The Bishop’s Tale (12 page)

Dame Perpetua left Frevisse at the door to the parlor. “I am not needed here, nor do I want to go in. I’d rather go to bed, by your leave.” Wishing she could go with her, Frevisse gave Dame Perpetua the small bundle to take with her, out of the way. Frevisse had guessed by its feel that it held a book and was curious what Chaucer had so particularly wanted to give her. But she meant to find a better time and place to open the bundle than now and did not wish to draw attention to it by carrying it with her into the parlor. She drew a deep breath, then went in.

The room was even more full of people than the evening she had arrived and, like then, most of them were strangers to her. Aunt Matilda and Bishop Beaufort sat near the fireplace, with Alice at her mother’s side and her husband Suffolk at the bishop’s, all in low-voiced conversation with various guests. Master Gallard, hovering just inside the door, bowed to her and said under the general murmur of conversation, “My lady your aunt has been asking after you. You’ll go at once to join her?”

Eyes kept modestly down, Frevisse eased her way around the edge of the room and people. The conversation she overheard as she went was mostly general, about the wet summer and the small harvest, a new cut for houppelande sleeves, a fragment of an anecdote about Chaucer, an admiring comment on his son-in-law Suffolk. Only once did someone mention death in her hearing, to be quickly cut off by his companion with a nod her way, so that she was not sure whose death he had spoken of. It seemed that here at least politeness was holding back avid talk within her hearing about Sir Clement, and she reached her aunt without being drawn into conversation with anyone.

Matilda, gray with grief, reached out to take her hand and draw her down to kiss her cheek in greeting. “Thank you, my dear, for coming to my comfort. I know you’ve had a difficult day, too.”

Frevisse kept a warm hold on her hand. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

Matilda drew her nearer to whisper in her ear, “Find a way to end this soon.” She smiled wanly as she spoke, because they both knew that the evening, like the day, had to take its course. Tomorrow all the remaining guests would leave, and the family could settle to finding their places in their grief. In the meanwhile, the present necessity of gracious hospitality had to be endured. Frevisse squeezed her hand in sympathy and moved to stand behind her, next to Alice, to become part of the polite flow of condolence and comments of people coming to speak to the bereaved family. She avoided even a glance at Bishop Beaufort.

Near the widow there were only kind words about Chaucer or mild reminiscences of happier times shared with him. But from where she stood, Frevisse easily saw the occasional excited hand movement or scandalized head-shaking mixed with uneasy but avid looks quickly curtailed.

It was no more than she had expected. They had seen a man call down God’s judgment on himself and then receive it. Because it had fallen on someone so obviously worthy of his terrifying death, they could afford excitement rather than fear, and indulge in righteous discussions of God’s wonders.

Frevisse’s gaze flickered sideways and down to Bishop Beaufort’s profile to the left of Alice. His voice and subdued movements were perfectly suited to the occasion, shaded to the finest degree of dignity and sorrow. To watch him was to believe there was nothing on his mind but the comfort of the bereaved and courtesy to their guests.

Frevisse knew better. He had succeeded among the harsh realities of the royal court for most of his life; he must perceive a great deal more of what went on around him than others did, and understand it more deeply than most would find comfortable to think on or to live with.

But her uncle had counted Bishop Beaufort not just as his cousin but as his dear friend. It had not been their abilities that differed but their ambitions. Chaucer, knowing how much she would need them, had trusted Beaufort with his last words to her. She had always trusted Chaucer more completely than she had ever trusted anyone else. And he had trusted Bishop Beaufort.

Assuredly the bishop was correct that Sir Clement’s had been an odd death. God could take life in any way he chose, and it had become so common to see his will in any unexplained or sudden death that churchly scholars had been obliged through the centuries to point out that not all such deaths came directly from God’s hand. But even so, why had this death been given this way—not simply the agony to breathe, the red disfiguring of his face and arms, the final strangling—but that strange relenting before the end, as if God had given only a glancing blow at first and then, when his warning was not taken, when Sir Clement showed no sign of comprehension or repentance, struck the fatal one?

