Sins of the Blood

by Margaret Frazer

  "You drank too much last night," Master Wyndford snapped. "You always drink too much."

  "I don't," Nicol said in the flat voice of someone who’s said the same too many times and yet would not give up the argument. “You and I, we sat there at the table after supper and drank together last night. I filled my cup twice and no more, and it would take stronger ale than that to get me drunk on two cups. I wasn't even half way to drunk.”

  But what if he had been just drunk enough to go out looking for the man who was his rival in both work and love? Frevisse thought. What if Simon and Elyn were not fled after all? What if Nicol had found them together...?

  Hoping to draw him on to say more of the evening, she said, her voice carefully light, “It was so warm last night. Sleeping did not come easy for those of us who went straight up to bed before the evening cooled.”

  Nicol, already half swung away from his father and her, stopped, stayed standing oddly where he was a moment longer with hand still to his head and frowning at the floor as if tracking a fugitive thought across the paving stones, before he lowered his hand, turned back toward his father, and said slowly, "Last night. I woke up from some bad dream. I don't know what time it was, but I wanted a drink, something to settle my stomach. I went down to the kitchen."

  Sharp with surprise, his father said, "You went downstairs?" Then with disgust, "You didn't. I never heard you. You dreamed it."

  "No. I did. I was awake. I don't know where you were..."

  "In bed. Asleep and not drunk."

  "...but you'd left the shutter open. There was moonlight in the room."

  "So I forgot to close it," Master Wyndford said impatiently at him. "That happens. Best you give up ale altogether if it sets you to muttering through the next day like this. Get back to work."

  Nicol lifted and twisted his shoulders, shaking his father's words away, intent on whatever he was remembering. "I could see the room in the moonlight and there were..." He stopped, then said slowly, as if only beginning to be sure of what he wanted to say. "There were three cups on the table."

  "There weren't any three cups,” Master Wyndford said impatiently.

  Frevisse went very still, willing the son and father to forget she was there as Nicol said more strongly, seeming to take firmer hold on the thought, "I saw three cups there."

  "You were drunk. There were no cups.”

  "I wasn't drunk. I wasn't dreaming. Why were there three cups? I put my own away when I’d finished. I know that. I put it back on its shelf and went to bed. 'Put away now and you'll not need do it later.' That's what Mother beat into me when I was little. She's three years dead but I still do it. Sober or half-drunk, I always put away, and last night I wasn't even half-drunk. I was..." He put a hand to his head again, his uncertainty returning. "I was something, but I wasn't drunk."

  "You were drunk," Master Wyndford said flatly. "And I'd not say you were sober now. Best you get back–"

  Nicol lowered his hand, stared at his father. "They were there last night, weren't they?"

  "Nobody was there," Master Wyndford said, sounding angry and uneasy together. "You went to bed drunk. You dreamt things. That's all."

  "I wasn't drunk!" Nicol shouted. He took a step toward his father, his uncertainty gone suddenly to anger of his own. "You put something in my ale, didn't you? Whatever it is you take when the pain is too bad. The draught that lets you sleep when you can't otherwise. You put that in my ale!"

  "You're a fool. You–"

  "So I'd be asleep when Simon and Elyn came to see you.” With rising anger, he crashed onward, into the same thought clutching Frevisse. “Simon and Elyn were there last night, weren't they?” he demanded. “That's why there were the three cups on the table. Because Simon and Elyn–"

  "You're off your head!" his father said back at him. "I haven't enough of my dose that I'd waste any of it on your thick head for anything, and they weren't there last night!"

  "You knew they were coming! You wanted me out of the way! You–"

  "I pray your pardon," said Alice, cold and precise on every word. "Is this about my tomb? Because otherwise I can see no reason for such shouting in a church."

  She had come in by the far door, must have crossed the nave at an angle that kept her hidden beyond the pillar nearest where they stood. Not by design, surely – she was lady here, with no need not to be seen – but it made her appearance sudden, and both men spun to face her, bending in hurried bows. Frevisse turned, too, curtsying but saying with very false calm while she did, "It seems Elyn and Simon talked with Master Wyndford last night. Now he's going to tell us why."

