by Mike Ashley
Beth was slowly, perhaps thoughtfully, closing the chest while Cathryn, gazing wistfully into the air at nothing, sighed, “They must be wonderfully in love to run away like this.” Turning her smile to Frevisse, she said a little dreamily, “We’d go with her sometimes when she was going to meet him. Sometimes Nicol Wyndford would be there because he’s Simon’s friend. We’d talk with him while Elyn and Simon talked together.” She gave a sly, teasing, sideways look at Beth. “Beth favours him. Nicol. But he favours Elyn.”
“He doesn’t!” Beth protested. “I don’t!”
“You do, too. You’ve even said you wished he’d look at you like he looks at her.”
“I never did!”
“You did!”
“None of which makes any difference to Dame Frevisse,” Lady Sybille said, crisp and disapproving from the room’s doorway. “I doubt, too, there’ll be any meeting with anyone after this for you two, or Elyn when we get her back. Have you finished with my lady’s bedchamber?” Probably knowing full well they had not.
The girls made swift curtsies and scurried away, while Frevisse made apology to Lady Sybille, taking blame for their delay on herself before leaving, too, out of the house and back to the church.
It was empty of workmen, but by the sound of men’s voices mixed with the chink of chisels on stones outside the window-hole in the wall she guessed they were at work in the stone-yard there, and there she would likely find Master Wyndford and his son. She meant to ask them more questions, but she paused in the aisle beside the panels of Simon Maye’s angels; stood looking at their proud, serene faces, and found it harder by the moment to think a man with the skill of hand and eye and mind to create such beauty would desert his work for a lesser love.
Except, of course, he probably did not think his Elyn was a lesser love.
Master Wyndford came into the aisle through the gap in the wall. Not seeing her where she stood aside, he stopped and stood staring at Alice’s tomb for a long moment, with one crippled hand still held against his chest, still rubbing at it with the other. His face was set with both sadness and worry. Sadness for the trouble Simon Maye had brought on them all; worry for the work and Alice’s displeasure, Frevisse supposed.
He turned and saw her. The hard set of his mouth did not change and his bow was curt, but she took no offence, simply said, “Master Wyndford,” as he came toward her.
“My lady,” he returned and nodded at the angels along the wall. “Nicol will finish those well enough. My lady need have no worry that way. That carving there is Nicol’s. You can see he’s skilled.”
Master Wyndford moved one hand in a small gesture at the stone corpse lying below the tomb chest. Frevisse had already seen it clearly enough to want no further look at it. In its ghastly way the decayed thing was as much a masterwork as the angels. Every detail of a rotting body – the arch of the barely fleshed ribs, the gaunt thrust of the hipbones past the sunken belly – all were done with exacting care, and if there was no pleasure in looking at it, well then, there was not meant to be, reminder as it was of where all worldly pride and riches came at last. But death and decay were certain and reminding of them was not something of which Frevisse felt in need. The thing ever in doubt until the last was the soul’s salvation, and so she preferred the angels’ promise of hope beyond death, of love stronger than decay.
And so, she thought, did Master Wyndford, who had waited for no answer from her but stared past her, down broodingly at the angels, and said, “They were his masterwork, those angels. When they were done, he would have been his own man, no journeyman anymore but a master in his own right.”
“And now?” Frevisse asked. “Now that he’s broken his contract and gone off?”
Master Wyndford pulled his shoulders a little straighter – the broad shoulders of a man who had worked with stone all of his life – and said, as if trying to straighten his thoughts along with his shoulders, “Eh, well, he may come back. There’s no saying. If he’s any sense, once the lust has gone out of him he’ll come craving pardon then and to have his work back.”
“Will you give it to him?”
Master Wyndford held silent a long moment before finally saying with a nod toward the angels. “There’s little I’d not forgive a man who does that kind of work.” His sadness and worry went into bitterness, and he said with open anger and frustration, “I warned him. When he came talking to me about this girl, I warned him well no good would come of wanting a woman instead of his work. I told him that letting her turn his head would only bring him to grief. I warned him marriage would be his ruin.”