Was that the right of it? And had it been done here, at Ewelme, in front of so many people, to be a public example to other sinners? But most of the people who saw him first struck down had not seen him die, so the example had been weakened, if example had been intended.

A shifting of people near the door brought her gaze around to see Sir Philip entering. He paused just inside to speak closely to Master Gallard, the little man nodding repeatedly to whatever the priest was saying before answering something back. Sir Philip shook his head, touched the usher’s shoulder as if in reassurance, and went out again.

Frevisse glanced at Bishop Beaufort to see his eyes shifting away from the doorway. By his bland facade, he might have seen nothing of interest, except his eyes slipped sideways to meet hers, as if wondering if she had seen them, too; then he was answering some comment from the earl of Suffolk as if he had never had his attention anywhere else.

Looking over his head and across the room, Frevisse glimpsed the physician who had attended Sir Clement’s death. With an abrupt wish for something besides fruitless speculation, she slipped sideways away from Matilda and Alice and made her way through the crowd toward him. He moved away to talk with another man as she neared him, but she followed to the room’s far end and stood a little aside from them, her head modestly down and her hands folded into her sleeves in an attitude of waiting, where he must surely notice she wanted to speak to him.

But overhearing their conversation about the weather and their relief that the chance of plague was gone now that the weather had turned cold, she remembered his name and was able, when he turned from the other man to her, to say, “Master Broun, I was wondering if I might speak to you about—”

His gesture of recognition interrupted her. “You’re Master Chaucer’s niece! My pardon, lady, for not knowing you sooner. Of course. Of course. You couldn’t ask your aunt about it, could you? Pardon us, please,” he added to the other man, who bowed his head and moved away, leaving them in what would pass for privacy in that gathering. Master Broun leaned his head nearer to her and dropped his voice to consultation level. “You’re wondering how it was with your uncle, of course. It came on slowly; he had time to prepare himself while we tried all that could be done but, alas”—he spread his white, well-tended hands in resignation —“it was not God’s will he live. But the end was peaceful. Very peaceful.”

He was an echo of Aunt Matilda. She had repeated and repeated that his end had been peaceful, as if for reassurance to herself more than anyone, so that Frevisse had resisted asking for details that might mar her aunt’s comfort. Now, with this unexpected chance, she asked, “Was he painfully ill?”

“Not painfully. Never painfully, no, except for a while when the starvation became marked, but that abated as his decline progressed. You know he fell ill early in the summer? The first indication of trouble was that he lost flesh with no cause. He seemed in good health but no matter what he ate, he lessened. We began to do all manner of things that should have helped.” He shook his head, his expression puckered with professional regret. “But nothing we did realigned his humors.”

If he were like others of his kind Frevisse had known, he would go on now to lengthy and detailed discourse on bile and sanguinity and the courses of the stars before he came back to the plain fact that Chaucer had died despite all his doctors’ knowledge and care. To forestall him, she said, “So it was a wasting disease, not painful in the main but with no hope.”

“Not by late autumn. From then it was merely a matter of time.” He spread his hands again in token of helplessness in the face of fate. “An unusual case, but not unheard-of.”

“And the man who died today, Sir Clement Sharpe. What happened to him?”

The physician stared at her blankly for a moment, then remembered to shut his mouth, only to open it and say rather severely, “You were in the hall, I believe? Yes, then you saw him. He called on God to witness his truth, and God smote him in his lie. And you were there in the priest’s chamber when he died. My lady, you
saw
how he died.”

“But he didn’t simply stop living,” Frevisse pressed. “It wasn’t that simple. I saw what agonies he was in—”

“Certainly.” Master Broun was beginning to be offended.

Frevisse moderated her tone to humble inquiry. “It was so terrible to see. I couldn’t watch. He didn’t choke on a bite of food, or the wine he drank go down the wrong way? It’s so terrible to think of God striking him down in that manner. I just keep hoping it was something else, and if it was, you would be the one who knew.”

