1 The Novice's Tale Page 7

  The cluttering knot of servants outside the door drew back reluctantly, leaving them a little space. Dame Claire said to the lady-in-waiting and the maid, “She will not need you for a while. Go reassure the others that she’s alive and quiet now, that she was in a nightmare, nothing else. We don’t need foolish rumors running through all the priory.”

  The maid curtsied, but the lady-in-waiting said firmly, “I’m the lady of her chamber today. I’d best stay and go in again when we’re able. You do as the lady bids,” she added to the maid.

  Clearly glad to obey, the maid walked away, immediately surrounded by the other servants. A little wave of low-voiced questioning followed after her, and Frevisse knew that despite Dame Claire’s words, by dark word would have run all the way to the village that Lady Ermentrude had been surrounded by dancing demons and the flames of Hell and that Father Henry had driven them away with prayers and holy water.

  Dames Claire and Frevisse started away from the door. Sir John stopped, putting his hand to his jaw and wincing. He asked, “She’ll live?” in a voice stiff with pain.

  Dame Claire thought before answering slowly, “There seems no reason why she shouldn’t. Her heart and pulse are strong. It’s her mind that seems gone most awry, and that will mend of itself if it’s only drunkenness.”

  “Then she’ll be all right?” Lady Isobel insisted.

  “I think there’s a goodly chance, though we may not know until morning Or later. Thomasine, bless you for your speed.” She held out her hand for the box Thomasine handed her, a little breathless with her haste. “There is this at least to bring on sleep, and that can be a better cure than most.”

  “The wine, I nearly forgot.” Lady Isobel drew away from her husband. “I’ll bring it.”

  “No, I will,” he offered quickly, but winced again, and she placed a hand on his arm and smiled up at him.

  “You don’t want the outside air on that tooth. Besides, I know where in the saddlebags it is. You wait here, love.”

  Beyond the cloister walls the bell began to ring for late afternoon’s Vespers. Dame Claire said, “You go, Dame Frevisse. Let Thomasine stay to help me. When Father Henry is through I want to give her the medicine and see if she will eat some of the milksop. We’ll come when we can.”

  “I’ll stay, too, by your leave,” Martha Hayward put in, thrusting her way into the knot around Dame Claire. “I know her ways as well as any and can fetch things for her from the cloister better than her present people. That’ll save Thomasine’s feet a bit.”

  “And when I’ve brought the wine, I’ll bide with her, too,” Lady Isobel said. “Or we can be with her in turns. Whatever is the matter, she’s my aunt and we owe her that much. If you think it all right?”

  “Assuredly,” Dame Claire said. “And good.”

  Frevisse, with the thought that they seemed to have the matter well in hand without her, nodded her own agreement and left for the church.

  Vespers was one of each day’s longer Hours, with four psalms to be sung among its prayers. In her first months in the nunnery, as a novice with ideals but little knowledge, Frevisse had resented its intrusion into the routine of every afternoon. All the other offices had made sense and been a gladness to her, even Matins and Lauds, the twin service that dragged her from bed at midnight. Prayer then in the dark watches of the night, the church seeming full of otherworldly shadows, lurking around small hollows of gold candlelight beside the altar, and her mind withdrawn by sleep from everything but the need to chant the office and prayers, was a wondrous time, with God present all around them.

  But Vespers came in busy late afternoon, with the nuns hurrying in to it from all parts of the priory and Frevisse almost always having to leave some task half-done behind her, and needing to go back to it, distracted, later. She had done silent penance for her resentment, but when that did not cure it, she had been finally forced to admit her feeling to Dame Perpetua, newly come then to being mistress of novices.

  “It intrudes,” she had complained. “It’s in the way of whatever I’m about.”

  “But isn’t prayer what we’re supposed to be about?” Dame Perpetua had asked. She had an instinctive talent for knowing the best way to teach, based on a novice’s needs and strengths. Some needed leading, others prodding. A very few could be challenged. “You have some business for being here other than serving God perhaps?”

