The Squire’s Tale

by Margaret Frazer

  ‘She’s quieter,“ Katherine answered. ”Exhaustion, Dame Claire says. She—Lady Blaunche—sent me with this.“ She laid a hand on the folded cloth. ”To shroud him.“ She swallowed on tears. ”She said I’m to stay and pray by him because he shouldn’t be alone, she says.“

  ‘That’s to the good, then,“ said Gil, still over-hearty. ”It’s what Master Fenner has come for, too.“

  ‘Better you’re both here for him,“ Master Verney added more quietly, ”and neither of you alone.“

  Frevisse silently agreed that for plain kindness’ sake, they should neither of them have to be alone just now, but as Robert with no word of his own took the cloth from Katherine and stood aside with a small gesture for her to go ahead of him into the chapel, Frevisse heard in her mind, unbidden, all there had been in his cry of Katherine’s name on the stairs a little while ago and had a treacherous thought that on the other hand maybe it was better they not be alone together. There had been something in the way he had said Katherine’s name…

  She cut the thought off. It was something Robert did not deserve, nor Katherine, and she said to Gil as he started to bow before going off on his given business, “Before anything else, bring food and wine for Master Fenner and Mistress Katherine, please.”

  ‘First thing of all,“ he said, his look showing he was beginning to approve of her.

  ‘And when you meet up with the steward, tell him I want to talk with him as soon as may be.“

  ‘Yes, my lady.“

  He bowed and left and she realized that the village bell had sometime ceased its tolling of Benedict’s years without her noticing and said to Master Verney with a tiredness of heart she hoped she hid, “Would you show me to Benedict’s chamber, please?”

  Chapter 17

  Frevisse let go by that she would be alone in Benedict’s room with a man, against the rules that should govern her. There were times for heeding rules and times for not, she had found, and while following Master Verney to a near doorway, a match for the one to the nursery stairs and her own chamber, she deemed this was a time for not, whatever confession and penance she might have to do for it afterwards.

  ‘These are storerooms here,“ he said, nodding toward the doors on either side and starting up the stairs. ”Benedict’s room is above.“

  ‘And Master Geoffrey’s,“ Frevisse said, remembering. ”Even so.“

  Both doors were closed and Master Verney had his hand raised to knock at Benedict’s before, with the sharpness of bitter remembering, he jerked back, swore under his breath, and opened the door with more violence than needed for anything except to relieve his feelings. Saying nothing because what was there to say, Frevisse followed him in. Master Verney had liked Benedict enough to ask him into his household for two years, been near enough to him to be able to talk him out of the solar last night when possibly no one else could have. Now all that was left was Benedict’s body lying in the chapel and the emptiness of a room to which he would never come back.

  Frevisse took hard hold on the practical thought that it was not truly an empty room. It was furnished with bed and table, chair, stools, chests, a fireplace on the outer wall, all much the way her own was but more lavishly, as befitted the household’s heir, and with the clutter of a young man with only himself to satisfy. A sheathed sword hung by its belt from one bedpost. A boot lay on the floor at the bed’s foot, its mate nowhere in sight. Clothing was heaped disorderly on the chest it should probably have been in and other clothing was in a smaller heap on the floor beside the table where a tray with pitcher and cloth-covered plate shared the tabletop with a wooden horse on wheels with one wheel broken off and in two but ready to be mended with gluepot and tools waiting to hand.

  Seeing where she was looking, Master Verney said, “John’s. He’s ever too hard on his toys and Benedict was ever mending them.”

  Frevisse nodded and went on looking. In a corner a cluster of fishing poles leaned against the wall, most of them far too short for Benedict’s likely use—had he taken his little half brothers and sister fishing with them or were they something kept from his own childhood, not so long past?— and on a stool beside the bedhead there were two books and a candle stub in a holder. Because books were something she never resisted, she went and picked them up, found one was a leather-bound book of devotions that looked little used and the other a well-worn copy of chivalrous tales.

  ‘Robert gave him that when he and Blaunche married,“ Master Verney said. ”A wedding present, he told Benedict. It was the first book anyone had ever given him, I think.“

  ‘And the devotions?“

  ‘From his mother a few Christmases ago.“

  It was easy to see which had mattered the most to Benedict but at least he had kept both to hand and with a feeling of fellowship toward Benedict that she had never expected to have, Frevisse put them down exactly where they had been and said, “The food and drink on the table. Were they there when you came in with Benedict from the solar last night?”

  ‘Yes.“

  No servant had come in with them later, then, and that meant that so far as was known, Master Verney had been the last person here with Benedict. She went to lift the cloth, uncovering a thick, folded slice of bread with honey soaked through it and a square-cut piece of ginger cake, and looked in the pitcher and the goblet standing next to it. “Nothing eaten and only a little of the ale gone. Did he drink it while you were here?”

