The Clerk's Tale

Chapter 22

That Juliana could succeed at persuading a jury exactly as she said was too real a likelihood. And possibly she was telling the truth, had done nothing more than tell Haselden what Montfort purposed. But Frevisse doubted it. But where was there proof to the contrary? All the frustration of that was in the look she shared with Christopher before he asked at Juliana, “How did Master Montfort come to tell you so much of his business that Master Haselden would want him dead?”

“Oh, that.” If Juliana remembered at all that Christopher was Montfort’s son, it did not matter to her. “I came here with Mother and Champyon not because I care a snapped twig about that manor but in hope of chances to be with Stephen. The more fool me.” She cast Stephen a look as baleful as his fixed on her. “Montfort came to see Champyon within an hour of his arriving in Goring. I stayed and listened. No one minded if I was there. I’m my mother’s dear daughter, after all. She doesn’t know about Stephen. Or about much of anything else, come to that. Montfort made it plain in just about so many words that he was already set to decide against Stephen as a way toward currying favor with my lord of Suffolk. He merely wanted Champyon and my mother to understand how grateful they were going to be to him. I should have left him to it.”

“But you sent word to Master Haselden instead,” said Christopher.

“A sealed message taken by an inn servant paid not to talk about it,” Juliana agreed.

Christopher looked to Haselden. “Her message was enough to decide you to kill Master Montfort?”

Haselden, something of his balance recovered, answered tersely, “Of course not. What the note said was only that there was trouble and I should meet her in the church just ere dark. I did, damn me.” He glared at Juliana, who smiled at him with a pleasure just short of open laughter, and he jerked his gaze back to Christopher. “That’s when she told me what Montfort said he was going to do. I knew the man well enough to believe her and to know there was no way to stop him short of killing him. But she’s lying if she says she didn’t know that’s what I meant to do. I worked it out while we were talking. The garden and how I could reach it and leave it with good chance of going unseen. Her share in it was to tell him the side way into the garden and get him there.”

“It will be my word against yours on that,” Juliana said, unbothered. “I think you said none of that to me. I’m very sure it never crossed my mind you meant to kill him.”

“Didn’t cross your mind? We talked it through. All of it!”

Juliana turned her smile to Christopher. “He talked about needing to talk alone with Montfort, with no one to know they’d met. All I did was say I’d help and the next day told Montfort I’d meet him in the garden. He’d said the day before that he meant to go around to my mother and all the others in the morning, so I knew I had the chance. Covering the ground before the ploughing started, he called it. I listened while he talked with Mother and Champyon but went out of the room a little before he’d finished and waited on the stairs for him. After that, it was all easy.” Unexpectedly, she laughed aloud and her voice took on the same silken undertone of lust she must have used to Montfort. “When he would have passed me, I laid a hand on his arm, looked at him from under my lashes, said I’d be in the nunnery’s infirmary garden about the hour of Nones and wouldn’t mind if he met me there. He promised me he would.” She changed abruptly to disgust. “I’ve never met a man I couldn’t lead by his privy parts like a horse by its halter. Montfort probably spent the rest of the morning holding his crotch.” She swept a look around at Frevisse and all the other women there, showing she thought it was something none of them could have managed even in their best days, then fixed her smile toward Lady Agnes while still saying to Christopher, “The interesting thing is that he was all pleased that morning when he was talking to my mother and Champyon over something that he said made the matter of the manor all simple. He said”-she cast a sideways look at Stephen-“that he had proof after all that Stephen was a bastard beyond doubt.”

Tight-faced with instant fury, Lady Agnes moved forward, leaving Mistress Haselden. “He couldn’t have. There’s nothing of the kind!”

“He seemed very sure about it,” Juliana said happily. “He patted his belt pouch and said that what he had there was worth money and he wanted to think awhile on how best to use it.”

To Frevisse that sounded a fool thing to have told anyone, but Montfort had never given sign of having much sense, only of greed. What he had probably wanted to think on was how best to extort the most money from both sides before doing what he meant to do all along.

“He didn’t happen to say what this ‘proof’ was?” Lady Agnes asked scornfully. “Because he said nothing of anything like that to me.”

“As if you’d admit it if he had,” Juliana said back at her, equally scornful. “He only said that there was going to be less trouble than he’d thought about ousting the Lengley claim because he had the proof now that Stephen was a bastard.”

“He was playing false,” Haselden growled. “Or she was lying, to make certain I was angry enough to kill him when the time came. What she did was send me a message that morning, saying he’d said that. But he hadn’t anything like it on him. I looked after I’d done for him and it wasn’t there.”

“That doesn’t mean he didn’t have it with him that morning,” Juliana snapped.

“It means you’re a liar, is what it means,” Haselden returned harshly. “You wanted to make sure I’d kill him, that’s all.”

More interested just then in practicalities than angrily flung accusations without proof, Frevisse asked, “Where’s the dagger you killed him with?”

