Novice’s Tale

by Margaret Frazer

  “Then what did we talk of?” Frevisse asked Domina Edith. “Thomasine, I think, after she had left. Briefly. And my being new as hosteler. None of that can signify. It has to have been something outside of St. Frideswide’s.”

  Domina Edith thought. “France?” she said at last. “Master Chaucer was telling us he was bound for France shortly. We gossiped of that. And of the King. And that Lady Ermentrude was angered at being ill-received at Fen Harcourt. I remember that.”

  “Moleyns,” said Frevisse with sudden memory. “Chaucer is going to collect Lord Moleyns’s heiress. We talked about her. And someone else.” It was names she wanted. Or events. Something to stir Thomasine’s memory, unless she was imagining there was anything to be stirred. She had only the henbane to lead her on and maybe it was a false clue.

  “William Vaughan,” Domina Edith said firmly. “A young man named William Vaughan who made a French marriage and left a child that Lady Moleyns has had the raising of.”

  Frevisse was aware of Thomasine suddenly tense in the circle of her arms. “That means something to you, Thomasine?”

  Thomasine frowned, then shook her head. “It can’t have been the William Vaughan I knew. Knew of,” she amended. “He died.”

  “So did this one. At Orleans siege, trying to save Lord Moleyns.”

  “Then it’s someone else. The William Vaughan whom Isobel knew died of sickness two years or more before then.”

  “Your sister knew him? Not you?”

  Willing to be helpful but clearly not understanding what difference it made, Thomasine said, “He was an esquire in Lady Ermentrude’s household when Isobel was there.”

  Frevisse said, “Then he would be the same. Master Chaucer was asking if he had relations yet living and if Lady Ermentrude knew them since he had been in her household.”

  “Oh, no.” Thomasine sounded very certain. “Because he couldn’t have married in France, because…”

  She stopped; against Frevisse’s encircling arm she was now utterly rigid When she said nothing else, Frevisse asked carefully, “He couldn’t have married because of what?”

  Slowly, drawn by Frevisse’s will more than her own, Thomasine’s head turned until she was staring wide-eyed directly at her.

  “Say it,”‘ Frevisse said softly, not daring to startle her but needing to hear it.

  Thomasine failed to respond. She was not, Frevisse realized as she watched a motionless struggle take place behind the girl’s eyes, a fool; it was simply that all her thinking had always been turned toward the Church and her nunhood. Now her mind was turned toward something else with the same intensity and depth, and what she was thinking was beginning to frighten her.

  Frevisse asked again, “Why couldn’t William Vaughan have married in France?”

  “Because…” Thomasine held back, then dropped her gaze away to the tiled floor and said, “… because he was betrothed to Isobel before he went. They did it secretly. He was to make his fortune and come back to her. He couldn’t have married anyone else. They were betrothed.”

  And a betrothal was as binding as the vow of marriage. Once made, however lightly, only death or an act by the Church could free the couple from one another. If Lady Isobel had been betrothed to William Vaughan, and he was still alive when she married Sir John, then her marriage was no marriage and her children were bastards.

  Which could be reason enough to kill.

  “It was a secret betrothal? No one knew of it except themselves? And you? How did you know of it if you didn’t know him?”

  “The one time I visited her at Lady Ermentrude’s, he had just gone to France. Isobel was all full of thoughts of him and talked to me because there was no one else. So I knew about him and that they were betrothed. But later she heard that he was dead.”

  Thomasine straightened up earnestly, free of Frevisse’s arm. “So it’s all right, it must be! Before she married Sir John, she’d heard from William Vaughan that he was ill and dying. That’s how she knew she was free to marry Sir John. Lady Ermentrude had arranged for their marrying and Isobel was finding reasons not to, until she heard William Vaughan was dying and then it was all right. I remember how glad she was, because she’d fallen in love with Sir John by then and been so afraid she would lose him. She told me so.”

  “But no one else knew of the betrothal? Not Lady Ermentrude?”

  Thomasine hesitated before saying uncertainly, “I think she might have. Isobel might have had to tell her, because she was running out of reasons for not marrying Sir John. There was a while they fought about it, and,” with some wonder that she had never thought about it before, “then she agreed she didn’t have to. And then, as if the saying no had never happened, they were married all of a sudden.”

  Thomasine looked at Frevisse, her eyes sad. “But Isobel never heard that he was dead. All she ever heard was that he was dying. He wrote to her, saying he was. She showed me his letter, and was sad about it for a day, and then her marriage to Sir John went forward. She never truly heard that William Vaughan was dead.”

  Isobel had simply hoped it were true, Frevisse thought, as usually it was when someone was pronounced dying. Very possibly Lady Ermentrude, not taking her resistance lightly, had pressured her into telling why she was avoiding marriage with Sir John. Which would explain why Lady Ermentrude had been so suddenly set on going to her that afternoon after they had talked of William Vaughan. The marriage she had been raging about to Sir John and Lady Isobel had indeed been theirs, not the Queen’s.

  Was it in that raging that Sir John learned their marriage was no marriage? Or had he known earlier? Whichever, he wanted it kept a secret as much as Lady Isobel.

