The Prioress’ Tale (24 page)

“You think I’d come in here otherwise?”

She gestured past him toward the church. “Is it well in there with Sister Thomasine?”

“She’s praying at the altar,” he said, and then answered what she had not asked. “And your madman is tucked into his blankets and not looking likely to stir out of them for any reason.”

“He’s not my madman. Listen, there was talk among Sir Reynold’s men against Master Porter that you’d better warn him of.”

“He’s heard. Word of it came right along with the word Sir Reynold was dead. It took the edge off our mourning for him, you can guess.”

Frevisse ignored that. “Sir Hugh warned them off, but he’s not Sir Reynold and they may decide not to heed him.”

“Master Porter already has Sir Reynold’s man off the tower, and on the chance the masons have to retreat into it, they’re readying the scaffolding to go over at a push if need be. Preferably with a few of Sir Reynold’s men on it, come to that.”

“Wait,” Frevisse said. “Sir Reynold had a man on the tower? Why? Since when?”

“Since yesterday, after they came back from the raid. A watch to warn if anyone was coming. Or trying to leave,” Joliffe said, grimly enough to show he saw the implications as clearly as she did. Sir Reynold had been afraid trouble was so close behind him, or at least that it was closing on him fast, that he had set watch against it. Had Domina Alys known that or was this something else he had kept from her?

Just now what Domina Alys had known or not known did not matter. A trouble closer than any he had thought of had overtaken Sir Reynold, and Frevisse asked, not even trying to make it casual, “Where did you spend last night?”

Joliffe understood exactly what she was asking and answered readily, “With the masons. From when I left you, on through supper and all night. But,” he added thoughtfully, “I slept near the door. I might have gone out after they were all asleep without anyone’s knowing.”

“Did you?”

“Go out? I’m not likely to say I did, am I?”

“Not if you have any wit at all. Did anyone else?”

“The nights are long and many bladders small. Some went out, as usual, but no one in particular or for overly long. Not Master Porter with a particularly heavy hammer—”

“Sir Reynold was stabbed,” Frevisse said.

“Not Master Porter carrying his dagger in his hand and snarling about vengeance. Of course I seem to recall that I slept a great deal of the time, it being night and all, so I probably missed some comings and goings, but no, I didn’t notice anything in particular.”

“And might not tell me if you had?” Frevisse suggested.

Joliffe tended to be unpredictable in what he took seriously and what he did not. He grinned at her question. “You’re not a very trusting woman, are you?”

“No. I’m not. You wouldn’t tell me, would you?”

“Probably not,” he said lightly. Then the lightness dropped away and he said, altogether serious, “There’s something I
will
tell you. Sir Reynold was being an obvious idiot for a long while before yesterday. You know about the Fenners and the Godfreys’ quarrel?”

“The Fenners,” Frevisse said with new alarm. “What about the Fenners?”

“There’s been word out for half a year and more that Sir Reynold meant to reopen the quarrel, so when things began to happen to various Fenner properties and Fenner followers these past few months—small things, nothing like yesterday’s raid but enough—there were suspicions, and when Sir Walter Fenner heard Sir Reynold was moved in here, he thought it was time to find out more of what Sir Reynold might have in hand. Do you know anything about Sir Walter?”

“A little.” Enough that she did not want to know more or have him in St. Frideswide’s again. The last time he had been there he had been trying to find his mother’s murderer among the nuns and not been greatly concerned with legalities while doing it.

“He’s somewhat more subtle in his ways than Sir Reynold was,” Joliffe said. “Before stirring trouble up, he decided to send someone to find out for certain, secretly, what Sir Reynold was about.”

“You,” Frevisse said.

“Me,” Joliffe agreed. He made her a graceful, mocking bow. “A simple minstrel, seemingly wandered into your fair priory by chance and therefore suspected of nothing.”

“Why you?”

“I was to hand when Sir Walter needed someone and he offered enough money it was worth my while to do it.”

“But you haven’t sent him word yet. There hasn’t been time,” Frevisse said.

“I sent it yesterday morning.”

Yes, he would have known enough by then to tell Sir Walter his suspicions were justified, even without the raid and killing afterward, but: “How?”

