Free The Novice’s Tale by Margaret Frazer

herself dragged helplessly in to where she least wanted to be.
     
    They must have brought Lady Ermentrude into the room with some thought of putting her to bed. Her shoes and stockings, hat and veil were off, her gown open at the throat. But they had gotten no further before the fit came on her. She was on the bed, her back against the high wooden headboard. Her face was purple with her mad effort and lack of breath as she flailed with arms and legs at anyone trying to come near her. And this close to her there were words caught in among the screaming, words pulled out of shape and torn to pieces, but it seemed she was ranting of fire and burning and her soul.
     
    Dame Frevisse to one side of the bed and one of her ladies-in-waiting to the other were stretched forward in a desperate attempt to take and control her arms, but they had no chance against a strength gone past sanity. Their occasional graspings seemed only to send her into a worse frenzy. She wrenched a hand free of Frevisse’s grasp to point wildly across the room at nothing.
     
    “T’ave coooom! Ear’s flaaaame!” she howled. Her eyes distended, her head thrown back to show the cords of her throat, she gagged for air, her wail raw with despair. She drew a fragment of breath and suddenly the words were clear: “God help! Save me!”
     
    Frevisse, aware of someone coming into the room, looked up, and her eye was then caught by the large carved crucifix on the wall. She broke away from Lady Ermentrude to grab it down. The crucifix was painted in raw colors, heavy in her hands. She went back to the bed to thrust it before Lady Ermentrude’s distended eyes. “My lady, look here!”
     
    Lady Ermentrude, mouth gaping in a desperate attempt to both scream and draw breath for another scream, choked. Her unfocused eyes glimpsed the crucifix, recognized it, and her hands fumbled out for it, grasped it, and dragged it to herself. Awkwardly, desperately, she pressed it to her lips, kissing it. It slid sideways onto her cheek, but she went on clinging to it as air whistled through her nostrils in a long-delayed need to simply breathe.
     
    In the trembling silence, with everyone around her frozen, waiting, Lady Ermentrude rolled her eyes sideways to Frevisse. Her jaw worked. In a barking whisper, she forced out, “Hell… fire… stop… it.”
     
    “It’s stopped,” Frevisse said. “We’ve stopped it.” She kept her voice low, pitched for reassurance, but Lady Ermentrude’s eyes remained frantic, demanding. Without changing tone, Frevisse said, “Someone tell Dame Claire to hurry. And find Father Henry.”
     
    Neither Lady Ermentrude’s lady-in-waiting nor the maid, cringed back against the wall beside the bed, moved, probably in fear of setting off the screaming again. Frevisse understood the fear; she was standing quite still herself. But she risked looking away, toward Sir John and Lady Isobel. They had been trying to help bring Lady Ermentrude to bed when the frenzy started. Now they were standing against the far wall, Lady Isobel pressed close to her husband, held in the protective circle of his arms though his own face was strained with shock.
     
    Beyond them, in the doorway, were Martha Hayward—of course, Frevisse thought—and Thomasine. Neither of them had had sense enough to close the door; staring faces crowded behind them, no one looking as if they had the wit to help.
     
    “Martha,” she said, still careful of her tone. “I need Dame Claire and Father Henry. Go now.”
     
    “Demons,” Thomasine interrupted in a loud whisper. “She was seeing demons.”
     
    “She wasn’t,” Frevisse said firmly, her attention quickly back to Lady Ermentrude, who was still clinging to the crucifix, her eyes now tightly shut.
     
    “Demons,” Thomasine repeated and came nearer, still clutching the bowl, her pale face narrow and intent in the frame of her white veil. “She’s evil and demons have come for her soul.”
     
    Lady Ermentrude