They had begun walking as Dame Frevisse talked, Thomasine hurrying a little to match her long stride. Now she stopped short under the last arch of the cloister walk and asked quickly, “Do I have to see him? I can only tell him what everyone else will say about them both.”
“You were the first to see your aunt when she returned here yesterday. And you were there at both their dyings, besides being with Lady Ermentrude all the night before her death. He wants to question you.”
“Everyone knows what happened. Everyone saw the drink take her mind and then her body. There’s nothing else to tell. And Martha’s heart failed. Dame Claire will tell him that.”
“Dame Claire says otherwise now.”
“She does?”
“Yes.”
Dame Frevisse’s voice had a hard edge to it that said more than the word, but what the more might be Thomasine had no time to guess. Dame Frevisse went on, and she had to follow, thrusting her hands up either sleeve and tucking her head down, resolutely low, not seeing anything except her feet as they left the cloister and crossed the courtyard to the guest house.
Its outer hall was crowded with people, mostly in Lady Ermentrude’s livery. Their clacking chatter died away as Dame Frevisse entered. Thomasine’s quick glancing to either side showed they were looking at her and Dame Frevisse, but Dame Frevisse passed among them with apparently complete disinterest.
At the threshold to the room that had been Lady Ermentrude’s, Thomasine consciously braced herself for whatever might be there, but after all it was only a room, with the window shutters standing open to the warm day’s sunlight, the bed freshly, neatly made—no sign at all that here had been two deaths so near together under God’s heavy hand, and the bodies still lying within the nunnery walls, wherever their souls might be by now.
Thomasine’s nervous glance around the room, from under the shelter of her lowered lids, showed her that Master Montfort wished to talk to what seemed a great many people besides herself. Dame Claire was there, and Father Henry, and Aunt Ermentrude’s lady-in-waiting Maryon, who was studying Dame Claire like Dame Alys studied a butchered lamb before dividing it. Only the monkey was missing. Beyond them, seated on the bench under the window, with the sunlight aureoling his brown hair to auburn, was the youth called Robert Fenner. Thomasine had the impression that he was looking at her almost like Maryon was looking at Dame Claire, so she moved backward, putting Dame Frevisse between her and his gaze.
But there were not enough places to sit in the room, except for the bed, where no one seemed to want to sit, certainly not Thomasine. Father Henry was already standing. It was Robert Fenner who stood up quickly and said, “Here. Pray you, sit here, my lady.”
He might have meant Dame Frevisse, but Dame Frevisse, intent on going to Dame Claire across the room, said, “Yes, Thomasine, do you sit. We may be waiting for a while.” She added to Dame Claire, “He’s not finished yet with Sir John and Lady Isobel?”
“Not yet. The lady is still so shaken, he’s talking with them in their room. But he can hardly be much longer.” Dame Claire’s tone, like her face, was rigid, withdrawn as if her thoughts were inwardly turning around something else.
Neither she nor Dame Frevisse were heeding Thomasine at all. With no choice, Thomasine went, eyes down, to take the place Robert Fenner had offered her.
Instead of moving away as she sat, he slid down on his heels beside her, his back against the wall. From there he could look up into her face whether she wanted him to or not. He smiled.
Thomasine deliberately shut her eyes, refusing to acknowledge that he was there, and began the Paternoster, the first prayer that came into her mind. Her lips moved on the “amen” though she did not mean them to, and he must have seen them because, before she could begin again, he said softly, “Dame Frevisse speaks to me.”
Thomasine threw him an inadvertent glance, then shut her lips tightly over any words that might try to escape her.
“You heard her. She’s fully a nun but she talks to me,” Robert persisted.
“But I don’t,” Thomasine whispered back, refusing to look at him again. “Not to any man.” The warmth left around her heart by Dame Frevisse’s assurance that she was safe from being put out of St. Frideswide’s made her less taut with nerves than she might have been, so she was able at least to tell him she did not want his attentions.
“My lady?” The quiet voice on her other side made Thomasine look up. The woman Maryon made a small curtsey with her head. “I hope you’re well enough after all that’s happened and last night?”
“Y-yes,” Thomasine murmured. “Thank you. And you?”
“Well enough, I thank you.” Maryon drew a deep sigh and smiled a little sadly at Robert, who had risen to his feet. “We are rather at loose ends for the time, my lord. What will you do now your lady is gone?”
Robert made a vague gesture. “There’s no place for me at home. Mayhap Sir Walter will take me again into his household. I don’t know.”
“Nor I.” She was a pretty woman, all softness and smooth skin, with dark hair and manners meant to please. She made Thomasine uncomfortable. “I left the Queen’s service in hope of seeing something more than Hertford Castle, where she mostly wants to be, and now that hope has come to an end with Lady Ermentrude’s dying. Though she wasn’t an easy mistress, mind.”
