There was quiet in the church now that the bell had ceased its tolling. The air still seemed to tremble slightly, remembering the fifty-seven slow strokes in memory of every year of Lady Ermentrude’s life, but faintly and fading now. As memories of Lady Ermentrude would fade away in time, Thomasine thought, fade away and not matter anymore.
But they mattered now, lying sickly between her thoughts and her praying, even here in her best place, on the step below St. Frideswide’s altar, where almost always she could lose herself in prayers and not think of the stone hurting her knees or the thinness of her hands clinging together or the two coffins waiting on their biers behind her.
She had helped wash and ready Lady Ermentrude’s body for its shroud and coffin, had followed it across the yard and seen it set beside Martha Hayward’s, and been given leave, after Prime, to remain in prayer for their souls. But the prayers she wanted seemed to be nowhere in her, only the thought of Lady Ermentrude’s and Martha’s bodies lying behind her, waiting for their people to come and take them to their final places. Lady Ermentrude would go to her own lordship’s church and a grave beside the high altar, to rest there under a carved stone image of herself until Last Judgment Day. Martha Hayward would lie in Banbury churchyard, where she would molder into bones to be dug up and put with other moldered bones in a charnel house, to make way for someone else’s burying. They were both dead and in need of her prayers, and no prayers would come, only the thought of how suddenly dead they had been.
Their dying had had nothing easy in it; even completed death had failed to soften the engraved pain of Lady Ermentrude’s harsh features before the shroud covered it. Surely a soul forced from its body by such an end desperately needed praying for, and Thomasine knew it. But the prayers would not come, not for her own sake or Lady Ermentrude’s or Martha’s. Only thoughts.
Of Lady Ermentrude’s dying, of the small black creeping thing reaching out – from Hell? – toward her…
A hand touched Thomasine’s shoulder. With a gasping shriek, she lunged forward to scrape with both hands at the base of the altar, then jerked her head around to find Dame Frevisse standing over her, come quietly in soft-soled shoes.
* * * * *
Unseemly amusement twitched at the corners of Frevisse’s mouth before she could control it. She knew Thomasine saw it but could say nothing to her, only gestured wordlessly for her to come. For a moment Thomasine seemed near to refusing, resentment and less readable things showing in her face. Then her expression blanked almost perfectly over whatever she was feeling, and she came away from the altar, to follow Frevisse across the church to the side door into the cloister.
Frevisse carefully kept from looking at her, wanting her to have time to recover the dignity she had lost in her panicked lunge. Frevisse remembered how painfully necessary and difficult dignity had been for herself when she was very young. That she had consciously ceased being very young years before she was Thomasine’s age did not change Thomasine’s need.
So because she was not looking at her, Frevisse was unprepared for Thomasine’s sudden, great sob as they stepped out into the cloister walk. It seemed to come from deep within the girl’s breast, a burden too much to bear, crumpling her down onto the bench there, her face buried in her hands. Aware that sympathy might only make it worse, Frevisse said firmly, “What is it, child, grief for your aunt, or something that can be helped?”
Thomasine turned up a teary face and cried out, “Two small weeks! That’s all there are until I’m safe. She can’t touch me anymore!”
With more sleep or less fear behind her, she would never have said so much. And even so, the words were hardly anything at all, only more of Thomasine’s tedious, too-passionate desiring to be a nun, and Frevisse would have let them pass except for the sudden, terrified widening of Thomasine’s eyes as she realized what she had said.
Frevisse, with sudden suspicion, demanded, “Why are you so afraid of being taken away from here, Thomasine? Were you forced to come? Are you in danger if you leave? Is that it?”
Thomasine’s face, usually smooth with youth and studied holiness, so bland she seemed to have hardly any expression at all unless she was nervous or exalted in prayer, changed swiftly to a desperate smiling that was all lies. “I’m not afraid.” She shook her head vehemently. “No one forced me. Ever.”
The cloister walk was not the place for talking. Taking the matter literally in hand, Frevisse grasped Thomasine’s arm, pulled her to her feet, and took her along the cloister to the narrow passage between the church and the nuns’ common room. Called the slipe, it led from the cloister to the cemetery, and brief, urgently needed conversations were allowed there. In it, still keeping hold of Thomasine’s arm, Frevisse said, “Now, what exactly has you so frightened?”
