Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [369]
No word had come from the Whiteheath manor – perhaps this very moment Thomas was on his way. She trembled, now, even to think of it. In a moment she must get up and warn her husband to send messages to stop him coming. If only she did not feel so weak. She closed her eyes.
It was the sound of clattering hoofs on the cobblestones that awoke her with a start. A glance at the shortened candle beside her couch told her that an hour had passed. And now she was not only wide awake but seized with panic. A horseman arriving at the manor after dark – it could only be Thomas.
She struggled to her feet, and, stumbling, crossed to the window before peering out into the courtyard below. A servant had opened the door. By the light of the torch he carried, she could make out a figure dismounting from his horse. She rattled the window desperately. He must not come into the house. The figures below took no notice. She reached out for something with which to break the glass, but then again the dizzy faintness overtook her and she fell back.
It was a few minutes later that Gilbert de Godefroi stood at the open doorway staring at the form of his wife. She was lying on the floor, her white hair covering her face like a shroud.
The messenger from Ranulf de Whiteheath, who was waiting in the yard below, had brought him a simple message:
“My master was away when your groom arrived. Your son is well but we have heard that the plague has reached Sarum. Do you still wish your son to return?”
And it was only when he had revived her and brought her to her bed again that she looked at him calmly but sadly and said:
“You must keep the boy away.”
That night she lay alone in the solar while, at her insistence, Gilbert slept in his chair in the hall. Both only slept fitfully, and several times he went to look at her. “You will feel well very soon,” he promised her, and at first light he made her drink some Malmsey wine. Soon afterwards she was sick again.
The buboes began the following evening: three little red rashes, under each armpit and in the groin. Before dark, they had already swollen into boils that made her cry out in pain, and as night fell the word spread through the village:
“The lady of Avonsford has the plague.”
She tried to keep her husband calm, but she did not succeed. He sent for the vicar, but word came back that the gap-toothed priest, terrified by the sight of his own dead sheep, had fled. As he gazed at his lovely wife, with her snow-white hair spread around her head on the pillow like an aureole, and saw with horror the way her body was being torn by the wracking pains, he remembered the haunting words of the poem they had heard two nights before, and they came back to him with a terrible new force:
And torn apart your limbs be all
No one can help you, no one shall;
Tomorrow, lady, we shall call.
He could not bear to think that she could be taken from him.
“God save us all,” he cried, helplessly.
He did what he could. He filled the room with herbs. He prayed himself, night and day; he sent for other priests and at last two were persuaded, for a handsome fee, to come out from Salisbury. But the hideous buboes grew: the one in her armpit was soon the size of an apple, white and hot, as the disease took its inevitable course. By the third day of her illness, he was desperate for any remedy.
It was when he had reached this point of despair, that Margery Dubber asked to apply her cures. She had been brooding for two days in the kitchen, waiting for someone to summon her. Everyone in the village knew that her cures for all ailments were the best, and more than once she had dropped a broad hint to that effect to the knight. He had taken no notice. Now however, seeing his wretched state, she went up and suggested herself boldly.
Godefroi was ready to agree, but Rose would not. Her eyes were sunken now, black with pain, but she found strength to raise her head, stare at the cook