1 The Novice's Tale

by Frazer, Margaret

  “So there’s no falseness in your being here?”

  “None.”

  Not loosening her hold but more gently, Frevisse said, “But you’re afraid.”

  Thomasine blinked on tears again, but fought them and said, “Yes. Will I be sent away for that?”

  It was very clearly a question that had been hurting in her for a long, long while. Frevisse eased her hold and said carefully, “It depends on why you’re afraid. Can you tell me?”

  Thomasine drew a deep, unhappy breath. “If I’m not allowed to stay, I’ll be married to someone and I can’t marry.”

  “Because you secretly promised yourself to someone before you came here?” It was a stupid thing that girls sometimes did, plighting their troth secretly with someone unsuitable and then finding themselves bound for life no matter how they felt later. A promise of betrothal was, in the Church’s law, as binding as a marriage vow and, like the marriage vow, could only be sundered by complicated legal means. If Thomasine had sworn such a thing, she had no right to be in St. Frideswide’s.

  But Thomasine, with shocked, wide eyes, vehemently shook her head. “Oh no, never anything like that! I would never, never, never promise myself to any man. I couldn’t!”

  “But why?” The vehemence was as confusing as the girl’s fear.

  Thomasine hung her head. “Babies.” She mumbled the word. “I’m afraid of having them.”

  Nearly Frevisse laughed. And nearly said the obvious: that very many women were afraid of it. But for Thomasine it was clearly something beyond that reasonable fear. Frevisse held her amusement and waited. Thomasine touched a knuckle to one brimming eye and said tremulously, “I know how women die in childbirth. There was a servant at our manor. A big, strong woman, but she died when her baby was born. I heard her screaming. It was awful. And my sister. She’s told me how-she nearly dies each time she has a baby and she doesn’t think she can have any more.”

  “Thomasine…”

  “I know,” Thomasine said quickly. “It’s all in God’s hands but—” She ducked her head and spoke to her toes, as if about a guilty secret. “With me it’s something more. It’s what the midwife said after my brother was born. I was there until they knew how hard it was going to be. Then they sent me out of the room, but I waited outside the door. They were all caring that it be a boy after only daughters, and it was a boy, and that was good. We didn’t know he was going to die almost right away. And my mother was never well afterwards. She died before the year was out. But it’s more than that.” Thomasine said it hastily, cutting off Frevisse’s half-formed reassurance. “It’s what the midwife said when she was leaving my mother, when we still thought everything was all right. She was saying to someone that it was my mother’s narrow hips that made it so killing-hard for her to give birth, and then she saw me standing there and said, ”There’s another one will have it bad, and worse than her mother, belike, she’s so narrow through all her bones and not like to outgrow it.“” Even after years Thomasine had the woman’s words and their intonation. “And I never have,” she finished miserably.

  Frevisse, looking at her, understood what the midwife had meant. Under the several layers and deliberate shapelessness of her novice’s gown, Thomasine was meager, thin all through herself and narrow in her hips. That was no sure sign childbearing would go ill with her; there was no sure way to tell with anyone until the moment came, but truly Thomasine believed it, had believed it for nearly half of her life.

  Carefully, Frevisse said, “So you decided to become a nun and be safe.”

  “Oh no! I was already wanting to be a nun. I swear I was. I’ve wanted it ever since I was a very, very little girl. But it seemed—what she said—it seemed it was God’s way of telling me that I was right. That I was meant to be a nun.” Thomasine’s earnestness faded to guilty sadness, and she whispered, “But I’m afraid of dying, too, the way my mother did, and in St. Frideswide’s I’m safe from it. If I have to leave, they’ll make me marry and he’ll want children and I’ll die. So I’ve tried so hard to be everything I had to be. But not just to keep from being put out!” She looked desperately at Frevisse. “I love God more than anything. I want to be here, truly I do. Only if Domina Edith or the others know I’m so afraid, they maybe won’t believe me. And I want to stay, I don’t want to have to leave. Do you have to tell them?”

  Her tears were falling freely now. Gently, wondering how Thomasine had ever come to think that to be a nun she had to have no other feelings except love of God, Frevisse said, “Thomasine, isn’t Dame Alys ranting in the kitchen a plain enough example of how far from holiness a nun can be and still belong here? No one is going to put you out because you’re afraid. We’re all of us here for more reasons than one, and for some of us the love of God is maybe the least of them. If only women who wanted nothing in life except to live in the cloister became nuns, there would be one small nunnery in all of England.”

  She was watching Thomasine’s face and saw when she began to believe her.

  Faintly, her eyes moist with tears, Thomasine asked, “Truly?”

  “Truly. Why didn’t you ask Dame Perpetua? She would have told you.”

  Thomasine looked down at her clasped hands. “Because you all think I’m so very good. I didn’t want anyone to know I’m not.”

  So Thomasine knew what was said of her holiness. Dryly Frevisse said, “Goodness can be a very great burden, both to live with and to have.”

  “Will you tell them?”

  “That you’re not good?” She saw her intended humor miss Thomasine altogether and instead said quickly, “Thomasine, beyond all doubting you are meant to be a nun. No one is going to keep you from it, least of all any of us here. But you’ll have to tell Domina Edith.”

  Thomasine’s lips trembled. “Must I?”

  “You must, to free your own mind if nothing else. I promise you, she’ll not send you away. But you must tell her. If you don’t, I’ll have to, and that won’t be so well.”

  Thomasine’s hazel-green eyes, still swimming in tears, searched Frevisse’s face as if for signs of trickery. Finding none, she whispered, “All right. I’ll tell her.”

  “Good then. And now there’s another matter to hand, the one that brought me for you. Master Montfort has come.”

  Thomasine looked at her questioningly.

  “The crowner,” Dame Frevisse said.

  Thomasine remembered then. He had come to St. Frideswide’s not long after she first entered, when a stockman had been found in a barn, dead, with a broken skull, and no one to swear how he had come by it. Master Morys Montfort had come then, it being his duty as crowner for northern Oxfordshire to view and report on any sudden deaths. So he had come and viewed and decided what everyone else was already certain of: that the stockman had last been seen somewhat drunk, was known to be more than a little careless at the best of times, and had gotten himself kicked in the head and half across the stable by a cow well known to be a kicker. Death by misadventure had been Master Montfort’s decision, and the man had been buried, the cow as the instrument of his death duly slaughtered and its meat distributed to the poor. Since then there had been no need for Master Montfort at St. Frideswide’s. Until now.

  “He was sent for after Martha Hay ward’s death.” For once Dame Frevisse’s voice was bare of anything but the flat statement of facts. “Now he’s come and must needs see to Lady Ermentrude’s dying, too, and wants to talk to everyone who had attendance on her, you among them. He’s in the guest hall.”

  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.”

  “Did you think so then?”

  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.”

  Tho
masine 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.”