6 The Murderer's Tale Read online

  Frevisse nodded in reply and held her tongue.

  The soft talk and music from the parlor muted as they circled up the dark curve of the stairs. At their top they opened into another small chamber, as unlit as the one below except that the wide door into the chapel itself stood open and by the faint glow of the altar lamp they knew which way to turn.

  “That way,” Dame Claire said, pointing toward this chamber’s far end where the outline of a door barely showed, “leads back into the solar and the ladies’ chamber beyond, so we don’t have to go back downstairs and up again.”

  That was helpful, at any rate, but Frevisse truly wanted to forget everything and turn her mind to the evening prayers now. She led the way into the chapel and by the altar lamp’s small light had an impression of a high-beamed ceiling, walls painted with pictures she did not try to make out in the low light, three tall windows of colored glass and stone fretwork with night’s full darkness beyond them. A faintness of music and indistinguishable talk came from below but too remote to be a trouble. The peace of a place meant for prayers wrapped around her, and Dame Claire drew a breath of relief as deep as Frevisse felt. Together they went forward and knelt at the foot of the two steps below the altar on a carpet woven in jewel-rich reds and blues and gold, crossed themselves, and bowed their heads to the welcome familiarity of Compline’s prayers.

  Chapter 7

  The night spent in the ladies’ chamber was not particularly different from one in the nunnery’s dormitory, once the bedtime chatter had quieted; and except she was not used to sharing a bed, Frevisse slept well and awoke feeling ready for the day when in the soft light of earliest dawn the ladies began to stir and rise.

  She and Dame Claire finished dressing easily before the others, their gowns and headwear meant to be put on without help and quickly. Then they waited, sitting quietly on their bed while the others finished, until Lady Lovell came from her own chamber and they all followed after her through the solar to the chapel for morning mass. Others of the household were there, the chapel fairly full before Sire Benedict, with Father Henry to assist him, began. Frevisse glimpsed Lionel, with Giles and Edeyn, standing to the right of the door and well to the back in the one quick glance she took around. Then she bent her head and mind to prayer, glad to go into the blessed joy where the passing matters of everyday—the concerns that came and briefly were and went away—were put aside, and mind and heart given over to worship, to awareness of God’s love and the eternity that lay beyond life.

  Sire Benedict went through the service without haste or flourish, his firm and careful voice weighted to the solemn wonder of what he dealt with. When he had finished and the flurry of amens and hands moving to cross breasts had shifted to a general movement out of the chapel and down to the great hall for breakfast, Dame Claire and Frevisse stood aside, no need for any word between them, until everyone had gone, including the two priests. Then, the chapel now to themselves, they went forward and knelt before the altar, as they had last night, to say the office of Prime together.

  The prayers were a joyful welcome to the day, thanks and hope for it combined; and when at the end, refreshed, Frevisse rose to find her knees stiff from the long kneeling, she was, as almost always, surprised at it, as if somehow her body should have been as far removed from itself as her mind had been. But it never was. It tediously clung to its necessities, day in, day out, and insisted that she heed them, too. She had long since learned to make the adjustment from the delight of reaching out toward God’s love, forgetful of the world, to bothering over her body’s demands and boring needs, but she would still rather have not been bothered.

  Just now, she found, her stomach in particular wanted to be heeded. Possibly in the same straits, Dame Claire, smiling, made the sign for breakfast. The habit of silence was strong in both of them, and Frevisse nodded for answer, smiling back.

  They were in time to take bread and ale from the single table set up in the great hall before it was cleared. No benches had been set; no one troubled to sit down over so short a meal. Frevisse and Dame Claire ate standing to one side while the table was taken away and the last lingering folk left. The sun was not yet far enough around to reach the hall’s windows but the light of a bright dawn filled it, and from the sounds in the yard outside there was going to be a riding out to somewhere.

