Patricia Ryan - [Fairfax Family 01] (48 page)

“
What?
” Martine exclaimed.

“Item:” Simon continued, as if he hadn’t heard her, “That she did render impotent both her first and second husbands by poisoning and other means. Item: That she did likewise poison Lady Estrude of Flanders and thereby took her life.”

“This is preposterous,” she said.

The priest glared at her and cleared his throat. “And let it be further known that said maleficia were performed at the behest of he who is known as Satan, and also by the names Lucifer and Beelzebub. And that the sorceress Martine Falconer has bound herself in service to this prince of devils, and in her allegiance to him, has renounced God, Jesus Christ, the saints, the Roman Church, and all the sacraments.”

Martine stared in incredulous horror at Father Simon, Bernard, and the men surrounding her. They all wore expressions of the utmost gravity. She began to tremble uncontrollably. “I want my husband.”

Bernard snickered. “As I understand it, your husband departed this morning for Hastings, and is therefore unavailable.”

“Of course,” she said, comprehension dawning. “You knew he wouldn’t be here. You never would have tried this otherwise. How did you—”

“Oh, I’ve been kept exceedingly well informed of the Saxon’s comings and goings. My good lady Clare has seen to that.”

Martine sighed disgustedly. “Clare. I should have known.” She nodded toward the sheet of parchment in Father Simon’s hand. “What does this mean? What will happen to me?”

Father Simon folded up the document and slid it beneath his robe. “You’ll be encouraged to confess.”

She swallowed hard. When she spoke, her voice was an unsteady rasp. “You mean tortured.”

“Alas, no,” responded the priest. “The more effective methods, the ones they use on the Continent, well, they’re frowned upon in England. But you will be interrogated. Questioned. And then you will be tried and found guilty.”

Tried and found guilty. Just like that.
“Wh-what is the punishment for sorcery?” she asked.

“Nothing much,” Father Simon said lightly. “A fine, a few lashes, perhaps... at the worst, banishment.”

Relief overwhelmed her. “Thank God,” she breathed.

“But of course,” Simon continued, “it’s not sorcery you’ve been accused of. It’s
heretical
sorcery. Sorcery in the service of the Devil. And the punishment for heresy of this magnitude is death.”

“Then I’m to be hung,” she whispered.

Simon took a step toward her and smiled; so did Bernard. Both men seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely, like two cats toying with a trapped mouse.

“Not necessarily,” said Bernard. “Oh, you might be lucky and get off with a hanging. But there are those in England, such as Father Simon here, who advocate that heretics be burned at the stake.”

“As is the practice in the more civilized European realms,” Simon elaborated.

Martine shook her head slowly. “No...”

“Oh, yes,” Bernard said, stepping close to Martine and gripping her chin to force her to look at him. “So you didn’t much like the idea of marriage to me, did you? You thought you’d gotten the better of me, you and that damned woodsman. Well, now I’m in a position to return the favor, and I assure you I intend to take full advantage of it. I will petition Bishop Lambert to make an example of you. Make no mistake—you
will
be found guilty, and then you will die on the pyre, screaming and begging as the flames consume you. There’s no agony that can compare to death by fire.”

Martine wrested her head out of his grasp. “Except perhaps marriage to you.”

Someone in back chuckled. Bernard, his jaw set in outrage, withdrew his sword from its scabbard and held its razor-sharp tip to her throat. “You seem to forget who has the upper hand here, Lady Woodsman. Perhaps you need reminding.” To the men supporting her, he said, “Hold her head still.”

A hand seized her braid and tugged her head back, hard. She drew in a panicked breath as Bernard raised the sword high, its blade pointed upward. He paused briefly, a feral glint in his eye. She saw him aim the heavy, jeweled hilt toward her forehead—and then he grimaced and whipped it down with savage force.

Red-hot pain burst within her. Her legs collapsed, and she heard herself groan. Bernard’s voice, strangely deep and muffled, said, “Let her go.” The hands released her and she fell facedown onto the carpeted floor.

“Gag the bitch,” Bernard said. The last thing she felt was gloved fingers prying her mouth open and stuffing a rag in... and then a cold, empty darkness engulfed her.

