The Clerk's Tale

Chapter 6

Frevisse held silent, too taken by surprise that he’d admitted to what she had already thought to answer him, and defending nothing, only explaining, Christopher said, “So far as the jurors know, it was fair. But they didn’t ask all the questions that could have been asked. Nor did they look at the body so closely as they might have. And I didn’t tell them differently.”

“Necessary,” Master Gruesby said, come forward to just behind Christopher’s right elbow, the word hardly above a whisper and his eyes toward the floor.

“It was necessary,” Christopher agreed. “And they made it the easier by being more impressed with themselves for being jurors than with what questions they might be asking. But it was my duty to tell them. I didn’t.”

Frevisse looked past both of them to Dickon. Left to himself, he was edging forward, interested. Christopher looked around at him, too, and said, “I asked him to come with us. One of your own people. To make it proper you were here.”

Frevisse doubted being alone in the church with three men-and Dickon could count as such at his age-was more proper than being alone with two but it was not beyond bounds, being a public enough place, she hoped, and said with a nod of her head toward the bench along the opposite wall for the sitting of those too old or ill to stand through Mass or Offices, “Dickon, go sit there and don’t try to hear us.”

Even from three yards away she saw his chest heave with a disappointed sigh before he turned away, obeying. She looked back to Christopher and asked, suspecting she should bite her tongue instead, “Why didn’t you tell the jurors differently?”

“Because it wouldn’t have given us any better answer and would have told someone we knew more than he now thinks we do. If he’s still here.”

“The murderer, you mean.”

“We don’t have enough to know who he is. So we’ve kept some things to ourselves. Master Gruesby and I.”

“That was why there were questions missing from the inquest that I would have asked,” Frevisse said. “Such as where Champyon’s stepson, I forget his name, was that afternoon.”

“Rowland Englefield.”

“He has as direct an interest as James Champyon and Stephen Lengley in this inheritance. It’s considerable, I gather?”

“A fair-sized manor. Near Abingdon. It’s where it is that counts as much as it’s worth,” Christopher said.

“Why didn’t you question him?”

“We know where he was. He…” Christopher hesitated and looked around at Master Gruesby who looked up at him, his eyes owlishly large and worried behind his thick, wooden-rimmed spectacles. To whatever Christopher silently asked him, he lifted his shoulders slightly, let them drop, and went back to staring at his shoes. Left to make his own choice, Christopher said, “Master Rowland was somewhere his mother would not approve of. A house here in Goring.”

Either bawdy or for gambling or both, Frevisse supposed while being briefly diverted, as usual, by what was thought nuns wouldn’t know or shouldn’t hear about, as if because they chose to live aside from the world’s general ways they were therefore ignorant of them, even by someone like Christopher who had had occasion to know better about her. But all she asked aloud was, “How do you know?”

“He told me,” Christopher said. Frevisse raised her brows to him and he agreed, “No, not the best wellspring for truth if he’s the murderer. Nor does it help that the… woman… of the house swears he was there. He could have bribed her to it. But he said he’d lie if we asked him openly at the inquest. Therefore we didn’t.”

Fair enough, Frevisse supposed, especially since the jury had not thought to ask about him either, though it seemed to her that Rowland Englefield was a grown enough man not to be all that worried over what his mother would approve or not, but she let him go, asking, “And Philip Haselden. You overpassed him, too.”

Christopher smiled somewhat ruefully and said aside to Master Gruesby, “You were right. She didn’t fail to note that.”

Master Gruesby made a small, twitching nod of agreement without raising his head.

“Master Haselden,” Frevisse said, “has an interest in the Lengley inheritance almost as strong as the Champyons, doesn’t he? Because of his daughter?”

“If Stephen Lengley’s claim is good, then Haselden has made a very good bargain in marrying her to him. Otherwise, he hasn’t. How much have you heard about it?”

“Only that the Champyons claim Stephen Lengley is a bastard, with no right to the manor.”

“That’s all? You’re staying with Lady Agnes, aren’t you?”

“Since yesterday, yes. But she hasn’t talked of it. No one has. I had this much and no more from Stephen’s wife at dinner today.”

Christopher looked aside to the bench along the wall on their own side of the church and asked, “Shall we sit?”

Frevisse agreed with a nod and they went and did, though Master Gruesby would have gone on standing to Christopher’s far side if Christopher had not pointed firmly at the bench while going on to Frevisse, “It goes this way. Sir Henry Lengley was a well-propertied knight. He had lands both here and in Berkshire and near Minster Lovell. He married once. To Rose Bower.”