  Curious and with nothing else they should be doing, Frevisse and Dame Claire went that way, finishing their breakfast as they went and giving their drinking bowls to a servant they met in the screens passage on their way to the outer door. Coming out onto the doorstep, they found perhaps a score of horsemen milling in the center of the yard, mounted and ready to leave. Their clothing and the horses’ harnesses were serviceable rather than rich, showing they were bound for hunting, not a casual ride. Frevisse saw John Naylor was with them, and Giles Knyvet, but if Lionel was, she missed him.

  The dawn’s light clouds, underbellies gold from the rising sun, carried eastward on a gentle breeze, were clearing to a pale sky. The morning air was bright and cool, fresh from a small rain in the night. Lady Lovell was standing among her ladies at the yard’s edge on the cobbled walk just beyond the door, watching the riders but apparently aware of all else around her because as Dame Claire and Frevisse came out, she turned to raise her hand to them in welcome. She wore a gown of young green today, the color suited to the spring morning and her rich, dark eyes and pale skin. She looked as if she meant to go riding, too, her veil and wimple more practical and covering than yesterday’s had been, but the horsemen were gathering now behind the huntsman, whatever they had been waiting for finally accomplished, and in a clatter of hooves and eagerness they all rode out through the cobbled gateway, gone in moments, leaving the yard silent and seeming larger.

  “There!” said Lady Lovell. “That’s seen to.” She smiled at Dame Claire and Frevisse. “They’re away to hunt roebuck now it’s come into season again and we’d best wish them luck; the larder is low.” She nodded toward the unfinished west range of buildings where the workmen were already moving among the beginnings of walls and piles of stone. “Feeding them alone is challenging enough, let be the rest of the household.”

  She was cheerful over it; and judging by what Frevisse had seen so far of Minster Lovell and its lady, whatever was needful was probably handled well and in good time. But Dame Claire, having been cellarer at St. Frideswide’s, in charge of its stores and kitchen and aware of the complications of providing for a great many people for a long while, asked, “What did you do through Lent? Do you have to buy the while or are you able to have stores enough?”

  “Two hundred barrels of salt fish in as many different sorts as can be had, bought and brought by Martinmas,” Lady Lovell said. “And hope we’ve laid in spices and have herbs enough to change their taste from one day to the next from Shrovetide on.” When hunting and the eating of flesh had to stop until Easter day. “And bread to balance them. Thank God the harvests have been good of late.”

  Dame Claire could give amen to that readily enough. It was only two years since the end of three wet years of bad harvests when what had grown had rotted. St. Frideswide’s own fields had not produced enough for the nunnery’s needs, and high costs had made buying what little was imported almost ruinous. The same would have been true for every household, even those rich as the Lovells, because money could not buy what was not there.

  But that was past. People were well-fleshed again and this year looked to be another goodly one.

  Lady Lovell was saying, “I hope you’ll pardon me if I put off our talking over our village matter until afternoon. I’m to ride out this morning to see how it is with the fallow plowing and commend my dairywomen on how well they’re doing. Cook is complaining over what he’s to do with all the milk. Make more custards, I tell him. So if you grow sick of having custards while you’re here, it’s the dairymaids’ fault.”

  More horses were being brought from the stable, lighter boned than those on which the hunters had
ridden out: palfreys for an easy ride around the manor and its fields rather than hard galloping in the woods and over rough ground; and instead of plain harness, their leathers were bright with greens and reds and strong blues, some hung with little bells. Four of Lady Lovell’s ladies, Master Holt, and two squires strolled across the yard toward them. Lady Lovell stayed where she was and her horse was brought to her while Dame Claire said for both herself and Frevisse that they were quite willing to wait until her ladyship’s convenience in the village matter.

  “But this afternoon for certain,” Lady Lovell said. She mounted and added cheerfully, “Luce, I leave our guests to your care.”

  Luce, Dame Claire, and Frevisse curtsied their acknowledgment, but she had already drawn her horse around. Bells chimed on its harness as it stepped away, light-footed, leading the small, brightly dressed and caparisoned group away through the gateway.

