‘I never underestimate your experience, Sister,’ she said. ‘But I do not know how we should set about proving this theory of yours, though.’
‘I’m not sure we should try,’ the infirmarer replied. ‘The poor girl’s dead. Perhaps we ought to let her secrets die with her.’
‘Yes,’ Helewise said slowly. ‘It is only that I am thinking of whoever it is whose child she carried. If we are right and there was a lover, what will he be thinking now? Will he be waiting for her, expecting her return, worrying that, having got her pregnant, he is now to be dismissed totally from her life?’
‘He may not have wanted anything but to bed her,’ the infirmarer said shrewdly.
‘That is, of course, possible. Still, I cannot but help picturing him.’
‘You’ve a kind heart, my lady,’ Sister Euphemia said. ‘If you’re right, news will spread to the young lad soon enough, I would guess. Anyway, how on earth would we set about finding him to tell him?’
‘You are quite right, Sister, it would be impossible. And, indeed, we may have imagined it all wrong; Galiena may have been innocently pregnant by her husband and just not realised.’
‘Hmm. It’s always possible, as I said at the time.’ Disbelief was written all over the infirmarer’s face but she managed not to express it.
‘Thank you for bringing your thoughts to me,’ Helewise said. ‘As always, you reason soundly.’
‘That’s kind of you, my lady. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must return to my patients.’
‘Of course.’
Helewise sat deep in thought for some time after Sister Euphemia had gone. Then, making up her mind, she went to seek out three people.
First she found Ambrose. After burying Galiena, he had gone down to the Vale with Brother Firmin; he seemed to find comfort in the old monk’s kindly and undemanding company. Ambrose had announced that, together with his two servants who were attending him, he would like to stay on at Hawkenlye for a few days and he was welcomed as a guest with nobody asking him for an explanation. He had been offered the comfort of a bed up in the Abbey guest quarters, but he preferred, he said, to put up in the simpler accommodation down in the Vale with the monks and the pilgrims who had come to take the waters. A space had been found for him with the lay brothers, while Aebba and the young manservant were lodged in the pilgrims’ shelter.
When Helewise went to see Ambrose, he was sitting beside Brother Firmin and the carpenter, Brother Urse, while Brother Urse mended a rickety bench and Brother Firmin helped by handing him the tools. Seeing her approach, Ambrose got up and came to meet her.
‘My lady Abbess, were you looking for me?’ he asked.
‘Indeed. I was thinking, my lord, that nobody has yet informed your household of your wife’s death. Perhaps you would like to arrange to do this?’
‘It is a charitable thought, my lady,’ he answered gravely. Thinking for a moment, he said, ‘I could send the lad, I suppose, although I hesitate to make him the bearer of such bad news, for he is rough in his ways.’
‘I will ask two of the brothers, if you would prefer,’ Helewise offered, ashamed even as she spoke of her duplicity. ‘Safer, in any case, for two to ride together than for you to send your lad by himself.’
Ambrose studied her closely. Keeping her expression wide-eyed and innocent, she stared right back. Then abruptly he nodded. ‘Very well, my lady. Thank you.’
Then, as if such brief consideration of matters he preferred not to dwell on were more than enough, he gave her a brief bow and returned to the bench-mending.
Helewise next sought out Brother Saul and Brother Augustus. ‘Come with me,’ she said to them, ‘I have a job for you.’
As they walked either side of her back up to the Abbey, she explained.
‘I have told the lord Ambrose that I am sending you to his manor of Ryemarsh to inform his household of his wife’s death,’ she said quietly; there was nobody else on the path but, all the same, she felt the need to keep her voice down. ‘But in fact I want you to act as my eyes, if you will.’
‘What do you wish us to see for you, my lady?’ Saul asked.
She paused, trying to think how to phrase it tactfully while not giving away her suspicions; nobody but herself, the infirmarer, Sister Caliste and Josse knew that Galiena had been pregnant and she intended to keep it that way.
‘I wish,’ she said eventually, ‘that you try to gain an impression of the sort of life that was lived at Ryemarsh when Galiena was alive. Whether Ambrose and his wife were happy together, whether they entertained many visitors, whether either of them had close friends. Men or women.’ She tried to sound casual. ‘That sort of thing,’ she added lamely.
‘You want us to ask some clever questions of the servants and have a bit of a nose around?’ Augustus asked.
Saul began a reproof: ‘Gus! You must not-’, but Helewise put a hand on his arm to stop him. Giving Saul a smile, she then turned to Augustus and said, ‘Yes, Gus. That is precisely what I want.’
Josse returned to Hawkenlye the next day. He left New Winnowlands early and was riding through the Abbey gates as the community were in church for Sext. Leaving Horace in the stables — a young lay brother rather nervously took the big horse’s reins in Sister Martha’s absence — Josse decided that, while he waited, he would stroll off down to the Vale to stretch his legs.
There was a group of pilgrims in the shelter or, more accurately, just outside it, sitting in the shade of the chestnut trees. The noon sun was strong and all of them — there were five men, seven women and four children — looked exhausted by the sultry heat. Josse nodded a greeting and walked on to the monks’ shelter.
There he found Ambrose. The woman Aebba was with him; it seemed that she had just brought him fresh linen. She gave Josse a quick and, he thought, somewhat furtive glance then, at a nod from Ambrose, she hurried out of the shelter and off up the path towards the Abbey.
Josse said straight away, ‘I have visited your late wife’s kinfolk, my lord, and told them the news. They were greatly saddened, of course, and they send their condolences to you.’
Ambrose studied him. ‘Thank you, Josse,’ he said quietly. He sighed. ‘She is buried now, my poor young wife. The nuns will pray for her soul.’
‘God will hear,’ Josse said softly. ‘Rest assured of that.’
‘Hm.’ There was a pause, then Ambrose said, ‘I am staying on in the Vale for a few days. I find that it is peaceful here.’
And, Josse thought, you are loath to return to a home where there will never again be the light tread of Galiena’s swift feet. ‘I understand,’ he murmured. ‘I, too, always find solace in the very air of Hawkenlye. Especially down here in the Vale, where the pace of life seems less urgent.’
Ambrose smiled faintly. ‘It is the Abbess Helewise, I judge, who drives the ship forward,’ he remarked. ‘Down here, the monks have but to pray, care for the small needs of the pilgrims and perform what light duties crop up.’
Josse, too, smiled. ‘Aye. The Abbess told me when I first met her how dear old Brother Firmin once famously announced that the nuns were the Marthas and the monks the Marys. I am not sure,’ he added, lowering his voice, ‘that the Abbess, in her heart of hearts, entirely approves of a division of labour whereby the women do the work and the men gaze in rapt adoration on the wonders of the Lord.’
‘It’s the way of the world, Josse,’ Ambrose said. ‘Within the home, anyway, a good wife will work quietly and unobtrusively while her husband idles away his day in activities that really only serve to pass the time.’