The Servant's Tale

13

FOR THE DAY’S last prayers at Compline, St. Frideswide’s nuns were spared the cold rigors of the church. At the bell’s ringing of the hour, they laid aside their reading and handwork in the warming room, Dame Alys put out the candles, and in the gentle glow of the firelight Domina Edith led them in their prayers.

Frevisse enjoyed this brief while between the ending of each day’s tasks and the going to bed by twilight in summer, in darkness in winter. Even marred this evening by coughing and snuffling, the prayers held their promised peace for a day done and a night of rest to come, and ended as they always did with, “The Lord Almighty grant us a quiet night and a perfect end. Amen.”

As they finished, Sister Lucy sneezed heavily, Dame Perpetua coughed until it seemed she must suffocate, Dame Alys trumpeted into her handkerchief, and Frevisse thought with a private sigh that a quiet night did not seem likely. But two women from the kitchen bustled in with a pitcher of hot spiced wine and cups and such bread as was left over from supper, and Frevisse let go future woe for the present pleasure of that warmth before the cold walk through the cloister to bed.

By rights, when the time came to make their soft-footed, skirt-whispering way along the dark cloister walk, Domina Edith should have led them, and left them at the foot of the dormitory stairs to go with her servant on around the cloister to her own rooms. But the prioress was well aware of how slowly she moved these days, and of how cold the nights were. So tonight she gave her nuns leave to go on ahead of her, smiling gently and bowing her head to their curtsies before they hurried out the door into the darkness between the warming-room door and the lantern left lighted by the dormitory steps.

They were already on the stairs when they heard the rabble of sound from the courtyard. Where there should have been only the night’s thick black silence, there were voices rising in anger. Raggedly, losing their haste, the nuns stopped, turning toward the noise, startled.

“Outlaws!” Sister Amicia whispered. “They’re breaking in! We’ll all be raped!”

This might have started a panic among the nuns, except that Dame Alys likewise broke the rule of silence. “Hold!” she bellowed, and such was her authority, and volume, that the nuns froze in place.

Sister Fiacre made the sign for church and began to push herself feebly against the nuns in her way. But one of them was Dame Alys, and she was not to be moved. Her large, steadfast presence was a rock against which the tide of frightened women broke uselessly.

Dame Claire raised her hand in signal to Frevisse, who nodded, and the two stepped the other way down the cloister walk toward the gate that led to the courtyard. Dame Alys watched them go with such concentration that the others began to notice the direction of her gaze and, seeing two nuns who were not afraid-who were in fact moving toward the danger-their own courage was restored. Only then did Dame Alys begin to lead them toward the church in a silent, orderly procession.

As Frevisse and Dame Claire reached the outer door, it was clear from the noise that whatever was happening was directed at the older guesthall, not at the cloister door. As Frevisse reached for the latch, the voices rose in a kind of animal triumph. Dame Claire crossed herself. By the sound of it, there were going to be people hurt. Frevisse lifted the latch and went out.

Confused for a moment in the suddenness of torchlight, she paused. There were perhaps a dozen men struggling in a knot outside the old guesthall door. Some were carrying torches whose spasmed light jerked and flared and hid almost as much as it showed as the men wrestled and struck at something in their midst. Only one of them she recognized surely-Roger Naylor, the steward. At the edge of the melee, he was trying to drag men back, yelling at them to stop.

Frevisse grabbed her skirts out of her way and crossed the courtyard at a deft-footed run, adding her voice to Naylor’s. “Stop this! You’ve no right here! Stop it!”

She was unheeded, but as if spurred on by her presence, Naylor shoved in among the men, dragging first one and then another back from their violence until he was wedged well in among them, still shouting for them to stop. Frevisse tried to follow. These were village men; once they knew she and Naylor were there, they would stop. But they were too furious to notice anything but their goal, struggling against each other toward the center where more men were bent down holding and striking at someone under them.

Naylor drove a hard fist sideways into the ribs of a man to his left. The man, clutching a torch, reeled backwards. Frevisse caught at his elbow, shoving it up to keep the fire from her face, and shook him, demanding, “How dare you come here like this?”

The man gaped at her, seeing in a single glance who and what she was, then jerked free and backed off, throwing the torch to the cobbles before he turned and ran blundering off into the darkness.

“Naylor!” she called. “Are you all right?”

