had been under the rule of the previous prioress, the one now enjoying a comfortable life as a corrodian at St. Mary’s Abbey in York.

Basilda’s small, sharp eyes flickered towards Hildegard and she nodded once as she took in what Mariana was saying.

The hawk on its perch danced back and forth and the prioress took it onto her wrist and began to stroke the bird’s head with one finger. Hildegard was reminded of Archbishop Neville. In defeat, he had sought solace in the care bestowed on his hawk, too.

Eventually, Basilda gave a huge sigh that shook her jowls. “And you, Mistress York, with your useful facility in reading texts, will no doubt have read those other texts between Master Fulke and myself?” She rested a challenging glare on Hildegard, who nodded.

“But you have told no one?”

Hildegard shook her head.

“I trust this reticence will continue?” Basilda’s expression had something of pleading in it, which Hildegard was astonished to see.

Hildegard replied, “I have no desire to rake up matters that can only discomfort the living.”

Basilda turned to Mariana. “You may as well get out, then. Pack your things. Go to him. Praise God you have a son. There is no greater joy and duty than for a mother to care for her child.” She blinked rapidly, as if her eyes were filling up, then said sharply to Mariana, “I’ll write a letter to the abbot of Furness. You’ll find he’s a very different type than the man who fathered your child.” She beckoned to Hildegard. “As you’re so good with the pen, you can write what I dictate. Then we shall have only the matter of Northumberland to occupy us.”

“Is that so? I mean—” Hildegard faltered as she recalled how she had suspected the prioress of murdering the priest, her own son, and how now, unequivocally, that was unlikely to be so. And yet someone had made him a target, she was convinced. It could not have been accidental. “The death of”—she faltered again, glancing at Mariana, who was innocent of the truth—“The death of your priest,” she said tactfully, “is still unsolved.”

“You mean you believe there is some puzzle attached to it?”

“I do.”

“Was it not an accident?”

“Was it?”

“A careful boy. Difficult to believe he could ever be careless, the discipline of his upbringing—” Basilda looked confused. “And not death by his own hand, either. A great sin. Not to be countenanced. And he was looking forward to the fight over his inheritance.”

Hildegard said, “I believe the manner of his death is open to question.”

Basilda sent Mariana upstairs to fetch the writing implements. While she was out of hearing, the prioress turned to Hildegard.

“Tell me bluntly. You think he was murdered?”

“I believe it’s a possibility.”

“That’s what Josiana, my cellaress, believes, too.” Tears again came into her eyes and brimmed on the folds of flesh beneath. “He was harmless. He would never have won Kilton. He knew it. But he was looking forward to testing his mettle against the men of law. He thought to prove himself to delete the dishonour of his birth. He was no pawn in Northumberland’s power games, no use to Bolingbroke. Fulke was aware of that. So why would anybody have wanted him dead?”

A note of determination came into Basilda’s voice. “Do this one thing for me, Mistress York. Find his killer. And leave that person’s punishment to me.”

First impressions are often misleading, Hildegard thought, not for the first time, as she made her way outside after writing Mariana’s letter for her. Even when the plain logic of expediency led to an obvious conclusion, it often failed to take into account the ambivalent nature of the human heart. To see someone as black or white was no more than to regard them as characters in a morality play. It was not true to the light and dark of human nature.

To think she had secretly suspected Mariana and the prioress of harming the priest.

The matter concerning Northumberland was explained by Basilda before they left.

The earl had decided to visit Handale that very day. It was his own priory, one his family had endowed generations ago. Until now, he had taken no interest in it. With the roads free from snow, it was an opportunity, then, to pay a visit before returning north to his stronghold at Alnwick Castle.

At the same time, he would use the priory church for the blessing of the marriage between Harry Summers and the heiress of the Kilton lands. And dining this time, his chancellor and other relevant officials might as well give the accounts a casual once-over, nothing rigorous, of course, but an opportunity to get things straight should never be lost.

After Hildegard and Mariana left Basilda and crossed to the refectory, they found the place in ferment.

There was some merriment among the masons when the news about the earl was recounted by Hamo’s dairymaid, who had got it from the head kitchener shortly after the harbinger of the earl’s retinue had put in an appearance.

Apparently, he had announced, “A few demands will make his grace’s visit more tolerable,” and then produced a list of requirements as long as his arm. The earl, the conversi were relieved to discover, would not expect to be housed overnight. It would be a short visit only. Even so, it involved a wholesale scrubbing down of the kitchens. Conversi were seen on their hands and knees in all the places the earl was likely to set foot. The church shone. Incense was thick in the air.

The turmoil increased when, unheralded, bedraggled, and out of temper, the masons’ master, Sueno de Schockwynde, finally puffed in after his servant, leading a melancholy horse, and, not much later, was followed by his travel companions, the Durham coroner and his clerk.

They had set off a week ago, as soon as they had received the prioress’s message about Giles’s death, but then the snows had come and they had been halted halfway across the moors.

Schockwynde came across Hildegard in the warming room while everyone was at mass. He gave a double take. “Have you left the Order, domina—sister—I mean, mistress, is it?”

It showed how ruffled the master was after his journey, she thought, that he addressed her without the elaborate courtesies that so often brought him mockery from the rougher elements.

“My decision has not yet been made,” she admitted. “It’s a long story. For the time being, I’m known as Mistress York and would welcome your discretion.”

“It’s yours.” He bowed.

“But tell me, master, how did you fare over the moors in this weather? I hear you had to take refuge for a few days?”

“It was utterly and completely abominable,” he replied. “Not just because of the snow—that was trying enough—but also because of an event so vile that we are left with nerves shattered and our thoughts in disarray.” He turned to the coroner, who had just entered. “You would not disagree, Rodrick?”