The Clerk's Tale

Chapter 13

At Vespers’ end, while St. Mary’s nuns hurried off to their supper in the refectory, Frevisse went out with Domina Elisabeth into the last of the day, with swathes of creamy clouds across the pale sky and a faint-orange sunset fading down behind the westward hills as they made haste back to Lady Agnes’s, into the warmth and ordered hurry of the tables being set up for supper in the hall there. Although there were no other guests and only a single remove of beef and mutton pie, a fish tart cooked with fruit and spices, garlic boiled to tenderness and savory with saffron, salt, and cinnamon, and yesterday’s gingerbread with warmed honey and nutmeg poured over it, the meal went on longer than any nunnery meal might have done and by its end Frevisse was stifling yawns and grateful when, as they rose from their places, Domina Elisabeth asked Lady Agnes’s pardon because she and Dame Frevisse wished to withdraw to their chamber to say Compline and go to bed nearer to their usual hour than they lately had.

“We’ve had days busier than is our wont and been keeping late hours into the bargain,” she said, smiling. “By your leave, a night closer to our proper way of things will do us well.”

“An early-to-bed will do me no harm either,” Lady Agnes said, adding with a look at Letice, “So I’m told,” and they parted with mutual wishes for a good night and sound sleep.

Frevisse, at least, after she and Domina Elisabeth had said Compline together and hastened into their warmed bed, had both the good night and sound sleep but found the morning none the easier to face. Hurriedly dressed and with Prime’s prayers hurriedly said, they descended to the hall’s fire-warmth and breakfast, to learn that Montfort’s funeral would be that afternoon, for a certainty.

“His son’s to be back this morning,” Emme said, setting wedges of cheese next to the bread already on the table, “and what with the dozen people I’ve heard came in yesterday and some more expected this morning, there’s enough to do it proper. There’s been no stinting on the feast neither, from what I’ve heard. The inns and bakers are beside themselves with readying it all. But won’t Domina Matilda be glad when it’s all done with and things are quiet again?”

Domina Elisabeth agreed she would be indeed. Silently so did Frevisse because, when it was all over and done, Mistress Montfort and her people would leave and maybe by tomorrow night there would be place for Domina Elisabeth and her in St. Mary’s.

“Even the weather is to the good,” Emme went on, taking up the pitcher to pour more ale for Domina Elisabeth. “Not nearly so cold today. There’s some friends of Lady Agnes will be here to dinner and they’ll be glad of the better riding. Oh, and Mistress Letice said to tell you Lady Agnes will be lying in this morning, to be rested for when they come and for this afternoon.”

She left them then and while they ate and drank Frevisse wondered how it was at the nunnery, with the Office of the Dead to be said at the usual hours of prayer and the funeral to be readied for, but was turned from her thoughts by Domina Elisabeth asking if she would spend the morning with her and her cousin. “To give her different company the while, please you?”

“Of course,” Frevisse said, as courtesy demanded, but found, once the words were out, that she did not mind doing it. There would be small chance she could ask questions of Master Gruesby today and no chance at all of talking with Christopher. Nor was she much minded to be caught in talk with Lady Agnes and her friends and there would be no sheltering in the church, busy with final readying of the grave and all. To be out of the way of everything for at least a few hours seemed the best chance the morning held.

It held other chance, too, beginning when they discovered as they came outside, cloak-wrapped and ready to hurry, that there was small need. Just as Emme had said, yesterday’s freezing cold was gone, the air almost mild, with a soft dripping from eaves and the rising sun a red-orange ball through thin white clouds. Giving up hurry, they crossed the street into the nunnery foreyard and along it toward the cloister door through the early morning come-and-go of servants about their business, until Frevisse saw Dickon standing in the further gateway through into the stableyard, holding a pitchfork but only busy at watching people, not doing anything himself except, when he saw them, to raise a hand in greeting.

With a sudden thought Frevisse said, “My lady, there’s Dickon. May I have a word with him? It’s his first time so far away from home and I wonder how he’s doing.”

Domina Elisabeth glanced toward him. “Master Naylor’s boy? Of course.”

