6 The Murderer's Tale

by Frazer, Margaret

  They looked at each other, all with the same question, but it was Lady Lovell who finally said it aloud.

  “What was Martyn doing with his back to Lionel?”

  Chapter 17

  Neither Frevisse nor Dame Claire made answer to that. For Martyn to turn his back on Lionel, to be so distracted as to let his dagger be taken and his throat be cut by the man he was there to watch and help…

  “And then for Lionel to fall and be lying perfectly straight on his back with his hands arranged on his breast, and Martyn to wait until then before falling across him,” Frevisse said slowly. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  Lady Lovell, her voice as even and almost as pleasant as usual but with a hard anger in her eyes, said, “Apparently there’s going to be more for the crowner to ask about than we thought at first. Dame Claire, will you do something more than you have already?”

  Somewhat unwillingly, Dame Claire nodded.

  “Would you see if Sire Benedict or your priest have blood on their shoe soles? I can’t think of any way to find out except by asking to see them, but if you could do it so they don’t know that it matters, it would be better. Can you do that?”

  “Yes, my lady. Father Henry has only the one pair of shoes, I know, but does Sire Benedict have more so he could have changed?”

  “He has only the one pair and they’re new ones, part of his Easter livery. He always gives his old ones away afterward, for charity’s sake and to have no more than he needs. Dame Frevisse, as well as Lionel’s shoes, would you find out exactly what happens in his attacks? I’ve always let it be enough for me to know he has them and to pray for him and made a point not to pry beyond that. Enough people pry at him, he’s needed a few friends who don’t; but maybe if we know more about them, we’ll find we’ve only misunderstood something and there’s no problem after all.”

  Unhesitatingly Frevisse said, “Yes, my lady,” ignoring Dame Claire’s sideways look at her that said she suspected Frevisse would have tried anyway, asked or not.

  Lady Lovell shook her head. “I don’t want to be doubting where there was no doubt, but if it’s possible Martyn didn’t die the way we thought, if it’s possible Lionel didn’t kill him, then…” She stopped but what she did not say was there in the silence with them.

  If Lionel had not killed Martyn, then someone else had, and while Lionel was chained with his despair in the dark room, the murderer was still free among them.

  In the great hall after they had left Lady Lovell, Dame Claire said, “Before anything, I think we should go to the chapel for at least one of the morning’s offices. We’ve done none of them.”

  With sharp guilt, Frevisse realized that was true. Yesterday she had been missing St. Frideswide’s familiar ways. Today she had forgone everything that made St. Frideswide’s most precious to her. She bent her head in quick agreement. “In the chapel?”

  It had been blood-polluted, but it was quiet and apart from the general bustle of the household, still a good place to pray.

  Dame Claire agreed with a nod, adding, “Besides, I doubt I could draw you as far away as the church again, could I? Not with your mind all turned to this.”

  Frevisse knew how little Dame Claire had liked her morning spent in what had seemed indulgent curiosity and too much talk. “Dame Claire, I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for asking questions? You always ask questions. And it seems this time you’re in the right with them. There seem to be questions that ought to be asked before Lionel is condemned. But there are also prayers to be said.”

  She said it without irk or anger, only firmly, and did not wait for more agreement but led the way back to the stairs that would take them up to the solar rather than across the hall now busy with servants beginning to set up the tables for dinner. Frevisse followed, meaning to say nothing else, but as they came to Lionel’s guarded door, with Deryk still outside it, she said, “Wait only a moment, I pray you.” Before Dame Claire had turned around to ask her why, she said, “Deryk, I need to see Lionel again.”

  Behind her, Dame Claire made a disapproving noise, but Deryk was already unlocking the door without question or hesitation, and when he opened it and stood aside, Frevisse went in without looking back to see how annoyed Dame Claire now was.

