The Servant's Tale

7

FREVISSE FOUND A quiet corner in the cloister that the sun had warmed a little, and the wind couldn’t reach. She pulled the thick paper from her sleeve and unfolded it. Her uncle’s distinctive italic warmed her further just seeing it. For a moment she was transported home-with the Chaucers she had found the only permanent dwelling place of her life before she came to St. Frideswide’s-the house new-built when she came to it, bright outside with unmellowed Cotswold stone, bright inside with many large windows. She smiled, remembering how proud her uncle had been to greet visitors in his magnificent hall.

She opened the letter and began to read. Thomas Chaucer had not inherited his father’s gift for soaring imagery, but he was lucid and fluent, with more than a hint of his father’s sense of the ridiculous.

To my dear and right well beloved niece Dame Frevisse at St. Frideswide’s Priory: I greet you as heartily as I am able and so does your aunt Matilda, who begs me greet you in her name.

This winter proving severe, and my age beginning to weigh on me, I am staying at home this Christmastide. We, for a wonder, have no guests, and so are more than amply provisioned, all matters considered. Therefore I write to ask if you have any secret desire for some treat more than St. Frideswide’s can provide. Sugared almonds, perhaps, or three oranges to eat and share with Dame Claire and Domina Edith?

The King has been much busied with Parliament and his council at Westminster, and is gone to Bury St. Edmunds for the holy days. There has been much to-doing now that Bedford is come from France to settle matters between Gloucester and Beaufort yet again, and I am happily out of it for the present. I would quote Ecclesiastes at you, but you already know my choice of verse.

I have required my messenger to wait upon your reply, so stand not upon lengthy ceremony, but make your request and put it into his hand. He will receive it gladly, and perhaps repeat gossip of things hereabouts, which I command you to take with a grain of salt. May the blessings of this holy season fill your heart with joy.

Frevisse smiled over the letter, reread it twice, then tucked it back into her sleeve. She would share it with Domina Edith later, as it was against the Rule to have a letter whose contents were unknown to the prioress. She did indeed have a special request, and would write it down in brief and send it posting down the road to her uncle.

Meg had hardly slept last night and not at all today. Now, in late afternoon, aching with her exhaustion, she went on sitting hunched beside Barnaby’s unconscious body, watching his slack face and listening to the unchanging pattern of his noisy breathing while her weary mind went endlessly over all her fears and possibilities.

Even if Barnaby lived, he could not work. And if he could not work then he had no right to hold the house and land that were their living. It might be that the steward would advise Lord Lovel to allow Sym to take up his father’s rights and duties. That way they could keep the little they had left. He had the right of inheritance, and that was not easily set by, so there was some hope.

But Sym was only sixteen. Or maybe seventeen; the years blurred into one another anymore. He was well grown and strong but not a man yet. And he had already quarreled twice, with his father’s help, with the steward. And even if he did take up Barnaby’s place, there would still be Barnaby, and the little she had saved so far would go to pay for his accident if nothing else. Only it had not been an accident, and that would cost them more. He had been drunk and singing; the players had seen him and even known the very song, one of the only two he knew. Everyone in the village had heard him lurching home drunk and bawling the words often enough to believe their story.

At least Sym had found Gilbey’s old horse as it wandered grazing on the village green in the dark last night. “Too stupid to go home,” he had said. “Or too smart, if Gilbey Dunn is as stingy with its fodder as everything else. The old boy’s not hurt, any rod, except some scrapes on his knees and hocks that don’t go deep enough to matter. Gilbey’s got nothing to open his mouth about.”

But Gilbey would open his mouth, and loudly, because though Meg hated to say it about anyone, let alone a neighbor, he was a mean and calculating man. Besides, the horse was maybe not so sound as Sym was saying; he had his father’s way of wishing a thing to be so and then believing it was. And she suspected that what was left of the harness would take a deal of mending, if it could be mended at all, let alone that there was no salvaging the cart.

