10 The Squire's Tale

by Frazer, Margaret

  With a moan, the clerk lurched up from the prie-dieu and fumbled as if blind toward the crucifix on the wall.

  “Quickly,” Dame Claire cried and Frevisse ran to grab up the dagger, dropped by Master Geoffrey and kicked by someone into the middle of the floor, and flung herself to the bedside where Lady Blaunche had opened her eyes in a wide stare upward, her mouth gaping for air she was not finding. Frevisse held up the dagger by its bloodied blade above her face, where she had to see it, making blade and hilt and handguard into a cross above her, asking at her desperately, “Do you repent of all your sins and pray to God to receive your immortal soul?”

  Lady Blaunche gasped, gasped again, choked with a jerking motion of her head that had to be a nod. And went still.

  Mouth still gaped. Eyes still stared. But emptily. She was no longer there.

  ‘The baby,“ Dame Claire said and grabbed the dagger from Frevisse so quickly that only barely she let go in time not to be cut but she understood the frantic haste. With Lady Blaunche dead, the baby she was bearing would very soon, if not already, be dead, too, and if it was not baptized before it died, its immortal soul would be doomed to that outermost ring of Hell where souls unsaved but not greatly sinful were left for eternity untormented by anything but the worst torment of all—of never having hope of seeing the face of God. The Church’s law and all pity demanded attempt be made, since there was no hope of the unborn’s body, to save its soul, and that could only be done by…

  With swift, brutal force Dame Claire grabbed up the front of Lady Blaunche’s gown, thrust the dagger through and ripped the cloth open in a wide gash to Lady Blaunche’s knees.

  ‘Water,“ she ordered, setting to do the same to the undergown. ”And towels.“

  Gil and Master Skipton stayed standing as they were, not yet comprehending anymore than that Lady Blaunche was dead. Even Master Geoffrey, turned back from the wall without the crucifix, made no move. Only Frevisse did, going to the nearby table where pitcher and basin stood and a towel hung, ordering at Master Skipton on the way, “We need more water, more towels. Fetch them.” It was best to have men out of the way for this anyway. “Gil, guard the door that no one comes in here. Master Geoffrey, pray some more.”

  Only when she had towel, basin and pitcher in hand and the men were obeying her did she realize Katherine was standing beside the window, frozen and staring at Lady Blaunche; and Frevisse, frightened for her because what was coming was something she should not see, snapped, “Katherine, go tend to Mistress Avys so Mistress Dionisia can come in here. We need her.”

  Katherine turned a blank stare with horror to her instead of moving.

  ‘Go!“ Frevisse ordered more harshly and Katherine did, following Master Skipton and Gil out of the room, and she went on to Dame Claire who paused with dagger poised over Lady Blaunche’s bared belly and looked at her with sickened, fearing eyes, to which Frevisse, equally sickened and in fear, said, ”You have to.“

  And Dame Claire turned back to Lady Blaunche’s body and did.

  Made a long, sure-handed slice with the dagger point down the belly just left of the center line, the white flesh parting, opening to show the red flesh underneath. And made another dagger stroke, slicing through that…

  A bare few minutes—that seemed to go on forever— later, it was over, the thing done.

  Mistress Dionisia was there by then, tight-faced with the same effort not to be sick that Frevisse was fighting down but taking up a share of what needed doing, the three of them working together in grim silence, each of them knowing what was needed. There was nothing to be done about the smell of blood and filth except wait until the mattress could be taken away and herbs burned to purify the air, but Mistress Dionisia brought towels from a chest along one wall to sop up and wipe away as much blood as could be. Then Frevisse and Dame Claire lifted Lady Blaunche’s body and Mistress Dionisia brought a blanket from a chest at the foot of the bed to spread over the ruined mattress and, when Lady Blaunche was laid down again and straightened, they put more towels over the great wound to take whatever after-seepage there would be, pulled her gown closed over it, and bound another towel tightly around her belly to keep it as together as might be until needle and thread could be brought to stitch it closed and her body altogether cleaned and readied for burial.

