Strong as Death (Catherine LeVendeur) (14 page)

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Authors: Sharan Newman

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“No one anywhere,” she answered. “I barely knew him, but his reputation was blameless. After his wife died, there was no
gossip about another marriage, or even of a mistress. I believe that all his children are doing well. He seemed a totally inoffensive man.”
Rigaud thought of the Hugh he had known twenty years before. Griselle’s estimate was true, and yet it seemed such a poor summation of a man’s life, that he had committed no offense. He wished that he could discover something dark and horrible, just to keep Hugh’s memory alive. But he didn’t believe he would. Not Hugh. The man had been too much of a coward to be evil. He’d needed the coercion of his friends just to have a little fun.
And even then, he hadn’t liked it much.
Rigaud thanked the Lady Griselle and went to give his report to Brother James.
 
“Roberto,” Maruxa whispered as they walked, “those two monks are asking people about the death of Hugh of Grignon. What are we to tell them?”
“Nothing,” Roberto answered. “They won’t bother with us anyway. Why should they?”
“But what if someone remembers us?” Maruxa asked.
“Then we’ll say we forgot,” Roberto said firmly. “It was a long time ago. We travel to so many places. Why should there be anything memorable about Grignon?”
“You were right. We should have waited to set out,” Maruxa muttered. “There are too many people from that area among the pilgrims here.”
“Well, we didn’t,” Robert said in exasperation. “And no one has recognized us so far. Even if they did, why should I want to kill Hugh of Grignon? It would make more sense for him to murder me.”
“That’s true,” Maruxa said. “And the one who is really to blame is already dead, may her soul writhe on a red-hot bed of coals, forever in torment.”
“Amen,” said Roberto.
Figeac, Wednesday, May 7, 1142; The Feast of Saint Mastidie, Virgin of Troyes, whose deeds have been lost to time.
 
Unde si bonum est Iherusalem ubi steterunt pedes domini visitare, longe melius est, caelo ubi ipse facie ad faciem conspicitur, inhiare. Qui ergo quod melius est promittit, quod deterius est pro meliore compensare non potest.
 
Therefore, if it is good to visit Jerusalem where the Lord’s feet stood, far better is it to long for heaven where he is seen face-to-face. Therefore, whoever promises that which is better cannot reckon what is poorer to be the equal of that which is greater.
—Peter the Venerable
Letter 51, to the knight, Hugh Catula
 
