9 The Reeve's Tale Page 14

  The crowner broke off his pleased smiling. “Dame, I said I didn’t want to hear from you!”

  ‘But it’s a good point,“ Gilbey said sharply.

  ‘And whatever are Lord Lovell and Abbot Gilberd going to say if all this ends up hindering the harvest?“ Dame Frevisse murmured, still seemingly more to herself than anyone.

  ‘I told you, Dame…“

  ‘Oh, aye,“ Simon said quickly. ”There’s that, isn’t there? Lord Lovell and Abbot Gilbert, they’ll neither of them like having the harvest messed the way it will be if Gilbey and I be arrested, that’s sure.“

  With a harried edge that had not been there before, Master Montfort snapped, “There’s been no talk of arresting anyone!” The surprise on the jurors’ faces said that was not what they had thought. “I’m making inquiries, assessing facts. That’s what I’m supposed to do, you dolts. I’ve begun with you, that’s all. There are plenty of others I’ll question before I’m done.”

  With a mildness that Simon was more wary of all the time, Dame Frevisse murmured, “Since it’s certain Tom Hulcote was killed somewhere else and his body was only a little while where it was found, it must have been moved in the night before?”

  The clerk laid down his pen and began sifting among the bits of paper scattered in front of him, apparently looking for the one that recorded what had been said, while Master Montfort blustered, “Yes. Well. Yes. That seems to have been the way of it. Yes.”

  The clerk left off shuffling the papers and took up his pen again, writing down that, Simon supposed, while Dame Frevisse asked, slightly raising her head toward him and Gilbey, “Where were you that night?”

  ‘The night the body was moved?“ Simon thought back rapidly. ”In the church. All night. So Anne could sleep some. There’ll be witnesses enough to it and to say I never went out at all.“

  ‘And I was at home with my wife and servants,“ Gilbey said, ”and they’ll all say so.“

  ‘For what that’s worth,“ Master Montfort returned. ”Their word in the matter is no good at all and you know it.“

  ‘But he was gone from the village when Tom Hulcote was killed,“ Dame Frevisse said.

  ‘How do you know when he was killed, Dame?“ Montfort pounced.

  Seeming to see no possible threat to herself in that, Dame Frevisse answered gently, “Everyone knows he was last seen alive on Saturday, near to sundown. He wasn’t seen again, that anyone admits to, until his body was found Tuesday dawn. From how far gone it was then, he must have died closer to Saturday night than Tuesday morning. But you know that,” she added softly to the floor. “You’ve viewed the body.”

  ‘Of course I have,“ Master Montfort said ungraciously. View of the body was the first thing a crowner was supposed to do at any murder inquest. View it, study it for cause of death, then give the order that it could now be buried. In Tom Hulcote’s case, with the days of hot weather since he had died, the order to bury him was come none too soon, and Simon guessed Master Montfort had taken none too close a look before ordering the burial.

  ‘So where were you,“ Dame Frevisse asked Gilbey Dunn, ”between Saturday afternoon and Tuesday morning?“

  ‘Midday Saturday I left for Banbury, to fetch a doctor for my sons.“ Gilbey’s voice had a hard, self-satisfied edge. ”I brought him back with me on Sunday, and he was in my house until Monday morning and can say I was there the while.“

  ‘Who saw to your livestock then?“ Master Montfort demanded.

  ‘My man,“ Gilbey returned as sharply.

  ‘I thought this Tom Hulcote was your man.“

  ‘He wasn’t my only one, and God help me if he had been. He was worthless most of this past quarter year, gone as much as he was here half the spring and all this summer and besides I’d let him go as useless more than a week before he was killed. It’s Jack Fleccher still works for me, and it doesn’t matter anyway because I wasn’t here to kill Hulcote.“

  ‘And I couldn’t have moved the body,“ Simon said. ”That means we’re both clear, and belt and hood be damned.“

  ‘All it means is that you worked together at his death!“ Master Montfort snarled. He pointed at Gilbey. ”The reeve killed him while you were gone, kept the body hidden until you came back, and then you moved it while he was safe in the church, all to confuse that you were together in it all along. But you’ve been caught out at it and may as well confess!“

  ‘That’s daft!“ Simon burst out as Gilbey exclaimed, ”You’re mad!“

  ‘You watch your tongues, or there’ll be fines on you both!“ Master Montfort shot back.

