The Clerk's Tale

Chapter 8

The trouble, Frevisse realized upon awakening near dawn, roused by sounds of the household starting to stir, was that asking questions of Lady Agnes about the Lengley inheritance and other things would be awkward now that she knew Frevisse was, however distantly, kin to my lord of Suffolk. At this time yesterday it had seemed the stay with her would be simple and brief. Now it was become a tangle of lordly ambitions and questions that were not going to be easy to ask.

Someone rattled the latch, then came in, light from a carried candle showing through the drawn bed curtains before the maidservant said, “Good morning, my ladies. There’s snow come at last,” as she crossed the room to light their candle on the chest. Briefly Frevisse gave way to hope that it was maybe early enough there was chance of being dressed and across to the priory for Prime, but even as she thought it, the priory bell began to call to the Office and Domina Elisabeth stirred toward awake with a slow unwillingness that told there would be no hurrying to prayers this morning.

In truth, the only hurrying was into their cold clothing and down to the hall where a fire was built up and burning high on the hearth. Bread and ale and some of last night’s meat pie were brought to them there and a bench pulled close for them to sit with their feet toward the fire. With its welcome heat on their faces and gradually warming through their gowns, they said something of Prime’s prayers and psalms, but for Frevisse it was heavy going, the day all out of order with breaking their fast before they prayed and no Mass afterward and servants coming and going behind them…

She brought her thoughts up short, took firm hold on them, and set them to where they should be-Scrutare me, Domine, et proba me; explora renes meos et cor meum. Search me, Lord, and try me; test my soul and my heart-deliberately unknotting her thoughts and weaving them into prayer.

When they had finished, she judged it likely near the time Lady Agnes, up by now and dressed and breakfasted, would ask for their company and they would not escape her until they went to Tierce. Then Domina Elisabeth would go to her cousin and Frevisse would… what?

Before she had found answer to that there came a rapping at the hall’s outer door. Lady Agnes’s manservant, just come from kitchenward with an armload of logs for the fire, dumped them on the hearth and went to find out who was there, shutting the inner door behind him to close off the draught when he opened the outer so that it was a few moments more before Domina Elisabeth and Frevisse saw who was come, as he hurried in ahead of the servant following him with equal hurry away from the cold.

“Master Gruesby?” said Frevisse in surprise and stood up as the clerk, bundled deep into a cloak, his hands buried in its folds and snow dusted over his dark hat and shoulders, went hesitant between one step and the next, slowed, but managed to come the rest of the way and bow to them both while the manservant went to his task of adding logs to the fire.

“My… my ladies,” Master Gruesby said unevenly, whether from chattering cold or uneasiness. He made another bow to Domina Elisabeth. “By… by your leave, please, may I speak with Dame Frevisse?”

“Of course.” Domina Elisabeth gestured him closer to the fire. “Here, move nearer the warmth, pray.”

That seemed to unsettle him worse but he obeyed, pulling off his gloves and putting his hands out toward the flames while saying at Frevisse, with little, uneasy looks at Domina Elisabeth, “My lady asks pardon for asking anyone out into the cold but since you’d be coming to church anyway, she supposed, she was wondering, if you would come to see her this morning. If it please you. If you would do her the courtesy.”

“Your lady?” Frevisse was momentarily puzzled, then understood. “Mistress Montfort?”

“Mistress Montfort, yes.” Master Gruesby rushed at his words, as if to have them done as soon as might be. “It was Master Christopher’s thought. He’s been called away to another death. At Moulsford. Word came late yesterday. He rode out at first light.”

“What happened?” Domina Elisabeth asked.

Looking anywhere but at either of the women, Master Gruesby managed, “It seems someone dropped a tree on himself. Likely an accident but there was no one there to see it and Master Christopher must serve as crowner to say whether that’s all it was or no.”

“God have mercy on their soul,” Domina Elisabeth said.

She crossed herself, and Frevisse, Master Gruesby, and the manservant just standing up from the fire did likewise before Master Gruesby went on, still at a rush, “Master Montfort’s funeral won’t be delayed because of it, he thinks. He’ll be back tomorrow. But if you’d give a little time to his mother, Dame Frevisse, it would divert her, Master Christopher thought. He thought that with him gone, it would be well for her to be… diverted.”

Frevisse looked to Domina Elisabeth. “Might I?”

If Domina Elisabeth was wondering why Frevisse instead of herself was asked, she hid it. “There’s no reason why you shouldn’t. If you wish, please do.”

Frevisse quite wished, for several reasons, but all she said aloud to Master Gruesby was, “Pray, say I’ll be pleased to come to her after Tierce.”

Master Gruesby bobbed a low bow of thanks, drawing back a step even as he did and another step while he said, “Thank you, my lady. Please you, I’ll await you at the cloister door after Tierce to see you to the guesthall.”

