The Widow's Tale (Sister Frevisse Medieval Mysteries Book 14)

by Frazer, Margaret

  From a small doored space under the table, Master Say set out pen and inkpot and paper, saying as courteously as ever to Domina Elisabeth, “You may not have time to finish before dinner, but you may make a start, if you wish.”

  Domina Elisabeth thanked him with matching courtesy. He bowed to her, bowed to Frevisse, and left the room, shutting the door behind him. And Domina Elisabeth, letting go her dignity, went slack and said to the world at large in open dismay and distress, “Into the middle of what have we fallen?”

  Chapter 9

  The manor of Baas had been no one’s home for a long while, owned by people who lived elsewhere and used it rarely, taking the profits from the land and caring little about the rest. John and Beth in their little while here had begun to undo that neglect. Besides their re-made parlor and bedchamber at one end of the hall, they had turned a long storage chamber above the butlery and pantry at the hall’s other end into their children’s nursery and a bedchamber for guests.

  “Which is not particularly kind to guests,” Beth had said months ago, when showing Cristiana what had been done. “But it will have to do for now, and we have put in the other stairway,” letting the guest chamber be reached by its own steep stairs at the far end of the screens passage, near the door to the small rearyard with the kitchen and bakehouse. “And something has to be done about that, too,” Beth had said. “It is not convenient to have the food raced to the house in hopes of it staying warm the while. Surely they could have changed at least that some time in the past hundred years or so.”

  But no one had and the Says had not yet and, “The great hall we’ll keep as it is for now. The roof is still sound,” Beth had told Cristiana when they had last sat together in long, good talk.

  Sitting on the bed in the guest chamber, leaning against one of the tall bedposts with her eyes closed, too weary to face the trouble of lying down, Cristiana tried to remember when that had been. At Easter? Only four months ago? Was it less than four months since the world had gone all wrong and left her without even her wits, it sometimes seemed? It was so hard to think clearly. But she had to think, and she opened her eyes without lifting her head and stared at her hands lying slack and empty in her lap. Her tiredness was the trouble. She was too tired to think well. And too worried. When she was rested, when Mary and Jane were with her, safe, then she’d be able to gather her wits toward what needed to be done next.

  When she was rested and when she was rid of the nuns, she amended. They reminded her of too much. She wanted them gone.

  Small-child sounds came from beyond the wall— scuffling, as from large mice trying to be quiet, and whispers, and someone’s smothered laughter. Cristiana raised her head, listening, aware she was smiling. Those were good sounds. Home sounds. Beth and John’s Geneffeve would be there, almost two years old now; and Beth’s six-year-old daughter from her first marriage, named Elizabeth for her mother but called Betha.

  Beth and John seemed so complete together that it was hard to remember she was once married to someone else, that she had been widowed and yet married again and was happy. It happened, Cristiana knew. People remarried and were happy. She had no hope herself though, either for marriage or the kind of happiness it brought. With Edward dead, her only happiness would be what she had when Mary and Jane were safe and with her again.

  Beyond the wall someone—probably Nurse—gave a low-voiced order that brought quiet. Beth had surely sent word that quiet should be kept so Cristiana could rest, but Cristiana did not mind if the silence did not last. After the horrible silences of the nunnery—the emptiness where there had been nothing but women’s voices—children’s sounds were welcome; and the servants’ voices in their coming and going across the kitchen yard below the window; and the shifting of dishes and mutter of voices in the butlery under the room, where things were being readied to serve forth dinner in the hall.

  Home sounds, familiar and good to hear. But not her home’s sounds. She wanted so much to be home again. She hurt with that want, and with the hopelessness of wanting it, because so much of home had been Edward and he was dead.

  Knowing Ivetta’s footfall on the stairs, she pushed herself away from the bedpost, sat up straight, and braced herself to show no more of her weakness than she could help. She was to eat here rather than in the hall with the household, and here was assuredly a goodly place to be. Beth had made the room a welcoming place, the walls painted dark green with a scrolling border of yellow vines and leaves; the ceiling beams painted yellow with green vines and leaves along them; the bedcurtains and coverlet of plain, dark blue. There was a small chest set at the bedfoot for putting things in and sitting on, a single low-backed chair, a table beside the door with basin and ewer and towel for washing, a wall-pole for hanging clothing. After the barren nunnery, the place was comfort and sanctuary, only tainted by Cristiana’s knowing that she had nowhere else to go.

