The Clerk's Tale

Chapter 20

Lady Agnes’s grief was fierce nor could the people best able to comfort her come to her need. Domina Matilda was dealing with her nuns’ distress and prayers for Nichola’s soul, Goring’s priest was gone to the Haseldens, and Lady Agnes flailed out against anyone seeing her broken down and weeping-“I won’t give them the pleasure!”-so that friends were turned back at the door and it was left to Letice and Domina Elisabeth to do what they could with her while Frevisse helped them as best she might, keeping her own grieving to herself. Not until late morning did Lady Agnes, with tears running down her cheeks along wrinkles that seemed to have sunken deeper since the ill word came, say suddenly, “There’ll be some sort of inquest. I want it here. Send word.”

“My lady,” Letice started, “the crowner may have already chosen-”

“Then he can choose again. He knows the place. There’s no reason Mistress Haselden should have the burden now and the nunnery’s put up with enough these past few days. Here is where it should be. Send that louter Lucas to tell him so.” Lady Agnes’s fierceness broke, too much of her strength worn out of her with grief. Pitifully, a hand over her eyes, she said, “If it’s not here, I won’t be able to go. I can’t… I can’t…” She broke off, tears flooding again, and Letice fled, crying, too, to do her bidding while Domina Elisabeth set, again, to persuading Lady Agnes to drink more of the latest soothing drink Emme, weeping, had brought for her.

Whether for Lady Agnes’s need or because it made best sense, Christopher sent word back, with thanks, that he would hold the inquest there, and that since there was no need for delay and something of a mercy in haste, it would be next morning.

“Good. Good. God be thanked,” Lady Agnes said. She was by then enough tired out that Emme’s drinks had begun to take hold. Domina Elisabeth was able to persuade her to lie down awhile, and once down, she slept a merciful part of the day away, to awaken in late afternoon too tired for more weeping until in the evening Stephen came to her, gray-faced and weary with his own grief but wanting her to hear from him what had happened. Domina Elisabeth made to leave the room when he came in, taking Frevisse with her, but Lady Agnes bade them stay as well as Letice. “This is something you’ll know sooner or later and it might as well be sooner.”

Frevisse trusted neither Lady Agnes’s calm nor Stephen’s but he pulled a chair close to his grandmother, took hold of her hands, and began steadily to tell her about the hunt and finding Nichola. There his tears began to come again but he struggled a few words more before he broke, let go Lady Agnes’s hands, and slid from his chair to his knees, his arms around her waist, his face in her lap. Her own tears streaming, Lady Agnes bent over him, trying to give comfort where there was no comfort to be had until, probably more worn out than anything like comforted, Stephen ceased to cry and, sitting on the floor, leaning against his grandmother’s knees, finished the dark telling while she stroked his hair.

Lady Agnes wanted him to stay the night but, looking worse than when he had come, he said, “Nichola is there. I have to be, too,” and left.

It was a long while before Lady Agnes finally slept but in the morning she seemed done with crying for a while, calm outwardly at least, giving firm orders for what needed to be done before the inquest, including having her chair carried out to the gallery, admitting she would not have the strength to stand as she had through Montfort’s inquest. But after sight of herself in her mirror as Letice readied her, she had the chair moved well back into the shadows where she would be able to see much without being easily seen herself. “Not looking like this,” she said.

Whatever else might die, it seemed vanity did not.

But even vanity was no armor against grief. When time came to take her place in the gallery, Lady Agnes was grim-faced and unaccustomedly silent, maybe thinking, just as Frevisse was, of what sorry contrast there was between Montfort’s inquest and today, with only Domina Elisabeth and Frevisse there to keep her company and Letice hovering behind, waiting to be needed. Given her own choice, Frevisse would have preferred to be somewhere else. She had heard enough from Stephen’s telling last night, wanted to hear no more, and most certainly did not want to hear the kind of details that would come out at an inquest; but the choice was Domina Elisabeth’s, not hers, and Domina Elisabeth would not leave Lady Agnes, to Letice’s great relief. It was the necessary choice and the better one, Frevisse knew, and she made the best of it by watching the people in-gathering below her. Many of them were the same who had come to Montfort’s inquest, but they were far more subdued for this one. Nichola must have been known to most of them all of her life and there were red-rimmed eyes and muffled sobbing among the women, no loud talk or jostling among the men.

