A Twisted Vengeance Read online

  A

  TWISTED

  Vengeance

  A Kate Clifford Mystery

  CANDACE ROBB

  For mothers and daughters

  A Twisted Vengeance

  GLOSSARY

  BEGUINES: a community of women leading lives of religious devotion who, unlike those who entered convents, were not bound by permanent vows; they dedicated themselves to chastity and charity and worked largely among the poor and the sick, usually in urban settings.

  FACTOR: in business, one who is trusted to transact business as an agent, deputy, or representative of a merchant/trader.

  KELPIE: a shape-changing aquatic spirit of Scottish legend. Its name may derive from the Scottish Gaelic words “cailpeach” or “colpach,” meaning heifer or colt. Kelpies are said to haunt rivers and streams, usually in the shape of a horse. The sound of a kelpie’s tail entering the water is said to resemble that of thunder.

  LADY ALTAR: an altar dedicated to and holding a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

  LOLLARDS: beginning in 14th century England, those inspired by the teachings of John Wycliffe, essentially stating that the Catholic church had been corrupted by temporal matters, and urging a return to the simpler values of living a life in imitation of Christ; by the 15th century the term “lollard” was a synonym for “heretic” in England.

  MARTHA HOUSE: a term derived from Bible story of Lazarus and his two sisters, Martha (active) and Mary (contemplative); one of the many terms used throughout Europe to indicate a household of lay religious women dedicated to serving the community.

  MAISON DIEU: hospital.

  SEMPSTER: an early form of the word “seamstress.”

  Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.

  Though all things foul would wear the brows of grace,

  Yet Grace must still look so.

  —William Shakespeare, Macbeth IV, 3, 22–24

  The fall is so deep, she is so rightly fallen, that the soul cannot fill herself from such an abyss.

  —Marguerite Porete

  PROLOGUE

  York, second week in July, 1399

  The terror of the dream never abated. She opened her eyes in the dark prison of her childhood bedchamber. Heard his ragged breathing, smelled his breath—cloying sweetness of wine, rancid stench of bile—as he leaned down, reaching for her, whispering of his need, his hunger. She opened her mouth to scream, but she was mute. She struggled to push him away, but her arms were limp, heavy, dead to her.

  Why do you not strike him down, my Lord? How can you abide such abomination, my Savior? Are you not my Savior? Is he right, that I deserve this?

  It is a dream, only a dream, now, tonight, it is truly only a dream, he is dead, he can no longer hurt me, it is a dream, wake up wake up wake up.

  She sat up, panting, her shift clinging to her sweat-soaked body. A noise. Someone moving about on the other side of her door, in the kitchen. Outside her window it was the soft gray of a midsummer night. Who would be moving about the kitchen in the middle of the night? Why had Dame Eleanor lodged her here, across the garden from her sisters, all alone? But they did not know she was alone. They thought Nan, the serving maid, would be here. Perhaps it was only Nan she heard, returning early.

  He had sworn that he would find her, rise from the grave and take her, that they were bound for eternity. Whoever it was, they were at the door. The dagger. She slipped it from beneath her pillow. The door creaked open. Not Nan—much too tall for Nan. A man’s breath, a man’s smell. He took a step in. She leapt from the bed, throwing herself on him, forcing him to fall backward into the kitchen. Stabbing him, stabbing, stabbing. Not speaking. Never speak. Never make a noise. He will kill me if I wake the others.

  “God have mercy. Have mercy!” he wheezed.

  She stopped. This voice was soft. Frightened. God forgive me. It is not him. Not Father.

  She dropped her dagger in the doorway as she backed into her room. Heart pounding, fighting the fear and confusion clouding her mind, she dressed, stumbling in her haste. She must think what to do. Berend. He was strong and kind. He would help her. She would go through the gate to Dame Katherine’s kitchen and wake Berend.

  She retrieved her dagger. Bloody. Slippery. Wiped it on her skirt. Tucked it in her girdle. Stepped to the door, lifting her skirts to step over his body. But there was no body. God help me!

