9 The Reeve's Tale Read online

  ‘Is she willing to that?“ Perryn asked formally.

  Mary jerked her head up. “Yes. Very willing. And you damnably well know it.”

  Tom Hulcote tightened his arm around her, drawing her to him.

  ‘Is there any other offer?“ Perryn asked, not looking at Gilbey Dunn.

  Gilbey took a measured pace forward, and when Perryn acknowledged him with a nod, said, bold with self-assurance, “I offer to take the holding on lease for twenty years, at six shillings a year, or whatever else may be agreed on between Lord Lovell’s steward and me.”

  Mary Woderove swung out from Tom’s hold and around on Gilbey. “And what becomes of me if you take it all?” she demanded fiercely.

  Gilbey turned a cold look on her. “You have a toft and some land, and he has something.” He made an equally cold look at Tom Hulcote. “Let you marry, if that’s what you want, and live as you can with what you have.”

  Tom laid a hand on Mary’s shoulder. “I want better than that for her!”

  ‘Then you should be a better man,“ Gilbey said coldly back.

  Tom made a threatening step forward. “I’m as good as you and likely better!”

  ‘Then pity you don’t show it,“ Gilbey returned, holding his ground, older than Tom by some not-few years but with no apparent doubt that he’d be his match if their quarrel came to more than words.

  Mary shifted away from them, back toward the onlookers. Elena took a step forward—toward her husband or toward Tom Hulcote, Frevisse wondered—but before more happened, Perryn said, “That’s enough. From both of you. Think on you’re in the church.”

  ‘Let him think…“ Tom Hulcote began.

  ‘You’ll be fined if you keep on like this,“ Perryn warned.

  ‘Fined!“ Tom cried. ”You’d do it, too! Me but not him, because all you’re for is to keep the poor down and folk like him and you up, and don’t think we don’t know it! Them that has, keeps and always has, and now for bad measure you want to take what the rest of us have, too!“

  There were answering grumbles and shifting among some of the onlookers. Father Henry eased away from the wall and in amongst the largest clot of them, beginning to lay hands weightily on various shoulders and saying things into various ears as Father Edmund rose to his feet behind the table to say in his clear, carrying priest’s voice, “Remember, all of you, where you are and what will come of violence done here.”

  Tom Hulcote turned to him with suddenly a desperate plea instead of anger. “Help me in this,” he begged, and pointed at Gilbey. “He has land enough, more than enough. Tell him to let this bit go to someone as needs it!”

  ‘Tom, that isn’t where the issue lies,“ Father Edmund began.

  ‘It is!“ Tom’s anger flared up again. ”Tell him, priest— tell yourself, come to that—what’s said in the Bible about rich men and heaven! You’ve preached it often enough!“

  ‘Tom!“ Perryn warned sharply. ”Don’t make me have to judge against you!“

  ‘Judge against me?“ He swung toward Perryn now, voice rising. ”You’re the one who’d best watch out for judgment. You and him!“

  He pointed viciously at Gilbey, and Frevisse stood up abruptly, rapping out with bridled anger, “Enough!”

  She had been still long enough to be forgotten, and her suddenness brought heads around toward her and a brief, startled silence into which she said at Tom, “You’re the priory’s villein and my say has been asked in this matter on that account. My say is that angers are too high and hot now for decision to be made. By your reeve’s leave and yours—” with a nod to the jurors and in a quieter voice “—I say we should have a half hour’s pause before we finish.” Long enough to talk Tom Hulcote down and around, she hoped, and give Father Henry more chance at settling the other men.

  ‘A good thought,“ Perryn said quickly. And to the jurors, ”Yes?“ and to a man, they nodded in matching, swift agreement.

  Chapter 7

  The church emptied by fits and starts, in clots of people talking as they crowded out the door into the churchyard or else in little groups around the nave while waiting for the doorway to clear and their own chance to leave.

