6 The Murderer's Tale

by Frazer, Margaret

  “She and Lady Elizabeth have already gone, my lady,” the man answered.

  Frevisse noticed that most of the folk still here had been at the lower tables. Lady Lovell, her ladies, and what gentlemen there had been were gone, apparently as usual. The man led her deftly among the others, back to the dais and to the door at its opposite end from where Luce had taken them that afternoon. Beyond it was a small antechamber with doors on each side of it, the one to the left shut, the one at its far end open to a spiral stairway almost lost in the unlighted shadows, the one on their right open to lamplight. The man rapped lightly on the frame of the open door and stood aide, looking back, for her to go past him.

  The room she entered was large, low-ceilinged, pleasantly proportioned, with its three wide, stone-mullioned windows looking out on the garden where a clear blue twilight still lingered. Lamps set about on shoulder-tall wrought-iron holders showed golden rush matting covering the floor and the ceiling beams brightly painted in a weave of vines and flowers. Gaily embroidered cushions were strewn along the wide bench below the windows, and girls and women vaguely familiar from that afternoon in the garden and a few gentlemen Frevisse remembered from the hall at supper sat there and on other, larger cushions around the floor in talk and laughter. Opposite the windows a fireplace with elaborately carved stone mantel emboldened the wall. Lady Lovell sat in front of it on a long, backed, cushioned wooden bench, with Edeyn seated beside her, and Giles, Father Henry, the house priest, and Dame Claire standing near.

  From the doorway Frevisse’s guide made a low bow and said, “My lady.”

  Lady Lovell smiled and held out a hand in welcome. “Good, he found you! Come join us, please. We lost you in the hall.”

  Drawn easily into her company, Frevisse noted first that Dame Claire was apparently at ease and then that Father Henry and Sire Benedict were enjoying talk of their own to one side of everyone else’s. Something about St. Augustine, she thought from a snatch she overheard. She had not thought Father Henry would remember so much of his studies as even to recall St. Augustine, let alone discuss him.

  That was a mean-spirited thought, she realized in the same moment as she had it; but before she could follow where it had come from, John Naylor came in with the man he had been with at supper. They bowed to Lady Lovell without approaching and moved away into one of the groups across the room. Frevisse noted where, with intent to talk with young John before the evening was done. For now it was enough that for the first time since coming to Minster Lovell, she knew where all of their company was and how they seemed to be.

  In something like an echo to her thought, she heard Lady Lovell saying, “We’re a sadly diminished company, I fear, with my lord and so many of the men gone with him, and no notion of how long they’ll be about it.”

  “Is it going to be complicated?” Edeyn asked.

  “If it involves France and money, it’s always complicated,” her husband pointed out, and there was wry, agreeing laughter among them.

  “Dame Frevisse told me a little of what’s toward,” Dame Claire said. “Is there trouble?”

  “Mostly only for my lord of Warwick.” Lady Lovell shook her head. “He really does not want the office or to go to France. There’s rumor that he’s ill, would prefer to take to his bed. But King Henry is insisting on it. So he’s called various of his people to him for advice on what to expect and what to ask of the King before he agrees, as agree he must. Hence, my lord is gone.”

  “Your husband served in France,” Dame Claire said. “For a long while, I think?”

  “Long enough to know he doesn’t desire to go back. But then there’s this that came from it.” Lady Lovell looked around at her rich room, with the sense of all of Minster Lovell that lay beyond it. “His profits from France have helped to build all this without too deeply draining regular revenues from our lands, so we’ve little cause of complaint, I suppose. So long as he doesn’t have to go back,” she added with a laugh.

  The talk moved along easy ways to nowhere in particular. Weather and crops and pilgrimages and how the roads were. Father Henry and Sire Benedict wandered away with whatever they were discussing, and eventually Frevisse was sitting at one end of the long bench beside Edeyn, who turned away from Dame Claire and Lady Lovell’s deep conversation over which herbs companioned well with others in a garden to ask, “You’re well recovered from your walking?”