  A hand over her mouth. He spun her round and clutched her so tightly she felt his blood flowing, soaking the back of her gown, the warmth of it. She gagged on the sickly sweet smell of it, like her father’s wine-breath. He dragged her outside into the garden. The great wolfhounds began to bark. Salvation? She struggled, but he did not lose his grip; even when he stumbled he grasped her so tightly she could not breathe. Her feet skimmed the grass, the packed mud of the alley. I am dying.

  A jolt. She was pulled free, falling forward.

  “Run to the church.” It was the soldier who watched all night from the street. More than a soldier, a guardian angel. He kicked the wounded man in the stomach.

  She curled over herself, gasping for breath.

  “Get up. Run to the church. Do not stop. Do not look back.” He nudged her, gently. “Run!” Suddenly there were more men. They rushed at her savior.

  She rose and ran, her breath a searing knife in her throat and chest, but she ran, ran for her life. She heard the men attacking the soldier, bone against flesh against bone. Surely an angel could not suffer mortal wounds. But she would pray for him. To the church across Castlegate. Door locked. Stumbling round to the side, where the sisters entered. Footsteps coming her way. She fled, and there it was, the door, opening, the candle by the lady altar. She crumpled to the floor, the cool tiles. She stretched out upon them, bloodied, cursed, saved.

  1

  IN THE NIGHT

  Yet again Kate was undone by her mother’s biting tongue. A gift of fresh berry tarts was received with delight by her mother’s three companions, but Eleanor Clifford responded with a tirade about Kate’s lack of religious fervor. A month earlier, the three beguines would have looked confused at Dame Eleanor’s odd response to such an offering from her daughter, but apparently they had grown accustomed to this peculiar aspect of their benefactor’s behavior and simply removed themselves to the other side of the hall. Their movement did nothing to disrupt Eleanor from her recitation of opportunities for spiritual advancement ignored by her errant daughter—joining their morning prayer, attending daily mass, saying the rosary and evening prayers before the lady altar in the hall, encouraging her wards to join her in all these activities.

  “Yours is a singularly ungodly life, Katherine,” she concluded.

  A strange lecture from the mother who had raised Kate to view with skepticism all those who wore their spiritual beliefs like a badge and who had never encouraged such activities in their home. Growing up in the border country of Northumberland, Kate had been taught to rely on her kin, her wits, and her knowledge of the countryside rather than prayers. “Prayers are for spineless cowards and addle-pated sophists,” Eleanor had told her children time and again. Their remote parish shared a priest with several other clusters of farms and manors so that they heard mass infrequently, and, when they did, the cleric’s rambling sermons occasioned much eye-rolling and giggling among the children, while the adults sat with heads bowed in slumber.

  So Kate might be forgiven for questioning the sincerity of her mother’s newfound piety. She was not the only person perplexed by Eleanor’s return to York in the company of three beguines, or poor sisters, with whom she intended to found a Martha House. It had caused a stir in her cousin William Frost’s household and more widely among Kate’s fellow merchants and guild members. All wanted to know what ca
tastrophe had left Eleanor widowed, pious, and fleeing from Strasbourg.

  “Well? What of that?” Eleanor loudly demanded.

  Glancing up at her mother’s flushed face enclosed in the incongruous wimple, Kate could do nothing but shrug, having stopped listening early in her mother’s tirade. After all, she’d heard it all before.

  Growling, Eleanor took Kate by the shoulders and shook her. A mistake.

  Kate’s father had trained her to defend herself, and she had spent her years since his death perfecting her martial skills. In one sweeping motion she caught her mother’s hands and used them to push her so that she lost her balance and stumbled backward against a—fortunately—heavy table.

  Sisters Clara, Brigida, and Dina rushed to Eleanor’s aid, helping her to a chair.

  Knowing there was nothing she could say or do to make peace in the moment, Kate turned to leave.

  But Eleanor was not finished. “What will the children you claim to hold so dear think when they learn their guardian is a bawd? Have you thought of that?”

