The Clerk's Tale

Chapter 21

Lady Agnes was seated at her window, a cloak wrapped well around her against draughts, the thin winter sunlight making paler her already pallid face, and when she turned her head from watching the street and whoever was presently leaving her house to regard Christopher and his question with a long level stare, her years were sitting more heavily on her than they had been two days ago. She had allowed him to come in because Frevisse had asked it but not given him so much as a look until now and looked more ready to bid him go away than answer it.

But after a pause, her stare still fixed on him, she said, “Ballock daggers are common enough. Why are you asking?”

“They’re not that common, my lady,” Christopher said.

She looked away out the window, determined not to be interested. “What does it matter?”

Evenly but with the weight of his authority as crowner quietly behind it, Christopher said, “There’s been murder, Lady Agnes. A death where there need not have been. In the king’s name, tell me what you know about any such dagger.”

She turned her head to look at him again as if staring him down might end the matter before, abruptly, she faced forward and said at the wall in a low, half-angry voice, “Philip has one. Master Haselden. Or had one. After he came back from the French war with Lord Lovell, he used to always wear it until I told him it was coarse.” She returned her look, sharp now, to Christopher. “That was years ago. It’s been years since I’ve seen it. Anyone could have it by now. It could be anywhere.”

“Thank you.” Christopher took a step back from her, ready to leave.

“You’re not particularly welcome.” Distracted from her grief, Lady Agnes was becoming crisp, and more crisply her look going past him, she asked, “When did my solar become everyone’s thoroughfare? Who are you?”

Frevisse turned with Christopher, Domina Elisabeth, and Letice to find Master Gruesby hovering with his usual unease in the doorway, as if uncertain whether he had come in too far or else not far enough or, when Lady Agnes snapped at him, should not have come at all.

“He’s my clerk,” Christopher said, going toward him, asking, “You heard?”

“Master Haselden,” Master Gruesby murmured.

“He’s likely returned home by now. Go and make inquiry after the dagger. Take someone with you. Where’s Denys?”

“Gone back to the nunnery with everything.”

“Is Jankyn still below? Take him with you. He’ll be better anyway. Master Lengley?”

They were both too intent on what they were doing to think about where they were or Christopher would not have asked that, Frevisse thought. But he did, and Master Gruesby answered, low as always but not too low to be heard across the room, “He went to the inn where the Champyons are staying. He said something to a servant and waited while the servant went inside and came out again. I presume he sent in word to someone there and waited for the answer.”

Christopher nodded agreement with that. “And then?”

“He returned here. He’s in the garden again.”

Lady Agnes snatched her staff from where it was leaned against the window seat and thudded it on the floor, flinching everyone around to face her as she demanded, “What do you mean, having your man follow my grandson?”

Christopher gestured Master Gruesby to leave while saying, “Lady Agnes-”

“Don’t ‘Lady Agnes’ me.” She struck the floor again. “What are you at? And where’s he going?” She pointed her staff at Master Gruesby’s back as he scuttled out of sight. “I want him back here!”

“Lady Agnes…” Christopher tried again.

“Philip’s dagger. My grandson. This is all about Montfort’s murder, isn’t it?” She threw the folds of her cloak aside from her legs and made to rise. “You young fool, let it lie. I don’t care if he was your father. He was never, and isn’t now, worth making trouble over.” She tried to push herself to her feet but failed, too weak or else too shaken by her rage, but striking peevishly at Letice who had rushed to help her, saying still fiercely at Christopher, “Let it lie, I tell you!”

“You’ll make yourself ill, my lady!” Letice protested.

Domina Elisabeth was gone to her, too, taking her a goblet of something to urge on her while frowning at Christopher who, unsettled by so much disapproval turned on him, tried, “Lady Agnes, none of this may go anywhere-”

“Good,” she snapped, shoving away Letice’s attempt to cover her legs again and refusing the offered drink. “Nobody cares who killed him, least of all me, just so long as he’s dead.”

“Lady Agnes, no,” Domina Elisabeth said.

Lady Agnes rounded on her but stopped, bit back whatever she had been going to say, and after a hard-fought moment said bitterly instead, “You’re in the right and I’m not. Whatever kind of man Montfort was, murder can’t be let go.” And at Christopher, more grudging than gracious, “Follow my grandson if you think it will do you any good. It won’t. He was with me when Montfort was killed and that’s flat.”

