by Mike Ashley
Lady Alice looked past him to his workmen clustered in and outside the someday-window that opened now to the stoneyard where they should have been busy at their tasks. “You,” she said at them all. “Do any of you know aught of this? Where he might be off to?”
One and all, they shook their head, a few of them taking courage to say, “No, my lady,” one of them even making bold to add, “He was here at suppertime. Then he wasn’t. We’ve none of us seen him since.”
She looked behind her, past Frevisse standing at her shoulder to the three ladies-in-waiting as far off as they dared, the two younger ones rather huddled together and looking as if they wished they could hide behind the nearest pillar. Lady Alice’s anger had already washed over them this morning and her displeasure was by no means lessened now as she demanded, “You still don’t know anything else either?”
“No, my lady. No,” they hurriedly assured her. “Elyn never said anything.”
Frevisse was sorry for them but that was no help, she knew. She had no place here except as Lady Alice’s cousin, come on a bishop-granted visit to Ewelme three days ago from her cloistered life as a nun in St Frideswide’s nunnery the other end of the shire. She had worried that Alice’s summons meant there was trouble of some sort and her help was needed. She had soon realized, though, that all Alice wanted was her companionship – and maybe someone new to show off her tomb to. Frevisse had hardly brushed off the dust of travel before Alice had brought her here, to show her the work on both church and tomb and tell at length how it all would be when it was finished, the church beautiful with many-coloured light through the stained glass of the new window, the tomb made in the latest of fashions.
The tomb was well toward being done. Only the stone-carved canopy remained to be finished, now that the alabaster image of Lady Alice in beautiful robes had been settled into place atop the tomb chest. The chest itself, carved around with standing angels bearing shields to be painted with the heraldic arms of her ancestors, was raised above the floor on an open-worked, stone-carved screen behind which, directly under the chest, could be seen a second full-length effigy, this one of a semi-shrouded corpse in the latter stages of its decay, meant to remind those that lived of the fate that came to all, no matter what their earthly glory.
“Not that that’s kept me from giving myself a glorious tomb,” Alice had said, laughing at herself for it as they walked back to the manor house afterward. “Given the expense of it, I thought I’d have it to enjoy while I was alive, rather than leave money for it in my will and never see it. Besides, on the chance I may live for a long while yet, I thought it best to have my image done now, before I go any older and more wrinkled.”
“Ah, vanity even unto death,” Frevisse had teased her.
Alice had said back, “It’s not much use after death, is it?” and they had laughed together, their friendship firm despite how differently they had gone about their lives – Frevisse gladly into a nunnery and a life of prayer, Alice into worldly wealth and power by way of three marriages. Now in her third widowhood, she was using that wealth and power to have made for her a tomb fine enough to comfort her against the time when death would make worldly wealth and power of no more use to her. Frevisse, as a Benedictine nun vowed to poverty as well as chastity and obedience, knew her own grave would lie nameless under a stretch of grass-grown turf in the nunnery orchard, and she found that a quiet, pleasing thought.
Alice’s choice, though, was Alice’s choice, between her and God, and Frevisse had no quarrel with it. The trouble this morning was that others had made choices of their own that did not suit with Alice’s, and Alice was very angry and had been growing angrier about it ever since one too few of her ladies-in-waiting had come to her bedchamber at dawn to ready her for the day. To Alice’s question, “Where’s Elyn?” Lady Sybille, senior among her ladies-in-waiting, had looked at Beth and Cathryn, youngest of her ladies – girls whose well-born families had set them to serve and learn in Lady Alice’s household until they were old enough for the marriages made for them. That was usual enough, but there should have been three of them there this morning, and Lady Sybille had said sternly, “Tell my lady.”
Beth and Cathryn had traded guilty looks before Beth answered with a rather desperate boldness meant to show her innocence in the matter, “We don’t know, my lady. She went out last night and never came back to bed.”
