8 The Maiden's Tale

by Frazer, Margaret

  The screens passage at the lower end of the hall not only closed off drafts and the mealtime business of buttery, pantry, and kitchen from view of diners at the high table but served as a passageway between the outer door to the courtyard and the back stairways down to storerooms and through to the range of buildings between the great hall and the chapel over the gateway into Hay Wharf Lane. On its lower floor, the range of buildings was workshops and more storage; above were chambers for the squires and household yeomen when they were not on night attendance to my lord and lady and for such others of the household staff as were of too high rank to sleep in the great hall or kitchen. Some of the better of the household, such as Master Bruneau, had their own chambers. Others shared—two, three, four, or more to a room, depending on their ranks.

  No one was likely to remark on anyone’s coming and going there; folk constantly did, and Jane went openly, meaning to ask the first likely person she met if Eyon Chesman was anywhere around. He was her someday-husband’s cousin, as it happened, a household yeoman as he was and even sharing a sleeping chamber with him, though Jane had never noticed them much together otherwise and their being related having nothing to do with why she had to seek him out. Yester evening she had given Eyon the pattern for a particularly elaborate harness ornament he was supposed to take to Master Belancer the silverworker in Silver Street this morning. Lady Alice meant the ornament as a New Year’s present for her husband and wanted to know if Master Belancer would be able to do the work and in time.

  At least that was what it was agreed among her and Eyon and Jane would be said if it ever came to questioning. Not that it likely ever would, but he should have been back by now and Jane ran the excuse through her mind, to have it smooth if she should have to give it as she went from the screens passage into the gateway range. The first of the rooms there was somewhat larger than the others, meant as a place for those not on duty to gather and keep idle company if they chose. There always seemed to be a few men and boys there, any time of the day, and Jane expected to find, if not Eyon, then someone who could say where he was.

  Instead she found a crowding of men around Master Hyndstoke, the household’s doctor. He was young, his Oxford education come by at the Suffolks’ expense so that he was serving in their household for a time in recompense, mostly an easy duty since both the earl and countess were in determinedly good health and kept their household the same. Presently he was gravely shaking his head at the questions being put to him by too many men at once and trying to go past them while he did, and Jane stopped where she was, momentarily frightened. But it was an unlikely time of year for plague and there was more curiosity than fear in the questioning. Then what was it? she wondered.

  One of the men looked around, saw her, and broke from the others to come to her. Of anyone there, she would have least chosen Robyn Helas to tell her anything but he was already saying, even as he came, “It’s Eyon Chesman. He’s dead. Just now,” putting out a hand to steady her if she needed it. She stepped aside from his hand, neither needing it nor willing to have taken it if she had.

  He was handsome, was Robyn Helas. No one would hesitate to admit it. But he was also fond of himself, and Jane was uncharmed by either his looks or the courteous attentions he sometimes made a point of giving her, because behind whatever he said to her, she always heard a hint of mockery, a lurking pleasure at paying her compliments both of them knew he did not mean.

  So she did not want his “comforting” now, if that was what he intended, but demanded, “Dead? How?”

  Not seeming to mind her shy from him, Robyn answered, “From too much drink it looks like. He drank himself stupid last night and died of it.”

  “Where was his cousin? Why wasn’t he there?”

  “He was attending on the earl last night.” That meant William Chesman had slept with other yeomen and squires in the earl’s outer chamber after seeing him to bed and waited on him through all the early duties this morning.

  “And no one found Eyon until now?”

  “You know as much as I do,” Robyn answered with a shrug. He was standing too close to her in the way she particularly disliked, but she was less concerned over him than over what she should do now. Lady Alice had to be told, but she also had to have back the other paper Eyon had been given last night, the one that mattered, folded up with the pattern of the harness ornament but not meant for Master Belancer the silversmith at all.

  As she hesitated over which way to go, Master Hyndstoke won clear of the men and Jane moved into his way, asking, “What did he die of, sir? My lady will want to know.”

  For the earl’s niece and one of Lady Alice’s ladies, Master Hyndstoke stopped and, dropping none of his gravity, answered, “I would say he taxed his body too heavily with drink last night and died of it.”

  “It was only that?” one of the men asked. “Not anything contagious?”

  “Nothing contagious,” Master Hyndstoke said firmly, directing his answer to Jane. “It was drink gone against him, no disease. It sometime happens that way with some men. Too much drink and the body can’t maintain itself. It closes down and dies.”

  “You’re certain sure that’s all it was?” a kitchen maid asked from behind Jane where other housefolk were now pushing into the room, sure sign that word of an unexpected death was spreading through Coldharbour.

  “Certain!” Master Hyndstoke insisted, impatient at being doubted.

  Jane swung around from him to Robyn. “You’d best go tell my lady this. She’ll want to know and better she hear fact than rumor.”

  “I…” Master Hyndstoke started in what was probably a protest that he had meant to bear the news himself.

