Heart of Ice

by Alys Clare

  Stifling her grief, Sister Tiphaine watched as the infirmarer began to administer small drops of the water to the old man.

  The two jugs were soon emptied; Sister Caliste had been working her way from the opposite end of the ward and she and the infirmarer – with Sister Tiphaine at her shoulder – met in the middle.

  ‘I don’t know what you think you’ve got here,’ Sister Euphemia began in a cross whisper, glaring at the two nuns – acute disappointment had made her good nature temporarily quite desert her – ‘but it doesn’t seem to be doing any good whatsoever.’

  But Sister Caliste had her eyes on a young woman who was lying just inside the door and who had been the first person she had treated. ‘Wait,’ she murmured. ‘Just wait . . .’

  Tiphaine and Euphemia, noticing where she was looking, also turned their attention to the young woman. As they watched, she opened her eyes and struggled to raise her head. The three nuns hastened over to her. She was still sweaty and hot but her skin had lost the burn of high fever; the rash that had mottled her chest and face seemed to have faded from dark red to pink and little scabs were forming on the open lesions.

  The woman’s eyes were wide with fear. ‘I was in the lane,’ she muttered, ‘calling for the children . . .’

  ‘You are at Hawkenlye,’ Sister Caliste said gently, sitting down on the edge of the bed and taking the woman’s hand. ‘You have been very unwell but now you are going to get better.’

  ‘Am I?’ The woman frowned. ‘It doesn’t feel like it. Oh, I ache! All over!’ Then, panic crossing her face, she cried, ‘Where are my children?’

  ‘Hush, hush,’ Caliste soothed her. ‘They are here, but in a different room. They too were sick but both are recovering.’

  The woman looked as if she could hardly believe what had happened. ‘We’re not dead? Not dying?’

  ‘No.’ Sister Caliste smiled at her. ‘You will be very weak for some time, I fear, but eventually you will be able to go home again.’

  The woman’s eyes closed. ‘Very well, Sister. Whatever you say.’ The she gave a huge yawn and went to sleep.

  The pattern was repeated in several of the patients for whom Sister Euphemia had all but given up hope. Afterwards, with the luxury of time to consider, she often asked herself whether that mysterious draught really had anything to do with their recovery or whether it was simply that the illness had run its course and at last left their racked bodies. As with all plagues, she reflected, there were always some who were stronger than the rest and who better withstood the ravages of the disease.

  Rational thinking was all very well, however; the other part of Sister Euphemia, the one which knew that she had observed not one but several miracles, put logic right out of mind and prompted her to go down on her knees and thank God for his mercy.

  The Abbess Helewise did not respond to the miracle draught. She lay quite still, her body voided, so deeply unconscious that, when they tried to offer her water of any sort, it just rolled into her partly open lips and dribbled out again. The danger of some of it going down her inert throat and choking her was, Sister Euphemia decreed, too dangerous and so they had to stop. Sister Caliste, who had begged to be allowed to nurse her, had to content herself with bathing the Abbess’s face and forehead with a cloth wrung out in the draught.

  They had clipped her already short hair closer to her head in the hope of thus lowering her alarmingly high fever and now Caliste repeatedly put the damp cloth on to the short, springy curls. She all but forgot that this woman was Abbess of Hawkenlye; deadly white face, red-gold hair darkened with sweat and water, eyes closed and already appearing to have sunk back into the skull, she could have been any woman brought in for the Hawkenlye nuns to care for.

  Except, Caliste thought, tears in her eyes, I don’t necessarily love any of the others as I love her.

  Gently she removed the cloth – it was quite hot in her hands – wrung it out yet again and replaced it on the Abbess’s forehead.

  Tiphaine made another visit to the forest fringes. Without Caliste, she carried back both full vessels herself. When they were empty, she found a handcart and this time made the trip with three times as many jugs.

  Eventually, of course, someone asked her what she was doing; with a shrug, as if it was not that important, she muttered something about a preparation she had made up in her little hut. The explanation was accepted and soon everyone was aware that the herbalist had come up with something that really seemed to work.