  Master Verney shook his head. “We talked is all and finally he asked me to leave him alone. He was tired and I think ashamed and disappointed in himself. He wanted to be alone, he said, and I left him sitting on the edge of the bed.”

  If everything he had told her was the truth, it meant that, so far as was known, Master Verney had been the last person here with Benedict until his murderer came or Benedict went out and was killed elsewhere.

  Equally, until she had some thought as to why someone would have killed him, she had to assume, firstly, until she was certain they could not have, that anyone might have done it and, secondly, until she was certain they were not, that anyone could be lying to her. Including Master Verney.

  But she kept that to herself as she touched her foot against the little heap of clothing beside the table, then bent to feel of it and said, “Everything is wet.”

  ‘It was downpouring when we crossed the yard. He changed out of his soaked clothes while we were talking.“

  ‘What did you do?“

  ‘I stood by the door and dripped.“

  As would anyone who came into the room last night. There were still puddled places on the floorboards that would tell her nothing, she supposed, for the same reason that there was no use looking for wet clothing to tell who else had been here or met Benedict elsewhere and either killed him at the stairfoot or carried his body there, supposing it had been raining at the time and not between storms. Whatever the way of it had been, with all of last night’s rain the murderer would not be the only man in Brinskep manor with wet clothes today.

  Unless the wet clothing belonged to someone who had had no reason to be out in the rain, no reason to be wet.

  She should have had Gil ask questions toward learning that, too, would bid him do so when next she saw him. And there was also need, now she thought of it, to find if anyone had taken a message from Benedict to someone. Supposing they arranged to meet in the screens passage, there was chance no one else might have known Benedict was there. When it was late enough, people would be more likely sleeping than wandering and the screens passage was a somewhat possible place for privacy. In which case Benedict lying at the stairfoot dead might have come about by accident after all.

  But whomever he had met with would have said something about meeting with him by now. Unless they had immediately seen the danger of being unfairly accused of his murder and held silent. Or they might actually have killed him and were holding silent for even better reason.

  But even so, whoever had been messenger between them would have spoke
n out by now. Or should have. And she would have to go on doubting Benedict had been back to the hall last night and believing that, whatever had happened, it had very possibly happened here. Where there was nothing that told her anything.

  ‘Dame Frevisse?“ Master Verney asked.

  She came back from her thinking with a start. “Yes. I’m nearly done.” But she went to look under the bed where there was surprisingly little dust but the missing boot and a small, lidded box shoved against the wall at the head of the bed. Leaving the boot and dust where they were, Frevisse drew out the box, set it on the bed and opened it. Inside, at first look, was nothing much, a mere jumble of things, but Master Verney had crossed the room to join her and now drew a painful breath, reached out and laid his fingertips on a small coil of red-dyed leather. “Dasher’s leash,” he said thickly. “A greyhound his mother had when Benedict was small. We use to joke they teethed on each other. Benedict grew up and Dasher grew old and here…” There were tears on his cheek but there was no shame in crying and he did not bother with wiping them away, instead found and took up something else that looked like nothing much but had mattered enough to Benedict to keep, a two-inch length of chipped flint, neatly crafted into an arrowhead. “We found this one day along the stream when he was maybe ten years old. I told him how such a thing is supposed to be the tip of a thunderbolt, left behind when lightning strikes down to the ground. I didn’t know… he’d… kept it.”

  Master Verney turned sharply and crossed the room away from her, to stand facing the wall. He took the arrowhead with him, clenched in his hand, Frevisse noted but did not say, only closed the box carefully and put it back where it had been under the bed. Every child had such a box or its like, Frevisse suspected. Hers had been very small, hardly larger than her child-hand, because there had been hardly room to spare among her parents’ travelling necessities for anything not needed simply to live but she had kept it and its “treasures” right up to the day she had known, fully and irrevocably, that she would go into a nunnery. That day, with her choice whole and certain in her, she had gone off alone with her box, the last thing she had in all the world that was all her own, the last thing left to her from her parents, and had carefully chosen a place no one would likely ever dig but she could find again if ever she wanted to—knowing even then she never would—and buried it and its “treasures” as some sort of final parting from everything her life had been until then.

  The kind of parting Benedict had been given no chance to make.

  The sound of someone coming up the stairs drew her from her thoughts. She straightened from beside the bed and turned to the door as a man paused in the doorway, saw first her, then Master Verney, and said, “Gil said I was wanted here?” uncertain not about Gil but about why he was wanted.

  Master Verney, tucking the arrowhead into his belt pouch and not minding it was plain he had been crying, said, “Master Fenner has given Dame Frevisse leave to ask questions about Master Benedict’s death. She has some for you, Master Skipton, if you please.”

