Sins of the Blood

by Margaret Frazer

  "It isn't plain," Dame Frevisse snapped. "If it happened that way, there should be blood on the coif and there isn't. And when I first went into the garden, before anyone else did, there was a spider's web across the open garden gateway. An unbroken spider's web all hung with dew. No one went through that gateway this dawn."

  "Then he went over the fence," Pollard said impatiently.

  With a glance at Dame Frevisse and the air of someone accurately repeating a lesson, Pers put in, "The fence is too high to be jumped and too weak to be climbed." Then he flushed as Pollard looked angrily at him.

  "And aside from that," Dame Frevisse said, "the footprints show he went through the gateway, not over the fence."

  "You just said he didn't go through the gateway!" Pollard quickly pointed out.

  "Not at dawn," Dame Frevisse answered back. "Whoever did this to Jenkyn didn't run through that gate at dawn. He would have broken the spider's web, and it wasn't broken. This was done last night." To Father Clement she asked, "Among the men Jenkyn knew, who had reason to want him dead? Or will have the most from his death?"

  With shock, Ada found that she had looked without thinking at Pers. And that so had everyone else in the room. He gaped back at them, speechless, but Elyn exclaimed, "No! He'd not harm a hair of Jenkyn's head! There'd be no point. Everything comes to me. Everyone knows that."

  "But he'd be the man here," Dame Frevisse said. "Just you and he to run things and no Jenkyn in the way."

  Elyn flushed a dark, shamed red at what was implied behind the words. Furiously indignant for both of them, Father Clement cut in. "Here now! No one's ever thought of any such thing!"

  "There's nothing between us," Elyn whispered. "There's nothing and never has been."

  More loudly and more definitely, Pers declared, "That's right!"

  Pollard, more outraged than either of them, said, "It's flat stupid to think there is. He's to marry my girl!"

  Ignoring their combined indignation, Dame Frevisse asked Pers, "Did you dance with Pollard's Kate at the bonfire last night?"

  "Aye. Of course." Defiantly.

  "And spent the night with her?

  Angrily Pollard put in, with an uneasy glance at Father Clement – fathers had to pay fines for girls who were wayward before their marriage – "That he did, but in my house with all the rest of us. So we know where he was all last night and he had no chance of doing anything to his uncle."

  Dame Frevisse turned to Ada, and Ada found her direct, demanding gaze disconcerting even before she asked, "Did Elyn come out with you right away when you came last night? Or did you have to wait a while?"

  "She said she had to cover the fire and I should go back to Cisily," Ada answered, trying to see why it mattered. This was all going too quickly for her. "She said she'd be there just after me and she was."

  "A little after? Or longer?"

  Beginning to understand but unwilling to, Ada answered slowly, "I was busy with Cisily. I don't know. A little while. Not much."

  "Enough while that she could have put on Jenkyn's shoes and made those footprints on the doorstep and across the byreyard?"

  Ada wanted to say, No, there hadn't been enough time for Elyn to have done all that; but as she started to, she looked at Elyn's white, frozen face and held silent.

  From beside the bed Dame Frevisse said, "The footprints were like those of a child wearing shoes too big for him, deep in the heels and nothing in the toes. You've little feet, Elyn, for your size, and Jenkyn has a man's. Where did you hide the shoes so you could claim someone had stolen them?"

  Elyn, staring at something in front of her that was not there for anyone else to see, did not answer. It was Pers, his voice raw with disbelief and hurt, who asked, "But why?"

  Elyn did not answer nor her expression change. Surprisingly gently, Dame Frevisse said, "Why, Elyn? What was the reason?"

  Where there had been nothing, feeling shimmered at last in Elyn's eyes. "Because I couldn't bear him. Not anymore."

  "Jenkyn?" Ada asked, her disbelief an echo of Pers'. "You couldn't bear Jenkyn?"

