7 The Prioress' Tale

by Frazer, Margaret

  Lady Adela sat, unhappy with it, and Frevisse took the chance to say, “I must needs go, too.”

  Lady Eleanor began to say something to that, thought better of it, and said instead with her familiar gentleness, “Best let things simply go what way they will, Dame. There’s naught that we can do to make them better.”

  Not after some of us have done so much to make them worse, Frevisse thought bitterly, but schooled her face to what might be taken for agreement and merely curtsied and went out.

  No one was in the cloister walk, and Frevisse stopped at the corner of the garth wall near the foot of Lady Eleanor’s stairs, a hand on the pillar, her forehead resting against the stone as she listened to the quiet, deep even for the cloister. By the emptiness, the stillness, the nunnery might have been deserted; the loudest sound seemed to be the throbbing of her back, and she wondered briefly what Dame Juliana and Dame Perpetua had done with the other nuns for now. In a usual day it would have been time, or nearly time, for Tierce, but the day had lost all the familiar shape of days in St. Frideswide’s. The sky was unabated blue and sunlight filled the cloister; by midday there might even be a passing warmth on the stones; but the gray ash of fear was lying over everything, even her thoughts. What had she learned so far? Nothing that helped, so far as she could tell.

  She tried to say a prayer for Sir Reynold’s soul. Death— and fear—should not be more real than prayers, but for now they seemed to be, distracting her from what should come easily.

  She went along the walk, toward the church, seeing as she passed the parlor that Sir Reynold’s body was gone. Was it at all possible that it had been someone from outside who killed him, someone come seeking revenge, finding it and gone now?

  She wished she could believe that had been the way of it, but she did not. Whoever the murderer was, it was someone here.

  She went into the church, expecting to find Sir Reynold’s body coffined and vigil being kept, but the church was empty except for Sister Thomasine kneeling on the altar’s lowest step, far gone in prayer, as usual. Sir Hugh must intend to take the body with them, out of Fenner reach. That would not go down well with the crowner either when the time came he learned of all this.

  In the familiar shadows and quiet, Frevisse closed her eyes as she sought to gather her feelings and her thoughts into something coherent, but what came was another question.

  Where was Joice?

  Frevisse opened her eyes, looking for her. St. Frideswide’s was a plain church; there were few places in it to be out of sight, and Frevisse circled quickly behind the farther choir stalls, to the door into the tower. The boards closing it looked solidly set, just as always, but when she took hold and lifted from one side, they shifted, just as Joliffe had said. Not much but enough that a slender person would go through. But how could Joice have known? And even if she did, what would be her purpose in going out of the nunnery now?

  Frevisse shut the boards again and turned away toward the altar, more from habit than purpose, not thinking of the madman until she came past the end of the choir stalls. From there she could see both the altar and behind it, where he had been bedded. Obscure in the shadows, he was sitting up on his pallet now, instead of huddled into his blankets. And Joice was kneeling in front of him, her green cloak spread out around her as she leaned toward him in what looked to Frevisse like familiar, earnest talk.

  The madman was leaning toward her, too, their heads close, but he looked suddenly sideways to Frevisse and jerked back at sight of her. Joice looked and jerked back too; and as Frevisse went toward them, she stood sharply up and moved to hide the madman behind the full swing of her cloak, saying quickly, “I came to pray, then thought it would be… wonderful to talk to someone who… the miracle… I wanted to ask him…”

  Frevisse stopped almost near enough to push Joice aside if she wanted. Whatever else she was, the girl was a poor liar; and Frevisse, trying to hold her growing anger of disbelief behind an outwardly calm voice, said accusingly, “You know him.”

  “No!” Joice answered a little desperately. “It’s that he’s not mad anymore! It’s safe to talk to him. Sister Thomasine cured him. He…”

  Behind her the madman rose to his feet.

  Joice turned quickly on him, exclaiming, “Edmund, no. Don’t!” grasping his arm as if to force him down again; but he took hold of her hands, refusing, saying, “Joice, she’s not a fool. She knows.”