  “Yes,” Jane urged, “you go, too.” Robyn, who Jane had noticed was never unwilling to come to Lady Alice’s notice, was already going. Master Hyndstoke, with a haste that slightly lost him dignity, followed. Jane, intent now on somehow having the paper Eyon had had no chance to deliver, went the other way, working around and through the talking crowd who were all too busy to bother with her who knew no more than they did and did not want to talk about it with them.

  Passing through several more small chambers, each one opening into the next, she found Eyon’s room easily enough, and to her relief and discomfort both, no one was left there but William Chesman, standing at the foot of his cousin’s narrow bed, looking down at the blanket-covered body. Jane never knew what to say or how to be with him but that was momentarily a lesser matter as she suddenly confronted the certainty of Eyon’s death. Until then it had simply been a complication, meaning trouble over having back the message of which no one else should know. Now abruptly it was real. Eyon was dead.

  He had been one of the witnesses for his cousin’s betrothal but Jane had never had much to do with him beyond the few words occasionally needed between them concerning Lady Alice’s matter. He had been no one in particular to her—a moderately aged man of moderate appearance, moderate manners, moderate speech, that was all. Someone of use to Lady Alice.

  But now where there had been someone called Eyon Chesman there was no one at all. His soul was gone—heavenward, hellward, into purgatory, there was no way of telling. The only certainty was that all that was left of him here was that body under the blanket, laid still and straightly out in the way that only the dead lay.

  It was not as if she had never seen other people dead. She had and some she had known far better than she had known Eyon. She had even sat with Sister Thebaude while she was dying, seen her die. But each death was its own death, each death was singular, particular, and this one was Eyon’s, and beyond how little or much he had mattered to her, he had been near kin to William who, by the way he was standing at the foot of the bed, head stiffly bowed and back rigid, was in pain, so that Jane, knowing she had to say something rather than stand there watching him while he thought he was alone, said, “Someone has gone for a priest?”

  William raised his head to stare at the crucifix on the wall above the head of the bed and
finally said, “Yes.” He seemed to be having trouble finding his thoughts but managed after a pause, “There’ll have to be more than usual masses said for him.”

  Because he had died without confession or last rites to ensure his soul’s safety.

  “My lord and lady will surely help with that,” Jane said. It came out stiffly. She and William had never said anything to each other beyond the simple conversations inevitable in living in the same household until they had agreed to their marriage together in front of witnesses a month ago and then made the betrothal vows that sealed them to one another beyond recovery. After that even simple conversation had become almost impossibly awkward, for her at least, and William had surely made no effort at it; but just now silence had to be kept at bay and Jane managed to force out, “He was dead when you found him?”

  William looked down at his cousin’s body again before answering, “I thought he was asleep when I came in, but I couldn’t rouse him. He wasn’t breathing anymore. Master Hyndstoke says he’s been dead, been past help for hours.”

  William lifted his hands and ran them backward through his hair that, like his cousin’s, was moderately brown but, unlike Eyon’s, was given to a crisp curl that did not take well to the currently fashionable smooth bowl cut so that he wore it a little long, the better for running his hands through, Jane thought irrelevantly, and pulled her mind up short, knowing she was simply veering away from what she did not want to think about. What she needed to do was find that paper in the few moments before other people came, and how she would do it if it was on Eyon’s body—she looked around the room for where else it might be but there was neither cast-off clothing nor belt pouch, only Eyon’s shoes on the floor beside the bed—she did not know. But to gain time she asked, “He hadn’t been sick at all?”

  “No,” William answered. “Yester evening we were…”

  People were in the next room, coming. Probably the priest, certainly the curious. William broke off what he was saying and looked at her—an odd look that asked questions without expecting answers—for the briefest silent instant before he held out a hand toward her and said in a low voice, “Here. This is what you want, I think.”

  He had the folded papers. It was a small room, barely enough for the two beds and the chest along the wall that served for storage and sitting both. Jane was already near enough to him that she need only reach out for them to have them and she did, snatching them with no time to pretend she did not know what they were or question how he had come by them. The priest was at her back now, his murmurous voice familiar. Quickly, not looking away from William’s deep, still-questioning look but refusing him any answers, defying him to say more, she tucked the papers into the wrist of her gown’s tight sleeve, secure and out of sight before she turned from him, made way and curtsied for the priest and escaped. What was presently most necessary was to let Lady Alice know the message was safe. Undelivered but safe. What William knew or did not know or was guessing at would have to wait for later, was something with which Lady Alice would have to deal. Jane on her part had refused to ask questions, even of herself, ever since Lady Alice had first trusted her in the matter.

  But she was nonetheless asking herself one now because Eyon Chesman had not been someone who drank himself senseless at any time and most assuredly not when he had been entrusted with anything, let alone something as necessary as this message. That certainty about him had been one of the great reasons Lady Alice had chosen to use him in the matter.

  So how had he come to die of too much drink?

