The Passion of Dolssa (35 page)

“And she escaped?”

He nodded. “She did.”

No credit to you,
thought Lop. A low laugh rumbled in his throat. “Some trick that must have been,” he said, “for such an old crone to slip through the Bishop of Tolosa’s chains.”

Senhor Hugo watched Lop. “Heretics,” he said slowly, “can be cunning.”

“Or have cunning friends,” added Lop.

The knight’s eyebrows rose. “That is also true.” He stood and placed a coin upon the table. “For your good help,” he said. “I’ll see you again.” He left before Lop could rise to show him to the door.

BOTILLE

e have to hide you.”

My sisters and I crowded into Dolssa’s bedroom. Her face was pale as she listened to all that had happened in the night and in the morning at mass.

“There is only one place we know of,” I said, “where searchers ought not to find you, and that’s down in Plazensa’s ale cellar.”

Dolssa thought a while. “If they think me dead,” she asked, “will they still search?”

Sazia answered in low tones. “They will search for any shred of you,” she said. “Any clue as to whom you influenced, what you did, what you left behind.”

“Until Lucien de Saint-Honore leaves town,” I said, “you are not safe.”

She wrung her hands. “Let me leave you!” she begged. “Let me carry my danger away from this place.”

I knelt down and took her hands in mine.

“Dolssa, that time is past,” I said. “We will face this together.”

A tear ran down her cheek.

I spoke as gently as I could. “What does your beloved tell you?”

She looked up at me. “My mother asked me the same question the night she died.”

“And what did you say?” asked Plazensa.

Dolssa shook her head. “I had no answer.” She rose slowly to her feet. “I will go to the cellar. May . . . may I have a candle?”

Plazi looked sad. “Only if you want to watch the rats. Better not to,
galineta
. Someone could glimpse the light or smell the smoke. And it’s not the cellar itself. It’s a long box within the cellar where jugs are stored, built into the foundation, so it’s not often seen. Searchers could well pass over you and not know to look.”

Dolssa looked green. “Not a cellar, but a coffin.”

We nodded. We felt awful.

She swallowed. “When must I go down? At night?”

I turned to Sazia. “What do you think, little
s
rre
? When will danger come?”

Sazia shook her head mournfully. “Exactly when is unknown to me, but that it’s coming soon is certain.”

Dolssa rose unsteadily to her feet. “Take me to my grave, then,” she said. “Perhaps, with practice such as this, I’ll come to fear it less.”

We settled her as best we could into the ale cellar. It was a gruesome place to hide a human soul. I felt miserable doing it, and even more so as I saw how humbly she submitted to it, though it terrified her. Her chamber was indeed a coffin, damp, with pale roots snaking through the walls.

My sisters went back upstairs to prepare the next meal for the tavern, and to receive the inquisitor when he returned. I should have joined them, but I lingered a few moments before closing the lid over Dolssa’s sham tomb.

We sat together on the slab lid of the box that would hide her from view, and together we watched the small light from my little candlestick. I wished I could do something to comfort her.

“We’ll get through this,” I told her. “Your beloved would not have spared you this far for nothing.”

Dolssa took so long in answering, I wondered if she’d heard me. Breathing, down in that musty gloom, took all the courage she had.

“My beloved,” she finally said, “ought to be enough for me.”

She was scolding herself. Poor girl.

“What’s he like?” I asked her.

She turned to look at me curiously. “Don’t you know?”

I leaned against her shoulder. “Not as you do,” I said. “I’ve heard Dominus Bernard’s sermons, of course. He’s a shameless old rascal, but I know he loves Jhesus. That’s not what I mean. You say he’s your beloved. If you were any other girl with a beau, I would ask you, what’s he like?”

“Oh.” I wondered if she were blushing.

“I like Jhesus myself,” I said. “I wish he were one of the customers at the Three Pigeons.” I nudged Dolssa. “I suppose, thanks to you, he has been here a good deal lately.”

I got a smile from her then, in spite of her melancholy.

“Don’t lose heart,
galineta
,” I whispered. “You can trust us.”

“Have you ever had a beau, Botille?”

I laughed. “Not I! I’ve no time for that. Nobody courts the matchmaker.”

