The Murderer's Tale (2 page)

Martyn composed his face with the insolent assurance he had when showing how clever he was and said, gravely as a bishop questioning the Pope, “Can you tell me what animal has its tail between its eyes?”

Giles looked from Lionel’s face to Martyn’s and detested both of them for knowing the answer and being sure he would not have it. An animal with its tail between its eyes? Whatever the answer was, it was going to be undoubtedly too stupid to have wasted his time over. “I can’t conceive. What animal has its tail between its eyes?”

Martyn grinned. “A cat licking its rump.”

Giles managed a credible laugh and granted, “A good one. I’d never have thought of it.” And would never have wanted to.

“Don’t tell Edeyn,” Lionel said. “I want to see her face when I ask her.”

“I won’t,” Giles assured him. He set what was left of his breakfast on the table, took a quick drink of ale, gave a quick bow of his head to Lionel, and said, “Speaking of Edeyn, I’d best see how she does. Pray, excuse me.”

Lionel excused him with insulting readiness.

Giles’ pair of rooms lay the other way than Lionel’s off the parlor. The outer one of them was bare today, stripped of its tapestries and cushions, the shutters closed and barred over the lower half of the windows where the glass panes had been removed to be packed for going to Langling. Their unshuttered upper halves showed full gray dawn light and the last of the stars gone. The carts would be on their way shortly and so should the rest of the household.

As Giles crossed the room toward his bedchamber, one of his men came from the farther doorway and circled hurriedly aside to make ample room for him to pass, bowing low while he did despite the small leather-bound box he carried in both arms.

Giles nodded at the chest. “Is that the last of it?”

“Except for what Mistress Knyvet’s maids will carry, master.”

“Then hurry up with it. We’re behindhand in our going as it is, and Master Lionel is impatient to be off.”

The man bowed again, shifting further aside and more quickly on his way.

In the bedchamber, Giles found Edeyn standing beside the stripped, unmattressed bed, her cloak over her arm, watching her two maids folding a thick cloth around her jewel box that would go in a saddlebag for especial safekeeping. The maids did not look up as he came; they had heard what he said outside the room and their movements were earnest with hurry. But Edeyn smiled at him as he crossed to her. He took hold of her chin, lifting her face to him for a kiss he lingered over. He preferred large-breasted, wide-hipped women, they offered more for him to grasp in bed, and Edeyn was completely opposite, small-boned and slender and hardly as high as his shoulder, but he had taught her how to kiss and do other things that pleased him and all in all they managed well enough.

Well enough that she was four months along with what would be his heir if it were a boy. The heir she would have gladly borne Lionel if Lionel’s marrying had not been impossible.

Giles sometimes wondered if she knew that he knew she had loved Lionel before she loved him. He did not mind she had, was in fact glad of it. It made having her more pleasurable. And because he suspected Lionel had loved her in return, maybe still did love her, come to that, he made a point sometimes of letting Lionel see how very much Edeyn was now his. A word, a gesture, a casual mention of a particularly good night’s work between them. Never much. Just a little paying back for everything else that Lionel had that should have been his.

As he drew back from their kiss, Edeyn smiled up at him and said, “We’re ready.”

“Good then. Let’s be off. Lionel is waiting.”

She nodded obediently, obligingly, and moved away as her maids caught up the last of their own things. Giles let her reach the door before he said, “Edeyn. One other thing.”

She turned back toward him. “Yes?”

“Lionel has a new riddle.” Edeyn was forever trying to be part of Lionel and Martyn’s riddle games, but she had more will than wit for them and her guesses were usually so far awry they made more laughter than the right one did. “When he asks you it, say it’s a cat licking its arse.”

One more small put paid to Lionel.

Chapter 2

The garden was still sweet from the late afternoon rain. A band of saffron-colored sunset showed below the westward clouds, and the light lay long and golden over the garden wall, gilding where it touched. Along the paths crystal droplets patterned from low leaves, swept clear by the nuns’ long skirts as they walked past in their evening recreation, two of them pacing side by side, hands folded into their sleeves, the third alone, her rosary in her hands. Above them, silhouetted against the yellow sky on the high arch of the pear tree’s branch beyond the wall, a thrush sang to the world. The garden was hushed to the soft sound of their walking, the rain droplets’ patter, the thrush’s evening singing.