  By then there was a clutter of voices beyond the closed door to the parlor—Mistress Avys crying out things, men asking questions, Gil gruffly answering and still holding off anyone from coming in. But Robert and the priest must be let in soon, and Mistress Dionisia quickly brought another sheet to cover Lady Blaunche from neck to feet, hiding all that had been done, and then a pillow slip of fine linen that Dame Claire used to wrap up what there had been of the baby as tenderly as if it still lived and laid it—him—for now in the emptied basin that was all the cradle he would ever have.

  But he would be buried with his mother and the both of them in consecrated ground because Frevisse and Dame Claire could testify that Lady Blaunche with her last breath had repented of her self-murder and that the baby had moved as Dame Claire lifted him free of his mother’s body for Frevisse to baptize with plain water and the necessary words—In nomine Patre, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit— enough, in such desperate need, for his salvation before he ceased to be alive.

  That was all the comfort they would have to offer Robert, Frevisse was afraid.

  She could hear his voice among those outside the door now, questioning and frightened, and despite she could not hear the words, she knew there was no mercy in keeping him out any longer. They had made things as well as could be for him to see and she said to Mistress Dionisia, “Best you let Master Fenner and the priest come in now,” and to Dame Claire, stepped back from the bed after setting the basin beside Lady Blaunche’s body, “Best you sit, before you fall,” with a nod toward the chest at the foot of the bed, and wished she could say more—Dame Claire never took well the losing of someone in her care, whatever the cause— but Mistress Dionisia was opening the door to Robert.

  He stood for a moment, not coming in. There was a crowd of people behind him that were probably not so many as they seemed to Frevisse but they somehow drew back from the opened door, suddenly silent and leaving him alone to this, and carefully, maybe wary of what he was going to see, surely wary with pain, he came in, with a look to Mistress Dionisia to shut the door behind him.

  ‘Until Father Laurence comes,“ he whispered as if his voice would rise to nothing more, and while she did, stood where he was before, slowly, slowly, he crossed to the bedside and stood looking down at the stillness that had been his wife. Stood looking with the numbness of someone looking at too much grief too suddenly, the numbness of someone taken so great a blow that there was no pain yet, no feeling at all.

  But that would not save him even a little when finally the numbness went and the pain came in full force, and carefully, into his silence, Frevisse said, “She was aware enough, at the very last, to ask forgiveness.”

  ‘So Gil said.“ Robert drew a deep, shaken breath. ”The baby?“

  ‘Safe. Baptized. A son, if you want to name him.“

  Robert took his eyes from Lady Blaunche’s death-smoothed face for the first time, to look at the small, carefully wrapped bundle beside her, and a little blankly said, “We hadn’t talked yet about… I’ll have to think. I…”

  That was the moment pain began to awake in him. His eyes widened with it and his breath shortened as he turned to Frevisse to ask on a rising note of dread, “What am I going to do? What am I going to tell the children? How am I going to bring them to understand?”

  ‘It was despair,“ Frevisse said quickly. ”Benedict’s death was more than she could bear. She gave way.“

  Robert’s face hardened. “Whoever killed Benedict just as surely killed her, killed the baby. Someone…”

  A cautious rap at the door silenced him and there was a distracted time as Father Lauren
ce came in and Dame Claire went to assure him Lady Blaunche had died in grace and Mistress Avys came held up between Katherine and Emelye, all of them tear-marred but Mistress Avys’ screaming worn out to wracking sobs. They circled to the bed’s far side and knelt across from Robert sinking to his knees at Lady Blaunche’s near side while Frevisse, nearer the bed’s foot and Dame Claire joined him, with Mistress Dionisia kneeling a little farther off as Father Laurence at the foot of the bed began prayers.

  From beyond the open door to the parlor came the heavy sounds of a great many other people going down to their knees, too. Household folk with a right to be there, Frevisse supposed, but Gil had rightly kept anyone else from entering the bedchamber. Only those nearest Lady Blaunche in her life were here, save for her children—her living children and Benedict; but she would be with Benedict soon enough, leaving her living children to their grief because her own grief for their half brother had killed her.

