Winter Heart

by Margaret Frazer

  “She be. You said to tell you,” the woman said, bobbing a curtsey.

  Frevisse said thanks on Margery’s behalf and her own and stood up, bringing Master Naylor and Margery to their feet with her. “I want to hear what she has to say,” she said. “Best you hear, too.”

  They found Anneys Barnsley rolling her head fretfully from side to side on the pillow, making small sounds of awakening and distress, as if she was trying to awaken and could not – or was being shoved out of sleep against her will. There was a stool beside the bed. Frevisse sat on it to bring her near the woman’s ear, and began persuading her toward wakening, but after a moment Margery touched her shoulder and said softly, “Asking your pardon, my lady, but you don’t have a soothing kind of voice. Not for this, leastwise. Mayhap I should do it?”

  Frevisse stood up and stepped out of the way, joining Master Naylor in the doorway of the small chamber, aware Sister Elianor was as close behind them as she dared to be, craning to see over their shoulders. Frevisse shifted a little, to give her easier view as Margery sat down on the stool, took Anneys Barnsley’s near hand, and began to talk to her softly, soothingly, saying her name, assuring her that she was safe, that she need not be afraid. The woman’s eyelids flickered and even briefly opened, but she continued to twist her head restlessly on the pillow.

  “Anneys,” Margery said, still gently but insisting now. “Anneys, it’s all right. I’m here. I won’t leave you. You’re safe.”

  Anneys Barnsley seemed to hear her, rolled her head sideways, moaned, “You said... John... you said... you said... John...”

  Whatever John had said slipped away along with her brief almost-consciousness. Giving up the struggle, she went slack, back into sleep. Margery patted her hand, tucked it under the blanket, looked up at Frevisse and Master Naylor, and said softly, “That’s better. She’s gone into a more natural sleep now. It will last a while, and when she properly awakes, she’ll know what she’s saying and you can ask her things.”

  Since Margery seemed inclined to stay with the woman, Frevisse simply nodded and withdrew across the hall to the hearth again, taking Master Naylor with her, Sister Elianor trailing behind. There, before Frevisse could say it, Master Naylor said grimly, “That’s not her husband’s name. He’s Henry, not ever John. She was moaning to someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “There’s the question, isn’t it?” All of Master Naylor’s displeasure at the business showed in his voice, “John is altogether too common a name. She might as well have said ‘Dick’ or some such.”

  “Name me those in the village,” Frevisse said.

  Master Naylor considered, frowning with thought, then answered, “There’s John atte Bush, but his wife is the village alewife and never lets him carry enough coin for more than a few rolls of the dice and rarely beyond reach of her ladle. There’s John Wryght who’s said he’ll see to the Barnsleys’ cow and all, but he’s a straight lad with no eyes for any but his Jonet. John Smith at the forge, he could have split Barnsley’s skull right enough, although I don’t know why. Not for Anneys’ sake – he’s been contentedly without a wife these past two years. There’s Dick Ford’s son John. He’s not quite right in the head, but he’s never looked like harming anyone, and he’s right useful with a scythe at haying and harvest.”

  Master Naylor paused, probably working his way down the village to gather more names from his memory. But Frevisse was remembering, too. In the hours of waiting for anyone to come back and tell her things, she had had time and enough to think through all she had lately heard about the Barnsleys and Tom Kelmstowe, and now she asked, not quite certain, “Do I remember rightly it was someone named John who gave Kelmstowe away about his cousin’s land?”

  “Oh, aye,” Master Naylor said readily. “John Adirton that was, but he’s so lately widowed it’s hard to think he’s already looking again. His wife died not long after–” Master Naylor stopped, an odd look on his face, then finished slowly, “–not long after Kelmstowe came back.”

  A small quiet came after his words, until Frevisse said, “Sister Elianor, bid Mistress Margery come to us.” And added as Sister Elianor made a quick curtsy and spun to obey, “Seemly, sister.”

  Sister Elianor, already in the midst of her first hurried steps away, brought herself up short, visibly re-gathered herself, and went on across the hall at what Frevisse in her younger, impatient days had called “cloister pace”. Hurried but never flurried, as Domina Edith had used to say.

