Come in of his own will he might have but Montfort did not sound mollified by it. But, “I’ve a right to go where I please, so long as I come back in goodly time, and I did! Look you, I was in Banbury for a day. I’ve a sister there, a freewoman, and was minded to see her and it was nobody’s business I meant to go so I wasn’t telling no one, was I? And I wasn’t to know you’d be swinging in here wanting me that very day. Nor have I run off, I’m here, so why be yelling at me for it?”
“You mind your tongue or you’ll be looking for it one of these days,” Montfort bullied.
“Now, you don’t know my lord so well as you think,” retorted Gilbey. “He’s a fair man and so’s his steward, and they don’t punish a man for speaking his mind, even if he is a villein. Especially me, for I’m the best laborer in all the village, and an honest man.”
A voice slipped in between them, too low for Frevisse to make out the words but enough for her to recognize. “Father Henry?” she asked.
“Your priest? Yes,” the man agreed, and added hastily, “Here, now, you can’t be going in there.”
But Frevisse had already lifted the latch. Montfort would bring Father Henry around to saying anything—or else believe what he wanted to believe out of anything Father Henry said—if left to himself, and she wanted the truth as it was, not as Montfort preferred it to be.
Montfort, red-faced and leaning forward across the table where his clerk was busy scratching down all that was being said, whirled to glare at her coming in. “You’ve been putting your nose in again, woman!” he snapped. “Sending this priest to ask questions that are no concern of yours. That will have you in trouble yet, you mark my words.”
Frevisse murmured with a feigned humility, “I pray your forgiveness yet again.” And could not forbear asking, “Has he been of use to you?”
“Maybe. Some.” Not liking giving that much ground, Montfort swung back toward Gilbey Dunn standing in the room’s center like a thick-necked, stubborn bull. Their glares were mutual. “So you left the alehouse early, you say, just after the fight between this player and Sym and went home to bed, you say.” Montfort made it sound a crime.
“Aye. I went home. It was late and I’m not minded to sleep in the alehouse.”
“And you heard the furor when Sym was found and stayed in your bed anyway?”
“I heard the noise but was warm in bed. They sounded like no more than drunken fools to me and I stayed where I was.”
Montfort said, “It’s illegal to ignore the hue and cry.”
“It wasn’t a hue and cry, it was a clot of fools seeking to go on a loon’s errand.”
“So you stayed in your house the rest of the night?”
“Aye.”
“Alone?”
“…Aye.”
Frevisse thought not, but she said nothing.
“This Sym was no friend of yours, though, was he?”
“You’d be hard put to find anyone who liked him, quarrelsome as he was.”
“And what did you have against the nun Sister Fiacre?”
That sidestep caught Gilbey flat for a moment. “Who?”
“The priory sacrist. She keeps the church in order. She’s been murdered, too.”
“Is she the one? I heard a nun had her bread baked in the church, but I didn’t catch the name. I’ve no idea what she even looked like. For all I know I never set eyes on her in all my days, let alone ever speak to her. What could I be having against her?”
“And you’ve some tale of where you were the afternoon that she was killed? You were seen coming in the back nunnery gate about then, let me tell you that much.”
So Montfort had actually found out something she had not. But as Gilbey Dunn’s face furrowed into stubborn lines, she thought of something else. Sullenly he said, “There’s those always watching others when they should be tending to their own work.”
“That’s as may be but what business had you here that afternoon?”
“None that’s any man’s business but my own. And I never went near the church where she was killed! You’ll not find anyone can say in truth I did.”
“Then where were you, man?” Montfort demanded. “Have it out.”
Gilbey’s mouth clamped down in tight refusal. He would have to say it sooner or later but he was stubborn enough to make it later if he could. Frevisse, with an excess of impatience at both of them, said sharply, “If you really want to know, go ask Annie, our laundress. She can probably tell you where he was that afternoon. And she knows better than anyone why his bed was warm enough he didn’t leave it the night that Sym was killed!”