  Tiphaine knew that she could not go on taking the credit. But all that, she decided, ignoring her aching back as she pushed the handcart back up the track towards the Abbey for the third time, would just have to wait.

  Josse sat outside the Vale infirmary waiting for the Abbess to come off duty. It was the hour for Vespers and he thought he might accompany her up to the Abbey church, attend the office with her and then persuade her to go along to her room so that he could tell her all about Sabin de Retz, her grandfather and his own musings as to what might lie behind the mystery.

  He waited.

  She did not come.

  Finally Sister Euphemia came out. She took Josse’s hand and led him a short way off along the path that bordered the lake. Then she halted, turned and looked him in the eyes.

  ‘Sir Josse, the Abbess Helewise has the sickness.’

  There was an instant in which his whole soul rejected the news. Then, as it began to sink in, he felt a vast wail of grief well up inside him. No, oh, no!

  He contained it. His voice harsh with emotion, he said gruffly, ‘Will she live?’

  ‘I do not know,’ the infirmarer said steadily, ‘although I fear the worst.’

  ‘Why did you not tell me sooner?’

  ‘We hoped – I hoped – to avoid it and save you this pain,’ she confessed. ‘I went on believing that she would suddenly take a turn for the better. But . . .’ She held out empty hands, palms uppermost, in a hopeless gesture.

  ‘What can we do?’ He began pacing to and fro. ‘We must fetch the Eye from the Abbess’s room!’ he cried. ‘We’ve tried it once, I realise that, but perhaps—’

  ‘Sister Tiphaine has already done that,’ the infirmarer told him.

  ‘And?’

  She hesitated. ‘In some cases, the dying appear to have been brought back.’

  He knew the rest without her having to say it. ‘But not the Abbess.’

  ‘No. Dear Sir Josse, no.’

  ‘Should I have another try?’

  Knowing how he loathed the Eye and everything to do with it, Sister Euphemia realised what the offer must have cost him. ‘I fear it would not help, for she is beyond swallowing any of the water.’

  His eyes wild, he tore at his hair and then shouted, ‘What, then? Do we just let her die?’

  And Sister Euphemia said, very quietly, ‘I have just sent for Father Gilbert again.’

  Much later that night, when in almost every place except for Hawkenlye Abbey all activity had ceased for the night and the world was deeply asleep, a dark shape crept from its lair out on the marshy land beside the river and made a quiet, unseen way into the town.

  He had felt sick earlier and the headache had developed until the very daylight had been like a flaming, searing torch held up to his eyes. He had slept on the rotten straw-filled mattress that he found in the corner of the hovel, wrapping himself in his thick cloak and pulling the filthy sacking up to his neck when the shivering began. He had slept and, on waking, felt a little better. He found kindling and firewood and got a small, hot blaze going in the hearth in its circle of stones. Then he had prepared a hot drink and made himself eat – sparingly – from his dwindling supplies. The drink had, he reflected, probably done him more good than the food, for he carried a variety of remedies in his pack and this one had been sold to him by a stallholder in Paris who swore it would ease the worst headache and stop an incipient fever dead in his tracks.

  Perhaps – the man gave a brief, grim smile – the stallholder h
ad not after all used the word dead.

  But the drug was strong – he thought he detected the bitterness of opium – and his depression of earlier in the day quickly gave way to an uplifting sense of elation.

  Now, setting out on the faint track that led back along the river to Tonbridge, the man felt new energy coursing through him, a firm new resolve to finish the job and get out. He had packed up his belongings and fastened his pack behind his horse’s saddle, then worked hard for a short time to ensure that he had left no sign of his brief occupation of the hovel for others to find and question. He would leave his horse hidden nearby, he thought, slip into the house, do what he must do and then, before anybody had realised what had happened, be on his way south to the coast and home.

  Where was home? He asked himself the question as he trudged along, waiting until the path was more clearly defined before he mounted; it would be folly to risk his horse putting a foot into some hidden hole in the rough ground and pulling up lame. Home . . .

