The Lady Agnes Mystery, Volume 1

by Andrea Japp

  ‘Is your stomach still hurting?’

  ‘Not as much.’

  A sigh. Jeanne had fallen asleep again and the apothecary thought that it was for the best. As soon as she had regained some of her strength, she would be told the dreadful news of Hedwige’s death. Éleusie had instructed them all to keep quiet about it because of the long friendship between the two women.

  The tall, sullen woman was overcome by a deep sense of sorrow. Adélaïde Condeau was dead and so was Hedwige du Thilay. Jeanne had narrowly escaped following them to the grave, and as for Blanche de Blinot, she owed her life to her dislike of lavender tea. The poor old woman was gradually losing her wits and had been plunged into a kind of retrospective terror. The constant expression of fear she wore gave her face the appearance of a death mask. As for Geneviève Fournier, she had become a shadow of her former self after witnessing the shocking death of Hedwige, to whom it appeared she had been a great deal closer than Annelette had previously thought. Indeed, it was as though all the vitality had been drained out of the amiable sister in charge of the fishponds and henhouses. Geneviève wandered through the passageways like a tortured little ghost, scarcely noticing the other sisters as they tried to smile to her.

  In contrast, the treasurer nun’s gruesome death appeared to have restored the Abbess’s determination, which had waned since the arrival of the inquisitor. Annelette felt a nagging concern: what if Éleusie de Beaufort had made up her mind to fight to the death? What if she had foolishly decided to sacrifice herself in order to eradicate the evil beast that was attacking them from within? She could not allow it. The Abbess must not die, and Annelette would do everything in her power to ensure that she did not.

  Annelette Beaupré entered the herbarium to make the first of her two daily inspections. The bell for terce+ had just rung and she had been excused from attending the service.

  She paused in front of the medicine cabinet. A sudden excitement made her almost cry out with joy. She had been right! The mixture of egg white and almond oil she had been preparing each night had worked its magic. A sudden sadness dampened Annelette’s enthusiasm. Geneviève Fournier had stopped scolding her hens. Their unreliability and the dwindling number of eggs she found each morning in the nests left her indifferent.

  Pull yourself together, woman! Save your tears for when you’ve trapped this vermin.

  Two black footprints were encrusted in the sticky substance. So, somebody had entered the herbarium sometime between compline the previous evening and that morning. Somebody who had no business being there and therefore could only have been up to no good.

  The apothecary rushed outside and headed straight for the Abbess’s chambers.

  Éleusie listened, open-mouthed, hanging on her every word. After Annelette had finished telling her about her trap and what she had discovered, the Abbess said:

  ‘Egg white, I see … And what now?’

  ‘Give the order for everybody to assemble in the scriptorium and take off their shoes without mixing them up, and have a novice bring in two warming pans full of hot embers.’

  ‘Warming pans? Do you mean the ones we put in our beds to dry out the damp sheets?’

  ‘The very same. And I want them red hot. It will be quicker than taking everything into the kitchen and unmasking the culprit there.’

  A tentative row of white robes waited. The sisters stood in their stockinged feet, their shoes lined up in front of them. Loud whispers had broken out when the unexpected order had been given:

  ‘Take our shoes off? Am I hearing things?’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘The floor’s freezing …’

  ‘I’m sure Annelette is behind this madness.’

  ‘Whatever could they want with our shoes …?’

  ‘My stockings are filthy. We don’t change them until the end of the week …’

  ‘I doubt this is a hygiene inspection.’

  ‘There’s a hole in one of mine and my toe’s sticking out. I haven’t had time to darn it. How embarrassing …’

  Éleusie had ordered them to be quiet and waited while a bemused-looking novice went to fetch the warming pans she had requested. Finally they arrived from the kitchens, smoking from the embers inside.

