16 The Traitor's Tale

by Frazer, Margaret

  “The priest,” the woman answered, fear in her voice, too. “They’re all stirred up against him.”

  “For what?”

  “For everything.” For a moment anger joined her fear. “He’s not a good man. He won’t leave off about ‘his rights’, wants his full tithes and heriot no matter how hard things have maybe gone with someone. He …” Several of the men at the lane’s end made a sudden start away from the others, yelling and gesturing for the rest to follow them along the lane.

  “Oh, blessed Saint Edmund,” the woman gasped. “They’re going to do it.”

  Joliffe swung Rowan away from her. Sire John’s house stood blank-faced, with no one heading that way with any warning, and Joliffe did not mean to be seen doing what none of the priest’s own people would do. He cared too much for his own neck, but he set Rowan into a trot along the cross-street, toward where he thought—hoped—there would be a gate into whatever rearyard the priest’s house had.

  There was, and it was standing partly open. Dismounting, he drew Rowan’s reins hurriedly through the gate’s round handle and went into the small yard. There were a barn and sheds on one side, a small garden of herbs and vegetables and a grassy square with a bench to the other, with a path through the garden to the house’s back door. Joliffe went for the door at a run and on the threshold came almost into collision with the priest’s lean servant going out.

  “The village is up!” Joliffe said at him. “They’re after Sire John. He has to get out of here!”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling him,” the man snarled. He had a bundle clutched to his chest with both arms and shoved Joliffe out of his way with an elbow. “He won’t go, But I am.”

  And he did, breaking into a shamble-legged run for the rear gate.

  Joliffe opened his mouth to call after him, gave it up as useless, and went into a kitchen that showed Sire John’s devotion to his comfort and belly. Pots, frypans, sieves, ladles, and other kitchen gear hung about the broad cooking hearth, a heavy, wooden-topped work table sat in the room’s middle, and a closed chest with a large lock against one wall probably held such costly things as spices. The villagers would make short work of the lock, Joliffe thought as he crossed the room. As for Sire John …

  The priest was standing at the streetward window of his parlor, had opened one shutter and was looking out and along the street with no sign of alarm or fear about him, only—as he looked around at Joliffe—dawning anger. “You,” he said. “Why are you …”

  Joliffe pointed toward the rabble-sound of men coming along the street. “They’re coming for you. Against you. You have to get out of here. Quickly. Before someone among them thinks to block the back way.”

  Sire John drew himself up straight, his thick neck holding his thick head high. “Let them come. I’m their priest. They’ll not dare raise one hand against me.”

  “They mean to raise more than one hand against you,’ Joliffe snapped, shoved him aside, slammed shut the shutter, and dropped the bar across the window. At least the servant had bothered to bar the front door before he fled. “Have you ever seen what happens when men give up being men and turn into one great, vicious beast? That’s what’s coming up the street for you!”

  Sire John disdained that with, “They’re my people. I’m their priest. They’ll not dare to …”

  “Have you ever given them one single cause to love you? Even one?” Joliffe snarled. “Whatever else they do, they’re going to burn down your house and everything in it, and it will be over your dead body they do it if you don’t get out of here!”

  That got him what he wanted more than Sire John’s escape. He had already given up hope he could shift the priest fast enough to save him, too fool-pleased with himself as he was to believe he could ever come to harm. Joliffe, on the other hand, had a strongly set sense of his own mortality and wanted out of here. But he also wanted what he had come for, and at his deliberately said threat of burning, Sire John’s gaze snapped sidewise toward the closed doors of the aumbry against the end wall, telling Joliffe what he wanted to know. On the instant he let the priest go and went to snatch open both the aumbry’s doors, ignored Sire John’s outraged cry, and knelt and began roughly pulling out the piled scrolls that mostly filled it. Not pious books but records of property and income. Sire John advanced on him with thunderous anger and intent to hurt, but a sudden smashing at both the shuttered window and barred door stopped him and turned him half around with—finally—alarm.

