The Chatter of the Maidens (5 page)

‘I was only—’ Helewise began. But she couldn’t think how to continue. Anyway, was there any point in denying, to the observant and perceptive Euphemia of all people, the special place that Josse occupied in her heart?

Euphemia gave her another smile, one that brimmed with kindness and understanding. ‘Me, I’m puzzling over why a man with a severe wound in his arm should take it into his head to go riding his great horse at large obstacles, that’s all.’ She sighed. ‘Didn’t we
tell
him he was lucky to keep the arm, when the wound was first inflicted? Did we really need to say, make sure you don’t put it to the test until it’s fully healed?’ She shook her head, tutting under her breath at the ways of men.

‘Apparently we did,’ Helewise said. ‘He’s a man of action, Sister. It must have been hard for him, having to sit around like an invalid.’

The infirmarer gave her a shrewd look. ‘Especially when there were things on his mind,’ she said. ‘Things he was brooding over. A man of action, like you say, would look on a good gallop and a few challenging ditches to jump as a good way of taking himself out of himself. Yes?’

Helewise nodded. She, too, remembered how dejected Josse had seemed, back in the early spring. Joanna de Courtenay might have worked her magic to save his arm, but there were other legacies of that brief time in February which were not so readily healed.

But it was wiser, she thought, not to speak further of things best forgotten.

‘Was the whole dreadful cut infected?’ she asked Sister Euphemia. ‘Will healing be as long and as painful a matter as I fear it may be?’

‘Indeed, no,’ the infirmarer said. ‘That girl knew what she was doing, and the muscles and sinews have mended well. No, like I said, only one end of the wound – where it bit the deepest – was proving stubborn. And when the silly man went off hunting, he must have wrenched the arm and disturbed the scab. He let it get dirty, and some ill humour entered his blood. The result you saw this morning. Fever burning like hellfire and a bowlful of foul pus.’

‘Oh,’ Helewise said weakly. Euphemia, for all her great strengths and skills, did have a tendency to forget that everyone she addressed wasn’t as accustomed to the seamier side of nursing as she and her nuns were.

‘Abbess, dear, you’ve gone quite pale!’ the infirmarer was exclaiming. ‘Just you stay there and I’ll fetch you a restorative—’

‘Thank you, Sister, but there is no need.’ Helewise took a couple of deep breaths, and the light-headed feeling slowly passed. She met Sister Euphemia’s worried eyes. ‘May I see him?’

‘If you wish to, then of course,’ Sister Euphemia replied, sounding as if it were a surprise to have her superior ask permission. ‘Only I must warn you, he’s very deeply asleep. You don’t get a mere light doze, with poppy and mandrake,’ she added, half under her breath.

With a swift, silent prayer that she be able to keep her reaction and her emotions under control, Helewise accompanied Sister Euphemia over to the infirmary.

Josse lay as if dead, so deeply asleep that he did not so much as twitch.

Sister Euphemia bent down to put her hand on to his forehead. ‘Still hot, but not as bad as he was,’ she said.

‘The improvement continues?’ Helewise whispered.

‘Aye.’ The infirmarer smiled briefly. ‘No need to whisper, Abbess. Right now, he wouldn’t hear a battle cry.’

There was a strong smell on the air. Quite pleasant, but with elements oddly at variance . . . Helewise sniffed, trying to identify it.

‘We’re putting poultices on his arm.’ The infirmarer lifted a soft piece of cloth draped across Josse’s shoulders to demonstrate. ‘See, Abbess? Cabbage leaf to draw out the poison, lavender and self-heal to cleanse, crushed garlic to combat the yellow humours in the discharge.’

Lavender and garlic, Helewise thought. Not exactly an everyday combination of smells.

‘. . . prefer it if we’d had lavender flowers, and a few more self-heal leaves,’ the infirmarer was saying, ‘but Sister Tiphaine’s stock of fresh plants is still small, what with the poor weather and all, and, of course, lavender won’t be in flower for a while yet.’

