Wounded Heroes Boxed Set

by Judith Arnold

  "We know, Olive." Joanna leaned over her, patting her back. "He talked you into it. That doesn’t make it right, but ‘twill help when you’re tried. You might get some lashes, but I’m sure they won’t hang you, not given that—"

  "Hang me!" she wailed, looking up with tear-filled eyes. "I didn’t know you could hang for...oh, God. Oh, God. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to. But he said if I went ahead and had the baby, he could never marry me, because of the shame."

  Joanna glanced at Graeham and Nyle, who looked as confounded as she felt.

  Someone knocked on the door. "Can someone sell me an elixir of—"

  "No!" Nyle bellowed.

  Joanna kelt next to Olive, who was rocking back and forth as tears slid down her cheeks. "You’re with child?"

  Olive pressed a hand to her mouth, her eyes squeezed shut, her waxen face sheened with sweat.

  Graeham handed a large tin bowl to Joanna, who thrust it under Olive’s face just in time. When the girl’s bout of retching was over, Graeham took the bowl and passed her a damp cloth, with which she bathed Olive’s face and throat.

  "Are you pregnant by Rolf le Fever?" Nyle asked her.

  "Isn’t that why you’re going to arrest me?" she asked raspily. "Because I was going to...to get rid of the baby?"

  Joanna, Graeham and Nyle all exchanged looks.

  Another knock sounded at the door. "Can I get some—"

  "No!" all three of them yelled at once.

  "Olive," Joanna said, "tell us what happened." Graeham handed her a handkerchief; she dabbed the girl’s face with it, then opened Olive’s fingers and stuffed it into her hand. "From the beginning. You and Rolf le Fever..." she prompted.

  "Aye," Olive sniffled, wiping her nose with the handkerchief.

  "For how long?"

  "Since Christmastide. ‘Twas around the time his wife took sick with her head cold, because that’s when he...he noticed me, was when I started bringing her her tonic."

  "He seduced you?" Joanna said gently.

  Olive closed her eyes and nodded. "At first I...I tried to resist him, mostly because he was a married man, but also because I was in l-love with Damian. And I c-could¬n’t believe a man like that could see anything in someone like me. He’s a guildmaster, and rich and handsome and he dresses so fine. But Rolf, he wouldn’t give up. He said he loved me, he needed me. His wife took a turn for the worse, what with the black bile and all. He said it looked like she was dying, and he meant to marry me after she was gone." Olive shook her head. "I let him have his way with me. And now I’m in love with him and I’ve got his babe in my belly and I’m ruined."

  "I don’t understand," Graeham said. "He told you he couldn’t marry you if you had the baby?"

  Olive nodded, her gaze fixed on the damp handkerchief as she twisted it in her hands. "I’d be a fallen woman. A man in his position couldn’t marry a girl who’d had a babe out of wedlock, even if it was his. He made me promise to g-get rid of it."

  "With those herbs?" Joanna asked, indicating the two bundles that Nyle still held.

  "Aye."

  "That’s what you were talking to le Fever about in the alley last night?" Graeham asked her. "Ending the pregnancy?"

  "You heard us?" Olive asked, aghast.

  "Aye. I thought...well, I thought you were talking about something else."

  "You want to have the baby?" Joanna asked her.

  "Oh, yes." Olive raised her tearful gaze to Joanna. "But if you hadn’t shown up when you did last night, I’d have gone ahead and got rid of it. I was that upset when I saw you’d taken those herbs. I couldn’t figure out how you knew what I was doing with them. But once I thought about it, I realized you did the right thing. You kept me from a terrible sin."

  Joanna was at a loss for words.

  "After you left," Olive said, "I asked myself what you would do if you were in my fix. You’re always so wise and strong. You always know the right thing to do. I decided you’d have the baby even without a husband, even if it meant living in shame. You’d lift your chin and make the best of it. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do." Olive sat up straight and gave Joanna a watery little smile.

  Joanna squeezed her hand.

  "Only now I’m going to be arrested for trying to oust the babe from the womb," Olive said mournfully.

  "That’s not something women get arrested for," Joanna assured her.

  Olive pointed to Nyle. "But he said he was here to arrest me—and he had the herbs. I thought—"

  "He was mistaken," Joanna said. "We all were."