  Chapter 2

  The sharp-edged wind harried the slight snow along the cloister walk, into corners and out again and into swirling patterns around their skirts as the nuns hurried through the cold and early evening darkness from the refectory to the hoped-for comfort of the warming room and an hour by a fire before Compline’s prayers and shivering bedtime. Their Benedictine black woolen gowns, black veils, and white wimples that left nothing open but their faces were small protection against the wind’s icy fingering tonight, and though by rights Dame Juliana should have led the way, they were all too much in haste to care for precedence. It was Sister Emma who was first, exclaiming as she scurried, “Mercy, mercy, mercy! If it’s this cold now, what will it be like later?” But that was a thing she always said at every winter’s beginning and no one answered her, only crowded on her heels and one another’s, hurrying each other along, bringing Sister Emma to protest over her shoulder as she fumbled with the latch of the warming room’s door, “Don’t push so!” and then “Mercy!” as the door opened into blessed warmth and firelight.

  In St. Frideswide’s cloister, only the prioress’ parlor, the kitchen, and here had fireplaces, with fires allowed, by the rules, in the parlor and warming room only from October’s end to May’s beginning each year. By their prioress’ will, the rule could sometimes be slacked and sometimes had been, but it was November now, in the year of our Lord’s grace 1439, and “Even if it wasn’t time, it’s cold enough,” Sister Johane said, her hands out to the fire as she crowded with the rest toward the hearth.

  Only Sister Thomasine was slow to follow. Coming last as she generally did to everything but prayers, she took time to close the door with the deliberate, considering care she gave to everything she did, then crossed quietly to join the others, Dame Frevisse shifting slightly, willingly, aside to make room for her. There were only nine of them in the priory now, few enough there was room at the hearth for all of them if they kept close together and with the cold no one minded doing that.

  St. Frideswide’s had never been large but at least they had been ten until two weeks ago, until their prioress’ ill-dealing had been found out and the priory been put at their abbot’s mercy. Through the days since then, Abbot Gilberd had pried into every possible corner of the priory’s life, setting his officers to find out how wrong things had gone under their prioress’ care, how much she had misused their property, how much she had overspent of money she had meant to have but never did.

  She was gone now, after more than twenty years in St. Frideswide’s—four of them as prioress—sent away last week to another nunnery where she would be no more than a common nun among strangers, with her nuns here not even told where she was gone, not even allowed to see her leave; while they were all in chapter meeting one morning, she had simply been given over to some of Abbot Gilberd’s men and taken away, with only her simple-witted servant for companion and that for kindness to the servant, who would not have understood losing her mistress rather than any other reason.

  In all truth, it was a relief to have her gone, but even so her going left an odd emptiness behind it. An emptiness that was growing in St. Frideswide’s. Besides their prioress, their prioress’ aunt who had been boarding there was gone, with servant and dogs and relatives; and Abbot Gilberd had determined that little Lady Adela must go, too, a child who had been put into St. Frideswide’s five years ago by Lord Warenne, her father, to be raised and educated and to become, the nuns had not too secretly hoped though it was never promised, a nun with them some day.

  “And he does pay us for her. At Lady Day and Michaelmas,” Dame Juliana had dared to say when Abbot Gilberd had told them Lady Adela had to go. They had all known by then that there was small use in protesting to Abbot Gilberd over anything, but Dame Juliana as the priory’s cellarer and kitchener had grown a little bold out of desperation at the responsibility that had come on her with their prioress’ fall and had even dared to add, though in a small voice, “We need the money, you know.”

  “None better,” Abbot Gilberd had answered, a little edgily perhaps after too many hours of going over the rolls of the priory’s unsatisfactory accounts. “But just now there’s as much need for prayer here as for money, and for that you need to be rid of all distractions. The child is a distraction.”

  “Only a little one,” Dame Perpetua might have said, and after all she had had the main responsibility of Lady Adela; but revelations of how deeply in trouble St
. Frideswide’s was had cowed them into simply accepting Abbot Gilberd’s will.

  At least he was as concerned with fully restoring the worship that had been too much slacked under their prioress’ indiscipline as with taking in hand the worldly order gone too far awry in St. Frideswide’s these past months. That much about him she could appreciate, Frevisse thought as she drew her hands back from the blessed warmth, tucked them into the opposite sleeves of her gown, and huddled them against her. That, and the fact that he was finished with them, for a while at least.

  He had told them so this morning in chapter meeting, right after he had finished detailing precisely how badly off the priory was and how narrowly they were going to have to live while their finances and properties were straightened into order and, hopefully, profit again. Even what had seemed small things—such as warmed, spiced cider after Compline to comfort their way to their beds—would have to be foregone for the while. “Spices are expensive,” Abbot Gilberd had said in that case, “and your store of cider low and you have no prospect of being able to buy more of either one this year. What you have will have to last you.” And that was only one of the economies he had enjoined on them. “Your steward understands it all,” he had said. “Follow what he tells you and you should do well enough.”

  That had been hard to hear—used to governing themselves, to be put under the governance of their steward. But Abbot Gilberd had turned their minds from it by going on, “With that, I think that I’ve done all that can be presently done for you. Even if more needs doing, it will have to wait. I’m summoned to the parliament meeting at Westminster and must leave tomorrow for it.” Elbows resting on the arms of his chair—their prioress’ chair—he had steepled his fingers together and looked at their waiting faces in front of him and said what they were waiting to hear. “That leaves us with only the question of who should be your prioress now.”