She could have beckoned him to come to them, but not wanting Domina Elisabeth to hear what else she wanted from Dickon, Frevisse went toward him, quickly enough that although he promptly set the pitchfork aside and came to meet her, they were well away from Domina Elisabeth and as by themselves as they were going to be in the busy yard when they met and she asked as he straightened from his bow to her, “How goes it with you and the others? Is everything well?”

“It’s crowding up in the stable, there’s so many folk come in now.” He was cheerful about it. “Keeps it warmer at night. We’re fed well, too.”

“Straw,” she said, pointing at bits of it caught in his hair.

He brushed it away and asked in his turn, “How goes it with you, my lady?”

“I’m beset with too much talking and not enough to do.” Surprised at herself for saying that aloud and at Dickon’s laugh, she went on quickly, “There’s something I’d have you do for me.”

Dickon brightened even more. “Surely, my lady.”

“I’d know how easy or hard it is to go along the back wall of the nunnery from outside without being seen. There’s a part of the wall along there that’s only wicker hurdles. I’d like to know about that part especially. How easy it is to come to and anything else about it you can see. Without you being noticed at it. Without anyone else knowing what you’re doing.”

“Especially the murderer,” Dickon said. “That’s what it’s for, isn’t it? It’s about Montfort’s murder.”

Dickon would have been small use to her if he weren’t sharp-witted but Frevisse said quellingly, “Yes. So be careful.”

“Careful as a king in his counting house, my lady,” he said, cheerful as if she’d given him a holiday. “I promise.”

She left him with hope he’d keep his promise, rejoining Domina Elisabeth who asked, “All’s well with him?”

“With him and with the other men, he says. They’re keeping warm and are well fed.”

Domina Elisabeth laughed. “Then all’s well.”

But not with Frevisse, busy with being displeased with herself for not having asked Dickon to do this two days ago, in the church when she’d had the chance and should have thought of it, rather than letting it go until now. What else wasn’t she doing? Of what else hadn’t she thought? And was she not thinking of them, not doing them, because she cared too little about finding out Montfort’s murderer? With that thought troubling her, she followed Domina Elisabeth through the cloister, this morning almost as busy with servants as the yard had been, preparations for the funeral and afterwards leaving no peace even here until they reached the infirmary and its quiet, not even the infirmarian there.

“Ysobel may be sleeping,” Domina Elisabeth said softly. “Wait here while I see.”

Careful of the inner door, she let herself into the next room and Frevisse waited, content where she was beside the work-marred table among the mingled, familiar, pleasant odors of herbs and oils and other things, but the respite was brief before Domina Elisabeth returned to the door and nodded for her to come on.

There was need in all nunneries, since all sleeping and living spaces were shared, only the prioress having any privacy, for somewhere the ill could be kept apart, either to avoid contagion or simply to spare the nunnery the disturbance that inevitably came with caring for the ill. Like St. Frideswide’s, St. Mary’s room for this was plain, with white-plastered walls and a few beds-four of them here, with a small table between each pair of them-and a single, shuttered window.

That much Frevisse saw before Domina Elisabeth closed the door, returning the room to a gloom broken only by the fierce, low glow of burning coals in a brazier set near the first bed inside the door. By that little light Frevisse could see only a little of the woman slowly, possibly painfully, shifting herself higher on the pillows there, until Domina Elisabeth lighted a splinter at the brazier, and sheltering its burning tip with her hand, returned to the table to light the oil lamp waiting there. In the small yellow spread of light from the low lamp flame Frevisse saw Sister Ysobel more clearly, lying back against her pillows now with her eyes shut while she recovered from the effort of moving even that slightly. She wore a long-sleeved winter undergown, her head was wrapped in a white kerchief, and her age was difficult to judge, wasted with illness as she was, her face sunk into thin flesh stretched over blunt bones, her eyes into hollows under her dark brows. She might have been Frevisse’s age or much older. Or possibly much younger. Not that age much mattered by now. What mattered more at this far end of living was how good or ill someone had lived the life they had had and how well they would see it out.

And how much more suffering the body would have to endure before the soul was able to go free.

Domina Elisabeth laid a hand on her cousin’s lying on top of the blanket and asked gently, “Is there anything you’d like? Anything I can get for you?”

Sister Ysobel opened her eyes. There was far more life in them than in her wasted body and her whisper was strong as she answered, “What I’d like is the window opened.”