Thomasine’s gaze went everywhere except Frevisse’s face, and she blurted out with a sharp confusion of fear and desperation, “I never said I was afraid. I never did!”
Frevisse shook her arm. “Are you here by fraud or force? By threats or trickery? What are you fearing?”
Thomasine clasped her hands prayerfully and cried, “None of that. I want to be here! I’ve wanted it all my life!”
“But there’s a reason you could be forbidden your final vows and Lady Ermentrude knew it? If there is, you have to tell someone. Domina Edith or Father Henry or Dame Perpetua–”
“There isn’t any! I swear it!”
Meaning to have the truth from her, Frevisse badgered relentlessly, “You know that taking your vows falsely is a sin as great as apostasy itself?”
Thomasine had never seemed to have any courage in her, had always seemed to be all nerves and prayers, but at that challenge she steadied as if struck. Straightening in Frevisse’s hold, she said, her voice high and light with strain, “I know it. I’d never falsely swear to God.”
“So there’s no falseness in your being here?”
“None.”
Not loosening her hold but more gently, Frevisse said, “But you’re afraid.”
Thomasine blinked on tears again, but fought them and said, “Yes. Will I be sent away for that?”
It was very clearly a question that had been hurting in her for a long, long while. Frevisse eased her hold and said carefully, “It depends on why you’re afraid. Can you tell me?”
Thomasine drew a deep, unhappy breath. “If I’m not allowed to stay, I’ll be married to someone and I can’t marry.”
“Because you secretly promised yourself to someone before you came here?” It was a stupid thing that girls sometimes did, plighting their troth secretly with someone unsuitable and then finding themselves bound for life no matter how they felt later. A promise of betrothal was, in the Church’s law, as binding as a marriage vow and, like the marriage vow, could only be sundered by complicated legal means. If Thomasine had sworn such a thing, she had no right to be in St. Frideswide’s.
But Thomasine, with shocked, wide eyes, vehemently shook her head. “Oh no, never anything like that! I would never, never, never promise myself to any man. I couldn’t!”
“But why?” The vehemence was as confusing as the girl’s fear.
Thomasine hung her head. “Babies.” She mumbled the word. “I’m afraid of having them.”
Nearly Frevisse laughed. And nearly said the obvious: That very many women were afraid of it. But for Thomasine it was clearly something beyond that reasonable fear. Frevisse held her amusement and waited. Thomasine touched a knuckle to one brimming eye and said tremulously, “I know how women die in childbirth. There was a servant at our manor. A big, strong woman, but she died when her baby was born. I heard her screaming. It was awful. And my sister. She’s told me how she nearly dies each time she has a baby and she doesn’t think she can have any more.”
“Thomasine…”
“I know,” Thomasine said quickly. “It’s all in God’s hands but–” She ducked her head and spoke to her toes, as if about a guilty secret. “With me it’s something more. It’s what the midwife said after my brother was born. I was there until they knew how hard it was going to be. Then they sent me out of the room, but I waited outside the door. They were all caring that it be a boy after only daughters, and it was a boy, and that was good. We didn’t know he was going to die almost right away. And my mother was never well afterwards. She died before the year was out. But it’s more than that.” Thomasine said it hastily, cutting off Frevisse’s half-formed reassurance. “It’s what the midwife said when she was leaving my mother, when we still thought everything was all right. She was saying to someone that it was my mother’s narrow hips that made it so killing-hard for her to give birth, and then she saw me standing there and said, ‘There’s another one will have it bad, and worse than her mother, belike, she’s so narrow through all her bones and not like to outgrow it.’” Even after years Thomasine had the woman’s words and their intonation. “And I never have,” she finished miserably.
Frevisse, looking at her, understood what the midwife had meant. Under the several layers and deliberate shapelessness of her novice’s gown, Thomasine was meager, thin all through herself and narrow in her hips. That was no sure sign childbearing would go ill with her; there was no sure way to tell with anyone until the moment came, but truly Thomasine believed it, had believed it for nearly half of her life.
Carefully, Frevisse said, “So you decided to become a nun and be safe.”