  Frevisse, goaded into looking at her mind and its habits, had come—less than graciously at first—to admit there were reasons for Vespers at the busy end of afternoons: a need to remember there were matters more important to the undying soul than the passing needs of everyday.

  “A solis ortu usque ad occasum, laudabile noman domini.”‘ From the dawn of the day until sunset, praised be the Name of the Lord.

  They sang the words in Latin, but Frevisse turned them to English in her mind, partly from the little Latin that she knew but mostly from her much-treasured Bible, an object forbidden because it was a Wycliffe English translation. Still, she felt, understanding the glory of the words as she chanted them could not be sinful, no matter how she came by that understanding. She wove her voice with the other nuns into a curtain of praise, familiar and practiced, warm in the gray shadows of the afternoon church.

  She knew when Dame Claire joined them, her surprisingly sweet, clear alto as precise on every note as she was precise with her medicines.

  “Non nobis, Domine, non nobis: sed monini tuo da gloriamo.”‘ Not to us, Lord, not to us, but glory to your name, for your true love. Amen.

  The last of the office sounded softly among the raftered roof and stone walls, then fell away to silence. Slowly, with the stiffness of age and sitting, Domina Edith rose, and they rose after her and in a hush of skirts and slippered feet made a procession out into the cloister. There would be supper soon, a familiar pittance of cheese and apples, with any bread saved from midday dinner, then a chance to rest or walk in the little garden or the orchard, to reflect on the day, and, by a relaxation of the Rule, to talk among themselves. Though today Frevisse would go back to the guest halls, seeing to what needed doing there. The day’s last office, Compline, came after that, and then bed.

  In the cloister walk they all knelt together for Domina Edith’s blessing. She had raised her hand, had begun to speak, when the door to the courtyard slammed, startling them all in their places. Footsteps sharp with running came, and a woman in Lady Ermentrude’s livery burst into the cloister walk’s far end.

  “She’s choking!” she cried. “She’s dying! The priest said come. Come quickly.”

  Frevisse caught Domina Edith’s raised eyebrows giving her leave to go. She left her place in line, but Dame Claire had not waited even for that and was already running down the cloister walk. The others started to rise, confused, but Domina Edith with a single gesture felled them and silenced them. Age had not lessened her authority.

  Frevisse overtook Dame Claire at the cloister gate. They came out into the courtyard together, wasting no time on anyone as they crossed the yard. In the guest hall most of Lady Ermentrude’s people had sat down to supper at the trestle tables. Heads turned as Frevisse and Dame Claire passed through, not running now but moving too fast to go unnoticed. Frevisse glimpsed Sir John rising from beside his wife at the head of the tables as she and Dame Claire reached Lady Ermentrude’s door.

  Dame Claire’s sharp stop in the doorway forced Frevisse to sidestep to avoid her. Then she stopped as sharply, too.

  Father Henry was rising from his knees beside the bed, shaking his curly head with dazed disbelief. Lady Ermentrude lay propped up on her pillows, head rolled to one side, her hands still holding the crucifix, her mouth open, her harsh breathing filling the room. On the floor between her and Father Henry sprawled Martha Hayward, her legs straddled wide, her mouth agape and clogged with foam, her hands looking like claws in the rush matting, her eyes bulging, blood-suffused, in the strangled, dead purple of her face.

  Chapter 5

 
Frevisse stopped where she was, as much in disgust as horror, then crossed herself as much in penance for the disgust as for the repose of Martha’s soul. Dame Claire, recovering from her own reaction, went to kneel where Father Henry had been.

  Frevisse, almost as quickly, went to stand between sight of Martha’s body and Thomasine, who was crouched too near it, whimpers crawling up from her throat and her face pressed against prayer-clasped hands. Carefully, not wanting to bring on hysterics, she took Thomasine by the shoulders and said as gently as she could, “Stand up out of Dame Claire’s way.”

  The infirmarian was feeling for pulse and breath, looking for life where very surely there was none.

  “Stand up,” Frevisse repeated, wanting to get her away from the temptation to look again at Martha.