  The undersheriff stepped forward. "Not necessarily."

  Graeham exchanged a quick look of dismay with Joanna and rubbed his forehead.

  "You two are satisfied with the wench’s explanation because you know her and you’re disposed to believe her," Nyle said. "But in my vocation, I’ve had to learn to cultivate skepticism."

  "She’s an innocent girl," Graeham said. "A bit impressionable, a bit lacking in judgment, perhaps, but she’s young."

  Joanna stood, her hand resting on Olive’s shoulder. "She’s certainly no murderer."

  "Murderer!" Olive said.

  "When did Rolf le Fever propose to you that you begin adulterating his wife’s tonic with poison?" Nyle demanded, standing over the cowering girl. "Was it before or after you became his mistress?"

  Olive closed her eyes. "I’m going to be sick again."

  Joanna held the bowl for her and wiped her face. "Leave her be," she told Nyle. "She didn’t poison Ada de Fever."

  "Perhaps," said the sheriff. "But think about it. A young girl with a babe quickening in her belly, desperate to marry the father —only he’s already got a wife. The girl happens to be the apothecary’s apprentice. The wife’s laid up with a rheum of the head. ‘Tis a simple matter to lace her tonic with something that’ll make her gradually sicker, and when the time comes, she gets enough to kill her, and none’s the wiser. Le Fever may not even know she’s been doing it. Perhaps she conjured up the scheme all on her own."

  "Can you look at this trembling, weeping girl," Joanna said, "and honestly think she’s capable of such underhanded doings?"

  "Mistress," Nyle said wearily, "I’ve served as undersheriff in this city for nigh unto twenty years. I’ve seen grisly, cold-blooded murder done by sweet little grannies and pink-cheeked children who laughed about it afterward. More than once, I’ve seen men protest their innocence so fervently, with tears in their eyes and their hands clutching holy relics, that they were judged innocent and let go, only to turn around and murder again."

  Olive leapt to her feet. "I didn’t do it! I did want to marry Rolf, but I would never sully my soul with murder—never! Tell me how to prove my innocence, and I’ll do it!"

  Indicating the herbs, Nyle said, "‘Twill help if these are what you say they are, and not poison. I’ll have them analyzed by a master apothecary. In the meantime, you’re to be incarcerated at the Gaol of London—"

  "The gaol!" Joanna exclaimed. "You don’t have to take her to—"

  "She’s a suspected murderer," Nyle said, unhooking the manacles from his belt.

  Olive whimpered.

  "You don’t need those," Graeham said. "She’ll go with you quietly, won’t you, Olive?"

  Olive nodded vigorously. "Yes, I swear I will. Please don’t chain me."

  "All right, then." The undersheriff grudgingly replaced the manacles. "But if you try to escape on the way to gaol, I won’t hesitate to use deadly force."

  "I won’t try to escape."

  "What of Rolf le Fever?" Graeham asked. "You can’t arrest Olive and let him off scot-free."

  "I have every intention of questioning Master Rolf," Nyle said. "He lives in that blue and red house on Milk Street, yes?"

  "Aye," Joanna said, "but you’ll find him at the silk traders’ market hall. He’s there’s most mornings until nones."

  "I’ll go to the market hall, then, after I escort this young woman to gaol. Are you ready?" he asked O
live.

  The girl nodded.

  Joanna embraced her. "You’ll be out of gaol before nightfall. I’ll make sure of it."

  ***

  AFTER EVERYONE WAS gone, Elswyth pushed aside the deerskin curtain she’d been listening behind and stepped into the apothecary shop.

  It was dark in here, with the door and window closed. Dust motes hovered in the narrow shaft of sunlight squeezing in between the window shutters. They looked like little sparkling stars; Elswyth trailed her hand back and forth through them, making them dance and spin.

  The sunlight shot through the stack of blue glass phials on the work table, making them glow from within like sapphires. How beautiful they were, exquisite really. They came from Venice. That’s why they cost so much. No wonder the silk merchant’s widow had tried to steal one. But Elswyth had stopped her. That’s ours, she’d told her, and Joanna Chapman had seen she was caught and put it back.

