5 The Boy's Tale

by Frazer, Margaret

  “She isn’t supposed to leave the children for more than a minute!” Frevisse said angrily. “Assuredly not long enough to go all the way to the village!” The seven dead men had been put in the village church to await the crowner’s and sheriff’s coming. In the warm weather, with no certainty how long it would take for the crown’s officers to come, that had seemed better than having them in the priory’s church. But the village was a quarter mile away. By the field path it took only a short while to go and come back, if one’s business there was brief, not much longer if one took the road. “How long has she been gone?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been in the infirmary since dinner.”

  “What of the children? When were they last seen?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t asked anyone. When I couldn’t find them, I came to you.”

  “Jenet wouldn’t have taken them with her. She knows they have to stay inside the cloister.” Frevisse was thinking aloud, and asked the next thought that came to her. “Why did you come to me before anyone else?”

  Sister Thomasine bit her lip, dropped her eyes, and said at the floor, “I’ve seen how you watch them, and how worried you’ve looked ever since they came. More worried than anyone else. More worried than seemed needed.” She huddled her shoulders up a little, in echo of a gesture she had almost lost since taking her vows. “So … I thought that maybe you knew more than the others about something wrong in their coming and when I couldn’t find them …”

  Her words trailed off nervously. She looked worriedly up at Frevisse, who stared back at her with an unsettled mingling of surprise and dismay. She had been wrong to think that Sister Thomasine did not notice much of anything beyond her prayers and duties. To find that she noticed Frevisse specifically enough to know she was worried over the boys when no one else was, was disconcerting in the extreme.

  But that was not to the point just now. “Lady Adela is gone, too, you said?”

  Sister Thomasine looked even more wretched. “Yes. I couldn’t find her either. And … and the gate to the orchard is unlocked.”

  Frevisse found she was staring at the younger nun. “What brought you to try it and find out?”

  “When I couldn’t find any of them anywhere inside the cloister, I went to see if they were in the garden. Lady Adela has been there with us at recreation. I thought she might have taken the boys. The orchard gate is just beyond and so I tried it, just because that’s what a child would do, you know, and it was unlocked. It isn’t supposed to be unlocked!”

  “No, it isn’t. Come with me.” Without knowing she had made up her mind, she hurried out of the slype and toward the orchard gate.

  Sister Thomasine followed her but asked, “Shouldn’t we tell someone if we’re going out?”

  Strictly, she was right. Someone should be told and permission granted before any nun left the cloister except on such business as the hosteler had and then only within set limits. But seeking permission would take time and Frevisse was afraid there was no time to spare. “The fewer people outside the nunnery who know the boys are here, the better. If we can find them before someone else does, that will be best.”

  Just as Sister Thomasine had said, the cloister gate was unlocked. Frevisse went out it unhesitatingly but Sister Thomasine hung back. “I can’t go out,” she said faintly.

  Frevisse paused, understanding her scruples but without time for them. “Then I have to go alone.”

  She should not. If a nun absolutely had to go out of cloister for a real and weighty reason, not for whim or fancy, even then under no circumstances was she supposed to go alone but always accompanied by at least another nun. For Frevisse to go out alone would only compound her fault of going out at all, but that would be less wicked than trying to coax Sister Thomasine into coming along against her fine-edged conscience.

  But to her surprise, Sister Thomasine lifted her head and said, “You have authority over me as sacrist of St. Frideswide’s. Say I must come with you and I shall.”

  It was as neat a shifting of responsibility as Frevisse had ever encountered, though it was undoubtedly done in total innocence.

  “Come then,” Frevisse said, and Sister Thomasine came without hesitation. Stifling an irk she knew she should not feel, Frevisse shut the gate and directed briskly, “You take this half of the orchard and I’ll take that. Call to them and look for them and we’ll meet on the far side if we don’t find them.”

  It was a fair-sized orchard, meant to meet the nunnery’s needs. Planted when the nunnery was new, the trees were gnarled with age, their lower branches near the ground, spread wide and temptingly easy for a child to climb, with good hiding in the summer’s thickness of leaves.

  The long grass whispered at Frevisse’s hem and gave softly under her foot, silencing her steps. She called, “Come out now!” and summoned the children by name, and listened for an answer, but there was not even a rustle in the leaves to betray where someone might be hiding. Out of sight among the trees, Sister Thomasine was cajoling the children to show themselves with no better luck. As she neared the orchard’s far side, Frevisse said grimly to herself, “They’d best not be playing hide-and-seek with us.”

  She and Sister Thomasine met along the earthen bank that curved around the orchard’s outer edge, drawn together by their own voices.

  “Perhaps they never came this way,” Sister Thomasine suggested.

  “Someone unlocked the gate from the inside,” Frevisse answered. She was eyeing the earthen bank. It was perhaps six feet high, grown over with long grass and steep enough that anyone would have to scramble to go up it. But the climb was far from impossible; the bank was meant more to set the orchard apart than serve as an impassable barrier. “They surely came this way, and can’t have gone far. We might see them from up there.” Frevisse gathered up her skirts in one hand, preparing to climb.

