The Hunter’s Tale (7 page)

‘Let me see.“

Hugh had shifted a little aside without getting up, and Sir Ralph had squatted down on his heels to take hold of the young hound’s head in his usual rough way, holding her hard by the muzzle while pulling her ear up for a better look.

Sir William strolled toward them, asking, “Trouble?”

‘Nothing much,“ Sir Ralph had said, had let her go and stood up, turning away from her.

It was just then that something among the trees must have caught Skyre’s eye—a squirrel maybe, or the bright flit of a bird among the bushes. No one ever knew what. All that Hugh—crouched beside her and rummaging in a leather bag for an ointment for the scratch—saw was her head snap up, suddenly alert. Knowing what a fool she could be, he had dropped the bag and grabbed for her collar but too late; she was away in a single long bound and gone among the trees and he was left sprawled stomach-down on the grass while above him, Sir Ralph roared out, “Skyre!” Snarling, “Get up, you fool,” he kicked at Hugh’s hip, grabbed up a leash lying there, and whipped it across Degory’s bare legs with, “Idiot! Get after her!” Swore, “Damned idiot!” at Hugh just scrambling up, hit him across the back with the leash for good measure, and went furiously away into the woods himself, slashing the leash at the underbrush as he went.

Within the hour he was dead.

When the body was found, they had made the hue and cry for his murderer. Law required that and fear made certain of it. The search had spread through and beyond the woods. They had tried to find a track to set the dogs on but maybe they had trammeled too much in the first horror of finding the body or there was too much blood; even Somer, best of the lymers, failed to take up a scent. Nor did Hugh with his huntsman’s skills find any track to follow nor had anyone at all been seen. They had been left with nothing more to do but carry the body home and send a man to bring the crowner.

It sometimes took days for a crowner to come but Master Hampden had ridden in with his men late the next day, while Hugh was gone to fetch Ursula. He had viewed the body and where it had been found, asked questions, but received few answers because no one had many to give. By the time Hugh had returned from St. Frideswide’s, he was holding his inquest, where it was officially found that Sir Ralph’s death was indeed murder by person or persons unknown. “And that,” Master Hampden had apologized afterward to Lady Anneys, “is the best I can presently give you.”

He had ridden away before the funeral, with promise that a search would be made and questions asked about likely strangers seen anywhere around there, adding a warning to keep watch themselves for anyone and anything—and as easily as that it had all been settled, tidied away into the crowner’s records as tidily as Sir Ralph into his grave. Hugh wished his thoughts could be as tidily done with and put away; but aside from them—and time was dulling their edge, he found—things on the whole were very good. The summer was coming on to Lammastide with promise of a fine harvest if the weather held, and Tom had asked him what the chances were of having venison for a start-of-harvest feast he was minded to give the villagers.

Hugh had warned, “You do this, you risk making a new custom they’ll want every year,” and Tom had answered, “Father made enough bad customs here over the years that a good new one will likely get us more than it loses.”

Therefore, tomorrow Hugh would ride out with some of the hounds to find where best to hunt a roedeer stag in a day or two; and though neither he nor Tom had said it, they both knew the fact that the hunt would be the first one since Sir Ralph’s death made it all the sweeter.

But this afternoon Hugh had spent helping Degory clean out the kennel and kennel yard and spread clean straw, and he was satisfyingly tired and hardly thinking of anything at all as he bent over the washbasin set on the bench outside the hall door to scrub his face and hands before going in to supper. The late afternoon sun was warm on his back through his shirt, and when he dried his face and hands, the linen towel smelled of the rosemary bush over which it must have been draped after laundering. Inside the hall there was the thud of tabletops going onto trestles as the servants set up for supper and his
stomach
growled with timely hunger; but the soft thud of a horse’s hoofs behind him turned him around to see Gib of the stable leading a saddled and bridled gray horse toward him across the yard.

Frowning with puzzlement rather than displeasure, Hugh said, “That’s Master Selenger’s horse, isn’t it?” Knowing it was.

‘Aye,“ Gib answered. ”The man is back again. I make that three days running he’s been here.“

‘It is,“ Hugh agreed.