  The thin band of sunlight through the slit window had strengthened since early morning, but even so the room would have been mostly darkness until the door opened, letting in the fuller light from the stairs. Lionel, still seated where she had left him, slumped forward on the chest, did not respond. Only Fidelitas, still leaning against his knee, lifted her head to see who had come. To one side the food Father Henry must have brought him sat on the floor untouched even by Fidelitas.

  There was no particular point in talk. What comfort she could offer, she had offered before, so she simply said, “Let me see the bottom of your shoes.”

  Lionel stirred and looked at her, not speaking but visibly working to draw his mind back from whatever darkness it had reached. Finally, more slowly than Frevisse’s impatience would have liked, he grasped what she had asked of him and lifted his left foot and cocked his knee to bend his foot toward the doorway and the light. There was nothing on the sole beyond expected scuffs.

  “Your other one,” she said.

  There was no blood on it either, but this time as he set it down he asked, “Why?”

  She could not tell him, not with Deryk there to hear and the chance it would not come to anything after all. “There are people who care about you. Hold to that. Remember it.”

  Fidelitas whined small in her throat and nudged her muzzle against his arm. Lionel moved his free hand to the nape of her neck and sank his fingers into her fur, holding to it as if to a lifeline.

  Frevisse drew back and let Deryk close the door.

  “Has anyone besides Father Henry come to him?” she asked.

  “Only our priest, and he didn’t do good with him either,” Deryk readily answered.

  Dame Claire said nothing to her at all, simply turned away and went on to the chapel.

  It smelled of lye and scrubbing and had a barren air, with the long woven carpet rolled up from across the floor to lie in front of the altar that now was stripped of its white covering and all the things that had stood on it. Over it the lamp hung dark.

  But the chapel was still a good place for prayer, a place where holiness had been, and quiet and apart from the household bustle. Frevisse and Dame Claire went past the large damp places where the scrubbing had been done to kneel in front of the altar. Times for the early and mid-morning offices were long past, but it was close to the time for None and they settled to the prayers and psalms together. Frevisse knew she took too long to draw her mind fully into them but thought she had managed it until at the end, while she was saying, correctly, with Dame Claire, the Paschaltide responsory of Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia, she found she was thinking, far more strongly, the prayer from the end of None. Misericordia et Veritas praecedent faciem tuam, Domine. Mercy and truth go before you, Lord.

  In the head-bowed silence after they had finished, she went on praying for that. For mercy and truth. And that there would be mercy in the truth once it was found.

  If it was found.

  Chapter 18

  It was time for dinner when they finished, and though Frevisse dreaded the talk there would be with so many people brought together for the first time since this morning, there was no choice but to go.

  It helped that she and Dame Claire were at the high table, though their company there was noticeably diminished not only by Lionel’s absence but by that of Giles and Edeyn and Sire Benedict. Lady Lovell saw to it that the talk around her was kept to ordinary things, but enough snatches and scraps of conversation from the lower tables reached Frevisse to make plain there was no restraint there. It seemed interest in the general bloodiness of the murder had eased in favor of speculation over Lionel. It did not matter that it was understood he had only killed because he was possessed. That warranted p
ity and pity was granted, in limited amounts; but it warranted fear, too, because what could be expected of a man so readily seized on, so readily driven out of his mind? And with the fear went indignation that—like the fear—was the more enjoyable because it could both be safely indulged in and was so undeniably justified.

  With dinner over and the household scattering to their afternoon tasks, Dame Claire said, “I’ll speak with Father Henry before he goes and find out Sire Benedict afterward. What are you about?”

  “I want to talk to Edeyn about Lionel’s fits.”

  Dame Claire went away toward Father Henry where he was in talk with some officer of the household about coursing hares, to judge by their gestures.

  Frevisse made her own way through the thinning shift of people, picking up snippets of talk as she went, most of it no different from the rest she had heard and, so far as she could tell, summed up by one of the maidservants she had earlier heard in the solar, exclaiming still on a variation of her theme, “And think! They’ve left him loose all this time! It’s a wonder it hasn’t come to this before. It’s a wonder it hasn’t. And it could have been anyone he killed. It could have been any of us!”

