Thunder grumbled. Dame Claire looked up as if it were reminding her of something. “I must go.”
“One other thing,” Frevisse said. “Sir John has the toothache. Have you anything to help it until he can find an honest surgeon to draw it?”
Dame Claire, always ready to talk of remedies, brightened, thought for a moment, and said, “My oil of cloves is nearly gone but I’ll have more from the Michaelmas fair. He’s surely welcome to what I have left. Has he been troubled long?”
“Long enough that he bought a cure from a passing mountebank some time of late. He described it as all froth and little help.”
Dame Claire made a ladylike snort of contempt. “I know of that false cure. All smoke and dwale and fancy words. Then they show you the gnawing worm they’ve driven from your tooth, but it’s come out of their sleeve, not your mouth.” Thunder muttered in the clouds. “If he’s hurting, this weather will make it hurt the worse. Tell him to send to me for the oil of cloves when he wants it. Where are you bound for?”
“The kitchen, I’m afraid.”
Dame Claire nodded her sympathy and went away.
Frevisse, drawn by duty and against her own inclination, went to see how matters were coming between Dame Alys and her unfortunate staff. Thomasine, as ordered, hung in her wake. There should have been no need of that within the cloister, but Frevisse felt uncomfortable unless she actually had the girl in sight.
The kitchen was crowded. Frevisse paused in the doorway, waiting to sort out what was happening, and saw that besides the priory’s usual lay workers, there were three of St. Frideswide’s nuns and a half dozen Fenner servants hurrying under Dame Alys’s full-voiced orders.
The dame was presently declaring that the next hand besides her own that touched the pastry would be ground up and added to the meat for the pies, but her usual fury lacked full conviction.
“Here now, here now!” She poked one of the servants in the ribs with her bent spoon but scarcely hard enough to make the woman wince. “Do that chicken neck again! There’s a fistful of meat on those bones! Pick it all off, pick it all! We’ve too many hungry mouths waiting to waste a morsel!”
She saw Frevisse and turned on her, exclaiming, “So let’s have a new chimney built if the other can’t be repaired! It will take less time, I swear to you. And now I’m feeding a troop of Fenners because one wasn’t enough, and that one stupid enough to drink herself to death at our priory! Ah, I see you’re bringing me Thomasine back, that’s one good thing, because surely I’ve need of the girl. And you, too, if you’ve a while to spare.”
Frevisse had spent her own apprenticeship in the kitchen and knew how much of that she could ignore. She said, “Thomasine is to be my help today. I’ve come to see how supper is going on. Will there be enough?”‘
“Enough. And maybe a little more.” Dame Alys admitted it grudgingly. “Sir Walter didn’t come empty-handed. He’s given us a moldy cheese, one sack of flour, and a sick old ox. I can make do.”
The growth of mold on the cheese was smaller than the palm of a hand and the cheese itself was the size of a cartwheel, the meat turning on the rarely used spit in the fireplace smelled savory, and the sack of flour sitting near the door was a very large one. From what Frevisse could see, there was more than sufficient food to satisfy all their enforced guests. And it would be delicious. Despite her tongue, Dame Alys would supervise the making of a meal – even for an enemy – to perfection. She would see it as coals of fire on their heads for her to feed the Fenners well enough so they could have no complaints about St. Frideswide’s hospitality.
But it must have been hard on her to be brought to this pass: Burdened with food enough and help enough and no more Lady Ermentrude to plague her, Dame Alys was woefully short of things to complain of.
“Have you people enough for serving the supper?” Frevisse asked.
“I’m having nothing to do with serving Fenners!” snapped Dame Alys. Then she conceded unwillingly, “Sir Walter has said that if we bring the food to the cloister door, he will have people to take it to the guest halls, so that’s settled. But there’s more than enough to do. We’ll be sore wearied doing our work in here. Sister Amicia, when I said I wanted those parsnips cut to finger size, I didn’t mean a giant’s fingers. Smaller, girl, or they won’t cook till Hallowmas.”
Because Frevisse was responsible for the feeding of guests, she took a purely formal walk between the tables, looking at the cheese flans, meat pies, sauces, and other things prepared or in the making. There was a sweet, spicy odor of cakes baking. Dame Alys, carrying her warp-handled spoon like a baton of office, rumbled at her heels, pointing out that the Fenners’ flour was over-ground to almost useless fineness and their beef hung too heavy on the spit, and the cheese they had brought was aged, which she declared made it evil to digest.
