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VIII. Fontevraud, 1207



The ale from Sir Richard must have been very strong, and they consumed a goodly amount of it. Thomas remembered only crawling beneath a lean-to in order to pass out. By then the conversation with the knight had stirred up his memories of Janet again in ways he did not want, but not wanting to think of these things meant only that he could not keep from thinking about them. He drifted, perhaps into slumber, but soon enough into the depths of memory. . . .


Abbess Gilles found Thomas’s swift return from Ercildoun quite amazing. He should have been weeks longer. That said, he was right to have come back so soon, because his wife was losing ground rapidly and nothing to be done about it.

Morven and the abbess had moved Janet to the abbey’s infirmary. The nuns grew poppies in the garden, an extract of which allowed Janet to sleep comfortably, hopefully to regain her strength. But each time she woke from these long induced naps it seemed as if she had lost a little more energy, not gained. Upon waking to discover Thomas at her side, however, she rallied. Her brown eyes shone with joy, and for a few days she was up and about, denying that anything terrible plagued her, although her skin remained clammy to the touch and her brow feverish. She wished to return home. She remained so insistent that the abbess advised Thomas to take her to Chinon. “She will not last a week regardless of where she is situated. Better with you, her good husband, than in our infirmary surrounded by ailing lepers.” She added, “I’m sending Sister Marguerite with you. Ministering to the sick is one of her duties.” At least this meant the three of them would be together, however long she endured.

Death was in the air, it seemed. News had arrived at Chinon that King Henry’s son, Geoffrey, had been trampled by a horse in Paris. He would normally have been interred at Fontevraud, but his father was quite content to have his most adversarial son buried at Notre Dame cathedral instead.

After two days, Janet’s newfound energy failed her. She was at her loom. She abruptly became confused as to where to pass the shuttle. She met his gaze with alarm, then simply fell forward. He was there to catch her. He lifted her up and carried her to bed. Janet weighed hardly more than a sparrow.

Father and daughter maintained a vigil from then on, one of them always awake with her. Mostly they just watched her sleep and listened to the crackle of her breathing. She didn’t need the poppy tincture now to sleep. At one point, he stood in the shadows and beheld Morven in a pool of candlelight at her mother’s side, and it was for a moment like seeing Janet twice.

When the change came, it was slight, a shift in the rhythm of her breath. Both of them knelt beside her, speaking to her as she slept. Her breaths became softer and softer until, finally, they ceased.

He clutched Morven to him as he wept. She received him stiffly and shed no tears.

Morven left to inform her abbess. Gilles suggested they bury Janet in one of the cemeteries near the Chapterhouse, beside but distinct from the cemetery of nuns. She could be placed there, where others of the small town surrounding the abbey had also been laid to rest.


Thomas was bathing Janet’s body when his daughter quietly returned. More than a few minutes passed before he realized she was there; when he did notice her, the combined look of confusion and shock on her face stopped him. He set the sponge down in the bowl of water and drew a sheet to cover Janet. He’d been so intent upon cleansing Janet’s body that he had neglected to glamour himself into Tàm the Old Mason, Tàm her father, Tàm who wasn’t yet thirty.

Head bowed, he said nothing, and waited for her to speak.

“What are you?” she asked.

“Your father,” he replied. “Altered by my time with the—”

“Demons.”

“Worse than any demons, Morven. Calculating and sly, murderous things.”

“Did Mother—”

“She knew, yes. But I kept it hidden mostly, from her, from everyone. Not because it’s something evil. I did not want to remind her of what had happened, how we’d been separated for near twenty years—her years—but only a handful of months for me before I managed to escape. Time in Ailfion, it doesn’t run the same as here.”

“Ailfion?”

“It has many names.” He rattled off the ones Alderman Stroud had given it: Elfhaven. Álfheim. Ildathach. Then he added, “One of the elves suggested its true name was Yvagddu.”

She stared at him as if she’d just discovered he was mad. “Elves. You escaped from elves?”

“Yes, from elves.” He glanced down at Janet. “I didn’t mean to keep it from you. I was keeping so much from her so that we could go on being together. Otherwise, my appearance would have been a constant reminder of my difference, the distance dividing us. That would have been too cruel. And people would have noticed, wondered, whispered.” He shuffled where he stood, and in an instant he was his old self with gray hair and hollowed cheeks. “I’m sorry I forgot.”

Morven asked him to remove the glamour again.

Reluctantly, he did so, head bowed.

She came closer. He watched her without turning his head. “But you are younger than I am,” she said. “Twenty years younger at least.”