  “And could still be one of us,” the man she talked to said. “Think on it. They say he takes on the strength of fifteen men when the demon takes hold of him. How likely is he to be held by those little chains and that door there and Deryk? The sooner he’s gone the better.”

  “They say Sire Benedict blessed the chains with holy water, to be sure they’d hold,” another woman said. She had serving dishes stacked in her hands and was probably meant to be clearing the table.

  “And how much good do you think Sire Benedict’s holy water is going to do against a demon that can murder a man in a chapel?” the man scoffed. “If it wills it, Master Knyvet’ll pull the chains out of the wall and burst the door and go where he pleases, and where will we be then?”

  Frevisse had managed to hear that much by taking more time than needed to edge around them on her way to the door, but now she had heard enough. With the talk going that way, there would be no satisfying folk until Lionel was as harshly, straitly confined as could be managed, with assurances he would be kept that way. Nothing said about the infrequency of his attacks or that there was warning of them or that he had never harmed anyone before would make any difference. Even what she had presently in his favor was no more than would give the crowner momentary pause before he completed the condemnation.

  She knocked at the Knyvets’ chamber door. The maidservant came in answer and turned to say into the room who it was, and Edeyn called out, “Come in. I pray you, come in.”

  She was seated at the window and did not rise, saying with an apologizing smile as Frevisse entered, “I’m strictly told to rest, to stay at ease and not tire myself by even so much as pacing the room.”

  “Is your childing that”—Frevisse looked for a word and chose—“delicate?”

  “So much as I can tell, the child is well and so am I. It’s my husband who frets, I suppose because it’s the most he can do about the baby and me for now.”

  She was speaking with what Frevisse thought was a feigned lightness, as if she had some thought of how she wanted to seem but could not quite carry it off. Her attempt was gallant, though, and Frevisse, who had been surprised to see Giles was not there, asked, to keep the conversation going, “But Master Giles isn’t here?”

  “It makes him restless to be closed in,” Edeyn said. “We ate and then he went out. To the church, I think. And he hopes to talk with Lady Lovell this afternoon. Have you heard when the crowner can be expected?”

  The last question betrayed that she was not as settled as she was trying to seem. There had not been time for any messenger even to reach the crowner, let be bring back word of when he might be there. Carefully Frevisse answered, “There’s no word at all yet.” Then she asked because she could not let the matter go, “May I talk to you of Master Knyvet?”

  “Of Lionel?” Edeyn’s voice ached somewhere between hurt and gladness. “Have you seen him again? How is it with him?”

  “I saw him just before dinner. He isn’t eating but that will pass. Otherwise he’s well.”

  “Except in his mind where the pain must be near to overwhelming him,” Edeyn returned.

  Taken off guard again by one of Edeyn’s shifts that showed how much more there was to her than her young, sweet face and pleasant manners, Frevisse returned as directly, “Except in his mind.” Recovering and wanting to counter the bleakness that admission brought to Edeyn’s face, she added, “Fidelitas is still with him.”

  “Then he still has a friend,” Edeyn said.

  “At least two,” Frevisse agreed, “counting you.”

  “Counting me,” Edeyn echoed. But the brightness was gone from her face again as she added bitterly, “For all the good that I can do him.”

  “You can maybe do some good. There’s something I’m wondering and you may know enough about him to tell me.”

  The maid made a negative sound from across the room, but Edeyn brushed a hand in her direction, dismissing her to silence, and said, intent on Frevisse, “I’m not the one who thinks I’m in need of being treated like Venetian glass. Ask me what you will.”

  “What happens to Lionel when an attack comes on him? What does he do?”

