The Clerk's Tale

Chapter 4

Even from the steep angle of the gallery, Frevisse knew him. Master Christopher, Montfort’s eldest son. When she had first met and last seen him, over five years ago, he had been a very young man in his father’s service but capable even then of standing out against his father’s authority if he saw the need, something no one else around Montfort dared to do so far as Frevisse had ever seen. Now he was crowner himself, come to the authority somewhat young perhaps but he strode up the hall through the bands of thin winter sunlight through the hall’s windows with all the certainty of someone ready to face and deal with whatever came. He was suitably gowned in black, his houppelande three-quarters long and severely plain over black hosen and plain, low-cut black leather shoes, his hat equally black and plain, without padded roll or liripipe, only a dark blue, silver-set jewel pinned to its left side.

Frevisse had no clear view of his face before he reached the table at the head of the hall and turned his back to the gallery, laying down a leather case that he then opened and stood looking at while others took their places around and in front of him, beginning with another young man far more simply dressed, carrying papers and obviously his clerk, who went to a place made ready for him with pens and ink at one end of the table. While he was sorting things there to his satisfaction, another man in Montfort livery was seeing eight men into places on two benches, one behind the other, in front of the table. They were the jurors, Frevisse guessed, brought together to rule on Master Montfort’s death-its cause and his murderer, if so much was known. It was the jurors’ task to have learned as much as might be about the crime before the trial, that they might more sensibly judge the evidence and claims that came before them. Therefore they were usually local men, as these looked to be, dressed in their best doublets, gowns, and hats in a bright array of greens and blues and reds, trying to keep solemn demeanor but their heads bobbing toward each other in eager talk and turning over their shoulders to see who else was being let into the hall.

Lady Agnes, having nudged Nichola along the gallery railing toward Stephen and Master Haselden, put herself between her and Frevisse and set to cheerfully telling her who each of the jurors were and her opinion of them. Frevisse neither particularly cared nor particularly listened but gathered that, since there were no witnesses to the actual murder to serve as jurors, Master Christopher had given order for the eight male householders nearest to the nunnery to take the duty of viewing the body with him and coming to conclusions about the murder.

“Ah, but there’s Master Gruesby,” said Lady Agnes with more interest, pointing. “Montfort’s clerk. The little, uneasy man with the pair of spectacles there, being shown to the bench behind the jurors by one of the crowner’s men. Remember I told you he found Montfort dead?”

He was, indeed, the man Frevisse had always seen as Montfort’s clerk and now she had his name. As the finder of Montfort’s body, his testimony would be maybe the most awaited, something some men would have enjoyed, but he gave no sign of being comfortable to be there, sitting on the very edge of the outer end of the benches where he had been put as if he expected it to burn him, adjusting with both hands his wooden-rimmed spectacles, held on by loops of ribbon around his ears and then adjusting them again and altogether seeming to wish he were somewhere else.

But, “Ah!” Lady Agnes said with great satisfaction. “Here comes the widow, and better yet, Domina Elisabeth is with her. That’s good. She’ll be a comfort to her, poor lady.”

And be able to tell Lady Agnes everything about her afterward, Frevisse thought wryly. Accompanied by Domina Elisabeth and a maidservant, Mistress Montfort was escorted by one of the men now done with the jurors to a cushioned place on a bench well to one side, where her son would not readily see her whenever he looked up. Certainly now, as she shifted the cushion a little further along the bench and sat down, the maidservant on one side of her, Domina Elisabeth on the other, mother and son traded no look, her head still bowed too low for Frevisse to see her face, Master Christopher busy in talk with his clerk at the table end.

“Letice,” Lady Agnes asked impatiently, “where are her children? Didn’t I hear some of her children had come with her?”

From where she stood a proper few paces behind her lady but still able to see nearly everything and hear all, Letice said, “Two daughters and two other sons came with her is what I heard, but she didn’t want them here for this, it’s said. They’re at the nunnery.”