Gilbey’s face went white and red by turns as he gaped at her. Fools, she thought, and turned on her heel to stalk out of the room.
Frevisse went out the door and saw Roger Naylor across the courtyard speaking with a man standing in a wagon burdened with a hogshead barrel.
Naylor looked around and saw her coming. “My lady,” he said with a broad smile, “Thomas Chaucer has sent you a gift of cider, though I think it wicked of him to think you suffer from a thirst so great as this.”
Frevisse lifted her chin at his impertinence. “I believe it is the priory’s thirst he caters to, Master Naylor. He asked me if I had a Christmas wish, and this was it. Would you have this taken to the priory kitchen? I’ll go to Dame Alys and warn her of its coming.”
But as she came within hearing of the kitchen, she knew Dame Alys had another matter in hand at present.
“Gone again! I turn around and the woman is gone again! What’s the use of giving any of you leave to do anything if you never see fit to bother doing it after I’ve told you? Where’s she gone, I ask you?”
One of the women, scouring with full-armed strength at a frypan on a table near the door, said in the subdued tone the kitchen staff found best to use around Dame Alys, “Maybe to see her son again. The dead one, you know. There’s his wake this afternoon.”
“And about time. Maybe then she’ll stop wearing herself to the bone with all this flitting about. In the door, out the door. She might have said she wasn’t staying when she came in. I’d not have told her to see to the onions otherwise and now we’re behindhand on them because I thought she was doing it.” Dame Alys, parading the length of the kitchen and back, rapping her heavy spoon on each of the thick tables as she passed, turned and saw Frevisse. “And you, Dame,” she croaked. “Don’t be asking for more cider for anything whatsoever, I’m telling you.” She rounded on another kitchen worker before Frevisse could reply. “And why aren’t you chopping the kindling like I said? Are you expecting me to do that, too, as well as think for you into the bargain? That fire goes out and it will be your hide they’ll be writing next year’s accounts on, I’ll see to it myself.”
The woman standing by the wood stack in the near corner spread out her empty hands. “The ax is gone. I’m looking for it.”
“The ax is gone. Your wits are gone. My patience went a long, long time ago. You couldn’t find it two days ago. Meg had it out killing chickens for the pies and you couldn’t figure that out. So who has it today? Nobody. Nobody is killing anything today and the fool thing is here somewhere, so look for it, you daft-wit. Pick up something and look. What do you want here, Dame Frevisse?”
Before the chance to answer disappeared, Frevisse replied, “Only to tell you, Dame Alys, that my uncle Thomas Chaucer has sent us a hogshead of cider. Master Naylor is having it moved from the courtyard to your storeroom. So that’s one grief and worry off your mind.”
Since grief and worry—transposed to temper and nagging—were Dame Alys’s main pleasure in life, she was maybe not so happy with the news as she might have been. Her brows drew down heavily, but before she could find something wrong about an excess of cider, one of the women held up the ax and said, “Here! I’ve found it!” and Dame Alys turned on her.
“Not a minute too soon, I’d be saying. And you,” she snapped at another woman. “Why aren’t you chopping the onions?”
“I can’t find a knife for it.”
Dame Alys threw up her hands with an inarticulate cry. Frevisse decided this was not the time to twit Dame Alys further about the cider and left. The hapless kitchen workers would have to endure without her.
The watch over Sister Fiacre’s body, two by two, had come round again to Frevisse this afternoon. She had time to put on her warm nighttime shoes, the ones lined with woolly sheepskin, before going to the church.
Sister Emma came in soon after her, and the two nuns ending their watch flashed them grateful nods as they rose, genuflected toward the altar, and left.
Before kneeling, Frevisse looked briefly at Sister Fiacre’s face. It was waxy now, and faintly mottled, the color too false to mistake its stillness for sleeping, but the expression was serene. There was no evidence, lying as she was, positioned with Dame Claire’s great care, of the terrible destruction to her skull. She might have simply died, Frevisse thought as she knelt and bent her head over her clasped hands.
