The Squire’s Tale (17 page)

It hardly mattered, Frevisse supposed. Whichever way it had been, things were as they were, and once the meal had started, it was none so bad as it might have been for her at least. The man on her left and the one on Dame Claire’s right spoke with them each briefly, enough to satisfy manners, and then turned to talk with the men on their other sides, leaving her and Dame Claire to their meal and each other’s company. Keeping in mind their Lenten fasting, she and Dame Claire took only small portions of all the dishes set out with the first remove, and though they ate slowly, they finished before anyone else could and were left, not feeling free to talk here among so many men, with nothing to do except exchange a glance at each other past the edges of their veils and then, on Frevisse’s part, with everyone else busy at their food and talk, to look to the high table to see how things went there.

Mistress Dionisia had withdrawn, she saw, to the corner near the solar door, quietly out of the way, keeping discreet ward on her young mistress. From nunnery talk, Frevisse knew she had been Katherine’s nurse in the girl’s babyhood and her waiting-woman ever since. She had come into the Fenner household with her and therefore it was likely that when Katherine married she would go with her again and so must be almost as desperately interested as Katherine in what these Allesleys were like; but from the utter quietness of her standing there, with hands folded at her waist and eyes downcast, she might have been feeling nothing, thinking nothing, noticing nothing beyond the floor at her feet, and despite that was probably seeing as well as Frevisse could that between Katherine and Drew Allesley, seated on her other side from Robert, all seemed to be going amiably just now.

Certainly to the eye there was no more amiss with the young man from the front than there had been from the back. He and Katherine made a couple good to look on as they sat there, his fair head and her dark one close together in what looked like lively talk, broken off only sometimes while he served her from whatever dish was set between them or he made brief talk to Master Verney on his left and Katherine turned, equally briefly, to Robert on her right.

The second remove was brought, occupying Frevisse a while, but when she had done, she turned her heed to Robert and Sir Lewis who looked to be, surprisingly enough, almost as easily in talk together as the others. If nothing else, that meant they were both able to put manners before angers, and in such dealing as they were to have after this, that could only be to the good, Frevisse thought. Only Benedict, seated on Sir Lewis’ other side, was making a poor show, unable to summon up good manners enough to hide how displeased he was to be there, leaving him on what looked like the constant edge of being openly rude. He made sorry contrary to young Allesley but Frevisse was less sorry for him than for Robert, forced into pretending he did not see his stepson’s ill manner while probably hoping it would go no worse, and mercifully it did not as they passed on to the third remove, but Frevisse, for one, was relieved when the meal was done, thanks given, and everyone was drawing back from the tables.

Her own hope, said quickly to Dame Claire under the scrape of benches being shoved back and voices shifting to louder around them, was that they could go to the chapel to say at least something of the day’s Offices, and Dame Claire gave a quick nod of agreement but they had only begun to wend their way around benches and men toward the outer door when Gil slid around a clot of arbiters and to them so purposefully that Frevisse’s heart sank even before he bowed and said, “They’re going to start their talking now and Mistress Katherine and Master Drew are going out to walk in the garden awhile, or maybe the orchard, and Master Fenner asks if you two would keep them company.”

‘Keep them company?“ Dame Claire repeated uncertainly.

Gil stepped closer, saying too low for anyone else to hear, “He wants someone besides Mistress Dionisia there.”

Frevisse traded looks with Dame Claire that told each other the request was too reasonable to refuse but that they both wished they could, before Dame Claire said to Gil as mildly as if nothing else could have been more pleasurable to them, “Of course we will.”

Gil cleared a way for them the rest of the way down the hall, to join Katherine and Drew in the screen’s passage to the outer door, with Mistress Dionisia and an Allesley servant there, too. Katherine gave Frevisse’s name and Dame Claire’s to Drew and his to them and he made them a low bow and polite greeting and said to Katherine, gesturing toward the door, “By your leave?”

