The Prioress' Tale

Chapter 24

“He may have such a dagger,” Frevisse said, “but you said he had no blood on him when he left the cloister last night, and I’ve seen him this morning wearing what he was wearing then.”

Relief made Benet slump and almost laugh. “Yes!” Edmund was not so easily done with Sir Hugh. He had begun to shiver lightly and wrapping his arms around him for a little warmth, he said, “He and your prioress could have worked together. He could have given her the dagger to use, she killed Sir Reynold, and then Sir Hugh carried the dagger away.”

“That would leave her able to deal with the blood but with no weapon, while Sir Hugh had the weapon and no blood!” Joice said eagerly, going to pick up one of the blankets from the bed and handing it to Edmund who took it with a look of thanks that lingered on her, Frevisse saw; saw, too, that Joice’s look lingered on him and their hands were together on the blanket a moment longer than was necessary. To increase the trouble, Benet saw it, too. Frevisse could tell by the frown tightening between his eyes, and she said, “No, I can’t think they’d work together that way.”

“Why not?” Joliffe reasonably asked, and added, “It would solve a great deal,” meaning more than Sir Reynold’s murder.

Ashamed that somewhere in her she would not have minded accepting Domina Alys’ guilt for true, Frevisse said slowly, forcing her feelings aside, “Because that isn’t… like her. She might kill in a fury, on the instant, but to plan out a thing like this… and against Sir Reynold… She doesn’t plan.”

But she had planned Frevisse’s punishment yesterday. Frevisse’s back was still too aching, too hurtful when she moved uncarefully, for her not to remember that Domina Alys had thought that out in detail ahead of time. But to kill Sir Reynold…

“It would have been more possible for them, that way, than it would have been for anyone else,” Joice insisted.

“And if they did it, they can’t be rid of all sign of it yet,” said Edmund. “Isn’t your prioress’ gown made of wool? It won’t dry quickly, even with the fire. It could still be damp, still show signs of just being washed. Anything like that would make a certainty.”

“And we have to be certain,” Joliffe said quietly, his gaze fixed on Frevisse. Unwillingly she nodded, agreeing. More quietly, understanding what he was asking her to do, he said, “It will have to be you who finds out. If there’s anything to find, it will be in her rooms. A damp gown. Some trace of blood.”

Frevisse lifted her head with a thought aside from what he was saying.

Blood.

There had been blood in St. Frideswide’s yesterday, too. And yesterday, if not today, there had been bloodied clothing.

She looked at Benet.

Alys tried to rise to anger. Anger would at least be something she was used to, something better than this dead drag of grief that seemed to be all she could feel since seeing Reynold dead. Dull, aching, heavy grief that weighed down every thought she tried to have, every move she tried to make. The abbot’s letter was in her hand, and she said at Hugh, standing in her parlor doorway, refusing to come farther in, “You had no right to read this. It was to me, not you.”

“Alys, I haven’t time for this. You sent to know why we were readying to go.” He pointed at the letter. “There’s why.”

“Reynold wouldn’t have left,” she said dully. “Reynold would have stayed to help me face it out.” But Reynold was dead.

“If it wasn’t for Reynold, it wouldn’t have to be faced at all,” Hugh said coldly.

“And you,” Alys said. “You, too. You’re in this as much as he was.”

“And you before any of us,” Hugh returned, and turned to go, not interested. “I have to have the men out of here.”

“I didn’t know what he was playing at!” Alys said desperately, trying to be angry but only aching-aching as if something had broken in her that she could not find or mend. Forcing the desperation because she needed to feel something more than pain, she cried, “I didn’t know how he was using me!”

Hugh swung half around to look at her and said disgustedly, “Maybe not, but you knew full well how you were using him.”

She had known, but it had not mattered. What had mattered was that she had been glad of him being here. Using him had been only part of it, and so it had not mattered.

But if he had not been here, he would not be dead now. Dead without time to repent or be absolved of his sins and maybe gone to hell because of it.

