The Reeve's Tale (12 page)

From the little liking she had for Mary or Tom or Gilbey, Frevisse had nothing to say against that, but, “Mayhap someone else will offer for it.”

Perryn shook his head regretfully. “Not so long as it’s a quarreling point ‘tween Gilbey and Tom. There’s none wants to be caught there.”

Frevisse could see why. She little liked being there herself, even knowing that in a while she would walk away from it. “But Mary will have the profit from the crops this year?”

‘Oh, aye. She’ll not be done out of what’s rightfully hers, though that won’t be the way she tells it.“

They were to the church door now. Past Father Henry and Sister Thomasine going out ahead of them, Frevisse could see the small rain had finished while they were inside and the sun was making a watery-yellow attempt to burn through the clouds.

‘Uh,“ said Perryn as a moist, heavy heat met them beyond the church porch, and Frevisse felt the same, on the instant too aware of her layers of clothing and close-fitted wimple. Already among the village women scattered across the churchyard in talk and with an eye to their children playing among the grave mounds some had slipped off their wimples and were settling their veils or kerchiefs over their hair as loosely as when they worked in the fields.

‘Good for the last of the haying, though,“ Perryn said.

And if they could be at it tomorrow, they might well finish soon enough to have a rest between haying’s hard, long labor and the harder, longer one of harvest.

Frevisse made a small prayer for God’s blessing and to St. Dorothy for abundance, then asked, “What was that about between Walter Hopper and Hamon whatever-his-name?”

Perryn rumbled a deep, brief laugh. “That was thinking ahead on Walter’s part, that was. The thing is, he holds land enough that his workdays to the priory add up, and most years he has to hire a man or more to work some of them for him while he sees to his own land. In this dealing with Hamon, he gambled last autumn that the bad weather would change this year, knowing that if it did, there’d be out-of-the-ordinary high wages to be paid for anyone he needed to hire.”

‘Ah,“ Frevisse said, understanding. ”He therefore stood surety for this Hamon’s debt, certain he’d not be able to repay, and now will have him to work for no wages at all.“

‘Instead of having to bargain for others at rising prices, aye. Mind you, it’s no great cheat for Hamon, all considered. Walter will feed him along the way and Walter feeds well, and Hamon will be no shorter of money at the end than he would have been if he was hiring out on his own since he spends whatever he gets as fast as he gets it, at the alehouse here and on worse in Banbury.“

‘He’s a troublemaker?“ Frevisse asked.

‘Hamon? Nay, except what he makes for himself. He’s not yet learned and never will, I doubt, that it’s not play that holds life together but work. That makes him fair useless here, where most everything is work. Eh, well, that’s what the rest of us are here for, I sometimes think. To see to such as can’t see to themselves.“

One of the jurors came up on his other side then, wanting to speak with him. Perryn asked her pardon and drew aside and, glad of the chance to gather herself and her thoughts, Frevisse looked away, over the low church wall at the field beyond it, flowing away in waist-high green grain toward the distant woodshore’s darker band of forest. It was one of the three great fields around the village, each laid out in its own patterning of strips ploughed this way and that with how the land lay and planted or left fallow or set to hay turn and turn and turn about, year by year by year. They stretched out on all sides of the village, laced through with paths for workers going out and coming in and with wider ways for hay wains and harvest carts, with sometimes a tree left standing in a grassy balk, its shade somewhere for folk to sit through the midmorning and afternoon rest times and almost inevitably the tree was large—save here and there where some past giant had gone down with age or in a storm and been replaced by a stripling now no more than maybe half a century old— thick-trunked, the crowns of leaves widespread, their shade familiar to uncounted and mostly forgotten—even their graves in the churchyard replaced by newer ones— generations of Prior Byfield folk.

