The Marsh King's Daughter (8 page)

'The ways of God are not ours to fathom, only to obey.'

Miriel bit her lip on an unsuitable retort concerning the ways of God. 'Then may I perform those tasks and pray for him?' she requested.

Sister Margaret frowned at her. 'It would not be seemly, a young girl like you.'

'More than half the "young girls like me" are already married with a baby in the cradle,' Miriel pointed out. 'And I am no shrinking innocent to balk at what must be done,' adding quickly as the sister's frown deepened, 'I nursed my grandfather through his final sickness. I had to do everything for him - everything,' she emphasised. 'My mother refused to go near the sick room.'

The infirmaress conceded the point, but her brow remained furrowed. 'Why the interest in this one?' she asked suspiciously. 'I wonder if you are tempted by the devil's trap of youth and comeliness?'

Miriel breathed out hard, forcing control upon herself. It was all she could do not to shriek at the old nun. 'He is not comely at the moment,' she said. 'I hate being helpless. I want to feel that I am doing something - that even if he dies we have tried our best.'

The patient tossed, threw out his arm, and knocked the watered wine from her hands, splashing the bedclothes with a blood-red stain. Miriel swiftly retrieved the cup and pulled back the sheet.

'Hide it,' he muttered. 'Have to hide it.' His chest rose and fell with the rapidity of his breathing. They had dressed him in a spare chemise from the linen coffer and it clung to his body in wet creases.

Miriel took his hand. 'Hide what?' He turned his eyes to her, frowning, struggling to focus. For a moment they glimmered with lucidity. The semblance of a grin parted his lips. 'Pandora's box,' he gasped, and fell back, shuddering.

The nun waved her stick. 'Do as you will with him,' she snorted and turned away, plainly deciding that she had wasted enough of her time. 'I doubt he is long for this world anyway.'

'Thank you, sister,' Miriel said with a rush of relief. She was powerfully aware of how easily the infirmaress could have refused. 'Who's Pandora, do you think?'

Sister Margaret shrugged indifferently. 'People in the grip of fever babble all manner of nonsense.'

'I just wondered if he was trying to say something about the King's treasure.'

The infirmaress stopped and gave Miriel a severe look over her shoulder, but then her lips twitched. 'Now who is babbling nonsense?' she asked. 'Keep your mind on your prayers, not the lure of material things.'

'Yes, sister.' Miriel lowered her eyes and pretended to be chastened. But her curiosity was too great for that. She thought of what he had said and the way they had found him on the sheep pasture. If only she knew more. 'You're not going to die,' she muttered fiercely. 'I won't let you.'

Nicholas felt as if he had been swimming for days in a hot and salty sea. Many times he had almost drowned beneath its waves, surfacing at the last moment, choking and gulping in extremity. He was aware of someone swimming with him, trying to buoy him above the waves, pleading with him to continue when all he wanted to do was let go and have peace.

Occasionally his father appeared, but for once the spectre said little, except to make the tart observation that while Nicholas appeared to be fulfilling his vow to die in his bed, he was almost seventy years too soon.

Nicholas ignored him for he did not have the strength and the current was too strong for him to turn and answer. Doggedly he continued to swim while the mist around him thickened into something resembling soup and scarcely breathable. Then he heard voices and saw the ship looming at him through the mist. Her strakes glistened and a scarlet dragon's head snarled at her prow. She was called Miriel and even at first sighting, even before he had seen the treasure chest in her. open hold, he knew instinctively that she belonged to him. J

Firm hands reached down and hauled him aboard. Above his head a striped sail billowed, and the mist shredded away to clear blue sky before the strengthening wind. Beneath him

the ship's deck rocked on the swell. The air was cold, clean and sharp. He drew a great lungful and opened his eyes.

A young nun whose brown gaze and thin nose he vaguely remembered was leaning over him, a linen cloth in her hand. The fragrance of woodsmoke clung to the coarse fibres of her habit and a plain wooden cross on a leather cord swung at her neck. She looked at him narrowly and passed her hand back and forth in front of his face.

