Servant’s Tale

by Margaret Frazer

  At her voice he warily uncurled from the ball he had made of himself. Naylor grabbed a torch from someone and held it for Dame Claire to see him better.

  Frevisse, with dismay, recognized Ellis.

  But he seemed little hurt. A smear of blood from some cut hidden in his hair was trailing down his cheek in front of his ear, and he was holding one hand to the back of his head and the other to his ribs, but he looked up at Dame Claire with a grimace and said, “Thank God there were so many of them. They might have made a competent job of it otherwise.”

  “Let me feel,” Dame Claire ordered, pulling his hand away from his side.

  Frevisse, leaving her to it, turned savagely on the men around her. “So what do you mean, coming like this, laying hands on a guest of the priory?”

  The man who had nearly hit her, squarely built, with a blunt face and blunter manners, said, “He’s stabbed young Sym. We come to get him ‘fore he can be away.”

  “You pursued him even into here?”

  “Pursued be damned,” Ellis said. He winced from Dame Claire’s probing at his ribs. “They dragged me out of the guesthall. Where I’ve been since well before sundown and nowhere near this Sym.”

  “It were a player done it. His mam said so. Said he said so. And it’s you he fought with this morning,” the man said.

  “That doesn’t mean I did it.” Ellis flinched as Dame Claire parted his hair to find his wound. “I haven’t left here tonight and I’ve not been stabbing anyone.”

  “No,” Joliffe said with dispassionate arrogance. “But I probably did.”

  He was standing in the guesthall doorway, with darkness behind him and the red flare of torchlight in front, catching and losing his finally drawn features as he added, as if lightly amused, “But you all came in so sudden and grabbed so quick without saying why, you never gave me chance to say, did you?”

  “You bench-bred cur—” the blunt-faced man said, starting to move toward him.

  Roger Naylor stepped in front of the man, facing Joliffe, and said the same thing that was in Frevisse’s mind. “So what do you mean, saying a fool thing like it was ‘probably’ you who stabbed him? You don’t look drunk enough to not know whether you knifed a man or not.”

  “I’m not drunk at all,” Joliffe answered. Frevisse had seen his mouth tighten at the villager’s insult but his voice was still as casual as before. Only the glint in his eyes was dangerous, telling her he knew exactly what he was doing in drawing the men off Ellis to himself. “ T went to that little rathole of an alehouse but I’d hardly sat myself down when this Sym of yours decided he didn’t want me there. I never had chance to drink.”

  “And why would he be minding you there, if it was this fellow here he fought with today?” Naylor demanded, gesturing at Ellis.

  “Maybe because of the girl I was sitting by. She didn’t mind but he did.”

  Ellis, ducking away from Dame Claire’s probing fingers, said indignantly, “That’s why you were so set on going? That’s what you did while I was laying him out this morning? Arranged to meet her there?”‘

  Joliffe shrugged. “She said she’d be there. Said she’d not mind if I came. So I went.”

  “But Sym objected,” Frevisse said.

  “Very much.” Joliffe matched her dry tone. “And he’d had ale enough to make up for what I never had a chance to drink. He wouldn’t take talking to, not by me or the girl, and when I went to leave he came for me.”

  “So you drew your dagger in defense,” Naylor said.

  “I never drew my dagger at all. There wasn’t time. He had his knife out when he came for me, and I grabbed his wrist and kept hold if it, that’s all. We lurched around and fell over a bench, twisting as we went so he was on the bottom. I sprang clear, told some of his friends they’d best hold him there until I was gone, and I left.”

  “And came back here,” Naylor said.

  Joliffe hesitated, then agreed, “And came back here.”

  “Or lay in wait to knife him in die dark!” someone yelled from the crowd.

  “I could have,” Joliffe returned as loudly. “Only I didn’t.”

  “Easy to say!” someone else yelled. Drawn off Ellis, they were stilling wanting vengeance and Joliffe would do as well as any other stranger. Frevisse eased sideways around someone, meaning to put herself between them and Joliffe. But Naylor moved more openly, stepping directly out into the space between him and the villagers, and said in a voice as roused with anger as their own, “And understand that talk is all that’s going to happen until we’ve had a chance to ask Sym himself. Were any of you at the alehouse, to say if what he’s said so far is true?”

  With a grumble and shuffle, six of the men showed they had been there.

  “So,” Naylor demanded, “did it happen the way he says? Sym drew on him and they fought and fell and then he left?”

  The men shifted and looked at one another, twitched elbows at each other’s ribs, until finally one of them said, “Aye. That was the way of it. Just like he says.”

  Frevisse was at Naylor’s side now, between the crowd and Joliffe, a naked place to be, the small torch-glared space between one man and the crowding, anger-harshened faces, but she set her voice bold as Naylor’s to ask, “So was Sym’s knife still in Sym’s hand when he got up?”

  One of the three men caught her thought. “That’s right. He still had it. He put it back in its sheath. I remember.”

  General nods from the others agreed with him.

  “So whatever happened, if he was hurt then, it was an accident,” Frevisse said, “and of Sym’s making.”