Her double appeal to his learning and his manhood flattered the physician enough to consider her question. “I of course checked him immediately for some cause of his distress,” he replied with suitable gravity, “but there was no sign of what it might be. It was as if all his humors had turned violently against him all at once.”

“There seemed to be something in his throat.”

“I looked there first, of course, but it was not something
in
his throat, it was his throat itself. A severe and prolonged spasm of all the flesh in there that caused an effusion of fluid and brought on a swelling that inhibited his breathing.”

Inhibited his breathing to the point of death, Frevisse thought drily, but she kept her tone mild and wondering as she said, “What about those terrible welts all over his face, and that redness, and the itching that seemed to torment him almost as much as his breathing? They had nothing to do with his throat constricting, did they?”

Master Broun shifted uneasily, then said, “They were no part of his throat’s affliction. They were something else altogether, brought on, I believe, by his general distress and the imminence of death.”

“His death agonies brought on welts and itching?” In all the deaths she had seen or ever heard of, there had been nothing like that.

Master Broun held silent a moment, uneasy rather than offended, and then said in a much lower voice, “They were no direct part of his throat’s affliction. Of that I’m sure. But did you see the pattern of welts on his face, as if he had been struck by an open hand? A hand of more than human size, one that struck and made those marks on him.”

Frevisse hesitated. She could not remember any pattern to the marks on Sir Clement’s face, but she had been farther away than Master Broun. Had anyone else seen it? Letting that go for now, she asked, “Why do you suppose his breathing eased the way it did? His breathing was much easier when I came in.”

The physician was clearly on more comfortable ground with that issue. “There you have further proof of God’s work in this. There was no reason for the abatement of Sir Clement’s agony for that little while except God’s mercy, that he have time to repent. When he did not, his life and soul were wrenched from him as you saw.”

Master Broun crossed himself, and so did Frevisse, but as she did, she said, “He drank something just before that final attack.”

“Wine. A little wine.”

“He didn’t choke on it? His throat wasn’t still too constricted for it?”

“I would not have allowed him to drink if it had been.” Master Broun grew haughty again. “No, Sir Clement did not choke on wine or anything else. It was simply God’s will and beyond our comprehension.” He spread his hands, indicating even he was helpless before such power. “God’s ways are strange to man.”

Chapter
12

Wrung out, Frevisse had thought her sleep that night would be heavy, but it was shallow and broken, rarely deep enough for dreams or long enough for any rest. Dame Perpetua slept through her uneasy stirring, but they had promised each other that if either woke near the time, she would awake the other for the prayers of Matins. Among all the other wakenings there was no way to tell when one was midnight, but at last, wakening yet again, she guessed the time was nearly right and gently roused Dame Perpetua. Together, in whispers, they said the office’s many psalms, the soft sound of their praying almost lost in the general murmur of other people’s breathing and Joan’s snoring.

When they finished, Dame Perpetua lay down, rolled on her side, and was shortly asleep again. Frevisse, still uneasy with her own thoughts, took longer, and in the morning was no nearer to satisfaction or answers—and felt no more rested—than when she had gone to bed.

And Aunt Matilda had finally given way to her grief. She awoke and, as was always her way, rose and went to kneel at her prie-dieu for first prayer. But there, where comfort should have been greatest, she bent forward over her prayer book, shaken by sobs. At first the other women left her to cry; she was past due and surely needed the tears. But it went on, and worsened, until she was clinging to the prie-dieu, helplessly wracked and unable to stop.

As Frevisse hovered uncertainly, Alice left the gown her maid held ready to put on her and went to her mother. Taking her gently by the shoulders, she helped Matilda to her feet and, not bothering with words, led her back toward the bed. Aunt Matilda, her face collapsed and splotched, clung sideways to her daughter and went on sobbing helplessly.