7 The Prioress' Tale

by Frazer, Margaret

  “How long did you stay out after Sir Hugh went in?” she asked Benet.

  “I don’t know.” He was impatient now. “The moon wasn’t up and I wasn’t heeding the stars. Awhile.”

  “Did you see anyone else while you were out there?”

  “No. No one. Whoever did it must have gone in through some back way. Or come later.”

  “And you didn’t hear anything? No outcry? Nothing?”

  “No. We have to go.”

  She wanted to ask him if anyone had likely noticed when he returned to the hall but there seemed small point to it. Even if they had, they would likely have no more certainty about when it was than he had about when Sir Reynold and Sir Hugh had gone or Sir Hugh had come back. No one would have been turning an hourglass on it.

  She nodded that she was done and they went, leaving her standing there looking at the door that had not been barred last night, thinking on what she had learned so far and wishing she could see she was near to an answer. But she was not, and she should go, while there was chance to question Sir Hugh.

  Chapter 22

  Uneasy with dislike of everything that she was doing, Frevisse went up the stairs to Lady Eleanor’s room. Its door was shut, but the heavy wood was not enough to keep in Lady Eleanor’s angry voice and Frevisse paused with her hand raised to knock. She had never heard Lady Eleanor close to anger before, over anything, but in what sounded like a cold fury she was demanding, “And you’ll just go, like that, with everything undone? Is that all this has come to?”

  Sir Hugh’s answer was less clear, his voice low, hurried, but without obvious anger “… later… see that…”

  Frevisse knocked at the door. There was instantly silence but hardly a pause before Margrete opened it. Lady Eleanor and Sir Hugh stood facing each other near the foot of the bed. Across the room Joice and Lady Adela were seated at the window, each holding a dog and both looking toward the door with open relief. If they were there, then whatever Lady Eleanor and her son had been arguing over, it had not been murder, Frevisse thought. And was disconcerted at how easily the thought came.

  “Dame Frevisse,” Lady Eleanor said crisply. Her face, so pale when Frevisse last saw her, now had the bright flush of anger. “It’s good you’ve come. He means to take the men and go, now, today.”

  “He can’t go! None of them can!” The protest burst out before Frevisse could stop it.

  Less patiently than he had spoken to his mother, Sir Hugh said back, “I can. I’d better, unless you want more bloodshed here than there’s been already.”

  “Surely you can hold your men back from doing anything against the masons,” Frevisse said.

  “Hah!” Lady Eleanor exclaimed. “It’s not the masons I’d fear for if this lot of sword draggers went against them.”

  “Mother,” Sir Hugh said, tight-lipped with control. “If we’re here when this abbot comes—and my guess is that someone has talked too much and he’s coming in force, by what it says here—” He jerked up his hand with a paper that looked to have been a sealed letter but was open and unfolded now. “He’ll see too much, and if he does, he’ll likely try to keep us from leaving at all. I can’t afford to have him seeing things or keeping us here!”

  “Abbot?” Frevisse said, going toward them. “Which abbot? Lady Eleanor, does he mean our Abbot Gilberd?”

  “Yes,” Lady Eleanor answered. “Someone has stirred him up, it seems. The letter says he means to be here this afternoon at latest, and that letter is a nice balancing between giving word he’s coming and not leaving time for much to be done about it!”

  Frevisse turned on Sir Hugh. “How did you come by the letter? It surely wasn’t to you. When did it come?”

  “It came this morning. No, it’s for Alys. I took it from the messenger,” Sir Hugh said impatiently.

  “It wasn’t yours to take!”

  “She’ll have it in good time.”

  “She should have had it from the messenger’s hand! Unopened!”

  “She’ll have to settle at having it from mine,” he said coolly, and turned his attention deliberately away from her. “Mother, I haven’t time for this. I’ll let you know where we settle. It won’t be so good as here, but we’ll make do. This isn’t finished.”

  “Then you’re not calling off the Fenner matter. You’re only out of here for safety’s sake?” Lady Eleanor said.

  “Yes!” Sir Hugh’s patience was suddenly thin. “You don’t think there can be any calling off of it now, do you? After what Reynold’s done? Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t.”