  Frevisse’s own years of practicing patience – practicing but never seeming quite to master it – presently served her well as she and Master Naylor sat in matching silence, waiting for Sister Elianor to return with Margery. They came nearly soon enough, and Frevisse said promptly, without explanation, “Margery, tell us about the death of John Adirton’s wife.”

  Margery was getting on in years but had not left any of her wits behind her. Her look from Frevisse to Master Naylor and back again was sharp, before she answered straightly, “It was a terrible griping in the guts. It came on suddenly and went so fast I had no chance against it.”

  “She’d not been ill before?”

  “In good health enough, for the middle of winter and all. I was surprised by how quickly she went, but that happens.”

  “You have no thought on what caused her sickness?” Frevisse asked.

  “When something goes to the bad inside a body, there’s not always way to tell what or why. Often and often it happens and there it is.” Margery said that with resignation, having long since had to accept as a bitter fact of life that death did not always come for a knowable reason. “No one else sickened, thanks be to all the saints. I’ve had to be satisfied with that.”

  “No one else sickened until the Kelmstowes last night,” Frevisse said quietly. “Except they all look likely to live.”

  “Oh, aye. She was worse than they by far.” Margery stopped, was silent a moment, then went on slowly, “But otherwise all was the same. The griping in the guts. The vomiting.” Still more slowly, she said, “But it can’t have been the broth. John Adirton and his wife both ate the same for supper the night she fell ill. I asked, because I thought it might be the food had somehow gone bad, but they both said, no, they’d eaten from the same pot.”

  “But not the same bowl,” Frevisse suggested.

  “Nay, there’d be no need for that. John Adirton is well off, as things go in Prior Byfield,” Margery said.

  Frevisse looked to Master Naylor. “Well off enough to have coin in hand if need be?”

  “Aye,” Master Naylor said grimly.

  Margery, not knowing all that was behind Frevisse’s questions but not behindhand in understanding the sway of the talk, said, “He was about the first to the Barnsleys’ when Anneys started shrieking this morning. He was one as helped to hold her and bring her here.” Margery paused, considering, then added, “It was maybe him, now I think on it, who said right at the first I’d do well to give her something to quiet her.”

  Quickly Frevisse asked, “Is he the same who asked that here in the hall, too?”

  “Aye, that was him.”

  Frevisse and Master Naylor looked at one another. The steward’s frown had deepened. “Shall I fetch him?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Frevisse said curtly. “Wait. Margery, do you see where we’re tending with this?”

  Margery had been flicking her sharp eyes from one of them to other, listening hard, and she said now, “I think so, aye.”

  “Then I want you to go with Master Naylor, and when he’s laid hold on John Adirton, I want you to have a long look around Adirton’s place to see what you can find. Anything that doesn’t seem right.”

  “Like maybe what he might have put in someone’s broth,” Margery said shrewdly.

  “That would be useful,” Frevisse granted.

  * * * * *

  Unfortunately for Frevisse’s quiet of mind, neither Master Naylor nor Margery nor any word from the village came back in the
short while before the bell summoned her from her parlor to Vespers. She did not deny to herself that she set her mind with more determination than devotion to the Office, but she knew after all these years that sometimes determination was all that could be brought to her prayers. She also knew that sometimes determination sufficed to give opening for devotion to come after all.

  Today she found that her devotion and her distraction came together in one of Vesper’s psalms, it ending with Benefac, Domine, bonis et rectis corde. Qui autem declinant in vias suas obliquas, abigat eos Dominus cum male agentibus. – Do kindness, Lord, to the good and honest of heart. But who turns aside into their crooked ways, Lord lead them away amid evil doers.

  Yes, that served her humour very well for now, and she was able to go to supper with the other nuns and sit with some quiet of mind through the meal while Dame Thomasine read softly from Dame Julian of Norwich’s Showings. She was nonetheless relieved as they left the refectory to begin the hour of recreation before Compline ended the day to find one of the guesthall servants waiting in the cloister walk to tell her she was wanted in the guesthall, please it her.

  It pleased her very well. Asking Dame Claire to come with her – and then Sister Elianor, too, as she saw the novice’s face – she left the cloister. Crossing the yard to the guesthall, she only with effort held her walk to “hurried, not flurried.” Setting Sister Elianor a good example, she firmly told herself.

