1 The Novice's Tale

by Frazer, Margaret

  “St. Frideswide’s guest hall?” Lady Ermentrude’s voice scaled up with outraged disbelief. Her hand clawed down around Thomasine’s nearest wrist, nearly upsetting the bowl. “Have they made you a nun yet?”

  Thomasine’s mouth opened, but no sound came. Frevisse, against the girl’s panic, said soothingly, “There are days and days yet before Thomasine is to take her vows. You’ve time to rest, to sleep a little more.”

  “No, I will not sleep! I will not stay here! Neither of us will stay! I’ll have us both away from here!” She moved as if to push herself up on her pillows, letting go of Thomasine to do it. Thomasine stood quickly up out of her way and Frevisse moved between them.

  “You shouldn’t try to rise yet. You should rest awhile, I think—”

  “I want out of here! And I’m taking the girl with me, don’t try to stop us! That bitch Isobel and her dog of a husband tried to make a fool of me. They’re here, aren’t they? Don’t deny it, I saw them!”

  Frevisse said lightly, wishing she understood what the matter was, “They came directly after you, afraid something might happen to you.”

  “Afraid? By God’s great toe, I’ll show them how to be afraid! Where’s Thomasine gone now?”

  “I’m here, Great-aunt.” Thomasine, apparently recovering a little of her nerve, moved past Frevisse to where Lady Ermentrude could see her again.

  Lady Ermentrude gestured for the goblet again, took it for herself from Frevisse, and this time drank without help. But her gaze remained on Thomasine, her eyes unblinking. “They shall not make a nun of you,” she began. Then she frowned and seemed to lose the trail of her thinking. She sat peering into the depths of her goblet before pronouncing, “If this is supposed to be malmsey, the vintage is truly vile.”

  Frevisse said, “There’s medicine in it, to ease you.”

  Lady Ermentrude cocked a wary and increasingly alert eye at her. “I’ve been sick.”

  Frevisse refrained from saying, “You’ve been drunk as your own monkey.” She merely nodded.

  “But I’m better now. It’s Thomasine I must take care of. You’re not keeping her, you know. I’ve told you that.”

  “I will pray for you, Great-aunt, if I stay,” Thomasine offered.

  Against the vastness of Lady Ermentrude’s certainty and the wandering of her mind, it was a feeble attempt at argument, and Lady Ermentrude, even weak and lying back against her pillows, swept over it, saying, “We’re past the time for praying. It’s doing that’s needed. A great deal of doing.”

  “But not just yet, Great-aunt, while you’re still so ill.” Lady Isobel stood in the doorway, dressed only in her loose and flowing bedgown. Her fair hair spreading over her shoulders made her look hardly older than Thomasine. Only a tired grayness around her eyes showed she too had had little sleep.

  She spoke mildly, but Lady Ermentrude stiffened. She was one of the few people Frevisse had ever seen whose nostrils actually flared with anger; they flared now, and her breast heaved as she gathered force for her mounting anger. “I need no words from you, whore! Nor your presence. You lost your chance and it’s Thomasine’s now. When I have her out of here—”

  But anger was no substitute for strength. In an effort to raise herself on her elbows, the better to rage at Lady Isobel, she lost breath to finish and fell back gasping, ashen, against her pillows. Frevisse moved quickly, rescuing the tilting goblet from her loosened fingers as Thomasine sank to her knees, crying prayers beside the bed. Lady Isobel started forward but Frevisse moved more quickly, intercepting her and turning her back through the doorway, out of her great-aunt’s sight.

  Thomasine suddenly found she was alone with the person she least wanted to face by herself. But she had seen enough to know that for now at least Lady Ermentrude could do nothing more than say words at her, and uncertainly she reached out with some idea of feeling for her pulse the way she had seen Dame Claire sometimes do with others. Lady Ermentrude, drawing deep breaths and steadying a little, jerked her hand away and gestured in feeble demand at the goblet.

  “Thirsty,” she croaked.

  Thomasine, in hope of the medicine sending her to sleep again, held the goblet to her lips. Lady Ermentrude gulped at it, seemed to revive a little, but did not try to rise again, only asked with a bitter edge of anger, “Your sister—where did she go?”

  Thomasine said, “Dame Frevisse took her away.”

