Chapter Twenty-Two
St. Blitha
Her left hand was smashed, but she was trying to do her best with it.
As morning dawned over the winter-cold land, Andressa was already up and moving, with many things to do on this feast day.
The day had arrived.
She’d slept in her own bed last night, surprising since she was positive that she had been headed for The Chaos after her thrashing.
That was the only way to describe it; a thrashing of epic proportions meant to intimidate her, denigrate her, and punish her for hurting Sister Dymphna, who was in bed and hardly able to speak or move.
The damage to her skull was very bad, and she had a loss of vision in one eye, but the Mother Abbess would not call for a physic.
She had one of the other nuns, a woman who tended the sick at the abbey, see to Sister Dymphna’s needs. But she was in bad shape, indeed.
Yet, Andressa felt no guilt. It was one less nun to have to worry about as far as she was concerned.
Moreover, she was nursing her own substantial injuries that were mostly to the left side of her body because when she’d curled up in a ball on the floor of the Mother Abbess’ solar, they’d only been able to beat the left side of her body.
As a result, her left foot and left knee were horribly swollen, and her left hand, as it had covered her skull, had been badly mashed.
She knew she had some broken bones, but she could at least grasp things with her index finger and thumb.
The other three fingers of the hand were useless.
Even so, she was expected to participate in the feast. The Mother Abbess had been very clear about that.
After the thrashing, she let Andressa lay on the floor of her solar for about an hour before she had Sister Agnes and Sister Petronilla carry her back to her cell and toss her onto her bed.
She’d remained there for the rest of the day and the same healer nun who had been tending to Sister Dymphna came in to tend to her wounds as well.
Anything bleeding or exposed had been washed with wine and tightly wrapped in boiled linen, and that included her hand.
However, there wasn’t much they could do about the wound on her face.
She had three big gouges on the left side of her face, by the hairline, and they had bled profusely.
The healer nun had cleaned them up, so they weren’t oozing, but the damage was obvious.
To help conceal it somewhat, Andressa had tied a strip of the boiled linen around her head, like a kerchief to keep her hair away from her bruised face, covering up the wounds.
But no amount of cleaning or boiled linen could hide the fact that she’d been soundly thrashed.
However, the fear of another beating hadn’t been her motivation to rise from her bed and get to work.
There had been something more to Andressa’s dedication to duty.
As she’d lain in bed yesterday, reflecting on the situation in general, she had come to the conclusion that she was in a very important position to save the king as well as every other tortured soul at St. Blitha.
She held the key.
It was true that she was instrumental in protecting the king from an assassination attempt, as Maxton had told her, but there was more to it.
So many women had suffered under the hand of the Mother Abbess, and now that Andressa had been given an important role in the function of the abbey, she knew she had to do something about it.
Those horrible souls who had beaten her yesterday weren’t going to get away with it.
They wanted to humiliate and punish her, and kill those who displeased them, but no more.
In the end, Andressa would have the last word.
She had a plan.
Therefore, before dawn, she was out in the laundry area where she’d stashed the dried foxglove leaves, crushing them into a fine powder with her good hand.
For good measure, she’d stripped off even more dead leaves and crushed them as well, just to increase the toxicity of the poison.
Once she’d finished with that, she’d gone to find the dwale plants and picked off sixteen fat, purple berries.
Then, she’d pulled up three of the plants to get to the poisonous roots.
Washing off the plants in a bucket of water, she’d cut the top section away from the tender roots and proceeded to mash the fat, white roots in a small bowl she used when she made soap.
The mashed roots were then placed in a cheesecloth from the kitchens and Andressa placed the leaves and roots into an earthenware pitcher of wine to steep, sinking the ingredients straight to the bottom of the pitcher.
Her last act was to mash those sixteen berries and put everything – skins, stems, and juice – into the wine.
The more poison, the better.
It was double the amount she’d been instructed to use, but she wanted to make sure it did the job it was supposed to do.