With barely a knock at the door, Emme entered, head-kerchief awry, and with hurried curtsy tumbled out, “Master Stephen is quarreling in the garden with that woman that was here the other day. I heard them when I went out…”

“Damn her!” With the help of her staff and her anger, Lady Agnes surged to her feet. “I’ll have her head on the garden path this time…” She swayed, sat heavily down, and made to rise again despite it but Letice and Domina Elisabeth closed on her, exclaiming that she must not, and Frevisse, already moving toward the door, said, “Shall I bring them here? Both of them?”

“Yes!” Lady Agnes cried. “The both of them. That bitch in heat can at least let him be until Nichola’s in her grave!”

Frevisse escaped out the door, Christopher with her, but in the gallery with no one to hear them she said, “It’s maybe best you stay here. Whatever Lady Agnes knows, she’s more likely to say it while she’s angry. I’ll bring Stephen and Juliana for you.”

“Here? With Lady Agnes to hear everything?”

“Here and now, while they’re all angry,” she said over her shoulder, leaving. “They’ll maybe drive each other on to betray more than otherwise they would.”

Above her head as she went down the stairs, Christopher called to a man in his livery waiting beside the hall’s hearth, the hall finally empty of everyone else, “Go with Dame Frevisse. She has my authority. Back her on whatever she does.”

Frevisse let the man follow her without wasting explanation on him, thinking pointlessly as she left the hall and crossed the yard that it was as well she was wearing that unloved fur-lined habit today, given how often she was going outside without a cloak. Stephen’s angry voice reached her as she went through the garden gateway. He and Juliana were not in the winter-barren arbor this time but on the path halfway down the garden and no sign of lust between them, Juliana clinging to Stephen’s arm to keep him near her as he pulled away, saying at her, “Leave go. Just leave go. I don’t want you.”

“Then soon. There’s no reason not to…” Juliana broke off, seeing Frevisse and the crowner’s man and letting Stephen go as he turned and saw them, too.

Frevisse, not bothering with courtesy, said at Stephen, “Your grandmother wants to see you,” and at Juliana, “You, also. Now.”

Juliana drew back, gathering her cloak around her. “A pity, then, that I don’t want to see her.” She gave Stephen an unfriendly sideways look. “I’m not welcome here and I’m going.”

“The crowner is with her and wants to see you, too. He’s sent his man to be sure of it,” Frevisse said, and when Juliana looked about to refuse again, Christopher’s man took a purposeful step forward. She paused at that then shrugged with disgust and started toward the house. Stephen opened his mouth to ask something of Frevisse but she curtly shook her head at him and stepped aside to let him and Juliana and Christopher’s man go ahead of her.

They returned to the hall in silence, with Christopher’s man going aside to the fire again once they were inside and Stephen waiting at the stairs for Frevisse and Juliana to go up ahead of him. Frevisse, going first, heard Juliana behind her say something quickly and low to Stephen, who only answered, “No,” and Juliana’s face was sullen and unbecoming when she joined Frevisse in the gallery. Stephen’s was no better and in continued silence Frevisse led them into Lady Agnes’s chamber and then stepped aside, staying beside the door as they crossed together toward Lady Agnes still seated at the window, Christopher standing beside her and Domina Elisabeth and Letice drawn away to the fireside.

Watching them come toward her, Lady Agnes gave a short, barking laugh. “Is it a falling out of lovers makes you both so grim? Or just fury at me for interrupting a dog and his bitch at play?”

“No play, Grandmother,” Stephen said back at her. “Not anymore.”

“Finding lust an insufficient bond, are you?”

“Just because you’re past it, you old bitch-” Juliana started.

But Stephen cut her off, saying at Christopher, “I’ve asked her about how the horsehairs might have come on Nichola’s glove and she won’t say. I haven’t told her what else you know.”

That was a neatly placed bluff but Juliana gave Christopher no time to play it, saying at Stephen scornfully, “Whatever he knows, he doesn’t know enough or he’d be arresting someone.”

“You’re right. As always,” Stephen snapped back. “But I know enough. You made Nichola fall. You killed her.”

“You fool.” Juliana’s anger was as vicious as his own. “She fell. There was nothing more to it than that!”

“You made her fall, Juliana.”

“It was her own stupid clumsiness made her fall. Or her horse’s. It doesn’t matter!”

“Or a riding whip across her face! You tried that on me one time, remember? I said something you didn’t like and I barely got my hand up in time to keep from a cut across the eyes. Nichola wasn’t so quick.”

Juliana took a step to bring her close to him, said up at him, furious and unfearing, “Don’t be such a dolt. The little fool was hit by a branch.”

