Knights of de Ware 03 - My Hero (21 page)

The last rites were finished without further incident as Cynthia clasped the old man’s hand, feeling his life force diminish. Upon the final “Amen,” Henry’s spirit left him. The hand in hers fell cool and silent.

“Farewell, old friend,” she whispered, brushing a rogue tear from her eye.

It was senseless to cry, she knew. After all, Henry had lived far beyond most men’s lifetimes. And, according to his confession, he hadn’t lacked for pleasure. Still, it wasn’t easy for her, sharing the slow drain of life from a man as his spirit departed.

Watching Cynthia, Garth felt such a welling up of empathy for her that he could scarcely keep himself from enfolding her in his arms to protect her from death’s shadow. She still clasped the poor man’s hand. Her head was bent in sorrow, and he saw her wipe at a tear. But she’d remained by the old villager, comforting him, amusing him, giving him courage to face his own death.

“There are others,” she said quietly as she finally crossed Henry’s hands atop his chest and blew out the candle near his head.

“Show me,” he murmured.

He followed her down the dusty lane, nodding now and then at onlookers curious about the strange priest in their village.

Cynthia spoke under her breath. “It would perhaps be best to make the blessings brief. It’s getting late, and—“

“I’ll stay all night if need be,” he told her, mildly offended that she’d think otherwise, “to see that their souls are properly shriven.”

“I believe you would, Garth,” she said with a fleeting smile. “It’s only that there are those yet living who may need your aid more.”

He stopped in his tracks and looked her square in her azure eyes. Something there made him shiver. “How many are afflicted?”

Fear flickered over her features, then vanished, so swiftly he might have imagined it. “I haven’t counted.”

She led him to a cottage at the outskirts of the village, in the middle of a field. The villagers followed them, murmuring among themselves, keeping a respectful distance.

Garth winced when the door swung open under his arm and the sickly stench hit him full force. He knew the smell at once. Death. The bile rose in his throat, but he choked it down. A de Ware never cowered from death.

Covering his nose and mouth with his woolen sleeve, he shouldered his way into the hovel. He scooped up the first body he found, bringing his burden outside to rest upon a soft patch of clover. Four more times he braved the interior of the cottage till the entire family lay nestled along the wattle fence of their demesne.

He began with the little girl he’d brought out last. Kneeling in the dirt, he cradled the tiny, limp body across his lap, taking care to cover her legs with her thin chemise, brushing her hair back from her face. It was a horrible task, looking upon the awful handiwork God sometimes wrought upon innocents, a task Garth only endured because he believed it would help their poor lost souls find peace.

Cynthia’s throat constricted. There was a sharp stinging in her nose that always preceded a sob. And she wasn’t the only one afflicted. The villagers stood silent in awe. Garth’s tenderness as he crooned a blessing to the child, soft as a cradlesong, caught at her heart, sending a trickle of tears down her cheek.

“My lady!” someone hissed suddenly behind her.

She turned. It was Nan atte Gate. The poor woman’s face was contorted with misery.

“It’s Tim, my lady! My little one has it now!”

“Ah, nay.” Cynthia’s heart sank. Leaving Garth to his duties, she followed Nan, lugging the satchel of medicines that had grown perilously light.

Inside the cottage, Tim peered up at her with sunken, heavy-lidded eyes. His face was pale and slack. He looked as if he might blow away with the breeze. She brushed her hands together.

“It’s because of the eggs,” he murmured.

She frowned. “The eggs?”

Tim nodded gravely, wincing as his stomach cramped. “Not allowed…at Lent. God is…punishing me.”

She swallowed back tears. “God wouldn’t punish you like this, Tim. You’re one of his favorite children.”

He shook his head. “The Abbot says I’m a sinner.”

“The Abbot?” She clenched her jaw against a reply she might later regret, and then laid her hands gently upon the boy’s forehead. “Never mind the Abbot, Tim. God knows you’re a good lad.”

Her palms tingled with his youthful energy, weak but still flickering. When she closed her eyes, a clear image of mint came to her. After a moment, she withdrew her hands and reached into her satchel for a packet of the leaves.