“You’re married,” Frevisse said. “Or you were. You have a son. Surely you . . .”
“Oh, aye, I was married. I was warned against it, the way I warned young Simon, but I was set on her, just like him on this Elyn, and I married her. The young don’t listen. They don’t hear. No matter what’s said to them, they think it’ll go differently for them. It never does but they think it will.”
“I listened, Father.” Just come through the wall’s gap from the stoneyard, Nicol Wyndford bent his head respectfully to Frevisse but as he came forward, it was still at his father he said, “I’ve listened to you every time and done as you bid. I left Elyn to Simon. Now he has her and I don’t. Can’t that be enough to satisfy you?”
“Satisfy me?” Master Wyndford said bitterly. “No. I’m to be satisfied to watch him ruin his life with a marriage he didn’t need? Watch him lose everything he could have been and go dark with disappointment and failure? Watch him never do all he could have if he hadn’t thought he needed this girl, this . . .”
“It wasn’t marriage to Mother that ruined your hands,” Nicol said sharply at him.
His angry flow of words broken, Master Wyndford started to pull his hands away from him as if to look at them, saying as if suddenly bewildered, “My hands?” Then he clutched them to him again and said, his anger flooding back, “No. They weren’t her fault. What she did was done years before they finished me. She kept me from what I could have done. That’s what she did. All those years when she needed this and she wanted that. Everything had to be the way she wanted it to be. She had to have everything she wanted to have. She wouldn’t let me go where the best work was to be had and she never give me peace enough to give my mind to what work there was. She clung and she nagged through every unblessed hour I was married to her. She wore me out and made me nothing. Then she died and the arthritics finished what she’d started.”
“That isn’t Elyn, though,” Nicol protested. “There’s sweetness in her. She . . .”
Master Wyndford pounded his fisted hands against his chest. Disgusted and dismissing, with old, embedded anger, he snapped, “You think your mother didn’t show sweet when she was wooing me? It’s after they have you, that’s when you find out what they are.”
“No,” Nicol said, stiff with useless rebellion. “Father . . .”
But Master Wyndford swept onward with growing rage and bitterness. “Years of misery when he could have years of making. That’s what a man gets when he marries.” He nodded harshly at the line of angels. “I did work like that once. ONCE. You’d ruin yourself if I let you, but I won’t. Do you think I could stand to watch it happen again?” He held his twisted hands a little out from his chest, then clutched them back against him. “They’re gone. Simon and this Elyn. They’re gone and there’s all the proof you need of what a fool she’s made of him!” Dropping the quarrel that was all his own as suddenly as he’d taken it up, Master Wyndford demanded instead, “You left your work to come in here for other than to pick a quarrel with me. What did you want?”
Nicol had begun rubbing his forehead while his father was still talking and now said, “I don’t remember,” and began to turn away.
“Remember your courtesy to the lady,” his father snapped.
Nicol dropped his hand, turned back, bowed to Frevisse without looking at her, and made to turn away again, his hand returning to his head as if it hurt
.
Frevisse, sorry for his father’s harsh set-down and wanting to show what sympathy she could, asked, “Are you ill?”
Still turning away, Nicol said, “The weather is in my head, is all. The heat, I think. There’s maybe a storm coming.”
“You drank too much last night,” Master Wyndford snapped. “That’s all. You always drink too much.”
“I don’t,” Nicol said in the flat voice of someone who’s said the same too many times to care much anymore.
But he stopped in his turning away, held unmoving a moment, frowning at the floor as if tracking a fugitive thought across the paving stones, then lowered his hand, turned back toward his father, and said slowly, “Last night. I’ve remembered something. I woke up from some bad dream. I don’t know what time it was, but I wanted a drink. I was thirsty. I went down to the kitchen.”
“You went downstairs?” Master Wyndford said, sharp with surprise. Then sharp with disgust, “You didn’t. I never heard you. You dreamed it.”
“No. I was awake. I don’t know where you were . . .”
“In bed. Asleep and not drunk, which you surely were.”
Following his thought more than his father’s words, Nicol went on, “The shutter was open. You’d left the shutter open. There was moonlight in the room.”