Stephen and Master Haselden came in together, to be escorted by one of Christopher’s men to a forward bench where two other men were already seated. If Stephen had slept at all, it had done him little good. He looked hardly better than his grandmother, and Master Haselden matched him, both of them dry-eyed at present but stiff with strain and looking to have been shaved and combed and dressed by force of someone else’s will rather than their own. But while Master Haselden made effort to answer the men and few women who came forward to speak to him and Stephen before taking their places elsewhere in the hall, Stephen said almost nothing, looked at no one, sitting with his hands clutched to each other in his lap as if only by holding tightly to them could he hold together at all.

Of Nichola’s mother there was no sign, but that was reasonable. Why would she want to be here to hear over what she already terribly knew?

The hall was nearly full when Juliana entered, followed by her brother, and Frevisse’s displeasure was nothing to Lady Agnes’s, who leaned forward with an inward hiss of breath and a movement toward rising to her feet but Letice stepped hurriedly to her side and said, low-voiced, “They’re here as witnesses. They were on the hunt.”

“What were they doing on the hunt?” Lady Agnes demanded, hardly less displeased. “It was no matter of theirs.”

“Master Haselden gave out word it was open to everyone. He supposed some of Mistress Montfort’s people might want a change and come along. He never thought those would dare. It’s said he wasn’t happy when they did.”

“He should have turned them back at the start!”

But at that moment Christopher entered. What little talk there had been in the hall dropped away and perforce Lady Agnes sat back in her chair, everyone watching while he took his place behind the table and nodded to his clerk, who stood up from his place at the table’s end, cleared his throat, and said, “All those present who were on the hunt with Nichola Lengley yesterday, please stand.”

Besides Master Haselden and Stephen and the two men sharing their bench, three other men, a woman Frevisse did not know, Juliana, and her brother all stood up from the two benches behind them. The young clerk looked to Christopher who, very much Master Montfort the Crowner at that moment, said at them, “Those of you who were at the finding of the body will be sworn as jurors. The rest of you, who were on the hunt but not at the finding of the body, know you are charged to speak out if you hear aught testified here that is not truth as you think it to be. So swear.”

With some glances among themselves, the men behind Master Haselden and Stephen and the woman and Juliana and Rowland gave their oaths. Christopher nodded for them to sit, his clerk gave the jurors’ oath to Stephen, Master Haselden, and the two men with them, said, “Be seated,” and set them example by sitting down himself.

After that Christopher made mercifully short business of the inquest, there being small question about what had happened. Step by official step, he took the juror-witnesses through their finding of Nichola’s body and the viewing of it with him afterwards. They were more knowledgeable than their fellows had been for Montfort’s inquest but nothing any of them had to say was new from what Stephen had told Lady Agnes last night, nor was what Christopher’s young clerk read about the body unexpected-that it was neither marked nor marred beyond what would be likely from having fallen from a steep bank and been rolled on by a horse, save for a narrow cut across her face where probably a branch had caught her in riding down through the thicket on the stream’s other side.

When all that had been testified to, Christopher asked, “Are you willing, the four of you, to rule that Nichola Lengley died of being crushed under her horse, fallen during the hunt yesterday?”

The juror-sworn men nodded, Master Haselden with his head bowed too low for his face to be seen, Stephen sitting so tautly upright he seemed barely able to move his head.

“Then you are thanked for your service and dismissed,” Christopher said.

And there was an end to it. Nichola could now be buried and the bereaved left to somehow pick up their lives and go on.

Lady Agnes made to rise then and did not object when Domina Elisabeth on one side and Letice on her other helped her. Once on her feet, she ordered Letice, “Tell anyone who wants to come up that I’m seeing no one today. Only Stephen. And Philip if he’s minded to come. None else. You mind that. None else.”

She leaned all her weight to Domina Elisabeth’s arm, gestured Letice away toward the stairs, and turned toward her solar. Frevisse went to open the solar’s door ahead of them, then stood aside, letting them enter first.

Emme was waiting, with the fire built high and the bed turned down, and she hurried to take Lady Agnes’s other arm, but Lady Agnes balked at sight of the bed.

“I’m not sick,” she snapped. “When I’m dead or dying, you’ll find me in bed in daytime and not before. When I’m dead…” She started to cry again and Emme with her.

Leaving them to it, Frevisse silently shut the door and returned along the gallery to the head of the stairs. Letice was on guard below, deep in talk and unhappy exclaims with three townswomen. Around the hall other low-voiced people were likewise still in talk, Master Haselden among them, bracketed in talk with four men; while others were drifting toward the outer door, including Juliana and Rowland, heads-together with the other woman from the hunt. Frevisse’s swift look did not find Stephen anywhere but, more to her present purpose, she saw Christopher just leaving, followed by his young clerk and Master Gruesby, and she gathered her skirts aside from her feet and went down the stairs far more quickly than was safe, passed Letice and the women with her with lowered eyes to avoid being caught into talk with them, and keeping wide of Juliana, made her way the hall’s length as swiftly as she could without openly running. If she had to follow Christopher back to the nunnery, she would but would rather overtake him here.

