The Nun's Tale (9 page)

Brother Wulfstan’s summons arrived as Lucie and Tildy finished the morning chores.

‘He is not unwell?’ Lucie asked the messenger with alarm.

‘Brother Wulfstan is well. He requires your assistance with an ailing guest.’

Knowing that the infirmarian would not make such a request idly, Lucie instructed Tildy to ask customers to return in the afternoon and accompanied the messenger to the abbey, tingling with curiosity about the unusual summons.

Her haste was rewarded. When Lucie saw the prioress of St Clement’s in attendance in the patient’s room at the guest house, she guessed the identity of the patient shrouded in the curtained bed. She had heard the rumours about Dame Joanna of Leeds.

Dame Isobel greeted her politely.

Brother Wulfstan came forward with open arms. ‘Bless you for coming so quickly, Lucie.’ He led her aside to explain the situation. His face darkened as he moved farther into the tale of Joanna’s disappearance, reappearance, the two deaths that seemed linked to her, the rumour of her miraculous mantle, and her possible danger. ‘Forgive me for drawing you into such unholy concerns, Lucie, but I need a woman’s help in this and I know you have the skill – and the discretion.’

Lucie smiled at Wulfstan’s dear, troubled face. ‘With such sweet words, how could I possibly be offended? Come.’ She took his arm. ‘Introduce me to this fascinating patient.’

With a grateful smile, Wulfstan led Lucie over to the curtained bed. A table had been drawn up beside it. The infirmarian had assembled a wine flagon, some apothecary jars, a cup, spoons and measures, and a spirit lamp on which a bowl of water steamed. ‘The Reverend Mother needs Dame Joanna calm enough to answer questions. She hopes to discover what happened – what drove Joanna away, what brought her back.’

Lucie could well imagine. She suspected that it was Archbishop Thoresby who motivated Dame Isobel.

‘I thought to begin with something simple: valerian and balm in wine, a strong dosage. But I must know whether Joanna is in any pain. The sisters believe she has discomfort from cuts, scratches, bruises, but is otherwise sound. I hoped you might examine her and reassure me.’ Wulfstan turned at a noise from Dame Isobel. ‘Forgive me, Reverend Mother. I do not mean to question you. I am taking my normal precautions. A medicine for one can be a poison for another. We pray God to guide our hands, but He expects us to take care.’

Dame Isobel tucked her hands beneath her scapular and bowed her acquiescence.

Wulfstan turned back to Lucie. ‘I shall be in the corridor while you examine Dame Joanna. I shall await your summons to return.’

When the door had closed behind Wulfstan, Dame Isobel joined Lucie. Lucie opened the curtain. Dame Joanna lay with her eyes closed, her mouth moving as if in prayer, her hands pressed together on her chest. She was wrapped in a clean but shabby blue mantle. Her face was pale. Deathly pale.

‘Dame Joanna,’ Lucie said, and waited for an answer.

The nun continued as she had been.

Lucie leaned over and touched Joanna’s arm.

The woman jerked her arm away, opened her eyes, and stared up at Lucie with alarm.

Could she have been unaware of Lucie’s presence until the touch and then respond so dramatically? Lucie was puzzled. ‘Please, do not be frightened. I am Mistress Wilton, an apothecary. I am to examine you so the infirmarian knows how to treat you.’

The green eyes flicked over to Dame Isobel, back to Lucie. ‘Treat me?’

‘Brother Wulfstan will prepare a remedy to calm you, help you sleep. But he must know as much as possible about you. Whether you are in any pain is important.’

‘Pain is unimportant.’

Lucie glanced back at Dame Isobel with raised eyebrows.

Dame Isobel shook her head, dismissing Joanna’s reply.

Lucie felt Joanna’s forehead with the back of her hand. ‘You are not feverish, yet they tell me you have been talking as if you were. Why is that, Dame Joanna?’

Joanna touched the hand Lucie still held to her forehead. ‘I do not mean to be trouble. I would not mind so much if you would examine me alone.’

‘Without your Reverend Mother?’

Joanna nodded.

Lucie turned to Isobel. ‘Will you permit this?’