  “That’s good. You stay away from her. She’s vile. She wouldn’t listen. You stay away from her.” Lady Ermentrude kicked feebly at the sheet. “ T want to go. Help me get up.”

  “No, Aunt, you’re supposed to stay here!”

  “God’s eyes! Don’t be telling me what I can do and not do! Help me up! Go fetch my women and tell them what I want. We’ll be out of here by dawn and halfway to Lincoln and the bishop before sunset. Go fetch my women!”

  Her hand had closed in a convulsive claw around Thomasine’s wrist, dragging her close to drive the words and wine smell into her face, but with her last order she flung her loose. Thomasine backed quickly out of reach and scurried for the door.

  But in the last instant she turned back to look and saw, to her horror, a small dark shapelessness flow from the shadows between the bed curtains and Lady Ermentrude’s pillows. As she watched, a narrow black stick came out of it, and suddenly there was a small, almost-human hand at the end of it, stretching, reaching, for Lady Ermentrude’s head. Thomasine gave a cry of terror and fled.

  Frevisse patiently said again, to Sir John this time, come out in his bed robe to be sure all was well with his wife, “No, truly, she seems better. Muddled still, and weak, but very likely to live, I think. Unfortunately her temper is no better than it was.”

  “It is a shame, but very like her,” Lady Isobel said sadly. She was leaning wearily against her husband’s shoulder, his arm around her waist in support. “All this started before her drinking did yesterday. No, the day before yesterday now. But she drank all her medicine?”

  “She drank much of it and should sleep. Now if you’ll pardon me…”

  She meant to return to Thomasine, but Thomasine was suddenly there, catching urgently hold of her arm. “I saw,” the girl gasped. “I saw—” The word caught in her throat, then was cut off completely by a strangled, inarticulate cry from the room behind her, that scaled toward a wail and broke into a less-than-human caw of pain.

  “Angels and ministers of faith, defend us,” Sir John breathed.

  Frevisse in her mind echoed him, riveted to her place by the same shock felt by them all. It was Dame Claire, coming unseen from the shadows of the hall, who moved past them toward the doorway, saying sharply, “She’s in pain. Are you deaf?”

  Behind her, forms stirred, jerked out of their sleep, and began to rise before they even knew why they were awake. Frevisse’s own shock had been broken by Dame Claire. Quickly she followed her, saying over her shoulder to Sir John and Lady Isobel, “We’ll see to this. Best you stay out of it. Thomasine—‘’

  But Thomasine was already following Dame Claire. It was the woman Maryon at her elbow, and behind her Robert Fenner. The choking, stuttered cries from Lady Ermentrude broke and began again, and Frevisse whirled away into the room. Maryon followed, and Robert behind her slammed the door against anyone else who might come to gawk.

  Lady Ermentrude was no longer lying feebly under her blankets but flinging from side to side on the bed, thrashing against her own strangled, croaking screams. Her body jerked in rhythm to them, and her bulging eyes stared frantically at nothing.

  Dame Claire, with a tiny vial in one hand, cried out to anyone, “We have to hold her! I can’t help her like this!”

  Robert, already moving, crossed the room to fling himself over the bed, pinning Lady Ermentrude’s legs flat beneath his body. She writhed, but he was too heavy for her to throw off. Frevisse managed to lay hold of her shoulders while Maryon grabbed at her arms. Between them they forced her down flat. She heaved under their hold, writhing and thrust
ing with strength she should not have had, still crying out. Her eyes were wild and unfocused with pain, and she was fighting not them but whatever pain was driving her as tears ran down her face, smearing into her tangled hair.

  “Hold her!” Dame Claire pleaded, the vial still in her hand, held uselessly out of reach of Lady Ermentrude’s flinging head. “If I can quiet her with this… !”

  They held, but there was no holding her still, until quite abruptly she arched her body upward to what seemed a breaking point under the grip. She stretched out in a helpless spasm, her mouth open in a silent scream. Then she collapsed, rag-limp and gasping, staring upward at the ceiling, all the struggle gone out of her.

  They waited. She did not move except for her breast’s rapid rise and fall. “

  The vial now unneeded, Dame Claire said softly, “Let her go. Slowly. As careful as you may.”