  That was no idle pounding and demands, Joliffe thought. Those were axes being wielded against the wood, and he had reached the back of the cabinet without finding any packet. The shutter started to splinter. Sire John was caught in the middle of the room, unsure against which outrage to move first. Joliffe drew his dagger and dug the point under the bottom board of the cabinet, prying upward, certain that somewhere here there was a hidden place but without time to find the catch to open it. The door, hacked off its hinges, was giving way and hands were through the broken shutters, shoving aside the bar there. The board gave to Joliffe’s dagger and he flung it up to show the expected hollow underneath, with a velvet pouch, a wooden box with painted lid, and an oil cloth-wrapped packet that had to be Burgate’s.

  And too bad if it wasn’t, Joliffe thought, snatching it up.

  Men were climbing over the windowsill, shoving at each other to be first. Sire John was going toward them, crying out in outraged protest. Joliffe thrust the packet down the front of his doublet. For good measure, since it was there, he grabbed up the velvet pouch, too, feeling the shape and weight of coins through the thick cloth, and thrust it after the packet, trusting to his belt at his waist to keep both pouch and packet with him, leaving his hands free for his dagger as he sprang to his feet.

  At the broken front door men were elbowing and pushing at each other, crowding to be in. Sire John, too late frightened, was backing away with nowhere to go because men were coming in from the kitchen, too. From there came the first crash of something being thrown down, and Sire John half-swung around toward the sound, mouth open in more useless protest unheard in the shouting all around him.

  Then the men closed on him from all sides and had him. He was grabbed, shoved, struck with fists. Joliffe, shouting, too, and with a fist raised, to seem as if he belonged there, slid rapidly sideways toward the kitchen door, keeping his back to the wall as much as might be. Intent on the priest, no one heeded him. Sire John was down, men were piling over him, and Joliffe was almost to the kitchen door through the men still crowding in from that way when he saw that he was being stared at by a man along the wall the other side of the kitchen doorway.

  Stared at as if the man knew he did not belong there.

  But then neither did the man. He was no villager; was rough-clothed but for riding, not work, and his hair was cut to court-style more than country—and most betrayingly, he was no part of the rout happening around him, was coldly watching it all with head high and no yelling.

  And having probably made much the same judgment of Joliffe, he was beginning to move Joliffe’s way with a set, flat intent in his eyes that made Joliffe think letting him come close would be an ill thing, and with new urgent need Joliffe shoved among the men toward the doorway, as hampered by them as the other man but nearer to it. If he could get into the clear and run for Rowan …

  The sickening thuds of wooden clubs had been added to the pounding of fists and now suddenly the shouting went to a greater roar and all unexpectedly there was a mighty shoving back of men from the middle of the room, crushing Joliffe to the wall just short of the doorway. His foe, with better luck, kept coming. Above the suddenly cleared space in the room’s middle someone swung up an ax. Its blunt back struck one of the beams, making the downward stroke clumsy and shortened but ending in a thick crunch that told it had found bone.

  Joliffe saw his foe glance toward the sound with flaring laughter. Other men were laughing, too, and cheering, and someone was holding up the priest’s head in two
hands, lifting it high, blood pouring from it … With a final hearty shove of two men out of his way Joliffe broke clear and into the kitchen, moving fast for the rear door but feeling, rather than hearing over the cheers and yelling, the other man come in behind him, and because behind him was not some place he wanted the man to be, he spun around, drawing his dagger as he did, to find the other man already had his own dagger in hand and was closing on him as if he wanted blood more than he wanted answers.

  For choice, Joliffe preferred to give him neither.

  The kitchen was not wide or high enough for good sword-work, but wanting more than only his dagger between him and the other man, Joliffe shied sideways to the firewood stacked beside the hearth and grabbed up a long and narrow piece. With that and his dagger at the ready, he backed toward the outer door while the other man circled the work table intent on cutting him off from that escape. But a jostle of village men broke suddenly from the parlor into the kitchen maybe belatedly having found they did not want to be part of what was happening in there. They caught both Joliffe and the other man in their rush toward the rear door, giving no heed to either them or their drawn daggers. Then one of the men swerved to grab a broad frypan from the wall, and the other men realized what they were missing and instead of flight they were suddenly grabbing what they could, and in their shove and shift, while Joliffe, off-balance, tried to fend his way out the door, the other man reached him. Unable to swing around enough to bring his dagger between them, his other arm hampered by too many men around him, Joliffe wrenched sideways, and broke clear but too late, felt a blow low on his left side in the same moment that he was finally able to bring his rough piece of wood around hard at the man’s head. It struck solidly, with all the weight Joliffe could put behind it.