With Dame Alys distracted by Frevisse, the women set up small spates of talking among themselves, with one of the Fenner servants going so far as to giggle at something someone said. Dame Alys stopped her with a fuming look, but behind her back the murmured talk went on. Only Thomasine, standing at the edge of it all where Frevisse had left her, kept silent, her head down, hands folded into her sleeves.
Frevisse, under the burden of Dame Alys’s complaints, forgot her. It was Sister Amicia who exclaimed in shrill tones easily heard across the kitchen, “Well, crying all over the floor like a rag gone sopping. It’s not like you cared for her, is it? Goodness!”
Frevisse’s quick glance told her that Thomasine was indeed crying, shaking from shoulders to feet with her arms pulled tight against her to hold in the sobs. Not wanting her to lose the fight, Frevisse put down the spoonful of frumenty she had been about to taste, and swept between the tables to take Thomasine briskly by the arm and out of the kitchen before anyone could find anything else to say.
The slipe would be too chill after the kitchen’s warmth, and so Frevisse took Thomasine around the cloister to the church, entering by the small side door the nuns used to come and go for their services. It let into the choir, an arrangement of stepped seats facing one another across the tiled floor. The altar of polished stone was to their right, raised on a dais three steps up from the floor, gleaming with white linen, gold, and brass. Frevisse firmly stopped Thomasine’s instinctive turn toward it, led her instead through the choir, past the two nuns praying at the coffins, to the church’s farther end, near the great western door that led into the courtyard and was rarely used except for processions on high feast days. There was a stone bench built from the wall on the great door’s left side, on which the sick or weary guest could rest during services.
“Sit,” ordered Frevisse.
Thomasine obeyed. Frevisse sat beside her.
“Now,” Frevisse said, “if you need to cry, get on with it.”
Thomasine did. She pressed her hands over her face and wept until the tears seeped between her fingers.
Frevisse waited patiently, until the sobs subsided to a few ragged hiccups and then silence. Thomasine’s hands fell limply into her lap.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
Frevisse waited, having no particular answer to that.
Thomasine hiccuped again on caught tears. Drawing a handkerchief from her sleeve, she wiped her face. “It was what Sister Amicia said,” she whispered. “She was hoping their bodies would be taken away soon, so the harvest home feasting won’t be spoiled by their being here. Lady Ermentrude’s and Martha’s.” She nodded painfully toward the coffins, lidded now and nailed shut, then looked at Frevisse with huge, tear-swimming eyes. “Sister Amicia is wanting harvest home to be as ever it is, not thinking of them at all and that they’re dead and won’t see harvest anymore. It hurt so much so suddenly, thinking they’d never sit down with their friends anymore, I started to cry. They’re dead and I’m crying when I should be praying.”
Frevisse said, “No, you cried for good reason. Now you’ve finished and we’ve things to see to. Come wash your face so we can be on with them.”
Thomasine raised her head. Her pale, thin face was mottled with the red of her crying, her eyes pained. “But I’m not supposed to feel these kinds of things! I’m not supposed to care about things like the body dying, or anything of the world at all. I don’t want to. I want to be away from it, not hurting for it. They’ve gone to God. I’m only supposed to pray for them, not cry.”
Frevisse might have had compassion for the child if she had been asking for guidance, but her usual impatience at Thomasine’s useless simplicity and the pressure of too many things still needing to be done made her ask sharply, “And what good do you think your prayers are going to be if you don’t care about what you’re praying for? We work and pray for more than just ourselves and well you’d know it if you’d paid any heed to anything at all besides yourself since you came here. What good do you think your prayers are going to be, if the only thing you care about is your own self? You cried because you were hurting for other people’s hurt, and that’s probably worth more than a hundred careful prayers with no feeling at all behind them. Now come. We’ve things to do.”
Thomasine stayed where she was, staring with mouth slightly open, looking stupid. Or stunned. Then her mouth closed, and a slow flush of color crept up her face, covering the mottling of her crying. Her eyes lost the blur of tears and her month’s soft line tightened, making her look more her age, a woman instead of a frail and cosseted little girl.
Frevisse half-expected some kind of answer from her, but after that first moment, Thomasine’s gaze dropped and she rose to her feet, showing that she was ready to come, all outward meekness again. Only the stiffness of her shoulders and her rigid neck, the cringe gone out of it, showed that what Frevisse had said had struck deep enough to leave a mark. And something of the courage she had shown to the crowner had come back, too, because before Frevisse could turn away, she lifted her head and said quietly, “Master Montfort wants it to be me who killed them, doesn’t he?”
There were ways around answering that directly, but meeting her gaze, Frevisse said levelly, “Yes. You’re the simplest choice, and with Sir Walter snapping at him, Montfort is going to want the simplest choice.”
