The Bishop’s Tale

by Margaret Frazer

  “He made that poor girl’s life none too easy,” Sir Ralph’s lady said. Then she added mostly under her breath, “And now she’ll do the same for Guy, I’d guess.” She and Frevisse exchanged private smiles, understanding that dainty Lady Anne had a will of her own.

  The men began talking of Guy’s good fortune. Now that Sir Clement was out of his way, he was expected to do well.

  “He’s a solid enough fellow, with none of the crotchets that family seems to carry like other folks pass on brown hair,” the short merchant said. “But the day isn’t going to better for our staying here and we ought to be on our way. We only stayed to talk with you this while longer, and now we have.”

  He embraced the lady, dropped a casual kiss in the vicinity of her cheek, and said, “You take care, Eleanor. No rheums this year, you hear?”

  “And the same to you, brother,” she returned. “We’ll expect you at Christmas if you know what’s good for you.”

  There were handshakes and bows all around, and the three merchants left the hall in a bustle of cloaks and servants.

  “Ah, now, I’ll miss him,” Lady Eleanor said wistfully.

  Her husband took her by the arm and drew her close. “Christmas isn’t so far off,” he said comfortingly.

  “If die weather doesn’t have us all pent-up like badgers by then,” Sir Edward said. “All the signs say this will be a bitter year.”

  “It’s been bitter enough for Sir Clement already,” Frevisse said. The three of them would leave to sit to dinner soon, and there were still things she wanted to ask them before then, so she returned directly to Sir Clement. “I’ll be asked so many questions when I return to St. Frideswide’s, but I was so far away from what happened. You were all beside him at die feast. What especially did you see?”

  The three looked at each other. Sir Edward shrugged as if he could think of nothing special, and Lady Eleanor answered more fully, “Why, nothing in particular. Sir Clement was simply being offensive, as always, and I faced away from him as much as might be, talking to the lady on my other side. Until he quarreled with my lord.” She smiled sympathetically up at her husband. “And not very long after that he began to make strange sounds. That was terrifying, let me tell you!”

  “I thought he’d choked on something at first,” Sir Ralph said.

  “There wasn’t any warning? He just began to choke?” Frevisse asked. She did not know what she was trying to learn, but if she kept asking questions, someone might say something that mattered.

  Sir Ralph shook his head. “After his outburst at me—and mine at him, I lost some of my temper, too,” he admitted to his wife’s knowing prod at his ribs, “we all set to eating again. He snapped at a server for not refilling his wine fast enough, but that was all.”

  “Jevan was waiting on him then?”

  “Not with the wine,” Sir Edward said. “That was all from the household servers, moving in front of the tables, you know, and keeping an eye on everyone. They did well. Your aunt’s to be complimented on her people.”

  “But lightning itself wouldn’t move fast enough for Sir Clement,” Lady Eleanor said.

  They agreed on that, and went on chatting until dinner was called. Then Frevisse assured them her aunt was most sorry for the inconvenience to them, and received their assurances that they held no one responsible for the trouble—except Sir Clement who continued to be a trial even in death, they agreed—and they all parted in mutual goodwill.

  Dame Perpetua was still in Chaucer’s library, huddled down on a stool in front of one of the aumbries with an open book on her lap, too intent on it to notice Frevisse’s arrival. Across the room Master Lionel, scrutinizing a selection of documents laid out along the window seat, did not acknowledge her, either. Amused, Frevisse slipped across the room to lay a hand on Dame Perpetua’s shoulder.

  The other nun twitched her head a little and said, “Mmmm?” without looking up.

  “Is it a good book?” Frevisse asked.

  “Mmmm.” Dame Perpetua drew her attention reluctantly away to blink up at her, decided she was really there, and said enthusiastically, “It’s Mandeville’s Travels! I haven’t read it since I was a girl. I loved it. All those wonders—”

  Knowing how long Dame Perpetua could go on about a book, Frevisse interrupted, “Did you find anything useful to our problem?”

  Dame Perpetua’s face blanked, then she brightened. “Indeed I did! Here.” She set Mandeville aside and took up one of the volumes lying beside her. “Your uncle was wonderful. There are books here about everything. I could stay forever. This one is a Materia Medica, with a whole part just about poisons and their effects.”

  Frevisse took it. “How did you manage to find it? And so quickly?”

  “I asked Master Lionel,” Dame Perpetua said with the simplicity of the obvious. She lowered her voice. “He doesn’t want to talk to anyone, but he knows where everything is. I asked about poisons, and he showed me this one right away.”

  “Does it have what we need?”

  Dame Perpetua looked abashed. “I decided to let you see for yourself if it’s any help, while I…” She lovingly touched the book in her lap.

  Frevisse knew she had been no better herself with the Gawain book earlier that morning. She smiled and said, “Then I’ll look into it. You go on.”

