The Squire’s Tale (34 page)

She made him a curt curtsy and started to draw back, head still bowed. Quelling an urge to impatience at both her and Robert, Frevisse put a hand to the middle of her back, stopping her, and said, “Tell him the rest. The other thing we talked of.”

Katherine gave her a desperate look.

‘The rest,“ Frevisse insisted. ”He won’t say it. You have to.“

‘About your wanting to be a nun,“ Robert put in, his voice barren and harsh. ”You want to tell me you want to go back to St. Frideswide’s with Dame Frevisse when she goes tomorrow because you want to be a nun.“

‘No,“ Katherine began, startled. ”I don’t…“

‘This afternoon, then? There’s still time to put a few miles between you and here if that’s what you want so much.“

‘Robert,“ Frevisse cut in sharply, silencing him, then said at Katherine, equally sharp, ”Say it. What you said to me. Look at him and say it.“

And Katherine did, caught between tears and an anger at Robert’s harshness, the words pouring out even more vehemently than they had to Frevisse. “I only want to be a nun if I can’t marry you. That’s what I told Dame Frevisse. That I’ve loved you for this year and more and that I want to marry you or else be a nun. I said I’d tell you when the time was better for it but she said I had to tell you now. That you needed to hear it. She said…” Katherine broke off, not able to go on against Robert’s frozen stare; bowed her head and said as she sank in a low curtsy, the words smothered by shame and tears, “But I shouldn’t have and I’m sorry and pray your pardon. I…”

Robert gave a low cry, closed the few feet between them in a single stride, bent to take hold of her beneath the elbows and raised her up, held her away from him to let her look into his face where all his heart was naked to be seen. And Katherine after a long moment’s look went simply into his arms, that closed around her as if bringing her home.

And Frevisse turned away and left them, with for the first time in too many days a quiet surety that some way now there would be goodness come from all the ill there had been.

Author’s Note

The idea that the 1400s in England were a black pit of constant lawlessness and violence is no longer an unquestioned given of scholarship. That Robert and Sir Lewis would choose arbitration over armed conflict is very much in character for their time and place, especially because, at the time of this story, the massive breakdown of royal power that led to the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses in the next decade was only a shadowed possibility. Evidence abounds that in normal times most people—at all levels of society and right through the century—preferred to utilize the well-developed and thoroughly structured system of arbitration to settle disputes, on the very good grounds that arbitration did not tend to leave you dead and cost
far
less than hiring lawyers and going to court—motivations as valid then as now.

The medieval medical theory of bodily “humours” held (to put it as briefly as mercifully possible) that there are four humours to the body—hot, cold, moist and dry—and if they are in balance, none outweighing the others in influence, then a person is healthy. Likewise, lost health can be restored by putting the humours into balance again and elaborate treatises of the time dealt with how this could be done. What this evidences is a basic grasp of the idea of hormonal imbalance and attempts with insufficient tools to cope with it, as Dame Claire does with Lady Blaunche. But then, even today, hormonal balance is often a difficult thing to manage and it should be understood that the Middle Ages were not a willfully ignorant time. Rather than wallowing in darkness, waiting for the Renaissance to happen, centuries of concentrated effort went into developing tools both of the mind and hand and in accumulating knowledge, some of it rescued out of the abyss left by the fall of Rome, much of it newly discovered, all of it laying the basis for the breakthroughs of the Renaissance, which then—like an ungrateful child—turned on its begetter and scorned it.

As for Caesarean delivery, it was well-known in the Middle Ages, as amply detailed and illustrated in
Not of Woman Born: Representations of Caesarean Birth in Medieval and Renaissance Culture
by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski. As a passing point of interest, the incision was traditionally made along the woman’s linea alba, lengthwise to the body, because there was less blood that way, making it easier to find and deliver the baby in time for baptism before it, usually, died. Because the mother was almost invariably dead before this was done, it did not matter that all the belly muscles were severed in the process. Far later, when advances in surgery made it possible to perform C-sections with child and mother surviving, doctors continued to slice vertically rather than crosswise despite it was no longer necessary to do so and that it was understood that an incision side to side,
between
the stomach muscles, would leave them intact. Only eventually, and not many years ago, in the 1970s, did it occur to doctors to change their technique, and not all, I’m informed, have done so yet. One has to ask, when someone talks about the “barbarous” Middle Ages, what we should term such willful and unnecessary mutilation of a body today.

Among the very many works I accessed in developing the background for this story, of particular note and much use was Christine Carpenter’s densely detailed book
Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401-1499.
A scholarly delight.