Frevisse held back from saying she thought she could find her own way to the guesthall, merely said in answer to his courtesy, “Thank you.”

With another bow, Master Gruesby made his escape and Frevisse turned to ask Domina Elisabeth, “How was Mistress Montfort yesterday while you were with her?” Because curious though she was about a woman unfortunate enough to be married to Montfort and bear him children-five, she thought Christopher had once said-time spent with someone in deep mourning for the man might be more than she could well face.

“Quiet,” said Domina Elisabeth. “But we only met at the priory gate as we were coming to the inquest, hardly a time for her to be much given to talk.”

“You sat with her through it.”

“She hardly stirred, barely raised her head, did not cry at all that I saw, but very possibly her grief was drained to the dregs for a while. At the end she bade me farewell and we parted. That was all, and if she’s the same today, you’ll have a dull time of it.”

It sounded so but still it gave something to which she could look forward. Besides, in the brief time it would take Master Gruesby to see her to the guesthall, she might have time to question him a little or at least tell him what little she had so far learned, doubtful though she was that any of it was going to be new to him.

But Letice called to them from the gallery then, asking if they’d come up to Lady Agnes and they did, keeping her company until it was time to go to Tierce and Emme brought their cloaks. Outside, a harsh wind helped them across the street and through the priory gateway, a slight snow in large flakes flighting around them and blown into little drifts along the base of walls but the ground frozen; the two of them came dry-footed into the cloister, safe out of the wind if not the cold, in time to join the last of the nuns hastening into the church.

Tierce went its usual way, today’s psalms and prayers strong with hope for God’s help in time of peril-Deus, audi orationem meam; auribus percipe verba oris mei… Deus adjuvat me; et Dominus susceptor est animae meae. God, hear my prayer; with your ears hear the words of my mouth… God helps me; and the Lord protects my soul-giving both comfort and strength even in times un-perilous. Afterward, in the cloister walk again, Domina Elisabeth turned toward the infirmary and Frevisse back toward the priory yard, letting herself out the cloister door in a flurry of wind-pushed cloak and skirts and veil and pulling the door hard shut, making sure it was tightly latched before she turned to find Master Gruesby huddled into his cloak and waiting for her as she had been sure he would be. He did not seem the sort of man who would ever be late to anything if he could help it.

“Master Gruesby,” she said by way of greeting.

More toward the cobbles than her, he answered, “Dame Frevisse,” and “This way, please,” and would have hurried away except that, catching and holding close the flapping ends of her veil with one hand, she refused to fight her skirts to walk more quickly into the wind, forcing him to unhurry and then fall back to her side, giving her the chance to ask, “Yesterday Master Christopher said what matters most about this contested manor is where it is. He knows then about the part it has in the contention between Lovell and Suffolk?”

Master Gruesby was shorter than she was and kept his head so down, with the thick wooden rims of his spectacles to hide much of his face, that she bent a little over as she asked and so saw him blink and make two false starts before he forced out, “Yes. He knows.”

“And Master Montfort knew?”

“He knew.”

From cloister door to guesthall stairs was not that far. They were nearly there and she asked more quickly, “How much did he know?”

Master Gruesby scuttled a little faster, reaching the stairs ahead of her. Set side-on to the yard, they a little blocked the wind-very little, Frevisse amended as a gust made her cringe more deeply into her cloak but she stopped where she was, forcing Master Gruesby to turn back to her and answer in a reluctant rush, “He knew that my lord of Suffolk hopes Master Champyon will have the manor. But that Lord Lovell wants it for Master Lengley.”

“How much pressure have Suffolk and Lovell put toward having their own way about it? On the escheator or anyone else.”

Master Gruesby blinked rapidly. “I don’t know.”

Frevisse had a sudden wondering whether that was true or not but now Master Gruesby had a question of his own. “Have you found out anything?” Even looking at her as he asked it.

“Only about this, and that Lady Agnes doesn’t mean to talk about any of it if she can help it. Nor will I be able to ask much while around her because she knows I’m cousin to Suffolk’s wife.” To Master Gruesby’s quick questioning look she added, “No, I didn’t tell her. My prioress did.”

Master Gruesby gave a slight shake of his head and what might have been a regretful sigh and would have started up the stairs again but Frevisse said before he could, “What was in Lord Lovell’s letter?”

The question seemed to startle him though it could hardly be unexpected. “I don’t know. I’ve not read it yet. Word came that Master Christopher was needed and after that…” He made a vague gesture. “There’s hardly been time.”