  Still staring in front of her, Elyn nodded and finally said, in a low voice, "He was so nothing. No matter what I did, he was nothing. And last night, at the bonfire, I was watching Pers." Her gaze slid up to him and then away to the floor in front of her feet. "I watched him dancing with his Kate. Both of them so beautiful. And happy. And then I had to come home with Jenkyn, because he wouldn't dance. It was too much trouble, he said. Nor he didn't like staying up at night nor Midsummer wandering. He didn't much like anything that cost him any effort." Bitterness and scorn and the anger that must have been in her for a long time before last night tightened her voice. "I tried to talk with him when we were home, trying to make him see how things could be different, better between us. But everything was too much trouble for him. I always had to talk a week to make him do a day's work. He was forever dragging back on everything I asked him. He wouldn't... " Her hands, knotted in her lap, clenched and unclenched. "I suddenly couldn't bear him any longer. He stood up, saying he was going to bed, and I... I took him and threw him... He doesn't weigh much, never did... backwards against the wall. I'd wanted to do that to him... do something to him... hurt him... for so very long. I didn't know, I didn't mean..." She stopped, then said dully, "Or maybe I did. Maybe I did mean it to kill him. I don't know."

  Gently but with the same remorseless searching, Dame Frevisse said, "So he was lying there, and you were trying to decide what to do when Ada came to say you were needed, and you thought maybe there was a way out of what you had done after all."

  Elyn nodded toward her hands. "The idea came to me all at once and I knew what I could do. Make it look like a thief came in, a stranger, and killed him. I made the footprints, just as you said. The shoes are in the midden by the byre. Then I went to Cisily. I thought he'd be dead when I came home. He wasn't and that was awful. And there was the blood but he wasn't bleeding anymore so I shifted the rushes, buried the bloody ones under clean ones, meaning to be rid of them later and no one the wiser, and put his coif on him to cover what was in his hair. I'd be the one to ready him for burial and no one would have to see and likely no one would have thought about it anyway." She raised sad, accusing eyes to the nun. "But you did. I should have waited until you'd gone before I came out crying about him. Then it would have been all right."

  Stirred at last out of the silence holding them all, Father Clement said, "You've sinned, Elyn. And sinned worse in meaning to let him die unshriven, his soul likely bound straight for hell."

  Ada shivered and was not the only one to cross herself at that. But Elyn only said bitterly, "He never sinned enough to go to hell. And purgatory wouldn't hurt him any worse than he's hurt me these years. Only–" Now she wrapped her arms around herself and looked toward the bed resentfully. "–only I hadn't thought he'd go on alive so long. And with that breathing. Isn't he ever going to stop it?"

  He did, a little later. One last, faint rasping out of breath and, this time, nothing after it. Only the silence drawing out and out, until they knew he would not breathe again.

  And afterwards, freed at last to go on home, matching her long stride to Dame Claire's shorter one as they walked again along the lane's grassy verge toward the priory, Frevisse tried to find a prayer that would answer, for her at least, some of the pain the past hours had held. And Dame Claire's mind, too, was behind them rather than ahead, because out of the quiet between then she suddenly asked, "Would you have paid so much heed to the footprints if it hadn't been for the spider's web?"

  "No. I doubt it. I'd probably not have thought about them at all. Or wondered about the blood."

  "So it wasn't the footprints or the blood that trapped her."

  "No. Only the spider's web." And the fact that Frevisse had chosen to think about it.

  A spider's web and a moment's thought. So small a pair of things to be so deadly.

  As small as the break in a woman's heart between enduring and despair. />
  The Stone-Worker's Tale

  A Novelette by Margaret Frazer

  When Domina Frevisse had last been in St. Mary's church at Ewelme, it had been a quiet place, its brief nave divided from its side aisles by graceful stone pillars, the chancel and high altar remote beyond a richly painted wooden screen topped by a gilded crucifix and saintly statutes.

  Now its quiet and all its ordered peace were gone. Near the high altar the south aisle was given over to scaffolding, stone dust, and workmen; the summer morning's heavy sunlight pouring unobstructed through the gaping hole in the wall that would someday be a stone-mullioned window of richly stained glass; and the crane with its ropes and pulleys still straddled Lady Alice's stone tomb chest from yesterday's lowering into place of the stone slab that was its top, complete with a full-length carving of Lady Alice lying in prayerful repose, gazing serenely up to heaven.

