Winter Heart

by Margaret Frazer

  “Then I don’t know. I think I smothered some in the bag. When I had my wits back, I was in a cart being jounced along somewhere.” His gaze was fixed on her face, trying to tell if she believed him or not. She merely gave a small nod for him to continue. He leaned somewhat forward and let the words pour out.

  “It was drovers took me. They told me they were headed for London with their cattle, and if I gave no trouble, they’d make none and let me free when we got there. They said they’d been paid to take me there.”

  Drovers were men who moved herds of cattle from places like Wales and the North, where the land favored pasturage rather than tilled fields, to towns or cities where the meat would bring a price worth the trouble of ambling with a herd of cattle for miles and days.

  Frevisse looked to Master Naylor. He answered her unasked question. “There were some came by about the time. Were bound for London, I heard. Probably had the thought the market would be good with the holidays then and after that everyone getting their eating in before Lent starts.”

  “Aye, that’s what they said,” Kelmstowe agreed.

  “So you were in the cart that carried what they needed while they traveled,” Frevisse said. “Out of sight. Not out of sound, though.”

  “They had me trussed like a calf being hauled to market, and gagged most of the time, and hidden. They fed me, let me out often enough for need, and said if I kept quiet, I’d be let loose when the time came. If not... well, they never said what it would be ‘if not’, only I didn’t want to find out.”

  If he was a liar, he was good one. Frevisse silently granted that, but kept the thought and all others from showing on her face as she said, “And so they kept their word in the end. They let you go.”

  Kelmstowe grimaced. “That they did. Right in what must have been the middle of London. They’d left the cattle somewhere.” In some butcher’s pasture outside the city, Frevisse supposed. “But two of them drove the cart with me in it right into the city, let me loose, set me down on the step of a big fountain spewing water, and drove off. By the time I had wits enough to see straight, they were gone, out of sight in all the rush of people and carts and all there.” His voice had gone a little high with strain, remembering it. “Have you ever been to London?”

  “I have,” Frevisse said gravely.

  “Then you know.” The horror of it was still with him. “Nor I couldn’t find my way out! Those streets – there’s so many of them and they twist around so. Nor folk there don’t talk right and there’s so many of them all talking at once.”

  “I know,” she granted, just as gravely. Even though he had probably been sometimes to Banbury on a market day, in his first few minutes in London he had undoubtedly seen more people than in all his life before. And they did say words differently in London than here in northern Oxfordshire. Kelmstowe would have indeed had trouble both in understanding and in making himself understood.

  “I just wandered at first, thinking I’d find my way out. Only I didn’t. I kept getting twisted around. Saw things like you’d not believe. That church there with the spire! We could put the whole of Prior Byfield into it, I swear. There were churches everywhere – not so big as that one, but dozens of them, maybe. And what I saw in the shops. Things I couldn’t hope to buy in a hundred years of working. And the river. Enough to swallow here and all, and a bridge across it as long as the whole village and full of houses, and people living there!”

  “We know all that,” Master Naylor said quellingly. “Get on with how you came back.”

  Kelmstowe nodded, straightened, and went on, “It was seeing the river did it. I knew we hadn’t crossed anything like that coming into London. It’s loud. I’d have heard it. So that was one direction I could forget going. If only the sun had been out, I could have told east from west and all, but the overcast was thick. But it came out the next day. I slept in a church porch that night, and then at dawn there was the sun. I knew the drovers had been heading south most of the time. Sunlight through the cart’s canvas, see. So I knew I had to head north. I got out of London by a wide street and a gateway that’s wide as my house. I asked at an inn for Oxford. Thought that would be more likely known than Banbury or here. They set me on the right road and–” He shrugged. “–I walked, found Oxford finally, and came on from there.”

  Like Anneys Barnsley’s claim of rape, there was nothing to say all that was true or not. Surely he had been in London. For the rest...

  Kelmstowe either guessed at her doubt or saw it in her face, because he shoved up his sleeves, one after the other, from his wrists and held out his arms. “See. The marks of the ropes are still there.”