“They’ll hear all about it anyway. Servants talk, even if no one else does,” Lady Agnes said. Then she stiffened, with a hissed intake of breath through her teeth, fierce with an anger that both startled Frevisse and turned her gaze with Lady Agnes’s to the man and woman just being let into the hall. There was nothing particular about them, a middle-aged couple, soberly dressed, with a certain stiffness to them perhaps, the woman’s hand resting on the man’s raised one more as if they were making formal entrance to the royal court at Westminster than to a crowner’s inquest in a country town, and with maybe an excess of cloth in the woman’s skirts and a little too much length in the liripipe swung down from the man’s broad hat and around his shoulders, but surely nothing worth Lady Agnes’s open ire at seeing them.

It was Stephen who said over his wife’s head, laughter behind the words, “Steady on, Grandmadam. You knew they’d be here.”

“That doesn’t make seeing them any the easier, the slinking weasels.”

“If you frown like that, you’ll give yourself wrinkles,” Stephen suggested, “besides letting them see how much they irk you.”

Lady Agnes flashed him a look of dislike to match what she had given the man and woman but he went on cheerfully, “Besides, you don’t want to waste all your fury on them. Rowland and Juliana are here, too.”

With another furious intake of breath that left Stephen laughing, Lady Agnes whipped her look from him back to the hall where a younger man and woman were entering in the first couple’s wake, following them up the hall to the bench in front of Mistress Montfort.

“Oh, yes, putting themselves to the fore,” Lady Agnes said with rich dislike. “That’s just their way.”

“You’d like them none the better for sitting in the back,” Stephen pointed out.

“What I’d like is them standing outside in the cold until they’re needed,” his grandmother returned sharply.

“What you’d like is them in the Thames up to their necks, with hopes there’d be a flood,” Stephen answered, then laid his hand over Nichola’s resting on the railing and said, because she was looking worriedly from him to Lady Agnes and back again, openly uncertain whether anger or laughter had the upper hand between them, “It’s all right.”

“Not while they’re breathing it isn’t,” Lady Agnes snapped.

Frevisse held back from asking who they were for fear of rousing Lady Agnes more but watched with interest as the older of the two women paused to say something to Mistress Montfort who briefly raised her head to answer and then looked down again, leaving the two couples to sit ahead of her, the two women in the middle, the men at either end.

A few others had been let in behind them, to take places on the rear benches, but apparently they were the last who were meant to be there by right or necessity because way was now being given to whoever else would come in and the hall’s orderly quiet broke under the hurry and talk of men and women crowding in, trying for a better place than someone else at the hall’s far end and along the sides; but before it came to elbow-pressing, the guards at the door lowered their halberds to bar the way and exchanged a few short, sharp words with the foremost of those they had cut off before Master Christopher rapped once on the bare wood of the tabletop, bringing sudden silence to the hall except for the scuffle and shift of people still settling themselves.

Ignoring them, Master Christopher in a voice pitched to be heard without being raised, said, firm with authority, “The inquest into the matter of the death of Master Morys Montfort, esquire and of this shire, is now begun.”

With most sudden deaths there was little question of how they had come about, whether by accident or open murder, but in any where there had been real question, his father’s preferred method of inquiry had been to gather as quickly as possible enough facts or seeming-facts to allow him to come to a conclusion that suited him and thereafter overbear the jury into agreeing with him. That Master Christopher’s way differed from his father’s was immediately clear. In a level, easily carrying voice he said to the jurors, “You have all viewed the body and the site of the murder in company with me?”

They agreed with scattered “Ayes” and head-nodding that they had.

“Would one of you be pleased, then, to describe what was seen and concluded by you all? Master Wilton.”

Master Wilton had been agreed on beforehand, to judge by how readily he stood up, an underbuilt man with a reedy voice and the forward manner of someone always overready to put himself forward before others could. Eager with his brief authority, he told in careful detail that they had all seen where the deceased’s body had been found, in the small garden of St. Mary’s priory, and looked at the said body where it presently lay in St. Mary’s priory.

“What did you conclude?” Master Christopher asked.

“That the deceased had been stabbed once with a long-bladed weapon too narrow to have been a sword and therefore likely to have been a dagger or knife.” Master Wilton was firm and clear about it and equally firm as he went on, “Nor did the body seem to have been moved from where it fell. We therefore judge from that that the deceased was probably killed there.”

Frevisse bit down on the urge to say, if only to Lady Agnes, that if the deceased was indeed dead and his body not been moved, then yes, “probably” that’s where he had been killed.