Her haste served her well. She came out of the hall and into the yard in time to see him going not toward the street but through the gateway into Lady Agnes’s garden, Master Gruesby and Stephen with him. The young clerk was left behind at the gate and he stepped into her way as she approached, to stop her going in, but she called past him to Christopher, “Master… Montfort,” sticking only a little over the name.

Already well away along the path, Christopher turned and, seeing her, raised a hand to tell his clerk to let her pass and she joined the three of them as Christopher was saying to Stephen in apparent answer to a question or protest, “Anything you would say to me you can say with her here to hear it.”

Stephen cast her a look, openly uncertain what to make of that, but driven by something else too twisted tight inside him to be held back, he let it go and demanded at Christopher, “At the inquest, you ruled on how Nichola died but didn’t rule her death was accidental. Why not?”

That was the question that had brought Frevisse after Christopher and she nodded agreement with it. Christopher gave a slight sideways look toward her but asked at Stephen, sharp with demand of his own, “How did your wife’s gloves come to be on the floor of her father’s hall?”

“Her gloves?” Stephen asked back, blankly.

“Your wife’s riding gloves. When her body was lying in her father’s great hall, the gloves were on the floor beside her. At least they were a woman’s riding gloves. Of fine doeskin. Patterned blue and green. But your wife was still wrapped in her cloak. How did her gloves come to be on the floor?”

“Her gloves,” Stephen repeated, groping backward in his memory. “Her gloves.” He struggled and finally said, “Yes. Her father took them off her when we first found her. I was… I was holding her and he was calling to her and pulled her gloves off to rub her hands. He was trying…” Stephen stopped, his head twisted aside and eyes tightly shut, struggling again before he was able to say with strangled control, “He was trying to wake her. When finally the others… took her away from us, while they were wrapping her in her cloak, the gloves were lying there and I picked them up and tucked them through my belt. They’d been her New Year’s present. She… took great care of them. I couldn’t leave them. But when we were home again, there in the hall, it suddenly was stupid to have them when she was…” He shook his head, as if to escape the tears rising in his eyes. “I pulled them out of my belt and threw them down and kicked them aside.” He went abruptly angry. “She shouldn’t have been on the hunt at all! She only went because we didn’t want to anger her father. I should have… angered him and be damned. But I didn’t. I didn’t. I didn’t.”

That was something with which both Master Haselden and Stephen were going to have to live ever after. Just as Nichola was going to be ever after dead because of it.

But Christopher said, “Everyone says she hated riding. That she was afraid of it. What does that mean?”

“Mean?”

“Was she a poor rider?”

“No. No, she rode well enough. She just didn’t… didn’t like it. She was always afraid… something would happen.”

“She kept well behind the other riders the whole hunt. That’s what everyone is agreed on. Was that always her way?”

“Always. Sometimes I tried to stay back with her but in a hunt you don’t… you don’t hang back. You ride as hell after the hounds as you can.”

“But Nichola didn’t. She always kept well away from other riders.”

“Yes,” Stephen answered, his gaze fixed on Christopher’s face as he tried to follow where the other man was going.

“Always?” Christopher insisted.

“Always.”

“And carefully? Never ‘hell after the hounds’?”

“Never.” Even the thought of it made bitter laughter rise in Stephen.

“Then how did she come by that cut across her face?”

The laughter died out of Stephen, leaving only a bitterness that was mostly pain. “A branch,” he said flatly. “A branch caught her across the face.”

Master Gruesby cleared his throat, startling at least Frevisse, who had yet again forgotten him standing aside and silent, until he said now toward his feet, “It was a very precise branch. If branch it was.”

“What?” Stephen said at him.

Master Gruesby huddled his shoulders a little higher as if asking pardon for having spoken, leaving it to Christopher to answer, “It was something Master Gruesby pointed out. The cut was laid straight across her brow. Straight and even. A branch might have done it. Equally, a branch might well have not. If, as you and everyone says, she didn’t ride fast or ever close to other riders, how did it happen a branch came whipping back into her face that sharply? It didn’t happen in her fall.”

“No,” Stephen agreed. “No. Where she fell it was open. There was nothing there that could have done it.”

But something had.

Very quietly Frevisse asked Christopher, “Why did you want to know about her gloves?”

