5 The Boy's Tale

by Frazer, Margaret

  “And you’ve only come to keep them company,” Frevisse said, no less grim outwardly but her anger dissipated by the child’s explanation. “Not lead them out to mischief again?”

  “No, Dame.” Lady Adela shook her head urgently to show how sincerely she meant it, her fair hair flicking around her shoulders with her vehemence. “We won’t go out anymore, ever, until you say we can.”

  “You promised me that before and you went anyway. Why should I believe you now?” Frevisse included Edmund and Jasper in the accusing question.

  “Because we know it’s dangerous now and won’t do it again. Will we?” Lady Adela asked Edmund and Jasper.

  Both boys shook their heads. They seemed none the worse for yesterday, except for a kind of solemnity, a wariness to their watching, that Frevisse had not noticed in them before. Partly she was glad of it; it meant yesterday’s terror had left a lesson and they would assuredly be more careful because of it. But it also angered her, because it was a lesson they should not have had to learn so young.

  But all she said was, “That’s good then. See that you remember it, please.” Including Jenet and Tibby in what she had to say next, she went on, “But I’m afraid I have bad news to bring you.”

  “Colwin is dead,” Jasper said sadly. “He was drowned where we nearly were. Dame Perpetua told us.”

  “She came between breakfast and chapter to tell them,” Tibby explained quickly. “She thought it best they know as soon as might be and hear it from her rather than someone else.”

  “That’s well,” Frevisse said, sick with what she had to say next. They had seemingly absorbed Colwin’s death well enough, but they had known Will better. What his death would mean, coming so close after everything else, she did not know. “But last night sometime—we don’t know when yet—Will was killed, too. In the guesthall.”

  Tibby’s mouth dropped open. Jenet shrieked and threw her apron over her face, pressed her hands to it, and began to rock and keen. Lady Adela sank down on her heels between the two boys and put her arms around Jasper. He and Edmund stared up at Frevisse, their eyes huge and shocked.

  “I’m sorry,” Frevisse said, feeling the words were useless.

  Tibby stood up. “I’ll bring something to drink from the kitchen. Cider. Something. We need something.”

  “That would be good,” Frevisse agreed, and Tibby left. Frevisse sank down to the children’s level, to see their faces directly. Stricken and silent, they stared back at her, nobody heeding Jenet wailing across the room. To the children Frevisse said, “We’ll find who did it. We don’t know yet but we’ll find out.”

  “How did they kill him?” Edmund asked.

  “He was stabbed. In the heart. He would have died almost as it happened.”

  “Did he fight them?”

  “He didn’t have a chance to.”

  “He should have fought them! Jasper and I would have fought them!” Edmund’s anger was not enough to stop the tears welling up and sliding down his face. “They won’t kill us like that! We’ll fight them if they come!”

  “Nobody is going to kill you,” Frevisse said. “You’re safe here.”

  “They’ve killed Hery and Hamon and Colwin and Will,” Jasper said in a curiously calm voice. He was not crying; he was not doing anything except sitting there and saying the truth with horrible certainty as he stared into nothingness over her shoulder. “They tried to kill us at the pigpen, and they tried to kill us at the pool, and they’ll go on trying because they don’t want us to be alive anymore.”

  “Jasper,” Frevisse said in agony for the pain and fear he was refusing to show. “Who would want you dead? Why?” Those were the most basic questions of all and she had no answers to them.

  But Jasper did. He shifted his eyes and looked at her. “The people my mother is afraid of. She sent us away because she’s afraid of what they want to do. She was trying to save us.”

  Trying to pretend he was not crying, Edmund said, “We thought they’d all been killed when we fought them by the stream, before we came here, but there must be more of them. They’ll try to kill Sir Gawyn and Mistress Maryon next!”

  “No they won’t. We’re going to bring Sir Gawyn and Mistress Maryon into the cloister, into the infirmary, and there’ll be guards at all the doors. No one will be able to reach them here. Or reach you either.” Unable to face Jasper’s expression that refused even that little hope, and not knowing what to do about Edmund’s tears, Frevisse rose to her feet and snapped, “Jenet, stop wailing! You’ve done nothing else since you came here and we’re all tired of it!” To the three children, more gently, she said, “I have to go see to other things now. Edmund, Jasper, you will stay here, in this room. You understand now? No going out for anything unless I say you may?”