  And that explained why Lady Isobel was willing to accept Thomasine as the murderer, because Thomasine’s death would break the last link between herself and William Vaughan now that Lady Ermentrude was dead.

  And Chaucer—the one person who could keep Sir Walter from executing Thomasine—was gone to ask their help in saving her.

  The pieces went together in Frevisse’s mind with the silver chink of dropping coins. They had not finished falling before she was on her feet and running.

  She wasted no time returning through the cloister. The church’s west door into the yard was the shortest way, and she took it. There were men in the yard, soldiers and servants both, mostly in sullen little clumps along the walls. No one moved to stop her, and the single man at the top of the guest-house steps gave way before her rush as she thrust past him.

  She had one glimpse of Sir Walter in red-faced argument with Montfort as she crossed the hall, but they were nowhere near enough to stop her, and if they shouted an order to any of the scattered servants, she did not hear it. She was in the passageway and at Sir John and Lady Isobel’s closed door. She struck it hard, twice, with her fist, even as her other hand found the handle. With fist and hand, she shoved the door wide open, bursting into the room. Her own grip on the door handle stopped her there; for two strong heartbeats she was as motionless as the two men and Lady Isobel standing across the room, Sir John’s hand still on the wine bottle he was setting down on the table, Lady Isobel still reaching out to Chaucer, who held, half-raised to his lips, the goblet she had just given him.

  All of them were staring at her.

  With a deep, unsteady breath, Frevisse drew back into her dignity, straightened, and said, “Thomas, I wouldn’t drink that if I were you.”

  Chapter 14

  Thomasine sat down in the far corner of the window bench in Domina Edith’s parlor, her hands folded in her lap, her gaze on the sunlit, empty yard below. Sir Walter and Master Montfort and all their men were gone. Sir Walter had taken Lady Ermentrude’s household with him. There had been a great clatter, with shouting and creaking of wheels and clanking of harness, but now. there was only the mid-morning silence, with, distantly, the calling of workers in the fields. Everything in the past few days might not have happened, except for Martha Hay ward’s coffin waiting in the church for someon
e to come and take it to her people.

  But here, in the first deep quiet since yesterday, Domina Edith had asked Thomasine to come to the parlor, and told her to sit while she and Dame Frevisse and Master Chaucer talked together. Thomasine heard their voices as a wordless mutter, a background to the quiet, glad to have her Benedictine peace wrapped round her again.

  Lady Ermentrude’s coffin and mortal remains had gone with her son and with her murderers. Sir John, bound to his horse and his hands tied behind him, Lady Isobel at his side and guarded, had ridden out behind the coffin on its cart this morning, with Master Montfort’s men on all sides of them, taking them to Oxford and the royal justices.

  Thomasine, at her request, had spoken to Isobel before they left. Thomasine had known by then what had happened. The other nuns had been told as much as they needed to know at recreation time before Compline yesterday, but she had been taken to Domina Edith and told all of it. So she had known as she stood there, looking at her sister and Sir John, that Isobel had killed two people, had tried to kill her, and only barely been stopped from killing Master Chaucer; that she had done all that while she fretted over her husband’s toothache, and talked of being grieved, and that Sir John, weak and insecure, had helped her.

  But the soul-deep quietness and surety that had come with Thomasine out of the golden-hazed, half-remembered wonder in the church had still been in her then. It was in her now, keeping her from horror and even anger. She had felt compassion and sorrow as she stood in Isobel and Sir John’s room with the guards at the door and told them she would pray for them, and asked if there was anything else she might do.

  Isobel had been dry-eyed then, but the marks of tears were on her, and she had clung to Sir John’s hand as tightly as he was holding to hers.

  “My children,” she had said, her voice uneven with grief. “ ”This was done for them. All of it for them. Tell her, John. Tell her how it was all for the children.“

  Sir John lifted his head. His gaze wandered, never quite finding Thomasine before he vaguely answered, “Yes,” his look turned toward the barred and shuttered window.

  Isobel’s hand tightened on his, but her gaze held, burning, on Thomasine. “People will try to make them suffer but they’re innocent. And their inheritance is in doubt. You’re meaning to be a nun. Go on with it, and make no claim on their inheritance. Don’t rob them. Promise me that.”

  “Assuredly.”

  The promise came easily, sincerely, but Isobel leaned forward, a harshness of anger in her voice, saying, “It’s a promise you must keep. We’ll have our marriage legalized before this… ends. They’ll be legitimate then, and nothing, nothing will come to you or your clever nuns that brought us to this. John, tell her that.”

  Her knuckles showed white around his hand, and he looked at her, but then away.

  “John,” she insisted.

  And he said, “Yes,” but whether in agreement or only answering her tightened hold on him, Thomasine could not tell.

  “And keep away from them. They are not to come to you, or you to them, so you can tell them lies about us. I’ll see to that before—” She had held back the words that had to come after that, and turned her face away, with maybe tears in her eyes again, but certainly grief as she said, “Go away.” No apology for anything that she had done. No regretting anything but failure.

  Thomasine had gone. Except for what his wife had told him to say, Sir John had not spoken at all, and at Thomasine’s last sight of him, he had been staring downward, slowly moving his head from side to side as if disbelieving what had happened.