Naylor was too busy to reply. He dragged another man back by his tunic neck, pushed him aside, and grabbed for a third. The first man, staggering to balance, went snarling at Naylor’s back. Frevisse stepped forward and kicked hard at his knee. Her swing, shortened by her skirt, staggered him without bringing him down and he swung around on her furiously, fist rising. Frevisse flung up her arm but fright doused his anger before he struck. He pushed back from her, mumbling, “Pardon, lady, pardon.” He turned to run, shouting, “Look, men! The nuns are come!”

“And you might take note of Master Naylor, too,” Frevisse said acidly, unheard.

Distracted, the men began pulling back from their victim, helped by Naylor’s final shoves and curses. “It’s enough, damn you,” he snarled. “Pull back. You’ve done enough.”

“More than enough,” Dame Claire said. Frevisse was suddenly aware that Dame Claire was directly behind her. Now with a reined anger and unshaken nerves, the infirmarian went in among the men. They readily yielded to her passing, and she went to her knees beside the man they had been pummeling.

At her voice he warily uncurled from the ball he had made of himself. Naylor grabbed a torch from someone and held it for Dame Claire to see him better.

Frevisse, with dismay, recognized Ellis.

But he seemed little hurt. A smear of blood from some cut hidden in his hair was trailing down his cheek in front of his ear, and he was holding one hand to the back of his head and the other to his ribs, but he looked up at Dame Claire with a grimace and said, “Thank God there were so many of them. They might have made a competent job of it otherwise.”

“Let me feel,” Dame Claire ordered, pulling his hand away from his side.

Frevisse, leaving her to it, turned savagely on the men around her. “So what do you mean, coming like this, laying hands on a guest of the priory?”

The man who had nearly hit her, squarely built, with a blunt face and blunter manners, said, “He’s stabbed young Sym. We come to get him ’fore he can be away.”

“You pursued him even into here?”

“Pursued be damned,” Ellis said. He winced from Dame Claire’s probing at his ribs. “They dragged me out of the guesthall. Where I’ve been since well before sundown and nowhere near this Sym.”

“It were a player done it. His mam said so. Said he said so. And it’s you he fought with this morning,” the man said.

“That doesn’t mean I did it.” Ellis flinched as Dame Claire parted his hair to find his wound. “I haven’t left here tonight and I’ve not been stabbing anyone.”

“No,” Joliffe said with dispassionate arrogance. “But I probably did.”

He was standing in the guesthall doorway, with darkness behind him and the red flare of torchlight in front, catching and losing his finally drawn features as he added, as if lightly amused, “But you all came in so sudden and grabbed so quick without saying why, you never gave me chance to say, did you?”

“You bench-bred cur-” the blunt-faced man said, starting to move toward him.

Roger Naylor stepped in front of the man, facing Joliffe, and said the same thing that was in Frevisse’s mind. “So what do you mean, saying a fool thing like it was ‘probably’ you who stabbed him? You don’t look drunk enough to not know whether you knifed a man or not.”

“I’m not drunk at all,” Joliffe answered. Frevisse had seen his mouth tighten at the villager’s insult but his voice was still as casual as before. Only the glint in his eyes was dangerous, telling her he knew exactly what he was doing in drawing the men off Ellis to himself. “I went to that little rathole of an alehouse but I’d hardly sat myself down when this Sym of yours decided he didn’t want me there. I never had chance to drink.”

“And why would he be minding you there, if it was this fellow here he fought with today?” Naylor demanded, gesturing at Ellis.

“Maybe because of the girl I was sitting by. She didn’t mind but he did.”

Ellis, ducking away from Dame Claire’s probing fingers, said indignantly, “That’s why you were so set on going? That’s what you did while I was laying him out this morning? Arranged to meet her there?”

Joliffe shrugged. “She said she’d be there. Said she’d not mind if I came. So I went.”

“But Sym objected,” Frevisse said.

“Very much.” Joliffe matched her dry tone. “And he’d had ale enough to make up for what I never had a chance to drink. He wouldn’t take talking to, not by me or the girl, and when I went to leave he came for me.”

“So you drew your dagger in defense,” Naylor said.

“I never drew my dagger at all. There wasn’t time. He had his knife out when he came for me, and I grabbed his wrist and kept hold if it, that’s all. We lurched around and fell over a bench, twisting as we went so he was on the bottom. I sprang clear, told some of his friends they’d best hold him there until I was gone, and I left.”

