by Robert Adams
Rupen's party was well guarded, for all that most of the once-numerous bands of bandits had long since been ridden to earth and exterminated like the human vermin they were. The Archbishop had detailed no less than twenty lances—some hundred men, total—to the command of Sir Rupen to escort Her Grace of Norfolk to her husband's seat in his barony of Strathtyne. In addition to the baggage train of the lances, there were three huge, ponderous mule-drawn wagons of tents, bedding, food and assorted gear, since the Archbishop had felt it better that Her Grace's retinue camp out than partake of the hospitality of castles, halls, inns, or villages en route. Spare mounts, draught mules, and pack mules had to also be brought along, so the column was a long one and could move no faster than its slowest components. But as he never had been a cavalryman, like Bass Foster, this fact did not chafe at him as it would have at the Lady Krystal's husband.
Rupen had been working with Sir Peter Fairley in the Royal Cannon Foundry and its related manufactories when summoned urgently to attend Archbishop Harold in Yorkminster.
Tapping a sealed, signed, and sanded document drawn on vellum, the aged churchman had said, "Rupen, I have decided to accede to your request that Krystal Foster be taken from out the nunnery and placed at Whyffler Hall, but not entirely for the reasons of which you so fervently bespoke me. No, I have but just received privy word from an unimpeachable but equally unquotable source that a certain very powerful person has designs upon the lady's life and either has already or very shortly will hire on professional assassins to effect his aims. A bevy of nursing sisters would be no match for such ruthless, determined, motivated men, where at Whyffler Hall, its security administered by that old warhorse Sir Geoffrey Musgrave and his picked pack of savage Borderers, with precious few of his men-servants as aren't old soldiers, I can think of not many other places she would be safer, and I want you to ride up there and see the preparations made for her tightly guarded occupancy of a suite in the old tower onto which the present hall was built."
"During the reign of the present king's great-grandfather, when first Emmett O'Malley and I were projected into this world, that tower and the inner bailey were Whyffler Hall, then called Whyffler Castle. I lived at various times and for varying periods in that old tower, and, as I recall, with thick carpets to cover the floors, wall hangings over the stone walls and open arrow slits, and a log fire on the hearth, those chambers can be quite comfortable in even the coldest and dampest of seasons."
"I'll be asking the abbess for two or three nursing sisters to accompany Krystal and live with and care for her so long as they are needed, so see that arrangements are made for them, as well as for some serving women; I believe that certain commoner women who have served her at various times still live on the barony, so you should have Sir Geoffrey search them out and bring them back to the hall."
"Please perform these things with expedience and get back here to start your journey north with Krystal, for the sooner I can get my foot guards from out the precincts of that nursing order, the better for all concerned. You've met the abbess, so you can well imagine her reception of and behavior toward a score of liveried men-at-arms camped hard beside and patrolling day and night around her nunnery and hospital. She has made it abundantly clear that she will only tolerate them at all because they are mine and she recognizes that she and her chapter are beholden to me."
Rupen had shaken his head and declared, "Hal, I am not a Roman Catholic and I never met many nuns on my own world. Are they all so fanatically misanthropic? Are they supposed to be so? Sister Fatima and those other three who helped to subdue Krystal did not seem so."
The old man had sighed and replied, "The Mother Elfreyda of today is the unfortunate result of many vicissitudes which have befallen and afflicted her over the years, Rupen. She was a very rich heiress, you know, come of an old and famous family of the West Riding. In the cradle, she was betrothed to the son of her father's war companion; the two children virtually grew up together, and so theirs was as close to a love match as you will see in this world and time and culture."
"Alas, only two bare months a bride, she found herself a young widow when some pest carried off her entire household, save only a few of the lower servants. Her husband had not yet been decently encrypted, nor was she yet fully recovered of her own near-fatal illness, when her grasping in-laws, anxious to retain all that had been her inheritance to their own family, began to put upon her an extremity of pressure to wed some cousin of her late husband—an old man, more than four times her age, a multiple widower with issue old enough to have been her parents."
