Thomassia was especially solicitous toward Mansur, frequently extending her hand to him. “S endeví—ína, s endeví—ína, el contacontes.”
“What does the bint want of me?”
“I think,” Adelia said. “I think she’s asking you to tell her fortune.”
Mansur was offended. “I am no cup reader.”
“I’ll tell the lassie her fortune.” Rankin leaned over the table to grab Thomassia’s hand. Even while cramming food into his mouth, he hadn’t taken his eyes off her. “Tell her she’s a wee angel, so she is, and all this feast lacks is parritch. Tell her she’s destined for a fine husband.”
Adelia did her best. “What’s parritch?” she muttered at Ulf.
“A mess of cracked oats. He made me eat some once. Never again.”
Finally replete, they were returned to the hall and saw what, because they’d been so grateful for its immediate protection, they’d missed at first—a poverty that had not been reflected in their meal. The furniture was sparse and worn, some of it battered. The stones of the floor showed grass growing through cracks. Other cracks in the walls had either been roughly repaired or not repaired at all, letting in long bars of sunlight.
It occurred to them that the stables they’d passed on their way in had been empty, nor had there been any sign of servants other than Thomassia.
Hardly what was to be expected of a comital palace.
Adelia remembered Henry Plantagenet’s contempt for countries which, as this one did here, maintained a system of partible inheritance, by which land and property were divided equally between heirs.
In England, under Henry II, Norman law insisted instead on primogeniture, whereby the eldest legitimate son inherited everything. “Primogeniture forces younger brothers to go out and work for their bloody living,” the king had told her. “It leaves estates intact, keeps a proper aristocratic structure, it means alord is alord.” He’d added what was of more importance to him: “And he’s easier to tax.”
Dividing property, subdividing it for the next generation, then for the next ad infinitum, meant, he’d said, “that some poor sod ends up with a title, a few fields, and not so much as a clout to wipe his arse on.”
Presumably, the baby Count of Caronne asleep in his cradle upstairs was such a one.
So we’re vulnerable, Adelia thought, because these mountain people in their poverty are vulnerable.
There could be no protection for the Cathars here, not even the Catholics who tolerated them; no true asylum here from the rich, omnipotent enemy that surrounded them. They might think themselves secure, but Adelia knew they were not.
IN THE ROOM UPSTAIRS, where the arms of Caronne were carved into one of its thick stone walls, the Countess of Caronne sat on her rumpled bed, listening, her eyes watching the O’Donnell where he stood at the window looking out over its colossal view as he told his tale.
When he’d finished, she said: “That was a risk you took rescuing her, Patrick.”
He didn’t turn round. “That was a risk I took rescuing them all.”
“Her.”
He gave a grunt that was half a laugh. “So obvious?”
“To me, yes.”
He slammed his fist on a sill two feet thick. “Why? Will you tell me that? Why? Of all the women ... she’s nothing to look at, stubborn as a Munster heifer, and all she can see is her fokking bishop.”
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 p
ay 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 preparations for Christmas, which, whether their views coincided on the birth of Jesus or not, Cathars and Catholics celebrated at a feast for the whole village in the castle hall.
Mansur, Ulf, and Rankin spent their time assisting the village shepherds with their flocks—a purely male occupation—or used their skills to try to mend some of the castle’s dilapidation.
Taking part in these things restored to the ex-prisoners a good deal of what the Bishop of Aveyron had taken away. Rankin, especially, was most at home. “Like the Highlands wi’out the bloody rain” was how he described it, though it was beginning to be apparent that, for him, part of Caronne’s attraction lay in his growing friendship with Thomassia.
Were being absorbed, Adelia thought. This marvelous, peculiar place is taking us into its heart. She was taking it into hers, but there was no sign of the O’Donnell coming to take the five of them away, and at any time the snow might come, to cut them off from the outside world.
At night, thinking of Allie, she wondered how long this idyll would last, or how long she wanted it to.
ON CHRISTMAS EVE MORNING, the women were preparing for the next day’s feast in a kitchen festooned with the hanging corpses of hens, ducks, and geese waiting to be put on their spits, when Mansur appeared in the doorway “There is trouble in the village.”
Adelia dropped the hand mill with which she’d been grinding chestnuts for the torte aux marrons, Caronne’s version of Christmas pudding.
Her eyes met Boggart’s in the same terror. They’ve come for us. Then, with Thomassia, Fabrisse, her baby son tied to her back, and Ward at their heels, they pelted outside and heard the screaming coming from down the mountain.
Not again, God, please not again.
