The Murderer's Tale (8 page)

In the general shift of folk while the servants cleared the hall of all but the chairs and benches left for comfort, she drifted apart from Dame Claire who had fallen into talk over supper with one of Lady Lovell’s older ladies about the particular benefits of certain herbs. There presently seemed to be a cheerful disagreement over whether camomile or dandelion was the better at cleansing the body of certain phlegms, and because she had no idea on the matter either way, Frevisse did not care to join in. Dame Claire was better for her sleep, her color good again and the stiffness that had had her limping when she first arose gone by the time they had come down to the hall. It had occurred to Frevisse, finding she could not remember when last Dame Claire had been out of St. Frideswide’s farther than Prior Byfield, to be worried for her, surrounded in the hall by far more people and overt cheerfulness than she was used to. There had been people, strangers, through these few days of travel but only a few at any time, not a great clutter and noise of them like here, eager for the evening’s pleasures at an hour when in St. Frideswide’s the nuns were turning toward the quietness of Compline’s prayers and bed.

But Dame Claire seemed to be enjoying herself and so did the lady with her, so Frevisse left them to it and looked down the hall in search of John Naylor. He had been seated at a lower table in company and deep conversation with an older man whom Frevisse guessed by his quiet manner of authority and his being set with John to be Lord Lovell’s high steward. It had crossed her mind to hope that young John was aware that what he might say could affect their later dealings on the nunnery’s matter, but while she watched he had seemed to be listening far more than he was talking and she had been reassured. He was more likely to make a good impression that way than another.

But she still wanted to learn what had been said and was making her way among the people toward where she had last seen him when Master Geffers, the franklin, intercepted her. Without his unfortunate hat his presence was diminished and his years more obvious, but his inclination to talk was the same as he slid from between two men into Frevisse’s way with, “Dame Frevisse, we meet again.”

Frevisse acknowledged that truth with a brief inclination of her head and attempted to go on past him, but he was too much in the way and already chatting with great enthusiasm about how splendid Minster Lovell was and, “I understand you and Dame Claire are staying with Lady Lovell’s damsels. How very good of Lady Lovell, very good.”

From wariness of anything that might prolong the conversation, Frevisse did not ask where he had been given quarters, but that did not stop him from telling her he was above and beyond the kitchens. “And very pleasant it is. Though not so good as what there will be when the west range is finished. There’ll be a great many pleasant rooms there, I understand.”

Frevisse thought that Master Geffers probably
understood
very little. He was just skilled at collecting oddments of information and pasting them together into what passed for conversation. She knew his sort and how little chance she had of escaping him without some sort of talk, so she asked, “And the Stenbys? Where are they?” She had not thought of them between when they had parted company on the road and now, but they served to divert Master Geffers.

“Ah, the Stenbys. There’s a pair I’d not mind on my properties. Solid yeomen. No nonsense and good workers, if I’m any judge. They’re not here. They found a place to stay in the village. Some goodwife glad of an extra halfpenny for putting them up and feeding them. They’ll make their devotion at the shrine in the morning and start home afterward.” Master Geffers leaned closer to Frevisse’s ear as if someone in the shift of folk around them might be interested in the great secret he was about to impart. “A wise choice for them. They’d not have fitted in here. Best among their own kind.”

Frevisse made—murmured was too kind a word; muttered was closer to the truth—some sort of agreement at him and moved on among the people talking and waiting around them for the last of the trestles to be carried out. She was no longer particularly set on finding John so much as on escaping Master Geffers; but Master Geffers, probably out of long experience of people trying to escape him, kept with her, saying as they went, “And you’ll have noticed that Master Knyvet isn’t here, either.”

The eagerness behind his words warned Frevisse there was a particularly choice piece of talk to come, and she cast quickly through her mind for a way to avoid it. She liked what little she had seen of Lionel Knyvet. She did not want to hear about him by way of Master Geffers’ tattling, but Master Geffers’ tongue was too quick for her. He shook his head and said with a regret that Frevisse doubted went further than the turned-down corners of his mouth, “There’s a sad case. Poor man. We were warned but one always hopes, but I fear the worst, not seeing him here for supper.”