  Presently, though, Lady Alice was anything but prayerful, serene, or reposed as she demanded at her master mason, "He's gone? Just gone? He was here yesterday and now, like that, he's gone?"

  Around them the workmen were drawn back, idle instead of busy at their varied tasks, wary and watching while Master Wyndford said in open distress, "Yes, my lady," agreeing to what he had already admitted. "In the night sometime it must have been," he added, as if that might help.

  It did not. When young Simon Maye had gone was not the point. Even why he had gone was not Lady Alice's concern just now, and she said angrily, "What of my angels, then? If he's gone, who's going to finish my angels?"

  Her tomb was splendid with angels. They were carved in a guardian array along both sides of the tall tomb chest, and more would go along the stone canopy that would someday rise above the tomb, and more would stand on the pinnacles that would rise above even that. Already four of the panels that would edge the canopy were done, were sitting on the floor along the aisle well away from the work still going on, leaned at an angle against the wall so that their angels – three to each panel – gazed upward rather than downward as they someday would when in place above the tomb. Domina Frevisse had admired those angels the other times she had come with Alice to the church to see how the work came on. They were half-length, rising from their waists out of the stone, framed by the curve of their wings behind their shoulders, every fold of cloth, every feather delicately detailed. Some of the angels were crowned and some were not; some had their hands folded on their breast, others had them raised in praise, others held them palm to palm in prayer; and their faces differed, too, so that each was more than simply the same again, and all in all they were as masterful a piece of work as Frevisse had ever found herself smiling at for the plain pleasure they gave.

  But there were only four panels when six were intended, and only twelve angels of the eighteen there were meant to be; and Master Wyndford looked aside from Alice's anger to a heavy-shouldered youth standing nearby and said, "My son, Nicol. He's as skilled a carver of stone as Simon Maye. He'll finish the angels, my lady."

  Lady Alice turned her critical look on Nicol Wyndford as he bowed to her. He was dressed like the other workmen in a plain tunic and hosen, had pale, flat hair and a pale, flat face that just now was heavy with sullenness. "Are you?" she demanded. "Are you as good as Simon Maye?"

  Nicol Wyndford looked from her to his father and back again, hunched his shoulders in not quite a shrug, and said toward the floor, "Nearly, my lady."

  "Nearly." Lady Alice said with raw displeasure; and to his father, "Master Wyndford, I am not paying for nearly."

  She assuredly was not. Frevisse was come from her cloistered nunnery of St. Frideswide's on a bishop-granted week's visit to her cousin. These middle years of the 1400s were troubled with quarrels among the nobles around the king. Favors sought and given were a way of binding alliances: The bishop had granted this favor for Alice and some day she would do something in return; or maybe this was the bishop's return for some favor Alice had already done him. Frevisse had not asked, only regretted being summoned from her ordered life while at the same time glad of chance to see her cousin; but she had hardly brushed off the dust of travel before Alice had taken her to the church to show off the tomb and tell her at length how it would be when it was finished – all in the latest of fashions, Alice assured her. Besides the stone-carved canopy with its praying angels above the alabaster image of herself atop the tomb chest where her body would eventually lie, the chest itself was raised on a stone-carved screen behind which, directly under the chest, was another full-length carving, this one of a shrouded corpse in the latter stages of decay, meant to remind those that lived of the fate that came to all, no matter what their earthly glory.

  "Not that that's kept me from giving myself a glorious tomb," Alice had said, laughing at herself for it as they walked back to the manor house afterward. "Given what it will cost when done, I thought I'd have it to enjoy while I was alive, rather than leave money for it in my will and never see it. Besides, on the chance I may live for a long while yet, I thought it best to have my image done now, before I go any older."

  "Ah, vanity even unto death," Frevisse had teased her.

  "Well, it's not much use after death, is it?" Alice had answered back, and they had laughed together, their friendship firm despite how differently they had gone about their lives – Frevisse gladly into a nunnery and a life of prayer, Alice into worldly wealth and power by way of three marriages. Now in her third widowhood, she was using that worldly wealth and power to have made for her a tomb fine enough to comfort her against the time when death would make worldly wealth and power of no more use to her.

