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!” Read 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?” Read 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?” Read more »

Less than two years after radiation therapy had killed the cancer in my sternum, the idiot stuff was back, now in my right ribs and lung. Neither of those is fun, especially when a hole is put in your back to drain the cancerous fluid out of your lung, and when you see the x-ray showing how almost an entire rib has been dissolved away by the cancer. Since something hard hitting and quick was obviously needed, I accepted the need for chemotherapy.

Let me say here there are great differences between clinics. Because of moving and insurance changes, I’ve been to five clinics and a number of different oncologists over these twenty years, and I no longer have any hesitation over changing doctors and/or clinic if they treat me (1) as too ignorant to know when something is going wrong with my body and their treatment, and (2) as a dead woman walking. You can recognize the former when you feel your concerns dismissed or treated lightly. The second is more subtle but too often there. The best oncologists truly care how you’re doing. The lesser kind merely go through a pre-set checklist of treatments, and when that’s finished and you’re not in remission… well, there’s more where you came from.

People with cancer are told to stay calm and keep a positive attitude, but I have found that occasional, well-justified anger is a great help in focusing my mind on what I need to do.

These days you stand a good chance of finding official cancer-literature that admits to the “cognitive impairment” (heaven forfend it be outright called “brain damage”) caused by chemotherapy in the majority of recipients. But twelve years ago, when I tried to make my then-oncologist understand that something was wrong with my mind – that it desperately wasn’t working right – the most I could get out of him was a vague, dismissive, “We hear that a lot,” and the shrugging suggestion that it was depression.

Now, I know depression. I’ve rung enough changes on depression to know it when it happens to me. What I was experiencing was something else altogether, and I was left to suffer through it on my own. A brief article about “chemo-fuzzies” in a magazine for cancer sufferers was the only, chance-found help I had. It was not until a few years later that report came out from a British study confirming that, yes, chemotherapy can destroy the myelin sheath on the nerves in the brain.  In fact, it seems four out of five people on chemotherapy complain of mind-fuzzies to greater or lesser degree.  “We hear that a lot” indeed!

Too bad most of the oncologists I have encountered don’t seem to care.  Too bad, too, that it was still more years before those cancer booklets that proliferate in doctors’ offices began to tentatively admit to the problem.  And, yes, I’m bitter, both for myself and for everyone else who was left to suffer without understanding why — to think that they were going mad while their doctors dismissed them.

My own chemo-fuzzies were definitely at greater end of the scale, making thinking a constant uphill battle for coherence, but I had to struggle on without help, unable to make clear to family or friends what was happening to me, barely able to cope with day-to-day matters, and all too often reduced to desperate tears by the overwhelming effort to do such familiar things as write checks to pay monthly bills or fix food to feed myself.

There were also the several days shortly after each treatment when I could do nothing but lie on my bed while chemo-agony coursed along my bones. I remember how, during one of these times, I would wait until the pain paused, freeing me to slip off the bed to sit on the floor and work at correcting the galley proofs for The Squire’s Tale for a few minutes until the next wave of pain hit, sending me crawling back onto the bed to see it through.

The one thing to the good in this time came from a friend who treated me with reiki and made me an “old wive’s” tea of ginger, marsh mallow, peppermint, and horehound that ended my nausea without any prescription drug, and introduced me to colored light therapy. I had had such good luck with alternative medicines before then that I was willing to try other things, and certainly since then I’ve had some dramatic effects from the light therapy and at least the ease of lying quietly under it when ease was often hard to come by.

Yet all through that dreadful time, morning by morning I got up, made a pot of tea, set the computer going, and wrote for as long as I could while the brain was at its best, until it would close down like a door shutting in my face and I was left to grope onward through the day.

The disconcerting thing is that, reading the books I wrote while my brain groped toward healing, there’s no sign of the struggle going on.  I’ve found that likewise true when I’ve worked on a story while suffering from flu or a dire cold or family grief – the writing goes on and no one can tell how ill I was while I wrote it.  I’ve heard the same from other authors but have, as yet, been able to draw no profound conclusions, except perhaps that we all are quite mad.

In a creative rather than pathological way of course.

Still, eventually I finished with the chemotherapy and was in remission. My hair regrew into a curly mop that I hadn’t had before (but which, alas, went away with my next haircut), and bit by bit over the next few years thinking became less of a desperate struggle for coherence. I began work on The Bastard’s Tale.

Round Three was over. I yet lived.

But the cancer was not done with me yet.

– Margaret

There was quiet in the church now that the bell had ceased its tolling. The air still seemed to tremble slightly, remembering the fifty-seven slow strokes in memory of every year of Lady Ermentrude’s life, but faintly and fading now. As memories of Lady Ermentrude would fade away in time, Thomasine thought, fade away and not matter anymore.

But they mattered now, lying sickly between her thoughts and her praying, even here in her best place, on the step below St. Frideswide’s altar, where almost always she could lose herself in prayers and not think of the stone hurting her knees or the thinness of her hands clinging together or the two coffins waiting on their biers behind her.