“I . . .” He considered what to tell her, how to tell her. “The Yvag—that’s what the elves call themselves—they have a pond, the changeling pool, where they immerse human babies stolen from our world, like my sister’s child. Changelings. Its waters turn those babes elven.”

“What has that to do with this?”

“In my escape I hid from them in that pool. I knew not its magical properties, nor had any idea that the waters were changing me, too. I returned home believing our differences—your mother’s and mine—were all down to the inequities of time here and in their world. As your mother aged, I began to see it was more than that. She grew older while I . . . ”

“You were hiding this from yourself, not from my mother.”

Her accusation stung. “You’re right, of course. I didn’t want to face what happened to me, what I’ve become.”

“And what is that, Father?” She seemed impatient with him.

“Forever a new cousin, forever an arriving stranger.” He stared into her eyes. “What they took from me was time itself. Very soon now everybody I’ve ever loved will be gone from this world. I lost you, Morven, years ago. You and she were stolen from me. It was how it had to be if you were to go on living. The elves would have murdered you both. And now I can’t have you back, I can only hold onto you going forward for however long that lasts.”

“You’re right, Father. You lost me so long ago, your reasons no longer matter. You made the choice. I was left behind. No one reclaimed me from the Church. Now all we have is the time ahead. There is no time before.”

After a minute, he cleared his throat. “I would remain here with you, if you’ll let me stay.”

She nodded and stated very matter-of-factly, “Abbess Gilles wanted me to assure you that you can be buried beside Mother.”

A smile quivered on his lips. “Your abbess will likely be disappointed.”


Thomas remained at Chinon for eight more years, an old man attended to occasionally by Sister Marguerite. King Henry was dead and entombed at Fontevraud; Queen Eleanor was in residence at the chateau. Tàm the Mason was too old to work; he lived reclusively in his cottage. The money from the Lusks ceased arriving, which he suspected meant that Filib had finally succumbed to old age. But Thomas had saved enough of it that he could still pay for the few things he needed to live. Morven was now supervised by a new abbess, Mathilde of Flanders. Caring for elders in the villages of Fontevraud and Chinon allowed Morven to visit him. She brought him vegetables and herbs from the abbey gardens, but never stayed long.

Abbess Mathilde died in her turn and was succeeded by a further Abbess Mathilde, this one from Bohemia. Almost immediately upon arrival, she selected a group of nuns to populate the Priory of Wariville, a part of the Order of Fontevraud north of Paris. Because of her work on behalf of the needy all the way to Chinon, Abbess Mathilde named Sister Marguerite to be prioress.

Morven broke the news to her father. “At least you can shed your glamour awhile,” she said. “No one in Wariville will know you.”

By then he had gone about so long looking ancient, gray-haired, and gray-bearded that he could hardly recall what he looked like otherwise. Morven, at fifty-one, was also gray-haired, like her mother.

He had to sell his cottage, the last place that anchored him to Janet’s memory or anything on Earth. Could he do this and begin again? He wasn’t sure. There seemed no point to it all. He wasn’t fighting the elven, though he knew they wouldn’t have given up taking innocent souls as sacrifices; he wasn’t at his wife’s side—in fact in his isolation he felt that she was already blurring, fading like a ghost in sunlight. He thought he heard her voice in Morven but could no longer be sure. Janet had been the one who spoke French well. He still stumbled through it, as he stumbled through reading and writing. She had taught him a great deal. He’d relied on her for so much.

It was difficult interacting with people now. He was unused to it. He doubted he would ever get used to it again. Nevertheless, in short order he sold the cottage and purchased a cart, loading what little he would take. That included Janet’s loom, from which hung the half-finished tapestry she had been working on when she died. Morven had, once or twice, offered to finish it, for the pattern was clear, but he didn’t want it finished, as though if he left it like that, Janet might somehow return, drawn perhaps to its incompleteness. The loom was the largest thing he owned. He left behind most of the furniture, save for one trestle table and a stool, a chest with his winter cloak and boots in it along with Janet’s few possessions, her shawls and hangings, and of course his and Waldroup’s bows.

He headed north ahead of the Fontevraud nuns. He hoped the town of Wariville or one of the lords of Clermont would be able to offer him some employment.

