‘We were all at Nones, I gather, when it happened. Look.“ She leaned a little out, as Frevisse had done, and pointed, leftward this time. ”You can even see the garden fence from here.“
Domina Elisabeth leaned out to look and Frevisse took the chance to ask, “How long ago did the wall along‘ the garden there fall down?”
‘Oh, goodness, let me think,“ Domina Matilda said. ”How ever did you know of that?“
‘Someone mentioned it,“ Frevisse vaguely answered.
Domina Matilda, busy reckoning, was not curious enough to ask who, and said, “Twenty and some years ago, it must be. No, longer than that. Oh, my. The bank gave way and the wall collapsed the year before Agincourt. I was just out of my noviate and remember we were gathering money to rebuild it and instead had to pay it all into our tithe toward our late King Henry, God keep his soul, going into France. Afterwards, we just never bothered with it. It’s been one withy fence after another. I suppose it’s something I should take in hand, shouldn’t I? But if there’s ever money to spare, it’s always needed somewhere else more.”
‘Isn’t that always the way of it?“ Domina Elisabeth said. ”More things to do than money to do them with.“
Before they could go off on that, Frevisse asked, “Wasn’t Mistress Champyon at school here then?”
‘After that, by a little, I think.“ Domina Matilda made a face. ”Cecely Bower and her sister Rose. We none of us much liked them.“ Then she thought better of being uncharitable and asked more moderately, ”Do you know her?“
‘No. It’s only that she’s being talked about so much.“
‘She’s doing her share of talking, too, if she’s anything like she was.“
However long since Cecely had been there, it seemed Domina Matilda’s feelings toward her had not warmed. “Not even her sister liked her much.”
‘Nobody seems to now, either,“ said Domina Elisabeth, moving away from the window, back toward the comfort of the fire.
Domina Matilda followed her, saying with a laugh, “Well, her present husband and her children must—or maybe—do. But that makes one wonder about them, doesn’t it?”
Left to herself, Frevisse leaned out the window and looked down again, thinking that the drop from there to the top of the bank would not be too long for a man if he slid down and hung by his hands from the window’s sill before dropping. Before he did, he would have been able to see if anyone was in sight, too, and judge whether or not he could go unseen for the brief moment it would have taken him to be out the window and drop to the bank and slide into the ditch. To a desperate man, the chance of being seen would have been little enough, and he must have been desperate to take the chances he had taken.
But the problem with having him drop from the window was that he would have had to be in the prioress’s parlor and how he would have come there Frevisse did not yet see. Even given all else he had dared to have Montfort dead, even depending on all the nuns to be at Nones, still the hope he could pass through the nunnery to reach the parlor unnoticed by any servant seemed one chance too many.
Unless Domina Matilda was with him in planning Montfort’s death.
Frevisse eased back from the window and turned to look at Domina Matilda, seated again by the fire, stroking her spaniel’s ears and sharing with Domina Elisabeth the constant costs of keeping up a nunnery’s buildings. What interest could she possibly have had in wanting Montfort dead? Nothing Frevisse had heard so far linked her in any way with the Lengley inheritance. Unless her friendship with Lady Agnes ran so deeply she was willing to help toward murder…
It made better sense to think she might not have known it was going to be murder and was holding quiet now out of fear.
But also holding quiet at peril of her soul, and what would be worth that?
A promise of lands or goods or money to the priory in payment for her silence?
That was possible, Frevisse supposed. She had known a prioress who had imperiled her self and soul for worldly gains. But Domina Matilda did not seem that kind. She seemed more like Domina Elisabeth, firm and able in her duties, now asking Domina Elisabeth, “Do you think Mistress Montfort might want to aid the rebuilding of the garden’s wall as a sort of memorial to her husband?”
Frevisse looked away, out the window again. Then turned to face it fully, leaning forward as if that would be enough to help her see more clearly what was happening at the ferry landing across the river.
Something in her suddenness must have drawn Domina Elisabeth’s notice because from across the room she asked, “Dame Frevisse? What is it?”
‘I don’t know. Would the hunters be coming home this soon?“ That seemed the most likely reason for the milling of horses, riders, and—small with distance but no mistaking the surge and shift of them—a pack of hunting hounds in the wide space left among Streatley’s low buildings for travelers to gather to the ferry.