“Oh no! I was already wanting to be a nun. I swear I was. I’ve wanted it ever since I was a very, very little girl. But it seemed – what she said – it seemed it was God’s way of telling me that I was right. That I was meant to be a nun.” Thomasine’s earnestness faded to guilty sadness, and she whispered, “But I’m afraid of dying, too, the way my mother did, and in St. Frideswide’s I’m safe from it. If I have to leave, they’ll make me marry and he’ll want children and I’ll die. So I’ve tried so hard to be everything I had to be. But not just to keep from being put out!” She looked desperately at Frevisse. “I love God more than anything. I want to be here, truly I do. Only if Domina Edith or the others know I’m so afraid, they maybe won’t believe me. And I want to stay, I don’t want to have to leave. Do you have to tell them?”
Her tears were falling freely now. Gently, wondering how Thomasine had ever come to think that to be a nun she had to have no other feelings except love of God, Frevisse said, “Thomasine, isn’t Dame Alys ranting in the kitchen a plain enough example of how far from holiness a nun can be and still belong here? No one is going to put you out because you’re afraid. We’re all of us here for more reasons than one, and for some of us the love of God is maybe the least of them. If only women who wanted nothing in life except to live in the cloister became nuns, there would be one small nunnery in all of England.”
She was watching Thomasine’s face and saw when she began to believe her.
Faintly, her eyes moist with tears, Thomasine asked, “Truly?”
“Truly. Why didn’t you ask Dame Perpetua? She would have told you.”
Thomasine looked down at her clasped hands. “Because you all think I’m so very good. I didn’t want anyone to know I’m not.”
So Thomasine knew what was said of her holiness. Dryly Frevisse said, “Goodness can be a very great burden, both to live with and to have.”
“Will you tell them?”
“That you’re not good?” She saw her intended humor miss Thomasine altogether and instead said quickly, “Thomasine, beyond all doubting you are meant to be a nun. No one is going to keep you from it, least of all any of us here. But you’ll have to tell Domina Edith.”
Thomasine’s lips trembled. “Must I?”
“You must, to free your own mind if nothing else. I promise you, she’ll not send you away. But you must tell her. If you don’t, I’ll have to, and that won’t be so well.”
Thomasine’s hazel-green eyes, still swimming in tears, searched Frevisse’s face as if for signs of trickery. Finding none, she whispered, “All right. I’ll tell her.”
“Good then. And now there’s another matter to hand, the one that brought me for you. Master Montfort has come.”
Thomasine looked at her questioningly.
“The crowner,” Dame Frevisse said.
Thomasine remembered then. He had come to St. Frideswide’s not long after she first entered, when a stockman had been found in a barn, dead, with a broken skull, and no one to swear how he had come by it. Master Morys Montfort had come then, it being his duty as crowner for northern Oxfordshire to view and report on any sudden deaths. So he had come and viewed and decided what everyone else was already certain of: that the stockman had last been seen somewhat drunk, was known to be more than a little careless at the best of times, and had gotten himself kicked in the head and half across the stable by a cow well known to be a kicker. Death by misadventure had been Master Montfort’s decision, and the man had been buried, the cow as the instrument of his death duly slaughtered and its meat distributed to the poor. Since then there had been no need for Master Montfort at St. Frideswide’s. Until now.
“He was sent for after Martha Hayward’s death.” For once Dame Frevisse’s voice was bare of anything but the flat statement of facts. “Now he’s come and must needs see to Lady Ermentrude’s dying, too, and wants to talk to everyone who had attendance on her, you among them. He’s in the guest hall.”
They had begun walking as Dame Frevisse talked, Thomasine hurrying a little to match her long stride. Now she stopped short under the last arch of the cloister walk and asked quickly, “Do I have to see him? I can only tell him what everyone else will say about them both.”
“You were the first to see your aunt when she returned here yesterday. And you were there at both their dyings, besides being with Lady Ermentrude all the night before her death. He wants to question you.”
“Everyone knows what happened. Everyone saw the drink take her mind and then her body. There’s nothing else to tell. And Martha’s heart failed. Dame Claire will tell him that.”
“Dame Claire says otherwise now.”
“She does?”
“Yes.”
Dame Frevisse’s voice had a hard edge to it that said more than the word, but what the more might be Thomasine had no time to guess. Dame Frevisse went on, and she had to follow, thrusting her hands up either sleeve and tucking her head down, resolutely low, not seeing anything except her feet as they left the cloister and crossed the courtyard to the guest house.
