‘Oh, wouldn’t you!’
He pretended not to hear that. ‘I am quite sure that, if I make an open approach and appeal to these people’s sense of honour, they’ll respond. Perhaps it’ll be a question of my assuring them that we’ll do our best to stop people like Hamm Robinson meddling in their affairs, perhaps then they’ll-’
But whatever nonsensical thing he had been going to go on to say, Helewise didn’t hear it. At that moment, after a perfunctory knock at the door, Sister Euphemia burst in.
‘Abbess, Sir Josse,’ she panted, red in the face, ‘forgive my interruption, but it’s Sister Caliste. She’s disappeared!’
Chapter Eight
Sister Caliste had, it transpired, been missing for some time.
They established this fact, over the course of the next hour, by working out who had seen her last. She had been present at Tierce, that was quite certain; a lot of the nuns remembered that. She had then gone about her morning’s work in the infirmary, including a visit to Sister Tiphaine for some white horehound; Sister Euphemia needed to make more syrup for an elderly woman suffering from chest pains and a racking cough.
‘I know she came back here with the herbs,’ Sister Beata said, clearly suppressing tears of distress. ‘I remember telling her to take them straight to Sister Euphemia, who was anxious to have them and who really had better things to do than twiddle her thumbs waiting for some novice to get a move on!’ The threatened tears spilled down Sister Beata’s cheeks. ‘Oh, do you think I upset her? Do you think I made her run off?’
‘Not for a moment.’ Helewise briefly touched Sister Beata’s hand. ‘If you did issue a reprimand, then I’m perfectly certain it can have been but a mild one.’ She gave the worried nun an encouraging smile. ‘You are not capable of unkindness, Sister.’
Sister Beata looked a little more cheerful. Then, her face falling again, ‘But Sister Caliste is still missing. Whoever’s fault it was.’
‘Quite,’ Helewise agreed. ‘However, Sir Josse and I are questioning everyone, and we’ll soon know where she’s gone.’
She gave Sister Beata an encouraging smile; whether its chief aim was in fact to encourage the sister or herself, she didn’t stop to think.
Helewise searched out the remaining sisters who could possibly have useful information. There was, for instance, little point in talking to the Madeleine nuns who lived in the Virgin Sisters’ House, since they hardly ever left it, nor to the sisters who devotedly, and in total isolation, cared for the lepers. But, these nuns apart, she consulted all the rest. Nobody had anything useful to tell her on the subject of Sister Caliste.
* * *
The afternoon was well advanced by the time she had finished. Josse, in the meantime, had been down in the vale, and had even, so she had been told, gone riding off after some pilgrim family who had left that morning, just in case they could shed light on Caliste’s disappearance.
He returned looking dejected; there was no need to ask if he had met with success.
The two of them were discussing what they should do next when, again, Sister Euphemia came in search of them.
This time, she looked not so much disturbed but annoyed. ‘Abbess Helewise,’ she said, her face tight, ‘would you please come with me? One of my patients’ — she almost spat out the word — ‘has something to tell you. And for the life of me I can’t think why she didn’t speak up earlier,’ she added in a mutter as she led the way over to the infirmary, ‘truly I can’t!’
She marched through the door and along the length of the room, stopping at the foot of the cot occupied by the old woman with the cough.
‘Hilde!’ she said, in a loud voice. ‘I have brought Abbess Helewise and Sir Josse d’Acquin.’ If she had hoped to cower the old woman by announcing Helewise and Josse so loudly and grandly, then, Helewise observed, Euphemia was in for a disappointment.
‘Oh, aye?’ Hilde said hoarsely. ‘Nice, it is, to have visitors! Good day, lady! Good day, Sir Knight!’
Sister Euphemia was shaking her head in annoyance. ‘Never mind all that! Hilde, kindly tell the Abbess here what you just told me! Right now, if you please!’
The three of them waited while Hilde shifted first to the left, then to the right, punched the straw-filled pillow a couple of times, coughed, then settled herself comfortably. Clearly, she was intending to make the most of the brief attention. ‘Well,’ she began slowly, ‘I heard you’re looking for that sister, the pretty blue-eyed one with the white novice’s veil?’
‘Yes!’ Sister Euphemia said crossly. ‘Do get on with it!’
‘Didn’t ought to be a nun, that one,’ Hilde said. ‘Too pretty, like I says. Ought to be warming some fellow’s bed at night, eh, Sir Knight?’ She shot a look at Josse and cackled with laughter, which brought on a violent fit of coughing.
Sister Euphemia, at once the caring nurse, sat down beside her, supporting the thin shoulders while Hilde coughed and choked. Then, when the fit began to subside, she gave her first some sips of water, and then a measure of some light-coloured syrup from a stoppered glass bottle.
‘Aaagh,’ Hilde said, lying back again, ‘I reckon I’m not long for this world!’ Having closed both eyes, she opened one again, just a slit, to take stock of how her performance was being received.
‘Do you think you could stay with us long enough to impart this vital information?’ Helewise said gently, smiling down at the old woman.
Hilde opened her eyes again. Grinning a gap-toothed smile in reply to Helewise’s, she said, ‘Aye, Abbess. Reckon I could.’ Abandoning her delaying tactics, she said, with admirable brevity, ‘If you want to know where Sister Caliste’s gone, I can tell you. She’s gone into the forest.’
‘Into the forest?’ Helewise and Josse spoke together, with the same surprise. Although, Helewise thought, I don’t know why I, at least, should be surprised. Not after I witnessed the girl emitting that weird humming. As if she were calling out to the great tract of woodland.
Or — which was even more unnerving — answering its summons to her.
‘What did Sister Caliste say, exactly?’ Josse was asking Hilde.
‘She said she weren’t going far,’ Hilde said, which was reassuring. ‘Said something about the other sister what was in there.’
‘Another sister?’ Helewise queried. ‘Are you quite sure, Hilde?’ She could think of no other nun who had ever expressed the least interest in entering the forest; quite the contrary, she often felt they were too in awe of it, too reluctant even to let the shade of its trees fall upon them. Superstition! Ignorant, stubborn superstition, that was what it was, and it ought to have no place in the minds of women who had given themselves into God’s holy care! In Helewise’s opinion, such sentiments demonstrated a distinct lack of faith in the Heavenly Father’s protective powers.
But: ‘I’m quite sure, Abbess Helewise,’ Hilde was saying firmly. ‘Like I says, I didn’t really catch the full story, but I heard the young ’un say that about the other sister.’
‘Could it have been Sister Tiphaine?’ Josse muttered to Helewise. ‘Gone in to pick mushrooms, or fly agaric, or belladonna?’
‘It’s possible,’ Helewise agreed. ‘After all, Sister Beata did say that Caliste had been sent to Sister Tiphaine for supplies. Perhaps Caliste thought Sister Tiphaine would be in the forest.’ She frowned. ‘But it makes no sense! Even if that had been so, Sister Caliste wouldn’t have known, surely, that Sister Tiphaine was in the woods? And, even more to the point, Sister Caliste would have been back by now!’
Josse put a hand briefly on the back of Helewise’s. A swift light touch, but, she found, reassuring. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Now that we’ve been given a clue as to where she was going,’ he glanced down at Hilde and grinned, ‘I can go after her. I’ll find her, Abbess.’
Helewise and Hilde watched as he strode off down the length of the infirmary, heavy boots making a dull thump, spurs ringing out melodiously.