The Boy's Tale (28 page)

Colwin had used Lady Adela and the oath to lure the boys from the cloister. Had he merely been making mischief to amuse himself, or had there been purpose to it? But if he had made the attempt against the boys there at the pigsty when an unexpected chance offered itself and then again more deliberately at the pool, who had killed him? Or had it been Will who tried both times to kill the boys, and when Colwin had interfered with him, or came on him by accident, killed him for it? But how did that lead to Will's death?

Every possibility ended in the uncertainties of questions she could not answer yet. There were too many pieces missing. Or she was not seeing the pieces she had in their right order. There were answers somewhere, and some way to find them—but they had to be found quickly, before there was more murder.

But first she had to go to Domina Edith, to face a farewell she did not want to make.

Wiping at her damp forehead and the frown drawn tiredly between her eyes, with a wish that she had had more sleep last night, she continued up the stairs.

The parlor was still, empty in the afternoon sunlight beginning to slant through the wide window overlooking the courtyard. In the bedroom beyond it the stillness was almost as deep. Sister Thomasine knelt at the prie-dieu in silent prayer. Sister Lucy sat beside the bed, fanning Domina Edith's face with a sheet of parchment taken from some book. The gentle sway of her hand, the small noise of the parchment moving in the air, were the only sound and movement in the room, and for a dreaded moment Frevisse was unsure that Domina Edith still lived.

But faintly, faintly the sheet over her stirred and her face was not yet graying with death.

Frevisse had meant only to stand in the doorway, make her silent farewell and a prayer and go softly away. She had thought that was all she could bear. But Sister Lucy's face was as wan as Domina Edith's, and Frevisse went forward, silently held out her hand for the parchment.

The elderly nun hesitated. Frevisse made a gesture as if washing her face and stretched her back. Sister Lucy blinked with weary acknowledgment of her need, gave over the parchment, and rose from the stool, hand pressed to the small of her back. She moved aside and Frevisse took her place, beginning to fan Domina Edith's face as Sister Lucy left the room.

Frevisse had thought to pray while she sat there, but she found herself watching Domina Edith's face instead. The gentleness of her dying had taken much of the age from it. She seemed small and smooth-skinned as a child, but the serenity she had lived in showed in her sleeping face with a completeness that only years gave. She was past being old; she was no longer really here at all but well along the way that could only be gone alone, no matter how you went about your dying, no matter how much or little you were loved.

Tenderly, for her own sake even more than Domina Edith's, Frevisse leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead. Gently, as gently as the prioress's breathing there in the summer stillness of the room.

When Sister Lucy returned, Frevisse gave her back her place without comment and went away, her grieving quiet in her for a while.

This time she paused deliberately at the window on the stairs to look out, over the nunnery wall to the green distance of fields and the forest and the blazing clear sky beyond them all. She had chosen long past to make St. Frideswide's the world to her, closed into it so she could set her mind and heart free in quest of matters beyond the world. But whatever she had chosen, the world beyond the walls was still there with its fears, its dangers, its ambitions.

Its beauties.

Here, from the narrow window, only its beauties could be seen, but that did not mean the fears, dangers, and ambitions were not real. Nor did their reality mean that beauty was a lie.

All of them were real. The error lay in denying the reality of one because the others existed, too.

And there was the trouble with how she had been looking at the pieces of the problem. They had to fit together some way, and she had not yet found it.

Chapter
21

The stairway's warmth was suddenly too much to bear, and Frevisse went hurriedly down. She needed somewhere else to think. Not the cloister walk, somewhere she would be unlikely to be interrupted. Somewhere . . .

As she came out at the bottom of the stairs, Sister Juliana bustled past her toward the outer door. Sister Juliana was not given to bustling; distracted, Frevisse watched her. And then heard the firm, ongoing knocking at the outer door. A knocking heavy enough she should have heard it herself. By Sister Juliana's sharp glance as she passed, she agreed, but there was no help for it now and Frevisse began to withdraw discreetly from whatever outward business was demanding attention. If she went the other way along the cloister walk . . .

Sister Juliana's alarmed cry echoed along the passage from the outer door. Frevisse spun around and went back to help. But in the passage, as she came in sight of the door now open and Sister Juliana standing there, her step faltered as if suddenly there were insufficient floor under her feet. Nearly filling the doorway—and no way to stop him if he chose to come in—was a man in helmet and breastplate, with a glimpse in the yard beyond him of mounted, armored men.

Quelling an urge to retreat, Frevisse steadied herself and went forward. In a clear, assured, and carrying voice, she said, "What is it, Sister Juliana?"

Sister Juliana turned to face her, eyes wide, mouth working soundlessly. Frevisse laid a gentle hand on her arm and spoke past her to the waiting man. "Can we help you in some way, sir? If you want shelter for the night, I pray you go across the yard to the guesthalls. You and your men will be seen to there."

The man was fumbling at the chin strap of his helmet. As she spoke, he loosed it and pulled his helmet and coif off to show his sweat-matted hair. He was suddenly far less threatening. With a slight bow, he said, "My lady would speak with a Dame Frevisse, said to be in this house. Is it possible?"

"Your . . . lady?" Frevisse asked, her voice level with outward politeness while she tightened her hold on Sister Juliana's arm to keep her silent and hold her there, thinking for a shocked moment he must mean the boy's mother, God forbid, and she did not want to face that alone.

