The Innocent (25 page)

“Did you eat in the kitchen, Anne?”

“No, madam, truly I do not think I could. I was sick you see, after…” She couldn’t finish the sentence and, much to her shame, hot tears slid down her face.

“Ah, child, come here.”

Anne ran to her mistress and sobbed in her arms as if Margaret had been her mother. The older woman cried as well, broken-hearted tears for all the sadness of the last few months, as she stroked the girl’s hair. Anne quietened eventually, but she stayed kneeling beside Margaret, and a little peace came to them both. After a time, they heard the Abbey bell call the brothers to prayer and Margaret sighed.

“We must go down to the chapel soon. Dermot should have finished his work…”

Margaret sighed again as she eyed her unfinished household accounts. Expenditure was very heavy currently and would get heavier, especially since the funeral expenses for Piers would include a new set of black mourning for each member of the household. Mathew, in the depths of his grief, had also talked about endowing chantry Masses to be said for his son, to pray for the repose of his soul. If he went ahead with the plan, he would have to find the twenty pounds it would cost each year from the proceeds of his business, because what he gave her to run Blessing House would not remotely stretch such a great way. And there was also the monument for Piers to be designed and made, which would be very expensive, and the price of Soul-Scot for his son that must be paid to Father Bartolph and his helpers after the funeral Mass, in recognition of their prayers to help Piers’s soul find peace.

So many decisions, decisions for Mathew, and then, as if the thought had conjured up the man, her husband joined them in the solar. Discreetly, Anne curtsied to Mathew and hurried to tidy up the little room, quietly making it ready for the night.

“Husband, I would like to make a suggestion—about Aveline.”

Mathew frowned and dropped into his chair beside the empty hearth. After the events of this morning, the day had moved so fast that he’d not thought of what needed to be done for some hours. He sighed.

“Very well. Speak on.”

“I believe she should be buried at Burning Norton.”

Mathew considered her words. Burning Norton was a symbol of his success; it was the house and estate he had purchased only some few years ago in Yorkshire, in the moors near the Cistercian Abbey of Rievaulx. Sheep country mostly, open moorland that even a few years ago had not been worth very much even to the most land-hungry noble. But Mathew had seen the possibilities as the monks had done, and when the impoverished baron who owned Burning Norton had died, he’d been able to persuade the widow to sell after he had agreed to settle an annuity on her.

His venture in the north had been remarkably successful and, over time, he’d expanded his holdings as much as he could, while the tough little sheep who grew such good wool browsed through the heather, and each autumn as they were shorn, made him a little richer.

His daughter, Alicia, and her husband—one of the powerful and influential Raby family, a landless younger son, who was, unusually, not very war-like—lived there, though they were guarding his interests. In his will he had settled the estate on both of them for all that they had done to make the place prosper, but he’d not told them yet. Time enough to learn their good fortune after he was gone.

Yes, it was a good decision that Margaret had made. The parish priest, whose church was close by the estate, was ignorant, barely knew his Latin, and with a suitable “gift” to his parish, he might be amenable to their wishes.

He grunted, and Margaret took that for assent. “I do not believe that we will be permitted to have her buried in consecrated ground, but perhaps the priest might be asked to bless her grave if we were to bury her in the grounds of the house. The little copse of trees that looks down on the valley there? It’s very peaceful.”

It was strange that the subject of Aveline provoked no heat in either of them. Mathew had not once, in all his agony watching over Piers’s body in the chapel, spoken one word of reproach of his daughter-in-law. How she died was impossible to think about—or indeed talk about—because each in their own way felt responsible. All they could do to end this tragedy was bury Piers and his wife, as honorably as they could. And try to get on with looking after the living.

“It’s settled then?”

Mathew nodded heavily. Yes, he would agree. For a moment a lonely picture nudged his mind: the plain coffin of his daughter-in-law, bouncing in the back of a cart on the rough moorland tracks as she made her long last journey, alone.

Later in the evening, with Margaret’s words echoing in her mind, Anne saw that lonely picture, too, as she stood beside the old open arrow chest in the cellar under the kitchen that contained Aveline’s body.

