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

by Frazer, Margaret

  “No.” Mistress Say’s protest was sharp. “She’d never hope that. Leave Mary and Jane like that? She never would.”

  Ivetta stopped rocking, pulled herself straight in the chair, and said on a sob, wine and sorrow both at work in her, “She was going to have to leave them anyway. She was going to die. That’s how she could bring herself to do it. Because she was dying.” Ivetta pressed a hand between her breasts. “It was back before her husband died, when the pain first frighted her, she told me about it. That her mother had died that way. Of a canker in the bone eating her away. But there was her husband to worry over, and I think most times she let herself believe it wasn’t happening. You know how we do with things we don’t want to think about. But down deep, where the pain was coming from, she knew it was going to be worse before it was done and would kill her at the last. So she likely hoped somebody would kill her, too. That’s what I think. Because it would be better if they did. Mary and Jane would be safe with Master Helyngton dead, and if someone killed her, then she wouldn’t have to be afraid of the pain anymore, see.”

  They were all staring at her, probably remembering—as Frevisse was—how often Cristiana had been openly in pain. Mind-pain, they had all thought, grown from her overwrought griefs and fears, and some of it had been, surely. But much of it must have been more, and her mind-pain made all the worse by the certainty of her own death closing on her and the fear that she would die not only in pain but without her daughters safe.

  Quietly Master Say said, “That much fear and that much pain. I can see, then, how she did it. God have mercy on her soul.”

  With matching quiet, Frevisse said, “She left it to God whether she would die then or have to live to a worse death. He gave her the mercy of dying then. Surely he’ll have mercy on her soul, too.”

  They all made the sign of the cross on themselves and Ivetta took a deep drink of wine before saying fiercely, “At least Laurence Helyngton is dead, too, and that’s good. He’s why they’re all dead. My Pers . . .” She broke off with a heaving sob and hunched over again, gone back to her grief.

  “At least with Colles and Laurence dead, and Nol dealt with, it’s all ended,” Master Say said, trying for some satisfaction. “Did Lady Alice have Nol taken away or am I to send him after her?”

  “He’s still here,” Mistress Say answered. “Dame Frevisse asked her to leave him.”

  Frevisse had hoped the matter of Nol would wait until the morning, but Master Say turned a questioning look toward her and she answered, “It isn’t ended. Nol wasn’t the only one here who betrayed Cristiana and Sir Gerveys.” Ivetta’s new sobbing stopped on a gulp. Along with everyone else, she stared at Frevisse and in the candle-glow and shadows Frevisse looked back at them all. The Says. Ivetta, Master Fyncham. All of them as much in need of sleep and being done with the day as she was. But as steadily as if her mind and heart were not dragged down under the weight of her own grief and guilt, she said, “Nol was Suffolk’s spy but he never had chance to know Sir Gerveys would go to Ware. When Cristiana and Sir Gerveys talked of it, Nol never overheard them. Both he and Ivetta say Pers was with him then. Nor did Pers know where they were going until their horses were being saddled. The only people who knew Sir Gerveys would go to Ware before he went were himself, Cristiana, and Ivetta.”

  “Me?” Ivetta said as if short of breath.

  “You. You were outside Cristiana’s chamber when she and Sir Gerveys talked. You could easily have overheard them.” Ivetta stared at Frevisse, her mouth hanging open. Then she closed it, swallowed, and said, “I didn’t. I wasn’t near the door. I was farther down the stairs. With Pers. We were talking.”

  “Pers saw Nol skulking at the stairfoot and went to talk to him,” Frevisse said. She abruptly shifted her heed to the steward still standing in the shadows. “Master Fyncham, as part of your duties you know where the house servants are and what they’re doing? To be certain they’re earning their wages and not wasting their time, yes?”

  “Yes, my lady.”

  “You therefore usually know if they’re where they should be when they should be, and if they’re not?”

  “Yes, my lady. Usually,” Master Fyncham said steadily. “Three evenings ago, the evening before Pers was killed, do you remember if anyone was missing from where they should have been, before or during or after supper? Particularly after supper.”

  After a moment’s consideration, Master Fyncham said, “No. Everything was in order that evening. Everyone was here and doing what they should have been doing.”