Either unnoticing or undisturbed, Master Christopher asked, “When would you judge that this murder took place?” And added a shade more quickly than Master Wilton could open his mouth, “We know it was the twenty-first of January this year of God’s grace. The time of day is what we need.”

Master Wilton caught back what he had all too clearly been going to say, swallowed with a large bobbing of his Adam’s apple, and said instead, “We judge he was killed in the afternoon of the said day, shortly before the body was found.”

Rather than after it was found, Frevisse thought, curt with impatience.

Master Christopher thanked Master Wilton and bade him sit, then spoke to his clerk, who left off his busy scratching of pen on paper to call on Master John Gruesby, finder of the body.

Slowly, maybe hoping the whole business would go away if only he took long enough, Master Gruesby rose to his feet, looking nowhere but at some papers clutched with both hands. But his hands did not tremble, Frevisse noticed, and though his voice did not rise much above a whisper, it held steady as he confirmed he was John Gruesby, late clerk to Master Morys Montfort, subescheator of Oxfordshire, and that he had found Master Montfort’s body the afternoon of the twenty-first of January just past as had just been said.

“How did you come to happen on the body?” Master Christopher asked.

“I was in search of Master Montfort.”

“Did you know he would be in the said garden?”

“I did not know for certain he would be. I was told he had gone that way and followed him.”

“Why were you looking for him?”

“A message had come for him. When he could not be found in the priory’s guesthouse, where I expected him to be because that was where we were staying while here, I began asking after him. Someone had seen him go out of the guesthouse. Another had seen him going toward the nunnery’s stableyard. A man there told me he thought he’d seen him going toward the way to the infirmary garden. I went that way and found him dead there.”

“Isn’t the infirmary garden part of the cloister?”

“Yes. I believe so.”

“But it’s open for anyone to come or go as they choose?”

“I believe not. There is a door to it inside the cloister and another, the way by which I entered, from the stableyard through a door said to be kept always locked.”

“Did you find this door locked?”

“No.”

“How did it come to be unlocked?”

“I don’t know.”

“You and the priory’s infirmarian dealt with the body before anyone else. You found no key on him?”

“No.”

“Did you look for one?”

“Yes. I also looked in the garden. There was none there, either.”

Frevisse wanted to hear more about the unlocked door but Master Christopher turned his questions to where and how the body had been lying. Nothing that Master Gruesby said varied from what Frevisse had already heard from Lady Agnes, except that Master Christopher asked if he had seen any weapon there that might have been used for the murder, either when he first found the body or when he had searched the garden for a key. To that Master Gruesby answered he had not. He had yet to look up.

There were other things Frevisse would have asked but Master Christopher moved on to, “Why was Master Montfort here in Goring?”

“He was come in his office of escheator.”

“In what matter?”

“The inheritance of Henry Lengley, esquire of this shire, lately deceased.”

“Was there dispute in the matter?”

“There has been disagreement,” Master Gruesby murmured.

“Between whom?”

“Between the said Henry Lengley’s younger brother Stephen Lengley…”

Frevisse had readily understood that nothing he was being asked was any surprise to Master Gruesby nor were his answers any surprise to Master Christopher but now she looked sharply aside, past Lady Agnes and over Nichola’s head to Stephen standing with all his attention on what was passing below but faintly smiling, as if it was a show put on particularly to entertain him.

“… and his late mother’s sister Cecily Bower, presently wife to James Champyon, esquire of Henley.”

The couple who had stirred Lady Agnes’s ire sat a little straighter, conscious of heads and murmurs turned their way. But Frevisse noted that the only surprise seemed to be her own. The matter was generally known, then. Except to her and perhaps Domina Elisabeth.

But Master Christopher was now asking, “Do you know of anyone who might have been interested enough in Master Montfort’s death to murder him?”

Master Gruesby ruffled through his papers uneasily and must have whispered something that reached not even to the table because Master Christopher asked, “What?”

A little louder, enough to be heard, Master Gruesby said, “There have been people angry at him over the years.”

That was gravely mis-saying it but all Master Christopher asked was, “Was there anyone angry at him now? Here?”

Master Gruesby shook his head, then probably remembered from his own clerking that the clerk writing away at the table would not see that and said, barely to be heard, “No one. No, there wasn’t anyone. He’d only just begun here.”

