The Widow's Tale (Sister Frevisse Medieval Mysteries Book 14) (23 page)

She had probably truly believed that but the stupidity of doing so made Frevisse insist even more harshly, “Why? What did Laurence want it for? Did you even know what it was?”

“No! I still don’t! I just knew it was something he could use to buy the duke of Suffolk’s favor he wanted so much. They were just supposed to take it!” Pier voice scaled up into a wail and broke on a new rush of tears.

No one moved to comfort her.

“Why?” Frevisse coldly insisted again. “Why did you tell him about it?”

When Ivetta only went on sobbing, too lost in her own hurt to answer, Master Fyncham stepped forward and laid a hand heavily on her shoulder in firm reminder that she had been spoken to and had to answer. Tear-smeared and far gone in sorrow for herself, Ivetta raised her head and said on a half-whimper, pleading to be understood, “It was for my boy. He’s a priest stuck away nowhere. I want better for him. When they were trying to make Mary marry that Clement, Master Helyngton swore that if I helped them, then he’d help me. I didn’t. I wouldn’t. But this was only a paper or something. I thought maybe it would be enough. He said it was. That he’d help my boy. But he swore there’d be no killing either!”

“And you believed him?” Master Say protested disbelievingly.

“I didn’t have anything else to believe in, did I?” Ivetta wailed. “There was nobody else going to help my Nicholas, was there? Not Sir Gerveys with his duke of York and going away to Ireland and taking Pers with him. Not Master Say. He’d get the girls away from Master Helyngton but that wouldn’t have done anything for my Nicholas, would it? It had to be Master Helyngton or nobody and he said he would!”

Now it was Mistress Say who protested, “Ivetta, how could you think to let him have Mary and Jane? How could you mean to do that?”

Ivetta was beginning to be sullen at all their doubts. “Mistress Cristiana was going to die and not have them anyway, Master Say would stop that Laurence. I knew that. So if I could do something for my Nicholas, I had to, that’s all. Don’t you see?”

Frevisse saw. Protected by a muddle of excuses to herself, Ivetta had chosen ambition for her son over Cristiana’s need.

“It was that Master Colies,” Ivetta said with angry misery. “He laughed when Master Helyngton said nobody would be hurt. I should have known then. It’s his doing it all went wrong.”

There were a great many reasons besides Colies why so much was gone wrong, but Frevisse did not bother to point them out. She had not planned her sudden attack on Ivetta, had meant to leave accusing her until tomorrow, but the words had come on an uprush of anger, and now that it was done, she was not surprised by how easily Ivetta had broken. She saw that the woman had no depth of thought or strength. She did whatever seemed immediately needed, followed her soonest thought, probably never held to a longer course than whatever she saw lying just in front of her. This time her shallow thinking had cost five men’s lives and Cristiana a bitter death. That the death had been a quicker death than Cristiana would otherwise have had might someday be a comfort to Frevisse. Just now it was not.

“Master Fyncham,” Master Say ordered, “lock her away some place for the night. I’ll give her over to the crowner to be questioned tomorrow.”

As Master Fyncham took her under one arm and raised her from the chair, Ivetta protested, “I didn’t do anything! Not against the law!”

“You’ll tell what you did so the sheriff will better know what happened,” Master Say said coldly.

His coldness—or maybe the looks on all their faces— silenced her. Beginning to sob again, she let Master Fyncham lead her away, and only when she was well gone did Frevisse ask, “What will be done with her?”

Master Say made a small, discontented sound. “Little can be done. She’ll be questioned about what she did and what she knows and then, if I have my way, she’ll be sent to live with her son in that place in the Huntingdonshire marshes and serve her right. I won’t have her anywhere around here, that’s certain.”

Weary with sorrow, Mistress Say asked, “But why, when it was too late to have this hateful paper, did Colles kill Gerveys? And poor Sawnder? There wasn’t any use to it then.”

“To have Gerveys out of the way?” Master Say guessed. “To end his interfering?”

Among the day’s nightmare swirl of memories Frevisse had a clear one of Colles’ face as he killed Cristiana. It had been alight with pleasure. He had looked a man come suddenly alive at the chance to kill. And because she was so tired, Frevisse said, when otherwise she might not have, “Or he did it simply because he wanted to. For the pleasure of having Gerveys dead.”