It had been the players saying that that had set him into a temper at them. He had asked to borrow their horse, it being easier for him to ask from strangers than from folk who knew him well. But the dark-haired one had refused him, saying, “That thing won’t run on wheels again. Better you take another cart to bring the kindling home,” and Sym had lost his temper. It was always easy to set Sym in a temper, and easier when there was work to do that he did not want to bother with.

Hewe was not so hard to deal with. He had a temper, right enough, but it went to sulks more than to fury. He was lying beside her now, curled into the blankets on one of the guesthall’s thin straw mattresses, his head on her thigh. With the fondness she rarely had chance to show, Meg stroked gently at his golden fair hair, then let her hand rest again on his shoulder while she went on watching Barnaby. She was still worried for Hewe. He was not thick flesh and muscle like Barnaby and Sym, he needed tending more than they did. She had made him rest and be warm again instead of going for the cart with Sym; and was nursing a small hope that maybe last night had changed him. He had come back quiet, as if thoughtful, from his time with Father Henry.

Father Henry lived cleanly, easily. He had a servant to take care of him in his own little house, which probably had a fireplace, they being so common at the priory. Hewe had to have seen the difference; he had to have finally understood what she had been telling him all these years. That he did not have to be as mired into the village as his father and brother were. That he could live better if he would only try.

It was different for Sym. In the right way of things he would have the croft and its fields and duties and rights after his father died. God in his wisdom had made Sym strong like his father, suited for his work. And Sym, unlike Barnaby, would maybe take strong hold once it was his, and put it right. If he had the chance.

Meg’s hands clenched. Barnaby had brought them to this. He had always claimed that he made his own luck. Had claimed it loudly, swaggering, through those days when her parents had been after her to marry him. She had often, when it was far too late, wondered why she had. Except she had grown tired of her mother’s nagging and her father’s hard hand across her head, and been excited by Barnaby’s demands.

But now she was mostly past almost anything except a final longing to save something out of all of it. To save Hewe from being no more than his father and brother were.

But what if that wanting was somehow against God’s will? No, how could it be, since she was trying to give him to God, not keep him for herself, no matter how dear he was to her? Surely if she could bring him to the priesthood…

Hewe moved sharply, sat up to look more closely at his father, and then whispered, “He’s waking up.”

Meg turned back from the far wandering of her thoughts to peer at Barnaby’s face, and saw that Hewe was right. There was the beginning of awareness there, a flickering of eyelids and muscles that had been lax all these hours past.

Meg clamped her hand around Hewe’s wrist, not noticing how her strength made him wince, and whispered, “Go find someone to go for Dame Claire. Find someone now.”

Hewe scrambled out of the blankets and went. Meg leaned nearer to Barnaby. His breathing had changed, strengthened and become uneven. With a soft moaning murmur he opened his eyes. Unfocused, he blinked vacantly, then seemed to realize that the ceiling was unfamiliar. He frowned, and shifted his eyes without moving his head, until he found Meg bending toward him. His mouth moved slightly, soundlessly. His lips were cracked with dryness; Meg reached for the clean cloth in a bowl of water that Dame Claire had left, telling her how to use it. Carefully, she squeezed the cloth past dripping, then held it to Barnaby’s lips and squeezed again, gentling the water into his mouth.

He licked his lips and wanted more. She gave it and finally he managed to say hoarsely, “I’m hurt.”

Meg nodded.

“Bad?” he asked.

Meg hesitated, then nodded again. “Your ribs are broken and your hand, too, and we don’t know what else maybe is. Best you lie still. Dame Claire will come. She’s been tending you.”

Barnaby closed his eyes and moaned, “I’m hurt horrible. I’m hurting…” He opened his eyes wide, fear shining in them. “I want the priest. You fetch the priest, woman.”

“He’ll come,” Meg said. “We’ll send for him, too.”

Feeling someone at her back, she looked up over her shoulder to see the woman who traveled with the players and the fair-haired youth who had helped mock Sym standing close behind her. Uncertain, vaguely alarmed, Meg stood up to face them but before she had found anything to say, the woman said kindly, “Do you need help? Is there anything we can do?”

Meg glanced from them to Barnaby. His eyes were shut again, his breathing uneven with his pain. “He’s hurting. My boy’s gone for someone for Dame Claire, but he’s wanting the priest now.”

