The Devil's Diadem (24 page)

‘My lord?’

‘Damn him! Damn him!
Damn him!
’

And then the earl gave an almost hysterical laugh. ‘What am I saying? He is already damned, more than I could ever wish on him. Oh God, oh God, what am I to do? Adelie? She is truly gone?’

I nodded again, hoping that no one ever told him the terrible manner of his wife’s death.

‘And the children,’ he said, much softer now, ‘the children.
Stephen
. What did they ever do to deserve such a manner of death? They were innocents, especially the babies. Gone, Owain, truly?’

I nodded. ‘I have left Stephen’s body in the chapel, my lord earl. I thought you would want …’

‘Yes. Thank you. Thank you.’ The earl rested a heavy hand on my shoulder. ‘Who is left of my household, Owain? Who?’

‘Of the ladies, only Mistress Evelyn is well. Mistress Yvette is dead. Mistress Maeb is dying, or dead.’

‘Maeb has the plague?’

‘Badly, my lord.’ And then I added, without thinking: ‘She has taken hemlock, to die more peacefully than the plague would allow her.’

‘
Hemlock?
And where would she get
that
, priest?’

That hand had tightened into a claw on my shoulder now, and I quailed. The earl did not wait for an answer. ‘Where is she?’

‘In the solar, my lord. I am sorry —’ That damned word kept burbling to the surface, and it was the most useless word contained within a priest’s — or any man’s — vocabulary. I thought of muttering something about peace, and God’s will, and thought better of it immediately.

I need not have worried. The earl was already gone, running to the inner gate and the great keep.

He did not come back until that evening.

I saw him enter the chapel, pausing as he stared at the crammed beds, his nostrils twitching at the stink, his face aghast at the moans and wails of the dying.

I hurried over. ‘My lord?’

‘Maeb is somewhere I cannot reach her now,’ he said. He looked me in the eye. ‘Running with the wolves.’

I went cold. I knew what he meant.

‘I have done all I can for her,’ the earl continued. ‘Either she will live or she won’t. Where is Stephen?’

‘Behind the altar, my lord. Do you … do you require my aid?’

Pengraic studied me. His face was weary, so weary, and his skin ashen, as if he suffered himself. ‘Do you have the time?’ he said, indicating the chaos of the chapel.

‘I will always have the time for Lord Stephen,’ I said.

‘Then thank you,’ the earl said. ‘Yes, assist me if you will. And after … cause Stephen’s name and rank to be carved into the central heartstone of the chapel that his soul may rest in the very heart of this sacred place.’

I nodded, and together we moved toward the altar, and poor Stephen’s body.

Part Three
The Countess

Chapter One

I
drank the hemlock, and was grateful and at peace. I was certain I would go straight to hell for my sins, but at least I need not suffer needlessly in the doing. I lay back and Evelyn, weeping, sat with me, holding my hand and stroking my forehead.

A time passed, and I felt my limbs grow cold. I tried to move my hands and feet and found I could not.

More time passed, and my vision blurred, the high roof of the solar vanishing into myriad patches of indistinct greys and browns.

I could not see Evelyn at my side, which I much regretted for I would have liked to depart this life with my last sight being of her kind and loved face.

After yet more time as my limbs grew heavy, and so cold I wanted to shiver, but could not, my consciousness dimmed and I knew only blackness.

I died. It was utterly wonderful. I did not need to fight any more. It was peaceful. There was, finally, no pain. I had escaped any hemlock and plague both. No demons from hell came to seize me. I had no guilt any more. My world became one of complete serenity.

There was just … nothing, and I could drift uncaring and at peace.

I dreamed as I faded from life. I dreamed I heard an angry man shouting and Evelyn’s fearful voice replying. I dreamed of being rocked back and forth, and of being shaken about in my cold, hard bed.

Then my dream grew most strange, and I thought to myself that the hemlock was working fully to drive my senses from my body.

I dreamed I walked down a path in a dark, dark forest, peopled with the trees from the walls of the castle chapel. There was no light. Nothing.

