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

by Frazer, Margaret

  She stared down at the top of her daughter’s heads. They were her only love left in the world and love had to be her guide and guard now. Not hatred. Love. The only burning she must have in her was her love for Mary, for Jane, for Edward, for Gerveys. Whatever she did, it had to be done only in love, never in hatred, because only in love would she ever be again and forever with Edward.

  Chapter 23

  Frevisse supposed it was to the good that Cristiana had loosed her fears enough to come this far with her daughters and Ivetta. Watching them across the garden, she was able to hear Mary’s and Jane’s delighted exclaims and, once, their pleading to go nearer. She saw Cristiana kiss them and set them to watching again, and then saw Cristiana go very still. So strangely still, with such a deep-set quiet in her face as she stared away toward the royal gathering, that Frevisse went on watching her.

  There had been too much quiet in Cristiana since yesterday.

  And then Cristiana turned and said something to Ivetta, turned back to her daughters and said something to them, then moved them gently out of her way and went out the gate. They both protested, but Cristiana only bent and kissed them over the gate, cupped a hand tenderly along each girl’s face while looking into their eyes and saying something.

  Then she turned and walked away, falling in behind several servant-women carrying filled platters toward the gathering.

  Cristiana had done it all so simply that Frevisse sat looking for a while longer at the emptiness where she had been without much thinking about it before—with the first, small spark of alarm—she wondered why Cristiana was going there.

  Very probably to plead in person for the king’s favor and mercy. He was known for giving both to almost anyone who asked.

  But . . .

  Frevisse stood up and went toward the gate. Mary and Jane hardly glanced at her but Ivetta looked around with tear-reddened eyes. Frevisse took her by the arm and drew her back from the gate, to ask low-voiced and beyond the girls’ hearing, “What did Mistress Helyngton say to you?” Ivetta repeated somewhat blankly, “Say to me?”

  “Just now. Before she left. What did she say?”

  “She said . . .” Ivetta seemed confused by the question. “I don’t know.”

  “You do. She just said it. You can’t have forgotten. Tell me.”

  With effort, Ivetta gathered her wits. “Yes. Well. She said something like it was time to make an end. Then, like I’d said she mustn’t, she said, ‘I must.’ Only I hadn’t said anything because I didn’t know what she meant. ‘I must,’ she said and away she went.” Ivetta was agrieved about that. “After telling us all morning that we couldn’t, then she did.”

  “What did she say to Mary and Jane?”

  “To Mary and Jane? That she loved them, of course. She always says that when she’s going away.”

  Ivetta was beginning to be annoyed at being questioned. Not caring, Frevisse demanded, “Does she have any weapon on her?”

  Ivetta stared at her. “What?”

  “Does she have a dagger on her?” Frevisse said roughly, “Some weapon? Anything?”

  “She has my Pers’ dagger. I brought it back with me after . . . after he … It was all . . . all …” Ivetta stumbled over returning tears.

  Frevisse tightened her grip on Ivetta’s arm. “She has it now? You’re certain?”

  “She made me give it her after Sir Gerveys . . .” Ivetta gulped on a sob, fumbling for words. “She said she’d never go without weapon again. She slept with it under her pillow last night. She—“

  “She has it now?” Frevisse insisted.

  “Hidden up her sleeve. In its sheath. She said—“

  “Stay here,” Frevisse ordered. “Keep the girls with you. No matter what happens, keep them here. Or take them inside. Do not let them come after me.” She was leaving even as she said it, at the gate pushed Mary and Jane aside, went out, and shoved the gate firmly shut behind her, pausing only to order, “Stay here,” at them for good measure before she started after Cristiana.

  She could see her too far ahead among the scattered servants going to and coming from the pavilions. In her plain widow’s garb, she blended easily with the servants, would probably pass with no trouble between the guards. Frevisse hesitated either to shout or run after her. If Cristiana purposed nothing more than kneeling to the king to plead for his well-known mercy, it would be wrong to hinder her. What Frevisse wanted was to make certain that was all she meant to do—to overtake her, ask her, make certain of her—and with her longer stride she closed on her along the slope, was barely a dozen yards behind her as Cristiana past the guards unnoticed.