  “Very well, thank you. I have to confess we’ve not been striving to see how many miles we can make but rather taking our time.”

  “But it isn’t going so well for Dame Claire, is it?” Edeyn asked with concern. “She’s not so used to it?”

  The girl’s perception surprised Frevisse. She had been seeing Edeyn as more a girl than a woman because she seemed uncalloused yet by the pains life would bring, still holding to that wonderful belief of the young that they could not be touched by the worst things in life. Not a belief that lasted but potentially immensely aggravating while it did. Probably much of her innocence came from the simple fact that she had had no children yet; and she was likely protected by her husband and even Lionel from full understanding of what Lionel’s affliction meant, even though she and her husband lived with him.

  But to Edeyn’s question about Dame Claire, Frevisse said mildly, “No, she’s not. Nor am I of late, come to that, but I had more of such walking in my girlhood and the way of it comes back to me when needed.”

  Edeyn asked more questions then, careful ones that showed she was ready to pull back if she were shown she went too far, but Frevisse talked a little to her about a childhood spent on roads across England and through Europe, until Edeyn sighed and said, “I’ve never really been anywhere. There was home and then here, around to their manors with my lord and lady, and once to London, and now we go between Knyvet and Langling every year, but that’s all.”

  “And hither, thither, and yon on Lionel’s pilgrimages these three years we’ve been married, don’t forget,” her husband put in from where he leaned on his crossed arms on the high back of the bench behind her. “Not that those are any great delight. Monks and shrines and too much praying.” He bowed slightly to Frevisse and added with a smile, “Begging your pardon, of course.”

  Frevisse, in mind of what she had heard from Master Geffers about him, found neither his smile nor him charming. She replied, “A pity, though, that his pilgrimages have done him so little good. Master Geffers was talking in the hall about what happens to him. That was an attack coming on him in the garden, wasn’t it?”

  She had been wrong about Edeyn. The girl’s stricken expression and her involuntary, almost angry half turn toward her husband betrayed she was far from untouched by what happened to Lionel.

  But it was Giles whom Frevisse was set at now and she pushed on with, “How does he?” and saw that her directness made no noticeable impression on Giles. He only shrugged and answered, “Well enough. The fit was a brief one. He’s sleeping it off now, with his knave Martyn hovering over him. That man was born to be a nursemaid. And a scavenging hound. He’s found his garbage heap in Lionel, that’s for certain.”

  That sounded like a song often sung and one Giles would have gone on with, but Edeyn interrupted him, asking Frevisse, “Master Geffers told you about Lionel?”

  “When I talked with him in the hall after supper. He seemed to know all about it.”

  Edeyn looked up at Giles. “You told him, didn’t you?” Giles shrugged, dismissing what was close to an angry accusation, but Edeyn said, the accusation more open, “That was unkind. The man talks. Everyone will know.”

  “Everyone here knows anyway. Why do you think we have the room we do?”

  “Because until the west range is done, I have none better to offer a loved guest like Edeyn,” Lady Lovell said, turning from her conversation with Dame Claire.

  Giles and Edeyn had kept their voices down to polite quietness. Skill both in keeping conversations private and in not heeding others’ talk was needed with so many living
together, but they were too near Lady Lovell’s shoulder to have been unheard, and because she was their lady, she did not need to ignore them unless she wished. She smiled at them both and said, “You’re worried over Lionel?”

  “He’s been attacked again, my lady,” Edeyn said softly. “It had been two months or more. We’d hoped—”

  “You’d hoped,” Giles interrupted. “The rest of us know better.”

  Lady Lovell fixed her eyes on him in a look more sharp than Frevisse would have cared to have used on her, but her tone was mild enough as she said, “We pray and we hope, Master Giles. That’s how things change in this world.”

  Giles immediately bowed his head to her in gracious acceptance. “You have the right of it, my lady. I’ve been too close to it too long. Hope grows thin after so many disappointments. That’s all.”

  “Master Knyvet is afflicted?” Dame Claire asked. “With what?”

  “The falling sickness,” Lady Lovell said.