“No. She wasn’t that,” Robert agreed.
“I’ve wondered if it wasn’t her wanting to leave the Queen, so much as the Queen asking her to go because of her tongue. Did you ever hear aught about that?”‘ There was a curious cadence to her speech that made Thomasine wonder where she had been born.
“Never anything but what Lady Ermentrude said. That she was tired and wished to leave and Queen Katherine granted it.”
“You never heard her speak ill of the Queen?”
“Never.”
The conversation did not interest Robert. Maryon turned her attention back to Thomasine. “Or you either? Never any reason why she left the Queen except she was tired?”
Gossip of royalty was not common in St. Frideswide’s. Thomasine remembered very well what Lady Ermentrude had said the afternoon she first arrived. “She said there was going to be scandal and she wanted to be away before it started.”
Maryon’s eyes, so gentle-humored and soft under their full lids until then, sharpened. “Did she say what sort?”
Thomasine was too surprised and nervous to move or answer, until Dame Frevisse said, “Thomasine,” in a tone that brought her to her feet. Past hope of going unnoticed, she moved a little forward, made an uncertain bob of a curtsey, and whispered, “Sir.”
“Look at me, child.”
It was a straight demand, barely courteous. Drawing a deep breath, Thomasine looked at him.
“So,” he said, as if that settled something. “You met Lady Ermentrude when she first arrived here yesterday. How did she seem to you? I want what you thought about it then, not what you think about it now. Well?”
Despite the clipped command in his voice, Thomasine waited, swallowing, making sure before she tried them that the words would come. “Excited,” she managed at last. “Angry.” And then because strict truthfulness was needed, she added, “I could smell wine on her breath. I think she was drunk.” She glanced at the little clerk, who was busily writing her words on one of his scraps of parchment.
“She frightened you.” Montfort reclaimed her attention.
Thomasine turned her surprise to him. How had he known that?
“I’ve already heard that from your sister.” Master Montfort gave the information as if grudging it. “She says Lady Ermentrude appeared drunk. That she was dragging you by the arm. That you were frightened.”
Reassured he was not reading her thoughts, Thomasine answered readily, “Yes, I was afraid. She said she was going to take me out of St. Frideswide’s. She was holding onto me so tightly I couldn’t break free. And she was talking so wildly. I think it was the drink in her making her talk so.”
The question rapped at her as if she had said too much. Thomasine hesitated, her eyes darting from place to place around the floor as if the answer would be somewhere there.
“I was too afraid to think,” she whispered at last. “I was too afraid.”
“But you did not try to get away from her.”
“She was hurting me…”
Beside her Robert said, “I told her not to struggle.”
Thomasine stared at him. She had not known he was standing so near to her, or that he would dare speak so strongly to Master Montfort.
“Who are you?” Master Montfort demanded.
“My name is Robert Fenner. I am in—was in—Lady Ermentrude’s household.”
“Fenner? Then you are related to her, as well.”
“I am a great-nephew.”
“You were in her service long?”
“Almost three years. I began in Sir Walter’s household at age nine, but latterly his household became too large, and I was sent to Lady Ermentrude.”
“There was no quarrel?”
“No.”
“You got along well with Lady Ermentrude?”
“As well as any.”
“You went with her when she rode to Sir John’s manor?”
“No.”
“But you were in the yard when she returned?”
“I heard Lady Ermentrude ride in. I was in the guest house and came out in time to see her send the priest away and take hold of Lady Thomasine.”
His bright gaze moved to Thomasine, who instantly dropped her own. But there was no way to shut out his warm, steady voice.
“And how did she seem to you then?” Montfort demanded.
“Frightened. Very frightened. But she listened to me and helped me bring Lady Ermentrude into the hall.”
“I meant, how was Lady Ermentrude?” Master Montfort said, his tone attempting to quell.
Not very quelled, Robert said, “Drunk, I think. Smelling of wine, unsteady on her feet. Confused in her talking. But—”
“So she was drunk and feeling the effects of her hard riding that day and the day before,” Master Montfort interrupted.
“She’d ridden that much and more on other occasions and not felt it. I don’t know why she did that day.”
“But she did feel it, didn’t she?”
“I don’t think it was the riding.”
“The drinking then. She was not a young woman.” He looked around the room and dared someone to gainsay him. No one did, and having asserted his authority, Master Montfort said, “So it would seem safe to say it was her drinking and exhaustion that killed her, coming as they did after her raging of the day before. She was too old to indulge in all that temper and drinking. They made an end of her.”
Quite clearly he had the answer he was seeking. Now he would let them go, Thomasine thought, and gathered herself for the relief of dismissal.
“No,” Dame Claire said in precise, deep tones, “it was something else.”