Mistress Say stood up abruptly. “I have to go to bed.” Master Say rose, too, but stiffly, his hours of riding telling on him, and said to Frevisse, “My lady, if you’ll see to the candles, please?”

Frevisse made a small nod that she would but asked, “What will you do about Nol?”

“Nol.” Master Say seemed to pull thought of Nol out of some far corner of his mind. “Yes. Nol. I think I’ll send him to Lady Alice with a letter of what we know now, and tell him not to return. Let him make his way in the world with Suffolk’s favor. Or, better, with no one’s at all.”

He took a candle from the nearest stand and followed Mistress Say through the shadows to their bedchamber. When the door was shut behind them, Frevisse took another candle for herself, blew out the rest, and left the parlor for the high-roofed blackness of the hall. Not bound for her own bed, she had to go the hall’s length, the candle’s light small among the huge shadows. The close walls and low ceiling of the screens passage and the stairs up to Cristiana’s bedchamber were better, and the bedchamber itself was brightly lighted enough, candles burning at the four corners of the bed where the long, still form of Christiana’s body lay in its shroud.

Kneeling in prayer on the bed’s far side, Domina Elisabeth looked up when Frevisse came in but did not speak and for that Frevisse was grateful. Just now there was nothing she wanted to say to anyone or for anyone to say to her. She and Domina Elisabeth merely bowed their heads slightly to one another, Frevisse knelt beside the bed to take up the prayers for Cristiana’s soul, and Domina Elisabeth rose and went to the mattress waiting on the floor across the room. Head bowed, hands folded together, Frevisse waited through the quiet sounds of her removing and folding and setting aside veil and wimple and outer gown; waited while she lay down and settled; waited until the steady breathing soon told she slept. Waited then for prayers to come but they did not. She was alone with the night’s deep quiet and the deeper quiet of Cristiana’s body on the bed and wanted to say her own prayers for mercy for Cristiana’s soul, but nothing came to her. Only plain
Requiescat in pace.
Rest in peace. Which was insufficient to the great need crying in her not only to pray for Cristiana but to find a way past her own guilt for Cristiana’s death.

No one else was ever likely to see her guilt, but she knew and that was enough. Knew she had understood too little and had left too much until too late. Knew she had had everything sorted down to near certainty of Ivetta’s guilt by this morning, but had chosen to leave accusing her for later. Had chosen to wait until the already over-busied day was done because Ivetta would still be here then and nothing more would happen before then. She had thought. And had been most terribly wrong.

But if she had spoken out this morning, would it have kept Cristiana from what she did? Or only burdened her with one more bitter grief? As it was, she had been spared knowledge of Ivetta’s betrayal. And the death her disease would have finally given her.

Frevisse supposed that time would come when she might weave some shred of comfort from that; but there would never be comfort against knowing her own guilt in having given too little heed to Cristiana these past days. She had not troubled to see how far Cristiana was gone into despair, how at the end of her strength she was to endure any more; and because she had not seen, two men’s souls were surely gone to hell and Cristiana had died with hardly time to make her own peace.

But Cristiana
had
made that peace. From her last words, Frevisse could even find hope that she had killed Laurence not so much in hatred for him but for love of her daughters.

Was it better to have killed for love rather than in hate? Frevisse did not know, could only hope, and with a sigh out of her depths of sorrow and regrets, she turned to Compline’s prayers. Despite the hour was probably nearer to Matins, she wanted Compline’s prayers. They were meant to bring the heart and mind to peace after a day’s troubles. Even such a day as today. But the prayers that came to her first were from Matins after all.
A vinculispeccatorum nostrorum ahsolvai nos omnipotent et misericors Dominus.
From the chains of our sins set us free, almighty and merciful Lord.
Miserere nostri, Domine, miserere nostri. Fiat misericordia tua, Domine, super nos, quemadmodum speravimus in te.
Pity us, Lord, pity us. Let your mercy, Lord, be on us, as we have hoped in you.

The words wound around her mind and into her heart, giving her, if not the peace she needed, then the beginning of what might someday be peace.

Because beyond today was Eternity and the vastness of God’s Love.