“How?” Stephen demanded, his fists clenched at his sides. “She’d have to be riding close behind someone for a branch to hit back that hard into her face and she never rode that close, especially in rough riding like there was along that stream. What did you do, Juliana? When all the rest of us went charging up the far bank of the stream, you pulled back, knowing Nichola would be well behind us all? Did you try to shove her off her horse and she flung out her hand to save herself, grabbed at your horse’s mane, and that’s how its hairs were tangled in her glove? Was that the way of it?”

“You idiot, Stephen!” Juliana’s fury was now matching his, made harsher with scorn and disgust. “Suppose I did take the chance there at the stream to say something to her. Suppose she laughed at me for it and said that whatever I did, whatever happened, you were hers and going to stay that way. Suppose she made me angry enough I didn’t care what I did? You’re guessing all of it!”

“She made you so angry that you hit her across the face, didn’t you? And then what? While she was blind with pain, you swung your horse against hers and sent it over the bank? Was that the way of it?”

Juliana took a step back from him, suddenly cold in her rage. “You’re such a fool, Stephen!”

“Why do it, Juliana?” Stephen asked, the words raw with pain. “She never did you any harm.”

“She laughed at me. And she married you when you ought to be mine!”

“Our marriage was her father’s doing and mine, not hers! It’s me you should have killed. Or him. Not her!”

With fury uppermost in him, Stephen grabbed Juliana by the arms. Nothing of the lover was left in either one of them, only the desire to hurt, and Christopher started forward to stop him but Juliana twisted loose and out of Stephen’s reach saying with a fury to match his, “You bastard!” She stopped and sudden, ugly delight sprang into her face and then her voice. “Yes! Bastard! You’re as much a bastard as your grandmother is a lying bitch, and I’ll tell the next escheator everything about it when he comes!”

Carried on her anger, she turned away in a swirl of cloak, past Frevisse and out the door before anyone could stop her. Frevisse, nearest, followed her, to call down to Christopher’s man to block her leaving if need be, but Juliana was brought short at the stairhead by Master Gruesby who was just handing Mistress Haselden up the last step onto the gallery, with no way past them and no chance for them to be out of Juliana’s way before Christopher had overtaken her with, “Wait on, my lady. There’s more to say,” and added to Stephen come close behind him, still angry and wanting his hands on Juliana, “Enough. The rest is mine to do,” stopping him a few yards away.

For one long moment they all stood staring one at another. Juliana, Stephen, Christopher. Master Gruesby still holding Mistress Haselden’s arm. Mistress Haselden still poised on the last step. Frevisse. Then Master Gruesby let go of Mistress Haselden and Christopher pointed first at Juliana and then aside, saying, “Step away, my lady,” and gave a look at Stephen and for good measure at Lady Agnes, Domina Elisabeth, and Letice just come out into the gallery from the solar, warning them all to stay where they were, while Frevisse quietly eased sidewards and back, putting herself in the way of the other door from the gallery to leave Juliana not even that retreat as, obeying Christopher sullenly, she moved away from the stairs.

Mistress Haselden, not understanding any of it, stared at them all with tear-reddened eyes, seeming even slighter a person than Frevisse remembered her from the day of Montfort’s funeral when at least there had been her husband to steady her. Here she was simply a worn wisp of a woman in a plain black mourning gown and veil who, openly desperate to be reassured, asked toward Lady Agnes, “What-?”

But Christopher stepped in front of her, interrupting her, albeit courteously, not to fright her more, “My lady, thank you for coming. Master Gruesby?”

That was an asking as to why she was here and Master Gruesby hastily but to Christopher rather than at the floor said, “Master Haselden was not at home. I asked Mistress Haselden about the dagger and then thought that you should hear her.”

“Mistress Haselden,” Christopher said, still carefully courteous, “my clerk asked you about a certain kind of dagger?”

Another woman might have questioned why but Mistress Haselden looked to be too dulled with grief to care. “My husband had one, I know. I tried to find it just now, when your clerk asked about it, but I couldn’t. Then your clerk said I should talk to you.”

“Your husband wears this dagger?”

“Not for a long while. He said it was overlarge and awkward for everyday wearing. He put it away in his clothes chest a long time ago.”

“He might have sold it since then and not told you. Or given it to one of your sons,” Christopher suggested.

Mistress Haselden refused that with a small shaking of her head. “I see it every time I turn out that chest for the spring and autumn cleaning. It’s always-”

“Allison.”