  Not so willing to accuse a nun of lying as he was his son of drunkenness, Master Wyndford stared, trapped and speechless, from her to Lady Alice and past her to the three of her ladies who had followed after her. When he did not promptly answer, Alice said crisply, "Well, Master Wyndford? I came to say I was willing to let your son work on my angels. Now I won't say it until I've heard more about this. You talked with Elyn and Simon last night, my cousin says."

  Stiffly, more to the nearest pillar than to her, Master Wyndford said, "Yes, my lady."

  "And yet you didn't see fit to say so when I was here earlier this morning."

  "No, my lady." Still to the pillar.

  Seeing Alice's displeasure growing, Frevisse put in, still feigning a calm she no longer felt, "What did they come to see you about?"

  Master Wyndford gave her a look as black as any he had had for his son and answered sullenly, "About being married."

  "And to tell you they were running off," Alice said.

  "No." Master Wyndford heaved a breath far too heavy to be called a sigh. "They didn't say anything about running off. They wanted to talk about marrying. How soon I thought they could do it and all. I told them not to be fools. They went away. That was all."

  "They said nothing about leaving?" Alice pressed.

  "Nothing," Master Wyndford said bitterly. "We talked and then they went away." His face and voice darkened with deep-set grief and long-nurtured rage. "I told Simon that marriage would rob him of everything, the way it robbed me. I told her that if she loved him, she'd let him go. But that wasn't what they wanted to hear. They didn't listen. They would never have listened."

  "And so you poisoned them," Frevisse said quietly.

  Master Wyndford jerked his head around to stare at her, along with everyone else.

  "While they sat there, trusting you," Frevisse said, her voice hardening, "you poisoned them. And while you were ridding yourself of their bodies, Nicol came downstairs and saw the cups on the table."

  "No!" Master Wyndford protested fiercely.

  But Nicol, his stare gone from Frevisse to his father, said wonderingly, "You dosed me enough to make me sleep. So I wouldn't know they'd been there. Then you gave them more. You gave them enough to kill them." The thought took hold on him, going past guess into belief, and with an on-rush of anger he yelled, "You killed them!”

  “No!” Master Wyndford denied as fiercely as before.

  Alice made to say something. Frevisse stopped her with a small gesture and slight shake of the head as Nicol cried out, “I can see you killing her. You hate women because of Mother. But Simon? How could you kill Simon? Of all people, you love him!"

  "I couldn't!" Master Wyndford cried back at him. "I didn't! I..." But his eyes were going from Nicol to Frevisse to Alice to Nicol again, and he must have seen their growing certainty and arrayed anger, and the same weakness that had betrayed him to ruin by a vile-humoured wife betrayed him now. Defiance and denial went out of him, turned only into weak assertion and a pleading that they understand with, "I didn't kill them. Death... Death is so empty. There's nothing there when someone is dead. I couldn't bear... I couldn't see Simon that way. I gave them sleep, that's all. With my syrup of poppies. I gave them sleep. That's all I did."

  "Where are they?" Frevisse asked.

  Master Wyndford shook his head, refusing that. "They're sleeping. Leave them.
They'll never know. They'll sleep away and never find out all the ugliness that comes afterward, never have to live through all the years after this love they think they're in is gone. They'll just sleep. They'll just..." A man who had worked more with his hands than words through his life, he gestured outward with his hands, groping for words, needing to make someone, anyone, understand. "They'll sleep and go free and never know..."

  Frevisse grabbed him by one wrist and wrenched his hand over to have clear look at what she had glimpsed as he gestured. Across his palm the flesh was scraped red and raw.

  As Master Wyndford jerked loose from her, Nicol grabbed him by his other wrist, dragged his arm out, fighting him for it, forcing his hand palm-upward. The same fresh wound was there, too, and Nicol said as if only half-believing it, "Rope-burn!" And together, in the same rush of understanding, he and Frevisse looked toward the crane with its ropes and pulleys still straddling Lady Alice's tomb; and Frevisse with the horror of certainty said, "No," as Nicol flung his father's hand away from him and bolted toward the gap in the wall to the stone-yard, yelling, "I need men here! All of you! Hurry!"