“Make a weak brew for him with these,” she told Nan, “and sweeten it with honey if you have it. I’ll come back at day’s end to see how he fares.” Then she brushed the lad’s hair back from his eyes. “God understands, Tim. He wants you to get better. He’ll forgive you for the eggs.”

Tim only stared at her, and for a brief, eerie moment, her own conviction was shaken.
Would
she be forgiven? It was true, she’d counseled many to break the strictures of Lent. But surely that counsel was divinely inspired. After all, her power came from God, didn’t it? Surely it was holy inspiration that moved her to give the villagers the egg broth.

But then, perhaps more than the egg broth ate away at her faith and made her fear the wrath of God. There was also the matter of Father Garth.

Despite her blind certainty that she simply steered Garth toward a more harmonious path, one that suited his own passionate nature, in a small corner of her heart, she wondered if she contrived to steal him from the church for her own selfish satisfaction. That, she was sure, God would never sanction.

The Abbot steepled his long fingers together and smiled grimly from the solar as he watched the peasant boy depart through the sagging gates of Charing.

A murrain in the village. Lady Cynthia dispensing her devil’s cures. And people dying. This was good news indeed. That and the list of herbs Mary had brought him were enough to condemn the lady on the spot.

But, he considered, scraping his nail over the worn stone of the window embrasure, patience had its merits. Better not to appear too eager. There was plenty of time to settle the noose about Lady Cynthia’s pale and trembling neck. Besides, sickness was such an ugly business. He’d had more than his share of it with that wretched woman’s late husband. Nay, he’d wait in the dubious comfort of his crumbling keep until the time ripened.

He turned from the window and went to his desk, picking up a sharpened quill. He dipped it in ink as thick as blood, and meticulously scrawled a damning
X
upon the parchment Mary had brought him, next to the word
belladonna
. Such a pretty word for such a deadly plant, a devil’s herb. There would be others, many others, that would bear the fatal
X
next to their names. But the Abbot preferred to do his work slowly and methodically, savoring each blow of the executioner’s ax.

By the time Garth visited the fifth house to perform last rites, the inevitable cup of yellowish broth by the bedside had begun to look very suspicious. Finally, he asked about it.

The dead man’s wife turned pale and wrung her hands.

“Please forgive him!” she cried. “I know it’s Lent, but she said it might help! And it did…for a time!”

“What? What might help?”

“The eggs!” The lady clapped a hand to her mouth, realizing she’d revealed more than she’d wanted to.

“Eggs?”

“Please forgive him,” she repeated. “He was a good man. And she said he’d be forgiven.”

Garth was confused. He took the woman by the shoulders. “Who said he’d be forgiven?”

The woman’s face crumbled. “You mean he won’t? Oh, please, Father. Father, please…” She began to wail.

“He will be forgiven all his sins,” Garth told her, waiting for her to calm. “Now, who told you to feed him eggs?”

“Lady Cynthia, of course. She’s taken care of him all along. She’s a great healer and a good lady, but it’s a grave sickness, and she could do nothing to save my…”

The woman fell to sobbing again, and Garth absently patted her hand.

Bloody hell—was Lady Cynthia instructing the villagers to disobey the dictates of Lent? Could she have unwittingly brought God’s wrath down upon the villagers?

He extricated himself from the weeping woman’s clutches. He had to absolve the dead man’s soul now before she dissolved into hysterics. Setting her aside, he hastily recited the last rites.

Then, his cassock flapping with authority, he set out to determine just what was at the heart of Lady Cynthia’s blasphemy.

He found her in a nearby hovel. The west-facing shutters had been thrown wide, but the sinking sun could only afford so much light. Still, when he charged in, he could make out the figure of Cynthia crouching at the foot of a straw bed, her sleeves stained and her discarded wimple crumpled in the corner.

“What healing do you practice, lady,” he demanded without preface, “that you take the church’s commandments into your own hands?”

The other three women in the room quailed at his voice, but Cynthia didn’t spare him a glance. She only barked at him to close the door.

He resisted the urge to slam it, astounded by her impertinence.

“Now,” she hoarsely urged her patient.

“I…cannot…” the woman whimpered from the bed. “Let me…die.”

“Nay, Milla! You’ve got to use every bit of your strength,” Cynthia told her. “Your babe may yet live. We must save it if we can.”