Its outer hall was crowded with people, mostly in Lady Ermentrude’s livery. Their clacking chatter died away as Dame Frevisse entered. Thomasine’s quick glancing to either side showed they were looking at her and Dame Frevisse, but Dame Frevisse passed among them with apparently complete disinterest.
At the threshold to the room that had been Lady Ermentrude’s, Thomasine consciously braced herself for whatever might be there, but after all it was only a room, with the window shutters standing open to the warm day’s sunlight, the bed freshly, neatly made – no sign at all that here had been two deaths so near together under God’s heavy hand, and the bodies still lying within the nunnery walls, wherever their souls might be by now.
Thomasine’s nervous glance around the room, from under the shelter of her lowered lids, showed her that Master Montfort wished to talk to what seemed a great many people besides herself. Dame Claire was there, and Father Henry, and Aunt Ermentrude’s lady-in-waiting Maryon, who was studying Dame Claire like Dame Alys studied a butchered lamb before dividing it. Only the monkey was missing. Beyond them, seated on the bench under the window, with the sunlight aureoling his brown hair to auburn, was the youth called Robert Fenner. Thomasine had the impression that he was looking at her almost like Maryon was looking at Dame Claire, so she moved backward, putting Dame Frevisse between her and his gaze.
But there were not enough places to sit in the room, except for the bed, where no one seemed to want to sit, certainly not Thomasine. Father Henry was already standing. It was Robert Fenner who stood up quickly and said, “Here. Pray you, sit here, my lady.”
He might have meant Dame Frevisse, but Dame Frevisse, intent on going to Dame Claire across the room, said, “Yes, Thomasine, do you sit. We may be waiting for a while.” She added to Dame Claire, “He’s not finished yet with Sir John and Lady Isobel?”
“Not yet. The lady is still so shaken, he’s talking with them in their room. But he can hardly be much longer.” Dame Claire’s tone, like her face, was rigid, withdrawn as if her thoughts were inwardly turning around something else.
Neither she nor Dame Frevisse were heeding Thomasine at all. With no choice, Thomasine went, eyes down, to take the place Robert Fenner had offered her.
Instead of moving away as she sat, he slid down on his heels beside her, his back against the wall. From there he could look up into her face whether she wanted him to or not. He smiled. Thomasine deliberately shut her eyes, refusing to acknowledge that he was there, and began the Paternoster, the first prayer that came into her mind. Her lips moved on the “amen” though she did not mean them to, and he must have seen them because, before she could begin again, he said softly, “Dame Frevisse speaks to me.”
Thomasine threw him an inadvertent glance, then shut her lips tightly over any words that might try to escape her.
“You heard her. She’s fully a nun but she talks to me,” Robert persisted.
“But I don’t,” Thomasine whispered back, refusing to look at him again. “Not to any man.” The warmth left around her heart by Dame Frevisse’s assurance that she was safe from being put out of St. Frideswide’s made her less taut with nerves than she might have been, so she was able at least to tell him she did not want his attentions.
“My lady?” The quiet voice on her other side made Thomasine look up. The woman Maryon made a small courtesy with her head. “I hope you’re well enough after all that’s happened and last night?”
“Y-yes,” Thomasine murmured. “Thank you. And you?”
“Well enough, I thank you.” Maryon drew a deep sigh and smiled a little sadly at Robert, who had risen to his feet. “We are rather at loose ends for the time, my lord. What will you do now your lady is gone?”
Robert made a vague gesture. “There’s no place for me at home. Mayhap Sir Walter will take me again into his household. I don’t know.”
“Nor I.” She was a pretty woman, all softness and smooth skin, with dark hair and manners meant to please. She made Thomasine uncomfortable. “I left the Queen’s service in hope of seeing something more than Hertford Castle, where she mostly wants to be, and now that hope has come to an end with Lady Ermentrude’s dying. Though she wasn’t an easy mistress, mind.”
“No. She wasn’t that,” Robert agreed.
“I’ve wondered if it wasn’t her wanting to leave the Queen, so much as the Queen asking her to go because of her tongue. Did you ever hear aught about that?”‘ There was a curious cadence to her speech that made Thomasine wonder where she had been born.
