Chapter 7 – The Council of the Well
A coded message on a folded scrap of parchment, concealed in the hollow of a tree:
Do it this afternoon. Servants down to one maid, guard corps reduced and ill. Snowdrifts will cover an approach from the east. Southeast window will be open.
* * *
Mionet had not signed up for this.
To be a lady of Segoile was not at all the same as being a rustic noblewoman like her mother, and still less like the Duchess of Andelin.
If Mionet’s maids had been ill, she would never have known it.
She could barely have matched a name to a face.
That was the whole point of uniforms and caps, after all; to make the maids look like each other.
There were some terribly fashionable households that matched their servants the way they matched their carriage horses: footmen of like height, or Lady Hamel with her bevy of redheads, who looked so well in azure livery.
Countess Vimont had begun the fashion with a retinue of willowy blondes, though cynical folk said it was only to divert her husband from her own bed.
Mionet would never have gone downstairs to look in on the servants herself, much less inquired after the nearby peasants.
But neither she nor Davi tried to dissuade Duchess Andelin.
In Tresingale, if His Grace was ill, the responsibility for the town rested on the shoulders of his eighteen-year-old wife.
“We must find out who is ill, first,” Duchess Andelin was saying as they made their precarious way down the hill to Eugene Street. “Does it always come on so suddenly? It seemed almost overnight.”
“No, not so’s I recall,” Davi said, grim and ungrammatical.
He had yielded to Mionet’s hints and finally acquired a proper eyepatch from somewhere, but no one would ever mistake him for a gentleman.
“Usually, folk started getting sick over a week or so, and everyone would be sick for a week, and then it’d trickle off and everyone was well again by January.
Sometimes it carried off the wounded, but I’ve never heard of a healthy man dying of it.
Gen makes a tonic that knocks out the worst of it.
If you ask him nice, it might knock out the sick fellow in the meantime. ”
Duchess Andelin gave him a sharp glance, but there was no doubt of his meaning. His Grace had been obviously getting sick for days, and Mionet couldn’t imagine how he had been persuaded to stay abed unless he was physically unable to get out of it.
“Tastes like death, though,” Davi added as they approached the storehouse and granaries.
Nearer the river, steam rose from the bathhouses, where the constantly piped hot water kept them nearly as warm as summer, and billowed from the stacks of the laundry.
But it seemed to Mionet that there were fewer people abroad, even with the cold, and she sat up straight in her saddle, observing with sharp gray eyes.
They deposited their horses in the town’s stable, a few doors down from the infirmary, and Duchess Andelin admonished the stable boys to cover their faces and wash their hands, though it was probably too late. The one on the left was already coughing.
Welcome warmth blasted from the doors of the infirmary as they stepped inside, followed by a snarling salutation.
“Shut the damned door and stay back from the beds,” ordered Genon Hengest, turning at the noise of the door.
He was one man whose appearance was improved by the linen swathed round his head, covering up some of his more gruesome scars.
Mionet had sympathy for a man so afflicted, but he was hardly a proper healer for the Duchess of Andelin.
In Segoile, he would never have been let in the door.
“We will.” Duchess Andelin lifted a hand to her scarf automatically and then thought the better of it. “I hope you are well, Genon.”
“My lady? What in blazes are you doing here?” he demanded, with a jerking bow.
“I—that is…” The duchess hesitated, noting the men filling all the beds of the infirmary, covering their mouths to avoid coughing at their duchess. “Might I have a word? Outside?”
They stepped outside so she could confess in private that His Grace was ill, as were a number of others up at the manor.
“You might have just sent a messenger for that,” Mr. Hengest said, frowning. “One of my boys is brewing up a vat of tonic, I’ll have some jugs of it for you directly. Juste is sick, too?”
“Yes, and Adelan, and Leonin, Sim, Peri…”
“Leonin’s in a bad way,” Davi added, with an apologetic glance at the lady. “I was coming to fetch you myself.”
“And that’s the other reason I came,” Duchess Andelin added anxiously. “There is only you and Mr. Brestle, and the pair of you can’t be everywhere at once. We must know who is sick, and who is badly so. Have either of you seen Tounot or Sir Jinmin?”
“I saw Jinmin this morning, and he was fine,” said Sir Auber, appearing from behind them.
“It seems we’ve had the same idea, my lady.
