A Murderous Procession aka The Assassin

The countess shrugged her white shoulders. “It happens. Not to me, Blessed Mother be thanked, but it happens.”

“I never thought it.” He went and sat beside her on the bed. “Look after her for me, Fabrisse. Deniz and I will have to leave tomorrow.”

“I will.”

He gave her a kiss. “She’s a useful doctor, should you be ill. There’s thirty of Joanna’s household wouldn’t be alive today if she hadn’t dragged them back from their coffins. And a smile on her to light up the sun.”

“I said I will look after her.”

“I am sorry about your husband.”

She shrugged, sliding a patched work shift over her magnificent body. “He was old.”

“Will you marry again?”

“I may have to; it depends who offers.”

“Meanwhile…”

“Meanwhile.”

They smiled at each other. As she leaned down to search for her clogs, he tweaked her backside for old times’ sake. “You’re still the most beautiful woman I ever saw,” he said

“I know.” She gave him a push to the door. “Silk,” she reminded him. “The price has just gone up; it must be orfrois, with spun silver in the weft. And a jointed knight puppet for Raymond when he’s older, and a cloak for Thomassia, English wool is preferable, and a new skillet, and we have run out of cumin…”

Still enumerating, she accompanied him down the stairs, his arm round her shoulders.

BY THE TIME Adelia had finished milking her third goat of the morning, Thomassia and the Dowager Countess had done ten each.

A cold wind was blowing through the goat pens-a wind of some sort was always blowing up here-but, wrapped in her cloak, she had been warmed by the activity She sat back on her haunches, her shoulder aching only slightly-it was getting better. So, she thought, was her prowess at milking. The other two women had been surprised when she’d approached the first set of goat teats with a scientific interest that had turned out in practice to be totally inept.

“You’ve never milked anything?”

“It wasn’t on my school’s curriculum.”

That she had attended a school, let alone a medical school, also amazed them; the countess could sign her name; Thomassia wasn’t able even to do that.

Adelia would have kept her education from them, but it appeared that the talkative Irishman had made it known. She became worried that they might broadcast it. “I’ve had to learn that, outside Sicily the terms female doctor and witch are synonymous.”

“No, no,” Fabrisse said easily “Nobody will betray you. We have no truck with authority here.”

Caronne, it appeared, was a stopping place on a secret route to the Catalans in the Pyrenees, receiving and passing on visitors whom the Church would not only have abhorred, but imprisoned-or worse. Adelia and her friends were merely part of a succession of smugglers, Cathar perfects, wandering Moslem soothsayers, and other oddities to whom Caronne had provided refuge; its own position being too anomalous for betrayal. When the Bishop of Carcassonne’s tax gatherer rode up the mountain on his tithe-collecting visit-he was expected any day, so a lookout had been posted-there would be a rush of villagers herding as many of their taxable sheep and as much of their grain into the deep recesses of the forest as possible, hoping that their absence wouldn’t arouse his suspicion that too few herds and sacks remained.

This, despite the fact that not handing over the bishop’s portion would, according to the Church, send their souls to hell.

Neither did Fabrisse, a Catholic devoted to the Virgin Mary, see any reason to believe in the rightness of the men who ruled her faith and distorted its precepts. Many of her friends in the village were Cathars and, though she deplored the fact that her own Church was everywhere in the region losing ground to Catharism, she would no more have betrayed them than she would have thrown her beloved baby son over her castle ramparts. All were locked together into a united front of shared poverty

“The count used to say he owed nothing to a tax inspector who rode up here on a fine horse with a retinue of inspectors more richly dressed than he was. Jesus told us to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, but he did not anticipate that His own Church would itself become Caesar.”

It was a view that suffused the entire village. When Adelia and Fabrisse were passing through its square one evening on their way to take a fennel chest rub to the countess’s elderly Cathar friend, Na Roqua, Adelia heard the gathering of men sitting under the shade of an elm tree discussing the carnelages tax which would soon be due.

“Why should we have to pay over so many of our lambs to the bishop?” one of them asked; obviously an annual and rhetorical question.

“Don’t let’s pay anything” another voice said. “Let’s kill the bishop instead.”

Listening to the rueful laughter, Fabrisse said to Adelia: “You hear? You are safe here. You must not fear.”

She’s so easy, God protect her. But I saw Ermengarde burn; she didn’t. She’s right, though, I must stop being frightened, I’m tired of being frightened.

Even so, she couldn’t help asking whether the village priest would keep silent. “Won’t he tell his bishop about us, about you, the Cathars?”

“Him?” The Dowager Countess’s perfect eyebrows rose in a comic arch. The priest’s carnal sins ensured both his silence and collaboration, his services to Caronne’s lonely women not being restricted to the masses he performed in church.

Adelia was becoming very fond of the Dowager Countess; indeed, had never met anyone quite like her. There was a high honesty to her that prevented Adelia categorizing her as a loose woman; it was all one with the woman’s disregard for the rules men made.

She made no bones about the fact that, husbandless just now, she had physical needs; why not cater to them? She took the young priest from the little church to her bed rather as other people took a hot brick on which to warm their feet. (Adelia wondered if, when Fabrisse went to confession, he absolved her of a sin they had committed together.)

“Besides,” Fabrisse went on, “you are the Irishman’s friends, and therefore honored guests. Your safety is of utmost importance to us.”

“You all trust him that much?” Adelia couldn’t help asking.

“Of course. Don’t you?”

“Yes, yes, I do. It’s just that… he risked his life for us, and I still don’t see why he should have.”

Fabrisse’s eyes rested on her face for a moment. “Don’t you?” she said again. “Then, in that, I cannot help you.”

IN CARONNE, EVERYBODY, noble or peasant, worked with his hands. Fabrisse might be the countess, but she didn’t find it demeaning to fetch water from her well in jars balanced on her head as the other women did, nor chop her own firewood, nor do her own laundry in the stream below the castle. She and Thomassia were mistress and servant but both joined in the gathering on Na Roqua’s roof balcony of an evening with several of the other village women to spin or comb one another’s hair with a nit comb-a sign of friendship-whilst they gossiped.

Adelia gathered that the women had a rougher time of it than their menfolk, working just as hard for less reward, any objection being overridden or even met with the occasional blow. They didn’t complain of it, being used to it, but it was apparent that they flowered once they were widowed-and mostly Caronne women lived longer than the men.

Na Roqua, Fabrisse’s friend, for instance, and her neighbor, Na Lizier, had set up their own businesses since their husbands died and now ruled their sons and grandchildren like the matriarchs they had both become.

BY DAY, BOGGART and Adelia helped Fabrisse and Thomassia with their chores and began the endless