  “Ah, poor man. For how long? What’s been done for him?”

  “Everything that’s ever been known,” Lady Lovell said.

  “Concoctions, decoctions, electuraries, pilgrimages, prayers,” Giles put in. “A fortune’s been spent on it, first by his father and now by him.”

  “And none of it to any use?” Dame Claire asked.

  “As you see, he’s not with us tonight.”

  “Has pennyroyal been tried? Saffron, I’ve heard, can help. It’s expensive but very little is needed.” Almost to herself, her mind away on possibilities, she added, “But then only a very little is safe to use, I understand.”

  “If we could make his demon down a medicine direct, it might effect a difference,” Giles said dryly. “On Lionel there’s been none.”

  Drifting while they talked, the house priest Sire Benedict and Father Henry had come back to them in time for just that last. “Demon?” Father Henry asked, hearing enough to catch his interest. “No difference? What?”

  “My cousin,” Giles said. “He’s—”

  “Giles!” Edeyn protested.

  He gave her a look affectionate and lightly mocking. “You think he’s never going to hear?”

  Lady Lovell took her hand with a sympathy that made no effort to stop Giles because he was right. The only surprise was that Sire Benedict had not talked of it already. Everyone else did at the first chance they had, Frevisse thought angrily, then chided herself because that was not fair, only her own ill temper at Giles coming to the fore. He was enjoying himself and not even particularly trying to hide it.

  “My cousin has the falling sickness. Every so often a demon-fit comes on him. He’s in one right now. That’s why he wasn’t at supper.”

  “It’s over with!” Edeyn said. “He’s only worn-out now, with fighting it so hard.”

  Her protest skimmed past Father Henry unheeded as he asked while crossing himself, “That’s why he’s on pilgrimage then, is it? Though I’d think he’d seek out St. Vitus instead of Kenelm.” He turned to Sire Benedict. “Wouldn’t you? For the falling sickness? But I don’t know of any shrine offhand.”

  “I’ve heard of one at Corvey, I think,” Sire Benedict said.

  “You mean Corby, in Lincolnshire?” Father Henry said doubtfully.

  “No, Corvey. It’s abroad. Somewhere beyond France?” Sire Benedict was unsure, too. Farther than anyone was likely to go at any rate.

  “But exorcism. That’s been done, hasn’t it?” Father Henry asked.

  “Several times,” Giles answered. “It works as well as everything else does.”

  “But which phase of the moon?” Father Henry asked. “Not the new? I’ve heard tell of a house exorcised when the moon was new and it burned down the week after, with everyone in it.”

  “The body being house of the soul this while it lives, it would be the same case,” Sire Benedict agreed. “It wasn’t done at the new moon, was it?”

  “I don’t remember,” Giles said with more seeming seriousness than before. “Though now that I think on it, it was after the last one that he fell headforemost almost into the fire. That scar on his face, you know. That’s from that.”

  The priests shook their heads, Sire Benedict clicking his tongue.

  Giles was not the only one enjoying himself, Frevisse thought bitterly. From Master Geffers’ plain-faced talebearing to all these various considerations of herbs and prayers and exorcisms, everyone had their own way of taking pleasure for themselves, one way or another, out of Lionel’s curse. Except for Edeyn and maybe Lady Lovell, no one seemed to see him as the charming man who had welcomed strangers to his company along the wayside this afternoon, who laughed over silly riddles and walked in a rose garden talking of a poem. No one seemed to remember any of that about him, only that he was demon-ridden. The thing that was least himself was the only thing about him people thought of.

  Except for Edeyn and probably Lady Lovell, which spoke well of both of them. Except that for Edeyn, Lionel was very near. Their laughter and their pleasures matched each other and what might that not lead to, if it had not already?

  Frevisse realized abruptly that she was going the way of malicious conjecture herself, and it did not matter that it was only in her own thoughts rather than with her tongue, it was something in which she should not indulge, any more than the eager talk around her—gone now to discussion between Dame Claire and Sire Benedict of what herbs might work best in conjunction with the efforts of exorcism—should lead her to indulge in anger at anyone. Including Giles.

