The Bishop’s Tale

by Margaret Frazer

  His gesture of recognition interrupted her. “You’re Master Chaucer’s niece! My pardon, lady, for not knowing you sooner. Of course. Of course. You couldn’t ask your aunt about it, could you? Pardon us, please,” he added to the other man, who bowed his head and moved away, leaving them in what would pass for privacy in that gathering. Master Broun leaned his head nearer to her and dropped his voice to consultation level. “You’re wondering how it was with your uncle, of course. It came on slowly; he had time to prepare himself while we tried all that could be done but, alas”—he spread his white, well-tended hands in resignation —“it was not God’s will he live. But the end was peaceful. Very peaceful.”

  He was an echo of Aunt Matilda. She had repeated and repeated that his end had been peaceful, as if for reassurance to herself more than anyone, so that Frevisse had resisted asking for details that might mar her aunt’s comfort. Now, with this unexpected chance, she asked, “Was he painfully ill?”

  “Not painfully. Never painfully, no, except for a while when the starvation became marked, but that abated as his decline progressed. You know he fell ill early in the summer? The first indication of trouble was that he lost flesh with no cause. He seemed in good health but no matter what he ate, he lessened. We began to do all manner of things that should have helped.” He shook his head, his expression puckered with professional regret. “But nothing we did realigned his humors.”

  If he were like others of his kind Frevisse had known, he would go on now to lengthy and detailed discourse on bile and sanguinity and the courses of the stars before he came back to the plain fact that Chaucer had died despite all his doctors’ knowledge and care. To forestall him, she said, “So it was a wasting disease, not painful in the main but with no hope.”

  “Not by late autumn. From then it was merely a matter of time.” He spread his hands again in token of helplessness in the face of fate. “An unusual case, but not unheard-of.”

  “And the man who died today, Sir Clement Sharpe. What happened to him?”

  The physician stared at her blankly for a moment, then remembered to shut his mouth, only to open it and say rather severely, “You were in the hall, I believe? Yes, then you saw him. He called on God to witness his truth, and God smote him in his lie. And you were there in the priest’s chamber when he died. My lady, you saw how he died.”

  “But he didn’t simply stop living,” Frevisse pressed. “It wasn’t that simple. I saw what agonies he was in—”

  “Certainly.” Master Broun was beginning to be offended.

  Frevisse moderated her tone to humble inquiry. “It was so terrible to see. I couldn’t watch. He didn’t choke on a bite of food, or the wine he drank go down the wrong way? It’s so terrible to think of God striking him down in that manner. I just keep hoping it was something else, and if it was, you would be the one who knew.”

  Her double appeal to his learning and his manhood flattered the physician enough to consider her question. “I of course checked him immediately for some cause of his distress,” he replied with suitable gravity, “but there was no sign of what it might be. It was as if all his humors had turned violently against him all at once.”

  “There seemed to be something in his throat.”

  “I looked there first, of course, but it was not something in his throat, it was his throat itself. A severe and prolonged spasm of all the flesh in there that caused an effusion of fluid and brought on a swelling that inhibited his breathing.”

  Inhibited his breathing to the point of death, Frevisse thought drily, but she kept her tone mild and wondering as she said, “What about those terrible welts all over his face, and that redness, and the itching that seemed to torment him almost as much as his breathing? They had nothing to do with his throat constricting, did they?”

  Master Broun shifted uneasily, then said, “They were no part of his throat’s affliction. They were something else altogether, brought on, I believe, by his general distress and the imminence of death.”

  “His death agonies brought on welts and itching?” In all the deaths she had seen or ever heard of, there had been nothing like that.

  Master Broun held silent a moment, uneasy rather than offended, and then said in a much lower voice, “They were no direct part of his throat’s affliction. Of that I’m sure. But did you see the pattern of welts on his face, as if he had been struck by an open hand? A hand of more than human size, one that struck and made those marks on him.”

  Frevisse hesitated. She could not remember any pattern to the marks on Sir Clement’s face, but she had been farther away than Master Broun. Had anyone else seen it? Letting that go for now, she asked, “Why do you suppose his breathing eased the way it did? His breathing was much easier when I came in.”

  The physician was clearly on more comfortable ground with that issue. “There you have further proof of God’s work in this. There was no reason for the abatement of Sir Clement’s agony for that little while except God’s mercy, that he have time to repent. When he did not, his life and soul were wrenched from him as you saw.”

  Master Broun crossed himself, and so did Frevisse, but as she did, she said, “He drank something just before that final attack.”

  “Wine. A little wine.”

  “He didn’t choke on it? His throat wasn’t still too constricted for it?”

  “I would not have allowed him to drink if it had been.” Master Broun grew haughty again. “No, Sir Clement did not choke on wine or anything else. It was simply God’s will and beyond our comprehension.” He spread his hands, indicating even he was helpless before such power. “God’s ways are strange to man.”

