The Bishop’s Tale (14 page)

“Lately he had me copying various books he wanted for his own. I finished a new work of Boccaccio’s at Michaelmas—”

“New?” Frevisse asked ironically. The Italian writer had died well back in the last century.

“Newly in English at any rate.” The corners of his mouth twitched. If Frevisse had thought him given to amusement, she would have suspected he was suppressing a smile. He said, “It’s a very traditional tirade against women. Quite passionate actually.”

Aware that he was watching for her reaction while he spoke, Frevisse asked with unfeigned amusement, “Did he do a matching treatise equally fair to men?”

Sir Philip laughed aloud, deep and full and so surprising that Dame Perpetua looked up from the book she held and Master Lionel broke his concentration on a handful of papers long enough to stare offended at them before returning to his work.

“The translator assures us,” Sir Philip said, “that the work is put into English for its literary form, not its sentiments.”

“How very comforting,” Frevisse responded drily. “How did my uncle come by it?”

“He borrowed it from his grace the duke of Gloucester with permission to make copy of it—”

“The duke of Gloucester? The duke of Gloucester loaned one of his precious books to a relative of Bishop
Beaufort!”

Besides creating scandals and upheaval in the royal government, principally against Bishop Beaufort, the king’s uncle Gloucester’s great passion was a devoted—and expensive—pursuit of books not readily had in England.

“A precious book of which I daresay the duke’s and your uncle’s may be presently the only copies. His grace of Gloucester commissioned the translation. It seems the love of books is stronger than the hatreds of politics.”

“It must be.” But then her uncle had never been particularly good at hatreds. “They take too much energy and concentration,” he had said. “I have better things to do.”

Sir Philip looked across the room toward the desks beside the window. He hesitated, then said, “Lately Master Chaucer had set me to copying out a book of the deeds of Arthur that I’d never seen before. Or to be more precise, the deeds of Sir Gawain. Would you care to see it?”

“Yes! Assuredly!”

“It’s here.” Sir Philip crossed to the smaller desk, behind Chaucer’s but placed the same way, left end to the window for better light for the writer’s work. Frevisse followed him as he folded back the cloth covering the desk’s slanted top to reveal a sheet written half-over in fine, black italic script next to a thin book held open by a copyist’s usual small lead bars laid across the top of its pages. With care that told how much he valued the book, Sir Philip put aside the bars and inserted a paper scrap in his place before picking it up and handing it to her.

It was bound in green leather, soft to her touch. Frevisse stroked it, delaying the pleasure of opening a work she did not know. But only briefly; her eagerness was too much.

“It’s in English,” she said in surprise. Most stories of King Arthur that she had encountered were in French. Not all, but most.

“And verse, for good measure,” Sir Philip said.

“ ‘Since the siege and the assault was ceased at Troy, The burgh broken and burned to brands and ashes, The man that the trammels of treason there wrought…’” Frevisse read. “Oh, this has a goodly way to it!” Forgetful of any other purpose, she sank down on the window seat, intent on the wonder of having something entirely new to read. “”If you’ll listen this lay but a little while…‘“

“Here’s where you’ve all gone to!”

Startled, Frevisse looked up, along with Dame Perpetua. Sir Philip turned sharply. Only Master Lionel kept on with his business; no one ever came looking for him. One of Aunt Matilda’s maidservants entered the room. “Can you come?” she asked with a quick curtsy directed at both Frevisse and Sir Philip. “My lady the countess prays it. My lady her mother has taken to crying again and can’t stop. My lady the countess feels one or the other or both of you might be able to help her.”

Frevisse was already rising and putting the book back on the desk as Sir Philip said, “Assuredly.”

“Dame Perpetua, will you stay here?” Frevisse asked. There would be no fear of impropriety in Master Lionel’s presence, and this was the chance they needed.

“If I may,” Dame Perpetua said. She had made no move to relinquish the book she was holding. “I doubt I’d serve more than small purpose in going.”

Frevisse nodded briskly and followed Sir Philip and the maidservant out of the room.

