The Servant's Tale

by Margaret Frazer

  She had forgotten that sunshine. And the laughter.

  And riding in the basket.

  How had she forgotten that? The days’ journeyings had been so long that she could not walk with the others, but had ridden in a basket strapped on the side of an ambling donkey. Shaded by a wide-brimmed straw hat and lulled to dreaming and sometimes sleep by the donkey’s rocking gait along hours and hours of dusty roads to…where? To where there had been oranges for her father to pick for her.

  She had gone on no journeyings for a long while now. And that, yes, that was what she wanted, more than an orange. Perhaps, come the spring, she could ask leave to go on pilgrimage.

  To where?

  The possibilities, like memories, rose up in her mind.

  Canterbury, with its flint wall and the tall glories of its cathedral’s nave. Walsingham, waiting green and quiet at the end of miles of gentle riding. St. Denis and the exciting bustle of Paris. Compostela again, to be visited with true understanding of the grace it could bestow, sitting beyond the mountains and near the orange groves…

  Reality slid between Frevisse and her dreaming. No nun from St. Frideswide’s would ever go so far as Compostela. Or even St. Denis. Oxford, maybe, to St. Frideswide’s tomb; that might be possible. Or Canterbury, if Domina Edith felt that St. Thomas had granted a particularly desperate prayer. But Frevisse had no desperate prayer—except that she wanted…wanted…

  Unworded discontent pulled at her while she fought to leave the thought unfinished. She wanted…Sleep, she said firmly to herself. A good, deep sleep and no rheum left in her head when she awakened.

  “Dame Frevisse?”

  Frevisse realized her thoughts had taken her further away than she had known; the soft voice and the chink of the rings as the curtain closing her cubicle was pushed aside startled her into sitting up abruptly. She had heard no one moving, and whispered a little sharply, “Who’s there?”

  “It’s Eda, my lady. About the man Barnaby. He’s dying, seems like. I’ve told Dame Claire and she said to ask if you would come.”

  Why, Frevisse peevishly wondered, did people always choose to die in the middle of the night? But she immediately pushed the idea away. It was not her place to question; it was her place to serve those who came to the priory, whether to travel on or to die there. And if she told herself that often enough, maybe she would come to remember it first instead of second.

  “I will come at once,” she said, matching Eda’s humble tone.

  Chapter

  9

  FREVISSE SHIVERED AND wrapped her arms more tightly around herself. There was nothing she could do to help Barnaby, and the hall was as cold as the night was black beyond the dimly lit windows, or even the corners of the hall beyond the reach of the small lamp Dame Claire had set beside the body while she checked it.

  The servant Eda, anxious not to be idle, lifted the lamp in an attempt to give Dame Claire a better light, but was shivering so hard that Dame Claire bid her with an impatient gesture to put it down again. Obeying, she moved beyond Barnaby’s corpse to put both arms around Meg, and both of them stood shivering and looking everywhere but at Dame Claire. Frevisse wished she had thought to step down from her own dignity of office to comfort Meg. Now, instead, she was left to shiver alone.

  Dame Claire sighed with a weariness that had nothing to do with waking before dawn. “It was something torn inside of him, maybe. Or something broken that I didn’t find. The foam at the corner of his mouth says it was likely a hurt to his lungs.” She drew one of the blankets over Barnaby’s face.

  Meg moaned and turned her face into Eda’s shoulder.

  Taking another of the blankets, Dame Claire rose, went to put it around Meg’s shoulders, and asked, “What happened at the last? When did you realize he was dying?”

  “I didn’t,” Meg whispered without raising her head. “He was sleeping. I went to sleep, and woke to see he was so still….”

  “He never struggled or stirred or…?” Dame Claire pressed.

  “No.” Meg shook her head.

  “But there must have been something. What woke you? Did he make a noise?”

  Frevisse put out a hand to stop her. She knew how boldly Dame Claire fought against anyone’s dying, and how sternly she sought for reasons when she lost; but this was neither time nor place to make Barnaby’s widow more wretched than she was. “Eda,” Frevisse said, “take her with you. Let her sleep next to you. It isn’t good for her to be alone for the rest of the night.”