Domina Elisabeth drew back from the bed, distressed. “Oh, Ysobel, you know that wouldn’t be to the good.”

Clear air in a sickroom was unhealthy, a danger to the ill, but, “What’s it going to do?” Sister Ysobel asked, laughter tinging her voice. “Kill me? Dame Frevisse, if you would be so good.”

Without comment, Frevisse went to the window, set high enough in the wall that she had to stretch to reach the shutter’s catch, slipped it aside, and lowered the shutter, letting in the early morning’s light and a draught of cold air. Behind her, Sister Ysobel began to cough and Frevisse turned around to see her with a handkerchief pressed over her mouth, struggling with the spasm while Domina Elisabeth hurriedly poured a cup of water from the pitcher on the table beside the lamp, turned away from her cousin so she did not see-perhaps purposefully did not see-when her cousin’s coughing stopped and Sister Ysobel sank flat against her pillows again, her hand with the handkerchief dropping weakly to her side. But Frevisse saw and wondered into what terrors she would fall if ever there was that bright-red spotting of blood on a handkerchief of her own, before Sister Ysobel recovered strength enough to close her fingers around the handkerchief, hiding it.

Maybe she was past the terror of knowing she was going to die. She was calm, anyway, as she sipped from the cup Domina Elisabeth held to her lips and she smiled when she was done and said to them both, “Thank you.” She moved a hand slightly toward the bed beside her own. “Sit, if it please you.” And when they had settled side by each on the bed’s edge, she asked, “What have you done since I saw you yesterday, cousin?”

“Nearly nothing,” Domina Elisabeth answered. “Talked with your prioress. Had supper. Went early to bed and slept. And here I am again.”

“What a dull world I’m leaving. Sister Joane told me when she brought my breakfast that the funeral will be this afternoon. You’re going, the both of you?”

“It seems best we do, since we’re here.”

“Then you can tell me all about it afterwards.” Spare of movement, either too weak or else saving what strength she had for when she had greater need of it, she smiled toward Frevisse without turning her head. “My cousin tells me you’ve had to do with murders before this one, yes?”

Silently accepting that Domina Elisabeth had had to find things to talk of through the hours she had spent with her cousin, Frevisse granted, “Sometimes, yes.”

“She says you’ve skill at finding out murderers.”

“By God’s grace, yes,” Frevisse admitted.

“Have you been doing aught to finding out our murderer here?”

There were times when lying would be comfort and convenient but even then a sin and Frevisse said, ignoring the interested turn of Domina Elisabeth’s head toward her, “I’ve thought about the murder, yes.”

“And you’d rather I didn’t ask you about it,” Sister Ysobel said, smiling more.

Frevisse smiled back. “Much rather.”

“Then I won’t.” She paused for breath. “On the other hand, you’re welcome to ask me whatever you like about it.”

“Oh, Ysobel,” Domina Elisabeth protested, “you don’t want to think about such a thing now, do you?”

Sister Ysobel turned her smile toward her cousin. “Come now, Elisabeth. You have to know that presently I have a particular interest in death.”

Frevisse had noted before now that the dying were often able to speak more lightly of their mortality than those around them could. Domina Elisabeth was silenced for the moment by Sister Ysobel’s question as Sister Ysobel said to Frevisse, “Is there anything you want to ask me?”

If nothing else, it would pass the time, both for her and Sister Ysobel, and Frevisse said, “Your rosary. Could you show me how you were praying with it that day? How fast or slow you were telling the beads.”

Sister Ysobel reached toward the table where a rosary of both dark and silver beads lay waiting. Domina Elisabeth hastily handed it to her and Sister Ysobel smiled her thanks, took it, closed her eyes, and began, “Ave Maria, gratia plena…” Hail Mary, full of grace… deliberate over the words as if each one were precious.

After four Aves, one to a bead, Frevisse stopped her. “That’s the way you always say it?”

Sister Ysobel opened her eyes. “Always.” She handed the rosary back to Domina Elisabeth but kept her gaze steady on Frevisse. “Always,” she repeated.

Then there would have been more than time enough for the murderer to be well away before Master Gruesby raised an outcry.