In the forest wolves howled and something monstrous grunted and roared.

I grew frightened. I hastened ever faster down the path, knowing that down here, somewhere, lay safety and peace.

Then something huge blocked my path.

I cried out in fear and fell back, but the massive thing pursued me. I felt hot breath wash over me.

Go back
, someone said.

A wolf snapped at my heels and I shrieked.

Again something massive pushed at me, and somewhere in the depths of my mind I think I recognised it as the shoulder of a mighty horse.

Someone, the rider on the mighty horse, was using the animal to push me back.

Go back.

I turned, and fled, the wolves and the horse and rider pursuing me.

I dreamed. I dreamed I wandered the mountain tops, carrying a torch. I was looking down into the valley, and there was the table-topped mountain that now held Pengraic Castle, save that in my dream I again saw the circling dancers and the man standing in their centre, with light about his head.

I wanted to get to that flat-topped mountain, to those dancers, to the man crowned with light, but every time I started down the thing came at me again (
the horse
) and it pushed me back, back, back.

The wolves howled.

I fled along the forest path. Behind me came the thunder of hooves, and the snap and snarl of the wolf pack.

I was terrified, witless with fear, my heart pounding so fast I thought it would burst.

I ran.

Eventually, I collapsed with fear and exhaustion, and the horse and the wolf pack were upon me.

Then, somewhere far distant, I heard the shout of an angry and vengeful man. I trembled within my non-existent state. Was it the Devil, reaching for me?

The man, shouting again, closer now.

Now the voice of a woman. I could sense — hear — her cringing within her reply to the man, hear her fear, and her guilt also.

What was it, this guilt, that it had spread throughout the entire world? I wished them gone, for they had both destroyed the peace of my death. I tried to ignore them, tried to push myself back into the void of death, but the voices were insistent, and they dragged me closer, closer, closer.

Pain shattered my peace. I found myself within a body again and it was wracked with pain. I gasped, spending a fraction of existence wondering that finally my throat had opened enough to admit air, then gasped again, choking, drawing in painful breath after painful breath, feeling my ribs crack with the force of my coughing.

The pain was terrible but, worse, was the realisation that I was still alive and that, somehow, someone had denied me death.

The hemlock had failed me and now I would burn.

I hated whoever it was had denied me death, and I wept, not wanting to open my eyes in case that action finally sealed my re-entry into life.

‘Maeb? Maeb?’

It was Evelyn. ‘
Maeb
?’

I wept anew, and finally opened my eyes. I had been seen, it was too late. ‘I hurt, Evelyn. I am in agony. Kill me, please, please …’

‘Like you did my son?’

I turned my eyes, and there stood the Earl of Pengraic, and I knew the Devil
had
come to fetch me.

Chapter Two

I
t took me years to understand why I did not die, and to understand the significance of the horse and rider and the wolves.

But then, in that year after I woke up from death, I had no idea. I could not understand why I had not died. I
knew
I was dying from both plague and hemlock, and yet neither killed me. Strange. Moreover, I was certain that I did die, so how was it I found myself alive? Breathing? In agony?

Neither Owain, nor Evelyn, nor even the earl, would speak of it to me. Owain and Evelyn because, I think, they simply did not know how my health was accomplished, and the earl would not speak of it because that was his prerogative (and he probably did not know, either). I had fragmentary dreams of wolves and horses, but I thought them the hallucinations of the hemlock, not of any true vision.

I found myself in the world, and somehow I needed to find the strength to live once more.

I spent many days, probably weeks, in my bed in the solar. Evelyn nursed me constantly, feeding me broths, washing me, turning me from side to side so I did not develop sores on my body, murmuring to me as to a child, perhaps like she had once murmured to her daughter, who she must have been frantic about … But still she nursed me.

Owain visited many times, bringing both company and his skills as a herbalist. I asked him about Stephen and the children, and he said that the earl had commanded that Stephen be buried under the heartstone of the chapel, and the other children in the aisle with their mother.