  Annelette, accompanied by the Abbess, approached the left-hand side of the row of bemused or irritated women. She picked up the first pair of shoes and rubbed them over the lid of the piping-hot pan. She repeated the same procedure with each of the sisters’ shoes in turn, ignoring their murmured questions and astonished faces. Suddenly, there was a sound of sizzling, and a horrible stench like rotten teeth or stagnant marshes issued from one of Yolande de Fleury’s shoes. Annelette continued brushing it over the pan until a flaky white coating formed on the wooden sole. She felt her face stiffen with rage, but forced herself to continue the experiment until she reached the end of the row of white robes. No other shoe reacted to the heat of the embers. She charged over to Yolande, who was as white as a sheet, and boomed so loudly that some of the sisters jumped:

  ‘What were you doing in the herbarium?’

  ‘But … I wasn’t …’

  ‘Will you stop!’ the apothecary fumed.

  Éleusie, fearing a fit of violence on the part of the big woman, intervened in a faltering voice:

  ‘Yolande, come with us to my study. You others, go about your tasks.’

  They had to drag the reluctant Yolande, who tried to defend herself, insisting that she had not set foot in the herbarium.

  Annelette pushed the young woman into the Abbess’s study and slammed the door behind them. She leaned up against the door panel as though afraid Yolande might try to escape.

  Éleusie walked behind her desk and stood with her hands laid flat on the heavy slab of dark oak. Annelette barely recognised her voice as she exploded:

  ‘Yolande, I am at the end of my tether. Two of my girls are dead and two more have escaped the same fate by a hair’s breadth, and all this within a matter of days. The time for procrastination and pleasantries is over. Any other attitude would be recklessness on my part. I demand the truth, and I want it now! If you insist on prevaricating, I shall have no other choice but to turn you over to the secular authority of the chief bailiff, Monge de Brineux, since I refuse to pass judgement on one of my own daughters. I have requested the death penalty for the culprit. I have asked for her to be stripped to the waist and given a public beating.’

  Despite the apparent harshness of the punishment, it was in fact relatively lenient for a crime of poisoning; execution was usually preceded by torture.

  Yolande stared at her with tired eyes, incapable of uttering a word. Éleusie almost screamed at her:

  ‘I am waiting for the truth! The whole truth! I command you to answer me this instant!’

  Yolande stood motionless, her face had drained of colour and was turning deathly pale. She lowered her head and spoke:

  ‘I did not set foot in the herbarium. The last time I went anywhere near the building, Annelette surprised me and reported my nocturnal outing to you. I’ve not been there since.’

  ‘You’re lying,’ said Annelette. ‘What do you think those white flakes on the soles of your shoes were? The cooked egg whites, which I spread on the floor in front of the cabinet containing the poisons. What do you think that evil smell was? It was the fetid rue I mixed into the preparation. I found the shoe prints in the mixture this morning – your shoe prints.’

  Yolande only shook her head. Éleusie came out from behind her desk and walked right up to her. She spoke in a stern voice:

  ‘Time is running short, Yolande. You are doing yourself no favours. I will tell you the two suspicions I have formed about you. Either you are the murderess, in which case my wrath will follow you to the grave and you will never find peace, or … you have developed an excessive attachment to one of your fellow nuns, an attachment that drives you to seek privacy outside the dormitory walls. Such an attachment would result in the two of you being sepa
rated, but that is all. I am waiting. You may yet be saved if you confess your sins. Seize this opportunity, daughter. Hell is more terrible than your worst imaginings. Quickly, I am waiting.’

  Yolande, her eyes brimming with tears, looked up at this woman she had once so admired and who terrified her now. She closed her eyes and let out a deep sigh.

  ‘My son …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Somebody occasionally brings me news of my son.’ A smile lit up the pretty, round face, ravaged with sorrow. She continued:

  ‘He is well. He is ten now. My father brought him up. He passed him off as one of his bastards so that he wouldn’t be stripped of the family name. My sacrifice saved him. I thank God for it every day in each of my prayers.’

