The Novice’s Tale (22 page)

“The kitchen, I’m afraid.”

Dame Claire nodded her sympathy and went away.

Frevisse, drawn by duty and against her own inclination, went to see how matters were coming between Dame Alys and her unfortunate staff. Thomasine, as ordered, hung in her wake. There should have been no need of that within the cloister, but Frevisse felt uncomfortable unless she actually had the girl in sight.

The kitchen was crowded. Frevisse paused in the doorway, waiting to sort out what was happening, and saw that besides the priory’s usual lay workers, there were three of St. Frideswide’s nuns and a half dozen Fenner servants hurrying under Dame Alys’s full-voiced orders.

The dame was presently declaring that the next hand besides her own that touched the pastry would be ground up and added to the meat for the pies, but her usual fury lacked full conviction.

“Here now, here now!” She poked one of the servants in the ribs with her bent spoon but scarcely hard enough to make the woman wince. “Do that chicken neck again! There’s a fistful of meat on those bones! Pick it all off, pick it all! We’ve too many hungry mouths waiting to waste a morsel!”

She saw Frevisse, and turned on her, exclaiming, “So let’s have a new chimney built if the other can’t be repaired! It will take less time, I swear you. And now I’m feeding a troop of Fenners because one wasn’t enough, and that one stupid enough to drink herself to death at our priory! Ah, I see you’re bringing me Thomasine back, that’s one good thing, because surely I’ve need of the girl. And you, too, if you’ve a while to spare.”

Frevisse had spent her own apprenticeship in the kitchen and knew how much of that she could ignore. She said, “Thomasine is to be my help today. I’ve come to see how supper is going on. Will there be enough?”‘

“Enough. And maybe a little more.” Dame Alys admitted it grudgingly. “Sir Walter didn’t come empty-handed. He’s given us a moldy cheese, one sack of flour, and a sick old ox.” She jerked her spoon at the immense carcass turning on the great spit in the far fireplace. “I can make do.”

The growth of mold on the cheese was smaller than the palm of a hand and the cheese itself was the size of a cartwheel. The spit in the fireplace was in danger of bending under the weight of the beef roasting on it. The single sack of flour was a very large one. It appeared from what Frevisse could see that there was more than sufficient food to satisfy all their enforced guests. And it would be delicious. Despite her tongue, Dame Alys would supervise the making of a meal for even an enemy to perfection. It would be as coals of fire on their heads for her to feed the Fenners well enough so they could have no complaints about St. Frideswide’s hospitality.

But it must have been hard on her to be brought to this pass. Burdened with food enough and help enough and no more Lady Ermentrude to plague her, Dame Alys was woefully short of things to complain of.

“Have you people enough for serving the supper?” Frevisse asked.

“I’m having nothing to do with serving Fenners!” snapped Dame Alys. Then she conceded unwillingly, “Sir Walter has said that if we bring the food to the cloister gate, he will have people to take it to the guest halls, so that’s settled. But there’s more than enough to do, we’ll be sore wearied doing our work in here. Sister Amicia, when I said I wanted those parsnips cut to finger size, I didn’t mean a giant’s fingers. Smaller, girl, or they won’t cook till Hallowmas.”

Because Frevisse was responsible for the feeding of the guests, she took a purely formal walk between the tables, looking at the cheese flans, meat pies, sauces, and other things prepared or in the making. There was a sweet, spicy odor of cakes baking. Dame Alys, carrying her warp-handled spoon like a baton of office, rumbled at her heels, pointing out that the Fenners’ flour was over-ground to almost useless fineness and their beef hung too heavy on the spit, and the cheese they had brought was aged, which she declared made it evil to digest.

With Dame Alys distracted by Frevisse, the women set up small spates of talking among themselves, with one of the Fenner servants going so far as to giggle at something someone said. Dame Alys stopped her with a fuming look, but behind her back the murmured talk went on. Only Thomasine, standing at the edge of it all where Frevisse had left her, kept silent, her head down, hands folded into her sleeves.

Frevisse, under the burden of Dame Alys’s complaints, forgot her. It was Sister Amicia who exclaimed in shrill tones easily heard across the kitchen, “Well, crying ail over the floor like a rag gone sopping. It’s not like you cared for her, is it? Goodness!”

Frevisse’s quick glance told her that Thomasine was indeed crying, shaking from shoulders to feet with her arms pulled tight against her to hold in the sobs. Not wanting her to lose the fight, Frevisse put down the spoonful of frumenty she had been about to taste, and swept between the tables to take Thomasine briskly by the arm and out of the kitchen before anyone could find anything else to say.

The slipe would be too chill after the kitchen’s warmth; Frevisse took Thomasine around the cloister to the church, entering by the small side door the nuns used to come and go for their services. It let into the choir, an arrangement of stepped pews facing one another across the tiled floor. The altar of polished stone was to their right, raised on a dais three steps up from the floor, gleaming with white linen, gold, and brass. Frevisse firmly stopped Thomasine’s instinctive turn toward it, led her instead through the choir, past the two nuns praying at the coffins, to the church’s farther end, near the great western door that led into the courtyard and was rarely used except for processions on high feast days. There was a stone bench built from the wall on the great door’s left side, on which the sick or weary guest could rest during services.

“Sit,” ordered Frevisse.

Thomasine obeyed. Frevisse sat beside her.

“Now,” Frevisse said, “if you need to cry, get on with it.”

Thomasine did. She pressed her hands over her face and wept until the tears seeped between her fingers.

Frevisse waited patiently, until the sobs subsided to a few ragged hiccups and then silence. Thomasine’s hands fell limply into her lap.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

Frevisse waited, having no particular answer to that.