But she had not. She had died in a way that made no sense, and that lack of sense bothered Frevisse as much as the murder itself. They did not even know what she had been killed with. Something heavy, and therefore perhaps large, not easy to hide surely. Or two weapons, one blunt, one sharp. But no one seemed to have seen anything. It was as blank as the reason for Sister Fiacre being killed at all, if revenge by the players was discounted.
And was she wrong in discounting that, Frevisse wondered?
Because they were the one link between Sym’s death and Sister Fiacre’s. Had she let her own feelings interfere?
Yes.
She had cared more about proving that Joliffe was innocent than in finding the killer. She almost cared more that the players not be arrested than that the murderer be discovered. Even that she could admit if she faced it. And that was dangerous because what if they were guilty after all? Not just one of them, but all of them together, which looked like the way it had to be if any of them were.
Frevisse pressed her folded hands against her lips until they hurt against her teeth. She had learned as much as she could about the murders and had solved nothing. She was here to pray for Sister Fiacre. She would.
After all, Sister Fiacre’s death was maybe some sort of mercy, wracked as she had been by the cancer in her breast, with nothing but months of cruel and growing pain ahead of her. It was a death as merciful, in its cruel way, as maybe the man Barnaby’s had been, with only a crippled life ahead of him.
Frevisse realized the ugliness of her own thoughts even as she thought them. It was the basest wrong to take God’s place in choosing what was mercy and what was not, in choosing what was right and what was not. She bent her head lower, humiliated by her mind’s treachery, and pressed her knuckles against her forehead, making a new pain to draw her mind away from crippled judgment and crippled lives.
Her mind paused for a frozen moment, then felt that thought again.
Crippled lives. Sister Fiacre and Barnaby had both been crippled, hurting in their different ways.
So many lives were crippled if looked at from a certain angled way. Barnaby. Sister Fiacre. And Sym. And if you looked at it a certain way, so was…
Without realizing it, she had risen to her feet. What she was thinking had a kind of sense to it, no matter how much her mind recoiled from it. Had a kind of sense that explained the unexplained about Sym’s death and Sister Fiacre’s. Explained in a way that was close to madness.
“Dame Frevisse?” Sister Emma asked uncertainly.
Frevisse shook her head once, sharply, shaking off anything that would break the way her thoughts were now running at full, frightening pitch.
Sister Emma insisted, “Dame Frevisse, what is it?”
Frevisse spun around, grabbed her arm, cried, “Find Dame Claire!” and pushed past her.
“Dame Frevisse!” Sister Emma cried after her but Frevisse was past heeding. She ran the length of the church and out the western door into the yard and wan sunlight. There was no one there but as she ran on, across the yard and through the arched gateway into the outer yard, she saw Naylor talking to two servants in a stable doorway. Her suddenness brought him quickly around, and he started toward her, his mouth opening to question her, but she did not stop. “Come with me!” she cried.
He came after her, catching her urgency.
“Oh, God,” she prayed as she ran, “don’t let it be,” and kept on running.
She smelled it as she reached the closed door of the calving shed. Recognized its warm, coppery smell in the clear cold of the day. She hesitated, unwilling to see what she knew the smell meant.
Naylor reached past her and opened the door.
Meg had killed him beside his brother’s coffin. His blood was there in a spread pool where she must have held him until it finished. But when the bleeding was done, she had moved him to a clean pile of straw. They were there together now, Meg sitting with her legs curled under her, Hewe with his head on her lap, his hands folded on his chest over the embroidered front of Father Henry’s surplice. She must have put it on him afterwards because the only blood on it was a little around the neck, soaked through the cloth she had wound there to cover the gash that let out his life.
With the things she had taken from the sacristry Meg had made Sym’s coffin into as near an altar as she could, covered by one of the white altar cloths, set with the paten and the chalice, all brought from the sacristy. A lamp, in lieu of the candles she did not dare take off the altar, shed its light over the quiet scene. In the moment before others came and the yelling began, Meg looked at Frevisse and Naylor and said serenely, as if she could not see their horror, “He’s gone to Heaven now. He’s safe.”