She tried to drag her mind away from that, from the aching circle it had been in all morning now. Reynold was dead. He had no business being dead, leaving her only Hugh to be angry at, and she said, “You’re using the abbot’s letter for excuse, nothing more. You want to be gone without promising me you’ll carry out what Reynold said he’d do.”

“I’m not promising you anything,” Hugh said impatiently. “I’ve told you that.”

“Reynold promised-”

“I didn’t and I won’t.”

“He swore he-”

“It doesn’t matter what he swore! It’s odds to evens whether he would have kept his word anyway, being Reynold. At least with me you know where you are. I’m swearing to nothing and you can expect nothing. Grasp it, Alys. Whether Reynold lived or not, you would have been on your own before long, and he wouldn’t have cared that he’d played you for the fool along the way.”

“He wasn’t playing me for a fool!”

Reynold would never have played her for a fool. They had understood each other. No one had ever understood them except each other.

Hugh made a contemptuous sound. “Reynold played everybody for a fool.”

With her aching rousing toward outright pain, Alys flung

back at him, “Including you?”

“Including me. The only difference was that I let myself be played for the fool. That gave me a choice in when it stopped. Unlike the rest of you.”

A shout and confused sounds from the yard below jerked him around toward the window. “Now what?” he said and came back, past her to the window. Leaning to look out, he swore and turned for the door again, saying, “It’s your damned abbot. He’s here before his time and some fool has opened the gate to him.”

Alys had followed him to the window, was still there, looking out, seeing what he had not; and with laughter sickened behind her words, she said, “It’s more than ‘my’ abbot. That’s Walter Fenner with him, if I know anything.”

Hugh spun and came back to her side, swearing.

“No going now, Hugh.” She did not try to keep her great, grim satisfaction hidden. “There are Fenners and abbot’s men together down there. You’re going nowhere.”

Hugh threw her a savage look. “Your people were told to keep the gates shut!”

“By Reynold,” she answered.

“And by me this morning!”

“But not by me,” Alys returned sharply, still looking at the mounted men now crowding full the yard. She could guess that the man foremost among them, richly dressed in Benedictine black with fur-edged sleeves and collar and a man behind him bearing an abbatial crozier the way a lay noble’s man would carry his lord’s banner, was Abbot Gilberd. Sir Walter Fenner, riding close beside him, she knew all too well by sight, and… she made a raw sound that was as close as she could come to open laughter. “There’s why they opened the gate. That’s Roger Naylor there.” Her erstwhile, cursed steward. He had gone and betrayed her to the abbot, the first chance that he’d had.

“Fenners! A score and more besides your damned abbot’s men,” Hugh snarled. He stepped back from the window, rigid, considering possibilities and discarding most of them before he grabbed her arm. “You come with me. We’ll face this out together. We blame it all on Reynold.”

She went unresisting. Reynold was dead, and everyone and everything was turning against her, except for Katerin, who came out of her corner behind the door, a little crouched with fear, but following as Hugh pulled her down the stairs, ordering as they went, “We can blame it all on Reynold. Everything. I’ll back you on how you knew nothing of what he was doing and you’ll back me that I was against it all the way and set on having his men out of here as soon as he was dead, because, like you, I didn’t think that they should be here. They may not believe us, but they can’t disprove it. If we can find a way, too, to lay blame for his death on that madman you’ve in the church, that will be better yet. He’s likely, so why not use him?”

Alys tried to say the madman was not Reynold’s murderer because with Reynold dead, the madman was all she had left for hope; but they had reached the foot of the stairs, were just into the cloister walk, Hugh still holding her by the arm, still drawing her along with him, still talking as he turned toward the outer door and came, suddenly silent, to a stop, staring at-of all unlikely things-her madman standing on the low garth wall not far away along the walk. And beyond him, at the next pillar holding up the walk’s roof, the minstrel. Both of them stretched as far up as they could reach and groping in the narrow wedge of space where roof beam and roof slanted together.

The beams of the cloister walk’s roof were the only place that had come quickly to Frevisse’s mind where something could be readily hidden in the cloister. Impelled by sounds of men and horses outside in the yard as she came out of the church, she had said urgently to Joliffe, Benet, and Edmund, “Hurry! They’re leaving!”

