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

  Frevisse tried not to regard him balefully back while she went on, “Nor is it the usual discontented talk about things ‘not going well’. It’s real anger at very certain things and certain people.”

  “Such as?” Domina Elisabeth asked, with more than simple curiosity.

  Frevisse suspected that the worry came from the letter from Domina Elisabeth’s brother Abbot Gilberd, brought yesterday by a passing knight. As nuns they might be removed from the world, but they were not remote from it. Trouble was too often a thing that spread and Frevisse’s present unease at things made her answer carefully, “People are angry at how badly the French war is suddenly going and at the king’s people demanding more money when there’s no sign that good use has been made of the money already given. They’re angry at the lords around the king for their greed and misgoverning and for spoiling the wool trade with Flanders this year.”

  “The lords around the king,” Domina Elisabeth repeated. “That includes the duke of Suffolk?”

  Knowing from where that particular question came, Frevisse hesitated over what to say before settling for, “I would say especially the duke of Suffolk.”

  While Domina Elisabeth silently, frowningly, considered that, Frevisse asked in her turn, “Your brother is at Parliament?” Abbots, like lay lords, being regularly summoned to attend.

  “Yes,” Domina Elisabeth said, a weight of worry to the word.

  “Did he say how things go there?”

  Domina Elisabeth stroked the curve of the cat’s back. “Not well, I gather. Gilberd says the Commons are refusing to give any more tax toward the war and he doesn’t think they’ll change their minds.”

  A merchant from Northampton had put it more bluntly in the guesthall two days ago. “If Suffolk thinks he’s going to get a grant of money for this French war he looks determined to lose, he’s damn-all in for a surprise, may the devil rot his bones.”

  To which a yeoman had said, “If Hell gaped open and swallowed Suffolk tomorrow, England would be the better for it, and the devil can take Somerset, too, for better measure.”

  “Why wait until tomorrow?” the merchant had answered. Here in the peaceful parlor, with a dule of doves rising from the guesthall yard below the window with the morning sunlight on their wings, those passions seemed far off, almost unreal; but like an echo to Frevisse’s less comfortable thoughts, Domina Elisabeth said, “You haven’t heard from your cousin lately, have you?”

  Frevisse had not, as Domina Elisabeth well knew because any message—by word or writing—that came to a nun had to be made known to her prioress. It was with wariness of the unasked question behind the words that Frevisse answered because she knew from where the question came, “No. I haven’t.”

  Unlikely as it seemed, given their so different lives, her cousin was the duchess of Suffolk, wife to the much-hated duke. Because of that, Frevisse knew something more of the duke of Suffolk than she wished she did, and because of what she knew, she and her cousin had not been able these few years past to write or send so much as a word to each other. But as if no word from her cousin were a little matter, Frevisse said, “With Suffolk so busy about the king of late, she’s probably too much occupied with seeing to their lands and all else in his place.”

  She was saved from more by the cloister bell starting to ring to Tierce. Domina Elisabeth gave a mild sigh and stood up and Frevisse moved aside to let her go ahead from the room. There should be silence now until they began the Office in the church, but Domina Elisabeth had let the Benedictine rule of silence slacken over the years and said as she led the way down the stairs to the cloister walk, “I meant to ask you, too, what you think of how our widow is doing.” Frevisse missed the strictly kept silence of her early years as a nun, but even then if the prioress had asked a question, it was answered and after a due moment of thought she made as near to a nothing answer as she could, saying, “She gives no trouble.”

  They had reached the foot of the stairs. Beyond the doorway other nuns were hurrying from all sides of the cloister toward the church, but Domina Elisabeth stopped and turned around. “Does that bode good or ill, do you think?”

  Frevisse hesitated, not happy to be asked, unsure how to answer, settling finally for, “It’s difficult to say.”

  “You mean,” Domina Elisabeth said crisply, “that you can’t tell whether she’s truly penitent or is merely biding her time until she can be done with us.”

