The Clerk's Tale

Chapter 2

Frevisse stopped short and raised her head but kept her surprise to herself as she answered, level-voiced, “No, I didn’t know.”

The woman in front of her nodded as if pleased to hear it. Elderly but standing straightly, her age-faded eyes bright amongst the deep-set wrinkles of her long-boned face, she pointed with a short, leaf-carved walking staff of polished oak toward the ash tree.

“Over there. Stabbed to the heart. Four days ago. His clerk found him.”

“Indeed?” Frevisse ventured.

“Indeed. Though I doubt the clerk did it, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Ah.” The woman apparently found that both a surprise and a lack. Though white-wimpled and black-veiled, she was no nun; her gown of dark-dyed green wool with darker-dyed high-standing collar and wide cuffs told that, but while Frevisse had no guess who she might be-not the grieving widow, assuredly-the woman said with complete certainty, “You’re Sister Ysobel’s cousin. The prioress. Domina Elisabeth.”

Her certainty made Frevisse pleased to answer, “No. She’s with Sister Ysobel.”

“Ah. Then you are…?”

“Dame Frevisse. I companied her here. And you?” Since questions could go both ways.

“Lady Agnes Lengley,” she answered readily enough, with a pause to see if Frevisse found that significant. Frevisse did not and Lady Agnes went on a little more briskly, “I come sometimes to sit with Sister Ysobel but she’ll enjoy fresh company and I’ll leave them to it for today.” She jerked the tip of her walking staff toward the ash tree again. “So if you didn’t know about him, you weren’t praying for him just now?”

“No.”

“Pity. He was an unpleasant man. He’s probably in need of prayers.”

She started forward, needing her walking staff a little but not much and clearly expecting Frevisse to join her.

As much for curiosity as courtesy, Frevisse did, tucking her hands up her opposite sleeves and shortening her steps to match the older woman’s, saying, “His widow rode in a little while ago with a great many people.”

“Ah, yes. I saw that. And probably none of them much caring he’s dead but not about to miss for anything the funeral and the sport of mourning him.”

Dryly Frevisse asked, “He wasn’t much liked?”

“Liked? Morys Montfort? Not by anyone who knew him as far as I’ve ever heard.”

“Montfort?” Frevisse stopped, startled and not hiding it. “The crowner Montfort? Is that who’s dead?”

Lady Agnes, gone a step onward, stopped and looked back over her shoulder, surprised in her turn. “Yes. That’s him. You knew him?”

“Somewhat.” And had not liked him. As crowner he was a royal officer, charged with looking into any sudden deaths, to learn if they were accident or if there was blame, and if there was blame, then to call in the sheriff and collect any fines there might be due to the king. The office carried both power to do good or ill and the chance for profits both just and unjust, and the few times, too many, that Frevisse had had dealings with Master Montfort had not been pleasant. That he was violently dead was neither a surprise nor a distress but she asked, “Who’s thought to have killed him?”

“There’s never even a good guess, so far as I’ve heard. Or maybe I mean there are too many guesses.” Lady Agnes walked on, prodding her walking staff into the gravel. “He made enough men angry at him over the years he was crowner. Or it was maybe something he’s done since he became escheator. Much good that’s done him.”

“Escheator?” Frevisse was again in step at Lady Agnes’s side. “When did he leave off being crowner?”

“Last Michaelmas. Well, he was serving under Walter Wythill, who’s properly escheator, but Wythill has been none so well, as Montfort well knew when he agreed to serve him, and so Montfort was seeing to much of his duties these few months past. With an eye to succeeding him, I’d warrant, and hope of going on to be sheriff afterwards, surely. That’s the way it goes, often enough. But that’s all it got him.” She pointed her staff toward the tree.

Escheator was another royal office, its main duty to determine the lawful heir or heirs of inheritances and see to them having their properties-with due fines paid to the king. As with the crowner, there were profits to be had from the work, but as Lady Agnes said, it was also often a man’s last step to becoming sheriff of a shire, with such wide-reaching power that the thought that Montfort might someday have ranged so high made Frevisse slightly ill, and to cut off the half-made thought that it was better he was dead, she asked, “But what was he doing here in this garden at all?” An unlikely place for any man to be, let alone Montfort.

