The Clerk’s Tale (30 page)

‘But given the cost of ferrying hunters and hounds and horses… ?“ Domina Elisabeth questioned.

Domina Matilda laughed. “St. Mary’s owns the ferry. I gave them all free passage both going and coming back, since they’re hunting to our good.”

While Domina Elisabeth asked how well the profits from the ferry balanced against its costs, Frevisse rose and went to the nearer of the room’s two windows, finding when she had set back one of the shutters, that it overlooked a little of the churchyard but not much because the parlor was built out from the church’s west end and the church’s tower and the townfolk’s porch and door into the nave blocked sight of most of the yard, leaving only a narrow slice of it to be seen along the millstream bank, with the mill’s roof and mill wheel showing above the wall not far off.

She closed the shutter and went to the other window, opening its shutter with better hope and was not disappointed. This was the window she had seen from the mill. From it she could see across the water meadow to the Thames and the Berkshire hills that in the pale, winter-misted morning air seemed distant and unlikely, as if they might dissolve away with the mists. The loveliness held her a moment. Then she leaned forward onto the wide stone sill and looked down into the dark-flowing ditch, deep within its banks below her, and then leftward along the priory’s buildings, able by leaning a little further out to see the garden’s withy fence.

Behind her, Domina Matilda was saying, “One of the useful things about owning the ferry is that at least we don’t have to pay to have our grain hauled over to our mill and brought back as flour. Isn’t it foolishness we don’t own the mill right outside our walls but the one over the river at Streatley? You can see it from there, Dame Frevisse.”

Frevisse could, high enough here to see over the pollarded trees along the river to Streatley and its mill and the ferry landing not far from it. Behind her, both prioresses rose and came to join her at the window, the spaniel padding beside his mistress, Domina Elisabeth asking as they came who owned the mill in Goring if not the nuns.

‘Oh, the earl—only I must say marquis now; such a foreign word—of Suffolk. He’s lord of the town, you know.“

Domina Elisabeth said no, she had not known that, and Frevisse braced for her to say more, but they had reached the window, Frevisse moving aside to make room for them, and Domina Matilda said, pointing toward the path along the millstream’s other side, “Isn’t it strange to think that Master Montfort’s murderer very possibly walked right past here? I might even have seen him if I’d been here and happened to look out.”

‘You weren’t here?“ Domina Elisabeth asked.

‘We were all at Nones, I gather, when it happened. Look.“ She leaned a little out, as Frevisse had done, and pointed, leftward this time. ”You can even see the garden fence from here.“

Domina Elisabeth leaned out to look and Frevisse took the chance to ask, “How long ago did the wall along‘ the garden there fall down?”

‘Oh, goodness, let me think,“ Domina Matilda said. ”How ever did you know of that?“

‘Someone mentioned it,“ Frevisse vaguely answered.

Domina Matilda, busy reckoning, was not curious enough to ask who, and said, “Twenty and some years ago, it must be. No, longer than that. Oh, my. The bank gave way and the wall collapsed the year before Agincourt. I was just out of my noviate and remember we were gathering money to rebuild it and instead had to pay it all into our tithe toward our late King Henry, God keep his soul, going into France. Afterwards, we just never bothered with it. It’s been one withy fence after another. I suppose it’s something I should take in hand, shouldn’t I? But if there’s ever money to spare, it’s always needed somewhere else more.”

‘Isn’t that always the way of it?“ Domina Elisabeth said. ”More things to do than money to do them with.“

Before they could go off on that, Frevisse asked, “Wasn’t Mistress Champyon at school here then?”

‘After that, by a little, I think.“ Domina Matilda made a face. ”Cecely Bower and her sister Rose. We none of us much liked them.“ Then she thought better of being uncharitable and asked more moderately, ”Do you know her?“

‘No. It’s only that she’s being talked about so much.“

‘She’s doing her share of talking, too, if she’s anything like she was.“

However long since Cecely had been there, it seemed Domina Matilda’s feelings toward her had not warmed. “Not even her sister liked her much.”

