Alys Clare: Girl In A Red Tunic

Then, to cap it all, King Richard goes and gets himself captured, would you believe it, by some upstart duke who promptly hands him over to the Emperor! To the people of England, it was almost inconceivable that their King, who had set off with such a force of arms that it had taken thousands of ships to carry everything (the tale had grown in the telling), could have been taken against his will. What of all his soldiers? What of those companies of heavily armed men guarding him? Couldn’t they have prevented this disaster that was making beggars of everyone? Josse could have explained to them, had he been of a mind, that the King had been separated from his main force of arms and was virtually undefended; that, having been shipwrecked south of Trieste on his way home from Acre, he’d had little choice but to opt for the overland route, despite the fact that it took him into the territory of his mortal enemy, Duke Leopold of Austria, where his merchant’s disguise had been penetrated and his capture had swiftly ensued.

But Josse was as tired and dispirited as everyone else and he didn’t bother.

Now, his guard duty done — he had been relieved by a company of eager knights whose youth and innocence made him feel very old — Josse was heading for home. He thought — he hoped — that it was merely a product of his state of mind, but in reality he felt far from well. His throat ached, he had a congestion in his chest that produced a constant, phlegmy cough, and his limbs ached. Horace plodded steadily along beneath him, well-behaved and calm, and Josse sat in the saddle and dozed.

He made a couple of overnight stops, then crossed the Thames estuary and went on with his journey. He still felt ill; a concerned serving woman in a tavern outside Colchester had given him a hot drink which she said would ease his cough but instead it had made him vomit, which had caused his throat to hurt even more. Riding miserably towards the North Downs, he had an unexpectedly cheering thought: he would not go home to New Winnowlands; he would turn aside and instead go to Hawkenlye Abbey. The infirmarer there was an old friend and he had more faith in her healing powers than in anyone else’s on Earth. She would fuss over him, tuck him up in a cot with clean sheets and a hot stone at his feet, cover him with warm woollen blankets and spoon medicines and rem edies into his mouth. Her nursing nuns would glide calmly up and down the long infirmary, giving him serene and caring smiles and occasionally pausing to put a cool white hand on his hot forehead, and he would lie there being looked after until he felt better. Clucking to Horace, he kicked the big horse into a canter and hastened on his way.

The solicitude with which he was received at Hawkenlye was all that he had envisaged. Sister Euphemia, reaching up to place the envisioned cool hand on his forehead, studied him briefly and then gave a quick nod. She summoned a nursing nun — to Josse’s delight it was young Sister Caliste, a favourite of his — and gave orders for him to be put to bed at the far end of the infirmary ‘where it’s more peaceful’. However, given the sharp look that she gave him when, amid his effusive thanks, he broke off to cough, he reckoned that his placement away from others had more to do with her concern that everybody else currently sick at Hawkenlye Abbey would not end up coughing too.

It was odd, he mused, following Sister Caliste’s slim, upright form down the long ward, how some sicknesses could pass from one person to another. Things like a headache or the pain of a sprained wrist, for example, you kept to yourself, but coughs, fevers and inflammations of the lungs seemed to jump from body to body as if some malign and invisible spirit bore them through the air …

They had reached the curtained-off recess where he was to be cared for. Sister Caliste tactfully turned her back while he took off his heavy cloak and slipped out of his tunic, shirt and hose and, dressed only in his thin undershirt, crawled into bed. The sheets were as cool on his hot skin as he had dreamed they would be and he just knew that as soon as his blood cooled down and the shivers began, Sister Caliste would return to cover him with a warm blanket. With a smile she disappeared between the curtains, but presently she returned and made him drink a concoction that tasted almost as bad as that of the Colchester serving woman. The only difference was, he reflected as at last he gave in to sleep, was that the Hawkenlye infirmarer’s medicine worked the other way round: it didn’t make him vomit and it did stop his cough.

He slept, dreamed and dozed the day away. Sister Caliste came to see him briefly now and again, once bringing him some savoury broth and a couple of times giving him more of the medicinal draught, although he detected that the subsequent doses had been watered down and were less potent. Once he opened his eyes and thought he saw the Abbess’s face staring down at him but it could have been a dream; the Abbess seemed to feature quite regularly in his dreams. Later, when it was dark, he was given a cool drink and someone — he thought it was Sister Euphemia — said a prayer over him whose main point appeared to be to ask God and His angels to watch over Josse until the morning. Then, with that most comforting thought in mind, he slept again, this time long, deep and dreamlessly, and he did not wake up until morning.

He realised straight away that he felt better. Much better, in fact; the heat in his skin had gone and so had the sore throat. He tried an experimental cough and managed to produce only a small amount of phlegm. Aye, he was on the mend, no doubt about it. He noticed that he was very hungry and, as if she had been waiting outside the curtains for him to appreciate this fact, Sister Caliste appeared bearing a bowl of porridge and a cool drink.

As the infirmarer had done the previous day, she put her hand on his forehead. Smiling, she said, ‘Your fever has passed for the time being, Sir Josse, although it may return later in the day, that being the way of fevers.’

‘I feel quite well,’ he assured her. ‘I’d like to-’

‘Get up?’ She smiled again.

‘You have learned to read men’s minds in the course of your nursing training, Sister,’ he observed.

‘Oh, no. Sister Euphemia has that talent, but not I. If I guess right, it is only because I learn through constant repetition. Sir Josse, nine people out of ten want to get up the first morning they wake to find their fever gone.’

‘But you do not let them.’ He was depressingly sure of it.

‘No,’ she agreed, taking the empty porridge bowl from him and straightening his sheet and blanket, ‘because if we were to do so, they would spend a happy hour or two believing themselves recovered, then come creeping back to us with their hot, aching heads in their hands and feeling more ill than they were in the first place.’

‘Oh.’

His mournful monosyllable made her smile again. ‘Do not worry,’ she whispered, putting her sweet mouth close to his ear, ‘I think I may safely assure you that you’ll be up and about tomorrow.’

Then, with the suggestion of a wink that, in a fully professed nun, was highly daring, she was gone.

Sister Euphemia came to have a thorough look at him later in the morning, ordering him to open his mouth widely so that she could look down his throat, making him give a cough or two, putting her ear to his chest to listen to his breathing and smoothing the hair back from his forehead with her hand as she tested him for fever. What she observed must have reassured her for she allowed his curtains to be drawn back. He would have liked her to stay and talk to him — as yet he had not even begun to catch up on what had been happening in the Abbey since his last visit — but she seemed preoccupied and he guessed she had too much to do to waste her time gossiping with him. With a nod of approval, she left him.