Frevisse inwardly winced at the name though Christopher seemed not to have heard what he had said but went on, “She and her sister were the heirs of another knight. There were no sons and his lands at his death were split between the sisters.”

“The entail,” whispered Master Gruesby. Meaning the restrictions put by law on how land could be inherited, and though there were diverse of ways land could be entailed, once a particular way was fixed to a particular property, that way was supposed to be inviolate for all time to come. It might not be but it took considerable influence and costly legal work to change it.

“Yes,” Christopher agreed. “The entail. That’s where the trouble lies. By it, the two sisters each received half their father’s properties. But if either sister’s line fails-if the time comes that there are no more of the blood of one or the other of the sisters-then the share of the property that went to her must needs revert to the other sister or to those of her lineage who then live. You see?”

Frevisse saw. There were entails that allowed property to pass only along the male line, never along the female, come what might, even shifting everything to remote male cousins if there were no directly descended sons. Other entails, such as this one, allowed property to be divided among daughters if sons were lacking, with provision that the divided lands be reunited should either line die out.

“Rose is dead, I take it,” said Frevisse.

“Over twenty years ago.”

“But she left two sons.”

“According to Lady Agnes, she left two sons,” Christopher agreed. “Henry, who died last year…”

“Naturally?”

“You mean, is there suspicion he was helped to his death? No. He’d been in ill health since very young, it’s said.”

Beyond Christopher, Master Gruesby nodded agreement to that. His hands, laid unquietly one on either knee, looked to be longing for pen and paper, and Frevisse had the passing thought that today was the first time she had ever seen him without them, even as she went on, “Which left Rose’s younger son, Stephen, to inherit.”

“So Lady Agnes and Master Stephen claim. But Rose’s sister, now Mistress Champyon, claims Rose had but the one son. Young Henry. She says Stephen is not her nephew but Sir Henry’s son by one of his mistresses.”

“One of his mistresses?”

Momentarily discomfited, Christopher said toward somewhere beyond her left shoulder, “He seems to have been noted for them.”

“But there have to be records and witnesses as to whether this Rose had one son or two. There had to have been people at his birth-servants, midwife, friends, a priest-that can say who his mother was. There has to be someone.”

“You’d think so,” Christopher agreed with no joy. “But it’s been more than twenty years. It seems Stephen was born at one of Sir Henry’s manors away in Berkshire. No one here and now outside the family knows anything. And Lady Agnes says he’s her grandson by Sir Henry and his wife. Mistress Champyon says that her sister never had a second child. But they’ve neither been able to give any proof, thus far. One way or the other.”

“Why did she wait so long to challenge his legitimacy? If she’d done it from the first, there would have been witnesses easily come by, one way or the other.”

“She claims she didn’t know he existed until now. Until after her admitted nephew, young Henry, was dead and she made to recover the manor. Then she was told her sister had had a second son.”

“Where had he been all this while? Or where had she been, not to know of him?”

“She says she never liked Sir Henry or Lady Agnes. She made no effort to know anything about them after Rose died.”

“Or her nephew? The one she knew she had? She didn’t want to know about him, either?”

“No. Her sister was dead and he was Sir Henry’s son and no concern of hers, she says. Nor, after her sister was dead, were there any family links to here. For her to hear more.”

“Bedfordshire,” Master Gruesby murmured.

“That’s the rest of it,” Christopher agreed. “Her first marriage took her into Bedfordshire.”

Where she was not likely to hear anything by chance about the Lengleys and she must have left no friends behind to tell her anything, Frevisse supposed. She assuredly didn’t sound like the sort of woman who had long-lasting friends. “Then it was only after young Henry, the nephew she says she knew she had, was dead… How did she come to hear about that?” Because somehow Frevisse did not see Lady Agnes bothering to send her word.

“Her second marriage lately brought her to Henley. Not so far off. She heard talk. Or someone wanted to make trouble. I don’t know.”

“It might be worth finding out who saw to her knowing,” Frevisse suggested, and Christopher turned his head and made a single nod to Master Gruesby, who gave a small nod in return, note dutifully taken despite lack of pen and paper, Frevisse gathered while she went on, back to where she’d been, “So where was Stephen all this while, after his mother’s death? If she was his mother.”

