Death and the Maiden

by Samantha Norman

  He wished it weren’t there, or, more precisely, that it weren’t, in fact, a fourth-day moon and that he could obey his usually impeccable instincts and bleed the patient lying close to death in the bed behind him.

  It was his third visit to Elsford Manor in as many days, but the old woman’s condition defied him; nothing he had administered so far had reduced her fever or alleviated her symptoms, which meant that bleeding was the only option left. The trouble was that on a day as inauspicious as a fourth moon, it was deemed too dangerous.

  He put away the lancet he had been sharpening before he saw the moon and turned back to the room.

  He looked out onto a large chamber. Its newly whitewashed walls, ornate tapestries and elegantly carved ceiling spoke of prosperity and announced to all who entered that the lady Penda had done well for herself: sheep farming, someone had told him—and judging by the number of long-legged, black-faced beasts chomping in the numerous wattle pens he had passed on his way in, they were probably right.

  His patient was lying in a large wooden bed whose heavy linen curtains were tied back to their posts to allow her exposure to the efficacious fresh air. Not that she seemed to be benefiting from it, mind; she was so deathly pale, almost the color of the sheets she was lying in, and so terribly still. In fact the only sign of life in her this morning was the slight movement of her parched lips, mouthing, every now and then, some silent incantation, or death agony perhaps.

  Brother Gilbert shook his head sadly; it wouldn’t be too much longer now . . .

  Speaking in a low voice, reciting soothing passages from the Gospel of St. John, he picked up his chrismatory box and approached the bed, ready to perform the viaticum when the time came. But when he knelt down beside the bed she murmured something he couldn’t quite catch . . .

  He stood up, motioning to her family, who were huddled anxiously in the middle of the room and whose unstinting care had, more than once, brought a lump to his throat. She might have been dying, he thought, but she wouldn’t die unloved, and certainly not alone, which must have been some comfort at least.

  “She speaks,” he mouthed as they hurried over.

  Ulf knelt beside his grandmother while the others formed a semicircle around him.

  “You say something, Gylth?” he asked her softly. “You need summat? Only got to ask. Anything . . . You know that.”

  Gyltha opened her mouth to speak but her voice was so faint that he was forced to press his ear almost to her lips to hear it.

  The others exchanged anxious glances, bending like saplings in a breeze toward the bed, silent tears dripping onto the top of their boots as they waited to hear her dying words.

  They saw her open her eyes and held their breath.

  “I said . . .” The faint whisper was audible only to Ulf. “That lad . . .” She gasped, struggling to raise her arm to point toward Brother Gilbert. “Nice boy . . . I’m sure . . . but, oh, Ulf, the bugger’s got breath like a basilisk, so ’less you want to finish me off . . .”

  Partly out of sympathy for Brother Gilbert and partly because he was laughing so much, it was some time before Ulf could impart the words—which, fortunately, turned out not to be his grandmother’s last—to the others.

  Chapter 14

  Sitting on a wind-fallen alder branch gazing out over the river, waiting for the fish to bite, Arthur felt his thoughts drifting to his great-grandmother.

  He knew that today might very well be “the day”—as everyone referred to it—and although he fervently hoped it wasn’t, he was equally adamant that he didn’t want to be at the bedside if it was. But, this morning, when he had put his foot down and refused to go to the manor with the rest of them, his mother had taken it very badly.

  “Oh, let ’im be, Ed!” His father’s intervention, when she started shouting at him, came as a welcome surprise. “Let ’im go fishin’ if tha’s what ’e wants. It’ll be good for ’im . . . Besides, Gylth won’t know the difference and we’ll need summat for supper when we get back.” It was a rare day that Robert Atewod plucked up the courage to gainsay his wife, and Arthur was extremely grateful that it was this one.

  Besides, he had seen Gyltha recently and had stood dutifully at the foot of her bed with the others, for what felt like an age, gazing at her insentient form.

  But he hadn’t liked it. The body in the bed hadn’t looked like her, all desiccated and pathetic, and the experience had reminded him, most unpleasantly, of the time he was taken to St. Etheldreda’s shrine at Ely.