She did not expect him to tell her, but he did. “A peddler came into your village the same day I came here. He wasn’t a friendly sort and settled for bedding down alone in someone’s byre instead of someplace better, with no one to notice if he slipped out and spent a while near onto moonrise in the deep shadows of the church’s doorway, doing nothing. No more than anyone noticed me go out over your orchard wall—no great trick, let me tell you—and meet him there, tell him what I knew, and come back the same way. He was away yesterday morning to pass word to someone in Banbury, who’s sent it on fast to Sir Walter by now.”

“And when Sir Walter hears it, he’ll come in force against Sir Reynold here.”

“Yes,” Joliffe agreed.

“How soon?” Frevisse demanded. “If you went now and told him things had changed, that Sir Reynold is dead…”

“Sir Reynold’s men aren’t. Nor Sir Hugh. After yesterday’s work, Sir Walter won’t be satisfied with anything short of being sure no Godfrey can strike at him again.”

With St. Frideswide’s caught in the middle.

Not trying to hide her anger, only the fear that was goading it on, Frevisse asked, “How soon is he likely to be here?”

“Tomorrow, I would guess.”

“When you meant to be gone, well out of it before he ever came but here long enough you wouldn’t be suspected of being the one who told him, even if anyone bothered to think of you at all.”

“That was what I had in mind, yes.”

“Leaving us to face it all unwarned!”

“No!” Joliffe denied that forcefully. “Before I left, I would have told
you
and trusted you not to betray me.”

She would not have, he was right about that, but: “What good would that have done?”

He shrugged, confident. “There are only three doors into the cloister. You would have found way to have them barred when Sir Walter and his men came. With Sir Reynold and his men shut out and the nuns shut in, you’d all have been safe enough.”

“But our priory folk wouldn’t be, or our villagers!”

“I suspect I would have passed a word of something like warning along to your villagers as I went through, and they’d see your priory folk heard in time, and I doubt they would be passing it along to Sir Reynold’s folk.”

“Wouldn’t that risk you being found out if anyone asked questions afterward? Exactly what you’ve tried to avoid?” she said caustically, too angry to believe him willingly.

He answered caustically back, “I doubt Sir Reynold and his ilk—your prioress among them—would bother with questioning their peasants afterward. Aside from despising them too much to think it worth their while, they’d likely be too busy answering questions themselves by then from sheriff and crowner and abbot and all to care what any villagers might have to say.”

Beyond the fact that he was probably right, Frevisse was annoyed to find she believed he would have done exactly as he said.

Improbably, as if there had been no taint of anger between them, he grinned at her. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like I’ll be going anywhere for a time, as things are now.”

“It would be a great pity if you wandered off at this point,” Frevisse agreed. “Because if you did, suspicion of Sir Reynold’s murder would very likely turn on you.”

“But now that you know Sir Walter is coming… ?”

Joliffe left the question unfinished but she knew what it was. What was she going to do with what she knew?

“Nothing, yet,” she said. Joliffe would be in danger as soon as she warned anyone because they would want to know how she knew. But neither could she keep it secret for long, for everyone else’s sake.

She sat down on the garth wall with a suddenness that acknowledged how tired she was, in mind and body both. Joliffe joined her, leaning back against a pillar the way her back would not presently let her, with one leg crooked under him, at ease. The morning was still cold, but the sun had cleared the roof of the east range, spilling thick gold light into the cloister; Joliffe held out his hand into the brightness, cupped as if the light were something he could hold.

“The simplest way to handle it,” he said, “is of course to find out who Sir Reynold’s murderer is. Then I can go, warnings can be given, all is well.”

“Well
is not the word I would have chosen,” Frevisse said. “Nor
simplest.”

“Ah, words,” Joliffe said airily. “Such feckless things.”

“But supposing you aren’t the one who killed him… ?”

Joliffe bowed his head to her without looking away from his hand. “Thank you for being willing to suppose that.”

“You’re welcome. So supposing it wasn’t you, who else could it have been?”

“For choice, your Domina Alys.”

“For choice, your Master Porter,” she answered back.

Joliffe regretfully agreed. “Sir Reynold had both of them furious with him before yesterday was over.”

“But he was Domina Alys’ kinsman. She’d be less likely than Master Porter to turn to killing him.”