"At their first and only meeting, the supposed suitor became besotted and made earnest attempts to take undue liberties with her, brutally beating her when she resisted him and only desisting when strong drink had utterly deprived him of any ability to control his limbs. With the help of the few faithful servants who had survived the pest, she fled to the sanctuary of a nearby convent and ended by taking holy orders and bequeathing her entire inheritance to the Church. Her greedy in-laws fought the thing, of course, and of course they lost, such was Rome's power in this kingdom in those days."
"It was quickly noticed by her superiors that the young woman was a most effective administrator, quick to learn new skills and most adept at managing people. Therefore, she was primed and very thoroughly trained and, at length, given the management of a new chapter of the order situated somewhat north of this city. It is said that during the six or seven years of her rule there, she was an exceedingly competent mother."
"But then came the death of Richard IV Tudor, the coronation of his younger brother, the present king, and the long-drawn-out state of war between King Arthur and his dead brother's widow, Angela. That most unsaintly woman was, as you no doubt have heard, a 'niece' of the Roman pope who preceded that late and unlamented Pope Abdul, and as regent for the son she had borne more than seven months after her royal husband's demise, she could have made of this realm a virtual satrapy of Rome. Therefore, Abdul first excommunicated Arthur, then interdicted all who might offer him support or comfort. Those infamies having failed to whip the folk into line, he forbade the sale of 'priests' powder,' or refined niter, to England or Wales and preached a general Crusade against the realm and Arthur, whom he chose to name 'Usurper.'"
"Naturally, time was required for the various bands of continental, Scottish, and Irish Crusaders to meet, form up, organize transport fleets, and the like."
"Meanwhile, civil war raged in England, with about two thirds of the people supporting Arthur and some bare third, most of those living in or hard by London, supporting the so-called Regent, Angela."
"But Arthur is a Tudor born and bred, with all the ruthlessness and stubborn temerity of that house and breed. He struck hard and repeatedly at the Regent's forces, usually forcing them to combat in places and at times of his choosing and, mostly, roundly thrashing them, and this despite his forces' dearth of many of the sinews of warfare. His accidental battle with the mounted squadrons of the Regent—called Monteleone's Horse after their commander, Captain Sir Pietro, Conte di Monteleone, Papal Knight and Angela's lover, even while her husband still had lived—resulted in so complete and smashing a victory for our arms that the Regency never again found itself able to field any kind of organized force against us."
"But that still left the oncoming hordes of foreign Crusaders, fully armed and well supplied with gunpowder, while our forces had little or none and nowhere left to get any more of the precious stuff."
"And then came Bass Foster, eh?" said Rupen.
"Yes, I've told you that tale, Rupen," said the Archbishop. "Once the army was reputed to be well resupplied with powder, its size began to swell, the reorganization effected on William Collier's designs by Bass and Buddy Webster rendered it stronger and far more flexible and easier to control—on the march or in combat, and this led to the five great battles that sent all the Crusading hosts reeling in abject defeat, those of them as still even drew breath."
"Bu
t to back up a bit in the chronological order of events, while still Sir Francis Whyffler and Bass and the rest were riding down from Whyffler Hall, the initial invaders, a strong force of French, Flemings, Burgundians, and others, had landed on the east coast at the estuary of the Tees River. While part of them laid siege to the walled town of Middlesbrough, most of the knights and mounted men-at-arms moved inland along the south bank of the Tees, conducting sort of a raid in force and guided by certain survivors of Monteleone's Horse."
"Mother Elfreyda's convent and hospital was located on the south bank of the Tees, in those days, too. And being a nursing order, they had not even thought to question the loyalties of certain ill or wounded fighting men who had come or been borne to their door, they had simply taken them in and given them the best care of which they were capable. They were paid for their true Christian charity in a very hard coin, indeed."