  Ivetta came in, carrying a cloth-covered tray, saying while balancing it with hand and hip while she closed the door, “Here you are and don’t tell me you don’t feel like eating, because you’re skin and bones and need your strength.”

  Cristiana had no urge to refuse the food. In truth she felt very much like eating and used the bedpost to pull herself to her feet as Ivetta set the tray on the chest and drew the chair close to it. Cristiana sat there, not minding Ivetta’s hand on her arm to steady her, and let Ivetta ply her with slices of cold chicken, fresh bread, new cheese, and, “Wine,” Cristiana said when Ivetta poured it for her. “Beth is doing very well by me.” And as easily as that, she started to cry.

  That took her by surprise. She had not known she was that near to tears, to be undone by ordinary kindness. Helpless with sobs, she pressed her hands to the ache in her breast that wanted to be pain as she struggled for the breath to go on sobbing. Ivetta came to her, making the same mother-hen sounds she would have made for a child in tears, wrapped Cristiana in her arms and held her until the sobbing stopped, then patted her briskly on the back, said, “There. That’s better out than in. You’ll feel better now,” and began to hand her food. “Just skin and bones. What were those nuns thinking, starving you like that? Have the wine. It’s strengthening.” Still hiccuping from the sobs, Cristiana drank but said as she set the goblet down, “The nuns did what they were told to do with me. Some of them were even kind.” Fairness came hard, but Cristiana tried for it anyway. “As far as they were allowed. Dame Frevisse, the one here with her prioress, she was kind.”

  “I take it her prioress wasn’t,” Ivetta said grimly, not interested in fairness.

  “She only knew what she’d been told about me. They live very much by the Rule themselves. They’re . . .” It came hard to say it, but if she was going to hate, it was better not to waste her anger where it did no good; better to turn it where it was best deserved—at Laurence and Milisent—and she forced out, “They’re good women.”

  “You’re not thinking of turning into one yourself, are you?” Ivetta demanded. Ivetta did her duty to the Church but her son had become a priest much against her wishes, nor did it help that all he had from it so far, after scraping out a living tutoring schoolboys in Cambridge, was lately to be made rector of a small parish in Huntingdonshire. “With never a hope of grandchildren for me now,” Ivetta had complained to Cristiana. “Nor him likely able to see to me in my old age, the place being all marsh and barely enough to support him alone. Nor is he likely to rise to better, us being nobody and all.”

  So Ivetta did not favor lives being given to God, and Cristiana said, smiling and certain, “No. No nunhood for me.”

  She ate enough to satisfy herself and Ivetta both. Only when she was finished did Ivetta say, “If you’ve done and you’re willing, Sir Gerveys would like to see you.”

  “You should have said! Yes, I want to see him!” He had deliberately left her to rest after carrying her here, but she had been waiting for him to return, was angry at Ivetta but heard the anger in her voice and mitigated it with a smile, saying
more mildly, “While he’s with me, you can have time with Pers.”

  Ivetta blushed, her face bright pink in the white surround of her wimple. “Yes, my lady,” she murmured, her dimples showing as she fought and failed to hold in a smile.

  She left the chamber in a flustered hurry, leaving Cristiana struggling between her own smile and yet more tears. She had been pleased by the affection openly growing between Ivetta and Pers these past two years. Ivetta was a carpenter’s widow of Ware. Unable to keep up her husband’s trade or their home after his death, she had moved with her son to live with her sister’s family in Broxbourne about the time Cristiana lost to illness the woman who had been nurse to Mary and Jane since their births. When word spread—the way word always spread about almost everything—from manor house to village that Highmeade’s lady was in need of a new nurse, Ivetta had presented herself at the manor, asking to see Mistress Helyngton. Cristiana had thought well of her courage in daring that, had been impressed, too, by her straight-forward manner. Not over-tall, Ivetta had stood foursquare and firm in front of Cristiana and said why she was there—that she was an honest widow who wanted honest work and thought she would serve well as nurse to a squire’s daughters.