Goaded by his uncertainty, Frevisse would have prodded him for more. Master Christopher only said, “Thank you. You are welcome to sit down,” and Master Gruesby did, with the heavy suddenness of legs giving way.

The priory’s gardener, Master Garner, was called next, an elderly man who rose stiffly from his place on a rear bench and came forward to stand before the jurors and answered Master Christopher’s question as to his name and all with a briskness that suggested he more probably demanded his plants to grow rather than simply encouraged them. When asked, he swore to deal in no lies and when questioned agreed that, yes, there was a lock to the side door to the infirmary garden and, yes, it was kept locked and there were but two keys to it, that he knew of.

“Who has those keys?”

“The infirmarian be one who does, I understand. The other be my lady prioress. It’s my lady gives it to me when there’s work needed in that garden there. Turning garden beds, carrying out refuse, things like that. Only she didn’t have the key that day, I know.”

That made an interested stir among most of the onlookers but Master Christopher merely asked, “Do you know who did?”

“She did.” Master Garner pointed up at Lady Agnes. “Still does, for all I know.”

All heads turned and lifted to look at her. Undiscomfited, Lady Agnes slightly bowed her head to Master Christopher who slightly bent his in return but turned back to ask Master Garner, “So you were never at the door that day and so far as you know, it was locked or should have been?”

“Aye, sir, it should have been.”

Master Christopher thanked and dismissed him and held out a hand toward his clerk, who handed him a paper from which he read a sworn statement from Sister Joane, presently infirmarian at St. Mary’s priory, that the key to the infirmary garden’s door had not been out of her possession that day nor any other and to the best of her knowing the door had been locked as it should have been. That done, he handed the paper back to his clerk and turned again to look up at Lady Agnes.

“My lady, rather than ask you to come down, may we give you oath and have your answers from up there?”

“With thanks for your kindness, sir, yes,” Lady Agnes granted.

When she was sworn, Master Christopher asked, “Is this true you presently hold the prioress’s key to the door in question, my lady?”

In a carrying voice, easily heard throughout the hall, she answered, “It is.”

“Why?”

She explained with admirable briefness about her visits of kindness to Sister Ysobel.

“Has the key ever been out of your keeping?”

“Not since Domina Matilda trusted it to me. I keep it with my own household keys and they are always with me.”

“Did you use the key the day that Master Montfort was killed?”

“Did I go to the infirmary garden, you mean. No, I did not.”

Master Christopher thanked her, she welcomed him, and the stableman was called who had seen Montfort cross the stableyard; but, no, he swore it was only Montfort he’d seen go that way until Master Gruesby came and, yes, he’d been there in the stableyard, at one task and another, a good half of an hour and more and would have noticed anyone else going that way, he was certain, sir, and was certain, too, that no one had come out from there either, not until Master Gruesby did, calling for help, almost as soon as he’d gone in.

He was thanked and dismissed in his turn and Master Christopher looked at a paper in front of him, then looked to Master Wilton as master juryman and asked, “Have you made inquiry if anyone was seen entering the garden from the outside of the nunnery?”

The man stood up again. “No one says they saw anyone anywhere near there through the midpart of that day.”

He sat down again without being bidden. Master Christopher nodded thanks to him, then nodded to his clerk, who had been waiting and now straightened in his place to declare to the hall, “Master James Champyon is called before the court.”

The man on the forward bench rose from beside his wife, took a pace forward, ignoring the rustle of people shifting and craning to have better view of him, and announced firmly, “Here, sir.”

“And be damned to you,” Lady Agnes said under her breath. Nichola twitched with a suppressed laugh.

Master Christopher’s questioning of him was brief and to the point, neither man seeming to expect much of it. He affirmed that he was indeed Master James Champyon, esquire of Henley-on-Thames, and that he was presently husband of Cecily Bower, widow of Rowland Englefield and sister of the late Rose, who had been wife of the late Sir Henry Lengley, knight. No, he and his wife did not live in Goring but were come, with her grown children by her first husband-here he somewhat turned and made a small nod at the younger man and woman beside his wife-in the matter of his wife’s manor of Reckling…

“His wife’s manor?” Lady Agnes hissed under her breath. “I think not.”

“… presently in dispute,” Master Champyon rolled on, “after the death of my wife’s sister’s son, Sir Henry Lengley’s heir, Henry Lengley the younger.”