  The women left behind drifted back into the house, Dame Claire and Frevisse following Luce. The others were talking of the duties they were to see to while their lady was gone—Frevisse gathered that Lady Lovell left them to no idleness—and though some scattered away through the house about their business, Luce followed three others back into the hall and across it to Lady Lovell’s parlor, with Frevisse and Dame Claire perforce with her. They were no more bent on idleness than the rest; in the parlor they all took sewing from a chest along one wall. While the others moved away to sit where the light was best, beside the windows, Luce asked Frevisse and Dame Claire, “Would you care to join us? We’re sewing things for my dower chest. My lady said we could work at them this morning, please you.”

  Sewing and Frevisse had never done well together, but Dame Claire said readily they would be most happy to join in so there was no help for it. She made the best of it by offering to do hems and was set to turning under and stitching the hem of a white linen smock while Dame Claire gladly took to setting in a gown’s sleeve and Luce worked on a bodice.

  Dame Claire commented on the good quality of the cloth. Luce explained it was a gift from Lady Lovell. “She’s very good to any of us when we come to marriage.”

  “Remember how after everything else she’d done, she gave Constance a set of strings for her lute when Constance was crying, so sure there would be none to be had where she was going to live in the Welsh Marches?” one of the other women said.

  “And then it all turned out badly, with her husband dying before two years were out and no babies either,” someone else said.

  “No ill luck on me,” Luce said quickly, signing a cross in the air between her and the other woman.

  Several of them paused to cross and uncross their fingers before one of them said, “But I don’t know that Constance thought it ill luck, come to that. Your fellow is young enough, but Constance’s husband was well toward the grave and two wives there before him when the match was made.”

  “The Lovells are very good at helping their people to marriages if our families ask,” Luce explained. “They’ve property in so many places and know so many folk, there’s almost always a match they can at least suggest if not arrange.”

  “There’s one they did well for.” A woman farther along the window seat nodded out into the garden. Frevisse looked up from her laborious hemming to see Edeyn strolling along one of the formal garden paths, Lionel beside her, Martyn and the white dog following.

  “Except for him, of course,” another of the women said, with a meaningful nod at Lionel.

  “But it’s not as if she were married to him,” Luce said warmly. “No one tried to do that to her.”

  “Nobody would!” the other woman exclaimed. “And they couldn’t anyway. He’s vowed never to marry, they say. So his cousin will inherit eventually, and that means she’s as good as lady of the Knyvet lands already.”

  “With a husband I’d not mind being in bed with,” the farther lady said.

  “I’d guess she doesn’t either. At any rate, she’s with child.”

  Exclaims of delight greeted that.

  “But can you imagine having a baby in a house with someone like that?” Luce asked. Her voice thrilled with a horror made pleasurable because it was something she did not have to face.

  “Can you imagine even walking with him the way she is?” the farther woman said. “She’s braver than I am, let me tell you.”

  Remembering this might be all new to Dame Claire and Frevisse, Luce asked, “Do you know about Master Knyvet? That he has demon-fits?”

  “We were told last night,” Dame Claire answered, nothing like interest showing in her tone, her attention back on her sewing.

  Frevisse held back from answering at all, not trusting what might come out if she were not careful. But she still looked out the window. Despite the avid talk around her, all there was to see were two men and a woman walking with a white dog in a spring garden on a fair morning. Part of her knew it was not so simple as that, and part of her very much wished it were, and part of her was unreasonably, seethingly angry at Luce and the others for their chatter over what for Lionel was a nightmare that never ended and inevitably included anyone near to him and anyone who cared about him.

  How much did Edeyn care? Frevisse suddenly wondered.

  Surprised, she cast through her mind to find from where that particular question had come and then shoved it away, along with her memories of them under the oak tree by the road yesterday noontide and walking beside each other in the rose garden yesterday evening. Edeyn’s and Lionel’s lives were no concern of hers. He would be in her prayers for a while after she had left Minster Lovell, until thought of him slid away under new matters and familiar ways and there would be the end of it. Or she would remember him, pray for him; but only his name and a thought attached to it would be there, nothing particular about him.