  “But you don’t want to,” Lady Eleanor insisted.

  Unexpectedly Sir Hugh half laughed and leaned down to kiss Lady Eleanor on the forehead. “No,” he said, quietly certain. “I don’t want to. Not any more than you do. Set your mind to ease on that.”

  Lady Eleanor reached up and laid her hand along his cheek, smiling, saying fondly, “That’s my good son.” She patted him lightly, briskly, affectionately. “Then you’d best be off. If it were me, I’d choose a place and time to meet and send the men off by different ways. Don’t bother with taking more than you can carry yourselves. Carts are only a bother. The priory can use whatever you leave.”

  “Already considered and decided. Only I won’t tell you where we’ll be because then you can swear you don’t know.” He stepped back, took one of her hands, and kissed it. “You’ll hear from me.”

  He gave a brief bow of his head toward Lady Adela and Joice, another to Frevisse, and would have gone with no more than that, but Frevisse said, disbelieving she had understood, “You mean you’re taking your men and going? Now? Before anything has been settled over Sir Reynold’s murder?”

  Sir Hugh gave her a cold look. “You have it, my lady.”

  “But Sir Reynold’s murder…”

  “We’ll maybe find out who did it and we’ll maybe not. Right now it’s more important to have us away from here before your abbot comes.”

  “If you leave, it will be said you did it.”

  “If I stay, it may very well not matter whether I did it or not. If we’re kept here long enough for the Fenners to find us out, I’ll likely be dead anyway.”

  He was moving for the door as he spoke. Quickly Frevisse asked as he went past her, “When you left Domina Alys and Sir Reynold last night, did you go directly back to the guest hall?”

  “Where else would I go? Yes, I went directly back to the guest hall.”

  He was to the door now, ready to forget her if she would let him, but Frevisse demanded at his back, “Did you see anyone else out then?”

  He turned, letting her see she annoyed him but answering, “I saw Benet on the guest-hall steps. And, no, I didn’t see anyone else. And, no, I didn’t kill Reynold. Mother, take care, stay well.” He clipped a bow of his head toward Lady Eleanor and was gone.

  Margrete shut the door behind him but was looking at Frevisse while she did. They were all looking at her, Frevisse realized. Joice, for whom it was essentially finished, the threat of Sir Reynold gone and Benet unlikely now to push any claim on her, so that all she need do from here on was wait. Lady Adela, never any part of it except in curiosity. And Lady Eleanor, whose part in the Godfreys being here seemed to have been far more than Frevisse had ever had reason to guess.

  Silently she and Frevisse regarded one another across the room, Frevisse with no words for what was in her mind, until finally Lady Eleanor said mildly, not offended, only curious, “What are you doing? Suspecting Hugh of killing Reynold?”

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” Frevisse said. And then because that was a lie, said, “Yes, I’m suspecting Sir Hugh of killing Sir Reynold. I’m suspecting everyone and asking questions I’d rather not be asking, because someone has to and no one else is.”

  “And now you’ve found out something you’d rather not have known. About me,” Lady Eleanor said calmly.

  “Yes.” Frevisse threw all her anger into that, glad to have it said. “You knew Sir Reynold was a
ttacking the Fenners, didn’t you? Not just the other day but for months now. You’ve known about it and you want Sir Hugh to keep on with it.”

  Lady Eleanor bent her head in quiet acknowledgment. “Yes. Exactly so.”

  “Yes to all of it?” Frevisse asked a little desperately, wanting her denial.

  “To all of it,” Lady Eleanor said.

  “It was because of you Sir Reynold came here, wasn’t it? All the years Domina Alys has been here, he never came until now. It was you who thought how he could use St. Frideswide’s and told him.”

  “I wrote to Hugh about it,” Lady Eleanor answered, undisturbed by the anger behind Frevisse’s accusation. “My husband, his father, paid most of the costs of the court matters that came to nothing against the Fenners. Hugh and I had talked of having our own back from the Fenners somehow, and this seemed a good chance to do it. He brought Reynold in on it.”

  “Is this why you come to St. Frideswide’s? To use it against the Fenners?”

