Kindle - Winter Heart

The thin sunshine of a January afternoon lay quietly through the room.  There was no warmth to it, but in these short winter days any light at all was welcome, and for warmth there was the fire on the hearth, and there Domina Frevisse had her tall-backed chair and slanted writing desk.  Turned for the afternoon light to fall across the parchment roll open on the desk, she was working her way down the small-written lines of all that had been expended for the Christmas holidays and what was left to see St. Frideswide’s priory through the rest of the winter. 

It was just as well that Lent was coming with its necessary fasting.  Not that there looked to be any likelihood of true shortages of food or fuel through the rest of the winter.  There was no real lack of anything.  It was simply that as prioress now of small St. Frideswide’s, a priory in the Oxfordshire countryside, Frevisse had to look more forward, consider things more deeply and at length, than she had ever had to do when simply one among the other nuns.  She would have been content to be left to her prayers and daily duties, an ordinary nun, but she had been raised to prioress despite herself and now had very many lives dependent – both here within the nunnery and beyond its walls – on the care she gave to her duties, and that meant spending what seemed endless hours going through account rolls from all the different offices of the nunnery that, despite they worked apart, needed to be welded into a whole by her, as well as dealing with all the other matters brought to her.

She sighed and laid down her pen, freeing her cramped fingers, curling and uncurling them until they unstiffened, then holding out both chilled hands toward the fire.  Her feet in their fur-lined slippers, raised above the draughts along the floor by the low railing of the desk, were warm enough.  So was the rest of her in the gown that had been a gift from a cousin long ago.  She had resisted such ease for her body when she was a plain nun, had intended to continue doing so as prioress.  Instead, she found herself making more use of the privileges that came with her place than she had ever thought she would.  Except they felt less like privileges and more like mitigations.  There was so much about being prioress she had never wanted, and if she had to sit here by the hour, tending to accounts and other matters, instead of busy at tasks here and there around the nunnery as she used to be, then, yes, she needed the gown to keep her warm, and the fire to keep her fingers supple and the ink from thickening past use on the pen’s point.

A soft scratching at the closed door made her sigh, draw her hands back into her lap, and call, “
Benedicite
,” in a bidding voice.

The door opened far enough for Dame Amicia to put her head through the gap.  “Please you, my lady, Master Naylor is below, asking to speak with you.”

Frevisse refrained from saying he would have to be below, wouldn’t he, because the prioress’ parlor and bedchamber were up a flight of stairs from the cloister walk.  Curbing her words was another necessary thing for her but nothing new:  She had been making that effort from long before she became prioress.  “Pray, bring him up.”

Dame Amicia gave a cheerful nod and withdrew, forgetting to shut the door.  Frevisse straightened in her chair and looked across the room at the shadow-line creeping along the wall as the sun crept toward its setting.  The afternoon was worn well away.  For the priory’s steward to want to see her at this hour argued a problem beyond the ordinary.  Because nuns were, in general, supposed to stay cloistered and not go beyond their nunnery walls except for greatest necessity, someone was needed to oversee, manage, and report on everything concerning their properties and people.  Master Naylor had been steward here a long while, was skilled at his work, and able to deal with nearly all problems as they came, reporting on them in due time and usually with them well settled. 

Frevisse braced herself for whatever was the trouble he felt he must bring to her so out of his usual time.

The two footfalls came up the stone stairs.  Dame Amicia, leading, said, “Master Naylor, my lady,” and stepped aside from the door.  Since no nun should be alone with a man, she would stay there quietly, hands folded into her sleeves and head bowed, through whatever business followed.

Master Naylor, coming in behind her, paused to bow to Frevisse, then crossed to her.  He had never grown fat in his office, which spoke well of him not battening on his charges.  For all the years Frevisse had known him, his long, lean face had been so deeply lined that concern seemed to sit constantly on him, whatever his true humour might be.  He wore a thick, short cloak with its the hood pushed back, over a doublet probably thickly padded against the cold, as likely were his knee-high boots.  To judge by that and his winter-reddened face, he had been out and about with his duties, and when he had said, “My lady,” to her, Frevisse gestured to the other chair beside the hearth with, “Please sit and warm yourself, Master Naylor.”

He accepted that bidding without hesitation, betraying he no long felt the need to stand on dignity and form between them – or perhaps only that he was getting well on in years – but even as he sat, he said, “We have a problem, my lady.  Tom Kelmstowe is come back.”

Frevisse considered the name blankly for a moment before she remembered and said, “The serf who ran away not long before Christmastide.”  Almost three weeks ago. 

Few serfs troubled to run away anymore.  Both they and their lords had long since found it far easier to settle on a money payment for their freedom.  That let the man or woman stay where they were and pay a straightforward rent to the lord for the land they worked, rather than the lord having to constantly reckon up (and constantly argue over) the complicated fees and services otherwise owed by a serf. 

“Ah,” she said, remembering more.  “He was accused of attempting a rape.”

“Aye.  He said then he didn’t do it.  He says so now.  To the good, nobody seems to want to take up the charge against him again, not even the woman or her husband.”

“No?” said Frevisse, raising her brows.

“No,” Master Naylor said glumly.  “Which makes me think what most folk thought at the time – that there was nothing in the charge to start with.”

“But this Kelmstowe then ran off.”

“He’d been in other trouble, too, just before then, remember.”

“I don’t,” Frevisse said.  There was so much to remember anymore that she no longer tried to keep in mind what could be let go.

 “Aye.  Seems two years back he got some demesne land into his hands that’s Lord Lovell’s, not the priory’s, and kept it hidden from the accounts.  It was his cousin’s, and he paid his cousin to go on doing service to Lord Lovell for the land as if still holding it, while Kelmstowe worked it and made a profit without paying any greater tithe to the priory.”

