Chastising herself for having allowed herself to be spoiled by the wondrous viands of Castle Soaring—though that was hardly the root of her lack of appetite—she rose from the stool before the fire pit and turned her thoughts to the day ahead that had little hope of passing quickly.
Since requests for her services had sagged these past days, she had only to prepare a few medicinals. The most pressing one was for the young wife and mother whose cottage was situated beside hers and who sometimes suffered such terrible aches of the head that she was confined to her pallet with the shutters closed to keep out the light. Petronilla was her name, and she had become a friend since, with God’s help, Helene had snatched the woman’s infant daughter from a coughing death shortly after her arrival in Parsings. Unfortunately, though Helene felt she had proved her skill as a healer, Petronilla’s husband continued to regard her with suspicion and urge his wife to seek the services of the old healer. Hardly faint of heart, his wife refused.
A half hour later, with the sound of John’s and Tilda’s laughter and shouts slipping through the cracks of her wattle and daub walls, Helene decided against her mantle as her son had done and stepped outside with her friend’s medicinal in hand. Immediately, she halted, for a lad of ten and some years ran toward her.
“Aye?” she asked, wary of his wide-eyed, furrow-browed expression.
“’Tis Amos! He asks for you.”
Though the old healer had been kind and welcoming to Helene, he mostly kept to his more prosperous side of the village. “Did he say what he requires?”
“He has taken ill and cannot rise from his pallet.”
Helene inclined her head. “Tell him I am coming.”
The boy ran and Helene ducked back into the cottage to retrieve her basket. Shortly, having sent Tilda home and passed a disappointed John into the care of Petronilla who thanked her profusely for the medicinal, Helene arrived at Amos’s cottage that was in a less sorrier state than her own. Not surprisingly, there were a dozen villagers gathered outside the healer’s door.
“Can you make him right?” asked a woman who was not as old as her bent frame suggested.
As Helene turned sideways to slip between her and the lad who had summoned her, she said, “I cannot know that until I have examined him, but he will benefit from prayer.” As opposed to the wringing of hands.
She pushed the door inward, stepped into the dim and unexpectedly stale interior, and closed the door.
“’Tis you, woman healer?” Amos croaked from the opposite side of the room.
Having expected others to be gathered around him, she was surprised to find him alone. “Aye, Helene.” She sidestepped a chair, an upended cauldron, and scattered kindling near a smoldering fire pit. Reaching his side where he lay atop a pallet with only a thin blanket covering him ankles to mid chest, she lowered her basket and went down on her knees. “What ails you, Amos?”
The wet eyes that had followed her across the room briefly closed. “My end. ’Tis near.” With effort, he raised an arm and dropped his hand upon his chest. “It has been stalking me since before you arrived in Parsings, and this morn it came out of the shadows and sat hard upon my chest.”
“Then it is your heart that troubles you.” She reached for her basket.
“More than troubles me. ‘Twill be the death of me.”
Very likely from the looks of him, but still she said, “I have something that—”
“It will do no good. I have seen enough of this to know it will not be distracted.”
“But—”
“I did not ask you to come that you might heal me where I am unable to heal myself.” He cleared his throat. “I summoned you that those who continue to seek my services when I would have had them turn to you and give me rest during my final days will know I have faith in your skills.”
“That is generous.” Helene turned back the cloth that covered the basket’s contents. “And I thank you, but you must allow me—”
“Bring those who are outside in, and I will tell it to them.” He drew a wheezing breath and patted his chest. “I cannot much longer bear the weight.”
“But—”
“I beseech you!”
She stood and, in her haste to cross the room, further scattered the kindling. A moment later, she wrenched open the door, causing those outside to startle and look at her with wide-eyed expectation. “Amos bids you enter.”
“All
of us?” said the bent woman.
“Aye, I fear the end is upon him.”
They pushed inside and past her, quickly filling the cottage.
Sarah, the laundress who was a score and ten years of age and had never wed, reached Amos ahead of the others and sank down beside him. “Amos, tell us ‘tis not so—that you are not bound for heaven.”
