The Passion of Dolssa

  Nothing could ruffle Senhor Hugo. “I was there when she was sentenced in Tolosa. Oc.”

  “And she escaped?”

  He nodded. “She did.”

  No credit to you, thought Lop. A low laugh rumbled in his throat. “Some trick that must have been,” he said, “for such an old crone to slip through the Bishop of Tolosa’s chains.”

  Senhor Hugo watched Lop. “Heretics,” he said slowly, “can be cunning.”

  “Or have cunning friends,” added Lop.

  The knight’s eyebrows rose. “That is also true.” He stood and placed a coin upon the table. “For your good help,” he said. “I’ll see you again.” He left before Lop could rise to show him to the door.

  BOTILLE

  e have to hide you.”

  My sisters and I crowded into Dolssa’s bedroom. Her face was pale as she listened to all that had happened in the night and in the morning at mass.

  “There is only one place we know of,” I said, “where searchers ought not to find you, and that’s down in Plazensa’s ale cellar.”

  Dolssa thought a while. “If they think me dead,” she asked, “will they still search?”

  Sazia answered in low tones. “They will search for any shred of you,” she said. “Any clue as to whom you influenced, what you did, what you left behind.”

  “Until Lucien de Saint-Honore leaves town,” I said, “you are not safe.”

  She wrung her hands. “Let me leave you!” she begged. “Let me carry my danger away from this place.”

  I knelt down and took her hands in mine.

  “Dolssa, that time is past,” I said. “We will face this together.”

  A tear ran down her cheek.

  I spoke as gently as I could. “What does your beloved tell you?”

  She looked up at me. “My mother asked me the same question the night she died.”

  “And what did you say?” asked Plazensa.

  Dolssa shook her head. “I had no answer.” She rose slowly to her feet. “I will go to the cellar. May . . . may I have a candle?”

  Plazi looked sad. “Only if you want to watch the rats. Better not to, galineta. Someone could glimpse the light or smell the smoke. And it’s not the cellar itself. It’s a long box within the cellar where jugs are stored, built into the foundation, so it’s not often seen. Searchers could well pass over you and not know to look.”

  Dolssa looked green. “Not a cellar, but a coffin.”

  We nodded. We felt awful.

  She swallowed. “When must I go down? At night?”

  I turned to Sazia. “What do you think, little srre? When will danger come?”

  Sazia shook her head mournfully. “Exactly when is unknown to me, but that it’s coming soon is certain.”

  Dolssa rose unsteadily to her feet. “Take me to my grave, then,” she said. “Perhaps, with practice such as this, I’ll come to fear it less.”

  We settled her as best we could into the ale cellar. It was a gruesome place to hide a human soul. I felt miserable doing it, and even more so as I saw how humbly she submitted to it, though it terrified her. Her chamber was indeed a coffin, damp, with pale roots snaking through the walls.

  My sisters went back upstairs to prepare the next meal for the tavern, and to receive the inquisitor when he returned. I should have joined them, but I lingered a few moments before closing the lid over Dolssa’s sham tomb.

  We sat together on the slab lid of the box that would hide her from view, and together we watched the small light from my little candlestick. I wished I could do something to comfort her.

  “We’ll get through this,” I told her. “Your beloved would not have spared you this far for nothing.”

  Dolssa took so long in answering, I wondered if she’d heard me. Breathing, down in that musty gloom, took all the courage she had.

  “My beloved,” she finally said, “ought to be enough for me.”

  She was scolding herself. Poor girl.

  “What’s he like?” I asked her.

  She turned to look at me curiously. “Don’t you know?”

  I leaned against her shoulder. “Not as you do,” I said. “I’ve heard Dominus Bernard’s sermons, of course. He’s a shameless old rascal, but I know he loves Jhesus. That’s not what I mean. You say he’s your beloved. If you were any other girl with a beau, I would ask you, what’s he like?”

  “Oh.” I wondered if she were blushing.

  “I like Jhesus myself,” I said. “I wish he were one of the customers at the Three Pigeons.” I nudged Dolssa. “I suppose, thanks to you, he has been here a good deal lately.”