She had helped wash and ready Lady Ermentrude’s body for its shroud and coffin, had followed it across the yard and seen it set beside Martha Hayward’s, and been given leave, after Prime, to remain in prayer for their souls. But the prayers she wanted seemed to be nowhere in her, only the thought of Lady Ermentrude’s and Martha’s bodies lying behind her, waiting for their people to come and take them to their final places. Lady Ermentrude would go to her own lordship’s church and a grave beside the high altar, to rest there under a carved stone image of herself until Last Judgment Day. Martha Hayward would lie in Banbury churchyard, where she would molder into bones to be dug up and put with other moldered bones in a charnel house, to make way for someone else’s burying. They were both dead and in need of her prayers, and no prayers would come, only the thought of how suddenly dead they had been.

Their dying had had nothing easy in it; even completed death had failed to soften the engraved pain of Lady Ermentrude’s harsh features before the shroud covered it. Surely a soul forced from its body by such an end desperately needed praying for, and Thomasine knew it. But the prayers would not come, not for her own sake or Lady Ermentrude’s or Martha’s. Only thoughts.

Of Lady Ermentrude’s dying, of the small black creeping thing reaching out – from Hell? – toward her…

A hand touched Thomasine’s shoulder. With a gasping shriek, she lunged forward to scrape with both hands at the base of the altar, then jerked her head around to find Dame Frevisse standing over her, come quietly in soft-soled shoes. Read more »

Frevisse was awake. Somewhere the last faint tendrils of a dream drifted and faded from a far corner of her mind, leaving no memory of what it had been. The hour was past Matins but still far from dawn, she thought. She raised her head a little, looking for the small window in the high pitch of the dormitory’s gable end. By St. Benedict’s Holy Rule all who lived in nunnery or monastery should sleep together in a single room, the dorter. But the Rule had slackened in the nine hundred years since St. Benedict had taken his hand from it. St. Frideswide’s was not the only place where the prioress slept in a room of her own, and the dorter had been divided with board walls into small separate rooms that faced one another along the length of the dorter. Each cell belonged to one nun, and sometimes each had a door or, as at St. Frideswide’s, curtains at the open end.

There, in a privacy St. Benedict had never intended, each nun had her own bed, a chest for belongings, often even a carpet, and assuredly more small comforts than the Rule even at its laxest allowed. In Frevisse’s, one wall was hung with a tapestry come from her grandmother’s mother, its figures stiff, their clothing strange, but the colors rich and the picture a rose garden with the Lover seeking his Holy Love. Across from it, beside her bed, there was a small but silver crucifix her father had brought from Rome.

It was all lost in near-darkness now. Through each night the only light for all the dorter was a single small-burning lamp at the head of the stairs down to the church, and sometimes moonlight slanting through the gable window.

As a novice, Frevisse had slept badly. She had been uncomfortable with the hard mattress and with sleeping in her undergown as the Rule required, had been disturbed by the water gurgling through the necessarium at the dorter’s other end, and at being roused at midnight to go to the church for Matins and Lauds.

Finally, over the years, she had learned to use her lying awake for prayer, or meditation, or remembering, or simply thinking. Now, waking in the night was no longer a burden but a gift for which she was often grateful.

With the last whisper of the dream drifted out of her mind, she lay looking at the high gable window, trying to judge the time, but there was no familiar star or any moonlight, only the rich darkness of sky, so different in its satin gleam from the dead black of the dorter’s night. She pulled herself more closely into her blankets’ warmth, settling into her mattress’s familiar lumps. And found she could not settle. Whatever hour of the night it was, not only sleep but quietness had left her.

She stirred restlessly, realizing she was fully awake. Why? She roamed through her mind and found she was wanting – for no good reason – to go and see how Lady Ermentrude was doing. And Thomasine. Read more »

With the cancer in my sternum, I received radiation therapy that, day by day, drained me of more and more energy. Because mornings are my best time to write, I scheduled my radiation treatments for early afternoons, which would have given me time to rest before writing again except that, besides writing and taking myself to the hospital for radiation and trying to rest while keeping house, I was also helping one of my sons get his driver’s license, buy a car, and find an apartment before he started going to college that fall. I wanted him as ready as possible to live without me if it came to that.

With all of that going on, the writing went very, very slowly.  One page a day was good, two pages in a day was a triumph.  But I didn’t tell my agent or editor what I was going through, thinking that when I missed my deadline on the present book, I would have a terrific excuse for it and they’d forgive me.  Imagine my “disappointment” when I finished the book two weeks ahead of the deadline, my great excuse gone to waste.

At the end of everything I was weak but still functioning, with the tumor in the sternum dead and the hope of more books ahead of me.

(Take note, however, that when, with radiation, they say “There’ll be some reddening of the skin at the site”, what they mean is you are getting a radiation burn.  I had good luck with simple aloe vera gel to soothe mine, rather than some prescription thing.  And when they say there’ll be “some tanning”, they don’t mean as from a pleasant time at the beach but closer to tanning an animal hide. Bloody, misleading euphemisms.)

