Tyrant of the Mind

by Priscilla Royal

  “I did not encourage…” he began.

  “Come now, brother! You know Richard. He needed no enticing but had good reason of his own for taking you both into this family. I do honor his decision. With the taking of our vows, we three have always been kin in God, but after all we have been through together since my coming to the priory, I believe we may claim a closer mortal relationship as well.”

  “My lady, you are kind…”

  Eleanor waved her hand at him. “Go and see to the sick, brother. I will stay with the Lady Isabelle and the Lady Juliana.”

  ***

  As the door closed behind the priest, Eleanor shut her eyes so tightly they hurt, her body once more begging for a far closer bonding with the monk than that of brother and sister. Then, taking a deep breath, she faced the two women. “I share your grief over the loss of Sir Geoffrey, a good and honorable man who saved my own father’s life.”

  “He was that, my lady, as well as a kind father to me,” Juliana said. She tried to move but found it difficult to pry herself from Isabelle’s grasp.

  “Nay, Juliana, stay close to me.” Isabelle looked up at her stepdaughter, revealing as she did a face ashen with fatigue and eyes red from so many tears. “Now that your father is dead, you cannot go to Tyndal. Surely you see that.”

  Juliana turned her head away from Isabelle and frowned, but Eleanor saw pain in the look, not anger.

  Isabelle fumbled at her stepdaughter’s hands. “You can pray all you like in the chapel at Lavenham. There is no need for a more distant cloistering.” The corners of her mouth turned vaguely upward, but the smile was feeble. “You must stay with me. Think of how much I need your comfort and companionship now. My oldest friend. My dearest sister.” She pulled Juliana’s hands to her breast and looked at Eleanor. “Sir Geoffrey may have murdered Henry, but he was a good husband to me as he was a good father to Juliana. I shall not marry another but will remain a widow for the rest of my days.” She reached out to touch Juliana’s face. “Hear me, my sweet friend, for I share your desire to remain unmarried! I swear to take mantle and ring in front of the bishop with a vow of chastity for the remainder of my life. Thus you need not marry either, don’t you see? You can stay and give me consolation. We can give each other succor in our prayers, two sisters bound in grief.” Isabelle tugged at Juliana’s robe and laughed, but the sound held little mirth.

  As gently as she could, Juliana pushed her hands away, walked to Eleanor and knelt in front of her. “I still beg admission to Tyndal as an anchoress, my lady,” she said, her voice muted but her words firmly spoken.

  “No!” Isabelle screamed. “You cannot do this. There is no need!”

  “Hush, Isabelle,” Juliana said.

  Isabelle threw herself down on the rush-covered floor and crawled to the kneeling woman. She wrapped her arms around her stepdaughter’s legs and pressed her head into the back of Juliana’s thighs. “Don’t you see that God has answered both our prayers?” Her voice was muffled and hoarse. “When I married your father, I knew he was an old man and must soon die. His death now, however, is surely a sign from God! As a widow, I have enough income from my lands for both of us to live in peace and comfort. George will not force you to marry Robert nor anyone you do not fancy. God surely means for the two of us to live, as we have…”

  Tears began to flow down Juliana’s cheeks. “It is you who does not understand, Isabelle. I do not want to share a life with you. My calling to become an anchoress is a true one.”

  “You cannot leave me! I will not be left alone again!” As Isabelle struggled to her knees, she grabbed the front of her robe, ripping the fabric of her dress from neck to waist and clawing deep ridges into her chest. Blood quickly filled the wounds and flowed down her body in crooked rivulets.

  Eleanor and Juliana stared at her in shock.

  “See how you have slashed my heart!” the widow screamed as she smeared the blood across her breasts. “You say that I am the one who does not understand, but you are the one who is blind! You have lost one mother to the tomb, but God has torn two mothers from my arms. Two! Then He cut the sweet babe from my womb, a child who might have had my mother’s eyes to look on me again with love. Indeed, God has stolen from me everything that I have dearly loved. Now, surely, He can leave me one sister for warm and loving comfort?”

