Leaving Gwyn at the gatehouse with the horses, he sought out Dame Madge and she came to the steps of the main range of buildings to meet him.
‘The woman is too ill to talk to you, Sir John,’ she announced firmly. A tall, stooped woman with a gaunt face, she was almost a female version of John himself, a humourless, no-nonsense person who spoke her mind and whose honesty was beyond question. He did not even attempt to persuade her to let him see the victim, but accepted her word.
‘Has she been ravished?’ he asked.
‘Undoubtedly and repeatedly,’ replied the grim-featured nun. ‘She has been damaged in her woman’s parts, as well as beaten sorely about the head and face. Her wits are disordered at the moment, but no doubt they will return.’
‘She will recover, then?’
Dame Madge nodded. ‘She is young and strong and her body will heal up. I am not so sure about her mind, after such an ordeal from those swine.’
‘They will pay for it, never fear, lady. I will see to it myself He sighed and shook his head at the amount of evil in the world.
Though sequestered in a priory, the nuns were always avid for news of the outside world, and he told the old sister of the evil calamity in the city two nights earlier. She crossed herself and murmured a prayer for the dead children and their mother.
‘There are sinful people about, Sir John. Though I cannot condone heresy, which eats at the fabric of our Mother Church, no one can approve of such random and vicious cruelty.’
‘It seems to have affected my wife very much,’ said John. ‘Though she was very active in a campaign to rid the city of these heretics, since these deaths she seems to have turned in on herself and has become silent and morose.’
Dame Madge gave him a sudden sweet smile. ‘Your wife is a strange woman, Crowner! We have had ample opportunity here to get to know her, from her two fruitless attempts to take the veil. I think she despairs of life, since her brother fell from grace — and you have not helped at all, sir, with your absences and your amorous adventures!’
De Wolfe nodded sadly. ‘We should never have married, sister. It was not of our doing — we were pushed together by our parents.’
The dame nodded but was unforgiving. ‘What the Lord has joined together, let no man break asunder, even until death itself.’
With this uncompromising finale, de Wolfe left the priory, with an assurance that the nuns would let him know when the woman was fit enough to be questioned. He rode back to the East Gate in silence, Gwyn knowing him well enough not to intrude on his bleak mood. At Rougemont, they returned the horses they had borrowed from the castle stables, and John went to bring the sheriff up to date on events. When he had told him of the latest crime in Polsloe and of the failure to make any headway with the Milk Lane fire, he went back to Martin’s Lane and waited for his dinner. Matilda was up in her solar at the back of the house, so John went to sit in Mary’s kitchen-hut in the yard, drinking ale and watching her gut some fish that she was going to spit-roast over the fire that burned red in its pit in the middle of the floor. She was a brisk, competent woman, and John was always impressed by the variety of good food that she managed to produce with such primitive facilities.
As she worked, he told her of the morning’s visit to Polsloe, and as usual she was angrily sympathetic to the victim’s plight.
‘You men are such evil creatures!’ she complained. ‘Look at the harm that has been done to women and children in the space of a few days. You treat animals better than that!’
Few would let a maid speak to them so frankly, but John and Mary understood each other far beyond the usual relationship of master to servant. He cocked his head upwards towards the solar stairs.
‘What mood is your mistress in today?’ he asked. ‘She seems oddly subdued since yesterday, hardly bothering to abuse me!’
Mary nodded as she slid long skewers through the herrings to place across the forked supports over the fire. ‘There’s something bothering her, that’s for sure. But her tongue is recovering, for I heard her shouting at Lucille not long ago.’
The wraith-like French maid lived in abject subjection to Matilda’s bad temper. Recently, when her mistress had gone into retreat in the priory, Lucille had been farmed out to Eleanor de Revelle, but when John’s wife had returned to the house she was reclaimed, as if she was some piece of furniture.
John sat drinking for a while, watching the cook adding herbs to an iron pot of hare stew at the edge of the fire and peeling onions to go with the fish. Suddenly, she looked up.
‘I hear the solar door opening. You had better make yourself scarce,’ she warned.
John took the hint, as Matilda frowned upon his fraternising with the lower classes — especially as she had a shrewd suspicion that in the past John had known Mary a little too well, in the biblical sense. Taking his jug of ale, he slid out of the hut, which faced away from the solar, and hurried around the house, through the covered passage that led to the vestibule.
When she lumbered into the hall, her husband was sitting by the fire, fondling his hound’s ears. She looked at him suspiciously but said nothing as she made her way to her usual seat, the hooded monks’ chair on the other side of the hearth.
From long practice, John was sensitive to her moods and detected that her recent preoccupied depression was now giving way to suppressed anger. She glared across at him as he sat with his ale-pot in his hand.
‘Are you not going to get me something to drink?’ she snapped, her small eyes dark and penetrating.
Relieved that at least she was speaking to him now, John went to the table, where he kept his wines, and filled a pewter cup from a skin of Anjou red. As he handed it to her, he took advantage of the slight thaw in her mood to tell her about the attack in Polsloe. ‘I went to the priory to see the poor woman, but Dame Madge told me she was too ill. She asked after your health, by the way.’
Matilda grabbed the cup and swallowed half the contents in one draught. ‘I suppose that old crone slandered me, telling you what a difficult woman I was when I was there!’ she said bitterly.
‘She did no such thing,’ retorted John indignantly, annoyed by his wife’s lack of charity in ignoring the plight of the ravished woman.
‘The world is full of evil people,’ she muttered obscurely, slipping back into silence until Mary came in some time later to set the table for their dinner. Most households ate directly off the scrubbed boards of their tables, but Matilda had long insisted on wooden or pewter platters to hold the bread trenchers and bowls for potage and stews. When the carrot and herb soup and the grilled herrings were finished, the cook-maid brought a dish of diced fat pork with winter-sweetened parsnips.
The pair champed their way through the courses in surly silence, until Matilda suddenly grunted and fished inside her mouth.
‘That useless woman — she could have broken my teeth!’ she snapped, throwing a small piece of bone down on the table.
John tried to be conciliatory, though he knew that his wife seized on every chance to denigrate Mary. ‘We should build a better cook-shed for her,’ he suggested mildly. ‘It’s very difficult for her to prepare food properly in that tiny place, where she has to live and work.’
Matilda took instant exception to his innocent remark. ‘You contradict me at every turn, John!’ she flared. ‘You always defend the woman — and don’t think I don’t know why! No doubt you employ your lechery on her at every opportunity. Lucille is not blind, you know; she sees plenty from that room of hers!’
The injustice of this accusation melted John’s restraint like the sun on morning frost, especially as he had not laid a lecherous finger on their cook-maid for several years.