A moment she paused, looking from face to face, presenting her own ruin with wide, illusionless eyes.
‘You see me, gentlemen. Since that time I may, perhaps, have moved a few short paces nearer the grave, but the change is not so great. I was already what I am now. I had been so for some few years. Three at least, I think, since Eudo had shared my bed, for pity of me, yes, but himself in abstinence to starvation, and without complaint. Such beauty as I ever had was gone, withered away into this aching shell. He could not touch me without causing me pain. And himself worse pain, whether he touched or abstained. And she, you will remember if ever you saw her, she was most beautiful. What all men said, I say, also. Most beautiful, and enraged, and desperate. And famished, like him. I fear I distress you, gentlemen,’ she said, seeing them all three held in frozen awe at her composure and her merciless candour, delivered without emphasis, even with sympathy. ‘I hope not. I simply wish to make all things plain. It is necessary.’
‘There is no need to labour further,’ said Radulfus. “This is not hard to understand, but very hard to hear as it must be to tell.’
‘No,’ she said reassuringly, ‘I feel no reluctance. Never fret for me. I owe truth to her, as well as to you. But enough, then. He loved her. She loved him. Let us make it brief. They loved, and I knew. No one else. I did not blame them. Neither did I forgive them. He was my lord, I had loved him five-and-twenty years, and there was no remission because I was an empty shell. He was mine, I would not endure to share him.
‘And now,’ she said, ‘I must tell something that had happened more than a year earlier. At that time I was using the medicines you sent me, Brother Cadfael, to ease my pain when it grew too gross. And I grant you the syrup of poppies does help, for a tune, but after a while the charm fails, the body grows accustomed, or the demon grows stronger within.’
‘It is true,’ said Cadfael soberly. ‘I have seen it lose its hold. And beyond a certain strength treatment cannot go.’
“That I understood. Beyond that there is only one cure, and we are forbidden to resort to that. None the less,’ said Donata inexorably, ‘I did consider how to die. Mortal sin, Father, I knew it, yet I did consider. Oh, never look aside at Brother Cadfael, I would not have come to him for the means, I knew he would not give them to me if I did. Nor did I ever intend to give my life away easily. But I foresaw a time when the load would become more than even I could bear, and I wished to have some small thing about me, a little vial of deliverance, a promise of peace, perhaps never to use, only to keep as a talisman, the very touch of it consolation to me that at the worst
at the last extreme, there was left to me a way of escape. To know that was to go on enduring. Is that reproach to me, Father?’
Abbot Radulfus stirred abruptly out of a stillness so long sustained that he emerged from it with a sharp indrawn breath, as if himself stricken with a shadowy insight into her suffering.
‘I am not sure that I have the right to pronounce. You are here, you have withstood that temptation. To overcome the lures of evil is all that can be required of mortals. But you make no mention of those other consolations open to the Christian soul. I know your priest to be a man of grace. Did you not allow him the opportunity to lift some part of your burden from you?’
‘Father Eadmer is a good man and a kind,’ said Donata with a thin, wry smile, ‘and no doubt my soul has benefited from his prayers. But pain is here in the body, and has a very loud voice. Sometimes I could not hear my own voice say Amen! for the demon howling. Howbeit, rightly or wrongly, I did look about me for other aid.’
‘Is this to the present purpose?’ Hugh asked gently. ‘For it cannot be pleasant to you, and God knows it must be tiring you out.’
‘It is very much to the purpose. You will see. Bear with me, till I end what I have begun. I got my talisman,’ she said. ‘I will not tell you from whom. I was still able to go about, then, to wander among the booths at the abbey fair, or in the market. I got what I wanted from a traveller. By now she may herself be dead, for she was old. I have not seen her since, nor ever expected to. But she made for me what I wanted, one draught, contained in so small a vial, my release from pain and from the world. Tightly stoppered, she said it would not lose its power. She told me its properties, for in very small doses it is used against pain when other things fail, but in this strength it would end pain for ever. The herb is hemlock.’
‘It has been known,’ said Cadfael bleakly,’to end pain for ever even when the sufferer never meant to surrender life. I do not use it. Its dangers are too great. There is a lotion can be made to use against ulcers and swellings and inflammations, but there are other remedies safer.’
‘No doubt!’ said Donata. ‘But the safety I sought was of a different kind. I had my charm, and I kept it always about me, and often I set my hand to it when the pain was extreme, but always I withdrew without drawing the stopper. As if the mere having it was buttress to my own strength. Bear with me, I am coming to the matter in hand. Last year, when my lord gave himself utterly to the love of Generys, I went to her cottage, at a time in the afternoon when Eudo was elsewhere about his manor. I took with me a flask of a good wine, and two cups that matched, and my vial of hemlock. And I proposed to her a wager.’
She paused only to draw breath, and ease slightly the position in which she had been motionless so long. None of her three hearers had any mind to break the thread now. All their presuppositions were already blown clean away in the wind of her chill detachment, for she spoke of pain and passion in tones level and quiet, almost indifferent, concerned only with making all plain past shadow of doubt.
‘I was never her enemy,’ she said. ‘We had known each other many years, I felt for her rage and despair when Ruald abandoned her. This was not in hate or envy or despite. We were two women impossibly shackled together by the cords of our rights in one man, and neither of us could endure the mutilation of sharing him. I set before her a way out of the trap. We would pour two cups of wine, and add to one of them the draught of hemlock. If it was I who died, then she would have full possession of my lord, and, God knows, my blessing if she could give him happiness, as I had lost the power to do. And if it was she who died, then I swore to her that I would live out my life to the wretched end unsparing, and never again seek alleviation.’
‘And Generys agreed to such a bargain?’ Hugh asked incredulously.
‘She was as bitter, bold and resolute as I, and as tormented by having and not having. Yes, she agreed. I think, gladly.’
‘Yet this was no easy thing to manage fairly.’
‘With no will to cheat, yes, it was very easy,’ she said simply. ‘She went out from the room, and neither watched nor listened, while I filled the cups, evenly but that the one contained hemlock. Then I went out, far down the Potter’s Field, while she parted and changed the cups as she thought fit, and set the one on the press and the other on the table, and came and called me hi, and I chose. It was June, the twenty-eighth day of the month, a beautiful midsummer. I remember how the meadow grasses were coming into flower, I came back to the cottage with my skirts spangled with the silver of their seeds. And we sat down together, there within, and drank our wine, and were at peace. And afterwards, since I knew that the draught brought on a rigor of the whole body, from the extremities inward to the heart, we agreed between us to part, she to remain quiet where she was, I to go back to Longner, that whichever of us Godare I say God, Father, or must I say only chance, or fate?whichever of us was chosen should die at home. I promise you, Father, I had not forgotten God, I did not feel that he had stricken me from his book. It was as simple as where you have it written: of two, one shall be taken and the other left. I went home, and I span while I waited. And hour by hourfor it does not hurryI waited for the numbness in the hands to make me fumble at the wool on the distaff, and still my fingers span and my wrist twisted, and there was no change in my dexterity. And I waited for the cold to seize upon my feet, and climb into my ankles, and there was no chill and no clumsiness, and my breath came without hindrance.’