“Angels and ministers of faith, defend us,” Sir John breathed.
Frevisse in her mind echoed him, riveted to her place by the same shock felt by them all. It was Dame Claire, coming unseen from the shadows of the hall, who moved past them toward the doorway, saying sharply, “She’s in pain. Are you deaf?”
Behind her, forms stirred, jerked out of their sleep, and began to rise before they even knew why they were awake. Frevisse’s own shock had been broken by Dame Claire. Quickly she followed her, saying over her shoulder to Sir John and Lady Isobel, “We’ll see to this. Best you stay out of it. Thomasine–”
But Thomasine was already following Dame Claire. It was the woman Maryon at her elbow, and behind her Robert Fenner. The choking, stuttered cries from Lady Ermentrude broke and began again, and Frevisse whirled away into the room. Maryon followed, and Robert behind her slammed the door against anyone else who might come to gawk.
Lady Ermentrude was no longer lying feebly under her blankets but flinging from side to side on the bed, thrashing against her own strangled, croaking screams. Her body jerked in rhythm to them, and her bulging eyes stared frantically at nothing.
Dame Claire, with a tiny vial in one hand, cried out to anyone, “We have to hold her! I can’t help her like this!”
Robert, already moving, crossed the room to fling himself over the bed, pinning Lady Ermentrude’s legs flat beneath his body. She writhed, but he was too heavy for her to throw off. Frevisse managed to lay hold of her shoulders while Maryon grabbed at her arms. Between them they forced her down flat. She heaved under their hold, writhing and thrusting with strength she should not have had, still crying out. Her eyes were wild and unfocused with pain, and she was fighting not them but whatever pain was driving her as tears ran down her face, smearing into her tangled hair.
“Hold her!” Dame Claire pleaded, the vial still in her hand, held uselessly out of reach of Lady Ermentrude’s flinging head. “If I can quiet her with this... !”
They held, but there was no holding her still, until quite abruptly she arched her body upward to what seemed a breaking point under the grip. She stretched out in a helpless spasm, her mouth open in a silent scream. Then she collapsed, rag-limp and gasping, staring upward at the ceiling, all the struggle gone out of her.
They waited. She did not move except for her breast’s rapid rise and fall. The vial now unneeded, Dame Claire said softly, “Let her go. Slowly. As careful as you may.”
Carefully, poised to grab her again if need be, Frevisse and Maryon obeyed. Robert, as slowly and cautiously, rose, holding his breath until he was safely clear. Across the room the door began to open. Dame Claire glanced at Frevisse and shook her head. With an agreeing nod, Frevisse backed hurriedly away and went to keep out whoever was meaning to come in.
“Not now,” she whispered urgently, even before she saw it was Sir John.
His face all creased with anxiety, he tried to look past her into the room. “Is she...”
As he hesitated over a choice of words, Frevisse answered quickly, understanding. “She’s alive. It was another fit came on her but she’s quieted, sooner than before. She may be...”
“Dame Frevisse!” Dame Claire’s voice was sharp with alarm and urgency, two things she rarely showed.
Forgetting Sir John, Frevisse rushed back to her.
“Her breathing is failing. And she’s gone cold again. Feel her.”
Frevisse felt Lady Ermentrude’s face. It was still flushed with her panic, but was cold as hung meat. Her breathing, which should have been steadying, was coming in small heaves, and her whole body moved as if to help her take each breath. At Frevisse’s touch, her eyes swiveled toward her, pupils spread so wide the eyes seemed black with terror.
“Father Henry,” Frevisse said. “We need Father Henry.”
“I’m here,” the priest said behind her, his box in his hands. Dame Claire surrendered her place to him, and by that single gesture Frevisse understood that there was no earthly thing left to do for Lady Ermentrude. Whatever was happening was now God’s business, with Father Henry as his intermediary.
