Not tall, but above average for a woman, slender almost to leanness, and straight as a lance. “Brother Edmund sent me to you. My master has a cold, and is croaking like a frog. Brother Edmund says you can help him.”
“God willing!” said Cadfael, returning her scrutiny just as candidly. He had never seen her so close before, nor expected to, for she kept herself apart, taking no risks, perhaps, with an exacting master. Her head was uncovered now, her face, oval, thin and bright, shone lily-pale between wings of black, curling hair.
“Come within,” he said, “and tell me more of his case. His voice is certainly of importance. A workman who loses his tools has lost his living. What manner of cold is it he’s taken? Has he rheumy eyes? A thick head? A stuffed nose?”
She followed him into the workshop, which was already shadowy within, lit only by the glow of the damped-down brazier, until Cadfael lit a sulphur spill and kindled his small lamp. She looked about her with interest at the laden shelves and the herbs dangling from the beams, stirring and rustling faintly in the draught from the door. “His throat,” she said indifferently. “Nothing else worries him. He’s hoarse and dry. Brother Edmund says you have lozenges and draughts. He’s not ill,” she said with tolerant disdain. “Not hot or fevered. Anything that touches his voice sends him into a sweat. Or mine, for that matter. Another of his tools he can’t afford to lose, little as he cares about the rest of me. Brother Cadfael, do you make all these pastes and potions?” She was ranging the shelves of bottles and jars with eyes respectfully rounded.
“I do the brewing and pounding,” said Cadfael, “the earth supplies the means. I’ll send your lord some pastilles for his throat, and a linctus to take every three hours. But that I must mix. A few minutes only. Sit by the brazier, it grows cold here in the evening.”
She thanked him, but did not sit. The array of mysterious containers fascinated her. She continued to prowl and gaze, restless but silent, a feline presence at his back as he selected from among his flasks cinquefoil and horehound, mint and a trace of poppy, and measured them into a green glass bottle. Her hand, slender and long-fingered, stroked along the jars with their Latin inscriptions.
“You need nothing for yourself?” he asked. “To ward off his infection?”
“I never take cold,” she said, with scorn for the weaknesses of Rémy of Pertuis and all his kind.
“Is he a good master?” Cadfael asked directly.
“He feeds and clothes me,” she said promptly, proof against surprise.
“No more than that? He would owe that to his groom or his scullion. You, I hear, are the prop of his reputation.”
She turned to face him as he filled his bottle to the neck with a honeyed syrup, and stoppered it. Thus eye to eye she showed as experienced and illusionless, not bruised but wary of bruises, and prepared to evade or return them at need; and yet even younger than he had taken her to be, surely no more than eighteen.
“He is a very good poet and minstrel, never think other wise. What I know, he taught me. What I had from God, yes, that is mine; but he showed me its use. If there ever was a debt, that and food and clothing would still have paid it, but there is none. He owes me nothing. The price for me he paid when he bought me.”
He turned to stare her in the face, and judge how literally she meant the words she had chosen; and she smiled at him. “Bought, not hired. I am Rémy’s slave, and better his by far than tied to the one he bought me from. Did you not know it still goes on?”
“Bishop Wulstan preached against it years back,” said Cadfael, “and did his best to shame it out of England, if not out of the world. But though he drove the dealers into cover, yes, I know it still goes on. They trade out of Bristol. Very quietly, but yes, it’s known. But that’s mainly a matter of shipping Welsh slaves into Ireland, money seldom passes for humankind here.”
“My mother,” said the girl, “goes to prove the traffic is both ways. In a bad season, with food short, her father sold her, one daughter too many to feed, to a Bristol trader, who sold her again to the lord of a half-waste manor near Gloucester. He used her as his bedmate till she died, but it was not in his bed I was got. She knew how to keep the one by a man she liked, and how to be rid of her master’s brood,” said the girl with ruthless simplicity. “But I was born a slave. There’s no appeal.”
“There could be escape,” said Cadfael, though admitting difficulties.
“Escape to what? Another worse bondage? With Rémy at least I am not mauled, I am valued after a fashion, I can sing, and play, if it’s another who calls the tune. I own nothing, not even what I wear on my body. Where should I go? What should I do? In whom should I trust? No, I am not a fool. Go I would, if I could see a place for me anywhere, as I am. But risk being brought back, once having fled him? That would be quite another servitude, harder by far than now. He would want me chained. No, I can wait. Things can change,” she said, and shrugged thin, straight shoulders, a litle wide and bony for a girl. “Rémy is not a bad man, as men go. I have known worse. I can wait.”
There was good sense in that, considering her present circumstances. Her Provençal master, apparently, made no demands on her body, and the use he made of her voice provided her considerable pleasure. It is essentially pleasure to exercise the gifts of God. He clothed, warmed and fed her. If she had no love for him, she had no hate, either, she even conceded, very fairly, that his teaching had given her a means to independent life, if ever she could discover a place of safety in which to practise it. And at her age she could afford a few years of waiting. Rémy himself was in search of a powerful patron. In the court of some susbtantial honour she might make a very comfortable place for herself.
But still, Cadfael reflected ruefully at the end of these practical musings, still as a slave.
“I expected you to tell me now,” said the girl, eyeing him curiously, “that there is one place where I could take refuge and not be pursued. Rémy would never dare follow me into a nunnery.”
“God forbid!” prayed Cadfael with blunt fervour. “You would turn any convent indoors-outdoors within a month. No, you’ll never hear me give you that advice. It is not for you.”
“It was for you,” she pointed out, with mischief in her voice and her eyes. “And for that lad Tutilo from Ramsey. Or would you have ruled him out, too? His case is much like mine. It irks me to be in bondage, it irked him to be a menial in the same house as a loathsome old satyr who liked him far too well. A third son to a poor man, he had to look out for himself.”
“I trust,” said Cadfael, giving the linctus bottle an experimental shake to ensure the contents should be well mixed, “I trust that was not his only reason for entering Ramsey.”
“Oh, but I think it was, though he doesn’t know it. He thinks he was called to a vocation, out of all the evils of the world.” She herself, Cadfael guessed, had known many of those evils on familiar terms, and yet emerged thus far rather contemptuous of them than either soiled or afraid. “That is why he works so hard at being holy,” she said seriously. “Whatever he takes it into his head to do he’ll do with all his might. But if he was convinced, he’d be easier about it.”
Cadfael stood staring at her in mild astonishment. “You seem to know more than I do about this young brother of mine,” he said. “And yet I’ve never seen you so much as notice his existence. You move about the enclave, when you’re seen at all, like a modest shadow, eyes on the ground. How did you ever come to exchange good-day with him, let alone read the poor lad’s mind?”
“Rémy borrowed him to make a third voice in triple organa. But we had no chance to talk then. Of course no one ever sees us look at each other or speak to each other. It would be ill for both of us. He is to be a monk, and should never be private with a woman, and I am a bondwoman, and if I talk with a young man it will be thought I have notions only fit for a free woman, and may try to slip out of my chains. I am accustomed to dissembling, and he is learning. You need not fear any harm. He has his eyes all on sainthood, on service to his monastery. Me, I am a voice. We talk of music, that is the only thing we share.”