“Now that’s a question that’s been asked,” Lady Agnes said. “No one knows. As a place to kill someone, it’s private enough, that’s sure.” She gave a brief look around the garden, as Frevisse already had. To one side there was only the blank, windowless back wall of what Frevisse guessed was a barn or byre. To the other side a single narrow window looked down from high in the gable-end of some cloister building, while from the infirmary there were only two small windows set well up under the eaves, too high for easy looking out of. As for ways into the garden, there was only the door from the infirmary and another through a tall wooden wall across the gap between the infirmary and what she supposed was barn or byre, which raised a question…

“But who he met here and why he was killed…” Lady Agnes sniffed disdainfully, as if being killed was an ill-mannered thing to do. “… no one knows.”

“He likely had enemies enough,” Frevisse suggested.

“In plenty, I’d guess. Nor had he made any friends lately around here, either.”

“He was in Goring as escheator, then?”

“He was.”

Lady Agnes’s answer was clipped short enough that Frevisse held back from asking more that way; asked instead, “The inquest is tomorrow, I think I heard. Has the crowner learned anything, do you know?” Whoever was crowner now.

“Ah.” Lady Agnes brightened. “That I don’t know, though word is he’s been busy enough these two days past with questions and all. Having his mother here will likely slow him down a bit but that can hardly be helped.”

“His mother?”

“Montfort’s widow. The crowner is Montfort’s son, God help him. Succeeded to the office when Montfort moved up to escheator, worse luck for him now. A grieving mother on one hand-supposing she’s grieving all that much, which I wouldn’t be-and a murdered father on the other. He’ll be wishing himself anywhere but here before this is done, I’ll warrant.”

They were taking the turn of the path back toward the infirmary from one of the far comers of the garden, in time to see the infirmary door open and a nun stand aside to let Domina Elisabeth go ahead of her into the garden.

“Ah,” Lady Agnes said with satisfaction. “Here comes Domina Matilda, and that’s your Domina Elisabeth with her, I take it.”

Frevisse murmured agreement. The afternoon was waning, with more shadows than sunlight within the garden walls now, but they joined the two prioresses on the path outside the infirmary door where the light still fell most golden and almost warm. Names were given, with much bowing of heads and a curtsy of respect from Frevisse to St. Mary’s prioress, a gaunt, crisp woman in a faultless Augustinian habit and firmly starched and sharply pressed veil, whose deepened lines around eyes and mouth looked more likely to laughter than ill-temper as she said, “I’ve already given apologies to Domina Elisabeth for your poor welcome. Unhappily, I’m not sure I can better it, we’re so suddenly crowded. More folk came with Mistress Montfort than we expected and-”

“Now there’s no trouble,” Lady Agnes interrupted. “The both of them are welcome to stay with me.”

Domina Matilda gave her a considering look before saying, “That’s kindly offered,” adding to Domina Elisabeth with a smile, “Lady Agnes’s house is nearly opposite our east gate. You’d be well seen to there, I promise, as well as be able to come easily to most of the Offices if you choose.” Her smile deepened. “I can also speak well of her character.”

“Hah,” Lady Agnes said.

“Besides,” Domina Matilda went on, “she can show you the back way to and from the infirmary and let you use her key, to visit Sister Ysobel as you choose.”

“Her key?” Domina Elisabeth said, too surprised to hide it. Back ways into nunneries were simply a common fact; keys to them in lay hands were not.

“That she may see Sister Ysobel as she wishes.”

“It’s what I came for today,” Lady Agnes put in, “but you were here already and pleased Sister Ysobel surely was to see you.”

“You’re friend to my cousin, then?” Domina Elisabeth asked.

“For some years now. She was the infirmarian’s help when I once fell ill enough”-and once had better be the only time it happened to her, her tone said-“to need all the care St. Mary’s could give me.”

“And gave it gladly, fair recompense for all your kindnesses to us,” Domina Matilda put in.

Lady Agnes acknowledged that with a slight nod and a smile. “The care included Sister Ysobel keeping watch over me through the worst hours of my ailment and sitting with me for company through the days it took me to recover. Now, in her need, I return the favor as best I may. Though not to so good an outcome, I fear.”

“I fear not,” Domina Elisabeth agreed quietly, and the four women made the sign of the cross on themselves before she added, “Dame Frevisse and I would be pleased to stay with you, my lady. Thank you for the courtesy.”

Domina Matilda smiled with relief-it was no little matter to have strange nuns sleep in a nunnery’s dorter, probably the only place she had left to offer, unavoidably distracting and disturbing the others from their usual ways-and Lady Agnes said briskly, “Best we be off then. You’ll have to keep their men and horses,” she added to Domina Matilda. “I’ve not the room for them, but you’ll give orders to let their people know where they are and where to bring their baggage?”

