The Servant’s Tale (28 page)

Her apologies and theirs mingled and she went on until, halfway across the courtyard she realized why they were there, and spun around to see them coming out again, Joliffe between them now, his arms firmly in their grasp and no gentleness in their hold on him.

Nearly she started back toward them. But the bell was still demanding that she come to prayers. And there was nothing she could do to change what was coming. All she had were unanswered or ill-answered questions, and none of them would do Joliffe any good.

Helpless, her feelings at war against her thoughts, she watched Montfort’s men drag Joliffe up the steps to the new guesthall. He kept his feet, but only barely, having to fight against their hold to do it. She saw them twist his arms, hurting him to keep their hold. Answering anger and fear surged in her. Fiercely, she did not want Joliffe hurt.

And that very fierceness was a warning, set against Domina Edith’s earlier one. She was caring too much about Joliffe, instead of about the truth. She was supposed to find the truth, let the guilt lie where it might. The players should be no concern of hers beyond that.

Finally, fully, she faced it. Domina Edith was right, these people had roused in her a long-dormant love for the endless journeying of her youth. They had brought alive again a part of herself she had loved and never fully left. She wanted them free to go their way, as she was no longer free to go.

But Joliffe had lied to her.

Grimly, she turned away to hurry into the cloister, away from Joliffe and the rest, if not away from her thoughts.

Crowded with the other nuns in the warming room, her head bent in what was supposed to be prayer, she stared down at her thick black gown, and felt her wimple’s tightness along her temples and under her chin. In the years she had worn them, they had become too familiar to be noticed; they were a part of herself. But now she felt their constriction and their meaning. Knew what they gave her. And what they denied her.

No,
she said in her mind.
No,
this if
where I belong, and this is what I should be doing. Here. Now is when I’m living, not in some memory of my childhood.

Forcing out of her mind her remembrance of Joliffe dragged between Montfort’s men, she gave herself to the service beginning around her, losing herself in the chanted repetition of the psalms, soaking in the words with her mind and soul, listening with a novice’s fervor for answers that had to be there.

And found a part of them in the New Testament lesson:

“‘Wherefore… give diligence to make your calling and election sure; for if you do these things, you shall never fall.”“

And she had been near to falling. Not from her vows, surely, but from her devotion to her life. From her obedience and her acceptance.

But there, with the thought in clear words, she knew that danger was past. Feelings came and went, but her surety of why she was here was in her mind and in her heart deeper than feelings or a day’s passing inclination.

At the office’s end, she felt as cleansed and clear as if she was come from Easter Mass and communion, her thoughts no longer warring against her inclinations, but set and settled on what she had to do.

Dinner came after Nones. Frevisse said grace with the others in the refectory, sat in her place on the bench, and determined to heed the day’s reading rather than her own thoughts for a while. They were still hearing the history of the English people as written by St. Bede and still read poorly by Sister Thomasine.

“”In Northumbria, there was a head of a family,“” Thomasine intoned, “‘who led a devout life, with all his household. He fell ill, his condition steadily deteriorating until the crisis came, and he died in the early hours of the night. But at daybreak he returned to life and sat up, to the consternation of those weeping about his body.”“

As was to be expected,
thought Frevisse, dipping her bread in her mutton stew to soften and flavor it.
We would be shocked and frightened if Sister Fiacre sat up and spoke to us. It would be hours before we’d have our wits about us enough to rejoice at the miracle.

Thomasine droned on. The Northumbrian divided his property into three parts and gave a third to his wife, a third to his sons, and a third to the poor before going off to become a monk.

What would a resurrected Fiacre do, being already a nun? Frevisse wondered.

Visitors came to the man, to hear stories of his experience in the world beyond the grave, and he told of seeing damned souls leaping from flame to bitter frost and back again in a fruitless search for comfort, and of a wonderful, fragrant countryside for the saved. “”“I was most reluctant to return to my body, for I was entranced by die pleasantness and beauty of the place.”‘“ Sister Thomasine read, Bede quoting the man. ”’ “But I did not dare to question my guide, and I suddenly found myself alive among men once more.”‘“

Sister Fiacre, too, might be unhappy at her return, weeping and wringing her hands to find herself among ordinary people again.

The man was described as living in great severity in his monastery, breaking ice to plunge himself into a wintertime river, standing up to his neck in the flowing water, reciting psalms, until he could no longer bear it and must climb out, but refusing to change his wet domes, saying to those who questioned him that he had seen it worse in another place.

Here Sister Thomasine stopped, not to savor the grim joke, but to say,
“Tu autem, Domine, miserere nobis,”
meaning that she had finished the reading.

Frevisse responded with the rest of the nuns,
“Deo gracias,”
but dinner was not quite over. The meal continued in silence, and without a voice to listen to, Frevisse’s thoughts went on their own way. Had that man truly been right and good in what he did? She had seen it happen—a person resolutely using punishment and privation to drive out the ability to enjoy life’s good things. Though didn’t that also make it impossible to enjoy the pleasures of the fragrant meadow promised to the saved? Having set their heart on earth to miseries, might not such people be happier in the rigors of Hell?

Frevisse caught the thought and suppressed its strangeness sternly. There was no doubt that strict disciplines could lead to sainthood, all authority agreed on that.

Unable to meditate on the reading to any purpose, she found her mind wandering to the murders. Was Domina Edith right? Could there be two murderers about, one with a knife and the other with a club?

And wandering past the murders to what Montfort was doing to Joliffe now.

Harshly, she jerked away from that thought. She had to find an answer—answers—to these murders and soon.

The need for immediate answers tightened in her. She laid her bread down, unable to swallow.