She smiled on him and led their way out into the bright spring day, with a pause at the head of the steps while she gathered her skirts a little higher in front and Mistress Dionisia picked them up in back to keep them off the stairs. Then Drew held out his hand and she rested her free one on it for him to lead her down, with another pause at the stairfoot while Mistress Dionisia set down her back-skirts and Katherine reached around to gather them up. She was dressed to show both that she was able to afford such a wealth of cloth and lady enough to have no other need for her hands than managing her skirts and she made a quick and graceful movement of clearing them from the ground behind with one hand while still holding them up in front with her other, all without showing more than the tip of her shoe when she’d finished and smiled at Drew to show she was ready to go on.

Many of the lesser folk with no part in the afternoon’s talks had already spilled out of the hall but they cleared way as Drew and Katherine crossed the yard toward the gate, followed by Dame Claire and Frevisse—glad her own skirts were far less full and made to clear the ground, even if only by a scant inch—followed by Mistress Dionisia followed in turn by Gil and Drew’s servant. Outside the gateway, they turned leftward and went by a graveled path between the manor’s wall and a granary, turned a corner of the manor’s wall and were at a penticed gate set in a waist-high withy fence, with beyond it the garden laid out narrowly between wall and orchard in a pattern of graveled paths and square beds where only a few early plants showed young green, with a hedge and arbor closing it in at its far end and a turf bench along the low earthen bank that separated it from the orchard.

As Drew held the gate open for her, Katherine murmured that it was not so pleasant a place this early in the spring as later in the year.

‘No matter what time of year we were here,“ he answered, ”you’d be the fairest flower in it.“

Katherine turned her gaze aside, looking down, accepting his fair words in the best of maidenly manners, and remembering the fiercely frightened girl of hardly two hours ago, Frevisse wondered if this change in her was purely by will or if, after all, she found Drew Allesley to her liking. If it was the latter way with her, all this might not turn out so ill after all. At least for Katherine.

Meanwhile Gil hurried forward to hold the gate open for Frevisse, Dame Claire, and Mistress Dionisia to pass through, leaving Drew and Katherine free to stroll off together by the nearest path, Katherine saying something about the grapevine over the arbor. There being no need to more than keep them in sight, Frevisse hesitated over what to do now. Gil and the Allesley man were in no doubt on their own behalf; they propped themselves against the pentice posts as if ready to hold them up for the afternoon, and Mistress Dionisia, saying to no one in particular, “There now, I’ve been on my feet long enough and want to be off them, by your leave,” sat herself down on a wooden bench beside the gateway, adding to Frevisse and Dame Claire, Come sit, too, if you like. There’s room enough.“

‘We’d rather walk a little,“ Dame Claire said with a smile, moving away toward a path that Katherine and Drew were not on. ”Dame Frevisse?“

Unaware she had any particular urge to walk until Dame Claire said she did, Frevisse joined her, the two of them falling without thought into the familiar, matching, measured steps they so often used when circling St. Frideswide’s cloister walk together, hands tucked into their opposite sleeves and eyes to the ground a few yards ahead of them. The silence between them was familiar, too, and Frevisse would have been content with it and with the thinly warm spring sunshine and no more sounds than the small crunch of gravel underfoot, the bird sounds in the hedge at the garden’s end, the low murmur of Katherine and Drew’s voices across the garden and Mistress Dionisia and the two men beside the gate; but she sensed Dame Claire tense beside her, and when they had walked the garden’s length and were turning to go back again with nothing spoken yet, she asked, “What’s the matter?”

With a promptness that betrayed how much she had been wanting to say something but her voice, like Frevisse’s, kept cloister-low, Dame Claire burst out, “I don’t know. Too much. Nothing. I don’t know.”

Overt uncertainty was rarely Dame Claire’s way. The surprise of it nearly brought Frevisse to a halt, but Dame Claire went on walking, saying, “It’s Lady Blaunche. I don’t know what to do.”