  Carefully, poised to grab her again if need be, Frevisse and Maryon obeyed. Robert, as slowly and cautiously, rose, holding his breath until he was safely clear.

  Across the room the door began to open. Dame Claire glanced at Frevisse and shook her head. With an agreeing nod, Frevisse backed hurriedly away and went to keep out whoever was meaning to come in.

  “Not now,” she whispered urgently, even before she saw it was Sir John.

  His face all creased with anxiety, he tried to look past her into the room. “Is she…”

  As he hesitated over a choice of words, Frevisse answered quickly, understanding. “She’s alive. It was another fit came on her but she’s quieted, sooner than before. She may be…”

  “Dame Frevisse!” Dame Claire’s voice was sharp with alarm and urgency, two things she rarely showed.

  Forgetting Sir John, Frevisse rushed back to her.

  “Her breathing is failing. And she’s gone cold again. Feel her.”

  Frevisse felt Lady Ermentrude’s face. It was still flushed with her panic but was cold as hung meat. Her breathing, which should have been steadying, was coming in small heaves, and her whole body moved as if to help her take each breath. At Frevisse’s touch, her eyes swiveled toward her, pupils spread so wide the eyes seemed black with terror.

  “Father Henry,” Frevisse said. “We need Father Henry.”

  “I’m here,” the priest said behind her, his box in his hands. Dame Claire surrendered her place to him, and by that single gesture Frevisse understood that there was no earthly thing left to do for Ermentrude. Whatever was happening was now God’s business, with Father Henry as his intermediary.

  Maryon, stricken and white with shock, had already withdrawn to the door. Sir John still stood there, with a crowd of faces behind him. Frevisse belatedly looked for Thomasine and saw her on her knees at the prie-dieu, her face pressed against her prayer-rigid hands, her lips moving silently. Robert Fenner moved as if to go toward her, but Frevisse’s hand on his arm stopped him. Prayers were the most needed things now, certainly not his attention. He resisted, but at her subtle pull he retreated with her and Dame Claire to join the others at the door.

  They waited, all of them and the crowding servants. For a mercy there was now no sign of Lady Isobel; Sir John, for the little that Frevisse was aware of him, seemed oddly incomplete without her. But her attention was drawn, as was everyone else’s, to Father Henry. She heard his hurried words and the struggle of Lady Ermentrude’s breathing. They were the only sounds in the room until Father Henry’s words of Last Unction ran out, and then there was only Lady Ermentrude’s breathing, until it caught and strangled to a stop. Her hands lifted, moved as if she meant to sign herself, or to seek for air no longer there, then were flung outward as her eyes rolled back and her body arched and stiffened one final time. Father Henry caught her hands and held them, but even as he did, all of her collapsed, her body falling loose and empty, her head rolling sideways, her hands no more than lifeless rags between his own.

  In the utter stillness afterward, Frevisse knew that Thomasine had turned from the prie-dieu to stare as all the rest of them were staring. And it was Thomasine who whispered, even her softness loud in the stillness, “In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum eium.”

  Into your hands, O Lord, we commend her spirit.

  And if ever a soul was dependent on God’s mercy to enter Heaven, surely Lady Ermentrude’s was, thought Frevisse.

  Chapter 7

  There was quiet in the church now that the bell had ceased its tolling. The air still seemed to tremble slightly, remembering the fifty-seven slow strokes in memory of every year of Lady Ermentrude’s life, but faintly and fading now. As memories of Lady Ermentrude would fade away in time, Thomasine thought, fade away and not matter anymore.

  But they mattered now, lying sickly between her thoughts and her praying, even here in her best place, on the step below St. Frideswide’s altar, where almost always she could lose herself in prayers and not think of the stone hurting her knees or the thinness of her hands clinging together or the two coffins waiting on their biers behind her.

  She had helped wash and ready Lady Ermentrude’s body for its shroud and coffin, had followed it across the yard and seen it set beside Martha Hay ward’s, and been given leave, after Prime, to remain in prayer for their souls. But the prayers she wanted seemed to be nowhere in her, only the thought of Lady Ermentrude’s and Martha’s bodies lying behind her, waiting for their people to come and take them to their final places. Lady Ermentrude would go to her own lordship’s church and a grave beside the high altar, to rest there under a carved stone image of herself until Last Judgment Day. Martha Hay ward would lie in Banbury churchyard, where she would molder into bones to be dug up and put with other moldered bones in a charnel house, to make way for someone else’s burying.