“Assuredly,” Domina Matilda agreed.

They made their farewells and thanks to her then and parted at the infirmary’s door, Lady Agnes promptly turning away along the walk toward the garden’s other door, saying to Domina Elisabeth beside her and Frevisse following after, “She’s a good woman, is Domina Matilda. Keeps a firm hand on everything and takes no nonsense from anyone, including me. Here’s our way.”

The door in the wooden wall was narrow and latched by a short wooden bar fastened to the door and swung down into a wooden hasp on the frame. It opened into the gap between the buildings, with another wooden wall and door at its other end. “The gardener’s way into the garden,” Lady Agnes said, standing aside to let them go ahead of her, “for when he’s needed here, and if a doctor is wanted in the infirmary, without need to bring him through the nunnery. A moment please.” Having followed them into the alleyway, she paused now to almost but not quite shut the door and then fished a long, broad-teethed key from her sleeve.

“You see how it works,” she said, crowding aside as best she could to let them both see as she jiggled the key into the lock on this side of the door. “The key goes in here, and when I turn it, it turns a latch on the garden side that lifts the bar out of its catch, letting me open the door. To lock it from here, I have to turn the key to lift the latch to lift the bar so I can pull the door shut and then turn the key to lower the latch, setting the bar into its catch. Done,” she added, wiggling the key from the lock and tucking it back into her sleeve.

“Then from inside there’s no need of a key,” Frevisse said. “The bar can just be lifted by anyone on that side of the door.”

“Even so.”

The alleyway, closed in between walls and under the eaves of the barn-a byre would have had a smell of animals, Frevisse decided-was dark and chill but short and at its other end the other door had no lock nor was it as well made as the other, loose on its hinges as Frevisse swung it open and went through into what she guessed was the nunnery’s kitchen garden, a long stretch of rough earth beds and low wicker fences overlooked by the back of nunnery buildings and separated on one side by a waist-high willow-woven fence from a large, open yard. Not the foreyard by which they had come into the nunnery but one of byres and barns, a haystack, a long woodpile, and men at work at the varied tasks that made possible the nuns’ life of prayers.

The only idle man in sight was sitting on a bench, leaning against the kitchen garden’s gatepost, but as Lady Agnes led them the shortest way toward him, he stood up, straightened his doublet, and bowed to Lady Agnes, who waved a hand at him and said, “I’m going home, Lucas. Move out.”

He bowed again but took a good look at Domina Elisabeth and Frevisse before he set off along the yard, the women following. The well-trod mud made easy going except where a cart had lately rutted it raw and Lucas paused while they managed across it with careful feet and lifted skirts. No one paid them any particular heed that Frevisse noticed, though Lady Agnes asked pardon for bringing them such a back way with, “It’s convenient to my purpose when I go to see Sister Ysobel. No getting caught up in talk in the cloister and so forth on days when I don’t have time for it.”

Following Lucas, they turned through a plain, double gateway, one gate set open, into the foreyard they had left to enter the cloister at the first. It was quiet now, guests and their horses and baggage all sorted out and away, only two men left, cleaning the cobbles with shovel and broom. Now Lucas fell back to a few paces behind Frevisse, still following Lady Agnes and Domina Elisabeth, along the foreyard and out the nunnery’s front gateway to the street again and into the hurry of people about their end-of-day shopping or home-going. With no riders or carts coming, Lady Agnes crossed it a-slant to the right, saying to Domina Elisabeth beside her and a little over her shoulder to Frevisse, “I live just there,” pointing with her staff along the street to an overhanging housefront set, unusually, longwise rather than narrow to the street.

Like most of its neighbors, it rose two tall stories and, like them, was half-timbered, the plastering between the wide timbers scored into cross-hatched and swirling patterns, while the roof’s thick thatch was golden with newness. At street level, set back under the upper storey’s overhang and thereby protected from weather when it came, two narrow shops fronted the street, their shutters down to make counters out into the way of passersby, the better to show their goods. One of them was selling gloves ranging from plain cloth to fine leather, the other had baskets of many-colored embroidery thread set out on display and skeins of fine-dyed wool hung on a bar above them. Their keepers were both women who gave smiling greeting to Lady Agnes, who gave it smiling back and said low-voiced to Domina Elisabeth, Frevisse barely able to catch the words, “Widows, like myself, the both of them, but not so fortunate in their husbands. They don’t pay much rent to me but they make a living and that’s better than having them poor and on the parish’s hands. Besides, they’re quiet. I’d not have men loud under my solar day in and out for anything I might be paid.”