  “Surely, my lady. That’s no trouble at all. Come now, we’ll find you a place.” Eda moved to lead Meg away.

  But Meg held back, gesturing at Barnaby’s body. “I can’t leave him. He has to be watched over. He can’t be left alone. Can’t we take him to the church?”

  “In the morning,” Frevisse said. “We’ll find someone to take him back to the village church in the morning. And someone will watch by him tonight, but it doesn’t have to be you. Go with Eda.”

  Meg let Eda lead her away then, shuffling her feet as if she lacked the strength to lift them.

  When they were gone, Dame Claire asked, “Where are her sons? Why was she watching alone?”

  “She sent them home, to see to things. She probably thought there was no danger of this; he seemed better.”

  “I thought he was,” Dame Claire said regretfully. “I truly thought he was. If I hadn’t, I would have set someone to watch with her. She was probably sleeping, so exhausted she never heard his dying. Poor woman.”

  “Poor indeed. The funeral will probably take what few pence she’s managed to gather working here, and then there’ll be heriot and gersum to Lord Lovel for the older boy to take up the holding.”

  “The gersum can’t be high, their holding is so small,” said Claire.

  “Still, she’ll not have a penny to bless herself with after they do all that, plus pay damages for the cart and maybe the horse and whatever else. The family will be in debt at best and perhaps beggared. The older boy is an ill-tempered, disobedient fool, not likely to do his work even if he gets the holding. He’ll be no comfort to Meg, or much use. And the other one is not made for hard work.”

  “That may change,” said Claire. “He’s young.”

  Behind them came the sound of footsteps, and they turned toward the dark shape looming toward them, featureless with the low glow of the players’ fire behind him until he was near enough to their own light for his face to show.

  But Frevisse had already recognized Ellis by his height and broad shoulders. “Is he dead?” asked the man.

  “Yes.”

  “A pity. Rose is asking if you’ll come look at Piers.” His request was halfhearted; a woman’s fussing over a child’s minor illness was deeply discounted in the fact of a man’s dying.

  But Claire said, “Assuredly.” From what she knew of fevers, it was likely to have worsened in the night. Or seemed to; every ache seemed worse in the night, and worse again when it was a child. Small wonder the man dared to ask despite Barnaby’s death. She bent to gather up her box and the lamp.

  “I’ll stay here,” Frevisse said. “We said someone would keep watch by him.”

  Dame Claire paused to look at her. “Are you sure? We can find a servant to do it.”

  Frevisse shook her head. “I won’t sleep again tonight. Go on.”

  Ellis nodded at the blanket-covered shape that had been Barnaby. “We never heard a sound, not till Meg woke us with her crying.”

  Frevisse said, “He must have gone quietly, in his sleep.”

  “A mercy he’d been shriven.”

  “A mercy indeed,” Dame Claire agreed. “Come. Let’s see to your little boy.”

  They went away toward the other fire. Frevisse knelt down beside Barnaby’s body and composed herself for prayer and meditation. At least something so distinct as death gave her a focus for her thoughts. There was a soul to be prayed for, and that she knew how to do.

  But despite her efforts, her mind woul
d not hold to the practiced words. A recitation of familiar prayers could sometimes take her through the cold and dark emotions of the moment into the harmonies of the seven crystal spheres that were around the world and led by steps of grace into the light and joy surrounding the throne of God in Heaven.

  She had learned when she was fairly young that she could do that on occasion—leave the world in mind at least, for a greater, deeper, higher plane. Among her reasons for choosing to become a nun had been her desire to join more freely, more frequently with that high place.

  Sister Thomasine could do it with a thought, Frevisse suspected. For Sister Thomasine it was part of her nature; for Frevisse it was a studied effort, which seemed hardly fair. Frevisse shook off that mean thought; petty jealousy would only weigh her spirit down, keep it from the freedom she wanted for it. Deliberately, she turned her thought away from the mundane and began again to reach out of herself toward God.