Loud laughter jarred into the quiet from the cloister beyond the garden wall. Frevisse and Dame Claire paused in their walking, their heads turning toward the noise, as if the gathering of the priory’s other nuns could be seen, there in the warming room where they had chosen to spend the recreation hour in talk over the spiced, warm wine the prioress had allowed them against the April day’s damp and alleged chill. Under Prioress Domina Alys’ disapproving eye but allowed it by the Rule, Frevisse, Dame Claire, and Sister Thomasine had chosen instead to go out into the garden, forgoing both the wine and crowded talking for the quiet of the rain-sweet April evening.

But there was no real escape. The other nuns’ jollity pursued them at least by ear, and at the end of recreation they must needs rejoin them for evening prayers and then to bed in the long dormitory, where often and often anymore the rule of silence did not hold, as it should by St. Benedict’s Rule that ordered silence all through the day except at need and in the hour of recreation. Instead the talk went on with giggling and whispering through the walls of the sleeping cells, keeping everyone awake and making it hard for them to rouse for the midnight prayers of Matins and Lauds.

Frevisse, turning away from the laughter, momentarily envied Sister Thomasine’s serene detachment from it all. Untouched by the laughter, St. Frideswide’s youngest nun stood below the garden’s outer wall, gazing up raptly at the thrush still singing to the heavens. In this spring of God’s grace 1437, Sister Thomasine had been in St. Frideswide’s Priory seven and a half years, a nun for over five of those, and with no desire in her heart except to go on as deeply into worship of her Lord as she could manage, with no apparent thought at all of the tensions growing daily greater under the priory’s newly fissured peace.

Time was when Frevisse had found the child very tedious, but an unworldly maturity as well as womanhood had grown on Sister Thomasine through the years. Her mind always bound to God and her prayers, she nonetheless went about her duties through the nunnery with a quiet efficiency, made probably more quiet and efficient, Frevisse admitted, because she was so detached from them. Quite against her inclination Frevisse had come to—not affection, Sister Thomasine’s earnestness still wore at her nerves too frequently—but an acknowledgement of her deep though different worth and, lately, her envied ability to live untouched beyond the changes Domina Alys as prioress had wrought in St. Frideswide’s these past seven months.

Dame Claire sighed and walked on. Frevisse went with her, shortening her stride to match Dame Claire’s lesser with the ease of long familiarity.

“You know what she thinks of our being out here,” Dame Claire said.

There was no question of whom she meant. Domina Alys was too much in their minds just as she was too much in their lives. “That we’re talking of her,” Frevisse said. “Which we are.”

“More than that. Worse than that. She thinks that we’re plotting against her. Sister—” Dame Claire stopped, her hesitancy telling a great deal about the wariness now become part of the priory’s life. “That’s what someone told me. That she thinks whenever we come out and the others stay in, we’re plotting against her.”

“Plotting what? She’s prioress, God help us all. What can we do?”

Frevisse did not try to conceal her irritability. Forbearance was not among the virtues she had sufficiently cultivated yet in her life, and Domina Alys’ overbearing ways were an unceasing trial to her, most simply because under obedience to the vow she had taken almost twenty years ago when she became a nun, she was pledged to obey without hesitation or grudging those whom God put over her. Until last summer that vow had been no trouble to her because Domina Edith had been prioress when she made it. Domina Edith who had been kind and wise with years, with a knowing eye and a steadying discipline on the women given into her care—women as different from one another as any group of women anywhere despite their common bonds of avowed nunhood, their shared hours of prayer seven times a day, their enclosure within St. Frideswide’s walls, and their black Benedictine habits and veils, the white wimples encircling their faces, that gave them an outward sameness. While Domina Edith was their prioress, a balance had been kept, with no overt favorites, no choosing one nun over another for this duty or that privilege except as they had deserved or earned it, and a fair, strict keeping of St. Benedict’s holy Rule for everyone.

