7 The Prioress' Tale Read online

  The men here were turning uglier even as Frevisse approached. Someone’s boot dug into the madman’s haunch hard enough to shift him, and when he tried to scuttle a little sideways he was shoved back, hard enough to knock him over. Above the men’s laughter Frevisse ordered, “That’s enough now.”

  A few of them looked at her over their shoulders. Most of them ignored her, and one of the men had unsheathed his dagger now and was flicking the point of it too near the madman’s face as he struggled to his knees. The madman threw up an arm to protect himself, and another man put a foot against his ribs and shoved him over. Others joined in, rolling him off the well’s top step and down the rest onto the cobbles. Angrily Frevisse started forward, intent on coming between them and the man. Sister Amicia squeaked, “You can’t!” and caught her by the arm while the men, probably enjoying it more now they had women to watch them being brave, kept the madman down with kicks and jabs and at least one more dagger unsheathed. Frevisse pulled loose from Sister Amicia, ignoring the pain it cost across her back, and thrust in among them, ordering in open anger now, “That’s enough!,” grabbing the nearest of them by the arm and pulling him around.

  He started to swear something at her despite she was a nun, but above the dark snarl of sound from the other men still set on the madman, Joliffe asked cheerfully, “Isn’t it late in the day for a hunt?”

  They all looked, Frevisse with them, to find him balanced on the well curb above them, crouched down on his heels and leaned forward on his toes to see better what they were doing. He sniffed audibly. “Though I can’t deny that the spoor is still lying strong.” He leaned farther, staring with exaggerated curiosity at the hunched madman among their legs. “What is it you’re hunting anyway? Boar? Hedgehog?” He seemed to overbalance into falling, changed it with a twist of his body to a light-footed spring to the foot of the steps, so that the men drew back, grinning. He sauntered in among them, bent over the madman for a closer look and said, “No, not boar or hedgehog. Wrong pelt.” He straightened to look around at the men incredulously. “You’re not wanting it for its pelt, are you?”

  Most of the men laughed and one made a rude comment on what they wanted “it” for. Joliffe shook his head in mock seriousness. “I doubt I can recommend that,” he said. “Not when we don’t even know what it is. Dame Frevisse, is this a common sort of animal around here? Do you know what it is?”

  Following wherever he was taking this, Frevisse came forward. The men drew back and apart to let her through, and since it seemed to her the farther they were from the madman the better, she copied Joliffe’s pretense of studying him while half circling at an overly fastidiousness distance so that, unwittingly, the men drew back more. Slowly, as if deeply considering the madman still crouched at Joliffe’s feet, she said, “It does bear some resemblance to something I know. I might…” She drew her consideration out, copying her aunt whose indecisions on even the most minor matters had made uncomfortable suspenses for everyone around her. In her aunt’s case it had come from a natural incoherency of thought; for Frevisse it was a play for time until Joliffe let her know what he had in mind. He had better have something in mind. She was watching him more closely than she was looking at the madman, and when she was most between him and the men and they least likely to see, he flickered his fingers at her in a horn sign—middle fingers and thumb bent down, the outer two fingers pointed out.

  Frevisse recoiled violently, letting her voice scale up in pretended shock. “It isn’t! It can’t be!” She made the sign of the cross widely in the air between her and the madman. “Blessed St. Anthony against the demons! It’s… it’s…”

  Joliffe joined in her overplayed horror. “It is!” His sign of the cross was wilder and wider than hers. “You have it!” He struck a pose of shock and dismay. “It’s a failed fiend!”

  The men were laughing, enjoying the show. Joliffe grabbed the madman under one arm and wrenched him to his feet, exclaiming at Frevisse as if her stupidity stood between them all and salvation, “Don’t you see? That explains the stench of hell about it!” He looked around frantically and pointed at the church door. “What it needs is the odor of sanctity!”

  Too rapidly for anyone to stop him, he dragged the madman up and along the well steps, outflanking the nearest men, heading for the church’s wide west door, close across the yard.

  “Wait on!” one of the men called out in surprise. “Where are you going with him?”