  She had brought her son Nicholas with her, a half-grown boy standing quietly a pace behind his mother. Cristiana had noted he had the good manners she wanted for her own children, and when she had determined that Ivetta could both read and write and had taught Nicholas before he went to grammar school and that he read well, she had said she would consider Ivetta as nurse to Mary and Jane. Edward had then made inquiry in Ware about Ivetta and her late husband, been satisfied with what he heard, and within the week Ivetta and Nicholas had come to Highmeade, to everyone’s satisfaction both then and afterward. Ivetta had settled into her duties, while Nicholas with his reading, writing, and reckoning proved useful around the manor, until Edward had taken an interest in him and with help from Father Richard, the priest at St-i Augustine’s in Broxbourne, found a way for him to work his way through an education at Cambridge’s University.

  The pity was that Edward’s influence had stretched only to getting Nicholas the poor rectorship in Huntingdonshire, so that Cristiana had hoped that the growing warmth between Ivetta and Pers would give Ivetta enough pleasure and hope in someone other than her son to ease her disappointment. Besides that, Pers was a good man. That he and Gerveys were here and not gone to Ireland was boon to both Ivetta and herself, Cristiana thought, her smile for Ivetta struggling against her own urge to cry; but hearing Gerveys on the stairs, taking them two at a time, she shook her head, impatient with herself, not wanting him to see her in tears yet again.

  He bounded into sight, stopped in the doorway with hands braced on either side of the frame to keep himself from pitching into the room, and looked at her with a questioning tilt to his head. “You’re better?”

  Smiling was suddenly easier than tears, and Cristiana held out her hands to him, saying, “Just seeing you gives me strength enough.”

  He crossed the room, shifted the tray from the chest to the foot of the bed, sat down where it had been, caught her hands into his own, and looked hard into her face, to see if she were telling the truth. She looked as searchingly back at him. She felt so changed, so other than she had been when last they were alone together, that she wanted reassurance he was unchanged, that despite her own desperately different self, he was still dearly familiar, still dearly himself.

  “It was worse than anything you told us in the parlor, wasn’t it?” he asked.

  Cristiana’s hands tightened on his in a spasm of remembrance and her throat constricted, keeping her from answering. Only finally was she able to whisper, “I was afraid all of the time. I was afraid beyond anything I’ve ever been before. First, when Laurence and Milisent seized me, then in the nunnery. I was afraid I’d never get out, that I’d never be found, that I’d be there forever.”

  That fear rose in her again, not merely the memory of it but a black tide that drove her to her feet and away from Gerveys, not wanting him to see it. Fighting to put something else in her mind in place of it, she went to the window and looked out. The roof of the kitchen across the small, paved yard cut off view of much except its roof-slates, but away over the wall of the kitchen garden beside it she could see a slope of pasture, a stream, a summer-cut hayfield with milch-cows grazing. Peaceful things. Ordinary things. Cristiana leaned against the windowsill, her hands in fists, trying to fill her mind with thoughts about the manor, about life going on its everyday way, not sunk in a black nightmare of fear. Beth’s new herb garden, started with help of seeds and slips from Christiana’s own. Think of that. And there beyond the kitchen roof were the tops of trees in the old orchard, heavy with apples for eating now or, come autumn, stored for winter or made into cider and cask-stored in the manor’s cellars to give sight and taste of golden summer when winter’s cold and gray were over everything. And out of her sight the other way from the kitchen was the manor’s rearyard with its byres and barns and sheds and dairy, the granary, the poultry-yard. And the fishponds on the slope below them, for fresh fish on fast-days and in Lent. And the fields where harvest was happening—grains and peas and beans to feed the manor’s people through the year and, with luck, enough to sell for money to buy those things the manor could not grow. Everything that was everyday life and not a black nightmare of fear. And with that thought, bitterness rose in Cristiana, stronger than the fear. All of those same things had been her life until now. Year in, year out, she had lived their rhythm, sometimes with Edward there, often on her own but always making a home for him, for Mary and Jane, for herself. And now her harvest that she had planned and seen planted, her orchard, her house, her everything were in Laurence’s hold. And in Milisent’s, along with her current husband Colles. They were there and she was here and she hated them.