  Now, in Domina Edith’s parlor, while the prioress spoke in her soothing murmur to Dame Frevisse and Master Chaucer, St. Frideswide’s peace seemed a more fragile thing to Thomasine than it had been before, a less sure protection than she had thought it was. But it was real, and so was the golden quiet in herself that she knew Isobel had never known. Nor ever would, too bound as she was to her worldly desires to learn that the only way to securely hold anything was to let go of wanting.

  Across the parlor Master Chaucer said, “Most of the lady’s anger seems to be at William Vaughan for not having died when he was supposed to. She seems to feel the fault is his. His living after he wrote he was dying forced her to the murders.”

  Dame Frevisse shook her head, not in denial but in regretful agreement, and said, “She and Vaughan thought they were in love and made promises to one another. But their ‘love’ failed to last beyond their parting. He hardly wrote to her after he left, she said. The message that he was dying was his last. Knowing men—and I beg your pardon, Uncle—I would guess William Vaughan had been as busy forgetting her as she anxious to forget him, until he was ill and sure he would die. He sent the message because he wanted to let her know, if she hadn’t done anything about it in the meantime, that she would shortly be free of her vow to him—and possibly to make her feel at least a little sorry for him, dying of flux in a foreign land. When he recovered he felt too ashamed to write and say he was still alive, still out of love with her, that she was still bound by the hasty words they had spoken to one another so long ago.”

  “And then he went on to father a child on another woman,” Domina Edith murmured. “As careless in his affections, seemingly, as in his promises.”

  “As careless as Lady Isobel,” Master Chaucer replied. “She had no right to be making such a betrothal with no one’s knowledge. And less right to agree to marrying Sir John without being certain she was free.”

  Softly from her corner Thomasine said, “She was in love with Sir John. She’s still in love with him.”

  “She’s destroyed him,” Dame Frevisse answered quietly.

  Master Chaucer nodded. “The pity is that if she hadn’t told John of her other betrothal before they were married, it would be held he married her in full good faith and that their children were, at least, legitimate. But because she told him and he knew of the other betrothal as well as she did, their marriage was invalid from its start since William Vaughan was alive when it was made. They didn’t know that, though, and would never have known it if Lady Ermentrude hadn’t taken it upon herself to bludgeon them about it after she heard that Vaughan died three years later than they had thought.”

  Thomasine dared to ask, “So it’s certain my lady aunt knew about the betrothal?”

  Master Chaucer nodded. “She had it out of Isobel, when Isobel’s reasons for not marrying Sir John grew ever more feeble. You know at least as well as the rest of us how she would demand an answer to her questions.”

  Thomasine nodded, and was a little surprised to find no trace of resentment in herself. Poor Lady Ermentrude, was all she thought.

  Master Chaucer continued, “All this touched her on her pride. It was she who came to me about the marriage, she who was all puffed up about how smoothly the arranging went, and she who felt most abused by this sudden impediment to her plans—an impediment that came about while Isobel and William were in her care, to her greater discredit. Then, just as she must needs tell me about it, Isobel received the letter from William and shared its contents with her.”

  “She ought not to have told Sir John what the problem was,” remarked Dame Frevisse.

  “But Lady Isobel wanted him to know she was not refusing him because she wanted to,” said Chaucer. “So she told him her secret, and what they would have made of it, I don’t know, but word came of Vaughan’s ‘dying’ and the matter was suddenly all easy for them.”

  “It was only our chance talking here that afternoon that gave the truth about William Vaughan’s dying to Lady Ermentrude,” said Dame Frevisse, “and set the matter on its way to her death.”

  “I only spoke of it to keep her mind from planning to bother you,” said Chaucer with real regret. “She was a great meddler and a proud woman. She wasn’t thinking of Lady Isobel or Sir John when she rode off to tell them. She was thinking of herself and of what blame might come to her at the undoing of their marriage. She never gave them time to
think of a quiet way to fix matters, just let her temper take high hand. And Isobel’s came back to answer it.”

  Domina Edith’s tone was regretful but firm. “Sin will out, and its price is terrible.”

  “But they hadn’t knowingly sinned,” Thomasine said earnestly. “Even Lady Ermentrude was in the right in going to warn them their souls were in danger.”

  Domina Edith looked at her, her eyes deep with age and knowing, so that suddenly but very surely Thomasine realized how much of the prioress’s quietness came not from the weariness of age but from years of watching other people’s lives, and her own as well, and thinking on them while she did.

  “They did not knowingly sin in their marrying,” Domina Edith agreed quietly. “Nor did Lady Ermentrude in going to tell them of William Vaughan. It was Lady Ermentrude’s prideful arrogance toward them and her wrath when they would not bend to her will that were her sins. And they did sin knowingly when they chose to kill her instead of bending to the necessity of facing their wrong.” She looked at Thomasine. “That’s what all her resolve was to have you out of here. She was in a fury with them and their foolish insistence that they would not undo their marriage. She determined to punish them by taking you out of here and seeing you married, so your legitimate children would inherit the family lands and deny them to John and Isobel’s children.”