reproach to me, Father?’
Abbot Radulfus stirred abruptly out of a stillness so long sustained that he emerged from it with a sharp indrawn breath, as if himself stricken with a shadowy insight into her suffering.
‘I am not sure that I have the right to pronounce. You are here, you have withstood that temptation. To overcome the lures of evil is all that can be required of mortals. But you make no mention of those other consolations open to the Christian soul. I know your priest to be a man of grace. Did you not allow him the opportunity to lift some part of your burden from you?’
‘Father Eadmer is a good man and a kind,’ said Donata with a thin, wry smile, ‘and no doubt my soul has benefited from his prayers. But pain is here in the body, and has a very loud voice. Sometimes I could not hear my own voice say Amen! for the demon howling. Howbeit, rightly or wrongly, I did look about me for other aid.’
‘Is this to the present purpose?’ Hugh asked gently. ‘For it cannot be pleasant to you, and God knows it must be tiring you out.’
‘It is very much to the purpose. You will see. Bear with me, till I end what I have begun. I got my talisman,’ she said. ‘I will not tell you from whom. I was still able to go about, then, to wander among the booths at the abbey fair, or in the market. I got what I wanted from a traveller. By now she may herself be dead, for she was old. I have not seen her since, nor ever expected to. But she made for me what I wanted, one draught, contained in so small a vial, my release from pain and from the world. Tightly stoppered, she said it would not lose its power. She told me its properties, for in very small doses it is used against pain when other things fail, but in this strength it would end pain for ever. The herb is hemlock.’
‘It has been known,’ said Cadfael bleakly,’to end pain for ever even when the sufferer never meant to surrender life. I do not use it. Its dangers are too great. There is a lotion can be made to use against ulcers and swellings and inflammations, but there are other remedies safer.’
‘No doubt!’ said Donata. ‘But the safety I sought was of a different kind. I had my charm, and I kept it always about me, and often I set my hand to it when the pain was extreme, but always I withdrew without drawing the stopper. As if the mere having it was buttress to my own strength. Bear with me, I am coming to the matter in hand. Last year, when my lord gave himself utterly to the love of Generys, I went to her cottage, at a time in the afternoon when Eudo was elsewhere about his manor. I took with me a flask of a good wine, and two cups that matched, and my vial of hemlock. And I proposed to her a wager.’
She paused only to draw breath, and ease slightly the position in which she had been motionless so long. None of her three hearers had any mind to break the thread now. All their presuppositions were already blown clean away in the wind of her chill detachment, for she spoke of pain and passion in tones level and quiet, almost indifferent, concerned only with making all plain past shadow of doubt.
‘I was never her enemy,’ she said. ‘We had known each other many years, I felt for her rage and despair when Ruald abandoned her. This was not in hate or envy or despite. We were two women impossibly shackled together by the cords of our rights in one man, and neither of us could endure the mutilation of sharing him. I set before her a way out of the trap. We would pour two cups of wine, and add to one of them the draught of hemlock. If it was I who died, then she would have full possession of my lord, and, God knows, my blessing if she could give him happiness, as I had lost the power to do. And if it was she who died, then I swore to her that I would live out my life to the wretched end unsparing, and never again seek alleviation.’
‘And Generys agreed to such a bargain?’ Hugh asked incredulously.
‘She was as bitter, bold and resolute as I, and as tormented by having and not having. Yes, she agreed. I think, gladly.’
‘Yet this was no easy thing to manage fairly.’
‘With no will to cheat, yes, it was very easy,’ she said simply. ‘She went out from the room, and neither watched nor listened, while I filled the cups, evenly but that the one contained hemlock. Then I went out, far down the Potter’s Field, while she parted and changed the cups as she thought fit, and set the one on the press and the other on the table, and came and called me hi, and I chose. It was June, the twenty-eighth day of the month, a beautiful midsummer. I remember how the meadow grasses were coming into flower, I came back to the cottage with my skirts spangled with the silver of their seeds. And we sat down together, there within, and drank our wine, and were at peace. And afterwards, since I knew that the draught brought on a rigor of the whole body, from the extremities inward to the heart, we agreed between us to part, she to remain quiet where she was, I to go back to Longner, that whichever of us God?are I say God, Father, or must I say only chance, or fate??whichever of us was chosen should die at home. I promise you, Father, I had not forgotten God, I did not feel that he had stricken me from his book. It was as simple as where you have it written: of two, one shall be taken and the other left. I went home, and I span while I waited. And hour by hour?for it does not hurry?I waited for the numbness in the hands to make me fumble at the wool on the distaff, and still my fingers span and my wrist twisted, and there was no change in my dexterity. And I waited for the cold to seize upon my feet, and climb into my ankles, and there was no chill and no clumsiness, and my breath came without hindrance.’
She drew a deep, unburdened sigh, and let her head rest back against the panelling, eased of the main weight of the load she had brought them.
‘You had won your wager,’ said the abbot in a low and grieving voice.
‘No,’ said Donata, ‘I had lost my wager.’ And in a moment she added scrupulously: ‘There is one detail I had forgotten to mention. We kissed, sisterly, when we parted.’
She had not done, she was only gathering herself to continue coherently to the end, but the silence lasted some minutes. Hugh got up from his place and poured a cup of wine from the flask on the abbot’s table, and went and set it down on the bench beside her, convenient to her hand. ‘You are very tired. Would you not like to rest a little while? You have done what you came to do. Whatever this may have been, it was not murder.’
She looked up at him with the benign indulgence she felt now towards all the young, as though she had lived not forty-five years but a hundred, and seen all manner of tragedies pass and lapse into oblivion.
“Thank you, but I am the better for having resolved this matter. You need not trouble for me. Let me make an end, and then I will rest.’ But to accommodate him she put out a hand for the cup, and seeing how even that slight weight made her wrist quiver, Hugh supported it while she drank. The red of the wine gave her grey lips, for a moment, the dew and flush of blood.
‘Let me make an end! Eudo came home, I told him what we had done, and that the lot had failed to fall on me. I wanted no concealment, I was willing to bear witness truly, but he would not suffer it. He had lost her, but he would not let me be lost, or his honour, or his sons’ honour. He went that night, alone, and buried her. Now I see that Sulien, deep in his own pit of grief, must have followed him to an assignation, and discovered him in a funeral rite. But my lord never knew it. Never a word was said of that, never a sign given. He told me how he found her, lying on her bed as if asleep. When the numbness began she must have lain down there, and let death come to her.