“You’ll have time now,” Frevisse said curtly and started up the stairs, impatient with him and deliberately making him have to hurry to reach the door and open it ahead of her. The hall into which he ushered her was large, meant for a gathering, eating, sleeping place for usual guests but far from crowded this morning, two plainly black-dressed women sitting with some embroidery beside a window and a black-doubleted youth leaning against the wall near them, balanced on one leg and kicking backward at the wainscotting, all of them probably in attendance on Mistress Montfort but with presently nothing to do but pass the time, it seemed.

“This way, please,” Master Gruesby said and led Frevisse the room’s length to a shut door at its far end. After a wary knock and someone’s call from inside, he opened it and went in, Frevisse following him. Montfort’s widow turned toward them from where she stood at the fireplace as Master Gruesby said, “Dame Frevisse is come, my lady,” giving Frevisse her first near, clear sight of her, dressed as she had been yesterday in full mourning-black except for the white wimple tight around her face between the thick fall of layered black veils. Her close-fitted sleeves came down to her fingers, nearly covering her hands laid quietly, one over the other, in front of her, and the rich stuff of her gown, falling about her unwaisted in graceful folds to the floor and spreading outward around her feet, caught even the day’s dull light with a sort of sheen. It was all meant to show that her late husband had been a wealthy man, well worth being mourned, but of Mistress Montfort herself only the pale oval of her face showed, showing nothing as she and Frevisse exchanged slight curtsies to each other while Master Gruesby drew back, closing the door as he left.

The chamber was small and nunnery-plain but with a tall bed and table, joint stools, a cushioned bench under the window, and set at the bedfoot, two chests of the sort used for travel and likely come with Mistress Montfort. In a comer across the room from the fireplace and its fire crackling among thick logs there was a brazier burning charcoal; between them, the chamber was actually warm rather than merely unchilled, to Frevisse’s pleasure as she unclasped and took off her cloak.

“Just lay it there,” Mistress Montfort said, pointing toward the bed, and added, catching Frevisse’s look around the room in mute surprise to find they were alone, “I sent everyone out. I was tired of their talk that went the same ways all the time and never anywhere.” Her voice was pale and even and her face matched it, with pale eyes and lashes and brows so fair she almost seemed to have no features at all. Besides that, she was slightly built, both in height and body, and would hardly have come to Montfort’s shoulder, Frevisse judged, with the added, unkind thought that might have partly been why Montfort married her-she would have been most easy for him to overbear in any way he chose.

But Mistress Montfort was gesturing toward the window bench with, “Pray, let’s sit, if you will,” and together they moved that way, Frevisse far more easily than Mistress Montfort, who had to deal with her gown trailing half a yard on the floor around her feet and needing to be gathered and lifted out of her way before she could move at all. At last seated on the window bench facing Frevisse, spreading and settling her skirts in graceful folds around her feet, she said with a shading of bitterness, “My husband’s choice,” and looked up in time to see Frevisse’s uncertainty at that and added, slightly smiling, “He bought all this some few years ago. He said that if he died ere me, he wanted me mourning him in something worthy of him, not some poor excuse for widow’s weeds.” She smoothed a hand down the rich cloth. “Of course he also said that if I died ere him, he could sell it all for as much as it was worth, not having been used, and cut his losses.”

With nothing to say to that but need to say something, Frevisse tried, coming as close as she could honestly come to offering regret for Montfort’s death, “I’m sorry for your grief.”

With a small shrug and no particular feeling, Mistress Montfort said, “It’s little enough but thank you.” And again must have seen Frevisse’s momentary uncertainty at what to say to that because she added kindly, “My grief. It’s very little, I’m afraid. I grieve he died the way he did, cut off without even chance to cry out for God’s mercy, but I can’t mourn that he’s gone.” She looked down again, still smoothing at her skirts, then raised her gaze to Frevisse and asked, “I pray you, can you tell me how to go about mourning a man like him? What do you do when you know there’s a soul in desperate need of prayer but all you can manage are thanks to God that you’re free?”

Frevisse, unready for their talk to go that way, momentarily had no answer, knowing that so far she had slacked prayers for him herself, but finally said the best she had to offer, “I’d pay a priest to say a great quantity of masses for him and, hoping for the best, go on with my life.”

Mistress Montfort gazed full at her, eyes wide and considering, for the length of a long-drawn breath. Then all unexpectedly she began to smile. “Yes,” she said. “Yes. That much I can do.” And even more unexpectedly she laughed, soft but truly, as if some tightly wrought cord in her had eased. “I thought, from what I’ve heard of you from my son and Master Gruesby, you might be someone I could talk to. I never meant to be so open, though. Pardon me.”

“You needed to say it all,” Frevisse said, unhesitating, “and I am, after all, safe.”

“From what Christopher and Master Gruesby have said about you, safe is hardly what you are. But someone who would understand, yes. Thank you.”