The two women stood looking down at Josse for some moments in silence. Then the infirmarer said, with a slight and uncharacteristic tentativeness, ‘You reckon he’s looking better, Abbess?’

Helewise could have kicked herself. This excellent woman, her skilled and prized infirmarer, had been working herself to a standstill all day, and Helewise hadn’t given her a word of thanks or appreciation!

She turned to Sister Euphemia. ‘Indeed I do, Sister. And forgive me that I did not say so without prompting.’ She hesitated, wondering if to go on. Bearing in mind their relative positions in the community, she should really strive always to maintain her distance, even from the most senior of her nuns. But, on the other hand, there was nobody near to overhear. And Euphemia, as she well knew, was a woman to appreciate and honour a confidence. . . .

‘Sir Josse is a valued friend and ally of our community,’ she went on eventually, making up her mind. ‘We should all miss him grievously, were any harm to come to him.’ She took a deep breath. She was just starting to say the words, ‘especially me’ when Sister Euphemia touched her sleeve.

‘I know, Abbess,’ she said quietly.

And, for the first time in all that long day, Helewise felt tears in her eyes. Strange, she thought, turning away so that her coif hid her face, how often we manage to maintain our composure all the while we are tense and waiting for some dreaded outcome, only to break down afterwards, when it’s all over and the worst hasn’t happened.

Especially when some good soul says a few kindly words.

Sister Euphemia was being very tactful and bending down to test the poultice. Helewise took advantage of the moment, and wiped away her tears.

‘Will you leave your patient – indeed, all of your patients – and come with me to Vespers?’ she asked Sister Euphemia presently. The infirmarer was one of a handful of nuns who, when their duties necessitated it, were permitted to be absent from church for the canonical hours.

‘That I will,’ Sister Euphemia said. With one last look at Josse, she moved away from the bedside. ‘There are others who will watch while I am away, and I need to make my thanks.’

‘As do we all,’ Helewise agreed.

Sometimes, she reflected as the two of them left the infirmary and crossed to the church, joining in the file of all the other members of their community heading for their evening prayers, it was easy to forget.

To overlook the fact that the infirmarer, the nurses, all of them were but instruments. And that, no matter how skilled the hands, healing – not only for Josse but for all those poor souls in the infirmary who had survived to the end of another day – did not come from anywhere but from God.

With her heart light with the relief of Josse’s first step on the long road to recovery, Helewise humbly bowed her head before God’s goodness and went in through the church door.

 

For the next week, Sister Euphemia battled against the infection in Josse’s wounded arm. Although his fever never again rose to a burning heat that threatened his life, the encroaching inflammation in the wound refused to give up.

Brice and Will returned to their respective homes, apparently only partially swayed by the infirmarer’s assurance that Sir Josse would live. Will, his face intent, said to the Abbess as he left, ‘Pray for him, Abbess. The good Lord’ll listen to you.’

And she did. All the sisters prayed, the nursing nuns tried potion after potion, and still the battle was not won. Sister Euphemia, knowing full well what the loss of his right arm meant for a fighting man, nevertheless prepared herself for what began to seem the inevitable.

Then, after a mysterious absence that led to her doing penance for three missed devotions, Sister Tiphaine appeared one evening in the infirmary, a small earthenware pot clutched in her hand.

‘Try this,’ she said, thrusting the pot at the infirmarer.

‘What is it?’ Sister Euphemia had removed the cloth cover and was sniffing the contents of the pot. ‘Hmm. Smells quite pleasant.’

‘Something we haven’t yet tried.’ Sister Tiphaine seemed reluctant to meet her Sister’s eyes.

‘All well and good,’ Sister Euphemia said, ‘but what
is
it?’

‘Secret remedy.’ Sister Tiphaine gave her a swift grin. ‘They do say some of the magic goes, if the secret’s revealed.’

‘Sister, really, we—’ the infirmarer began. Then she made herself stop, instead thanking Sister Tiphaine with a brief bow and promising to try the new potion on her patient without delay.