  Chapter 12

  Wrung out, Frevisse had thought her sleep that night would be heavy, but it was shallow and broken, rarely deep enough for dreams or long enough for any rest. Dame Perpetua slept through her uneasy stirring, but they had promised each other that if either woke near the time, she would awake the other for the prayers of Matins. Among all the other wakenings there was no way to tell when one was midnight, but at last, wakening yet again, she guessed the time was nearly right and gently roused Dame Perpetua. Together, in whispers, they said the office’s many psalms, the soft sound of their praying almost lost in the general murmur of other people’s breathing and Joan’s snoring.

  When they finished, Dame Perpetua lay down, rolled on her side, and was shortly asleep again. Frevisse, still uneasy with her own thoughts, took longer, and in the morning was no nearer to satisfaction or answers—and felt no more rested—than when she had gone to bed.

  And Aunt Matilda had finally given way to her grief. She awoke and, as was always her way, rose and went to kneel at her prie-dieu for first prayer. But there, where comfort should have been greatest, she bent forward over her prayer book, shaken by sobs. At first the other women left her to cry; she was past due and surely needed the tears. But it went on, and worsened, until she was clinging to the prie-dieu, helplessly wracked and unable to stop.

  As Frevisse hovered uncertainly, Alice left the gown her maid held ready to put on her and went to her mother. Taking her gently by the shoulders, she helped Matilda to her feet and, not bothering with words, led her back toward the bed. Aunt Matilda, her face collapsed and splotched, clung sideways to her daughter and went on sobbing helplessly.

  It took so long to calm her that it was a while before Frevisse was free to leave the bedchamber. There had been some thought that she would accompany her aunt and Alice in standing in the hall to bid farewell to the departing guests, but word had been sent to Suffolk that he must take the duty, which was acceptable, he now being Lord of Ewelme, and since Alice meant to remain with her mother, there was no seemly reason for Frevisse to join him.

  No one questioned when she and Dame Perpetua withdrew as they had done yesterday, to say Prime in the parlor. And when they had finished, she asked Dame Perpetua, “Will you help me with something?”

  Dame Perpetua looked up from shaking straight the folds of her skirts.
“If I can,” she said. “What is it?”

  “About Sir Clement’s death.”

  Dame Perpetua’s expression showed her discomfort with the doubts which Bishop Beaufort had expressed, and she said with less confidence, “What do you want me to do?”

  “If it wasn’t God who killed Sir Clement, then it had to have been poison. I need to know what kind it could have been.”

  “But Sir Clement shared every dish, just as we all did.

  And his goblet, too.“ Dame Perpetua moved immediately to the same objections Frevisse had to the problem. ”How could he have been poisoned and no one else?“

  “If we can learn what poison it was, perhaps we’ll know. There may be something among my uncle’s very many books that would enlighten us. Would you help me look?”

  The frown drawn between Dame Perpetua’s brows disappeared. Books were her worldly passion, and there were very few of them at St. Frideswide’s Priory. But she subdued her obvious eagerness and despite a sudden shine in her eyes said with quiet agreement, “Yes, surely, I’ll help you all I can.”

  Chaucer had found he could deal with his business better the farther he was from his wife’s domestic concerns, and so the room from which he had run his merchant ventures and other dealings was at the far end of Ewelme’s range of buildings. While they went, Frevisse explained what she wanted. “I talked with the physician. He says Sir Clement died of a cramping of his throat and an effusion of fluids. His throat constricted and strangled him.”

  Dame Perpetua made a small, distressed sound. It was expected she would be upset by the very thought of such a death, but she was also a clearheaded woman; she would be of more help the more she knew, rather than cosseted in ignorance.

  Frevisse went on, “But he didn’t just simply die. You saw him choking in the hall, but when I saw him a while later, in Sir Philip’s room, he was so much better I thought he was going to live.”

  “What?” Dame Perpetua asked incredulously.

  “The strangling had subsided to the point where he was sitting up, able to talk a little, even drink some wine.”

  “He was that much improved?”

  “Except that he had broken out in red welts over his face and neck and arms, and their itching was tormenting him.” Frevisse deliberately did not mention Dr. Broun’s assertion that the welts were patterned like an open hand. She wanted someone else’s observation on that and did not want to distract Dame Perpetua with something she was not sure of. “Then soon after he drank the wine, the choking came back and he died, with barely time for the last sacrament.”

  “God have mercy on him. You think there was poison in the wine?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the trouble. I don’t know anything that would kill someone the way Sir Clement died. That’s what I hope to find in my uncle’s library—something about poisons that cause those symptoms. The strangling and welts and unbearable itching.”

  After a moment of considering that, Dame Perpetua said very quietly, “Oh my.” And after another moment of thought: “Then you think his worship may be right and Sir Philip did murder Sir Clement?”

  “I don’t know clearly yet what to think. But I’ve begun to wonder why God would kill a man in so elaborate a way, instead of more directly, simply, there in the hall as example to all.”

  “Dame Frevisse! You’re questioning God’s will? Even at the orders of a cardinal bishop that’s so perilous! How can you—” Dame Perpetua gestured in wordless distress at the plight of being caught between God and the order of a prince of the Church.

  “I know. But what if it wasn’t God’s will? What if Bishop Beaufort is right and it was a man’s will in this? Or if God did indeed strike at Sir Clement, there in the hall, not to kill him but only to warn, and someone took advantage of it to poison him?”

