The Widow's Tale (Sister Frevisse Medieval Mysteries Book 14) Read online

  “Your screaming was no good anyway,” Laurence said. “Your servants are penned in the kitchen under guard by now and Ankaret is seeing to your girls.”

  Some part of Cristiana’s mind refused all of that. None of it was happening. It was too wrong to be happening. She was in a nightmare and she would wake up . . .

  But from the hall, growing fainter, Mary’s cries and now Jane’s, too, brought her wrenching forward against the ropes, fighting them, twisting her head from side to side to be rid of the gag. Only when she saw Laurence, Milisent, and Colies watching her, pleased by her useless fighting, did she stop and fall back in the chair, tears starting.

  Laurence leaned toward her. “There’s being sensible. You’ll only hurt yourself or else make it so we have to do worse to you. You being a madwoman, no one can object if we do whatever we must to restrain you.”

  Cristiana made a protesting sound.

  “There, there,” Milisent mocked her. “We’ll see to you well enough, never worry. Shall I tell you how?”

  “No,” Colles said. “Let her wonder.”

  “If Edward hadn’t been so stupidly stubborn,” Laurence said, “it wouldn’t have to go this way.”

  Cristiana twisted her head, trying to loosen the gag. Milisent took hold of her chin, carefully digging in her fingernails to hold Cristiana still while she leaned close to say into her face, “We’re putting you some place where you’ll be safe. If you’re good, it won’t be forever. If you stay put and make no trouble, then when your girls are safely seen to—marriage for Mary, a nunnery for Jane is what we have in mind—we’ll let you out. Until then—“ the nails dug deeper in and Milisent’s breath was hot on Cristiana’s face. “—you be good, or I’ll see to it you hurt far more than you do now.”

  They kept her there, tied, all that afternoon. Helpless, she had to watch Laurence and Milisent go thoroughly through everything in the chest where Edward kept his less valuable documents about the manor. “Not that there’s any need to see it all now,” Laurence said as he dumped a handful of scrolls on the table. “The place is mine until the wardships run out.” Less easily satisfied, Milisent took the household keys from Cristiana’s belt, saying, “I want to see the rest. Edward gave her some pretty things, as I recall.”

  “Ankaret will want her share,” Laurence warned. He left off shifting through the papers. “I’ll come with you. Edward’s money-chest is somewhere. I want it.”

  Colies, from where he had sat himself down at the window, called after them as they went out the door, “Send someone with wine. This waiting is dull.”

  Waiting for what? Cristiana shut her eyes and tried to find some corner of her mind she could crawl into and hide until she awoke from all of this, but no awakening came. Instead, hours later, as the room was darkening with early evening and Laurence and Milisent had been drinking for a while with Colies and talking over how well they were going to do here, Laurence finally gave order for her to be loosed from the chair. By then she was too stiffened to move on her own, unable to resist at all as the same two men untied her, dragged to her feet and dragged her hands behind her to tie them again, careless that they hurt her. She made an unwilling sound of pain but no one heeded it.

  A cloth like the one still jammed in her mouth was tied over her eyes and, held again by a man on either side, she was led blind from the room into the great hall. She strained to hear anything at all—some sign that someone was there to see what was happening to her—but all she heard was nothing.

  Then she was outside, was lifted astride a horse, with a man immediately swinging into the saddle behind her and other people mounting other horses around her. She tried to tell which way they rode from the manor and for how long, but she wasn’t sure. It was night, though, when they finally stopped and she was dragged down from the horse and into a building and through a room that smelled unclean. She was bumped carelessly against a doorframe, into another room, and a door was shut heavily behind her before, at last, someone took off the blindfold.