‘There’s something more wrong with her than you thought?“

‘What’s worst wrong with her she’s doing to herself,“ Dame Claire said sharply; and then, unhappily, ”No, that’s not fair. Some of it is truly her body’s unbalanced humours and I’m trying to do what can be done for that. But she’s not helping. She’s…“ Dame Claire broke off and started again, annoyance and pity equally mixed, ”There I am, still wanting to be unkind about her when how she presently is isn’t even all her own doing. Childbearing simply isn’t kind to her and she’s unkind because of it.“

‘I doubt,“ Frevisse murmured, ”she’s a mild lady at the best of times.“

‘I gather not,“ Dame Claire agreed, grimly enough that Frevisse looked sideways at her, again surprised. Very rarely did anything come between Dame Claire and her care for someone she was tending, their needs outweighing all else with her, including her own feelings toward them.

‘You’ll be able to help her, though?“

Dame Claire drew and let out a long breath before she answered, very quietly, “I don’t know.”

Frevisse stopped and turned toward her, beginning to be alarmed. “You don’t know?”

Dame Claire faced her in turn. “It’s as with a bone or muscle kept twisted out of their right way too long. They’re all the harder to draw back to where they should be and harder to keep there once they are. Lady Blaunche’s humours have been awry for a long while, not just with this childing but with her others, too, and that her childings have come so near together makes it the worse. There’s hardly been chance for her body to right itself between them. For a great many women it doesn’t matter. For her, it’s otherwise.”

‘But surely there’s something—“

‘Surely there is. But it will take time.“

The flat way she said “time” told Frevisse she meant more than a little of it and carefully, afraid she would not like the answer, Frevisse asked, “Longer than Lent?”

‘Very possibly.“

Dame Claire did not sound as if she liked her answer any better than Frevisse did, and in a silence now brooding on Frevisse’s side as well as Dame Claire’s, they walked on.

Since becoming a nun Frevisse had never been anywhere out in St. Frideswide’s for either Christmas or Easter, the tomes of each year when heart and mind should be most fully given over to the mystery and joy of, first, Christ’s coming into the world and then his triumph over it. To be somewhere else, to be unable to weave herself into the deep patterning of prayers and praise that brought her into the very heart of the mystery, the core of its joy…

‘Nor does it help,“ Dame Claire went on, ”that everything and nearly everyone around her seems bent on making everything worse. Did you know she and her husband quarreled last night?“

‘No.“

Nor did Frevisse much want to, but Dame Claire went on, somewhat grimly, “Mistress Avys has taken to telling me everything there’s ever been wrong with her lady, which is useful only to a point. Then it becomes more trouble than help and I surely don’t need to hear what she and her husband were angry over at each other in their bed. Why can’t people remember there are ears on the other side of doors? And there’ll be another quarrel tonight if Master Fenner hears what she told Katherine this morning after he and Benedict quarreled.”

‘He’s quarreled with Benedict, too?“

‘Most assuredly.“

The garden was far longer than it was wide but they had reached its end and turned to pass through the arbor, able to glimpse through the barren branches that Katherine and Drew were already well back toward the gate by the garden’s other path, not hurrying, merely matching each other’s pace without apparent need to think about it, their heads turned toward each other, Katherine’s tilted a little up toward his, both of them smiling as they talked. Dame Claire made a small nod toward them. “It looks as if Lady Blaunche’s hope there is going to be lost, too. After Master Fenner and Benedict went at it this morning…”

‘Over what?“

‘This Allesley business. What else? I don’t know what set them off. The other women and I were with Lady Blaunche in her bedchamber and they were in the parlor and we didn’t hear what started them, only from where they were too angry to keep their voices down. First it was Benedict shouting that Master Fenner was a fool not to keep Katherine’s wealth in Fenner hands instead of giving it over to people who didn’t deserve the luck. Master Fenner shouted back that no matter what Benedict thought and come what may, he was to keep his mouth shut while the dealings with the Allesleys went on or he’d find himself out the door for once and all and not a penny with him to see him on his way.“