‘No,“ Domina Matilda said, rising and coming back to the window. ”It’s too soon, surely. They…“ Her voice faltered as she reached Frevisse’s side and saw what Frevisse was now seeing—a long shape wrapped in a dark cloak being carried toward the ferry by three men, and softly she said, ”God have mercy. Someone’s dead.“ She swung away from the window. ”Or hurt. Please God, only hurt. I’ll send someone to find out.“
Chapter 19
It was Nichola Lengley. And she was dead. Master Gruesby, standing behind and aside from Master Christopher and young Denys in the hall of the Haseldens’ manor house, was doing what he could not to see her cloak-wrapped body laid on the trestle table set up for it hurriedly and crooked in the middle of the hall. Word of the death had spread through Goring in the time it had taken for her to be carried from the ferry to her home and Master Christopher had followed almost as soon as he heard and Master Gruesby had gone with young Denys after him. That Master Christopher had not turned him back was to the good but that did not mean Master Gruesby was pleased to be here nor did he want to think about the dead girl. Instead he had noted as they rode into the manor’s yard how the Haseldens’ house, proudly fronting its own lane off the Reading road, was all new-built, with pargetted plasterwork and thick-laid thatch. Now, here in the hall, he was purposely noting that all its furnishings were likewise mostly new, the painted tapestry on the wall at the far end of the best quality—French, he thought, and Master Haselden had been in the French war, so it was maybe booty rather than bought…
But none of all his noticing other things kept him from being all too aware of the body lying there. He did not like bodies. People alive made him uneasy, it was true, but he had perfected being forgotten, could be in a room and go unnoticed by everyone and was happy at it. What he was not happy about and had never been able to hide from was his pity for the dead. Even those he had never known when they were alive. What made this worse was that he remembered this girl alive all too well, both at the inquest and after Master Montfort’s funeral. She had been pretty, he remembered, in the way young things often were, simply because they were young. Now she was not. Either young or pretty.
Not that her face was much marred. It was dirtied, yes, and with dried and darkened blood flowed out from both the corners of her mouth that her softly sobbing mother was even now carefully, carefully washing away with a cloth and warm water from the basin held by a loudly sobbing maidservant standing beside her. But the dirt and blood had not taken the prettiness out of her face. It was the emptiness did that. The emptiness where there had been someone alive and now there was nothing, only empty flesh already graying toward its decay. The brightness of her fair hair spread behind her head and falling over the table’s edge now that her mother had eased off her veil and wimple and dropped them to the floor was almost an offense, looking so much more alive than she did.
And besides death, Master Gruesby did not like grief as raw and new as it was here. He didn’t like grief at all, come to that, but as crowner’s clerk he had mostly come to deaths after there had been time for the grief arou
nd them to be worn out a little. Here death and grief were both too raw, too hurtful—the mother crying as if something deep inside her had broken and she would never be able to stop; the father standing beside Master Christopher across the table from his wife, never quite looking at either her or his dead daughter but talking, talking, the words coming as if he couldn’t stop them, saying again for Master Gruesby no longer knew how many times, “The stream bank was steep, it was muddy, yes, but everyone else made it, safe as anything. Nobody else fell. Nobody else.”
And worst, the dead girl’s husband simply standing at the foot of the table looking at her and nothing else. Not moving. Not speaking, only standing there. As if bereft of movement as his dead wife.
But guessing by his clothing, he had done something more than that sometime. Besides the expected spatter of mud over him from hard, muddy riding, he was mired with mud to his knees and the front and one shoulder of his thick, winter-padded doublet was smeared with not only mud but blood where, down on both knees, he must have gathered his wife’s broken body against him.
‘It was Stephen. He looked around and didn’t see her,“ Master Haselden said, yet again telling how the hunt had been at full gallop away from the stream, crossing a pasture with the hounds in cry after a stag, when Stephen had missed Nichola. ”He yelled at me and turned back and so did I and so did…“ He named off two others, the men who had been standing muddy and white-faced in the yard with their horses when Master Christopher, Master Gruesby, and young Denys had ridden in. The rest of the hunt, it seemed, had made the kill before they realized they were short some of their riders and gone back to find them, not knowing until then that theirs had not been the day’s only kill.
‘It wasn’t that bad where she fell,“ Master Haselden was saying again. ”There was thicket all along the other side of the stream where we’d come down, yes, but where she fell on the other side was open. It was steep and muddy but open. And she was right at the top when she fell, when her horse went over. Everyone else made it, nobody else fell…“
He kept circling back to that. That nobody else had fallen. Nobody else. Only Nichola. But that was how it was with accidents, Master Gruesby had noticed over the years. They happened to one person when they could just as easily have happened to another. Or to nobody. They were the will of God. Or of the Devil. He had heard them called both but made no choice himself. For some reason—some fault by her or her horse or in the mud under its hoofs—she and her horse had slipped on a muddy slope and fallen and she’d been thrown and her horse while struggling to rise had fallen again and rolled on her, with probably never a chance for her, tangled in skirts and cloak, to scramble clear.
‘She hated riding,“ Mistress Haselden whispered. Her husband flinched a look at her and away again. She had finished with the blood, was wringing the cloth out in the dirtied water. ”Hated it. He’d have her go. He wouldn’t take her no for an answer. But she hated it. The way I’ve always hated it.“
Master Haselden began shaking his head, refusing that, insisting as he had insisted before, “She rode careful. She always rode careful…”
‘Hated it,“ Mistress Haselden whispered again, beginning to clean the mud from her daughter’s forehead now.
