1 The Novice's Tale

by Frazer, Margaret

  Maudelyn proved almost as difficult to run to ground as Maryon, but once cornered, she seemed prepared to talk with them. She was a homely woman, the sort who would be normally cheerful and glad of a gossip, even with her betters. But now her hands twisted in her skirt and she kept her eyes averted. “Yes, I remember what happened as clearly as can be. It was just as I’ve already told you, and Sir Walter. There’s nothing more to be said, I promise you.”

  “Is there anyone you can think of who would be wanting your mistress dead?”

  Maudelyn shrugged. “None.”

  “She was a kind mistress?”

  Maudelyn hesitated, then shrugged again. “She could be right cruel, to me and to everyone around her, when she chose. And she mostly did. It’s no wonder—” She stopped short.

  “What? That someone murdered her?” asked Dame Claire.

  A hand over her mouth, Maudelyn nodded.

  “Come now,” said Frevisse in her strictest voice, “tell us the truth. It may be that we already know what it is you’re trying to hide.”

  Maudelyn’s eyes widened. Her hand slowly came down. “It doesn’t matter, I guess,” she muttered. “With my lady dead, I’ve lost my place anyhow.” She took a breath and straightened her back. “”Twas me that drank the wine.“

  “What wine?”

  “In the bottle. I saw it and nobody was paying much attention, so I took it and hid it under my skirt and said I needed to visit the garderobe, and I drank it there and dropped the bottle down the hole. There! I’ve told you!” She broke into tears.

  Frevisse absently patted Maudelyn’s plump shoulder and looked at Dame Claire, who was looking back, both of them dismayed at this destruction of the most solid part of their theory.

  “Have you been ill since you drank the wine?” Dame Claire asked.

  “N-no,” Maudelyn blubbered. Her tears stopped as if her eyes had been plugged with a cork. “Is it true, then? That it was poison killed her? And it was in the wine? By Our Lady’s veil, I drank from the very bottle!”

  They assured her that could not be the case, as she was herself still alive, and left her still amazed. When they were out of earshot, Dame Claire asked, “Now what?”

  “I don’t know. It seemed so clear the poison must be in the bottle. I should have guessed otherwise when Lady Isobel told me she opened the twin of it for Sir John. Because unless she marked it somehow, how could she tell which was the deadly bottle after they rubbed around one another on that hard ride? It should have been plain to me then that the poison could not have been in the wine.”

  The cloister bell began to chime, startling them both.

  “Vespers,” Dame Claire said, relieved. “We can’t do anything more today.”

  “Except ask Thomasine if she’s remembered seeing anything more,” Frevisse said as they left the guest house and descended the stairs to the yard, hurrying a little through the soft fall of rain. “But she won’t. She’ll repeat she prayed all night and saw or heard no one and there’s the end of it. Why does the child bother me so much?”

  “Because she’s the child you very nearly might have been, if you’d had her childhood leisure to indulge in piety,” Dame Claire said.

  Frevisse looked sideways at her, and found her own first amusement at such an idea sliding into dismay with the discomforting thought that it might be true. Except for Domina Edith, Dame Claire knew more about Frevisse’s deep piety than anyone else at St. Frideswide’s; and knew better than anyone that it was only her early childhood that nourished a need to be as pragmatic as devout. It was a welcome diversion from such thoughts to see Robert Fenner coming purposefully toward them, reaching them as they reached the cloister gate.

  As they crowded under the eaves, out of the rain, Frevisse saw again the large bruise that was discoloring Robert’s left cheek and jaw. As Dame Claire reached to touch it, he flinched back from her.

  Frevisse asked quickly, “Was it Sir Walter gave you the bruise? How did you anger him that badly?”

  Robert jerked his hand in quick dismissal. “I was too slow picking up a boot he’d dropped, that’s all. His mother was quick with her hands, too, but not as strong.”

  “So he’s taken you back into his household.”

  “Yes. I’m a Fenner after all, and we take care of our own. If roughly, sometimes.”‘

  “Then perhaps you can be of service to us—and Thomasine, if you will.”

