The Widow's Tale (Sister Frevisse Medieval Mysteries Book 14) (22 page)

F
revisse supposed
it was to the good that Cristiana had loosed her fears enough to come this far with her daughters and Ivetta. Watching them across the garden, she was able to hear Mary’s and Jane’s delighted exclaims and, once, their pleading to go nearer. She saw Cristiana kiss them and set them to watching again, and then saw Cristiana go very still. So strangely still, with such a deep-set quiet in her face as she stared away toward the royal gathering, that Frevisse went on watching her.

There had been too much quiet in Cristiana since yesterday.

And then Cristiana turned and said something to Ivetta, turned back to her daughters and said something to them, then moved them gently out of her way and went out the gate. They both protested, but Cristiana only bent and kissed them over the gate, cupped a hand tenderly along each girl’s face while looking into their eyes and saying something.

Then she turned and walked away, falling in behind several servant-women carrying filled platters toward the gathering.

Cristiana had done it all so simply that Frevisse sat looking for a while longer at the emptiness where she had been without much thinking about it before—with the first, small spark of alarm—she wondered
why
Cristiana was going there.

Very probably to plead in person for the king’s favor and mercy. He was known for giving both to almost anyone who asked.

But . . .

Frevisse stood up and went toward the gate. Mary and Jane hardly glanced at her but Ivetta looked around with tear-reddened eyes. Frevisse took her by the arm and drew her back from the gate, to ask low-voiced and beyond the girls’ hearing, “What did Mistress Helyngton say to you?” Ivetta repeated somewhat blankly, “Say to me?”

“Just now. Before she left. What did she say?”

“She said . . .” Ivetta seemed confused by the question. “I don’t know.”

“You do. She just said it. You can’t have forgotten. Tell me.”

With effort, Ivetta gathered her wits. “Yes. Well. She said something like it was time to make an end. Then, like I’d said she mustn’t, she said, ‘I must.’ Only I hadn’t said anything because I didn’t know what she meant. ‘I must,’ she said and away she went.” Ivetta was agrieved about that. “After telling us all morning that we couldn’t, then she did.”

“What did she say to Mary and Jane?”

“To Mary and Jane? That she loved them, of course. She always says that when she’s going away.”

Ivetta was beginning to be annoyed at being questioned. Not caring, Frevisse demanded, “Does she have any weapon on her?”

Ivetta stared at her. “What?”

“Does she have a dagger on her?” Frevisse said roughly, “Some weapon? Anything?”

“She has my Pers’ dagger. I brought it back with me after . . . after he … It was all . . . all …” Ivetta stumbled over returning tears.

Frevisse tightened her grip on Ivetta’s arm. “She has it now? You’re certain?”

“She made me give it her after Sir Gerveys . . .” Ivetta gulped on a sob, fumbling for words. “She said she’d never go without weapon again. She slept with it under her pillow last night. She—“

“She has it
now
?” Frevisse insisted.

“Hidden up her sleeve. In its sheath. She said—“

“Stay here,” Frevisse ordered. “Keep the girls with you. No matter what happens, keep them here. Or take them inside. Do
not
let them come after me.” She was leaving even as she said it, at the gate pushed Mary and Jane aside, went out, and shoved the gate firmly shut behind her, pausing only to order, “Stay here,” at them for good measure before she started after Cristiana.

She could see her too far ahead among the scattered servants going to and coming from the pavilions. In her plain widow’s garb, she blended easily with the servants, would probably pass with no trouble between the guards. Frevisse hesitated either to shout or run after her. If Cristiana purposed nothing more than kneeling to the king to plead for his well-known mercy, it would be wrong to hinder her. What Frevisse wanted was to make certain that was all she meant to do—to overtake her, ask her, make certain of her—and with her longer stride she closed on her along the slope, was barely a dozen yards behind her as Cristiana past the guards unnoticed.

Frevisse passed with almost equal ease. One of the guards made as if to speak to her but she gave him a purposefully arrogant stare and he let her go on—being a nun was sometimes useful in unexpected ways. Ahead of her, the servants Cristiana was following were nearly to the edge of the crowd spread among the pavilions and food-laden tables. Frevisse would have called out then, but in the time Frevisse took to draw breath, Cristiana went suddenly aside from the servants, around them and away into the crowd.

C
ristiana made
her way among the talking, laughing, eating, drinking men and women all around her without the slightest fear that anyone would see her, heed her, stop her. Fear, as well as thought, had left her when she left the garden. The only thing left to her was the need to do. She was air and light and simple purpose, and as she had known she must, she found Laurence easily.

