The Clerk's Tale

Chapter 5

Even in the startled moment before she realized that the Master Montfort the man meant was Christopher, not his dead father, Frevisse noted that no one seemed to have seen his brief word to her. Stephen was saying something to Master Haselden intent on coming down the stairs and Nichola had moved away to join Lady Agnes and Domina Elisabeth, neither of them looking Frevisse’s way as Christopher’s clerk finished with his thanks to Lady Agnes, bowed, and withdrew. Only Nichola looked around at her and shyly smiled while Domina Elisabeth said, seemingly continuing from something said before, “She’d surely be pleased for the courtesy of your asking her but I doubt she’ll come, things being as they are.”

Lady Agnes tapped her staff on the floor. “She can’t really be cast down by being rid of him, can she? Is she that great an idiot?”

“I’ve only talked with her hardly enough to know what she feels or how she is, only that she’s behaving seemly,” Domina Elisabeth answered moderately. “Was he truly as ill-mannered as everyone says he was?”

“That and more,” Lady Agnes said without hesitation.

Domina Elisabeth had never had the mischance to encounter Montfort, probably did not even remember he was the crowner who had dealt with a death near the nunnery a few years ago, nor did Frevisse intend to be drawn into talk about him. Instead, she merely stood, head a little down, listening with Nichola while Lady Agnes detailed a few of Montfort’s rudenesses and, a few paces away, Master Haselden and Stephen discussed the likelihood that last year’s increase in wool sold abroad was going to hold for this year, too. The servants had quickly finished setting the trestle and tabletop in the hall’s center and a maidservant was going along it laying out bread trenchers, the man Lucas following after her with a pitcher in one hand and a stack of wooden cups in the other to set a cup and fill it between every two trenchers. Emme was smoothing a white linen cloth over the high table, finishing as the maid who had laid the bread trenchers brought pewter plates from the sideboard set along one wall of the hall and laid six places along the upper side of the high table, followed again by Lucas bringing three pewter cups, one to set between each two places, with Emme in her turn coming back from the sideboard with white linen napkins and pewter spoons to set beside each plate. That done, Letice, who had been overseeing it all, came to tell Lady Agnes, “All’s ready, my lady.”

“Then shall we sit?” Lady Agnes said graciously to her guests, took her own place at the center of the long, high-backed bench that was the high table’s seat, and pointed everyone to their places, Domina Elisabeth and then Stephen on her right, Master Haselden on her left, and Frevisse and Nichola beyond him.

“And no throwing of bread pellets at one another,” Lady Agnes added with a warning look first at Stephen, then at Nichola, who smothered laughter while Stephen said, all injury, “It’s hardly kind to mention our youngling indiscretions in front of guests, Grandmadam.”

“Nor would I if I thought you’d outgrown them,” Lady Agnes returned. “Pray, be seated, all of you.”

That was sign for Letice to sit at the near end of the lower table and beckon a rough-dressed man who probably saw to whatever outside work there was to come forward to a place at the lower table’s end and the first remove to be brought to the high table by Lucas, Emme, and the other woman servant-roasted quails, onions fried in egg and butter and seasonings, custard tarts with raisins, and bread still warm from the oven-while for the lower table there was a thick pottage and more bread. That much of their duty done, the three of them sat with Letice and the other man and fell to their meal along with them.

Since supper had been a private thing in Lady Agnes’s solar and breakfast the same, this was Frevisse’s first chance to see Lady Agnes’s household at the full, though there was surely a cook in the kitchen. A very good cook, Frevisse amended as she tasted the quail set before her. Because conversation was expected, Master Haselden and she agreed between them that the weather was mild for this time of year and were moving on to discussing the condition of the road between Wallingford and Goring before Lady Agnes claimed his attention with a question about whether it was wool sales abroad or to clothmakers hereabout they should be looking to sell to this year, but that merely meant, equally for politeness’ sake, that Frevisse should take up talk with Nichola on her other side, and forgoing the overtried weather, she asked the only other bland thing that came readily to mind, “Have you been married long?”

With a shy smile and happy eyes, Nichola said, “Six months the morrow of Epiphany just past.” And blushed a little and added, “I’m older than I look, truly. I’ll be sixteen come St. Mark’s.”

Frevisse agreed graciously that she did look younger than that but kept to herself the thought that even so she was young to be a wife and, if things went as usual, probably soon a mother. It also meant she had almost certainly been married to Stephen by others’ decision rather than her own.

