The Bishop’s Tale

by Margaret Frazer

“And when you decided you couldn’t bear him alive anymore, for your own sake and for Lady Anne, you remembered,” Dame Frevisse said.

  “I remembered. And waited, as you said, a long while, with the packet of ground nuts in my belt pouch, until I saw what I thought was my chance.” He spoke almost as if by rote, as if the thing had grown dull with repeating to himself too many times. “I saw the meat pies being made when I talked to the cook that morning. Their crusts were blind-baked, the top crust separate from the bottom, the filling put in later. The top crust was only set on, not sealed. In the crowding and hurry of serving, it was easy to bump the top of Sir Clement’s pie awry and step aside as if to set it right. What I did instead…” His control wavered, and he paused to draw a steadying breath. “What I did instead, with my back to everyone, was scatter the walnuts—I had them ready in my hand—over the meat filling and put the crust back on. No one was likely to notice me enough to remember I’d even done it, or think it mattered, if they did.”

  “But in the room, when he began to be better, how did you poison him again?” Dame Frevisse asked.

  “I didn’t. It’s taken him that way before, seeming to ease and then coming on again. And this time it came on strongly enough to kill him.”

  “You meant for us to believe it was God who killed him!” Suffolk said indignantly.

  Murmurs and exclamations of anger or shock began to run among everyone in the room, but Beaufort bore over them with, “Why did you do it? No matter how much you hated him, you had so little to gain from his death. Certainly not enough to so imperil your soul. Why did you do it?”

  In a proud, dead voice, Jevan said, “I had no hope anymore for myself, whether he was dead or living. But I could set her free to go where her heart wants to.”

  “But Jevan…” Lady Anne, in the circle of Guy’s arm, reached uncertainly for words. “You know I love Guy. That I’ve always loved him. That I don’t love you.”

  With a brilliance of pain in his eyes seared by cold hopelessness, Jevan answered, “I know,” and looked away.

  Darkness drew in early under the close sky, and the freezing cold crept with it. There was no fire in Chaucer’s library now, and Frevisse and Dame Perpetua sat close together, saying Compline by a single candle’s light among the shadows. They had come here because Frevisse needed time away from all the day’s demands. Jevan’s confession had only been the beginning. At Suffolk’s orders, he had been taken under guard to be kept for the crowner’s coming, but Frevisse had had to stay and deal with everyone else’s questions, until word came that rumor of what had passed had reached Aunt Matilda and she wished her niece’s presence.

  Then everything had had to be repeated and explained again. But at the end of it, Aunt Matilda had been sitting up in bed, eating broth and bread with more vigor than she had shown in days while exclaiming over the rudeness of committing murder at a funeral. “Though if someone was going to be murdered, Sir Clement was the best choice. I never liked him.”

  The crowner’s arrival had been announced then, and Frevisse had been summoned to his presence and Bishop Beaufort’s. He had proved to be a quiet, listening man, and she had detailed everything for him more deeply than she had to anyone else, down to why she had set the trap as she had.

  “Among the three best able to poison Sir Clement, there was no way to prove who did it, no way to disprove any denial they might make. Jevan told me himself that walnuts made his uncle ill. That made me think he might be innocent. But then again, he could simply not have been careful to conceal it because he didn’t know there was any suspicion of murder and so a need for silence. On the other hand, Guy and Lady Anne’s silence about the nuts could have been innocence—they didn’t know it was important and so said nothing—or guilt—a concealing of a dangerous fact. There was no way to tell. What I did know was that according to Galen even touching a food that ill affects a person the way these nuts did Sir Clement can bring on a rash and itching. I remembered that at Sir Clement’s death, while we stood nervously around, someone was rubbing his hand against his thigh. Rubbing and rubbing as if with nerves. Or with a terrible itching. I could remember that but not who it had been. Guy or Jevan, I thought, but it made me think the murderer might, like Sir Clement, be made ill by the nuts, that he had handled them at least briefly and been affected. So I asked for everyone to be brought together, and had the cook make tarts with walnuts in them, not plainly but so that someone would have to be holding one before he noticed. Then I watched to see who would take one and not eat it.”

  “And Jevan Dey did not,” the crowner said.

  “Jevan Dey did not.” And so she had found her murderer. And nearly lost him when he realized that his attempt to keep everyone from suspicion had failed and tried to die the death he had given his uncle.

  What she did not know yet was how Sir Philip had known to stop him in time.

  But meanwhile, she had given a murderer over to justice, and in some part of her, that was the beginning of reparation for her choices of last spring. But in her mind she still saw Jevan as he was led from the parlor by Suffolk’s men—an alone young man who would hang before spring came.

  She and Dame Perpetua finished Compline’s prayers. Quiet closed around them, but neither of them moved. Quiet, even among the cold and shadows, was a blessing just then.

  A soft footfall outside the door told them when their respite was past. Frevisse braced herself for whatever demand was coming now, and at the small knock said, “Benedicite,” in what she hoped was a welcoming voice. From the glance Dame Perpetua gave her, it was not.

  Sir Philip entered, carrying another candle. Despite his shielding hand as he crossed the room, its light jumped and fluttered, dancing the shadows around each other until he set it down on the table beside the nuns’ small light. He looked around. “No Master Lionel?”

  “Gone to his bed, I hope,” Frevisse said. “Even he has to give way to the necessities of night.”

  “As you gave way to Bishop Beaufort’s necessity.”

  So he had not come by chance, but with a need—like her own—to talk about what had happened. But Frevisse could not read his tone to understand his feeling in the matter. She looked at him questioningly. “You’d rather I hadn’t done this?”

  “I’d rather Jevan had had longer to work through the torments in himself to some sort of better peace. He came to me here yesterday to make confession.”

  “That’s how you knew to stop him from eating the tart.”

  And why he had not said he had been in talk with Jevan afterwards.

  Sir Philip nodded. He looked as tired as she felt, but like her, he could not let the day go yet. “He confessed the murder and his abiding hatred for Sir Clement even after his death, and his hopeless disbelief in God’s mercy. Given more time—and now he may not be given the time—he might win free of them and go to his death with a clearer soul.”

  “Or there might not be enough time from here to the world’s end for him to do that.” Frevisse did not try to conceal her pain at that. “His wounds were as long as his life.”

  “And as deep.”

  “At least you stopped him from killing himself. For murder there can be repentance and a chance for heaven. For suicide, he would have been damned without hope.”

  “It was his living without hope that drove him to do what he did,” Sir Philip said gravely.

  Frevisse thrust her hands further up her sleeves, huddling in on herself for warmth against the cold that was more than outward. “I could easily find myself in that sin.”

  Sir Philip’s smile was so slight as to be almost unseen in the candle-lit darkness. “But his grace the bishop will remember you as a good and useful servant for your service to him.”

  “I’d rather he didn’t,” Frevisse said curtly. “I’ll stay the while that Aunt Matilda needs me. Then Dame Perpetua and I will go back to St. Frideswide’s and that, please God, will simply be the end of it.”

  “Nothing is so simple as it
ought to be,” Dame Perpetua pointed out firmly.

  “Especially justice,” Sir Philip added.

  “Especially justice,” Frevisse echoed. But justice did not seem enough. It answered too few things, and most particularly Jevan’s despair that, at the last, had betrayed him more than her attempts to reach the truth. She stood up. “There must be somewhere in this house warmer than here. Let’s go there.”