  “Quite probably.” Unhuddled, standing straight, he was tall. His hair, dark golden now that the mud was washed out of it, was combed back from his face, which had been scrubbed clean, too, and as if it had been washed off him with the dirt, there was no sign of madness in him as he met Frevisse’s look. “My deep apology for our deception, my lady.”

  Momentarily ignoring him, Frevisse said accusingly at Joice, “You recognized him yesterday. You put your cloak around him not from pity but because you knew him!”

  “Of course I knew him!” Joice said angrily. “I should have let him freeze!”

  “Joice,” he tried again.

  “It might be best,” Sister Thomasine said gently from beside the altar steps, “if you went on seeming mad awhile. Things being as they are,” she added hesitantly, looking from one to another of them as if to be certain she had it right.

  Frevisse stared at her, blank-minded with surprise. Joice, frozen, stared, too; but Edmund, after a moment, collapsed back into a crumpled heap on the pallet behind him, gone useless again to all appearances except for the long look of understanding between him and Sister Thomasine.

  Half disbelieving, Frevisse managed to say, “You know that he was never mad?”

  “Oh.” Sister Thomasine pushed her hands a little farther up her sleeves and ducked her head shyly. “Yes. I knew.”

  “From the very first?”

  Sister Thomasine ducked her head lower. “Yes,” she said softly.

  “And you let us think he was? Let us think you’d made a miracle?”

  “I knew you’d find out it wasn’t a miracle,” Sister Thomasine said in almost a whisper. “It was just it seemed he’d be safer if everyone thought he’d been mad and that he’d been cured for a while.”

  “But you know he wasn’t, that he hadn’t been,” Frevisse insisted. “How did you know he wasn’t?”

  Sister Thomasine turtled back into her wimple as if she would have altogether disappeared if possible. “It was just…” She hesitated, then said with surprising firmness, considering she was still whispering, “It was just he didn’t feel mad.”

  He had not felt mad.

  Frevisse had been worrying at the back of her mind over Sister Thomasine’s hurt when she found she had worked no miracle. Apparently it was not Sister Thomasine she needed to worry over, and she was distractedly trying not to follow the implications of that as Edmund said warmly, “She was protecting me.”

  “You need protecting!” Joice said. “What did you think you were doing, coming here like this?”

  That told Frevisse they had not had much time for talk before she came, and Edmund’s edged answer said some of that time had been spent in Joice being angry at him.

  “I told you. I was trying to find out how it was with you. Word had gone to your father of what had happened before someone came to your uncle with rumor of where you were, and then it seemed well for me to find out if you needed help sooner than the sheriff could be here.”

  “Oh, yes,” Joice said scornfully. “How great a help did you think you’d be, drooling and filthy and stinking?”

  “I didn’t drool. And the filth and stench were to keep people at bay.”

  “It did do that,” Joliffe agreed from the corner of the choir stalls behind Frevisse.

  Frevisse startled around as Joice exclaimed in alarm and Edmund jerked up to his knees, a hand going to his waist for a dagger he was not wearing. Only Sister Thomasine looked toward Joliffe with no particular alarm, and he gave her a small bow before he strolled toward the rest of them, making a general
bow and saying to Edmund, “You did the madman very well. You fooled me along with the rest.”

  Edmund settled back onto his blankets. “Thank you, and more particularly my thanks for your help yesterday.”

  Joliffe sat down on his heels to come head level with him and said cheerfully, “A pleasure. So besides being Edmund and an occasional madman, who are you?”

  “Edmund Harman, a clerk to her uncle.” Edmund nodded at Joice.

  “A merchant’s clerk?” Joliffe grinned with delight. “But come knight-erranting to save the lady. What you ought to be is a player, you did your madman so well.”

  “What he ought to be is locked away,” Joice snapped, then demanded at Edmund, “What do you think will happen to you if Sir Reynold’s men find you out? What were you thinking of, coming here like…”—she gestured at him in a frustration for words—“like that?”

  “How should I have come?” Edmund asked back. “What chance would I have had if I’d just come knocking at the gate with inquiries after your welfare? None of us were even sure you wanted help. At least this way I could wander off again, no harm done, and no one the wiser except me if that was the way of it.”