  There were indeed faint marks that could be from rope, but whether they were old and nearly healed or lately made and lightly was hard to tell. Frevisse nodded with no comment, and he pulled his sleeves down, hiding the marks.

  “What did you do for food and places to stay?” she asked.

  “One of the drovers gave me sixpence. By way of farewell, he said. So there was food, and there’s monasteries that have to take you in if you ask.” He looked around the guesthall. “Like here.” Some of the stiffness had gone out of him while he talked. Now weariness seemed to be taking over. “It was slow going and a long way.”

  “And you walked all of it?” Frevisse asked.

  “Aye.”

  “Are those the shoes you wore?”

  “Aye.”

  “Let me see the bottom of them.”

  Kelmstowe held up one foot, then the other. The thin leather soles of both shoes were worn through in several places; they looked to have stray bits of leather put inside for a kind of cheap patching. “They’re all I have,” Kelmstowe said, somewhat defensively. “Everything else I had here is gone. I’ve not even a change of clothing left me.”

  “Yet you’ve come back,” Frevisse said, her voice even.

  “There are my mam and sister, aren’t there?” Kelmstowe returned. “They couldn’t just be left to fend for themselves, could they? Not knowing what’d happened to me and all, and no one to see to them.”

  Frevisse looked at Master Naylor inquiringly.

  “They’re well,” the steward said in answer. “The house is the mother’s, so it wasn’t lost. She has her dower acres left to her, too. It’s not much, but it’s something. The sister found work here in the nunnery.”

  “That’s not what I want for her,” Kelmstowe said sullenly. “We were set for better.”

  “There was one of Gilbey Dunn’s sons would marry her if she had a better dowry,” Master Naylor said by way of explanation.

  With earnest, seeming honesty, Kelmstowe said, “Aye. He still would, they’re that set on each other. It’s his father and mother won’t have it otherwise. That’s part of what I was trying for with–” He made an uncertain gesture, probably meaning to show the trick with land that he had been caught at.

  “You tried the wrong way,” Master Naylor returned sharply, “and see where it got you.”

  “It wasn’t that trying that got me snatched and taken away!” Kelmstowe shot back. “That’s something else altogether and I’d give something to know what!” He visibly remembered where he was and with whom he was speaking and pulled his temper back down to sullen again. “If I knew what that was all for, I’d know a whole lot more.”

  “Surely,” Frevisse said. “But since we’ll know no more without the drovers to question, we have to set your word against likelihood and let it go at that.” She waited to see if he would contest that. When Kelmstowe, although his lips tightened with the effort, showed his good sense by saying nothing and even bowed his head a little in acceptance, she turned her heed to Master Naylor to ask, “Do I understand rightly that his mother’s and sister’s well-being fairly well depend on him?”

  “It does.”

  “Will the rest of the village have him back?” Meaning not only the allegedly wronged husband and wife but, as importantly, the women of the village who could, among them, make a man�
��s life hell if they took against him.

  “Aye,” Master Naylor said.

  That made matters simpler anyway, Frevisse thought, and was grateful for it. Looking down at her hands folded in her lap, she considered what she had heard from both men, matched it with what she had heard from and about Kelmstowe and knew of Master Naylor, and finally looked up, met and held Kelmstowe’s gaze, and said, “Then, on Master Naylor’s word, and for the sake of your mother and sister, and in the hope of your good behavior hereafter, the priory grants your return.”

  Kelmstowe let out his pent breath with a gasp of open relief and slumped, his spine suddenly unrigid. He rose, went down on one knee in front of her, and said with bowed head, “My deep thanks, Domina. For my mother and sister even more than for myself.”

  “My blessing on you and them,” Frevisse said. She signed the cross in the air above him. “I trust you will not fail Master Naylor’s faith in you.” She pretended not to see the twist of Master Naylor’s mouth at that. She was, perhaps unfairly, putting on him the burden of responsibility for Kelmstowe’s good behavior, and he knew it.