  ‘But if that was the way of it,“ Dame Frevisse asked softly of no one in particular, ”if only one of them could have been there when the body was moved, how did the belt of one of them and the hood of the other come to be left there together?“

  ‘Come to that,“ Gilbey said, ”why would I be so idiot as to be moving a body about while wearing my best belt, eh?“

  Master Montfort slammed a fist onto the table, jarring it, making his clerk’s pen skitter on the paper. “That’s enough from you! From both of you. From all of you! You’ve my leave to go. All of you. You, too, Dame. Out!”

  Chapter 12

  Hoping her bowed head and hidden hands concealed her fine shuddering of anger, Frevisse followed Perryn and Gilbey out of the house and across the foreyard to the street. Montfort had always brought her to anger and, at his worst, fear, because he was an arrogant and dangerous fool, disliking anyone and anything that came between him and whatever his present purpose was, and what she saw of his present purpose here frightened her.

  Ahead of her, at the green’s edge, Gilbey turned on Perryn and said angrily, “He wants us guilty.”

  They were well away from any of Montfort’s men but not out of their sight and maybe not out of their hearing, and Perryn said back, “Not here.”

  ‘My house then,“ Gilbey said, and Perryn nodded terse agreement.

  They must needs talk somewhere and quickly, Frevisse thought, because she doubted they would have much time. All Montfort need do was bring the jurors around. When once he had their agreement—and she had seen no sign they would make much trouble over it—it would be small matter to put together a full jury to have an indictment and Gilbey and Perryn arrested.

  Gilbey’s messuage was not far. Most of Prior Byfield stretched out down both sides of the long green, but at its churchward end a short lane pushed out and Gilbey’s was there, the farthest and nearly the only house along it, Frevisse saw as she followed the two men that way. Of the other two on the lane, one was no more than a poor toft— a small house set in a small garden and no more—while the other had some time been lived in but was now turned into a cattleyard, its house into a byre.

  Beyond it was Gilbey’s, and even taken up with the tangle Montfort was making, Frevisse nearly came to a stop at full sight of it across the low withy fence between the street and its wide yard. Most villeins’ houses were serviceable but simple: of timbers, wattle, daub, and plaster, long and low, easily put up, easily taken down and shifted around in the yard as desire or need required, with thatch likely to be the greatest expense in keeping it up and nothing much changed from one generation to the next because what was the point in putting much money into something that belonged, when all was said and done, to the lord rather than the man who lived in it? But although Gilbey’s house was of timber, wattle, daub, plaster, and thatch well enough, there was nothing long and low about it. Beyond its foreyard garden, it stood square, with gable ends high enough, roof steep enough, it must have an actual upper floor instead of merely a loft tucked among rafters; there was even a small window poked out under a little gable of its own from the thatch along the side of the roof Frevisse could see and a fireplace chimney showing on the other side.

  Elena was at the door, looking out over its closed lower half, either watching the chickens at work in the dust between doorstep and garden or for Gilbey, and she waited there while they came across
the yard but stepped out as they came along the garden’s path and asked, her failure of other greeting betraying her worry, “How went it?”

  ‘Badly,“ Gilbey answered, and as they reached his doorstep turned on Frevisse with, ”You, with those questions of yours. You’re so sharp you’ll cut yourself one of these days.“

  ‘Gilbey!“ Elena said.

  Gilbey ignored her. “What if what you asked hadn’t brought the right answers? He’d have us under his arrest by now!”

  ‘I wasn’t asking those questions to keep you from arrest,“ Frevisse said back at him. ”I was asking them to find out what the answers were.“

  She heard Perryn’s soft, hissed intake of breath as he understood she would have asked her questions whether she thought them dangerous to him and Gilbey or not.

  Gilbey, realizing the same thing, started to swear, “By God’s holy…”

  ‘Gilbey!“ Elena said.

  This time Gilbey cut off, though he looked more irked than penitent, and Elena laid a hand on his arm as she said, “If it went that badly, we’d best go in to say whatever else needs saying.” Belatedly she curtsyed to Frevisse. “If you would do us the honor, my lady?”