  Everybody went to see St. Etheldreda at some point in their life, apparently—although he couldn’t understand why—and her jeweled shrine in the eastern arm of the cathedral was an object of veneration and a source of great income for the priory. In the spring and summer Ely was awash with pilgrims, who descended like starlings, cartfuls of them clattering noisily over the causeway and splashing through the swamps in their overloaded boats to pay homage to her. So she must have had something. But standing in the cathedral that day, staring at a collection of old bones in a casket, Arthur had been overwhelmed by the cloying atmosphere of death: the incense and the damp stone and the disembodied incantations of the monks had flooded his senses in a suffocating wave, and he had felt the same sensation gazing at the living corpse of his great-grandmother.

  Besides, as with St. Etheldreda, he doubted very much that Gyltha was even aware of his presence, nor, for the life of him, could he see what good staring at her was going to do. Nevertheless he had done it, even as he resolved never to repeat the experience, and besides, if she was going to die, he wanted to remember her the way she had been, corpulent, vibrant, funny and alive, not a sapless old stick in a bed.

  He glanced up at the sky again, wondering whether God was still watching, relieved to see that the outline of the moon had vanished for the day.

  A little while later, he got up from his log, tied his fishing line to a nearby fallen alder branch and went to join Will at the water’s edge.

  “Pass us that glaive, would you?” he asked him. “Gonna see if’n I can crown us a jack or two.”

  On the other side of the river he watched a group of men and women wade across the marsh on stilts, dipping like herons every so often as they scoured the lodes and drains of the reeds and rushes that would otherwise choke them. During the autumn and winter water poured in ceaselessly from the uplands, so that without drainage and the rapt attention of every Fenlander, the marsh would revert to a quagmire, the meadow to a marsh, and the world would sink under its weight. So there was barely a section of stream, lode, or riverbank for whose repair somebody wasn’t personally responsible, and often on pain of death.

  Indeed, Arthur was still having nightmares about another of Hawise’s stories, the one about the former abbot of Ramsey, an ill-tempered old boy by all accounts, who, when he discovered a hole in an earthen dam one day, hanged the tenant he deemed responsible and used the poor fellow’s corpse to make the repair.

  “And sometimes at night,” Hawise had told them, her voice dropping to a whisper, the way it did when she was trying to frighten them, “when the wind’s in the right direction you can still hear the dead man’s moans.”

  Arthur shivered—he couldn’t help it—and put his fingers in his ears, just in case.

  The hours passed swiftly, as they always did by the river, and before they knew it the abbey bells were sounding for nones.

  “Ought to be getting back then, I s’pose,” Will said, looking up with a satisfied grin from his bucket brimming with fish. Arthur nodded and began to pack up his things. Only Tom was reluctant to leave.

  “Can’t we stay a bit longer?” he pleaded. “Just a bit.”

  Poor Tom. His was the poorest catch, and yet he had promised his mother a pike or two for supper, and because Arthur was acutely sensitive to the effects of maternal disappointment, especially today, he took pity on him.

  “All right then,” he said, ignoring Will’s groan of dissent. “We’ll stay a bit longer . . . but
you’d best get on with it, we ain’t waitin’ forever . . .”

  It was a bitter irony, the first in his short life, that a decision born from kindness was one he would regret for the rest of it. Because, as it turned out, if he hadn’t agreed to wait for Tom, they would have been long gone by the time the wind blew in from the North Sea, disturbing Martha’s watery grave and sending her body bobbing over the choppy waters toward them.

  Chapter 15

  Allie found it harder to part from Rowley than she had expected but, because she was still angry with him, refused to show it. Nevertheless, when they reached the outskirts of London and she watched him ride off, she was surprised at how sad she felt. It wasn’t as though she wasn’t used to long separations from him, from both parents, in fact—her childhood had been littered with them—but in the past there had always been Gyltha to comfort and protect her. Now, all of a sudden, she was completely alone.

  They spent that night at Rowley’s manor in St. Albans and at the crack of dawn the next morning set off on the final leg of their journey, moving briskly through the gently undulating Hertfordshire countryside and flat monotony of the Cambridgeshire plains until, eventually, they came to the point where the land surrendered to the vast sea of horizons and endless sky of the Fens.

