The story goes thusly: Margaret of Antioch was a beautiful virgin who became a Christian in the days when persecuting Christians was fashionable among the Romans. For repelling the advances of a Roman official, she was arrested and put to many torments. During this time she was cast into a dungeon where the Devil himself came to persecute her. It is said he appeared as a dragon and finally, annoyed at her refusal to be terrified, he swallowed her whole. Then, either because she was holding a cross or made the sign of the cross, the dragon’s body split open and Margaret emerged unharmed.

Of course she was eventually martyred — by beheading in her case — and became a saint and – of all things — the patron of women in childbirth. (The way that, say, St. Laurence who was martyred on a grill over a fire is the patron saint of cooks; or St. Apollonia who was battered with stones and had her teeth knocked out is the patron saint of dentists.)

St. Margaret often appears in medieval art. If your see a graceful young woman portrayed with a dragon — sometimes emerging from his belly, sometimes leading him by a collar around his neck and a chain – that will probably be St. Margaret.

But I am not sharing her story out of piety. My real purpose is to share this picture:

To share this picture and show the sort of wicked humor medieval people were comfortable with in their religion and because every time I see it — the look on the dragon’s face, with his “victim’s” skirt still trailing out of the his mouth as she rises out of his stomach – I laugh out loud.

But more than just the humor, this illustrates another of the reasons that I can never stop researching. If I hadn’t studied saints as a way to better understand the medieval world view, I wouldn’t know St. Margaret of Antioch’s story, and this picture would be simply something to frown over in blank puzzlement at what it was all about.  The medieval world is not ours, and if we don’t know what we’re looking at in their context, much of the richness of the medieval world escapes us.  Pictures and other artwork were often layered with meanings no longer readily grasped but understood almost automatically in medieval times.

Decades ago I stood on the green before the west front of Wells Cathedral, able to do little more that say, “Wow.  Look at all those statues.”  A few years ago I stood there again and found myself automatically starting to “read” that west front like some giant book. After all my years of research, trying to learn to “think medievally”, the iconography that went with each statue and even where they were positioned on the cathedral’s front were layered with meanings for me. It was a vastly exciting experience, not least because I hadn’t come there intending to read it. Without thinking about it, I simply, automatically, started to, just as a medieval person would have.

Which I suppose explains a lot about my occasional disorientation with the 21^st century?

– Margaret

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Thomasine sat in the far corner of the window bench in Domina Edith’s parlor, her hands folded in her lap, her gaze on the sunlit, empty yard below. Sir Walter and Master Montfort and all their men were gone. Sir Walter had taken Lady Ermentrude’s household with him. There had been a great clatter, with shouting and creaking of wheels and clanking of harness, but now there was only the mid-morning silence with, distantly, the calling of workers in the fields. Everything in the past few days might not have happened, except for Martha Hayward’s coffin waiting in the church for someone to come and take it to her people. (more…)

Ela clutched at Frevisse’s sleeve. “When I saw what they were doing, I went the back way round, into the church! To Domina Edith. She said I was to come get you! And him!” She gestured wildly at Chaucer. “She said to hurry!”

“Damn him,” Chaucer said without passion, and went for the door.

Jerking her sleeve free from Ela’s fingers, Frevisse followed him, overtaking him at the foot of the stairs, in the cloister walk.  “Your men?” she asked. “Can they be of use?”

Chaucer shook his head. “There’d only be blood shed to no purpose. I’ll have to stop him with words or nothing.”

Breathless with fear as much as haste, Frevisse nodded, gathered up her skirts and ran. Chaucer followed her. (more…)

A friend once phoned me after reading – I won’t say which of my later books – to exclaim at me with apparent indignation, “You used your own disease in the story!”  What could I say but “Well, yes.  There’s no point in letting it go to waste.

It’s a quality authors have: everything that happens is grist for a story or a character.  More than once, I’ve been in the middle of some very real emotional crisis and become aware that in the back of my mind I’m thinking, “Remember how this feels.  You can use it in a story sometime.”  Shuffling between two nurses down a hospital hallway, still groggy from surgery and anesthetic, with tubes and drainage bottles hanging from me, what did I find myself thinking?  “Remember how this feels.  You can use it in a story sometime.”  And I did, giving someone a wound high in one shoulder because I had some idea of how much movement he might have afterward.  Pain to the point of screaming in the bone from cancer?  I used that experience in a story as a character’s motivation for a final desperate act.  Feeling the life go out of a well-loved cat as I held her…  Let’s just say grief doesn’t get in the way of using even the saddest things.