Everyone’s eyes went to her, but her own gaze was on the crowner, her face as set and certain as his own.
After a moment Montfort asked insolently, “Something else, madam?”
Dame Claire said stiffly, “She may have been drunk when she arrived here, but all her dying signs show something else. Her convulsions as she was dying. The manner of the pain and the way it took her. That was not her heart failing. I have had time since she died to look into my books. I’ve read—” She drew a deep breath and forced herself to go on against Master Montfort’s lowering look of displeasure. “Lady Ermentrude was poisoned. That’s why she died.”
Thomasine, caught in her own stillness, had not known how still everyone else had been through all of Dame Claire’s speaking. Not until now, when sharply there was movement and indrawn breaths, her own among them. Master Montfort’s lower lip jigged up and down as if fighting with his mouth over whether he would speak or not. Finally he said tersely, “You think so?”
“I know so.”
“And what makes you sure?”
“I would maybe not be sure—”
“Ah.”
“But Martha Hay ward’s death was the same.”
Before, there had been surprise in the movements around the room; that sharpened now into open consternation. Except from Dame Frevisse. Thomasine, despite her own alarm, was aware of the nun’s stillness. Had Dame Frevisse known Dame Claire was going to say that?
Master Montfort had recovered himself.
“I’ve not turned to Martha Hayward’s death,” he said sternly. “So, you say it was suspicious, too?”
“Father Henry was there when she died,” Dame Claire said. “And Thomasine. They can tell you the manner of her dying.”
Master Montfort glared at the priest. “Well?”‘
Father Henry was clearly unhappy at being called on to confirm a dreadful truth. “We were watching by Lady Ermentrude. She was sleeping and Martha was talking. Martha’s tongue went ever on wheels but this time she was gabbling, louder and louder, until I had to tell her to remember the sleeping woman. But she became excited, very lively. She would not sit still, walked around and around, still babbling, until the words began to catch in her throat and change to queer sounds. She grew flushed and she looked strange and then clawed at herself.” Father Henry made vague gestures at his chest or throat. “She fell down kicking on the floor. Thrashing and choking until suddenly she wasn’t… anymore. There was time for me to pray over her but only barely, and she died before help came.”
There was perspiration on his forehead as he finished, his open face revealing his discomfort.
Thomasine was already braced as Master Montfort’s displeased eye turned to her. “Well?” he demanded. “Was that the way of it?”
Feebly, biting her lip, she nodded. He glared at Dame Claire. “I was told it was heart failure. Can’t that have been heart failure? The clutching at her chest?”
Before Dame Claire could speak, Dame Frevisse said in her light, clear, unemotional voice, “Father Henry, pardon me, but how exactly did Martha catch at herself? Can you show us exactly?”
The priest looked bewildered but complied, his big hands after a moment’s hesitation going not to his chest but to his throat, and not clawing but grabbing and pulling as if trying to loosen something that could not be reached.
“Like that?” Dame Frevisse asked.
“Like that,” Father Henry confirmed.
Thomasine nodded.
Dame Frevisse turned to Master Montfort. “So it was not her chest she grabbed for but her throat.”
“And that proves?” he said shortly.
“The heart in final pain does not make someone catch at her throat,” Dame Claire said.
“But this Martha woman died in minutes, by his account, and Lady Ermentrude was all night about it.”
“Individuals have individual responses to poisons; what will kill one instantly may, in fact, only give another an hour’s indigestion.”
“Perhaps Martha Hay ward took more of the poison more quickly than Lady Ermentrude did,” Dame Frevisse put in.
“How’s that?” Master Montfort snapped the words, upset that these women were defying him, and clearly more dissatisfied with them with every word they said.
Dame Frevisse seemed not to notice. “There was wine beside Lady Ermentrude’s bed, with medicine to make her sleep, but she collapsed before having any of it.” She looked at Father Henry again. “You said Martha helped herself to Lady Ermentrude’s wine. She must have drank most of it. I remember there was very little left when it spilled.”
Father Henry moved his feet nervously. “She ate the milksop and then drank deeply of the wine. I told her it had medicine in it and she stopped. I should have stopped her, but—”
But Martha Hayward had never been a woman easily stopped in her pleasures, said the look on everyone’s face.
“She was always tasting or sipping at whatever cam
e to hand,” Thomasine offered softly.
Master Montfort’s look suggested he did not want to hear about it. “So did ”anyone else drink any of this wine?“ People began shaking their heads, but before anyone could answer, he rapped out, ”You said it was spilled?“ and looked at Dame Frevisse.
“In the trouble after Martha’s dying it was spilled. So far as I know, no one else drank of it.”
Master Montfort looked at everyone but received only shrugs or shaking of heads.
Novice’s Tale Page 12