‘… always kept behind everyone else,“ Master Haselden said. ”That’s why we didn’t know she was down. We none of us saw…“
From what he had said and said again, the four men had come back and found her dead. The horse had been still alive but lying half in the stream and half out with a broken hind leg and someone had cut its throat to end its misery. Nichola had been more than broken, she had been crushed from her chest downward and Master Gruesby was glad it would not be his duty to pay heed when time came for Master Christopher to view the body. It was a crowner’s duty to view a body before bringing the matter of the death before an inquest and it was his clerk’s duty to write down what the crowner saw. Master Gruesby had always been careful to sit well apart from Master Mont-fort’s viewing and kept his gaze to his pen and paper as much as might be, satisfied to write, not see. He wondered if Denys, trying just now to handle his writing box and its small inkpot and pens and paper suitable for carrying from place to place to use at awkward times like now, had learned the value of writing without seeing.
If he hadn’t, he had better because there were so many ugly ways to die and, after seeing them, so many nights of nightmares about them.
Though for Stephen Lengley, by the look of him, the nightmare was here, no need to wait for night. What lay in front of him was mercifully mostly hidden in the folds of cloak wrapped and doubled around it but he had seen her freshly dead, had held the ruin of her in his arms, and by the look of him he was remembering that. Or what might be worse in this moment, how she had been and never would be again.
Master Gruesby had lived too far from closeness to anyone to understand fully what grief there could be in that much loss but knew he did not understand, knew he did not want to understand, and slid his gaze away Troni everyone, down to a pair of riding gloves lying beside the table on the floor that was, he determinedly noted, of good stone flagging under its clean scatter of rushes…
Far kinder at it than his father would have been, Master Christopher was disentangling himself from Master Haselden’s half-unwitted, grieving circling of words by laying a hand on the man’s shoulder to silence him long enough to say himself, “I understand. I’m sorry beyond words for your loss.” And then, more to Mistress Haselden than her husband, “I’m sorry, too, but I have to view her body. Once I’ve done that, I’ll go away.”
He—and Master Gruesby with him—clearly expected she would give trouble over that but she only went on washing her daughter’s face while she answered, her voice dead behind her soft sobbing, “I won’t unclothe her here for everyone to see. We’ll take her into my chamber. I’ll ready her there and then you can see her.”
‘Thank you.“ Master Christopher matched her quietness and added to Master Haselden, ”I’ll speak to the other men while we wait.“
‘Yes,“ Master Haselden said vaguely, as if he had not been listening, did not know to what he was answering. ”I’ll…“ He lost whatever he had been going to say and stopped, baffled by his grief.
It was his wife who said in her dead voice to the maid beside her, “I’ll need hot water. A great deal of it. And the best kitchen knife. To cut her clothing off her. And some of the men to bring her to the room.”
‘I’ll…“ Master Haselden started again.
‘Not you,“ his wife said. ”Nor Stephen.“ To the sobbing maidservant she added, ”See that someone gives Stephen something strong to drink. And that he sits down. I’ll…“ Her voice finally faltered, but as Master Gruesby looked up from the floor to her, she recovered it and said steadily on, turning away from the table, ”I’ll find clean sheets to lay her on.“
Master Christopher turned his own uneasy look from her to Stephen back to Master Haselden and said, to no one in particular this time, “I’ll question the other men now,” and started to withdraw, with a gesture at Denys and a look at Master Gruesby telling them to follow him. But Master Gruesby met his look with a stare so strong that Master Christopher paused, surprised, and deliberately Master Gruesby lowered his gaze towards the gloves lying on the floor, then raised his eyes to Master Christopher. Just raising his own gaze from them, Master Christopher met his silent asking and after only the barest pause answered him with a quick, agreeing jerk of his head.
No one else saw it. Mistress Haselden and the maid were already gone. Master Haselden had turned away. A manservant was persuading Stephen aside. Young Denys was closing his scribe’s box.
Nor did any of them seem to notice Master Gruesby bend and take up the gloves and tuck them, carefully folded together, away from sight in the folds of his gown as he followed Master Christopher out of the hall.
Chapter 20
Lady Agnes’s grief was fierce nor could the people best able to comfort her come to her need.
Domina Matilda was dealing with her nuns’ distress and prayers for Nichola’s soul, Goring’s priest was gone to the Haseldens, and Lady Agnes flailed out against anyone seeing her broken down and weeping— “I won’t give them the pleasure!”—so that friends were turned back at the door and it was left to Letice and Domina Elisabeth to do what they could with her while Frevisse helped them as best she might, keeping her own grieving to herself. Not until late morning did Lady Agnes, with tears running down her cheeks along wrinkles that seemed to have sunken deeper since the ill word came, say suddenly, “There’ll be some sort of inquest. I want it here. Send word.”
‘My lady,“ Letice started, ”the crowner may have already chosen—“
‘Then he can choose again. He knows the place. There’s no reason Mistress Haselden should have the burden now and the nunnery’s put up with enough these past few days. Here is where it should be. Send that louter Lucas to tell him so.“ Lady Agnes’s fierceness broke, too much of her strength worn out of her with grief. Pitifully, a hand over her eyes, she said, ”If it’s not here, I won’t be able to go. I can’t… I can’t…“ She broke off, Oars flooding again, and Letice fled, crying, too, to do her bidding while Domina Elisabeth set, again, to persuading Lady Agnes to drink more of the latest soothing drink Emme, weeping, had brought for her.
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