by Ellis Peters
She turned and walked away out of the hall door and round towards the kitchen, and the bunch of keys at her waist rang as if she had deliberately set them jangling in a last derisive spurt of defiance. She left a charged silence behind her, which Juliana was the first one bold enough to break.
‘Well, children, make yourselves content,’ she said, eyeing her grandson and his bride sardonically. ‘You have what you wanted, make the most of it. There’s hard work and much thought goes into running a household.’
Margery hastened to ingratiate herself with thanks and promises. The old woman listened tolerantly, but with that chill smile so unnervingly like Susanna’s still on her lips. ‘There, be off now, and let Daniel get back to his work. Brother Cadfael, I can see, is none too pleased with seeing me roused. I’m likely to be getting some fresh potion poured into me to settle me down, through the three of you and your squabbles.’
They went gladly enough, they had much to say to each other privately. Cadfael saw the spreading grey pallor round Juliana’s mouth as soon as she relaxed her obstinate self-control and lay back against her cushions. He fetched water from the cooling jar, and shook out a dose of the powdered oak mistletoe for her to take. She looked up at him over the cup with a sour grin.
‘Well, say it! Tell me my granddaughter has been shabbily used!’
‘There is no need for me to say it,’ said Cadfael, standing back to study her the better and finding her hands steady, her breath even, and her countenance as hardy as ever, ‘since you know it yourself.’
‘And too late to mend it. But I’ve allowed her the one day she wanted. I could have denied her even that. When I gave her the keys, years ago, you don’t think they were the only ones? What, leave myself unfurnished? No, I can still poke into corners, if I choose. And I do, sometimes.’
Cadfael was packing his dressings and unguents back into his scrip, but with an eye still intent on her. ‘And do you mean to give up both bunches to Daniel’s wife now? If you had meant mischief, you could have handed them to her before your granddaughter’s face.’
‘My mischief is almost over,’ said Juliana, suddenly sombre. ‘All keys will be wrested from me soon, if I don’t give them up willingly. But these I’ll keep yet a day or two. I still have a use for them.’
This was her house, her family. Whatever boiled within it, ripe for eruption, was hers to deal with. No outsider need come near.
In the middle of the morning, when Susanna and Rannilt were both busy in the kitchen, and would certainly be occupied for some time, and the men were at work in the shop, Juliana sent the only remaining witness, Margery, to fetch her a measure of a strong wine she favoured for mulling from a vintner’s a satisfactory distance away across the town. When she had the hall to herself, she rose, bearing down heavily on her stick, and felt beneath her full skirt for the keys she kept hidden in a bag-pocket there.
Susanna’s chamber door was open. A narrow rear door gave quick access here to the strip of yard which separated the kitchen from the house. Faintly Juliana could hear the voices of the two women, their words indistinguishable, their tones revealing. Susanna was cool, short and dry as always. The girl sounded anxious, grieved, solicitous. Juliana knew well enough about that truant day when the chit had come home hastily and in the dark. No one had told her, but she knew. The sharpness of her senses neither denied nor spared her anything. Shabbily used, and too late to mend! The girl had been listening, appalled, to the quarrel in the hall, and felt for the mistress who had shown her kindness. Young things are easily moved to generous indignation and sympathy. The old have no such easy grace.
The store-room with its heavy vats of salted food, jars of oil, crocks of flour and oatmeal and dry goods, tubs of fat, bunches of dried herbs, shared the width of the hall with Susanna’s chamber, and opened out of it. This door was locked. Juliana fitted the key Baldwin Peche had cut for her before ever she gave up the original, and opened the door and went in, into the myriad fat, spicy, aromatic, salt smells of the pantry.
She was within for perhaps ten minutes, hardly more. She was ensconced in her cushioned corner under the staircase and the door locked again securely by the time Margery came back with her wine, and the spices needed to mull it to her liking for her indulgence at bedtime.
‘I have been telling this youngster,’ said Brother Anselm, fitting together curved shards of wood with the adroit delicacy appropriate to the handling of beloved flesh wounded, ‘that should he consider taking vows as a novice here, his tenure would be assured. A life of dedication to the music of worshipwhat better could he seek, gifted as he is? And the world would withdraw its hand from him, and leave him in peace.’
Liliwin kept his fair head bent discreetly over the small mortar in which he was industriously grinding resins for the precentor’s gum, and said never a word, but the colour rose in his neck and mounted his cheek and brow to the hair-line. What was offered might be a life secured and at peace, but it was not the life he wanted. Whatever went on inside that vulnerable and anxious head of his, there was not the ghost of a vocation for the monastic life there. Even if he escaped his present peril, even if he won his Rannilt and took her away with him, after more of the world’s battering he might end as a small vagrant rogue, and she as what? His partner in some enforced thievery, picking pockets at fair and market in order to keep them both alive? Or worse, as his breadwinner by dubious means when all else failed? We have more to answer for here, thought Brother Cadfael, watching the work in silence, than the rights and wrongs of one local charge of robbery and assault. What we send out from here, in the end, must be armed against fate in something better than motley.