“I’ve always found myself more inclined to loathe those I know best, rather than strangers,” Joliffe observed.

Ignoring that, Frevisse said, “And she’s likely to lose whatever she hoped to gain by him being here, now he’s dead, besides that she knows better than most, being nun and prioress, how she’s damned her soul if she’s killed him, while for Master Porter killing him might seem no more than a straightforward way to be rid of the threat Sir Reynold was to him.”

“Except now Sir Reynold’s men are a danger to him. He would have likely foreseen that.”

“He’s maybe counting on the clear fact that Sir Hugh is not so short-headed as Sir Reynold, mat he’ll see better than to turn them loose on anyone.”

“Of course there could be reasons Sir Hugh would want Sir Reynold dead,” Joliffe said. “One at least. He’ll likely take over the men for his own and have the profit of what Sir Reynold started, now Sir Reynold is dead.”

“There’s that,” Frevisse granted. “He’s hardly to know how ungood a thing that is at this point. Though, again, this is hardly the time to unbalance things, even not knowing that. Wouldn’t it serve him better to wait until Sir Reynold had fully succeeded?”

“Who knows?” Joliffe said. “What we have is somewhere to start, three possibilities to find out about.” He stood up. “I’ll go learn what I can about Master Porter and anyone else among the masons last night. You’ll do the same for your prioress and Sir Hugh and anyone else inside the cloister who may look likely once you’ve started?”

Frevisse nodded and stood up. She did not see how she would be able to do much, but it was better than waiting for what might happen, with a murderer somewhere among them. Oddly, that had been a thought she had been keeping clear of, concentrating on Sir Reynold being dead. But Sir Reynold was dead because someone had killed him, and she had to gather her thoughts to face that. “Meet me in the church after Tierce,” she said. It was not much time, but they did not have much time, nor maybe many chances either, to exchange what they might learn.

“One thing,” Joliffe said. “About how Sir Reynold was killed. You said he was stabbed. Where?”

“In the passage from the cloister out to the yard.”

“I meant where, on him, was he stabbed. How was it done? With what?”

“In the back with a sword.”

“Not a dagger?”

“It was a wide wound. I’d think it would have taken a sword to make it.”

“Where?” Joliffe turned his back toward her. “Show me.”

Frevisse drew her finger in a line below his left shoulder blade, from midway across that side of his back toward his spine. Joliffe’s shoulders twitched and a shiver ran up him. “There.”

Joliffe turned around. “Did it go all the way through him?”

Frevisse remembered the blood had spread from under the body and answered, “Yes. Why are you asking all this?”

“I don’t know. It’s just I’ve always found it better to know too much than too little. Haven’t you? Ask questions while you can, for what you might need to know later.”

She had found that true, too, though probably on different sorts of occasions than he had. They regarded each other in considering silence a moment before Joliffe said, “I’ll see you after Tierce,” and turned back toward the church.

Chapter 21

Frevisse had thought to go to Domina Alys first. Since it could not be avoided, it would be best to have it done. But Joliffe’s questions about the wound took her back to the parlor. She had seen Sir Reynold’s gashed flesh and dried blood but not looked closely. Had not wanted to look closely. It had seemed sufficient to know the wound had surely caused Sir Reynold’s death. But there was never a sufficiency of knowing, not about anything, only an end to where the mind could reach. Or to where it
wanted
to reach. And now Frevisse wanted to know more.

And wished she did not have to.

She rapped lightly at the parlor’s closed door, and after a pause Dame Claire opened it. Her sleeves were pushed up above her elbows; she had probably helped to strip off the befouled clothing that lay in a heap by the door and then with washing off the filth and blood that came with violent death. She had the strained look of someone who had been concentrating too long on a thing they did not like, but she and Frevisse had dealt with death together before now and saying calmly, “I thought you’d be here to see him sooner,” she stood aside for Frevisse to enter, leaving the door open behind her for more light than the rushlights they had been using.

Sir Reynold’s body was laid out on a sheet in the cleared center of the floor with Benet and Lewis kneeling beside it, rinsing cloths out in basins of reddened water. They looked up briefly as Frevisse entered but were too absorbed in enduring what they were doing to care that she was there.