  The man dropped, and dropping the piece of wood, Joliffe shoved away from him and out the door into the yard, a hand pressed to his side. He was hurt, he knew, but had no time to find out how badly. Hampered as he’d been, he doubted he’d hit the man hard enough to keep him down for long and wanted very much to be away before the fellow was up again. At more a stumble than run he made for the back gate, to find on its far side that Rowan was gone.

  His heart lurched downward before he saw her, hardly ten yards off, head down, pulling at grass growing along a back wall, unconcerned with the world’s travails, her reins trailing beside her.

  Under his hand his side had begun to be warm and sticky with his blood, nor were his legs so steady as he would have liked them to be as he went toward her, careful not to startle her. She went on tearing at the grass while he leaned over and took up the reins. She didn’t argue about his slow climb into the saddle either, blundering though he was as pain began to awaken in his side. She only tore quicker grassy mouthfuls before he pulled up her head and swung her away from the wall.

  Joliffe was thankful both for her forbearance and that the sun was gone, blotted out by the sweeping storm clouds bringing an early twilight that would go quickly into darkness. That would help to hide his flight if his foe followed, and he did not doubt the man would. Maybe not until he had made certain the packet was no longer in the priest’s house but after that …

  They had said not one word between them but Joliffe was certain past doubt the man had been there for the packet now being blood-soaked against Joliffe’s side. The man had killed Lady Alice’s man to have it, and having not found it on him, had been making use of the villagers’ riot to try for it himself.

  Making use of the riot? Or was he the cause of the riot? It had been by angry villagers and beheading that Suffolk’s priest had died in Alderton.

  That was wondering that could wait for later. More immediately, Joliffe knew—pursued or not—he had to do something about the bleeding.

  He had without thinking set Rowan away along the road they were already on. It had climbed them out of the narrow valley onto higher ground where there was forest beyond the village fields, and he’d reached the forest now, the rising wind under the clouds beginning to whip the trees as he guided Rowan among them and stopped her out of sight of the road. She was not pleased, stood shifting from leg to leg and sometimes sidling, while he reached inside his doublet, shifted the packet and the priest’s pouch to his other side, then twisted around enough, despite the pain, to pull his spare shirt out of his saddlebag. Folding it into a thick pad, he slipped it inside his doublet and pressed it over the wound without trying to learn how bad the hurt was, because there was no point in finding out, there being nothing he could do for it just now except stop the bleeding. If he could.

  Chapter 20

  Seasons came more subtly within the cloister than in the outer world. The Offices wove their changing garland of prayers through the days and months but otherwise the shifting of the year into autumn was mostly told by the cloister garth’s and garden’s fading to the duller greens of summer’s end and the longer, lower slant of each day’s sunlight into the cloister walk. Beyond the walls was all the autumn haste of harvest, the gathering in of the year’s yield, and the nuns took their small part in that— besides their prayers for good weather and a bountiful year—with gathering the apples in their own orchard, enclosed by a grass-grown earthen bank and ditch beside the cloister.

  With baskets and ladders among the trees and much climbing up and down and laughter and eating of apples, they every year made a holiday of the work, and this bright, warm, dry September day as much as any other, with the sunlight green and gold among the trees, and the red bounty of apples filling basket after basket. Even Dame Emma’s tumble from a ladder harmed nothing more than her dignity, and there would be fresh apple tarts with raisins and cinnamon and nutmeg for supper tonight and apple cakes drizzled with honey tomorrow.