Nichola, concentrating on neatly removing bones from her quail, said lightly, as if in answer to Frevisse’s unspoken thought, “It was because of the inheritance, you see. Lady Agnes held Stephen’s wardship but Father had his marriage.” And therefore the right to choose whom Stephen married and to make what profit he could from it. “With Stephen coming of age, we had to be married lest the chance be lost for it.” The chance that Stephen, left to his own choice, might have chosen to marry elsewhere when he was of age and his marriage out of Master Haselden’s keeping. It was common enough for orphans not yet come of age to be given in wardship to a kinsman by whoever was immediate overlord of whatever lands were their inheritance, as Stephen had been given to his grandmother; and it was at least as common for their marriage right to be sold or given to someone else for separate profit; nor was it any surprise that Master Haselden had chosen to marry Stephen and his inheritance to his daughter, seemingly with Lady Agnes’s good will, to judge by the friendship between them.

“How long has Stephen’s brother been dead?”

“Harry? A little over a year.”

“Was he of age or did his grandmother have his wardship, too?”

“She had both boys’ wardships, and Harry’s marriage, too. She had him betrothed and he would have been married just before he came of age but he died. Everybody was terribly unhappy about it. Especially Anne, the girl he was going to marry. Everyone liked her. But she’s married to an esquire over Reading way now, so that’s all right.”

“But Lady Agnes didn’t have keeping of Stephen’s marriage,” Frevisse said, almost too lightly for it to be a question, as if she were not much interested.

“Oh, no. She meant to, along with his wardship, after Sir Henry her son died,” Nichola chatted on happily, picking raisins from one of the tarts to eat one by one, “but Lord Lovell saw to Father having it instead. But I think Lady Agnes would have agreed to our marrying anyway. There was halfway thought of Harry and I being married but then she had a chance for Anne.”

Following after the one part of that that interested her, Frevisse asked, “Lord Lovell is overlord of the Lengley lands then?”

Nichola paused with a morsel of quail on the tip of her sharp knife halfway to her mouth, thinking about it, frowning more uncertainly. “No. The Lengleys hold from the king. But Sir Henry and young Harry after him, they were feoffed to Lord Lovell.” Meaning they had been pledged his followers and he pledged to help them if there was need. “Sir Henry was in his retinue in France, in the war with him. So was Father. He and Sir Henry were friends.”

Emme and Lucas had left the lower table a few moments ago. Now they returned with the second remove-dishes of ground pork mixed with bread crumbs, spices, and cheese and cooked to firmness in a light golden crust that were set between each two of them along the high table; and parsnips thinly sliced and fried in oil; and a thickened mix of figs and raisins cooked in spiced red wine to go with a red gingerbread.

In the way of good manners it was the gentleman’s duty to serve the lady beside him. Dame Frevisse and Nichola, paired with each other, had served themselves, while Stephen had seen to Domina Elisabeth and Master Haselden to Lady Agnes who now slapped him on the back of the hand as he made to put a portion of the pork on her plate, telling him, “I taught you better than that. You move the goblet well aside first, that you can make the serving gracefully. Not all cramped in like you’re doing.”

“Yes, my lady,” Master Haselden said, like a chided schoolboy but smiling as he returned the pork to its dish, set down his knife, moved the goblet aside, then set to serving her again.

Frevisse, dividing the parsnips with Nichola, looked around the edge of her veil at Master Haselden, wondering if he was as unangry as he sounded. Nichola, catching her look, said with a soft laugh, “Lady Agnes had the raising of my father for a few years in her husband’s household when he was a boy. That’s why she treats him that way and he lets her. Nobody else would dare.”

But he must have a deep affection for Lady Agnes, too, Frevisse thought. Little else was likely to make a man as well possessed as Master Haselden have such tolerance of Lady Agnes’s ways. And to keep up her side of the talk she asked, “Were you in Lady Agnes’s household like your father, Mistress Lengley?”

“It still doesn’t sound right to be called that,” Nichola complained, smiling. “It makes me sound like I’m Stephen’s mother. No, I was with Lady Agnes but only for a while. Mostly I was with the nuns.” Nichola brightened past courtesy into open pleasure. “They taught me my reading and numbers and needlework and I liked it there. Then I was with Lady Agnes and then Stephen and I were married and now Mother is teaching me all the other things I need to know.”

“You and Stephen live with your parents?”