  Kelmstowe rose and bowed to her. “I will not, my lady.”

  “Then best you go and tell your mother and sister how it now is.”

  “Yes, my lady.” He moved to go, then as if compelled, turned back and said, “I never touched Anneys Barnsley.”

  “However that may be, it was your running off that undid you,” Master Naylor said before Frevisse could answer.

  “Nor I didn’t do that neither,” Kelmstowe said, but with a weariness that had no fight in it nor any hope of being believed. He had wound himself taut to face his prioress’ judgment. Now the let-go of that was taking over, opening him to the exhaustion against which he had been holding out. He bowed to both her and Master Naylor and left the guesthall.

  Frevisse looked to the steward. “Well? How much of that was truth from him and how much lies, do you think?”

  Master Naylor shook his head. “I’d not care to say. I think he and Barnsley’s wife will be the only ones who ever know what happened between them.”

  “If anything.”

  “If anything. As for the being taken off to London, seems he was there, from what he says. It’s his going that makes me wonder.”

  It made Frevisse wonder, too, but she said, “He may have run off on a moment of anger made up of the whole mix of having been found out about his cousin’s land and being accused of the rape.” Although a moment of anger seemed hardly sufficient to have carried him all the way to London. To Banbury or Oxford perhaps, but London? “However it was, we’re unlikely ever to know.” She stood up, ready to return to the cloister. “I liked he did not beg me for his land and all back.”

  “I warned him against that. That it would do him no good.”

  “His goods were sold of course. Who was given his land?”

  Master Naylor held back his answer a moment, then said with a grimace, “Henry Barnsley.”

  Frevisse, who had begun to move toward the outer doorway, stopped short. “Our reeve.” The man who had ruled against Kelmstowe in the manor court and whose wife Kelmstowe was accused of attacking.

  “Aye.”

  “So Kelmstowe has come back to nothing much and has to live with seeing Henry Barnsley with just about all he’s lost.”

  At his most dour, Master Naylor agreed, “That’s the way of it.”

  “And you think this is going to go well?”

  Master Naylor paused as if considering precisely the answer he wanted to give, then said, “I think so. However foolish some of what he’s done has been, Kelmstowe is no fool. He’s tried running off...”

  “You don’t hold with his story of the drovers then.”

  “Who can know?” But plainly, pushed to it, Master Nayor did not believe it. “He’s tried running off and found it didn’t answer. He’s sharp enough, he could have made a life for himself somewhere else. One no worse and likely better than he’s going to have here for a time. Only he found he couldn’t after all just leave his mother and sister to fend for themselves. So even knowing he’d only made everything worse for himself and them by running off, he’s come back. He’s no fool. He’s found out what doesn’t work and what does. I think he’ll do well enough, and finally pull himself back to where he was and better. In the long run.”

  That was a great deal for the steward, usually tight with his words, to grant about anyone. Frevisse accepted it with a nod. She did not tell him to keep eye and ear on the matter; he did not need that telling. Instead, as the cloister bell began to ring, summoning her to the next Office, she said, “Let me hear sometimes how it goes.”

  Two weeks later Henry Barnsley was dead.

  * * * * *

  Frevisse was seated at the window in her parlor for the sake of the morning’s rare sunlight. The days had been particularly gray of late, making today’s open, winter-pale sky particularly welcome. Even the occasional flurry of snow from some drifting wisp of cloud was beautiful in its diamond-sparkling as it fell. A long session with Dame Juliana between Tierce and Sext, going over the cellarer’s accounts to be certain all was in readiness for Lent so far as the kitchen was concerned, and then another while spent with Dame Johane after Sext considering the possibility of the nuns making a new cope for Father Henry for Easter, had left her knowing she must do “nothing” for a time, to ease her mind in readiness for the rest of the day. So she had taken up the psalter that had been her uncle’s gift to her at his death and sat down on the cushioned bench in the sunshine to read for a time.