No one held all of any but almost everyone in the village held some of each, and there was meadow, too, for grazing cattle along the stream in the low places that too often flooded with the spring and autumn rains to be worth planting; and rough pasture beyond the fields, poorer soil cleared by men in want of more land before the Great Death of almost a hundred years ago had made such a dearth of people that there was, even now, no longer need to plough or plant those acres anymore. And of course on a green hillock well out of the village the windmill for grinding of the village’s grain spread its sailed arms against the sky. And downstream was the marsh with its rushes for so many uses, and here and there a hedgerow, and the road that ran through the village and away to north and south and places for the most part too far away to be bothered over by Prior Byfield folk. But it was the fields that were Prior Byfield’s life. If there was to be food in the village, then month in, month out, the fields had to be ploughed, harrowed, seeded, tended, harvested, ploughed again, harrowed again, seeded, tended… year around to year, no end to it, come what may, if Prior Byfield was to live.

Knowing that, Frevisse could only wonder how had it been for Simon Perryn and the others these past three years of ill weather. To watch their hoped-for harvests rot in the fields and then live with the hunger that came afterwards, and everything to do again—the ploughing, harrowing, seeding—days into weeks into months of work with no surety that the next year would be any better.

The field of grain beyond the churchyard wall, only weeks away from ripeness, gave evidence of their courage and hope that they would win their gamble this year at least.

Domina Elisabeth had had the right of it, Frevisse thought—and not about Sister Thomasine alone. Her own prayers would hereafter have a different weight to them, now that the village folk had names and faces for her.

She looked for Sister Thomasine and found her drawn aside into the lee of the church porch, alone again and in no seeming distress. When Frevisse approached her, she looked up calmly enough, and asked, “Is it settled?”

‘The reeve and jurors have decided to keep the holding in Lord Lovell’‘s hands for the time being, rather than give it to either man,“ Frevisse answered; and then did not resist asking, ”What do you think of it all?“

‘Of it all?“ Sister Thomasine asked, puzzled.

Frevisse made a small gesture to the gathered clumps of people scattered around the churchyard. “Of all this. Of everyone.”

With the slightest of thoughtful frowns, Sister Thomasine looked around at the clusters of men and women, all of them busy in talk, and the children everywhere, most of the older ones playing at some kind of walking-tag among their elders, just short of running so no one could say at them, “Don’t run,” but managing to annoy their elders with it anyway while the younger ones were mostly, oddly enough, keeping with their mothers, sitting on the grass beside them or leaning against them, their mothers’ hands absently resting on heads or shoulders or patting at fretful ones wanting to be heeded or go home. Frevisse only wished someone would take Mary Woderove home. She was near the wall beside the gateway pentice, being talked to by Anne, Perryn’s wife, and three other women, and though she seemed quieted out of her anger, she was standing with her head down, refusing to look at them. Anne’s younger boy was there, too, pushing restlessly against his mother, scratching behind one ear at some idle itch, although his brother and Dickon had found a perch further along the wall with some other boys who were listening wide-eared to Father Edmund and Father Henry talking again with Tom Hulcote and some other men. Faced with both priests, they were all subdued enough, though Tom kept shaking his head again and again against whatever was being said at him.

Sister Thomasine sighed and turned her mild gaze back to Frevisse, the slight frown softened to puzzlement as she said gently, “I don’t see why so many choose to make such trouble for themselves, to care so much for worldly things that at the end all come to nothing. Why care so much for things that always end, when there’s God instead?”

It was what a nun, a bride of Christ, should say, but Frevisse knew Sister Thomasine well enough to know that the should and ought that guarded and guided most people’s tongues had nothing to do with her answer. She truly did not see what there was in the World that could possibly be preferred to God.

Frevisse had made the same choice, had given her life over to God and prayer, but knew she had carried with her into her nun’s life an understanding of the other choices and why people made them. She was unsure— and unsettled by her unsurety—whether Sister Thomasine’s lack of that understanding was a weakness or a strength.

The clot of men around Tom Hulcote was breaking up, dispersing at the priests’ urging, Frevisse guessed, with Father Edmund keeping a hand on Tom’s shoulder and going with him toward Mary, still among the women, while Father Henry came toward Frevisse and Sister Thomasine with half his heed still on Tom’s friends, watching to be sure they wandered off rather than clustered into talk again. As he joined them, Frevisse asked, “Did you talk him out of his anger?”