“Tedious bastard,” Lady Agnes muttered.

Stephen leaned behind Nichola to whisper with smothered laughter, “Grandmother, no. It’s me, not him, who’s supposed to be the bastard.”

Lady Agnes made an angry noise at him, while below them Master Christopher asked, “This is the matter that the escheator Master Montfort was here to deal with?”

“It is,” Master Champyon agreed.

“But no decision had yet been reached?”

“No. He had only come to town the day before his death.”

“Did you see him the day of his death?”

“I saw him in the morning, at the inn where my wife and I are presently staying. The Swan in High Street.”

“Did you see him in the afternoon of that day?”

“No, sir. I spent the day at the inn with my wife and never went out.”

“And were seen there by various servants and other folk, I suppose?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you. Pray, be seated. Clerk.”

Frevisse saw Master Gruesby’s head twitch to attention before he must have realized he was not being summoned. It was Master Christopher’s clerk, as Master Champyon took his seat again, who declared, “Master Stephen Lengley is called before the court,” and looked around and up.

So did everyone else in the hall, and Stephen calmly moved to the head of the stairs, made a slight bow toward the clerk or maybe the onlookers in general, then leaned forward, grasped the rope railings on either side of the steps, and in a single, long movement, swung himself out and down, to land gracefully and a small flourish at the stairfoot. A ripple just short of open clapping ran through the onlookers while Stephen, seeming to notice nothing, strolled around to the front of the table, bowed deeply to Master Christopher, and said, “Here, sir.”

“Yes,” Master Christopher observed flatly. “Thank you,” and set to questioning him much as he had done Master Champyon, with Stephen’s answers coming as readily as Master Champyon’s had. He affirmed he was indeed Stephen Lengley, younger son of Sir Henry Lengley, knight, resident here in Goring, and, yes, he was on the opposite side from Master Champyon in the dispute over this manor of Reckling but, no, he had not seen Master Montfort the day of his death. “He questioned both Master Champyon and me the day before and told us he would summon us again when he’d found out more. That was the last I saw or knew of him until after he was dead.”

“Where were you the afternoon that he was killed?”

“Here, visiting my grandmother, from dinnertime until the servants came exclaiming there was a man killed at the nunnery.”

“And you were seen here during that time?”

“Neither my grandmother nor her servants being blind, I was certainly seen here, yes.”

There was laughter at that. Ignoring it, Master Christopher said, “Thank you,” and dismissed him.

The questioning of both Master Champyon and Stephen had been a makeweight, Frevisse decided, watching Stephen bow and return up the stairs two at a time. She could see the outward purpose of it-they were the foremost concerned in the matter that had brought Montfort to Goring-but their testimony had done little more than add bulk to the inquest. Why? she wondered. Unless Master Christopher wanted, for some reason, to have on record where they claimed to have been when Montfort was killed.

With a wink for Nichola and a grin at his grandmother, Stephen took his place again, Master Haselden whispering something from his other side that made Stephen force down a smile and Nichola giggle; while below them Master Christopher was asking the jury if they could come to a conclusion based on what they knew by their own seeing and what they had heard here. Obediently, the men twisted around and toward each other on their benches, bringing their heads together. Around the hall a buzz of talk started up, only to fall away a few moments later when the jurors straightened themselves around into their places again and Master Wilton rose from among them to say into the waiting hush, “My lord crowner, from what we know and have here heard, we conclude that Master Morys Montfort, esquire and of this shire, was murdered by someone unknown and at present unknowable.”

It was as safe and unfortunately as fair a conclusion as could be made from what had been presented to them here, unless they wanted to bring accusation against Master Gruesby, the only person known to have been in the garden with Montfort that afternoon and apparently they did not. Master Christopher accepted their conclusion as if he had expected nothing else, thanked the jurors for their service, and formally closed the inquest.

What Frevisse expected then was a great deal of standing about and talking, but several of the crowner’s men moved from their places near the door, one of them going to open it wide, the others beginning to shift the onlookers toward it, skillful as sheepdogs working a herd of sheep. Even Master Champyon and his wife had just time to speak briefly to Mistress Montfort before one of them was beside them, courteously urging them away and Mistress Champyon’s son and daughter with them. They went, Master Champyon and his stepson in immediate talk together and no backward look from either of them or the daughter. Only Mistress Champyon paused to cast a long glare upward to the gallery, at Lady Agnes and Stephen, Frevisse thought, returned in kind by Lady Agnes though Stephen met it with a slight bow from the waist that probably accounted for the increased anger with which Mistress Champyon turned and swept after her family.