Chapter
23
IT HAD ALL been so simple.
Meg thought they understood. She had explained it very carefully to Dame Frevisse, to them all, and they were being kind to her so they must understand how simple it all was.
If Barnaby had lived, he would have gone back into his bad ways and, more than that, kept anything good from ever happening to Sym or Hewe or her. But for just that little while he had been good. He had been kind, and made confession, and had suffered terribly, a penance for his sins. Just in that little while he had behaved like a good Christian, one worthy of Heaven. It would have been wrong to have allowed that to be wasted. And it had not been hard. She had held the pillow over his face only a little while and then he had died and been free to be good for always, never bad or hurting again.
And Sym. Poor Sym, who never understood anything really. He had been so frightened by his blood from that little wound in his side that he had lain down and done everything she told him: said the Act of Contrition, promising to amend his life, and kissed the little cross of tied sticks that was the only holy thing she had in the cottage, and wished to go to Heaven—all the things Father Clement had said were enough to cleanse a soul if there were no priest ready to do it with holy words and oil and the wafer. Then the knife had gone in so easily—it had to be kept always sharp for cutting bread and the rare rabbit or chicken—he had hardly seemed to know it, just looked at her with more surprise than pain and then twisted a little when she had pulled it out, and gone to sleep, sweetly as the baby he had once been, never to hurt himself or anyone else anymore.
Sister Fiacre had been a dangerous chance-taking. But Meg had watched a woman die of a cancerous breast and knew how long the dying went on. Sister Fiacre was a holy woman, dealing with holy objects every day and saying how sometimes when praying she could feel herself surrounded by the love of God and His holy saints. She had never hurt anyone or sinned very deeply; surely God had not meant for her to suffer so hard for very long. And by showing herself holy and kind to Meg, God’s plan for her dying was made clear to Meg. Surely God would not have put Sister Fiacre so plainly in her path if He hadn’t meant her to ease her dying.
It had been no difficulty getting the ax. It was there in the kitchen, and she had been using it for kill
ing chickens for the priory’s pies—she had never learned the knack of wringing their necks, she had always had need of the ax. A single stunning blow with the blunt end, and then two with the sharp, to make sure. No one had thought a thing when they had seen her washing it off, after.
And Hewe. She was sorry he had been so afraid. She hadn’t wanted him afraid but her fear for him had been greater. If he had gone away with the players, they would have corrupted him and he would have ended damned forever. She knew God wanted him for a priest, but he seemed set on wandering from his appointed path into sinfulness. There had been only the one way to save him, to make him safe despite himself.
She had taken him to his brother and left him there to pray, and gone to the kitchen for the knife and to the church for the priest things. Hewe had not understood, not even when he saw the altar things and vestments. Not understood until she had explained it to him, and made him kneel and swear he was God’s servant before anyone else’s, and pray in contrition for absolution, there at the altar she had made. She had brought all the proper things to make it a true altar. He had understood then that she was saving him. He had understood and was glad of it. She knew he was glad, because she had seen his repenting tears falling when she bent to be sure of her stroke across his throat.
So much worrying about her family, for so very long. And now, so simply, it was done and they were safe.
Meg looked up at the sky, tilting her head to feel the soft snow fall on her cheek. It was odd to be so warm out in the cold, but they had given her a cloak, heavy wool and double weight, because it was a long ride to Banbury, Dame Frevisse had said.
Meg had never been there, of course, but it did not seem to matter now that she was going. She knew why she had to go, and that she would not be coming back. She was quite clear on that, but it hardly mattered. She had done what needed doing. She was tired; they could take her where they wanted, it no longer mattered. Everything was settled and there would be a priest there for her. The angry, fox-faced man, the crowner, had promised her that. So, with one thing and another, it would not be so very long, she thought, until she was safe, too.
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