"When the Crusaders arrived in the area, they at first were very respectful, as soldiers of the Cross should be. They brought certain ill members of their own contingent and left them for treatment, then marched south to loot and burn and rape and kill. However, one of the sickly men they had left behind under the care of the sisters happened to be an Englishman who had been an ensign in Monteleone's Horse, and immediately the Crusaders returned, he made haste to tell them that the convent was harboring traitorous men, supporters of the Usurper, Arthur Tudor."
"The military commander, a French vicomte, led a strong force to the convent and demanded the immediate delivery of the invalids to him, that they might be executed in such manners as befitted their heinous crimes against the rightful sovereign and the Holy Church. Quite properly, if rather ill-advisedly, Mother Elfreyda refused, reminding him that they rested within sacred precincts and that they therefore were lawfully in sanctuary."
"So that Frenchman and his followers took the convent by storm, repeatedly raped every female they could find—young or old, nun or lay, ill or well—butchered every male they could find, looted it of everything of value, carried off all the kine, and made an effort to fire every building. Some half month later, elements of King Arthur's army met and exterminated most of those Crusaders."
"Mother Elfreyda and her surviving nuns and lay sisters put their battered holding back in the best order they could and tried to go on with their work, and, like as not, none of us would ever have known of the disgusting outrages they had suffered had not the wounded and dying French vicomte confessing his many and terrible sins to one of my priests with the English army made mention of his misdeeds at that convent."
"Immediately my military duties allowed of it, I journeyed to Mother Elfreyda's holding and did all that I could of both corporeal and spiritual nature to ameliorate their plight, including gift of a goodly measure of minted French gold."
"Armed with the gold, armored with their faith and hope, she and hers continued to do their works of charity while repairing and replacing that which they had lost or seen damaged, and they might well have put everything back into full, functioning order . . . but then came the Scottish Crusaders and utter ruin, fresh defilement, and death."
"It was not until after the Battle of Hexham Moor that word of this new outrage against Mother Elfreyda and her chapter came to me. In addition to his ordered forces, King Alexander's army had had as a component a huge, uncontrolled—indeed, practically uncontrollable—mob of wild highlanders. On the march, these fanned out ahead of the army and well out from the column's flanks, few of them at all well armed, fewer still mounted, ill clothed, barefoot, savage as the wild beasts that were their totems, all hungry for loot and blood."
"Bands of them marauded both by day and by night, if moonlight happened to be strong enough to allow them to see. And it was by night that some hundred or more swept down on that convent, in pursuit of a handful of hapless villagers who mistakenly thought that safety lay behind its walls. These barbarians not only looted and raped, they laughingly prefaced murder with maiming and unholy mutilations, they raped women to death, then continued to defile the corpses for hours. They vandalized and desecrated. They burned the crops in the fields, hacked down the orchards, polluted the two wells with dead bodies, and fired every structure that would burn. Their behavior against those holy women and their patients on that night would have shamed a Kalmyk or a Tatar."
"When I arrived there, five weeks after the battle, the place had the appearance of a mere lifeless shell. But searching found Mother Elfreyda and four sisters still hale enough to nurse two others, though one of those died while we were there. Although she was at the first determined to stay there and rebuild again, I at last was able to persuade her to move her chapter to the location it currently occupies, an old abbey that had been vacant for the half century since all of its residents had died of an outbreak of priests' plague and which had thereafter been administered, its rich lands farmed, by Yorkminster. She and her chapter have prospered there and achieved many good works. Perhaps now you can understand why Mother Elfreyda so dislikes and distrusts men anywhere in proximity to her holdings and sisters."
Rupen had shuddered. "God, what hideous experiences the poor woman has undergone. Everything considered, it's a wonder that she isn't as mad as her patients, Hal."