Christopher turned to Master Gruesby. “You saw it. You showed it to me. Tell them.”

Frevisse thought Master Gruesby would rather have walked on hot coals-if he could have done it unnoticed-than obey that. As it was, he answered without raising his head, firmly toward the ground, “There were the long hairs of a horse’s mane or tail caught in the beadwork of her left glove. Her horse was a bay. With a black mane and tail. The hairs caught on her glove were chestnut. A bright chestnut.”

Stephen was no fool. He saw as quickly as Frevisse what that could mean and color rose in his face as he said at Christopher, “You mean you think her fall wasn’t an accident.”

“I have to have a doubt.”

“You think someone crowded her there on the stream bank and she went over the edge because of it,” Stephen pressed.

“There’s nothing to say she couldn’t have brushed against someone else’s horse at any time during the hunt,” Christopher answered.

“Except she wouldn’t have. She always kept clear of other riders. Even me.”

“This time she might not have.”

“She would have. It’s someone else who didn’t keep clear. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? That maybe it was because of someone else her horse went down that bank and they’re keeping quiet about it.”

“That’s more than can be safely said.” Christopher refused to shift from caution. “It’s something that has to be thought on, but it’s nothing more than that. As yet.”

Stephen began to be angry. “Why didn’t you say anything about it at the inquest?”

Without anger Christopher said back at him, “Because there’s nothing can be proved from those horsehairs. There are only four of them. How many chestnut horses were on the hunt?”

“I don’t know. Four. Maybe five.” Stephen abruptly stopped, as if he saw the difficulty.

“With not much difference between one chestnut and another,” Frevisse said. “Unless you’re looking for a difference. You are looking for that difference, aren’t you, Master Montfort?”

“Master Gruesby has been, yes,” Christopher said. “That’s one reason I held the inquest so quickly. To keep everyone’s horses here and give him chance to see them all on the quiet. Since some of the people on the hunt are not of Goring and could leave.”

“Why bother looking if nothing can be proved from what you have?” Stephen demanded, vehement with frustration and anger together.

Both Christopher’s voice and look at Stephen were level. “Because I want to know.”

“Why tell me about it if nothing can be done!”

“Because you asked.”

Stephen stared at him, tried to say something and failed, then made a sudden flinging movement of his hands and spun around and walked away.

Frevisse, Christopher, and Master Gruesby watched him go in silence, back toward the house, letting him leave the garden before Christopher said, “Master Gruesby.”

Without needing more, Master Gruesby gave a quick bob of his head and left them, too.

“To do what?” Frevisse asked of Christopher.

“To see where Master Lengley goes.”

Trying to keep buried the sick feeling that went with the thought that Stephen could have had part in Nichola’s death, she asked, “Does he have a chestnut horse?”

“No. His father-in-law does but it wasn’t ridden yesterday.”

“You really think Nichola didn’t die by accident?”

“I think I’d like to know more certainly than I do that she did die by accident.”

“Someone could have crowded her accidentally and not want to admit it.”

But Christopher answered that with the objection already in her own mind. “How could someone accidentally crowd a rider who always rode behind the hunt?”

“And by having Stephen followed?” she asked.

“He has to know better than I do who might want his wife dead,” Christopher said grimly. “If he had no part in it, I hope at least to find out whom he might suspect.”

“Who on the hunt had chestnut horses?”

Christopher named three men whose names meant nothing to her, then, “Rowland Englefield and his sister.”

Cold down her spine, Frevisse said, “Both of them?”

“An almost matched pair, I understand.”

“And Master Gruesby has seen them?”

“Today, he intends.”

“You know there’s more than friendship between Stephen and Lady Juliana?”

Christopher’s eyes narrowed. “No. I don’t know that.”

Keeping her own feelings to herself as much as might be, Frevisse told him what she had seen and heard said, both between them and about them. Christopher listened without comment and when she had finished said, “I’ll make sure Master Gruesby looks especially close at her horse. And her brother’s. For all the good it will do. Four horsehairs aren’t enough to prove anything.”

“If naught else, at least the suspicion will go with Juliana hereafter.”

“You think she’s more likely than her brother to have done it?”

“Would you kill a girl to help your sister more easily satisfy her lust?” But there could be more than lust to it now, she realized.

With Nichola dead, Stephen was free to marry again.

But if Juliana married him, her interests would then be completely opposite to her mother’s hopes of proving him baseborn.

The tangle was worsening, and without need to hear Christopher’s answer, she asked the next thing on her mind. “With all this, have you been able to go any further about your father’s murder?”

