The Boy's Tale

by Margaret Frazer

  Frevisse had hoped she was not that obvious and bent her head obediently over the lavender, inhaling deeply.

  As calmly as if they were discussing a simple kitchen matter, Dame Claire said, "So there's a dark secret concerning these children that you and Domina Edith feel it better I do not know."

  "Best that no one knows," Frevisse said evenly, keeping her voice both firm and calm. "Or if that can't be managed, then as few as possible."

  "But they're in some sort of danger, you believe."

  "Yes."

  "You're certain, then, they weren't just claiming to have been pushed to avoid admitting they'd fallen in by carelessness?"

  "They were too honestly terrified. Jasper especially." She had belatedly had another thought. "And they said yesterday that their fall into the pigsty was no accident either. No one paid them any heed, but maybe they were right. I need to talk to Master Naylor. Someone should look through the woods around the pool to see if there's any trace of who was there."

  "And Maryon should be told. She's obviously not their mother—" Dame Claire made it a question but fixed her eyes on Frevisse, expecting confirmation. Frevisse nodded wryly, accepting that Dame Claire had already guessed more than Frevisse wished she had. "—but they're in her care so she should know," Dame Claire finished. "Is the lavender helping?"

  Frevisse had gone on unthinkingly inhaling its slightly musty sweetness the while. Now, at Dame Claire's question, she realized her knots of keyed-up intensity had eased and left her mind more clear on what had to be done. "Yes," she said in surprise.

  "That's good then." Dame Claire turned from the shelves to face her fully. "If I trusted no one else in all the world, I trust Domina Edith and she's depended on you in other matters like this. I'll accept I should not know why the boys are in danger, and you have my leave to do what you think needs to be done, and to come and go as you see fit, until this trouble is settled. Is that sufficient?"

  "Very sufficient," Frevisse said. The matter was now fully in her hands. Come of it what might, it would be on her head. "I'll go about it then."

  The bell began to ring to None.

  "Prayers first," Dame Claire said. "Those always first."

  Frevisse opened her mouth to protest that the sooner the woods were searched the better, then closed it. Whoever had been there was long gone, and anything he had left behind would still be there when prayers were over. Obediently, she bowed her head and folded her hands into her sleeves, ready to follow Dame Claire to the church.

  "And afterwards have Sister Juliana give you a new pair of shoes before you go out again," Dame Claire added.

  Later, in the shadow of the gateway to the outer yard, Master Naylor eyed Frevisse with extreme disfavor. "And you're sure of this? They're not lying to save themselves a smacking?"

  Frevisse wondered in passing if Edmund and Jasper had ever had a smacking, and doubted it, even as she said, "They're due for one anyway, leaving the cloister as they did. And, no, I don't think they're lying. You know a child who's only pretending to be frightened looks different from one who really is."

  What might have been a smile lifted one corner of Master Naylor's mouth. "My boy has tried that fooling a time or two, yes. Good enough then." The brief amusement was gone from Master Naylor's face. "I'll go myself to see what I can find around the pool."

  "Would you try to find out, too, if anyone unfamiliar was seen around here today? Or anyone not where they should have been?"

  "With the haying started, most everyone that can be spared is in the fields. They'll know if anyone wasn't there who should be, and the same with the few left to usual tasks. But by the same hand, with nigh everyone in the fields, someone could come and go around the priory and not be noticed so long as they kept clear of the hay field."

  "I know. But ask anyway, on the chance someone was seen, something noticed."

  "Aye, Dame. But you'd best tell the boys' own folk what's toward."

  "That's where I'm bound for next." Little though she liked the idea of telling Maryon about this.

  Master Naylor, straightening from his bow, fixed her with the demand, "Why would anyone be trying to kill these boys?"

  Taken unready by his bluntness, Frevisse took too long to finally say, "I don't know."

  "But you have ideas."

  "Yes." She forestalled his next question by saying, "I can't tell them to you."

  He stared at her an uncomfortable time more, and she met his look with her own, until he nodded impassive acceptance, bowed again, and left her.

  Satisfied that he would do all that she had asked and regretting what next she had to do, Frevisse turned toward the guesthall.

  As Frevisse explained yet again what had happened, Maryon rose from where she had been sitting on the foot of Sir Gawyn's bed and, twisting her hands around each other, paced the narrow width of the room and back again. Frevisse finished, "They're safe now, tucked into bed and Tibby and Jenet both watching them."

  Maryon snapped, "Jenet is useless!"

  Frevisse silently agreed but only said, "They won't be left to just her care anymore."

  "They should be brought here," Sir Gawyn said from the bed. He had been standing, holding to the bedpost but on his own feet, when Frevisse entered, and though he had lain down again, he was markedly better than yesterday, pale but no longer the ill gray that he had been. He seemed stronger, too, but Frevisse wondered how much of his strength came from his will to have it and not because he was actually that much better.