  His grin was as charming as an angel’s. And his mind as quick to understand. “You want me to listen to anything I can, and see you hear of it afterwards.”

  “Yes.”

  “Gladly. Anything to serve the Lady Thomasine. You’re worried for her, aren’t you?”

  “And so are you, I think.”

  “I think her very fair and very sweet.” A faint blush over his cheeks made him suddenly look even younger than he was. “But I’m also without inheritance and have few hopes and know that even if she willed it, she could not be for me. So all I can be is worried for her. So far it’s all Sir Walter’s idea to have her out of here, but with a little more pushing, Master Montfort of the little wits and great ambition is going to agree with him. The easiest choice will be the best choice for him, he thinks.”

  “And that’s where Thomasine’s peril lies,” Frevisse said bluntly. “So if you hear anything you think I ought to know, any of the priory’s lay servants will know how to take word to me about it. Will you be able to do that?”

  “Yours at your need, my lady,” Robert said as if she were a queen. “Will you take Lady Thomasine a letter from me?”

  “Never,” she said promptly.

  He grinned around the worry in his eyes, and said, “Well, there’s something else, too.” He bowed. “You’ve been asking questions about who was in Lady Ermentrude’s chamber last night. You’d best ask me, too.”

  Frevisse and Dame Claire exchanged looks. The bell was still calling to Vespers, but there was this task to be done as well. Best talk to him now while he came willing to speak; Domina Edith would almost surely pardon their being late.

  “You were in Lady Ermentrude’s chamber that night?” Frevisse asked.

  “Once. I awoke sometime and went to see if anything was needed. Lady Ermentrude and the woman Maryon were both sleeping. Lady Isobel was not there, or the maidservant, Maudelyn. The lady Thomasine was praying. I don’t think she knew I’d come.”

  “You did not speak to her?”

  “No.” But his color deepened, and it was obvious he had stood there awhile, looking. If his look was anything like the way he said her name, it had been a very warm and lingering stare, Frevisse thought, and Thomasine deep indeed in prayers not to have felt it. She asked, “Except for then, and later when Lady Ermentrude died, were you ever in her chamber that day or before?”

  A shrewdness in his face told Frevisse he was following very well what her questions meant, but he answered simply enough, “I helped bring her into the hall when she first came. That was all.”

  “So you saw her very well then,” Dame Claire said. “I only came to her after she had begun to quiet. Was she very drunk?”

  “Like I’d never seen her,” Robert said. “It seemed more than drunkenness, like she was gone mad.”

  “Brain-fevered maybe,” Frevisse suggested. “From the day’s heat and her drinking and her anger.”

  Robert frowned, not anxious to disagree. “She was giddy on her feet and saying her eyes hurt. The sun wasn’t particularly bright that I noticed but she said it was hurting her and covered them. Her eyes were all black and swollen, I know that. The blue of them was a thin rim about the black. And she kept hold on one thought all the while as if she were afraid of losing it: she would have Thomasine away from here at once. But she seemed so wild I doubt she really knew what she was saying, just kept saying it, with her eyes all staring, so she looked mad even if she wasn’t.” His look sharpened on Dame Claire. “I’ve said something.”

  Frevisse looked at the infirmarian b
eside her. Dame Claire’s expression was somewhere between excitement and distress, and her voice uneven as she said, “Yes, you’ve said something.” She pulled at Frevisse’s arm. “We have to go or we’ll be too late even for Domina Edith. Thank you for telling us.”

  The bell for Vespers had stopped. Frevisse and Dame Claire hurried along the cloister walk. So urgent was her need for information that Frevisse ignored the rule of silence to ask, “What did he say that mattered so much to you?”

  Dame Claire pressed her fingers into Frevisse’s flesh through the heavy cloth of her habit. “I never heard her symptoms before. I never asked how she was when she first came back here from the Wykehams. Everyone kept saying she was drunk and I never asked.”

  “It didn’t seem to matter. Drunkenness or brain fever. Does it make a difference?”

