‘Keep them company?“ Dame Claire repeated uncertainly.
Gil stepped closer, saying too low for anyone else to hear, “He wants someone besides Mistress Dionisia there.”
Frevisse traded looks with Dame Claire that told each other the request was too reasonable to refuse but that they both wished they could, before Dame Claire said to Gil as mildly as if nothing else could have been more pleasurable to them, “Of course we will.”
Gil cleared a way for them the rest of the way down the hall, to join Katherine and Drew in the screen’s passage to the outer door, with Mistress Dionisia and an Allesley servant there, too. Katherine gave Frevisse’s name and Dame Claire’s to Drew and his to them and he made them a low bow and polite greeting and said to Katherine, gesturing toward the door, “By your leave?”
She smiled on him and led their way out into the bright spring day, with a pause at the head of the steps while she gathered her skirts a little higher in front and Mistress Dionisia picked them up in back to keep them off the stairs. Then Drew held out his hand and she rested her free one on it for him to lead her down, with another pause at the stairfoot while Mistress Dionisia set down her back-skirts and Katherine reached around to gather them up. She was dressed to show both that she was able to afford such a wealth of cloth and lady enough to have no other need for her hands than managing her skirts and she made a quick and graceful movement of clearing them from the ground behind with one hand while still holding them up in front with her other, all without showing more than the tip of her shoe when she’d finished and smiled at Drew to show she was ready to go on.
Many of the lesser folk with no part in the afternoon’s talks had already spilled out of the hall but they cleared way as Drew and Katherine crossed the yard toward the gate, followed by Dame Claire and Frevisse—glad her own skirts were far less full and made to clear the ground, even if only by a scant inch—followed by Mistress Dionisia followed in turn by Gil and Drew’s servant. Outside the gateway, they turned leftward and went by a graveled path between the manor’s wall and a granary, turned a corner of the manor’s wall and were at a penticed gate set in a waist-high withy fence, with beyond it the garden laid out narrowly between wall and orchard in a pattern of graveled paths and square beds where only a few early plants showed young green, with a hedge and arbor closing it in at its far end and a turf bench along the low earthen bank that separated it from the orchard.
As Drew held the gate open for her, Katherine murmured that it was not so pleasant a place this early in the spring as later in the year.
‘No matter what time of year we were here,“ he answered, ”you’d be the fairest flower in it.“
Katherine turned her gaze aside, looking down, accepting his fair words in the best of maidenly manners, and remembering the fiercely frightened girl of hardly two hours ago, Frevisse wondered if this change in her was purely by will or if, after all, she found Drew Allesley to her liking. If it was the latter way with her, all this might not turn out so ill after all. At least for Katherine.
Meanwhile Gil hurried forward to hold the gate open for Frevisse, Dame Claire, and Mistress Dionisia to pass through, leaving Drew and Katherine free to stroll off together by the nearest path, Katherine saying something about the grapevine over the arbor. There being no need to more than keep them in sight, Frevisse hesitated over what to do now. Gil and the Allesley man were in no doubt on their own behalf; they propped themselves against the pentice posts as if ready to hold them up for the afternoon, and Mistress Dionisia, saying to no one in particular, “There now, I’ve been on my feet long enough and want to be off them, by your leave,” sat herself down on a wooden bench beside the gateway, adding to Frevisse and Dame Claire, Come sit, too, if you like. There’s room enough.“
‘We’d rather walk a little,“ Dame Claire said with a smile, moving away toward a path that Katherine and Drew were not on. ”Dame Frevisse?“
Unaware she had any particular urge to walk until Dame Claire said she did, Frevisse joined her, the two of them falling without thought into the familiar, matching, measured steps they so often used when circling St. Frideswide’s cloister walk together, hands tucked into their opposite sleeves and eyes to the ground a few yards ahead of them. The silence between them was familiar, too, and Frevisse would have been content with it and with the thinly warm spring sunshine and no more sounds than the small crunch of gravel underfoot, the bird sounds in the hedge at the garden’s end, the low murmur of Katherine and Drew’s voices across the garden and Mistress Dionisia and the two men beside the gate; but she sensed Dame Claire tense beside her, and when they had walked the garden’s length and were turning to go back again with nothing spoken yet, she asked, “What’s the matter?”
With a promptness that betrayed how much she had been wanting to say something but her voice, like Frevisse’s, kept cloister-low, Dame Claire burst out, “I don’t know. Too much. Nothing. I don’t know.”
Overt uncertainty was rarely Dame Claire’s way. The surprise of it nearly brought Frevisse to a halt, but Dame Claire went on walking, saying, “It’s Lady Blaunche. I don’t know what to do.”