  They left the horses on the uplands and waded through the marsh on foot, arriving, eventually, at a small landing stage on the river, where a boat was waiting for them. Through the rushes Allie could just make out the figure of a man hunched in the middle of it, puffed up against the cold like a pigeon, his coif pulled low over his face, the fingers of a heavily gloved hand tapping his knee. At the same time Penda spotted him, too, and, motioning for her to keep quiet, crept over the wooden boards of the quay to the water’s edge. When she was directly above him, she put the thumb and forefinger of her left hand into the corners of her mouth and gave a loud, shrill whistle.

  The man spun around in alarm, his twisting bulk rocking the boat dangerously, and Allie gave a squeal of delight.

  “Ulf!”

  As soon as he saw her Ulf leapt out of the boat, took her in his arms and spun her around.

  “What a surprise! What a lovely surprise!” he said when he put her down at last. “And the mistress?” he asked, peering over her shoulder as though Adelia might be hiding in the reeds somewhere.

  Allie’s heart sank. She should have expected this, should have known he would be disappointed that it was her and not Adelia who had come to their aid; after all, the last time he’d clapped eyes on her she was only a child, hardly a fitting substitute for his beloved mistress.

  She blushed, a combination of guilt and shame at her hubris.

  “Oh, Ulf, she is coming,” she said. “It’s just that she hurt her ankle badly, you see, and can’t travel, but she’ll be here as soon as she can. I promise.”

  But if Ulf was disappointed he had the grace not to show it—another reason in a long litany of them why she loved him. Instead, and perhaps sensing her mortification, he crooked his finger under her chin and lifted it.

  “Never you mind,” he said as he picked her up and put her into the boat beside Penda. “You’ll do. Chip off the old block, you are, if I remember right.” Then he climbed in, took his place at the oars and set off along the King’s Delph, to Elsford.

  A combination of the early start and the boat’s rhythm had a soporific effect, and before long, despite the cold, Allie was curled up on the bench beside Penda, fast asleep.

  “She up to it then, d’you think?” Penda asked Ulf when she was sure Allie couldn’t overhear.

  “Aye.” Ulf nodded. “She’ll do right enough. Got her mother’s blood in her veins, that one, same instinct for healing, allus did, even as a baby.”

  Penda looked down at the recumbent Allie, took off her mantle and draped it over her.

  “And Gylth?” she asked, tucking her pelt neatly around her. “Still with us, I trust? I ain’t dragged this poor girl all the way here for nothing, then?”

  “No.” Ulf rested the oars for a moment and crossed himself. “No you ain’t. Still ’ere, thank God, but . . .” He shook his head. “I tell you, Pen, these is strange times right enough, and Gyltha or no Gyltha, it makes me worry if we’ve done the right thing bringing her here . . .”

  Penda looked up. Something in his tone disturbed her, and when he was reluctant to elaborate, she left her place beside Allie and climbed onto the bench beside him.

  “What?” she asked, searching his face. “What d’you mean?”

  He turned to her.

  “We found Martha,” he said.

  As village reeve, and Arthur’s uncle, Ulf was who the boys ran to when they found the body.

  “It were dreadful, Pen,” Ulf said, shaking his head as though that could expel the memory. “I’ve seen plenty o’ death in my time, natural and unnatural, taken more corpses off gibbets and pulled more bodies outta bogs than I care to remember, but I ain’t seen nothin’ like that, not even in the old days with the mistress . . . It weren’t—” He broke off, his voice cracking with emotion. “It weren’t natural, Pen.” And he turned to her with an expression of such torment that it made her blood run cold.

  For a moment neither of them spoke, the only sounds the cloop of the moorhens as they headed to their nests for the evening and the gentle splash of his oars dipping in the water.

  “What d’you mean not ‘natural’?” Penda asked. “Drownin’, weren’t it? Not the first, poor little bugger.”