  “Up there?” Sister Thomasine regarded the height doubtfully. “The bell for None will go at any moment.”

  But Frevisse could not stop the search now, having broken the rules to begin it. Going back would only give the children time to wander farther. “I’ll take responsibility if we’re late,” she said and bent forward to climb the steep slope. After more hesitation, Sister Thomasine followed her.

  At the top Frevisse sat down with a grateful exhale to catch her breath and look at what lay beyond. Perhaps fifty yards away a wide stream curved between the nunnery and the open fields of the village. It was heavily bordered with trees that were mostly willows and alders to hold the banks together and provide withies for making baskets and hurdles and even walls of houses, but with larger trees among them whose deadfalls could be gleaned for firewood in season. The earthen bank was too low to give a view beyond the trees, and between the bank and stream was only a narrow field, this year in pasture with a few milch cows grazing at their leisure. Angling across it was the broad ditch dug to divert water from the stream to the nunnery, first under the kitchen and then the necessarium before curving back to rejoin the stream below the pasture. Made when the priory was new, it was nearly hidden behind its own screen of brush and younger trees.

  Sister Thomasine struggled up beside her, less out of breath but far more shaken, if her white face and wide eyes were anything to judge by. Since she had come to St. Frideswide’s as a novice seven years ago, she had been no farther out of the cloister than the inner yard and the orchard, and those only rarely. Now, plumping down beside Frevisse, she straightened her wimple and veil and smoothed the front of her dress with habitual preciseness. Then she stared out at the wide world beyond the bank with gentle wonder, squinting against the sunlight glancing into her eyes.

  “Oh how lovely,” she breathed, and Frevisse felt a pang of mingled satisfaction and alarm. It was good to see Sister Thomasine startled out of her still-faced holiness; it was also disquieting. There was nothing unusual to see from here, certainly nothing that would imperil anyone’s soul to gaze on it, but it had been in girlhood that Sister Thomasine h
ad blithely given up the world. What effect would this glimpse of unrealized beauty have on her now?

  Very little, it appeared, for after a moment Sister Thomasine dropped her hands into her lap and, smiling, said contentedly, “It’s good to see, once in a while, how beautiful it is, so I can understand the ones who choose to stay in it and pray the better for them. I don’t see the children.”

  There was indeed no one in sight but the milch cows, but Frevisse said, “Listen.”

  From somewhere among the trees along the ditch children’s bright voices laughed and called. Sister Thomasine crossed herself with a great sigh of relief. Frevisse gathered herself to her feet. “I’ll go for them. You stay here, and if you hear the bell, go back without us. I’ll be as quick behind you as we can.” There was no point in both of them being in more trouble than was necessary. Sister Thomasine nodded gratefully, and Frevisse set herself to slide down the outer side of the bank.

  They had meant to go no farther than the orchard, but when trees had been climbed and tag had been played and Lady Adela refused to be tied to a tree to be a maiden in need of rescuing—with Jasper chosen to be the dragon so Edmund could slay him—there was nothing left to do except climb the sunlit slope of the earthen bank. Once they had done that and seen a whole new world to explore, going down the bank’s far side was inevitable.

  Jasper had momentarily hung back. “We shouldn’t,” he said. But Edmund was already going, arms spread out for balance while his feet ran away with him; and when Lady Adela lay down athwart the hill and rolled, laughing, her hair tangling around her head, it was too much to resist. Jasper flung himself down and rolled after her, finding too late there was no way to control how fast he went so that he bowled to the bottom to land sprawled and laughing almost on top of her, any idea that they shouldn’t go at all quite gone.

  Edmund, indignant at having missed that sport, was ready to climb up and take his turn at it, but Lady Adela was already clambering out of the dry ditch at the bottom to set off across the pasture. Giddy and not sure if he could walk straight, Jasper followed her. Edmund trotted after them with the idea it would be fun to chase the cows, but Lady Adela said, “No,” with so firm an assurance that he dropped the idea without argument. She was limping a little more than before, Jasper noticed, as if maybe her leg were tired or hurting, but she didn’t say so, just led them to the grave-bottomed stream flowing among the withies through the pasture.

  There wasn’t any need to talk about it. They all sat down, stripped off their shoes and hosen, and waded in, up to their knees in its cool joy.

  Jasper wasn’t sure exactly how it was decided it would be his shirt they used, but before long his doublet was on the bank and his shirt had been turned into a net to catch the minnows that darted among the green streamers of water plants wavering gently in the current. Lady Adela tried at first to keep her skirts out of the water, but being careful interfered with their sport and she gave it up in favor of swishing her hem through the water to herd the minnows toward Edmund and Jasper. It didn’t matter that they were having no success at all; and they were all so thoroughly wet that by the time Jasper stumbled over something and sat down up to his chin in the stream all he could do was laugh.

  He had never in all his life been so without people expecting him and his brother to behave with dignity and good manners—and seeing to it that they did. Here there were just themselves and Lady Adela and nobody telling them what to do and that they shouldn’t do something they wanted badly to do. There was water and sunlight and splashing and minnows and laughter as loud as they wanted it to be.

