Music of the Distant Stars

by Alys Clare

  There was no time for detailed explanations, and I just said, ‘It’s Lady Claude. She’s had a fit.’

  One of the women caught sight of my hands and rushed towards me, her kind face full of sympathy. ‘She’s attacked you!’ she gasped. Then, with a scowl that I knew was not directed at me, she added, ‘I always thought it was only a matter of time before someone got hurt.’

  ‘Enough!’ barked Bermund. He was already halfway across the hall, racing off to Claude.

  I had to warn him. ‘Be careful,’ I shouted. ‘She is not in her right mind.’

  He paused, just for a moment, and looked back at me. He too, I realized, knew the true nature of Lady Claude de Seés. Was it only her equals who were so blind?

  The servant with the kindly face had wrapped her apron round the worst cut, on the back of my left hand, and, thanking her, I said, ‘We should go with him.’

  She looked very reluctant, but, brave soul that she was, she nodded. ‘Come along, Tilda,’ she said to the other woman, and the three of us hurried after Bermund.

  My heart was pounding. Each beat was sending a huge throb of pain through the blow on my cheek; I could feel it swelling up, and briefly I put my hand to feel it. I wondered if she had broken the bone.

  We reached the doorway to Claude’s sewing room. Bermund was standing there, so still that he might have been turned to stone. I rushed up to him, about to speak, to demand he go inside to help her, to restrain her . . . I did not know.

  And I saw why he was so still.

  She was sitting against the wall, her back resting on the Lust panel. The woman in the scarlet gown still lay there in her abandonment, her mouth open, her bodice splayed wide to show the pale breasts. Now, another patch of scarlet echoed the vivid gown; another gaping mouth parodied the woman’s arousal.

  Below her, Claude de Seés lay with her head fallen back against the colourful wools of the panel. Her mouth was open, and her dead eyes, half-closed, stared accusingly out at us. There was a deep cut right beneath her chin, narrow where it began under her right ear, wide and bloody as it slashed down across her neck. In her left hand she held the knife from her sewing bag.

  She had drawn it across her throat.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Bermund had sent men out to find Lord Gilbert and, as soon as he came puffing and panting back to Lakehall and heard what had happened, he ordered one of the men to take me home. ‘You have had a dreadful shock,’ he said, looking anxiously at me, ‘and you are hurt.’

  ‘But you have to know what happened, what she did!’ I protested. ‘I’ve got to explain!’

  He hushed me, kindly but firmly. ‘Bermund has already told me. He relayed to me all that you told him, and I will take what action is necessary.’ He sighed. ‘To think she has been living here, right here under my roof, with my wife and my children, all this time!’ He gave a shudder.

  I said quickly, ‘I don’t believe you or your family were in any danger, my lord. Lady Claude’s madness was limited and—’ I stopped, suddenly seeing again her eyes narrowed in hate and terrible vengeance. I couldn’t prevent the violent shudder that ran through me.

  He looked at me. ‘Don’t think about her now,’ he advised. ‘Go home, girl. If there are matters concerning her that I need to speak to you about later, I will send for you.’

  I bowed my head. I wanted desperately to get away and was more than ready to obey his command. ‘Very well, my lord.’

  I remembered then who was lying asleep in my aunt’s house. I think Lord Gilbert had forgotten, in which case it would not have occurred to him that I would have to break the news of Claude’s death to the man who had been going to marry her.

  As I hurried away from Lakehall and headed for home, I wondered what he would say.

  Of all the sad moments that followed on from what Claude had done, the worst was when I explained to Sir Alain de Villequier that his bride-to-be had murdered the woman he had loved.

  He was awake when I opened the door and went into the house, and I told him straight away. His eyes registered his shock and his horror. Then, covering his face with his hands, he wept.

  ‘I was out looking for her, that morning when you came to the hall to tell Lord Gilbert you’d found her body,’ he sobbed. ‘We’d arranged to meet in our usual trysting place, but she didn’t come. I waited all night, and I thought Claude must have caught her slipping out and locked her back inside that damned sewing room.’

  ‘I thought she was locked in every night,’ I said. ‘How did she get out?’