Sir William, a few days after his promised visit to see what help or comfort he might give Lady Anneys, had sent Master Selenger to ask if Tom needed help with anything and promise that he had only to ask if he did. Tom had thanked Master Selenger but said, “It’s what I’ve been doing for years here. The only thing that’s changed is that it’s all easier done without Father to tell me what’s wrong with everything I do.”

Master Selenger had laughed at that, said he was likewise charged with asking after Lady Anneys, and had ended by sitting with her in her garden, talking for a somewhat while. When he came back yesterday, he had brought Elyn with him and not seen Tom at all but kept company with Lady Anneys, Elyn, Lucy, and Ursula in the garden for much of the afternoon.

And here he was back again. Without Elyn. And not to see Tom, who had gone past the kennel two hours ago on his way to the east field and not yet come back.

Hugh, frowning, turned back toward the hall and immediately smoothed the frown away to greet Master Selenger coming out.

‘Hugh,“ Master Selenger returned cheerfully. ”Good day. I hear there’s to be a hunt.“

‘We mean so,“ Hugh said. ”Would you and Sir William be minded to join us for it when the time comes, do you think?“

‘Surely,“ Master Selenger answered and they talked hounds a little before he made his farewell, thanked Gib, and gave him a small coin for waiting with his horse.

Watching him ride away, Gib gave the coin a toss and said, “He’s a gentleman, is that one.”

Hugh agreed to that, but while Gib tucked the coin into his belt pouch and headed back for the stable, he stood watching Master Selenger out of sight. A man much about Lady Anneys’ own age. Well-featured, well-kept, pleasant-mannered.

All things Sir Ralph had not been or bothered to be.

Hugh went in search of his mother and found her in her garden, alone, standing at the gate toward the cart-track, looking outward across the field where the last of the hay, dried and carefully gathered into haycocks, was waiting to be stacked or else carted away to byres and the stable. In the westering sunlight they looked like heaps of gold, and in their way they were—food through the winter for horses and cattle. Lady Anneys turned as Hugh neared her and said, smiling, “I was thinking I might get a rosebush next year. When I was a girl, a neighbor had one in her garden. The flowers were more red than anything I’ve ever seen and smelled so beautifully. I’ve always wanted one of my own.”

Hugh had not known that. He had never heard her want anything at all, he realized; and wondered, with a twitch of what felt like guilt for never having wondered it before, what else she had wanted and never had. Her silence about anything she felt or wanted had been a way of hiding from Sir Ralph, he suddenly thought. They had all hidden from him in whatever ways they could. Tom had used his anger, Miles his mockery, Hugh the talk of hounds and hunting. Lady Anneys had had her silence.

But in keeping Sir Ralph shut out, they had kept shut away from each other, too. For safety’s sake you left as few gaps in your wall as possible. Even banded together the way he had been with Miles and Tom against Sir Ralph, Hugh knew how much he had never said. And Lady Anneys had had no one at all. No friends because around Sir Ralph friends had been impossible to have. Not her children. She could give them her love and what comfort there was in that but not her protection and assuredly not her thoughts.

But none of that was anything he could say to her and he said instead, “I’ll find you a rosebush, come the spring. I’ll ride to Northampton, Oxford, or even London to do it, if I have to.”

Lady Anneys smiled at him and said, “That would be lovely.” But not as if she believed it would truly happen. Which goaded Hugh to ask, a little more abruptly than he might have, “Where are Lucy and Ursula?” Had she been here alone with Master Selenger?

‘I sent them in with my sewing when Master Selenger left. I was ready to be alone awhile.“

Hugh stepped back, ready to leave her, but she held out her hand and said, “But I’d welcome your company. You’re not a chattering young girl.”

Hugh returned to her side. She tucked her hand into the crook of his arm and they stood together in companionable silence, Hugh looking out at the hayfield, Lady Anneys toying with the purple flowers of whatever it was growing tall beside the gate, until in what he thought might be a safe while, Hugh asked easily, as if merely making talk, “Was Master Selenger good company this afternoon?”

‘Very good,“ Lady Anneys said.

Hugh waited but she said nothing more and in another while he said, “I wish nothing would change from how it is now.”