“Oh, yes.” Nichola was blithe about it. “I’m almost ready to have my own household, Mother says, but not yet. Besides, it makes better sense we don’t start to live as if Stephen has his own until he does. Have his own, I mean.” Nichola had kept steadily at her food, neatly tucking words between bites with the hearty appetite of the young but the good manners of the well-raised, but now she stopped, looked at Frevisse, and asked, “Do you know about those people trying to steal his inheritance?”

Used to eating far less at a meal than had been offered to her in even the first remove, Frevisse had mostly been only picking at her food, trying to give the seeming of eating without doing much. Now, to hide her interest-quickened despite herself-she spooned more of the figs and raisins onto the last of her gingerbread while answering, “Only what I heard here today at the inquest. That someone disputes his right to inherit.”

“The Champyons.” The name was not an easy one to spit but Nichola managed it, sounding something like a kitten being fierce. With a glance past Frevisse to be sure no one was heeding them, she leaned nearer, saying very low but still fiercely, “They’re such liars. They want to take his mother’s land away from him. Only, to do it, they have to say he’s a bastard. But if he was, then he couldn’t inherit his father’s lands either. He wouldn’t have anything at all. They’re so nasty.”

Nasty was probably a milder word than Lady Agnes used on them, let alone Stephen’s feelings in the matter, and it was just as well that curiosity was not a sin because Frevisse was about to give way to hers by asking more when a shifting along the table said the meal was done. Emme and Letice brought basins of warmed water and towels for everyone at the high table to turn in their place and wash their hands, then at Lady Agnes’s asking, Domina Elisabeth gave thanks and they all rose, Lady Agnes saying she was minded to lie down for a time, adding to Master Haselden, “Give your wife my greetings, please,” and to Stephen, “Come, kiss your old grandmother.”

“My grandmother, yes,” Stephen agreed, taking her by the hands and kissing her cheek. “But old? Never.”

Lady Agnes patted his cheek, smiling. “There’s a good, flattering boy.” She turned and held out her arms to Nichola. “You next, my dear.”

Nichola went readily to her embrace, Stephen saying past them, “No need to glower, Letice. We’re going.”

“And none too soon,” the woman grumbled, come to stand behind her lady with muted impatience to have her away.

“Hush,” Lady Agnes said, drawing back from Nichola with a gentle touch to her cheek. “I’ve reached such an age that my every lying down may be my last, so don’t rush me to it.”

“Oh, Grandmother, no,” Nichola protested.

“Oh, Nichola, yes. I only pray you may live so long,” Lady Agnes said cheerfully.

Frevisse had noticed often enough ere this that while people knew of their own mortality, there were very few who truly believed in it. Frevisse suspected Lady Agnes did not. She might say what was proper to say at her age but her own dying was no more real to her than theirs were to Stephen or Nichola, bright with young years and love. And still cheerful, Lady Agnes added at her grandson, “And long years to you, too, Stephen, rascal though you are.”

“You’re a one to talk about rascals,” Stephen returned, his arm lightly around Nichola’s shoulders. “It’s being a rascal that’s kept you alive so long and don’t deny it.”

“I admit and deny nothing,” Lady Agnes said, “except you’ve never learned to keep a civil tongue in your head to me. Now away with you.”

Emme had brought their cloaks by then and, with Stephen’s promise to visit her tomorrow, they left, and Lady Agnes turned to Domina Elisabeth to ask, “How do you purpose to spend your afternoon, my lady?”

“I thought to see how my cousin does.”

“And give her all the news of this morning,” Lady Agnes said. “Very right. That will cheer her some. And Dame Frevisse?”

“With Domina Elisabeth’s leave, I mean to pray awhile in the church.”

Domina Elisabeth readily gave that leave, and while Lady Agnes labored her way up the stairs with Letice, Emme was sent to fetch their cloaks from their room. Then, at blessed last, Frevisse followed Domina Elisabeth out the hall door into the houseyard’s shadows, the afternoon sun already slipping away behind rooftops. The day was noticeably colder than yesterday had been, and Domina Elisabeth said with an upward glance, “There’s a change coming. We may have snow yet before we’re done.”

Frevisse made a murmur of agreement but no comment to keep a conversation going. She had not known how deeply tired of talk she was until now when she was so near to being free of it. For most of her years in St. Frideswide’s the rule of silence had held, no talk allowed the nuns except during the hour of recreation at day’s end or when there was absolute need. That discipline had slacked of late, even more under Domina Elisabeth than the prioress before her, and Frevisse direly missed the freedom there had been in that silence, a freedom from need to deal with others’ thoughts and chance to go deeper into her own, searching out new places in her thoughts and moving into wider reaches of prayer.