  For Master Wyndford, working alone and in the dark last night, the work of lifting the stone slab with its alabaster figure from its place atop the tomb chest must have been brutal work, and lowering it into place again no easier, the pulley-ropes leaving raw testament of that on his hands.

  The workmen who came at Nicol's call made quicker business of it, and when the slab was lifted and swung aside, Simon and Elyn were there, still sleeping. A little longer and they would have slept away to death, smothered in the sealed darkness without ever – if God were merciful – rousing.

  If the summer night had been longer, so that Master Wyndford could have set to his work at the tomb sooner; or if Frevisse had been less willing to question the twists in what at first seemed straight; or Nicol had refused his uncertain, half-dreamed memory of something that seemed to make no sense, that was the end to which they would have come.

  Instead, they were lifted out of the stone darkness and carried from the church, into sunlight and wide air and life again.

  And Master Wyndford stood in the church's stone-pillared shadows, tears sliding down his face, and Nicol went to him, leaving Simon and Elyn to the exclaims and care of Alice's women, and put an arm around his shoulders and stood with him, waiting for what would come next; and Alice, once she had given all the necessary orders, came to Frevisse, still standing beside the angels, and said softly, "They likely wouldn't have been found until the time came to bury me there. Thank you."

  Frevisse, her eyes on the stone-carved angels smiling as they gazed into eternity, said softly back to her, "And now you shall have the rest of your angels."

  "And thank you for that, too," said Alice.

  A Guided Tour of St. Frideswide – By Margaret Frazer

  Prior Byfield

  Other Properties and Income of St. Frideswide

  The Outer Yard

  The Steward's Duties

  The Inner Gateway and Priest's Chamber

  The Cloister

  Prioress' Rooms

  Guest Parlors and Smaller Chambers

  Infirmary Wing

  Refectory and Kitchen

  Necessarium and Slype

  Private Orchard

  Warming Room

  Dormitory

  Sacristy

  Scribal Stalls

  Church

  Bibliography

  * * * * *

  Fairly early in the growth of monastic culture in medieval Europe, monasteries and nunneries (terms interchanged with disconcerting ease at the time) took on a reasonably standardized form. There was a church, with a cloister walk (usually but not necessarily square) against one outer wall of the church (usually the south but not invariably). The walk would be covered and go around an open garth. On the three sides of the walk away from the church would be ranged the rooms necessary for the monks’ or nuns’ daily living. All of these elements would vary in size and elaboration depending on the monastery’s means or ambition. Outside this enclosed cloister that was supposed to contain the nuns’ and monks’ daily lives, there were all the necessary worldly matters meant to sustain the monastery’s inner life, seen to by people employed or owned by the monastery to that end.

  All of this can be readily gathered from any number of books about medieval monasteries – usually with standardized plans that give a good general idea of how they were laid out but not necessarily reveal the highly variable reality there actually was. One of the most readily found online is that of St. Gall which – while wonderful – is of an extremely wealthy monastery, not typical of smaller, far less wealthy places such as St. Frideswide’s.

  On a similar note, medieval records are full of details concerning monasteries and nunneries that were not managed well and fell into all manner of difficulties (both monetary and moral). It should be remembered that, then as now, it’s troubled places and people who make the news, not the majority of us who scrape along well enough and peaceably from day to day. (Or decade to decade, if we’re truly fortunate.) So although reading studies of monasteries may lead you to think that all of them were in constant trouble all of the time, remember the records that scholars are culling from are generally (1) dealing with only the places where things went wrong, and (2) cover several centuries, which thins down the overall impact if you think about it.

  And so we turn to St. Frideswide’s in rural northern Oxfordshire. Imaginary, yes, but fully realized as an ordinary place much like many others common across England in both rural and urban settings by the 1400s. A wealthy widow founded it in the 1300s, saw to its beginning, and endowed it with lands and other income to sustain it – alas, not so fully as she intended to do before she died. As long as the nuns manage their resources well, however, St. Frideswide is comfortably prosperous, its holdings sufficient for its needs although unlikely ever to make it wealthy to the point of luxury. Much of its income derives from what it owns in and around the neighboring village of Prior Byfield.