She wanted no room for error. As the very strong poison was flushing into the wine, she’d gathered two more pitchers of wine from the kitchen and used mulling spices to flavor all three of the pitchers, so that all of them would essentially taste the same.
She even marked the poison pitcher with a scratch across the bottom of it, and she marked a second pitcher of untainted wine with a gouge on the handle.
It was a gouge she would tell the Mother Abbess that the marked pitcher was meant for the king, but she wasn’t finished with it.
Into that gouged pitcher, she put a second sachet that mimicked the one she’d put the poisonous plants in, only this cheesecloth sachet held harmless dead rose petals and dried grass.
It would trick the sisters into believing that particular pitcher was the poisoned one.
Only Andressa would know which wine was truly poisoned.
And that was the wine destined for the Mother Abbess.
With all three pitchers of wine ready and waiting, Andressa went about her duties of supervising the coming feast. The kitchen nuns, older women who were so bereft of all hope that they moved around like mindless ghosts, had been up before dawn as well, without the supervision of Sister Blanche.
The women were boiling beef in a great pot over an open flame in preparation of the coming feast, and the smell of baking bread filled the crisp morning air.
The smells of cooking weren’t unusual at St. Blitha, but it was food always meant for the Mother Abbess’ fine table.
Even this morning, as Andressa had worked, she saw at least four or five pledges and postulates slip from the postern gate in their morning hunt for food and she felt sorry that the smells of cooking were making those poor starving women miserable.
But it was misery, Andressa hoped, that would soon be ended.
Ironic how she had no guilt about poisoning the Mother Abbess and anyone else who drank the poisoned wine.
She knew it might also be Sisters Agnes and Petronilla, but still, she felt no remorse.
Murder was a sin, and she knew that, but she hoped that when she stood before God on Judgement Day, he would understand that what she did had been for the greater good.
Unless the Mother Abbess and her kind were stopped, more women were going to die. Murder would continue.
Andressa hoped that God would understand that.
Because of her management duties in the kitchen this morning, Andressa was able to steal a piece of beef under the guise of tasting it to see if it was fit for the feast. She had the cook add more salt to the water to flavor the meat after she’d stuffed several morsels into her mouth, feeding her rumbling belly.
It was good beef, bought with the Mother Abbess’ ill-gotten money, and the bread was made with the finest flour.
All of it fit for a kingly feast, as the wine in the laundry area continued to leech more and more poison out of the ingredients that had been placed in it.
It was turning into a potion unto itself.
The morning began to deepen and the sun began to make its march across the sky as there was some commotion over by the chapel, specifically at the Abbot’s Lodge as the Bishop of Essex made his arrival for the feast day.
The chapel, and the garden, filled with the bishop’s men because he traveled with a massive entourage.
Horses were stuffed into the barnyard on the east side of the kitchen, and as Andressa stood back in her shaded laundry area, stirring the poison wine with a stick to ensure the ingredients were melding well with the wine itself, she could see the bishop himself and the Mother Abbess, with Sister Agnes, and Sister Petronilla, standing between the garden and the Abbot’s Lodge.
Andressa watched the scene closely, noting that they seemed to be in discussion. She was positive that the Mother Abbess hadn’t told the bishop of the directive from the Holy Father because the bishop and the king were friends, and the bishop was one of the man’s advisors.
Aatto de Horndon was a loud man, obvious in manner and in mood, and he was greatly disliked by almost everyone.
The Mother Abbess enjoyed a close relationship with him, probably too close, and the woman surely wasn’t going to jeopardize that by telling him of the Holy Father’s order. He may very well try to stop it.
And there was no stopping wheels that were already in motion.
Therefore, Andressa went back to work as the sun continued to rise and the day turned surprisingly mild from the icy temperatures they’d been having this season.
She went back and forth between the kitchens and the laundry area, alternately making sure the food was being well-prepared and tending to her concoction of wines.
In fact, she was busily tending to the poisoned wine, stirring and stirring, when she heard a noise from the postern gate.
Although she knew it was locked, she turned to see what the noise was.