  ‘With pleasure.“

  ‘Here then,“ Gilbey said and led the way, with Perryn asking Elena as they went, ”How goes it with your boys?“

  Belatedly in her turn, Frevisse saw that Elena looked very much the way most other of the village mothers presently looked—unkept, plainly dressed in a workaday gown of rough-woven linen, with simple cap and unstarched veil, gray-shadowed around her eyes with too little sleep and too much worry. But her fine-boned beauty was still there and woke, startling, as she smiled and said with open gladness of her sons, “Their fevers broke this morning, St. Roch be praised. Both of them. They’ve been mostly sleeping since.”

  ‘Agnes with them?“ Gilbey demanded.

  Without apparent offense at Gilbey’s rudeness, Elena said, “Of course.” Or it might have been she was simply too tired to bother with being angry at him just now. Or else she was dangerously capable of hiding what she felt.

  ‘And your children?“ Elena asked of Perryn. ”I heard Colyn was past the worst. But Adam and Lucy?“

  ‘Lucy’s fever broke last night. Adam’s hasn’t,“ Perryn said tersely.

  The quick darkening of Elena’s face showed she understood what that meant, but “Soon then,” she said kindly as Gilbey stood aside to let Frevisse go into the house ahead of him and Perryn after her.

  Gilbey, following them in, said, “Hen,” at a beady-eyed red one that had taken advantage of the door Elena had left open to come in and peck for crumbs under the table.

  With a soft laugh Elena took up a broom from beside the door and shooed it out in a ruffle of feathers and clucking, giving Frevisse a chance to see around the low-ceilinged room. Well-lighted by a window beside the door and another in the southward wall, it took up almost all this floor of the house, with a board wall and doorway at its far end closing off what looked to be storage space. Against one wall narrow stairs went steeply up to another room or rooms, probably where the children and Agnes must be since there was no sign anyone slept down here where most of the living and all the cooking were done. The furnishings were usual—table, benches, joint stools, chairs, chests—but all of better quality and quantity than usual in a villein’s house. That and the chimneyed hearth and that the floor was of boards instead of dirt told Frevisse much about how well off Gilbey was and something more about what Elena must have brought to their marriage because all this was more what a well-to-do townsman would have, rather than a country-bred peasant.

  What if the rumor was true and there had been something between Tom Hulcote and Elena? What if she had come to choose him openly over her husband? It would have been a choice condemned by law and the Church, impossible ever to be anything but illicit, but women enough made that kind of choice. If Elena had, how much of all this would Gilbey have lost? Because Frevisse judged Elena would not have left behind anything she could take.

  As Elena turned to her husband and guests—hen disposed of and the door’s bottom half shut and firmly latched against return—Frevisse clamped off that thought. All other consideration aside, Elena frankly lacked the look of a woman who had lately lost a lover for whom she might have done desperate things. That, from what Frevisse had heard, was Mary Woderove’s part; the talk among the women in the church was that she had gone wild at word of Tom Hulcote’s death, had been kept from harming herself only by quieting draughts from Mistress Margery, and had needed much counseling and consoling from Father Edmund.

  And none of that was to the present need, and Frevisse said, abrupt with impatience at herself, “These jurors. Tell me about them.”

  ‘Tell you what?“ Gilbey asked. ”Fools, the lot of them.“

  ‘You’d better hope not. Perryn, tell me, how did it happen they were the ones helped you bring Tom Hulcote’s body in?“

  ‘They were who came to hand first, that’s all. John Rudyng and Bert Fleccher at the alehouse, Walter Hopper and Hamon Otale at Walter’s place on the way. That’s all there was to it.“

  ‘What sort of men are they?“

  ‘That’s not the problem here!“ Gilbey said.

  ‘It’s part of the problem,“ Frevisse said back at him. ”How long there is to find Tom Hulcote’s murderer depends on how well they can hold out against Montfort wanting it to be one or both of you.“ Elena gasped but Frevisse asked Perryn again, ”What sort of men are they? Hamon I remember from manor court. He’s not likely to be happy with you just now.“

  ‘No,“ Perryn agreed, ”but Walter Hopper is solid enough.“

  ‘He’s the one who didn’t say anything while we were there?“

  ‘Aye. He’s hard to push where he doesn’t want to go.“

  ‘And the others?“

  ‘Bert Fleccher…“

  ‘A troublemaker,“ Gilbey said.