  She did not know where she was. The room was poor and bare, with a small, battered table with a single candle burning on it, two stools, a bed, a shuttered window. An inn somewhere? Someone’s house? Neither Laurence nor Colles were there, only Milisent and one of the men who had bound and blindfolded her in the parlor. When another man soon brought food—cold beef and bread and some thin ale—she was untied and ungagged so she could eat while Milisent did. She was too stiff beyond hope of making any move to escape nor did she try to cry out for help. Neither Laurence or Milisent was so careless as to have anyone near who would heed her if she did. Finished eating, she was allowed to see to her bodily necessities in a small, windowless side chamber with Milisent standing in the doorway to be sure she tried nothing foolish. What could I possibly try, Cristiana wondered dazedly. She could think of nothing. She could barely think at all by then, even when Milisent led her to the bed and shoved her down on its edge, for the man to tie her by both wrists to one bedpost, leaving her able to sit on the bed’s edge or uncomfortably lie down.

  The man left the room. Milisent readied for bed and—far more comfortably than Cristiana—lay down on the bed’s far side, saying, “Don’t think I’m enjoying having to keep you company,” before she rolled over and, by her breathing, was soon asleep.

  Cristiana did not have that mercy. Held by the rope, afraid of waking Milisent if she moved, her mind beating wildly from one thought to another, all of them desperate, all of them useless, it was a long while before—crying inwardly to Edward to make all this not be happening—she finally fell into something like sleep, though it brought her neither rest nor peace.

  The morning reversed the night. Milisent awoke, one of the men came in, Cristiana was untied, allowed her body’s needs, fed, then gagged and blindfolded again. To her shame she whimpered slightly. Milisent laughed. Again held firmly between two men but her hands unbound, she was led outside, where Milisent said, “You’re going to be put in horsecarried litter today.” Cristiana had a brief hope that with her hands free she might find some way of escape; but when a hand at the back of her head bent her over and shoved her forward to grope her way onto the litter—finding it a small one meant for one person—she had no more than eased her way around and into the cushioned seat than her arms were seized from either side and her wrists bound to the litter’s sides. Then her ankles were grabbed and likewise tied to something fixed that did not move when she tried to kick loose from it. Thwarted, tears coming anew at her helplessness, she flung her head backward hard against the end wall of the litter. It, too, was cushioned, and as she heard curtains drawn closed with the rattle of metal rings on both sides of the litter, she knew that—tied, gagged, and cushioned as she was—there would be no way to make anyone know she was in need of help.

  Through that day and two more she was carried in the litter, kept always gagged and blindfolded, loosed only to be hurried into some place for each night. Milisent warned her that the people wherever they stayed were told she was a madwoman, that crying out for help would do her no good, would only get her gagged at night, too. Afraid of that, Cristiana kept silent. She never saw Laurence or Colles but during the days heard them and Milisent talking as they rode. They were careful, though, never to be near enough for her to hear what they were saying and the guards must have been forbidden to talk at all. No one betrayed where they were or where they were going, and the first day and second must have been overcast because she had not even sunwarmth on one side of the litter or the other to tell her the direction they traveled. But none of the towns through which they passed were big enough to be London, nor did they cross a river large enough to be the Thames, and if they had gone east, surely they would have reached the coast in less than three days. So they were set north or west. Or northwest or southwest. Or . . .

  At some point and time Cristiana gave up even that wondering. Numb with fear and despair, she curled into a corner of her mind and stayed there, accepting there was nothing she
could do to help herself and nothing she could do to help Mary and Jane. There was nothing she could do except cease to feel and think, and she did; let herself be bound and unbound and told what to do without thinking to resist. When there was nothing to be done, all she could do was nothing.

  It was the third night, when she had been bound to yet another bed but Milisent was still up, that Laurence came into their room. Neither he nor Milisent looked the worse for their journey. In truth, he looked so sleek with satisfaction that Cristiana stirred enough out of her numbness to remember how much she loathed him as he crossed the room, stood staring down at her, and said to Milisent, “You’ll have to make her presentable tomorrow. We want them to think she’s been cared for.”

  “She’ll be presentable,” Milisent said impatiently. “There’ll be no cause to complain against us.”