  Juliana paled, then jumped to her feet and stepped away from the bleeding woman.

  Isabelle stared at her stepdaughter with mute despair. Then she began tearing at her own face.

  Eleanor rushed forward and grabbed her hands as the woman tried to claw her eyes. “Juliana,” she cried as she wrestled with Isabelle. “Bring Sister Anne. Quickly!”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Eleanor sat in silence, unable to form thoughts. The memory of the writhing, screaming widow flooded all words from her mind. Perhaps it had taken only a short while to restrain Isabelle so Sister Anne could force a drink of sleep-inducing poppy juice down her throat, but it had seemed to take forever.

  “I pity her, my lady. Few among us have been faced as often as she with the choice between two equally evil paths and no other.”

  Eleanor looked at Juliana, but she was still seeing the whimpering Isabelle with her exposed flesh and raw soul bleeding from more wounds than she could count. She had felt inadequate to deal with such pain and knew how thoroughly she had failed in comforting the woman. Perhaps Isabelle had been right about her. Perhaps she had fled from the world because she was unable to face its harshest realities. “Aye,” she said wearily. “She has suffered much.”

  “I knew of the rape.” Juliana’s eyes were moist with unwept tears.

  “As did I, but only after your brother’s murder.”

  “She told me that she was pregnant by Henry.”

  “And that she told me as well.”

  Despite the chill air, drops of sweat began to glisten on Juliana’s forehead. “It was then she told me she would marry my father, not my brother.”

  “A sin to have intercourse with both son and father, however unwilling her sexual act with the former. Even if God were to forgive that, man’s law would still find any marriage with your father invalid as a consequence of the rape.” Eleanor inwardly cringed at the sound of her own voice. Her words were so cold, so pale, against the bloody backdrop of Isabelle’s searing agony. “How did you reply to what she told you?”

  “I told her she must marry Henry, that there was no other choice. If she did marry him there would be no shame in a birth soon after the vows for we had all long expected them to marry. To bed my father, however, would not only make him an unwitting sinner and she a witting one, but it would be a cruelty to so use and deceive a man who had been as kind to her as if she had been his own daughter.”

  “To be abused by Henry and then marry him, knowing that she now owed him the marriage debt for the rest of their lives together? Could you have so willingly shared a bed with the man who had raped you, then borne his children and supported him as a wife must do?”

  Juliana sharply turned her face away. “What choice had she? Common wisdom tells us that she could not have been raped because she quickened with child and thus she must have taken pleasure in the act.” Returning her gaze to meet Eleanor’s, her brown eyes turned as dark as a moonless night. “I may not concur with common wisdom, my lady, but I repeat: What choice had she in fact? A man may make as many bastards as he wishes and take them all to his wife to rear, but a woman is a whore who has but one, unless she marries the father.”

  “From the anger I hear in your voice, Juliana, I wonder that you advised her to do something you found as abhorrent as she.”

  Juliana walked over to the pitcher and poured some wine into her cup but stared at the contents without drinking. The sweat on her forehead was now running down her cheeks like tears. “You are most observant to detect the serpent wrapped around my heart. In truth, I did tell Isabelle that she had no choice, but did not do so unti
l after I told her that there were ways of getting rid of the child and that I would help her find a safe remedy.”

  Eleanor hesitated, then replied in a quiet voice. “A sin for cert.”

  The weak smile on Juliana’s lips was at odds with the terror Eleanor could see in her eyes.

  “And her response to your suggestion?”

  “She refused.”

  Eleanor nodded and sipped at her own wine, more to gain time to think than from any wish for it. “Then you are innocent of a graver act,” she said at last. Juliana’s head was bowed and she could learn nothing from her look. “Did she say why she refused?”

  Juliana’s laugh sounded brittle, but the terror had receded from her eyes. “She hated the father but love quickened for the babe.”

  This matched what Isabelle had told her before. “Did she tell Henry about the child?”

  “No, but when Sir Geoffrey claimed he was the father of Isabelle’s baby, Henry suspected the truth. My brother may have suffered from many faults, but simple he was not. He was quite able to count both days and months.”