Chapter
13

When Frevisse came into her aunt’s bedchamber she found Matilda lying in bed desperately clinging to Alice’s hands and Alice saying soothing things in a voice that told she had been saying them for a long while. Matilda’s face was ravaged with tears and hopeless crying. Frevisse went to her and laid a hand on her shaking shoulder under the covers. Still holding with one hand to Alice, Aunt Matilda reached the other to grasp Frevisse’s wrist, sobbing brokenly, “I miss him so much! I miss him so much!”

“I know, Aunt. I know. I do, too,” Frevisse said with aching sincerity, and without warning was crying with her, huge, unbearable tears scalding down her cheeks.

Sir Philip joined her at the bedside. His voice warmer than Frevisse had ever heard it, and calm with deep authority, he said, “My dear lady, you’ve made yourself ill with your grieving. You’ll break your heart if you go on, and think what your husband would say to see you like this.”

Matilda choked on a sob and with the ghost of a smile trembling on her lips, said, “He… he would say… ‘N-now, Maud. Now, Maud.”“

“Exactly so. So imagine he’s saying that to you and try to find the peace he would want you to have.” He bent over her, not to give blessing but to tuck the embroidered cover more comfortingly under her chin. “You’re over-wearied and must stay in bed all this day. You’ve been too brave for too long and need your rest to regain your strength, just as Master Chaucer would want you to. If you want anything, we’ll joyfully do or bring it.” He glanced around the room, eliciting a nod or faint murmur of agreement from everyone there. “You see? We love you, too, and want you well again. We’ve lost the head of our household; we could not bear to lose its heart.”

Aunt Matilda sniffed tremulously and managed a watery smile. Tears still stood in her eyes but the raw edge of hysteria was gone. She had let go of Frevisse’s hand and was holding Sir Philip’s now.

He turned to one of the women holding a goblet at the foot of the bed. “Is that for my lady?”

“A sleeping potion, sir.”

She held it out and he took it. Alice lifted her mother on the pillows, and, still holding her hand, Sir Philip gently held the goblet to Matilda’s lips, waiting patiently while she drank it a sip at a time, until she had taken it all. Then he handed the goblet away and took her hand in both of his.

“You’ll stay with me?” she quavered. “Even while I sleep? You’ll stay with me and pray? For Thomas?”

“And for you, my lady. I’ll be here when you awaken,” he promised.

Worn-out, she did not resist whatever had been in the drink but soon slipped into a drowse, with tears still on her cheeks. Even with the drug, it was a shallow sleep, pathetic in its fragility.

Frevisse had drawn back from the bed while Sir Philip tended to her aunt. Now, with everyone keeping very still for fear of disturbing the sleeper, and Sir Philip clearly intending to stay there for as long as he had promised, she slipped sideways to the door and out. Silently, she edged the door closed but not latched behind her, whispered, “She sleeps, but only lightly,” to the pair of serving maids hovering in the outer chamber, and gave them no time to ask her anything else, but went briskly on.

Now, while for this once she could be sure of where he was, she meant to look through Sir Philip’s room.

If she had met anyone in the chapel’s antechamber, she would have simply gone in, as if intent on prayers. But there was no one, and she went up the narrow stairs in soft-footed haste. Outside his door she paused to rap sharply, lest his servant be there. No one called out, and she went in.

The bed had been made, the shutters set open to the pallid sunlight. The sparsely furnished room was neatened to the point of being utterly impersonal. There was no trace of the chaos of emotion and desperation yesterday.

Frevisse crossed to the table. She touched her fingertips to its scrubbed top, where Sir Clement had fallen forward, as if an answer might come to her by that. Nothing did. She looked around and saw the only closed place was the aumbry, from where the bottle and goblet that had given Sir Clement his last drink had come. She opened its doors to three neatly ordered shelves. The bottle on the bottom one, beside two cups and a pewter plate was not yesterday’s; this one’s cork had not been pulled. She took up the nearest cup and found it unremarkable, of blue-glazed pottery, simple, undecorated, austere like the rest of the room. Its fellow matched it. The plate might have come from a peasant’s cottage.