Dame Isobel did not look pleased, but she nodded. ‘Of course, Mistress Wilton. Brother Wulfstan says I can trust you as I do him.’ Dame Isobel gave Joanna and Lucie a little bow, then moved away to the far side of the room. She sat down with her head bowed, hands pressed together in prayer.

Lucie looked at Joanna’s eyes, her mouth. Her teeth were in remarkably good condition except for a front tooth that was chipped. ‘Does the chipped tooth hurt?’

Joanna touched it with her tongue, nodded.

‘Brother Wulfstan can give you clove oil to dab on it for the pain.’

‘I offer it up as a penance.’

‘But why, if there is a remedy?’

Joanna said nothing.

Lucie shrugged. ‘As you wish. How did you chip it?’

The eyes turned inward. ‘I fell.’

Coupled with a fresh scar beside Joanna’s mouth and a red streak in the whites of her eyes, Lucie guessed she had been beaten, and not very long ago. But her business was to examine Joanna’s body, not her story. ‘You had a blackened eye recently?’

Joanna nodded.

‘And a cut beside your mouth?’

A shrug.

‘All from the fall?’

Another shrug.

Lucie patted Joanna’s hand. ‘You can help me, if you will. I am not a physician, so I may miss something. If my touch hurts you, makes you uncomfortable in any way, please tell me.’

‘Your touch is gentle, Mistress Wilton.’

Lucie wondered what all this talk of Joanna’s state of mind was about. So far only the woman’s inattention when Lucie first opened the curtain had been odd.

‘I must lift your shift. Will you help me?’ Lucie touched an end of the shawl.

Joanna grabbed it away from Lucie and unwound it, pulling it out from under her, carefully tucking it beside her. ‘You must not touch it.’

‘Is there anything else I must not touch?’

Joanna shook her head, then arched her body so Lucie could pull up the shift.

Joanna’s feet and legs had the cuts, scratches, and bruises of an active child. The bottoms of her feet had healing sores, obviously already tended by the infirmaress at St Clement’s or at Nunburton. Nothing unusual. She was missing a toe on her left foot, but it was an old injury. Still, it might be important.

‘How did you lose this toe?’

‘Frostbite.’

‘How long ago?’

Joanna shrugged. ‘A few years.’

Lucie found that quite plausible. Joanna’s torso was bruised and scratched, but none of the marks were surprising.

Around Joanna’s neck was a medal. ‘This is pretty.’ Lucie lifted it.

Joanna grabbed it from Lucie, holding it protectively in her cupped hand.

Lucie thought it best not to comment, just stick to her task. ‘Please turn over on your stomach.’

Joanna did so.

Here were puzzling injuries. Patches of scabbed abrasions, some still tender scars, yellowing bruises, almost gone. ‘How did you come by the cuts and bruises on your back?’

‘I am clumsy.’

Lucie doubted that was the cause. It was unlikely that her clumsiness would make her fall backwards rather than forwards. ‘They look almost healed.’ She pressed the worst spot gently. ‘Does this hurt?’

‘Pain purifies me.’

Wulfstan had warned Lucie that Joanna spoke thus. ‘You may pull down your shift.’

Joanna pulled it down slowly, as if even this movement exhausted her.

‘May I see your arms?’

Joanna pushed up her sleeves.

‘So many cuts and scratches,’ Lucie murmured. ‘You have not been living a life of ease recently.’

Joanna suddenly pressed Lucie’s hand and looked earnestly into her eyes. ‘He was so kind. I thought he loved me.’

Lucie stared at Joanna, puzzled by the shift in mood. ‘Who, Joanna?’ She tried not to sound too eager.

Tears shimmered in the lovely green eyes. ‘How could I have been so fooled?’ Joanna dug her nails into Lucie’s hand.

‘Who fooled you?’

But the moment died. Joanna withdrew her hand, turned her head aside. ‘I should be dead,’ she said in a matter of fact tone.

Lucie studied the tear-streaked face, the eyes staring blankly at the curtain. ‘Why is that?’

‘I am cursed.’

‘By whom?’

‘God.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘The Blessed Virgin Mary told me.’

‘Then why were you given the great honour of resurrection?’

Joanna closed her eyes.

Lucie pressed a discoloured spot on Joanna’s left shoulder. Joanna jerked. ‘This hurts, doesn’t it?’

