The Prioress’ Tale (2 page)

The problem was that she had no wish to bring Abbot Gilberd in on any matter at all if she could avoid it. St. Frideswide’s was only a priory, and so it had to be a daughter house, subservient to an abbey and not even an abbey of nuns at that, but in St. Frideswide’s case, to St. Bartholomew’s Abbey at Northampton. Domina Edith had made the best of it, but for Alys it rankled. If St. Frideswide’s had been an abbey, its abbess would have been subject to no one in England except the Bishop of Lincoln, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the King himself, so it was a great pity that the widow who had founded and endowed it in the last century had not had wealth or influence enough to make it one. That was a flaw that, given time enough and the chance to be rid of people like Dame Frevisse, Alys meant to correct.

The problem was that if she gave Abbot Gilberd a chance to ask questions out of the ordinary about St. Frideswide’s, concerning Dame Frevisse to begin with, he was all too likely to go on to asking others; and there were those among her nuns—Dame Frevisse was not the only one, just the worst—who would take a chance like that to make trouble, when just now in particular Alys did not want trouble. Unfortunately that meant she must go on dealing with Dame Frevisse; but if the woman would not bend, then she would have to be broken and that would settle the problem just as well.

Alys realized she had lost her place in the office again, but it did not matter. Wherever they were, it had gone on long enough. It would be time for Vespers before they had finished at this rate, and she had things to do. Not bothering with whatever everyone else was saying, she raised her voice and declared loudly,
“Benedicamus domino deo gratias fidelium animae per misericordiam dei requiescant in pace amen,”
and rose to her feet.

The slower-witted among her nuns fumbled through a few more words of the psalm before joining in the uneven chorus of amens trailing after hers. Alys made an impatient sign of the cross at them, slammed her prayer book shut, and shoved out of her choir stall. There were things to be done, and the sooner they were seen to, the sooner they would be finished. That was how she saw it.

Chapter 2

Frevisse came our last among the nuns from the church into the sunlight of the cloister walk. The others were scattering to their different duties, Domina Alys ahead of them all and already well away along the walk, going with her usual heavy-footed purpose as if she would tread down anyone daring to be in her way.

Drawing in a deep breath of the bright autumn air, Frevisse closed her eyes, both to shut out sight of her prioress and the better to feel the sunlight on her face. She had learned in these three years under Domina Alys’ rule to take and enjoy when they came such small pleasures as a moment in the sunlight and a quiet pause among the daily troubles. There was probably no being rid of Domina Alys this side of the grave: prioresses, like priors and abbots, were elected for life. And the harvest had been bad again this year; there would be hunger among the villagers and likely in the nunnery, too, by spring. And the daily offices of prayer were increasingly badly done, increasingly uncomforting, between the builders’ noise and the prioress’ inattention. It seemed that day by day there was less and less peace to be had anywhere in St. Frideswide’s, but for this moment, here, just now, there was sunlight and quietness; and brief though they both would be, Frevisse had learned that momentary pleasures enjoyed as fully as she could were far better than no pleasures at all. She had come to see them as God’s gift given in God’s way, to be accepted when nothing else seemed being given and nothing else could be understood.

Time had been when the offices with their beauty of prayers and psalms had been, day in and day out, Frevisse’s greatest pleasure, a sanctuary and sure refuge from the small, unceasing troubles of every day, a time when she could let go of the world and give her mind over entirely toward eternity and God. Now, mangled as they daily were by Domina Alys’ stupidity—

Frevisse cut the bitter thought short. She had gone that way too many times, never to any use. In the election for a new prioress after Domina Edith’s death, too many of the nuns had separately thought to soothe then-Dame Alys’ temper and ambition by giving her a single vote in the first round of voting and instead they had unwittingly given her the election. Fit retribution for their cowardice, Frevisse thought. Except that the rest of them, the few who had not bent to fear of Dame Alys, were now forced to live under Domina Alys along with the rest.

The moment of quiet ended. The few lay servants of the priory who still bothered to come to services had slipped out of the church past her and away while she stood there, and now Lady Eleanor, who always lingered a little longer for private prayers of her own, said quietly beside her, “Dame Frevisse.”