  Frevisse, following Joliffe with her skirts grabbed up to let her move more quickly, swung around, her hands raised in prayer, between him and the men to exclaim in pious, ringing tones, “We’ve been in the presence of hell! Pray!

  Pray for your souls! St. Anthony, who faced the demons in the desert, guard us here. St. Amable, who…“

  The men jostled each other in a confused change of direction, less interested in their souls than in their escaping prey; and even though Frevisse slowed them a little, forcing them to go around her, they would have had Joliffe before he reached the church and sanctuary, except the madman somehow managed to break into a run with him, not fumbling, pulling back, or falling. They reached the door with time for Joliffe to thrust it open, shove the madman in and himself after him, and on the safe side of the threshold lean back out to exclaim cheerfully, “It’s all right! I’ll see to him from here!,” before drawing back inside and slamming the door shut for the first of the men to run hard up against it.

  The heavy thud of the bar dropping across it inside told how thoroughly he had it fast against their fists and angry yells, leaving Frevisse free to retreat the other way, toward the cloister, catching Sister Amicia by the arm as she went with, “We’d best go in, too. Come.”

  Sister Amicia came, and inside, when Frevisse turned to bring the rarely used bar there down across the door, was enough recovered to ask, a little shrill with excitement and fear, “They wouldn’t dare try to come in here, would they?”

  The men’s pounding yells on the church doors were muffled but not faint, and Frevisse was about to say that she did not want to find out the hard way what they would dare, when behind them in the passageway Domina Alys demanded, “What are you doing? What’s toward out there?”

  Frevisse and Sister Amicia swung around to face her, dropping into curtsies, Frevisse answering while they did, “It’s some of your cousin’s men. They’ve hunted a madman into the church and want him out again for sport.”

  “They’re beating my church door down because they want sport?” Domina Alys started forward in heavy-treading fury. “I’ll show them sport!”

  Frevisse swung around to jerk the door open ahead of her while Sister Amicia shrank back against the wall, but Domina Alys as she stalked past them ordered, “Sister Amicia, come. It you’re hosteler, you have to learn how to handle fools and dolts like this!”

  Sister Amicia gaped, then looked to Frevisse, asking help. Frevisse shook her head with none to give, and forced to it, Sister Amicia momentarily shut her eyes, then followed Domina Alys, leaving Frevisse surprised by her for the first time—both that she went and that she did it silently.

  Given no other orders herself, Frevisse went the other way, toward the church’s cloister door, reaching it as Dame Juliana, Sister Emma, and Sister Cecely came from somewhere else in the cloister, drawn by men’s pounding and yells. To their alarmed questions, Frevisse said quickly, “It’s only some of Sir Reynold’s men making trouble. Domina Alys has gone out to them. She’ll—”

  The pounding and yells cut off.

  Frevisse smiled with more assurance than she felt. “There. You see? It’s done. She’s taken care of it.”

  Sister Cecely looked a little regretful and Sister Emma started to protest, but Dame Juliana said, “Good. We can all go back to our work,” and firmly shepherded them away despite Sister Emma beginning to protest that, too.

  Chapter 14

  From inside the church, Domina Alys’ general fury, if not her actual words, was audible beyond the west door, a
nd Frevisse for once wished her joy of her rage.

  Joliffe was partway down the nave, the madman slumped to the floor beside him and Dame Perpetua confronting them both indignantly, with Lady Adela close behind her, intent on missing nothing, and Sister Thomasine, drawn from her prayers, rising from her knees below the altar. Apparently in answer to a challenge Dame Perpetua had made him, Joliffe was saying, “He needs sanctuary. I’m asking it for him.”

  Dame Perpetua returned stiffly, sounding set on letting them come no further, “He has to ask sanctuary for himself. If he wants it, he has to ask for it.”

  Joliffe started to answer her, stopped, and bent to take hold of the madman’s chin instead, forcing his head up. What the man had briefly shown of wits when he ran was gone now. He was back to being only a dirty heap, his hands clutched to his head, not resisting or, probably, comprehending as Joliffe demanded into his face, “Do you claim sanctuary?” The madman’s eyes did not even focus on him, and when Joliffe let him go, his head dropped and bobbled loosely; but Joliffe turned back to Dame Perpetua with, “You see? He nodded. He’s asking.”