Thomasine searched Frevisse’s face, looking for hope. Frevisse did not give it. So far she had no idea who had given the poison, or why. Until she did, Thomasine was indeed the first, best choice. “Come now,” she said. “All that may be done is being done. We must go tell Domina Edith how matters stand. She’ll want to know.”
The door to the prioress’s parlor stood open, and from it Sir Walter’s voice rumbled, raw with temper and bare of courtesy. “Hear me out! My mother is dead. By poison, Montfort says. Murdered. And from what I’ve heard, it was some one of you did it.”
Frevisse flickered one hand in the sign for church, meaning Thomasine should go there and stay. Thomasine nodded and left without hesitation. When she was safely gone, Frevisse rapped at the door clearly enough to be heard over Sir Walter’s continuing voice.
“Benedicite,”‘ Domina Edith said. Her quiet voice carried with apparent ease over Sir Walter’s, and Frevisse entered, head properly bowed but not so low she could not see all of the room from under her eyelids. Domina Edith was in her chair, drawn straightly up but facing Sir Walter with an expression that said he was far from overwhelming her with his noble temper. To her right stood Dame Claire, rigid with self-control; to her left was Father Henry, very pink with indignation, glaring at Sir Walter.
Beyond Sir Walter was Robert Fenner, standing statue-still, his face guarded. A freshly formed bruise showed dark along the side of his face. He glanced past Frevisse, looking for someone, and when he saw she was not there, set his eyes back to carefully not looking at anyone.
Sir Walter, with his mother’s way of dominating a room, stood in the parlor’s center, head up, hands on hips. He paid no heed to Frevisse but went on at Domina Edith, “My mother was never so drunk in her life she didn’t know what she was doing, and there was naught wrong with her heart. It was poison, and someone here gave it, and the only one with reason enough to do it, Montfort says, is your novice Thomasine D’Evers. I want her to come away with me, now. Montfort says he’s not done with his questions, but he’s a fool and I am not. Are you going to give her over at my asking or do you want to make a quarrel of it?”
So it had gone that far already. Frevisse could not help making a tiny sound of disgust, and Sir Walter swung around to point at her fiercely, aware of her after all. “You! You’re hosteler, right? My mother was in your keeping when someone killed her so you must share responsibility with that puling girl. I think you know more than you’ve told.” He swung back to Domina Edith. “She’s not a nun. You’ve no right to keep her. You can’t protect her. I’ll have her out of here if I have to take the place apart stone by stone!” His face was red, his light, protuberant eyes very like his mother’s. “And if the King’s man won’t do justice, I’ll have you all for sheltering her!”
Domina Edith raised her eyebrows very slightly. Father Henry, hands clenched into fists, stirred forward, but the prioress lifted a finger from the arm of her chair, stopping him. Very calmly she said to Sir Walter, “I am a professed nun, belonging to God. Not you nor Master Montfort nor the King himself, God keep him, can touch me or any of those in my charge without committing direst sin.”
Sir Walter’s jaw worked, cutting off words not fit to say before he finally swung back at Frevisse and said sharply, “Give over the girl. For the sake of your soul and your prioress’s peace. You know where she is. She’s in your care – just as my mother was!”
“Your mother was also in mine,” Dame Claire said firmly. He glared at her, but she went on, “We don’t know who gave the poison to your lady mother. Or to Martha Hayward. We don’t even know where the poison came from.”
“You have poisons on your shelf, all ‘pothecaries do. I dare you to deny it!”
“The poison that killed them was nightshade, and, yes, I have it with my medicines, for poultices and suchlike. But it also grows in any wood, for anyone to take if they trouble to look for it.”‘
“And there’s the matter of who could have given it, no matter where it came from.” Domina Edith spoke in a cold, clipped, patience-coming-to-an-end tone. “I myself would think three times over before agreeing with Master Montfort on any conclusion, especially one so grave as this.”
Sir Walter asked with his belligerence a little less certain, “You have some better ideas on the matter?”
“Dame Claire very sensibly points out that others besides Thomasine could have had nightshade. It might be someone among Lady Ermentrude’s own people.”
“So that’s how you would have it!” Sir Walter sneered his scorn. “Blame it on a servant and not one of your own! Pah, a servant could have done it anywhere and more conveniently elsewhere than this. It wasn’t one of her own people. It was someone here. Mayhap even one of you right in this room!”
He was stirring himself to fury again. Frevisse felt her own temper rising in answer to it, and saw that Father Henry was reddening, tensing to say something or, worse, do something. Quickly she said, “Then you’ll have to tell us why one of us would do it, Sir Walter. Why would we want Lady Ermentrude dead when she’s given so much to St. Frideswide’s?”