  Afterward, Elswyth had counted the thirty-four phials five times to make sure they were all there. And that evening, after her gardening, she’d counted them again, just to make sure.

  That thieving bitch mustn’t be allowed to get her hands on something so precious. That would be very bad, very bad.

  Elswyth picked one up and looked around. The tiled-lined fire pit was empty even of ashes, having been swept out that morning by Olive; the broom still leaned against the kettle rack. Hauling back, Elswyth hurled the phial into the pit, where it fractured in an explosion of startling blue shards.

  She smiled and smashed another one, and another, and another, until the pit was filled with crushed glass that overflowed onto the earthen floor.

  Her breath came faster now, but because it was a tiring business, shattering thirty-four glass phials, not because she was excited or upset. The time for fury was over. The simmering rage that had bubbled and bubbled in her brain for the past year was gone now, replaced by a cold, clear certainty —a resolve that felt wonderfully sharp and hard and glittering, like the fragments of blue glass in the fire pit.

  She knew what she had to do; it had come to her while her daughter was weeping over that lying, crawling whoreson who planted his bastard in her belly. He’s a guildmaster, and rich and handsome and he dresses so fine...He said he loved me, he needed me...He meant to marry me...

  Elswyth fetched a sheet of parchment and a quill and the ink pot and brought them to the work table. Uncapping the ink jar, she dipped in the quill and wrote To Olive at the top of the sheet.

  You will wonder why I have done what I have done, she wrote in the elegant hand that had always been her pride. That is why I am writing this letter before I do it...

  Chapter 23

  * * *

  THOMAS HARPER, SITTING in the sun on his barrel in front of Mistress Joanna’s kitchen hut, inhaled the unhappy smell of scorched porridge and wondered where she was. She and the serjant both, for when he’d peered through the windows into the storeroom, he’d found it empty—the first time in a month and a half that Graeham Fox hadn’t been there.

  As the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow rang terce, the back door of the guildmaster’s blue and red house opened and a fleshy maidservant emerged with a marketing basket over her arm. She exchanged a cheery "Good morrow" with the manservant mucking out the stable and left.

  It was much later than Thomas usually broke his fast, and hunger ground away at his belly. He was sorely tempted to just walk into the kitchen and dish himself up a bowlful of porridge. Joanna wouldn’t mind; like most learned people, she knew his malady to be less contagious than was generally believed. But if he was seen by one of the neighbors—such as the money lender’s wife, casting him looks of abhorrence as she tended to her garden—he’d be put to death.

  A gust of laughter wheezed up out of Thomas’s chest. Ironic that a pathetic creature such as he should fear death. For what was he but the walking dead, a gradually crumbling thing that used to be a man. He’d managed on his own well enough until now, despite the deadening of his face and arms and legs, but soon he would lose the last vestiges of his precious independence, for the thing he’d dreaded for years was at last beginning to happen. He was going blind in his one good eye. The vision that used to be crisp as a hawk’s was gradually, inexorably, growing cloudy around the edges. Soon the murkiness would shroud everything he saw, and then his world would be one of darkness and shadow.

  He’d be blind and numb. Wherefore should he fear death?

  Disgusted by his lapse into self-pity, Thomas closed his eyes and conjured up the image of the woman he’d loved and cast aside when he was young and healthy and foolish, the woman who still had the power to soothe and comfort him, even in his imagination. Thomas, my love, Bertrada used to whisper as she caressed his brow, kissed his cheek, took him in her arms. I’m here for you. I’ll always be here for you. And I’ll always love you...always...

  "Thomas."

  He opened his eyes to find Joanna Chapman and Graeham Fox standing before him, and made himself smile. "Mistress," he said with a nod. "Graeham. I think this is the first time I’ve seen you out of doors, serjant. Didn’t realize your hair had quite so much red in it."

  "So it does." Joanna trailed her fingers through Graeham’s hair. "It’s lovely in the sunlight."

  Graeham exchanged a smile with her that was so warm and intimate, Thomas felt like a voyeur having witnessed it. Interesting.

  "How do you fare today, Thomas?" asked Graeham.

  Thomas smiled. "Never better. Well, perhaps that’s overstating it a bit."

  Graeham’s chuckle was weary, a little pained. He yawned. Joanna yawned, too.

  "You two look tired," Thomas observed.

  Graeham smiled at Joanna, who blushed and looked away. Very interesting.

  "My porridge smells as if it’s burned to the pot," said Mistress Joanna, entering the kitchen. "I’ll have to throw it out, but it’s a shame to waste the good part on top. Will you have some of it, Thomas?"

  Thomas looked heavenward with his good eye, amused and touched by her efforts to make her charity seem like anything but. "I suppose I could help you out by eating a bowl of it, mistress."

  As she was fetching his porridge, the back door of the blue and red house opened again. This time it was the guildmaster himself who stepped out, adorned as usual in his peacock-hued finery. Graeham ducked behind a corner of the kitchen and watched him closely as he walked toward Milk Street.

  "Don’t want to be seen?" Thomas asked.

  "Not by him."

  Something about the serjant’s grim expression discouraged Thomas from asking any more questions.

  The door opened yet again, as soon as the guildmaster was out of sight. Another plump, aproned woman emerged, the pink-cheeked wench Thomas sometimes saw chopping and singing at the kitchen window. She untied her coverchief, revealing brown hair braided and coiled around her head, which she patted. With a glance to make sure the money changer’s wife had her back turned, she darted across the yard, around the pile of filthy straw Byram had raked onto the ground and into the stable.

  "They should find a more discreet place to tup," Graeham said. "They’re bound to get caught one of these days."

  "According to Publilius Syrus," Thomas said, "God Himself decreed love and wisdom antithetical to each other."

  "All too true, I’m afraid," said Graeham, suddenly melancholy.

  "What’s all too true?" Joanna asked as she stepped out of the kitchen with a ladle full of porridge.

  Seemingly unsettled for some reason, Graeham said, "Thomas told me I looked exhausted, and I said ‘twas all too true."

  "You should take a nap if you can," she said through another yawn as she poured the porridge into Thomas’s bowl. "I’d do the same, but Mistress Ada is expecting me to come back and sit with her, and I think it’s best if I do." She touched Graeham’s hand. "Try to get some sleep."

  He brushed his knuckles across her cheek. "You’re as tired as I am. I can see it in your eyes."

  Joanna s
miled. "I’ll sleep after—" her gaze flicked toward Thomas and away "—after everything’s settled."

  "I don’t like you being over there, with things as they are," Graeham said.

  "Le Fever’s not even home."

  "Still...you’d best keep your wits about you."

  "You worry too much." She returned the ladle to the kitchen, filled a bucket with fresh water for Thomas, and took her leave, crossing the guildmaster’s stable yard and entering the house without knock¬ing.

  "If I weren’t so hungry," Thomas said, groping about in his pouch for his spoon, "I’d have about a hundred questions I’d be pestering you with right now."

  "Then I’m glad you’re hungry." With a smile and a wave, Graeham turned and hobbled into the house on his crutch.

  Thomas finished the porridge slowly, savoring it as he used to savor fourteen-course feasts. He drank some of the water from the bucket and used the rest to wash his bowl and spoon. When there was nothing more for him to do, he sat and did nothing, gratified simply to be off his feet. One of the worst aspects of this cursed malady was that it had made idleness a way of life.

  Finally, when the sitting still got to be too much even for him, he rose awkwardly and crossed to the window at the back of the house to say good-bye to Graeham. At first he thought the storeroom was empty, but then he saw the young man lying on his back on the little cot, still fully dressed in shirt, braies and boots, but fast asleep.

  "Enjoy your dreams, serjant." Thomas shuffled across the croft and into the alley, but stumbled back as someone—a woman —walked by without looking.

  She brushed against him as she passed. Thomas’s heart seized up; this was what he dreaded more than anything, that someone would touch him accidentally and he would be called to task for it.

  But the woman didn’t even seem to notice the contact, so single-mindedly did she stalk past. She had a ragged mane of red hair, he saw as she veered out of the alley and across the croft; not slightly rusty, like Graeham Fox’s hair, but vibrant copper turning to gray. A wineskin was slung crosswise over her back, and she held a twig broom with the sweeping end up, rather importantly, like a scepter. That was odd, but not as odd as how she was dressed—or rather, not dressed. For it seemed to Thomas that the woman’s kirtle wasn’t a kirtle at all, but...