Lady Anneys let that lie for a few moments before she said, “That would be good. But Tom will likely marry soon.”

‘Philippa?“ Hugh asked, despite he knew the answer.

Lady Anneys a little nodded. “And Miles will go away to his manor before then. It’s time and past for him to take up his own life.”

‘This is his life,“ Hugh said and could not keep an edge from his voice. ”Here. With us.“

Lady Anneys slightly shook her head against that. “Miles hasn’t had a life here. He’s had Hell. He needs to be free of here. He needs the chance to heal as best he can from everything Sir Ralph did to ruin him.”

‘Sir Ralph is gone,“ Hugh said stubbornly.

‘In body,“ Lady Anneys answered.

And though his soul was surely gone to Hell, he lingered in other ways, Hugh bitterly, silently admitted.

‘And you,“ his mother went on. ”You’re free to go, too, if you want.“

‘There’s nowhere else I want to go.“ Why should there be, when everything he wanted was here? ”You, too,“ he said. ”You’re free, too. To stay or go.“

‘I’ll likely go,“ she said. She must have felt him tense under her hand because she squeezed his arm and added mildly, ”Once Tom is married, Philippa should be mistress here without a mother-in-law at her back, watching her every move. I have my dower lands to go to and I will.“ Her smile deepened. ”I can find you a wife and husbands for Lucy and Ursula from there as well as from here, probably. Unless you want to find your own?“

Hugh made a sound that admitted to nothing.

Lady Anneys laughed at him, squeezed his arm again, and let him go. “There’s no hurry, though. And after all, Ursula may choose the nunnery.”

‘Do you think she will?“

‘I don’t know.“

Hugh tried to think of Ursula grown up and shut away into a nunnery but couldn’t. Not that she’d be any more lost to them in the nunnery than married, he supposed. And a nunnery might be easier to visit than a brother-in-law, he half-jestingly supposed to himself, ready to let go of thought about what might come and be simply at peace in the summer-warm quiet, waiting to be called to supper.

But quietly, hardly louder than the bees humming in the beebalm in the garden bed behind her, Lady Anneys said, “I think, when you return Ursula to St. Frideswide’s, I’ll go with her and stay, too, for a time.”

Startled, Hugh demanded, “Why?” More roughly than he might have if she had not taken him so much by surprise.

For a long moment she did not answer; then said only, still quietly, “It would be best, I think,” in a way that somehow stopped him asking more.

Chapter 5

Although dawn’s cobweb-gray shadows were barely gone from the cloister walk, the day was already warm and promised to be warmer and Frevisse made no more haste than the other nuns as they left the cool inside of the church after Mass to go the short way along the roofed walk to their morning chapter meeting.

St. Frideswide’s was neither a large nor wealthy nunnery. It maintained itself but barely more and the room used in the mornings for the daily chapter meeting, where a chapter of St. Benedict’s Rule was read and matters of business and discipline were discussed, was a plain place, like nearly everywhere in the nunnery, with plastered but unpainted walls, a chair for Domina Elisabeth, stools for her nuns, a small wooden worktable, and nothing more. In wet or cold weather it served for the nuns’ evening hour of recreation before Compline’s prayers and bed, and in winter it was their warming room, having the nunnery’s only fireplace save for those in the kitchen and the prioress’ parlor.

Presently, though, the hour of recreation was a long summer’s day away and there was most definitely no need for warming. Instead, the door stood open and someone had already lowered the shutter from the window, letting in the soft-scented morning air and a long-slanted shaft of richly golden light from the newly risen sun. Nuns whose joint stools were in its way shifted aside and turned their backs to it with a scrape of wooden legs on stone, except Sister Thomasine went to stand directly in its brightness, her eyes shut, her face held up to the light. Sister Thomasine had always lived her nun’s life more intently than most did. Given her choice, she would have been in the church praying on her knees at the altar more hours of the day and night than not. There was even sometimes whispered hope among some of the nuns that she might prove to be a saint, and Frevisse—who only slowly over the years had come to accept her as other than merely annoying—granted to herself that for Sister Thomasine the touch of the sunlight was probably like the touch of God’s hand in blessing on her.