The Difficult Saint: A Catherine LeVendeur Mystery (20 page)

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Authors: Sharan Newman

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Edgar intervened. “Catherine, no man would mistake one of those concoctions for something potable. What I fear is that there may be those who wish to draw us all into the trap along with Agnes. I worry that the protection of the archbishop may not be enough. Hermann’s expression when you mentioned Albero was hardly respectful.”
“I noticed that, too,” Walter said. “It may be just as well not to use those letters, yet, Hubert. It’s possible that Gerhardt was no friend of Archbishop Albero.”
“You’re all in the right,” Hubert admitted. “I might have simply arranged with the family for Agnes to atone, given all I own for her freedom and taken her home with us. But then she would always be a murderer in the eyes of the world. There must be a way we can prove her innocence, even if the true villain is never known.”
“I wish Solomon were here to help.” Catherine sighed. “He’s naturally distrustful of everyone.”
Hubert nodded glumly, then brightened.
“I have an even better idea,” he said. “Walter, can you find rooms for us, perhaps for some time? Edgar, Catherine, take the children and go with him. I’m going to talk to Mina.”
 
There was almost as much dismay inside the castle as out.
“What were you thinking of?” Maria demanded. “You gave those
people the right to wander freely through our land and accost anyone they like.”
Peter bit his lip. Now that Margaret had left, he was feeling much younger and less certain.
“If my stepmother didn’t kill my father, then she should go free,” he said finally. “What if someone else poisoned him after all?”
“But who, Peter?” Hermann asked. “How?”
“I don’t know,” Peter answered. “I’ve been trying to think ever since it happened. There were so many people coming and going then, so many banquets. And not everyone who came was a friend. You all know that.”
They did, but they were surprised that Peter had noticed. Maria’s husband, Folmar, gaped at him in wonder.
“So you are making Agnes’s family find the murderer for us?” he asked. “But what if we’re right and she is guilty?”
“Then they’ll have to believe it, too,” Peter said. “But perhaps we can at least find out why she did it. She might tell one of them something. Don’t you think I’m right?”
Hermann put an arm around him.
“Nephew, you are now lord here, in fact and in name,” he said. “What you decide is what we will do. At least we won’t offend Count Thibault by behaving too rashly toward one under his protection. And, in any case, we still have the woman locked up here. If no other suspect appears, we can always have her hanged as planned.”
Trien. Thursday, 4 kalends July (June 28), 1146; 12 Tammuz, 4906. The vigil of the passion of Saints Peter and Paul.
 
 
Comes vero per exploratores ejus praesentiens adventum archiepis-
copi, in fugam conversus, nocte illa in villam episcopi Witelich se
recepit: equos et homines reficere volens, et nihil reperiens, villam
totam concremavit.
 
 
The count [of Namur] through his spies, was forewarned of the coming of the Archbishop [Albero] who had turned about in retreat. That night in the episcopal town of Witelch, the count met him. Horses and men wished for revenge, and nothing was spared; the town was completely destroyed.
 
—Baldric
The Life of Albero
 
 
“
O
f course there’s been gossip,” Mina told them.”The town’s been full of speculation about Lord Gerhardt’s death, but nothing that I could swear has any truth behind it.”
She looked apologetically at the faces across from her. Edgar, Catherine and Hubert each showed their disappointment.
“Not everyone thinks your daughter is a sorceress,” Mina added. “But you’ll have a difficult time trying to make anyone believe she didn’t poison Gerhardt.”
“I know,” Hubert said glumly. “She’s a stranger. It’s easy to think the worst of her.”
Catherine leaned forward. “But that’s why no one seems to have tried to find another explanation. Gerhardt was a fairly powerful man. He must have made enemies.”
“Not so many as you would think,” Mina told her. “He treated his people well enough, didn’t cheat in his dealings with the town, gave generously to the church, at least until recently. He was even tolerent toward us.”
“A veritable saint,” Edgar murmured.
Hubert gave him a sour glance.
“Even saints have those who dislike them,” he insisted.
Catherine agreed. “If Gerhardt was that honest, it’s all the more likely that he offended others. Especially those he traded with. In Simon’s dealings, did he know of anyone who was resentful because Gerhardt wouldn’t agree to a questionable sale?”
Mina thought. “You mean like buying horses that were stolen?”
“Yes, exactly!” Hubert said eagerly.
“No,” Mina said. “Never. He managed to stay on good terms
with both sides of the war between the Graf Heinrich and Archbishop Albero. We think that’s why his alms lately have been made directly to the poor instead of through the monasteries. He didn’t want gifts to Saint Maximin to be considered an insult to the archbishop, since the graf is advocate for the monastery. And yet he took the side of the town against Albero’s demands.”
“The archbishop?” Catherine remembered the reaction of Hermann and Maria to his name. “What was he demanding?”
“What they always want,” she said wearily. “Higher tolls, more tithes, a bigger share of everything we have. But, of course, his war with Graf Heinrich is our worst worry.”
“What is this war?” Edgar asked. “We heard nothing of it until we were almost here.”
He and Catherine had returned from England two years before after being caught and almost killed in that civil war. He wasn’t pleased to discover that they might have fallen into another.
“It’s been going on for years,” Mina said. “I don’t understand completely what it’s about. Something to do with jurisdiction over lands and the abbey of Saint Maximin. Graf Heinrich’s army invaded a few years ago and destroyed villages all around, although Trier escaped. Both the Christian and Jewish burghers are caught between the hammer and the anvil here. Neither lord is better for us than the other so we aren’t concerned about who prevails but the uncertainty and the sudden attacks are intolerable.”
“Could Gerhardt have been planning to announce for one or the other?” Edgar asked.
“I don’t know,” Mina answered. “There’s been no talk of it. He was really more one of us than a nobleman. His greatest wealth was the vines, and matters affecting trade were more important to him than the great battles of the burgraves.”
“There must be someone who didn’t like him,” Catherine insisted. “No one is that wonderful.”
Mina shook her head. “If there is, I never heard of it. But I’ll keep asking among my friends.”
Edgar had been gnawing on the other side of the problem.
“What I still don’t understand,” he said. “Is why everyone immediately assumed Gerhardt was murdered. I know what Hermann
told us, but there are a thousand ways he might have eaten something evil or he might have had a cancer or other illness and not known it.”
“That bothers me, too,” Catherine agreed. “Someone near him must at least guess that there was a reason for him to be killed or they wouldn’t have jumped to that conclusion so quickly. We have to discover what it was.”
“But how?” Hubert moaned.
Catherine thought a while. Then she lifted her head, jaw set, as if preparing for a fight.
“I have to make Agnes tell me what happened,” she announced. “All of it. No, there are things she wouldn’t tell you, Father. She may not want to tell me. But we have to learn what Gerhardt was like in private and she’s the one who must know best.”
“Catherine, you’re the last person she’d confess such things to,” Hubert said.
“I’m her sister,” Catherine maintained. “I just have to get her to remember that. There was a time when we told each other everything. Things we would never tell anyone else.”
The others were doubtful.
“That time is gone,” Edgar said gently. “Like Jehan, she blames you for the way her life has changed, even more than she blames your father.”
Catherine bit her lips. She wasn’t convinced, but she couldn’t think of an argument.
“Perhaps, you could talk to her maids, first,” Mina suggested. “They’re still at Saint Irminen with the nuns.”
“No one told us that,” Hubert said, hope starting to grow in him. “Yes, Catherine, you go to them. If anyone knows what happened between Gerhardt and Agnes, it’s the women who dressed her and kept her company.”
Catherine saw the sense in that. “If nothing else, they might give me enough information to make Agnes believe I already know everything. But if she did confide in them, why didn’t they say something when she was first accused?”
What if they’re protecting her? Catherine thought.
Once again, she was confronted with the possibility that Agnes
was guilty. She shut the idea out of her mind. That was a solution she refused to face.
 