  The book was everything Dame Perpetua had said it was. A little skimming of the pages brought her to the part about poisons, just after a treatise on the diagnosing of humors according to the planets. She sat on the chair at Sir Philip’s desk, laid open the book, and began to read. Her Latin was imperfect, but unlike literature, this was mostly straightforward text and she could follow its gist, translating the fragments that were pertinent to the question. Was there a poison whose symptoms matched Sir Clement’s fatal ones?

  The list ranged from commonly known poisons found in any English woodland or roadside to exotic ones difficult to obtain except from very specialized merchants with the most exotic of contacts. It seemed very complete.

  And none of the poisons listed created symptoms that matched Sir Clement’s.

  There were ones signified by difficulty in breathing but not the swollen, strangled closing of the throat Dr. Broun had described. There were vomitings of different quality and color, and sometimes fits or mania, but Sir Clement had been quite clear in his mind and not given any sign of being even sick to his stomach, let alone vomiting. As for discolorations of the body, particularly of extremities, there were no suggestions of his general blotching of itching welts on face and arms.

  If Sir Clement had been poisoned, it was not with any poison described in what seemed to be a most scrupulously thorough book.

  Dame Perpetua had been paying closer heed than Frevisse had thought. She said from across the room, “It doesn’t have what you want?”

  “No.”

  “Then perhaps Bishop Beaufort is wrong. Perhaps it was God’s hand against Sir Clement.”

  “No.”

  Dame Perpetua made no effort to hide her surprise. “You don’t think so anymore?”

  “I’m not sure anymore. Not the way we were sure when it happened. I want to ask more questions. Will you look for another book on poisons? There might well be another.”

  “If you think it’s needed, certainly.” Dame Perpetua put down the Mandeville.

  Frevisse had noted that Master Lionel, ceasing to shuffle among his papers while she talked, had been standing still with his head partly turned to listen. Now she said directly to him, “Will you help Dame Perpetua with this, Master Lionel?”

  The old clerk’s head snapped away and his hands began to move busily among his papers. But he made a sound that might have been agreement, and Dame Perpetua smiled and nodded in confirmation.

  Satisfied that between them they would do far more than she could, Frevisse left them to it.

  Frevisse went to Aunt Matilda’s chamber. Her aunt lay sleeping, her plump body under the covers, her slackened, ravaged face l
ooking vulnerable. Her daughter had sent for her sewing and was sitting comfortably on a cushion under the window, coloring a rose pink with silk thread. She looked up when Frevisse entered and put a long finger in front of her pursed lips. Frevisse nodded and went to peer more closely at her aunt, who never stirred. Joan was sitting on a stool beside the bed, staring at her mistress, her own face wretched.

  Frevisse bowed her head and offered a prayer for the solace of this sad company, and left.

  The kitchen of Ewelme manor house was large, floored with stone flags, and rising two stories to a roof set with louvers that could be opened to let the smoke and heat out. A tray of roasted chickens was cooling on a table, and a cook’s helper was leaning gingerly into a low-burning fireplace to stir a large pot hanging over the coals. The cook himself was seated on a tall stool, wiping his strong-looking hand with a clean towel. When he saw Frevisse, he rose at once to his feet and bowed twice.

  “You grace this room with your presence,” he said, bowing yet again. He spoke with an accent Frevisse could not identify. He was a tall man, with dark, curly hair that glistened as if washed in oil, and he moved his hands eloquently as he spoke. “Is there some way I may help you? Something I may bring to you?”

  “Will you answer one or two questions?” returned Frevisse.

  “Of course, if I can. Do you want a recipe to take back with you to your nunnery?” He turned to the helper. “I require a bit of paper, a quill, and some ink, at once!”

  But Frevisse raised a hand to stop the helper. “No, it is nothing like that. This concerns the funeral feast, from which a guest had to be helped, who later died.”

  The cook sat down as if someone had cut his hamstrings. But he said nothing, only waited.

  “Do you know the man who died? Sir Clement?”

  “No, madam. But he sent his servant in to speak to me about the menu for the feast.”

  “Which servant?”

  “I do not know, madam. A lean fellow, with brown hair and a sad face.”

  “Why was Sir Clement interested in the menu?”

  “Because, I gather, he had an unhappy stomach, which required certain things to keep its balance.”

  “What things?”

  The cook gave a lengthy sigh, held up a hand, and began to count on his fingers. “The milk used in the making of any dish must be fresh, as Sir Clement could not abide sour milk; his saltcellar must be full and clean, as he used a good deal of salt on his food, and was inclined to throw a contaminated saltcellar on the floor; any dish containing nuts must be announced when it was brought to his place, as he would not, under any circumstances, eat anything containing nuts; and the goblet he drank from must be silver or gold as he could not bear the taste pewter gave to his drink. I will say what I told this servant, madam, that I assured Sir Clement’s servant that only the finest, freshest, and most costly ingredients were going into every dish prepared in this house, and that the final remove, which Sir Clement never got a chance to throw on the floor, contained filberts. And I had the impertinence to ask if Sir Clement had brought a goblet of his own to use, as it was quite impossible for us to take a goblet reserved for, say, the duke of Norfolk and give it to Sir Clement’s use. And it transpired he had, as this problem had arisen before on Sir Clement’s journeying, and he had learned to bring his own.” The cook had set off on this story calmly, had become indignant by the middle of it, but cooled to triumphant amusement by the end. The cook’s helper, by his expression, stood ready to back the cook in every particular, so Frevisse did not question him, only asked the cook to make a copy of the feast menu, which he did. She tucked it up her sleeve, thanked him for his cooperation, and withdrew.