  ‘He’s that,“ Perryn agreed slowly, ”but not mean-hearted about it.“

  ‘Nay, just a fool, and that can be as bad,“ Gilbey said. ”He’d not mind seeing us down if he could do it without hurt to himself. Then there’s John Rudyng. He’s no use either. Without his mother-in-law there to tell him what to do, he’ll go whatever way looks easiest.“

  ‘Aye, maybe,“ Perryn agreed glumly.

  Gilbey sat down in the chair beside the table, fingers drumming angrily at the broad wooden tabletop. “And that crowner will likely…”

  Elena, turning back from a wall-hung aumbry with pitcher and fine blue-glazed goblets, said on a soft but rising note, “Gilbey. Guests.”

  Gilbey twitched a startled look toward her, then at Frevisse, realized he was sitting and she was not, and stood abruptly up, making an awkward gesture toward the room’s only other chair, saying, “Pray, sit, Dame. If you will.”

  He did not have it smoothly down but he was trying. Frevisse made a slight bow of her head to acknowledge his manners and sat. “You, too,” he said at Perryn less graciously but waiting until the reeve had sat on a bench end before sitting again himself. Elena put the pitcher and goblets on the table and began to pour a clear, golden ale while Gilbey, going back to what he had been saying, said, “That shit-witted crowner will bring them around to indicting us by suppertime, so what are we going to do?”

  Elena’s hands jerked, making the ale she was pouring miss the goblet. “Indict you?” she repeated. “For what? For Tom Hulcote’s murder?”

  ‘What else?“ Gilbey returned.

  She set the pitcher down, looking at Frevisse and Perryn’s faces, wanting a different answer. “Truly?”

  Perryn nodded.

  ‘On what proof?“

  ‘Fool’s proof,“ Gilbey snapped, ”but since he has fools for jurors, it’ll be enough.“

  ‘It won’t be enough when it comes to county court,“ said Perryn. ”Not with men he can’t force the way he can here.“

  ‘He’ll have us ruined long befor
e it comes to that,“ Gilbey said. Because in the while until then, all their property would be taken into the king’s hands for keeping, forfeit to the king if they were found guilty, returned to them if they were found innocent, but either way, some officer of Montfort would likely have the running and profit of it all in the meanwhile—officially on the king’s behalf, and surely much would reach the royal coffers, but a great deal would go into the crowner’s purse along the way, and Frevisse no more doubted it than Gilbey or Perryn did.

  Nor did Elena, who said slowly, wiping up the spilled ale, “So it’s not so much who’s guilty that he’s looking for as that you two are the wealthiest men in Prior Byfield, yes?”

  ‘And justice be damned,“ Gilbey agreed grimly. ”He’s reckoning what a pretty profit he’ll make out of his share of our property if we’re found guilty and how much he’ll make off it even if we aren’t, and since there’s not much profit to be had in finding a poor man guilty, we’re his murderers of choice.“

  ‘More than that,“ Perryn said, ”if he settles for us being guilty, then the true murderer goes unfound and that’s as bad a wrong.“

  Elena paused in holding out a goblet to Frevisse. “Worse still,” she said quietly, “is that it has to be someone of the village and they’ll go on being here, with none of us knowing who he is.”

  In the silence that answered that, Frevisse took the goblet Elena was holding out to her, before a small knock at the door made them all look that way, to see Dickon Naylor looking over it uncertainly.

  ‘You weren’t at your house,“ he said to Perryn, plainly unsure of his welcome, ”so I came here…“

  ‘Come in,“ Gilbey snapped. ”Don’t stand there looking lost. That ass of a crowner let you go, then?“

  Shutting the half-door carefully behind him and snicking the latch, Dickon answered, “He’s finished for today, he says. He’s sent everybody home.”

  ‘Finished?“ Frevisse repeated, surprised along with Perryn and Gilbey.