Onward, stubbornly, I went. The Reeve’s Tale became the first book to be published as a hardcover, and my next book after that was The Squire’s Tale, where I fulfilled a long-held wish to write Robert’s story.  He had shown up in The Novice’s Tale as, first, an unnamed servant who opened doors and answered questions, but an unnamed, recurring servant was a bother, so I gave him a name and ended by making him someone integral to the whole story. I also found I would like to spend more time with him.  Thus he made his small appearance in The Bishop’s Tale and eventually got his own whole book.

But despite the radiation specialist’s assurance during the treatment that I would notice no effects to my lungs from the radiation therapy, when the treatment was done I was promptly assured by my then-oncologist that I would soon suffer “asthma-like effects”.  He at least was telling the truth.  Pills of bee pollen and Siberian ginseng moderated the breathing problems to some degree, but the polluted city air too often caused my damaged lungs to seize up, just as with asthma, and I promise you that it’s a terrifying feeling, not being able to draw in enough oxygen.

Happily, as a writer I don’t have to live in a city, so less than a year after finishing the radiation I ended up moving to the country so I could indulge more easily in the simple pleasure of breathing.

Besides, I like living in the country far more than I do living in town.

Alas, a year later, as I had The Clerk’s Tale under way, the cancer returned in my ribs and right lung, doing such rapid damage that I submitted to the dire necessity of chemotherapy.

– Margaret

Frevisse stopped where she was, as much in disgust as horror, then crossed herself as much in penance for the disgust as for the repose of Martha’s soul. Dame Claire, recovering from her own reaction, went to kneel where Father Henry had been.

Frevisse, almost as quickly, went to stand between sight of Martha’s body and Thomasine, who was crouched too near it, whimpers crawling up from her throat and her face pressed against prayer-clasped hands. Carefully, not wanting to bring on hysterics, she took the girl by the shoulders and said as gently as she could, “Stand up out of Dame Claire’s way.”

The infirmarian was feeling for pulse and breath, looking for life where very surely there was none.

“Stand up,” Frevisse repeated, wanting to get her away from the temptation to look again at Martha.

Thomasine responded, letting herself be helped to her feet. With an arm around her shoulders, Frevisse turned her away from both Martha and Lady Ermentrude.

“It was awful,” Thomasine whispered, shaking in Frevisse’s hold. “It was horrible. She had a… fit. She–”

Firmly across her rising voice Frevisse said, “It’s over. She’s not hurting anymore. It’s finished.”

Dame Claire sat back from her fruitless search for signs of life and looked up at Father Henry still standing above her. “What happened?” she demanded. Read more »

The place within the cloister where the world most boldly intruded was the kitchen. It was a squat, ugly room with two big roasting fireplaces and a bake oven in its farther wall, sturdy locked pantry cupboards against the other walls, and an array of heavy tables in its middle for the carving, mincing, kneading, mixing, setting out, and gathering in of whatever needed preparation for the meals of the day. Nor was there any pious silence here. Because there was such necessary work to be done – mostly by lay servants not under vows – the rule of silence did not hold; instead of hand signals and nods, there was ordinary conversation broken by curt orders, the words mixed among a secular clatter of dishes, clang of heavy iron pots, ring of large stirring spoons tossed from pan to counter, slap of bread being kneaded, whisht of knives slicing at vegetables and, more rarely, meat. And over all of that was almost always Dame Alys’ big voice, stronger than the noise and kitchen odors. Dame Alys was cellarer, second only to Domina Edith in the priory. She was in charge of overseeing labor, land, and buildings, and since St. Frideswide’s was too small to have a kitchener under her orders, Dame Alys saw to that office, too – food and drink and firewood and the kitchen itself.

Word of Lady Ermentrude’s arrival had come this far already, and Dame Alys was in full cry. “So now we’re bound to cater to her drunk as well as stupid, are we? Her and that mighty baggage of followers.” Dame Alys slammed an iron stirring spoon down on a table to emphasize her wrath. Since she was a large-boned woman running to muscle rather than fat, the spoon bent visibly.

The three women servants cast looks at one another and went on with their business. Although Dame Alys’s rages were as immense and sincere as her penances, she seldom actually injured anyone in them. But she was always more interested in venting spleen than in being soothed or hearing anyone’s helpful replies, and no one bothered saying anything.

Now, straightening the spoon between her hands, she pointed it at Thomasine hesitating in the doorway and said, “You’re come to tell me she’s asking for her dinner already, aren’t you? Well, you can tell her from me I need more warning than that to set a proper meal under her nose. Would to God it were in my power to serve her as she deserves. Spoiled fish and rotten apples, with ditch water for a drink, that’s what she’d have. And I’d stand over her with a cleaver to make sure she ate and drank it all!”

She paused to draw breath. Into the momentary lull Martha Hayward said, without looking up from a mixing bowl and whatever she was beating in it. “That would be enough to start a real feud between the Godfreys and the Fenners.”

“What say you?” Dame Alys said indignantly. “There’s been no bloodshed as yet, but there’s feud all right. And the blood will come soon, too, if they don’t stop pushing to take our property away from us!”

Martha, bold to grin at Dame Alys, said, “And meanwhile the lawyers’ cost enough to break both families. Aye, lawyers love a good quarrel between great families.” Read more »