  Frevisse hesitated, then said, “I can’t tell, no.”

  “Neither can I, and it disturbs me.”

  Domina Elisabeth turned away and swept toward the church in a fullness of black skirts and long veil. Frevisse, heavy with thought and following more slowly, was among the last to take her place in the choir, and as she took up her prayer book, she looked from the side of her eyes at Cristiana lying in her penitent’s place before the altar. Frevisse knew from experience how uncomfortable she had to be, had seen her sometimes shift a little during an Office but never much. Neither had she ever shown any protest against the long whiles she had to kneel there. In truth, she never showed anything or made any protest. And yet somehow there was no feeling of penitence about her.

  “Lam tibi, Domine, Rex aeternae gloriae …” Praise to you, King of eternal glories . . . The familiar words, leading on to the prayers and praise and psalms that were usually Frevisse’s delight, did not catch and hold her mind this morning. She chanted with the others, “Deus caritas est, et qui manet in caritate, in Deo manet, et Deus in eo. “ God is love, and who lives in love, lives in God, and God in him. But Domina Elisabeth’s questions had set further off balance her already unsettled thoughts.

  Cristiana was proving to be more than a passing wonder among the nuns. With rarely any scandal among themselves greater than someone falling asleep during an Office or sometimes a sharp word said over something, and such family news as came usually providing no more than talk for a day or two at best, a sinful widow set among them, doing her penance before their very eyes, was like a god-sent gift. At least that was the impression Frevisse had from listening to the talk about her. Domina Elisabeth kept discipline enough that during the day everyone tended mostly to their own work and business, but during the recreation hour between supper and Compline’s prayers before bed, tongues were set free, and even after these few weeks, talk about the woman was still rampant despite they had long ago run out of fresh ground to cover. They had only what Domina Elisabeth had said on the first day—certainly nothing from Cristiana herself, wrapped in her silence—but that did not stop or even slow their speculations. She was a widow who had done something terrible beyond the ordinary, but precisely what she had done had been frustratingly not said, leaving them free to talk over again and again what she might have done; and for women who lived chaste lives apart from the world, they found their way through a surprisingly wide number of possibilities.

  Along with Sister Thomasine and, usually, Dame Claire, Frevisse kept aside from the talk. On her own part, she had never repeated to anyone what the woman in the guesthall had said, partly because she did not know the truth or falseness of it, partly because she was certain the woman had viciously meant for her to repeat it, and Frevisse—quite aside from her own unwillingness to such talk—had decided not to oblige her, but wished that Domina Elisabeth, besides forbidding talk with Cristiana, would likewise forbid talk about her.

  “Domine, miserere mei. . . ne derelinquas me. Neque despicias me, Deus …” Lord, pity me … do not abandon me. Nor despise me, God . . .

  Frevisse slid her eyes sideways again to the woman. In her gray gown, lying so still on the gray stones, she seemed hardly there. Indeed, she went so silently and gray through every day that she would have hardly seemed to be in the nunnery at all save for the nuns’ talk about her, and even that would have to pall someday. Soon, Frevisse hoped.

  * * *

  During a chill and rainy recreation hour a few days later, she and Dame Claire were walking at a measured pace around and a
round the roofed, square cloister walk. Because everyone else had chosen to stay in the warming room, save Sister Thomasine, gone, as was her way, to the church to pray, they were alone; and because silence was easy between them, they were silent, until Dame Claire said, “I’m worried about our widow.”

  Frevisse, who had been thinking about her copying work and how many days it might be before she finished with the present book, took a moment to shift her thoughts, then said, “Worried? Why? Do you think she’s ill?”

  “When I’ve asked her,” which would count as necessary talk from Dame Claire as infirmarian, “she says she isn’t.”

  “She’d surely tell you if she was, if only to win some ease in her life.”