  “Knew if I wanted help?” Joice exclaimed indignantly. “You think I asked to be grabbed in the street and carried off?”

  “How should I know? Knowing you, you might very well have!”

  Joice gasped, momentarily driven beyond words.

  “So,” said Joliffe, still cheerfully, “with that settled, what do we do next?”

  “You might begin with taking all this somewhat more seriously,” Frevisse said curtly. She had neither prayed nor eaten yet today, and she wanted, suddenly, simply to sit down for a while and cope with nothing. “For one thing, someone besides me has mentioned you as possibly Sir Reynold’s murderer.”

  “Ah, yes.” Joliffe stood up. “Who better to blame for any new ill than the passing player, the wandering minstrel, the lordless, landless nobody? Always the favorite for anything gone wrong.” His tone was slight but his eyes were bleak and unjesting. He knew as well as she did how much danger he was in. “In other words, the question is not, am I suspected, but have you learned anything that might save my neck? And I hope you have because I haven’t. Or Edmund’s neck either, come to that, because an unknown madman who, it turns out, isn’t mad, will be first choice after me when they’re looking for someone to hang.”

  “You found out nothing from the masons?”

  “Only that if they’re lying, they’re better at it than I am.”

  “You’re sure of all of them for all of last night?” Frevisse insisted.

  “One way or another they’re all answered for.”

  “Including Master Porter?”

  “Seemingly.”

  “Seemingly?” she questioned quickly.

  Joliffe spread out his hands. “I’m always open to possibilities, but right now he doesn’t seem to be one. That leaves us all of Sir Reynold’s men, Edmund, myself, Mistress Joice, nunnery servants, nunnery nuns, your Domina Alys, and you, to be thorough about it. Have I missed anyone?”

  Only if she cared to believe Lady Eleanor and Lady Adela should be suspected, too, and she did not. She slowly shook her head and said regretfully, “There’s something else that complicates matters, too.”

  “Oh, good. We needed complications.”

  Frevisse chose to ignore that. “Word has come that Abbot Gilbert will be here this afternoon at latest.” Sister Thomasine made a small, glad sound and clasped her hands at her breast. The others looked only puzzled. “Abbot Gilberd?” Jolliffe asked.

  “St. Frideswide’s is answerable to him.”

  “Thank all the saints your Domina Alys is answerable to somebody,” Joliffe said.

  “But Sir Hugh means to be out of here with Sir Reynold’s men before he comes, and that takes a good many of our possible murderers away,” Frevisse pointed out.

  “Always supposing it wasn’t Edmund or I. Or Domina Alys.”

  “Or Joice or I or Sister Thomasine,” Frevisse added caustically. “If we don’t find out the murderer now, we may never be able to.”

  Joliffe grasped her point without difficulty. “So did you learn anything of use? Did you see the wound once it was cleaned?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did it go straight into him or at an angle?”

  “Straight into him. Straight in and all the way through.”

  Joice made a small, sickened sound. Sister Thomasine crossed herself and bowed her head. Joliffe merely looked interested.

  “Straight through. And just below the left shoulder blade, you said. And from the back.”

  “From the back,” Frevisse agreed.

  “Then it wasn’t done by Joice or Sister Thomasine. They’re neither of them tall enough. You are, of course. Or nearly.”

  “Tall enough?” Edmund asked.

  “Tall enough to drive home the kind of blow that killed him.” Joliffe stood up. “Directly through him, not at an upward angle. Then there’s the matter of strength enough for a blow like that. Dame Frevisse has the height, but I doubt she has the strength. The inclination probably, but not the strength.”

  Frevisse refrained from answering that, instead said only, “So we can let go suspecting anyone below, say, your height.”

  “Unless someone was seen carrying a joint stool as well as a sword around with them last night, yes,” Joliffe agreed. “Which brings us back to Domina Alys and most of Sir Reynold’s men.”

  “And you and Edmund,” Frevisse said.

  From behind Sister Thomasine, Benet asked, “Edmund?”

