The Clerk’s Tale (12 page)

Frevisse waited until she realized that was all he meant to say, then insisted, “What was it about?”

Master Gruesby’s eyes widened. “I didn’t open it.”

‘Where is it?“

‘With the other papers, waiting for whoever comes to finish the Lengley escheat.“

‘It had to do with that?“

‘I don’t know. I didn’t open it.“

‘But it was addressed to Master Montfort?“

‘To Master Montfort as escheator, yes.“

And might very well have nothing to do with his murder but she said anyway to Christopher, “You should maybe read it.”

His look asked her why, to which she could only answer, “Just to see if Lord Lovell needs answer to something, I suppose,” and rose to her feet to show she was ready to leave.

Christopher and Master Gruesby rose with her and across the nave Dickon leaped to his feet, plainly willing to do something besides sit. Frevisse beckoned to him while adding to Christopher, “How will I get word to you of anything useful I might hear?”

‘I’ll send Master Gruesby to you sometime. Or make occasion to talk with you myself.“

‘What excuse will you make for staying here longer, now the inquest is done?“

‘There’s still my father’s funeral. The in-gathering of folk to it and the funeral itself will keep me here at least four days more, I think.“

‘Here?“ Frevisse barely covered her alarm. ”He’s to be buried here?“ Rather than in his own parish church, the more common way.

Christopher made a small shrug and said, giving away neither one thing nor another, “Mother thought here would serve as well as anywhere.”

Because it did not matter to her where her husband was buried so long as she was rid of him? Frevisse lowered her head in hope of hiding both that unkind thought and her dismay at after all not being soon done with Lady Agnes.

Chapter 7

With bows, Christopher and Master Gruesby left her and Dickon came forward, curiosity writ large on his young face. The weak, long-slanted light through the nave’s south windows patchily brightened the nave’s gray shadows but told Frevisse that if she were at St. Frideswide’s she would about now have been finishing her day’s tasks before Vespers. Here there was only blank time to be filled, and tucking her hands more deeply into her opposite sleeves for warmth against the church’s cold creeping into her, she said, “Thank you for waiting this while, Dickon.”

He had grown suddenly this past year, was all long bones and boyish angles and could have been awkward with it but was not. Instead, he reminded her of his father, contained and certain in both manners and movement. He was more given to smiling than Frevisse had ever seen from his father, though, and he was smiling now, a boyish grin as he made a bow to her and answered, “You’re welcome, my lady,” with a glance at the door closing behind Christopher and Master Gruesby, inviting her to tell him what it had been about.

With the thought that it was better he knew something than be left to his own devisings, she said, “We were discussing his father’s death. If anyone asks, you’re welcome to tell them that.”

Dickon brightened. “You’re going to find out who did it, aren’t you?”

“That
is something you’re
not
welcome to say.”

‘But you’re going to.“

‘As God wills.“

‘The way you did when—“

‘I think it would be better if that’s not talked about,“ she said quellingly.

Dickon sobered with quick understanding. “Better if they don’t know to watch out for you. Yes.”

That was not the way she would have said it but she let it go, saying instead, “You can go now.”

‘You’re staying here?“

Frevisse suppressed a smile of her own at that. Dickon, like his father, wanted to understand what he was being told to do, rather than simply obeying. It made his father a difficult man with whom to deal but a good steward to the nunnery and she said, “I mean to pray here until Vespers. After that, I’ll be with Domina Elisabeth. You can be about your own business.”

Dickon accepted that with a grin and a bow but hesitated before he turned to go and asked, “Shall I listen for… things?”

In her turn Frevisse hesitated, then said, “Listen, but don’t ask anything. Or be caught at listening.”

Dickon nodded with quick understanding, bowed again, and headed cheerily out.