  She decided to go see if Master Lionel had performed another prompt, masterly trick with the book search. But to her surprise Dame Perpetua was not in Chaucer’s chamber. Frevisse paused in the doorway, looking around to be sure she was not crouched behind the desk or a stack of books. Someone had lighted a fire in the small fireplace against the day’s deepening cold; its bright flickering against the gray light falling through the windows made a slight promise of warmth, but Master Lionel was busy at his chest half the room away from it, oblivious both to its possibilities and her entering. And Sir Philip was standing at the window, staring out with a troubled frown easy to read even across the room.

  The frown smoothed itself away as easily as warmed wax slips down the side of a candle, and his voice was merely its familiar neutral as he spoke. “Dame Frevisse. You expected Dame Perpetua, obviously.”

  She could not bring herself to care she might be endangering her reputation by being alone with a virile man, however priestly, with only a madman for a witness. As a compromise, she left the door open a crack. She was tired from her efforts, from talking endlessly to people, from being in a once-familiar place that had become strange to her. And she was chilled. She went to sit on a stool in front of the fire. Putting her feet forward and holding her hands out to the warmth, she said, “Am I sickening for something or is the day suddenly colder?”

  “The day is suddenly much colder.” Sir Philip held the flat of his hand toward the glass in front of him without quite touching it. “You can feel it pouring in as if the window were open. I’ll not be surprised if the moat is frozen by morning.”

  Frevisse gave a weary sigh. There was the long ride back to St. Frideswide’s to be endured in a day or two, and she could not decide whether she preferred bitter cold and firm roads or warmer weather and endless mire.

  His back still to her, Sir Philip asked, “Are you free to talk now about Bishop Beaufort’s interest in you?”

  “To obey the bishop’s will, I have had to ask questions of so many people that I doubt it is any secret. He does not believe Sir Clement died by God’s hand.”

  “He thought that from the very first.”

  “And because my uncle told him I had a subtle intelligence, he asked me to learn whether it were indeed a miracle or not.”

  Sir Philip swung from the window to stare at her. “And have you?”

  “I am sure it wasn’t God who killed him.”

  The priest took that with admirably contained surprise. “Then who?”

  Frevisse shook her head. “That I haven’t learned. Or exactly how they did it. But it was at least begun at the feast, and as nearly as I can tell, you didn’t have the chance to do anything to him there. At least not directly.”

  Sir Philip’s brows drew together as he began to gather fully what she had said. “You suspected me? On what possible grounds? Or were you just generally suspecting everyone?”

  “I am suspecting anyone who had an enemy in Sir Clement. You are on the list. If Sir Clement made good his claim that you were born in villeinage, your chance to rise high in the Church could be destroyed. By coming here for a reason not connected with you, Sir Clement gave you an opportunity, perhaps, to act against him without the suspicion that might be raised if you went to him, or caused him to be summoned here. It was a chance to be rid of him that you’d not likely have again.”

  “But there was no need for me to attack him, to murder him. I took care years ago to be sure the needful documents were all in order. There was no question of his having any claim over me, no matter how much he prated of it. And I made sure anyone who inquired and needed to know the futility of his insolence did know of it. He was an annoyance, not a threat.”

  Frevisse believed him. It was the kind of thing a man of Sir Philip’s intelligence would have done. “But you’ve never told Bishop Beaufort that?”

  “It would have been somewhat presumptuous of me to offer the information without being asked.”

  “But you know he’s interested in you.”

  “He suggested to Master Chaucer that I might be of service to him, and to me that I could profit by learning the ways of an important household. I accepted Master Chaucer’s offer gratefully. For one thing it simply gave me my brother’s company for this while.”

  “Your brother?
” The one Robert had not been sure was alive or not.

  “Gallard Basing, the household usher. You didn’t know?”

  “No one told me your surname was Basing.”

  “I suppose there was no reason to. And we look nothing alike.” He bounced a little on the balls of his feet, and his smile, twisted as it was in the webbing of scars on his face, was nevertheless charming.

  He came to sit on his heels on the other side of the hearth, rubbing his hands as he held them out to the flames. The gesture reminded Frevisse of something—someone—but the half-memory slipped away behind the realization that Gallard Basing had had free movement through the hall all through the feast, and probably access to the food before it was served. Was Gallard protected by the same documents that protected Sir Philip? Did Gallard even know about the documents? How much did the brothers love one another? Trust one another? Use one another?