Frevisse, opening her eyes, turned to her with a smile. The Rule of silence that should have confined all idle conversation in the cloister to the hour of recreation at day’s end had long since gone slack under Domina Alys, and because it was difficult to keep to hand gestures when everyone else was chattering on like jays through a day, Frevisse had let it go, too, and now answered easily, “My lady. How is it with you?”

Lady Eleanor must always have been a small woman and now in her years beyond middle age she was smaller still, but rather than have dried and wrinkled and wearied with her years, she had faded gently to softness and rose, given as much to laughter as to prayers. As usual, she was smiling now, and equally as usual an insistent wisp of white hair had escaped from her careful wimple to curl against her cheek. Since coming to St. Frideswide’s last spring, she made a quiet, constant effort to be what she called a “shadow nun,” always dressing in simple gray gowns and plain white wimples and veils, but she admitted freely that she had no intention of ever taking a nun’s vows, and she had kept her vanity of unshorn hair, as that curl gave away more often than not. She was pushing it back into her wimple as she answered Frevisse’s courtesy, “Very well, thank you, my lady.”

“An arthritic attack in the night,” her maid Margrete muttered from behind her.

“Which has passed off and gone,” Lady Eleanor responded, not turning her head. Most conversations between herself and Margrete were carried on that way, with Margrete usually the correct three paces behind her lady but joining in the talk whenever she felt it necessary and Lady Eleanor answering her without looking back. They had been together most of their lives—“Longer than I was with either of my husbands,” Lady Eleanor had once said—and silence could go on between them comfortably for hours, or their conversations could be, like now, a mere sharp exchange that barely distracted Lady Eleanor from asking Frevisse lightly, “Standing here with your eyes closed praying for patience with my niece?”

Frevisse’s smile twisted to wryness. “Nothing so pious, I fear. I was simply enjoying the sunlight.”

“That can be piety, too, I think. Enjoying God’s gifts. Better than being rude about them, even ignoring them, surely.”

“Surely,” Frevisse agreed. She enjoyed Lady Eleanor’s directness with life and equally her kindness toward it. Had she always been so, or was it something that came with years and living? Whichever it was, it was in strong contrast to the ways of Domina Alys, her niece. That Lady Eleanor was another Godfrey had been among the reasons Frevisse had so strongly protested against her coming when her offer of a corrody had first been raised.

Accepting a set sum of money in return for keeping a lady in comfort for the rest of her life was a gamble nunneries sometimes took for the sake of having much money in hand all at once, but it was a gamble St. Frideswide’s had always, with good cause, avoided until now. Too many stories from other nunneries that had succumbed to the temptation of corrodies through need or even misplaced kindness made fearfully clear how often a lady would leave behind her worldly responsibilities but bring with her into the cloister too many servants, comforts, pets, and even quantities of visiting relatives, all disrupting what was supposed to be the cloister’s peace.

Besides that very immediate risk, there was the chance that the lady might live too long. A corrody was a set sum of money, paid when she first came. If her life ran out before her money did, then the nunnery had a profit; if she lived on, the nunnery faced uncompensated expenses that could eventually, disastrously, far outweigh any advantages there might have been in having her money at the beginning.

All that and the fact that Lady Eleanor was Domina Alys’ father’s sister had been reason enough to Frevisse’s mind for refusing her. There had even been others among the nuns who not only agreed but dared to say so. The argument over it in chapter meeting had gone on more mornings than one, but anyone who dared go against Domina Alys always found she had more ways than a few to make them feel her displeasure. She did not give in to opposition, nor forget or forgive it, and at the last, driven and drawn by that reality and by Domina Alys’ insistence that, “She’s too old to live long enough to be a trouble to us and we
need
the money,” most of the nuns had given way.