‘Nobody seems to now, either,“ said Domina Elisabeth, moving away from the window, back toward the comfort of the fire.

Domina Matilda followed her, saying with a laugh, “Well, her present husband and her children must—or maybe—do. But that makes one wonder about them, doesn’t it?”

Left to herself, Frevisse leaned out the window and looked down again, thinking that the drop from there to the top of the bank would not be too long for a man if he slid down and hung by his hands from the window’s sill before dropping. Before he did, he would have been able to see if anyone was in sight, too, and judge whether or not he could go unseen for the brief moment it would have taken him to be out the window and drop to the bank and slide into the ditch. To a desperate man, the chance of being seen would have been little enough, and he must have been desperate to take the chances he had taken.

But the problem with having him drop from the window was that he would have had to be in the prioress’s parlor and how he would have come there Frevisse did not yet see. Even given all else he had dared to have Montfort dead, even depending on all the nuns to be at Nones, still the hope he could pass through the nunnery to reach the parlor unnoticed by any servant seemed one chance too many.

Unless Domina Matilda was with him in planning Montfort’s death.

Frevisse eased back from the window and turned to look at Domina Matilda, seated again by the fire, stroking her spaniel’s ears and sharing with Domina Elisabeth the constant costs of keeping up a nunnery’s buildings. What interest could she possibly have had in wanting Montfort dead? Nothing Frevisse had heard so far linked her in any way with the Lengley inheritance. Unless her friendship with Lady Agnes ran so deeply she was willing to help toward murder…

It made better sense to think she might not have known it was going to be murder and was holding quiet now out of fear.

But also holding quiet at peril of her soul, and what would be worth that?

A promise of lands or goods or money to the priory in payment for her silence?

That was possible, Frevisse supposed. She had known a prioress who had imperiled her self and soul for worldly gains. But Domina Matilda did not seem that kind. She seemed more like Domina Elisabeth, firm and able in her duties, now asking Domina Elisabeth, “Do you think Mistress Montfort might want to aid the rebuilding of the garden’s wall as a sort of memorial to her husband?”

Frevisse looked away, out the window again. Then turned to face it fully, leaning forward as if that would be enough to help her see more clearly what was happening at the ferry landing across the river.

Something in her suddenness must have drawn Domina Elisabeth’s notice because from across the room she asked, “Dame Frevisse? What is it?”

‘I don’t know. Would the hunters be coming home this soon?“ That seemed the most likely reason for the milling of horses, riders, and—small with distance but no mistaking the surge and shift of them—a pack of hunting hounds in the wide space left among Streatley’s low buildings for travelers to gather to the ferry.

‘No,“ Domina Matilda said, rising and coming back to the window. ”It’s too soon, surely. They…“ Her voice faltered as she reached Frevisse’s side and saw what Frevisse was now seeing—a long shape wrapped in a dark cloak being carried toward the ferry by three men, and softly she said, ”God have mercy. Someone’s dead.“ She swung away from the window. ”Or hurt. Please God, only hurt. I’ll send someone to find out.“

Chapter 19

It was Nichola Lengley. And she was dead. Master Gruesby, standing behind and aside from Master Christopher and young Denys in the hall of the Haseldens’ manor house, was doing what he could not to see her cloak-wrapped body laid on the trestle table set up for it hurriedly and crooked in the middle of the hall. Word of the death had spread through Goring in the time it had taken for her to be carried from the ferry to her home and Master Christopher had followed almost as soon as he heard and Master Gruesby had gone with young Denys after him. That Master Christopher had not turned him back was to the good but that did not mean Master Gruesby was pleased to be here nor did he want to think about the dead girl. Instead he had noted as they rode into the manor’s yard how the Haseldens’ house, proudly fronting its own lane off the Reading road, was all new-built, with pargetted plasterwork and thick-laid thatch. Now, here in the hall, he was purposely noting that all its furnishings were likewise mostly new, the painted tapestry on the wall at the far end of the best quality—French, he thought, and Master Haselden had been in the French war, so it was maybe booty rather than bought…

But none of all his noticing other things kept him from being all too aware of the body lying there. He did not like bodies. People alive made him uneasy, it was true, but he had perfected being forgotten, could be in a room and go unnoticed by everyone and was happy at it. What he was not happy about and had never been able to hide from was his pity for the dead. Even those he had never known when they were alive. What made this worse was that he remembered this girl alive all too well, both at the inquest and after Master Montfort’s funeral. She had been pretty, he remembered, in the way young things often were, simply because they were young. Now she was not. Either young or pretty.

