The Prioress' Tale

Chapter 12

Domina Alys pronounced the blessing that closed the chapter meeting-“Dies et actus nostros in sua pace disponat Dominus omnipotens. Amen.” The almighty Lord order our day and deeds in his peace-without seeming to hear how ill it accorded with the day so far. Frevisse heard but with no urge to laughter. With Domina Alys’ gaze on her, she bowed her head at last, crossed the room in front of everyone else, and went out into the cloister walk where golden light from the risen sun was flowing over the roof’s ridge into the garth. But the warming room was on the cloister’s east side and the walk there was still in shadow, the stones still cold with frost as, with the pain across her back reminding her to make no sudden movement, she eased down to lie with her face to them. The cold went through her clothing into her flesh, and she tried to curb the prideful hope that the other nuns as they filed past her knew her shivering was from the cold, naught else.

She had lain like this before, and so had others of them for one reason or another, but only as a single punishment, not punishment added to punishment, done only once and then ended. She was going to face this eleven times a day from now until Domina Alys tired of it, and she doubted that would be soon.

Striking the offender with a foot in passing was permitted, and Domina Alys, coming first, did so, kicking solidly into her hip, but the blow was sidewise and with only a soft shoe, so there was more intent than hurt in it. No one else touched her. Most of them passed as quickly as they could and as wide from her as might be.

And it would be like that from now on, Frevisse thought bitterly. Maybe no one but Domina Alys would strike at her, but neither would anyone approach her, now or any other time through the days to come. They would avoid her out of fear of Domina Alys’ displeasure turning on them as fiercely as it had turned on her, leaving her almost as isolated as if locked away into a room.

As sick with that thought as from the whipping, she gathered her will to face the pain of rising to her feet again. But as she started to rise hands took her under each elbow, helping her. Startled into sudden movement and then wincing from the pain of it, she looked to find Sister Thomasine holding her on one side, Dame Claire on the other. Carefully they helped her to her feet and made sure she was steady before they let her go. Then Sister Thomasine simply-the way that she did everything: prayers and duties and dangerous kindnesses, Frevisse thought-bent her head, tucked her hands into her sleeves, and went away.

Dame Claire, with an expression of rigorous disapproval on her face but not, Frevisse hoped, for her, said, “You’d best come to the infirmary now. I have an ointment that will help your back.”

Frevisse shook her head. “I have to see to the guest halls.” She looked around. Sister Amicia was standing at the corner of the cloister, nervously shifting from foot to foot, waiting for her.

“They’ll keep,” Dame Claire said briskly, taking her by the arm again. “You need to have your back seen to.”

Frevisse pulled free of her hold. Her precariously begun acceptance of her pain and of what she still had to face was already unbalanced by Dame Claire and Sister Thomasine’s unexpected kindness. More kindness might undo her completely, and that she could not afford. If once she gave way, if once she began to bend out of the pride that was keeping her upright and moving, she might collapse into her misery, might break as completely as Domina Alys wanted her to, and so she said, abruptly and ungraciously, “No. Not now. I have to go,” and turned her back on Dame Claire’s protest, refusing to hear it. She passed Sister Amicia without speaking or looking at her but knew she turned and followed her as behind them Dame Claire said quietly, “When you’re ready, then.”

The pain in her back and the effort to hide it made it difficult to concentrate on telling Sister Amicia even the simplest things she would need to know and deal with as hosteler. Frevisse had small hope that good would come of Domina Alys’ choice. Sister Amicia had never shown strong inclination toward anything but talk and finding reasons to leave the priory on visits to her family. While Domina Edith was prioress, she’d had small indulgence in either, but things had bettered for her under Domina Alys. Silence in the priory no longer burdened her and she had managed to go home twice a year the past two years-and been late by a day or more in returning to St. Frideswide’s each time.

Frevisse also saw, with a weary premonition of trouble, how often sister Amicia followed with her eyes, though careful not to turn her head, men as they passed by.

She also noticed how often some men managed to return that notice.

What surprised her was that Sister Amicia seemed actually to hear what she was being told. Once she even asked a sensible question, about how count of the linens was kept. Ela, who at Frevisse’s request had been explaining the linen press to her in the unemotioned monotone Ela saved for people with whom she did not want to deal, fixed her with a considering look, answered her, and went on with slightly less constraint.

It was better when after their breakfast Sir Reynold and his men, dressed and armed for riding, left, taking their noise and insolence with them to the outer yard and presumably away. With fewer men around, mostly servants who knew better than to be in Frevisse’s way, Sister Amicia’s concentration was marginally better, but by then Frevisse was near the end of what she could endure for now. She only barely managed to keep on until the bell began for Tierce, and when she heard it, stopped in mid-sentence a detailing of when and how the hall rushes were changed, to say, “Enough. We’ll do more after Sext,” hoping that by then she might have found a way to cope with her back’s aching and the rest of the day.

As they crossed the yard back to the cloister, Benet overtook them, went past them to reach the door ahead of them and hold it open with a smile. In her surprise at seeing him and with bitter remembrance that there was no injunction against speaking to him outside the cloister, Frevisse said, “You didn’t go with Sir Reynold, then.”

