Girl In A Red Tunic Read Online Free PDF

occasionally pausing to put a cool white hand on his hot forehead, and he would lie there being looked after until he felt better. Clucking to Horace, he kicked the big horse into a canter and hastened on his way.
     
    The solicitude with which he was received at Hawkenlye was all that he had envisaged. Sister Euphemia, reaching up to place the envisioned cool hand on his forehead, studied him briefly and then gave a quick nod. She summoned a nursing nun – to Josse’s delight it was young Sister Caliste, a favourite of his – and gave orders for him to be put to bed at the far end of the infirmary ‘where it’s more peaceful’. However, given the sharp look that she gave him when, amid his effusive thanks, he broke off to cough, he reckoned that his placement away from others had more to do with her concern that everybody else currently sick at Hawkenlye Abbey would not end up coughing too.
         It was odd, he mused, following Sister Caliste’s slim, upright form down the long ward, how some sicknesses could pass from one person to another. Things like a headache or the pain of a sprained wrist, for example, you kept to yourself, but coughs, fevers and inflammations of the lungs seemed to jump from body to body as if some malign and invisible spirit bore them through the air  ...
         They had reached the curtained-off recess where he was to be cared for. Sister Caliste tactfully turned her back while he took off his heavy cloak and slipped out of his tunic, shirt and hose and, dressed only in his thin undershirt, crawled into bed. The sheets were as cool on his hot skin as he had dreamed they would be and he just knew that as soon as his blood cooled down and the shivers began, Sister Caliste would return to cover him with a warm blanket. With a smile she disappeared between the curtains, but presently she returned and made him drink a concoction that tasted almost as bad as that of the Colchester serving woman. The only difference was, he reflected as at last he gave in to sleep, was that the Hawkenlye infirmarer’s medicine worked the other way round: it didn’t make him vomit and it did stop his cough.
     
    He slept, dreamed and dozed the day away. Sister Caliste came to see him briefly now and again, once bringing him some savoury broth and a couple of times giving him more of the medicinal draught, although he detected that the subsequent doses had been watered down and were less potent. Once he opened his eyes and thought he saw the Abbess’s face staring down at him but it could have been a dream; the Abbess seemed to feature quite regularly in his dreams. Later, when it was dark, he was given a cool drink and someone – he thought it was Sister Euphemia – said a prayer over him whose main point appeared to be to ask God and His angels to watch over Josse until the morning. Then, with that most comforting thought in mind, he slept again, this time long, deep and dreamlessly, and he did not wake up until morning.
         He realised straight away that he felt better. Much better, in fact; the heat in his skin had gone and so had the sore throat. He tried an experimental cough and managed to produce only a small amount of phlegm. Aye, he was on the mend, no doubt about it. He noticed that he was very hungry and, as if she had been waiting outside the curtains for him to appreciate this fact, Sister Caliste appeared bearing a bowl of porridge and a cool drink.
         As the infirmarer had done the previous day, she put her hand on his forehead. Smiling, she said, ‘Your fever has passed for the time being, Sir Josse, although it may return later in the day, that being the way of fevers.’
         ‘I feel quite well,’ he assured her. ‘I’d like to—’
         ‘Get up?’ She smiled again.
         ‘You have learned to read men’s minds in the course of your nursing training, Sister,’ he observed.
         ‘Oh, no. Sister Euphemia has that talent, but not I. If I guess right,