  Frevisse, as a Benedictine nun vowed to poverty as well as chastity and obedience, knew her own grave would lie nameless under a stretch of grass-grown turf in the nunnery orchard. She found that a quiet, pleasing thought; but Alice's choice was Alice's choice, and this morning Alice was neither quiet nor pleased with either the young journeyman stone-carver Simon Maye who was so suddenly gone without word or warning, nor with Master Wyndford and the offer of his own son in Simon Maye's place.

  Standing a little aside and behind her cousin, Frevisse was sorrier for Master Wyndford's discomfiture than for Alice's disappointment. Sorry, too, that he could not offer himself for the work, as master of the lesser workmen here. But even if, in his day, he had been a master carver of stone figures as well as a master mason – and the two often went together – he had no hope of being one now. Not with both his hands misshapen as they were by arthritics, the fingers swollen and crooked and bent sideways at the knuckles, past hope of ever doing fine work again. They pained him, too, or at least ached. The other times she had come with Alice to see how the work went, Frevisse had noted him gently rubbing one hand's thumb in slow circles on the palm of the other hand, first one, then the other, easing what must be a constant aching there, probably unconscious he was doing it. Today the ache had shifted; he was holding one hand against his chest, gently rubbing and rubbing at the back of it with the fingertips of the other while he talked to Alice, still not seeming to know he did it. Frevisse suspected that the ache of them and the bitterness of his lost skill accounted, even more than his years did, for the deep lines down his face and the sour look he seemed always to wear

  His voice was quiet with respect and certainty, though, as he said now, "I promise you, my lady, the work will not suffer if you charge Nicol with it."

  "Nicol doesn't think so," Alice pointed out sharply.

  Master Wyndford sent his son a hard look. "Simon Maye is his friend. He speaks from that rather than honestly about his own skill."

  And his father would take him to task for it later, Frevisse thought.

  Alice, unsatisfied, looked from father to son to father again, and said impatiently, "I'll think on it and tell you later."

  She swung away from him in a swirl of long skirts and fine veiling. It was to her back that he bowed, saying, "My lady," Nicol and all the workmen bowing, too, as she swept away across the church toward the outer doo
r in even worse humour than she had come.

  Outside the church, her ladies were waiting for her, already under her disapproval, come to it long before Master Wyndford, when one too few of them had come to her bedchamber at dawn to ready her for the day. She had looked around and asked, concerned, "Where's Elyn?"

  Lady Sybille, senior among her ladies-in-waiting, in her service for years, had looked at Beth and Cathryn, youngest among Alice's ladies – girls whose noble families had set them to serve and learn in Lady Alice's household until they were old enough for the marriages made for them. "Tell my lady," Lady Sybille had said sternly.

  Beth and Cathryn had traded guilty looks, with Cathryn shifting uneasily a little aside, leaving answering to Beth, who had said with sufficient boldness to show her innocence in the matter, "We don't know, my lady. She went out last night and never came back to bed."

  The three of them shared a bed in the chamber beyond Alice's bedchamber where her ladies-in-waiting and waiting women slept. Lady Sybille, who oversaw them all, had her bed there, too, but it was curtained, giving her such privacy as befitted her higher place in the household. Alice looked at her, and she answered, not needing to hear the question, "We saw you and Domina Frevisse to bed. Then they saw me to mine. So far as I knew, Elyn then settled to bed with the rest of them. I had no reason to think she did not, the other women were paying no heed, going to bed themselves, and these two did not see fit to say anything."

  "She said she would be back!" Beth protested. "Then we fell asleep and didn't know she didn't come!"

  "Not until we woke up this morning," Cathryn added.

  "Do you at least know where she meant to go?" Alice had asked.

  Cathryn had looked at the floor. Beth had whispered as if in the confessional, "To see Simon Maye. We think. She didn't say."

  Lady Sybille drew in a sharp, impatient breath. "At that hour? Surely not," while Alice had said angrily, "Has it gone that far between them?"