He was standing in talk with several other men on the edge of where the crowd was thickest, beside a white-cloth-covered table untidy with the remains of food. Milisent was beside him and her unpleasant husband beside her, but their backs were to Cristiana and she barely noted them or the other men. Her gaze was fixed on Laurence, and she paused, her arms folded in front of herself, hiding her right hand as she slipped it into the tight-fitted left sleeve of her undergown, to the hilt of Pers’ dagger waiting in its sheath along the inside of her forearm. Happily, he had favored a narrow blade, easily hidden there. She had wanted Gerveys’ dagger, because it was his, as well as for the comfort of it, but the crowner had it. That had mattered then. Now it did not. Any dagger would serve for what she had finally, in the garden, understood she had to do. And she slid the dagger from her sleeve, and holding it still hidden by her crossed arms, went forward and slipped past Milisent, so suddenly in front of Laurence that he broke off in mid-word of whatever he was saying, staring at her and unready as all in one half instant she drew back her right arm, grabbed his shoulder with her left hand, and with a strength she would have had for nothing else drove Pers’ dagger into him, below his ribs and slanted upward to come at his heart.

In some cold corner of her mind she must have planned that blow, but at that moment it seemed simply there, the way that Laurence’s surprise was simply there as he stared downward at her fist thrust against his belly around the dagger’s hilt. She knew she had struck true, against no bone, and his surprise was joy and balm and blessing across all the raw wounds he had made in her. He made to clutch at his belly where the pain must be starting, and she jerked the dagger out of him and stepped back, aware that around them people had begun to yell, some falling back, others grabbing for her, and without time to stab again, she swung wide and high, slashing the dagger at Milisent’s throat. She missed: Milisent had begun to back away, screaming, but the sudden bloody line that opened across her face from cheek to forehead was triumph of a kind.

Then a blow drove into her side below her wide-flung arm and she staggered sideways; but in some cold other corner of her mind she had known that would come, did not mind, and yet was surprised that her legs had ceased to hold her up, that she was falling . . .

Frevisse searched with rising urgency among the talking, shifting crowd, saw Cristiana and moved toward her, was almost in reach of catching hold on her when Cristiana went suddenly forward, slipping past a woman and in front of a man Frevisse only too late saw was Laurence. She started to cry out to Cristiana and in warning but the half-made cry was lost in a sudden shouting and a backward shove of people. Against them, she shoved forward, in time to see Master Colies drive a dagger into Cristiana’s side, staggering her sideways with the blow’s force.

Laurence was on his knees, bent over on himself. Milisent was screaming. People were shouting, some of them pushing to get further away, others crowding forward to see what was happening. Cristiana began to fall. Someone among the men pressing forward saw a man down, a woman shrieking with blood flowing from her hands pressed to her face, another woman falling, and Colies with a dagger in his hand, and did what instinct told him—had out his own dagger and struck at Colles.

Frevisse saw Colies’ look of surprise as he took a single staggered step, then dropped to his knees, and—still looking surprised—slumped forward and sprawled across the trampled grass. Above him, Milisent, blind with blood and pain, went on screaming. Frevisse, at last reaching Cristiana, went to her knees beside her, arms stretched out over her body to keep men’s feet away, but the shoving and shouting were making a circle clear of the bodies now. She was able to turn Cristiana onto her back, slide an arm under her shoulders, and lift her a little, saying her name.

People were taking still-screaming Milisent away. Someone shoved at Master Colies with a foot and said, “He’s dead,” while two men turned Laurence over. He was alive but his body arched upward with pain and his strangled moan was bubbled with blood.

Cristiana’s eyes opened. White-faced and wide-eyed with pain and fear, she whispered up at Frevisse, “He’s not dead?”

“He won’t live,” Frevisse said. She looked around at the staring circle of faces and ordered, “For mercy, get a priest here.” Because Cristiana was not going to live, either.

But Cristiana’s fear had gone, leaving only the pain as she whispered, satisfied, “If he’s dead. Then they’ll. Be safe.”

“They’ll be safe,” Frevisse said strongly, wanting to be sure she heard. “They’ll be safe now.”

“Not for hatred . . .” Cristiana broke off on a moan and her body twisted with pain. Frevisse held her more closely. Cristiana steadied from the pain. “For love,” she forced out, short of breath. “Tell them. For love.”

“For love,” Frevisse assured her. “You did it for love. Not for hatred. For love. I’ll tell them.”