Triumphantly Sir Walter sprang at the point. “Because she was meaning to take your novice out of here! She was going to take the girl away – and with her would go her dowry. Surely something you’re not wanting to lose. A poor little place like this is always wanting money. You couldn’t afford to lose the only dowry likely to come your way for a while, so my mother had to die. But you’re going to lose more than the dowry now. There’s not a Fenner will give a penny to this place when the truth’s found out!”
Domina Edith flung up one hand to silence Dame Claire and Frevisse together. “Stay!” she snapped at Father Henry, already moving toward Sir Walter, his hands flexing at his sides. The priest stopped, but Frevisse heard his teeth grinding together. Domina Edith, her eyes fixed on Sir Walter with a chill and withering look, pressed her hands down on the arms of her chair and raised herself slowly, remorselessly, to her feet. She was not tall, but her force of will reached out and held them all until she had drawn herself up straight. In a tone to match her look, but not raising her voice, she said, “If it were any business of yours to discover, you’d find St. Frideswide’s has no need to go begging to anyone, or be bankrupt by a lost dowry. Our house may be small but we are not poor nor beholden to anyone, and you may take your Fenner pennies and your temper with them, for you’ll not insult me and mine in my own nunnery. You are in sorrow and, by the Holy Rule, our guest for this time being, and will be treated so, no matter how we feel about it. But mind your tongue. Not even your mother in all her tempers ever presumed to speak to us as you have done. You have what answers we can give you here. Go back to the guest hall and leave us before even guest right and a knowledge of your grief aren’t enough to make me stomach you. And don’t come in my presence again unless you are on bended knee in sign of a contrite heart, asking my forgiveness. Go.”
Sir Walter drew himself up, breathing heavily through his nose, his mouth working around things he wanted to say while his mind visibly canceled them short of open words. At the last it was probably the fact he had had to face his mother all his life that kept him silent against Domina Edith, and furious but unable to do else, he jerked his shoulders in a travesty of a bow and flung himself out of the door. Less headlong, Robert followed him, with a roll of his eyes and a raising of his eyebrows at Frevisse as he passed her. Frevisse looked at his bruised cheek and twitched her head at Sir Walter’s back. Robert nodded, and was gone. She pushed the door shut after him and moved quickly to help Dame Claire ease Domina Edith back into her chair.
The prioress seemed none the worse for her effort, only a little breathless, and still annoyed. “Worse manners than any Fenner, ever. And less sense. Half a mind would at least make up for lacking manners. A little.” Her hand closed on Frevisse’s wrist. “There’s going to be more trouble coming. We didn’t satisfy him and he won’t be stopped by what we’ve said. You’re hosteler and must go out of the cloister yet again. Can you face him?”
“Yes, of course.” She had spent all her childhood managing other people being difficult; she had small qualms about facing either Sir Walter or Master Montfort.
“That’s good. That’s very good. You can go then where you need to go, and ask what needs to be asked. Master Montfort will never find out everything, not now that Sir Walter has an answer that satisfies him. We can’t depend on either of them for the answers.”
“Yes, Domina.”
“And Dame Claire,” Domina Edith said.
“Whatever you need, Domina.”
“Think harder on the poison and who could have given it. Was there a particular reason for it to be nightshade? Who, having chosen it, would have it to hand? Did they choose it suddenly because it was there? Or did they plan aforetimes to have it? Think of all of it, both of you. Father Henry.”
The priest came eagerly to stand in front of her.
“Your prayers,” she said. His face showed his disappointment at so inactive a task, but Domina Edith said firmly, “Your prayers. As many of them as you can manage, that we be allowed to find out whatever truth there is in this. Because,” she added with a waspishness that must have been strong in her in her youth, however mellowed it had grown with age, “truth would have to stand up and bite Master Montfort before he’d recognize it. Go on now, all of you. I have a shameful need to sleep.” Her attention sharpened again. “Where’s Thomasine?”
“I sent her to the church when I realized Sir Walter was with you,” Frevisse said.
Domina Edith nodded, satisfied. “Let her stay there. She’ll do well not to be with you when you cross paths with Montfort or Sir Walter. Go on now.”
They left her. At the foot of the stairs Father Henry went away toward the church, Dame Claire and Frevisse, of one accord, to the narrow slipe where they could talk. But once there, they seemed out of things to say, and Frevisse wondered if the strain of the past two days showed as clearly on her as it did in the gray shadowing around Dame Claire’s eyes.