Lucas lengthened his stride to go ahead of them and opened a door set in a gateway between Lady Agnes’s house and the next. They passed through into a cart-wide, cobbled, clean-swept passage leading back between the houses, chill and deep-shadowed in the fading afternoon but opening into a small, cobbled yard with a blank wall of the neighboring house down one side, the rear wing of Lady Agnes’s house down the other, the yard cut off at its far side by a head-high wattle-and-daub wall, neatly capped by thatching, and a closed gate, while the main part of the house rose between them and the street now.

That much Frevisse took in before a kerchiefed, aproned bundle of a woman flurried out of a doorway from that main part of the house and came clucking like a flustered hen toward Lady Agnes, thrusting a cloak at her while Lady Agnes fended it off, saying, “Letice, there’s no need. I’m about to be indoors, aren’t I?”

“You shouldn’t have been out this long without it and the day’s turning colder by the minute. If you’ve taken cold, it’s no fault of mine. I saw you coming and have Emme building up the fire this very minute but this will see you warm until then.”

Still fending off the cloak and moving toward the door, Lady Agnes said, “Letice, this is Domina Elisabeth of St. Frideswide’s near Banbury, Sister Ysobel’s cousin. Remember I said she was coming? And Dame Frevisse. They’re my guests for this while. St. Mary’s is overcrowded.”

Letice made a quick, respectful curtsy their way without slacking her heed of Lady Agnes but leaving off with the cloak to go ahead of her up the stone step and open the door, saying, “I saw them crossing the street with you, my lady, and thought that might be the way of it and I’ve sent Cook word. I’ll tell Emme to see to airing Master Stephen’s room when she’s done with the fire, shall I?”

“Yes,” Lady Agnes agreed, adding to Domina Elisabeth, “Stephen is my grandson. We keep his room ready even though he mostly stays with his wife’s family since he married. And here we are.”

With Letice standing aside to let them pass, she led them through the carved wooden arch of the doorway into the darkness of a wooden-walled booth that served to hold off the worst draughts from the rest of the house and through its smaller inner doorway into the house’s hall, a high-raftered room running the house’s full length, stone-floored and well-lighted by a pair of tall windows looking out into yard they had just left, with a fireplace in the wall between them and beyond them another doorway that led away into the wing along the yard. At the far end a narrow stairway made of thick oaken slabs went steeply up to an open gallery above, with shut doors at either end to private parts of the house, Frevisse supposed, the one on the left probably into the solar Lady Agnes had said was above the street-facing shops, and it was indeed to the stairs that Lady Agnes went, saying to Domina Elisabeth, “Now for it. Pray, pardon me my slowness.” For the first time the need for her staff was plain as she leaned to it heavily while gripping the stairs’ rope railing with one hand and pulling herself upward. Letice had hurried to catch up to her but the stairway was too narrow; she could not help her lady from beside her, only climbed close behind, ready to be needed, and at the top give her a push up the last step that Lady Agnes seemed not to mind, only turned, flushed with effort and a little short of breath, to say down to Domina Elisabeth, “There. I only hope your knees are better than my poor old ones.”

“You could save your knees,” Letice muttered, laboring up the last step herself, “if you’d have your room below instead of up here.”

“There’s nothing to see from any room down there except the yard and there’s nothing goes on there,” Lady Agnes answered as if this were something said between them more often than once. “Come,” she added to Domina Elisabeth now climbing after her. “I’ll show you my chamber. You’ll see for yourself why I mean to keep it.”

“They might better like to see their own,” Letice said.

“Before Emme has seen to it? Nonsense.” Thudding her short staff solidly on the gallery’s wooden floor with every step, Lady Agnes headed for the nearer door, and with a well-heaved sigh Letice hustled ahead of her to open it.

Frevisse, following Domina Elisabeth up the stairs and then along the gallery, knew as soon as she entered the solar why Lady Agnes favored it. Besides being of goodly size, it had a long window set under the front eave, thrust out over the shopfronts and the street, with glass in the middle two lights so that even on days too cold to have the wooden shutters open on the unglassed ends, Lady Agnes could still look out at whatever might be passing in the street, if not over the nunnery wall. More than that, the chamber was amply furnished toward comfort, not only with Lady Agnes’s tall bed hung with cream-colored curtains embroidered in twining green vines and crimson flowers but thick rush matting underfoot to warm the floor, a wide-topped table with a bench along one side, two backed chairs, a pair of heavy chests along one wall, and painted wall-hangings of ships with wind-bellied sails and strange cities perched on rocky coasts. There were the usual joint stools, too, and the clutter of everyday living-an embroidery frame with some three-quarters finished piece of tapestry work in bold colors beside one of the chairs; three books in a pile on one end of the table; folded linen in a basket beside one of the chests, waiting to be put away-but best of all just now was the deep-hearthed fireplace where a woman in servant’s gown and apron, gray hair wisping out from under the back of the neatly wrapped linen kerchief covering her head, was presently laying kindling carefully onto an old fire’s coals, with three logs ready to join them when there was fire enough.