The rest of the household were at prayers but she had avoided going, pretending to be ill again after the events of the day. Now, as the light she was holding picked out the lines of the dead girl’s oddly peaceful face, Anne placed the iron knife that had killed Piers among Aveline’s skirts.

“Iron for defense, from the hungry spirits of the night,” Anne whispered.

Now she placed a little parcel of salt, twisted up in a scrap of cloth, in the dead woman’s clasped hands.

“Salt for the light I will burn for you.” For the next seven nights, Anne would cast salt over a candle flame held up in a window; the blue flame would tell the soul where her home was, until it was time for her to leave.

“And when the time comes, this is for your journey, to pay the waymaster…” Carefully, Anne put two copper pennies, hers to give from her wages last quarter day, over Aveline’s closed eyes.

“Blessed Mother, take my sister’s soul, guard it well, let her find happiness in your garden.”

There was more than one Mother to pray to—and it was not the Mother of Christ to whom she prayed now.

Lady Mary was gentle, but Aveline’s death had not been a gentle thing. Better, then, to pray to Aine: she at least would understand the bitterness, the injustice of this girl’s passing, for she was the goddess of the displaced and conquered people, those who had been driven to the west of England by long-ago invaders. Aine was mother to the motherless and defender of the lost; she would light the way for Aveline’s soul when it was time to journey to her long, last home.

“Sleep, Aveline. Sleep well in the Mother’s arms. You will not be forgotten while I live.”

Chapter Seventeen

It was the night of the Feast of the Visitation of Mary and all of England held its breath: the queen was finally in labor.

Warwick knew that his power would be diminished if the coming child was a boy, the heir that all England wanted, and so he had bribed a number of the queen’s ladies to ensure he would hear news of the birth as soon as it was accomplished—if it was accomplished, for his informants had given him interesting news. The queen was ill, semidelirious, and the doctors were worried. He rubbed his hands.

Perhaps, in time, there’d be a French marriage, after all.

For Doctor Moss, these were very frightening times. At the king’s insistence, he’d visited the queen three times a day during these last weeks, and each time after the examination, he’d debated telling the king the truth.

This pregnancy for Elizabeth Wydeville had been unlike those of her two sons with her former husband, Lord Grey. This time she had stored fluid in the last months of pregnancy, and while it made her famously delicate face puffy, it also placed strain on her heart. He could tell by her racing pulse and the headaches that were plaguing her. Further, when the heart was disordered, dropsy could result, grossly swelling the arms and legs until the patient could no longer move. Fearfully, in the last few days he’d observed the signs in her fingers. Her rings were sunk deep into the flesh and her feet were so swollen she could no longer wear her favorite slippers. If the child did not come very soon, he was afraid the queen’s life would be in serious danger—and that made him sweat, for the king would no doubt fix blame if she died. He, the celebrated Doctor Moss, would be the logical candidate.

At night in his room at the palace, which had a glimpse of the river and a sideways view of Westminster Hall, he’d pored over books from his student days. His library included the works of Galen and texts from Alexandria—banned by the church as the work of Muslim physicians—plus drawings of the illegal postmortem of a pregnant woman in Milan.

Except for the accepted remedies of leeching and cupping, nothing had suggested how he could alleviate the fluid buildup, so he’d resorted to wrapping the queen in hot sheets and blankets to make her sweat as much as possible. He’d also administered a mash of juniper berries steeped in equal parts of hot wine and the piss of a pregnant mare as an encouragement to the body to expel urine. The queen had not been an easy patient either. Everything he tried to do was only barely tolerated to speed the birth of the prince Elizabeth was convinced she was carrying. God help us all, he thought, if she has a girl. There’ll be hell to pay.

It was late now, and cold. Capricious summer had replaced the heat of late June with gray rain and a dank wind that moaned around his small windows. The summons to the queen had finally come on this dirty night after two weeks of false alarms, and he had the dizzy feeling of being strapped to a runaway horse. Events were moving too fast now and he feared a terrible fall.