  “Excuse me,” she said, rose and made curtsy to Lady Lovell, and crossed the room to where young John Naylor and the other man still stood in talk.

  They dropped whatever they were talking about to step apart and each bow to her. She inclined her head to them in return and then more particularly to the older man as young John introduced them, “Dame Frevisse, Master Holt, Lord Lovell’s high steward.”

  So she had been right about that. This was the man who oversaw all the men who oversaw all the numerous Lovell properties. He was perhaps near fifty, with gray and dark mixed thoroughly together in his hair and the years lined strongly, pleasantly in his face, as if he were someone who did well a job he cared about.

  She smiled at both of them and said, “I haven’t had chance to ask how it goes with you, John. You’re well seen to?”

  “Very well,” he said eagerly. “Master Holt has seen to me himself.”

  “Thank you for that courtesy,” Frevisse said.

  “I know his uncle a little. It’s pleasure as well as courtesy,” Master Holt said. He cocked an eye toward the seat she had just left. “I think the talk there didn’t suit you?”

  She did not want to begin again on Lionel and so made do with a part truth. “I’m afraid Giles Knyvet grates on me. I found I was wanting to be rude to him and decided a change of conversation might save my manners. At least I could be rude about him instead of to his face.”

  Both men smiled appreciatively. “You’re not alone in not much liking him,” Master Holt said.

  He might have let it go at that, but young John put in, “Petir in the stable when we first came in and I was seeing to the horses was a-cursing that Master Giles was come. He’d been in service in the Knyvet stables, and Master Giles claimed he was annoying Mistress Edeyn by too close attentions and had him dismissed when it wasn’t true.”

  “Or so Petir says,” Master Holt said. “Right now Petir is taking daily posies to one of the dairymaids. He’s soft where women are concerned. He may well have been too inclined to Mistress Edeyn and shown it more than Master Giles cared for.”

  “But Petir says it wasn’t really for that but because he saw Giles cutting a holly stick and told Master Gravesend of it because he knew what Master Giles meant to do with it.”

  “And what did he mean to do with it?” Frevisse asked. “According to Petir.”

  “According to Petir, he’s quick to strike servants who displease him, and he looks for reasons to be displea
sed. Usually only his own servants, but not always. And if anyone complains, he sees to it something more happens to them. He usually uses no more than a switch, but Petir saw him cutting the holly and told Master Gravesend.”

  Frevisse and Master Holt exchanged glances. It was one thing to lay a birch switch across a servant or even, if the case warranted it, a cane; but a holly stick was something else altogether. There was no give to a holly stick. It struck and it bruised, and the bruise went so deep that it was unlawful to strike pigs with it because the hurt flesh would not take salt and cure for winter storage but rot instead. The hurt would be the same on human flesh, deep and lasting.

  “So he told Master Gravesend and then there was trouble and at the end of it Petir was let go,” Master Holt guessed.

  “That’s what Petir says. He also says he was glad to go because he didn’t want to be there to find out what Master Giles might do against him in return.”

  To Frevisse’s mind that suited well with what she so far knew of Giles. Cruelties against his cousin behind his back, more overt cruelties against those who had small defense against him.

  And here she was caught up in talk again about people who were no concern of hers, she reminded herself, and was relieved that Dame Claire joined them then. She was introduced to Master Holt and exchanged greetings but said with a smile, “I was wondering if we should go to the chapel for Compline now, Dame Frevisse?”

  They should. It was a good thought and a welcome way out, and Frevisse agreed to it readily. They could even stay there in prayer until they heard the household going to bed and so escape more talk, she thought, as she made farewell to Master Holt and young John and followed Dame Claire away.

  “Lady Lovell told me the way,” Dame Claire explained as they left the parlor. “It’s up these stairs here.” The stairs Frevisse had noticed earlier, going up at the far end of the antechamber. As they went, Dame Claire added, whispering, nodding toward the door opposite the parlor, “That’s Lionel Knyvet’s room there.”