‘There’s something more wrong with her than you thought?“
‘What’s worst wrong with her she’s doing to herself,“ Dame Claire said sharply; and then, unhappily, ”No, that’s not fair. Some of it is truly her body’s unbalanced humours and I’m trying to do what can be done for that. But she’s not helping. She’s…“ Dame Claire broke off and started again, annoyance and pity equally mixed, ”There I am, still wanting to be unkind about her when how she presently is isn’t even all her own doing. Childbearing simply isn’t kind to her and she’s unkind because of it.“
‘I doubt,“ Frevisse murmured, ”she’s a mild lady at the best of times.“
‘I gather not,“ Dame Claire agreed, grimly enough that Frevisse looked sideways at her, again surprised. Very rarely did anything come between Dame Claire and her care for someone she was tending, their needs outweighing all else with her, including her own feelings toward them.
‘You’ll be able to help her, though?“
Dame Claire drew and let out a long breath before she answered, very quietly, “I don’t know.”
Frevisse stopped and turned toward her, beginning to be alarmed. “You don’t know?”
Dame Claire faced her in turn. “It’s as with a bone or muscle kept twisted out of their right way too long. They’re all the harder to draw back to where they should be and harder to keep there once they are. Lady Blaunche’s humours have been awry for a long while, not just with this childing but with her others, too, and that her childings have come so near together makes it the worse. There’s hardly been chance for her body to right itself between them. For a great many women it doesn’t matter. For her, it’s otherwise.”
‘But surely there’s something—“
‘Surely there is. But it will take time.“
The flat way she said “time” told Frevisse she meant more than a little of it and carefully, afraid she would not like the answer, Frevisse asked, “Longer than Lent?”
‘Very possibly.“
Dame Claire did not sound as if she liked her answer any better than Frevisse did, and in a silence now brooding on Frevisse’s side as well as Dame Claire’s, they walked on.
Since becoming a nun Frevisse had never been anywhere out in St. Frideswide’s for either Christmas or Easter, the tomes of each year when heart and mind should be most fully given over to the mystery and joy of, first, Christ’s coming into the world and then his triumph over it. To be somewhere else, to be unable to weave herself into the deep patterning of prayers and praise that brought her into the very heart of the mystery, the core of its joy…
‘Nor does it help,“ Dame Claire went on, ”that everything and nearly everyone around her seems bent on making everything worse. Did you know she and her husband quarreled last night?“
‘No.“
Nor did Frevisse much wan
t to, but Dame Claire went on, somewhat grimly, “Mistress Avys has taken to telling me everything there’s ever been wrong with her lady, which is useful only to a point. Then it becomes more trouble than help and I surely don’t need to hear what she and her husband were angry over at each other in their bed. Why can’t people remember there are ears on the other side of doors? And there’ll be another quarrel tonight if Master Fenner hears what she told Katherine this morning after he and Benedict quarreled.”
‘He’s quarreled with Benedict, too?“
‘Most assuredly.“
The garden was far longer than it was wide but they had reached its end and turned to pass through the arbor, able to glimpse through the barren branches that Katherine and Drew were already well back toward the gate by the garden’s other path, not hurrying, merely matching each other’s pace without apparent need to think about it, their heads turned toward each other, Katherine’s tilted a little up toward his, both of them smiling as they talked. Dame Claire made a small nod toward them. “It looks as if Lady Blaunche’s hope there is going to be lost, too. After Master Fenner and Benedict went at it this morning…”
‘Over what?“
‘This Allesley business. What else? I don’t know what set them off. The other women and I were with Lady Blaunche in her bedchamber and they were in the parlor and we didn’t hear what started them, only from where they were too angry to keep their voices down. First it was Benedict shouting that Master Fenner was a fool not to keep Katherine’s wealth in Fenner hands instead of giving it over to people who didn’t deserve the luck. Master Fenner shouted back that no matter what Benedict thought and come what may, he was to keep his mouth shut while the dealings with the Allesleys went on or he’d find himself out the door for once and all and not a penny with him to see him on his way.“
‘What did Lady Blaunche do at that?“
‘By then she was sobbing and trying to leave her bed and Mistress Avys and Master Geoffrey were trying to keep her there and I went out to those two fools in the parlor.“ Grim as Dame Claire sounded over it now, she must have been more so then. ”They were so busy being angry they didn’t even know I was there until I came between them and told them what I thought of them.“
‘And that ended it?“ Frevisse asked, not doubting it did. Despite that Dame Claire was so small-built a woman, when she was angry she was not someone with whom anyone usually argued.
‘It would have for Master Fenner. He backed away, said well enough that he was sorry, and started to make for the door, but…“ Dame Claire’s steps slowed, and although no one else was near enough to hear, dropped her voice even lower than it already was. ”But Benedict said after him— thank mercy too low for anyone but Master Fenner and me to hear him—that the reason Master Fenner wouldn’t let him have Katherine was because Master Fenner wanted her for himself.“
Not trying to hide she was startled but quick to Robert’s defense, Frevisse said, “He’d not be so willing to give her up to the Allesleys if that were the way of it.”