  The steward was a small-bodied, black-haired man, brisk and sharp-eyed, and he nodded crisply, used to obeying authority as well as wielding it. “Whatever is needed, my lady. We—the household—are greatly grieved for his death.”

  ‘He was liked?“ Frevisse asked, realizing there were signs of crying to Master Skipton’s eyes, too.

  ‘He was.“

  The simplicity of the answer as well as its vigor told her something more about Benedict—that what little she had seen of him must have been the worst. And that worst had been the errors of a young man not yet fully formed in judgment and that was something only time could mend in everyone. Time Benedict had not been given. Those who had known him longest, known him best, had thought well enough of him to care deeply he was dead, and that meant they would help the more willingly toward finding his murderer and she said, “I need you to tell me where everyone slept last night. The Allesleys, the arbiters, Master Verney, all the men that came with them, and the rest of the household.”

  Master Skipton drew a deep breath, as if in-gathering his thoughts along with air enough to tell them, and said, “Sir Lewis and Master Drew and all the arbiters slept in the solar, crowded but private and with no need for them to go out into the rain. Master Verney spent the night in my chamber. His men and the others slept in the hall, except for those who chose to sleep in the stables…”

  ‘Some did?“

  ‘Two, I think. They had horses the storm made restless, I understand.“

  ‘And the household?“

  ‘Wherever they usually sleep, so far as I know. The kitchen for some. In the hall for others. Some share a chamber on the yard’s east side, where my own is, and there are two married couples have rooms of their own there, too.“

  ‘Has there been any talk of anyone not being where they should have been or seen in an unlikely place last night?“

  ‘No.“

  ‘You’re certain?“

  “Not that’s come to my ears but I can ask.”

  ‘Please do,“ said Frevisse. ”Was anyone charged with keeping the lanterns lighted in the yard last night?“

  ‘No. They weren’t likely to stay lighted for long with the wind there was and who would be out in the storm to need them?“

  And whoever had been out, dealing with Benedict’s death and body, had preferred the darkness, surely, Frevisse thought and went on, “After the night-food was brought, did any other servant come here last night, that you know of?”

  ‘No. But I’ll ask, if you like.“

  ‘Thank you. Ask, too, if you will, if anyone took a message to Benedict, or from him, last night. And ask if any of the servants noticed that someone who stayed the night where there was no need for them to be out in the rain—in the hall or solar or wherever—had wet clothing this morning.

  Master Skipton’s quickened face told Frevisse he understood immediately why she asked that, but all he said was, “Yes, my lady.”

  ‘And this for both of you,“ she said, including Master Verney with a look. ”Did Master Benedict have any…“ She thought about what word to use. ”… interest in anyone, a woman or girl, here? Or anywhere,“ she added for good measure.

  ‘No,“ Master Skipton said. ”None.“

  Master Verney was more forthcoming. “His mother would have heard of it soon enough by way of Mistress Avys and put a stop to it within the hour.”

  That closed off the only other course of questioning she had except for, “One thing more, Master Skipton.” She fixed him with a straight look, to watch as much as hear his answer. “Did Master Verney stay in your chamber and not leave at any time until the morning?”

  Master Skipton’s answer was unhesitating. “Yes.”

  ‘You’re certain?“

  ‘Yes.“

  ‘What time did he come to bed?“

  ‘He was there before I was, because I had all the usual evening business of making certain doors were barred and fires covered before I was done for the day as well as making sure as much had been done as could be for our guests, but he left the solar when the Allesleys and arbiters were set to ready to bed.“

  ‘I went back to the hall after leaving Benedict here, dried a little by the fire there, then returned to the solar,“ Master Verney said evenly, though he had to know why she was asking where he had been and when last night. ”I thought not to leave Robert to it alone, helped keep up the talk until the evening’s end, and left when he did, went from there directly to Master Skipton’s room and, yes, stayed there until morning.“

  ‘And Robert?“ Frevisse asked evenly.

  ‘Robert?“ For the first time Master Verney slightly bridled. ”What about Robert?“

  ‘Where did he go? Do you know?“

  ‘He went with me as far as the yard,“ Master Verney said stiffly. ”We parted at the foot of the stairs.“ He stopped, the odd look on his face telling her that the same thing was crossing his mind as hers: they had been standing then wher
e Benedict’s body was found next morning. But Master Verney steadied and went on, ”He said he was going to see the children, maybe spend the night there. I’d surely not have gone back to Lady Blaunche last night if I’d had choice and was glad he wasn’t going to. I wished him good sleeping and went my way to Master Skipton’s room.“

  ‘Was it raining then?“

  ‘Not downpouring, just spattering. The end of the storm, before the next one moved in.“

  ‘And you stayed there until morning.“