More pain took Cristiana’s body. Laurence was still now. Dead, Frevisse thought, and so did the priest finally there, because he paused over Laurence’s body only long enough to sign it with the cross before coming to Cristiana. To judge by the gold and jeweled cross hung on his chest by a thick gold chain, he was maybe one of the king’s bishops, but it was his priesthood that mattered now, not his lordly rank. As he knelt beside her, Cristiana gasped, “My sins. Confess me.”

He signed the cross above her and began the necessary prayers. Frevisse went on holding her. Around them the crowd had thickened into a wall of staring faces but the babble of voices had fallen away to silence as people understood what was happening. In that silence the bishop leaned close over Cristiana for her to whisper her confession in his ear, too low for even Frevisse to hear. It was enough that she got the words out and he gave her the absolution and final blessing that cleansed her soul and freed it to go heavenward. But it was to Frevisse Cristiana finally looked, finally whispered, “My daughters.” Then the life went out of her and her eyes went empty and Frevisse was left kneeling with blood on her hands and blood on her gown and Cristiana gone.

N
ight was thickly come
, the hour for bed long past. In the parlor, the deep darkness was held back to the room’s corners and in long shadows among the ceiling beams by candles arrayed on stands beside the settle and beyond the chairs. The yellow light lay gently over the faces gathered there, but the faces were too few and there was nothing gentle in the grief on Mistress Say’s face or Ivetta’s, nor anything gentle about the weariness lined into Master Say’s as he laid a thick-folded parchment heavy with a wax seal on his wife’s lap and said, “It’s done,” before he sank down onto the long seat of the settle beside her.

He was still dressed as he had been when he rode out to the royal hawking this morning, but had ridden far more miles than he had purposed then. King Henry and his company had ridden on to Buntingford for the night, as they had intended, Master Say, who had not intended to, had ridden with them and now had ridden back, having made some manner of explanation to the king for the killings done almost in front of him this morning.

Only this morning?

From where she sat alone in the shadows at the shuttered window, Frevisse tried to make the day take on a shape that made sense but this morning seemed to have happened in someone else’s lifetime. And yet every moment of it kept playing over in her mind, an all-too powerful nightmare that would not end with some welcomed awakening. Cristiana was dead. And Laurence Helyngton and Colles. And Milisent was scarred for life across her face.

But here and now Mistress Say laid her hands on the parchment on her lap and asked, “Their wardships and everything?”

“Their wardships, the keeping of their lands, their marriages. All sealed with the king’s privy seal. The girls are ours. They’re safe.”

Master Fyncham came quietly into the room, bearing a tray with goblets that he offered first to Master Say, who took the nearest one with ready thanks. While he drank deeply and Master Fyncham went silently on to everyone else. Mistress Say said, “I don’t know if word was sent after the king, but when the crowner viewed the bodies, he found a day-old dagger-thrust through Henry Colles’ left arm.”

Master Say stared into the darkness, slowly taking that in before he finally said, “So he’s the one Gerveys stabbed, surely. He didn’t dare not be at the hawking, lest questions be asked, but it must have cost him something in the way of pain not to show he was hurt. Good.”

“The crowner took it further than that,” Mistress Say said. “He had Laurence’s men gone over. One of them had a wound as fresh as Colles’ and he turned appellant and told everything. By what he says, Laurence wasn’t at Gerveys’ killing or even the attack on the road, but he did set Colles on to do both. The man said Colles frighted him, he enjoyed the killing so much.”

“Master Say,” Frevisse said from the shadows, “what of the man who killed Colies?”

“Pardoned by the king,” Master Say answered. “He saw three people hurt and a man with a dagger in his hand, all within twenty feet of the king, and he struck in the king’s defense, as he thought.” Master Say rubbed a hand over his face. “It simplifies matters anyway, having Colles dead.”

“And Milisent alive,” Ivetta said with weary, bitter satisfaction from where she sat huddled in a chair at the edge of the candles’ wavering light, clutching a wine goblet. “She can answer what questions there still are, she can.”

Master Fyncham, the wine served, went to stand in the shadows beyond Ivetta, waiting to do whatever else might be needed.

Master Say slumped back on the settle. “Where’s Cristiana?”

“In her room here,” Mistress Say said quietly. “Ivetta watched by her into early evening. Domina Elisabeth is with her for now, and Dame Frevisse will pray the night beside her.”

“Mary and Jane. How are they?”

“Sleeping, I hope. They’ve cried all they can for today, I think. They understand she’s dead. After we’d readied her body, they saw it. But it’s all too much for them at present. Tomorrow will be worse for them.”

“The funeral?”

“Tomorrow in the afternoon.”

“She and Gerveys together?”

“That seemed best. There’s room to bury her beside Edward, and Gerveys beside her. Somewhere has been found for Pers, too.”