  “Yes,” Dame Claire agreed but sounded no happier. “Or if she were the monster of sinfulness we’ve been told she is, she would lie that she was ill, so as to have that ease.”

  “If she were the monster of sinfulness?”

  Dame Claire gestured impatiently. “If I knew nothing about her, if I only saw her, watched her as we’ve all been watching her these days, it’s grief I would think of. Not that she was depraved but that she was in deep grief.”

  “She might well be in grief. For her sins, if nothing else. Or for having been taken away from her sins unwillingly.”

  “Or for both and other things we’ve no thought of, which aren’t my duty to consider but Father Henry’s.” The priory’s priest. “It’s her health I’m worried for. She’s too pale and growing thin.”

  “Thin will happen when every other day you have only bread and water,” Frevisse said. “Can you advise Domina Elisabeth to ease that part of her penance?”

  “I’ve presumed it’s by Abbot Gilberd’s order.” And therefore not readily ignored.

  They walked on in silence, turned the corner near the refectory, and began around the walk again before Frevisse said toward the paving stones, “Have you noted that Sister Thomasine doesn’t avoid her?”

  “Yes.”

  Dame Claire sounded no more comfortable with that than Frevisse was. Sister Thomasine in her early years in St. Frideswide’s had been almost cripplingly pious, but over the years her piety had deepened, steadied, was no longer something she forcefully asserted but simply lived in. It made her—for Frevisse at least—far easier to live with. It was only to be expected she would pray for their sinful widow’s soul; it was equally expected she would otherwise shun her. Perhaps not so openly as some of the nuns did, gathering their skirts away if Cristiana happened near them, as if her sins were a sickness that might be caught, but surely keeping her distance. Instead, she made no point of it at all and in the church knelt beside her at the altar as easily as if she were another nun.

  Frevisse had been disquieted by that, was pleased Dame Claire was, too, and said on a sudden thought, “What if she made confession to Father Henry? If she did and showed any degree of contrition for her sins, he would be able to ask Domina Elisabeth to allow her more food at least.”

  “That might help, yes.” Dame Claire’s voice rose with relief. “He’d do that. Especially if I prompt him that way first. Yes. That might very well help.”

  And if it did not, at least they had tried.

  Chapter 5

  In honor of St. Lawrence’s day, supper had finished with the rare pleasure of crisply fried wafers dipped in sugar, so that afterward Cristiana on her knees in the church during the nuns’ daily hour of recreation gave deep thanks that today had not been one of her bread-and-water days and that for this little while she was not hungry. At most meals the nuns ate far less than she was used to having. She told herself she might have grown used to that, but her bread-and-water days left her so light-headed she was sometimes unsteady on her feet and at night her stomach gnawing at itself kept her awake when she might have slept, now that she no longer cried so much.

  In truth, she rarely cried at all anymore. She felt as if her grief had eaten its way into her so deeply it was maybe beyond her tears’ reach. Or maybe she was just too tired for crying.

  Having given her small prayer of thanks and her other, constant prayers for Mary and Jane and that Gerveys might find her soon, she sat back on her heels, her chin resting on her clasped hands pressed against the base of her throat in at least semblence of prayer. Around her, the church was abloom with golden, fading, evening light. She could remember when she would have felt that beauty was like God’s embrace made visible. Now all it meant was that she had endured through another day with no sign of any better hope for tomorrow.

  If only she wasn’t always so hungry she would be able to think more clearly and maybe find some way of escape from this place. She was sorry, too, in a distant way that she had upset the priest when he took her confession today. He seemed, all in all, a kindly enough man, with a burly, uncomplicated certainty to him that in another time and place she would have found comforting. He had even been kind enough to tell her his name. Father Henry. But despite that he had asked if she wanted to make confession, he had seemed almost afraid to hear it. Afraid of what depths of sin she would reveal? Afraid he would see hell’s mouth gaping behind her and his own soul polluted by her mere words? Even suspecting that was his thought had not curbed Cristiana’s gladness at a chance to talk to someone.