  Thomasine responded, letting herself be helped to her feet. With an arm around her shoulders, Frevisse turned her away from both Martha and Lady Ermentrude.

  “It was awful,” Thomasine whispered, shaking in Frevisse’s hold. “It was horrible. She had a… fit. She—”

  Firmly across her rising voice Frevisse said, “It’s over. She’s not hurting anymore. It’s finished.”

  Dame Claire sat back from her fruitless search for signs of life and looked up at Father Henry still standing above her. “What happened?” she demanded.

  Dumb-faced and stunned, perspiring freely, he shook his head. “We were sitting here, the women and I. The others were gone to supper. Lady Ermentrude was dozing, all quiet. Martha was at her stories again, about Lady Ermentrude and what a willful woman she was. I was, God pardon me,” he crossed himself fervently, “hard put not to be laughing at what she had to tell, until she grew too bold and Thomasine was beginning to be offended and went away to pray.” He pointed to the prie-dieu in the far corner. “I asked Martha then to speak more seemly.”

  There was a growing murmur at the doorway, and they turned to see a clot of people come to gape. No more were they noticed than they were pushed aside as Sir John came through, with Lady Isobel behind him. “What is it?” he asked. “What’s happened?”

  Frevisse cut across his questions, pushing Thomasine toward Lady Isobel. “My lady, please, your sister has need of you.”

  “Why, what’s happened?” Lady Isobel’s question was sharper than her husband’s. “Is my aunt all right?” She came to take Thomasine’s arm as she spoke and over her sister’s shoulder saw what lay on the floor. Her face went curd-pale. In a choked voice she said, “Martha Hay ward.”

  “Help Thomasine,” ordered Frevisse, shifting the girl into Lady Isobel’s arms. “Take her away from here.” Lady Isobel nodded distracted agreement, her sickened gaze still on Martha’s body.

  “She’d dead?” Sir John croaked the word disbelievingly, his gaze averted.

  Frevisse thought dryly that he must not have received his knighthood for skill in battle if he were squeamish over so bloodless a death; she firmly pushed both Thomasine and Lady Isobel away to the side of the room, turning back as Dame Claire told Father Henry, “Go on.”

  The priest, uneasy at his growing audience and still shocked, obeyed. “She said she was thirsty, all dry from so much talking, and missing her supper in the bargain, and the sops were going to waste and,” he gestured helplessly toward the empty bowl on the table, “she just ate them. She said she’d have a taste and then she ate them all.”

  “I dare say,” Frevisse said with subdued irony.

  Father Henry nodded vigorously. “She ate the sops, talking all the while, and then without my having any chance to stop her, she drank a great draught of the wine. I told her then it was meant for Lady Ermentrude and had medicine in it, so she made a face and stopped and went to talking again. In a while she said she was hot and opened the window, though I told her not to, and took to walking up and down the room. She was drunk then, I think, taking so much wine at once, for she wasn’t making much sense. I tried to have her sit down lest she rouse Lady Ermentrude but—”

  Father Henry stopped, embarrassment and uncertainty on his face.

  “She pushed him,” Thomasine said a little shrilly. “She laid hands on him and pushed him aside and kept on walking back and forth and Maryon said we’d best do something.”

  “Maryon?” Dame Claire asked.

  The dark-haired lady-in-waiting stepped forward from beside the door. Frevisse realized she had been there all the while but so still she had gone unnoticed. “I’m Maryon,” she said.

  “And you were here the while?”

  Maryon bent her head in acknowledgment. “I thought to be of service, if my lady should need me.”

  “What seemed the matter with Martha to you?”

  “Too much drink,” said Maryon succinctly. “I went to the door to send someone for some of my lady’s men to have her out of here but while I was speaking to the woman, Martha behind me started making… sounds.”

  “Awful sounds!” Thomasine cried, and they turned to stare at her. “And, and clawing at herself.” She made a feeble gesture at her chest and throat.

  Her calm a decided contrast to Thomasine’s edge of hysteria, Maryon said, “I told the woman to run find the infirmarian, that she would be in the church somewhere. When she was gone, Martha fell down and we couldn’t help her.”