  “Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine. Et lux perpetua luceat ei.” Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord. And light eternal shine upon him. “Kyrie, eleison. Christe, eleison. Kyrie, eleison.” Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

  The release did not come. Her thoughts, meant to go upward, outward, insistently flitted sideways, back to worldly things. To the indignation of Dame Alys in chapter. To the rude questioning of her performance of her duties by Roger Naylor. To Sym’s defiance, and Joliffe’s laughter. To the hall’s cold, now that the fire was dying.

  Her undiscipline annoyed her more than her earthbound prayers for the repose of the soul of the dead man under the blanket right in front of her.

  She found herself straining to overhear the hushed talking from the players’ end of the hall, and listening to the passage of Dame Claire behind her. She shivered in the icy draft of the opening and closing outer door, discovered she had lost where she had been in her recitation of Psalm 129, and started over with more impatience than reverence.

  Which was worse than not praying at all.

  Frevisse stopped, and for a while simply knelt there, allowing herself to be aware of the darkness and the cold and the quiet voices at the other fire. Then, less firmly, she set herself to praying again, not trying to use it as a way to anywhere but making her mind see each word as she said it, in simple progression toward her goal.

  An unknown while later she felt an icy draft up her back. Someone was coming in, with a rush of night air that fluttered the ends of her veil and pushed her gown against her back.

  Her concentration broken, she turned to see who it was. Ellis, she thought, and then was sure as he was briefly silhouetted against the players’ fire, handing a small goblet to Rose. Medicine for the boy. With a sound of annoyance at him, and at herself, Frevisse tried to turn her mind back to praying yet again.

  But now she was aware again that under the folded blanket was a hard stone floor, and that her nose wanted blowing, and that her fingers ached with cold.

  Exasperated, she slipped sideways to sit on the blanket; and after a few moments stood up. She was doing no one any good just sitting there. It was going to take a good deal of praying to free Barnaby’s soul from Purgatory, mere sympathy wasn’t going to do it. On the other hand, with a sentence as long as his probably was, putting off the prayers for a few hours would make small difference. Frevisse made the sign of the cross over his body. If prayers were failing her—or she was failing them—and all she could do was keep watch, that could be done as well near the players’ well-burning fire as here beside the near-gone embers that were all that was left of this one.

  The players were all awake. Rose was sitting beside Piers, holding him up with an arm behind his shoulders while gently making him drink from the goblet Ellis had brought. The boy’s face was flushed a dry, harsh red, showing that his fever had not yet broken. His mother was holding him firmly against his own restlessness, insisting that he drink while the three men sat on the far side of the fire, pretending they were not watching while talking among themselves as Frevisse came near enough to hear.

  “We’ll have to find the money somewhere.” Joliffe was saying. “Tisbe’s been shoeless on that near fore since we left Fen Harcourt. She’ll go lame if she has to go on that way.”

  “If the nuns pay us for the play—” Ellis began.

  Bassett rumbled, “No. What we do for them is in return for their courtesy to us, and to Piers.”

  “I wonder why they’ve been so kind to us?” said Joliffe. He looked around toward the darkness where Frevisse was. “Who’s there?”

  Frevisse had not tried to hide her coming, and she came forward now into the light. The men would have risen to their feet but she gestured them to stay seated and said with a smile that included them all, “I’ve been keeping cold watch over there and wonder if I might share your fire a while.”

  “Surely, my lady,” Bassett said, holding out his hand to the only empty stool among them.

  Frevisse hesitated, looking toward Rose. The woman nodded for her to be seated.

  “Piers is quieter when I’m by,” she said.

  Piers, laid down again on his pillow, rolled his head restlessly, his fevered eyes half-shut. They were all watching him, as if their gathered attention would be enough to help him.

  After a while Ellis asked, “Is the medicine working?”

  Rose waited, then said softly, “He’s going to sleep. The way the lady said he should.”

  They went on waiting until it was quite clear that Piers was soundly asleep. Rose touched his forehead and said, “I think he may be a little cooler.” Ellis sighed, his shoulders relaxing. Joliffe unknotted his fingers as if surprised to find them wound around each other so tightly. Bassett straightened his shoulders and set his hands on his spread knees. But no one moved to go back to their pallets, and no one spoke.