Maryon, stricken and white with shock, had already withdrawn to the door. Sir John still stood there, with a crowd of faces behind him. Frevisse belatedly looked for Thomasine and saw her on her knees at the prie-dieu, her face pressed against her prayer-rigid hands, her lips moving silently. Robert Fenner moved as if to go toward her, but Frevisse’s hand on his arm stopped him. Prayers were the most needed things now, certainly not his attention. He resisted, but at her subtle pull he retreated with her and Dame Claire to join the others at the door.
They waited, all of them and the crowding servants. For a mercy there was now no sign of Lady Isobel; Sir John, for the little that Frevisse was aware of him, seemed oddly incomplete without her. But her attention was drawn, as was everyone else’s, to Father Henry. She heard his hurried words and the struggle of Lady Ermentrude’s breathing. They were the only sounds in the room until Father Henry’s words of Last Unction ran out, and then there was only Lady Ermentrude’s breathing, until it caught and strangled to a stop. Her hands lifted, moved as if she meant to sign herself, or to seek for air no longer there, then were flung outward as her eyes rolled back and her body arched and stiffened one final time. Father Henry caught her hands and held them, but even as he did, all of her collapsed, her body falling loose and empty, her head rolling sideways, her hands no more than lifeless rags between his own.
In the utter stillness afterward, Frevisse knew that Thomasine had turned from the prie-dieu to stare as all the rest of them were staring. And it was Thomasine who whispered, even her softness loud in the stillness, “In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum eium.”
Into your hands, O Lord, we commend her spirit.
And if ever a soul was dependent on God’s mercy to enter Heaven, surely Lady Ermentrude’s was, thought Frevisse.
Chapter Seven
There was quiet in the church now that the bell had ceased its tolling. The air still seemed to tremble slightly, remembering the fifty-seven slow strokes in memory of every year of Lady Ermentrude’s life, but faintly and fading now. As memories of Lady Ermentrude would fade away in time, Thomasine thought, fade away and not matter anymore.
But they mattered now, lying sickly between her thoughts and her praying, even here in her best place, on the step below St. Frideswide’s altar, where almost always she could lose herself in prayers and not think of the stone hurting her knees or the thinness of her hands clinging together or the two coffins waiting on their biers behind her.
She had helped wash and ready Lady Ermentrude’s body for its shroud and coffin, had followed it across the yard and seen it set beside Martha Hayward’s, and been given leave, after Prime, to remain in prayer for their souls. But the prayers she wanted seemed to be nowhere in her, only the thought of Lady Ermentrude’s and Martha’s bodies lying behind her, waiting for their people to come and take them to their final places. Lady Ermentrude would go to her own lordship’s church and a grave beside the high altar, to rest there under a carved stone image of herself until Last Judgment Day. Martha Hayward would lie in Banbury churchyard, where she would molder into bones to be dug up and put with other moldered bones in a charnel house, to make way for someone else’s burying. They were both dead and in need of her prayers, and no prayers would come, only the thought of how suddenly dead they had been.
Their dying had had nothing easy in it; even completed death had failed to soften the engraved pain of Lady Ermentrude’s harsh features before the shroud covered it. Surely a soul forced from its body by such an end desperately needed praying for, and Thomasine knew it. But the prayers would not come, not for her own sake or Lady Ermentrude’s or Martha’s. Only thoughts.
Of Lady Ermentrude’s dying, of the small black creeping thing reaching out – from Hell? – toward her...
A hand touched Thomasine’s shoulder. With a gasping shriek, she lunged forward to scrape with both han
ds at the base of the altar, then jerked her head around to find Dame Frevisse standing over her, come quietly in soft-soled shoes.
* * * * *
Unseemly amusement twitched at the corners of Frevisse’s mouth before she could control it. She knew Thomasine saw it but could say nothing to her, only gestured wordlessly for her to come. For a moment Thomasine seemed near to refusing, resentment and less readable things showing in her face. Then her expression blanked almost perfectly over whatever she was feeling, and she came away from the altar, to follow Frevisse across the church to the side door into the cloister.
Frevisse carefully kept from looking at her, wanting her to have time to recover the dignity she had lost in her panicked lunge. Frevisse remembered how painfully necessary and difficult dignity had been for herself when she was very young. That she had consciously ceased being very young years before she was Thomasine’s age did not change Thomasine’s need.