“Never anything but what Lady Ermentrude said. That she was tired and wished to leave and Queen Katherine granted it.”
“You never heard her speak ill of the Queen?”
“Never.”
The conversation did not interest Robert. Maryon turned her attention back to Thomasine. “Or you either? Never any reason why she left the Queen except she was tired?”
Gossip of royalty was not common in St. Frideswide’s. Thomasine remembered very well what Lady Ermentrude had said the afternoon she first arrived. “She said there was going to be scandal and she wanted to be away before it started.”
Maryon’s eyes, so gentle-humored and soft under their full lids until then, sharpened. “Did she say what sort?”
A little disconcerted, Thomasine said, “Oh, no. She might have been going to but Master Chaucer said he’d heard nothing of any such thing and…” Thomasine sought for exactly his reply, “…and that he was sure Lady Ermentrude knew better than to say anything about any such matter, to him or anyone.”
Robert uttered a short sound of amusement. “How did she take that subtle hint?”
Thomasine looked at him, a little surprised. “How should she take it except agree?” She frowned, trying to remember. “Only I’m not sure she actually did. Domina Edith changed the subject right then, I think.” She paused, thoughtful – and remembered herself. With a blush and a sudden awareness of Robert’s eyes on her, she ducked her head down again.
Maryon, not noticing and clearly in a humour for gossiping, said, “Well, it will probably be a relief for her sons, her being dead, after the shock is over.”
That brought Thomasine’s head up again. “What a dreadful thing to say!”
“Not really,” Robert said lightly. “I was first in the household of Sir Walter, and many a time I heard Sir Walter complain that she was spending the family into poverty. ‘Always the best,’ he would shout, ‘and never mind if she has to send to London, Bristol, or Calais for it.’”
Maryon’s dimple appeared. “And I heard her complain that if her son had his way, they would live year round on bread and cheese.”
“Her, perhaps,” amended Robert. “Sir Walter believes a noble man’s living should match his high place.”
“Maybe he thinks those nearing life’s end should begin casting off what they cannot take with them.” Maryon’s ironic tone scandalized Thomasine, who believed people shouldn’t immerse themselves too deeply in life’s pleasures to begin with, in fear of the deadly sin of gluttony.
Robert, seeing Thomasine’s expression, dropped out of the wicked game at once. “Even the greatest families have their troubles these days,” he said.
“Indeed,” agreed Maryon, unaware. “Sir Walter has been sitting with such concern at Lord Fenner’s bedside these two months past.” She explained to Thomasine, “They’re cousins by Sir Walter’s father – or did you know that? Lady Ermentrude being you aunt, you probably did.”
“No,” said Robert. “Sister Thomasine takes very little notice of the matters of the world.”
“Of course, poor thing. Well, Lord Fenner has no sons and the title goes by the male line so Sir Walter will be Lord Fenner when the old man dies, which looks like it could happen any time. Property come with the title, but Lord Fenner has other wealth, and Sir Walter wants to be sure it doesn’t all get given away elsewhere. Interesting how he’s been so concerned about that, and now that his mother is dead, he comes by a fortune equally large. It appears Sir Walter will be doing very well for himself indeed.”
Maryon seemed to have acquired a wide knowledge of Fenner matters in the little while she had been in Lady Ermentrude’s service. Thomasine felt some reproving remark was required, but before she could form one, Master Montfort appeared in the doorway.
He was a round, well-bellied man with small black eyes and fox-red hair unevenly thinning across the top. The long, pointed slope of his nose gave his face a sly, smiling shrewdness that Thomasine supposed was surely useful in ferreting out the facts around unfortunate deaths.
Behind him a little dark shadow of a clerk, carrying pen and ink and parchment scraps, peered nearsightedly around the room for a place to put them. Master Montfort nodded him to the table by the bed and settled himself in the doorway, legs straddled as if to make sure they would all stay where he wanted them until he had finished his business.
In a full, self-assured voice, Master Montfort demanded, “Which of you is the novice Thomasine?”
Thomasine was too surprised and unsettled to move or answer until Dame Frevisse said, “Thomasine,” in a tone that brought her to her feet. Past hope of going unnoticed, she moved a little forward, made an uncertain bob of a curtsey, and whispered, “Sir.”