Dolssa looked puzzled. “I was sure that you and that young
ome
. . . What was his name . . . Symo? From our journey . . . ?”

I snorted with laughter. “You may be a holy woman, Dolssa de Stigata,” I told her, “but you’re no prophetess.”

Plazensa opened the door to the cellar. I saw her feet and heard her voice. “Best come up now, Botille.”

I wiped my eyes. “I’ll come see you again, as soon as it’s safe,” I told Dolssa.

Dolssa kissed my cheek. “Do that, please,” she said. “But for your sake, I pray, not until then.”

I settled her into the stone box and lowered the lid over her. Like a burial, indeed. Like rolling a stone over a garden tomb.

God in heaven,
I prayed,
hide her here.

I left Plazi and Sazia to their task of plucking two fat ducks, and returned to Dolssa’s room to remove from it any shred of evidence that a woman had stayed there.

I couldn’t think. My hands shook at the simplest of tasks. Every rush of sea wind at the shutters, every sound of man or beast, left me jittery and sick. If I pitied myself my troubles, I needed only to think of poor Dolssa.

We sent Mimi down to keep her company, and sometimes we heard the squeal of a dying rat from below. I wondered which was worse—hearing Mimi kill them, or knowing they were silently, sniffingly there.

We prepared dinner as though there would be tavern guests, stuffing ducks with chopped onions and mushrooms, and roasting them in a hot oven.

“No one’s coming tonight at all, it seems,” noted Plazensa.

Sazia poked her nose in the oven. “More for us.”

We actually looked up with anticipation when the door opened. But it was not a customer. It was Lop the
bayle
and Senhor Hugo the knight. Following at their heels was Friar Lucien de Saint-Honore.

While my heart stopped beating, Plazensa, that wondrous
femna
, pulled a crackling brown duck from the oven and presented it to her treacherous audience. “Just in time, my good men,” she said. “Dinner for three?”

“I’ll pour the wine,” offered Sazia, “unless ale is your pleasure tonight?”

Friar Lucien de Saint-Honore seemed to have noticed Plazensa’s smile for the first time. I would have enjoyed watching him struggle, any other day but this. Senhor Guilhem seemed to have noticed it too.

“We’re not here to dine,” the senhor said after an awkward pause. “Search the building.”

Dieu, help us. Hide Dolssa.

Lop led the charge, room by room through the tavern, with Senhor Guilhem at his side. He poked his staff under and behind all the furnishings and beds. He made no effort to spare our things. We sat and waited numbly in the tavern. When they entered Dolssa’s room, I held my breath, as if they might smell her lingering echo there.

“For what do you search, my lords?” Plazensa asked the friar and the knight.

Senhor Hugo was the only one who bothered to respond.

“My report,” he said, “which I will take back to Bishop Raimon of Tolosa, requires me to reconstruct the heretic’s final days and weeks. There seems to be some confusion. Some believe”—he glanced at Senhor Guilhem—“that she made her home in the woods, while others”—here he stared straight at me—“say she made her home at this tavern.”

“
Did
the heretic Dolssa make her home here at this tavern?” asked Lucien.

Oh, sisters, what do we do?

I dared not speak. Plazensa rose to the challenge.

“Many travelers stay here at the Three Pigeons for a time,” said she. “It is the nature of a public house such as ours.”

Friar Lucien de Saint-Honore pressed his hands together. “Did the heretic Dolssa make her home here at this tavern?”

“We had a Dolssa here,” she said, “for a few nights. We took pity on her. She was poor and weak when she arrived.”

“When did she arrive?”

Plazensa turned to Sazia. “Do you remember,
s
rre
?”

Sazia shrugged. “Some days ago. A week? I can’t be sure.”

“How did she get here?”

Sazia replied again. “She had neither mule nor horse.”

“When did she last leave?”

The hardest question of all. The woman who died needed to be Dolssa. She needed to have left here in order to be found in the woods last night.

I held up two fingers. “Two?” I babbled. “Two nights, good-bye,
femna
.”

Senhor Hugo de Miramont’s eyes narrowed, but he said nothing.

Plazensa and Sazia glanced at me. They didn’t understand that I must play the half-wit. Not yet.

Lop returned to the front room. Friar Lucien pointed up to the loft over the bar.