  In fury now instead of fear, Cristiana pushed herself away from the window. She wanted to have hack her life. She wanted to have back her children. She wanted to have back everything Laurence had stolen from her; and she swung around to Gerveys and asked fiercely, “You’ve told no one about Edward’s secret?”

  Gerveys stood up. “No one. Not even John. Not yet.” Cristiana returned to stand in front of him. “Not yet?” she echoed. “You mean you’re thinking of it?”

  “If we need to trust someone in this before we’re done, who better?”

  “He’s maybe too near the duke of Suffolk. Edward said this thing, whatever it is, is against Suffolk.”

  “I think Edward was right in saying John is King Henry’s man before ever he’s Suffolk’s. The trouble is that presently Suffolk holds almost all the power around the king and to serve King Henry means to serve Suffolk, too.”

  “Edward never had more to do with Suffolk than he could help.”

  “Edward’s ambition reached no further than his family and Highmeade. John’s ambitions go beyond that, and that presently means serving the king by way of the duke of Suffolk.”

  “Then it wouldn’t be safe to tell him this secret against Suffolk. Not if it’s anything so bad as Edward thought it was. At best, even if his first loyalty is to the king, it would be unfair to put him between his friendship for us and his service to Suffolk, wouldn’t it?”

  “Fair or unfair, I still trust John,” Gerveys said. “Without him, I wouldn’t even know you were missing. I’d be in Ireland and thinking all was well with you.”

  Guilty with a sudden thought, Cristiana sat down abruptly on the chest and pressed her hands to her forehead. “Gerveys, I’m sorry. I haven’t asked you anything. Why are you here? Why didn’t you go with York? How did John get leave to take me from Laurence? Where are my wits gone? It’s as if I can’t think at all anymore.”

  Gerveys took her hands from her forehead and gently kissed her there, the way he would have kissed Mary or Jane over a small hurt. “You’ve been somewhat busy surviving,” he pointed out, kindly.

  “But why didn’t you go with Yor
k? How did John and Beth come into this business at all?”

  “Someone doesn’t disappear the way you did without there’s talk. Laurence gave out his story, but the servants had their own of what happened at Highmeade the day you were taken. Beth heard both. She didn’t believe what Laurence said and what else she heard made her afraid for you. She wasn’t certain who around here she could depend on against Laurence, and John and I were gone. John was at Parliament at Winchester, remember, and I was in Wales. Laurence probably counted on my being gone without ever hearing about you. If he thought of John at all, he probably thought that by the time John returned, the trail to you would be cold. He may not even have thought that. He seems to have supposed no one would trouble over you disappearing. But Beth sent a messenger to John and a man to find me. He did, two days before we would have sailed. He gave me Beth’s message that you were gone and Laurence had taken over Highmeade and the girls. I asked leave from my lord of York and he gave it. I’m to follow him when I can.”

  “Laurence thought you’d gone. He didn’t know you’d come back.”

  “I took care he shouldn’t. I came to Baas after dark, talked with Beth, agreed John was our best help, and left that same night for Winchester. Being Speaker, John had to see Parliament through to its end and that didn’t come until mid-July. Since then we’ve been trying one way and another to find out what happened to you, where you were, what Laurence might be planning for Mary and Jane, all the time trying to keep secret I wasn’t gone to Ireland. As things went, the Says’ servants talked little and your folk at Highmeade talked much. When we’d pieced together what Laurence had done against you, John went to Suffolk and got a grant of your keeping in place of Laurence’s. He was going to do what he could about the girls next, while we were still trying to find out where you were. Then Milisent dismissed Ivetta, she came here, and that’s how John knew Laurence was bringing you back here. Given all of that, what else we can do except trust John? Besides that he’s proved himself a true friend, he’s best placed of anyone we know to deal with Suffolk. But handing a mad widow from one man’s keeping to another is a little matter. Wardships and marriages mean money. We need something to counter whatever Laurence has paid. Promising Suffolk this paper of Edward’s is the surest thing.”