It sounded like slaughter. It wasn’t; when they got there, it was Na Roqua standing on the flat roof of her house, yelling at Na Lizier, who was standing on hers and shrieking back insults across the narrow alley that divided their two houses.
Just two women quarrelíng. Thank you, Lord, thank you.
A crowd had collected to watch so that Fabrisse had to elbow her way through it. “Sancta Maria, what is happening here?”
“Stand back,” Na Roqua screeched at her. “Don’t go into that alley. Just see what lies within it.”
The thin morning sun hadn’t yet reached the passageway and Fabrisse had to peer to see what her old friend was pointing at. Adelia peered with her and managed to make out the body of a large male goat lying on the baked earth with its head twisted at an unnatural angle.
“She has killed him,” howled Na Roqua. “The jealous bitch enticed him onto her roof and threw him off.”
“I wouldn’t entice him into hell,” Na Lizier screamed back. “Which is where he belongs. I never touched the brute.”
“Oh yes you did. Look, look, there are no hoofprints in the alley. Did he fall into it from the sky, then? You pushed him.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Blessed Mother,” Fabrisse whispered. “It’s Auguste.”
Adelia had already encountered Auguste—there was a goat-toothed tear in the sleeve of her new hemp gown to prove it. The ram was Na Roqua’s pride and joy, but a pest to everybody else, roaming at will, eating whatever it could reach, and trying to copulate with anything that had a corresponding hole. (It was no coincidence that Auguste was the Christian name of the Bishop of Carcassonne.) That he hadn’t come to a sticky end before this was because the village was even more frightened of Na Roqua than it was of the goat.
It did look like murder. Na Roqua was right, there appeared to be no hoofprints in the alley; Auguste certainly hadn’t wandered into it. Adelia tried to keep her face straight. “Such a relief,” she whispered back. “I thought it was something dreadful.”
There was no amusement on the countess’s face; it was pale. “This is dreadful. Not only will it ruin Christmas, it will start a feud that could last for years.”
“A goat?”
“These are my people, ‘Delia. I know them and I tell you that a rift between the Roquas and the Liziers ...”
It had already begun. Amongst the onlookers, a Lizier grandson had made an unfavorable comment on Na Roqua and was being berated for it by one of her sons.
“You must do something” Fabrisse said.
“Me?”
“Yes, yes. You are the famous doctor. Ulf says you solve mysteries, solve this one.”
With narrowed eyes, Adelia glared toward the edge of the crowd where Ulf stood with Mansur, Rankin, and Ward, all of them watching the growing row with interest.
“And solve it so that nobody is to blame,” Fabrisse hissed. She stepped forward and raised her voice to a pitch that cut through an increasing pandemonium. “Listen to me. Listen to me.”
There was immediate quiet; the Dowager Countess might dress in tatters but she was Caronne’s authority.
Holding Adelia’s sleeve and dis
playing her like a landed fish, she shouted: “Here is someone who can solve this puzzle. This lady is a mistress of the art of death. Don Patricio told me. He said that the dead speak to her.”
More silence. At last, one of the Roqua sons said: “You mean, Auguste will tell her what happened?”
“Yes,” said Fabrisse.
“For God’s sake ...” Adelia muttered.
“I don’t care,” Fabrisse muttered back.
“But I don’t know about goats.”
“I don’t care. It is why the Virgin sent you to us.”
That was why, was it? It was ridiculous; Na Roqua and her family were Cathars; Na Lizier and hers, Catholic. Two faiths could live side by side without quarreling, while the death of a damned goat could start a vendetta. Yet Fabrisse, who knew these people better than she did, was truly concerned that it would.
oh, Lord, what to do? I suppose I owe it to this woman, to this village, to keep the peace. Somehow.
But a goat?
However, Adelia was Adelia; if there was a truth to find, she had to find it, no matter what came later. Death was her business. For the first time in a long time, she must practice her profession.
Breaking away from Fabrisse’s retaining arm, she strode toward Na Roqua’s house and opened its low door, to be afflicted by a strong stink of goat—when Auguste had not been pursuing his wanderings, he’d shared accommodation with his mistress.
The windows were shuttered against the cold, as they were in all Caronne’s houses, so that, when they were at home, its people lived in a semi-darkness lit only by a fire.
Adelia examined the lintel of the front door, then opened the shutters in order to look at the floor of the room into which it led. She climbed the stairs, studying each step as she went. Into the upper room, then up again to the roof, where the gaze of Na Roqua and the crowd below fell upon her with embarrassing expectation.
She returned downstairs, this time into what was usually the kitchen but here had been transformed into a place from which Na Roqua, having no use for a kitchen thanks to being supplied with food by her daughters-in-law, ran her wool-carding trade.