All the flat and necessary details that followed death and helped lead the living step by step into life as it would be now. But at mention of Pers, Ivetta, who like Mary and Jane had cried herself out sometime during the afternoon, began to rock forward and back, moaning softly.

Master Fyncham stepped forward and poured more wine into her goblet, probably sharing Frevisse’s hope that she would soon drink herself to quietness and sleep. But Mistress Say’s thin, tight hold on herself slipped, too, and she clutched her husband’s hand, clinging to him while she asked with a sorrowing need to understand, “Flow could Cristiana bring herself to this? Flow could she?”

The desperate why of Cristiana’s killing they all knew, Master Say had already said it most simply just after her death, while helping Frevisse to her feet and turning her away from Cristiana’s body, “I know her, yes. And him. He’d threatened her daughters. She was afraid for them.”

Frevisse did not know who had asked him that but it was a woman with a French-tinged voice who said, “For her children. Yes, th^t I can understand,” and Frevisse had lifted her gaze from Cristiana’s body to the woman standing beyond it. The queen. Frevisse had met her once, not that Queen Margaret would remember it nor did Frevisse care. But this was her first near sight of the king, standing there beside his wife. A tall, thin man with a long, still face and dark eyes, staring down at the blood and bodies.

Then, mercifully, Alice had taken her from Master Say and away to one of the pavilions where Mistress Say, tears streaming, had found them and, later, Domina Elisabeth. None of them, then or later, had needed to ask
why
Cristiana had done it, but now, with despair, Mistress Say cried, “How could she have brought herself to it? And there. With the king there. Didn’t she understand the danger of that? If Colles hadn’t killed her, someone else was as likely to, the way they killed Colles. What was she thinking of?”

Ivetta, still rocking back and forth and with the words thick with grief and tears and the wine beginning to take hold, said, “It’s probably what she hoped for. That someone would kill her. It’s what she wanted, most likely. Surely.”

“No.” Mistress Say’s protest was sharp. “She’d never hope that. Leave Mary and Jane like that? She never would.”

Ivetta stopped rocking, pulled herself straight in the chair, and said on a sob, wine and sorrow both at work in her, “She was going to have to leave them anyway. She was going to die. That’s how she could bring herself to do it. Because she was dying.” Ivetta pressed a hand between her breasts. “It was back before her husband died, when the pain first frighted her, she told me about it. That her mother had died that way. Of a canker in the bone eating her away. But there was her husband to worry over, and I think most times she let herself believe it wasn’t happening. You know how we do with things we don’t want to think about. But down deep, where the pain was coming from, she knew it was going to be worse before it was done and would kill her at the last. So she likely hoped somebody would kill her, too. That’s what I think. Because it would be better if they did. Mary and Jane would be safe with Master Helyngton dead, and if someone killed her, then she wouldn’t have to be afraid of the pain anymore, see.”

They were all staring at her, probably remembering—as Frevisse was—how often Cristiana had been openly in pain. Mind-pain, they had all thought, grown from her overwrought griefs and fears, and some of it had been, surely. But much of it must have been more, and her mind-pain made all the worse by the certainty of her own death closing on her and the fear that she would die not only in pain but without her daughters safe.

Quietly Master Say said, “That much fear and that much pain. I can see, then, how she did it. God have mercy on her soul.”

With matching quiet, Frevisse said, “She left it to God whether she would die then or have to live to a worse death. He gave her the mercy of dying then. Surely he’ll have mercy on her soul, too.”

They all made the sign of the cross on themselves and Ivetta took a deep drink of wine before saying fiercely, “At least Laurence Helyngton is dead, too, and that’s good. He’s why they’re all dead. My Pers . . .” She broke off with a heaving sob and hunched over again, gone back to her grief.

“At least with Colles and Laurence dead, and Nol dealt with, it’s all ended,” Master Say said, trying for some satisfaction. “Did Lady Alice have Nol taken away or am I to send him after her?”

“He’s still here,” Mistress Say answered. “Dame Frevisse asked her to leave him.”

Frevisse had hoped the matter of Nol would wait until the morning, but Master Say turned a questioning look toward her and she answered, “It isn’t ended. Nol wasn’t the only one here who betrayed Cristiana and Sir Gerveys.” Ivetta’s new sobbing stopped on a gulp. Along with everyone else, she stared at Frevisse and in the candle-glow and shadows Frevisse looked back at them all. The Says. Ivetta, Master Fyncham. All of them as much in need of sleep and being done with the day as she was. But as steadily as if her mind and heart were not dragged down under the weight of her own grief and guilt, she said, “Nol was Suffolk’s spy but he never had chance to know Sir Gerveys would go to Ware. When Cristiana and Sir Gerveys talked of it, Nol never overheard them. Both he and Ivetta say Pers was with him then. Nor did Pers know where they were going until their horses were being saddled. The only people who knew Sir Gerveys would go to Ware before he went were himself, Cristiana, and Ivetta.”