For that matter, there would have been time and enough for Master Gruesby to have killed Montfort, left through the fence, and come around and through the stableyard to “find” the body.

Frevisse found she was not uncomfortable with that possibility, able to believe easily enough that Master Gruesby, after his years in Montfort’s service, might have reached the point of hating him enough to kill him. He could have lied to Montfort to arrange the secret meeting, giving him the chance both to kill and to keep suspicion from himself. Where was he supposed to have been when Montfort was killed? Did Christopher know whether he had actually been where he said he was? Had Christopher even considered he might be lying?

Putting that thought aside for later, Frevisse said, “You told the crowner that no one entered the garden through the infirmary door. That you heard voices of, you thought, two men about the time Master Montfort was murdered. That you know how long it was until the outcry was raised because you were saying the rosary in that while. What else should I ask you about? Unless you’ve remembered something more.”

“It’s not that I’ve remembered more. It’s that I never finished what I had to tell that young man.”

“Didn’t finish? Why?”

“Because I began to cough, and before I’d done, he thanked me and left.” Sister Ysobel could put little force into the words but she bit them short with displeasure. Then she unwillingly smiled. “Sister Joane was glowering at him from the doorway. She frightened him off, I think. And I made no matter of it afterwards because what little else I had to say wasn’t enough to change anything, I doubt.”

But she wanted the chance to say it anyway and Frevisse obliged by asking, “What else was there?”

“The door from the passage into the garden. It creaks a little, hardly to be noticed unless one has nothing else to do but lie here and listen to whatever there is to hear. Before I heard the men talking together, it opened and shut only once. Nor was it open long. Only long enough for one person to pass through.”

“A creak as it opened, a short pause, another creak as it closed,” Frevisse said. “Like that? Not long enough for two people to have come through it?”

Sister Ysobel made a small, agreeing nod. “The next time I heard it was just before the dead man’s clerk made his outcry.”

There was nothing helpful in that. It was already certain, from the witnesses in the stableyard, that only Montfort and Master Gruesby had come that way, but before Frevisse had to say that to her, Sister Ysobel went on, “I suppose the murderer must have come through the fence. That’s an easy guess, though no one’s said so. It was the other thing I wanted to tell that young crowner. About hearing the murderer.”

Frevisse’s heed sharpened. “You heard him?”

“I heard him walking. Well, heard someone walking and afterwards knew it must have been him.”

“You’re certain it was a man?”

“The walk was too heavy and long-strided for it to have been a woman. Skirts, you know.”

“You didn’t wonder why there was a man in the garden?”

“I wondered but supposed we had a new gardener and no one had told me. There was no one else he was likely to be.”

“But you’re certain you didn’t hear him come in?”

“I slightly thought he must have come in by the gate and that I somehow hadn’t heard him. You know how one does, wanting an answer and taking one that’s simple rather than right.”

Frevisse knew. It was a common, sometimes perilous trick everyone sometimes played on themselves, herself included. “And you’re sure he hadn’t come through the infirmary?”

“I wasn’t fevered or drowsing that afternoon. When I’m not…” She paused, maybe to catch her breath-her dying lungs made even so little as she was asking of them difficult-but also she sounded a little ashamed as she continued, “When I’m awake and unfevered, I’m always listening. In hopes someone is coming to see me.”

Domina Elisabeth leaned forward to take her hand. Sister Ysobel returned her hold with a slight squeeze and went on, “I’m certain no one came that way. When the gate creaked with Montfort coming in, I thought it was the other man going out and wondered how I had missed hearing him when he came in.”

“I’ll speak to Sister Joane about having the gate hinges greased,” Domina Elisabeth said.

“Oh. No, don’t,” Sister Ysobel protested. “It gives me something to hear. Until spring comes…” Her pause then, as if something in her had suddenly hurt, betrayed how surely she knew there was likely to be no spring for her this year or any other, before she went on, “… there’ll be something more to hear in the garden than sparrows quarreling sometimes. But until then, with so little to hear, I’d rather the gate went on creaking.”

“Of course,” Domina Elisabeth murmured, meaning to be soothing, Frevisse supposed.

But she also supposed Sister Ysobel would prefer to be distracted rather than soothed and said, “So you heard the man who must have been the murderer walking. For how long, do you think, before Master Montfort came in?”