Before she could help herself, Frevisse asked, “Warned?”

“About his affliction.” Master Geffers dropped his voice unnecessarily low, as if everyone around them was waiting eagerly to hear what he said. “He’s possessed, you know. Horribly. Since childhood.”

Frevisse crossed herself even as she protested, “Possessed? How?”

“By a demon.”

Of course by a demon, Frevisse wanted to snap at him. What else would he be possessed by? But Master Geffers was going on, gathering speed now that he had her attention. “It’s why he’s making this pilgrimage around to St. Kenelm’s shrines. Over the past years he’s gone everywhere, prayed everywhere, made gifts to saints from one end of England to the other, but no one and nothing has been able to free him.” Master Geffers nodded, solemn-faced with the weight of it, but it was avid delight that gleamed in his eyes. “Fits. He has fits. The falling sickness, you know. The demon seizes him and he loses all control. He flails, thrashes, spits, blasphemes God’s name and everything holy. He—”

“You’ve seen this?”

Master Geffers hastily crossed himself. “God forbid, no. But I was told by someone who’s seen it a hundred times and done what he could to help.”

“Who?” Frevisse snapped, angry on Lionel Knyvet’s behalf that whatever happened to him was reduced to greedy talk in Master Geffers’ busy mouth by someone who should have known better.

Her tone was lost on Master Geffers. Urged on by her interest, he said, “His own cousin. Master Giles. Who would know better? He’s seen the demon take him with his own eyes.”

“And he told you about it? Does Master Knyvet want this thing known all over? Surely he doesn’t.”

Master Geffers agreed to that readily. “Oh, of course he doesn’t. He keeps it secret as best he may. But we were traveling together, you see. What if an attack came and we had no warning? Master Giles wanted us prepared. For our own safety. The attacks are so violent and come so suddenly. Though mind you”—he leaned toward her, drawn by his avidity to tell— “he does have warning, Master Giles says. The demon taunts him, to add to the torment. It tickles in his left hand before it attacks. So if ever you see Master Knyvet look at his left hand oddly, leave him as quickly as you may.”

Frevisse remembered Lionel’s face in the garden as he had held out his hand to look at it as if it were no longer part of him. He must have been feeling the demon then. Carefully she asked, “Where is he now?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it? He takes the warning and finds some place alone before the fit comes on him, with only his man Martyn Gravesend to see him through it. A pushing fellow, that Martyn, taking every advantage of his master’s curse to put himself forward. And as damned as the demon itself or he’d never dare to face the fits out the way he does. That’s what Master Giles says.”

Master Giles would say that, Frevisse thought. He had been quick enough to make his escape, she realized, to leave his cousin alone when he knew what was coming on him.

But Lionel had wanted them to go. He had wanted to be left, to not be seen. The warning in his hand gave him time for that and in that much it was a blessing.

But that was not the way Giles had made it seem when he had seen fit to tell Master Geffers and apparently the Stenbys. Or else that was not the way Master Geffers had heard it.

Revolted both by the idea of Lionel seized in a demon-fit and by Master Geffers’ eager talk of it, Frevisse asked, “Giles told all of you that were traveling together? The Stenbys, too?”

“All of us, to be sure. And said I should warn my servant, too, just in case.”

A servant who probably talked as readily as Master Geffers did, so that in a day or so there would be no one here who would not be watching for Lionel to look at his left hand oddly, with the worst of them hoping he would. And although Master Geffers would go on his way tomorrow morning, he would surely go on talking about Lionel along his way. Having traveled with someone possessed by a demon was too prime a tale to go untold. Frevisse wondered if Giles fully knew how much a cruelty he had done Lionel with his “warning.”

Remembering even what little she had so far seen of Giles, she rather thought he did.

A servant in the Lovell livery bowed in front of her and said, “My lady asks if you’d join her for the evening, my lady.”

Frevisse was glad to accept, both because it offered Lady Lovell’s pleasant company and an escape from Master Geffers. With a murmured farewell to the franklin, she followed the servant away among the cheerful crowding of household folk, asking as they went, “Were you to find my companion. Dame Claire, too?”