  Frevisse, in no hurry to be anywhere else, stayed where she was and noted Gilbey and his wife did, too, drawn together aside and turned away from everyone else, Elena’s hand resting on his arm as she said something to him too low for Frevisse to hear. No one approached them, but the several men coming Tom Hulcote’s way were headed off by Father Henry who, with his arms laid across several shoulders and a hand stretched to grip someone’s tunic, turned them aside and toward the door, talking cheerily at them while Father Edmund closed on Tom.

  Mary was there first, holding on to her lover’s arm, standing on tiptoe to say something in his ear. Frevisse, unable to hear past Perryn talking with the jurors, watched as Father Edmund said something to them both that made Tom go sullen, tuck in his chin, and glower at the priest while Mary faced Father Edmund with her chin up and her little mouth in an angry pout, bringing Frevisse to the uncharitable thought that she had better make the most of her prettiness while it lasted, because there looked to be little else to recommend her.

  But then, from what was said of her, making the most of her prettiness was exactly what she had been doing with Tom Hulcote.

  That thought decided Frevisse that she had best do something else than stand here being unkind about Mary Woderove. Sister Thomasine was still standing against the wall beyond the font with lowered eyes and hands folded into her opposite sleeves while the last of the onlookers crowded out the door, and Frevisse moved to go to her but saw Father Henry turn from herding his men out the door, whatever grievance they had been going to share with Tom Hulcote forgotten for now because they were grinning as they went out, and cross toward Sister Thomasine. Not needed there, Frevisse joined Perryn, just finished with the jurors. Gilbey and Elena were going away down the nave toward the door, the jurors trailing after them, and Frevisse and Perryn followed, leaving Father Edmund still in talk with Tom and Mary, saying to them with patient insistence, “Consider. One reason for not making threats is that now, if anything happens in the least way to Simon or Gilbey, you’ll be the first one men will look to for the trouble.”

  Beside her, Perryn made a soft snorting sound that told he had overheard, too, and quietly, for only the two of them to hear, Frevisse asked, “What do you think you’ll decide about the holding when all’s said and done?”

  ‘All’s as said and done as I need for it to be,“ Perryn answered, a tight edge of anger under his words, and for the first time Frevisse realized that, for all that the reeve kept a quiet outside, he would rouse if there was cause enough. ”Unless you’ve strong word against it, the jurors and I agree the holding should be kept in Lord Loveil’s hands for now, with Master Spencer’s leave when he’s been advised of how things stand. It means I’ll have to see to the hire of men to work it for the while and that’s not to the good but better than otherwise at present.“

  From the little liking she had for Mary or Tom or Gilbey, Frevisse had nothing to say against that, but, “Mayhap someone else will offer for it.”

  Perryn shook his head regretfully. “Not so long as it’s a quarreling point ‘tween Gilbey and Tom. There’s none wants to be caught there.”

  Frevisse could see why. She little liked being there herself, even knowing that in a while she would walk away from it. “But Mary will have the profit from the crops this year?”

  ‘Oh, aye. She’ll not be done out of what’s rightfully hers, though that won’t be the way she tells it.“

  They were to the church door now. Past Father Henry and Sister Thomasine going out ahead of them, Frevisse could see the small rain had finished while they were inside and the sun was making a watery-yellow attempt to burn through the clouds.

  ‘Uh,“ said Perryn as a moist, heavy heat met them beyond the church porch, and Frevisse felt the same, on the instant too aware of her layers of clothing and clo
se-fitted wimple. Already among the village women scattered across the churchyard in talk and with an eye to their children playing among the grave mounds some had slipped off their wimples and were settling their veils or kerchiefs over their hair as loosely as when they worked in the fields.

  ‘Good for the last of the haying, though,“ Perryn said.

  And if they could be at it tomorrow, they might well finish soon enough to have a rest between haying’s hard, long labor and the harder, longer one of harvest.

  Frevisse made a small prayer for God’s blessing and to St. Dorothy for abundance, then asked, “What was that about between Walter Hopper and Hamon whatever-his-name?”

  Perryn rumbled a deep, brief laugh. “That was thinking ahead on Walter’s part, that was. The thing is, he holds land enough that his workdays to the priory add up, and most years he has to hire a man or more to work some of them for him while he sees to his own land. In this dealing with Hamon, he gambled last autumn that the bad weather would change this year, knowing that if it did, there’d be out-of-the-ordinary high wages to be paid for anyone he needed to hire.”