  Kate had established her guesthouse on Petergate before she added two wards and a niece to her household. The fees wealthy merchants and the occasional noble or cleric paid for a discreet night with their mistresses had been necessary to pay off her late husband Simon Neville’s debts and provide for the masses he had requested for his soul. By the time Simon’s children by a prostitute in Calais had been brought to Kate upon their mother’s death, the household servants were already in the habit of discretion. Indeed, her clients paid for secrecy. However, worldly-wise Marie and Phillip had ferreted out the nature of the guesthouse, their own mother having been the mistress of many married men. The first thing Phillip, a boy of eleven, had said in Kate’s presence was a matter-of-fact explanation of what her brother-in-law Lionel had intended in Calais: He meant to comfort Maman and fill her with another baby she could not feed. Too late to shelter them. Pray God her mother never discovered how much they knew. But how had Eleanor learned of it?

  “And who is to tell them? You, Mother? Is that what your sudden obeisance to the Church has taught you—to slander your daughter? To undo all my work in healing three children who have already lost so much?” God in heaven, Kate had said it aloud. She had vowed to remain silent, to refuse her mother’s bait.

  “Your life is a shambles, Katherine.” With every word, Eleanor sought to undermine all that Kate had accomplished. Why? Why would a mother abuse her daughter in such wise?

  “I am leaving you now,” Kate said, stepping through the door and out into the night.

  At least she did not include me in the attack, her dead twin whispered in her mind.

  Yes, at least that, Geoff.

  Eleanor had brought Kate to York shortly after Geoff’s death in the hope that distance would sever the powerful link between the twins that remained strong even in death. She did not understand that, as twins, Kate and Geoff shared souls, life force. There could be no sundering. Her twin’s spirit lived within Kate, and she feared the bond between mother and child, though not nearly so strong as that between twins, might allow Eleanor to sense his presence. Apparently not. Or at least, not this night. A mercy.

  Her mother’s tumble did not prevent her from pursuit. “You are a young widow whose husband left you mired in debt and burdened with his two bastards, and yet you have turned away all the prominent men who have asked for your hand,” Eleanor proclaimed from the doorway.

  Kate knew she should keep walking. In such a mood, her mother could hear nothing. But the word bastards. If Marie and Phillip learned she spoke of them that way . . . “I have asked you not to call them that, Mother,” Kate threw back over her shoulder.

  “It is only the truth.”

  Kate paused, turned to shake her head at the gray-robed, white-wimpled taunter in the doorway. “You do not say that of your grandchild Petra, though it is equally true of her.”

  Eleanor took a step across the threshold. “If you care for the three of them as you claim, you have a duty to remarry. Yet look at you, bone buttons instead of silver, your hair untidy, skimping on the cloth in your skirts—you are revealing your penurious situation, frightening off future suitors.”

  “A duty to remarry?” Kate stepped closer so that all the neighborhood might not hear. “Were you not listening when I explained Simon’s will? I lose the business if I remarry.”

  “You will not need it.”

  “No? After all my unpleasant discoveries about Simon, I trust no man.”

  “You have a duty to those children—”

  “As did you to me. Yet you betrothed me to Simon Neville without a care as to his true circumstances. Or did you know of his profligate ways? Perhaps you knew he had a mistress with children in Calais. But you were so eager to be rid of me that you handed me over to the first man who showed an interest.”

  “The marriage was to protect you.”

  “Protect me? I was barely fifteen, Mother. My parents should have protected me. I was grieving for my twin brother. And my brother Roland. Did you ever stop to think of my feelings?”

  “How can you say such things to me?” Eleanor raised a hand to slap Kate.

  Kate blocked her, turned, and hurried away through the hedgerow gate, cursing herself for again being caught up in the fray.

