The Boy's Tale (18 page)

"You're getting me wet!"

"I mean to!"

"Stop it!"

She did not. Her third stick splashed between him and Jasper.

"Come on," said Edmund. "Let's push her in."

He waded to the bank, Jasper after him, and scrambled out.

"You wouldn't dare!" Lady Adela said, backing away.

"Yes, we would."

She hesitated, decided he meant it, and turned and ran, off the path into the underbrush, almost instantly out of sight.

Edmund, still in a temper, would have gone after her, but Jasper stopped and called after him, "We don't have our shoes."

Edmund pulled up, thought about it, then shrugged it all away as a waste of time, settling for saying loudly at the woods, "We're well rid of her anyway! And she'd better not tell anybody where we are either." Then he added to Jasper, "Come on. I bet I can throw farther than you can."

It was more fun to throw sticks from the top of the bank, and watch the ripple patterns break against each other and make little dazzles, of sunlight over the water. They came, of course, to tussling and then to daring each other to jump off the bank into the water, but they both knew neither of them dared to do it, Will's story notwithstanding. Their cheerful arguing had come down to, "I will if you will."—"You go first."—when Jasper, knowing it was not going to happen, moved away to find another stick. He was saying, "Not until you do," when Edmund's shocked yell spun him around.

He was in time to see his brother pitch sprawling into the water. As Jasper stared, he disappeared in a great splash, surfaced flailing desperately, too choked to cry out again, and Jasper realized he had to do something. But before he could, he was hit a great blow in his back by two hands, sending him over the edge after his brother.

Once she had determined the children were nowhere in the cloister and made sure the gate into the orchard was locked and the key still hidden and had snapped at Jenet for being useless and set her to look through the cloister all over again, Frevisse crossed the yard to the guesthall, learned by quiet questioning of one of the servants that the children were not with Sir Gawyn or Maryon, and returned to stand angrily at the top of the guesthall steps while trying to decide what best to do next.

They were not in the cloister, she was sure of that, and they had not gone out the orchard gate. They were unlikely to have all three fallen down the well together and made no sound while they did it, and someone would have seen them if they had gone out the kitchen door or gotten as far as the outer yard. That left only the side yard and the postern gate. It was quite possible that three small, determined children could have skulked out that way unnoticed.

She should go back to Dame Claire for permission to go out, Frevisse knew, but that would take time and the sooner and more quietly the children could be brought back, the better. If she did not find them very soon, then Master Naylor would have to be asked for men to look for them, but it was too soon to raise that much alarm. She doubted they had gone far.

At the postern, looking out over the gardens and sun-bright fields, her hand shading her eyes, she tried to guess where the children might have gone; and saw the trees along the stream and knew where, as a child, she would have gone on such a warm afternoon.

The two servant women hoeing in the kitchen garden straightened as she passed them but to her question said they had only just now come out and had seen no children go by. Frevisse went on, still sure of where they most likely were, and at the wood edge came on Lady Adela sitting in the long grass trying to weave fading sweet cecily flowers into a wreath.

Relieved to see her, certain Edmund and Jasper must be nearby, Frevisse said, "Their stalks are too stiff to work well for that."

Unaware of her until then, Lady Adela dropped her work and scrambled to her feet to curtsy and gasp, "I didn't hear you come, Dame."

"I could tell that," Frevisse said, standing very straight and staring down at her sternly.

Lady Adela gulped, scooped the ragged wreath from the ground, and held it out to her. "For you, Dame," she suggested hopefully.

"I don't think so. Where are Edmund and Jasper?"

Lady Adela dropped the wreath again and pointed into the trees. "There. At the stream. They were mean to me," she added.

"Show me where."

Lady Adela hesitated. "Are we in trouble?"

"You know the answer to that. And in worse trouble the longer people are worried over you. Show me where they are."

Lady Adela sighed at the inevitable and turned to lead the way in among the trees.

From somewhere not far away there was a cry and a great splash, followed an instant later by another splash.

"They've fallen in!" Lady Adela exclaimed. "Into the pool, and it's deep!"

Frevisse pushed her aside and ran. Hampered by the underbrush and her skirts and veil, she fought her way through and, following the sounds, came out onto a path above the wide curve of a pool. Well out in the water, beating madly at it, sinking and fighting their way to air again, were Edmund and Jasper. There was no hope at all that they could reach the bank on their own, and Frevisse looked desperately around for a stick large enough to thrust out to them. There was nothing and with no choice she moved to where the bank was less steep, reached down to grab the back hem of her gown and pull it forward and up between her legs, bundling the skirts to above her knees. There was too much of it to tuck under her belt, she was forced to hold it with one hand, leaving her other hand free for balance as she waded into the water.

The bottom dropped steeply and was breast-high on her by the time she was in reach of Jasper. Stretching, she grabbed his out-flung hand and dragged him toward her, ordering, "Don't kick, don't fight me, or we'll both drown!"

She did not expect him, in his terror, to understand her but he did; he went limp and let her pull him to her. She swung him around to behind her, ordering, "Hold on to me!" and reached for Edmund just sinking out of sight. Only barely she managed to clutch his hair before he disappeared. Ruthlessly she dragged his head back up out of the water and toward her. He was conscious but gagging for air. He had swallowed too much water and needed help, but there was nothing she could do for him here. Shifting her hold to under his chin to pull him through the water with his face above it, and weighed down now with Jasper clinging to her gown in the back, she struggled back toward the bank.