  “I don’t think that it was either one. What that boy said about Lady Ermentrude’s giddiness, her wildness almost without sense and her bulging eyes all black and hurting her in the sun; Frevisse, if we join that with her screaming afterwards and her seeming to see awful things, then she was already poisoned when she arrived back at St. Frideswide’s. I’d swear to it.”

  Chapter 11

  They were at the door to the church, already remiss in talking in the cloister and unwilling to be any later for Vespers. They slipped into the church, made apologizing curtseys to Domina Edith, and took their places in the choir.

  But once in her place, chanting the verses so familiar they did not need her thoughts, Frevisse felt the creeping impact of Dame Claire’s assertion. If she were right, someone had tried to kill Lady Ermentrude not two times but three. And it had to have been someone not of the priory, for none of the priory people went with her to the Wykehams or met her on the way back. So who, then? Someone who went to Sir John’s and Lady Isobel’s with her—or met her there or on the road on the way back to St. Frideswide’s. Whoever it was, came with her into the priory and stayed, to try again—and again.

  So some of the questions Frevisse had been asking were no longer ones that needed answering. But at the very least Thomasine could no longer be considered guilty. If Dame Claire were right, even Sir Walter and Master Montfort would have to accept that.

  Except this was somewhat subtle reasoning, at least by Master Montfort’s standards. He would not take Dame Claire’s word for it. He would say she was lying to protect the nunnery and refuse to hear her. Or, being male, he would say a mere woman should not dare to offer some female notion as fact. Montfort, the fool, and Sir Walter, the arrogant fool, would never waste their valuable masculine time seeking the truth when they thought they already had it.

  Suddenly Frevisse found the curses in today’s chanting of Psalm 109 very applicable. “Let his days be few; and let another take his office… Let his children be vagabonds… Let the extortioner consume all that he has; and let the stranger spoil his labor.” And she did not care if that curse fell on Master Montfort or on Sir Walter or on both of them, so well they both deserved it.

  But even as she knew the translation of this verse, she knew the later verse, and her perverse mind recited it to her before she could stop it: “His delight was in cursing, and it shall happen to him; he loved not blessing, therefore it shall be far from him.” With an inward bow, she begged pardon for her soul’s sake, and turned her mind back to Vespers’ true purpose, to bring the day toward its close in peace and harmony.

  Supper was bread and cheese and hot apple cider against the evening’s drizzling chill. Recreation was brief; no one was inclined to walk for long even in the damp shelter of the cloister. They all gathered in the warming room, waiting for Compline, and wishing the rule permitted a fire before October’s end. After awhile, Frevisse became aware that Dame Claire had gone out.

  When she returned, Frevisse was waiting for her in the cloister. They hurried into the slipe, where Dame Claire said with mixed eagerness and anger, “It was henbane. It’s useful for some things if carefully handled and poison if it’s not, and it’s easily come by. Red face, cold limbs, thirst, incoherence and inability to speak at all, delirium, the apple of the eyes so huge any light hurts them, everything seeming to be colored red. All of those are symptoms of it, laid out clear and plain in my book.”

  “And every one of them Lady Ermentrude had—”

  “Before she ate or drank a single thing here.”

  “We must tell Domina Edith right away,” said Dame Claire, but the bell began its summons for Compline.

  Frevisse shook her head and said quickly because all talking should stop with the first ring, “Tomorrow. There’s nothing to be done tonight and I’ll have time to think on it by then.”

  Dame Claire nodded agreement; nothing could be done tonight, no matter what was said.

  Frevisse tried to lose herself in the brief, familiar service and its quiet, closing prayer, Nunc dimittis: “Now, Lord, send your servant away in peace…” They sang it in low voices, a plaintive plainsong softened to silence at the end, bringing with it a sense of rest. Not until they had all made silent procession back to the dormitory and she had stripped off her outer gown and slipped into bed did her mind begin again the relentless search for a question, or questions, that would show her the road to the truth.

  But she fell asleep in the middle of her mulling, and did not wake until the cluster of small bells by the dorter door jangled her awake for Matins and Lauds in the dark middle of the night.

  When the long service was done and she was back in bed, listening to sleep come back to everyone else, she found she was utterly awake. Thoughts ran at random, taking her nowhere, refusing to be disciplined.