  “Do you remember if you saw Ivetta anywhere then?” Ivetta had cramped around in her chair to look, along with everyone else, at Master Fyncham, but she jerked around at that to stare at Frevisse again. Gazing thoughtfully down at the back of her kerchiefed head, Master Fyncham considered the question before finally saying, “She was at supper. I don’t remember her after that. But she was not within my concern, for me to note or not note, you understand.”

  “Where were you that evening, Ivetta?” Frevisse demanded at her.

  “Here!” Ivetta said. “Where else would I be?”

  “Where here?” Frevisse pressed.

  “With Mistress Helyngton. With the children in the nursery.”

  “When we ask Nurse about that in the morning, will she say you were there?” Frevisse asked.

  Ivetta’s eyes flicked down and up and from side to side, seemingly in search for what to say next. Frevisse did not give her chance to find an answer but stood up, moved toward her, said, “There’s no use in telling me you were with Pers then, Master Say’s man Edmund told me he played at dice with him after supper for a good hour or more in the hall that evening. If you weren’t with Cristiana and you weren’t with Pers, where were you?”

  “Walking,” Ivetta said. “In the garden. In the orchard, I mean.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes. All alone.”

  “All alone.” Step by deliberate step, Frevisse came closer to her with every word. “After supper. In the orchard.”

  “Yes!” Ivetta’s voice shrilled up. “I was … I was … I had a headache and . . . and …”

  Frevisse cut off her flailing for words. “You were walking but not in the orchard. I’ve been told it’s two miles to the manor of Highmeade. A half hour’s good walk. A half hour’s walk to Laurence Helyngton. A half hour’s walk back. You needed to be gone hardly more than an hour. An hour and a little more to go and come back from telling Laurence Helyngton that Sir Gerveys was going to Ware in the morning to get something valuable. Something that the duke of Suffolk very much wanted.”

  She was standing over Ivetta by then, and Ivetta was pressed backward into her chair, her hands gripped together around the wine goblet, her head bent sharply back to stare up at Frevisse. On short breaths she gasped out, “What? I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. I didn’t know.”

  “You’re the only person who could know. Cristiana and Sir Gerveys told nobody he was going to Ware. They talked of it only to each other and in her chamber, where there was no one else to hear them. Except you on the stairs outside the door. Then, the first chance you had, you slipped away to tell Laurence Helyngton.”

  “Why … I wouldn’t . . . why would . . .” Ivetta let go of the goblet with one hand to push herself straighter in the chair by one of its arms, her protest growing stronger. “Why would I do that? I didn’t!”

  “I don’t know why you did it,” Frevisse said. “But you did.” She kept her eyes set on Ivetta’s, and Ivetta, trapped. stared back as Frevisse went coldly on, “So tell us why you did it. Tell us so we can understand why you betrayed Cristiana to her worst enemy. Why you betrayed Sir Gerveys. Why you sent Pers to be killed. Sent Pers to die from a sword thrust through him. To die—“

  With a gasping scream, Ivetta dropped the goblet and covered her ears with both hands, bending over to hide her face, crying out, “Stop it! Nobody was supposed to be killed! There wasn’t supposed to be a fight! They were only going to make Sir Ge
rveys give it to them! They were only going to take the thing!”

  She had probably truly believed that but the stupidity of doing so made Frevisse insist even more harshly, “Why? What did Laurence want it for? Did you even know what it was?”

  “No! I still don’t! I just knew it was something he could use to buy the duke of Suffolk’s favor he wanted so much. They were just supposed to take it!” Pier voice scaled up into a wail and broke on a new rush of tears.

  No one moved to comfort her.

  “Why?” Frevisse coldly insisted again. “Why did you tell him about it?”

  When Ivetta only went on sobbing, too lost in her own hurt to answer, Master Fyncham stepped forward and laid a hand heavily on her shoulder in firm reminder that she had been spoken to and had to answer. Tear-smeared and far gone in sorrow for herself, Ivetta raised her head and said on a half-whimper, pleading to be understood, “It was for my boy. He’s a priest stuck away nowhere. I want better for him. When they were trying to make Mary marry that Clement, Master Helyngton swore that if I helped them, then he’d help me. I didn’t. I wouldn’t. But this was only a paper or something. I thought maybe it would be enough. He said it was. That he’d help my boy. But he swore there’d be no killing either!”