  They were both dead and in need of her prayers, and no prayers would come, only the thought of how suddenly dead they had been.

  Their dying had had nothing easy in it; even completed death had failed to soften the engraved pain of Lady Ermentrude’s harsh features before the shroud covered it. Surely a soul forced from its body by such an end desperately needed praying for, and Thomasine knew it. But the prayers would not come, not for her own sake or Lady Ermentrude’s or Martha’s. Only thoughts.

  Of Lady Ermentrude-‘s dying, of the small black creeping thing reaching out—from Hell?—toward her…

  A hand touched Thomasine’s shoulder. With a gasping shriek, she lunged forward to scrape with both hands at the base of the altar, then jerked her head around to find Dame Frevisse standing over her, come quietly in soft-soled shoes.

  Unseemly amusement twitched at the corners of Frevisse’s mouth before she could control it. She knew Thomasine saw it but could say nothing to her, only gestured wordlessly for her to come. For a moment Thomasine seemed near to refusing, resentment and less readable things showing in her face. Then her. expression blanked almost perfectly over whatever she was feeling, and she came away from the altar, following Frevisse across the church to the side door into the cloister.

  Frevisse carefully kept from looking at her, wanting her to have time to recover the dignity she had lost in her panicked lunge. Frevisse remembered how painfully necessary and difficult dignity had been for herself when she was very young. That she had consciously ceased being very young years before she was Thomasine’s age did not change Thomasine’s need.

  So because she was not looking at her, Frevisse was unprepared for Thomasine’s sudden, great sob as they stepped out into the cloister walk. It seemed to come from deep within the girl’s breast, a burden too much to bear, crumpling her down onto the bench there, her face buried in her hands. Aware that sympathy might only make it worse, Frevisse said firmly, “What is it, child, grief for your aurit, or something that can be helped?”

  Thomasine turned up a teary face and cried out, “Two small weeks! That’s all there are until I’m safe. She can’t touch me anymore!”

  With more sleep or less fear behind her, she would never have said so much. And even so, the words were h
ardly anything at all, only more of Thomasine’s tedious, too-passionate desiring to be a nun, and Frevisse would have let them pass except for the sudden, terrified widening of Thomasine’s eyes as she realized what she had said.

  Frevisse, with sudden suspicion, demanded, “Why are you so afraid of being taken away from here, Thomasine? Were you forced to come? Are you in danger if you leave? Is that it?”

  Thomasine’s face, usually smooth with youth and studied holiness, so bland she seemed to have hardly any expression at all unless she was nervous or exalted in prayer, changed swiftly to a desperate smiling that was all lies. “I’m not afraid.” She shook her head vehemently. “No one forced me. Ever.”

  The cloister walk was not the place for talking. Taking the matter literally in hand, Frevisse grasped Thomasine’s arm, pulled her to her feet, and took her along the cloister to the narrow passage between the church and the nuns’ common room. Called the slipe, it led from the cloister to the cemetery, and brief, urgently needed conversations were allowed there. In it, still keeping hold of Thomasine’s arm, Frevisse said, “Now, what exactly has you so frightened?”

  Thomasine’s gaze went everywhere except Frevisse’s face, and she blurted out with a sharp confusion of fear and desperation, “I never said I was afraid. I never did!”

  Frevisse shook her arm.“Are you here by fraud or force? By threats or trickery? What are you fearing?”

  Thomasine clasped her hands prayerfully and cried, “None of that. I want to be here! I’ve wanted it all my life!”

  “But there’s a reason you could be forbidden your final vows and Lady Ermentrude knew it? If there is, you have to tell someone. Domina Edith or Father Henry or Dame Perpetua—”

  “There isn’t any! I swear it!”

  Meaning to have the truth from her, Frevisse badgered relentlessly, “You know that taking your vows falsely is a sin as great as apostasy itself?”

  Thomasine had never seemed to have any courage in her, had always seemed to be all nerves and prayers, but at that challenge she steadied as if struck. Straightening in Frevisse’s hold, she said, her voice high and light with strain, “I know it. I’d never falsely swear to God.”