  Now she countered his suggestion with, "I don't think so. They'll be far more vulnerable here than in the cloister."

  "But they don't stay in the cloister!" Maryon pointed out. "This is the second time they've slipped out."

  "We'll keep better watch on them after this."

  "Not so well as we would." Sir Gawyn shifted himself higher against the head of the bed; he was becoming more adroit at managing with only his unhurt arm. "Mistress Maryon and I know them and they're used to us. And to Will and Colwin, too. The four of us know what's at stake. No one could guard them better the little while we'll still be here."

  "It will be some while yet before you can leave," Frevisse said.

  "Not very long." He ignored Maryon's protesting gesture. "Now that we've been found, we have to leave as soon as may be. Tomorrow if I could."

  "You can't!" Maryon said. "Not so soon with your shoulder."

  "No," Sir Gawyn agreed bitterly. "Not as soon as that. But soon. Two days or three."

  Maryon bit down on another protest. Her face smoothed into the blandness of a cat convincing someone it was not eyeing the cream, and she said reasonably, "But whatever we decide, for now at least they're in bed and sleeping and we'll not disturb them. There's nothing can be done before tomorrow, come what may."

  "No," Sir Gawyn broodingly agreed. "Not before tomorrow."

  Will had entered while they talked and remained standing just inside the door. Now, very quietly, he said, "You can't ride before another week is out, sire. Not without risk of opening your wound."

  "We'll be risking more if I don't ride!" Sir Gawyn snapped.

  Will opened his mouth to say something else, but Maryon interposed, "Did you find someone to mend your shirt?"

  "Aye, one of the women here will do it." Will shrugged the question away.

  Maryon, intent on diverting him from Sir Gawyn's shoulder, cut off whatever next he meant to say with, "And did you tell someone that Sir Gawyn can eat a heavier meal tonight than he has been?"

  "I've told the cook that, yes," Will said.

  "And—"

  He cut her off impatiently. "I've seen to it all. Sire—"

  Sir Gawyn cut them both off with a small sound of annoyance. "Enough, the both of you. I won't be worried over." And added, more to Will than Maryon, "I'm not your bone."

  Will's expression shut abruptly down to the blank obedience of a servant. He bowed silently and fixed his look somewhere on the far wall. Sir Gawyn gave his attenti
on over to Frevisse, saying, "Let things stay as they are for today. But tomorrow I think there's changes to be made. Our thanks for what you did. It will be remembered."

  Recognizing dismissal, Frevisse curtsied, said, "Their safety is thanks enough. No other remembrance is necessary," matching his manner, and gladly left him to Maryon and Will. He had her prayers. She wished him well, both for his own sake and because the sooner he was gone the better; the boys would go with him, cease to be so direct a threat to St. Frideswide's and no longer her concern.

  But until then they were, and she needed to find what else could be done to keep them safe.

  Chapter 15

  Frevisse returned to the cloister and went into the church. Neglect of her duties as sacrist had not been included in Dame Claire's permission to see to the matter of the boys. In the sacristy she took out the third best silver-plated candlesticks and set to polishing them. With even the least diligence, she should be able to occupy her mind with the necessities of duty—when silver polishing was done, there was always the need to inspect the altar cloths for frays or tears—until Vespers, unless Master Naylor sent to say he had word of something.

  What the something might be she supposed she could speculate on to no profit. Whoever had shoved Edmund and Jasper into the pool had taken care the boys not see him, even though he had not intended they live long enough for it to matter if they had. So he was probably careful enough to have left no footprints worth mentioning unless the attacker was phenomenally careless enough to walk in the mud somewhere, and even then soft shoe soles would leave nothing but an undistinguished foot-shape good only for determining if he had been generally large or small or medium.

  It would be convenient if he had left a torn bit of his clothing on a rough branch somewhere. She supposed she could hope for that much anyway. And there was still the chance he had been seen going to or coming from the woods, but there were hedges and walls enough, and nearly everyone gone to the haying anyway, that he would have to be either a dolt or unlucky to have been seen except by unlikely accident.

  Except that if he were a stranger, he would not know his way around well enough to make such good use of walls and hedges.

  But if he were a stranger, he would be more likely to be noticed even when he was well away from the stream and not bothering with concealment anymore.

  But why had he been by the stream, in the woods, at all? Surely not in the specific hope of having a chance against the boys. Their coming there by chance would have seemed too unlikely. But then again, had their going there been only chance? Was there something the children had not told her? There could in fact be a great deal they had not told her; she had given them no chance to tell her much of anything. She could talk to Lady Adela this evening and the boys tomorrow.

  But that did not solve the problem of who had lain in wait in the woods for them. Or not lain in wait? Suppose it had just been someone wanting to harm anyone who happened along and Edmund and Jasper had happened to hand. That kind of madness was not impossible. And ugly though it was, it would be less complicated than the other possibilities she had been considering.