  All the same, for Frevisse at least there was awareness that under the long grass among the trees were all the nuns who had ever died in St. Frideswide’s. They were all here, as— God willing—she someday would be, her grave as unmarked, as grass-grown, and as forgotten as all of theirs. She could not even say now, for certain, where Domina Edith, the prioress who had seen her with wisdom and kindness through her early years of nunhood, was buried among the others, and though that was as it should be—the earthly body something to be as free of as possible during life and willingly returned to earth at life’s end—still, Frevisse was aware of an autumnal sadness that so much could pass and be forgotten. There were already very few left in St. Frideswide’s who remembered Domina Edith. When they were gone, when there was no one anymore who remembered her, that would be the earthly end of all her goodness and wisdom; and when in their own turn they died and some day no one was left who remembered them …

  “That basket is done!” Sister Johane said merrily, leaning from the ladder to put a last two apples in the willow-woven basket Frevisse was holding up to her. “Best fetch another one.”

  And there were worse things than being forgotten after death, Frevisse thought as she carried the basket away to set beside the orchard gate. Better a quiet and forgotten grave than a long-lived fame for ill and evil deeds. And weren’t the apples piled in their baskets a beautiful sight, she thought, firmly turning her mind to somewhere pleasant to be. With all the beauty and bounty there were in the world, to dwell on only sadnesses was surely some manner of sin— of ingratitude, if nothing else.

  She was straightening from setting down the basket beside the others and already reaching for one of the stacked empty ones when Luce, the youngest of the guesthall servant women, looked hesitantly around the half-open gate, exclaimed, “Oh, good!” at seeing Frevisse, made a quick curtsy and said hurriedly, “Old Ela says you should come to the guesthall right away, you’re needed.”

  Old Ela must be growing forgetful, Frevisse thought and went on picking up the basket while answering, “Dame Juliana is hosteler. It’s her you want, not me.”

  “No,” Luce said with undiminished earnestness. “There’s a man hurt. Ela says he’s someone you know and you should come.”

  Fre
visse dropped the basket back into the pile, said, “You’d best tell Dame Juliana, too. And Dame Claire. They’re over there,” and pushed past her through the gateway, gathering her skirts clear of her feet so she could hurry and then—out of anyone’s sight in the cloister walk—run, returning to a swift walk as she went out the cloister door into the guesthall yard, so that she had her breath as she came into the guesthall’s large hall where some men and a few women were clumped around someone lying on the floor on his back.

  Frevisse thrust in among them before they knew she was there and gasped at the sight of the filthy, bloodied man sprawled there on an outspread cloak, even before she knew him for Joliffe and demanded of the people drawing back, Is he alive?”

  “He’s that,” a man kneeling beside him answered. “But badly fevered, seems.”

  She saw Joliffe’s chest lift then in a ragged breath and she demanded, “Why is he here on the floor and not put into a bed? There.” She pointed at one of the small side rooms meant for such guests as did not share the general sleeping in the hall for one reason or another but did not warrant the large bedchamber.

  “The blood,” one of the women protested. “On the bed?”

  “Which counts more? A clean sheet or a man’s life?” Frevisse snapped at her. “See the bed is ready.” And to the men, less curtly, “Be careful how you move him. The hurt is in his side?” That being where his clothing was most blackened with blood, presumably his. It looked to be long-dried. How long ago had he taken this hurt? If he did not live, they would likely never know that, or from whom he had had it, but just now those were lesser matters against having him alive and keeping him that way.

  While she was giving orders for someone to find and bring Father Henry, the nunnery’s priest, and for someone else to tell Dame Claire on her way it was a wounded man with whom she must deal, Dame Juliana hurried in. Presently hosteler, she took over ordering the guesthall servants, demanding hot water and clean rags. Dame Claire came in soon after with her box of medicines and Sister Johane to help her. By then Joliffe was on a bed in one of the small rooms, still raggedly breathing, still senseless. Father Henry came close behind Dame Claire, and since there was neither need nor room for Frevisse in the small chamber, nor strictly any reason she should be there, she withdrew, taking a last look at Joliffe past Dame Claire’s shoulder as she went.