The three girls shared a bed in the small chamber off the chamber where Alice’s older ladies and some of the waiting women slept. They were particularly Lady Sybille’s charge and she said, not needing to hear Alice’s next question, “We saw you and Dame Frevisse to bed. Then I saw them to theirs as always. So far as I knew, Elyn settled properly to bed, and these two did not see fit to say she did not.”
“She said she would be back!” Beth protested. “Then we fell asleep and didn’t know she didn’t come!”
“Not until we woke up this morning,” Cathryn added.
“Has she ever done this before?” Alice demanded.
“She most assuredly has not!” Lady Sybille said indignantly.
But Frevisse saw yet another guilty look pass between Beth and Cathryn and quietly asked, insisting, “Has she?”
Cathryn began hesitantly, “She’s . . .” and stopped.
Beth, with the impatience of someone wronged by another’s foolishness, said, “A few times, yes.”
“Why?” Alice had demanded, with growing anger.
“To see Simon Maye,” Beth whispered, as if in the confessional.
Lady Sybille drew a sharp breath. “At that hour? Surely not.”
“We think so,” Cathryn said hurriedly. “She didn’t say.”
“And she’s done it before this?” Alice said. “It’s gone that far between them?”
“But she’s always come back!” Cathryn wailed, “She’s never not come back!”
“Because she knew what trouble we’d be in if she didn’t,” Beth had said with a grimness that told Alice she would not be alone in having something to say to the erring Elyn when the time came.
Cathryn, with sudden enterprise and some desperation, added, “She maybe did come back and we were asleep and didn’t know it, and she woke up before we did and is only gone out for an early walk.”
“That’s more likely,” one of the other women had offered. “She’ll be back for breakfast, surely,”
“That’s somewhat too late,” Alice had snapped. Already in her undergown of cream-coloured linen, she had pointed at her green outer gown and ordered, “Finish dressing me.” And to Lady Sybille beginning a protest over the tray waiting with bread and cold meats for her to break her fast, “No, I’ll eat when I come back.”
“Come back?” Lady Sybille had faltered.
“From seeing what Simon Maye has to say about this,” Lady Alice had said grimly.
And there was where Elyn’s other fault – as deep as the first – lay: if what Beth and Cathryn said was true, she had brought Simon Maye into a disgrace that Alice could not ignore. Frevisse had taken no particular note of this Elyn in her few days here, but she remembered Simon Maye well enough . . . He was the journeyman carving the angels for the canopy above Alice’s tomb, and when she had first gone with Alice to the church, he had been so intent on his work that Master Wyndford had had to draw his heed, saying beside him, “Simon, my lady has come to see your work again.” Then Simon had hurriedly laid down his tools and turned and bowed, a young man with stone-dust greying his brown hair and not particularly different from uncounted other young men.
Until Frevisse had looked past him to the angel he was carving.
Half-length, its hands raised as if in praise, it was rising from the waist out of the stone. Framed by the curves of its wings behind its shoulders, there was an other-worldness to its face, a fineness to the stone-made folds of its gown, an aliveness to every delicately detailed feather of the wings that went far beyond an ordinary journeyman’s skill to the something else that came to only some
few, God-touched craftsmen.
But now he was not here. Alice’s sharp questions at Master Wyndford had determined that, and Elyn had become a lesser matter because, “Who’s going to finish my angels then?” Alice demanded at the master mason. “If Simon Maye is gone, who is going to finish them?”
There were to be eighteen of them along the tomb’s canopy, set in groups of three. The panels so far finished were set on the church’s aisle floor a safe distance away from where the building still went on, leaned partly upright against the wall, the angels gazing upward rather than downward as they would when in place above the tomb. Some were crowned and some were not. Some had their hands folded on their breast; others held them palm to palm in prayer; still others had them raised in praise, like the one that Frevisse had first seen. Besides that, each face was its own rather than simply the same again, and all in all they were as masterful a work as Frevisse had ever found herself smiling at for the plain pleasure they gave. But as yet there were only twelve, not eighteen there were meant to be, and Master Wyndford said, looking aside from Alice’s anger to a heavy-shouldered youth standing a little aside from the other workers, “My son Nicol. He’s as skilled a carver of stone as Simon Maye. He’ll finish the angels, my lady.”