“I heard him walking not long after Nones started. I started the Office when the bell stopped. When everyone would have started it in the church. I’d reached Olim locutus es in visione by the time I heard Master Montfort come in.”

About a quarter of an hour, Frevisse could guess. Unless Sister Ysobel had been praying at a running pace and it was doubtful that she had.

“I was maybe slower than usual,” Sister Ysobel said, as if picking up her thought. “Prayers pass the time and I never make haste over them anymore.”

Frevisse could not see yet that knowing how long the murderer had been there made any difference. But it might count for something later. There was the chance with every small piece that it might count later…

Sister Ysobel made a soft sound that was probably as near to laughter as she dared to come and, when Frevisse looked at her questioningly, said, “The way you were staring away to somewhere else, your mind gone far off and everything here forgotten. Did what I said help you any?”

“It might,” Frevisse said, the only truthful answer she had, and was saved from saying more by a nun coming into the room, breviary in hand, and the bell to Tierce beginning to ring. Forestalled from speaking by the Rule that enjoined silence when the call to an Office came but understanding readily enough the other nun was come to say Tierce with her cousin, Domina Elisabeth gave Sister Ysobel the breviary from the table beside the bed and, with Frevisse, silently rose and left, to go to the church for their own prayers.

Frevisse found small satisfaction in the Office, try though she did to put Sister Ysobel and what she had said from her mind for the while, and at the Office’s end she returned to the infirmary willingly enough with Domina Elisabeth, to find the other nun already gone, the breviary laid aside, and Sister Ysobel lying narrow under the blankets with flushed cheeks, her eyes fever-brightened, and her breathing more labored than it had been. But she said as soon as she saw them, “I’ve been thinking about what I heard,” then had to pause, fighting to find enough breath to go on, restlessly turning her head away from the hand Domina Elisabeth laid on her forehead.

“You’re hot,” Domina Elisabeth said. “Sister Joane showed me where the borage mixture is kept. I’ll ready some for you.”

When she was gone out, Frevisse asked, to give Sister Ysobel something to think about besides her dying body, “What have you thought of?”

Unsteady with her ragged breathing, Sister Ysobel whispered, “The other thing… I didn’t tell the… young crowner. That when Master Montfort came into the garden… he said something angrily. A word. No more. Then went to the waiting man. There were only his foot-steps, going from the gate. The other man, wherever he was, didn’t move. Then they talked.”

“But you heard nothing they said,” Frevisse said.

“There was hardly… anything to hear.” Sister Ysobel closed her eyes, waited until her breath caught up to her words, and went on, “They hardly… spoke at all.”

Domina Elisabeth returned with a small basin of water, saying as she set it on the table, “The borage is brewing. A few more minutes,” before she went out again, leaving Frevisse to take and wring out a cloth from the cool water and wipe Sister Ysobel’s hot face.

Sister Ysobel, used to having that done, kept on from where she had been. “One of them said something. The other one asked what sounded like a question. An angry question. That was the longest thing either of them said. The other man answered him back, angrily, too, and only a few words, and that was all.”

“That was all? They didn’t quarrel? A greeting, a question, an answer, and nothing else?”

“Nothing else.”

Frevisse considered that before finally saying, slowly, “The other man was there to kill Montfort. From what you say, there was no quarrel. One of them asked a question, the other answered and then, whoever the other man was, he simply stabbed Montfort. We don’t know why Montfort was there, but the other man came for no other reason than to kill him.”

Sister Ysobel made a small, agreeing movement of her head. “Yes,” she breathed. “Yes.”

“But I doubt it would have helped the crowner any, even had you been able to say it to him.”

Worry clearing from her brow, Sister Ysobel said on a sigh, “No. I don’t suppose it would.”

It did not even make clear that Montfort had come to the garden to meet someone he knew, although he’d be unlikely to agree to a secret meeting with a stranger.

Unless the stranger was a messenger from someone he did know, someone whose asking or order for such a secret meeting he would accept.

Who had asked the question Sister Ysobel thought she had heard? Had Montfort asked something and the murderer answered him, then stabbed him? Or had the murderer asked and killed Montfort when his answer had been wrong? Her guess would be the murderer had asked it and, when Montfort’s answer had not been what he wanted, had killed him. But either way was possible. And did it matter?