  “And you believed him?” Master Say protested disbelievingly.

  “I didn’t have anything else to believe in, did I?” Ivetta wailed. “There was nobody else going to help my Nicholas, was there? Not Sir Gerveys with his duke of York and going away to Ireland and taking Pers with him. Not Master Say. He’d get the girls away from Master Helyngton but that wouldn’t have done anything for my Nicholas, would it? It had to be Master Helyngton or nobody and he said he would!”

  Now it was Mistress Say who protested, “Ivetta, how could you think to let him have Mary and Jane? How could you mean to do that?”

  Ivetta was beginning to be sullen at all their doubts. “Mistress Cristiana was going to die and not have them anyway, Master Say would stop that Laurence. I knew that. So if I could do something for my Nicholas, I had to, that’s all. Don’t you see?”

  Frevisse saw. Protected by a muddle of excuses to herself, Ivetta had chosen ambition for her son over Cristiana’s need.

  “It was that Master Colies,” Ivetta said with angry misery. “He laughed when Master Helyngton said nobody would be hurt. I should have known then. It’s his doing it all went wrong.”

  There were a great many reasons besides Colies why so much was gone wrong, but Frevisse did not bother to point them out. She had not planned her sudden attack on Ivetta, had meant to leave accusing her until tomorrow, but the words had come on an uprush of anger, and now that it was done, she was not surprised by how easily Ivetta had broken. She saw that the woman had no depth of thought or strength. She did whatever seemed immediately needed, followed her soonest thought, probably never held to a longer course than whatever she saw lying just in front of her. This time her shallow thinking had cost five men’s lives and Cristiana a bitter death. That the death had been a quicker death than Cristiana would otherwise have had might someday be a comfort to Frevisse. Just now it was not.

  “Master Fyncham,” Master Say ordered, “lock her away some place for the night. I’ll give her over to the crowner to be questioned tomorrow.”

  As Master Fyncham took her under one arm and raised her from the chair, Ivetta protested, “I didn’t do anything! Not against the law!”

  “You’ll tell what you did so the sheriff will better know what happened,” Master Say said coldly.

  His coldness—or maybe the looks on all their faces— silenced her. Beginning to sob again, she let Master Fyncham lead her away, and only when she was well gone did Frevisse ask, “What will be done with her?”

  Master Say made a small, discontented sound. “Little can be done. She’ll be questioned about what she did and what she knows and then, if I have my way, she’ll be sent to live with her son in that place in the Huntingdonshire marshes and serve her right. I won’t have her anywhere around here, that’s certain.”

  Weary with sorrow, Mistress Say asked, “But why, when it was too late to have this hateful paper, did Colles kill Gerveys? And poor Sawnder? There wasn’t any use to it then.”

  “To have Gerveys out of the way?” Master Say guessed. “To end his interfering?”

  Among the day’s nightmare swirl of memories Frevisse had a clear one of Colles’ face as he killed Cristiana. It had been alight with pleasure. He had looked a man come suddenly alive at the chance to kill. And because she was so tired, Frevisse said, when otherwise she might not have, “Or he did it simply because he wanted to. For the pleasure of having Gerveys dead.”

  Mistress Say stood up abruptly. “I have to go to bed.” Master Say rose, too, but stiffly, his hours of riding telling on him, and said to Frevisse, “My lady, if you’ll see to the candles, please?”

  Frevisse made a small nod that she would but asked, “What will you do about Nol?”

  “Nol.” Master Say seemed to pull thought of Nol out of some far corner of his mind. “Yes. Nol. I think I’ll send him to Lady Alice with a letter of what we know now, and tell him not to return. Let him make his way in the world with Suffolk’s favor. Or, better, with no one’s at all.”

  He took a candle from the nearest stand and followed Mistress Say through the shadows to their bedchamber. When the door was shut behind them, Frevisse took another candle for herself, blew out the rest, and left the parlor for the high-roofed blackness of the hall. Not bound for her own bed, she had to go the hall’s length, the candle’s light small among the huge shadows. The close walls and low ceiling of the screens passage and the stairs up to Cristiana’s bedchamber were better, and the bedchamber itself was brightly lighted enough, candles burning at the four corners of the bed where the long, still form of Christiana’s body lay in its shroud.