Lady Alice turned her critical look on Nicol Wyndford as he bowed to her. Dressed like any workman in a plain tunic and hosen, he had pale, flat hair and a pale, flat face that just now was heavy with sullenness. “Are you?” she demanded at him. “Are you as good as Simon Maye?”
Nicol Wyndford looked from her to his father and back again, hunched his shoulders in not quite a shrug, and said toward the floor, “Nearly, my lady.”
“Nearly,” Lady Alice said with raw displeasure. “Master Wyndford, I am not paying for ‘nearly’.”
At that moment Frevisse was more sorry for Master Wyndford’s discomfiture than for Alice’s disappointment. Sorry, too, that he could not offer himself for the work, as master of the lesser workmen here. He might well have been, in his day, a master carver of stone in his own right – that often went together with being a mason – but he had no hope of being one now, misshapen as both his hands were by arthritis, the fingers swollen and crooked and bent sideways at the knuckles, past hope of ever doing fine work again. They pained him, too. The other times she had come with Alice, Frevisse had noted him gently rubbing one hand’s thumb in slow circles on the palm of the other, first one, then the other, as if to ease a constant aching, if not outright pain, that today was shifted to the back of the hand still clutched to his chest. Frevisse suspected that the bitterness of his lost skill accounted, even more than his years did, for the deep lines down his face and the sour look he seemed always to wear; but his voice was strong now with respect and certainty as he insisted, “I promise you, my lady, the work will not suffer if you charge Nicol with it.”
“Nicol doesn’t think so,” Alice pointed out sharply.
Master Wyndford sent his son a hard look. “Simon Maye is his friend. He speaks from that rather than honestly about his own skill.”
And his father would take him to task for it later, Frevisse thought.
Alice, unsatisfied, looked from father to son to father again, and said impatiently, “I’ll think on it and tell you later.”
She swung away from him in a swirl of long skirts and fine veiling. It was to her back that he bowed, saying, “My lady,” Nicol and all the workmen bowing, too, as she swept away across the church toward the outer door in even worse humour than she had come, Frevisse and her ladies following her.
The day was still so young the dew was not yet off the grass, but though the day promised to be warm and fair, Alice plainly did not mean to enjoy it, and probably no one around her would either. Instead of to the house and her morning duties, she went aside toward her gardens. “To pace off my anger at both Elyn and at Simon Maye,” she said, and at the garden gateway ordered at her ladies, “Go to your duties. I’ll walk with only my cousin. Beth and Cathryn, to you I’ll talk later.”
The threat in that was not veiled. Her women and both girls made hurried curtsies and more than willingly hastened away as she went into the garden, Frevisse still following her until Alice waited for her and when they were walking side by side between the herb-bordered beds of late summer flowers, said, “It’s Sir Reginald Barre. That’s who’s talked Simon Maye away from me. Sir Reginald’s a jealous cur and always has been. He and his wife both. I should never have talked about my tomb where they could hear. They’ve bribed Simon Maye away, and Elyn has gone with him. How could they both be so foolish at once?”
“Love?” Frevisse suggested.
“Love is all very well,” Alice said with sharp disapproval. “But there’s no good reason to let it take the place of common sense.”
Frevisse had rarely seen love and reason keep company together. It was more usual that when love came in, reason went out; and if the matter were lust instead of love, then reason only went out the faster. Having barely seen and never spoken to either Elyn or Simon, Frevisse had no way of knowing whether it was lust or love between them, but whichever way it was, reason seemed to have gone completely out. This running away together would likely gain them more trouble, both now and to come, than good.
“What I don’t see,” Alice said, snatching a spire of flowers from a lavender plant as she walked past, “is why Elyn would do something this headlong. She’s always showed sensible before this. Even in her dalliance with Simon Maye she hasn’t been foolish until now. I’ve already told her, when she asked me, that I’d speak favourably to her parents about him.”
