7 The Prioress' Tale
Page 25
Frevisse had already feared as much but it was worse to hear it said. “You’re saying that our ‘rescue’ is going to be as bad as our trouble has been?”
“Very likely.”
“What about you? Are you going to be able to leave here clear of any trouble? Sir Walter won’t give you away?”
“I told him my fee was double if he did. So far as everyone is concerned, he came here on a chance report from a chance peddler, nothing to do with me. I’m a mere wanderer who happened into this in all innocence and proved of noble use to Edmund in his peril. He’s already told in great detail how much a help I was to him, bless the man, and it’s planned I’m to ride out with him—the abbot is loaning us horses—when he leaves in maybe an hour to see Mistress Joice back to her loving family.”
“Who may reward you further for the help you gave him?” Frevisse asked dryly.
Joliffe laid an earnest hand over his heart. “I can only hope. For just now, I’m going to go suggest to Master Porter what manner of agreement he might try to make with your abbot over wages and unfinished towers and things. Supposing it’s possible to make agreement with your Abbot Gilberd. He seems to have come with a great many decisions already made.” He bowed lightly and was turning away toward the boarded doorway as he spoke, adding over his shoulder for parting, “I don’t envy you the next few days.”
“I doubt you envy me anything,” Frevisse said after him.
Joliffe turned back, with a look on his face that was disconcertingly like too many of Sister Thomasine’s—deep and quiet and with nothing hidden in it and yet nothing there that Frevisse could clearly read. “Oh yes,” he said most quietly after a moment. “There are things I envy you. Believe me.”
Then his laughter flashed up across his face and he fell back, made them both a deep, elaborate bow, swung around and was gone into the tower, the door dragged shut behind him.
Carefully gathering her mind back to itself, Frevisse turned to Sister Thomasine and slowly, finding her way, said, “You didn’t mind talking to him. To Joliffe. A man and a stranger.”“
“Oh, no,” Sister Thomasine said simply.
“Nor mind the madman being in the church, when we thought he was a madman.” Another man, another stranger, when ever since she had come to St. Frideswide’s, Sister Thomasine had kept from any dealings with any man that she could possibly avoid.
“I knew he wasn’t mad.” That was what she had said before—that he had not felt mad to her. Then what had she felt of Joliffe that she had accepted him, too?
And almost Frevisse asked, how she felt to her, then knew she did not want to know and said instead, “We’ve let go two offices so far today. Do you think there’s time for us to say them now?” Now, in the silence and the waiting before Vespers and whatever Abbot Gilberd would bring down on them. Here, with Domina Alys lying stretched out below the altar in what Frevisse hoped, for her soul’s sake, was the deepest of prayer.