“Look at me, child.”
It was a straight demand, barely courteous. Drawing a deep breath, Thomasine looked at him.
“So,” he said, as if that settled something. “You met Lady Ermentrude when she first arrived here yesterday. How did she seem to you? I want what you thought about it then, not what you think about it now. Well?”
Despite the clipped command in his voice, Thomasine waited, swallowing, making sure before she tried them that the words would come. “Excited,” she managed at last. “Angry.” And then because strict truthfulness was needed, she added, “I could smell wine on her breath. I think she was drunk.” She glanced at the little clerk, who was busily writing her words on one of his scraps of parchment.
“She frightened you.” Montfort reclaimed her attention.
Thomasine turned her surprise to him. How had he known that?
“I’ve already heard that from your sister.” Master Montfort gave the information as if grudging it. “She says Lady Ermentrude appeared drunk. That she was dragging you by the arm. That you were frightened.”
Reassured he was not reading her thoughts, Thomasine answered readily, “Yes, I was afraid. She said she was going to take me out of St. Frideswide’s. She was holding onto me so tightly I couldn’t break free. And she was talking so wildly. I think it was the drink in her making her talk so.”
“Did you think so then?”
The question rapped at her as if she had said too much. Thomasine hesitated, her eyes darting from place to place around the floor as if the answer would be somewhere there. “I was too afraid to think,” she whispered at last. “I was too afraid.”
“But you did not try to get away from her.”
“She was hurting me…”
Beside her Robert said, “I told her not to struggle.”
Thomasine stared at him. She had not known he was standing so near to her, or that he would dare speak so strongly to Master Montfort.
“Who are you?” Master Montfort demanded.
“My name is Robert Fenner. I am in – was in – Lady Ermentrude’s household.”
“Fenner? Then you are related to her, as well.”
“I am a great-nephew.”
“You were in her service long?”
“Almost three years. I began in Sir Walter’s household at age nine, but latterly his household became too large, and I was sent to Lady Ermentrude.”
“There was no quarrel?”
“No.”
“You got along well with Lady Ermentrude?”
“As well as any.”
“You went with her when she rode to Sir John’s manor?”
“No.”
“But you were in the yard when she returned?”
“I heard Lady Ermentrude ride in. I was in the guest house and came out in time to see her send the priest away and take hold of Lady Thomasine.”
His bright gaze moved to Thomasine, who instantly dropped her own. But there was no way to shut out his warm, steady voice.
“And how did she seem to you then?” Montfort demanded.
“Frightened. Very frightened. But she listened to me and helped me bring Lady Ermentrude into the hall.”
“I meant, how was Lady Ermentrude?” Master Montfort said, his tone attempting to quell.
Not very quelled, Robert said, “Drunk, I think. Smelling of wine, unsteady on her feet. Confused in her talking. But–”
“So she was drunk and feeling the effects of her hard riding that day and the day before,” Master Montfort interrupted.
“She’d ridden that much and more on other occasions and not felt it. I don’t know why she did that day.”
“But she did feel it, didn’t she?”
“I don’t think it was the riding.”
“The drinking then. She was not a young woman.” He looked around the room and dared someone to gainsay him. No one did, and having asserted his authority, Master Montfort said, “So it would seem safe to say it was her drinking and exhaustion that killed her, coming as they did after her raging of the day before. She was too old to indulge in all that temper and drinking. They made an end of her.”
Quite clearly he had the answer he was seeking. Now he would let them go, Thomasine thought, and gathered herself for the relief of dismissal.
“No,” Dame Claire said in precise, deep tones, “it was something else.”
Everyone’s eyes went to her, but her own gaze was on the crowner, her face as set and certain as his own.
After a moment Montfort asked insolently, “Something else, madam?”
Dame Claire said stiffly, “She may have been drunk when she arrived here, but all her dying signs show something else. Her convulsions as she was dying. The manner of the pain and the way it took her. That was not her heart failing. I have had time since she died to look into my books. I’ve read–” She drew a deep breath and forced herself to go on against Master Montfort’s lowering look of displeasure. “Lady Ermentrude was poisoned. That’s why she died.”