“She asked you? You said you would?” Frevisse echoed in surprise. “They’d countenance such a thing? Marriage between her and a journeyman stone-worker?”
“Oh, they’re none so fine as all that,” Alice said easily. She held the lavender to her nose and breathed deeply. “Elyn’s grandfather on the father’s side was a merchant out of Gloucester who bought himself into land and his son into marriage with a squire’s daughter. He was a friend of my father. That’s how I know the family. Elyn isn’t even their eldest or heir, just a younger daughter, here to be given some graces. If she had caught the eye of a young lord while in my household, they’d not have minded.” Alice’s small laughter at that was her first lightness of the morning. “But they’ll not mind a master stone-worker for her, which is what this Simon Maye will shortly be.”
“And Elyn knows that?”
“Oh, yes.” Alice’s humour darkened again. “She only had to wait. What are they thinking of? It’s Sir Reginald. He’s behind this in some way. I swear I’ll tell everyone he can’t find good workmen of his own but has to steal mine. I’ll making a laughing-stock of him. He found some way to turn Simon Maye’s head . . .”
“How would he have gone about that?” Frevisse asked. “Wouldn’t anyone he sent be noted here?” Ewelme being a small place and most of it centred on Lady Alice’s household. “Wouldn’t any stranger whose only business was with one of the workmen be talked about?” And talk of it would almost surely be brought to Alice by way of any of her household officers whose duties included knowing such things as went on around her. Alice’s frown acknowledged as much as Frevisse went on, “Besides that, is Simon Maye such a fool?”
“I wouldn’t have thought so,” Alice snapped. “But I’d not have thought it of Elyn either. Oh, how could either of them have been so foolish? And no matter what Master Wyndford avers about his son, I won’t have the drunken lout touching my angels.”
Surprised, Frevisse said, “Was he drunk?”
“What else would you call how he looked this morning? Or if he wasn’t outright drunk, he was at least ale-addled. Did you see when he bowed? He swayed near to falling over.”
“I thought him a little unsteady, yes, but thought he was simply unnerved at your talking to him.”
Alice made an impatient sound, dismissing that. “He’s not touching my angels,” she said again and threw the sprig of lavender a
way. The scent of lavender was supposed to soothe. Perhaps it had; with a little more resignation, she said, “Ah well. All this doesn’t mean the rest of us should waste our day. My chamberlain will be waiting, and then my steward.”
Being lady of a large household and of lands spread over a goodly number of counties did not mean she lived a life of plain leisure. She was responsible for a great many people, must deal for hours at a time with her officers over a great many matters. Frevisse, of no use to her with any of that, went her own way after they returned to the house, seeking out Beth and Cathryn. They were at their morning work of tidying Alice’s bedchamber and did not mind stopping when Frevisse said, “Tell me, what did Elyn take with her?”
“Take with her, my lady?” Cathryn echoed a little blankly.
Beth was quicker. “When she went out last night, you mean? She didn’t take anything that I saw. Unless she had it ready, waiting for her somewhere else.”
“But you haven’t looked to see for certain,” Frevisse said.
“No, my lady.” Cathryn was openly surprised at the thought. People living constantly together in a household learned the courtesy of leaving each other’s possessions alone. Cathryn looked as if the thought were beyond her, but again Beth quickly understood and said, “Her chest is in our room.”
Elyn’s chest sat along one wall, with Beth’s and Cathryn’s, and as soon as Beth put up the lid, Frevisse could see that nothing was gone from it. Small, it was meant to hold only a few clothes, a few personal things. Everything was carefully folded, carefully placed, with no space from which something might be missing.
“Is this the way it always is?” Frevisse asked.
“Oh, yes,” said Beth.
“That’s how Elyn is about everything,” Cathryn added, sounding faintly aggrieved, as if at some affront or fault.
Frevisse was more taken with the thought of how unlikely it was that this very careful Elyn had run off into the night so foolishly and unprepared, taking nothing with her. Still, women thinking themselves in love had done far more foolish things than that, and Frevisse supposed the next question had to be: How foolish was Simon Maye?
