Ellis Peters - The Sanctuary Sparrow

Walter, if he had anticipated any of this, had been wise to keep well away from it, safe in his shop. But the likelihood was that he had never been warned or consulted, and was expendable until this dispute was settled.

“But you knew,” cried Daniel, impatiently brushing aside her lifelong grievance, seldom if ever mentioned so plainly before, “you knew I should be marrying, and surely you had the sense to know my wife would expect her proper place in the house. You’ve had your day, you’ve no complaint. Of course the wife has precedence and requires the keys. And shall have them, too!”

Susanna turned her shoulder on him and appealed with flashing eyes to her grandmother, who had sat silent this while, but followed every word and every look. Her face was grim and controlled as ever, but her breathing was rapid and shallow, and Cadfael had closed his fingers on her wrist to feel the beat of her blood there, but it remained firm and measured. Her thin grey lips were set in a somewhat bitter smile.

“Madam grandmother, do you speak up! Your word still counts here as mine, it seems, cannot. Have I been so useless to you that you, also, want to discard me? Have I not done well by you all, all this while?”

“No one has found fault with you,” said Juliana shortly. “That is not the issue. I doubt if this chit of Daniel’s can match you, or do the half as well, but I suppose she has the goodwill and the perseverance to learn, if it has to be by her errors. What she has, and so I tell you, girl, is the right of the argument. The household rule is owing to her, and she will have to have it. I can say no other, like it or lump it. You may as well make it short and final, for it must happen.” And she rapped her stick sharply on the floor to make a period to the judgement.

Susanna stood gnawing at her lips and looking from face to face of all these three who were united against her. She was calm now, the anger that filled her had cooled into bitter scorn.

“Very well,” she said abruptly. “Under protest I’ll do what’s required of me. But not today. I have been the mistress here for years, I will not be turned out in the middle of my day’s work, without time to make up my accounts. She shall not be able to pick flies here and there, and say, this was left unfinished, or, she never told me there was a new pan needed, or, here’s a sheet was left wanting mending. No! Margery shall have a full inventory tomorrow, when I’ll hand over my charge. She shall have it listed what stocks she inherits, to the last salt fish in the last barrel. She shall start with a fair, clean leaf before her. I have my pride, even if no other regards it.” She turned fully to Margery, whose round fair face seemed distracted between satisfied complacency and discomfort, as if she did not quite know, at this moment, whether to be glad or sorry of her victory. “Tomorrow morning you shall have the keys. Since the store-room is entered through my chamber, you may also wish to have me move from there, and take that room yourself. Then you may. From tomorrow I won’t stand in your way.”

She turned and walked away out of the hall door and round towards the kitchen, and the bunch of keys at her waist rang as if she had deliberately set them jangling in a last derisive spurt of defiance. She left a charged silence behind her, which Juliana was the first one bold enough to break.

“Well, children, make yourselves content,” she said, eyeing her grandson and his bride sardonically. “You have what you wanted, make the most of it. There’s hard work and much thought goes into running a household.”

Margery hastened to ingratiate herself with thanks and promises. The old woman listened tolerantly, but with that chill smile so unnervingly like Susanna’s still on her lips. “There, be off now, and let Daniel get back to his work. Brother Cadfael, I can see, is none too pleased with seeing me roused. I’m likely to be getting some fresh potion poured into me to settle me down, through the three of you and your squabbles.”

They went gladly enough, they had much to say to each other privately. Cadfael saw the spreading grey pallor round Juliana’s mouth as soon as she relaxed her obstinate self-control and lay back against her cushions. He fetched water from the cooling jar, and shook out a dose of the powdered oak mistletoe for her to take. She looked up at him over the cup with a sour grin.

“Well, say it! Tell me my granddaughter has been shabbily used!”

“There is no need for me to say it,” said Cadfael, standing back to study her the better and finding her hands steady, her breath even, and her countenance as hardy as ever, “since you know it yourself.”

“And too late to mend it. But I’ve allowed her the one day she wanted. I could have denied her even that. When I gave her the keys, years ago, you don’t think they were the only ones? What, leave myself unfurnished? No, I can still poke into corners, if I choose. And I do, sometimes.”

Cadfael was packing his dressings and unguents back into his scrip, but with an eye still intent on her. “And do you mean to give up both bunches to Daniel’s wife now? If you had meant mischief, you could have handed them to her before your granddaughter’s face.”

“My mischief is almost over,” said Juliana, suddenly sombre. “All keys will be wrested from me soon, if I don’t give them up willingly. But these I’ll keep yet a day or two. I still have a use for them.”

This was her house, her family. Whatever boiled within it, ripe for eruption, was hers to deal with. No outsider need come near.

In the middle of the morning, when Susanna and Rannilt were both busy in the kitchen, and would certainly be occupied for some time, and the men were at work in the shop, Juliana sent the only remaining witness, Margery, to fetch her a measure of a strong wine she favoured for mulling from a vintner’s a satisfactory distance away across the town. When she had the hall to herself, she rose, bearing down heavily on her stick, and felt beneath her full skirt for the keys she kept hidden in a bag-pocket there.

Susanna’s chamber door was open. A narrow rear door gave quick access here to the strip of yard which separated the kitchen from the house. Faintly Juliana could hear the voices of the two women, their words indistinguishable, their tones revealing. Susanna was cool, short and dry as always. The girl sounded anxious, grieved, solicitous. Juliana knew well enough about that truant day when the chit had come home hastily and in the dark. No one had told her, but she knew. The sharpness of her senses neither denied nor spared her anything. Shabbily used, and too late to mend! The girl had been listening, appalled, to the quarrel in the hall, and felt for the mistress who had shown her kindness. Young things are easily moved to generous indignation and sympathy. The old have no such easy grace.

The store-room with its heavy vats of salted food, jars of oil, crocks of flour and oatmeal and dry goods, tubs of fat, bunches of dried herbs, shared the width of the hall with Susanna’s chamber, and opened out of it. This door was locked. Juliana fitted the key Baldwin Peche had cut for her before ever she gave up the original, and opened the door and went in, into the myriad fat, spicy, aromatic, salt smells of the pantry.

She was within for perhaps ten minutes, hardly more. She was ensconced in her cushioned corner under the staircase and the door locked again securely by the time Margery came back with her wine, and the spices needed to mull it to her liking for her indulgence at bedtime.

“I have been telling this youngster,” said Brother Anselm, fitting together curved shards of wood with the adroit delicacy appropriate to the handling of beloved flesh wounded, “that should he consider taking vows as a novice here, his tenure would be assured. A life of dedication to the music of worship—what better could he seek, gifted as he is? And the world would withdraw its hand from him, and leave him in peace.”