  In the hall the rushlights were burning on their prickets around the walls, giving a warm light to the gathering of people there. Foremost were Master Naylor and Master Richard, Margery, and a man who must be John Adirton. He was indeed one of the men who had brought Anneys Barnsley here and moreover the one who had said he saw her go into her house and come out again screaming. Standing behind him as if they were perhaps – but not quite – his guards were Simon Perryn and another village man whom Frevisse knew by sight though not by name.

  As Frevisse had asked her to, Dame Claire went away to see how Anneys Barnsley did, leaving Sister Elianor to stand correctly a few paces behind and aside as Frevisse acknowledged the men’s bows and Margery’s curtsy before saying, “John Adirton?”

  He bowed again. “My lady.” Though he had to be worried why he was here, he did not show it. He had a sharp and ready face, not unhandsome but with a certain cast of weasel to it, his eyes crowded somewhat too near his narrow nose. But confident – oh, yes, he showed confident in his level gaze at her.

  Frevisse deliberately turned her heed from him to ask of Master Richard. “Has there been any illness in the village?”

  “There’s been no one ill in the village all this week.”

  He would have said more, but Frevisse slightly raised one hand to stop him, nodded her thanks, and looked to Margery. The herbwife was carrying a folded bundle of cloth and shook it out to show a dark gray tunic. “It’s his,” she said with a nod at Adirton. “He says so.” She held up the sleeves for Frevisse to see. At their ends and part way up them they were dark with damp. “Not blood,” Margery added before Frevisse could ask. “Water. They’ve been washed.”

  “An odd time of year and weather for a man to take up doing even that much laundry,” Frevisse said, returning her look to Adirton.

  “There was blood on them, my lady,” he said quickly. “This morning at Barnsley’s, when I was seeing if he wasn’t simply stunned, that he was dead, I got his blood on them. I had to scrub it out before it set.”

  “Here, too,” Margery said, turning the tunic around to show its front. A wide area was damp; someone had never pointed out to Adirton that a dirty tunic only partly washed all too plainly showed different between the clean part and the uncleaned. “He had it hung over a stool near the fire. It’s farther toward dry than the sleeves because they weren’t hanging as free to the warmth.”

  “I wiped my hands there,” Adirton said. “After I’d touched him. I wasn’t thinking and I wiped my hands there, and so there was blood there, too.”

  Which could be true. If it came to it, questions could be asked, to find if someone remembered whether or not Adirton had gone near Barnsley’s body this morning. In the meanwhile...

  “You were the man who told the reeve about Tom Kelmstowe’s trick with his cousin’s land,” Frevisse said.

  Adirton blinked. “Aye,” he granted. For the first time he sounded wary. Or maybe only surprised she had brought it up.

  “How did you find it out?” she asked.

  “Don’t remember. Heard somebody saying something, I suppose. Figured it out.” He made an effort toward sounding bold instead of wary by adding, likely thinking it was for good measure but not thinking it through, “Women talk.”

  Frevisse fixed her look on him. “They do,” she agreed.

  Across the hall Dame Claire had been standing in the doorway to Anneys Barnsley’s room these past few moments. Now Frevisse looked toward her. Dame Claire nodded and Frevisse nodded back, then said, “Master Naylor, if you’ll bring him this way, please. Anneys Barnsley is better enough to see him.”

  She noted that Master Naylor’s grip on Adirton’s arm was needed to set him moving, and when Adirton showed unwilling to follow Frevisse into the small chamber, it was Master Naylor’s strong pull that brought him through the doorway, while Simon Perryn and the other villager kept close behind him, blocking even slight retreat.

  At this sudden filling of the room with people, Anneys Barnsley turned her head on the pillow and stared among them, befuddled at first until her gaze caught on John Adirton. With a whimpering cry, she rolled to her side and a little up on one elbow, to hold out her other hand to him as she exclaimed, the words still thick with the leavings of the drug, “Oh, John! It didn’t keep him safe! You said it would but it didn’t!”