  Kneeling in prayer on the bed’s far side, Domina Elisabeth looked up when Frevisse came in but did not speak and for that Frevisse was grateful. Just now there was nothing she wanted to say to anyone or for anyone to say to her. She and Domina Elisabeth merely bowed their heads slightly to one another, Frevisse knelt beside the bed to take up the prayers for Cristiana’s soul, and Domina Elisabeth rose and went to the mattress waiting on the floor across the room. Head bowed, hands folded together, Frevisse waited through the quiet sounds of her removing and folding and setting aside veil and wimple and outer gown; waited while she lay down and settled; waited until the steady breathing soon told she slept. Waited then for prayers to come but they did not. She was alone with the night’s deep quiet and the deeper quiet of Cristiana’s body on the bed and wanted to say her own prayers for mercy for Cristiana’s soul, but nothing came to her. Only plain Requiescat in pace. Rest in peace. Which was insufficient to the great need crying in her not only to pray for Cristiana but to find a way past her own guilt for Cristiana’s death.

  No one else was ever likely to see her guilt, but she knew and that was enough. Knew she had understood too little and had left too much until too late. Knew she had had everything sorted down to near certainty of Ivetta’s guilt by this morning, but had chosen to leave accusing her for later. Had chosen to wait until the already over-busied day was done because Ivetta would still be here then and nothing more would happen before then. She had thought. And had been most terribly wrong.

  But if she had spoken out this morning, would it have kept Cristiana from what she did? Or only burdened her with one more bitter grief? As it was, she had been spared knowledge of Ivetta’s betrayal. And the death her disease would have finally given her.

  Frevisse supposed that time would come when she might weave some shred of comfort from that; but there would never be comfort against knowing her own guilt in having given too little heed to Cristiana these past days. She had not troubled to see how far Cristiana was gone into despair, how at the end of her strength she was to endure any more; and because she had not seen, two men’s souls were surely gone to hell an
d Cristiana had died with hardly time to make her own peace.

  But Cristiana had made that peace. From her last words, Frevisse could even find hope that she had killed Laurence not so much in hatred for him but for love of her daughters.

  Was it better to have killed for love rather than in hate? Frevisse did not know, could only hope, and with a sigh out of her depths of sorrow and regrets, she turned to Compline’s prayers. Despite the hour was probably nearer to Matins, she wanted Compline’s prayers. They were meant to bring the heart and mind to peace after a day’s troubles. Even such a day as today. But the prayers that came to her first were from Matins after all. A vinculispeccatorum nostrorum ahsolvai nos omnipotent et misericors Dominus. From the chains of our sins set us free, almighty and merciful Lord. Miserere nostri, Domine, miserere nostri. Fiat misericordia tua, Domine, super nos, quemadmodum speravimus in te. Pity us, Lord, pity us. Let your mercy, Lord, be on us, as we have hoped in you.

  The words wound around her mind and into her heart, giving her, if not the peace she needed, then the beginning of what might someday be peace.

  Because beyond today was Eternity and the vastness of God’s Love.

  Author’s Note

  What happened in Normandy that summer of 1449 is told in detail by French chroniclers of the time—Enguerrand de Monstrelet and Jean de Waurin among others—but in less detail by English contemporaries and usually in even less detail by modern historians. To follow the latters’ example, suffice it to say that after more than a hundred years of warfare in France, the English in a matter of months lost almost everything the war had gained them.

  On the other hand, the French chroniclers and the documents in the treasure-trove Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Wars of the English in France During the Reign of Henry the Sixth, King of England (edited by Joseph Stevenson for the Rolls Series, 1864) detail Somerset’s refusal to negotiate over the broken truce despite the king of France’s repeated attempts to do so and Somerset’s orders to various English-held fortresses and towns to offer no resistance, simply to surrender. Letters and Papers also has the report written by Sir Francois de Surienne—the man whose attack on the Breton town broke the truce—to the king of France (Joan of Arc’s King Charles VII, once the Dauphin) of how Suffolk and Somerset set him on to do it. They had tried to put all the blame for the English losses on him as a scapegoat, so he had escaped and with this report was making personal peace with the French. This element of self-interest of course casts doubt on anything he might report against Suffolk and Somerset, except for the corroborative evidence of Somerset’s own letters to the French king and his well-chronicled failure to resist the French sweep into English-held territory.