  “Oh, no!” That, at least, roused Lady Eleanor to strong denial. “I came for exactly the reasons I gave. It was only after I was here that I began to see the possibilities.” She smiled, wanting Frevisse to understand. “We needed somewhere not readily thought of when raids started against the Fenners, but somewhere defensible if we were found out too soon.”

  “But why?” Frevisse asked. “Why any of it at all? The Godfreys and Fenners have let whatever it was between them go by for years. Why start it up again? It was over.”

  “It was never over,” Lady Eleanor said in gentle explanation, expecting her to understand. “They still have what’s ours. We fought it through the courts, hired lawyers, clerks, met the cost of paying judges off to hear the matter fairly when the Fenners were paying them to hear it otherwise. Years of that, all cost and no return, until we couldn’t afford to go on with it, particularly after my husband died, and had to let it lie, but, no, it wasn’t over, only at a standstill for a time.”

  “But this raiding of them,” Frevisse said. “Why?”

  “Partly as a way to have back a little of what they owe us.

  They’ve gone unhurt too long. But more than that, now that we’ve shown how vulnerable they are, men enough will join us so we can go against them openly. Men enough we can take back our properties the same way the Fenners have held them. By force.“

  Frevisse stood still, bringing herself to accept that all of this thus far—the thieving, at least two deaths, and possibly Sir Reynold’s—was, at the most, because of Lady Eleanor. Carefully keeping her feelings from her voice, she asked, “Did Domina Alys know any of this?”

  “None of it,” Lady Eleanor said unhesitantly. “She would never accept her priory being used this way. You know that.”

  Frevisse had thought she knew it; but she had thought she knew other things—thought she had known Lady Eleanor—and was finding she had been very wrong. “Why not have Sir Hugh do it alone, instead of giving it over to Sir Reynold?”

  “Partly because Reynold could always bring men to follow him more easily than anyone I’ve ever known, no matter what he asked of them, and partly because Alys would believe whatever Reynold told her, never look past it, nor tire of him being here as soon as she would have tired of Hugh.” Despite she had been speaking calmly, reasonably, tears shone in Lady Eleanor’s eyes and she broke off, pressing a hand to her lips to stop their trembling before going on a little brokenly, “You see, when Reynold set his mind to it, he could charm a bird out of a tree, a badger out of its holt, a man or woman into doing anything he asked of them, and Alys more quickly than most.”

  “And never mind that every word of what he said was likely a lie,” Margrete put in, handing her lady a handkerchief for the tears now sliding down her cheeks.

  “An utter lie,” Lady Eleanor agreed. “He was bound to be killed for it sooner or later. But there was no way to change him. The most that could be done was find a use for him.”

  “Bound to be killed?” Frevisse asked, trying to come back to the point. “Why?”

  “Because with Reynold the only thing that ever counted in the long run was having his own way. He’d say and do whatever he had to, to have it.”

  “And make everyone else pay whatever price they had to so he could,” Margrete said.

  “Knowing all that about him, you thought you could use him, trust him?” Frevisse asked.

  Lady Eleanor smiled faintly, fondly. “I’ve known him since he was a little boy. He couldn’t lie to me. I knew how he always dimpled in beside his mouth when he was lying.” Her tears were more for the boy maybe than for the man. “I’d tell him to his face when he was lying to me and he’d laugh and admit it, so we did well enough together when we wanted to. And in something like this against the Fenners where our purposes ran together, yes, I thought I could use him.”

  “Only he decided to play the fool with this last raid and ruined it all,” Margrete said bitterly.

  “We expected he’d play the fool sooner or later, being Reynold,” Lady Eleanor said, “but I’d hoped it would be later. I’d hoped Hugh could sway him long enough. But it’s likely that Hugh will be able to manage it from here. Things aren’t ruined, only made more difficult.”

  Frevisse forebore to point out that “things” had been made more than merely difficult for Domina Alys, and by no knowing consent of her own; and that unlike Sir Hugh and his men, neither she nor the nuns were going to be able to ride away from the trouble coming.