‘A fast learner, too,’ said Anselm critically, ‘and very biddable.’
‘Where he’s busy with what he loves, no doubt,’ agreed Cadfael, and grinned at seeing Liliwin’s brief, flashing glance, which met his eyes and instantly avoided them, returning dutifully to the work in hand. Try teaching him his letters instead of the neums, and he may be less ardent.’
‘No, you mistake, he has an appetite for either. I could teach him the elements of Latin if I had him for one year.’
Liliwin kept his head down and his mouth shut, grateful enough, and from the heart, for such praise, greedy to benefit by such generous teaching, enlarged and comforted by such simple kindness, and desirous of gratifying his tutor in return, if only he could. Now that his innocence began to be accepted as a probability, however uncertain as yet, these good people began also to make plans for his future. But his place was not here, but with his little dark girl, wherever their joint wanderings might take them about the world. Either that or out of the world, if the forty days of grace ebbed out without true vindication.
When the light faded too far to allow the fine work to continue, Brother Anselm bade him take the organetto and play and sing by ear to show off his skills to Brother Cadfael. And when Liliwin somewhat forgot himself and launched into a love song, innocent enough but disturbing within these walls, Anselm showed no sign of perturbation, but praised the melody and the verses, but the melody above all, and noted it down briskly to be translated to the glory of God.
The Vesper bell silenced their private pleasure. Liliwin put away the organetto with hasty gentleness, and followed to pluck Cadfael by the sleeve.
‘Did you see her? Rannilt? She came to no harm by me?’
‘I saw her. She was mending a gown, altogether composed and in no trouble. You did her no harm. Yesterday, I hear, she was singing at her work.’
Liliwin released him with a thankful sigh and a whisper of gratitude for such news. And Cadfael went in to Vespers reflecting that he had told but the more welcome half of truth, and wondering if Rannilt felt much like singing this evening. For she had overheard the battle that sent Susanna away defeated, displaced, robbed of the only realm a parsimonious grandmother and sire had left her. And Susanna was the mistress who, if she had never shown her much warmth, had nevertheless kept her from cold, hunger and
blows and, above all, had sent her to her strange marriage, so heretically blessed, and witnessed only by the saints whose relics sanctified her marriage bed. Tomorrow Susanna would give up the keys of her realm to a young rival. The little Welsh girl had a partisan heart, quicker to grief even than to joy. No, she would not feel like singing until tomorrow was over.
Rannilt crouched unsleeping on her pallet in the kitchen until all the house lights had been put out, except one, on which her attention was fixed. A miserly household goes early to bed to save lights and fuel, banking down the hearth-fire in the hall under small rubble, and snuffing all the candles and lamps. It was barely Compline, only just dark, but the young pair, quite full of each other now and cooing like doves, were happy enough to withdraw to their bed, and the others habitually fell asleep with the sun and awoke with it. Only in the store-room, showing a narrow chink of light downhill towards the kitchen, was there a candle still burning.
Rannilt had taken off neither shoes nor gown, but sat hugging herself for warmth and watching that meagre slit of light. When it was the only waking sign remaining, she got up and stole out across the few yards of hard-stamped earth between, and pressed herself against the narrow door that led into Susanna’s chamber.
Her lady was there within awake, tireless, proud, going between her chamber and the store, hard at work as she had sworn, resolute to render account of every jar of honey, every grain of flour, every drop of oil or flake of fat. Rannilt burned and bled for her, but also she went in awe of her, she dared not go in and cry aloud her grief and indignation.
The steps that moved about within were soft, brisk and purposeful. All Susanna’s movements were so, she did everything quickly, nothing in apparent haste, but now it did seem to Rannilt’s anxious ear that there was something of bridled desperation about the way she took those few sharp paces here and there, about her last housewifely survey in this burgage. The slight went deep with her, as well it might.
The faint gleam of light vanished from the slit window of the store-room, and reappeared at the chink of the shutter of the bedchamber. Rannilt heard the door between closed, and the key turned in the lock. Even on this last night Susanna would not sleep without first securing the safety of her charge. But surely now she had finished, and would go to her bed and take what rest she could.
The light went out. Rannilt froze into stillness in the listening silence, and after a long moment heard the inner door into the hall opened.
On the instant there was a sharp, brief sound, a subdued cry that was barely audible, but so charged with dismay and anger that Rannilt put a hand to the latch of the door against which she stood pressed, half in the desire to hold fast to something solid and familiar, half wishful to go in and see what could have provoked so desolate and frustrated a sound. The door gave to her touch. Distant within the hall she heard a voice, the words indistinguishable, but the grim tones unmistakably those of Dame Juliana. And Susanna’s voice replying, bitter and low. Two muted murmurs, full of resentment and conflict, but private as pillow confidences between man and wife.
Trembling, Rannilt pushed open the door, and crept across towards the open door into the hall, feeling her way in the dark. There was a feeble gleam of light high within the hall, it seemed to her to be shining from the head of the stairs. The old woman would not let anything happen in this house without prying and scolding. As though she had not done enough already, discarding her granddaughter and siding with the newcomer!