  “Surely God would strike down in his turn anyone who dared do such a thing! It would be blasphemy!”

  Frevisse refrained from saying God never seemed overly prompt in striking down blasphemers in these days. Like other sinners they seemed to flourish far longer than their deserving. Instead she said, “I’d be more than glad to leave the matter to him. But Bishop Beaufort has directed otherwise. Dame Perpetua, this is my burden, not yours. If you would rather be left clear of it, it’s your choice and I’ll understand.”

  Dame Perpetua straightened, her face firm, her hands tucked purposefully up her sleeves. “No. You asked for my help and I’ll gladly give it, along with my prayers to keep us safe. And I don’t suppose there’s blasphemy in what we’re doing, since we only seek to understand God’s will more clearly, to his greater glory and our salvation. Besides, I want to see your uncle’s books.”

  Frevisse had feared the chamber might be locked, but the door handle gave to her touch and the door swung easily open. With a mixture of emotions she did not try to sort out, she faced the place that, for her, had been Ewelme’s heart.

  The room was narrow but long, and despite the years since she had last been there, all its furnishings were familiar. She remembered Chaucer saying with amusement at his wife’s everlasting desire for change, “I bought what I wanted and needed at the start. Why should I change when they are still sufficient to me? Let my room be.”

  His desk was set where the light would be best over his shoulder from the windows with their wide seats, where Frevisse had sat reading for many an hour, lost to her proper duties and deeply happy. Chaucer had gathered books all through his life, beyond the considerable number he had inherited from his father. They had long since passed the bounds of being neatly closed away in a chest. He had given over one wall of his room to aumbrys for them, where they were safe behind closed doors but easily reached. Even then, they had always overflowed through the room, and Frevisse had been free to read what she chose, and Chaucer had gladly discussed or explained or argued at length anything that had puzzled her or caught her interest.

  In this room, in her uncle’s company, she had had a freedom she had had nowhere else in all her life, except in her love of God.

  A remembered figure straightened from his bent posture over an open chest across the room. Master Lionel, her uncle’s clerk. Frevisse was glad she had seen him several times the past few days so there was no surprise at his white hair, stooped shoulders, and wrinkled face. He had been only in late middle age when she lived here; now he was old. He peered at her across the room through magnifying lenses held on his nose by leather thongs looped around his ears before saying, “Frevisse. Come again,” as if it had been only hours since she had last been in his way and he was no more pleased now than he had been then. He had never approved of the time Chaucer had spent on her, to the neglect of business that was the heart and soul of Master Lionel’s existence.

  “Dame Frevisse,” he corrected himself. And added, “He’s gone, you know. He isn’t here.”

  “I know.” Startled, Frevisse responded with instinctive gentleness. Her uncle had not particularly mentioned Master Lionel during his last few visits to her. She wished now that he had, because more than Master Lionel’s appearance was changed. “But may I come in? He always welcomed me here.”

  Master Lionel looked around the room as if searching for a reason to refuse her, as if certain there was one there. “What do you want? He’s gone.”

  “My friend has never seen his books. I wanted to show them to her.”

  “It’s all right, Master Lionel. I’m sure she’s welcome here.”

  Intent on the elderly clerk, Frevisse had not noticed Sir Philip standing in the contrast of shadow at the room’s farther end and partly obscured by an open aumbry door. He came away from the bookshelves now, still speaking to the old clerk. “You can go on with your work. I’ll see to them. Master Chaucer would welcome her, you know. So shouldn’t we, also, in his name?”

  Master Lionel swung his head from Frevisse to the priest, then to Frevisse again and back to Sir Philip. The effort seemed to confuse him. He shrugged. “As you think best.” He turned back to the
chest, and Sir Philip motioned for Frevisse and Dame Perpetua to come in.

  He faced the shelves and pointed at various volumes as if they were what he spoke of, as he said, low and brisk, “He’s outlived his wits. It started about two years ago, but Master Chaucer wished him happy and found things for him to do, since he’s happy here.”

  “He still works?” Frevisse asked.

  “No, but he thinks he does. He’s supposed to be putting the papers in that chest in order and listing all the ventures they pertain to. They’re all only draft copies, so it doesn’t matter if he shifts and shuffles all day, every day, and scribbles nonsense on that great roll behind him and never gets any forwarder. Can I help you?”

  “It’s only as I said. Dame Perpetua would be glad of a chance to see my uncle’s books, to spend time here if she could.”

  “And you would not mind seeing them again either.”

  “This was my best place to be, before I entered St. Frideswide’s,” she answered, for the first time wondering what he knew of her from her uncle and, more to the immediate point, how they would look for what they needed with him at hand. There were far more books here than she remembered; of course Chaucer had gone on adding to his collection after she left. Nor did she have any idea where any particular books might be. Chaucer had loved to rearrange and reclassify his treasures; she had helped him do it often enough to know that, so there was no telling where anything might be now. A great many of them were spread and stacked in no order at all around the room, used at some time and not put back. That had also been her uncle’s way, and one of her chosen tasks had been to sort and put volumes away when the chamber finally became too disordered. There was no guessing where to find what she wanted, and she dared not ask Sir Philip.