  Faults he had indeed, but Juliana’s words reminded Eleanor that there was another issue that troubled. “I must say I was surprised,” she said softly, “that Henry took her with such force. He had every reason to believe they would wed in good time, although no formal betrothal had taken place. Did she tell you why Henry had attacked her?”

  Some men might rape a whore they had bought or some other man’s woman as an act of humiliation, but she did not believe they would ever ravish the one they cherished. Although Henry had been thoughtless, a willful and often selfish man, Eleanor did not remember him as a brutal youth. She could certainly imagine him beseeching Isabelle, like the whining puppy of her father’s description, but Eleanor had always thought that Henry wanted Isabelle as his companion in life as well as a playfellow in bed.

  “I asked. She replied with a laugh.” Juliana rubbed her cup as if to polish it, then took a deep drink of the wine. “In the summer we all spent together, did you ever see her behave as she did the night my father mocked my brother?”

  The change in direction with that question surprised Eleanor, but she had been quite taken aback at Isabelle’s wantonness during that dinner. Running a hand so shamelessly up Robert’s thigh was not the gesture of a faithful or happy wife, nor was it something Isabelle would have done that innocent summer so many years ago. She shook her head.

  “After she lost the babe, her manner with other men became quite immodest, and I warned her that her actions promised more than she might be willing to give to the men who watched her. She told me what she told my father, that she meant nothing by it. I fear I doubted that sometimes, although not as much as did my father.”

  Eleanor did not like the thought that just came to mind. Could Isabelle have used Henry? Was such a thing possible? Yet if it were, why? Why would any woman encourage a sexual attack? “Did she perhaps explain the choice of your father as her husband?”

  “Out of gratitude, she said. She owed her lands to our family for the comfort we had given her. She had only entered her fourth winter when her parents died. The day she came to us, my mother told me that I must treat her with the gentleness and affection any sister owes another for she was a most solemn child. Indeed, my task was a happy one because I quickly learned to love her, and she soon gained a merrier manner. Our family became her own. She had little choice if she wished to stay with us. If she would not marry Henry, she must marry my father.”

  “What of George? Surely she could have married him.”

  “He was already betrothed to a woman who died after Isabelle married my father.”

  Were all the Lavenhams so cursed with such ill fortune, Eleanor wondered. “Yet this marriage dishonored your father and caused him to sin most deeply, however unwittingly. You were grieved, yet you did not tell him that his own son was the father of the babe Isabelle carried?”

  Juliana fell to her knees and began to weep, her sobs so sharp and gasping that Eleanor ran to her friend. Juliana pushed her back with one hand.

  “Stay back, my lady! There is a snake that lies in my breast, its fangs dripping with a venom that will send you to Hell should it bite you.”

  Eleanor stepped back, making the sign of the cross as she did. “Shall I bring Brother Thomas to you, my child?”

  “Nay, my lady. Nay.” Then the sobbing slowed and Juliana rose, wiping the tears from her swollen face. Turning her back on the prioress, she walked over to the window and looked down into the open ward. The sun was shining with winter pallor. In the background, there was the sound of the slow dripping of melting ice. It punctuated the long silence between them.

  Eleanor waited.

  “Do you love your father, my lady?”

  “Aye.”

  “If you had a sister, would you not love her as well?”

  “Such love is precious in God’s sight.”

  Juliana turned, and her eyes narrowed with pain as she looked at the prioress. “Is it?”

  “Teach me your meaning.”

  “I have not yet confessed this, but you must hear it from me first for it is at Tyndal where I long to entomb myself.” She took a deep breath. “When I offered to help Isabelle destroy the child within her, I first heard the hiss of Eden’s snake. When I failed to tell my father that he was committing a sin by marrying the woman I called sister, I saw the snake approach.”

  “God is merciful to the penitent, and both these sins He will forgive. Isabelle did not take your advice about the child, and your father would probably have refused to believe you just as he did when Henry tried to tell him enough of the truth. But you asked about love? What do you mean?”