“She and Lady Elizabeth have already gone, my lady,” the man answered.

Frevisse noticed that most of the folk still here had been at the lower tables. Lady Lovell, her ladies, and what gentlemen there had been were gone, apparently as usual. The man led her deftly among the others, back to the dais and to the door at its opposite end from where Luce had taken them that afternoon. Beyond it was a small antechamber with doors on each side of it, the one to the left shut, the one at its far end open to a spiral stairway almost lost in the unlighted shadows, the one on their right open to lamplight. The man rapped lightly on the frame of the open door and stood aide, looking back, for her to go past him.

The room she entered was large, low-ceilinged, pleasantly proportioned, with its three wide, stone-mullioned windows looking out on the garden where a clear blue twilight still lingered. Lamps set about on shoulder-tall wrought-iron holders showed golden rush matting covering the floor and the ceiling beams brightly painted in a weave of vines and flowers. Gaily embroidered cushions were strewn along the wide bench below the windows, and girls and women vaguely familiar from that afternoon in the garden and a few gentlemen Frevisse remembered from the hall at supper sat there and on other, larger cushions around the floor in talk and laughter. Opposite the windows a fireplace with elaborately carved stone mantel emboldened the wall. Lady Lovell sat in front of it on a long, backed, cushioned wooden bench, with Edeyn seated beside her, and Giles, Father Henry, the house priest, and Dame Claire standing near.

From the doorway Frevisse’s guide made a low bow and said, “My lady.”

Lady Lovell smiled and held out a hand in welcome. “Good, he found you! Come join us, please. We lost you in the hall.”

Drawn easily into her company, Frevisse noted first that Dame Claire was apparently at ease and then that Father Henry and Sire Benedict were enjoying talk of their own to one side of everyone else’s. Something about St. Augustine, she thought from a snatch she overheard. She had not thought Father Henry would remember so much of his studies as even to recall St. Augustine, let alone discuss him.

That was a mean-spirited thought, she realized in the same moment as she had it; but before she could follow where it had come from, John Naylor came in with the man he had been with at supper. They bowed to Lady Lovell without approaching and moved away into one of the groups across the room. Frevisse noted where, with intent to talk with young John before the evening was done. For now it was enough that for the first time since coming to Minster Lovell, she knew where all of their company was and how they seemed to be.

In something like an echo to her thought, she heard Lady Lovell saying, “We’re a sadly diminished company, I fear, with my lord and so many of the men gone with him, and no notion of how long they’ll be about it.”

“Is it going to be complicated?” Edeyn asked.

“If it involves France and money, it’s always complicated,” her husband pointed out, and there was wry, agreeing laughter among them.

“Dame Frevisse told me a little of what’s toward,” Dame Claire said. “Is there trouble?”

“Mostly only for my lord of Warwick.” Lady Lovell shook her head. “He really does not want the office or to go to France. There’s rumor that he’s ill, would prefer to take to his bed. But King Henry is insisting on it. So he’s called various of his people to him for advice on what to expect and what to ask of the King before he agrees, as agree he must. Hence, my lord is gone.”

“Your husband served in France,” Dame Claire said. “For a long while, I think?”

“Long enough to know he doesn’t desire to go back. But then there’s this that came from it.” Lady Lovell looked around at her rich room, with the sense of all of Minster Lovell that lay beyond it. “His profits from France have helped to build all this without too deeply draining regular revenues from our lands, so we’ve little cause of complaint, I suppose. So long as he doesn’t have to go back,” she added with a laugh.

The talk moved along easy ways to nowhere in particular. Weather and crops and pilgrimages and how the roads were. Father Henry and Sire Benedict wandered away with whatever they were discussing, and eventually Frevisse was sitting at one end of the long bench beside Edeyn, who turned away from Dame Claire and Lady Lovell’s deep conversation over which herbs companioned well with others in a garden to ask, “You’re well recovered from your walking?”

“Very well, thank you. I have to confess we’ve not been striving to see how many miles we can make but rather taking our time.”

“But it isn’t going so well for Dame Claire, is it?” Edeyn asked with concern. “She’s not so used to it?”