  “We’ll stay,” said Edmund. “We won’t go out at all.” Jasper nodded.

  Frevisse thought Lady Adela would stay with them, but the girl followed her from the room, trotting as best her limp would let her to catch up and then stay beside her as Frevisse went along the cloister walk.

  Well away from the boys’ room Frevisse stopped. Lady Adela stopped with her. “Do you want something, child?” Frevisse asked. Lady Adela had never sought her company before.

  Her hands clasped prayerfully in front of her, her face tipped up to see Frevisse’s eyes, Lady Adela asked, “They will be all right, won’t they? You won’t let anyone hurt them?”

  “I’m doing all I can to keep them safe, and so are other people. And no one will hurt you, either, so you don’t have to be afraid.”

  “I’m not,” Lady Adela said indignantly. “Not for me. It’s just that I love Jasper and I mean to marry him, and so no one had better hurt him.”

  Improbable young love was something Frevisse had no time or patience for just now. “My Lady Adela,” she said with what restraint she could manage, “you are Lord Warenne’s daughter. I don’t think you can go choosing whom you will marry.” She refrained from adding, “And especially you should not choose either of these boys.”

  As much as her soft, sweet face allowed, Lady Adela’s expression hardened in unwonted stubbornness. “My father doesn’t want me and I’ll choose whom I like, no matter what he says.”

  “Lady Adela—” Frevisse began, then decided this was not an argument she had to participate in, most especially now. Instead she asked, “Why did you break your word and go out yesterday?”

  Startled by the change of direction, Lady Adela answered, “An oath given under duress isn’t binding. You made us promise not to go out so it didn’t count.”

  “An oath isn’t … Who told you that?”

  “Isn’t it true? We thought it was true or we wouldn’t have gone.” Lady Adela seemed distressed at the idea her argument might have been wrong.

  Frevisse gathered her wits and replied as clearly as she could. “If you’re forced to swear an oath because someone is threatening your life, if you’re in danger and have to make a promise to save yourself, that’s an oath made under duress and you are not bound by it. But it wasn’t that way when I asked you to promise, was it?”

  “No-o-o,” Lady Adela admitted. “I suppose not.”

  “So who told you about duress?”

  “I promised I wouldn’t tell.”

  “Was it someone here?”

  “Y-e-s.”

  “Lately?”

  “Y-e-s.” Lady Adela had become quite interested in her toe tracing the line of the stone paving in front of her.

  “Lady Adela, I think you had best tell me. You love Jasper. He and Edmund are in danger, and I need to know everything I can if they’re to be kept safe.” With difficulty, Frevisse made her tone mild.

  Reluctantly, Lady Adela said, “Now he’s dead, he won’t mind or be in trouble for it. There’s that.”

  “There’s that,” Frevisse agreed, holding tightly to her patience. “So please tell me.”

  “It was one of the men who belong to Edmund and Jasper.”

 
“Will? Sir Gawyn’s squire?”

  “No. The other one. The one we met at the stables that day. The bigger one. The one who drowned.”

  Colwin. “Yes,” Frevisse said. “I know who you mean.” But” not what it meant. It was simply another shape among the pieces she was gathering but none of them fit together yet with any sense. “When did you have chance to talk to him about oaths?”

  “That day at the sty, before Jasper and Edmund fell in. He was asking what we did all day, shut up in the nunnery, and didn’t we ever want to be out. So I told him about how we had been out and how you’d made us promise not to do it anymore, and then he told me about oaths made under duress. Only he was lying?”

  “He was lying,” Frevisse said firmly. “What were Edmund and Jasper doing while you talked with Colwin? Did they talk to him, too?”

  “Not then. They mostly talked with Master Naylor.” “Who else was there before the boys fell in?” “Father Henry and Will and the pig man and some other men from the stables, I don’t know their names.”