The sickness has hit fast and hard, I don’t believe I’ve seen above a dozen people about today.
And we’ve women and children to think of, and some older folk as well. ”
“I’ve been feeding Brother Oleare through the window,” Mr. Hengest agreed wryly. “Man’s a rail, one good cough would crack him in half. Years past, we broke up the camps into sections, quarantined each bit apart from the other bit.”
“We sort of have that,” Duchess Andelin said thoughtfully. “There are the cottages by the North Gate, the craftsmen’s quarter, the market square, the manor, the cookhouse, the barracks…His Grace said there were about three thousand people in Tresingale.”
“Yes, my lady. About half of them in the barracks.”
“Then we shall survey the other half, while Genon goes up to the manor,” she decided. “It is not so many with four of us…”
Of course, this set up an uproar on many fronts, from the cold to the fact that the duchess certainly would not go anywhere alone, and the lady actually stamped her small foot.
“I will stop and go somewhere to warm up, if I am cold,” she said, glaring up at them.
“This is not the time to fuss over such things, is it? When so many people are sick, and might need help? And you are His Grace’s knights, not my nurses.
I shall go, but I guess Davi must go with me.
Lady Verr, do you mind dreadfully going to the craftsmen’s quarter? ”
Actually, Mionet did mind. If she had wanted to faff about dosing sick people, she might have stayed home in her father’s cow hole.
She had not come to the Andelin Valley to play nurse to a lot of crude laborers, much less catch some terrible disease from them.
But to refuse was unmistakably to lose the duchess’s good opinion, perhaps forever, and Mionet had come too far to stop now.
“Not at all, Your Grace,” she said stoutly, trying to sound as if she were not already half-frozen.
It was astonishing, how quickly they cobbled together a strategy, and Sir Auber departed to pluck some helpers from the cottages and then headed to the barracks to acquaint Sirs Tounot and Jinmin with their plan.
It was endless, dreary, and depressing work. Dutifully, Mionet slogged through the muddy snow up to the cluster of buildings where the craftsmen were keeping themselves, a hodgepodge of whitewashed cottages and workshops for carpenters, blacksmiths, glassmakers, and the like.
“Hello,” she said to whatever grimy peasant opened the door. “I am Lady Verr, and we are seeing whether anyone in the house is sick…”
And their names? Are they too ill to get out of bed?
Have you any medicine? There were a half-dozen questions that Duchess Andelin had quickly listed to be asked at each house, and then she repeated Mr. Hengest’s warnings about handwashing and keeping one’s face covered.
Slogging back to Brambles, she plucked ink, quill, and parchment from under the saddlebags, warmed by the horse’s body, and wrote down the names of the house’s occupants and whether they were sick or well.
At least she might stick her hands under Bramble’s saddle blanket to warm them occasionally. The horse was the only thing keeping the ink from freezing and bursting its glass pot.
“Master Sharrenot,” she repeated at one workshop, a carpenter’s, judging by all the lathes. “Are you ill, sir?”
“It’s not so bad,” he croaked, though his eyes were blazing with fever.
“Are you here by yourself?”
“Aye,” he said, squinting at her. He was an ill-favored, bandy-legged old man who would not thank her for interfering, but Mionet drew herself up, yielding to an impulse she was certain she would regret.
“Please go wrap yourself and lie down,” she said briskly. “You should be honored, that your duchess sent me to look in on you. I assure you, I did not come all the way from the capital to tend a carpenter’s sniffles. Have you no more firewood?”
“Aye. Boy didn’t come this morning.” It was a testament to how poorly the man was feeling that he didn’t even argue. He just sank down into the little nest of blankets and furs at the back of the shop, hacking with a dry churning that did not sound good at all.
Gritting her teeth, Mionet stripped off her glove and pressed a bare hand to his balding head.
Hot as an oven, and dry as the Noreveni desert.
Dry fevers were more dangerous than wet ones, and she paused to warm up a mug of ale over a small blaze.
Her very specialized store of herblore recommended some basic treatments, but she was not a healer of this sort.
As a matter of fact, she had done everything she could to forget the things she knew, and rather resented having to exhume them from the crypts of her memory.
Outside, she plunged her bare hand into a snowbank until it stung, wiping away whatever bad water she might have taken in from touching the master, and then went to scribble down his name, with a note that Mr. Hengest ought to look in on him. Soon.