  “He never asked anything!” Dame Perpetua protested. “You did that.”

  “He can’t ask,” Frevisse said as she joined them. “He never says anything, never makes a sound. But he does need sanctuary until we can find a way to be sure of having him safe away from Sir Reynold’s men.”

  “So I’ve been told.” Dame Perpetua sent a displeased glance toward the west door and granted, equally displeased, “Yes, of course he may stay. It’s not as if it were a thing we can refuse, is it, if he needs it. Unless Domina Alys says otherwise,” she added for warning. She looked at the madman with unconcealed distaste. “But he’ll have to be washed somehow. We can’t bear that in here.”

  Frevisse agreed with that readily enough. The madman’s stench—still principally pigsty muck but with undersmells of sweating horse—was thicker with being indoors. It was only by fighting her own disgusted urge to keep her distance from him that she went to take him by the chin and lift and turn his head, to be sure of what she had glimpsed there on the side away from Joliffe: a wide brightness of blood beginning to ooze through the matted hair and encrusted filth above his ear and between his fingers clutched to his head.

  “He’s bleeding,” she said.

  “That fool with the dagger.” Joliffe shifted so he saw it now, too.

  Dame Perpetua made an annoyed sound and pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve, holding it out toward Frevisse without coming nearer, while ordering, “Lady Adela, go find Dame Claire and have her come. Tell her hot water and soap and a cloth and a towel are needed as well as her medicines. You bring them for her.”

  Swift despite her limp, Lady Adela curtsied and left while Frevisse took the handkerchief, pried the madman’s hand enough away from his head so she could slip it under his fingers, and let him go so that whether he knew it or not, he was pressing it over the wound himself. Joliffe circled him, feeling expertly at his sides and back. The madman flinched and cringed but nothing else, and Joliffe said, “I don’t feel anything broken but he’s probably bruised from the kicks. We can’t tell much more until he’s been washed. Meanwhile.” He hoisted the unresisting madman up to something like his feet. A stone bench ran along the nave wall, meant for the weak and ill to rest during services. There was no place else for sitting in the church besides the floor and the nuns’ choir stalls, and Joliffe shuffled the madman aside to it, seated him with a twist and a push, and stepped back, wiping his hands on each other. The madman promptly slumped forward, hands still to his head.

  Frevisse had followed, to be sure the handkerchief had not shifted, and when she saw that it was still firmly over the wound, stepped back willingly with Joliffe. Something definitely had to be done about the man’s smell.

  He was cold, too, shivering in the church’s chill. Something better than the coarse-cloth tunic from the alms clothing would have to be found for him. After he was washed.

  Behind her, Dame Perpetua asked, “And now?”

  The side door slammed open. The madman cringed and huddled farther in on himself, and the rest of them jerked around toward it, to face Domina Alys, flushed with fury and triumph, standing there to judge them all with a single hard look before she swung around to Katerin, crowded close behind her, and said with that odd patience that Frevisse had heard her use before to the woman, “See? All’s well. Everything’s well. You can go back to your cleaning.”

  “The men?” Katerin asked worriedly.

  “All gone. No one here to hurt me.”

  Despite Joliffe was plainly there and plainly a man, Katerin with her eyes set doglike to Domina Alys’ face accepted that, curtsied with her unsteady bob, and drew back out the door, presumably to her cleaning.

  Domina Alys heaved a huge sigh at being finished with that, turned again to survey them all with disapproval, then stalked along the nave toward the madman. Joliffe, skilled at being unobtrusive when he chose, drew smoothly back, giving her space to ignore him if she wished. She did, for now, and instead stopped in front of the unnoticing madman, glaring down at him, fists on her hips, in open disapproval of his existence.

  Kept outside behind her and Katerin until then, Sister Amicia came in hastily, still wide-eyed at whatever had passed in the yard, stopped to see who was there and what was happening, then came aside to Frevisse and Dame Perpetua, asking questions with her eyes she did not dare to say aloud. Hardly noticed, Sister Thomasine came to stand on their other side as Domina Alys turned to demand at Frevisse, “He stinks. Where’ve you been lodging him, Dame? The pigsty?”