  Until Lady Adela’s giggle broke off with a gulp, and Jasper and Edmund followed her frightened gaze upward to Dame Frevisse standing on the bank above them.

  Chapter 8

  The bell rang for None as Frevisse and Sister Thomasine herded the wet, subdued children back through the orchard gate. “Go on. You go to None, I’ll see to the children,” Frevisse told Sister Thomasine, who nodded gratefully and hastened away; but by the time she had disposed of the children, Frevisse was late, as she had known she would be, and had to slip into her choir stall among disapproving glances. Tomorrow in chapter meeting she would have to confess to leaving the cloister and taking Sister Thomasine with her and then do whatever penance was given. For now, she joined in the office’s second psalm even before she had found it in her prayer book, her head bent diligently to prayer. But only for a few lines. Then her mind slid away. The children were safely back in their rooms, with one of the priory servants to see Lady Adela into dry clothing and Jenet tearfully setting Edmund and Jasper to rights. No harm had come of their disobedience, but she doubted this was the end of it. She had been above them on the bank for a time, watching their laughter and play, and it was plain that she—that everyone—had seriously misjudged Lady Adela. Assuredly she was a quiet, polite, attentive child, but that was not all she was. And Edmund and Jasper were clearly not so biddable as they had seemed either.

  Nor, Frevisse guessed, would the three of them go back to being as quiet as they had been, now that they had discovered the delight of each other’s company. There was going to be need to supervise them more carefully, which was not going to be easy without it becoming obvious to the other nuns whose curiosity she did not want aroused.

  At None’s end, as the nuns left the church, Dame Claire waited beside the door with a gesture to Frevisse to stay with her. Head bowed, Frevisse stood beside her until everyone else was gone, then followed her around the cloister walk to the slype where Dame Claire said, “I suppose you had good reason to be late to the office?”

  Dame Claire was as near to a friend as Frevisse had in the priory. They were alike in their reasons for choosing to become nuns, and had long since learned to respect and depend on each other’s intelligence. But Dame Claire presently held the prioress’s authority and to that authority instead of to her friend Frevisse respectfully said, “Yes, Dame.”

  “And you will explain yourself in chapter tomorrow?”

  “Yes, Dame.”

  Dame Claire took a deep breath. “Good. I can tell Dame Alys so when she comes complaining to me about it at recreation.”

  Frevisse gave a small, tight smile. “As if no one had noticed I was late except her.”

  “And that there were grass stains on your gown and a smell of river mud on your shoes,” Dame Claire said. “Why were you outside and what kept you late?”

  “The children left the cloister and I had to go in search of them. They were playing in the stream at catching minnows. It was all three of them,” she added.

  “Lady Adela followed the boys? Why, to keep them from harm?”

  “I rather gathered that she led them.”

  “Our Lady Adela?”

  “Indeed. It seems to have been lack of opportunity rather than inclination that’s kept her so quiet these months past.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “It was she who knew where the key to the orchard was hidden. That was the way they went out.”

  “How did she know about the key?”

  “She wouldn’t tell me. She was willing to admit how they went out but not how she knew where the key was. She’d only say she ‘turned the rock over and there it was.’ And maybe that’s how it happened. They might have been playing and she found it by chance.”

  “Then likely she would have said so,” Dame Claire said.

  “I made her—made all three of them—promise not to go out again.” There had not been time to scold them properly over what they had done, and aside from dragging that little about the key out of Lady Adela, Frevisse had settled for insisting at them that they had done wrong and that they must not, must not, go out alone again. At her angry demand, as she hurried them along the cloister walk toward their rooms, they had mumblingly given their word, but she did not for a moment believe that meant the end of problems with them.

  “May I go across to the guesthall, to talk with Mistress Maryon? She may have an idea
what would keep them occupied.”

  “We certainly have few ideas. But I wish I knew why we’re keeping them at all—” Dame Claire broke off, perhaps because Frevisse’s inadvertent expression gave away more than she meant it to. Dame Claire fixed her with a long and considering look before saying, “No, maybe I don’t wish that. Domina Edith has agreed to it and with that I should be satisfied.”

  “It’s best,” Frevisse said. If anyone else had to be trusted with the secret of whom the boys were, she would choose Dame Claire first, but at present the fewer who knew, the safer all were.

  And perhaps her face showed some of that, too, because Dame Claire nodded. “So be it then. Yes, of course you may go talk to this Mistress Maryon.”

  Dame Alys was at the guesthall before her. Frevisse heard her voice by the time she reached the top of the stairs from the yard, demanding why they were setting the table up so early and did they call it clean because she did not, when was the last time anyone had scrubbed it down properly, they could take it outside right now and do it, she cared not if it was still damp from its last scrubbing, they would do it again and thoroughly this time.

  Coming into the hall, Frevisse stood aside as two of the serving men trudged past her on their way out, carrying the heavy tabletop between them.

  “And so long as we’re at it, we may as well look at all the others, too, and see how much else you’ve been slacking because you thought I wouldn’t notice,” Dame Alys declared at the servants left in the hall. “Go on. Stir yourselves.”