He grunted and, when Helene eased herself into a tight space between the others, his gaze found her. “She…” He raised a trembling finger from his chest and pointed at her.
Sarah peered over her shoulder. “The woman healer, Amos?”
He lowered and raised his chin. “Her…she is…” His body jerked and the hand upon his chest began to claw at it.
Helene pushed forward and dropped to her knees beside Sarah. “Move aside. I must—”
Amos cried out, arched his back, and drove his heels into his pallet while those who had gathered began to murmur, cry, and call upon God.
Before Helene could pull the stopper from the medicinal that would ease his pain, the healer of Parsings gave a shudder and a moan, and all of him eased.
Helene stared at his half open, unmoving eyes, then slid a hand beneath his upon his chest and, confirming his heart had beat its last, bowed her head and sent up a silent prayer.
Shortly, she met Sarah’s tearful gaze. “He has passed,” she said softly and looked to the others. “I am sorry, but naught could be done for him.”
Their expressions of grief were the old man’s due for all the years he had cared for them and their families. Thus, determining it was best to leave them to it, Helene lifted her basket, straightened, and turned away.
“For what did he summon you if you could not heal him?” one of the men called when she reached the door.
Inwardly, she groaned. What Amos had meant to tell them could only be done by him if it was to be believed rather than deemed self-serving. She looked around. “Methinks he must not have realized the severity of his sickness until after he sent for me.”
Discomfited by their deepening frowns and narrowing eyes, she stepped out into a day that had turned yet more bleak, and not only due to the old healer’s death. The clouds had darkened further and the breeze had, indeed, given way to a wind that swept cool air across her exposed skin.
Would next there be rain? she wondered as she traversed the road to her side of the village.
Wishing now that she had not followed John’s lead in leaving her mantle behind, she increased her pace and, some minutes later, collected her son from Petronilla.
As the day approached the nooning hour, the clouds unburdened themselves, albeit briefly. Thus, the village children, including those who had come in from the fields when the first drops began to fall, hastened out of doors to splash among the puddles and send up sprays of brown and red mud that better reflected the mood of the villagers as word spread of the old healer’s death.
Most unnerving was the silence that coiled around Helene’s cottage as none ventured to her door to seek advice or medicinals. And when she peered outside to assure herself that John’s shouts were prompted by joy, the look that some of the passersby gave her unsettled her further.
“Come, Durand,” she whispered as darker clouds rolled in. “Pray, come.”
John slept, his day’s play having finally slammed his lids closed and dropped his head to the table alongside his soup bowl. Thus, Helene had carried her increasingly weighty son to his pallet and tucked the covers around him.
An hour having passed with only cleaning and mending and worry to occupy her, she determined it was time to fuel the fire and seek her pallet beside John’s.
Shaking out her son’s mantle that had required much plying of needle and thread to repair the rips at shoulder and hem, she rose from her chair and crossed the room. For some minutes, she stood over John and studied his face that, with each passing day, lost more of the soft fullness of a child who yet clung to his mother’s skirts. But then, come the end of the month, he would mark his sixth year of life.
She bent and settled the mended mantle atop him to further ward off the chill wrought by the day’s intermittent rain, then pressed a kiss to his brow. “Sleep content.”
As she straightened, a knock sounded. Had someone taken ill? Perhaps one of the village women whose pregnancy was well advanced had begun to labor. Though late night visits were not uncommon in such circumstances, she hesitated.
The knock came again.
Reminding herself of the Wulfrith dagger beneath her skirts, touching the smaller one on her belt, she crossed to the door. “Who goes?” she called, careful not to speak too loudly for fear of rousing John.
“Pray, open the door,” entreated one whose voice she recognized.
“’Tis late, Jacob,” she spoke near the crack between door and frame. “What is it you need?”
“To speak with you. To warn you.”
The fine hairs along her arms rose. “Of what?”
“You and your boy are in danger.”
