The Clerk's Tale

Chapter 9

With Dame Frevisse safely left with Mistress Montfort, Master Gruesby went out into the cold and along the yard again, back to the cloister door where his knock brought a servant. Like any nunnery too small to have a constant porteress at the door, whoever was nearest came to the task but the servantwoman who opened the door to him did not question his being there. He was known from other visits and she only said, “I’ll see you there. Come on, then,” and led the way to the small parlor off the cloister kept for the nuns to receive guests. With a small, bouncing curtsy and “I’ll find someone to fetch your things,” she left him at the door and went off, supposing he could see himself in.

He did. It was a bare place, furnished for purpose, not comfort, with a bench, two low-backed chairs, and a slight table but no fireplace or brazier, nothing to take the edge off the raw air nor any light except what might come through a high, small window and the door if they were left open. Today the window was shuttered but the woman had let the door stand open for the sake of what gray light the day offered, and Master Gruesby set to pacing the room across and back for what warmth there was in moving, his arms clamped to his sides and his hands tucked under them, until the woman’s return with a three-wicked oil lamp that she set well toward one end of the table, then stepped aside, out of the way of the nun following after her with a small wooden chest.

On Master Montfort’s arrival at St. Mary’s, he had made prompt demand at the prioress that she give over to him all documents and deeds concerning Lengley-held lands that he knew she had in the nunnery’s keeping, only to be told promptly back that they were not his to demand. Master Montfort had started to swell toward outburst but it seemed the prioress had taken his measure more quickly than he had taken hers and liked him none the better for it because she had added, curt as he was, that she was, of course, willing to send someone to ask if Lady Agnes would allow him to see them.

“Allow me, madam?” Master Montfort had bridled. “Allow me?”

“If Lady Agnes graciously allows you,” she had answered, matching him snappish for snappish, “then, on my terms, you shall see them as often as you wish.”

“Your terms, madam? Who are you to make terms to me?”

“The person who has what you wish to see under lock and key and chain,” she had said back, and it had ended that while Master Montfort went off to other business, Master Gruesby had waited; and when Lady Agnes had sent back word, “Yes, let him look at whatever he wants and be damned to him. We’ve nothing to hide,” the prioress had given leave for Master Gruesby not only to see them that day but at any reasonable time he needed, with Sister Maud the sacristan to bring them and watch over everything he did.

And accordingly here was Sister Maud, thumping the chest down on the table’s other end from the lamp and bidding the servant leave with, “Pray, close the door as you go,” adding to the priory’s novice, come in behind her so she would not be left alone with a man, “Sit there,” pointing to the bench beside the door.

This was as it had been the other times. The novice would sit where she was told and Sister Maud would stand across the table from him, able to watch everything he did-her suspicion seemed to be that he would stuff his sleeves full of scrolls and papers and carry them off secretly if he could-while he ignored them both, for once unbothered by being under someone’s eyes because Sister Maud was not noticing him in particular, only what he did, and as soon as he was doing nothing with the chest and its documents, she would cease to notice him at all, he was certain.

That certainty made him very comfortable. He did not like being noticed. It was one of the reasons Dame Frevisse made him uncomfortable. She noticed him, and he knew full well that when she noticed things she thought about them, and he did not like being thought about. He preferred being un-thought about and it was for comfort against the unease Dame Frevisse made in him that he was come here, rather than for any work that needed doing. He had no delusion about that, no delusion that he was anything but hiding as he unhasped and set open the chest’s lid.

But there was nothing wrong with hiding if it kept him safe from being thought about, and to keep Sister Maud from thinking about him he started to sort through the chest’s scrolls and folded papers as if looking for something in particular. He was not. He knew well enough all there was there from the other times he had gone through the chest. Knew too well, but it was something familiar to do and he liked the familiar.

That was the worst of Master Montfort’s death-that it had ended almost everything familiar about Master Gruesby’s life. Nor did he have much hope it would better, because people tended to employ their own clerks and whoever took Master Montfort’s place as subescheator would almost surely not want him for clerk and about how he was to go about finding a new master he did not want to think.