Benet smiled, rueful. “He thought I might profit more by staying here and seeing Mistress Joice again. It went so well last night, you see.” He was reddening. “With Joice.”

Bound up in her own worry, Frevisse had hardly thought of Joice since yesterday, but it seemed the girl must have carried the evening through. With a pang for Benet, she brought herself to ask, “You have hope, then?”

Benet’s expression mixed a number of things, none of them very clear except, at the end, uncertainty. “I don’t know,” he said lamely.

Sister Amicia, more than willing to stand there talking than go in to Tierce, chimed in, “At least Lady Adela favors you. She talks about you to everyone.”

Visibly embarrassed, Benet said, “I know. Joice told me.”

“And Lady Adela is telling everyone else,” Sister Amicia assured him cheerfully.

“We’ll be late,” said Frevisse, partly out of pity for Benet but mostly because what interested her most just now was the coming chance to sit down in the shelter of her choir stall; and she went on into the cloister, Sister Amicia following her, leaving Benet to go his own way.

Neither her choir stall nor Tierce’s prayers were the refuge she had hoped for. The pain had subsided into a pervasive ache, deep and ready to rouse to pain again if she moved incautiously. That and awareness of the other nuns’ constant looks and sidelong glances toward her through much of the office kept her from losing herself in the prayers and psalms as she had hoped to do. And when, at the end, she went to lie down outside the door, she found her back had stiffened enough there was no way to lie down either gracefully or without pain, nor an easy way to rise when everyone had gone past her. Domina Alys was again the only one to strike her, and again Sister Thomasine was there at the end to help her up, but Dame Claire was not. Illogically angry at her for going on and at Sister Thomasine for waiting, angry, too, at her body for its treachery in stiffening and, more logically at Domina Alys for everything, Frevisse accepted Sister Thomasine’s help because she had to and managed to say, when it was done, “Thank you.”

Sister Thomasine, starting away after the others, paused to look back shyly around the edge of her veil. “You’re welcome,” she whispered.

“But you’d best not do it again or she may turn on you next.”

Sister Thomasine lifted her head, surprise on her pale face where her overfasting showed in the shadows under her hollowed cheeks. “Oh no,” she said as if disbelieving Frevisse could say so strange a thing. “She won’t do anything to me.” Her shy smile swiftly came and went, and before Frevisse could think of any answer to such certainty, she had lowered her head and was gone after the others.

Frevisse should have gone, too. Dame Juliana was giving out the heavier woolen winter gowns now, something Frevisse would have been eager for this time yesterday. But now, today, even more than being warmer, she wanted to be alone, if only for a little while. There were a few places for that in the cloister. To go to any of them would have looked as if she were hiding. And she would have been. Hiding was exactly what she wanted. But she would not give Domina Alys the satisfaction of knowing it or the chance to have her hunted out if it were guessed what she was doing, so instead she turned back to the surest refuge, into the church.

It was where she always went by preference when she had the chance or need, usually to her choir stall or else to kneel at the altar in prayer. Today, when she had shut the door between her and the cloister, she simply stayed where she was, leaning against the heavy wood, not even bothering to take her hand from the handle, her eyes thankfully closed now that finally she had no need to move or seem any particular way for anybody. She was alone, with time to gather her strength-not her thoughts, she was tired of trying to think; and not her courage, she was nearly out of that-just her strength to face the rest of the day.

She had been standing there, she did not know how long, sunk as near to mindless as she could come, when Joliffe said close behind her, “Dame Frevisse,” concerned.

She had not heard him come, but she was past having strength to be startled. And it had been illogical to hope no one beyond the nuns would come to know what had been done to her. Word had surely gone by way of servants out of the cloister to everywhere in the priory by now; but that did not mean she had to deal with questions, curiosity, sympathy, or anything else that might be offered. Most particularly it did not mean she had to deal with Joliffe, and she said, not moving, not even opening her eyes, “Go away.”

“Now, that’s unfriendly.” He sounded aggrieved and mocking together. “How do you know I haven’t come like Sir Orfeo, daring dangers to rescue his lady?”

“I’m not in need of rescuing. And as I recall, he failed.”

“Only according to Boethius.”

“ ‘Only according to Boethius’?” Frevisse turned around. “Only Boethius?” A man held, these hundreds of years past, to be an authority on anything he had chosen to write about?

Joliffe shrugged away her indignation. “He was a philosopher. He only talked to make a point and the points he could make were the only ones he talked about. No, I believe the other way the story is told, that Sir Orfeo won Heurodis free of Faerye. It’s much the better story.”

“What has ‘better’ to do with truth?”

“What has truth to do with a good story?”

“And since when,” Frevisse said, abruptly changing direction, “did I ever think Sir Orfeo and Heurodis were real, for me to be arguing about them so earnestly?”

“I don’t know,” said Joliffe lightly.

Frevisse looked at him consideringly and, finding at least the ache in her mind had lessened, said, “Thank you.”

Simply, with no trace of his familiar mockery, Joliffe answered, “You’re welcome.” And then, “Tell me what she did.”