  So she heard the clumsy, cautious steps on the stairs from the cloister before they reached the dorter, and catching up a shawl kept for such night-rising, went quickly from her cell toward the small light at the head of the stairs. Old Ela, a servant from the guest hall who rarely ventured so far into the cloister, looked up as if grateful to see her and, unwilling to wake the other sleepers with her message, beckoned at Frevisse, turned, and dragged her lame foot down the stairs again and out into the cloister walk. Frevisse followed her.

  “It was you I was coming for, my lady,” Ela declared in a whisper. “Only I didn’t know how I’d find you in the dark. But the boy said I must try, that I had to come since he could not and it’s a desperate matter. Robert, he said to tell you he was, and said I had to come straight away, though he never gave me even a ha’pence for doing it. Is it all right?”

  “Very alright,” Frevisse assured her. “I doubt he has a ha’penny to his name to spare. What’s the desperate matter?”

  “He says to tell you that they were talking late over there. But I could have told you that without his word on it; we all could hear that much of it, right enough. Loud, they were, then yelling at each other and then sinking down to soft again.”

  “Who?”

  “Sir Walter mostly. At the crowner hammer and tongs, and him not yelling back much, seems. He was objecting some, I guess, but feeble. Then everything settled and they went to their beds, except that boy Robert, who comes and tells me I have to tell you that they’re meaning to take Thomasine in the morning.”

  Frevisse drew a sharp breath, then steadied herself and said firmly, “That they won’t be able to do. We’re keeping her close in the cloister.”

  “That’s where they’re meaning to do it, Robert said!” Ela relished the shocks her tale was dealing. “When you’ve all gone in to breakfast and they can be certain where she is, they mean to come in from the orchard, through the infirmary door, and to the refectory and have her and be out with her before anything can be done. Now there’s wickedness for you, and against God’s own lamb, too, for that’s what the child is. Who else shall I be telling? There can be a goodly few of us between them and her when they come, and we won’t be bare-handed either.”

  “Don’t tell anyone!” Frevisse said quickly. The last thing they needed was a confrontation between angry, armed prior
y servants and Sir Walter’s men. “Keep this all to yourself.”

  “But if they think to take Lady Thomasine—”

  “They won’t take her. Not now that we know their plans. But don’t tell anyone else about it or we might start a fight that’ll have people hurt who need not be. And don’t let anyone know you’ve come to me, or that Robert ever spoke to you. Sir Walter will surely kill him if he knows it.”

  Old Ela’s eyes opened very wide. “So that’s the sort of man he is! A Fenner that would kill a Fenner.” She made a sound of disgust.

  “And maybe worse than that to you if you’re found out. So keep you quiet about this.” Frevisse was not above unveiled threats; the fewer people who knew trouble was coming, the fewer there would be to make it worse.

  Ela nodded her understanding. “No one will hear of it from me, I promise you. I’m back to my blankets and there I’ll stay till I’m dragged out at dawn. God’s blessing on you.”

  “And on you,” Frevisse said to her back as the old woman scuttled away along the shadowed walk.

  The rain had long since ended, but its chill and damp were still in the air. Frevisse shivered with more than the night chill and turned toward Domina Edith’s chamber.

  The prioress slept in her own room off her parlor, above the hall kept for her own use. It was not difficult to rouse her lay servant sleeping just inside her doorway, and easier still to persuade the woman that Frevisse must talk to her mistress. The mere fact of Frevisse daring to be there at that hour was almost argument enough. Yet before she went to summon the prioress, Domina Edith called from her bed, “Who is it? What’s the matter? Is it Dame Frevisse? Let her in.” The servant went quickly to open the door, and Domina Edith continued, “You can go. Take your pallet into the parlor and finish your sleep there. Go, go. Come here, Dame.”

  Domina Edith had been sleeping propped nearly upright on her pillows. As with so many of the elderly, she slept lightly and awakened easily, and in the small glow from the banked fire, her eyes were fully aware as Frevisse went quickly to kneel beside her bed.