  Frevisse realized she was following her thoughts instead of praying and, startled, opened her eyes. Above her the priest was praying, “Ne recorderis peccata mea, Domine, Dum veneris judicare saeculum per ignem. ” Do not remember my sins, Lord, When you will come to judge the age by fire. And with Dame Claire she responded, “Dirige, Domine, Deus meus, in conspectu tuo viam meaum.” Guide, Lord, my God, in your sight my way. But she said it only by form. There was nothing of her mind behind it, she realized, a poor way of prayer at the best of times and worse now when there was such deep need.

  But even as she thought that, while saying with the others, “Requiem aeternam,” she found she was looking at the long, bright swathe of Lady Blaunche’s blue gown trailing over the edge of the bed in front of her. There had not been time to undress the body. That was something her women would do with all else that would be needed to ready her for burial; for now, no one had even taken time to gather up her skirt fully out of sight under the sheet and so it was draped there, a graceful richness of fabric.

  With a bloodstain in the wrong place.

  Frevisse paused, took a backward step in her mind and looked at that thought again as intently as she was now staring at the bloodstain.

  It was in the wrong place.

  There had already been a great ruining of the gown with blood all down Lady Blaunche’s left side from where she had fallen after stabbing herself, and there had been more afterwards with what Dame Claire had had to do, but all that had been higher on the gown and more on its left side than anywhere. This blood was on the right side, near to the gown’s hem.

  Nowhere near the death wound or Dame Claire’s cutting.

  Nor did it have the look of someone having wiped their hands there. That would have made a shallow smear. This was a long, narrow, soaked-in-seeming stain, dark against the gown’s blue, as if it had had time to dry.

  Frevisse clasped her hands more tightly, resisting what she wanted to do until Father Laurence finished, but the moment he had and they had all echoed the final “Requiem aeternum,” she crossed herself with more haste than piety, grabbed for the skirt and turned it back, wanting to see if the blood had soaked through the thick velvet from the inside to out or from out to in.

  There was almost no stain on the inside.

  So it had come from the outside to in, and for that to be, either something long and narrow and bloody had lain on the skirt or the skirt had lain on it.

  ‘Dame Frevisse?“ Dame Claire asked, now standing over her.

  Frevisse stood up and turned away, shaking her head, wanting time for thinking. Around the bed the others were rising, too, save for Robert still on his knees, head still bowed. Frevisse gazed down at the back of his head for a moment, then looked around, saw Master Verney with Gil at the doorway, uncertain if he should come in, and Master Geoffrey standing up stiff-kneed from the prie-dieu. But it was Master Skipton she wanted.

  ‘Dame Frevisse,“ Dame Claire said, ”we should…“

  Frevisse shook her head again and left her, going past Master Verney and Gil into the parlor where the steward was directing several maidservants to build up the hearth fire and bring a pot to heat the water for cleansing Lady Blaunche’s body, with someone to take word to the laundress that there would shortly be sheets in need of immediate washing. He did not say, Before the blood set and could never be washed out, but the tense set of his whole face betrayed he was holding steady and to his duty with an effort that broke a little when he had dismissed the maids and turned to Frevisse. In a shaken voice he said, “First Master Benedict and now this. It’s terrible.”

  ‘Have you been steward here for long?“ Frevisse asked without heed for what he was saying.

  Surprised enough not to ask why, he answered, “Fifteen years. And my father and grandfather were stewards here before me.”

  It was often that way with smaller manors, sons of a family carrying on an office from one generation into the next, their familiarity with the people and place to everyone’s advantage. Frevisse had hoped it was that way here and asked, “Then you’d know, if anyone does, whether there’s any secret way into the tower here. Is there?”

  He looked at her as if she had somehow taken leave of her good sense. “What?”