Finally Dame Claire asked, “So what are we to do?”
At least to that Frevisse had an answer. “We do again what we’ve been doing – asking again where everyone was and what everyone did. We also seek to speak to those we’ve missed, to learn what they remember about everything that’s happened. Someone had an urgent reason to have Lady Ermentrude dead, or they’d not have been so headlong about it, not after Martha’s death. It would be among those who wanted her dead to begin with.” Frevisse began to count off on her fingers. “Her son, Sir Walter, to inherit the money he feared she would spend before he got hold of it. Sir John and Isobel, with whom she rode off to quarrel and who came riding so fast after her when she left them. There’s the servants she keeps close about her, Maudelyn and Maryon.”
“Why them?” interrupted Dame Claire.
“I don’t know. But every time something happens Maryon is there, peering and questioning. Except when I want to talk to her. Then she is not to be found.” She switched hands to tap her other thumb. “Robert Fenner.”
“That nice young man?”
“That nice young man began in Sir Walter’s household, moved suddenly to Lady Ermentrude’s, and now will go back. And it was after Sir Walter talked to him that Sir Walter began to suspect Thomasine.”
“What about Thomasine?” Dame Claire’s tone was reluctant, sober. “We even have to consider it might have been her, if only to prove it was not.”
Frevisse nodded, but said, “She might kill in fear, or panic, and surely she felt both when Lady Ermentrude seemed grimly determined to take her away, but her conscience would drive her into agonies afterwards. She’s the sort who does penance for spilling a bowl of soup.”
Dame Claire smiled despite herself at the thought of Thomasine’s excesses. Then she sobered. “There’s Martha Hayward’s death to be remembered, too.”
Frevisse shook her head. “It was most likely not meant at all. If by some terrible mistake Thomasine killed Martha, then that death would have shocked her back to her senses. She’d never have tried again.” She frowned. “Where did the poison come from? Is there any missing from your stock?”
“No. That is, I don’t think so. I haven’t used any nightshade in some while, so I am not sure whether my supply of it is a little diminished or not. The jar does not appear disturbed.”
“Which it probably would if Thomasine, who would have been in a great hurry, rushed in to steal some of it. What about some other poison? Was there anything in the stomach-ache potion for the monkey that could have killed a person?”
“Nothing sufficient even to kill the monkey, let be a person. And nothing to bring on those agonies.”
“So Lady Ermentrude came here drunk and we fed her milksops that Thomasine fetched from the kitchen.” She tapped her right forefinger.
“Yes,” nodded Dame Claire. “The feud between Dame Alys’s family and the Fenners. She has often said she’d like to take a hand in that quarrel.”
“But we’re fairly certain it was the wine that had the poison, since the monkey is dead of it.”
“Fairly certain, but not perfectly. Is it possible that the creature stopped to dip into the bowl of sops before rushing off with the bottle?”
“I suppose. We had best learn who could have handled the food at any time, as well as the wine. How long does nightshade take to kill?”
“Different times with different people and depending on how much and how fast they have it. Martha would have gulped most of the first goblet down at once, before Father Henry warned her it was medicine.”
“And Lady Ermentrude only sipped at the other one again and again the morning that she died,” said Frevisse, remembering. Her face stiffened with another thought. “The first one – the one that Martha drank from – Thomasine dropped it. Lady Isobel tried to give it to her but she dropped it. She is not usually so clumsy.”
The two women regarded each other soberly.
“Presuming Lady Isobel would not deliberately try to poison her own sister…” Frevisse said after a moment.
“Dame Frevisse!” Dame Claire exclaimed. “That’s not even to be thought on!”
“Everything has to be thought on. So let’s suppose Lady Isobel did mean to poison Thomasine.”
“That would mean she poisoned Lady Ermentrude too. And for what reason? Why would she want them both dead?”
“The wine was brought by her and her husband, and Lady Ermentrude was in a tearing rage at them, so bad they followed her here to try to settle it.”
“They were worried she would come to harm on the road.”
“I could be tempted to think they were more worried that she might say something about the quarrel,” Frevisse said grimly. “We don’t know why she was so angry.”
“They brought servants with them, and there were others with Lady Ermentrude. We’ll ask them what they know and heard. But there were others in reach of the wine after it was set out.”
Frevisse closed her eyes, trying to remember who had been in Lady Ermentrude’s chamber anytime she knew of. “You and I were there. And Thomasine. And Father Henry.”
“Now there’s nonsense,” Dame Claire protested. “He has no reason at all to want to kill anyone.”