So she made no effort of talk now and the cut of the air did not encourage lingering, despite their cloaks and their fur-lined gowns they had both put on this morning. Together, they briskly crossed and went along the street and through the priory’s gateway and to the cloister door where Domina Elisabeth’s knock brought a servant who, after a quick look through the grill set high in the door, promptly let them in, curtsying as Domina Elisabeth swept by. Frevisse followed in her wake into the cloister, where Domina Elisabeth paused to say, “I’ll join you at Nones,” and went on her way, leaving Frevisse to go her own toward the door, deep-set in the stone wall’s thickness, that opened from the cloister walk into the church.

Letting herself in with a turn of the heavy, round, iron handle, she entered the choir with its nuns’ stalls where they prayed the Offices ranked in double rows facing each other and, beyond them, the altar, with the lamp always burning above it the only light in the church besides what fell through high, small windows, many-colored from the painted glass but dim with the afternoon’s overcast sky, leaving both choir and nave more in shadows than not. Not that it mattered. It was to the altar she gratefully went, bunching her skirts and cloak to make a little padding under her knees which did not take to floors so easily as they used to do, before she sank down, clasped her hands, bowed her head over them, and drew a deep breath, not praying yet but letting quiet flow into her and her thoughts flow out, clearing her mind for prayer, the better to reach past the passing troubles of the world and body toward the bright, eternal freedom of God’s love.

This quieting of her mind rarely came on the instant. Instead her thoughts usually strayed and wandered, hithered and thithered, unable to settle. In her early years in St. Frideswide’s she had fought it, trying to hold her mind to where she wanted it to be, and her failure at it had been her constant trial and torment until she was finally forced, humiliated, to confess it to her then-prioress Domina Edith. A nun for longer than Frevisse had been alive, her body frail with age even then but never her mind, she had said, “Oh, that. It’s not something you need worry on.”

Frevisse had opened her mouth to protest, then closed it as Domina Edith went mildly on, “My prioress called it butterfly-mind. She said just to let it go its way and not worry on it, it’s no great matter, and so I’ve always done. Because one should obey one’s prioress, yes?” she had added with a sharp, unsolemn look at Frevisse, who could not help a smile because both of them knew that obedience was not the easiest-come of her virtues. “Not that I always succeed, even now,” Domina Edith had sighed. “Nor will you. But it’s not something you need struggle with. Simply let it happen and go on your way. That’s all you need do with it.”

And surprisingly enough it was as almost exactly that simple, Frevisse had found over the years since then. When she set to praying and her butterfly-mind began its fluttering, she did not follow it among her own scattered thoughts, trying to curb it, but let it go its way and went her own, into a further part of her mind where prayer came almost as easily as breathing, lightening her soul of the worldly dross that mere daily living gathered to her day in and out.

But today proved to be one of the days she did not go so readily into prayer as she wished, distracted for a while by the lately learned tangle of other people’s lives. Montfort’s murder was only part of it. Wherever the truth lay concerning the Lengley inheritance, someone was lost in greed-driven lying, but who? Montfort had been here because of it and someone had killed him. Was his death because of it? Master Christopher’s questioning of Master Champyon and Stephen showed he had considered that possibility. But it could be because of something else altogether. Was…

Like taking a willful child by the hand, she inwardly drew herself aside from that, said low but aloud, “Dominus me adesf”-Lord be with me-and left her other thoughts to go their way while she set to wending herself into the shining paths of prayer.

Gone far along them, she could not have said how much time passed before the bell began to call the priory to Nones. Unlike St. Frideswide’s, St. Mary’s church had a true-toned bell. Its notes fell strong-edged and clear through the far reaches of Frevisse’s praying, drawing her back until, with a deep-breathed sigh and regretting her knees, she rose and moved away from the altar, going to stand aside from the cloister door in wait for Domina Elisabeth as St. Mary’s nuns came singly or severally from whatever they had been doing to take their places in the choir stalls, each in her familiar own. Then Domina Elisabeth swept through the door in company with Domina Matilda, the two prioresses parting with cordial nods, Domina Matilda to go to her more finely wrought choir stall set at one end of the facing rows of her nuns, Domina Elisabeth to go to the far end, Frevissse following her, to the two stalls given over to them this morning.