“Me?” Ivetta said as if short of breath.

“You. You were outside Cristiana’s chamber when she and Sir Gerveys talked. You could easily have overheard them.” Ivetta stared at Frevisse, her mouth hanging open. Then she closed it, swallowed, and said, “I didn’t. I wasn’t near the door. I was farther down the stairs. With Pers. We were talking.”

“Pers saw Nol skulking at the stairfoot and went to talk to him,” Frevisse said. She abruptly shifted her heed to the steward still standing in the shadows. “Master Fyncham, as part of your duties you know where the house servants are and what they’re doing? To be certain they’re earning their wages and not wasting their time, yes?”

“Yes, my lady.”

“You therefore usually know if they’re where they should be when they should be, and if they’re not?”

“Yes, my lady. Usually,” Master Fyncham said steadily. “Three evenings ago, the evening before Pers was killed, do you remember if anyone was missing from where they should have been, before or during or after supper? Particularly after supper.”

After a moment’s consideration, Master Fyncham said, “No. Everything was in order that evening. Everyone was here and doing what they should have been doing.”

“Do you remember if you saw Ivetta anywhere then?” Ivetta had cramped around in her chair to look, along with everyone else, at Master Fyncham, but she jerked around at that to stare at Frevisse again. Gazing thoughtfully down at the back of her kerchiefed head, Master Fyncham considered the question before finally saying, “She was at supper. I don’t remember her after that. But she was not within my concern, for me to note or not note, you understand.”

“Where were you that evening, Ivetta?” Frevisse demanded at her.

“Here!” Ivetta said. “Where else would I be?”

“Where here?” Frevisse pressed.

“With Mistress Helyngton. With the children in the nursery.”

“When we ask Nurse about that in the morning, will she say you were there?” Frevisse asked.

Ivetta’s eyes flicked down and up and from side to side, seemingly in search for what to say next. Frevisse did not give her chance to find an answer but stood up, moved toward her, said, “There’s no use in telling me you were with Pers then, Master Say’s man Edmund told me he played at dice with him after supper for a good hour or more in the hall that evening. If you weren’t with Cristiana and you weren’t with Pers, where were you?”

“Walking,” Ivetta said. “In the garden. In the orchard, I mean.”

“Alone?”

“Yes. All alone.”

“All alone.” Step by deliberate step, Frevisse came closer to her with every word. “After supper. In the orchard.”

“Yes!” Ivetta’s voice shrilled up. “I was … I was … I had a headache and . . . and …”

Frevisse cut off her flailing for words. “You were walking but not in the orchard. I’ve been told it’s two miles to the manor of Highmeade. A half hour’s good walk. A half hour’s walk to Laurence Helyngton. A half hour’s walk back. You needed to be gone hardly more than an hour. An hour and a little more to go and come back from telling Laurence Helyngton that Sir Gerveys was going to Ware in the morning to get something valuable. Something that the duke of Suffolk very much wanted.”

She was standing over Ivetta by then, and Ivetta was pressed backward into her chair, her hands gripped together around the wine goblet, her head bent sharply back to stare up at Frevisse. On short breaths she gasped out, “What? I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. I didn’t know.”

“You’re the only person who could know. Cristiana and Sir Gerveys told nobody he was going to Ware. They talked of it only to each other and in her chamber, where there was no one else to hear them. Except you on the stairs outside the door. Then, the first chance you had, you slipped away to tell Laurence Helyngton.”

“Why … I wouldn’t . . . why would . . .” Ivetta let go of the goblet with one hand to push herself straighter in the chair by one of its arms, her protest growing stronger. “Why would I do that? I didn’t!”

“I don’t know why you did it,” Frevisse said. “But you did.” She kept her eyes set on Ivetta’s, and Ivetta, trapped. stared back as Frevisse went coldly on, “So tell us why you did it. Tell us so we can understand why you betrayed Cristiana to her worst enemy. Why you betrayed Sir Gerveys. Why you sent Pers to be killed. Sent Pers to die from a sword thrust through him. To die—“

With a gasping scream, Ivetta dropped the goblet and covered her ears with both hands, bending over to hide her face, crying out, “Stop it! Nobody was supposed to be killed! There wasn’t supposed to be a fight! They were only going to make Sir Gerveys give it to them! They were only going to take the thing!”