  ‘A secret way in. Hidden stairs. Some way to come and go unseen.“

  ‘Of course not. Why would there be?“ He was catching up now without quite believing she was asking such a thing. ”A stone tower is costly when just built simply. Add something like that… Besides, how could it be secret with everyone on the manor watching the place being built?“

  ‘This was built a goodly while ago.“

  ‘A hundred and fifty years. Maybe more. Very likely more.“

  ‘People could have forgotten.“

  ‘They remember whose grandfather kicked a cow and broke his foot three generations back. I think there’d be talk about ’that secret way to the lord’s parlor.‘ Don’t you?“

  She did and turned sharply back toward the bedchamber, ignoring Master Skipton beginning to ask, “Why…” because she did not have time to tell him why. There was one more thing she wanted to see, and returning to the bedchamber where Gil still guarded the doorway, she found Robert had risen and moved away from the bed, was now in the middle of the room, standing with head down and shoulders slack, listening to Master Verney and the priest, with Master Geoffrey to hand in case he was needed while at the bed the women, including Dame Claire and a maidservant, were readying to go on with what next needed to be done with Lady Blaunche’s body as soon as the men were gone.

  Circling past the men and away from the women, Frevisse went to the prie-dieu and found what she had hoped was there—dark on the pale, woven-rush matting that covered the floor, a streak of blood much the same in length and breadth as the stain on Lady Blaunche’s skirt.

  So Lady Blaunche’s skirt had lain on whatever had lain there, and sickly sure that she was guessing rightly, Frevisse knelt on the prie-dieu’s cushion, as Lady Blaunche must have done, and looked back over her right shoulder to where her own, far less full, skirts now covered the stain. On the rush matting to the left of her was the greater spread of Lady Blaunche’s blood from the wound under her left breast, where she had slumped sideways and down and bled, far from that streak. Just as on her gown that streak had been far from the wound.

  Beside her, startling her, Master Verney said, “She must have braced the dagger’s pommel there.” He leaned over to point to a marred place on one leg of the prie-dieu, just under the edge of the slanted top where a prayer book still lay open. It was a rounded dent that looked, as he said, to be made by the rounded pommel of a dagger’s hilt pressed heavily into the wood. “She braced it there, then thrust herself onto it.” He sounded as sick at the thought as Frevisse felt.

  Frevisse put out her hand, ran two fingers around the curve of the marred wood. “Who noticed this?”

  ‘Master Geoffrey.“

  ‘He showed it to you?“

  ‘When I came in.“

  ‘The dagger.“ She heard
her voice dry with strain, not sounding like her own. ”Whose is it?“

  ‘It’s an old one of Robert’s. It’s kept there.“ Master Verney nodded to the chest beside the wall at the head of the bed. ”For need when another isn’t to hand, I gather.“

  ‘And anyone and everyone could know it’s there.“

  Master Verney was openly puzzled. “Yes,” he said and waited as if expecting more questions but Frevisse had answers enough. Everything was come together into a whole, and when above her, Master Verney said heavily, “How could she bring herself to such a thing? Even…”

  ‘She didn’t,“ Frevisse said curtly, braced her hands on the prie-dieu and pushed herself sharply up to her feet. With the anger she had first had at Benedict’s death scalding in her now, she turned toward where Robert and the priest were still in talk, with Master Geoffrey still standing with them, and raised her voice for everyone in the room to hear her as she said, ”She didn’t kill herself. She was murdered. By the same man who murdered her son.“

  The words rasped into a silence fully come before she had finished saying them, with everyone—the men, the women by the bed, Gil at the door—turned to look at her, but her own look only on Master Geoffrey, watching his eyes widen and the blood drain from his face as he understood what she was saying.

  Robert turned his head to stare toward the clerk, then back to Frevisse. “What?” he asked.

  Her gaze still locked to Master Geoffrey’s, Frevisse said, coldly now, “From all I’ve been able to learn, no one with cause to want Benedict dead had any way to come to him unnoticed last night or chance to put his body at the foot of the stairs except you, Robert. The other man best able to both come to Benedict and move his body is Master Geoffrey.”

  ‘Who had no cause to kill him,“ Robert said, but slowly, watching, as everyone was watching now, the slow mount of blood back into the clerk’s face and the rapid lift and fall of his heavy breathing, his stare still at Dame Frevisse still staring back at him as she said, ”No cause we know of. No more cause than we know of for him to kill Lady Blaunche. But he did, because she didn’t kill herself and there’s no one else could have done it except him.“