Thomasine hiccuped again on caught tears. Drawing a handkerchief from her sleeve, she wiped her face. “It was what Sister Amicia said,” she whispered. “She was hoping their bodies would be taken away soon, so the harvest home feasting won’t be spoiled by their being here. Lady Ermentrude’s and Martha’s.” She nodded painfully toward the coffins, lidded now and nailed shut, then looked at Frevisse with huge, tear-swimming eyes. “Sister Amicia is wanting harvest home to be as ever it is, not thinking of them at all and that they’re dead and won’t see harvest anymore. It hurt so much so suddenly, thinking they’d never sit down with their friends anymore, I started to cry. They’re dead and I’m crying when I should be praying.”

Frevisse said, “No, you cried for good reason. Now you’ve finished and we’ve things to see to. Come wash your face so we can be on with them.”

Thomasine raised her head. Her pale, thin face was mottled with the red of her crying, her eyes pained. “But I’m not supposed to feel these kinds of things! I’m not supposed to care about things like the body dying, or anything of world at all. I don’t want to. I want to be away from it, not hurting for it. They’ve gone to God. I’m only supposed to pray for them, not cry.”

Frevisse might have had compassion for the child if she had been asking for guidance, hut her usual impatience at Thomasine’s useless simplicity, and the pressure of too many things still needing to be done, made her ask sharply, “And what good do you think your prayers are going to be if you don’t care about what you’re praying for? We work and pray for more than just ourselves and well you’d know it if you’d paid any heed to anything at all besides yourself since you came here. What good do you think your prayers are going to be, if the only thing you care about is your own self? You cried because you were hurting for other people’s hurt, and that’s probably worth more than a hundred careful prayers with no feeling at all behind them. Now come. We’ve things to do.”

Thomasine stayed where she was, staring with mouth slightly open, looking stupid. Or stunned. Then her mouth closed, and a slow flush of color crept up her face, covering the mottling of her crying. Her eyes lost the blur of tears and her month’s soft line tightened, making her look more her age, a woman instead of a frail and cosseted little girl.

Frevisse half-expected some kind of answer from her, but after that first moment, Thomasine’s gaze dropped and she rose to her feet, showing that she was ready to come, all outward meekness again. Only the stiffness of her shoulders and her rigid neck, the cringe gone out of it, showed that what Frevisse had said had struck deep enough to leave a mark. And something of the courage she had shown to the crowner had come back, too, because before Frevisse could turn away, she lifted her head and said quietly, “Master Montfort wants it to be me who killed them, doesn’t he?”

There were ways around answering that directly, but meeting her gaze, Frevisse said levelly, “Yes. You’re the simplest choice, and with Sir Walter snapping at him, Montfort is going to want the simplest choice.”

Thomasine searched Frevisse’s face, looking for hope. Frevisse did not give it. So far she had no idea who had given the poison, or why. Until she did, Thomasine was indeed the first, best choice. “Come now,” she said. “All that may be done is being done. We must go tell Domina Edith how matters stand. She’ll want to know.”

The door to the prioress’s parlor stood open, and from it Sir Walter’s voice rumbled, raw with temper and bare of courtesy. “Hear me out! My mother is dead. By poison, Montfort says. Murdered. And from what I’ve heard, it was some one of you did it.”

Frevisse flickered one hand in the sign‘ for church, meaning Thomasine should go there and stay. Thomasine nodded and left without hesitation. When she was safely gone, Frevisse rapped at the door clearly enough to be heard over Sir Walter’s continuing voice.

“
Benedicite,”‘
Domina Edith said. Her quiet voice carried with apparent ease over Sir Walter’s, and Frevisse entered, head properly bowed but not so low she could not see all of the room from under her eyelids. Domina Edith was in her chair, drawn straightly up but facing Sir Walter with an expression that said he was far from overwhelming her with his noble temper. To her right stood Dame Claire, rigid with self-control; to her left was Father Henry, very pink with indignation, glaring at Sir Walter.

Beyond Sir Walter was Robert Fenner, standing statue-still, his face guarded. A freshly formed bruise showed dark along the side of his face. He glanced past Frevisse, looking for someone, and when he saw she was not there, set his eyes back to carefully not looking at anyone.

Sir Walter, with his mother’s way of dominating a room, stood in the parlor’s center, head up, hands on hips. He paid no heed to Frevisse but went on at Domina Edith, “My mother was never so drunk in her life she didn’t know what she was doing, and there was naught wrong with her heart. It was poison, and someone here gave it, and the only one with reason enough to do it, Montfort says, is your novice Thomasine D’Evers. I want her to come away with me, now. Montfort says he’s not done with his questions, but he’s a fool and I am not. Are you going to give her over at my asking or do you want to make a quarrel of it?”

So it had gone that far already. Frevisse could not help making a tiny sound of disgust, and Sir Walter swung around to point at her fiercely, aware of her after all. “You! You’re hosteler, right? My mother was in your keeping when someone killed her so you must share responsibility with that puling girl. I think you know more man you’ve told.” He swung back to Domina Edith. “She’s not a nun. You’ve no right to keep her. You can’t protect her. I’ll have her out of here if I have to take the place apart stone by stone!” His face was red, his light, protuberant eyes very like his mother’s. “And if the King’s man won’t do justice, I’ll have you all for sheltering her!”

Domina Edith raised her eyebrows very slightly. Father Henry, hands clenched into fists, stirred forward, but the prioress lifted a finger from the arm of her chair, stopping him. Very calmly she said to Sir Walter, “I am a professed nun, belonging to God. Not you nor Master Montfort nor the King himself, God keep him, can touch me. Or any of those in my charge.”

Sir Walter’s jaw worked, cutting off words not fit to say before he finally swung back at Frevisse and said sharply, “Produce the girl. For the sake of your soul and your prioress’s peace. You know where she is. She’s in your care—just as my mother was!”