Benet protested, “They can’t be. I’m not with them,” and started past her toward the outer door; but Joliffe went past her and leaped onto the low wall to start searching where she had told them to, at the pillar and roof beam nearest the stairs to Domina Alys’ rooms, while Edmund took the next one. As Benet hesitated, half-turning back to them, Joliffe finished with the first, dropped down and circled past Edmund to leap up onto the wall again. AS Sir Hugh and Domina Alys came from the stairs.

Frevisse froze and so did they, staring, before Sir Hugh started forward, drawing his sword as he came, ordering, “Down! The both of you. Down!”

Joice said urgently, “Edmund!” and moved toward him as if that would be some defense, while Frevisse without thinking stepped in front of Sister Thomasine. Benet, more practical than either of them, drew as Sir Hugh did, his sword out and in Sir Hugh’s way.

“Benet…” Sir Hugh began.

In a voice hollowed with anger and grief, Benet answered, “No. It’s done.”

And behind Frevisse, Joliffe said, “It’s here.”

Sir Hugh made a spasmed move to go forward. Benet jerked his sword to hold him where he was, while Joliffe tugged and the thing came loose, a dark bundle, tightly rolled, that had been wedged into the angle of the roof and roof beam. He held it out toward Sir Hugh. “Yours?”

“No.” Hugh bit the word short.

“No,” Frevisse agreed. “Not yours. Godard’s. You merely made use of it.”

“When you killed Sir Reynold,” Benet said with bitter certainty.

“What are you talking about?” Domina Alys asked, strangely unforcefully. “What do you mean, killed Reynold? What is it?”

“Godard’s leather doublet,” Frevisse said. Joliffe shook it out. The leather, stiffened with dried blood, only partly gave up its folds but there was no doubting what it was. “Godard was wearing it when he was hurt. They took it off him in the hall after they brought him back here. Remember? By then the wound had been covered and the blood on the doublet was dried. It was thrown aside. No one bothered with it. Everyone forgot about it. Except Sir Hugh. Benet remembers he took it to his own room after Godard died, saying he would see that Godard’s things were given to his family when there was time.”

Domina Alys shook her head, holding now to Katerin’s arm as if she could not otherwise stand up, looking at Sir Hugh with a bewildered emptiness as she asked, “What’s she saying, Hugh?”

Sir Hugh did not answer. It was Benet who said, raw with angry pain, “She’s saying Sir Hugh took Godard’s doublet and wore it under his own doublet last night when he and Sir Reynold came to see you. She’s saying that after he left you, he put it on over his own doublet and waited here in the cloister walk, in the dark, for Sir Reynold to come down and then killed him.” Benet’s voice broke, leaving him wordless somewhere between grief and rage.

“It’s leather,” Frevisse said. “He needed to kill Sir Reynold close, to keep him from crying out, and the leather kept his own clothing from being bloodied. No one was going to miss a dead man’s doublet. All he had to do with it afterward was hide it here and go out clean in his own clothing.”

“Hugh?” Domina Alys asked. Tight-lipped with held-in rage, he threw her a harsh look and said nothing.

Joliffe picked up a dark blood-stiffened cloth that had fallen to the pavement from the unfolded doublet. “He’d even thought to bring a rag to clean his dagger with and left it here, too. The weather is too cold for flies to come to the blood and nothing else would give away its hiding place.”

“Hugh?” Domina Alys asked again, wanting him to say something, not that.

Sir Hugh lowered his sword away from Benet’s with a deep, impatient breath and said at her, “Don’t be a greater fool than Reynold thought you were. That’s exactly how it was.”

Domina Alys tried to answer. Her mouth moved, but nothing came, as if there were nothing left in her to make words out of; as if anger and hope and everything else words came from no longer existed in her; until finally, faint in the cold morning air, she whispered, “Why?”

Hugh looked at her disgustedly. “Because I had no more use for him. That’s why.”