“It was a warm night. I forgot to close it,” Master Wyndford said impatiently at him. “That happens. Best you give up ale altogether if it sets you to muttering through the next day like this. Get back to work.”
Nicol lifted and twisted his shoulders, shaking his father’s words away, intent on his memory and the unease of it. “There was the moonlight and I could see . . .” He stopped, then said slowly, as if only beginning to be sure of it, “There were three cups on the table.” More firmly, sure of the thought now, he said more strongly, “There were three cups there. Why were there three cups?”
“There weren’t any three cups,” said Master Wyndford. “You were drunk and dreamed it.”
“I wasn’t drunk. I wasn’t dreaming. You and I, we sat there at the table after supper and drank together. I filled my cup twice and no more, and it would take stronger ale than that was to get me drunk on two cups. Then I put my cup back on its shelf and went to bed. ‘Put away now and you’ll not need do it later.’ That’s what Mother beat into me when I was little, and I still do it. Sober or half-drunk, I always ‘put away’, and last night I wasn’t even half-drunk. I was . . .” He gripped his fingers into the side of his forehead. “I was something, but I wasn’t drunk.”
“You were drunk,” Master Wyndford said flatly. “And I’d not say you were sober now. Best you . . .”
Nicol lowered his hand. Stared at his father. “Three cups and none of them mine. They were there last night, weren’t they? They . . .”
“There was nobody there,” Master Wyndford said, angry and uneasy together. “You went to bed drunk. You dreamed things. You . . .”
“I wasn’t drunk!” Nicol shouted. He took a step toward his father, his uncertainty gone suddenly to anger of his own. “You put something in my ale, didn’t you? You have that potion you take when the pain is too bad. The draught that lets you sleep when you can’t otherwise. You put that in my ale!”
“You’re a fool. I never . . .”
“So I’d be asleep when Simon and Elyn came to see you. They were there. Simon and Elyn were there, weren’t they? That’s why there were the three cups on the table. Because Simon and Elyn . . .”
“You’re off your head!” his father shouted back at him. “I haven’t enough I’d waste any of my draught on your thick head for anything and they weren’t there last night!”
“It was to have me out of the way. You knew they were coming! You wanted me out of the way! You . . .”
“I pray your pardon,” said Alice, cold and precise on every word. “Is this about my tomb? Because otherwise I can see no reason for such shouting in a church.”
Frevisse was as taken by surprise as both the Wyndfords. Come in by the far door, Alice had crossed the nave at an angle that had kept her hidden beyond the pillar nearest where they stood. She had not done it by design, surely. She was lady here, with no need not to be seen. But it made her appearance sudden, and both men spun to face her, bending in hurried bows as Frevisse turned, too, and curtsied and said with very false calm as she straightened from it, “It seems Elyn and Simon talked with Master Wyndford last night. Now he’s going to tell us why.”
Not so willing to accuse a nun of lying as he was his son of drunkenness, Master Wyndford stared, speechless, from her to Lady Alice, past Lady Alice to her three ladies who had come with her, and back to Frevisse again, as Alice said, impatient at his failure to answer, “Well, Master Wyndford? I came to say I was willing to let your son work on my angels. Now I won’t say it until I’ve heard more about this. Did you talk with Elyn and Simon last night?”
Stiffly, now looking at the nearest pillar rather than at anyone, Master Wyndford said, “Yes, my lady.”
“And yet did not see fit to say so when I was here before.”
“No, my lady.” Still to the pillar.
Still feigning a calm she no longer felt, Frevisse said, “What did they come to see you about, Master Wyndford?”
He gave her a look as black as any he had had for his son before answering sullenly, “About being married.”
“And to tell you they were running off,” Alice said.
“No.” Master Wyndford heaved a breath far too heavy to be called a sigh. “They didn’t say anything about running off. They wanted to talk about marrying. How soon I thought they could do it and all. I told them not to be fools. They went away. That was all.”
“They said nothing about leaving?” Alice pressed.
