Meg did not even look up at this conversation going on over her head. She had lost a husband and her son in scarcely three days with not even a sickness to warn her it was about to happen. Sleep would help but it could not stop the full weight of the grief that was going to come when the first numbness of shock went out of her.
Meg raised her staring eyes from her hands to Dame Claire and said hopefully, “He was frightened, Sym was. Said he was afraid he might die. So I helped him say, ”O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee,“ like after confession. He said it slow and good, with tears. And he begged the Virgin to help. He wanted Heaven at the last, just as he should. I blessed him in God’s name before I went for help. Was that enough? Will he be all right?”
“If it happened just as you just told me, his soul is saved,”‘ Dame Claire assured her. “All who ask for God’s mercy receive it. You did well to remind him and pray with him. He’s safe now.”
Meg nodded, and looked back at her hands. “He’s safe now,” she murmured.
Dame Claire, lower voiced, said to Frevisse, “Talk to her, will you, while I go make the sleeping draught?”
“Yes,” Frevisse said, not wanting to. Meg looked at her and said again in a vague and worried voice, “Will it have been enough? He’ll be all right? Father Clement said once, when there was plague and he couldn’t be with everyone at once, that that could be enough. Sym will be all right?”
“He’s fine now,” Frevisse assured her. “Happy and at peace.” Sym’s corpse was lying empty under a blanket, but Dame Claire was right. If his mother had done all she said she had done, then his soul was safe, and that grief at least she could let go of. “You did all you could. Father Henry will say a proper funeral Mass for him, and that can only help. So don’t worry. How did this happen?”
Meg stirred a little. “It was a fight. Another of his fights. At the alehouse, he said. With one of the players. He didn’t even know he was hurt until he was home. He was so surprised, he looked and there was blood. I made him lie down. On my bed. And I looked at it, and I was scared, and that made him scared and he started begging for the priest because he didn’t want to die unshriven. He was so scared.” Her voice and face echoed his fright, reliving it. Frevisse patted her shoulder distantly. Meg went on, unable to let go of what was running steadily through her head. “I didn’t leave him until I’d done all I could. I remembered what Father Clement said and I did it. But there was no one else so I had to leave him. To find help. But he’s safe now. No more hurting. No more angers. He’s safe?”
“He’s safe,” Frevisse repeated, wishing Dame Claire would hurry.
Meg made as if to rise. “I have to go watch by his body. He can’t be left all alone tonight.”
Frevisse laid a hand on her cold arm and pressed her to stay where she was. “Father Henry is with him. He’ll pray beside him through the night. There’ll be time enough tomorrow. You’re staying here tonight.”
Meg looked around herself. “Here?”
Dame Claire came with the cup and its medicine. “You’re going to stay here and you’re going to drink this.”
Meg took the cup and stared into it without drinking. “It’s different here from everywhere else.”
“Drink your drink,” Dame Claire said.
Meg obediently drank a little, then said, staring at the dark liquid again, “They made me marry him. And then Sym was just like him. Just like him.” She raised her dazed eyes to Dame Claire. “I can stay here?”
“For tonight, at least. Drink all of it.”
Meg did, in a long, steady draught.
“Now lie down,” Dame Claire said, “and sleep. That’s what you’re to do now.”
“Hewe?”
“Hewe’s in the guesthall with friends,” Frevisse repeated patiently. “He’s taken care of.”
Meg’s eyes closed. “There’s no hurting in him. He’s not like his father. He’ll be all right.” Her eyes closed and probably as much from exhaustion as Dame Claire’s medicine her breathing evened into sleep as they watched her.
The clear weather held next day, and the cold with it. The services were blurred with snuffling and the chapter meeting with coughing; and Frevisse, who had been nearly over her own rheum, found it was come back, probably from her short sleep and being out in the icy night. Handkerchief in hand, she went about her duties until, as she was crossing the courtyard back from the old guesthall to the cloister, Father Henry intercepted her.
“Dame Frevisse, Dame Claire asks if you could come to her in the new hall,” he said.
Busy with her running nose and her aches, she did not ask why, but with a resigned sigh, only nodded and turned from her way to fall into step beside him, back across the yard and up the stone steps to the new guesthall, built for their higher-ranking visitors, with separate chambers and its own kitchen.
Sym, alive, would likely never have entered it. Now he was laid on a blanket on one of the hall’s trestle tables. Dame Claire was there, with a basin of warmed water steaming into the cold air on the table beside him, and a pile of clean rags and a folded cerecloth showing she had come to clean the body and ready it as far as might be for burial before the crowner came.
“Where are his mother and brother?” Frevisse asked.
“The boy is with the players. Meg was still sleeping when I left her,” Claire answered. “Which is just as well.” She made a small gesture toward the body. “There’s a problem.”