“Why would his cousin go along with that?” Frevisse asked. 

“His cousin is lazy to the bone.  Easier for him to have coin in hand from his cousin and slothfully work the days he owes Lord Lovell than trouble to work his own land day in, day out.”

The manor of Prior Byfield with its village and fields was divided between two lords.  Some of the people held their land from St. Frideswide’s priory and others from Lord Lovell.  Because St. Frideswide’s steward, in the person of Master Naylor, was close at hand and Lord Lovell’s steward – responsible for his lord’s far more numerous and scattered properties – was usually distant, it had long since been agreed Master Naylor would serve here as Lord Lovell’s agent.  As such, he held the manor court and oversaw the dealings of the village’s own officers, generally chosen by the villagers themselves – the reeve and hayward and others. 

For his service he was paid by Lord Lovell with grain when the harvests were good, with coin when they were poor.  Since he was likewise paid by the priory, he did well for himself and his family, but more importantly, unlike stewards that appeared as villains and the butt of angry jibes in stories – and too often in life – he was unbendingly honest in all his dealings, and as unbendingly fair as it was possible to be when faced with the tangles of law and angers and aggravations that villagers could boil up among themselves.

So Frevisse depended on his reports and judgment and said now, slowly, to be sure she understood, “That meant the land appeared in Lord Lovell’s records under the cousin’s name, but Tom Kelmstowe was the one working them and making no return to the priory.”  And finally remembering more of the matter, she added, “It meant, too, that if it had gone undiscovered long enough, in time there could have been confusion over just which lord held that land – the priory or Lord Lovell.”

“That was the more worrying part of it, yes,” Master Naylor agreed.

“I seem to remember, though, that you seemed nearly to admire him for how well he had carried it off.”

Not about to admit any such thing, Master Naylor said stiffly, “It was wrongly done.  There’s the point.  When someone gave him away, our reeve did right to take the land away and fine him.”  The reeve being someone of the village chosen to oversee that matters were kept fair between his fellow villagers and their lord – that his fellow-villagers did not deceive their lord nor their lord exact more than was right from them.

More of the matter was coming back to Frevisse.  “When the jurors brought it against him in the manor court, he abused them so violently he was fined for that, too.”

“Aye.  They didn’t much like being called straw-bred fools, mis-hung cokenays, and–”

Master Naylor broke off, probably belatedly thinking those were things a nun should not hear.  Frevisse would have had trouble holding back a smile at his discomfiture except that she recalled what came next.  “It was the reeve’s wife that claimed Kelmstowe attempted rape on her.  Early in Advent, as I remember.”

Master Naylor agreed glumly to that.  “He denied it and there were no witnesses and no evidence except her skirt was muddied where he’d thrown her down, she said.”

“Where did they find mud to fall in?  There’s been a hard freeze of everything since before St. Andrew’s day.”  At November’s end.

“She was gathering wood along the hedge of a field path that had thawed a little in the mid-day sun, she said, during those few somewhat warmer days we had early in Advent. Before the freeze went deep.  I went to see, and it was thawed there then, where she claimed it happened.”

“But she wasn’t actually raped?”

“She wasn’t.  Frighted him off with a scream and hitting at him with a stick, she said.  He had no bruises from any stick when we checked him, but then he might not, what with layers of winter clothes and her not being an overly strong-sinewed woman and all.  I don’t think anyone, even her husband, took her all that seriously.  He seemed more bewildered by it than outraged.  She’s given to flights of thinking one thing and then another and no one gives her much heed.  Last summer she took into her head the alewife was weakening the ale after the taster had tested it, and nobody saying anything to the contrary satisfied her.  So even with Kelmstowe willing to say he’d been along that lane sometime that afternoon – out to check his snares in the woods, I’ll warrant, though no one would say that, him least of all – I didn’t think the matter would go far. But then, like a fool, Kelmstowe fled.” 

And under the law, to flee after being accused of a crime was taken to be the same as admitting guilt.  Tom Kelmstowe had fled, was therefore guilty, and so everything he had owned had been seized by Master Naylor in the priory’s name, just as if Kelmstowe had been tried and sentenced by a jury.  By now his land was given to someone else and his goods sold.  Kelmstowe was come back to nothing.

Frevisse wanted to prop an elbow on an arm of the chair and rest her head, heavy with its thoughts, on her raised hand, but wimple and veil and dignity were against that.  She stayed straight and said, “Kelmstowe had to know he’d be coming back to nothing.  Do we want him here?  What’s in his mind?”  And why had Master Naylor brought the matter to her?

Master Naylor answered her unasked question rather than the others, saying, “He’s asked to plead his case to you.”

Frevisse closed her eyes.  As prioress, she was lady of all that the priory owned and thereby, by right, head of the manor court.  In practice, her place was taken by Master Naylor, with only the most complicated matters brought for her to sort out.  Full too often she felt that what the priory supposedly owned actually owned the priory, the demands of it all on her were so unceasing.  But she held in the sigh she wanted to give, opened her eyes, and asked, “Why?”  Both why Kelmstowe wanted to plead before her and why Master Naylor thought she should listen to the man.  Because Master Naylor obviously thought that, or he would not have come to her with it.

“He claims he was taken away against his will, that...”

The sweet-toned bell in the middle of the cloister began to ring, saying the hour was come for Vespers.  It likewise enjoined an instant end to talk among the nuns, in a readying for their coming prayers in the church.  Frevisse held up a hand to stop Master Naylor, who was already stopping; he knew nearly as well as she did that the Offices of prayer came before all else.  But as they both rose from their chairs, she gave herself permission to say, “Tomorrow, in the guesthall, just after Tierce.”