When he initially told me this I accepted it, thinking that beneath the heartstone was a fitting place for Stephen to lie. But over the next few nights I had unsettling dreams where I saw Stephen’s corpse falling through space until it caught in tangled, mossy tree branches, or being eaten by the wolves I had hallucinated about during my death.

When Owain returned, I asked him if Stephen was truly buried under the heartstone.

‘Full six feet,’ he said. ‘We dug deep into the clay and shale beneath the chapel.’

I shifted uncomfortably on my bed. ‘You managed to unearth the heartstone?’

‘Yes, why do you ask?’

‘I don’t know, Owain. I just thought …’ It troubled me somehow, that the sacred stone had been disturbed and dug about.

‘He is safe now, Maeb. Don’t worry about him.’

They were an unusual choice of words, but at the time I did not push Owain, or think too much on what he had said. I was tired and ill, and in much pain. Owain left a strong analgesic draught with Evelyn, patted me on the shoulder, and left.

The earl came and went. He slept in the privy chamber (I prayed to God that Owain had taken the babies’ bodies when he had taken Stephen’s) and he passed through the solar as he came and went from the privy chamber, barely sparing me a glance. Mostly, he was busy within the wider community (such as was left of it) of the castle, repairing the damage the plague had wrought.

The castle had needed its earl, very badly. Evelyn told me that from the day he arrived, the plague abated. Of those sick in the chapel, most recovered. Those few who died had been in their final extremity anyway. The survivors, either those who rose from their sick beds or those who had escaped the plague entirely, somehow found meaning and purpose again. Loose horses were caught and restabled. The gates and parapets were once more manned. The fire was struck in the smithy, and the kitchens in the great keep and the outer bailey once more provided food.

We were to live again, it appeared.

I spent much of my time wracked with pain. My joints ached abominably, my muscles refused to work, my abdomen was a mass of tenderness, my brain as loose and unthinking as a bowl of cold gruel. I lay in that bed, doing whatever Evelyn required of me, taking Owain’s draughts as instructed, and spending the rest of my time staring at the ceiling, grieving for Lady Adelie, and Stephen, and Rosamund and John, and Alice and Emmette, and wondering what would become of me.

I tried not to think of the earl’s words:
Like you did my son?

Aye. I had murdered his beloved son, and somehow he knew.

He had not spoken to me since that night, but I knew that he would. He waited only on my strength returning, that he might assault me with the full force of his rage.

He had hated me from the first moment he had set eyes on me, and I had justified all that hate in full measure.

I wished all the more that I was dead,
that I had remained dead,
for I had nothing left to live for.

Time passed. One morning, Evelyn, despite my weak protests, sat me on the side of the bed, washed my body and my hair, then dressed me in a linen shift and my best rust-red kirtle, finally plaiting my damp hair into two braids.

The kirtle hung loose on me, as I had lost a great deal of weight.

‘We will sit you by the fire for the morning,’ she announced. I winced and pleaded to stay in bed, to no avail.

Somehow, with Evelyn’s aid, I stumbled to a chair by the fire and she settled me into it with cushions and wraps. It was midsummer, and a bright day outside, but I was cold and glad enough of the fire and the wraps.

‘I won’t be able to stay long here,’ I said to Evelyn. ‘My joints pain me terribly, and —’

‘You
will
stay here for the morning,’ Evelyn said. ‘Your bed is tired of you.’

And with that she left me.

I looked longingly toward the bed.

It was out of my reach. I would need to wait for someone to help me back to it.

There were footsteps in the stairwell, and I looked hopefully toward its opening. It was likely one of the servants, bringing more wood, or a fresh pitcher of small beer for my lord’s —

It was the earl.

He stopped instantly. I was easily ignored when I lay in the corner in my bed, but to see me sit by the fire… he would need to pass right by me as he went to his privy chamber, and that would mean some form of acknowledgement.

I do not think, ever before in my life or ever again, I was quite so thoroughly terrified as I was at that moment. We would need to say something each to the other, and, knowing he knew I had murdered Stephen, what on earth could we say if not to parry recrimination and guilt?