'Are you awake?'

Nicholas started to say of course he was, and discovered that his voice had disappeared. When he tried to speak, he was seized by a paroxysm of violent coughing. The nun exchanged cloth for a goblet and swiftly set it to his lips. As Nicholas drank, the spasm eased, leaving him breathless and weak. Subsiding against the bolsters, he nodded his thanks to her.

'They were all certain that you were going to die. Father Gundulf gave you the last rites and prayers were said for your soul in the chapel.' Tilting her head to one side, she gave him a considering look. 'Either the prayers are working, or I am a good nurse and you are stronger than you look.' Nicholas grimaced and shook his head. Just now a new-born child could have defeated him in a fist fight. She offered him the drink again. Out of pride he raised a shaking hand to the cup and his fingers clumsily covered hers. The young nun gave a little start at the move and colour flushed across her cheekbones. Studying her as she set the cup aside and arranged the bedclothes, he remembered that her name was Sister Miriel. And then he thought of the gleaming ship in his dreams. The mind had a strange world and language of its own.

'You are in the convent of St Catherine’s-in-the-Marsh,' she told him as she smoothed and tucked. 'We found you on the sheep pasture, but you told us that you had come from the estuary.'

Nicholas frowned. It was difficult to sort the reality from his fevered dreams. All that came to him were images of churning mud and water, of desperation, terror, and the grim struggle to survive.

'I suppose,' she said, 'that you were a member of King John's baggage train.'

Nicholas looked at the woven stripes on the coverlet and nodded warily. An unwilling member, it was true, but nevertheless a witness to the doom.

'The soldiers have been searching the shore every day since it happened, but they have recovered naught but a few bodies and broken pieces of wood. It is said that the entire royal treasure was lost beneath the waves.' There was a sudden vibrancy in her tone at the mention of the treasure, which sat ill-at-ease with the image of a nun dedicated to the pure service of God. Nicholas had not missed the glow in her voice, but he was too tired to examine its reason. He thought it fortunate that the loss of his own voice meant that he did not have to explain anything.

She studied him and pursed her lips, which were as full and sensual as her nose was thin and austere. 'We had to say prayers in chapel for King John too,' she remarked, 'although not because he lost his baggage train. We heard the news yesterday that he has been stricken with gripes in the belly and is sick unto death.'

Nicholas's gaze sharpened and he formed a question with raised eyebrows.

'It is true, I swear it.' She placed her hand on the little wooden cross at her breast. 'He was first taken ill at Lynn, but his condition has worsened apace. Mother Abbess says that his sins are coming home to roost.'

Nicholas nodded and closed his eyes again so that she would not see the leap of joy in them. It might be wrong to exult at such news, but he would go to confession with a light heart. To the devil his own - and in very short order, he hoped. Perhaps then he could close the door on his past.

Gradually Nicholas recovered the use of his voice. His strength returned too as he devoured the nourishing broths and tisanes that were prepared for him. Although he much preferred the ministrations of Sister Miriel who would talk to him and was easy on the eye, she was seldom in attendance. Usually it was a nervous biddy called Godefe, skinny as a punt-pole, who treated him as if he was going to spring from his pallet and ravish her at the slightest opportunity. On the occasions when Godefe was not in attendance, he was left to the tender mercies of Sister Margaret. She, it seemed, had not the slightest fear of being ravished - all she would have to do to render him hors de combat would be to sit on him - but her irritation at having a man in the infirmary was made known at every turn.

One evening in late October, however, his fortune changed. Instead of the intimidated Godefe, or the intimidating infirmaress, Sister Miriel came to him with a bowl of ken broth and a bulky bundle tucked under her arm. A blue dusk had fallen outside. Her cheeks were flushed with cold and the keen smell of impending frost clung to her habit. Outside a bell was tolling in solemn, resounding strokes, but he was not aware of any religious office being due. 'King John has died,' she said as she gave him the broth and seated herself on the curule chair at his bedside. 'We heard the news not an hour ago from a merchant on his way to Lynn.'