So because she was not looking at her, Frevisse was unprepared for Thomasine’s sudden, great sob as they stepped out into the cloister walk. It seemed to come from deep within the girl’s breast, a burden too much to bear, crumpling her down onto the bench there, her face buried in her hands. Aware that sympathy might only make it worse, Frevisse said firmly, “What is it, child, grief for your aunt, or something that can be helped?”
Thomasine turned up a teary face and cried out, “Two small weeks! That’s all there are until I’m safe. She can’t touch me anymore!”
With more sleep or less fear behind her, she would never have said so much. And even so, the words were hardly anything at all, only more of Thomasine’s tedious, too-passionate desiring to be a nun, and Frevisse would have let them pass except for the sudden, terrified widening of Thomasine’s eyes as she realized what she had said.
Frevisse, with sudden suspicion, demanded, “Why are you so afraid of being taken away from here, Thomasine? Were you forced to come? Are you in danger if you leave? Is that it?”
Thomasine’s face, usually smooth with youth and studied holiness, so bland she seemed to have hardly any expression at all unless she was nervous or exalted in prayer, changed swiftly to a desperate smiling that was all lies. “I’m not afraid.” She shook her head vehemently. “No one forced me. Ever.”
The cloister walk was not the place for talking. Taking the matter literally in hand, Frevisse grasped Thomasine’s arm, pulled her to her feet, and took her along the cloister to the narrow passage between the church and the nuns’ common room. Called the slipe, it led from the cloister to the cemetery, and brief, urgently needed conversations were allowed there. In it, still keeping hold of Thomasine’s arm, Frevisse said, “Now, what exactly has you so frightened?”
Thomasine’s gaze went everywhere except Frevisse’s face, and she blurted out with a sharp confusion of fear and desperation, “I never said I was afraid. I never did!”
Frevisse shook her arm. “Are you here by fraud or force? By threats or trickery? What are you fearing?”
Thomasine clasped her hands prayerfully and cried, “None of that. I want to be here! I’ve wanted it all my life!”
“But there’s a reason you could be forbidden your final vows and Lady Ermentrude knew it? If there is, you have to tell someone. Domina Edith or Father Henry or Dame Perpetua–”
“There isn’t any! I swear it!”
Meaning to have the truth from her, Frevisse badgered relentlessly, “You know that taking your vows falsely is a sin as great as apostasy itself?”
Thomasine had never seemed to have any courage in her, had always seemed to be all nerves and prayers, but at that challenge she steadied as if struck. Straightening in Frevisse’s hold, she said, her voice high and light with strain, “I know it. I’d never falsely swear to God.”
“So there’s no falseness in your being here?”
“None.”
Not loosening her hold but more gently, Frevisse said, “But you’re afraid.”
Thomasine blinked on tears again, but fought them and said, “Yes. Will I be sent away for that?”
It was very clearly a question that had been hurting in her for a long, long while. Frevisse eased her hold and said carefully, “It depends on why you’re afraid. Can you tell me?”
Thomasine drew a deep, unhappy breath. “If I’m not allowed to stay, I’ll be married to someone and I can’t marry.”
“Because you secretly promised yourself to someone before you came here?” It was a stupid thing that girls sometimes did, plighting their troth secretly with someone unsuitable and then finding themselves bound for life no matter how they felt later. A promise of betrothal was, in the Church’s law, as binding as a marriage vow and, like the marriage vow, could only be sundered by complicated legal means. If Thomasine had sworn such a thing, she had no right to be in St. Frideswide’s.
But Thomasine, with shocked, wide eyes, vehemently shook her head. “Oh no, never anything like that! I would never, never, never promise myself to any man. I couldn’t!”
“But why?” The vehemence was as confusing as the girl’s fear.
Thomasine hung her head. “Babies.” She mumbled the word. “I’m afraid of having them.”