  The psalter was in English. As required, she had shown the gift to her then-prioress, Domina Edith, for approval. It being deemed fit to go into the nunnery’s small collection of books that were given out for Lenten reading and such other times as the prioress chose, Frevisse had rarely seen it afterward. Domina Alys, who came after Domina Edith, had seen small use for books at any time. After her, in Domina Elisabeth’s time, Frevisse had once been given it for reading during Lent and several times seen other nuns reading it. When, upon becoming prioress, she did the necessary inventory of everything the priory possessed, she had come on the psalter in the priory’s chest of books and taken it and kept it ever since with only the barest tremble of conscience.

  She knew her psalms in Latin, of course, but there was an odd comfort in reading them in English. They seemed somehow new, and the knowledge that her uncle had wanted her to have them was an occasional balm in the loneliness and work of her days. Thus: Blessed be men undefiled that go in the law of the Lord. Blessed be they that seek his witnessing, that seek him in all their heart. For they that work wickedness, go not in his ways... I would God guided my way...

  I would God guided my way...

  Holding the words in her mind, a prayer all in themselves, she gazed out the window at the winter sky and only gradually realized her free hand was stroking at a cat on her lap. She looked down, and indeed the nunnery’s cat was there, curled and comfortable in the sunlight, purring gently. Frevisse looked toward the door and saw it was opened the slightest bit, enough to let past a slender cat, which was somewhat unsettling because she was certain she had latched it. But apparently not, because the cat was very definitely on her lap. Where she never encouraged it to be.

  But then she never encouraged it to be in her parlor either, and yet it nonetheless too often was, with an insolence to which she had finally given way. She did not know which generation of cat this was of the one Domina Elisabeth had introduced into the cloister or whether it was a descendent at all. What mattered was that it kept the cloister clear enough of vermin to make keeping it worthwhile. That did not mean Frevisse wanted it on her lap. Yet she found she was still stroking it when she heard the soft footfall of one of her nuns hurrying up the stairs.

  “Enough,” she said, pushed to show the cat it was to shift itself, and slanted her lap to help it slide to the floor.

  The cat did not even trouble to throw her an offended look. It
understood the rules of the game between them and strolled away, tail high and twitching, to slip out the door past Dame Amicia’s skirts, unnoticed, as she came in at Frevisse’s bidding.

  Frevisse had already closed the psalter and folded her hands upon it, readying herself for whatever new trouble had arisen in the cloister to bring Dame Amicia in such unseemly haste. It had not taken her long, after becoming prioress herself, to understand the calm with which Domina Edith, all those years ago, had faced every happening: When everyone else was in a flurry, the last thing needed was to join in with them. So she did not rise to her feet in alarm at sight of the nun’s face, simply put the psalter aside and asked quietly, as Dame Amicia dipped in a hasty curtsy, “What is it, Dame?”

  “Word from Master Naylor, my lady! They’re bringing a woman from the village to Dame Claire...”

  “Hurt?” It would have to be badly; the village’s herbwife was capable of seeing to most troubles of the body there.

  “Gone mad! She’s found her husband murdered – lying there in his own blood and all – and she’s gone mad and they want Dame Claire to do something to quiet her! The man from Master Naylor said they’re bringing her now and–”

  “Murdered? Who?” But that was not to the point at present. Frevisse swept her own questions aside with a gesture and rose to her feet. She was about to order Dame Amicia to go to Dame Claire, but looking out the window, she saw a cluster of men and several women coming through the gateway from the outer yard and changed her mind, ordering instead, “Tell them to take her to the guesthall. I’ll fetch Dame Claire.”

  Dame Claire was the nunnery’s infirmarian. Well-learned from both experience and books, she was skilled in medicines and, of necessity, some surgery, since St. Frideswide’s and its village were remote from other help. She and the village herbwife Margery had worked well together for many years. Were growing toward old together, too, but each with someone trained to be their successor when the time came. There was little that could throw either woman into a fluster, for which Frevisse was grateful as she went with Dame Claire across the yard: A woman’s wailing met them at the stairs up to the guesthall door.