Alys Clare - Music of the Distant Stars

Edild watched as I came back inside, carefully wrapping the lettuce before stowing it in my satchel. She said, ‘Remember that the body exhibits its inner state in external symptoms.’

I understood; it is one of her most frequently-repeated maxims. She believes that disturbances in the mind bring about aches, pains and sickness in the body. I don’t understand how this can possibly happen, but she is my teacher and I deeply respect her wisdom and experience. ‘I am to question her and see if anything is troubling her?’ I asked.

Edild sighed. Sometimes I feel I have a tremendously long way to go before I am anything even approaching a healer. ‘You know something troubles her, and you also know what it is,’ she said patiently.

‘Her seamstress is dead, and she feels bad because it was she who brought Ida here to the hands of her killer,’ I said.

‘Yes. And?’

‘Her initial reaction, which she made the mistake of speaking aloud, was regret at the loss of a fine needlewoman, and she probably feels bad about that too.’

‘Good,’ said my aunt. ‘Now, off you go. The lady is waiting.’

Lady Claude had taken to her bed. On announcing myself at Lakehall, I was ushered inside, across the wide hall and through a curtained doorway on the far side. A short stair led up to a bedchamber; Lord Gilbert was clearly advanced in his domestic arrangements and liked to offer his guests a room for the use of themselves and their personal servant, for there was but the one bed in the chamber, with a truckle bed tucked away beneath it where the servant slept.

The bed was high, the sheets were fresh, crisp linen. The occupant was dressed in a high-necked linen shift, beautifully sewn, and her head was bare. She was lying back on her pillows regarding me through half-closed eyes. She beckoned to me, and I approached, dropping a swift courtesy. Her short hair, I now saw, was of an indeterminate, light-brown shade, fine in texture, thin and lying flat on her head. I studied her face. She had been pale before, but now she looked grey, her eyes sunk deep in her head. I felt her pain coming off her in waves, and instinctively I summoned my defences. It was not that I wasn’t sympathetic — far from it — but I would be no help to her if I, too, collapsed with a similar, agonizing pain.

Without asking, I put my hand to her brow, my open palm hovering a finger-joint’s length over the skin. Left temple, left side of forehead, right side, above the eyebrows, up in the hairline, right temple. Yes. I had felt the heat of the pain as my hand hovered over Claude’s left eyebrow but, as Edild had taught me, I covered the whole area before I began the treatment, in case the malaise was centred in more than one place.

I had asked the man who showed me in to bring hot water, and he had quietly slipped into the chamber and put a big, steaming jug on the floor, together with a mug. Now I selected the herbs from my bag, mixed them in a strong potion, tied them in a little cloth of fine linen and set the bag to steep in a mug of hot water. Then I poured almond oil into the small clay dish that I carry in my satchel, dropping in lavender oil and mixing it well. Returning to the bed, I said very quietly, ‘My lady, have I your permission to soothe your poor head?’

Her eyes were closed. She nodded: a tiny movement, barely perceptible.

I leaned over her and began the massage. I paused after a while to give her the infusion, then went back to the massage.

After quite some time, her eyes fluttered open. She looked up at me, and I read two things: the pain had eased its iron grip, and its recession had allowed what was really troubling Lady Claude to push forward and dominate her.

I went on stroking her head. I did not know what to say. I was not Edild, who can ease a patient’s extreme distress with the right words. It was quite possible that my attempts to help would do more harm than good. I kept quiet.

Presently, she gave me a rather tight-lipped smile and, taking hold of my wrist, removed my hand from her forehead. ‘The pain has gone?’ I asked. I knew it had, but it would be good to hear her say so.

‘It has. I thank you.’

I studied her. The colour in her cheeks had improved slightly. ‘You should perhaps stay in bed today,’ I suggested. ‘I have brought herbs to ensure that you will sleep. I will make an infusion for you.’

But even as I had spoken she had thrown back the bedclothes, and she now stood before me in her shift. ‘Only the sick and the weak sleep in the daytime,’ she declared. ‘Hand me my gown.’ She pointed an imperious finger. I did as she ordered, picking up the rich, black silk gown and dropping it over her head, helping her with the side lacings. Then she indicated her snowy-white headdress, and I handed her that too. She nodded towards her leather belt with the little velvet bag hanging from it — I noticed that there was also a large iron key suspended on a chain — and took it from me, fastening it around her thin waist. Beckoning me to follow, she led the way to a small room along the corridor, and as soon as she unlocked and opened the low wooden door, I recognized it as her sewing room.

I stared around the chilly, narrow space. Ida, I observed, had slept the nights of her guard duty on a tiny straw mattress with one thin blanket.

‘My linens.’ Claude swept her hand around, and I took in white sheets, linen cloths and personal undergarments, all of the finest fabrics and beautifully sewn with tiny stitches and delicate, subtle embroidery, much of it using the form and colour of our local fenland wild flowers. If this was Ida’s handiwork, she had indeed been gifted.

‘It’s beautiful,’ I said, and I wasn’t just being polite.

She brushed aside the praise, leading me on towards the end of the room, beneath the window, where a large wooden frame stood. She looked down at what was stretched over the frame, and for the first time I saw a smile on her face. ‘This, now, this is my work,’ she said. ‘These panels will hang around my marriage bed.’

I followed the direction of her eyes. The frame held a large piece of coarse linen perhaps three yards deep and a yard across; only a section of it was clamped in the frame, the remainder hanging down either side. It was, I observed, one of a series that she was working on. I leaned over the work, studying the careful stitches and the pleasing colours. It was only after looking at it for some time that I appreciated the subject matter.

For the intimate place that she would share with her new husband, Lady Claude had chosen to depict the Seven Deadly Sins. She was working on Gluttony, and a fat man sat on a stool cramming food into his mouth even as the cloth of his garment and his own flesh began to tear open, spilling red guts out on to his yellow robe. I glanced around to look more closely at the other panels, which were suspended from hooks along the walls. There was Pride, a pretty but vacuous-faced woman staring at herself in a mirror while her house burned down behind her with her agonized children inside. There was Lust, a scarlet-gowned woman lying with her eyes closed and her mouth wide open in sexual thrall, a man’s dark outline over her while devils with pitchforks edged ever closer out of the shadows. Wrath was depicted as a well-muscled man, red-faced with fury, holding an axe above his head and in the very act of swinging it down on the head of his child — a little boy holding a catapult in one hand and a dead fowl in the other, eyes wide with terror as he pleaded for mercy. Avarice showed a miser sitting on a golden stool, his hands clutching at handfuls of gold coins that were stashed in a sack at his feet, his attention so thoroughly absorbed that he did not see the skeletal woman, child and tiny baby that lay drooping beside him, the woman’s claw-like hand extended palm uppermost in the universal gesture of the beggar.