She stopped short and turned her head along with everyone else toward Master Haselden at the foot of the stairs. Then she moved aside as he came up them, two at a time, to pause at their top to take in everyone with a quick look and a slight, puzzled frown before laying a hand on his wife’s shoulder and saying, pleasantly enough though a little short-winded, “There now. I came home just after you’d gone. They said you were away with the crowner’s clerk to see Lady Agnes. What’s toward?”

“She was just telling us,” Christopher said, “that a dagger of yours has gone missing.”

“A dagger of mine?” Master Haselden laid his free hand to the pommel of the dagger at his belt. “I don’t think so.”

“Your ballock dagger,” Mistress Haselden said. “It’s gone from the chest.”

“If it is, I don’t know about it,” Master Haselden said, still caught too off guard for even indignation yet.

“I had the thought,” said Christopher, “that you might have put it elsewhere and not told her.”

Sure of her housekeeping if nothing else, Mistress Haselden answered before her husband could, “He hasn’t. He’d have said. It was there when I put his best doublet away after Christmas but when I looked just now, it’s not.”

“Then someone has taken it,” Juliana cut in suddenly. “And who more likely than Stephen?” She pointed an accusing finger at him. “He killed Montfort. He probably killed Nichola, too. He was always saying to me how much he hated her.”

“You lying bitch!” Stephen cried out. “I never did!”

He started for her but Juliana moved quickly behind Christopher who put a hand out in warning to Stephen, stopping him as Juliana went on, vicious with triumph, “He hated her! He even deliberately kept her barren all the time they were married so he could be rid of her someday. He never meant to get her with child, no matter what you wanted, Philip!”

Master Haselden swung angrily around on Stephen. “What? You kept her from breeding on purpose?”

Angry past caring and attacked too many ways at once, Stephen threw back, “For her sake, yes. She was too young-”

“Like hell she was!” Master Haselden boiled into higher anger. “She could have had one baby by now and another on the way if you’d done what you were supposed to!”

“Please, Philip,” Mistress Haselden protested. “She was too young. Don’t-”

“You knew,” Master Haselden exclaimed, disbelieving and angry together. “You knew!” And slapped her across the face with full-armed strength, spinning her sideways against the gallery’s rail.

“She didn’t know!” Stephen made to go for Master Haselden but Christopher grabbed hold of his arm and held him where he was, shouting at both of them, “Stop it!”

They both did, probably because Christopher’s man was coming at a run for the stairs, evening the odds, Stephen pulling back from Christopher, Master Haselden holding where he was, choleric and breathing heavily.

“Further off,” Christopher said, pointing for Stephen to draw back a few more steps and gesturing for his man to come up and keep watch on Master Haselden. Mistress Haselden, crying almost soundlessly, was still clinging to the railing, leaning over it, sobbing. Only when Lady Agnes came to her, laid a hand on her back, did she straighten and turn, burying her sobs against Lady Agnes’s shoulder as Lady Agnes put her arms around her.

Juliana, still venomous and not interested in any of that, said, “It was Stephen killed Master Montfort. It had to be.”

“Give it over, Juliana,” Stephen said, bitter and sounding suddenly weary. “I was here when it was done.”

“Your grandmother is a liar and so are all her servants,” Juliana snapped.

“Juliana,” Frevisse said quietly.

As if startled to remember she was there, Juliana spun around to face her, demanding harshly, “What?”

Still quietly but the words weighted, Frevisse asked, “Why did you call Master Haselden ‘Philip’?”

The question caught Juliana unready. “What? It’s…”

She groped for an answer but Master Haselden, not so quick to see the trap, said impatiently, “It’s my name.”

“I know it’s your name,” Frevisse said. “But I’d never presume to call you by it, and I’ve met you rather more times than I thought she’s ever done. Why did you call him Philip, Juliana?”

“For shit’s sake, Juliana, it doesn’t matter,” Master Haselden said, more impatiently. “They know you’re a whore. What does it matter if you were mine for a while? It was five years back.”

Now it was on him Juliana turned, eyes slitted with fury. “I wasn’t ‘yours,’ you weak-loined nothing. I made use of you for a while and that was all. Don’t ever go saying I was ‘yours.’ ”

“But it was Master Haselden killed Montfort, not Stephen, wasn’t it?” Frevisse asked, still quietly.

The quietness seemed to grate worse on Juliana than Master Haselden did. “What? Yes, of course it was him, not Stephen,” she snapped.

“Damn you, that’s a lie!” Master Haselden swore. “I wasn’t anywhere near Montfort that day once he’d done yapping at me at my place.”

“You were at the priory,” Frevisse reminded.

“Yes, I was at the priory. I was with Domina Matilda in her parlor and there was some old nun muttering her prayers in the comer who’ll say so along with Domina Matilda. I was nowhere near the garden.”