“With Lady Agnes. His father gave him over to her as almost a newborn baby and she raised him. That’s sure. It also seems that, whoever was or wasn’t his mother, Rose Bower did die about the time he was born. Lady Agnes says it was at his birth and that’s how he came to be given over to her. She says that Mistress Champyon…”

“Englefield,” Master Gruesby said at the floor.

“She was Mistress Englefield then, by her first husband, yes,” Christopher said. “Lady Agnes says word was sent to her both of the birth and her sister’s death. Mistress Champyon admits she was told of Rose’s death but denies ever hearing of a second son.”

“Still, whether she was told or not, there has to be someone who was at Stephen’s birth or knows certainly about it,” Frevisse insisted. “If nothing else, he was surely baptised.”

“The priest is dead. So is the midwife.”

Frevisse paused, a side consideration thrusting in. “Christopher, how do you come to know so much of all this? You only came here yesterday, didn’t you?”

“With my mother, yes. All this is mostly from the proofs readied by both sides for the escheat inquest. Master Gruesby sent word of it all to me while I was readying to come here. It’s everything my father knew before he was killed.”

“Stephen’s godparents. They’d know as well as anyone who his mother was. Please don’t tell me they’re dead.”

“No, they’re alive,” Christopher said, not looking happy about it. “They’re Lady Agnes and Master Philip Haselden.”

Startled, Frevisse protested, “Then how could his daughter marry Stephen?” Because the bond of a god-parent to godchild was considered so close that any such marriage was incest and against church law.

But as she could have foretold with an instant’s thought, Christopher answered, “By dispensation.” Whereby the Church declared a thing acceptable to God that otherwise was not. But dispensations were not had cheaply or easily. That he had gone to the trouble and expense of one meant Master Haselden’s stake in Stephen’s legitimacy was even higher than it had seemed.

None of this was her problem or business, Frevisse pointed out to herself. It was all no concern of hers except out of curiosity, and while curiosity did not figure on the list of deadly sins, neither was it among the sovereign virtues. This matter of who inherited a disputed manor was not something with which she need deal, was something she would leave behind her as soon as Mistress Montfort and her people took Montfort’s body away home for burial and she and Domina Elisabeth were able to stay properly in the nunnery. But nonetheless she heard herself saying, “Then as it stands now, there’s no proof on either side? Only Lady Agnes’s word against Mistress Champyon’s?”

On Christopher’s other side Master Gruesby hunched a little deeper into his shoulders as if it were some way his fault and glumly Christopher said, “Even so. And one of them has to be lying.”

Or both of them, Frevisse thought but did not say. In truth, there could well be a mix of lies and truth from both of them, and all of it made worse because the man who had come to find out one from the other was murdered.

Of course, given the kind of man Montfort had been, he might well be dead for some other reason than the matter of Stephen Lengley’s inheritance, but…

“What questions should the jurors have asked that they didn’t?”

It took Christopher a moment to shift backward in their talk to where they had been, but Master Gruesby said toward the floor, “The way in.”

“The way into the garden you mean?” Frevisse said.

Christopher caught up. “How the murderer came into the garden. And how he left without being seen. Yes.”

“Through the infirmary,” Frevisse offered. “The key hangs beside the door inside. But…” She immediately saw objection to that. “That would mean the murderer was likely a woman because no man could have passed through the cloister unnoticed. Do you think a woman could have killed your father?”

“I think I don’t know. Not who killed him or why. And until I know more, I’m trying to suppose nothing.”

A far different way than his father had taken. Montfort as crowner had always preferred to grab hold of the obvious choice-or the profitable one-and not let go unless forced to it.

But Christopher was going on, “The thing is that Sister Ysobel says no one went into the garden that way.”

“Would she have heard if they did?”

“What she said when I asked her was that it’s her lungs that are rotting, not her ears.”

“She might have slept and not known it.”

“Coughing,” said Master Gruesby to the floor.

Christopher agreed. “She said her coughing kept her from rest all that day. It probably did. She wasn’t resting well when I talked with her either. Talking came hard and I didn’t press her.”

“Did she hear anyone, anything from the garden?”

“She says she heard two men, speaking too low for her to know what they said or who they were. It seems they did not raise their voices, nor was there any outcry. They talked and then were quiet and the next thing she heard was Master Gruesby shouting.”

Frevisse looked at Master Gruesby who raised his head for a quick, startled look back at her as if the thought he had ever shouted was as impossible to him as it was to her. Then his gaze went down again and she asked of Christopher, “How long afterwards was that?”

“She was saying a rosary slowly. When she heard Master Gruesby, she was half the way through the second time since hearing the men in talk.”