  ‘Ah,“ Frevisse said, understanding. ”He therefore stood surety for this Hamon’s debt, certain he’d not be able to repay, and now will have him to work for no wages at all.“

  ‘Instead of having to bargain for others at rising prices, aye. Mind you, it’s no great cheat for Hamon, all considered. Walter will feed him along the way and Walter feeds well, and Hamon will be no shorter of money at the end than he would have been if he was hiring out on his own since he spends whatever he gets as fast as he gets it, at the alehouse here and on worse in Banbury.“

  ‘He’s a troublemaker?“ Frevisse asked.

  ‘Hamon? Nay, except what he makes for himself. He’s not yet learned and never will, I doubt, that it’s not play that holds life together but work. That makes him fair useless here, where most everything is work. Eh, well, that’s what the rest of us are here for, I sometimes think. To see to such as can’t see to themselves.“

  One of the jurors came up on his other side then, wanting to speak with him. Perryn asked her pardon and drew aside and, glad of the chance to gather herself and her thoughts, Frevisse looked away, over the low church wall at the field beyond it, flowing away in waist-high green grain toward the distant woodshore’s darker band of forest. It was one of the three great fields around the village, each laid out in its own patterning of strips ploughed this way and that with how the land lay and planted or left fallow or set to hay turn and turn and turn about, year by year by year. They stretched out on all sides of the village, laced through with paths for workers going out and coming in and with wider ways for hay wains and harvest carts, with sometimes a tree left standing in a grassy balk, its shade somewhere for folk to sit through the midmorning and afternoon rest times and almost inevitably the tree was large—save here and there where some past giant had gone down with age or in a storm and been replaced by a stripling now no more than maybe half a century old— thick-trunked, the crowns of leaves widespread, their shade familiar to uncounted and mostly forgotten—even their graves in the churchyard replaced by newer ones— generations of Prior Byfield folk.

  No one held all of any but almost everyone in the village held some of each, and there was meadow, too, for grazing cattle along the stream in the low places that too often flooded with the spring and autumn rains to be worth planting; and rough pasture beyond the fields, poorer soil cleared by men in want of more land before the Great Death of almost a hundred years ago had made such a dearth of people that there was, even now, no longer need to plough or plant those acres anymore. And of course on a green hillock well out of the village the windmill for grinding of the village’s grain spread its sailed arms against the sky. And downstream was the marsh with its rushes for so many uses, and here and there a hedgerow, and the road that ran through the village and away to north and south and places for the most part too far away to be bothered over by Prior Byfield folk. But it was the fields that were Prior Byfield’s life. If there was to be food in the village, then month in, month out, the fields had to be ploughed, harrowed, seeded, tended, harvested, ploughed again, harrowed again, seeded, tended… year around to year, no end to it, come what may, if Prior Byfield was to live.

  Knowing that, Frevisse could only wonder how had it been for Simon Perryn and the others these past three years of ill weather. To watch their hoped-for harvests rot in the fields and then live with the hunger that came afterwards, and everything to do again—the ploughing, harrowing, seeding—days into weeks into months of work with no surety that the next year would be any better.

  The field of grain beyond the churchyard wall, only weeks away from ripeness, gave evidence of their courage and hope that they would win their gamble this year at least.

  Domina Elisabeth had had the right of it, Frevisse thought—and not about Sister Thomasine alone. Her own prayers would hereafter have a different weight to them, now that the village folk had names and faces for her.

  She looked for Sister Thomasine and found her drawn aside into the lee of the church porch, alone again and in no seeming distress. When Frevisse approached her, she looked up calmly enough, and asked, “Is it settled?”

  ‘The reeve and jurors have decided to keep the holding in Lord Lovell’‘s hands for the time being, rather than give it to either man,“ Frevisse answered; and then did not resist asking, ”What do you think of it all?“

  ‘Of it all?“ Sister Thomasine asked, puzzled.

  Frevisse made a small gesture to the gathered clumps of people scattered around the churchyard. “Of all this. Of everyone.”