 
“
C
atherine, I couldn’t understand a word that cobbler said,” Edgar complained. “That was never French.”
“Something like it,” Catherine said. “Queen Eleanor speaks it and she has no trouble being understood. There are a few strange words and the pronunciation is different, but I can usually make it out. Don’t worry.”
Catherine continued looking through the felt-maker’s tray in front of his shop, next to the one where they had left their worn shoes. The felt-maker had used scraps of leftover material to create souvenir badges showing the dove of Figeac and the shell of Saint Jacques. He was doing so well with them this year that he was considering setting his daughter and son-in-law up in a stand by the abbey church of Saint Sauveur. He had already looked into making an arrangement with Arnauda, the baker who supplied the workers at the half-built church with bread and sweet gastels, for the space next to her cart. The felt-maker loved pilgrims.
Edgar wasn’t interested in shopping. He wanted to go to the church and watch the masons at work. Catherine looked at him in pity.
“
Carissime
, doesn’t it hurt you to watch work that no one will ever let you do?” she asked.
“A little,” Edgar said. “But there’s a certain joy just in learning how it’s done, in seeing the stones raised and fit just so. All the tools and machines and men moving together to create this wondrous edifice. It’s beautiful.”
He stopped. “You don’t understand, do you?”
“Yes,” she said slowly, “I do. At least I understand that this
gives you the same feeling I have when I listen to Master Gilbert lecture or when I can make sense of all the numbers in Father’s account book. It only saddens me that I can’t see the craft the way you do, that I’ll never share it with you.”
Edgar had no answer for that. He knew of no way to give her the excitement he felt when watching the men at work on the monumental building. He could no more explain the deep contentment he had when carving a bit of wood into a shape that had before existed only in his mind.
Catherine laughed at his expression. “It doesn’t grieve me all that much,” she said. “We share other things, don’t we? Now go to the church and enjoy the afternoon.”
Catherine wandered through the shops a bit more after he left. She didn’t really need to buy anything, but looking at the wares gave her time to think without having to talk with anyone.
Edgar had agreed that something should be said to someone about Catherine’s midnight expedition, but neither one of them were sure whom to tell.
Catherine knew that her reluctance to speak with the monk sent by the abbot had to do with the way she felt about Mondete Ticarde. It would be so easy to accuse a reformed prostitute, and Mondete would have so little chance to defend herself.
“If only I could be sure,” Catherine muttered as she examined a row of bright ribbons.
The vendor looked up. Catherine shook her head.
This wouldn’t do. She needed to know more, but who could she ask about Mondete? Not the other knights. They had already made it clear that they had known her quite well, but Catherine didn’t think they would discuss particulars with her. The Lady Griselle? Perhaps not. There was something about the woman that made Catherine feel that she had dirt on her face and a tear in her stockings. Griselle wouldn’t gossip casually with someone so far beneath her. But who else would know?
The answer came to Catherine.
Of course. How stupid not to have thought of her first: the invisible woman, Lady Griselle’s maid. Always silent, always
in attendance. She would notice much more than her mistress did. She would hear the best gossip. Catherine tried to think of her name. She didn’t remember ever hearing it.
Now the only problem was to find the woman apart from her mistress and then gain her confidence. But where would Lady Griselle go without her maid? Certainly not to church. The maid always went with her, never more than a step away. Griselle was such a stickler for propriety that Catherine feared she didn’t even go unaccompanied to the privy.
There must be something inspirational about shopping. As she looked over the lengths of cloth at the scarf-makers, Catherine thought of something a lady would leave her maid to do alone. She was looking at a length of bright yellow cloth, with a pattern worked in red at the edges. Catherine fingered her own scarf, dingy now from the elements and too many washings. Wearing something new would make her feel less like a peasant next to Lady Griselle, whose clothes were always clean and scented with lavender, as if freshly taken from the clothes chest. Catherine suspected that Griselle had even brought a gauffering iron to pleat the sleeves of her
bliaut.
Somehow Catherine couldn’t imagine Griselle bent over a washtub. So who would be the one most likely to see to it that the fine linen shifts, silk scarves and woolen
bliauts
were kept spotless? Was Lady Griselle likely to waste an afternoon in such work? Of course not. That’s what maids were for.
Catherine decided that her father should buy her the scarf as a reward for her cleverness. She told the woman at the shop to wrap it up to be paid for that afternoon.
“It never occurred to me that a pilgrimage would be so hard on my clothes,” she commented to the woman. “They become faded and dirty so much more quickly than at home. And my stockings! I washed them at Conques and they should be done again. Where do the women of the town do their washing?”
“At the river, of course,” the woman answered. “Where do the women of Paris do theirs, at the bathhouses?”
Catherine was tempted to say yes, that then one could wash body and clothes all at once, but she refrained. Instead, she thanked the woman, promising to return for the scarf.
Now she only hoped that the Lady Griselle had not brought so many pairs of stockings that she didn’t need to have them washed.
 