“We don’t know why Lady Ermentrude was killed. Not knowing, we can’t be sure he doesn’t have a reason from before he came here.” She smiled. “But it would be a passing strange reason, I should think. Now, Lady Isobel sat with her in the night. And the servants Maryon and Maudelyn. Sir John came at least once, I think. They all say no one else was there, but Lady Isobel and the two servants slept, and though Thomasine insists she was awake and praying the whole time, she might have dozed unknowingly.”
“Or been so far into her prayers she was unaware of anything else.”
Frevisse nodded agreement. “So there might have been others in and out and no way for us to learn of them except to go on asking. Will you come with me? Something that’s said may mean more to you than it does to me, or more to both of us if we’re both there to hear it.”
“Assuredly. Where first?”
Frevisse smiled wryly. “To Dame Alys, since we’re so near the kitchen.”
The kitchen still seethed with purposeful movement. The meat was browning on its spit, the baked cakes were cooling on a side table, and the smell of baking bread was rich in the air. Dame Alys was in heavy talk with one of Lady Ermentrude’s servants near the door. Frevisse, pausing to draw her attention, was aware that the low-voiced running talk all through the kitchen had stopped on their entry, and that faces turning toward them were bright with nervous excitement. Somehow word must have come to them that Dame Frevisse and Dame Claire were looking into this matter on orders from the prioress. Frevisse said nothing, but simply gestured a summons at Dame Alys, who for a change came without complaint or her spoon.
They returned to the slipe, and before Frevisse could say anything, Dame Alys burst out, “So is it true? Someone finally did what the old…” she reconsidered her word and said, “…lady has been begging to have done these fifty years or more?”
With a quelling lack of excitement Frevisse said, “She was assuredly poisoned. Someone has killed her and Domina Edith has set Dame Claire and me to asking questions.”
“And there were truly demons come to grab her Hell-bound soul? You saw them?”
“No one saw them,” Dame Claire said wearily. “Lady Ermentrude was jibbering in some sort of brain fever and Thomasine said she must be seeing demons. That was all it was, just her brain fever and too much wine. It was before she was poisoned anyway.”
“Oh. Thomasine.” Dame Alys dismissed the matter with regret but firmly. “As holy a child as I ever hope to meet, but she’s not got the sense God gives a Michaelmas goose. So what about Martha then? She was poisoned, too, they’re saying.”
Frevisse said, “It appears she took what was meant for Lady Ermentrude.”
Dame Alys crossed herself, shaking her head. “Greed and temper were always her failings. God’s will be done,” she added piously.
“But,” Frevisse asked, “who made the first milksop for Lady Ermentrude?”
“First one? She had more? The greedy–” Dame Alys stopped herself and said, “I did. Bad enough I had to take the time, and for such as she, but Thomasine is a perfect simpleton at any task not based on prayer.”
“What bread did you use?”
“None of my fine new loaves, I assure you! No, since it was to be soaked in milk anyway, I gave her an old loaf I’d meant to use as crumbs for thickening.”
“And what milk and honey?”
Dame Alys’s thin eyebrows climbed up her broad forehead. “Whatever was sitting on the hob and in the cupboard. It’s good enough for us, it’s good enough for the likes of Lady Errnentrude.”
“And did Thomasine go straight back to the guesthall?”
“Now, did I go along and show her the way? I’ve better things…” Dame Alys’ expression changed. “Ah, no, that’s when the shrieking started and Martha took off to see how close she could get to it, and I sent Thomasine packing after her.”
And since Thomasine had arrived at Lady Errnentrude’s room in Martha’s wake, she had not had time to go anywhere else. Unless she had gone to the infirmary on her way to the kitchen. But Frevisse thought she had not had much time for that, not if the milksop was all made in the little while before Lady Errnentrude began to scream.
Dame Alys, unhobbled by doubts, thrust onward. “That old harridan, thinking Thomasine belonged anywhere but in St. Frideswide’s! It’s God’s blessing I don’t have to cook another meal for her, but how long is it until that son of hers takes himself off?”
“Tomorrow or the next day, we hope,” Frevisse said. “But meanwhile he’s set men to mend the chimney and once they do, you won’t be bothered anymore.”
“It can’t happen soon enough. There, I’ve told you all I know. Can I go back to making sure those numb-wits don’t decide to use the rice for flour or some other foolishness?”
Frevisse excused her and drew a deep, steadying breath when she was gone. Dame Claire, with her blessed ability to keep silent, waited while she thought, until finally Frevisse said, “What I’m beginning to want more than anything else is the reason why someone wanted Lady Errnentrude dead right at this moment. Sir Walter is right, this was an awkward time and place to do a murder.”