So have my experiences added depth to my books?  Oddly, I can’t honestly say one way or another.  Mostly I’ve seen the cancer as a great annoyance and distraction, getting in the way of my work.  But I suppose having the likelihood of one’s own death – not simply the fact that one is going to die but the knowledge of what shape that death is probably going to have – looking back at you day in and day out for fourteen years must certainly affect one’s relationship to the world and work.

What I’ve mostly found, though, is that I’ve been increasingly compassionate.  The more I hurt, the more I want other people not to hurt.  The more miserable I happen to be, the more I want other people to be as happy as they possibly can.  I suppose as this desire has grown in me over the years, it has informed my writing, because I find myself often highly indignant at the murderers in my books.  How dare they do something so vile, so selfish and dreadful?

Of course the fact that they are my murderers gives me occasional pause when I find myself angry at them.  After all, whose fault are they if not mine?  And even more so mine because in order to write them believably, I have to find something in myself that understands them, something in me out of which I can make them real.  I’ve had people say to me, “You’re really Frevisse, aren’t you?”  But the truth is that I’m all my characters.  (I add with a wicked grin:  Consider that the next time you encounter Alys.)

Now, thinking about it here, I have to consider that very possibly it is this need to look at the dark parts of me joined with my own bodily miseries that has roused and nourished in me this profound and aching desire for other people’s well-being.  Knowing what it is to hurt, I want other people not to hurt.  So when someone tells me that my books have given them comfort in a hard and hurtful time of their life, that gives me very great pleasure.

– Margaret

The woman servant who had come with Lady Isobel was seated on the bench outside their chamber. She made no move to stop Frevisse, but Frevisse paused, turned from her intent to talk with Sir John and Lady Isobel because so casual a chance to talk to the woman might not come again.

“God’s greeting to you,” she said lightly, and nodded her head toward the door. “Your lord is still hurting?”

The woman, obviously bored at sitting attendance here, brightened, glad to talk about troubles. “Indeed he is. Wearying my poor lady with his needs and her so good to him she’ll not deny him anything.” She lowered her voice and said, leaning forward as if to give a great confidence, “Fancy, a big, strong man like him letting some passing peddler muck with his tooth because he’s afraid to have it drawn!”

Frevisse was not interested in Sir John’s toothache, but asked without a qualm at her own duplicity, “Do you suppose it was all the quarreling brought it on this time?”

The woman shrugged. “It comes on anytime it feels like, but I’d not be surprised. All that shouting would make anyone’s jaw ache.”

“They argued all the night, I’ve heard. And Sir John told Lady Ermentrude to leave.”

“Now that’s not quite right but close enough. Sir John was the one who tried to quiet it between them, but hardly a word in edgewise they let him have. We could hear them right through the door of the solar most of that evening. But the next morning when Lady Ermentrude came to leave, hardly a word was passed among them, except Lady Isobel sent my lord out to say, nice as you please, that he hoped, it would all come right after she’d thought on it and wouldn’t she break her fast before she left.”

“And did she?” (more…)

They were at the door to the church, already remiss in talking in the cloister and unwilling to be any later for Vespers. They slipped into the church, made apologizing curtseys to Domina Edith, and took their places in the choir stalls.

But once in her place, chanting the verses so familiar they did not need her thoughts, Frevisse felt the creeping impact of Dame Claire’s assertion. If she were right, someone had tried to kill Lady Ermentrude not two times but three. And it had to have been someone not of the priory, for none of the priory people went with her to the Wykehams or met her on the way back. So who, then? Someone who went to Sir John’s and Lady Isobel’s with her – or met her there or on the road on the way back to St. Frideswide’s. Whoever it was, they came with her into the priory and stayed to try again – and again.

So some of the questions Frevisse had been asking were no longer ones that needed answering, but at the very least Thomasine could no longer be considered guilty. If Dame Claire were right, even Sir Walter and Master Montfort would have to accept that.  Except this was somewhat subtle reasoning, at least by Master Montfort’s standards. He would not take Dame Claire’s word for it. He would say she was lying to protect the nunnery and refuse to hear her. Or, being male, he would say a mere woman should not dare to offer some female notion as fact. Montfort, the fool, and Sir Walter, the arrogant fool, would never waste their valuable masculine time seeking the truth when they thought they already had it.