After questioning the pilgrims, Brother Rigaud and Brother James had conferred and decided that there was no apparent reason for any of them to have murdered Hugh of Grignon.
“You are quite certain that neither of your old comrades could have had a part in it?” James asked.
Rigaud was. “Gaucher and Rufus are lecherous, gluttonous and bibulous,” he said, “but they would never slit a man’s throat in such an undignified and cowardly manner.”
“No one else in the party seems to have known him well. No one has accused anyone else,” James said. “That alone is unusual. I searched the belongings of the
jongleurs
and they had no rings.”
“As you requested, I went through the boxes of the Jews,” Rigaud added. “They protested, of course, but I told them it was on the orders of the abbot. The younger one had a knife strapped to his arm that he insisted was for preparing game according to their laws while traveling. I didn’t believe him, but the blade, I think, was too thick to have made the clean cut in Hugh’s neck. He wasn’t good at hiding his anger at my questions, either.”
“They’re all arrogant in their stubbornness,” James said bitterly. “And these men are under the protection of Saint-Denis. We can’t accuse them without absolute proof.”
“Without a witness or the missing ring, I don’t see how we can get it,” Rigaud said sadly. “I believe we should tell the abbot that we have concluded that Hugh was killed by robbers stalking the group. We’ve promised to hire more guards at Moissac. There’s little more we can do to help protect the other pilgrims.”
Brother James scratched his chin worriedly. “I suppose that would be best,” he said. “I wish I felt more sanguine about it, though. I can’t conquer the feeling that there’s a murderer traveling with us.”
Rigaud shrugged. “On a pilgrimage, there are many kinds
of sinners. Perhaps you sense the guilt of old murder in someone.”
“Perhaps,” James said. “But something about this slaying just doesn’t strike me as being the work of the
ribaux
. They would have taken his clothes and boots as well as his jewelry, don’t you think?”
“Not if they were in a rush, afraid of being seen.” Brother Rigaud put a hand on James’s shoulder. “If I, who was also his comrade, am satisfied that Hugh’s death was at the hands of the men of the forest, why should you doubt it?”
“I don’t know,” James answered. He thought for a moment, then shook himself as if that would shed the worry. “It’s certainly not as if the man were anything to me,” he added. “I have more than enough to concern myself with.”
“Precisely,” said Rigaud. “For instance, there have been complaints again that the priests the bishop of Osma brought with him are not conforming to our usage in the saying of Mass. We really must have this settled before it breaks out into open warfare between them and the rest of our brothers.”
Brother James was pleased to have something important to deal with again.
 
Catherine found the women of Figeac to be more than happy to share the stone trough at the river’s edge and give her a bit of their
leissive
, a mixture of wood ash and caustic soda, to rub into her laundry before soaking it. The laundresses traveling with the monks were also there, two widows in their fifties who had decided to devote their remaining years to caring for the linen of God’s servants, knowing that when they were too old for work, God’s servants would care for them. But there was no sign of Griselle’s maid.
There was no point in wasting the opportunity, however, so when her stockings and old scarf had sat long enough in the trough, Catherine took off her shoes and her long
bliaut
, tied up the skirts of her
chainse
and waded into the water with the others, who were busy pounding the dirt out on flat rocks and rinsing the clothes in the flowing water.
As she stood to wring out the stockings, Catherine caught
a name from amidst the babble of the women talking as they worked.
“I heard that, too,” one of the women was saying, “but I won’t believe it’s really Mondete unless I can see her face.”
“Don’t you think she could have repented?” the other woman asked.
From the black robes they were washing, Catherine realized that these were the laundresses from Cluny. She hadn’t thought of them as sources of information; they were even less noticed than the maid. But it made sense that they would be native to the region around Cluny, where Mondete came from as well. Despite the pain in her feet, turning blue in the cold water, Catherine slowed in her work and waited for the answer.
“Repented of what?” the first laundress asked. “What else was she supposed to do, starve? After what they did to her, Mondete’s parents could have at least taken her back in and arranged for her to marry or enter a convent.”
“It’s one thing to be the concubine of a rich lord,” the other woman objected. “There’s some advantage in that. But when you’ve lain with every man in the keep, from the knights to the stable boy, how could your parents even own you?”
“If they were the ones who sent you there in the first place, I think they’d have to,” the first woman snorted. “Giles and Theoda traded her for a piece of land. They knew when they sent her to him that Norbert liked ’em young.”
Catherine started in surprise and let go of the stocking, then had to splash after it as it floated downstream. Norbert!
In retrieving the stocking, she had missed part of the conversation: “ … always did well by them, especially if it was a boy.” The first laundress was speaking again. “Her parents were counting on that, too.”
Catherine understood enough. Poor Mondete! Sold to Norbert and cast off by both him and her family when she proved barren. Catherine wondered how young she had been. She knew the arrangement wasn’t uncommon. Often it was a way for a woman to marry into a better life when the lord gave his old mistress and a castellany to one of his supporters. Or he at least provided for the raising of his bastard children.
Catherine’s thoughts echoed the comment of the first laundress: What did Mondete need to repent of, then? What choice had she ever been given in her way of life? Of course, she may have taken to it. If she had enjoyed prostitution, then it was certainly sinful.
Catherine’s pity for the child Mondete slipped on a new thought. Perhaps her pilgrimage wasn’t penitential at all. Perhaps Norbert of Bussières hadn’t died as peacefully and naturally as they supposed.

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