  With the slightest of thoughtful frowns, Sister Thomasine looked around at the clusters of men and women, all of them busy in talk, and the children everywhere, most of the older ones playing at some kind of walking-tag among their elders, just short of running so no one could say at them, “Don’t run,” but managing to annoy their elders with it anyway while the younger ones were mostly, oddly enough, keeping with their mothers, sitting on the grass beside them or leaning against them, their mothers’ hands absently resting on heads or shoulders or patting at fretful ones wanting to be heeded or go home. Frevisse only wished someone would take Mary Woderove home. She was near the wall beside the gateway pentice, being talked to by Anne, Perryn’s wife, and three other women, and though she seemed quieted out of her anger, she was standing with her head down, refusing to look at them. Anne’s younger boy was there, too, pushing restlessly against his mother, scratching behind one ear at some idle itch, although his brother and Dickon had found a perch further along the wall with some other boys who were listening wide-eared to Father Edmund and Father Henry talking again with Tom Hulcote and some other men. Faced with both priests, they were all subdued enough, though Tom kept shaking his head again and again against whatever was being said at him.

  Sister Thomasine sighed and turned her mild gaze back to Frevisse, the slight frown softened to puzzlement as she said gently, “I don’t see why so many choose to make such trouble for themselves, to care so much for worldly things that at the end all come to nothing. Why care so much for things that always end, when there’s God instead?”

  It was what a nun, a bride of Christ, should say, but Frevisse knew Sister Thomasine well enough to know that the should and ought that guarded and guided most people’s tongues had nothing to do with her answer. She truly did not see what there was in the World that could possibly be preferred to God.

  Frevisse had made the same choice, had given her life over to God and prayer, but knew she had carried with her into her nun’s life an understanding of the other choices and why people made them. She was unsure— and unsettled by her unsurety—whether Sister Thomasine’s lack of that understanding was a weakness or a strength.

  The clot of men around Tom Hulcote was breaking up, dispersing at the priests’ urging, Frevisse guessed, with Father Edmund keeping a hand on Tom’s shoulder and going with him towa
rd Mary, still among the women, while Father Henry came toward Frevisse and Sister Thomasine with half his heed still on Tom’s friends, watching to be sure they wandered off rather than clustered into talk again. As he joined them, Frevisse asked, “Did you talk him out of his anger?”

  ‘I don’t know. Our best hope is that the worst of it is past. But Tom is as much hurt as angered over it, and the sore of the hurt will keep rubbing the anger awake, I’m afraid. He wants very much to have Mary Woderove to wife.“

  ‘They could marry, even without the holding,“ Frevisse said.

  ‘They neither of them want to live that poorly, I fear,“ Father Henry said gravely.

  Frevisse was saved from struggling to hold back from her answer to that by a shout, “Hai! Look!” from one of the boys atop the wall that turned heads first toward him and then where he was pointing, away toward a rider leading a packhorse just coming into view from the Banbury road beyond the priest’s house.

  There was no mistaking Otes, the Banbury carrier. Frevisse had had dealings with him when she was hosteler and again lately as the priory’s cellarer, because he came this way every few weeks on his rounds, carrying letters sometimes, and bringing things ordered by those lacking time or else the wish to go all the way to Banbury market for something not to be had otherwise—needles, say, or spices—and taking orders for things to be brought next time he came. Old Bet, the dun mare he rode, and Splotch, his strong-backed, brown-and-white spotted packhorse, were as well known as he was, and children were tearing off handfuls of the rich churchyard grass before running to meet him. His usual place was likely the village alehouse or else the oak tree on the green, but since most of the village looked to be gathered here, he turned churchward, to draw rein at the gateway, returning greetings but not so cheerfully as Frevisse was used to seeing him, his eyes running among the folk gathering to him until he found out Mary Woderove and said to her over the heads between them, with a twitch of his head toward his pack-horse, burdened with the usual packs and hampers on either side but between them this time a wooden box maybe two feet long, barely a foot wide or deep, “It’s your husband, Mary. I’ve brought him home.”