Catching her breath, she glanced over her shoulder. Though John’s lids remained closed, he grimaced and murmured. If she did not put an end to Jacob’s night visit, her son would awaken—and might be shaken by remembrance of when Sir Robert had come for her.
Though she longed to know what danger they were in, she decided it would be best if she and Jacob spoke in the light of day. “We shall talk on the morrow,” she rasped. “Good eve.”
He knocked again, more forcefully. “It cannot wait!”
John’s pallet rustled as he turned onto his back and flung an arm over his eyes.
“Helene!”
Grinding her teeth, she lifted the bar and opened the door a hand’s width. “Quiet!” she hissed as Jacob’s broad face took shape in the timid light of the tallow candle that had guided her mending. “You will awaken my son!”
“What I have to tell you is of great import. Pray, let me in.”
That
she would not do, but she would speak with him outside where they would be in sight of her neighbors’ homes. “Give me a moment to retrieve my mantle and I shall come out to you.”
Frustration rumpled his face, but he stepped back.
Helene closed and barred the door, only to unbar it a few moments later. mantle slung over her shoulders, she stepped outside into the crisp night air, eased the door closed, and settled her gaze on Jacob who stood a short distance away in the bit of moonlight that shone between the clouds.
“What is it?” she asked, clasping the edges of her mantle at her neck.
“There was a meeting of the village leaders this eve during which there was much talk of you.”
She shivered, as much from fear as the cold. “Me?”
Jacob took a step nearer. “Some believe you are the cause of Amos’s death.”
Helene breathed deep. “I am not. His heart was done with its life’s work. That is all.”
“Sarah says he tried to warn her and the others about you ere he passed, but he lost his voice as if by magic.”
This time it was Helene who took a step nearer. “Healing, not magic, is my craft. ’Twas death at Amos’s door that took his voice. As for what he was trying to speak, he told me he had summoned me that he might assure the others he had faith in my healing skills, and for that he asked me to let them in.”
Jacob made a face. “Be it so, he did not say it where it could be heard. And, with the other things that are being said of you, I fear ‘twould not be believed had he been able to. Certes, it would have been thought he was bewitched.”
She startled, for that last word was the same Margery had used in reference to her father’s pursuit of Helene.
“Parson’s leaders have good cause to look upon the old healer’s death with suspicion,” he continued. “After all, though he was much aged, now that he has passed, your services will be much in demand—quite fortunate for you and your son.”
Helene winced at how loud her swallow sounded. “What other things are said of me? And by whom?”
“I beseeched Margery to keep her fears to herself, but she is headstrong and would not heed me.”
Something inside Helene doubled over. Not that she was surprised that his daughter had shared their encounter. She had simply hoped more than she should have.
“This eve,” he said, “she stood up and told that—”
“This eve? Your daughter, not much more than a child, was allowed to attend a meeting of the village leaders
and
speak to them?” Of course, as Jacob was one of those leaders, he could do as he pleased.
“She is mostly a woman now. Indeed, she would wed if I consented.”
“Exactly!”
Helene could not be certain in the bare light, but she thought he averted his gaze.
“What did she tell, Jacob?”
“She said she believed that, since I will take no other to wife, you have bewitched me.”
Beneath her mantle, Helene crossed her arms over her chest. “How many years have you been widowed?”
Though he ignored the question and said, “You
have
entranced me, Helene,” she knew his wife had died five years past and, in all that time, he had not married again.
She took another step toward him. “’Tis called lust, not entrancement, and certainly not bewitching.”
Anger flashed across his face. “What of the incantations Margery heard you speak?”
Her own anger rose to meet his, for she did not doubt Margery had also fed that lie to the village leaders. She and John were in danger, likely more than when Robert had taken her from her home. “As I told your daughter, the words I spoke were prayers to our Lord that my medicinal bless the one for whom it was prepared.”
He shook his head. “Margery placed a hand upon a psalter and told that never had she heard such words, that they hissed and growled from your lips.”
Helene’s insides twisted so sharply she feared she might lose the meager contents of her stomach. “If you believe this, why did you come to warn me?” Though she asked it, she was fairly certain of his answer.