That was where Frevisse would have gone, for choice, but Lady Agnes was beckoning both her and Domina Elisabeth to come with her to the window where the shutters stood wide to the afternoon’s thinning light, saying as they joined her, “You see? I should sit downstairs with four walls and nothing but servants to watch when there’s this?”

She had the right of it, Frevisse silently agreed. The nunnery wall was indeed too high for her to see anything except nunnery rooftops and the church tower, but the street was all hers to watch and the nunnery’s main gate and whoever came and went through it.

But Lady Agnes was drawing the shutter closed at one end of the window with a nod for Frevisse to do the same at the other, turning when she had finished to say, “Emme, haven’t you that fire going yet?”

“Takes time, my lady,” Emme said as if she had said it uncounted times before now and was resigned to saying it patiently many times more. But Frevisse was coming to suspect that Lady Agnes’s servants were probably good at patience or they’d not be her servants for long. Certainly Letice took patiently Lady Agnes’s flurry of orders to set the two chairs and a joint stool nearer the fire and that she must tell Lucas the tables needn’t be set up in the hall tonight because she and the nuns would dine here and bring some hot spiced cider as soon as might be because, “It’s perishing cold in here. Emme!”

“Done, my lady,” Emme declared, standing up and back from the fire now licking up cheerily around the logs laid on the kindling she had been tending.

“Off with you, then, and see to airing my ladies’ bed. A pan of hot coals now and another at bedtime, I’d say, to be sure of it. Go on.”

Letice and Emme both went, and Lady Agnes, settling herself into one of the chairs, gestured Domina Elisabeth to the other and Frevisse to the joint stool which, being nearest to the warmth spreading out from the fire, suited her very well. Left to herself, she would have been content simply to sit and be warm, but Lady Agnes, hands folded on the rounded top of her staff, leaned forward in her chair and said to Domina Elisabeth, “So. You’ve heard how this widow comes to be in your way. You’ve heard about our murder?”

“Only that there had been one.”

“Ah. Well, then.” With no doubt that Domina Elisabeth would be as eager to hear as she was to tell, Lady Agnes started in again on all that Frevisse had already heard of Montfort’s death. Not interested in hearing it again, Frevisse turned her gaze and mind to the fire, watching the flames at their dance and play and the slow settling of the logs into a bed of coals that had been kindling and in a while would be only ashes, just as the logs would be before the evening was done, with new logs brought to take their place, to burn to ashes in their turn. Like human lives. A brief, bright flourishing and then an end.

She ought to feel more for Montfort’s death than she did.

She prodded at her feelings but nothing stirred. There was no regret in her that he was dead, only that he had died so badly, a mean-minded man come to a mean end. She would pray for his damned soul but that was the most she could do and even then with no eagerness, only duty. If anything, she would pray more readily for his murderer. Whatever reason he had had for killing Montfort-and knowing Montfort, he could well have had a great one-murder was among the worst sins and the murderer as much in need of prayer as Montfort was.

The bell from St. Mary’s church tower began to sound its clear calling to Vespers. Lady Agnes broke off her telling of the clerk raising an outcry at finding the body and Domina Elisabeth paused her dismay to cross themselves, but to Frevisse starting to rise to her feet in answer to the bell’s summons, Domina Elisabeth raised a hand and said, “We needn’t go tonight. We’ve had a long day,” and turned back to Lady Agnes, leaving Frevisse caught all unexpectedly into anger that Domina Elisabeth so lightly dismissed the Office as if it were something to be bothered over or not, as one chose.

But anger was a sin, too, and Frevisse quenched it, instead slid around on the joint stool to face the fire and put her back as much as possible to the other women, leaving Lady Agnes to go on, “Still, the inquest is to be here in my hall tomorrow, did I tell you? When that’s done, we’ll know as much as almost anyone about it all, but in the meanwhile people are saying…” while she silently began Vespers for herself.