  It was not quite a comfortable silence. Frevisse felt their awareness of her, felt maybe she should go but did not know how to do it gracefully, and to end the silence nodded toward Piers and said, “He’s a likely looking boy, and clever, from what I’ve seen of him. How old is he?”

  “Nine years, come Candlemas Eve,” Rose answered, not taking her eyes from her son’s face.

  The silence came again. Frevisse was about to suggest that she leave to let them go back to their sleeping when Bassett said, “A pity about the villein. Too bad hurt to live, I take it?”

  Frevisse answered, “A tear in his lungs, Dame Claire thinks. Nothing that could be helped and we only hoped he was going to be all right after all because we didn’t know of it. It’s going to be hard for his widow,” she added, to keep the conversation from fading out again. “With all the dues owed the lord now and her sons not full grown.”

  Bassett nodded. “Holding the land, you’re held by the land.”

  Joliffe, more serious than Frevisse had ever heard him, said, “‘And now I wax old, sick, sorry, and cold; as muck upon mold, I wither away.’”

  Ellis poked moodily at the unburned end of a log with his foot, shoving it further into the flames. “That’s us as much as them, though they never see it that way.”

  The mood was darkening. Against it, Frevisse said to Joliffe, “What you quoted, it’s from the Noah play, isn’t it? From Wakefield?”

  The gleam returned to Joliffe’s eyes. He grinned and asked, “How can a cloistered nun be knowing of such worldly things as the Wakefield plays?”

  “You can hardly call The Play of Noah a worldly thing,” Frevisse returned.

  “I don’t recall the Church tells that Noah’s wife has to be hauled bodily into the Ark, and then clouts him alongside of his head when she’s there.”

  “‘Welcome, wife, into this boat,’” Frevisse quoted. “And then she hits him. No, I don’t recall that from the Bible.”

  “Ah!” Ellis pointed an accusing finger. “That’s from the Chester plays. You’ve mixed your sources, scholar!”

  “Only after one of you did!” Frevisse returned. They all laughed, a friendly exchange
that swept away any last constraints.

  “A well-traveled lady,” Bassett said with interest. “Unless you’ve somehow come by copies of the plays?”

  “No copy but mine own memory, I fear,” Frevisse answered.

  “And how did you come by that, pray tell?” Joliffe asked.

  “I wasn’t born a cloistered nun. There was a time when St. Christopher was of more use to me than St. Simon Stylites.” Frevisse had meant to say it blithely, to match Joliffe’s tone, and was a little disconcerted to hear a sad edge to her voice.

  “So what brought you into the cloister after all?” Joliffe asked.

  “There are less fleas here than in other places I could name.” A flippant answer because a serious one did not seem appropriate.

  They laughed again, and Bassett said, “You must have stayed in some of the same inns we have.”

  “There was one inn,” Ellis offered, “where the guests were crowded so many to a bed that the fleas had perforce to sleep on the floor.”

  “And since that wasn’t comfortable for them, they stayed awake all night, biting us,” Joliffe added. He had pulled an apple from a bag beside his stool and cut a slice from it. He held the piece out to Frevisse. “But such talk can’t be seemly for a nun, however well traveled.”

  “Perhaps the lady came to a nunnery to escape the roads,” suggested Bassett. “The English roads are a shame to a Christian country.”

  “The worst road I ever traveled,” Frevisse said, suddenly remembering, “was in Yorkshire, I think. Or thereabouts. It had been raining….”

  “It’s weather more than the inns giving sorrow to us who travel,” said Ellis.

  But Frevisse was not to be turned from her reminiscence. “It was raining enough that the road was puddled from one side to the other in places, and ahead of us as we came riding along was a larger puddle than most. It had a large hump in the middle of it, like an island, and a man squatted down on the edge, looking all discouraged. Only when we reached him did we realize the hump in the puddle was his horse. They’d fallen into a hole so deep the horse could not stand but must swim to exhaustion, and the edges were so slippery it could not climb out, and there we found them, disconsolate rider and drowned horse.”