More interested in his hatred of Juliana, Haselden tossed back, “In the ditch, of course. It takes good cleaning to rid a dagger of all blood and I wasn’t going to have the time to do it with my usual one. So I took that one with me and dropped it into the mud afterward and treaded it down. A waste of a good dagger because of a shit of a man.”

“How did you carry it unseen?” Christopher asked.

“Sheathed down my back so no one knew I had it.” He might have been explaining something no more important than how he’d dealt with a broken bootlace. But that seemed to be about how much Montfort’s life had been worth to him-far less than his lost dagger.

Sadly, softly, Lady Agnes said, “Oh, Philip.”

What control Haselden had recovered broke. He turned on her savagely and said with all the sick rage and despair there was in him, “You think you’re free and clear? You and your bastard grandson? When all I did has gone for nothing anyway?” He turned back to Christopher, with a vicious gesture toward Stephen, and said, “Proof or not, Montfort had it right. There’s no more Bower blood in him than in a joint stool.”

“Philip, don’t be a fool!” Lady Agnes cried.

“I’ve already been a fool!” Haselden raged. He turned on Stephen. “You played me for a fool with my daughter, you treacherous bastard. I’ll put you down so far you’ll never crawl up again for that!”

Stephen tried for words that did not come, managed only to shake his head in refusal or denial. It was Christopher who said, “Proof, Master Haselden. Do you have proof?”

“My sworn oath on it. He was got on his father’s whore. His father and I and Lady Agnes conspired to pass him off as legitimately born because Sir Henry’s wife looked likely to die and all she’d had was one sickly brat to stand between Sir Henry keeping that manor and losing it. I’ll swear it on the Bible seven times over.”

Lady Agnes, ice now and settling to the fight, said, “I’ll swear to the contrary as many more times as need be, and who’ll be the more believed? Me, the boy’s own grandmother, or you, a proven murderer out for revenge?”

“Or let’s look at it,” Haselden returned, “as you with everything to keep if you’re believed, against me with nothing to lose.”.

“I’ve sworn on oath before that he’s legitimate and I’ll swear it again and go on swearing it until I die.”

“Then you’ll burn in hell!”

“I’ll run the risk!”

Whatever Master Haselden might have said back to that was forestalled by a small cough from Master Gruesby, whom Frevisse had vaguely noticed ease away along the gallery behind her a while ago. Now he sidled forward to Christopher, holding a ragged-ended piece of paper in one hand and in the other a short quill pen and an inkhorn small enough to have fit in his belt pouch. Barely above a whisper and more to Christopher’s shoes than Christopher he murmured, “Lady Juliana’s statement against Master Haselden.”

Christopher took the paper, swept it with his eyes, and said, “Good. Thank you.” He handed the paper back to him and nodded toward Juliana. “Let her sign it.”

Juliana looked half ready to refuse, then shrugged and held her hand out for the paper, read it quickly, and went to where Master Gruesby was now waiting at the railing, the only flat place to be had in the gallery besides the floor. With a careless flourish she took the readied pen from him and signed below his words and gave the paper and pen back to him with, “There. That’s done. Now I’m going.”

She started for the stairs but turned again to Stephen and said, low-voiced and gently, “All I wanted was for you to love me.”

Hoarsely, strangled on too many feelings, Stephen said, “No. You wanted me to lust for you. But my love… you never wanted my love. It was Nichola wanted that. And it was Nichola I gave it to.”

Juliana’s look at him went cold, but before she could make to leave again, Christopher said, “There’s still that for you to answer. Nichola Lengley’s death.”

Juliana raised her eyebrows in mocking surprise. “Her death? That’s nothing to do with me.”

“There’s evidence says otherwise,” Christopher said grimly.

Juliana hesitated. Then she smiled, bitter and brittle and mocking all at once, and answered, “Evidence? That as we crossed that stream I dropped back from the other riders to ride beside her despite she tried to keep away from me, even shoved at my horse? That I said something to her about her husband and she made answer back at me that he was hers and she would keep him no matter what I did? That she made me so angry I hit her across her pretty little face with my riding whip and she cried out and I knew she’d tell Stephen so I swung my horse against hers, forcing it sideways over the edge of that steep stream bank? Is that what you mean?”

“Exactly that,” said Christopher.

Juliana’s smile was now small and bright and hard with scorn. “For all of which I doubt you have evidence enough to hang a flea, let alone convince a jury against me. Therefore, I think there’s nothing else about Nichola Lengley’s death to be said between us.” And she turned away again, arrogant in her triumph and with nothing to be done to stop her because what she had said about the evidence was all too true, and no matter how much truth there was in what she had said, she had not made confession of it.

But Mistress Haselden beside the stairs said as Juliana reached the top of them, “Lady Juliana.”

And Juliana turned toward her. And Mistress Haselden put both hands against her and shoved. And Juliana with no chance to save herself, maybe not even time to feel afraid, fell outward and backward and the snap of her spine as it hit the edge of a thick oak step near the bottom came almost as one with the crunch of her skull into the hall’s stone paving.

And into the frozen, horrible quiet of the moment af terwards Mistress Haselden said with terrible calm to no one at all, “She tripped.”