Probably with Father Henry’s help she had begun to strip it for washing but had gone no further than beginning to remove the doublet and shirt. Sym’s chest and side were laid bare, and the ragged cut along the right side of his waist, smeared with dried, blackened blood, showed plainly. To Frevisse’s eye it looked no more than a shallow scrape that in the heat of his temper and the fight, Sym could quite possibly have not heeded right away.
It was the other wound, the smaller one, on his side between the lower left ribs and almost unbloodied, that held Frevisse once she saw it. She looked and went on looking, her mind knowing but not ready yet to admit what it meant. Only after a long pause did she say, knowing that Dame Claire knew as well as she did, “That went into his heart.”
“Directly in,” Dame Claire agreed.
“And if it did…”
She did not finish. There was no need. From a dagger thrust like that, into the heart and out again, and no more blood around it than would have followed the exiting blade, Sym must have died almost on the instant. Would have fallen and probably been dead before he was down.
Chapter 15
Father Henry, looking from Frevisse’s face to Dame Claire’s, said, “I don’t understand.”
Frevisse waited for Dame Claire to say something but she went on staring at Sym’s body, brooding over a death that should not have happened. At last, instead of answering the priest’s question, Frevisse asked, “You were in the village last night when Meg went looking for help?”
“One of the women was sick and had asked for me and—‘’ Father Henry betrayed embarrassment. ”—and I stopped at the alehouse before I came back here. To warm myself. It was cold out.“
“And Meg came there and said Sym was hurt?”
Father Henry nodded. “All afraid, she was, and glad to see me. She told the men her boy was hurt, that the player had stabbed him, she needed help. And then, seeing me, she begged me to come.”
“She’d left his brother with him and come looking for help?”
“The other boy was gone. She’d had to leave Sym there alone. That was part of her fear. That she had left him all alone. She kept saying we had to hurry so he wouldn’t be alone.”
Dame Claire raised her eyes from the body. “He must have died almost immediately. With hardly any pain.”
Frevisse lifted the boy’s hand. Or had he been old enough to be called a man? she wondered. In the quiescence of death his face was younger and more vulnerable than she remembered it being in life. Not that it much mattered
now, she supposed. Young or old or in between, he had been murdered. That at least was certain. She went to his doublet and shirt lying at the far end of the table, turned them over, held them up. A ragged tear on the right side showed where one dagger blow had slid in and torn out. There was no other rend.
“His mother must have pulled these up from his chest and side, to better see how he was hurt. And left them open when she went for help.”
“Then someone came in after she was gone,” Dame Claire said.
“Someone he didn’t fear. Or didn’t fear enough to be wary of. He was lying flat and quiet when the dagger went in the second time. Or would he have lost enough blood to be unconscious, do you think?”
Dame Claire shook her head. “No. That first wound is messy but shallow. Even bleeding, it took so long to soak through his doublet, he was home before he knew he was bleeding, didn’t Meg say? There wasn’t enough lost for him to faint. Unless he was the sort who does when they see blood.”
“He was aware enough to be afraid and plead for help. His mother said so. And ask for absolution and the rest.”
“How do you know he was lying down when he was struck?” Dame Claire asked.
“The angle of the blow. In a fight a dagger coming into someone’s side like this one seemingly did has to be held underhanded, and comes almost always in at an upward slant. But this one went straight in. I’d guess the person had to have been standing directly at his side when they did it, and Sym not expecting it at all.” Frevisse turned to Father Henry. “How was he lying when you came in?”
The priest had been looking from one to the other of them while they talked, his large features registering his bewilderment. Now, glad of something plain that he understood, he said, “On a bed by the far wall, on his back, his hands folded on his chest. Like he was asleep and peaceful. I thought he was until I touched him.”
“Was he covered?” Frevisse asked. Father Henry nodded, and she prodded, “How? With what and how much?”
“A blanket. It was pulled up to his chin.”
“And his hands were outside of it, folded on his chest?”
“Yes.”
Frevisse came back to the corpse and carefully folded the arms so the hands rested one on top of the other on his chest. “Like this?”
Father Henry nodded.
Dame Claire met Frevisse’s look. In that position Sym’s arm completely covered the fatal wound in his side.
“Oh, no,” Dame Claire said.
“Oh, yes,” Frevisse answered. “A murderer not only sure of his blow but very considerate and respectful afterwards.”
“Murderer?” Father Henry asked. “It was accident. That’s what was being said last night.”
“What happened in the alehouse was an accident. It wasn’t that wound he died from. It was this second wound, here, directly into his heart, that killed him. At home, while he was lying on his bed.”
That seeped with some degree of slowness into Father Henry’s understanding, but as it did, his eyes widened. “Someone killed him while he lay there hurt and needing help?”
“It seems so, yes.”