“How long a rosary?” Because a rosary could be either a loop of beads or a straight string of them and either one could be of any size. “Did she show it to you?”

“It was six decades.” Six sets of ten beads each for Ave Maries, with a single bead for Paternosters between each ten, and said slowly, that could be time enough for whoever had done the killing to be well enough away that anyone hearing the outcry might fail to link the outcry with having seen him.

“Did the jurors think to ask Sister Ysobel about what she might have heard?”

“They did,” Christopher admitted. “I said I’d asked her and she’d heard nothing.”

“Safer,” Master Gruesby said. “For her.”

Frevisse silently granted that was true enough. The murderer had come and gone unnoticed from the infirmary garden once. If he thought there was need to be rid of Sister Ysobel, why wouldn’t he try again? “But if not through the infirmary, then how?” she asked. “Not through the stableyard and other door, it seems. Nor over the fence.” Which she remembered was of wicker, not able to hold much weight beyond a squirrel’s.

“Through it,” Christopher said.

“Through the fence? Leaving a great hole no one has bothered to mention?”

“It’s of hurdles.” Large but light-weighted pieces of withy-woven fencing easily handled by a man, meant to be moved around for making sheep pens and such-like things, kept up by being tied end to end with each other to make a pen, or else, as in the nunnery’s garden, made into an uncostly but sufficient wall by fastening to firm-set uprights. “The twine holding a fencing to its post along the back side was cut,” Christopher said.

And with that done, the murderer needed do no more than simply push or pull the hurdle enough open to let himself in and out.

“What lies beyond the fence there?” Frevisse asked.

“The mill ditch runs just outside the wall, fed from the Thames, with an open meadow beyond it all the way to the river.”

“Nothing overlooks the ditch, the meadow?”

“Some nunnery windows and the mill. But no one says they saw anyone along there that day. Not at the needful time or anywhere near to it. Our best hope was some workmen at the mill that day but they were at their hot dinner in a tavern up the street all the time we need someone to have seen something.”

“Footprints?” Frevisse asked without much hope. Even in raw mud, shoes and boots, soft-soled as they mostly were, would hardly leave prints that mattered.

“The bank is well grassed. All Master Gruesby found was somewhere on the far side where a foot might have slipped and torn the grass a little. Otherwise nothing.”

Nothing seemed to be almost all there was so far but… “What else did the jurors not ask that they should have? Or not notice?”

“The dagger wound was not the only hurt to the body.”

“Christopher!” she protested. “How could they not notice that? Or you not point it out?”

Her protest did not unsettle him. After years of his father, it would probably take more than someone’s mere protest to unsettle him, and steadily he said, “I doubt any of them had seen a man violently dead before this. They weren’t minded to look closer than they had to this morning. They could see the dagger wound had surely killed him and that was enough.”

“But you should have pointed out…” She stopped, regarding him, his level look meeting her own. More quietly, she said, understanding, “So as it stands now, the murderer doesn’t know what you know and thinks everything is over and he’s safe. Giving us”-she noticed the “us” too late to change it-“a small advantage.”

“A very small advantage. Maybe none at all. But yes, that’s what I hope.”

“What are the other wounds?”

“A small cut in the right corner of the mouth. A scrape on the back of the head. Bruises on either side of the death wound.”

“The tree,” Master Gruesby murmured from behind Christopher.

“The tree where the body was found,” Christopher said. “It’s…” He made a ring with his hands maybe four inches wide.

“I’ve seen it,” Frevisse said. The young, slendertrunked ash tree in the grassy midst of the garden.

“There was a narrow cut to the bark on one side. Where the edge of a dagger might have sliced along it. At about heart height for my father.”

He said it coolly, keeping distant from it, probably the only safe way he could say it, and Frevisse matched him, keeping thought away from actual torn flesh to mere considering of the cut tree, saying after a silent moment of thinking, “It could be guessed, from that, that the murderer forced Master Montfort back against the tree with a hand put over his mouth hard enough to cut it with probably a ring, keeping him silent while he was stabbed.” It was a narrow tree; with Montfort’s body centered on it, a dagger thrust through his heart and on through him would very likely have sliced the bark the way Christopher said. She could see the rest of it, too. How the murderer had probably gone on holding Montfort there, weight leaned onto the dagger still through Montfort’s body, Montfort’s head still shoved back against the tree, hand still over Montfort’s mouth until Montfort was fully dead. Then his murderer would have stepped back, jerked out the dagger, and let the body slump aside and fall.