  “So there were you and Edmund and Jasper, Father Henry, Master Naylor, Will and Colwin, and the pig man and some men from the stables.” She went through the names slowly, ticking them off on her fingers. Lady Adela’s head bobbed to each one. “Anyone else?”

  Lady Adela’s head changed from bobbing to shaking. “No one else.”

  “And you were talking to Colwin when the boys fell in.” “No, I’d stopped that. I was just standing on the bottom rail of the fence—Master Naylor said I couldn’t go up higher because I’m a girl.” It was plain she scorned that reasoning. “I was leaning over to watch the piglets. I wasn’t talking to anyone.”

  “Who was standing near the boys when they fell?” Lady Adela frowned with concentration, then shook her head again. “I don’t know. I was looking at the piglets.”

  Frevisse withheld a sigh. It would be very helpful if someone knew where people were at that moment. She was sure now that it had been the first attempt to kill the boys. The murderer had been there and no one had noticed anything.

  Chapter 20

  At the end of Sext, when they had left the church and were gathered in the cloister walk before scattering to their different work, Dame Claire informed the nuns of Will’s murder, and told them in the mildest way that while they had been in service Sir Gawyn had been moved into the cloister’s infirmary and guards set at all the doors into the cloister, for his safety.

  Some word of Will’s murder had already begun to spread by way of the servants before then. Frevisse had felt the unease of it among the nuns when they gathered for the office with much looking at one another and small, urgent hand signals. They stirred now as Dame Claire told them, but when she went on to explain about Sir Gawyn they were startled into staring silence at the idea of a man brought deliberately into their midst.

  It was Dame Alys who reacted first, pushing red-faced to their fore, looming over Dame Claire and raging, “Without asking? You let a man be brought in here without consulting us? What are we supposed to make of that? It’s against the Rule, both doing it and not consulting us. What are we to make of it? A man in cloister!”

  Seeming even smaller than she was in front of Dame Alys’s bulk but as strong-willed in her quieter way, Dame Claire declared coldly back, “This is not the time to discuss it. You will wait until chapter tomorrow. Besides, there have been men in our cloister before.”

  “On business. Or as guest of Domina Edith’s parlor and always one of us there to keep it proper. Not put to bed in the infirmary! The Rule, Dame! You forget the Rule!”

  “And you forget charity! And the Rule that comes before even St. Benedict’s! Do to others as you would have them do to you!”

  “He’s a man!”

  “He’s hurt and he’s in danger!” She cut Dame Alys off with the sign for silence.

  Caught with her mouth open, Dame Alys huffed and purpled, enlarging with frustration and outrage to what seemed the point of bursting, then spun away, shoved through the other nuns, and stormed out of the cloister, presumably to wreak havoc in the guesthall, where no one could gesture her to silence.

  Dame Claire waited for the slam of the door into the yard, then motioned for the others to go about their business. Hushed, they obeyed, some more sullenly than others, only Frevisse staying and so only Frevisse seeing when Dame Claire let go her show of command and drained suddenly to weariness. But when Frevisse moved toward her, holding out a questioning hand to help, Dame Claire drew herself straight again, made a gesture of refusal that was close to anger, and went back into the church.

  Rebuffed and hurt by it even while understanding that Dame Claire resented the position she had put her in, Frevisse sighed and went to see how Sir Gawyn and Maryon did.

  As she passed the door to the boys’ room, Edmund leaned out and caught at her skirt.

  “Please, Dame, may we go see Sir Gawyn, now that he’s here? We’ll only go there and come right back. We promise. Jenet will be with us.”

  Jasper stood behind him, nodding earnest agreement. A luster had come back to him with this chance to see Sir Gawyn again and a hopefulness that Frevisse could not deny.

  “Let me see how he does first. He may be too tired just now, after coming from the guesthall. But surely soon Jenet may take you to see him.”