“Is there anything we can do besides asking questions?” Dame Claire asked.
“Not that I know of. And I can’t even be sure they’re the right ones.”
“You can only ask the questions you have. After all, they may lead on to others.”
Frevisse half-smiled. “True enough. Let’s see what more we can be learning.”
Not very much, it transpired.
“I haven’t noticed anyone much moved to grief for the lady,” Frevisse said, an hour later. “Not even her own son. He seems much hotter for revenge than burdened with grief.”
They had managed not to meet Sir Walter face-to-face, but Frevisse noticed, as they crossed the hall again in search of the servant Maudelyn, that more than a few people pointedly shifted out of their way and no one seemed inclined to meet their eyes.
“I think,” she said quietly, “that Sir Walter has made his displeasure with us known.”
“How long before he demands again we give him Thomasine?”‘
“He’ll want Master Montfort to back his demand this time, so it depends on how long it takes for him to terrify our crowner into it. Not very long, I’m afraid.”
Maudelyn proved almost as difficult to run to ground as Maryon, but once cornered, she seemed prepared to talk with them. She was a homely woman, the sort who would be normally cheerful and glad of a gossip, even with her betters. But now her hands twisted in her skirt and she kept her eyes averted. “Yes, I remember what happened as clearly as can be. It was just as I’ve already told you, and Sir Walter. There’s nothing more to be said, I promise you.”
“Is there anyone you can think of who would be wanting your mistress dead?”
Maudelyn shrugged. “None.”
“She was a kind mistress?”
Maudelyn hesitated, then shrugged again. “She could be right cruel, to me and to everyone around her, when she chose. And she mostly did. It’s no wonder–” She stopped short.
“What? That someone murdered her?” asked Dame Claire.
A hand over her mouth, Maudelyn nodded.
“Come now,” said Frevisse in her strictest voice. “Tell us the truth. It may be that we already know what it is you’re trying to hide.”
Maudelyn’s eyes widened. Her hand slowly came down. “It doesn’t matter, I guess,” she muttered. “With my lady dead, I’ve lost my place anyhow.” She took a breath and straightened her back. “”Twas me that drank the wine.”
“What wine?”
“In the bottle. I saw it and nobody was paying much attention, so I took it and hid it under my skirt and said I needed to visit the garderobe, and I drank it there and dropped the bottle down the hole. There! I’ve told you!” She broke into tears.
Frevisse absently patted Maudelyn’s plump shoulder and looked at Dame Claire, who was looking back, both of them dismayed at this destruction of the most solid part of their theory.
“Have you been ill since you drank the wine?” Dame Claire asked.
“N-no,” Maudelyn blubbered. Her tears stopped as if her eyes had been plugged with a cork. “Is it true, then? That it was poison killed her? And it was in the wine? By Our Lady’s veil, I drank from the very bottle!”
They assured her that could not be the case, as she was herself still alive, and left her still amazed. When they were out of earshot, Dame Claire asked, “Now what?”
“I don’t know. It seemed so clear the poison must be in the bottle. I should have guessed otherwise when Lady Isobel told me she opened the twin of it for Sir John. Because unless she marked it somehow, how could she tell which was the deadly bottle after they rubbed around one another on that hard ride? It should have been plain to me then that the poison could not have been in the wine.”
The cloister bell began to chime, startling them both.
“Vespers,” Dame Claire said, relieved. “We can’t do anything more today.”
“Except ask Thomasine if she’s remembered seeing anything more,” Frevisse said as they left the guest house and descended the stairs to the yard, hurrying a little through the soft fall of rain. “But she won’t. She’ll repeat she prayed all night and saw or heard no one and there’s the end of it. Why does the child bother me so much?”
“Because she’s the child you very nearly might have been, if you’d had her childhood leisure to indulge in piety,” Dame Claire said.
Frevisse looked sideways at her, and found her own first amusement at such an idea sliding into dismay with the discomforting thought that it might be true. Except for Domina Edith, Dame Claire knew more about Frevisse’s deep piety than anyone else at St. Frideswide’s, and knew better than anyone that it was her early childhood that nourished a need to be as pragmatic as devout. It was a welcome diversion from such thoughts to see Robert Fenner coming purposefully toward them, reaching them as they reached the cloister door.
As they crowded under the eaves, out of the rain, Frevisse saw again the large bruise discoloring his left cheek and jaw. As Dame Claire reached to touch it, he flinched back from her.
Frevisse asked quickly, “Was it Sir Walter gave you the bruise? How did you anger him that badly?”