  “He falls.” Edeyn answered without hesitation but her voice low and her eyes on Frevisse’s face as if to gauge her reaction. “He simply falls. It’s almost as if he’s died, he’s so suddenly not there. Then his body begins to jerk and twitch—his head and arms and legs and body all at once—and it’s horrible because he isn’t doing it, he isn’t there at all, it’s all something else making it happen to him. And then he—then it all stops, sometimes with one huge spasm, sometimes not, and he’s just left lying there unconscious and not moving until eventually he rouses and is himself again, only tired and a little dazed for a while.”

  She had moved a little while she talked, sketching gestures that were not her own, but Frevisse was not sure how much they were like what Lionel actually did and she asked carefully, “Just how wildly does he fling about in that part of the attack?”

  Edeyn made a widened swing of her arm and rolled her head from side to side. The maid made a distressed sound. Edeyn ignored her and said, “Like that. A little more violently and his legs with it, not so controlled, but much like that.”

  “Nothing more than that?”

  “Not anymore. It used to be they’d try to hold him quiet when he was attacked. As many men as could be called, they’d hold on to him, to try to keep him still. Then Martyn found out that that made it worse, as if the demon fought harder if he was fought against. Since then there’s been only Martyn doing only what needs to be done to keep Lionel from hurting himself, and the attacks are far easier.”

  “How long has it been that way?”

  “Oh, years now. Since before I married Giles.”

  “And how do you know so exactly what happens in them?”

  Edeyn hesitated, then confessed, “I was there once when an unwarned one came on him. It was in the solar, of an evening after supper, with only him and Martyn and me there. Giles was gone. As soon as it started, the servants all left.”

  Across the room her maid made a denying sound.

  “Except for Nan,” Edeyn corrected and managed a smile. “She wouldn’t leave because I wouldn’t. Afterward Martyn told Lionel that I went when everyone else did, as soon as he collapsed, and that I’d seen nothing else, but that wasn’t true. He lied to keep Lionel from feeling worse over it than he did, and since Lionel never asked me directly, I never had to lie to him.”

  “About staying there?” Frevisse asked.

  “Yes.”

  “But you would have lied to him if he had asked?”

  “He didn’t want me to be there. He doesn’t want me to know how it is with him. He would have been unhappy with knowing I knew. So I would have lied to him, yes.” She said it
simply, not so much defiant as completely certain, beyond any doubt or hesitation.

  “So you stayed,” Frevisse said. “Why?” Though she thought she knew.

  “Because I wanted to know exactly how it is with him when it happens, not have it left to my imagining. Can you think what sort of things I could imagine, knowing as little as he and Martyn ever say about them?”

  Frevisse did not have to think about what Edeyn might imagine. She had heard enough today alone of what people could conjure up to suppose what worse could be imagined. But that was not all of it and she asked, “But why did you want to know more?”

  For the second time Edeyn hesitated. Her young face firmed, showing something of the woman she might be growing toward, someone stronger than the child she had seemed when Frevisse first saw her along the road, bright with lighthearted talk and riddles. “Because what if one of the attacks came without warning, the way that one had— they do sometimes—and when Martyn wasn’t there? Or—” She paused, making a visible effort to steady herself enough to go on. “Or what if something happened to Martyn? He was the only one who knew what to do for Lionel. If I knew, then there would at least be me as well. But I never thought… it would be like… this.”

  “You care—” Frevisse found she had nearly said “for Lionel.” She changed it to, “—about Lionel.”

  “He’s kind and good, far more than he might be, considering how it is with him. And he’s clever. He and Martyn together were so…” She stopped, needing to deal with the pain of knowing there would never be Lionel and Martyn together again, nor probably ever even Lionel as things now were.

  Frevisse thought she had kept her own face controlled, but Edeyn read something in it, faintly smiled, and said, “I know. It’s all right. Lady Lovell warned me long since to be careful, that people might misthink my friendship, but that’s all it’s been. Friendship. Lionel has been so much alone except for Martyn.”