  I got a smile from her then, in spite of her melancholy.

  “Don’t lose heart, galineta,” I whispered. “You can trust us.”

  “Have you ever had a beau, Botille?”

  I laughed. “Not I! I’ve no time for that. Nobody courts the matchmaker.”

  Dolssa looked puzzled. “I was sure that you and that young ome . . . What was his name . . . Symo? From our journey . . . ?”

  I snorted with laughter. “You may be a holy woman, Dolssa de Stigata,” I told her, “but you’re no prophetess.”

  Plazensa opened the door to the cellar. I saw her feet and heard her voice. “Best come up now, Botille.”

  I wiped my eyes. “I’ll come see you again, as soon as it’s safe,” I told Dolssa.

  Dolssa kissed my cheek. “Do that, please,” she said. “But for your sake, I pray, not until then.”

  I settled her into the stone box and lowered the lid over her. Like a burial, indeed. Like rolling a stone over a garden tomb.

  God in heaven, I prayed, hide her here.

  I left Plazi and Sazia to their task of plucking two fat ducks, and returned to Dolssa’s room to remove from it any shred of evidence that a woman had stayed there.

  I couldn’t think. My hands shook at the simplest of tasks. Every rush of sea wind at the shutters, every sound of man or beast, left me jittery and sick. If I pitied myself my troubles, I needed only to think of poor Dolssa.

  We sent Mimi down to keep her company, and sometimes we heard the squeal of a dying rat from below. I wondered which was worse—hearing Mimi kill them, or knowing they were silently, sniffingly there.

  We prepared dinner as though there would be tavern guests, stuffing ducks with chopped onions and mushrooms, and roasting them in a hot oven.

  “No one’s coming tonight at all, it seems,” noted Plazensa.

  Sazia poked her nose in the oven. “More for us.”

  We actually looked up with anticipation when the door opened. But it was not a customer. It was Lop the bayle and Senhor Hugo the knight. Following at their heels was Friar Lucien de Saint-Honore.

  While my heart stopped beating, Plazensa, that wondrous femna, pulled a crackling brown duck from the oven and presented it to her treacherous audience. “Just in time, my good men,” she said. “Dinner for three?”

  “I’ll pour the wine,” offered Sazia, “unless ale is your pleasure tonight?”

  Friar Lucien de Saint-Honore seemed to have noticed Plazensa’s smile for the first time. I would have enjoyed watching him struggle, any other day but this. Senhor Guilhem seemed to have noticed it too.

  “We’re not here to dine,” the senhor said after an awkward pause. “Search the building.”

  Dieu, help us. Hide Dolssa.

  Lop led the charge, room by room through the tavern, with Senhor Guilhem at his side. He poked his staff under and behind all the furnishings and beds. He made no effort to spare our things. We sat and waited numbly in the tavern. When they entered Dolssa’s room, I held my breath, as if they might smell her lingering echo there.

  “For what do you search, my lords?” Plazensa asked the friar and the knight.

  Senhor Hugo was the only one who bothered to respond.

  “My report,” he said, “which I will take back to Bishop Raimon of Tolosa, requires me to reconstruct the heretic’s final days and weeks. There seems to be so
me confusion. Some believe”—he glanced at Senhor Guilhem—“that she made her home in the woods, while others”—here he stared straight at me—“say she made her home at this tavern.”

  “Did the heretic Dolssa make her home here at this tavern?” asked Lucien.

  Oh, sisters, what do we do?

  I dared not speak. Plazensa rose to the challenge.

  “Many travelers stay here at the Three Pigeons for a time,” said she. “It is the nature of a public house such as ours.”

  Friar Lucien de Saint-Honore pressed his hands together. “Did the heretic Dolssa make her home here at this tavern?”

  “We had a Dolssa here,” she said, “for a few nights. We took pity on her. She was poor and weak when she arrived.”

  “When did she arrive?”

  Plazensa turned to Sazia. “Do you remember, srre?”

  Sazia shrugged. “Some days ago. A week? I can’t be sure.”

  “How did she get here?”

  Sazia replied again. “She had neither mule nor horse.”