In truth, the need had indeed been real enough; was still real enough. Replacing the wooden bell pentise in the garth with one of carved stone had only seemed to enlarge Domina Alys’ ambitions for St. Frideswide’s. Last year she had persuaded the nuns to the bell pentise; this summer she had simply announced that she had hired men to build a tower and that Lady Eleanor’s corrody would pay for it. By then, worn down by the arguments over the corrody to begin with, almost no one had dared rouse her temper by challenging her on anything else if they could help it, even so great a matter as this. Only Frevisse had dared start a question against it, and been given a week on bread and water and one hundred aves every day of that week—“That you may learn a like humility to blessed Mary’s,” Domina Alys had snapped—for her presumption.

That had sufficed to silence the rest of the nuns, except those who enthusiastically supported whatever their prioress chose to do. Now there was nothing for it but to hope that Domina Alys was right, that Lady Eleanor’s corrody would cover the costs of stone and masons and lead for the roof when it reached that high. But that did not change the fact that the corrody should have been husbanded for the priory’s use over years, not spent all at once on a thing for which there was no need at all.

The one comfort was that Lady Eleanor had proven to be far less a trouble than Frevisse had feared. When she came just after Easter, she had brought only Margrete, very few of her household furnishings, and just two fluffy, blessedly well-behaved small dogs. Against all Frevisse’s expectations, she had settled gently into her place in the priory. She had even proven to be someone pleasant to talk with sometimes, so that now, with their ways lying the same way around the cloister walk, they went on together, neither of them hurried, Margrete following behind them, as Lady Eleanor said, “None went none so well, did it?”

Frevisse held herself to only “No,” but knew her voice’s edge gave away a great deal of what she did not say.

“The pity of it,” Lady Eleanor said, “is that Alys’ heart
is
in it. It’s her mind that’s not.”

Frevisse forbore to say what she thought of Domina Alys’ mind. They reached the corner of the cloister walk where they would part. Lady Eleanor’s room lay farther along while Frevisse would go by way of the shadowed passageway that led to the cloister’s outer door, beyond which normally no nun should go without especial permission and cause. But by St. Benedict’s Rule, every Benedictine house had to provide shelter and food for travelers, receiving even the poorest as guests and seeing to their needs. Frevisse, as hosteler of St. Frideswide’s, had the duty of overseeing that all of that was done, with the two guest halls that flanked the gateway to the outer yard in her charge, and she went and came from the cloister as her duties necessitated. She knew Domina Alys had made her hosteler for the sake of having her out of the cloister as much as might be, but she did not care. Better that than being cellarer and needing to deal daily and directly with Domina Alys over all the nunnery’s everyday needs, the way Dame Juliana had to.

Unfortunately, through the past two years, most of the priory’s guests were Godfreys, mostly come to see Domina Alys or to visit with Lady Eleanor or both, but always to enjoy the nunnery’s hospitality at little or no cost to themselves except in the way of such gifts as they might choose to bring. Admittedly, some had been untowardly generous, especially Lady Eleanor’s eldest son when he came at midsummer to see how his mother did, but Domina Alys too often invited whoever was visiting to spend their evenings in her parlor with her, for wine and for talk and laughter that could sometimes be heard across the cloister to the nuns’ dormitory, where lately listening seemed to be too often taking the place of sleeping.

Worse, whichever nuns were currently highest in their prioress’s favor were sometimes invited to share the evening’s merriment, and their open delight and the tidbits of talk they gave out afterward had set up a rivalry among too many of them to stay in Domina Alys’ good grace, to better their chance of being chosen. Only Dame Claire, Dame Perpetua, Sister Thomasine, and Frevisse were still excluded and were a little scorned by the others for it, though Sister Thomasine was too lost in her duties and her prayers to notice. Frevisse doubted she was more than distantly aware of even the builders’ noise, let alone how Domina Alys spent her evenings or the present intrusion of her cousin Sir Reynold and his men.

Through the past half year Sir Reynold had come more and more frequently, usually with only a few men and servants and usually for no more than a few days at a time, but two weeks’ end ago, with no word sent ahead, he had ridden in with half a score of his knights and squires, and their servants for good measure, and so far had given no sign of when he meant to leave. It left scant room in the guest halls for anyone else who might chance to come, even casual travelers for a single night, and stores that should have served through Christmastide at very least were being used up far too quickly.