Her eyes were closed. She nodded: a tiny movement, barely perceptible.
I leaned over her and began the massage. I paused after a while to give her the infusion, then went back to the massage.
After quite some time, her eyes fluttered open. She looked up at me, and I read two things: the pain had eased its iron grip, and its recession had allowed what was really troubling Lady Claude to push forward and dominate her.
I went on stroking her head. I did not know what to say. I was not Edild, who can ease a patient’s extreme distress with the right words. It was quite possible that my attempts to help would do more harm than good. I kept quiet.
Presently, she gave me a rather tight-lipped smile and, taking hold of my wrist, removed my hand from her forehead. ‘The pain has gone?’ I asked. I knew it had, but it would be good to hear her say so.
‘It has. I thank you.’
I studied her. The colour in her cheeks had improved slightly. ‘You should perhaps stay in bed today,’ I suggested. ‘I have brought herbs to ensure that you will sleep. I will make an infusion for you.’
But even as I had spoken she had thrown back the bedclothes, and she now stood before me in her shift. ‘Only the sick and the weak sleep in the daytime,’ she declared. ‘Hand me my gown.’ She pointed an imperious finger. I did as she ordered, picking up the rich, black silk gown and dropping it over her head, helping her with the side lacings. Then she indicated her snowy-white headdress, and I handed her that too. She nodded towards her leather belt with the little velvet bag hanging from it — I noticed that there was also a large iron key suspended on a chain — and took it from me, fastening it around her thin waist. Beckoning me to follow, she led the way to a small room along the corridor, and as soon as she unlocked and opened the low wooden door, I recognized it as her sewing room.
I stared around the chilly, narrow space. Ida, I observed, had slept the nights of her guard duty on a tiny straw mattress with one thin blanket.
‘My linens.’ Claude swept her hand around, and I took in white sheets, linen cloths and personal undergarments, all of the finest fabrics and beautifully sewn with tiny stitches and delicate, subtle embroidery, much of it using the form and colour of our local fenland wild flowers. If this was Ida’s handiwork, she had indeed been gifted.
‘It’s beautiful,’ I said, and I wasn’t just being polite.
She brushed aside the praise, leading me on towards the end of the room, beneath the window, where a large wooden frame stood. She looked down at what was stretched over the frame, and for the first time I saw a smile on her face. ‘This, now, this is my work,’ she said. ‘These panels will hang around my marriage bed.’
I followed the direction of her eyes. The frame held a large piece of coarse linen perhaps three yards deep and a yard across; only a section of it was clamped in the frame, the remainder hanging down either side. It was, I observed, one of a series that she was working on. I leaned over the work, studying the careful stitches and the pleasing colours. It was only after looking at it for some time that I appreciated the subject matter.
For the intimate place that she would share with her new husband, Lady Claude had chosen to depict the Seven Deadly Sins. She was working on Gluttony, and a fat man sat on a stool cramming food into his mouth even as the cloth of his garment and his own flesh began to tear open, spilling red guts out on to his yellow robe. I glanced around to look more closely at the other panels, which were suspended from hooks along the walls. There was Pride, a pretty but vacuous-faced woman staring at herself in a mirror while her house burned down behind her with her agonized children inside. There was Lust, a scarlet-gowned woman lying with her eyes closed and her mouth wide open in sexual thrall, a man’s dark outline over her while devils with pitchforks edged ever closer out of the shadows. Wrath was depicted as a well-muscled man, red-faced with fury, holding an axe above his head and in the very act of swinging it down on the head of his child — a little boy holding a catapult in one hand and a dead fowl in the other, eyes wide with terror as he pleaded for mercy. Avarice showed a miser sitting on a golden stool, his hands clutching at handfuls of gold coins that were stashed in a sack at his feet, his attention so thoroughly absorbed that he did not see the skeletal woman, child and tiny baby that lay drooping beside him, the woman’s claw-like hand extended palm uppermost in the universal gesture of the beggar.
Sloth and Envy were, it seemed, still to be embroidered.
I was lost for words. The lady’s skill with her needle was extraordinary, and her artistry was evident in the strong emotions that her designs provoked in me. The subject matter was worthy; our priest regularly regales us with the dangers of yielding to all sin, but the perils of the deadliest seven are a theme to which he returns again and again. In the right place, Claude’s panels would have provided a timely reminder that we should watch our behaviour and not yield to temptation. But these vivid, startling, horrifying panels were to go around her bed. .
I wondered if Sir Alain had any conception of what his future wife was working on. In a flash I knew that he had no idea; she would have coyly said it was to be a wonderful surprise that would be unveiled on their wedding night.
Poor man.
I cast around for some comment that I could make with sincerity. I said, ‘My lady, what outstanding skill you have! These depictions seem almost to live and breathe.’
She nodded. ‘We must ever be on our guard,’ she muttered. She was picking at one of the completed panels: Wrath. ‘The Devil awaits all the time,’ she went on in the same soft, monotonous tone, her eyes burning with fervour. ‘One small slip in our vigilance and there he is, forcing our hand. We-’ Her mouth shut like a trap, and she turned away. Perhaps it was that she had recalled who I was and that such remarks were unsuitable from a lady to a village woman, but I doubted it.
I thought it more likely that the thwarting of her life’s ambition to give herself to God had turned her mind a little and that she might even be slightly mad.
I put out my hand to her, catching her sleeve. ‘My lady, why not do some sewing now?’ I said gently. ‘You are feeling better, and it is peaceful here. If you stay here where it is nice and quiet, you will not run the risk of the noise and the clamour of the hall bringing your headache back.’
She must have seen the sense of that. Nodding — I had noticed that, nunlike, she did not speak unless she had to — she drew up her stool and sat down before the frame. In a gesture that appeared automatic, she reached down for the black velvet bag, putting it on her lap and opening the drawstrings that held it closed. She extracted a thimble, a small pair of sewing scissors, several hanks of different coloured wool and a pincushion in which four or five needles were stuck.
I recalled how I had wondered what was in the velvet bag, that she should clutch at it like a talisman on the dreadful day when Edild and I had come to lay out Ida’s body. Now I had the answer.
Calm now, she threaded her needle and, gazing fiercely at her panel, stabbed it down through the thick canvas. Her other hand was behind the fabric, waiting to receive the needle, and, her fingers moving so swiftly that I could barely follow her movements, she thrust it back up again and started another stitch. I watched her for some moments, listening to the soft grunts of exertion that accompanied her actions; embroidery of this sort was, I observed, quite hard work.
There was, I decided, something of the fanatic about Lady Claude. Uneasy suddenly, I wanted to be gone. I backed away towards the door, murmuring, ‘I will take my leave now, my lady. I have left a potion to help you sleep, but please call me if you need me.’