Robert jerked his hand in quick dismissal. “I was too slow picking up a boot he’d dropped, that’s all. His mother was quick with her hands, too, but not as strong.”
“So he’s taken you back into his household.”
“Yes. I’m a Fenner after all, and we take care of our own. If roughly, sometimes.”‘
“Then perhaps you can be of service to us – and Sister Thomasine, if you will.”
His grin was as charming as an angel’s and his mind as quick to understand. “You want me to listen to anything I can, and see you hear of it afterwards.”
“Yes.”
“Gladly. Anything to serve Sister Thomasine. You’re worried for her, aren’t you?”
“And so are you, I think.”
“I think her very fair and very sweet.” A faint blush over his cheeks made him suddenly look even younger than he was. “But I’m also without inheritance and have few hopes and know that even if she willed it, she could not be for me. So all I can be is worried for her. So far it’s all Sir Walter’s idea to have her out of here, but with a little more pushing, Master Montfort of the little wits and great ambition is going to agree with him. The easiest choice will be the best choice for him, he thinks.”
“And that’s where Thomasine’s peril lies,” Frevisse said bluntly. “So if you hear anything you think I ought to know, any of the priory’s lay servants will know how to take word to me about it. Will you be able to do that?”
“Yours at your need, my lady,” Robert said as if she were a queen. “Will you take Sister Thomasine a letter from me?”
“Never,” she said promptly.
He grinned around the worry in his eyes, and said, “Well, there’s something else, too.” He bowed. “You’ve been asking questions about who was in Lady Ermentrude’s chamber last night. You’d best ask me, too.”
Frevisse and Dame Claire exchanged looks. The bell was still calling to Vespers, but there was this task to be done as well. Best talk to him now while he came willing to speak; Domina Edith would almost surely pardon their being late.
“You were in Lady Ermentrude’s chamber that night?” Frevisse asked.
“Once. I awoke sometime and went to see if anything was needed. Lady Ermentrude and the woman Maryon were both sleeping. Lady Isobel was not there, or the maidservant, Maudelyn. Thomasine was praying. I don’t think she knew I’d come.”
“You did not speak to her?”
“No.” But his color deepened and it was obvious he had stood there awhile, looking. If his look was anything like the way he said her name, it had been a very warm and lingering stare, Frevisse thought, and Thomasine deep indeed in prayers not to have felt it. She asked, “Except for then, and later when Lady Ermentrude died, were you ever in her chamber that day or before?”
A shrewdness in his face told Frevisse he was following very well what her questions meant, but he answered simply enough, “I helped bring her into the hall when she first came. That was all.”
“So you saw her very well then,” Dame Claire said. “I only came to her after she had begun to quiet. Was she very drunk?”
“Like I’d never seen her,” Robert said. “It seemed more than drunkenness, like she was gone mad.”
“Brain-fevered maybe,” Frevisse suggested. “From the day’s heat and her drinking and her anger.”
Robert frowned, not anxious to disagree. “She was giddy on her feet and saying her eyes hurt. The sun wasn’t particularly bright that I noticed, but she said it was hurting her and covered them. Her eyes were all black and swollen, I know that. The blue of them was a thin rim about the black. And she kept hold on one thought all the while as if she were afraid of losing it: She would have Thomasine away from here at once. But she seemed so wild I doubt she really knew what she was saying, just kept saying it, with her eyes all staring, so she looked mad even if she wasn’t.” His look sharpened on Dame Claire. “I’ve said something.”
Frevisse looked at the infirmarian beside her. Dame Claire’s expression was somewhere between excitement and distress, and her voice uneven as she said, “Yes, you’ve said something.” She pulled at Frevisse’s arm. “We have to go or we’ll be too late even for Domina Edith. Thank you for telling us.”
The bell for Vespers had stopped. Frevisse and Dame Claire hurried along the cloister walk. So urgent was her need for information that Frevisse ignored the rule of silence to ask, “What did he say that mattered so much to you?”
Dame Claire pressed her fingers into Frevisse’s flesh through the heavy cloth of her habit. “I never heard her symptoms before. I never asked how she was when she first came back here from the Wykehams. Everyone kept saying she was drunk and I never asked.”
“It didn’t seem to matter. Drunkenness or brain fever. Does it make a difference?”
“I don’t think that it was either one. What that boy said about Lady Ermentrude’s giddiness, her wildness almost without sense, and her bulging eyes all black and hurting her in the sun; Frevisse, if we join that with her screaming afterwards and her seeming to see awful things, then she was already poisoned when she arrived back at St. Frideswide’s. I’d swear to it.”
Continue with Chapter 11 tomorrow!