  She wanted very much to hear that a stranger had been seen somewhere near today. Preferably a disreputable hedge-crawler who looked the sort to be up to anything mean and hurtful.

  She realized she had been polishing the same curve of candlestick past any need, and turned it over to come at a different place but found she was finished with it, so set it back into its aumbry, folded her polishing cloth, and decided she would be better off in her choir stall praying until Vespers. But as she left the sacristy, Sister Juliana approached her and gestured that she was wanted at the cloister door. Frevisse silently indicated her thanks and went.

  As she came out into the warm sunshine of the yard from the cool cloister shadows, Master Naylor stood up from where he had been sitting on the well edge and came down the steps toward her, his face, even for Master Naylor, grim.

  "You found something?" she asked.

  "More than you asked for. A dead man floating facedown in the pool."

  Frevisse gasped and had to draw in new breath before she could force out, "Who?"

  "The man Colwin. Drowned, by the look of him."

  "Colwin?" The boys' Colwin who had cheerfully taken them into the stable yesterday? "In the pool? Drowned?" she repeated blankly.

  "Unless he drowned elsewhere and then walked himself there. He didn't wash down that babbling stream in any flood, that's sure."

  "But the pool isn't that deep. Not over his head if he stood up."

  "Then obviously he didn't stand up," Master Naylor snapped.

  Frevisse sat down on one of the well steps. "This isn't what I expected."

  "Nor did he, I suppose," Master Naylor said acidly. But his anger was cover for his own dismay and, relenting, he said more reasonably, "But we're maybe making too much of it. His clothing was on the bank. He might have been in to swim, had a cramp and drowned."

  Her wits beginning to gather back, Frevisse said, "How did he happen to know about the pool? Had someone told him about it or did he happen on it himself?" And then drown there the same afternoon the boys nearly did? She could not make that seem likely.

  "The man who found him said he wondered how he came to be there," Master Naylor said. "He wasn't given to wandering around since he came here, apparently."

  "Has Father Henry been told? Where's the body now?"

  "He's been told. He's gone with the men I've sent to bring it in."

  Frevisse stood up. "I want to see it."

  Master Naylor hesitated. "It won't be a goodly sight."

  "He can't have been in the water so long the corpse has turned awful," Frevisse said bluntly. "It's barely been half the afternoon since I was there."

  At this evidence of a strong stomach, Master Naylor— who should have known better about Frevisse—closed his mouth to a tight line. He turned on his heel and walked away toward the gate to the side yard. Frevisse, assuming that was as near to agreement as she was going to have from him, rose and followed.

  The four men sent to bring Colwin in were just at the postern gate as Master Naylor and Frevisse came out, the body on a hurdle carried between them and Father Henry walking alongside, praying aloud from his prayer book. He and Latin were not so comfortable together as they might have been, but he made up for his inaccuracies with intensity, and a soul cast unexpectedly from a body was in even worse peril than usually came at the moment of death; prayers as many and rapid as possible were needed to save it and, hopefully, ease its passing. Father Henry neither paused nor glanced up from his work as Master Naylor ordered, "Bring it this way," and the men shifted course to follow him aside to the open-sided shed where the hanks of wool were hung to dry after dying. No one was there today, nor any wool hanging, but there was a rough worktable and the men gratefully slid the piece of fencing onto it; Colwin had not been a small man.

  Frevisse was grateful that the haying had nearly everyone out to the fields. Besides herself and Master Naylor, there were only the four men curious but saying nothing as Master Naylor ordered them to stand back, and Father Henry across the table from her, still intent in his prayers as she came near for her first clear look at the body.

  Colwin's clothing was in a folded pile at his side, except that he still wore his short breech covering his loins, as men often did when they went in swimming. A single long look told Frevisse there were no wounds on the body's front.

  "Turn him over, please," she said.

  The men gave Master Naylor quick, questioning looks. He twitched his hand, bidding one of them obey her, and the fellow reluctantly did, heaving Colwin's flaccid body onto its side, then to its belly. Water came out of the mouth. An arm flopped over the table edge. Frevisse lifted it back to beside the body. The flesh was unnaturally cool but still soft to the touch, he had been dead so little a while.

  There was no wounds on his back either.

  "Was there more water come out of hi
m when you picked him up?" she asked.

  "Much more, my lady," the man said.

  "So he was alive when he went into the water," Master Naylor said.

  "Alive enough to breathe awhile," Frevisse agreed.

  She touched his head, feeling to be sure the skull was intact. It was; no bones shifted under her probing. But . . .

  She hesitated, felt again along the back curve of the skull, and then asked Master Naylor, "Do you feel anything here?"

  Master Naylor felt, felt again, and said, "There's a lump." He parted Colwin's dark hair. "A large lump and new, I'd guess, but the skin wasn't broken. It didn't bleed."