  Frevisse passed with almost equal ease. One of the guards made as if to speak to her but she gave him a purposefully arrogant stare and he let her go on—being a nun was sometimes useful in unexpected ways. Ahead of her, the servants Cristiana was following were nearly to the edge of the crowd spread among the pavilions and food-laden tables. Frevisse would have called out then, but in the time Frevisse took to draw breath, Cristiana went suddenly aside from the servants, around them and away into the crowd.

  * * *

  Cristiana made her way among the talking, laughing, eating, drinking men and women all around her without the slightest fear that anyone would see her, heed her, stop her. Fear, as well as thought, had left her when she left the garden. The only thing left to her was the need to do. She was air and light and simple purpose, and as she had known she must, she found Laurence easily.

  He was standing in talk with several other men on the edge of where the crowd was thickest, beside a white-cloth-covered table untidy with the remains of food. Milisent was beside him and her unpleasant husband beside her, but their backs were to Cristiana and she barely noted them or the other men. Her gaze was fixed on Laurence, and she paused, her arms folded in front of herself, hiding her right hand as she slipped it into the tight-fitted left sleeve of her undergown, to the hilt of Pers’ dagger waiting in its sheath along the inside of her forearm. Happily, he had favored a narrow blade, easily hidden there. She had wanted Gerveys’ dagger, because it was his, as well as for the comfort of it, but the crowner had it. That had mattered then. Now it did not. Any dagger would serve for what she had finally, in the garden, understood she had to do. And she slid the dagger from her sleeve, and holding it still hidden by her crossed arms, went forward and slipped past Milisent, so suddenly in front of Laurence that he broke off in mid-word of whatever he was saying, staring at her and unready as all in one half instant she drew back her right arm, grabbed his shoulder with her left hand, and with a strength she would have had for nothing else drove Pers’ dagger into him, below his ribs and slanted upward to come at his heart.

  In some cold corner of her mind she must have planned that blow, but at that moment it seemed simply there, the way that Laurence’s surprise was simply there as he stared downward at her fist thrust against his belly around the dagger’s hilt. She knew she had struck true, against no bone, and his surprise was joy and balm and blessing across all the raw wounds he had made in her. He made to clutch at his belly where the pain must be starting, and she jerked the dagger out of him and stepped back, aware that around them people had begun to yell, some falling back, others grabbing for her, and without time to stab again, she swung wide and high, slashing the dagger at Milisent’s throat. She missed: Milisent had begun to back away, screaming, but the sudden bloody line that opened across her face from cheek to forehead was triumph of a kind.

  Then a blow drove into her side below her wide-flung arm and she staggered sideways; but in some cold other corner of her mind she had known that would come, did not mind, and yet was surprised that her legs had ceased to hold her up, that she was falling . . .

  Frevisse searched with rising urgency among the talking, shifting crowd, saw Cristiana and moved toward her, was almost in reach of catching hold on her when Cristiana went suddenly forward, slipping past a woman and in front of a man Frevisse only too late saw was Laurence. She
started to cry out to Cristiana and in warning but the half-made cry was lost in a sudden shouting and a backward shove of people. Against them, she shoved forward, in time to see Master Colies drive a dagger into Cristiana’s side, staggering her sideways with the blow’s force.

  Laurence was on his knees, bent over on himself. Milisent was screaming. People were shouting, some of them pushing to get further away, others crowding forward to see what was happening. Cristiana began to fall. Someone among the men pressing forward saw a man down, a woman shrieking with blood flowing from her hands pressed to her face, another woman falling, and Colies with a dagger in his hand, and did what instinct told him—had out his own dagger and struck at Colles.

  Frevisse saw Colies’ look of surprise as he took a single staggered step, then dropped to his knees, and—still looking surprised—slumped forward and sprawled across the trampled grass. Above him, Milisent, blind with blood and pain, went on screaming. Frevisse, at last reaching Cristiana, went to her knees beside her, arms stretched out over her body to keep men’s feet away, but the shoving and shouting were making a circle clear of the bodies now. She was able to turn Cristiana onto her back, slide an arm under her shoulders, and lift her a little, saying her name.