Late of a night two weeks and more after the mad duchess had been taken away to some one of her husband's minor holdings in the north, Mother Elfreyda sat in her smaller office, checking over lists of accounts prepared by Sister James the Elder, when there came a light tap upon the door.
"Enter," she snapped, then again, "Enter, I say."
When still the door was not pushed open, she stood up and threw it open, to have a wimpled form collapse into her arms, the back of its habit soaked in fresh, hot blood.
"Men . . . two . . . in the cell corridor . . . M . . . Mother," gasped Sister Agnes weakly. "Entering cells . . . killing patients . . . thought they'd killed me." Then the body went limp and its air escaped in the significant rattle.
"They did kill you, child . . . my dear, faithful sister," said the abbess softly, as she lowered the lifeless body to the floor.
She started out the door, then turned and opened a cabinet, fumbling in its depths until she found that which she sought. A hired ploughman had brought her the rusty iron horseman's mace, which was not a surprising thing to find in this area, due to all the campings and ridings of cavalry and raidings that had taken place around and about during the long civil war and the following repulses of the foreign Crusaders. Most metal artifacts so found were stored away until the smith made his rounds, then either sold to him for scrap or traded for part payments of the work he had done for them. But the mace the abbess had kept herself, mostly because it was a reminder of her long-dead father, a mace having been his favored weapon in lists or grande melee. As a small child, she had watched her loved sire practice for hours on end with just such a weapon as the ploughman had found. During her possession of it, she had carefully cleaned it of all rust, removed the rotted thongs from around its iron haft and replaced them with fresh ones, then set to polishing the steel quatrefoil head until it now shone like silver.
This night, she lifted it from its place in the cabinet, took a firm grip upon the shrunk-on leathern wrappings, and hefted it, trying to recall just how her father had moved the thing during the various exercises. Then she stepped out into the pitch-dark hallway, needing no lamp or torch, for she knew every inch of the corridors and cells and chambers as she knew the backs of her strong, work-roughened hands.
Swiftly, silently on her bare feet, she descended the stone stairs to ground level, then it was up another hallway, feeling now and again spots of sticky wetness beneath her feet, knowing them for drops of Sister Agnes' blood. Ahead, a brief glimmering of yellowish light told her that the death-wounded nun had left the door to the wing of patients' cells ajar. She stopped at the door and, breathing a quick prayer that the hinges not squeak, eased the portal farther open, though she made certain to remain in the protective darkness of the ma
in building, her mace held ready at her side, its chisel-pointed finial spike angled forward and upward.
A dark figure stood before the opened door of one of the cells, a bull's-eye lantern in one hand and a thin-bladed dagger, its blued blade running blood, in the other. She was upon the very point of stepping toward the trespasser when a second man, this one armed with a wider-bladed but just as bloody dirk, stepped from out the cell.
Taking the lantern, he muttered something in a guttural language that Mother Elfreyda could not understand. He and the man with the slender dagger moved briskly but quietly up to the door of the next cell, this one the closest to where the abbess stood. Lifting the bar and leaning it against the wall with no slightest noise, the dark-clothed short, slender man pushed open the door and, weapon held a bit ahead of him, entered the kennel, the slightly taller man holding the lantern so that its thin slice of light would illuminate the cell.
The distance to him was short, and in two swift steps, Mother Elfreyda was close enough to swing a looping, two-handed blow that caved in the skull under the dark cloth cap. The man's knees buckled and he collapsed without so much as a groan. The woman took the lantern from the slackening grip as the dead man fell.
A smothered cry and a momentary thrashing of straw came from within the malodorous cell, then the shorter man stepped into the open doorway, dashing blood from off his blade, his other hand open and extended, reaching for the lantern. He had started to whisper something when Mother Elfreyda jammed in the finial spike for its full length into his chest, just as his slashing blade opened wimple and throat beneath, almost from ear to ear. Even so, the woman bred of warrior stock crushed his skull, too, before the great dark claimed her forever.