  Frevisse instantly moved between her and Adirton, asking, “What didn’t keep your husband safe, mistress? Something you did?” Anneys Barnsley blinked up at her, confused, and Frevisse urged, “Something Adirton said you should do?”

  “Aye. That.” The woman’s blurred thoughts caught up to what she was being asked. She let her hand fall to the bed while she peered up at Frevisse. Fumbling, pulling the words almost singly from her befuddled mind, she said, “I was to say Tom tried to have me. So he’d run off then. Not be here to hurt my Henry. Be gone, see. It frighted me how he was so angry at Henry. John said I should do it. To make him go away.”

  Behind Frevisse, Adirton said in an awed voice, “Her wits are altogether gone. Seeing her man dead has turned them all the way over.”

  Not seeming to have heard him at all, Anneys Barnsley whimpered, “But he came back,” and dropped to the pillow again. Beginning to weep softly, she said at the ceiling beams, “John said he wouldn’t come back. But he did. Now he’s killed my Henry. Killed him dead.”

  As her weeping turned to a low wail on those last words, Adirton turned to Master Naylor and the other men and demanded, “You hear her, right enough? She knows it was Tom Kelmstowe did it. Who else but him?”

  “Who else but Kelmstowe is just the question we’ve been asking half the day,” said Frevisse said, moving aside as she spoke, out from between Anneys Barnsley and Adirton.

  The woman, her heed drawn by the movement, returned her tear-blurred gaze to Adirton. “You said,” she pleaded. “You said if I lied it would keep him safe. That you’d keep him safe. Why didn’t you?”

  “For the same reason he killed his wife,” Frevisse said.

  All the men except Master Naylor startled at that. Adirton was apparently too taken aback for protest or denial, but she had said it less in hope of anything from him – or even from Anneys Barnsley, probably still too drug-addled to understand – as for the listening men who would be the witnesses at Adirton’s trial, and seemingly still to only Anneys Barnsley, she said strongly, “He did it so he could marry you and have all – both his holding and yours.”

  “And Kelmstowe’s,” Master Naylor said.

  “And Kelmstowe’s,” Frevisse agreed.
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  Adirton had recovered enough to exclaim, “This is fool’s talk! You’re making something out of a mad woman’s maunderings.” He gave a jerk of his head at Anneys Barnsley, quietly continuing her weeping with a hand now over her eyes, her mind drifted away from them again, all Frevisse’s words lost to her. Adirton made to leave. Frevisse held up a hand to tell the men to let him go, but when he was from the room, sent them after him with another gesture. She followed, passing wide-eyed Sister Elianor, who had been hovering as close to outside the door as she could be, able to see and hear though there had been no room for her in the small chamber.

  Adirton, walking quickly, was headed for the outer door. “No,” Frevisse said after him. “We are not done with you here.”

  Adirton spun around, threat in the tension of his body. He was instantly flanked by Simon Perryn and the other man, with Master Naylor and his son ready behind them. Adirton assessed his chances and stood still, his glare fierce on Frevisse. It seemed he was no fool – that he already understood who was his worst foe here. Coming near, to confront him to his face, she said, “We have from Anneys Barnsley that you worked on her fear that Tom Kelmstowe might harm her husband. That you persuaded her to accuse him of trying to rape her. That you led her to think he would run away and her husband would be safe.”

  “She’s addled with whatever you’ve given to shut her up. There’s no one going to believe what she said in there.” Looking back and forth between the men flanking him, he demanded of them, “You could see she’s not in her right wits. You’re not set to believe any of that, are you, eh?”

  “Oh, aye,” Simon Perryn said quietly. “I think we are. And whatever else Domina Frevisse will say, too.”

  The other man nodded agreement. Adirton curled his lip with disgust at both of them.

  Frevisse went on, “That Kelmstowe went missing made it easy to believe you were right about him. Except he tells an altogether different story of why he disappeared. You’ve heard it?” she asked the two village men. They nodded that they had. She went on, “It’s an odd story, because how likely was it for someone to pay drovers to carry him off for a jest? But neither did it make sense that he’d take all that trouble to run away to London – and it does seem he was truly there – only to turn around and come back again. No more sense than it made to anybody that he would attack Anneys Barnsley and desert his mother and sister. So everything about his story made no sense.