Garth felt the blood drain from his face. He’d burst into the cottage, burning with righteous indignation. He’d never noticed the drama unfolding in the long shadows. A wan peasant woman shivered on the bed, her head lolling across a filthy pillow. Lady Cynthia worked feverishly between the woman’s legs, her own face dripping with sweat, her eyes fierce, her hair hanging in damp strings about her shoulders.

Garth averted his eyes and took a mortified step back.

“Push!” Cynthia commanded. “I can see the babe’s head.”

The woman on the bed let out a high, thin whine.

“What are you doing?” Garth demanded, a sheen of sweat rising on his lip at the tortured whimper. “Can you not see how she suffers?”

One of the peasant women spoke meekly. “That’s always the way of childbirth, Father.”

“That’s it. That’s it,” Cynthia chanted to the laboring woman.

The woman screamed as if she’d been knifed in the abdomen. Garth clenched his hands at the horrible sound, which roused his maiden-rescuing de Ware instincts. Indeed, he would have bolted forward to save her had not the attending peasant women looked upon him with pure horror at his very presence here.

“Again,” Cynthia urged.

“For the love of God, lady, let her be!” he demanded. He knew he was about as welcome as a wolf in a lady’s solar here, but it was too late to leave. He had to do something, anything, to end the suffering. “You’re killing her!”

“Aye, the mother is dying,” Cynthia hissed at him over her shoulder. “But the babe will survive.”

“You can’t know that,” he murmured back. “It’s in God’s hands.”

“I do know that,” she insisted, leaning forward to wrap her fingers about the baby’s tiny head. “Good, Milla. Push once more.”

“You’d challenge the will of God?” he whispered incredulously.

She never gave him answer, for at that moment, to his utter amazement, the child emerged, slithering out into Cynthia’s hands, its reddening face screwed up with fury, its tiny fists trembling in futile rage. It let out a terrific bawl.

The women seemed neither surprised nor troubled. They immediately fell into a pattern of attending to the babe’s needs, a task as familiar to their hands as that of reaping winter wheat.

But Garth could only blink in wonder at the infant. Cynthia had snatched a morsel of life from the very jaws of death. Even now, the poor mother rattled out her final breath.

Cynthia bent to close the woman’s now sightless eyes with blood-spattered hands. She drew a thin sheet over the woman’s face, crossed herself, and rose from the bedside.

He’d witnessed a miracle. Cynthia had pulled a new life, kicking and squalling, against all odds, into the world. And whether it came from God or some strange force of nature, Cynthia had been the instrument of that miracle.

For a long moment, her eyes locked with his. They were dark with pain, weary with fatigue, deep with mystery. And as beautiful as truth. Cynthia
did
have a gift, he realized. She was courageous, determined, compassionate…

And she was fainting. As he gazed on, her eyelids fluttered, and she pitched forward. His heart vaulted into his throat, and he dove forward in time to catch her, hefting her up into his arms.

Shouldering his way past the peasant women, he carried Cynthia into the fresh air. As he emerged, the two men of Cynthia’s guard greeted him with sharp glares. One of them drew his sword.

“What have you done?” the man barked.

“Is she dead?” the other hissed.

“Nay!” Garth denied adamantly. “Nay. She lives.”

Lord, he prayed it was so. He could see a faint pulse thrumming in her throat, and the breath still whistled softly between her rosy lips. But her healing efforts must have drained her life force. Her neck arched limply over his arm, and her limbs were as heavy and slack as an empty coat of chain mail.

His heart pounded. He had to save her.

As the guards hovered at a safe distance, he knelt in the spring weeds and laid her gently on the ground. How natural she looked there, her coppery hair spilled across the dark green clover, the fingers of one hand threaded through the stems, as if she belonged to the earth. But he’d be damned if he’d let her return to it. Not yet.

He lifted her head to rest upon his knee and fanned her with the hem of his cassock.

“Come on, Cynthia,” he urged. “Wake up.”

Her lips were pale, and her breath barely stirred the tendrils of hair framing her face.

He closed his eyes and bent his head in murmured prayer, reciting every entreaty he knew to convince God to spare her.

Still she lay silent.

Finally, abandoning prayer, he clasped her hand and brought it to his chest.