  There was nodding to that, too, through the whole crowd; but then the blunt-faced man said, “So it was maybe afterwards, in the dark outside, he did it.”

  The crowd readily grumbled back toward anger. Frevisse swiftly turned to Joliffe and said, “So tell us where you truly were after you left the alehouse. You didn’t come straight here.”

  She was guessing but already knew Joliffe’s face well enough to read, despite his control of it, that she had guessed right. Knowing only he could see her own expression, she willed him to understand it might be his life to answer her rightly; and maybe Naylor’s and Ellis’s lives, too. She and Dame Claire were almost surely safe enough; they would only be dragged aside if it came to fighting again; but she thought Naylor was not the kind of man to leave him to the crowd unfought for, and Ellis was already in the middle of it.

  Joliffe met her look and read it. Or already knew the stakes as well as she did. With a penchant for survival and wry humor both, he answered, “I went from the alehouse into the arms of the pretty girl. She left when Sym turned ugly, and waited for me at the church porch. We saw him go stumbling past on what I suppose was his way home. Unfortunately,” he added carelessly, not seeming to hear the stir and mutter among the men, “all I could charm from the girl were kisses and sweet words, but surely we were there long enough for even Sym to have reached his door.”

  “And that’s something Roger Naylor can ask about tomorrow,” Dame Claire cut in before anyone else could say more. “Tonight he can lock you up and be done with it, but Dame Frevisse and I need escort to the village if there’s someone hurt there. How bad is the wound?”

  The men looked vaguely at each other and shuffled uneasily. Dame Claire stood up with a disgusted look, but it was Naylor who said, letting his aggravation show, “You came storming up here, breaking our peace and beating our guest without even knowing how bad the hurt is? You don’t have any idea of it?”

  One of the men shrugged and muttered, “Meg came in’t‘alehouse. Said Sym’d been stabbed by one of the player folk. And we—” He looked around at his fellows and shrugged. “We called up some of’t’others thereabouts and came up here to make sure the man wasn’t trying to leave without he paid for what he’d done.”

  “Only you didn’t bother to grab the right man, and the right man hadn’t done it anyway,” Naylor snapped. “A fine lot of fools you’ve made of
yourselves.”

  Their looks said they agreed with him. Ellis had climbed painfully to his feet and went now to join Joliffe in the doorway. Dame Claire said, “So that’s settled. But we still need to go to the village. Who will…”

  But she was interrupted. Torchlight and voices from the priory gateway turned them in that direction as four more village men trod heavy-footed in, carrying a piece of fencing flat among them, a blanket-covered body on it. Meg walked beside it, unsteady on her feet, clinging and leaning on Hewe, who was white faced, tear stained, dazed. Father Henry came behind the sorry little group, his head bent in prayer. There was no need to ask who lay under the blanket, and no one did.

  Chapter 14

  Flatly turning to business in the face of death, Naylor said, “We can put him in the outer cowshed. It’s empty and he’ll keep there until the crowner comes.”

  It became the King’s business whenever any of his subjects died in an unexplained or violent way. His representative in such matters, the crowner, must come to look and question and collect evidence until he was satisfied he had the facts of the case. If there was guilt, he made an arrest. If the death had been by accident or from natural causes, everyone was released to go about his business. Sym’s body could not be buried until it had been viewed by the crowner.

  By custom, the body should go to lie in the village church, but there was no priest there now; and the priory’s church was not the place for one of Lord Lovel’s peasants. Indeed, the matter should have belonged altogether to Lord Lovel’s steward, but there was no telling where he was among his lord’s properties just now; it would take time to contact him, and he and Naylor had long since fallen into helping each other when either was in need or gone.

  So for the time being the priory was the place for Sym’s body. But Frevisse said with quiet authority equal to Naylor’s, “Rather, put him in the new guesthall. It’s readier to hand for what needs to be done.” And better the guesthall than a cowshed.

  Dame Claire had gone to Meg and was murmuring to her with the deep, ready sympathy she had for anyone in any kind of pain. But the blunt-faced man was not done yet and said loudly, still ready for trouble, “So it’s murder now maybe.”

  “Ah, Jankyn, let it go for now,” someone said. But others rumbled.

  Ellis and Joliffe still stood together in the doorway. Frevisse prayed they would have sense enough to fall back inside and throw down the bar across the door if the crowd turned ugly again.

  But the ugliness was past. There was only the grumbled certainty of wrongs and a wanting of explanations. Frevisse, careful to seem unhurried, moved to Meg’s other side, took her hand—dry, callused, limp in her own—and asked, “What did your son say about his hurt? Did he say who did it to him?”

  Meg did not raise her head. In a remote, weary voice, she answered, “He said the player stabbed him. In the alehouse. That’s all he said. It was another useless fight. Like Barnaby used to get into. Sym was always starting fights, like his father.”

  Her voice trailed off, but it had been enough. Naylor raised his own voice to say, “There. You’ve heard it. It happened in the alehouse, in the fight, and enough of you saw what happened there to know there’s no one to blame but Sym himself. There’s naught else for any of you to be doing now until the crowner comes. Go on home. It’s a cold night to be standing about.”