Like St. Frideswide’s, St. Mary’s choir stalls outnumbered the nuns there were to sit in them, but while at St. Frideswide’s that was because there were insufficient lands and properties to support many more than the ten nuns there presently were-the widow who had founded it dying before she had endowed it as fully as she had meant to-Frevisse understood from Lady Agnes’s talk that St. Mary’s had been founded by a lord some few centuries past and upon a time there had been as many as forty nuns. Now, however, there were but eight, leaving empty choir stalls in plenty, and Frevisse was grateful both for her place there and to go gladly into Nones’ prayers and psalms.

For courtesy’s sake, neither she nor Domina Elisabeth tried to join their voices with those of St. Mary’s nuns who through months into years of praying together blended smoothly into a whole with hardly need for thought about it. It was the same in every nunnery, making each nunnery’s Offices a thing particular to itself despite the words remained much the same all over Christendom, and therefore Frevisse was content to pray only on the edge of her own hearing, with Domina Elisabeth’s murmur beside her, under the rise and fall of the other nuns’ voices around them, and was nonetheless caught as easily as usual into the pleasure of Nones’ particular psalm today-Sed tu salvasti nos ab adversariis nostris, et eos, qui oderunt nos, confudisti. In Deo gloriabamur omni tempore… But you saved us from our enemies, and those who hated us you silenced. In God we gloried for all the time…

Only regretfully, as the Office came to its end, did Frevisse surface back to the chill church but signed herself with the cross, head to heart and side to side, along with everyone else and quietly joined Domina Elisabeth in going last out of the choir and out into the cloister walk where Domina Matilda had seen her nuns on their way and was waiting for Domina Elisabeth again. But Frevisse stopped before they reached her and said, “My lady, I’d stay in the church awhile, if you please.”

“Of course,” Domina Elisabeth granted without question. “And go back to Lady Agnes’s afterward?”

“If it please you, my lady. Or else simply walk in the cloister here.”

“Either would do. Though take care or with all this praying you’ll be as holy as Sister Thomasine,” Domina Elisabeth jested, meaning the one nun at St. Frideswide’s whose devotions were so intense that there was wary speculation she might be bound for sainthood.

Frevisse obligingly managed a smile and lowered her eyes in what might have been seemly humility but also served to hide her discomfort, because prayer was not her intent nor had she said it was. Instead, returned into the church, she went along the tall rood screen that divided the church, one end from the other, separating the choir that was the nuns’ part from the nave that belonged to the town. The rood screen’s finely carved fretwork allowed little to be seen of one side from the other; only the open doorway in its middle allowed clear sight of the altar from one end of the church to the other and a way to come and go between nave and choir, a wooden-grilled gate as the boundary between cloister and outside world but only hooked closed now, not locked during the day, to make easier the priest’s coming and going, and Frevisse passed through without pause into the nave.

However many people might have been there to hear Nones, there were only three now, Master Christopher and-less expected-Master Gruesby and-even less expected-young Dickon from St. Frideswide’s, standing together beside one of the thick stone pillars near the door into the outer yard, the townsfolk’s way into the church. But only Master Christopher came forward to greet her as she went toward them, bowing to her as they met, saying, “Thank you for coming. I wasn’t sure you could. Or would.”

Frevisse bent her head to him in return courtesy. “It’s good to see you again, Master-” she hesitated-“Mont-fort.”

“Christopher, please,” he said quickly. “I’m very weary of being ‘Master Montfort.’ ”

“Christopher, then,” she agreed, and indeed it did come far easier and they both smiled to it, with Christopher’s smile ridding him of all resemblance to his father save for his reddish hair. There had been no occasion for smiles the other time they had dealt together, Frevisse recalled, and thought that despite his smile he looked older than his years. With good reason, she also thought, so many things weighing on him just now-his duties as crowner, his mother’s widowhood, his own grief. At least she supposed he grieved to some degree; whatever Montfort had been, Christopher had been his son, and she said, “My regrets for your father’s death.”

Christopher’s smile faded. “Thank you. Though I’m afraid it’s because of his death I asked to see you.”

She had been afraid of that, too, but hoping she hid her wariness, she said, “Your father has my prayers.” Difficult though they were to make and the effort probably of more benefit to her soul than to Montfort’s.

“My thanks for that,” Christopher said. His voice dropped, too low for Dickon, standing a little behind and to one side of him, to hear, “But I needed to see you about more than prayers.”

Firmly avoiding what she feared was coming, Frevisse said moderately, “Judging by what I saw at the inquest, you have the matter as well in hand as could be hoped for.”

“I have,” Christopher agreed. “But it was a false inquest.”