Trying to find something to ask that might lead somewhere useful, she asked, “Did you hear the murderer leave?”

“I heard footfalls on the gravel again. Briefly.” She paused to work at breathing before going on, “Then there was only silence until the gate creaked again. I thought they had moved farther away… and were speaking too low for me to hear anything.”

“But you didn’t go on with the Office?”

Sister Ysobel’s smile was small and bitter and tired all at once. “I’d lost my place and couldn’t… bring my mind back to it. It’s hard to think sometimes. I took up the rosary instead.”

Domina Elisabeth returned with the borage mixture in a shallow cup. Sister Ysobel tried to sit up and Frevisse helped her with an arm behind her back and a careful pushing of the pillows, then moved aside for Domina Elisabeth to hold the cup to Sister Ysobel’s lips, patient while she drank in small sips between long pauses, until the cup was empty. Worn out with the effort, eyes closed, Sister Ysobel whispered her thanks to Domina Elisabeth, who asked as she set the cup down, “Would you like us to leave you to sleep now?”

Sister Ysobel moved her head slightly side to side on the pillow. “Stay,” she whispered. “Talk and let me listen.”

Domina Elisabeth and Frevisse traded looks, and as they sat down side by side on the next bed, where they had sat before, Domina Elisabeth said, “You’ve heard me more than enough these past few days. Dame Frevisse, do you talk for a while.”

That was fair and Frevisse cast quickly through her mind for something to say. There had been enough said about the murder for now and other people surely brought talk about nunnery matters. Better to find something far different, and on that thought’s heels Frevisse asked, “Have you ever been to Spain? On the pilgrimage to St. James at Compestela?”

Sister Ysobel’s lips made the word “No,” and Frevisse let the story take itself, building partly from her own very small-child memories of riding in a woven pannier on the side of a quiet ass led by her father along pale, dusty Spanish roads, the smell of orange blossoms in the air, but mixing it with other people’s haps and hazards heard over the years-including the pack-ladden mule who fell while crossing a flooded stream and, even though it was rescued from drowning, refused ever to cross running water again and had to be sold to the nearest farmer who would take it.

Sister Ysobel’s laughter over that brought on a brief heave of coughing that jerked her forward, drove her back into the pillow, and left her struggling with quickened, shallow breathing and blood flecked at one comer of her mouth. Wordless, Domina Elisabeth squeezed out the cloth in the basin and wiped away the blood, and Sister Ysobel after faintly smiling thanks whispered, “Go on, please.”

Frevisse did, more carefully this time, telling how in Compestela’s streets and market a pilgrim could buy St. James’s badge of a scallop shell made of everything from gold to pewter to poorly glazed plaster. “The only kind of scallop shell you can’t buy there is a real one, I think,” she said, though she did not remember for herself, had only heard her father laughing about it sometimes over the years afterwards.

Lying white and still against the pillow but smiling, Sister Ysobel whispered, “Isn’t that always the way?” And then, “I think I’ll sleep awhile now.”

“Of course, my dear.” Domina Elisabeth rose and leaned over to kiss her forehead and Frevisse could see the family resemblence there must once have been-a shape of nose and cheek-before disease had brought Sister Ysobel down to dying flesh sunk slack over bones.

“I just wish”-Sister Ysobel whispered-“that I could stand one more time… on a high hill… in sunlight and the wind.”

For a moment Frevisse thought what a strange longing that was for someone who had chosen to live out her years cloistered inside nunnery walls. And then thought that after all it was not so strange. Life’s end was the time when longings were most likely to rise up for things left behind or undone. Even if they had been left behind in favor of a greater longing, left undone because of a greater need, now was when they came, the ghosts of a life unlived. But useful ghosts, because how was anyone to know the true value of a thing except by knowing what it had cost them? How could anyone make final peace with all they were leaving unless they looked at it, judged it, valued it?

For herself, Frevisse could only hope that when her dying time came, her own last longing and regret would be as simple as a wish to stand one last time on a high hill in sunlight and the wind.

Quietly, careful of their footfalls and the door, they left Sister Ysobel to her sleep.