But with a nod across the yard the man said, "The countess of Suffolk."

Frevisse could not stop an audible gasp of relief. She looked past him and aside from the armored men directly in sight of the door to the other riders across the yard. There were perhaps a dozen of them, men and women mostly dressed in the dark blue of the Suffolk household, as the soldiers were under their light armor, she realized now. Some of them had dismounted and one of the women was bringing a filled goblet from the well to the most richly dressed of the women. Still mounted on her tall gray palfrey whose dark blue harness was embossed with the de la Pole arms of golden leopard heads, Countess Alice took the goblet with murmured thanks, but her head was already coming around toward the door, drawn by her name.

Her cousin's loveliness startled Frevisse as it usually did. With her cream complexion touched with rose and her finely drawn features and fair hair, Countess Alice was an ideal of fashionable womanhood. Her houppelande was a plain-cut one for travel, its sleeves hanging no more than a foot below her wrists; but it was of rich cloth as deeply green as the young fields, and while her women wore wimples and simple veils for riding, her own hair was gathered up and hidden under a padded roll with liripipe drawn under her chin and thrown over her left shoulder with an elegance that bespoke both ease and assurance.

"Frevisse! Cousin!" she called, and waved with her free hand, not needing to bother with her reins since a squire was holding to her horse's bridle.

"My Lady Alice," Frevisse returned with a curtsy.

"Your
cousin?”
Sister Juliana breathed beside her, fear forgotten in wonder. It was known that Alice Chaucer was Frevisse's cousin, their mothers being sisters, and that she was married to the earl of Suffolk, but knowing that by way of priory gossip and actually seeing the countess and her retinue and guard in St. Frideswide's courtyard were two vastly different things. "Your cousin," Sister Juliana repeated almost reverently.

Impatiently, Frevisse said, "Yes, I know. You'd best go tell Dame Claire."

Reminded that hovering in the outer doorway staring hardly suited with her dignity and the priory's propriety, Sister Juliana curtsied quickly toward Countess Alice and retreated out of sight.

Frevisse, her mind running quickly through possible reasons Alice might be here without warning, waited while a squire lifted Alice down from her fashionable box saddle and one of her ladies brushed travel dust from her skirts. When the woman, satisfied the countess was presentable, stepped back with a low curtsy, Alice came across the cobbles to Frevisse, hands held out in greeting.

Their lives had gone such widely different ways that they rarely met, but of late an affection that had barely been there when they were girls together had grown between them, partly out of shared memories and affection for Alice's parents, both dead now, and partly out of newly discovered respect for each other, for the women they had become. It was with unfeigned warmth that Frevisse took Alice's hands. Across the yard she could see Dame Alys looming at the top of the guesthall steps and said, "Your folk will be seen to, but you'll come in, won't you?"

"Gladly, Cousin." Smiling, graceful, Alice swept past her into the passageway; but as Frevisse turned from closing the door, Alice said, low-voiced and intent, her smile and light manners gone, "Is there somewhere private we may talk immediately? The prioress's parlor if there's nowhere else?"

Even wary as she already was, Frevisse was disconcerted by her cousin's intensity and said, "Not her parlor. Domina Edith is dying."

Alice's concern was instant and real. "Frevisse, I'm sorry to hear it! Father spoke of her sometimes. He thought very well of her. I'm indeed sorry."

Frevisse shied from the sympathy. "There's the lower parlor, just here at the end of the passage. We can talk there."

All smiles and lightness again, chatting about the warm weather and wasn't it good for the haying—Frevisse had never known her to take particular interest in haying before—Alice followed her into the cloister walk and along it to the parlor door. It was an austere room, kept for the nuns to receive their personal guests, anyone not needing the prioress's attention. There was a bench, a few stools, a table where refreshments might be put, a chair, but neither Frevisse nor Alice sat.

Alice had all the elegant loveliness her own fair features and her and her husband's wealth could provide, but it was her father's intelligence that lived behind the elegance, and as Frevisse closed the parlor door, Alice dropped her lightness and smiles again and said, "Your letter reached me. What have you heard about Queen Katherine that made you so curious you wrote me of her?"

"What's so desperate that you came here because of my letter?" Frevisse returned as quickly.

Countered, Alice paused, her expression revealing how rarely someone met a demand of hers with an answering demand. Then she shifted past annoyance to acceptance of Frevisse's challenge and with a straight-lipped smile nothing like her earlier one answered, "I showed your letter to Bishop Beaufort—"

"Beaufort!" The bishop of Winchester. The duke of Gloucester's great rival in the royal government.

"He and my lord husband are together in all matters around the King now."

"Then why show the letter to him rather than your husband?"

"Because Suffolk is bound for France with the latest muster. Your letter reached me barely in time for me to tell him of it before he sailed. He said Beaufort should know, that I should show it to him, and when I did—"

Frevisse swung away from her, hands clenched together, and paced the small length of the room. "I never thought it would go so far!"

Ignoring her outburst, Alice said, "My lord bishop thinks very well of you, from that matter at my father's funeral."

Frevisse shook her head; she did not want the bishop of Winchester to think of her at all. "He thought, as I did, that there was more than idle curiosity in your letter and that we should know more and immediately. For him to take an open hand in it would be too notable—"