Frevisse moved her head slightly side to side, refusing. She did not want to say the words, did not want even the feel of them ugly in her mind. If she could bury the thought of what had been done to her deep enough, it would somehow take the pain away with it. That was not logical, but the pain seemed to leave little room for logic; all she could do was refuse him an answer.

“Say it,” Joliffe insisted.

Frevisse turned away from him. Too quickly. The pain caught her to rigid stillness and she had to stand, breathing in short gasps between her teeth, while it subsided. When it had, she turned carefully back to him and said curtly, resenting both him and her own cowardice, “Along with the other punishments of humiliation and losing my place as hosteler, she whipped me.”

She was daring him to pity her, ready to be angry if he did; but his level, unreadable look told her nothing, and she added with bitter-edged lightness, “But after all she only used a birch rod on me and it was only twenty strokes, so I suppose I should be grateful for the mercy.”

“Only it doesn’t feel like mercy, does it?” Joliffe asked, level-voiced.

“No. It feels like pain!”

But as she said it, unable to stop the anger and a surge of too many other feelings, something in Joliffe’s face stopped her, held her quiet before she said in a voice that matched his own, “It’s been done to you, too, hasn’t it?”

Joliffe’s eyes widened in openly mocking surprise. “To me? A wandering player now turned minstrel? Someone no more than half a step off the devil’s tail to most people’s -way of thinking?” He raised his hands at her ignorance. “Why, I’ve found there are people who seem to feel an absolute obligation to it.”

He was laughing at himself and inviting her to laugh with him, but Frevisse no more believed his laughter than she believed his surprise, and did not want to join in it. “What do you do?” she asked.

He shrugged the question away. “Avoid it when I can.”

“And when you can’t?”

“Like everything else. Endure it. The way you were enduring trying to teach mat cow-eyed nun in the guest hall just now.”

It was a deft, firm-handed change of topic, and Frevisse let him make it. “St. Frideswide’s new hosteler, yes,” she said. “I’ve lost my office, among other things, for my sins.”

“A sorry thing, your fall from grace. They were talking of you last night. Your prioress and her cousins in the parlor. At least there was mention of a nun who was forever giving trouble, and I assumed it was you.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“How was it with the girl?” If he could change subjects, so could she.

Joliffe frowned slightly. “My fear would be she’ll break just when she most needs her wits about her.”

That was Frevisse’s thought, too, and she had no answer to it.

“But she kept close in talk with that young Benet last night,” Joliffe said. “Is she possibly warming to him?”

“It would help if she did,” Frevisse said, and would have said more but behind her the door opened and Dame Perpetua entered, followed by Lady Adela, come to ready things for Sext. She stopped short at sight of Joliffe, a man and someone she did not know; but the nave of the church was open to the priory’s guests and Dame Frevisse was still somewhat hosteler, so after her first surprise, she bowed her head to him slightly and went on.

Lady Adela stayed where she was and announced firmly, “You’re the minstrel.”

Joliffe swept her a low bow, one hand on his heart, the other flung wide as if in surrender to her. “You have it in a word, my lady.”

Lady Adela laughed and most improperly dropped a curtsy back to him, so deep he might have been an earl. “I’ve seen you from Lady Eleanor’s window, but they wouldn’t let me come to listen to you last night.”

“A lady fair in durance vile,” said Joliffe. “Shall I sing your plight abroad so your knight may find and rescue you?”

“I don’t have a knight,” she said regretfully.

“Then I’ll sing your beauties everywhere and find you one.”

“Lady Adela,” Dame Perpetua called.

Lady Adela’s brightness disappeared. With the solemness she mostly wore, as if life required a great deal of concentration, she leaned a little toward Joliffe to say, as if Frevisse were not there, “You don’t have to find a knight. Just tell Benet Godfrey.”

“He’ll do?” Joliffe asked as solemnly. He might have been as eleven-years-old as she was.

Lady Adela nodded. Laughter glimmered in her again. “And he’s already here, too.”

“Lady Adela,” Dame Perpetua insisted from the choir.

Lady Adela heaved a sigh seemingly from her toes, called dutifully, “Yes,” and went.

Joliffe turned back to Frevisse. “Are they thinking to make a nun of that one?”

“Some are. I’m not.”

“Sensible of you.” Joliffe made her a bow, far less elaborate than what he had lavished on Lady Adela. “I’ll go now.”

Frevisse put out a hand, not touching him but stopping him before he turned away. “Thank you for…” Drawing her mind aside from her hurting? For making her say what she had not wanted to say? For not overtly pitying her? “… For Boethius.”

The slightest of smiles curved his mouth. Quietly, devoid of mockery, devoid of everything but understanding, he said, “I know how it bruises the mind along with the body. Both need tending when it happens.”

Frevisse nodded, understanding with him. He bowed again and she bent her head to him, and did not watch him go but turned toward the choir, ready to pray now; and after Sext she would go to Dame Claire and let her see to her back and then bespeak a winter gown from Dame Juliana before taking Sister Amicia back to the guest halls.

The west door groaned on its hinges with Joliffe going out-why hadn’t she heard him coming in?-and she wished too late that she had thought to ask him if he knew where Sir Reynold and his men had been bound for today.