  Under Dame Claire’s quelling disinterest, the talk moved away from Lionel and even Edeyn, back to Luce and her marriage hopes and then on to the likely cost of Burgundian cloth this year and what had been used to dye a thread one of the other women was embroidering with so particularly rich a shade of yellow it was near to gold.

  Frevisse took no part in the talk. With a little effort she could make the hemming take all her concentration, fill up her mind past any thought except the necessities of even stitches and leaving no bloody marks from pricked fingers. As Dame Claire tied off her final stitch, Frevisse laboriously finished the smock’s hem and, heartily sick of it and afraid she would be offered another something to sew, said, “It must be near to Sext. Should we go to the chapel, do you think, Dame Claire?”

  Dame Claire looked out the window at the bright day and garden from where Lionel and the others had long since gone. “Better yet the church,” she said. “We’ve yet to pay our respects to St. Kenelm. We can do that and Sext, too. Would that be all right, do you think?” she asked Luce.

  “Oh, yes. There’s plenty of time until dinner,” Luce cheerfully agreed. “Did you see there’s a gate from the garden into the churchyard?”

  Dame Claire said they had noticed it yesterday. “Is it all right with you, Dame Frevisse?”

  So far as Frevisse was concerned it was better, combining the chance to move and the chance to be outside. She managed to temper her answer to murmured agreement but was already to the chamber door while Dame Claire was still showing Luce where she had left off sewing, and she only with effort held herself to wait in the antechamber until Dame Claire joined her. With hands folded into opposite sleeves, heads a little bent, and eyes properly to the ground a few yards ahead of them, they went together into the great hall, down it, and out. Frevisse forced herself to hold back her longer pace to Dame Claire’s lesser one and thought she had hidden her mood, but once they were outside, taking the well-graveled paths toward the churchyard gate, Dame Claire asked, “Better?”

  Annoyed and amused together that she had been so obvious, Frevisse said, “Better. Thank you.”

  “Luce should thank me, too.” There was a small smile in Dame Claire’s
voice. “You looked as if you were about to do violence to that hapless smock.”

  Frevisse laughed softly, already eased by being out. The paths were dried now from last night’s rain, and all the garden’s shades of green and brightness shone in the morning’s light, seeming new-made to the day. The gateway into the churchyard was roofed by a little thatched pentice and the gate was unlocked. Beyond it, the path ran on to the church porch through the peace of the churchyard. By the time they reached the door set deep in its porch, Frevisse was wholly quieted, her mind turned toward prayer.

  Every church was different, according to the desires of those who built it, but every one was the same, a place where the distance to God seemed less, the soul’s hope more reachable. Inside, this one of Minster Lovell was bright with light from the clerestory windows, and like the manor house, it smelled of newness, of stone not long from the quarry and fresh plastering and paint. Frevisse glimpsed its painted walls, dramatic with tall saints and a Judgment Day with demons, all done in bold colors to catch the eyes of worshipers and remind them of the need for prayer, but she and Dame Claire were drawn along the nave toward the altar and St. Kenelm’s shrine beyond it. Set high to be seen the length of the nave, elaborately carved from stone and painted in blues, reds, and greens touched here and there with gold, in the sunlight from the clerestory above and the east window beyond, it seemingly glowed with its holiness. Lord Lovell did well by his saint, Frevisse thought.

  Her eyes on the shrine, she was halfway along the nave before she realized she and Dame Claire were not alone there. Lionel’s back was to them where he knelt on the altar steps, but she recognized the dark blue houpelande he had been wearing in the garden earlier, and for even better confirmation the white dog Fidelitas lifted her head from where she lay on his spread skirts to look at them. Frevisse glanced around with unformed expectation of Martyn or Edeyn being somewhere near, but there was no one else. Beside her Dame Claire put out a hand to her arm, stopping her, and nodded toward Lionel. They exchanged a look but did not speak, understanding each other well enough. Lionel was in such a need of prayer that it would be shame to disturb him. Crossing themselves, they knelt where they were to make their own prayers, sharing the prayer book Dame Claire carried at her belt.