  She had promptly unsettled the poor man, though, when he began by asking when she had last made confession. “In Holy Week,” she had answered.

  Startled, he had fumbled, “Not since then? When they . . . after you . . . Surely before they brought you here . . . you didn’t make another one?”

  “I was seized without warning.” She had let all her bitterness show. “I was bound and gagged and brought here with no chance for anything.”

  Uneasily he had asked what penance she had been given at Easter. She had listed the Aves and Paternosters given her by Father Richard for her numerous small sins and the beeswax candle she had given the church in recompense for her anger at Edward when he bought the chestnut gelding last autumn when they had not needed another horse.

  When she stopped, Father Henry had sat silently waiting, then asked, “Nothing more?”

  “There was nothing more.”

  Again he had been silent, then bade her go on with what she wished to confess now. With bitter satisfaction, she had confessed to her wrath and her hatred and to her despair, then had waited through another silence from Father Henry before he asked cautiously, “Is that all?”

  “And envy,” she said, belatedly thinking of it. “Envy of the nuns at their meals on the days when I have only bread and water.”

  “And?”

  “There’s nothing more, Father.”

  “No . . . sins of the flesh?”

  “On my soul’s hope of salvation,” she had said more sharply than she had ever spoken to any priest, “those are all my sins.”

  Father Henry’s unhappy silence had drawn out somewhat long before finally he asked, “Do you repent of these sins?”

  She had meant to be humble, because those were sins, however justified, but found herself saying harshly, “No.” With no urge to take back the word once it was said.

  “I can give you neither penance nor God’s forgiveness if you’re not repentant,” Father Henry had warned. He had sounded as if it hurt him to say it.

  Caring nothing for his hurt, Cristiana had said, “Then don’t,” stood up, and walked away.

  Afterward she was sorry it had come to that. She knew full well the comfort there was in giving up her sins to a priest and the relief that came with forgiveness and penance. But what use would pretended repentance be? The hunger pains in her stomach would reawaken her envy. Her despair would not give way so long as she was trapped here. And as for her wrath and hatred at Faurence, Milisent, and everyone who had helped them put her here, what use would penance be when her fury at them still seared with actual, burning pain behind her breastbone? It wasn’t penance she wanted. What she wanted was out of here and her daughters with her and the chance to pay Laurence and M
ilisent back for everything.

  A flare of her hatred-pain took her with no warning, curled her forward on herself, and then, its warning given, faded. She straightened slowly, wary of waking it again, and was surprised to find tears on her cheeks and—when she opened her eyes—Sister Thomasine kneeling beside her in prayer toward the altar.

  Sister Thomasine prayed more intently than anyone Cristiana had ever known. No matter what the hour or how long she knelt, her body was straightly upright from her knees, her hands steepled together palm to palm at her breast, her head deeply bowed, her face shielded from view by the soft fall of her veil to either side of it. Save for when she gave Cristiana the pad for under her knees, she had never spoken to her nor given any sign that Cristiana was there while she was praying. That made it the more startling when now, as Cristiana drew a cautious breath, wary of wakening the pain again, and settled back onto her heels, Sister Thomasine lifted her head and turned to look at her, the first time Cristiana had fully seen her face.

  Whatever Sister Thomasine had been when young— pretty or plain or even ugly—was gone. Her face was refined down to fine bones and pallor almost as white as the wimple tightly around it, as if both food and sunlight were things in which she rarely indulged. And yet in her eyes were more of depth and distances than Cristiana had ever seen in anyone’s. Cristiana stared into them as Sister Thomasine put out a narrow, white hand and laid it gently on her shoulder with all the tenderness a mother might have given a child.

  It was only for a moment. Then Sister Thomasine took back her gaze and her hand and faced the altar again, head bowed to her prayers. Yet for that moment of her touch and look, Cristiana’s hatred, angers, and pain had all seemed little things.