Frevisse closed her eyes, drew a deep, relieved breath at being alone again, slipped one hand from her sleeve to cross herself, then tucked the hand away and went hurriedly up the nave into the blessed quiet of the choir, into the choir stall presently hers, to kneel on the cushion there. The sacrist would come probably soon, to be sure all was in readiness for Vespers, and the bell would begin its steady calling, the nuns would come, there would be the rustle of pages turning, a pause full of waiting and then the Office, with voices raised to evening prayers and psalms; but for now there was only uncomplicated silence and softly deepening shadows, and Frevisse, resting her elbows on the book ledge in front of her, bowed her head onto her clasped hands, shut her eyes, and sank into the shelter and delight of prayer.

Or meant to. From years of daily saying of the psalms woven into each day’s Offices, the cycle of them completed every week only to be done again the next week, they were become as familiar to her as the Paternoster, their passions both guide and shelter in her own reaching toward God, that endless questing of the soul that was the only thing she had ever found worth her whole heart’s longing. Now she slipped softly into,
“De caelis respicit Dominus: videt omnes filios hominum… Qui omnium eorum corda finxit, qui attendit ad omnia opera eorum
…” From heaven the Lord beholds: he sees all the sons of men… He who shaped the souls of them all, who knows all their works…

What she intended was to wind herself further and further from the world into the deeper places of heart and mind. What she found in a while was that somehow she had slid away, back to a psalm from Nones, and was whispering,
“Per te adversarios nostros reppulimus, et in nomine tuo calcavimus insurgentes in nos… Eos, qui od-erunt nos, confudisti.”
Through you we drove back our enemies, and in your name we trampled on the rebels against us… Those who hated us you silenced.

Worse, she was thinking of Montfort while she did and, startled and discomfited, she opened her eyes to stare down at her clasped hands without seeing anything but the dark way her thoughts had gone when she was not attending to them. At different times and places before now she had dealt with deaths of one kind and another. With ordinary deaths, come simply at the end of living, when the body was done and the soul had to move on in the natural way of things, there was sorrow to one degree or another, depending on what affection there had been for the dead. In her own life she had had some sorrows that had soon dimmed while others were with her yet and would be, even to her own death. Those were reasonable sorrows for reasonable deaths. The sorrow that came for deaths brought on violently was a different kind, because such deaths came out of the right way of things, before their time and never for sufficient reason but because of greed or lust or simply cruelty’s sake. For those there was anger as well as sorrow, that such wrong could be done by someone to anyone else.

There should be at least that much sorrow and something of anger in her for Montfort’s death, and in a way there was—sorrow at least for a soul gone unprepared and violently to judgment. But that Montfort was gone from the world… no. For that she felt no sorrow at all. His never-swerving greed, his ever-unmindful cruelty made the loss of him more benefit than pain.

Eos, qui oderunt nos, confudisti.
Those who hated us you silenced.

And yet…

… it had been wrong. However good it was to have Montfort gone, it was not by God’s will he had died. It was by murder, and Christopher had asked her help in finding out the murderer and she had committed herself to it because, by God’s grace, the finding out of things was a skill she had. Somewhere, probably near, there was a murderer freely moving among men, his corruption a taint to those around him, and with the deep sigh of taking up a burden she knew would be both heavy and unwieldy, Frevisse closed her eyes and set to praying again—
Dirigatur, Domine, oratio mea. Exaudi nos in die qua invo-caverimus te.
Guide, Lord, my prayer. Hear us in the day that we call to you—and this time held her mind to it better, only breaking off when she heard the sacrist moving among the choir stalls. She was late to her task, it seemed, because overhead the bell began to call to Vespers and with relief Frevisse settled back into her seat and bowed her head, to wait silent-minded for the in-gathering of nuns.

The Office’s prayers for peace of soul and mind through yet another night gave to her the comfort and quieting they always did but at their end she and Domina Elisabeth were, as it were, cast out from the nunnery’s quiet and peace to return through the gathering gray darkness of the overcast sunset to Lady Agnes’s, hurried on with more haste than grace by a nipping wind into Lady Agnes’s candle-lighted hall, where the maidservant said Lady Agnes would dine in her solar tonight, would they be pleased to join her or be served in their own chamber or the hall?