  People were taking still-screaming Milisent away. Someone shoved at Master Colies with a foot and said, “He’s dead,” while two men turned Laurence over. He was alive but his body arched upward with pain and his strangled moan was bubbled with blood.

  Cristiana’s eyes opened. White-faced and wide-eyed with pain and fear, she whispered up at Frevisse, “He’s not dead?”

  “He won’t live,” Frevisse said. She looked around at the staring circle of faces and ordered, “For mercy, get a priest here.” Because Cristiana was not going to live, either.

  But Cristiana’s fear had gone, leaving only the pain as she whispered, satisfied, “If he’s dead. Then they’ll. Be safe.”

  “They’ll be safe,” Frevisse said strongly, wanting to be sure she heard. “They’ll be safe now.”

  “Not for hatred . . .” Cristiana broke off on a moan and her body twisted with pain. Frevisse held her more closely. Cristiana steadied from the pain. “For love,” she forced out, short of breath. “Tell them. For love.”

  “For love,” Frevisse assured her. “You did it for love. Not for hatred. For love. I’ll tell them.”

  More pain took Cristiana’s body. Laurence was still now. Dead, Frevisse thought, and so did the priest finally there, because he paused over Laurence’s body only long enough to sign it with the cross before coming to Cristiana. To judge by the gold and jeweled cross hung on his chest by a thick gold chain, he was maybe one of the king’s bishops, but it was his priesthood that mattered now, not his lordly rank. As he knelt beside her, Cristiana gasped, “My sins. Confess me.”

  He signed the cross above her and began the necessary prayers. Frevisse went on holding her. Around them the crowd had thickened into a wall of staring faces but the babble of voices had fallen away to silence as people understood what was happening. In that silence the bishop leaned close over Cristiana for her to whisper her confession in his ear, too low for even Frevisse to hear. It was enough that she got the words out and he gave her the absolution and final blessing that cleansed her soul and freed it to go heavenward. But it was to Frevisse Cristiana finally looked, finally whispered, “My daughters.” Then the life went out of her and her eyes went empty and Frevisse was left kneeling with blood on her hands and blood on her gown and Cristiana gone.

  Chapter 24

  Night was thickly come, the hour for bed long past. In the parlor, the deep darkness was held back to the room’s corners and in long shadows among the ceiling beams by candles arrayed on stands beside the settle and beyond the chairs. The yellow light lay gently over the faces gathered there, but the faces were too few and there was nothing gentle in the grief on Mistress Say’s face or Ivetta’s, nor anything gentle about the weariness lined into Master Say’s as he laid a thick-folded parchment heavy with a wax seal on his wife’s lap and said, “It’s done,” before he sank down onto the long seat of the settle beside her.

  He was still dressed as he had been when he rode out to the royal hawking this morning, but had ridden far more miles than he had purposed then. King Henry and his company had ridden on to Buntingford for the night, as they had intended, Master Say, who had not intended to, had ridden with them and now had ridden back, having made some manner of explanation to the king for the killings done almost in front of him this morning.

  Only this morning?

  From where she sat alone in the shadows at the shuttered window, Frevisse tried to make the day take on a shape that made sense but this morning seemed to have happened in someone else’s lifetime. And yet every moment of it kept playing over in her mind, an all-too powerful nightmare that would not end with some welcomed awakening. Cristiana was dead. And Laurence Helyngton and Colles. And Milisent was scarred for life across her face.

  But here and now Mistress Say laid her hands on the parchment on her lap and asked, “Their wardships and everything?”

  “Their wardships, the keeping of their lands, their marriages. All sealed with the king’s privy seal. The girls are ours. They’re safe.”

  Master Fyncham came quietly into the room, bearing a tray with goblets that he offered first to Master Say, who took the nearest one with ready thanks. While he drank deeply and Master Fyncham went silently on to everyone else. Mistress Say said, “I don’t know if word was sent after the king, but when the crowner viewed the bodies, he found a day-old dagger-thrust through Henry Colles’ left arm.”