W
hat happened
in Normandy that summer of 1449 is told in detail by French chroniclers of the time—Enguerrand de Monstrelet and Jean de Waurin among others—but in less detail by English contemporaries and usually in even less detail by modern historians. To follow the latters’ example, suffice it to say that after more than a hundred years of warfare in France, the English in a matter of months lost almost everything the war had gained them.

On the other hand, the French chroniclers and the documents in the treasure-trove
Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Wars of the English in France During the Reign of Henry the Sixth, King of England
(edited by Joseph Stevenson for the Rolls Series, 1864) detail Somerset’s refusal to negotiate over the broken truce despite the king of France’s repeated attempts to do so and Somerset’s orders to various English-held fortresses and towns to offer no resistance, simply to surrender.
Letters and Papers
also has the report written by Sir Francois de Surienne—the man whose attack on the Breton town broke the truce—to the king of France (Joan of Arc’s King Charles VII, once the Dauphin) of how Suffolk and Somerset set him on to do it. They had tried to put all the blame for the English losses on him as a scapegoat, so he had escaped and with this report was making personal peace with the French. This element of self-interest of course casts doubt on anything he might report against Suffolk and Somerset, except for the corroborative evidence of Somerset’s own letters to the French king and his well-chronicled failure to resist the French sweep into English-held territory.

Charges of treason were made against Somerset in England for years afterward, but he was never prosecuted for his utter dereliction of duty in Normandy. In fact, following the duke of Suffolk’s death in the following year, Somerset took his place as head of the royal government. For reasons I fail to understand, most modern histories of the Hundred Years’ War not only brush past these events but go on to treat the ensuing charges and outcry against Somerset as unjustified political maneuvering by the duke of York and others.

John Say—Sir John Say, as he became—of Broxbourne and his wife Elizabeth are real. In the anti-Suffolk polemics of the next year and so he figures as a villain by association and I had thought to use him as my villain in this book. Researching his overall career and life, however, I found him less a villain and more a highly competent man who seems to have served the crown of England rather than other men’s political ends. There is even evidence of the affection between him and his wife in the epitaph still to be seen on her grave: “Here lies ibame Elizabeth Sometime Wife to Sir John Say Knight daughter of Lawrence Cheyne Esquire of Cambridge Shire a Woman of Noble blood and most noble in good manners which deceased the xxv day of September The year of our Lord MCCClxxiii and interred in this church of Broxbourne awaiting The body of her said Husband whose Souls God Bring to Everlasting bliss amen.”

The manor of Baas remains, though nothing of the Says’ manor house itself. Gone, too, is St. Augustine’s church as it was in 1449 except for the ancient font. All else was built anew not long after this story, paid for by . . . John Say. He is buried there, his grave and damaged tomb brass still to be seen. Should you go there, you will likewise see that one Richard Goodhirst—Father Richard in the story—was priest at St. Augustine’s sometime in the mid-l400s. For a detailed study of John Say’s life and career, there is J.S. Roskell’s
Parliament and Politics in Late Medieval England,
vol. 2, The Hambledon Press, 1981.

All other non-noble characters in this story and the events around the Says and Broxbourne are fictional, save that King Henry VI did ride by way of Waltham and Ware to Cambridge and Ely in August 1449.

A minor point is my use of
butlery
in place of the more common term
buttery.
Butlery, the older form of the word, was still occasionally used in the 1400s and better conveys the room’s purpose.

A less minor point concerns the use of torture in late medieval England. Common enough as a legal device in earlier centuries, it was illegal by this time, except in such a situation as Frevisse cites in the story. Like police brutality in our own time, it surely occurred; but only later, with the rise of the Tudors and the Renaissance in England, did torture again become an established, accepted, and extensive part of the English legal system.

Again, my particular thanks go to Sarah J. Mason and Bill Welland. It was because I’ve been very happily a guest at their home in Broxbourne that “Sir John Say of Broxbourne” caught my attention and set me on the path taken by
The Widow’s Tale.
Because my health prevented another visit there during the first drafts of the story, they generously sent me information and pictures and maps of the area, Bill even venturing out to take photographs around

Baas so I could better envision the lay of the land, changed though it surely is after more than five-hundred years. When I did finally go there, I found I needed to change nothing, they had so well provided me with facts and details.

Certainly not least among their many kindnesses, they have phoned me so that I could hear the bells ringing at St. Augustine’s church across Broxbourne’s green from their home.