  Jasper drew a deep, delighted breath. He and his brother were so alike to look at, with their dark red hair and gray eyes and sturdy, graceful build, and so alike in what they did together; but Frevisse had noticed before now that Jasper did not talk or demand as much as Edmund did, perhaps because he had Edmund there to do it for him. But she thought he saw more of what was around him and felt what he saw more deeply than his brother did. Edmund would probably come to charm birds off the trees, as the saying went, and woo his way to anything, but she suspected it would be Jasper who would make true friends and hold them against whatever happened in his life; and he would hurt more over whatever happened to him than his brother did.

  Because there was nothing she could do to help that or keep him from any of the pain that would inevitably come to him, any more than she had been able to keep him from the hurts already happening, she smiled past Edmund at him with particular kindness before going on to the infirmary.

  Beyond the room where the medicines were made and kept was the longer room with its six beds where, God forbid, ill nuns could come for special rest and care. Living removed from any town and most people, under the stringent balance of the Rule, there were few illnesses in the priory beyond winter rheums, so the room was mostly unused, but it was kept in readiness, and there had been no trouble making up a bed by the door with fresh sheets and blankets for Sir Gawyn.

  But he was not lying in it when Frevisse entered. He was at the far end of the room, walking carefully from handhold on the bedpost at the end of one bed to the bedpost of the next, with Maryon hovering, as ever, near at hand. His face was set with concentration, his hair dark with perspiration at the temples. He looked up from his feet when he realized someone was there and, reading her expression rightly, said, “If I do naught but lie in bed, I’ll only grow feeble.”

  “And this way you may exhaust yourself beyond recovery, pushing yourself too hard too soon,” Frevisse returned.

  “He walked here on his own,” Maryon put in.

  “Slowly,” Sir Gawyn said wryly. “And I think I’m ready to lie down again now.”

  Maryon took hold of his unhurt arm and helped him back to his bed. The strain of the past days and today showed in her tense movement; her usual grace seemed as exhausted as Sir Gawyn’s strength.

  When he was lying down again—and admittedly his color was better than it had been; he might be right about the walking, despite what doctors insisted in such matters— Frevisse said, “You understand you’re to stay strictly in here?”

  “We heard,” Sir Gawyn said.

  “That was Dame Alys ranting?” Maryon asked.

  “Indeed,” Frevisse agreed.
‘The boys are confined to their room, too, but if you like, I’ll give permission for Jenet to bring them to see you.”

  Maryon smiled. “They were at their door as we came along. Yes, it would be good to have them come.”

  “No,” Sir Gawyn said. His eyes were closed. “Not now. Later.”

  With a worried look at him, Maryon reversed herself and agreed, “Not now. You’re tired. Later.”

  “But you could go see them,” Frevisse suggested to her. “I think they’d be glad of that.”

  “They would, wouldn’t they?” Maryon agreed, but not eagerly. How deep was the bond between her and Sir Gawyn, that she was willing to neglect the boys for him? “I’ll go now, while you rest, Gawyn.”

  Not opening his eyes, he nodded.

  Frevisse stepped back to let her go first, but as Maryon did, Sir Gawyn said, “Dame Frevisse, would you stay a little?”

  Maryon glanced back with a slight frown but went on. Frevisse returned to his bedside. With an effort, Sir Gawyn drew himself up a little on the pillows so he was not lying so helplessly flat and shifted himself, favoring his shoulder, into a better position.

  “How badly does it hurt?” she asked.

  “Surprisingly little, unless I move it too much.” But it was not his shoulder he was concerned with just now. “Has anything more been learned about Will’s death? And Col-win’s?”

  “Master Naylor is asking more questions, to learn where they were yesterday, and when, and if anyone unknown has been seen around here, but I’ve heard nothing from him so suppose he hasn’t found anything new.”

  “So no one has any idea about their deaths?”

  “I have ideas.”

  Sir Gawyn waited, and when she went no farther, said, “But you’re not going to tell me.”

  “They’re too unformed as yet. We’re guessing they were killed because they stood between someone and the boys.

  And we know someone wants the boys dead because someone has tried twice to kill them.”

  “Twice?” Sir Gawyn’s voice darkened. “What do you mean, twice?”