  Laurence went on considering Cristiana. She read his look and went rigid even before he put out a hand and stroked her, deliberate and slow, the length of her body from throat to hips, saying, “A waste, in a way, to put you into a nunnery unused. Edward seemed to enjoy you so much.”

  Milisent laughed. “Take her. Who’s to know?”

  In worse terror than any until now, Cristiana stared up into Laurence’s face through the long and horrible moment before he took his hand away from her, turned away with, “I think I can do without Edward’s leavings,” and left the room.

  It was in the morning while roughly combing out Cristiana’s tangled and matted hair, untended these three nights, that Milisent told her, “It’s a nunnery we’re taking you to. They’ll be told there that you’re a wanton widow, so debased and shameless in-dishonoring your husband’s name that your priest and bishop and lord have agreed you should be kept away from your children and in penitential prison until such time as priest and bishop and lord see fit to bid us take you into our care again or set you free.”

  Cristiana fumbled for words of protest.

  Milisent jerked on her hair, silencing her. “We have a warrant that authorizes us to put you away, and another letter from an abbot that assures the nuns that they are to take you in strict charge and keep you for as long as need be.” Teeth set against the pain of her pulled hair, Cristiana forced out, “Where?”

  “So far away from anywhere you know that there’s no chance anyone will find you or that you’ll find your way home again. Not with the watch that will be set on you.” Milisent finished with her, and Cristiana was gagged and blindfolded and tied into the horse-litter yet again; but in the afternoon the litter stopped long enough for one of the men to take off the gag and blindfold and untie her. Cristiana had no more than a useless sight of a hedgerow along a dusty road before the curtain was closed again. With no hope of anywhere to run, she sat with her shaking hands clenched together in her lap until the litter stopped again and she was pulled out and taken into the nunnery’s guesthall.

  After that she had had to endure Milisent only a little longer. To be unbound and ungagged and rid of Milisent and Laurence was such relief that only when she had been standing in the church, hearing her supposed shame exposed to the nuns and her punishment detailed, had she begun to understand how completely she was still trapped, still helpless.

  She had not dared, while Laurence and Milisent held her, to be anything more than afraid, but as these days and nights of enforced silence and false penance went unendingly on, and with the pain of the hours in front of the altar on her face or knees, her understanding grew and her hopelessness deepened into a dark despair. And with the despair, fed by her grief for Edward and her fear for Mary and Jane, came hatred.

  Her single hope was that somehow, somehow, Gerveys would find her. That he would find out where she was and come for her.

  Only please, by all of Heaven’s mercy, let him come soon.

  Chapter 4

  With fair weather and hope for a fine harvest, the easy days of middle summer passed inside St. Frideswide’s walls in their familiar way, bound around and carried onward by the ever changing, constant pattern of the daily Offices. So many of the Offices’ prayers were the same from day to day, but through each week the psalms were spread through the Offices so that all one hundred and fifty were said between one Sunday and the next while other prayers came and went with times of the year and saints’ days. To Frevisse it was an unending garland, its strands woven beautifully around each other. She had joined the weaving when she became a nun. Some nuns who had been part of the weaving then were dead now but others were become nuns in their place, just as someday she would be dead and there would others here instead, the weaving of praise and hope and love going always on, as it had gone on now for a thousand years already and would go on until the World’s end came, God willing.

  Still, her own handful of years—well, several handfuls— were enough with which to deal for now. This year especially, that was passing so fair among the priory’s fields, was fraught with trouble elsewhere. As hosteler she heard more than she might have—and certainly more than she wished—about how the world was going. Worst of the troubles was that the war in France looked likely to break out again. Toward the end of March an English raiding party out of Normandy had seized and plundered a border town in Brittany, directly against the truce there had been since the king’s marriage a few years ago. Frevisse gathered from stray bits of talk that both the duke of Brittany and his ally the king of France had first requested and then demanded a withdrawl of the English troops and restitution for stolen goods. That seemed a fair enough demand to Frevisse, but lately in the guesthall she had heard a Coventry merchant complain to another traveler, “That fool Dorset. . . No, he’s been made duke of Somerset, hasn’t he? He’s still a fool, either way . . . He’s refused to give the French anything except rude answers. Have you heard the French have seized some place of ours to show they mean business?”