  He grinned briefly, the expression there and gone in a heartbeat. ‘She had a second key,’ he said. ‘She wheedled it out of old Bermund. She said it was in case she wanted to get on with her work when Claude wasn’t there. That night when she didn’t come out to meet me, I thought Claude must have discovered Ida’s key and confiscated it.’

  Edild was watching him. I was very afraid she would try to stop him talking, convalescent as he was, but she said nothing.

  ‘When you took so long to answer Lord Gilbert’s summons that morning, you said you’d gone hunting,’ I reminded him. ‘I, for one, believed you.’

  ‘I was hunting,’ he said softly. ‘I was looking for Ida.’

  My thoughts ran on. I remembered the day Ida was buried and saw in my mind’s eye the figures of Lord Gilbert, Lady Emma, Sir Alain and Lady Claude up on the low rise above the grave. ‘She was looking at you, when Ida was buried,’ I murmured. ‘Lady Claude, I mean. I was touched because I thought she was looking to you for the strength to get her through the ordeal of burying the girl who had been her seamstress.’ I knew different now; Claude, I had no doubt, had been watching Sir Alain like a hawk to see if he gave away his feelings for the dead girl.

  ‘Claude didn’t need anyone else’s strength,’ he said wearily. ‘She had more than enough of her own.’ Then, in a burst of passion, ‘I wish I’d realized that she was in the habit of sneaking out of Lakehall! I thought, just like everyone else did, that she locked herself away all day and every day working on her sewing, but she didn’t.’

  ‘No,’ I agreed. ‘She went out with Ida the day of Ida’s death, and she went out again to set the trip wire that Derman ran into. Then, when he had fallen in the water, she beat him over the head with a piece of wood and killed him.’ I thought of something. ‘I knew she used to slip out,’ I said quietly. ‘I was treating her, you know, for her headaches and her insomnia. One day when I went to see her she wasn’t there. Lady Emma was quite upset, because she’d invited Lady Claude to go on an outing with her and the children and she’d said no, and then she went out by herself.’

  I felt Edild’s hand on my shoulder. ‘None of this was your fault, Lassair,’ she said firmly. ‘It was impossible for you to have realized the significance of Lady Claude’s absence.’

  Perhaps it was. It didn’t stop me feeling guilty about it.

  Silence fell. After a while I looked at Sir Alain and said, ‘What will you do?’

  I have rarely seen anyone look so hopeless, so bleak. He gave a deep sigh and said, ‘I shall have to make my report for the king concerning the three deaths here.’ He looked at Edild, then back at me. ‘Unless you two have told anyone else, only the three of us know what Ida and I were to each other.’

  ‘Alberic knows,’ I said.

  Sir Alain smiled grimly. ‘You can safely leave Alberic to me.’

  Edild said thoughtfully, ‘You will keep the fact that Ida was pregnant with your child when she died a secret.’

  He held her eyes. ‘I will. And you, will you do so too?’

  ‘Lassair and I are healers, and as such we are privy to many people’s secrets,’ she said. ‘We do not tell.’

  His relief was evident. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘What will you give as Lady Claude’s reason for killing herself if you withhold the true one?’ I asked. It was forward of me, I dare say, but after what I had suffered at Claude’s hands, I felt I had a right to ask.


  Evidently, he did too. ‘I shall explain discreetly, first to her mother and then to the king’s officials, that Claude’s frustrated desire to enter the convent finally overcame her, and she decided that life other than as a nun was not worth living.’

  ‘Won’t that make her mother feel very guilty?’ I asked. ‘It was she, after all, who proposed that one of her daughters should marry you.’

  ‘If it does, then she deserves it,’ he said harshly. ‘God knows, I have my own guilt to bear, over both Claude’s death and poor Geneviève’s withdrawal, but it was not I who made the sisters what they were.’

  I thought he was letting himself off lightly, but I did not say so. I met Edild’s eye and guessed she was thinking the same.

  I looked down at Sir Alain. His face was pale, and his eyes were closing. ‘He’s almost asleep,’ I whispered to Edild.

  She nodded. ‘We will leave him to rest.’ She got up, and so did I. We stood over him for a few moments, watching as his breathing deepened.