“Nothing,” Master Wyndford said bitterly. “We talked and then they went away.” His face and voice darkened with deep-set grief and long-nurtured rage. “I told Simon marriage would rob him of everything he might be and do. I told her that if she loved him, she’d let him go. They didn’t listen. It wasn’t what they wanted to hear. They’d never have listened.”
“And so you poisoned them,” Frevisse said quietly.
Master Wyndford jerked his head around to stare at her, along with everyone else.
“While they sat there, trusting you,” Frevisse said, still quietly, “you poisoned them. And while you were ridding yourself of their bodies, Nicol came downstairs and saw the cups on the table.”
“No!”
Master Wyndford’s protest was fierce, but Nicol, his stare gone from Frevisse to his father, said wonderingly, “You dosed me enough to make me sleep. So I wouldn’t know they’d been there. Then you gave them enough to kill them.” The thought took hold on him, going past guess into belief, and with an on-rush of anger he yelled, “You killed them! How could you? How could you kill them!”
“I couldn’t!” Master Wyndford cried back at him. “I didn’t! I . . .” But his eyes were going from Nicol to Frevisse to Alice to Nicol again, and he must have seen their growing certainty and anger arrayed against him, and the same weakness that had betrayed him to ruin by a vile-humoured wife betrayed him now. Defiance and denial went out of him, turned only into weak assertion and a pleading that they understand with, “I didn’t kill them. Death . . . I couldn’t see Simon dead. The dead are so . . . empty. There’s nothing there when someone is dead. I couldn’t bear to see Simon that way. I gave them sleep, that’s all. With my syrup of poppies. I gave them sleep. That’s all I did.”
“Where are they?” Frevisse demanded.
Master Wyndford shook his head, refusing that. “They’re sleeping. Leave them. They’ll never know. They’ll sleep away and never find out all the ugliness that comes afterward. Never have to live through all the years after this ‘love’ they think they’re in is gone. They’ll just sleep. They’ll just . . .” He was a man who had worked more with his hands than with words through his life. He gestured outward now, groping for words, needing
to make someone, anyone, understand. “They’ll sleep,” he pleaded. “They’ll sleep and go free and never know . . .”
Frevisse grabbed him by one wrist and wrenched his hand over to see what she had glimpsed as he gestured. There, red and raw across his palm, was a fresh wound of . . .
Master Wyndford jerked loose from her but Nicol grabbed him by his other wrist, dragged his arm out, fighting him for it, forcing his hand palm-upward to show the same fresh wound there; and Nicol said as if only half-believing it, “Rope-burn!”
Together, in the same rush of understanding, he and Frevisse looked toward the crane with its ropes and pulleys still straddling Lady Alice’s tomb; and Frevisse with the horror of certainty, said “No” as Nicol flung his father’s hand away from him and made for the gap in the wall to the stone-yard, yelling, “I need men here! All of you! Hurry!”
For Master Wyndford, alone and in the dark last night, the lifting of the stone slab with its alabaster figure from its place atop the tomb chest must have been brutal work, and later lowering it into place again would have hardly been easier. The pulley-ropes had left raw testament of that on his hands.
The workmen who came at Nicol’s call made quicker business of it; and when the slab was lifted and swung aside, Simon and Elyn were there, still sleeping. A little longer and they would have slept away to death, smothered in the sealed darkness without ever – if God were merciful – rousing. That was the end to which they would have come if the summer night had been longer, so that Master Wyndford could have set to his work at the tomb sooner; or if Frevisse had been less willing to question the twists in what had at first seemed straight; or Nicol refused his uncertain, half-dreamed memory of something that seemed to make no sense. Instead, they were lifted out of the stone darkness and carried from the church, into sunlight and wide air and life again. Master Wyndford stood in the church’s stone-pillared shadows, tears sliding down his face. Nicol went to him, leaving Simon and Elyn to the exclaims and care of Alice’s women, and put an arm around his shoulders and stood with him, waiting for what would come next; and Alice, once she had given all the necessary orders, came to Frevisse, still standing beside the angels, and said softly, “They likely wouldn’t have been found until the time came to bury me there. Thank you.”