He was fortunate that Count Raoul of Clermont, prior to departing upon a crusade alongside Phillipe Auguste, had made arrangements to see that the priory was supplied with wood for their fires. Thomas kept silent rather than ask about the crusade, lest they think him an idiot. The count’s foresters were shy a man, and the young, muscular Tallis Maçon was exactly what they were looking for. Many of the men were housed together on the count’s estate. Thomas, when asked about himself, told the others he had lived many years in Chinon near the Abbey of Our Lady of Fontevraud. It was all that he knew of France any longer, and he dared not invent some other story, certain that one of the other men would be able to see through any fabrication. Yes, he told them, he knew the priory for whom they were cutting the wood was of the Order of Fontevraud, and nearly added that his daughter was to be the new prioress before he stopped himself, realizing how absurd his claim would seem. Instead, he rattled on nervously at length about working for King Henry on his chateau. One of the men asked how old he was. Fortunately, the others then waxed on about what life as a king must be, and he clamped down on his desire to blend in. No one could know his stories. There was no one who could ever know the truth of him, and none who would have believed.

When Morven and the other nuns arrived in October, he was delivering cut wood for their fires and hearths. She saw him, but said nothing. Her duties as prioress kept her busy, responsibilities further limiting her freedom to visit him. The count never returned. Word of his death arrived borne by Gerard de Saint-Pierre, a baron who had accompanied him. The man stood before them all and announced the death of their count during the siege of Acre, proclaiming it the death of a noble man blessed by God. It had been a long time since Thomas had heard such speeches, most of them on battlefields in the aftermath of some engagement or other where lords or knights, never infantry or bowmen, had fallen. This proved no different.

It was as he watched the baron afterward that he began to suspect something was not quite right about him. In particular, it was the way the man leered after Count Raoul’s widow and daughter—a look with which Thomas had become too familiar. His own father had worn it, and the one who played at being his cousin from Alwich. It was the look of an Yvag steeped in lust within the human shell they inhabited.

“Of him be wary,” he warned Morven. “Your flock, too, else he’s likely to cull a teind from the priory, but not until he’s used her as he likes.”

The baron married the widow, and Thomas found himself released from the count’s service. He moved his belongings to an abandoned hovel nearer the priory and glamoured himself once more into an elderly man, albeit one who was still sturdy enough to handle himself. Tallis Maçon was gone, never to be seen again.

Morven was over sixty herself now, and arthritic. He would see her shuffling through her journey from priory to ville to minister to the sick and needy, but did not intrude upon her solitude.

Then one morning in May of the year 1207, she did not appear at all. He stood in the doorway for a time, watching. None of the other sisters were about that morning, either.

Finally, he walked to the high-walled priory himself. It was immediately clear that something had occurred. The sisters were all gathered in the yard. One of them began to wail. Thomas became afraid to move.

A nun came rushing up to shoo him away. He asked what had happened. “Oh, so awful. The abbess of Fontevraud has died—”

“Oh, I see.” Morven had probably been called home—

“No, indeed you do not,” said the nun. “We brought this terrible news to Sister Marguerite before matins only to find that she had died in her sleep this very night as well.” Another nun cried out in anguish behind her. Thomas stumbled back against the stone wall. His chest felt as if it was splitting down the middle. Not Morven, not her, too. Had there been signs? Of course there must, there had. Her body had been giving out for such a long time. He’d watched, unable to do anything else. She didn’t want his help, didn’t want him. And now he couldn’t even ask to see her, could he? Would these sisters allow him in?

“Impossible,” the sister answered his request.

“But she was my . . . my child.”

The nun looked at him in some mistrust, and quietly suggested he go home. When he tried to protest, she said, “Sister Marguerite, I’ll have you know . . . Oh, my dear God preserve us!” She clutched the cross at her breast. “Devil!”

It took him a moment to understand that in his grief, he’d shed his glamour right in front of the nun.

He backed away, out of the open gate. Turned and fled, his head down, tears streaming from his eyes. He could not bid his daughter farewell, could not kneel and pray beside her body. Could not remain here any longer. Morven, the last attachment he had to anyone or any place, was gone. All of them gone and him a stranger in everybody else’s world. He would never be buried beside Janet.


Thomas acquired a horse to pull his cart, drove it to Boulogne in Flanders, and there bought passage across the channel to Sussex. In his anguish, his madness, he intended to go home, to be Thomas Lindsay Rimor again. But the nearer he got, the more oppressive became his terror at arriving where no one would know him or acknowledge him as anything other than Thomas Learmonth, Thomas the Rhymer, the True Thomas of make-believe.

He was dead thrice over at least and cursed to remain on Earth until God took him.

Near Doncaster, he abruptly turned away from his journey northward and headed across Sherwood Forest and into the depths of Barnsdale Wood, where he intended to lose himself completely and forever. “Forever” had lasted forty-five years.


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