‘That’s my thought, too. But the look on his face…“ Dame Claire shook her head at memory of it. ”He looked as if he wished the floor would open up under Benedict and take him, and it was as if he could barely get the words out when he said he didn’t care what Benedict thought about anything so long as he kept it to himself and kept out of the way until he could keep his manners better than he kept his tongue. Then he left and Benedict started in to see his mother and I told him he couldn’t and he went away across the room to gloom to himself, I suppose.“
And had still been glooming at dinner, by the look of him. But he had kept his tongue, at any rate.
“Then I went back to Lady Blaunche,” Dame Claire was going on, “just in time to see her grab Katherine by the wrist…”
‘Katherine was there?“
‘Being readied for the Allesleys, with Lady Blaunche telling that girl Emelye and Mistress Dionisia everything to do as if they had no wits of their own. Emelye may not, come to that. But Lady Blaunche caught hold on Katherine and told her to remember that all she need do is flat refuse to marry an Allesley, and Master Fenner would never force her to it.“
Frevisse shook her head slowly in what she wished was disbelief that while Robert was working to make the best he could out of what was never his fault, his wife was still intent on balking him by any means she could manage. Briefly, she looked toward Katherine and Drew, laughing together, and then up at the parlor window, from where all the garden could be seen by anyone leaning even a little way out, and said, “If she sees them together thus, she’s going to be even more unhappy than she is.”
‘Merely unhappy would be a blessing. What she’ll be is furious. I can only hope she’s kept to her bed the way I ordered.“
‘Who’s with her now?“
‘Master Geoffrey, Mistress Avys and Emelye. For what it’s worth, so far as Mistress Avys and Emelye count. Mistress Avys enjoys being upset with Lady Blaunche, I think, and Emelye is too afraid of her—or at least too wary—to be much use. Master Geoffrey is more use than both of them put together and doubled. When all that Mistress Avys has to offer is pity for ’my poor lady’s plight‘—and that’s like tossing dry pinecones into a hot fire; all it does is stir Lady Blaunche to greater fretting—Master Geoffrey at least tries to quiet her by reminding her that too much choler is good for neither her nor the child. And just ere dinner, to divert her, he brought out an account roll he said she should work over with him.“
‘To give her something else to think on than her wrongs?“
‘Even so. Mind you, when she saw it was the accounts for this manor there’s all the trouble over, she threw it across the room and swore at him and was reaching for something else to throw—at him, I think—but he caught her hand and pointed out that maybe they could show by plain figures from the account roll that the manor had gained in worth while she held it, and if they did, then the Allesleys would have less grounds for demanding compensation along with its return.“
‘Someone should have thought of that before,“ Frevisse said.
‘I think someone did. Gil had just come to fetch Katherine down to dinner and I was near him and half heard him mutter, ’… thinks we’re all sheeps’ heads.‘ My guess would be Master Fenner thought of it long since but knew Lady Blaunche would take nothing of it from him.“
‘But she took it from Master Geoffrey.“
‘Just now, angry at her husband as she is, she’ll take just about anything from anyone else, rather than from him and from Master Geoffrey before anyone else.“
Frevisse cast her a sidewise, questioning look to which Dame Claire shook her head.
‘No, I don’t think there’s anything untoward between her and Master Geoffrey. He flatters her and is pleasant company because that’s the surest way to keep his place, from what Mistress Avys has said about how the last clerk of the household lost his, but Master Geoffrey has sense enough to know…“ Dame Claire broke off and said instead, her voice changed, ”Here comes what could be trouble.“
Frevisse had been walking with her head down but she raised it at Dame Claire’s warning in time to see Mistress Dionisia rising to her feet from the bench and Gil and Drew’s servant straightening from where they had been leaning against the pentice post to make curtsy and bows to Benedict and Emelye just coming through the gateway. Worse, Katherine and Drew, just finishing another circle of the garden, were approaching the gate with no way to turn aside from the newcomers; and without need to say anything between them, Frevisse and Dame Claire walked a little the faster, to bring them up to the others sooner—before anything could happen, was Frevisse’s thought but all that she said aloud, very low, was, “Sent by Lady Blaunche, do you think?”
As quietly, Dame Claire returned, “Without even pause for doubt, yes.”
They joined the others just as Benedict was saying in not the most friendly of voices, “We thought to enjoy the garden, too, while the weather is fair.”
It was generally agreed they had, and Emelye added brightly, “Though I love the way everything smells so sweetly after rain, don’t you?”
It seemed everyone did, and while they were agreeing on it, Katherine began to drift away toward the nearest garden path. Inevitably, Drew drifted with her, and if her intent was to put distance between Drew and Benedict, she was helped by Gil stepping forward at that moment to ask Benedict, “Am I wanted at the hall, do you know, sir?” because when Benedict turned with a scowl to tell him that he wasn’t as far as Benedict knew, Katherine took the chance to turn full away to the path, Drew going with her.
The Squire’s Tale Page 14