  But he shook his head. “That’s just it, Pen,” he said. “It didn’t look like any drownin’ I ever seen . . . Didn’t look like she’d been in that water very long, for one, certainly not as long as she’d been missin’, and . . .” He turned to her again, and again she saw that haunted look. “There was somethin’ else . . .” He broke off, glancing at Allie over his shoulder. “There’s another girl gone missin’, too. An’ reports of another one washed up dead at Manea . . . I tell you, Pen, it’s the devil at work again.”

  Again . . .

  Penda froze, the embers of an ancient memory stirring to life, and closed her eyes, trying to suppress it. But it was no good. No matter how long nor how hard she tried to forget, she had seen the devil’s work with her own eyes and never could.

  Then she, too, glanced back at Allie and, relieved to see she was still asleep, clenched her fist and raised it to the heavens.

  “God keep you safe, girl,” she hissed under her breath. “Or ’e’ll ’ave me to answer to.”

  Chapter 16

  It was dark by the time the boat bumped up against the moorings at Elsford, jolting Allie awake.

  Though still sleepy, with Ulf’s arm, she was able to stagger up the steep slope of the riverbank onto the towpath without incident.

  Penda lit a lantern and led the way down a meandering track through the marsh that led, eventually, into a long avenue of yew trees at the end of which a disembodied flame was darting this way and that like a will-o’-the-wisp. As they got closer Allie could see that it was, in fact, a brand that a small person was carrying, pacing up and down outside the entrance to a manor house . . .

  “This is Hawise,” Penda said, introducing the peripatetic beacon, who, it turned out, was a girl. “Ulf’s daughter.” Then, turning to the girl: “And this here’s Allie. Mistress’s daughter.”

  The girl grinned and curtsied low, giggling at the loud rustling her straw-stuffed petticoats made as they brushed on the ground.

  Allie stared at her blankly, sleepy disorientation rendering her mute for the time being. Only a moment ago, it seemed, she had been fast asleep in a boat, and suddenly here she was, another world away in Elsford. She was midyawn when Penda took her arm and marshaled her up a short flight of stone steps to a heavily carved entrance door.

  “Welcome to Elsford,” she said, pushing it open and ushering her into a hall where she was confronted with a staircase that appeared to have ambitions for heaven. “Come,” Penda said, setting off up it.

/>   It was a long, hard climb on such tired legs, but eventually, they stopped at a landing and another door, which opened, as if by magic, onto a brightly lit room where two women were waiting.

  Allie stood on the threshold, overcome by fatigue, blinking into the unexpected light and the gaze of the strangers, until Ulf took her arm from Penda and guided her into the room.

  “This is Rosa, my wife,” he said, embracing the elder of the two women. “And that’s Jodi, Penda’s maid . . . Long-suffering, the both of ’em, as you can imagine,” he added, grinning.

  The women smiled and curtsied but Allie barely noticed them, because she was already looking beyond them, at the tiny figure—little more than a wrinkle in a blanket—lying in the bed behind them.

  “Gyltha!” she cried, tears of joy, relief and fatigue spouting from her eyes as she ran to her. “Darling, darling Gyltha!”

  She dropped to her knees at the bedside, clasping the frail hand that had crept out from under the covers and pressing it gratefully to her lips as she wept some more.

  “There, there,” said Gyltha, stroking her hair with her one dry hand. “There, there, me old darlin’. There, there.”

  They stayed like that for a while, weeping together and murmuring to one another, until, with a loud sniff, Gyltha withdrew her hand and pointed accusingly at Penda.

  “And you!” she hissed. “I told you not to go buggerin’ about, draggin’ ’em all this way! Got better things to do with their time than fussin’ round old women. You should be ashamed o’ yourself.”

  Although the rebuke was harsh, Allie felt it augured well and implied that, despite her obvious physical frailty, Gyltha had lost none of her spark; on the other hand, Penda looked so hurt that she felt compelled to intervene on her behalf.

  “Gyltha, that’s terribly unfair,” she said, sitting up and wiping her eyes. “You must know how worried we’ve all been, Penda especially, and if you thought for one moment that I wouldn’t come when you needed me . . . well . . . you’ve got another think coming. Besides, it’s too late anyway, I’m here now, and as soon as she’s better, Ma will be, too, so you’ll just have to put up with it, I’m afraid.”