  He had been born in a small town in Normandy, the product of a liaison between the daughter of a tanner and a man who had been a soldier under old Geoffrey Plantagenet, Henry II’s father, but who had lost his right hand and, no more use as a fighting man, spent the remainder of his life haunting inns, taverns, tap rooms . . . anywhere, in fact, where someone would sell – even better, buy – him a drink. He had the patter down to a fine art and the hideous stump that was the end of his right arm evoked sympathy and revulsion in equal parts; people often stood him a mug of small beer or of thin, sharp wine purely to make him cover it up again.

  This unlikely couple remained together for the duration of the woman’s pregnancy and for a further five or six years, when the foul odours of the tannery finally got the better of the one-handed soldier and he took off in the middle of the night, never to be seen in his home town again.

  Surprisingly, he took his little son with him. The boy – he had been christened Gilles – had shown a precocious intelligence and a talent for mimicry and it was quite possible that the father saw the lad as a likely source of income. A spot of entertainment, a clever little trick that amused men halfway to drunkenness and made them laugh, and the sous would roll in.

  Gilles soon found out how to talk himself out of trouble; in his father’s habitual haunts, not every broken man wanted female company for the fumble in the straw after the lamps were extinguished, and young Gilles grew up handsome of face and slim of body. As he entered adolescence he added fighting skills to his repertoire. He killed his first victim at the age of fourteen, a man unwise enough to corner him and hold a knife to his throat until he gave up his purse. Gilles had got his own knife unsheathed and into the man’s heart before the assailant had even finished his hoarsely whispered demands.

  His father died when he was fifteen. Not that the demise of his parent made much difference to Gilles, for by then his father had sunk deep into alcoholism and barely recognised his son except when, as he often did, he tried to touch him for money. Gilles was already planning his own future and without the burden of his father – it was strange but, for all the old man’s faults, Gilles had loved him in a way and had never managed to persuade himself to abandon him – he was now free to pursue the path he had set. He knew of a certain local lord who, engaged in a quarrel with a neighbour, was in need of mercenary soldiers to support his cause. The lord laughed at Gilles when he presented himself as a potential fighting man, for he was still slightly built and had the face of an angel. But the graceful young body was strong as steel: Gilles, undeterred, drew his sword and showed the lord what he could do with it. He was engaged on the spot.

  But Gilles did not intend to be a rank-and-file soldier all his life. The local lord was but the first step on the ladder that would win for Gilles the life he wanted and he used his position in that household ruthlessly, advancing his own cause to anyone with the slightest influence in higher circles who was prepared to listen to him. Within a year he was working for a minor duke; within five he had been engaged by a particularly aggressive bishop who needed the discreet removal of a persistent but prominent troublemaker. That murder was the first of the efficient and totally clandestine killings which were to become the trademark – although a bare handful of people knew it – of Gilles de Vaudreuil.

  The rumour of an efficient and highly professional killer spread quietly and steadily through the ranks of Norman, Angevin and Plantagenet aristocratic circles; it was quite amazing, Gilles often thought, just how many rich, ruthless and influential men with their eyes firmly set on some personal goal required the disappearance of somebody else in order to achieve their ambition. As Gilles’s experience grew, so did the fee that he demanded; such was his reputation that they always paid him what he asked. By the time he was thirty he had lodged a small fortune safely away with the Knights Templar; their discretion was as assured as his own and he knew his money was safe. One day, he told himself, one day when I grow tired of killing, I shall return to that pretty little river deep in the hills of Normandy, buy myself a modest manor and some land and live a life of ease and comfort until I die.

  This present mission had come as no great surprise. When his current paymaster had sent for him, Gilles had guessed that the target victim must be one of two men, both of whom stood between this master and where he wanted to go. One target Gilles dismissed as unlikely; the man was just too famous, especially now, and the attention currently surrounding him and his entourage and following every move that he made would make it very difficult, although not out of the question, to kill him. But when Gilles’s new master asked him if he thought it possible to kill the other person, who in fact turned out to be the intended victim, Gilles had already begun to consider ways and means. ‘Oh, yes, Sire,’ he had calmly replied. ‘It is not only possible but achievable.’