The only good thing was that whoever took Master Montfort’s place, or else their clerk, would go through all these same documents and deeds, and that would end at least one of Master Gruesby’s problems.

As for finding work again, well, there was always place to be had for a clerk with a good hand, and so long as he was allowed to work he’d be at least somewhat content. He liked his work, liked words and the writing of them-the clean flow of well-made ink, the skritch of pen point over parchment or paper, the clear black shaping of letters. He enjoyed the making of something where there had been nothing and the satisfaction of how words set rightly down made a thing firm and certain.

Or as certain as people let anything be, even words. Because it was never words by themselves that made trouble, Master Gruesby had found. It was people who made trouble and used words to do it. That was why he preferred words to people. Words stayed what they were. He liked things to stay what they were. That was why his secret hope was that Master Christopher would have place for him, so that he could stay with the familiar. That had been what made Master Montfort endurable. He had been the same, year in, year out, never giving anything Master Gruesby’s way except orders, yes, but never wanting anything back, either, except Master Gruesby’s work. He had wanted no talk, no thought, no trouble, just Master Gruesby to go on steadily writing. Being with him had been simple. There was never doubt about him.

Equally, that was what made being with Dame Frevisse so unsimple a thing. She was hardly ever, with her thinking and what she did, where one thought she was or expected her to be. It was because she made him uneasy that he was here now, trying to calm himself by dealing with papers rather than people, but to keep up the seeming he had some other purpose, he took up and unrolled one of the scrolls. A brief look at it told him it was a perfectly correct lease of meadowlands from Lord Lovell, good for another eight years, no quarrel or question about it. In truth, from his other times of going through them, he knew there was no quarrel or question about any of these documents. They were, for the most part, simply deeds, leases, agreements having to do with the long-term holding and inheritance of all Lengley properties, and very probably-no, certainly-no one had bothered to have them out since Sir Henry’s death nor possibly for some while before then. They said what they said and until now there had probably been no need for anyone to look closely through them. Land was the safest of all things to hold and most of those who held any at all knew well what they held and by what rights they held it, down to the last square foot of messuage for a peasant, the last acre of meadow, wood, or arable for a lord. Sensible men took expense and trouble when they acquired any property to be sure the legalities were completely and correctly met.

Even the agreement over the Bower manor on which the present argument hung was clear enough. It said exactly what Lady Agnes claimed and Mistress Cecily admitted it did. The trouble did not lie with the agreement. Its words were clear, its meaning certain. The trouble lay with people. With who was Stephen Lengley’s mother and who was not. There was where the quarrel and question lay. With who was lying and who was not.

Putting the rolled documents to one side on the table, Master Gruesby shuffled through the folded papers in the bottom of the chest. Like the scrolls, they were of all ages, some going back the two hundred years and a little more to when the first Lengleys had risen to knighthood and began to hold property. Some even had seals still hanging from them, or parts of seals whose wax had gone brittle with age and broken. They were the seals of the men and women who had made or witnessed the agreements, men and women long dead and mostly forgotten except for their names here; and so were the clerks’ hands also long gone that had written the words, and their names were gone with them unless, for some reason, they were here in a document they had written those years upon years ago. Master Gruesby fingered what he knew to be the newest seal among them, the seal of Goring Priory itself, showing the Virgin seated with the Child on her lap under a fretted canopy. It did not seal the paper closed but was fastened to the letter by a ribbon, not meant to keep secret what was written there but testifying that the prioress of Goring-Domina Nichola Inglefield then, it seemed-had witnessed what was written and swore to its truth.

He did not open it. He had read it when he had read all the others and knew what it said. He simply wanted to see it again, to be certain it was still there and satisfied of that, left it where it was and chose another to unfold and read, a list made over seventy years ago, for some reason long passed, of who held what manors in some corner of Berkshire. So Sister Maud would not think he was wasting time here, he seemed to read it with great care and at the end nodded to himself as if satisfied of something and carefully put it and all the rest back into the chest, closed and hasped it, and nodded that he was done to Sister Maud without looking directly at her.

“Good,” she said and turned away to lead him out of the room and see him out of the cloister.

With still no decision made of what he ought to do, he followed her.