Father Henry crossed himself. “That’s horrible.”
“Maybe more horrible is the fact that we don’t have any idea who might have done it. Or why.”
Dame Claire wrung out a cloth in the cooling water. “He was quarrelsome, I gather, from what his mother said.”
“And by what the men said last night,” Frevisse agreed. She watched as Dame Claire began to wash the body.
She knew Roger Naylor had already sent for the crowner. The messenger had gone that morning; but there was no certainty as to where Master Montfort might be at this holiday season or of how long it would take the messenger to find him, and so no way of knowing when he would come.
Nor any assurance that his coming would aid in finding the truth. Master Montfort had been to St. Frideswide’s before, and to Frevisse’s mind he was an arrogant fool who resisted any help anyone tried to give him, especially women, and most especially cloistered nuns.
Frevisse said, “There’s no one knows this is murder except us. Can we keep it so?”
Dame Claire paused. Like Frevisse, she felt that Montfort could be a menace to the truth. She nodded.
Father Henry, a worried frown of thinking between his eyes, worked at it a little longer before saying, “You mean keep secret that he was murdered?”
“Until the crowner comes. To give us time to question and learn things before the murderer knows we know and are looking for him.” She picked up one of the cloths, dipped it into the water, and wrung it out. “It was someone that knew Sym was hurt and where to find him.”
“It may be just as well his mother was gone,” Dame Claire said.
Frevisse joined her in the task of cleansing Sym’s body. It was not hard to think that whoever had killed Sym and coolly taken the time afterward to arrange his body, might well have killed Meg, too, if she had been there.
“Father Henry, are you free this morning to go down to the village and spend time in the alehouse asking questions? And to listen to what’s being said? For surely the talk will be rife about last night.”
Father Henry did not need to consider on that. He nodded readily. “I can spend the whole day if need be, until I’m sure I’ve heard everything there is to hear.”
“And remember it all and bring it back here to me,” Frevisse said. “Can you go now?”
Father Henry looked doubtfully at the body.
“We’ll see he’s not left,” Frevisse assured him. “He’ll be well prayed for. And finding his murderer is a service to him, too.”
Father Henry nodded agreement with that. “I can go now.”
“Try to learn who he’s fought or argued with lately. And where they were after he left the alehouse last night if that’s possible. But don’t let people know you’re after more than only gossip,” Frevisse warned.
Father Henry nodded. “They’re used to me gossiping. That will be no problem.”
When he was gone, Frevisse put down the cloth. “I’m going to bring Joliffe’s dagger and see if it matches the wound. He’s still going to be the first suspected when word of this is out.”
“And the other player’s, too. The one who fought with Sym.”
“Their daggers are all the same.” But she would check to see if they had other knives beside the daggers they had shown her. She would need to have the players cleared beyond any doubt before Montfort arrived; he was ever willing to take the easiest path to a solution, and the players were a very obvious choice.
It did not signify, for example, that Ellis had said he’d never left the priory last night. She would need to find out that no one saw him leave, or, better, that someone, not Bassett or Rose, saw him asleep in the guesthouse at the right time. And Bassett and Rose would have to be proven innocent as well. And Joliffe. She hoped Father Henry had the wit to seek out the girl Tibby.
“What if…” she began, thinking out loud.
Dame Claire, looking past her, shook her head.
Meg was coming into the hall. Her hours of sleep from Dame Claire’s drink seemed to have brought a little more life back into her body and mind. She looked less shrunken, less bewildered as she came to stand beside Sym’s body. She gazed at his face, then tenderly laid a hand over his own resting on his chest and looked up at Dame Claire.
“He’s gone to Heaven,” she said. “He’s not hurting nor angry anymore. Never angry anymore again.”
“Never again,” Dame Claire agreed gently.
A single tear moved down the lines of Meg’s face. “He’s better where he’s gone.”
“It’s what we pray for, each of us,” Dame Claire said.
Meg turned her look to Frevisse. “You said you’d seen to my other boy? He needs to go home to see to things there, if he hasn’t already. Has he, do you know? He doesn’t always remember the stock needs tending, come what may.”
“I’ll see if he’s gone,�
�� Frevisse said, “and send him to you if he hasn’t.”
“Nay, then. This is women’s work here and none of his,” said Meg as she reached for the cloth Frevisse had laid down. “We’ll see to Sym. Just tell him to go on home, pray you, but I want to see him later.”
“I will,” Frevisse said, thinking as she went that Meg was on the body’s right side and that Dame Claire could be trusted to keep her from seeing his left side and the second wound if it were at all possible.
The cold had a crisper edge to it as she crossed the yard but the sky was still shining, barely wisped with far-off clouds. Frevisse huddled her habit around her as she hurried and indulged in a moment of covetousness, wishing for Domina Edith’s fur-lined cloak.
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