  The other two women received this unexpected confession in stunned silence. The bewildered Éleusie murmured:

  ‘But …’

  ‘You wanted the whole truth, Reverend Mother, but some truths are better left unsaid. But now I’ve started I’ll go on. I was fifteen when I fell passionately in love with a handsome steward. The inevitable happened. I fell pregnant by a peasant, outside the sacraments of marriage. The man I was supposed to marry spurned the dishonoured girl I had become. There was no excuse for me, it is true, as I had given myself with complete abandon. My beloved was beaten and driven away. Had he remained he would have been castrated and wrongly branded a rapist. He was so caring, so passionately loving. My father shut me away for the last five months of my pregnancy. Nobody was supposed to know. My son was taken from me immediately after he was born and entrusted to a wet nurse. After that I lived in the servants’ quarters, on the pretext that I was no better than a beggar and deserved to be treated like one. And then my little Thibaut, whom I would occasionally glimpse at the end of a corridor, was struck down, and I saw in his illness a sign of God’s wrath. I resolved to do penance for the rest of my days to atone for my sins.’ She seemed not to notice the tears rolling down her cheeks. She clasped her hands with joy and continued: ‘My sacrifice did not go unheeded, for which I am eternally grateful. My little boy is glowing with health. He can ride a horse now, just like a young man, and my father loves him like a son. I pray for him, too. He was so hard and unforgiving. Perhaps the love in his heart has been reawakened thanks to my child.’ She straightened up and concluded: ‘That is the whole truth, Reverend Mother. You, too, have known sensual joy, the love of a husband. I realise that in the eyes of mankind I was unwed, but I swear to you that when my beloved bedded me for the first time I was convinced that God was witnessing our nuptials. I was wrong.’

  The revelation had shocked Éleusie de Beaufort. She felt hurt that Yolande had not confided in her. She attempted to comfort her, aware that it was futile.

  ‘Dear Yolande … The Church accepts that its sons and daughters have known physical attraction and the pleasures of the flesh within and even outside wedlock in some cases. It is enough that we vow to banish it from our thoughts for ever when we take the cloth. As our holy Saint Augustine …’

  ‘You don’t understand!’ Yolande cried out, suddenly becoming agitated. ‘I would never, do you hear, never have sought the deceptive calm of your nunneries, never have yielded to your stupid rules and regulations if I had not feared for my son’s life, if I had married my beloved. Never!’

  She flew into a hysterical rage, hurling herself at the desk and sweeping up the papers with both hands, crumpling them, tearing them to shreds, banging her fists down on the oak table and wailing:

  ‘Never, never … I hate you! Only the memory of Thibaut and my beloved keeps me alive in this place.’

  She turned on the Abbess, her face twisted with rage. She raised her hands to claw the woman she had so respected during the long years spent in the nunnery, the long years of what in her eyes had been a less terrible form of imprisonment than any other simply because Thibaut had survived thanks to her atonement.

  Annelette leapt in front of Yolande and slapped her twice hard on the face. The apothecary’s deep, gruff voice rang out:

  ‘Control yourself! This instant!’

  Yolande stared at her with crazed eyes, ready to pounce. Annelette shook her and growled:

  ‘You little fool. Do you imagine that piety is what brought me here? No, I came here because it was the only place where I could practise my art. Do you think Berthe de Marchiennes took her vows because she longed for a life of contemplation? No. Her family didn’t need another daughter. Do you think Éleusie de Beaufort would have agreed to lead our congregation if she had not been widowed? And do you truly believe that Adélaïde Condeau would have chosen the monastic life if she had been well born instead of abandoned in a forest? And the others? You little fool! Most of us come here in order to avoid a life on the streets! At least we are close to God and lucky enough not to be hired out by the hour in some brothel in a town, ending our days riddled with disease and left to die in the gutter.’

  The brutal truth of Annelette’s tirade brought Yolande suddenly to her senses. She whispered:

  ‘Forgive me. I humbly beg your forgiveness.’

  ‘Who brings you news of your son?’

  Yolande pursed her lips and declared categorically:

  ‘I’m not telling you. You can threaten your worst but my lips are sealed. I’ve made enough mistakes already. I refuse to hurt someone who has shown only kindness by bringing me such solace.’