But all that ugliness she left unsaid. By the look on Christopher’s face he could see it clearly enough for himself, though he said steadily enough, “That’s how we guessed it, too. Master Gruesby and I. It had to be someone strong.”

“Someone strong or else very angry,” Frevisse said. Anger’s strength was never a thing to be discounted.

“Or very angry,” Christopher granted. Angry enough to drive a dagger through a man to the hilt.

“The bruises,”. Frevisse said. “You said there were bruises to either side of the wound. Did you mean to the sides or at the ends?”

Christopher paused as if sorting out what she meant. Behind him Master Gruesby said to the floor, “At the ends.”

“I see.” Christopher drew an imaginary slit in the air. “At the ends, yes.” And then added, “Round bruises.”

Now it was Frevisse’s turn to pause. “Round bruises?”

“Like two knobs had been driven against him.”

Frevisse drew a sharp breath. “A ballock dagger.”

Christopher nodded agreement. “Neither Master Gruesby nor I can think of anything else that would do it. And they’re not common.”

No, they were not. Usually heavy-bladed and often unusually long for a dagger, their handguard was shaped not in the usual outstretched quillons but, most often, into two rounded lobes. Sometimes there was only one lobe, sometimes there were three, with no reason Frevisse had ever heard as to why the shape was particularly desirable at all except for the sake of being different. Or lewd. She only knew they were indeed not common, and carefully putting aside thought of how much anger-or hatred-there had to be behind a thrust hard enough to leave those bruises with it, she said, “You said nothing about it at the inquest so that whoever it was will go on wearing it. Your men”-and you, she did not say aloud-“were watching for it today, in hopes the murderer would be here.”

“Yes.”

But they’d seen no one, or she and Christopher would not be having this talk; and because it was probably better that they be done and part company before someone saw her in talk with the crowner and wonder why, she asked, “What do you want of me?”

Christopher did not hesitate over his answer. “To listen and to watch. You’re likely to hear talk of things no one would say to me. You’re likely to find questions to ask that I wouldn’t.”

She did not argue that. She knew herself well enough to know that with all that Christopher had told her, she would be listening and seeing differently, both at Lady Agnes’s and here in the nunnery, and she would be asking questions, if only of herself, so that all in all there seemed no point to refusing Christopher her help and she bent her head to him with, “As you wish.”

Christopher smiled with a relief that briefly made him look as young as he probably was. “Thank you.”

But she already had a question she wanted to ask and said past him, “Master Gruesby, the letter you were taking to Master Montfort that afternoon, what was it about?”

At his name Master Gruesby jerked up his head and now stared at her over Christopher’s shoulder with much the look he might have had if sentence of death had just been pronounced upon him. “The letter?” he whispered.

“The letter.”

He fumbled open his wide leather belt pouch with one hand and rummaged in it while still staring at her, rustling paper and parchment as if in search of a writing he could consult before he managed to say without help, “It was from Lord Lovell.”

Frevisse waited until she realized that was all he meant to say, then insisted, “What was it about?”

Master Gruesby’s eyes widened. “I didn’t open it.”

“Where is it?”

“With the other papers, waiting for whoever comes to finish the Lengley escheat.”

“It had to do with that?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t open it.”

“But it was addressed to Master Montfort?”

“To Master Montfort as escheator, yes.”

And might very well have nothing to do with his murder but she said anyway to Christopher, “You should maybe read it.”

His look asked her why, to which she could only answer, “Just to see if Lord Lovell needs answer to something, I suppose,” and rose to her feet to show she was ready to leave.

Christopher and Master Gruesby rose with her and across the nave Dickon leaped to his feet, plainly willing to do something besides sit. Frevisse beckoned to him while adding to Christopher, “How will I get word to you of anything useful I might hear?”

“I’ll send Master Gruesby to you sometime. Or make occasion to talk with you myself.”

“What excuse will you make for staying here longer, now the inquest is done?”

“There’s still my father’s funeral. The in-gathering of folk to it and the funeral itself will keep me here at least four days more, I think.”

“Here?” Frevisse barely covered her alarm. “He’s to be buried here?” Rather than in his own parish church, the more common way.

Christopher made a small shrug and said, giving away neither one thing nor another, “Mother thought here would serve as well as anywhere.”

Because it did not matter to her where her husband was buried so long as she was rid of him? Frevisse lowered her head in hope of hiding both that unkind thought and her dismay at after all not being soon done with Lady Agnes.