Suddenly Frevisse found the curses in today’s chanting of Psalm 109 very applicable. “Let his days be few; and let another take his office… Let his children be vagabonds… Let the extortioner consume all that he has; and let the stranger spoil his labor.” And she did not care if that curse fell on Master Montfort or on Sir Walter or on both of them, so well they both deserved it. (more…)

Far from being done with me, in the fourteen years since it first returned, the idiot cancer has come back and back and back. Ten times? Twelve? I’ve lost count. I’ve had a year off here, a year and a half there, once even two years whole years. But always it comes again. A tumor here. A tumor there. A dissolving bone. A distended gut. A battered brain.

For twenty years I’ve seen announcement after announcement of a “breakthrough discovery” for a new treatment, but so far as I’ve seen they are all last heard of as “being developed” and then disappear from view without a trace. For several years I had some luck with aromatase inhibitor drugs, but one and all they have given me life-trashing collateral damage. (I scorn the euphemism “side effects” with bitterness and distain. They aren’t like “side dishes” on a menu, a matter of choice. They’re part and parcel of the drug.)  Worst of this damage has been further, accumulating brain damage (seemingly deemed irrelevant by many oncologists, whose primary concern appears to be defeating the cancer, even if it means the treatment kills you before the cancer can) so that creative writing has become harder and harder.

And I’m afraid that apologies are due to all my readers and to many of you who’ve written to me through the years.  I know I’ve too often been behindhand in answering letters and emails, and far too often have never answered at all. Much has depended on where I was in the cycling of cancer through my life, and how much energy I had to spare from working on a story while dealing with the idiot disease, so that often everything but the story has gone to the wall, neglected. I offer this not as an excuse for failing you but as the reason, and I humbly apologize for all disappointments.

But one may well ask:  How does someone go on writing while dealing with a life-threatening, crippling disease?

The answer:  Very slowly, if that’s all that’s possible. And very stubbornly, certainly.

Little did my long-suffering family know that the infuriating stubbornness of my youth (all right – of my infancy, childhood, youth, middle age, and declining years) would turn out to be a Good Thing, because there have been many days when it’s been only bloody-minded stubbornness that’s dragged me to the computer to work.

Yet the cancer goes on, forcing me to accept it as a chronic disease – a thing I will now be fighting day in and day out for the rest of my life, never leaving me alone for long. That’s why I chose to make a kind of closure with Frevisse in The Apostate’s Tale. Someone once earned their master’s degree in English with a thesis paper on how Frevisse’s series makes a single, over-arching story told in multiple volumes. I love that idea, and willful, stubborn creature that I am, I chose to end Frevisse’s story where I wanted it to end.

Still, I’ve already written a novella for her, set after Apostate’s, and hope to write more. Let them be considered grace notes to the series itself. And even if there are no more stories – well, the ending to Joliffe’s last book – “Let the wagons roll!” – still pleases me with thought of that gallant, joyous going onward. Whether I am able to or not.

You see, the cancer is back, and it’s fighting me harder and longer than it’s ever done before. It’s the reason there’s been so little activity here since the end of 2011, when the last aromastase medication I attempted wiped out my energy and too much of my brain, all to no use. So far, through more than a year, nothing I’ve tried has curbed the nasty stuff and this summer I’ve been brought at last to what I’ve avoided for twelve years for fear of losing more of my brain – another bout with chemotherapy.

But maybe my stubbornness will see me through again. After all, Cancer happens. And Death. But so does Life.

– Margaret

Thunder grumbled. Dame Claire looked up as if it were reminding her of something. “I must go.”

“One other thing,” Frevisse said. “Sir John has the toothache. Have you anything to help it until he can find an honest surgeon to draw it?”

Dame Claire, always ready to talk of remedies, brightened, thought for a moment, and said, “My oil of cloves is nearly gone but I’ll have more from the Michaelmas fair. He’s surely welcome to what I have left. Has he been troubled long?”

“Long enough that he bought a cure from a passing mountebank some time of late. He described it as all froth and little help.”