  Annelette could tell from her tone of voice that it was pointless to insist. She wanted, however, to confirm the truth of what she had already deduced:

  ‘And do these secret exchanges take place at night in front of the herbarium, which cannot be seen from our Reverend Mother’s chambers or from the dormitory?’

  ‘Yes. That’s all I’m going to tell you.’

  Éleusie felt appalled by the violence of the scene, but even more so by the discovery of yet another life destroyed. In a voice weak with exhaustion, she ordered:

  ‘That will be all, daughter. Leave us.’

  ‘Will your punishment …’

  ‘Who am I to turn my back on you when He opened his arms to Mary Magdalene? Go in peace, Yolande. My only reproach is that it took you so long to tell us the truth.’

  Suddenly anxious, Yolande stammered:

  ‘Do you think that … if I had confessed sooner, Hedwige might have been …’

  Annelette answered for the Abbess:

  ‘Saved? I doubt it. There’s no need for you to carry the burden of her death on your conscience. I suspect that she and Jeanne were a threat to the murderess and she decided to kill them. If we find out exactly why, we will discover who the poisoner is … or at least I hope so.’

  After Yolande de Fleury had left, the two women stood facing one another for a moment. Éleusie de Beaufort was the first to break the silence:

  ‘I am … Is it true?’

  ‘Is what true?’

  ‘That you would never have taken holy orders if you had been able to practise as a physician or apothecary in the world?’

  Annelette suppressed a sad smile before confessing:

  ‘Yes, it is. And if your dear husband had not passed away, would you be here among us?’

  ‘No. But I have never regretted my choice.’

  ‘Neither have I. Still, it was a second choice.’

  ‘You see, Annelette, despite the climate of resentment towards the Church, these nunneries where we are allowed to live in peace, to work, to act, to make decisions are a blessing to women.’

  Annelette shook her head.

  ‘Behind this blessing lies a harsh reality: we women enjoy almost no rights in the world. Those who, like yourself, are better off might be fortunate enough to marry a man of honour, respect and love, but what about the others? What choice do they have? Freedom, it is true, can be bought like everything else. I was prepared to pay a high price for mine, but nobody was interested in my opinion, certainly not my father, who never even asked for it. As an unattractive spinster with no inheritance I
could either look after my brother’s children – my brother who was a mediocre doctor but a man – or join a nunnery. I chose the least demeaning of the two alternatives.’

  ‘I’m afraid I must agree with Annelette,’ a high-pitched voice rang out behind them.

  They turned as one. Berthe de Marchiennes was standing uneasily before them. She seemed to have lost her usual air of superiority.

  ‘Berthe …’

  ‘I knocked several times but no one answered so I came in. I only overheard the end of your conversation,’ she added quickly.

  She clasped her hands together, and it occurred to Annelette that this was the first time she had ever seen her stripped of her pious arrogance.

  ‘What is happening, Reverend Mother? It feels as though the world is collapsing all around us … I do not know what to think.’

  ‘We are as bewildered as you, daughter,’ the Abbess replied, a little too sharply.

  The cellarer opened her mouth, seemingly lost for words:

  ‘I know that you don’t like me very much, Reverend Mother, nor you, Annelette, nor the others. It pains me even though I know I only have myself to blame. I’ve … It’s such a terrible thing to admit that you’ve never been wanted, loved. Even now at my age I don’t know which is harder: to admit it to the rest of the world or to myself. God has been my constant solace. He welcomed me into his arms. Clairets has been my only home, my haven. I confess … I was jealous and resented your appointment, Reverend Mother. I assumed that my seniority and the faultless service I had rendered guaranteed my position as abbess – more than that, I felt it was my due. During these past few days I have begun to realise how much I overestimated my abilities. I feel so powerless, so pathetically feeble in the face of these lethal blows raining down upon us, and I am infinitely grateful to you, Madame, for being our abbess.’

  This astonishing display of humility must have been difficult for Berthe de Marchiennes, and Éleusie reached out her hand, but the other woman shook her head. She moistened her lips with her tongue before continuing: