The Marsh King's Daughter by Elizabeth Chadwick Page B

line. 'No one ever strikes her with a switch for filching provisions from the store rooms to fill her fat belly!'
    'Hush, oh hush!' Adela squeaked like an agitated mouse. 'She'll hear you!' 'Oh yes, she's certainly got better ears than God,' Miriel said viciously, but heeded Adela's warning and finished her ablutions in jerky silence. Uppermost in her mind was the sure knowledge that she did not fit in here and never would.
    Following the silent breaking of fast in the refectory, Miriel collected a stone costrel of wine and a basket of loaves from the cellaress and crossed the courtyard to the infirmary. Owing to her own disability and her duty to the sick, Sister Margaret had been excused the long, nocturnal hours of prayer in the chapel. The bread and wine were for her patients. There was also a hearth in the infirmary where nourishing meals could be cooked to tempt ailing appetites. Sister Margaret,
    although not afflicted by the latter, had availed herself of the frying pan and was devouring the last of a mushroom omelette as Miriel entered, staggering a little beneath her burden.
    The delicious smell of the food made Miriel's half-empty stomach churn with longing, but she was not so foolish as to hope that there was any left. She would have to wait for the midday meal several hours hence and hope that the cellaress was feeling generous.
    Setting the bread and wine on the trestle, she threw a glance the direction of the curtain screening the man's bed from the three sick nuns occupying the main part of the infirmary.
    She could hear a constant low muttering and the swish of bedclothes tossed by a restless body.
    'We said a prayer for the young man in chapel, sister,' she ventured. 'How does he fare?'
    Leaning on her stick, dabbing her lips with a napkin, the infirmaress heaved to her feet. 'He is in need of prayers for certain,' she said. 'There is nothing more that we can do for him.' She hobbled to the curtain, and drawing it a little to one side, beckoned to the girl.
    The gesture surprised Miriel. For the past day and a half she had been kept well away from the patient. She was not, however, going to look a gift horse in the mouth, and hastened to Sister Margaret's side.
    'See the red spots on his cheekbones?' the nun said with a grim nod. 'First they will darken until they are the colour of pig's blood, and then the tips of his fingers and the soles of his feet will blacken and he will die.'
    Miriel swallowed and stared, filled with horror and pity. She did not doubt the nun's word for such a death had happened to a neighbour in Lincoln two years ago after he caught a winter ague.
    As if aware of their scrutiny, the patient tossed and groaned. Sweat plastered his hair to his skull in dark spikes and shone in the hollow of his throat, as if he had just been pulled anew from the sea. His eyes were open but blind as unpolished stones. The irises flickered, following some inner vision, and he licked his lips.
    'The tide,' he panted. 'Christ Jesu, the tide!' His body threshed and fought.
    Without thinking Miriel darted to the bedside. There was a bowl of lavender water on the coffer with a cloth soaking in it. She wrung out the linen and laid it on his brow, then set her arm behind his shoulders and gave him a drink from the cup that also stood on the coffer.
    'Surely there is something that can be done for him?' She fixed Sister Margaret with a pleading stare.
    The infirmaress shook her head. 'Save for washing him down to cool his body and giving him willow bark in wine, we are powerless. It will be as God wills.'
    'But if God had wanted him to die, he would have let him drown out on the estuary, not here with us,' Miriel protested.
    'The ways of God are not ours to fathom, only to obey.'
    Miriel bit her lip on an unsuitable retort concerning the ways of God. 'Then may I perform those tasks and pray for him?' she requested.
    Sister Margaret frowned at her. 'It would not be seemly, a young girl like you.'
    'More than half