  “When did she last leave?”

  The hardest question of all. The woman who died needed to be Dolssa. She needed to have left here in order to be found in the woods last night.

  I held up two fingers. “Two?” I babbled. “Two nights, good-bye, femna.”

  Senhor Hugo de Miramont’s eyes narrowed, but he said nothing.

  Plazensa and Sazia glanced at me. They didn’t understand that I must play the half-wit. Not yet.

  Lop returned to the front room. Friar Lucien pointed up to the loft over the bar.

  Plazensa sighed. “Jobau,” she called upward, “lower your ladder.”

  A boar’s grunt was our answer.

  “Jobau,” Plazi persisted, “we have men here who think you might be a holy young maiden. Lower your ladder.”

  Jobau told us, and all within earshot, which precise anatomical parts of a jackass he thought we were.

  “Drop your ladder, you drunken swine, or you’ll get a flogging that’ll smack you sober,” called Lop.

  The ladder came down with a crash and a shower of insults. Lop climbed up, prodded the fetid heap of straw and blankets Jobau called a bed, and came back down. Jobau kept a steady torrent of abuses hurling down upon us for a good while after, and I’d never liked him better than I did just then.

  “Satisfied?” Plazensa’s eyes flashed.

  “That’s it, then,” said the knight, but the friar held up a hand.

  “Where do you store your wine and ale?” he asked my older sister.

  She blinked at him. “In the cellar.”

  “I thought so.”

  Plazi wordlessly rose and slid aside the wooden slab that guarded the opening to her precious stores. Lop held a candle and descended the ladder. He disappeared, leaving us with the knight and the friar watching us.

  Keeping our faces still. That was the hardest part.

  “Did you venerate Dolssa as a holy woman?” asked the friar.

  Plazensa didn’t flinch. “We knew there were those,” she said calmly, “who called her a healer. A medica. To us, she was just another boarder at the tavern.”

  She made me proud.

  A piercing scream met our ears. Lucien de Saint-Honore jumped. From down below, we heard Lop swear. Mimi shot up the ladder and into the tavern. She disappeared under the bar, hissing at us.

  I crouched down for a look at her. “Are you all right, cat-cat?” I asked in my infant voice.

  “Why would there be a cat in an empty cellar?” demanded the friar.

  “Tending to the rats, of course,” Plazensa said haughtily. “I run a clean establishment.”

  We waited longer. And longer still. Finally the bayle appeared from out of the ground. He had a nasty gash running alongside his nose, beading angry drops of blood.

  “If I ever see that cat of yours again,” he told us, “I’ll skin it alive.”

  “Where’s my candlestick?” Plazi asked him.

  The bayle headed for the door, with the knight and friar following. “Fetch it yourself,” he said. “Your devilish cat made me drop it.”

  I think I was still shaking that night, when Symo arrived, and we told him what had happened. He might as well know all, since he’d become our brother.

  He kicked off his boots and stretched his foul-smelling feet onto a nearby chair.

  “It was bound to happen,” he said. “You’re lucky they didn’t find her.”

  Mimi strutted by and arched her back—a Mimi who had just feasted on her own specially caught raw fish. Plazensa had told me to buy one from Litgier, but he refused payment.

  “We’ve fixed a room for you,” Sazia told Symo. “The room that used to be Dolssa’s.”

  “And just like that, I’m banished to bed?” He stretched his burly arms, cracking several joints in the process. “Where’s my dinner?”

  Taking advantage of Plazensa just isn’t done. My older srre bit her lip and sliced him a plate of duck and turnips with murderous efficiency.

  I couldn’t abide conversation, nor the stench of his feet. I left the bar and sat in a low chair by the wall, peering out at the darkness of the lagoon through the shutters.

  More low clouds had rolled in on sea breezes, blocking any gleam from the night sky.

  I couldn’t bear to think of Dolssa, alone in her darkness all night. She must be terrified. After the men had gone, I went downstairs and sat with her for a time, but we none of us dared stay long. Should anyone return, all must seem as usual.

  And would they return?