  Chapter 23

  He stood at the corner of the altar steps behind Sister Thomasine, looking at all of them with a puzzlement that said he had not been listening out of sight. “Edmund?” he repeated. “Who’s Edmund?”

  Joice moved toward him, saying warmly as if glad he was there, “Benet, were you looking for me?”

  Become a little wary, his gaze going from her to Joliffe to Edmund, slumped in on himself again, to Frevisse, to Sister Thomasine, and back to Joliffe and Edmund, he said, “I needed to see you. Lady Eleanor said you’d come here to pray?”

  He made that too much a question and Frevisse tried desperately to find something to say to divert him from whatever he was starting to wonder, but it was Joliffe who said in apparent delight, moving between him and Edmund, “My lord! We’re trying to work out who could have killed Sir Reynold and who could not.”

  “What? Here?” Benet asked, all the unacceptability of that answer plain in his voice.

  “Where better? It’s out of the way and quiet. And your sword is exactly what we need. Thank you.”

  He reached for the sword hung at Benet’s side—Sir Hugh must have given order for the men to go armed now, Frevisse thought—and Benet immediately stepped back from him, clapping a hand to the pommel, asking, “Why do you think you need a sword?”

  “It had to be someone fairly tall who killed Sir Reynold,” Joliffe began, his hand still out for the sword.

  “How do you know that?” Benet asked, making no move to give it.

  “Because of how the blow went in.”

  Benet’s other hand came around to grip the hilt, white-knuckled and ready to draw. “How do you know how the blow went in?”

  Joliffe seemed not to notice, going on easily, “Dame Frevisse told me. She saw it.”

  “Yes,” Benet agreed, glancing at her, his suspicion not allayed but spreading to include her. “She did.”

  “To put a blow straight through a man that way,” Joliffe said, moving toward Benet as if still expecting him to hand over his sword, “it had to have been done by someone near Sir Reynold’s height. If we have a sword and someone’s back, we can maybe judge how tall the murderer was and that would limit who to be suspicious of.”

  Benet fell back another step, giving himself enough to draw his sword, and countered, “Who’s Edmund?”

  So much for diverting him. />
  “He’s no one,” Joice said.

  Looking at all their faces guardedly, Benet held out his free hand to her. “Come away from here.”

  “No! Not with you,” Joice said, beginning to draw back from him, and Benet moved suddenly forward, pushing Joliffe aside, reaching for her. Hampered by her cloak and skirts, Joice tried to avoid him but stumbled, and he caught her by the arm, saying, “There’s something wrong here. Come away.” She jerked to be free of him, and Edmund sprang up, ordering, “Leave her alone,” as he started for Benet, who swung Joice behind him in the same movement of drawing his sword, to bring it point up to Edmund’s throat, stopping him in mid-stride.

  Unarmed, clad in only a rough tunic and hosen, Edmund froze where he was. They all froze, because the smallest movement of Benet’s sword could be Edmund’s death, until Sister Thomasine said quietly, “There’s no need.” Benet’s gage flickered her way; she came nearer to him, to lay her hand on his wrist above where he held the sword and say, “Truly. There’s no need. And this no place to shed anyone’s blood.”

  Trying to sound as calm as Sister Thomasine, Frevisse said, “You’re in a church, Benet. And the man isn’t even armed.”

  Benet jerked his head at Joliffe. “He is.” Joliffe promptly held his hands well out from himself, away from the dagger hung from his belt. Benet glanced at him but kept the sword at Edmund’s throat. “And this man’s been all a lie from the start. He’s not witless. He was never witless, was he? Were you?” he added at Edmund in direct accusation.

  Before Edmund could answer, Frevisse said, “No. You’re right. He was never mad. He pretended to be so he could reach Joice, help her if she needed it. He’s here for Joice’s sake, the same as you are. He’s a clerk to her uncle, that’s all.”

  Gently, her hand still lightly on his wrist, Sister Thomasine said, “You’re in a church.”

  Benet hesitated, then lowered his sword from Edmund’s throat, turned the blade aside, but kept his gaze on him. “He could still be the one who killed Sir Reynold.”

  “Yes,” Frevisse agreed. “But so could others. That’s what we’re trying to learn.”