Discomfited at the thought of being talked of, Frevisse said, to go another way, “You have a fine son in Christopher.”

“A very fine son, I think,” Mistress Montfort smilingly agreed, before the smile faded as she added, “The others are more like to their father.”

Not a happy thought, and all that Frevisse could find to say to it was, “They all came with you, didn’t they?”

“They’re all here but John.” She didn’t seem to take much comfort from it. “Just now Edward has gone with Christopher on this crowner business and one of the servants has taken Anne and Joan to see something of Goring. They’ve found little else besides their crying to do here and are finding it tedious.” There was the faintest dry edge to her voice on that. “John will be here with his wife’s family sometime tomorrow morning. In time for the funeral.”

“And Christopher?” Frevisse asked, realizing how little she actually knew of him. “Is he married, too?”

Mistress Montfort’s eyes suddenly shone. “No. He’s not. I stopped it. Every time.” She must have read a-right Frevisse’s suddenly shuttered face because she went on, “Oh, no, not against Christopher’s desire, ever. Against his father’s. If Christopher had wanted anyone his father eyed for him, it would have been different. But all Montfort ever considered was what the marriage might do for him. Never what it might do to Christopher. His first choice, when Christopher was fourteen, was half Christopher’s age and born half-witted but her father could have been useful. Then, a few years later, there was a senile widow thrice his age who had a brother Montfort was dealing with. And finally, three years ago, a woman known to take any man to bed who caught her eye, but she would have come with a fine stretch of lands, both by dower and of her own and was hungry for a young husband after her second elderly one was lately dead, so my husband saw no trouble.”

Mistress Montfort’s clasped hands still lay lightly in her lap and her voice was even, her eyes lowered. Someone careless-and Montfort had ever been careless of people over whom he had power-would not have noticed her seeming-quiet body was rigid with an anger that showed only when, now, she looked up with it burning in her eyes, though none of it showed in her voice as she said, “That is what my husband would have wished on Christopher.”

Because this was not only what Mistress Montfort wanted to talk about but what she needed to say, Frevisse asked, “How did you stop the marriages?”

Again there was the faint curve of her mouth and warming in her eyes. “Easily, as it happened. All I did was talk on about how wonderful whichever marriage it was would be. How the half-wit would surely bear witted children. That the talk I’d heard about the aged widow being secretly at odds with her brother was surely only talk. That undoubtedly the whore would take great care to get with child only by Christopher, not just any man. I approved so much that my husband had to start doubting, and when he came to doubt enough, then he found his own reasons for breaking off the match.”

Where strength is lacking, wits will serve, as the old proverb went, Frevisse thought. Wives more than anyone probably proved it true. But aloud she only asked gently, “Did he know how much you hated him?”

“How much I still hate him.” Mistress Montfort did not hesitate over that cold, soul-deep answer. “No. Nor would it have mattered to him if he had. What I felt never mattered, so long as I was serviceable. So long as I made his home comfortable. Provided him with sufficient children. Was there for his use. What I felt about it didn’t matter.”

Her hands were clenched into white-knuckled fists in her lap. “Oh, yes. I hated him. I was married to him when I was fourteen. Had his first child when I was fifteen and was already hating him by then. He was a mean-minded, small-hearted, pushing man, and I was someone he felt most free to push all that he wanted to.”

Still gently, understanding more with every word that Mistress Montfort said, Frevisse offered, “And you’re telling me these things because you’ve never said them aloud but need to and it’s best if they’re said to someone you can trust to hold silent and will likely never see again.”

Mistress Montfort nodded, her hands still tightly clasped together in her lap. “From what both Christopher and Master Gruesby’s said of you, I thought you would do.”

Setting aside her unease at the thought of Master Gruesby saying anything at all about her, Frevisse said, “Your hatred at least has to be confessed to a priest.”

Mistress Montfort bent her head slightly, agreeing. “It does, and now that he’s gone, I’ll confess it, do penance for it, hope to purge my heart of it. I couldn’t before because…”

She made a small, helpless gesture and Frevisse finished for her, “Because confession and penance are done with intent never to sin that way again, and you knew that so long as Montfort was in life, you’d go on hating him.”

Mistress Montfort nodded, pleased to have it said for her. “Yes. I would have. But now he’s dead and damned and I’m alive and able to purge my soul of hatred for him. Which is the worse, do you think? My sin in hating him or his sins that brought me to my hatred?”

Frevisse hesitated over an answer to that but thoughtfully, bitterly, Mistress Montfort answered it for herself with, “Not that it much matters toward his damnation, I suppose. He had sins enough of every kind that adding the weight of those more to his soul will hardly matter.”

It was a cruel epitaph. But Montfort had worked long and hard to have it and Frevisse could find no urge in herself to refuse it to him.