“And came back here,” Naylor said.

Joliffe hesitated, then agreed, “And came back here.”

“Or lay in wait to knife him in the dark!” someone yelled from the crowd.

“I could have,” Joliffe returned as loudly. “Only I didn’t.”

“Easy to say!” someone else yelled. Drawn off Ellis, they were stilling wanting vengeance and Joliffe would do as well as any other stranger. Frevisse eased sideways around someone, meaning to put herself between them and Joliffe. But Naylor moved more openly, stepping directly out into the space between him and the villagers, and said in a voice as roused with anger as their own, “And understand that talk is all that’s going to happen until we’ve had a chance to ask Sym himself. Were any of you at the alehouse, to say if what he’s said so far is true?”

With a grumble and shuffle, six of the men showed they had been there.

“So,” Naylor demanded, “did it happen the way he says? Sym drew on him and they fought and fell and then he left?”

The men shifted and looked at one another, twitched elbows at each other’s ribs, until finally one of them said, “Aye. That was the way of it. Just like he says.”

Frevisse was at Naylor’s side now, between the crowd and Joliffe, a naked place to be, the small torch-glared space between one man and the crowding, anger-harshened faces, but she set her voice bold as Naylor’s to ask, “So was Sym’s knife still in Sym’s hand when he got up?”

One of the three men caught her thought. “That’s right. He still had it. He put it back in its sheath. I remember.”

General nods from the others agreed with him.

“So whatever happened, if he was hurt then, it was an accident,” Frevisse said, “and of Sym’s making.”

There was nodding to that, too, through the whole crowd; but then the blunt-faced man said, “So it was maybe afterwards, in the dark outside, he did it.”

The crowd readily grumbled back toward anger. Frevisse swiftly turned to Joliffe and said, “So tell us where you truly were after you left the alehouse. You didn’t come straight here.”

She was guessing but already knew Joliffe’s face well enough to read, despite his control of it, that she had guessed right. Knowing only he could see her own expression, she willed him to understand it might be his life to answer her rightly; and maybe Naylor’s and Ellis’s lives, too. She and Dame Claire were almost surely safe enough; they would only be dragged aside if it came to fighting again; but she thought Naylor was not the kind of man to leave him to the crowd unfought for, and Ellis was already in the middle of it.

Joliffe met her look and read it. Or already knew the stakes as well as she did. With a penchant for survival and wry humor both, he answered, “I went from the alehouse into the arms of the pretty girl. She left when Sym turned ugly, and waited for me at the church porch. We saw him go stumbling past on what I suppose was his way home. Unfortunately,” he added carelessly, not seeming to hear the stir and mutter among the men, “all I could charm from the girl were kisses and sweet words, but surely we were there long enough for even Sym to have reached his door.”

“And that’s something Roger Naylor can ask about tomorrow,” Dame Claire cut in before anyone else could say more. “Tonight he can lock you up and be done with it, but Dame Frevisse and I need escort to the village if there’s someone hurt there. How bad is the wound?”

The men looked vaguely at each other and shuffled uneasily. Dame Claire stood up with a disgusted look, but it was Naylor who said, letting his aggravation show, “You came storming up here, breaking our peace and beating our guest without even knowing how bad the hurt is? You don’t have any idea of it?”

One of the men shrugged and muttered, “Meg came in t’alehouse. Said Sym’d been stabbed by one of the player folk. And we-” He looked around at his fellows and shrugged. “We called up some of t’others thereabouts and came up here to make sure the man wasn’t trying to leave without he paid for what he’d done.”

“Only you didn’t bother to grab the right man, and the right man hadn’t done it anyway,” Naylor snapped. “A fine lot of fools you’ve made of yourselves.”

Their looks said they agreed with him. Ellis had climbed painfully to his feet and went now to join Joliffe in the doorway. Dame Claire said, “So that’s settled. But we still need to go to the village. Who will…”

But she was interrupted. Torchlight and voices from the priory gateway turned them in that direction as four more village men trod heavy-footed in, carrying a piece of fencing flat among them, a blanket-covered body on it. Meg walked beside it, unsteady on her feet, clinging and leaning on Hewe, who was white faced, tear stained, dazed. Father Henry came behind the sorry little group, his head bent in prayer. There was no need to ask who lay under the blanket, and no one did.