One of the murderers must be Gilbey Dunn. He hated Sym, who stood between him and his gain. Would Annie Lauder lie to save him if he promised to pay her leyrwite? And where was Father Henry, he with the answers to questions she needed to ask? He had been gone all morning. Out rabbiting again, she thought bitterly, while I’m trapped here. Almost always St. Frideswide’s walls were shelter and boundary to her, not limitations, but now she had a wild longing to leap clear of them, to follow where her questioning wanted to go, to the village, to Lord Warenne’s, to anywhere rather than going on circling here helplessly, blocked by the Rule.

Her fingers stopped squashing her bread into a formless wad. Rabbiting. With his hound.

Her excitement nearly brought her to her feet. Only barely she contained herself the little while left until the meal was done. With choked eagerness, she recited the grace with the others, rose with them, and moved quietly away from the table and out of the refectory into the cloister walk. But there, as the nuns separated to their afternoon duties, she swung sharply around and caught Dame Alys before she could disappear back to the kitchen.

With quick signs Frevisse asked her to come along to the slipe, the narrow passage that ran out into the orchard. Short conversations that could not wait for other times or better places were allowed there, and as soon as they were in its shelter Frevisse said, “About Domina Edith’s rabbit pie…”

“I’ve done the crust for it myself and if some fool hasn’t spoiled the meat with too much salt while I’ve been gone…”

Knowing better than to let Dame Alys warm to that theme, Frevisse cut across her. “It was yesterday Father Henry brought you the rabbit?” Dame Alys made a curt, surprised nod. “When yesterday?”

“Just before supper. Came skulking in all guilty, like a schoolboy caught out when he should have been at lessons, and I had to be the one that told him Sister Fiacre was dead. He was so upset he nearly forgot to hand over the rabbit, would have walked right out of the kitchen with it in his fist if I hadn’t snatched it. A holy man, maybe, but a great gawp in the bargain, I’ve often said…”

“You said he goes rabbiting with a hound?”

“A little spotted dog, called a hound only because that’s what it’s most nearly like. He keeps it in the miller’s house in the village, for Domina wouldn’t let him keep so raggedy a creature here—”

“Thank you!” Frevisse said and left Dame Alys standing with mouth open, surprised all over again at her rudeness.

On her way to the new guesthall, she stopped a servant in me yard and asked him to find Father Henry for her. “I need to see him as soon as may be. I’ll be with the crowner awhile, but after that he’ll have to look for me. Tell him I need to see him very soon.”

The man nodded and ran off, and she went on. It might have been better to wait until she had actually talked with Father Henry, but she wanted to know how far Montfort had gone in questioning Joliffe, and learn, if she could, what he had found out mat she had been unable to.

He was in his chamber, the new guesthall’s best room, standing close to the fire and looking pleased with himself. His clerk sat at a table across the room, hunched over a parchment he was reading instead of scribbling on.

Montfort glanced toward her and almost smiled. “I told you I’d solve this, and promptly.”

“Has someone confessed, then? The player?”

“Ha! Not him. Not that it matters. Just one or two more people I want to talk to and all will be done and I can return to Lord Lovel’s.”

“Who is it you need to speak with?”

“Not you, Dame. Though you might see to stirring up your servants. I’ve been kept waiting.”

“Is it one of our servants you want to see?”

“Hardly. It’s that fellow from the village. The one who quarreled with the dead boy.”

“Gilbey Dunn?”

“Yes, that’s the villein. They’re telling me no one can find him. They say he’s not been seen since yesterday and that’s nonsense. He’s a villein, not some noble gone to his other manor halfway across the country.”

Frevisse felt a stir of hope. Gilbey Dunn had taken himself off somewhere and no one knew where?

Montfort, backing a little nearer to the fire, said, “There’s some who would have me believe he’s the guilty one, that he ran off to escape justice. But I’ve got my murderer safe in hand, and all I need to do is settle matters about this Gilbey person, so I can leave. Lord Lovel expects me for Twelfth Night.”

Frevisse made impressed sounds at this second dropping of the Lovel name, and asked as if in total ignorance, “Which one of them have you in hand?”

“The fair-haired player. Joliffe, he’s called. He had reasons against both the dead man and your nun and was seen both places, village and church, near when the killings happened.”

As if truly seeking clarification, and not in argument, Frevisse said, “But I was told he was with a woman in the village at the time Sym was murdered. Tibby, her name is.”

Montfort waved dismissively. “Ah, yes, Tibby. She’d lie in God’s face for the sake of the player’s pretty face, I’ve no doubt, so her word is no use at all.”

Frevisse wanted information and forebore to argue with him, asking instead, “He was seen going into the church? By whom?”

“The dead boy’s mother. That stringy bit of a woman—” Montfort waved his hand vaguely, unable to remember her name. “So scared of talking to me, I thought she’d puddle in front of my eyes, but she spoke her piece. Came, in fact, of her own will to tell me. That was enough to settle it.”

“I heard him say he wasn’t in the priory the afternoon Sister Fiacre died,” Frevisse dared to point out.

“He’s said the same to me, but he’s a liar, all players are. That’s their trade. He was seen going toward the church, and probably hid in there, waiting his chance. When he saw her there alone, he took it.”

“Why?”

“For vengeance on her brother!” Master Montfort let his impatience show.

“And his reason for following Sym home and killing him?”

“They’d been in a fight, and by all accounts Sym was a bad-tempered brute. The player was afraid Sym would come after him later, bringing half the village louts with him. Look what happened, in fact—they did come seeking him. They knew him for what he was. The matter is clear and simple. They’re a debased lot, these lordless player folk, worse than the worst of the villeins. Facts are facts and I think we’ve found our murderer.”

“So except that you’re missing Gilbey Dunn, the matter is settled?”

Montfort frowned. “Except that,” he agreed shortly. He glared at her, suddenly suspicious. “Did you have some purpose in coming here to see me, Dame?”