  Master Say stared into the darkness, slowly taking that in before he finally said, “So he’s the one Gerveys stabbed, surely. He didn’t dare not be at the hawking, lest questions be asked, but it must have cost him something in the way of pain not to show he was hurt. Good.”

  “The crowner took it further than that,” Mistress Say said. “He had Laurence’s men gone over. One of them had a wound as fresh as Colles’ and he turned appellant and told everything. By what he says, Laurence wasn’t at Gerveys’ killing or even the attack on the road, but he did set Colles on to do both. The man said Colles frighted him, he enjoyed the killing so much.”

  “Master Say,” Frevisse said from the shadows, “what of the man who killed Colies?”

  “Pardoned by the king,” Master Say answered. “He saw three people hurt and a man with a dagger in his hand, all within twenty feet of the king, and he struck in the king’s defense, as he thought.” Master Say rubbed a hand over his face. “It simplifies matters anyway, having Colles dead.”

  “And Milisent alive,” Ivetta said with weary, bitter satisfaction from where she sat huddled in a chair at the edge of the candles’ wavering light, clutching a wine goblet. “She can answer what questions there still are, she can.”

  Master Fyncham, the wine served, went to stand in the shadows beyond Ivetta, waiting to do whatever else might be needed.

  Master Say slumped back on the settle. “Where’s Cristiana?”

  “In her room here,” Mistress Say said quietly. “Ivetta watched by her into early evening. Domina Elisabeth is with her for now, and Dame Frevisse will pray the night beside her.”

  “Mary and Jane. How are they?”

  “Sleeping, I hope. They’ve cried all they can for today, I think. They understand she’s dead. After we’d readied her body, they saw it. But it’s all too much for them at present. Tomorrow will be worse for them.”

  “The funeral?”

  “Tomorrow in the afternoon.”

  “She and Gerveys together?”

  “That seemed best. There’s room to bury her beside Edward, and Gerveys beside her. Somewhere has been found for Pers, too.”

  All the flat and necessary details that followed death and helped lead the living step by step into life as it would be now. But at mention of Pers, Ivetta, who like Mary and Jane had cried herself out sometime during the after
noon, began to rock forward and back, moaning softly.

  Master Fyncham stepped forward and poured more wine into her goblet, probably sharing Frevisse’s hope that she would soon drink herself to quietness and sleep. But Mistress Say’s thin, tight hold on herself slipped, too, and she clutched her husband’s hand, clinging to him while she asked with a sorrowing need to understand, “Flow could Cristiana bring herself to this? Flow could she?”

  The desperate why of Cristiana’s killing they all knew, Master Say had already said it most simply just after her death, while helping Frevisse to her feet and turning her away from Cristiana’s body, “I know her, yes. And him. He’d threatened her daughters. She was afraid for them.”

  Frevisse did not know who had asked him that but it was a woman with a French-tinged voice who said, “For her children. Yes, th^t I can understand,” and Frevisse had lifted her gaze from Cristiana’s body to the woman standing beyond it. The queen. Frevisse had met her once, not that Queen Margaret would remember it nor did Frevisse care. But this was her first near sight of the king, standing there beside his wife. A tall, thin man with a long, still face and dark eyes, staring down at the blood and bodies.

  Then, mercifully, Alice had taken her from Master Say and away to one of the pavilions where Mistress Say, tears streaming, had found them and, later, Domina Elisabeth. None of them, then or later, had needed to ask why Cristiana had done it, but now, with despair, Mistress Say cried, “How could she have brought herself to it? And there. With the king there. Didn’t she understand the danger of that? If Colles hadn’t killed her, someone else was as likely to, the way they killed Colles. What was she thinking of?”

  Ivetta, still rocking back and forth and with the words thick with grief and tears and the wine beginning to take hold, said, “It’s probably what she hoped for. That someone would kill her. It’s what she wanted, most likely. Surely.”