‘I don’t know. Our best hope is that the worst of it is past. But Tom is as much hurt as angered over it, and the sore of the hurt will keep rubbing the anger awake, I’m afraid. He wants very much to have Mary Woderove to wife.“

‘They could marry, even without the holding,“ Frevisse said.

‘They neither of them want to live that poorly, I fear,“ Father Henry said gravely.

Frevisse was saved from struggling to hold back from her answer to that by a shout, “Hai! Look!” from one of the boys atop the wall that turned heads first toward him and then where he was pointing, away toward a rider leading a packhorse just coming into view from the Banbury road beyond the priest’s house.

There was no mistaking Otes, the Banbury carrier. Frevisse had had dealings with him when she was hosteler and again lately as the priory’s cellarer, because he came this way every few weeks on his rounds, carrying letters sometimes, and bringing things ordered by those lacking time or else the wish to go all the way to Banbury market for something not to be had otherwise—needles, say, or spices—and taking orders for things to be brought next time he came. Old Bet, the dun mare he rode, and Splotch, his strong-backed, brown-and-white spotted packhorse, were as well known as he was, and children were tearing off handfuls of the rich churchyard grass before running to meet him. His usual place was likely the village alehouse or else the oak tree on the green, but since most of the village looked to be gathered here, he turned churchward, to draw rein at the gateway, returning greetings but not so cheerfully as Frevisse was used to seeing him, his eyes running among the folk gathering to him until he found out Mary Woderove and said to her over the heads between them, with a twitch of his head toward his pack-horse, burdened with the usual packs and hampers on either side but between them this time a wooden box maybe two feet long, barely a foot wide or deep, “It’s your husband, Mary. I’ve brought him home.”

Frevisse understood immediately and started a prayer. It was a moment longer before Mary, understanding at last, cried out shrilly and flung her hands over her face as Anne and the other women closed on her and Tom Hulcote drew hurriedly back with the look on his face of most men confronted by a crying woman and almost everyone else looked merely uncertain what to do, except the horses, who were reaching soft-lipped for the children’s offerings of fresh grasses, mouthing them carefully out of one small hand after another while the children stared at their parents and everyone else behaving suddenly so strangely. Father Edmund made the sign of the cross in the air toward what was earthly left of Matthew Woderove as he and Father Henry both began to pray aloud for the man’s soul. Sister Thomasine bent her head, joining Frevisse in the Office of the Dead:
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine. Et lux perpetua luceat eis.
Give eternal rest to them, Lord. And perpetual light shine on them…
A porte inferi Erue, Domine, animas eorum.
From the gate of hell Rescue, Lord, their souls. But Frevisse was also watching Mary sobbing in Anne’s arms, and Tom Hulcote caught awkwardly apart, alone, looking uneasily from Mary to the wooden box with her husband’s bones to Mary again; and at Gilbey and Elena Dunn even more apart from everyone than Tom Hulcote but close to each other.

Four ambitious people, Frevisse thought. All with hope for gain because of Matthew Woderove’s death.

And there was Matthew Woderove, dead.

She pushed the thought away. It was prayers for the man’s soul that were needed—
Delicta juventutis meae et ignorantias meas ne memineris, Domine.
The offenses of my youth and my weaknesses do not think on, Lord…

Still on Old Bet and looking faintly embarrassed by all he had unleashed, Otes said pleadingly to Father Edmund, “What should I be doing with him, eh?”

The priest ended a prayer and crossed himself, the gesture echoed by everyone, even the children, before he said, “Take him to his house, I suppose. That’s where the wake…”

Mary cried out and jerked back from Anne. “No!” She flailed a hand toward the box. “No! I won’t have it in my house! It can stay in the church! I don’t want it near me! Leave it here.”

‘Mary, dear,“ Anne protested, trying to cover scandal with pity. ”It’s Matthew. You have to…“