“Do you know, almost everyone else says ‘your father’s death.’ You’re almost the only one who says ‘murder.’ ”

“Almost everyone?”

“Master Gruesby, like you, says ‘murder.’ ”

“We share a certain scholarly desire to be precise, I suppose,” Frevisse said dryly. “Have you been able to find out where people were that day?”

“Yes. Stephen Lengley was at home through the morning. Until after my father had spoken with him and Master Haselden. Then he went to dine at his grandmother’s and was there until the alarm was raised after Master Gruesby found the body. Servants at both places all say the same thing. No one has been caught in contradiction to what anyone else says nor is there any sign of lying.”

Frevisse nodded that she was satisfied with that. As satisfied as could be, because servants could be loyal and there was no reason they could not lie well, especially to strangers. But for now she would accept what Christopher said as he went on, “Lady Agnes did not leave her chamber that day. She saw my father there in the morning. She was the first of them all he visited. After he was gone, she stayed alone except for her woman until her grandson came. They dined together there in her room. Master Haselden went out from home not long after Stephen did. He was then out and about on various business into the afternoon.”

“What business?”

“First, at the priory. He spent some time with Domina Matilda over priory matters.”

“Why?”

“He’s bailiff of Goring.”

“How can he be? Suffolk is lord of Goring and Master Haselden is Lord Lovell’s man,” Frevisse protested.

Christopher raised his shoulders slightly. “Master Haselden is head of the gentry around here. Since Lady Agnes’s son died a dozen years ago. He’s prosperous in his own right and has local authority. Until this matter of the manor arose, there was probably no conflict in his interests that weighed against everything in his favor. So he’s Suffolk’s bailiff here and sometimes there are things to be decided between him on the lord’s behalf and Domina Matilda on the priory’s.”

“So he was at the priory when your father was murdered. No.” She corrected herself. “Domina Matilda was at Nones then.”

“He left when Domina Matilda went to Nones. He spent most of the day afterwards upriver, riding the fields to see how much danger of flooding there was like to be.”

“Who saw him go?”

“Who saw him go?”

“Out of the priory. Who saw him leave?”

Christopher held back before admitting, “I don’t know.”

“Someone rode with him around the fields?”

“One of his men. They were both seen by people we’ve questioned.”

“Could anyone say exactly when they were seen?”

“Afternoon. That’s all. It was an overcast day, no close telling of time by the sun.”

“Ask who saw him leave the cloister. Find someone who certainly saw him walk out the cloister door into the yard.” She forestalled the question she saw coming to that by asking, “What about Master Champyon?”

Almost, Christopher refused to be turned aside from Master Haselden; he hesitated but finally said, “My father talked with Champyon at his inn that morning. He won’t say what was said between them. He claims it’s for the next escheator to know, no one else. He says he left not long thereafter to ride to Reading on business. He and the servant who went with him claim that’s all he did. That he rode out of Goring on the Reading road, nowhere near the nunnery and long before the time of the murder. They came back late the next day. I haven’t learned yet when he reached Reading. I’ve sent someone to ask.”

“Who heard what passed between him and your father?”

“Mistress Champyon and her son and daughter were there.”

Which was almost the same as saying “No one” because they would long since be all agreed on their story. Unless, for Stephen’s sake, Juliana deserted her mother. “Did your father have someone with him? Master Gruesby?”

“No. That morning he went alone to everyone.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Even Master Gruesby can’t say.”

“We know where Rowland Englefield was later, almost to a certainty. Where were Mistress Champyon and Lady Juliana after Master Montfort and then Master Champyon left them?”

“It seems they kept to their room at the inn.”

“Seems?”

“Their servants say so. Inn servants were in and out, bringing their dinner and clearing away afterwards. No one saw them go anywhere, anyway.”

“And Nichola?”

“Nichola?” The question stopped Christopher short. “Why her?”

“She had as much to lose as Stephen if he was found to have no claim to that manor. More to lose than her father does.” Though Frevisse had not seen it that way until now.

Nor had Christopher. Slowly, considering, he said, “I’ll find out.”

Another new thought made Frevisse exclaim, “Lady Agnes!”

“I already said-”

“Not where she was. About the dagger. She’s not always been an old woman who goes few places, and even now she has friends she talks with and is always hearing things from her servants. She very possibly knows as much as anyone about everyone and everything in Goring. She may well know who has something as unusual as a ballock dagger.”

“To protect someone she might lie,” Christopher said doubtfully.

“She probably would, if it were Stephen. Otherwise, she might not. We lose nothing by asking her, and best we ask her now, while she’s still unsettled by Nichola’s death.”