Not that her face was much marred. It was dirtied, yes, and with dried and darkened blood flowed out from both the corners of her mouth that her softly sobbing mother was even now carefully, carefully washing away with a cloth and warm water from the basin held by a loudly sobbing maidservant standing beside her. But the dirt and blood had not taken the prettiness out of her face. It was the emptiness did that. The emptiness where there had been someone alive and now there was nothing, only empty flesh already graying toward its decay. The brightness of her fair hair spread behind her head and falling over the table’s edge now that her mother had eased off her veil and wimple and dropped them to the floor was almost an offense, looking so much more alive than she did.

And besides death, Master Gruesby did not like grief as raw and new as it was here. He didn’t like grief at all, come to that, but as crowner’s clerk he had mostly come to deaths after there had been time for the grief around them to be worn out a little. Here death and grief were both too raw, too hurtful—the mother crying as if something deep inside her had broken and she would never be able to stop; the father standing beside Master Christopher across the table from his wife, never quite looking at either her or his dead daughter but talking, talking, the words coming as if he couldn’t stop them, saying again for Master Gruesby no longer knew how many times, “The stream bank was steep, it was muddy, yes, but everyone else made it, safe as anything. Nobody else fell. Nobody else.”

And worst, the dead girl’s husband simply standing at the foot of the table looking at her and nothing else. Not moving. Not speaking, only standing there. As if bereft of movement as his dead wife.

But guessing by his clothing, he had done something more than that sometime. Besides the expected spatter of mud over him from hard, muddy riding, he was mired with mud to his knees and the front and one shoulder of his thick, winter-padded doublet was smeared with not only mud but blood where, down on both knees, he must have gathered his wife’s broken body against him.

‘It was Stephen. He looked around and didn’t see her,“ Master Haselden said, yet again telling how the hunt had been at full gallop away from the stream, crossing a pasture with the hounds in cry after a stag, when Stephen had missed Nichola. ”He yelled at me and turned back and so did I and so did…“ He named off two others, the men who had been standing muddy and white-faced in the yard with their horses when Master Christopher, Master Gruesby, and young Denys had ridden in. The rest of the hunt, it seemed, had made the kill before they realized they were short some of their riders and gone back to find them, not knowing until then that theirs had not been the day’s only kill.

‘It wasn’t that bad where she fell,“ Master Haselden was saying again. ”There was thicket all along the other side of the stream where we’d come down, yes, but where she fell on the other side was open. It was steep and muddy but open. And she was right at the top when she fell, when her horse went over. Everyone else made it, nobody else fell…“

He kept circling back to that. That nobody else had fallen. Nobody else. Only Nichola. But that was how it was with accidents, Master Gruesby had noticed over the years. They happened to one person when they could just as easily have happened to another. Or to nobody. They were the will of God. Or of the Devil. He had heard them called both but made no choice himself. For some reason—some fault by her or her horse or in the mud under its hoofs—she and her horse had slipped on a muddy slope and fallen and she’d been thrown and her horse while struggling to rise had fallen again and rolled on her, with probably never a chance for her, tangled in skirts and cloak, to scramble clear.

‘She hated riding,“ Mistress Haselden whispered. Her husband flinched a look at her and away again. She had finished with the blood, was wringing the cloth out in the dirtied water. ”Hated it. He’d have her go. He wouldn’t take her no for an answer. But she hated it. The way I’ve always hated it.“