Susanna had half-closed the door of her room behind her, and Rannilt could see only the shadowy outline of her left side, from shoulder to hems, where she stood some three or four paces into the hall. But the voices had words now.
‘Hush, speak low!’ hissed the old woman, fiercely peremptory. ‘No need to wake the sleepers. You and I are enough to be watching out the night.’
She must be standing at the head of the stairs, with her small night-lamp in one hand and shielded by the other, Rannilt judged. She did not want to rouse any other member of the household.
‘One more, madam, than is needed!’
‘Should I leave you lone to your task, and you still hard at work so late? Such diligence! So strict in your accounting, and so careful in your providing!’
‘Neither you nor she, grandmother, shall be able to claim that I left one measure of flour or one drop of honey unaccounted for,’ said Susanna bitingly.
‘Nor one grain of oatmeal?’ there was a small, almost stealthy quiver of laughter from the head of the stairs. ‘Excellent housewifery, my girl, to find your crock still above half-full, and Easter already past! I give you your due, you have managed your affairs well.’
‘I learned from you, grandmother.’ Susanna had vanished from the chink of the door, taking a step towards the foot of the staircase. It seemed to Rannilt that she was now standing quite still, looking up at the old woman above her, and spitting her soft, bitter protest directly into the ancient face peering down at her in the dimness. What light the small lamp gave cast her shadow along the boards of the floor, a wide black barrier across the doorway. By the shape of the shadow, Susanna had wrapped her cloak about her, as well she might, working late in the chill of the night. ‘It is at your orders, grandmother,’ she said, low and clearly, ‘that I am surrendering my affairs. What did you mean to do with me now? Had you still a place prepared for me? A nunnery, perhaps?’
The shadow across the doorway was suddenly convulsed, as though she had flung out her arms and spread the cloak wide.
After those bitterly discreet exchanges the screech that tore the silence was so terrifying that Rannilt forgot herself, and started forward, hurling the inner door wide and bursting into the hall. She saw Dame Juliana, at the head of the stairs, shaken and convulsed as the black shadow had been, the lamp tilting and dripping oil in her left hand, her right clutching and clawing at her breast. The mouth that had just uttered that dreadful shriek was wrenched side long, the cheek above drawn out of shape. All this Rannilt saw in one brief glimpse, before the old woman lurched forward and fell headlong down the stairs, to crash to the floor below, and the lamp, flying from her hand, spat a jet of burning oil along the boards at Susanna’s feet, and went out.
Chapter Ten
Thursday night to Friday dawn
Rannilt sprang to smother the little serpent of fire that had caught something burnable and sent up a spurt of flame. Blindly, fumbling, her hands found the hard corner of a cloth-wrapped bundle, there on the floor near the wall, and beat out the fire that had caught at the fraying end of the cord that bound it. A few sparks floated and found splinters of wood, and she followed on her knees and quenched them with the hem of her skirt, and then it was quite dark. Not for long, for everyone in the house must be awake now; but for this moment, utterly dark. Rannilt groped about her blindly on the floor, trying to find where the old woman lay.
‘Stay still,’ said Susanna, in the gloom behind her. ‘I’ll make light.’
She was gone, quick and competent again as ever, back into her own room, where she could lay her hands instantly on flint and tinder, always ready by her bed. She came with a candle, and lit the oil-lamp in its bracket on the wall. Rannilt got up from her knees and darted to where Juliana lay on her face at the foot of the stairs. But Susanna was before her, kneeling beside her grandmother and running rapid hands over her in search of broken bones from her fall, before venturing to lift her over on to her back. Old bones are brittle, but it had not been a sheer fall, rather a rolling tumble from stair to stair.
Then they were all coming, clutching candles, gaping, crying questions, Daniel and Margery with one gown thrown hastily round the two of them, Walter bleared and querulous with sleep, Iestyn scurrying up the outdoor stairs from the undercroft and in by the rear door of Susanna’s chamber, which Rannilt had left standing open. Light on light sprang up, the usual frugal rule forgotten.
They came crowding, demanding, incoherent with sleep, and alarm and bewilderment. The smoky flames and flick
ering shadows filled the hall with changing shapes that danced about the two figures quiet on the floorboards. What had happened? What was all the noise? What was the old woman doing out of her bed? Why the smell of burning? Who had done this?
Susanna slid an arm under her grandmother’s body, cradled the grey head with her other palm, and turned her face-upward. She cast up at the clamouring circle of her kin one cold, glittering glance in which Rannilt saw, as none of them did, the scorn in which she held all members of her family but this spent and broken one on her arm.
‘Hold your noise, and make yourselves useful. Can you not see? She came out with her light to see how I was fairing, and she took another seizure like the last, and fell, and the last it may very well be. Rannilt can tell you. Rannilt saw her fall.’
‘I did,’ said Rannilt, quivering. ‘She dropped the lamp and caught at her breast, and then she fell. The oil spilled and took fire, I put it out
‘ She looked towards the wall for the bundle, whatever it had been, that had offered an end of tow to the spark, but there was nothing there now. ‘She’s not dead