But Domina Edith had died quietly of old age and her body’s weariness last summer, and matters were different now. Dame Alys—
Domina
Alys—had a very different way of governing. Frevisse readily admitted the title still stuck in her throat, even now, seven months after the election. An election whose outcome had been a mistake, Frevisse still felt. If God allowed mistakes in such matters, she conscientiously added, and she rather thought He did, so that human pride and certainty might learn the lesson of their own fallibility.

It had been understood among the nuns, when Domina Edith was dead and they were bound to elect her successor from among themselves, that then-Dame Alys dearly coveted the honor and the power that went with it. Domina Edith’s own choice had been Dame Claire, known to be steady, fair-minded, given to deep concern for those in her care when she was the priory’s infirmarian and later its cellarer. Frevisse thought that very likely Dame Claire would have had the election if matters had gone sensibly, but Dame Alys had a temper that boiled quickly and held on to wrongs long, and so near as Frevisse had been able to sort out, most of the nine nuns had been wary, if not plain afraid, of Dame Alys’ temper and memory. None wanted her as prioress, but some of them had been fearful of what would have to be endured if she received not even a single vote on the first ballot. Frevisse herself had not cared; she had cast her vote willingly for Dame Claire, and so had Sister Thomasine, she thought, because Sister Thomasine was not swayed by such worldly troubles as fear of Dame Alys’ wrath. Frevisse herself had received one vote—from Dame Claire, she knew—and had been glad to have no more. But the other six votes had all gone to Dame Alys, because Dame Alys had, of course, voted for herself and each of the other five nuns had thought to give her just one vote on the first ballot to appease her after-wrath a little. Instead, out of their cowardice, they had given her the election and now, for the length of her life, she was prioress of St. Frideswide’s.

More laughter broke across the evening’s quiet. Most of the nuns had made a kind of peace with what had been wrought. Frevisse had to admit that. It was undeniable that so long as Domina Alys had her own way, she could be pleasant to those under her. But her own way often went astray from the Rule toward indulgence and slackness. A little sleeping late and prayers delayed on cold winter mornings. Small, needless luxuries of food on non-feast days. Warmed, expensively-spiced wine for no good reason except she felt like it.

Little things. Always little things, but more and more of them and beginning to be bigger things. Today in the morning’s chapter meeting, Sister Amicia had asked if they could not all be allowed to stroll abroad, outside the nunnery, that afternoon. “Just a little way. It’s spring,” she had said wistfully.

Sister Amicia was known for having more the worldly inclinations of a merchant’s wife than the holy interests of a nun. A gentle but unrelenting hand needed to be kept on her, to keep her as she was supposed to be, and strolls abroad to see the world would, in the long run, do her more harm than good. Besides all that, her request was flat against what the Rule allowed for cloistered nuns. But Domina Alys had been on the edge of agreeing to it, encouraged by the eager nodding of most of the nuns to Sister Amicia’s words, until Frevisse had stood up and pointed out the impropriety of their going out for no better reason than their amusement. She knew afterward that she had been less diplomatic than she might have been, and very likely Domina Alys would have overborn the objection in the high-handed way she favored in settling any problem, but Sister Thomasine had also, very uncharacteristically, risen to her feet and in her soft but, on this occasion at least, definite voice said that, let the rest of them do as they would, she would never, not now or any other time, God keep her soul, go with them into such sin. Then, having not given a challenge but merely stated what she felt, she had sat down again, eyes lowered, hands folded in her lap, as inward-drawn and meek as usual. What the others did was now their own concern. But so pale, frail, unworldly it was hard to imagine she had ever lived outside the nunnery, she was thought among the nuns to be a saint in the making, and her words, rather than Frevisse’s protest, had given Domina Alys pause, so that her eventual, grudging decision had been that for today at least there would be no unseemly going abroad.

But what could be forgiven—or at least ignored—from Sister Thomasine remained an offense from Frevisse. She had felt the blunt edge of the prioress’ displeasure through the day and knew, from past experience, that when Domina Alys had had time to think of something sufficient, she would be paid fully back for her temerity in so overtly interfering.

But how could she not when such a wrong was about to be done? Irritable with helplessness, she repeated, “What can we do?”