On the middle shelf was a golden casket. Even before she opened it, Frevisse knew that it must contain the essentials for the last sacrament. She crossed herself, took it down, and reverently opened it. Everything appeared exactly as it ought to, with the tiny jars of chrism and holy water, a gilt crucifix, a small wax candle, and a pyx. She closed the box and rubbed her fingers with her thumb, to remove any trace of holy particles.

Feeling guilty for her intrusiveness, she reached among and behind the few pieces of folded clothing on the upper shelf for anything hastily put out of sight and found nothing.

She went to the bed. The straw-filled mattress rustled at her prodding. She stooped to look underneath. There were only the ropes laced through a plain wooden frame and his servant’s more narrow truckle bed. Careful even in her haste, she felt all through the coverings of Sir Philip’s bed and then pulled out the servant’s and did the same. Finding nothing, she unmade them, to inspect the mattresses. Neither showed any sign of having been cut open and sewn shut again and, hoping she did it identically to how they had been, she remade both beds.

She tried the prie-dieu next, running her hands along its sides and tilting the bench to look at its underside. As nearly as she could tell, there was nowhere for a hidden place in it. The cushion on the kneeler was firmly tacked down along all its edges and though she kneaded the cushion thoroughly with both hands she could detect nothing odd about its stuffing.

The desk remained. Like the prie-dieu it seemed to have no secret places, and the books were commonplace ones. A worn psalter, an
Oculus Sacerdotis
with a carved leather cover, the ubiquitous
Lay Folks Catechism,
from which Frevisse and nearly everyone she knew had been taught their prayers in childhood, and a handsome copy of
Stimulus Amoris,
written to stir the reader’s love of God. Frevisse riffled through the pages of each one, finding the first three to be plain copies of indifferent craftsmanship, heavily annotated in all their margins in firm, dark writing. The
Stimulus Amoris
was another matter. Its script had been done in a clear, steady hand meant to make the words as lovely in their seeming as in their meaning; what notes there were, were lightly done, as if to distract from the beauty of the pages as little as might be. And it was illuminated as the other books were not, painted throughout with pictures in bright, exquisite detail, shining among the pages. Despite where she was, and why, Frevisse lingered over the book.

When she put it back at last and looked around the room, she could find nothing else to question. There was nothing here to suggest murder.

But why should there be? Sir Philip had had all night to dispose of anything dangerous to himself. A trip to the necessarium, a bottle, a packet, a screw of paper dropped down the hole, and he was rid of evidence that he had killed a man. But aside from that, it was difficult to imagine that he had had some sort of poison in his room at all. Why would he? On the chance he might someday have occasion, desire, or chance to use it? If he were indeed a man who kept poison to hand that purposefully, he was far different and more dangerous than he seemed.

Or had he had poison to hand especially for Sir Clement? Knowing for weeks that Chaucer would die, and that almost surely Sir Clement would come to the funeral, had he prepared for the chance? But then how had he given him the poison at the feast and again in the room? For surely it had to have been a double dose of the same poison for the symptoms to be the same?

She had the
why
Sir Philip might have done it: Sir Clement was a threat to his advancement in the Church. But the
how
eluded her. In the room, yes, there might have been chance, but in the hall Sir Philip had been seated far down the table from Sir Clement and not come near him until after Sir Clement had been stricken.

Wait. Yes, he had.

He had gone to Sir Clement on the occasion of Sir Clement’s outburst, had spoken with him. Had there been chance then to put something in his food? Frevisse shut her eyes, trying to remember the scene. He had come up behind Sir Clement, but she could not recall that he had ever bent over the table or even come close to it. Dishes and drink had been well out of his easy reach; anything he might have done that way would have been obvious to someone.

Then had he had help? An accomplice from among other victims of Sir Clement’s tormenting, willing to share the risk and not likely to become a greater threat to Sir Philip than Sir Clement was? Who had been in a position to do what needed to be done at the table in the hall?