  Prior Byfield

  As the village thrives, so does St. Frideswide’s. If the nuns’ church is the heart of the nunnery, so the village may be thought of as the lifeblood that helps to sustain that heart. Far older than the nunnery, over the centuries the village has grown in the usual (but not universal; every village is shaped by its own particular circumstances) pattern, with most of the houses laid out side by side down either side of the roads leading into and out of it and around a long, grassy, open space in its middle, shared in common by the villagers and used not only for village gatherings but for grazing the villagers’ smaller livestock, such as milch goats and geese, tended to by children too small for heavier work. The geese in particular appreciate the shallow pond at one end of the green that is likewise useful for watering the draft oxen and horses at the end of workdays, saving the labor of drawing their water bucketful by bucketful from the village well, also on the green, that serves as the water supply for the whole village. Women whose houses are closest to the well are considered very fortunate, saved those daily extra steps in fetching water home.

  Also on the green is a plain wooden cross standing on a wide stone base near the far end from the pond, close to the village’s church at the head of the green. The church is the only stone-built building in Prior Byfield and surely the oldest but of no great size. A covered porch protects the door but otherwise the church is a plain rectangle, without side aisles or chapels, and its roof is simple timber and wood shingles, but there is a fine-carved wooden screen between the nave and chancel, its paint kept fresh by any villager with the skill, while ancient paintings of biblical stories and saints on the walls are left untouched, no one claiming sufficient skill for them. The church is dedicated to Saints Peter and Chad, but St. Chad, being local – as it were – tends to take precedence in the villagers’ minds.

  The village houses are timber-framed, with plastered in-filling of wattle-and-daub between the timb
ers. The roofs are thickly thatched. The windows are – as implied by the name – wind-holes, but besides the wooden shutters to close out the worst weather more prosperous folk can cover theirs with stretched waxed linen to allow in light while lessening draughts. (Glass has come into use by wealthy people in major towns, but is far from affordable by the lesser folk of Prior Byfield.) As with everything else in life, there are better houses and worse ones, depending on the income and efforts of their owners, but the basic house, of whatever size, is rectangular. Individual length and width vary, but floors are generally of dirt, sometimes kept so well-swept that they become concave and in some seasons rush-covered against the cold and draughts. Good housekeepers change the rushes regularly to keep their homes fresh; poor housekeepers may let things become matted, filthy masses. An open hearth is used for cooking and warmth, with the high-pitched roof giving space for the smoke to gather before seeping out through the thatch, which serves to discourage any vermin – insect or avian – up there. There may be a loft or partial loft for storage and extra living space, with sometimes the space below it enclosed from the main houseplace to make a separate room, but the old pattern of sharing living space with livestock is passing in this part of the country at least; the beasts tend to have their own byres or sheds now. This trend is aided by the fact that their added warmth to a houseplace is no longer needed, now that chimneyed fireplaces – once only used by the wealthy – are coming into being in some of the more prosperous ordinary houses, which also allows for former lofts to become full upper floors. Still, families generally still sleep with great awareness of each other in their home’s single or barely divided living space. Furnishings are minimal – stools, benches, a table, beds; chests for keeping more costly things; wall-poles for hanging cloaks and clothing; pots, a kettle, and a minimum of other things for cooking. More prosperous folk will have more; less prosperous folk will have less.

  Rather than shoulder to shoulder, as buildings are in the heart of towns, each house here sits on its own messuage – its allotment of land. Even the smallest messuage will have sufficient space for at least a small garden to grow fresh vegetables and herbs in season while villagers work toward the harvest. Larger holdings will have larger gardens, perhaps fruit trees, and a byre or byres for any livestock the householder may own, from poultry to pigs, sheep, cows, or even (for the quite well-off) draft animals. Not only are the animals valuable in themselves, but their manure is prized for spreading on the fields, since the necessity to maintain and revitalize the soil is well-understood.