The eyes of the court were on him, too, for there was scandal that the king permitted his personal physician to attend the birth and lay hands on the queen’s body. Most women were uneasy about men in the birthing chamber; they saw his role as giving out advice from behind a screen so that the queen’s modesty could be preserved. But the king was a forward-thinking man who had, in his early life, lived abroad in exile where new ideas flowed freely. He was anxious to make use of the all that modern medicine offered, as an example to his subjects. It was Edward who had talked Elizabeth into allowing Doctor Moss to attend the birth, but now, standing in the queen’s rooms surrounded by a pack of frightened women, Doctor Moss was wishing himself almost anywhere else. The queen was in hard labor, screaming and writhing, but her color was shocking. She was immensely hot to the touch and her hands, feet, arms, and legs were hugely swollen. The physician’s heart sank; her condition was extremely grave.

Meanwhile, in his private quarters in the palace, the king sat late with William Hastings waiting for news of the queen. Now that the time had finally come, his excitement was tempered by fear. To distract Edward, Hastings had arranged for mummers to be brought to Westminster earlier in the night, and for a time their silly jokes and lewd byplay had pleased the king. It was a scandalous entertainment from France retelling the myth of Leda and the Swan, but as the hours wore on the king’s mood had darkened. He genuinely loved the queen, in his way.

“Where is Moss? We’ve had no news for at least this hour.”

Hastings did his best to calm his master. “Sire, we can send for him again if that pleases you.”

The king, pacing up and down, looking onto the black-flowing river below his casements, nodded sharply, and a page, catching the look, scuttled from the room to fetch the doctor.

But in the birthing chamber, Doctor Moss was sweating almost as much as the mother-to-be. His greatest fear was that the strain on the queen’s heart would prove too great for her to bear. If he could not induce the birth very soon she would collapse into fits and quite probably die.

The doctor was not a religious man, but in the eye of this storm, he found himself praying, asking God, asking Saint Hippocrates, Saint Anne, anyone, to help him birth this child, for surely his skill did not extend so far. He needed help. Two frightened brothers from the Abbey had already witnessed his fear and confusion, since last night he’d had them bring the precious relic of the Virgin’s Girdle to help the queen—a supposedly guaranteed aid in even the most difficult childbirth.

The faded strip of cloth had done nothing: but now, at last, he remembered something, something unlikely, a long shot, but like a drowning man he clung to the thought—it was all he had. Anne, the girl at the Cuttifers’. The housekeeper had said she’d made something, a pessary, and it had helped that other tragic woman, the one who killed her husband—Alyce? Aveline, that was it—birth her child. It had opened the canal.

Galvanized by terror, he dispatched his apprentice Tom with a mighty clout to the ear to ride to the merchant’s house and return with the girl, never mind that it was deep in the night and the household would be asleep.

Tom was more frightened of his master than any merchant, so somehow he talked his way in past the door-ward of Blessing House and was brought to the housekeeper. For Jassy the sight of Tom’s escort, four liveried soldiers from the palace, changed her skepticism to conviction as the boy’s story of the queen’s birth pains tumbled out. And Mathew was likewise convinced when Tom was taken to speak to him.

So it was that Anne, in hastily thrown on clothes, was pushed up onto the back of a horse behind this lanky boy. Jassy was with her, bouncing along behind one of the other men, and in answer to her gasped-out questions, the soldier just kept saying, “We must hurry, woman!” as the horses raced through empty, rain-lashed streets.

For Anne, strange images of the vast, brooding mass of court buildings flashed past in a waking dream.

Through one of the gates, hurried down from the horse by strange hands, she and Jassy were rushed past the guard into an inner ward of the palace, then, on foot, they fled up winding stairs and through the endless dark courts, through doors, down corridors past the sleepy white faces of guards and servants, and buzzing knots of hastily dressed courtiers, avid for news, until at last they arrived at the queen’s rooms.

Jassy was forced to stay in the outer chambers, while inside, Moss hurried Anne into the little birthing room, yet again closing the door in the face of the king’s page, increasingly impatient for news, any news that he could take to Edward. Moss spoke to the girl urgently but quietly, not wanting the ladies around the bed to hear, his fingers so strong on her arm, the grip so intense, she could feel it on her bones.