  Might the bayle recall that he had not, blessings upon our mangy cat, searched the wine cellar as well as possible? Where else could we take Dolssa where she could hide in peace? For she could not stay here forever. Nor could she ever return to the open in Bajas.

  We needed time to think, and a good space to hide.

  All was quiet in the tavern, save for the unpleasantly moist sounds of Symo’s chewing.

  I laid my head in Plazi’s lap. I needed to hide my melancholy from Symo’s unfeeling eyes. Plazi rolled her bracelets like cartwheels across my back.

  Symo rose to his feet. “Let’s move Dolssa somewhere safer.” We stared at him. He pulled on his boots. “Dinner, by the way,” he said, “was fairly good.”

  “Ignore him, Plazi,” I said. “He’s an ape, not a man.”

  The ape peered through the shutters. “It’s good and dark tonight,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  “Go where?”

  He pulled on his coat. “Get your holy femna,” he whispered, “and let’s be off.”

  I folded my arms across my chest. “Not until you speak sense.”

  “Just get her and come.” His voice was dangerously low. “Walls have ears.”

  Plazi and I retreated behind the bar to confer.

  “What should we do?” I whispered. “Should we trust him? Could this be a trap?”

  “Any hiding place is better than this one,” she said, “but I don’t like it.”

  The door shut. We looked up to see that Symo had gone. What? Plazi and I stared. What could it mean? Would he now betray us?

  I ran after him, out the door and out into the street. Only the faintest sound of footsteps told me he was heading uphill toward town. I flew after him until we collided in the dark. We both stumbled. Symo only barely caught me before we fell.

  He clutched me by my arms and forced me to look at him. He was nothing but darkness, and a gleam upon eyes and teeth.

  “Why did you leave?” I asked him.

  “Why did I come, is the question!”

  He was so angry. Symo was always angry, but this frightened me.

  “You came because you had to, you bungler,” I reminded him. “You invented the lie, and you’re seeing it through.”

  “Did I have to, Botille Flasucra? Did I?”

  Oh, Dieu. With my sisters and Dolssa in mortal peril, must I appease Symo’s temper, too? Heaven help me! But the brute demanded I face him.
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  “No,” I said.

  He relaxed his grip.

  “You didn’t have to. Now let me go.”

  He released my arms. I almost stumbled again, I was so off-balance, but I righted myself this time.

  “I didn’t have to come, but I came. And still you do not trust me. You stand there, asking your sister, ‘Should we trust him?’ ‘Is this a trap?’ Mon Dieu!”

  Could people hear us?

  The thought of Dolssa, huddled in the cellar, gave me strength. “I hardly know you,” I said. “I have Dolssa’s life to think of, and my sisters’. And now the friar’s here—”

  “Sssh.” He took my elbow and led me back down the hill toward the water.

  We stood alone on the dark beach. The air smelled of salt and sand and fish. As though all was peace, and harvesttime, and autumn nights. Not the end of everything.

  “‘Now the friar’s here’?” He prompted me to continue.

  “Oc.” I breathed in the wet sea air. “Now the friar’s here, and I have no answers. Only fears, and danger everywhere I turn.”

  Symo kicked at the wet sand. It splashed in clumps into la mar. “You hate me, don’t you?”

  “No.” My answer surprised me. Didn’t I? “No, I don’t hate you. I just don’t like you much.”

  He looked out over the water. He laughed a little, a dry, bitter sound. The first time I’d ever heard him laugh. Then he stood a while. There was only enough light to see the glint in his eyes, and the stirring of the wind through his dark hair.

  “You can hate me if you like, Botille,” he finally said, “but you’ve got no choice but to trust me. I should have thought you’d have the sense to see that.”

  I wanted to be far from here. Long gone, with my sisters and Dolssa close by me. Carry me away, I begged la mar, far away to safety. Then bring me back home to the Bajas I knew before.

  “Come on, then,” Symo said. “It’s dark enough. Let’s pack some food and lead your Dolssa to my wine cellar, out in the vineyards. She’ll be far more comfortable there.”

  LUCIEN DE SAINT-HONORE

  tate your name.”

  The scrawny lad across the table from Lucien mumbled something.

  “One more time, my son?”