Halfway there, she was unsure that she would make it. Her soaked clothing and the children were too heavy. They dragged her down and her legs no longer wanted to hold her up. But Lady Adela was weeping on the bank hard enough to break her own heart and anyone's who heard her, and Jasper was gasping his way through every prayer he had ever learned in English and French and Latin, and Edmund was so utterly at the mercy of her strength that she struggled against her own aching need to collapse the few yards more to water shallow enough that Jasper's trailing legs touched bottom and he stood up, releasing her from his weight. From there she was able to wrestle Edmund and her skirts to the bank, Jasper splashing beside her.

Ignoring Lady Adela's sobbing and leaving Jasper to help himself, she pulled Edmund out of the water, rolled him onto his belly, and pounded on his back. He retched and gagged, water came out of his mouth, and he began to cry. Satisfied he was breathing sufficiently, Frevisse sank down in the soaking mess of her gown, fixed her gaze on Jasper's white but unwailing face, and demanded, "How could you be such fools as to both fall in?"

He began to shudder, sank down on the ground, drew his knees up against his chest, and wrapped his arms around them, holding tightly to himself. "We didn't fall," he whispered. "Someone pushed us."

Chapter 14

The two women working in the kitchen garden spied them as they straggled out from among the trees and came running with exclaims to help. Without answering their questions, Frevisse ordered, "Take the boys to Jenet. I'll bring Lady Adela."

She had already told Jasper and then Edmund when he was more recovered that they were not to say to anyone else that they had been pushed. "Nor you either, my lady," she had added fiercely to Lady Adela, goaded by fear as much as by anger. "And after this when you're told to stay where you've been put, maybe you'll do it!"

Edmund and Jasper had nodded miserable, dripping agreement. Now they clung to her hands, one on either side of her, resisting being given over to the women, but Frevisse handed them firmly away. "You need to be dry and put to bed as soon as may be." And inside the cloister walls in safety. "I can't walk fast with these soaked skirts. Go on. I'll be there when I may."

They let the women pick them up then, Edmund's head drooping down onto Joan's shoulder.

With a belated thought, Frevisse asked the women, "Have you seen anybody else while you've been out here? Has anyone else come by?"

"No, my lady. There's been no one, not nearby, save you. Most everyone's gone to the haying," Joan said readily. The other woman nodded agreement.

Frevisse gestured them to go on. Edmund had closed his eyes, but Jasper looked back at Frevisse all the way out of sight.

Seeming not to notice but with a small ache for him in her heart where she did not want it to be, Frevisse took Lady Adela's hand, kicked her soaked skirts away from her legs—even wrung out, they were a burden and bother— and followed, wishing there were someone to carry
her,
she was so exhausted. But there was not and she said a prayer for strength and kept on, one bare foot after another. Her shoes were somewhere in the bottom of the pool. One each in exchange for the boys' lives, she reminded herself, but the charity of the thought was forced. What she wanted was to spank them and Lady Adela very hard for their foolishness, and she dwelt on that thought because until she had them all, including herself, back inside the nunnery walls, she did not want to think about the possibility that whoever had pushed them into the water had almost surely still been there, hidden among the trees, watching, while she dragged them out.

But he was surely gone now, knowing the alarm would be raised. He would be somewhere else long before she could tell Master Naylor to send searchers. All the same, some sort of search would have to be made and soon. She would have to talk to Master Naylor quickly. No, she would have to talk to Dame Claire first. To explain what had happened, and to consult over what had to be done both to better protect the boys and to find whomever had attacked them.

No, she amended, pulling her skirts away from her legs again; first she had to change into dry clothing.

By St. Benedict's Rule, the dorter was supposed to be a large room where all the nuns slept communally, but in the centuries since St. Benedict wrote it, the Rule had eased in certain areas. The large dorter was divided into wooden-walled cells for each nun, where she slept and kept her personal belongings.

The curtain drawn across her cell's open end, Frevisse took off her wet, muddy gown and undergown and from the chest beside her bed took her only change of clothing, a gown and undergown identical to the first except they were clean and dry. She had meant to put them on after her weekly bath but there was no help for it now.

She concentrated on drying herself and re-dressing, but her mind was not interested in that problem. As she fussed at the row of buttons from the black undergown's elbow to wrist, the one thought that pushed at her was that someone wanted the boys dead.

A chance attempt against them by a killer passing casually by? Too unlikely to bother considering. There had to be a particular reason someone wanted them dead. Who? And for what reason?

It was hard to imagine it was someone of the nunnery or the village. So far as nearly everyone knew, they were only boys who had had misfortune on a journey. One of their own people? Why? Or someone else, from outside, who knew who they were and had somehow found them here? But again, why kill them?

Their mother was in danger, not of death but certainly censure and probably polite but ruthless imprisonment, for her imprudent marriage. The late king had imprisoned his stepmother for years for no better reason than that he disliked her. But how did their mother's indiscretion put Edmund and Jasper in danger?