However refined his speech and manner, this was what he’d done most of his life, Tess felt certain. Reg, too, was watching, eyes narrowed, likely having similar thoughts and new doubts about the Duke of Barrabou. Tess thanked Heaven that it would all be over tonight.
They feasted on roast hare, and Tess saw to it that Reg and Rowan finished the bottle of pisky (she took none herself; she needed her wits tonight). Getting them falling-down drunk was hard; they had a mighty capacity and years of practice. Tess, wishing she’d sprung for two bottles, tried to keep them sweet-tempered by telling Dozerius stories about fish the size of islands, rhinoceroses and camelopards, beautiful and compliant women. Rowan went from rapt to merry to benevolently snoozy, but Reg’s scowl deepened. He seemed utterly unimpaired.
When the spirits and stories had run out and the fire was down to embers, they tied Griss to a tree as usual. Rowan settled beside him and began snoring. Reg, though, stalked over to Tess and pressed the tip of his knife to her throat. She went still as a hare.
“Dunno what you’re playing at.” His voice raised the hairs on her neck. “If I were plying my comrades with booze and tales, it’d mean something was up. I warn you, lad: I sleep with one eye open. If you so much as get up to piss in the night, I will gut you. Clear?”
Tess dared no more than nod in answer. He’d sleep more soundly than he claimed—half a bottle of pisky wasn’t nothing, even to him—but she’d have to wait, listen, and be sure. Pathka had agreed to burn through the rope so she wouldn’t have to lean across Reg and Rowan to untie Griss. It was the old man who worried her. He’d be disoriented when she freed him; he might cry out in fear. Stuffing a rag in his mouth would frighten him all the more.
She’d have to play it by ear.
Around midnight she awoke to rain spattering her face, fat drops, hard as pebbles. The leafy canopy had blocked lighter rain, but now it was getting through; thunder rumbled above the urgent hiss of the rain-shower. Rowan and Reg cried out inarticulately, swatting at the air, unsure where they were or how they’d got here.
Then the storm got serious.
The wind whipped branches around. Clumps of wet leaves slapped Tess’s face and body, while above her tree limbs groaned and cracked ominously. Lightning struck a tree at the top of the ridge, and then another, which briefly caught fire. Close thunderclaps left her ears ringing.
Tess rushed to Griss’s tree. Reg and Rowan had fled into the darkness after the second lightning strike, Heaven knew where.
Pathka had seized the opportunity to start burning the ropes.
“Come on,” Tess cried above the howling wind, tugging Griss’s hand. “Can you walk?”
Lightning illuminated his horrified face. He flailed about, striking the side of Tess’s head. She clenched her teeth and grabbed him; it was like wrestling an otter, wet and slippery, surprisingly strong, and determined to wriggle free. She hefted him over her shoulders, the way a farmer carries a calf. He bucked at first, but went limp as she staggered to her feet.
Rain lashed her body, rolled down her face in torrents, down her jerkin, down her boots. She nearly tripped over a root that turned out to be Pathka, trying to herd her in the right direction. Thunder and lightning had confused everything; downhill looked the same on both sides of the ridge.
She followed Pathka’s tongue-flame like a will-o’-the-wisp, through stands of trees, around boulders, as fast as she could go without falling. She thought she heard Reg and Rowan, far away, screaming. She hoped they’d run down the wrong side of the ridge, gotten separated, or maybe fallen off a cliff.
At the bottom of the hill spread a field of cabbages, as the innkeeper had described. Tess’s feet churned mud as she ran, black clods flying. She kicked cabbages right off their stems but managed not to slide and fall. The thunder and lightning moved farther up the ridge; she heard Griss shouting, “Watch the sky, Annie!”
The promised village, Muddle-on-the-Fussy, came into view whenever it lightened, bulky thatched cottages, and there, by the river, a wide complex with a Saint at the apex of the roof. Tess reached the courtyard gate, set Griss on the stoop, and knocked with everything she had, hoping they could hear her over the storm.
“I’ll wait here,” said Pathka from a nearby yew bush. “They won’t want me inside.”
Before Tess could argue, the gate opened and out came a novice, her yellow habit eerie in the torchlight. “Mercy on a wet night,” she said, holding the door for Tess and Griss, not even asking their business. No one knocked on a night like this unless it was an emergency.
A quarter of an hour later, they were in the hospice hall, a long room with eight beds, three occupied. Griss, bundled in quilts before the hearth, shivered and whimpered as a second novice spooned soup into his mouth. The young ones had night duty, apparently. The one who’d let them in questioned Tess about Griss’s condition and origins; Tess felt chagrined at how little she knew. “He’s no family of mine; he might be from Trowebridge. I don’t know how old he is. His name may or may not actually be Griss,” she said. And she told them, more than once, “There are two men after him. You mustn’t let them take him. They tie him up at night, and I think they’re going to kill him when he turns out not to be rich.”
“You don’t believe he’s rich?” said a sharp, surprisingly familiar voice from across the infirmary. Tess turned to see a stout, older nun passing between the rows of beds. The room was nearly dark, but the woman’s shape and bearing confirmed Tess’s recognition: this was Mother Philomela, whom she’d seen with her father in Trowebridge.
There are moments that bring into question one’s free will, and whether the world doesn’t have some sentience behind it, trying to send a message. This was such a moment for Tess.
They’d never met face-to-face, and Tess looked very different now, but still she clambered to her feet, extended her hand, and said, “I’m Jacomo,” as if she might preempt the possibility of recognition by giving the woman an assumed name.
The old Mother Superior ignored Tess, approached Griss, and felt his forehead. “Are you wealthy, venerable Father? Will you be leaving us an endowment?”
“I’ve nothing,” he said hoarsely. “Nothing is worth having since I killed Annie.”
He told a garbled version of his story. It was his fault Annie was dead; he’d sent her to her doom. He’d wanted to teach Johnny a lesson, see, but no matter how much you wanted to do right in this world, the world would find a way to crush you.
Mother Philomela neither confirmed nor refuted this hypothesis, but smoothed his hair out of his eyes, took his pulse, listened to his lungs—which she pronounced very bad—and instructed the novices to give him as much soup as he would eat.
Tess plucked at the nun’s yellow sleeve as she walked past. “Two ruffians, Reg and Rowan, want to take him away, but don’t let them. He doesn’t deserve that fate.”
“I agree he does not,” said the nun sternly. “It’s curious, though: he’s indisputably one of Heaven’s innocents, and yet so bursting with guilt that he confesses his sins to every passerby.”
Griss looked as innocent as an openmouthed chick, awaiting the next spoonful of soup.
Mother Philomela went to an occupied bed to check the bedpan. “Tell me something, boy,” she called over her shoulder to Tess, who hadn’t followed her. “He’s not your father or grandfather, but you risked your safety to bring him here on such a night, with dangerous men pursuing. What drove you to help? Guilt? Pity? Something else?”
Tess considered, averting her eyes from the messy business Mother Philomela was now engaged in, cleaning up her elderly patient. “He reminds me of my grandmother,” offered Tess.