‘A little. It aches.’

‘Someone wrenched your arm out of the joint, I think.’

Joanna stared at Lucie as if willing her to go away.

‘It is difficult to do that with a fall.’

The staring eyes blinked, betrayed by tears.

‘And difficult, if not impossible, to pull back yourself. Was your arm useless for long?’

Joanna forced her eyes wide, trying to deny the tears.

Lucie dabbed at the tears already fallen. ‘I am finished. I will tell Brother Wulfstan what I’ve found. Trust him. He is a kind, skilled healer.’

Joanna thrust out her hand, clutching Lucie’s wrist. ‘I am not to be healed.’ Now her eyes, still wet, beseeched Lucie.

What on earth was she to make of this young woman? Not to be healed? ‘Why? Because of what you did? Running away, stealing the relic, arranging a funeral? Is that why you must do penance?’

‘I am cursed.’ Joanna emphasised each word, though her voice still held no emotion.

Lucie pulled her hand from Joanna’s grasp, smoothed the pale red strands from the woman’s brow. ‘God be with you, Joanna.’ She closed the curtains and stood quietly for a moment, collecting her thoughts. As she moved towards the door, Dame Isobel stood.

‘Joanna responded well to you, Mistress Wilton. You seemed to have a calming effect on her.’

‘She seems more secretive than agitated.’

Dame Isobel shook her head. ‘No. She is different with you. When I ask questions, she becomes disturbed and incoherent. She answered your questions.’

Lucie found Isobel’s round, unlined, moon-pale face unnerving. Ageless. As if the girl Lucie remembered had merely grown larger, taller, but had not matured. ‘Joanna answered some of my questions. But she hardly gave me useful answers.’

Isobel looked down at her folded hands, back up to Lucie’s face with meek eyes. ‘His Grace the Archbishop wants me to interrogate Joanna, find out what I can about what has happened to her. Would you help me?’

Coming to Brother Wulfstan’s aid was one thing, but to help Dame Isobel . . . They had not been friends at the convent. And last summer Owen had told Lucie that Isobel was much to blame in this present case, that she had kept Joanna’s disappearance a secret, being relieved to be rid of the strange young woman. ‘I am a busy woman, Reverend Mother. I have little time to spare.’

‘Forgive me.’ Isobel bowed her head and stepped aside. ‘God go with you, Mistress Wilton. Thank you for coming today.’

Lucie found Wulfstan waiting anxiously in the corridor. She told him what she had found, the chipped tooth, the healing eye, the shoulder, the other inconsequential cuts, scrapes, bruises. And the almost healed abrasions and deep bruises on her back. ‘I do not know what to make of them. Her explanation was that she is clumsy. An odd sort of clumsiness, always to land on her back.’ As Lucie voiced the thought, she blushed, hearing echoes of jokes about women who conduct their business on their backs.

Brother Wulfstan did not seem to notice Lucie’s discomfort. ‘Clumsy, yet no serious wounds or broken bones.’ He sighed. ‘So it is her soul, not her body that requires our help.’

Lucie forced herself to concentrate on Wulfstan’s concerns. ‘She will be a difficult patient. She believes God means her to offer up her pains as penance, and that she is meant to die soon.’

Wulfstan looked unhappy. ‘I understand she has had a vision about this.’

‘She says the Blessed Virgin Mary guides her. Do you believe she had a vision, Brother Wulfstan?’

He lifted his hands, palms up, shrugged. ‘How can we ever know? But in my heart I think it more likely she had a nightmare, a fever dream.’ He shook his head, sighed. ‘Did she say aught about her – Sweet Jesu, it sticks in my throat – resurrection?’ He winced on the last word.

Lucie gently touched his cheek. ‘No. When I mentioned it she said nothing.’

‘What of the mantle? What had she to say of that?’

‘Only that we are not to touch it.’

Wulfstan sighed. ‘Put your feelings aside and tell me, do you think the child can distinguish visions from dreams?’

‘I cannot tell. She says pain purifies her. She claims to be cursed. We have all heard such things before. If only her visions were more unusual. But even then, she might simply be a good storyteller.’ Lucie found it frustrating. ‘There are questions she will not answer, but I did not think that strange. Perhaps in time she will trust us and speak more freely.’