It was ever Sister Tiphaine’s way, she thought a little while later, watching the sleeping Josse as if the potion would announce its efficacy straight away. She knows her herbs; there is no doubting that; but sometimes, such an air of mystery hangs about her that one would almost suspect she keeps one foot in the pagan past. Magic, she said. The secret potion possesses magic, which would be lessened by revealing its constituents.

Stop acting like a superstitious peasant and remember who you are! Sister Euphemia’s conscience rebuked her firmly. Bowing her head, she crossed herself and offered up to God a brief but sincere apology for wondering, even for an instant, if her strange herbalist Sister’s words could possibly have any validity. . . .

And soon, whether because of the Sisters’ prayers, the herbalist’s potion, the infirmarer’s devoted care, Josse’s own fortitude, or a combination of all four, the infection began to retreat.

Waking up one afternoon from a pleasant doze, Josse opened his eyes to see an unfamiliar face looming over him. A pair of bright eyes stared unblinkingly at him; fringed with spiky, dark lashes, they were the misty, slightly purplish blue of early bluebells. . . .

The girl whose pretty face they adorned was dressed in a simple gown of an indeterminate buff shade; her head was uncovered, and her thick dark hair sprang up in wild curls which, it appeared, had resisted the girl’s attempt to restrain them in a fillet.

Her youth – she could not have been more than about thirteen or fourteen – and her style of dress indicated that she was not one of the Sisters; even postulants at Hawkenlye wore black and covered their heads. And, Josse thought, amused, no postulant he had ever encountered had that amount of naughtiness and high spirits in her expression.

He said, ‘Who are you?’

The girl gasped. ‘Oh! You spoke!’

‘Aye,’ he agreed. ‘Did they tell you I was stricken dumb?’

‘No, of course not! They said you had been grievously wounded, and were only just beginning to recover, and that I must sit here and watch you, and, when you woke up, I must hurry and tell Sister Euphemia or one of her nuns, so I’d better do so.’

She leapt up from her half-crouch beside his bed, but, just in time, he shot out his left arm and caught a fold of her skirt. ‘Don’t hurry away,’ he said. ‘Stay and talk to me.’

‘No, I mustn’t!’ She looked horrified. ‘Sister Euphemia was adamant. The very
instant
he wakes, she said. Oh, please, she’ll have me shut up and put on bread and water for a week if I disobey!’

There was, he noticed, a sparkle in her eyes as she spoke; he had a swift impression of a girl who obeyed when she felt like it, but who was perfectly prepared to do exactly as she pleased when she didn’t, and hang the consequences.

‘Very well,’ he said, ‘off you go, then. But make sure you come back again.’ It would actually be no bad thing to see the infirmarer; his sudden lunge to catch at the girl’s gown, even though he had used his undamaged arm, had made him feel dizzy, and sent an angry shooting pain from his wound up into his shoulder.

‘I will!’ the girl was saying as she sped away. He heard her light voice calling as she ran, ‘Sister Euphemia! Oh, Sister, he’s awake, and he’s
talking
!’ before the infirmarer’s strict tones interrupted her with a carrying, ‘
Hush
, child!’

The girl was as good as her word. Some time later, when Josse had spent a painful time with Sister Euphemia, she came back. Josse’s wound, despite the infirmarer’s infinitely gentle touch, was still sending out red-hot waves of pain from the re-dressing; he no longer felt quite as much like cheery conversation as he had done earlier.

And the girl, bless her, seemed to notice. Crouching down beside him, she gave him a sympathetic smile. ‘Did it hurt
very
much?’ she asked softly. Then, as if she knew he didn’t really want to talk, went on, ‘I fell out of a tree once and cut my shin open on a rock. You could see right down to the
bone
, it was horrid, dead white and sort of shiny. I used to cry out loud when it was time to change the dressing, and my mother gave me—’ She stopped suddenly, and a look of pain crossed the lively face. Leaning closer to Josse, she whispered, ‘My mother’s dead. She caught the sickness and she died.’