Outside Trier a ragged group had found shelter in a cave hollowed out of the hillside. There weren’t as many of them as had been at Vézelay. The trip had been hard on the faith and only the true believers remained. Or so they thought.
Denise watched the communal dinner pot as she waited for her husband and Astolfo to return. Of them all, she was the one most certain of the truth of their beliefs.
She had first heard them a year before on the night when she and her husband took in a wandering preacher who had come all the way from Lombardy to Nantes, speading the word. What he told them made so much more sense than the sermons of their local priest, even though he was a good man who seemed as troubled as Denise by his inability to answer her questions.
But Astolfo understood her doubts. The real problem, he explained, was that God never intended Man to stay on the earth so long. Ever since the birth of Christ, people had been free to return to our natural state, but our carnal nature kept us from doing so. It was only by renouncing the temptations of the flesh that we could reach heaven.
Evil was in the world because the world was evil in itself. All that was corporeal had been created by God’s first son, Lucifer. Our souls were angelic spirits, trapped in flesh. The world was full of suffering not because God didn’t care. It was because mankind had embraced the lowest part of itself. Christ, a perfect spirit who only appeared in the form of a man, had come to free us to return to Heaven. We need only renounce the dross and allow our souls to shine forth as we escape the prison of our bodies.
To Denise and her husband, Lanval, this interpretation of the chaos around them came as a revelation. Of course there was war, famine and poverty. Of course the strong preyed on the weak. God couldn’t protect them. He was waging war, Himself, against the darkness, against the snares the devil set for us. The only way to be saved was to return to the ways of the first followers of Christ. But, because we have gone so much farther into iniquity since then, it is necessary
to make a greater renunciation. We must, like the first Christians, abandon all possessions. But we must also give up carnal desires. The truly perfect ones of the faith abstained not only from sexual relations but from eating anything created by reproduction.
When Denise protested that they rarely had meat anyway but without eggs or cheese they couldn’t survive, Astolfo had smiled and assured her that no one was expected to become perfect all at once. Only a few were able to achieve that, but all could aspire.
There was more to learn, much more. Denise had told Father Milun about Astolfo’s words and he’d been very interested. She smiled now as she stirred the thin vegetable broth they would share that night. Father Milun was snoring on his pallet inside the cave at this moment. He had left his parish and come with them when the bishop had forbidden him to learn any more about this foreign heresy. And, while some had grown weary along the way and turned back, others had joined them. The man they met outside Provins, Andreas, was the strongest of converts. He was so eager to spread the news that they had to physically keep him from preaching at every crossroad. It was hard to convince him that it would do no one any good if he were to be martyred now, or worse, jeered at as a madman. They had to work quietly until they were strong enough to burst forth and save all of Christendom.
But Astolfo had assured them that there were many more of his order in Köln who would take them in and that they would find friends along the way. He had sent a message to one of them near here who had been generous before. When the group had arrived he had taken Lanval and gone to find this benefactor, promising that they would return soon with food and clothing and perhaps even passage on a boat that would carry them to the end of their journey.
Denise sighed. It would be good to have a home again.
 
Catherine’s request to be allowed to speak with Lisette and Laudine had been rebuffed by the portress at first. Walter had had to demand that they be taken to the abbess before she was admitted and then only into the small gatehouse.
“Will you be able to reach them on your own?” Walter asked her. “This is as far as I can go.”
“I know that.” Catherine smiled. “It’s amazing that the portress let you this far. It must be the cross you’re wearing. If the abbess will see me and if her Latin is at all competent, I’ll simply keep arguing until she concedes my right to question these women.”
Walter grimaced. “Good luck to you. I’d rather face Greek fire than an angry abbess.”
“Believe me, Walter, they’re not nearly as terrifying as a novice mistress.” Catherine reached up and gave his cheek a pat of reassurance. “She can flay me with her tongue, but there’ll be no lasting hurt. You should go now. I’m sure Father and Edgar would appreciate your help.”
Left alone, Catherine waited for the door to open, more nervous than she had admitted. She was worried that the abbess would refuse to see her at all. So, she was surprised when the portess returned, leading two women who clearly had not taken the veil.
The two regarded her with contempt, even though Catherine had dressed most carefully in the same clothing she had worn to visit Countess Mahaut.
“You must be the sister.” The woman who had spoken was the epitome of the heroine of the
jongleur
’s songs, with a round face, receding chin and wide hazel eyes.
The other was also attractive, although her nose was a bit sharp and her blue eyes too small.
“I’m Catherine, daughter of Hubert LeVendeur and wife to Edgar of Wedderlie.”
The women did not appear to be impressed. The first one spoke again. “I’m Laudine, daughter of Reginald of Chateauroux and this is Lisette. Her mother is Hersende, lady of Aubigny.”
Catherine refused to be drawn into a duel of lineage.
“I didn’t realize that you were still in Trier,” she told them.
“They say we can’t leave until it’s proven that we didn’t help Agnes poison Gerhardt,” Lisette told her. “If that stupid
jael
would confess that she did it alone, we could go home. Can you help us?”
“Hush!” Laudine told her. “After what Agnes said about her, do you think she’d be of any use?”
“What do you mean?” Catherine said.
“You ran away from the convent to marry,” Laudine said. “And
you’re a Jew lover. You’d rather consort with Jews than your own sister or your mother’s family. You should hear the things your grandfather says about you and your father.”

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