The woman glanced at the fair-haired youth who said, “I’ll go for him,” and left.

Meg wanted the woman to go, too, but she stayed, circling to Barnaby’s other side and sitting down on her heels to look closely at him, not as if intruding but to see if there was anything more she should do. Unsure how she should be toward the woman who was, after all, a lordless wanderer without place and without claim to anything but charity and contempt, Meg said nothing. She was less than Meg; less than anyone in the village; less than any servant in the priory. But disconcertingly she did not seem to know it. Slender in her simply cut brown gown that was long past being new and yet was graceful on her, she held herself more like a lord’s lady than someone less than a peasant. And it was hard to guess her age. Not young, Meg thought; the woman’s brown hair, worn in a single braid wrapped crownlike around her head, was touched with gray and her face had too many years of knowing to be mistaken for a girl’s. But neither was it worn, lined, and hardened the way all village women’s faces were. She did not look the way she should and, uneasy, Meg sat down by Barnaby again, covering her unease by taking his unhurt hand. It was chill to her touch. He did not stir, and she said, “He’s cold.”

“He should be kept warm.” The woman rose and without asking leave took the blankets from Hewe’s mattress and spread them over Barnaby.

Meg moved quickly to help and when the woman stood back, went on fussing the blankets closer under Barnaby’s chin and smoothing them over his shoulders, to show that it was her place to tend him, not the other woman’s.

After a few moments the woman said, “I think he’s unconscious again.”

“Or sleeping,” Meg said defensively.

“Or sleeping,” the woman agreed. She paused, then said, “My name is Rose.”

Meg eyed her uncertainly. “I’m Meg.”

“The two boys with you, they’re your sons?”

Meg realized the woman was trying to be friendly. Willing to be distracted, she said a little more easily, “Our sons. Sym and Hewe.”

“Sym is the older one?”

Meg stiffened, remembering his quarrel with her men, and nodded.

Rose did not seem to notice her stiffening, just said, “He’ll make a well-grown man. There’s strength in him.”

Pleased to have someone notice one of the good things about Sym, Meg nodded. “He’s like his father.”

“And the other boy is a handsome one.”

Meg warmed to the woman. “And bright,” she said. “He knows his letters.” It helped to say it aloud, made it more real.

“It’s good to have two sons. They can be a help to each other as well as to you.”

The idea of Sym and Hewe a help to each other held Meg silent for a disconcerted moment. But she knew her duty to a conversation and said, “You have a son, too.”

The warmth of Rose’s answering smile betrayed how deeply that fact mattered to her. “Piers,” she said.

“Is he feeling better?” Meg asked.

“Yes, thank you. His fever is still high but he’s resting quietly and keeping warm and Dame Claire says it shouldn’t worsen.”

At the mention of Dame Claire, Meg’s head twitched around toward the door, wondering how long it would be before help came. Rose asked, “Do you work here at the priory?”

Meg did not want to think about her work at the priory and how near she might be to losing it. “Sometimes,” she said. “You and the others are all players?”

“Not me,” Rose said with soft laughter. “I do the tumbling that brings the crowd to us and help to hold them afterwards long enough for us to gather their pence in payment for our shows.”

“Tumbling?” Meg said. Tumbling was what children did on a summer day down a grassy slope.

“Like this.” Rose stood up with swift grace, her arms raised over her head, then, as if it were a natural thing, bent backwards, doubling over the wrong way for any body to go. Too quickly for Meg to quite understand what she was seeing, Rose’s hands touched down behind her, and with a twist in the air she was over and upright.

“God grant mercy!” Meg breathed, crossing herself for protection against such strangeness.

Rose smiled. “It’s something I learned when I was little.” She turned sideways to give herself more room, tripped forward to land on her hands as she flung her feet up and over herself and back to the floor, bringing her upright with a little bounce. “See?”

Meg put a protective hand on Barnaby’s chest and waved the other at her to stop. It looked like something demons would do to mock God’s proper ways. “No more,” she begged.

“Indeed, no more,” said Dame Frevisse from the doorway.