Dame Claire made a ladylike snort of contempt. “I know of that false cure. All smoke and dwale and fancy words. Then they show you the gnawing worm they’ve driven from your tooth, but it’s come out of their sleeve, not your mouth.” Thunder muttered in the clouds. “If he’s hurting, this weather will make it hurt the worse. Tell him to send to me for the oil of cloves when he wants it. Where are you bound for?”

“The kitchen, I’m afraid.”

Dame Claire nodded her sympathy and went away.

Frevisse, drawn by duty and against her own inclination, went to see how matters were coming between Dame Alys and her unfortunate staff. Thomasine, as ordered, hung in her wake. There should have been no need of that within the cloister, but Frevisse felt uncomfortable unless she actually had the girl in sight.

The kitchen was crowded. Frevisse paused in the doorway, waiting to sort out what was happening, and saw that besides the priory’s usual lay workers, there were three of St. Frideswide’s nuns and a half dozen Fenner servants hurrying under Dame Alys’s full-voiced orders.

The dame was presently declaring that the next hand besides her own that touched the pastry would be ground up and added to the meat for the pies, but her usual fury lacked full conviction.

“Here now, here now!” She poked one of the servants in the ribs with her bent spoon but scarcely hard enough to make the woman wince. “Do that chicken neck again! There’s a fistful of meat on those bones! Pick it all off, pick it all! We’ve too many hungry mouths waiting to waste a morsel!” (more…)

Outside the doorway, they nearly collided with young Robert Fenner, who fell back, his eyes going to Thomasine. “I pray you pardon me, my ladies,” he said.

Apparently Thomasine was no longer afraid of this particular male. She murmured it was no matter and shifted a little, as if she would continue going toward the outer door. But Frevisse held her where she was and said to Robert, “Do you know if word is out about Lady Ermentrude’s death?”

“There’s talk beginning. Montfort is known for quick decisions, but hasn’t made one yet for this. People are starting to wonder, and once that starts it will spread like mold in damp bread.” He nodded at the door behind her. “Sir Walter has only just come but he’s even quicker to move than Montfort. If he believes the rumors about poison, he’ll press Montfort into doing something as fast as may be. If Montfort resists, there will be as fine a display of temper as this place has ever seen. He has that other matter to hand, so he will be doubly anxious not to linger over this one.”

“Other– You mean his uncle’s dying? But surely…”

“A cousin. Lord Fenner. He’s rich three times over, and Sir Walter is his heir. The title is Sir Walter’s for certain but he wants to be sure there’s no ill-written will sharing the wealth with others. He’s been at Lord Fenner’s sickbed this month past, and the talk has been that nothing short of Judgment Day could pull him away. But now his mother’s dead of a sudden, so here he is. Not that Lord Fenner will be making any wills in his absence.  His lordship is taking his time about dying and won’t make a will until the bishop himself has assured him there is absolutely no way he can carry any of it away with him beyond the grave. Still, Sir Walter will be eager to get back. He’s a careful man and doesn’t like leaving things to chance.”

“Or being kept from what he wants.”

“No. Best warn your prioress there is going to be hell to pay until his mother’s death is settled.” He looked at Thomasine and paused. This time Frevisse noted that Thomasine did not flinch from his look. More gently than he had been speaking to Frevisse, he said, “We are kin of sorts, my lady. Did you know that?”

“No,” she said softly. Her gaze dropped, but then returned to his face. “How?” (more…)

When Master Montfort was through with them, there was need to tell Domina Edith what was happening, and what was likely to come of it. At Dame Claire’s asking, Frevisse went with her, and afterward they stood together in the stillness of the parlor, waiting for Domina Edith to look up from her lap. The dog twitched in its sleep, a fly butted at a windowpane, and after a time Domina Edith raised her head.

“You have no doubt it was murder indeed?”

Frevisse inclined her head even more quickly than Dame Claire did. “Murder meant and planned and attempted twice, failing the first time, succeeding the second.”

“So you think Martha’s death was unintended?”

“I can see no reason for it being wanted.”

“But you see a reason for Lady Ermentrude’s?”

“Being Lady Ermentrude, there were probably any number of reasons and people wanting her death.” Two days ago Frevisse would have said that wryly, but there was no humor in it now. Someone had truly wanted Lady Ermentrude dead, wanted it badly enough that Martha’s accidental dying had not stopped them, wanted it desperately enough they had tried again with barely a pause.

“What reason does Master Montfort see?” (more…)