  Unpurposed now and aware of the hour and the cold, the men began to drift away out the priory gateway. The four bearing Sym’s body waited for Father Henry to lead the way to the new guesthall. Meg looked at Dame Claire, who said, “You come with me, Meg. You can stay the night here. There’s no need for you to go back to your house tonight, not alone.”

  “There’s Hewe,” Meg said vaguely, looking around.

  “I’ll see to him,” said Frevisse. The boy was standing where he had stopped, dazed, past tears for now. Meg did not look at him, only nodded and let Dame Claire take her from the women and lead her away toward the cloister door where cautious heads were brave enough to peer out, now the noise was over.

  “You’d best tell Domina Edith what has happened,” Frevisse said.

  Dame Claire nodded. The curious faces disappeared inside with her and Meg, and now the only light left in the courtyard was from the open guesthall door and a lantern sitting beside the mounting block. Naylor went to pick it up and held it so its yellow glow fell on Joliffe’s and Ellis’s faces where they still stood in the doorway.

  “You were luckier than I’d have thought was likely,” he said. “But you’re not to leave here. Master Montfort will be wanting to talk to you when he comes.”

  “They’ll stay,” Frevisse said. “There’s a sick child, and they’re to play for us tomorrow or next day.”

  Naylor nodded acceptance of that, his attention changing to her. “You were overbold in taking on those men with me. But I thank you for your help.”

  His ungrudged honesty surprised Frevisse into a frank answer. “You were bold enough yourself. I couldn’t leave you alone to it. Besides, they didn’t have the mindless sound yet of a mob that kills without thinking. They were angry at one man in particular and not past knowing a nun when they saw one. I thought it safe enough.”

  “Your notion of safe is somewhat broader than most,” Naylor said. “Well, I’ll be finishing my rounds now and go home, please you, my lady.”

  Frevisse nodded and he left, taking his lantern with him. Frevisse went to Hewe and took hold of his arm. “You’re cold,” she said. “Come in now. We don’t need you falling sick along with all else that’s happened.”

  He came, less because her words made sense than because he was ready to do anything he was told just then. Joliffe and Ellis were still waiting in the doorway, Bassett with them now. They all drew back as Frevisse brought Hewe in, and followed as she led him down the hall to the farther hearth were Rose was building up the fire. Piers, obviously under orders to stay where he was no matter what, peered out from among his blankets with wide-awake, wary curiosity. But they knew the immediate danger was past; only some of Rose’s tension was still betrayed in her movements as she glanced at Hewe and then at Frevisse, questioning.

  It had been plain instinct to bring him to Rose. While Barnaby had lain hurt there, no one had come visiting; Frevisse had no idea who in the village he could go to tonight. Father Henry had enough to see to with Sym’s soul and body, and if she gave him over to the priory servants, they would give him no peace with their questioning. That seemed to leave only Rose. Frevisse said, “His father was buried yesterday. Now his brother is dead. Dame Claire is caring for his mother and I don’t think there’s anyone he can go to.”

  Rose shifted her look back to Hewe for a considering moment, and then nodded. “He’s welcome here. Set him close to the fire. He looks in need of warming.”

  Over their heads Joliffe answered something Bassett had said. “You would have been a fool to follow me out there. The matter was mine. And if I didn’t set it right with the oafs, if it went wrong for Ellis and me, then Rose and Piers would have been needing you indeed.” He asked loudly, “So what’s in the pot for my supper, Rose?”

  “You’ve had your treat for tonight, my lad,” she said, and handed the bowl toward Hewe.

  He blinked at her uncertainly, not taking it. “My brother is dead,” he said.

  All the gentleness there had not been for her own menfolk was in Rose’s voice as she answered, “I know.” She shifted to sit in front of him. “And that’s a thing sad beyond saying. But your mother is going to be needing you, and you have to stop your shivering or you’ll be sick and that would be a pity, too. Here.”

  She held the spoon out to his mouth. As if he were no older than Piers, he opened for it obediently. Rose looked over his shoulder to Ellis, who picked up a cloak and draped it over the boy’s huddled back as she fed him another spoonful.

  Frevisse backed away. Hewe would be cared for now; she should go see what help Dame Claire might need. She found Dame Claire
was still in the infirmary, sitting on the edge of one of the beds beside Meg. Dame Claire rose when Frevisse came in but Meg did not even look up, only went on sitting there huddled in on herself, dry-eyed, her hands clenched tightly together in her tense lap.

  “She’ll stay here the night,” Dame Claire said, coming to Frevisse. “There’s no point in her going back to her place alone.”

  Frevisse nodded agreement, but Meg stirred herself enough to say, “Hewe?”

  “He’s with friends,” Frevisse said. “He’s warm and he’s fed. He’s fine.” She nearly went to take the woman’s hands, to make some sort of contact with her to be sure she was still there enough to hear, but instead she asked Dame Claire, “She needs some rest. You’ll give her something?”

  “The strongest draught that I can make. Then I’ll stay with her until I’m sure she’s sound asleep.”