Nearly Frevisse laughed. And nearly said the obvious: That very many women were afraid of it. But for Thomasine it was clearly something beyond that reasonable fear. Frevisse held her amusement and waited. Thomasine touched a knuckle to one brimming eye and said tremulously, “I know how women die in childbirth. There was a servant at our manor. A big, strong woman, but she died when her baby was born. I heard her screaming. It was awful. And my sister. She’s told me how she nearly dies each time she has a baby and she doesn’t think she can have any more.”
“Thomasine...”
“I know,” Thomasine said quickly. “It’s all in God’s hands but–” She ducked her head and spoke to her toes, as if about a guilty secret. “With me it’s something more. It’s what the midwife said after my brother was born. I was there until they knew how hard it was going to be. Then they sent me out of the room, but I waited outside the door. They were all caring that it be a boy after only daughters, and it was a boy, and that was good. We didn’t know he was going to die almost right away. And my mother was never well afterwards. She died before the year was out. But it’s more than that.” Thomasine said it hastily, cutting off Frevisse’s half-formed reassurance. “It’s what the midwife said when she was leaving my mother, when we still thought everything was all right. She was saying to someone that it was my mother’s narrow hips that made it so killing-hard for her to give birth, and then she saw me standing there and said, ‘There’s another one will have it bad, and worse than her mother, belike, she’s so narrow through all her bones and not like to outgrow it.’” Even after years Thomasine had the woman’s words and their intonation. “And I never have,” she finished miserably.
Frevisse, looking at her, understood what the midwife had meant. Under the several layers and deliberate shapelessness of her novice’s gown, Thomasine was meager, thin all through herself and narrow in her hips. That was no sure sign childbearing would go ill with her; there was no sure way to tell with anyone until the moment came, but truly Thomasine believed it, had believed it for nearly half of her life.
Carefully, Frevisse said, “So you decided to become a nun and be safe.”
“Oh no! I was already wanting to be a nun. I swear I was. I’ve wanted it ever since I was a very, very little girl. But it seemed – what she said – it seemed it was God’s way of telling me that I was right. That I was meant to be a nun.” Thomasine’s earnestness faded to guilty sadness, and she whispered, “But I’m afraid of dying, too, the way my mother did, and in St. Frideswide’s I’m safe from it. If I have to leave, they’ll make me marry and he’ll want children and I’ll die. So I’ve tried so hard to be everything I had to be. But not just to keep from being put out!” She looked desperately at Frevisse. “I love God more than anything. I want to be here, truly I do. Only if Domina Ed
ith or the others know I’m so afraid, they maybe won’t believe me. And I want to stay, I don’t want to have to leave. Do you have to tell them?”
Her tears were falling freely now. Gently, wondering how Thomasine had ever come to think that to be a nun she had to have no other feelings except love of God, Frevisse said, “Thomasine, isn’t Dame Alys ranting in the kitchen a plain enough example of how far from holiness a nun can be and still belong here? No one is going to put you out because you’re afraid. We’re all of us here for more reasons than one, and for some of us the love of God is maybe the least of them. If only women who wanted nothing in life except to live in the cloister became nuns, there would be one small nunnery in all of England.”
She was watching Thomasine’s face and saw when she began to believe her.
Faintly, her eyes moist with tears, Thomasine asked, “Truly?”
“Truly. Why didn’t you ask Dame Perpetua? She would have told you.”
Thomasine looked down at her clasped hands. “Because you all think I’m so very good. I didn’t want anyone to know I’m not.”
So Thomasine knew what was said of her holiness. Dryly Frevisse said, “Goodness can be a very great burden, both to live with and to have.”
“Will you tell them?”
“That you’re not good?” She saw her intended humor miss Thomasine altogether and instead said quickly, “Thomasine, beyond all doubting you are meant to be a nun. No one is going to keep you from it, least of all any of us here. But you’ll have to tell Domina Edith.”
Thomasine’s lips trembled. “Must I?”
“You must, to free your own mind if nothing else. I promise you, she’ll not send you away. But you must tell her. If you don’t, I’ll have to, and that won’t be so well.”
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