‘With Lady Agnes, surely,“ Domina Elisabeth said for both of them, which was well enough with Frevisse. For the sake of somewhere to start, she was going to suppose that Montfort’s death had to do with Stephen’s inheritance and surely Lady Agnes could be supposed someone from whom things might best be learned.

What was talked of first, though, over spiced pork cooked with apples in a thick crust, was the matter of Montfort’s widow staying longer than expected. Domina Elisabeth had heard of it from her cousin and so had Lady Agnes by way of servants’ talk brought to her by Letice. “So you’re welcome here,” she said, “for however long until she goes and longer if you like. You make a change for me. Now, tell me how Sister Ysobel does.”

From there the talk went to whether both nuns were recovered from their journey and how well Lady Agnes had rested that afternoon, with Frevisse finding no way to lead away to where she wanted to go until, as they finished the baked apples stuffed with raisins and walnuts, Domina Elisabeth asked lightly, “But what was that at the inquest this morning about trouble over your grandson’s inheritance?”

‘Peascods and sour grapes,“ Lady Agnes said with a dismissing wave of one hand. ”Stephen’s greedy aunt on his mother’s side is claiming Stephen isn’t her sister’s son. It’s all so she can lay hold of what isn’t hers.“ One of the windows rattled heavily in its frame, shaken by a wind gust, and Lady Agnes looked away to it, clucking her tongue. ”The weather is changing and not for the better, I fear. Will it be rain or snow tomorrow, do you think?“

Domina Elisabeth thought icy rain was likely but snow if it turned any colder, and Lady Agnes began to tell how difficult the ferry crossing was when the Thames ran high and how she preferred to cross by the bridge at Walling-ford whenever she had had to visit the more northward Lengley manors.

‘Not that I’ve had to trouble with those or any other for a while now. We traveled something much, my husband and I, seeing to them while he lived, and I did the like again after my son died, God keep his soul, until his young Henry came of age. Thank St. Paul they’re all Stephen’s to see to now and I needn’t anymore.“

Frevisse swept quickly through ways to turn that toward a question about Stephen but Lady Agnes was gone on to, “Let’s go sit by the fire, shall we, and Letice will bring us warmed clary. Will you read to us over it, Dame Frevisse? You have such a soothing voice.”

Frevisse was surprised to hear that, not remembering any other time she had ever been called “soothing” by anyone, but leaving the two chairs to Dame Agnes and Domina Elisabeth, she settled on a floor cushion rather than a stool, took the book Letice brought from a chest at the bedfoot, and found herself with a large, leather-bound
Canterbury Tales
and a slight sinking of her heart. But her uncle, from whom she had learned the pleasure there could be in the sound of words themselves as well as in their meanings when they were well set together, had also taught her, “Read true to the words, and let the rest fall as it may,” and if she followed that, she could not do badly by Geoffrey Chaucer’s work and very mildly she asked, “Where would you have me begin, my lady?”

‘Choose as you wish,“ Lady Agnes granted graciously.

Frevisse began uncertainly to turn pages but then with her regrettable (she had been sometimes told) tendency toward the perverse turned deliberately to the “Tale of Sir Thopas” and launched forth with solemn vigor into its deliberately thumping verse and equally thumping action. Her uncle Thomas had used to say, about his father who had written it, “He found it quite down-heartening the number of people who did not see the jest. But then they’re likely the same who do not see the jest in his retraction at the
Tales‘
end, so what can one do?”

At least this time the jest went over, with laughter from Lady Agnes and Domina Elisabeth and even from Letice across the chamber, and when Frevisse had ended the tale with The Host’s irked interruption—

“Mine ears ache…

Now such a rhyme to the devil I give!

This is rhyme doggerel
…“

—-Lady Agnes clapped, saying, “That was most—I don’t think ‘beautifully’ is a word to be used here—most happily done. Thank you, my dear.”