  Lady Eleanor dried the last of her tears, done with them for now, and said, “But even given what a fool he could be, Reynold shouldn’t have died this way. Not like this.”

  But then neither should he have been the kind of man he was, Frevisse thought; and without the apology she would have made a few minutes ago, she said, “I need to ask questions about when and where everyone was last night. Even you.”

  Lady Eleanor considered that a moment, then nodded. “Yes. I can see why.”

  Choosing to take that for permission, Frevisse asked, “Did any of you leave the room last night after Compline? You or Margrete or Joice?”

  “Or me,” said Lady Adela. “I slept here, too.”

  “You did,” Lady Eleanor agreed, “but this is one of those times you’re not to speak until you’re spoken to, my lady. No, none of us left that I know of, and I would have known, I think. I slept only fitfully and never deeply.”

  “Rheumatic pains,” Margrete said. “She won’t take enough of her medicine to let her sleep soundly.”

  “It makes my head thick all the next day when I do.”

  “And so does not sleeping well when you don’t,” Margrete returned.

  Lady Eleanor ignored her, following where Frevisse’s question led instead. “No, none of us went anywhere, but someone was where they shouldn’t have been, weren’t they? That’s what you’re trying to find out. It wouldn’t have been one of Reynold’s own men who killed him, that’s certain. But if it was someone from outside, come on purpose to kill him, how could they have counted on happening on so good a chance?”

  “It was maybe someone come from outside who wanted to kill just anyone,” Lady Adela suggested happily. She crossed the room to Lady Eleanor’s side, the dog tucked under her arm. “And it happened to be Sir Reynold and they’ve gone miles away from here by now and we’ll never know who it was.” Her eyes widened with another thought. “Or they’re still here somewhere. In the priory. Hiding.”

  “Lady Adela, go and sit and be quiet,” Lady Eleanor ordered, sharply enough that after a startled hesitation Lady Adela went back to the window bench to join Joice, who was sitting with the other dog cuddled to her breast, her face hidden against his furry back, surely listening but not interested enough to join in. Her green cloak had been returned to her last evening, cleaned, and she was wearing it against the room’s morning cold. The night’s airing had probably been enough to rid it of any lingering smell, and so she had everything that she had brought to St. Frideswide’s, and
when the time came, she would probably leave without a backward look or thought, even for Benet. It was not going to be so simple for the rest of them, and Frevisse said carefully to Lady Eleanor, “You don’t think it was one of his own men, then, or that it was likely to have been someone from outside.”

  “No. It had to have been someone already here. Someone still here, most likely. Or someone who should be here but isn’t.”

  She was watching Frevisse as she said it, and Frevisse was watching her, but there was nothing wrong with the logic of what she had said, and Frevisse agreed, “Yes.”

  “You’ll ask about all the servants, of course, and there are the masons,” Lady Eleanor went on consideringly. “The master mason in particular, I think, from what I’ve heard. And there’s the minstrel. And the madman, of course. It would be none so bad if it were either of them.”

  Not saying she was unready yet to discount Sir Reynold’s men, Frevisse said, “There are others to consider, too. Domina Alys, for one. She’d found out what Sir Reynold was doing and was angry at him. And Benet. He was outside the guest hall and unseen last night. And Sir Hugh. It seems he wasn’t happy with Sir Reynold last night, either.”

  Lady Eleanor lifted her head. “Not my son,” she said, meeting that possibility with flat refusal, as if that were enough to settle it.

  Joice spilled the dog onto the bench beside her and stood up. “I’m going to the church,” she said. “I need to pray.”

  Lady Eleanor started, “Do you think, Joice, that’s…” but Joice, moving quickly and with only a shadow of a curtsy to her and Frevisse, repeated, “I need to pray,” was out the door and gone. Belatedly, Lady Adela slid the dog she held to the floor with an ungracious bump and said, starting for the door, “I’ll go, too!”

  “You will not,” said Lady Eleanor. “Sit down.”

  Lady Adela hesitated.

  “Sit,” Lady Eleanor repeated.

  “But—”

  “Mistress Joice does not need your help in prayers, and this is not a day for everyone to be wandering anywhere they want to around the nunnery. Sit!”