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