Thomasine, caught in her own stillness, had not known how still everyone else had been through all of Dame Claire’s speaking. Not until now, when sharply there was movement and indrawn breaths, her own among them. Master Montfort’s lower lip jigged up and down as if fighting with his mouth over whether he would speak or not. Finally he said tersely, “You think so?”
“I know so.”
“And what makes you sure?”
“I would maybe not be sure–”
“Ah.”
“But Martha Hayward’s death was the same.”
Before, there had been surprise in the movements around the room; that sharpened now into open consternation. Except from Dame Frevisse. Thomasine, despite her own alarm, was aware of the nun’s stillness. Had Dame Frevisse known Dame Claire was going to say that?
Master Montfort had recovered himself. “I’ve not turned to Martha Hayward’s death,” he said sternly. “So, you say it was suspicious, too?”
“Father Henry was there when she died,” Dame Claire said. “And Thomasine. They can tell you the manner of her dying.”
Master Montfort glared at the priest. “Well?”‘
Father Henry was clearly unhappy at being called on to confirm a dreadful truth. “We were watching by Lady Ermentrude. She was sleeping and Martha was talking. Martha’s tongue went ever on wheels but this time she was gabbling, louder and louder, until I had to tell her to remember the sleeping woman. But she became excited, very lively. She would not sit still, walked around and around, still babbling, until the words began to catch in her throat and change to queer sounds. She grew flushed and she looked strange and then clawed at herself.” Father Henry made vague gestures at his chest or throat. “She fell down kicking on the floor. Thrashing and choking until suddenly she wasn’t… anymore. There was time for me to pray over her but only barely, and she died before help came.”
There was perspiration on his forehead as he finished, his open face revealing his discomfort.
Thomasine was already braced as Master Montfort’s displeased eye turned to her. “Well?” he demanded. “Was that the way of it?”
Feebly, biting her lip, she nodded. He glared at Dame Claire. “I was told it was heart failure. Can’t that have been heart failure? The clutching at her chest?”
Before Dame Claire could speak, Dame Frevisse said in her light, clear, unemotional voice, “Father Henry, pardon me, but how exactly did Martha catch at herself? Can you show us exactly?”
The priest looked bewildered but complied, his big hands after a moment’s hesitation going not to his chest but to his throat, and not clawing but grabbing and pulling as if trying to loosen something that could not be reached.
“Like that?” Dame Frevisse asked.
“Like that,” Father Henry confirmed.
Thomasine nodded.
Dame Frevisse turned to Master Montfort. “So it was not her chest she grabbed for but her throat.”
“And that proves?” he said shortly.
“The heart in final pain does not make someone catch at her throat,” Dame Claire said.
“But this Martha woman died in minutes, by his account, and Lady Ermentrude was all night about it.”
“Individuals have individual responses to poisons; what will kill one instantly may, in fact, only give another an hour’s indigestion.”
“Perhaps Martha Hayward took more of the poison more quickly than Lady Ermentrude did,” Dame Frevisse put in.
“How’s that?” Master Montfort snapped the words, upset that these women were defying him, and clearly more dissatisfied with them with every word they said.
Dame Frevisse seemed not to notice. “There was wine beside Lady Ermentrude’s bed, with medicine to make her sleep, but she collapsed before having any of it.” She looked at Father Henry again. “You said Martha helped herself to Lady Ermentrude’s wine. She must have drunk most of it. I remember there was very little left when it spilled.”
Father Henry moved his feet nervously. “She ate the milksop and then drank deeply of the wine. I told her it had medicine in it and she stopped. I should have stopped her, but–”
But Martha Hayward had never been a woman easily stopped in her pleasures, said the look on everyone’s face.
“She was always tasting or sipping at whatever came to hand,” Thomasine offered softly.
Master Montfort’s look suggested he did not want to hear about it. “So did anyone else drink any of this wine?” People began shaking their heads, but before anyone could answer, he rapped out, “You said it was spilled?” and looked at Dame Frevisse.
“In the trouble after Martha’s dying it was spilled. So far as I know, no one else drank of it.”
Master Montfort looked at everyone but received only shrugs or shaking of heads.
“So where did Lady Ermentrude have poison from, if poison it was?” he demanded.
Dame Claire answered that. “When she awakened in the night, not long before she died, she ate a little…”
“Of what?”