*   *   *

“Wake up, milord.” It was a woman’s voice. She spoke the old tongue. Thorne felt himself being jiggled, which precipitated a wave of nausea.

Groaning, he rolled over onto his stomach, squeezing his eyes against the pain that speared his head. He lay on a blanket-covered straw pallet, and there was something hard under his chest—a jug. He was fully dressed, including even his sword belt. “Go ‘way.” His sticky mouth tasted like the muck on the bottom of a wine barrel.

He heard other women’s whispers, and then a dozen hands took hold of him and turned him faceup. Hot breath near his ear: “Milord, wake up. It’s Nan.”

“Nan?” he moaned. Nan. Fat Nan. He must be at Fat Nan’s. That realization only compounded his misery. “Leave me alone.”

Nan said, “Leave
you
alone? After the way you pleasured me last night? The girls always said you was the best, a real stallion, but I never knew it till—”

“What?” he mumbled, squinting against the midday sun streaming in through the little window next to his pallet. He was in one of the brothel’s seedy little upstairs alcoves. Fat Nan and an audience of scantily clad wenches were hovering over him.

Nan turned to her girls. “
That
woke him up!” They laughed appreciatively, and Thorne relaxed as it dawned on him that he hadn’t, after all, shared a pallet with Fat Nan last night. He sat up slowly, wincing at his headache, and scanned the lineup of whores, struggling to remember which one...

Nan said, “You went through three of ‘em, milord.” The girls giggled at Thorne, who wasn’t quite sure whether to feel proud or ashamed of this feat. “‘Just keep ‘em coming,’ you said. You tried for a fourth—” she kicked the almost full brandy jug next to him, which rolled off the pallet, “but one sip out of it and you were out cold.”

The whores laughed uproariously, which made the Saxon’s head pulsate with pain. “You mean all I did was—”

“You don’t remember?” Nan said. “Small wonder. You showed up here yesterday, surly as a bear, ordering one jug of brandy after another. You drank yourself into a stupor, came to, drank some more, then passed out again. Over and over.”

Befreckled Tilda curled up on the pallet and laid her head in his lap. “Just like a babe at his mum’s teat,” she said wistfully. “‘Twas quite sweet, really.”

Another swell of sickness rose within him, and he swallowed it down, wondering how sweet Tilda would find it if he vomited up three jugs of brandy all over her.

“Took seven of us to haul you upstairs last night,” Nan said. “I would have let you sleep it off a bit longer, only there’s someone showed up just now, asking for you. A woman.”

The girls whistled and cooed. “He’s got them coming to whorehouses for him! Now,
that’s
love.”

Martine? Here? Christ, no.
He struggled to his feet, shaking off Tilda’s attempts to help, ran one hand over his needle-sharp morning beard, and tried to finger-comb his hair with the other, but it was still bandaged with Martine’s chemise sleeve. The whores parted for him and he stumbled down the stairs, wondering what he would say to her... why she had come here, of all places... why she had to see him like this...

He stopped short when he saw the plump redhead in the doorway. “Felda!”

She closed in on him quickly and slapped his face hard. “You bastard!” There were tears in her eyes. “You left her, to come to this... this...”

“All he did was drink,” said Nan from the stairs. “And now he’s got the devil’s own hangover, so why don’t you show him a little—”

“Good!” Felda spat out. “I’m glad you’re suffering. You left her. You left her!” She started beating on his chest with her fists, but he seized them and shook her.

“What happened?” She was sobbing too hard to talk. “Answer me! Did something happen to Martine?” Felda nodded. “What?
Tell me!
”

Nan squeezed his shoulder and handed Felda a cup of something, which she drank. Presently she calmed enough to talk. “‘Twas that Clare,” she choked out. “That bitch, I knew there was something wrong about her. She was his creature all along, the lying trollop. Soon as you rode away yesterday, she vanished. I didn’t think nothing about it at the time, but must be she run off to Harford and—”

“What are you talking about?” he demanded. “What happened?”

“Milady, she—she’s gone. They come for her in the middle of the night, Bernard and his men. They carried her out in her sleeping shift and threw her in a covered cart. I saw her. There was blood on her face, and they had her tied up and gagged.”