  Of course Kate was aware of her delicate situation. It kept her awake at night, it curdled her food. When Simon had died over two years earlier she discovered that he had left enormous debts and a will that left her in control of his business only until such time as she remarried, when it would go to his brother, Lionel. And then, almost a year to the day of Simon’s death, Lionel appeared on her doorstep with the unpleasant surprise of the recently orphaned Marie and Phillip. Swallowing her pride and hurt, Kate had taken them in, determined to love and care for them as her own.

  For more than a year she had worked hard to care for her wards while using all her wits to accrue wealth at a speed sufficient to appease her creditors with frequent payments, while quietly setting enough aside that she would someday have the means to choose whether or not to marry, according to her own desire. Once she had set aside sufficient funds in her own name, she would sell off the assets of Simon’s business, pay the remainder of the debts, and hand Lionel his brother’s business, with pleasure.

  And then, in late winter last, a tragedy of her mother’s making brought Petra, the daughter of Kate’s eldest brother, into the household. The child had been orphaned by Eleanor’s careless rekindling of an old feud that had earlier cost the lives of two of her sons. That winter her last son died as well as three others, strangers, and, if it had not been for Petra’s help, Kate’s ward Phillip would have been murdered as well.

  Her niece was a dear child for whom the city was even more alien than it had been for Kate six years earlier. But however much Kate welcomed her, Petra’s arrival upset the fragile balance of the household; now Marie and Phillip needed to be reassured that with her niece’s arrival, a blood relative, they were no less cherished than before. Indeed, Marie’s rivalry with Petra had hastened her brother’s decision to lodge in the home of Hugh Grantham, a master mason at the minster stoneyard under whom he was apprenticed. Though Phillip was realizing his dream with the apprenticeship, Kate worried that he had felt pushed out betimes.

  On the heels of the tragedy, Eleanor Clifford herself arrived unexpectedly in York, announcing that she meant to establish a Martha House in the city with three beguines who accompanied her from Strasbourg. Newly widowed, for a second time, Eleanor gave no explanation for her hasty departure from Strasbourg on the death of Ulrich Smit. To say that Kate did not welcome Eleanor’s return was an understatement.

  And now her mother had moved into a house just across the hedgerow.

  As Kate shut the gate behind her, her kitchen door opened and her Irish wolfhounds rushed out to greet her. Lille butted Kate’s hand, wanting her ears rubbed. Ghent leaned his warm bulk against Kate, lifting his head so she might scratch h
is throat. Here she was welcome, loved, treasured.

  “Did they enjoy the tarts?” Her cook, Berend, had followed the hounds from the kitchen, his powerful, battle-scarred bulk a reassuring presence.

  Kate gave each hound one more round before she straightened. “The sisters blessed you for them, but Mother took the offering as an opportunity to lecture me on my lack of piety.”

  Berend chuckled. “A riddle. How is a fruit tart like a penance? I should hope it would be received as a blessing.”

  “You are a blessing, Berend. And no doubt Mother is now happily partaking of one of your berry tarts with the beguines. Who can resist them?”

  “Perhaps. But I doubt she is any merrier than you are,” he said.

  “She is troubled, I know. And that is the cause of this vexing behavior. But why she will not confide in me—why she instead attacks me, despite choosing to live so close . . .”

  “God tests you.”

  Kate heard the smile in Berend’s voice. He was her cook, and so much more. Confidant and confessor, Berend was the person she most trusted. He was bemused by the contradiction in her sense of responsibility for her mother’s welfare despite their contentious relationship.

  “I tell myself she chose the only house that was offered to her. It is as simple as that,” Kate said.

  The tenant of the house, Agnes Dell, a recent widow, had offered to transfer her lease to Eleanor if she would accept her as a sister, or beguine. It was a house of modest size, smaller than Kate’s. With Eleanor’s maidservant and Agnes’s maidservant Nan, who now assisted the four sisters, it was crowded, though not intolerably so. Many large families lived in less space. It had not been an unreasonable choice.

  “She will come round,” said Berend.

  “By then she may have difficulty picking over the rubble of my future.” Kate told him about her mother’s threat to inform the children she ran a discreet brothel.