  All day Frevisse had been praying to be rid of her anger at Domina Alys. The hatred had been strongly enough refused that she was safe from it, she hoped, but all she had been able to do with her anger so far was curb it. Now it started to rouse sharply into words that would have been a mistake to utter. It was Dame Perpetua who saved her, saying hurriedly, quick to appease, “Lady Adela is bringing water and soap for him. And Dame Claire is coming to see to his hurts.”

  “He’s hurt more than his head?” Domina Alys looked with disapproval at the bloodied handkerchief. She had small use for people bothering to be hurt.

  “His ribs are maybe bruised,” Joliffe said, “but there’s nothing broken, I think.”

  Domina Alys threw him a look that said she did not want to hear what he had to think and ordered at Dame Perpetua, “So have him out of here if that’s all it is. Into the kitchen yard, I’d say. Some servant can tend his hurt, feed him, send him on his way.”

  Dame Perpetua looked at Frevisse, silently pointing out they had a problem now. Domina Alys caught the look and snapped, “What is it?” And when no one answered, “Dame?” dangerously.

  Frevisse drew breath to say it, but Sister Thomasine, aside and silent until then, spoke first, softly. “We’ve given him sanctuary.”

  Domina Alys looked in disbelief at—and did not conceal that she was smelling, too—the madman shivering on the wall bench all too near her. “Sanctuary?” she repeated. “Sanctuary to that dirty, stinking rag?” She turned on Frevisse and Dame Perpetua together, leaving Sister Thomasine out of it. “What do you mean, you gave him sanctuary?”

  “Those men…” Dame Perpetua began, forced into defending what she had done.

  Domina Alys was not interested. “I’ve settled with them. They won’t give trouble again.” She rammed a finger at the madman. “That is the trouble! He’s lunatic and stinking and you’ll see to his hurt yourself, feed him, and put him out the back gate, on his way before Vespers, and there’s an end to it!”

  “But if he’s come to ask St. Frideswide’s aid,” Sister Thomasine said, “then we have to let him stay. If he wants to pray here, we can’t put him out.”

  The madman lifted his head to look at her, out of the dirty mask of his face and tangled hair, his eyes staring directly, brightly at her; and she looked back at him, not wavering, repeating, “If he wants to pray here, we ha
ve to let him stay. We can’t refuse anyone who wants to pray.”

  It was true enough but not something Domina Alys wanted to hear, and she began sharply, “He can’t pray. He doesn’t even know…”

  The madman rose to his feet, the bloodied handkerchief clutched in his hand. “Pray,” he croaked.

  Frevisse gasped and crossed herself, and on either side of her. Sister Amicia and Dame Perpetua did likewise.

  “Pray,” the man repeated, more strongly.

  “Yes,” Sister Thomasine agreed. “Pray.”

  More quickly than anyone could have moved to stop him, he darted away at a stooping run up the nave. Domina Alys made a raged outcry and started after him, then caught herself back, apparently remembering that running after a madman was not part of a prioress’s dignity or duty, and snapped at Joliffe, “You brought him in. Fetch him back here. Now.”

  “Not from the altar,” Sister Thomasine said calmly.

  The madman had reached it, gone up its steps, was crouched beside it, clutching at the altar cloth like a small child to a mother’s skirts. A lunatic, filthy child and all too likely to pull everything down on top of him. Too impatient to wait for someone to obey her, Domina Alys started after him herself.

  Dame Perpetua flung out a hand to stop her. “He spoke!”

  Brought up short, Domina Alys stared at her.

  “He spoke!” Dame Perpetua insisted.

  Urgently Frevisse explained, “He’s never spoken before.”

  Domina Alys turned on them both. “What?”

  “He spoke,” Frevisse repeated. “Even when the men were at him, he never made even a sound.”

  Domina Alys frowned, absorbing that, and looked along the nave toward the altar and madman. “He’s never spoken?”

  “Never,” Dame Perpetua said. Her voice trembled.