  “She was lying on the floor, kicking, thrashing…” Thomasine’s eyes were full of desperate misery. “Father Henry went to help her, and I tried to pray, but it didn’t help. It didn’t help.”

  Father Henry said, “There was nothing I could do, but give her the Last Sacrament. There was time, barely. Just a general absolution and the anointing.” He held out the small wad of bread that he had correctly used to wipe the last of the chrism from his fingers. His hand was trembling. He looked at it with surprise and then put it behind his back.

  “But she just went on and on, kicking and choking!” Thomasine cried. “She couldn’t stop. Until she—died.”

  “A fit,” Lady Isobel said quickly, firmly, hugging Thomasine close. “A fit. Her heart, I would think. So fleshly a person easily might die like that. Here.”

  She moved Thomasine toward the table where a goblet sat beside the empty bowl of milksops. She pushed the goblet toward Thomasine’s hands. “Drink this. It will steady you, child.”

  Thomasine’s hands fluttered back, warding it off. “No. That’s the wine with Great-aunt’s medicine in it.”

  “Yes, but medicine for quieting nerves,” said Frevisse, remembering. Which would do Thomasine no harm just now. “It’s all right,” she said reassuringly. “Dame Claire can mix more. Go on.”

  Obediently Thomasine reached to take the goblet from Lady Isobel. But her hands were shaking far worse than Father Henry’s; there was an instant’s mistiming and the goblet fell, spattering the edge of Lady Isobel’s gown and splashing the wine across the rush matting in a bright stain.

  Isobel exclaimed in annoyance and backed away, shaking out her dress as Thomasine, wringing her hands, began a shaky litany. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—‘’

  “Enough!” Frevisse said sternly. “The dress will wash and there was hardly any wine in the cup. Crying over spilled wine is as useless as crying over milk.” She shifted her attention to Lady Isobel.

  But she was already recovered, her dress forgotten as she came back to Thomasine’s side. “It’s all right. Come sit down. You’re trembling so.” She led her away to the bench at the window. Sir John followed them and put his arm around his wife’s shoulders, holding her close while she held Thomasine. They were not moved so much by a servant’s death, Frevisse thought, as by the bare fact of Death itself, and a dreadful one, unexpected, a hard thing to face so young as they were. Thomasine, apparently recovering a little, began to draw slightly away from her sister and averted her eyes. Frevisse, reassured by so typical a gesture and feeling the girl would do well enough for the time being, turned her attention back to Dame Claire, who had closed Martha’s eyes and was straightening her limbs.


  “It would seem it was her heart,” Dame Claire pronounced, gazing on Martha’s face. She crossed herself and rose to her feet.

  “How does my lady aunt?” asked Lady Isobel.

  Dame Claire turned and felt Lady Ermentrude’s face and hands, and listened to her breathing before answering, “She seems to be doing well enough.”

  Coming near, Frevisse asked in a quiet voice, “Is it the medicine you gave her makes her sleep so deeply?” She was thinking that perhaps it was as well Thomasine had spilled it.

  “She never had any of the medicine. I wanted the food in her, to act against the drunkenness, and managed to make her eat a little, but by the time she’d finished being fed she was nearly stupored into sleep already and wouldn’t drink. She just went to sleep without it.”

  “What should we do?”

  Dame Claire stood still, thinking; and after a moment gave a tiny nod of decision. “Domina Edith must be told at once. Father Henry, will you do that? And Martha’s body had best be taken into the cloister, away from here. Can you find men to do it?”

  Frevisse turned to the door and pointed at four gawkers, who proved less willing to bear Martha’s bulk than they had been to stare at it. But they were even less willing to cross Frevisse, and managed to take the body away with a semblance of respect.

  With an audible sigh, Lady Isobel moved from her husband’s arms, going to pick up the goblet from where it had fallen and partly rolled under the table. As she bent over and her fingers closed around it, she made a small sound of surprise and reached further under the table, then cried out sharply, “It bit me!” She jerked her hand back and clasped the fingers with her other hand. Blood welled and spilled over.