  “When Adam and Eve were in Eden, they were at peace with God in their innocence. Satan rejoiced with the closing of those garden gates, for man became corruptible, sinful, and cruel. That I understood, yet in my willful ignorance, I believed I could remain pure because I wished no man ill but felt only love for those around me. Even when I wrestled Henry to the ground and cuffed his ears, I injured only his pride. Indeed, I loved my brother, although I despised his petty meanness.”

  “In childhood fights, there is little sin. Again, God has surely forgiven…”

  “God has shown me that no mortal love is without its corruption. When I told Isabelle that she could rid herself of the child, I did so out of love because I did not want her to suffer further for a violent act she had already endured. Do you not see? Out of the love I bore her, I urged her to sin.” Juliana stopped, her eyes growing wide.

  “Yet she did not do so. Thus you sinned only in making the suggestion. Once she told you that she cherished the child, you did not urge her further.”

  “Out of love, I failed to tell my father about the sin he would commit. Oh, I gave him reasons he should not marry her, but they were weak and he mocked them readily enough.” Juliana’s voice began to rise, her tone pleading. “He had suffered so after the death of my mother, my lady. How could I take that little joy from his eyes by telling him the real reason he could not marry Isabelle?”

  “Juliana, these are not faults that a loving God would not forgive…”

  “Will He forgive me for murdering my brother?”

  Eleanor blinked in horror. Had she been wrong after all? Had she been so misguided by a proud and frail logic that she had forced an innocent man to wrongly confess, even die, to protect a daughter he loved? “Your father admitted…”

  “My lord father did kill my brother, my lady, but it was I that sent Henry to his death.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  As Eleanor held the weeping woman, she raised her eyes, looked out the window encased by dark stone at the lighter gray of God’s heaven, and prayed for the wisdom she lacked. “Tell me the tale. In doing so, we will both wrest the serpent from your heart.”

  For just an instant, Juliana pulled the prioress closer, then released her and moved away from
the comfort of a friend’s arms. “It will take more than the telling to kill Satan’s beast, my lady.”

  “It is a beginning.”

  Juliana’s smile resembled the look of one in extreme pain who had just realized she would soon die. “As you heard, my father and Isabelle did not share a bed when she had her monthly courses. He found such womanly things distasteful, but he began to fear that his wife would use such absence to invite other men into their barren bed.”

  “Did he have reason or were his fears born only of jealousy?”

  “I have much to tell, my lady.”

  Eleanor nodded and fell silent.

  “While we were out on that tragic morning ride, Isabelle told me that although her courses had come early, they had been quite light, ceasing much before their time. Indeed, she suggested that her womb might have quickened. When I asked if she had told my lord father the happy news, she laughed and said she would in good time. She wished to wait until certain, but made me promise to say nothing until she gave permission. In the meantime, she said, she would enjoy a night or two quite alone since he believed her to be bleeding still.”

  “Then your father was not as impotent as she claimed?”

  “I found her quickening quite miraculous.”

  “Such has happened.”

  Juliana shook her head with a deep sadness. “Indeed I knew that my father sometimes did spend sleepless nights watching in the shadows to see if other men came to their marital chamber. Isabelle had seen him once or twice and told me so. Thus I tried to assure him of her innocence, claiming that I often came early and stayed with her on such nights to keep her company. Nonetheless, I began to share my father’s fear. She displayed her charms more, and much more than was seemly.”

  “Did she truly do so often?” Eleanor asked, thinking of the young woman who had ordered suitors to sing of their passions in the tradition of courtly love and the girl who, with the innocence of youth, had chosen only to dance with her sister, Juliana.

  “In the early days of their marriage, she had done no more than play at it, my lady. Indeed, she spent much time weeping in my arms over her lost babe. Oft we prayed together to bring her husband virility just once so she could have a child. I do believe she longed less for pleasure in the marital bed than for a baby girl with her mother’s eyes. Yet as her prayers continued to go unanswered, I began to suspect that she would lure some man into her bed so she might conceive once again. Her humors were growing quite unbalanced with her sorrow.”