“You know where the garden is, though? Where Montfort was killed?” Frevisse asked.

“Of course I know where the garden is. I had an aunt was a nun in St. Mary’s. I went more than once to see her while she was dying, carried her out into the garden twice at least. But I was nowhere near it the day Montfort was killed.” He rounded on Christopher. “What’s she playing at? This is your business, not hers. Shut her up.”

“She has my leave to make it her business,” Christopher said evenly. “Tell her what she asks.”

That was trust out of the ordinary since he did not know what she was doing, did not yet know he had told her something today that had finally brought things together in her mind, and she said at Master Haselden, “You’re the bailiff for Goring. It would have been you who gave the order for the mill to be repaired the day Master Montfort was murdered, yes?”

Now finally wary, Master Haselden granted, “Yes.”

“So you knew better than anyone that the ditch would be drained that day, giving a way to come at the garden there otherwise wouldn’t be.”

“Half Goring, if not more, knew the ditch would be drained that day.”

“How many also knew the miller would be gone to visit his daughter?”

“More than enough. I doubt he kept it a secret.”

“And that the workers would be out of the way, having a midday meal you paid for them at a tavern?”

“There’s nothing in all that,” Master Haselden said strongly.

“There’s not much but there’s something,” Frevisse said back. “It’s that you were in the prioress’s parlor brings it all together. It’s no great drop from the window there to the ditch bank.”

“What?” Master Haselden’s scorn almost rang true. “What do you think I did? Said ‘Pardon me, my lady’ and dropped out of her window and she never thought on it again?”

“I’m saying you set your visit to her just before Nones, knowing she’d go off to the Office and think nothing of letting you leave the cloister on your own, used as you both were to you being there as Suffolk.’s bailiff. All you needed do was go down the stairs with her and when she hasted off to the church along with the other nuns you turned around and went back to the parlor. If you met a servant, you said you’d forgotten something. Once out the window and into the ditch, you were safe from being seen from anywhere but the mill, where no one was likely to be.”

“And after I’d done for Montfort, I somehow crawled back through her window, dirty with mud and dripping, and strolled out of the cloister, leaving no trace? Are you really supposing that’s what I did?”

“No,” Frevisse said coldly. “I think you went back along the ditch and came out at the.mill where you knew nobody would be. If anyone saw you after that, going around to the gate back into the yard, you could say you’d been at the mill seeing how the work was coming on and had slipped into the mud. Not that anyone was likely to think much of muddy boots with all the mud there is around these days. Whether you did meet anyone who will remember when we ask doesn’t matter. We only have to ask your servant left waiting with the horses which way you came back into the yard. From the cloister and through the gateway.”

“He won’t know,” Master Haselden said. “He’s doing good the days he can keep track of where his feet are.”

Mistress Haselden had turned around a while before, keeping close to Lady Agnes but watching, listening, to everything, and now, faint-voiced and staring wide-eyed at her husband, she said, “That’s why you took Walt with you that day, isn’t it? Because he won’t remember anything.”

“Close your mouth and keep it closed!” Master Haselden took a step toward her, and despite Christopher’s man moved into his way, stopping him, Mistress Haselden shrank back against Lady Agnes, a hand pressed over her mouth to hush herself.

It was Lady Agnes who said to Christopher angrily, “She means Walt is simple. He’s serviceable for plain things, but if Philip had come bloody to the thighs and elbows, Walt would not have wondered about it or remembered long enough afterwards to say anything to anybody.”

“Damn you!” Master Haselden said.

“How you got Montfort to the garden is plain enough,” Frevisse said. “When he saw you that morning, you set up the meeting in the garden, for whatever reason you found to give him. The only great question left is why you killed him.”

“The great question is why no one’s killed you, with that mouth you have!” Master Haselden returned angrily. He faced Christopher. “There’s no proof of anything in what she says, just guesses.”

Scornful and disgusted, Juliana said, “There’s proof enough. You never could see more than what you wanted to.” She turned to Christopher and said impatiently, “Of course he killed Montfort. He told me so.”

Master Haselden choked on his fury. “You set me on to do it, you bitch!”

“All I did was tell you that he said he was going to decide against Stephen. After that you couldn’t wait to have him dead.”

“You set me on to do it and, by God, I’ll make that plain to any jury.”

“You won’t. What jury isn’t going to believe me in my distress”-Juliana’s voice took on a pleading innocence-“at the thought that anything I might have said could have set you on to do such a terrible thing?”