  He would go away and make his report to whoever it was waiting to receive it, I thought. He was our justiciar; he could reveal as much or as little as he wished. Three people were dead, two of them killed by the third, who had died by her own hand. Alain de Villequier could, if he so wished, attribute all three crimes to Claude’s extreme reaction to the thwarting of her ambitions to take the veil, a reaction that had driven her to insanity. He could, and he probably would. Because of who and what he was, no doubt he would be believed.

  It wasn’t really fair. But that was the way life usually was.

  We never found out whether Sir Alain’s face-saving version of the events at Aelf Fen that summer was accepted. We heard no more of it – nor, indeed, of him. I was sorry, in a way; he was a likeable man, and we could have done worse in a local officer of the law. Especially since my aunt and I knew his most carefully-guarded secret . . .

  He went away, and he didn’t come back. Lord Gilbert seemed more than ready to forget all about Lady Claude and her seamstress. The summons to return to Lakehall and give my account of what had happened the day Claude died never came. We concluded, my aunt, Hrype and I, that Lord Gilbert, too, might have known more about what had been going on than he wanted to reveal.

  I do not know what became of poor Alberic. I never saw him again after that day I encountered him beneath the oak tree and, for a while, I assumed he had returned to Brandon. He hadn’t. Sibert was sent to the village on some business of Lord Gilbert’s, and he reported that Alberic’s little house was standing empty. I like to think he went away from the scene of his unhappiness and settled elsewhere, finding a measure of contentment, but it isn’t very likely. With the death of Ida, his hope had died too, and when I look into my heart, I sense he is dead.

  Our return to normal life was helped and hastened on its way by a happy family event: Haward and Zarina were married. They do say that we value a wonderful gift even more when we have feared we would never receive it, and such was the case with my brother and his new wife. Joy seemed to shine out of them, as everyone who witnessed them on their wedding day agreed. My brother, straight-backed and handsome in his best tunic, was so relieved, so proud, that as he spoke his promise to take Zarina to be his wife, to love her and honour her, his stammer disappeared, and it has not come back. As for Zarina, she looked so beautiful that she might have been a spirit out of the blessed realm, her golden skin glowing and her eyes full of magic.

  They moved into my parents’ house, and there they will stay until Haward can build them a little place of their own. I have a feeling that day won’t be very long in coming. Zarina is pregnant, although she does not yet know it, and I think the three of them will want to be on their own.

  The picture that I saw in the runes has proved to be right.

  As for me, I am forging ahead with my studies. New roads are opening up before me, and I am both excited and apprehensive. Hrype has spoken to me several times about Gurdyman and the drawings he is trying to make to show the route to faraway places; for some reason the two of them believe I may have an aptitude for the work Gurdyman is trying to do, and there are suggestions that I should go to Cambridge to study with him.

  I worry about leaving my home and my family, and also about where such studies will take me. I worry, absurdly, that if I leave Aelf Fen to go to Cambridge, Rollo may come back and not know where to find me.

  That, I know, is foolish. If – when – Rollo comes back, he won’t let a little thing like half a day’s journey keep him from me. I wonder what he and Gurdyman would make of each other?

  Sometimes I can’t sleep. Then I pick up my bag of runes, slip outside into the night and, once I am far away from the sleeping village, light my little fire and see what the stones can tell me. I still suffer afterwards, although I am learning how to lessen the effects. Perhaps that’s something Hrype will help me with, once I pluck up the courage to ask him.

  Tonight is such a night, and I sit here alone in the darkness looking back at the village. My fire has died down, and I shall not replenish it, for soon I shall return to my bed. I look up into the sky. It is autumn now, and if I wait a little longer I shall see the Huntsman over in the south-eastern sky: his belt shining like precious jewels, and his faithful hound at his feet.

  I love the stars. I heard them singing, one summer night, or I thought I did. I still remember Alberic’s beautiful, heartbreaking lament for Ida. When I visit her grave, on his behalf, wherever he is, I sing it to her.

  Oh Ida, can you hear this sad refrain?

  Can notes of music pierce your damp and peaty frame?

  And would you hold me close if I were lain

  Beside you? Could we sing the happy songs again?

  I think she would be pleased.