“Another milksop,” Dame Frevisse said. “And drank a medicined wine Dame Claire had readied for her.”
“What was in it?” Montfort glared at Dame Claire.
“Valerian, white clover, the usual herbs that give a soothing rest. Nothing that would do harm.”
“And where’s the goblet from that time? Did she drink it all?”
Dame Claire looked around as if thinking to see it somewhere in the room. “I didn’t see it, after.”
Dame Frevisse said, “Robert, who had the tidying here after Lady Ermentrude was carried out?”
“I did. I oversaw some of her women doing it. I don’t remember the goblet. You helped in here, Maryon. Do you remember?”
Maryon raised her eyes from staring at the floor. “No. I don’t. I emptied the bowl of sops down the garderobe.”
“Where did the wine come from? Your stores?”
“It was a bottle of malmsey, supplied by Sir John and Lady Isobel.” Dame Claire frowned. “I don’t know where it went, either.”
“But the goblet,” Dame Frevisse insisted. “It was the goblet she drank from. Robert, Maryon, did either of you take it away?”
They both shook their heads. Dame Frevisse turned to Master Montfort. “Then we should look for it. And the bottle.”
“Oh, by all means. We don’t want to have theft on our hands, too, do we?” he said ironically.
But Robert was already moving to look behind a chair set crosswise to a corner, and Maryon behind a chest set against the wall. Master Montfort’s face took on a dusky red hue, and Thomasine guessed that only his dignity kept him from tapping his foot with impatience while he looked for the right thing to say to stop what he saw as nonsense.
Before he found whatever words he wanted, Robert on his knees, groping under the edge of the bed, drew back his hand with a satisfied exclamation and held up the goblet.
Master Montfort was unimpressed. “So we don’t have to take on theft, too. Simply carelessness.” He nodded dismissively at Maryon. “See to having it cleaned and put safely away with her other goods, woman.”
But Dame Frevisse intercepted Robert and took the goblet. She looked into it and turned it so Dame Claire could see to its bottom. The infirmarian shook her head. “There’s nothing left to judge anything by,” she said regretfully. “But it would be if we could find the bottle.”
“Come now, woman.” Master Montfort allowed his impatience to show around the edges of his vast dignity. “We must stop talking nonsense before it makes unneeded trouble. The throes of apoplexy can look much like poison, and we have grounds for suspecting it was apoplexy and none at all for thinking it was poison.”
Dame Claire drew herself up to the top of her diminutive height. “We have very excellent grounds for knowing it was poison. And assuredly it was never apoplexy. You’d have to find a quack doctor and pay him to say so if that’s the testimony you want. Every symptom named for both the women cries poison, not heart failure.”
Master Montfort glowered at her. “Poison is a cheap word. Can you be telling me what ‘poison’ it might have been?”
“Nightshade. I can show you the book and read you the words. They name the symptoms and they are very like what we saw.”
“Very like–! You draw bold conclusions for a person of your sex and learning.” He turned from her to address himself broadly to Father Henry, Robert, and his clerk. “It’s a common problem with women kept with too little to do and too little to think about. They find excitement where they may.”
Father Henry and Robert were too wary to make any answer to that. The clerk, whose pen had been scritching at parchment fragments all the while, did not write it down.
Master Montfort, noting he was being edited, strode across the room, snatched the parchment from the clerk’s ink-stained fingers, glanced down at what he had last written, made a disgusted noise, and crumpled it. “No need to put her words down. Nightshade and nonsense. That’s the kind of idle talk that blurs the straight facts of a case.”
Dame Frevisse said quietly, “Neither her talk nor her facts are idle, and it would be ill-advised to ignore them.” There was no hint of defiance or temper in her voice, but it held a confidence that with or without him, the inquiry would go on.
Master Montfort, puffed and red again, glared at her.
Dame Frevisse, unyielding, let him.
The unpleasant quiet held, the clerk’s pen poised above another scrap, waiting for words. Then Master Montfort looked away, as if to check what his clerk was going to write, and said ungraciously, “I see I must prove you wrong. Very well, we’ll have to begin my questioning again, it seems. Who was with her in the night. Who gave her food. Or could reach her goblet. And Sir Walter is coming,” he added gloomily. “He’s not going to like this. Not like it at all.”
Continue with Chapter 8 tomorrow!