“Ill-bred b-” Lady Agnes began but broke off with a glance at Frevisse and said instead at Stephen, “Help me down the stairs, boy. I want to have a word with Mistress Montfort if I may.”

“My lady,” Letice put in. “You’ve been on your feet a long while. Should you maybe lie down before dinner?”

“I’ve never needed to rest before I ate in my whole life and I’m not starting now,” Lady Agnes snapped. “Stephen.”

Her tone left the choice between quarreling or agreeing. Frevisse saw Stephen exchange a look with Master Haselden, who shrugged, holding in a smile, and Stephen said cheerfully, “As you wish, dear Grandmadam.”

He went down the stairs as he had before and turned around to wait while Lady Agnes turned around, too, to make her way down backward, saying aside to Frevisse as she went, “Slow but certain. That’s how I am these days.”

Beyond them the hall was almost emptied and Master Christopher had given over being crowner and gone to his mother, had taken her by the hands and was speaking to her as he led her toward the door, Domina Elisabeth left behind. Over Lady Agnes’s slowly descending head, Master Haselden said, “I’m afraid her son is seeing Mistress Montfort out. The nun is coming this way, though, if that helps.”

“Fie.” Lady Agnes looked over her shoulder. “She won’t have visitors and she won’t stay to talk. What ails the fool woman?”

“She’s in mourning?” Nichola ventured.

“For the likes of Montfort? Then she’s a fool indeed,” Lady Agnes said. “No, Letice,” she added to something her woman hadn’t said yet. “I’m not coming back up. They’ll be setting tables for dinner soon. I might as well be down and be done with it. Stephen.”

Obediently, now that she was in his reach, Stephen held her by the waist, steadying her down the last few steps to the floor, where she turned and batted his hands away, saying, “Leave off, youngling. I’m not a two-year-old,” and demanded up at Master Haselden, “Hand me my staff, Philip, and get out of Dame Frevisse’s way, you silly man.”

“My lady,” Master Haselden said, obeying with a deep bow and a smile.

They were all enjoying themselves, Frevisse realized as she made her own careful way down. That the inquest had dealt with a man’s death seemed of no matter to anyone; it might have been no more than a show put on as a pastime for them. Of course, that Montfort was the dead man probably had much to do with that. Was anyone at all sorry for his death? Even his widow? Or his son?

Master Christopher and his mother were both gone now, last from the hall except for his young, sandy-haired and freckled clerk still at the table gathering up papers, pens, and ink bottle, unheeded by Lady Agnes’s servants come to ready the hall for her dinner. Lady Agnes was gone aside to question Domina Elisabeth, and Nichola was paused at the head of the stairs to gather her skirts with one hand before starting down, gripping the rope railing tightly with the other while Stephen urged her, “Just jump. I’ll catch you.” And added when she started carefully down anyway, “I’ve never dropped Grandmadam and you weigh far less than she does.”

“I heard that, boy,” Lady Agnes called, “and when you’re in reach I’m going to give you a good thump to show you I did.”

Laughing, Stephen caught Nichola by the waist, swept her off the stairs, her squeal of surprise changing to laughter, too, as he swung her around in a swirl of skirts, gave her a swift kiss on the cheek, and set her down. In return and as swiftly, she caught his face between her hands and rose on tiptoe to kiss him firmly on the mouth.

“Here, here, here!” Lady Agnes declared in feigned indignation, rapping her staff on the floor. “What kind of wanton carrying-on is that for servants and nuns to see? Enough!”

Frevisse, drawn well aside from all of them but watching with pleasure, found suddenly the sandy-haired young clerk at her side, carrying papers, pens, and inkpot and saying in a low, hurried voice as he passed by her, for no one but her to hear, “Master Montfort hopes you’ll meet him in the church after Nones, please you, my lady,” and before she could answer had moved on to Lady Agnes, to give her the crowner’s thanks for the use of her hall this while.