  He had been hired – for a huge fee – and then he had disappeared. He had made his way to the abode of his victim, paid for one or two pieces of information, then sat patiently and simply used his eyes for a few days until he had completed his observations and his arrangements were in place. Then he had climbed a wall erroneously believed to be unscalable, crossed a stable yard as silently as a shadow and been on the very point of slipping through a doorway to the private, secret passage that led to the heart of his victim’s quarters when the unthinkable had happened. Someone had caught up with him and, barely able to speak for the pressure of Gilles’s hand at his throat, forced out the message that the mission was off.

  In the terrible rush of emotions that surged through him as the adrenalin ebbed away, one thing annoyed Gilles perhaps even more than his master’s last-minute cancellation of the job: the fact that the messenger had been able to pick up his trail and follow him right to the very door of the secret passage. When the two men were once more outside the castle walls – Gilles had been required to half-carry the messenger, who had sprained his ankle in getting over the wall – Gilles had demanded how the young man had achieved it. The fellow had said with a shy grin that, unable to find Gilles, he had instead hidden away to watch the one place where he reckoned Gilles could achieve access to the victim.

  The fact that another man seemed to possess his own abilities, which he had hitherto regarded as unique, shook Gilles de Vaudreuil to the core.

  And this unwelcome realisation was, although he had not yet fully admitted it to himself, the prime reason why his thoughts were suddenly turning more and more to that dream house in Normandy.

  He had reached the town. Dismounting, he led his horse along the road that led to the sheriff’s house. The secret was out that the girl and the old man were now lodged there; Gilles had observed the sheriff fetch the old man from the tavern and, even had he missed that, the talk in the tap room had been of the pretty young ’un and the old granddaddy under protection at Sheriff’s house.

  He took to the rough ground on the left as he passed the last of the town’s dilapidated and stinking dwellings. He walked on for a quarter of a mile or
so, and the sheriff’s house loomed up as a dark bulk on his right, on the other side of the track. He walked on, wraith-quiet; he had bound the metal parts of his horse’s bridle and stirrups so that the horse too moved all but silently. When he was some distance past the house, he tethered his horse to a tree, checked that his dagger, fine garrotte rope and short stabbing sword were in their accustomed places, and then crept back the way he had come.

  He saw the four men outside the sheriff’s house almost immediately. Clearly they were not used to mounting an invisible guard; two of them were actually talking to each other, albeit in whispers. Nobody could have told them, Gilles thought, that the sibilant, whispered s sound carried further than virtually any other on a still, cold night. He began to feel almost sorry for the sheriff if these men were the best he could find, for they were evidently bored and cold and, as Gilles watched, patiently waiting his moment, the other two moved from the side of the house and came to join the whispering pair. One of them said something, all four chuckled and then the man who had spoken drew something from under his cloak. It was a flask of some liquid – probably alcohol, which gave the temporary illusion of warmth – and Gilles observed all four men take turns at swigging from it.

  They seemed in no hurry to separate and return to their own posts; two, indeed, were now leaning comfortably against the wooden posts either side of the entrance to the courtyard. Gilles simply crept round the side of the house, keeping his distance, and climbed the courtyard wall. He dropped down inside and approached the house from the side, where it was totally unguarded. Then, in the shadows of the house, he tiptoed round to the door. The guards stood in the gateway, all four of them huddled together, but now the flask was on its third round and they had forgotten all about guard duty.

  The stab of pain hit him as he slipped the heavy blade of his short sword in the narrow gap between the door and the lintel, with the intention of easing up the latch that fastened it from the inside. So acute was the headache that for an instant he could think of nothing else. It passed as quickly as it had come; swiftly he returned to the task and soon the door gave before him. He opened it the merest crack, slipped inside and closed it again, although, thinking ahead to his escape, he lowered the latch only as far as was necessary to hold the door shut.