Nicholas dipped the horn spoon in the broth and stirred the surface, but he did not eat. He knew that he should feel triumphant, but strangely there was only a great numbness where emotion should be. He had hated and feared John for more than ten years, and it was impossible to let it go in an instant.

'I am sorry, were you one of his men?' she asked with concern.

Nicholas laughed grimly. 'One of his men,' he repeated and hook his head. 'Christ, if only you knew.' She rested her elbows on the bundle in her lap and leaned forward. 'If only I did.'

Nicholas started to eat the broth; with his mouth full he could not answer.

Her lips twitched. 'But you're not going to tell me, are you?'

Nicholas swallowed and raised his eyes to meet the intelligent humour in hers. Keeping his own counsel had become second nature, the difference between life and death. Yet he sensed a kindred spirit in the young nun seated at his bedside, and she too had made the difference between his life and death. 'I wasn't one of John's men,' he said. 'It was pure mischance that I came to be travelling with the royal baggage train.'

'You mean you were with them because of safety in numbers after all the trouble in Lincoln?'

He drank some more broth and she watched him in waiting silence, her chin cupped in her hand.

'I was one of the rebels causing the trouble at Lincoln,' he risked finally. 'They caught me trying to escape and brought me with them for interrogation. If John had realised that he had me in his possession, he would have strung me higher than the man in the moon.'

Her eyes widened in shock. 'But why?'

'Reasons,' he said grimly. 'My family is not the first to fall foul of John's dark nature.' He contemplated the spoon.' 'Actually John would not have cared how I died, just that it was quick and quiet.'

She gave a delicate shudder. 'We used to hear tales in Lincoln and roundabout,' she said. 'He hanged some tiny children who were hostages in his care, and I remember a terrible tale about a woman he starved to death.'

'That woman's knowledge is mine, and it was my father's too.' No longer hungry, he put the broth aside unfinished. 'He died while crossing the Narrow
Sea. Both he and his ship vanished. No trace of him or the Peronnelle was ever found, yet he was an experienced sailor and navigator, and the night was as calm as glass.'

'You are saying that he was killed?' Her eyes by now were huge.

'How can I when there is only suspicion and no proof?' He waved his hand. 'I should not be speaking of this; it is too dangerous.'

She sat upright in her chair and looked affronted. 'I won't' tell anyone.'

'Mayhap not, but I am a rebel and even if John is dead, the war is not over. Word of my presence here is bound to leak out.'

'But I am the only one who knows more about you than your name,' she said practically. 'And I won't say anything, I swear.' She clutched her wooden cross as she spoke.

Nicholas smiled without humour. 'Like the law of the confessional, you mean. But that still does not stop the other nuns from speculation and gossip. Women are the same the world over.'

'If not for me and my fellow nuns you would not be here now,' she said indignantly.

He inclined his head. 'For which I would not have you think me ungrateful. But it is not safe for me to remain here much longer.'

'You are not yet strong enough to leave.' She spoke quickly, almost as if panicking, he thought, and her hand gripped the bundle on her lap. He saw that it was a garment of some sort with lozenge-patterned braid on the cuffs. 'No, but I will be soon.'

'Where will you go?'

'Wherever the road takes me.' He pointed at the clothing. 'Is that for me, or are you on an errand elsewhere?' She sighed and placed the bundle on the bed. 'Mother Abbess says that since you are feeling stronger, you might want to move to the guest house. As you have no garments of your own save shirt and braies, of her charity has provided you with a tunic and chausses.' 'That is most generous of her.' Nicholas picked up the tunic and shook it out. It was fashioned of soft, tawny wool that had been both fulled and napped - a rich man's garment, than he had owned in a long time. The chausses were serviceable brown linen and there was a green hood with a short shoulder cape.

'We keep spare apparel in the guest house,' she explained to his look of surprised question. 'Travellers often arrive in weather and it is miserable to spend the night in wet clothes.'