“Oh, my Lady Seri. I didn’t know what to do. With the duchess so delicate and all… to take such terrible news… and the scandal of it as soon as word gets around… But it can’t be dismissed, and I don’t know what to do.” Ten years’ worth of new wrinkles crowded Nellia’s already weathered cheeks.
I wrapped my arms about her shaking shoulders and hushed her like a babe. “Nellia, take a breath and tell me. What is it? Why are we here?”
“It’s Mad Lucy. Nancy was bringing her breakfast as she does every day…” Nellia’s words drowned in a sob.
“The feebleminded nurse? Is this her room?” I felt vaguely guilty at not having realized the woman yet lived at Comigor.
Nellia nodded, burying her face in her hands.
I pushed the door open a little further. The room was unlike any servant’s room I’d ever seen. Straw was scattered about the floor, and tucked into every corner were crates and baskets. A small table was piled high with scraps of fabric and wood, papers, nails, and balls of colored yarn. On one wall were stacked rough plank shelves loaded with all manner of oddments. In one corner lay a pallet where a yellowed sheet covered a shape of ominous dimensions.
“Has the old woman died, then?” I asked. Without reason, my voice came out a whisper, though no one was nearby to overhear.
Nellia pressed a hand to her breast. “Not peacefully, though, my lady. Not as she should. She’s done for herself.”
I picked my way through the debris and knelt beside the pallet. Nellia remained by the door, her spine firmly aligned with the doorpost. With great misgivings, I pulled back the sheet.
She was a woman of some fifty years, not ancient as I had expected, tall and sturdily made, her skin unwrinkled and her gray hair combed and twisted into a knot on the top of her head. She was laid out neatly on her back, legs straight, skirt and apron smoothed, arms straight at her sides, but she could have had no blood in her. The wool blankets of the pallet were soaked with it, and the color and texture of her garments were indistinguishable beneath the stiff and rusty coating. Ugly slash marks marred her wrists.
But shocking and terrible as these things were, they were but a whisper beside the shouts of warning that filled my head when I saw her face. I knew her. For almost half a year she had brought me food I did not want, and she had urged me without words to eat it. She had brought me water, and when I was too listless to use it, she had silently washed my face and hands. She had brought me a brush in the pocket of her shift and shyly offered it as if it were a priceless treasure, and when, in my anger, I had thrown it against the door of my prison, she had picked it up and gently brushed my hair every day until it was cut off in the name of penitence. They had told me her name was Maddy, and I had ignored and despised her because I believed any servant chosen by my jailers must be a partner in their evil. But she had bathed my face and moistened my lips and held my hands while I labored to deliver my child who could not be allowed to live. She had wept for my son when I could not, and she had taken him from the room as soon as she had cut the cord that was my only contact with him. All these years I had believed they had killed her, too, the unspeaking witness to their unspeakable crimes. What was Maddy doing in my brother’s house? How could he have kept her-a constant reminder of the murder he had done?
“What are we to do?” Nellia’s quavering whisper intruded on my horrified astonishment. “Such a thing to happen on the day when the little one is born so frail. It’s too wicked a burden.”
“We must think of it just as if her heart had failed, Nellia.” I was surprised at my own calm voice. “The appearance is awful, but if she was mad, then there’s really not so much difference. Just a different part of her that has given out.”
“She was daft. Done nothing but rock in her chair and sit in all this clutter for all these years, but I never thought as she’d do this to herself. Such a gentle soul she was with the young master.”
“She was Gerick’s nurse? You told me that, but I didn’t realize…” I didn’t realize she was someone I knew.
“Aye. She cared for him from the day he was born.”
Nellia was crying again, and to calm her I set her to work. I sent Nancy for a clean blanket, and asked Nellia to find some rags and water so we could clean things up a bit.
“We’ll set her to rights, and then call the other servants to help us take her downstairs,” I said.
Nellia nodded, and we set to work replacing the bloodied blankets with fresh and putting a clean tunic and apron on the dead woman. While Nancy and Nellia scrubbed the floor, I wandered about the room, looking at the things on Maddy’s shelves. They were a child’s things: a ball, a writing slate with childish characters printed on it, a rag doll pieced together from scraps and stuffed with straw, a pile of blocks, a puzzle, and a small game board with dried beans set on it like game pieces. She must truly have been in a second childhood.
“How long ago did Madd… Lucy become feebleminded?” I asked Nellia, who seemed much more herself now she had something to do.
“It was when the young master was close on six years old, and mistress thought he was not so much in need of a nurse. I guess it took Lucy’s spirit right away when she wasn’t needed no more. She took herself to rocking and moaning on the day she had to leave the nursery, and no one was able to get her to do nothing else ever again. But when the physician said that her mind had left her, His Grace, your brother, wouldn’t let her be sent away, as she’d no place to go but an asylum, and the child loved her so.”
“Gerick loved her?”
“Aye, indeed he did. They was always happy together when he was a wee one, even though she couldn’t say no word to him. She talked with her eyes and her hands, I guess. They’d look at books together, and he’d tell her what was in them. She’d teach him games and take him for walks and was a blessing to the little mite.”
I was happy to hear that Gerick had known such care and affection and had been able to return it. I ran my fingers over the slate and the ball. “He came to see her here, didn’t he?”
“Well, I suspect as how he did-though the duchess forbade him to. She said Mad Lucy might harm him, but she’d never, no matter she had lost her mind or what.”
Did he still visit her, I wondered, and found the answer at hand quickly. On the shelf beside some broken knitting needles and a tin box of colored stones sat a small menagerie made of straw: a lion, a cow, a deer, a bear. I looked a little further and found a flute. Crude, but a reasonable replica of the reed flute I had shown him how to make.
So many things bothered me about all this, but I couldn’t name them, as if sunbeams were dancing through storm clouds, illuminating a roof here or a tree there, but just as you would turn to look at it, the gap would close, and gloom shroud everything once more.
Why would Maddy have taken her own life? The malady Nellia had described seemed no violent mania. Could those with failed reason feel the pangs of despair that precipitated self-murder? Had they enough calculation left to accomplish such a horrific deed?
When Nellia and Nancy were done, Maddy looked far less fearsome. Nellia wanted to know if we should send for some of the men to carry the body downstairs. Though I hated the thought of it, I knew Gerick should be told before we buried his friend.
“Nellia, when was it that the young duke took on his present… moodiness?”