  “Pont de l’Arche, isn’t it?” the other man asked. “Now we’ll have to trade Fougeres to have it back.”

  “What I want to know is how they took the place so easily,” the merchant had grumbled. “As soon as the truce was broken, every border town of ours should have been on double guard, and the more on guard because Somerset has refused every French offer toward peace.”

  “I’ve heard Suffolk is supposedly gone to Normandy to deal with the whole thing. Someone was saying that in Oxford.”

  “Suffolk,” the merchant said with disgust. “There’s setting the cockerel to deal with the fox. What I want to know is why should Suffolk or anyone have to go to Normandy to ‘deal with it’?” He had thumped a fist down on the wooden tabletop. “Why doesn’t King Henry send Somerset order to stop being an idiot? I say there’s something foul afoot about the whole business and that Suffolk and Somerset are hand in glove in it.”

  “I haven’t been able to make sense of what’s been done in France ever since they pulled York out from being governor,” said the other man. “And what about this Winnington business?”

  The merchant had thrown up his hands. “Don’t start me on the Winnington business!” Another source of ongoing anger across the country. Late in May one Robert Winnington— charged by the crown with safekeeping of the sea—had used the royal fleet to seize over a hundred ships of the Hanseatic League and its allies homeward bound to the Baltic with its yearly cargo of salt and other goods from the south. Because England was not at war with the Hanse, the seizure had been more bold than’ sensible, and in June a group of pilgrims from Gloucester, staying overnight at the priory on their way to the great shrine at Walsingham, had been full of talk and bitterness about it, one man complaining, “The Hanse is taking whatever English goods they find abroad, I hear. Eve a cousin will be ruined if that’s true.”

  “He won’t be the only one,” someone else said. “Nor king or council has made any move toward peace or to return the ships or to punish Winnington.”

  “And they won’t either,” a lean, aggravated woman had said sharply. “Winnington is their man and if you don’t know
that you’re a fool. Suffolk and those jackals around him run the king and never doubt but they’ll all make a pretty profit out of it. God keep King Henry, but where’s his wits in this, I ask?”

  “Ah, there then,” a plump, easier woman had said soothingly, “it’s not the king’s fault, is it? He’s hardly to blame, being so young and lacking experience.”

  “He’s twenty-seven,” one of the men grumbled. “His father at twenty-seven was winning the battle of Agincourt.”

  “Well, we’re not all like our fathers, are we?” the plump woman returned.

  “True enough,” the first woman snapped, “but some miss it by more than is good for them.”

  Added to that, as the summer went on there was talk and worry of French raids along the south and east coasts, irk at a new tax laid on all wool going into Flanders, speculation on how ill an omen was the sudden star that had burned for a number of spring evenings in the west, report that an outbreak of plague had adjourned the Parliament from Westminster to Winchester, and all of that mixed in with a general seethe of discontent against the king and his council of lords like Frevisse had never heard before.

  “And anger,” she said one warm morning in the prioress’ parlor in answer to Domina Elisabeth’s question about what was being said.

  Because a prioress sometimes had to receive particular guests and conduct such business as was not suited to the chapter meetings with all the nuns, the parlor was a more comfortable room than any other in the priory, with glassed windows and a fireplace and a fringed carpet woven in a Spanish pattern laid over the carved-legged table. In Domina Edith’s time, when Frevisse had first come to St. Frideswide’s, there had been an embroidery frame with always some work on it and a small greyhound who slept in a padded basket beside the fire. With Domina Elisabeth there was a slant-topped writing desk near the window where—like her nuns—she copied books to earn much-needed money for St. Frideswide’s and a sleek white-and-gray cat presently curled on a cushion at one end of the windowseat, regarding Frevisse with a baleful green eye over a tail carefully curled over nose and paws, unforgiving the interruption of his morning nap.