The Poison Maiden

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‘What will you have to say for yourself when the wind no longer stirs your hair? When your gullet is dry and you can utter no word, your bloodless face is white and your eyes are set in their gloomy sockets? When your mouth cannot be moistened and inside it your tongue stiffens against the roof of your mouth? When blood no longer courses in your veins? When your neck cannot bend or your arms embrace? When your foot cannot take a step? What does that putrid dead body reply now? Let him say what vain glory has to offer him now. .’

I listened to Prior Stephen’s funeral homily on the man I had killed as I nestled in the shadow of the great rood screen in the cavernous nave of Grey Friars, the Franciscan house that lies between Stinking Lane near the Shambles to the south and the Priory of St Bartholomew to the north. I, Mathilde de Clairebon, also known as Mathilde of Westminster, in the Year of Our Lord 1360, the thirty-third year of the reign of Edward III, am still killing to protect myself. I have no choice. I am old and wasted, well past my sixtieth summer. My courses have long dried. My blood is sluggish, my bones ache, my muscles protest, but that is only the flower; the stem is still as strong and tenacious as ever, as is the root that defines me. The great Aquinas, quoting Aristotle, claims that ‘being’ is only being when it relates. Our relationships, he argues, define us, bring us into being and, in so many cases, make us murderers or the victims of murder. I am no different. I, Mathilde, formerly handmaid, henchwoman, counsellor, physician and even lover of Isabella, once Queen of England. Now I’m a relic, a survivor. Two years after my mistress died, I shelter amongst these cold grey stones.

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