“What? Jesus!”

“She’d told me to find you, to look for you here.”

“Oh, God,” he groaned, sinking to his knees and holding his stomach. Someone thrust a bowl in front of him. He grabbed it with both hands and instantly emptied the contents of his stomach into it. Solicitous hands took away the bowl and wiped his mouth with a damp rag. Gaining his feet, he fumbled with his purse, emptied some coins into Nan’s conveniently open palm, then lurched out of the brothel and into the harsh noon sunshine, with Felda close on his heels. “I’ve got to go to Harford. I’ve got to get some men and go to—”

She grabbed his arm. “Nay! She’s not at Harford. I heard some of Bernard’s men talking about it. They were to take her here, to Hastings. She’ll be held at Battle Abbey until the trial.”

“What trial?” he asked, knowing even as the words left his mouth what the answer would be. Of course. It all made sense. He should have known this would happen.

“Heresy,” said Felda. “Bernard denounced her. They say the bishop’s going to make an example of her. They say... Oh, God, Thorne. They’d say she’s going to be tied to a stake and burned alive.”

*   *   *

“I went to Battle Abbey to see her,” Thorne told Matthew that evening, “but they wouldn’t let me in.”

“Of course not,” the prior said matter-of-factly. He was seemingly imperturbable—like Rainulf, a creature of the mind. “You won’t be able to see her for weeks, not until the trial. Please sit down,” he urged for the third time, indicating the seat opposite him at the little table in the hall of the prior’s lodge.

Thorne shook his head and continued pacing. He still felt the poisonous aftereffects of all that brandy, and moving seemed to help. “Can you imagine how she’s feeling right now? What she’s thinking? They’re threatening to burn her, for God’s sake. Can they do that?”

“They’ve been burning heretics in France and Italy for more than a century. Not only that, but their property is confiscated, often to the profit of their accusers. That’s what makes this concept of heretical sorcery so dangerous, so ripe for abuse. If men like Father Simon—priestly lapdogs to greedy monsters like Bernard—are given free reign to make such charges, who knows how many innocent lives could eventually be destroyed.”

Thorne stopped pacing and leaned on the table. “The only innocent life I care about right now is Martine’s. We have to come up with a strategy for this trial. I have no intention of letting them find her guilty.”

“They’re already found her guilty,” the prior said somberly. “We have to prove her innocent.”

Thorne dragged out a chair and straddled it. “That’s not the way a trial works. At my hallmoots—”

“Your hallmoots,” Matthew patiently explained, “are conducted according to the old Anglo-Saxon tradition, where the accused is assumed to be innocent until proven guilty. That’s not the way things work in an ecclesiastical court. They’ll start out assuming she’s a heretic, and go on from there.”

Thorne sighed raggedly. “And the Normans think they brought civilization to England,” he muttered.

Brother Matthew tapped the folded parchment on the table, his ebony eyes, usually so piercing, now focused on nothing. “The most serious accusation is that of ligature, the causing of impotence. And considering that she’s supposed to have caused it in the service of Satan...” He shook his head. “‘Tis a relatively new concept, heretical sorcery. There have been few trials to use as models, and that means there are few rules.”

“Is that good or bad?”

Matthew grimaced. “Probably bad. Bishop Lambert will be able to make the rules up as he goes along, so they’ll be to his advantage, not ours.”

Thorne felt as if the walls were closing in around him. “His advantage? What’s his stake in this?”

“If Martine is... if she can’t prove her innocence, and she’s...”

“And she’s burned,” Thorne supplied shortly.

Matthew nodded. “Her estates will be confiscated. The bulk will be distributed by Olivier as he sees fit, and I have little doubt that he’ll grant them to Bernard. They’ve always been close, and Bernard can argue that those lands have been in his family for nearly a century. He can be uncannily persuasive when there’s something he really wants. A smaller part—one or two holdings, perhaps—will go to the bishop. From what I know of him, ‘tis he who will benefit from their revenues, and not the Church. ‘Tis therefore very much in his interest that Martine’s guilt be maintained. Were it not for his avarice, I doubt she’d stand trial at all. Officially, canon law denies the existence of true heretical sorcery, although more and more those provisions are being overlooked.”