The Clerk’s Tale (23 page)

Frevisse slightly bowed her head, willingly agreeing with that and, more than willingly, followed Domina Elisabeth’s quiet sideways drift to a lee behind one of the larger clusters of people, not far from the church door but out of the way and people’s notice, in their black cloaks and veils unremarkable among the rest of the dark-clad mourners.

Outside the cloister and among so many strangers, Frevisse should have had her head deeply bowed and her eyes lowered. Instead, she bowed her head only enough to seem looking downward while able to cast quick looks around the yard, finding she knew few among the people gathered there. Besides Lady Agnes and her friends now in talk with several men Frevisse thought had been jurors, paired with women probably their wives, the only others familiar to her were Master and Mistress Champyon standing well away across the yard, with Juliana and her brother Rowland beside their mother, the four of them noticeably by themselves. Others there would be mostly relatives of Montfort or his wife, Frevisse guessed, or else unrelatives of sufficient acquaintance—she never seemed to think of friendship as part of Montfort’s life—to feel they should be here. Others, like Lady Agnes and her friends, were there for no more than curiosity or because they felt their importance required their presence. Some of that latter sort were easily picked out from among the others, standing with a puffed awareness of themselves, their voices a little too loud, their gestures a little too bold, to make certain they did not go unnoticed.

Master Champyon was of their kind, Frevisse judged, though presently restrained because no one was giving him any notice save his wife and stepchildren. Nonetheless he stood with his feet set firmly apart, as if claiming that space of yard for his own, with his thumbs hooked into his belt and his elbows cocked wide to spread his cloak open, showing his fine, dark-blue houppelande trimmed in black fur and the ornate, gold-shining—but brass, Frevisse guessed—buckle of his wide, black-dyed leather belt.

His wife well-matched him. Her fashionable padded headroll, set over cauls rather than a wimple, was that little too wide, the layers of veil draped over it that little too full, and she stood with the same over-boldness as her husband, a lift to her head as she looked around the yard with sharp, determined eyes that suggested she was going to be offended soon at being so completely ignored.

Her son, standing on her other side from Master Champyon, had neither his stepfather’s arrogance nor his mother’s sharp eyes, only the set face of someone who wished he were somewhere else. Broad-boned and of good height, he was somewhat wide-girthed for so young a man and likely heading toward what would be fat in a very few years. If he had been named after Rowland, Charlemagne’s great hero of legend, his mother must be displeased with how he was going, but more likely his namesake and probably godfather had been a wealthy uncle, or neighbor who might be hoped to remember his godchild generously in a will.

Frevisse chided herself for judging Mistress Champyon without knowing her except by guesses grown from other people’s words. As for Rowland himself, she had even less by which to guess anything about him. All she could really say with any certainty was that he was of a size to have been able to drive a dagger into Montfort.

And then there was Juliana.

Frevisse took some comfort that, by openly acknowledging her dislike of her, she could at least try to work against it toward being fair. But her good intent was not helped by Juliana being the only one of her family who looked at ease with being here, as if wherever she was should be pleased that she was there. Slender and bright in her blue cloak, she had an assured grace in even the slight turning of her head as she looked around the yard. Like her mother, she wore cauls and padded headroll rather than merely wimple and veil but the cauls were neatly proportioned to frame the delicacy of her face, the headroll only wide enough to spread the short veil draped over it into soft wings that drifted gracefully on either side as she turned her head back to say something to her brother.

Rowland bent his head toward her, said something in return that Juliana seemingly answered with something else because he broke toward laughter that changed his glooming face to that of a younger, brighter man before he stifled it with a hand over his mouth and their mother said something at him that brought his gloom back. Juliana turned her head away, removing herself again from their company. A moment later her look sharpened and Frevisse turned her own head to see Master Haselden entering, trim in black doublet and hose, one side of his cloak thrown back over his shoulder to leave his left hand free, held at waist-height for the woman beside him— surely his wife—to cling to with one hand while holding her skirts clear of the ground with the other. Only when she was safely through the gateway, but still clinging to her husband and her skirts, did Mistress Haselden look up and around with a rapid little glance that made Frevisse think of a mouse caught out of its hole, too frighted to know which way to run. Nichola and Stephen were just behind them and the likeness between mother and daughter was easy to see, though Nichola was pretty with a youth her mother had long since left behind, nor did she have any of her mother’s shyness. Very likely she had never met Montfort; his death could hardly mean anything to her; she was maybe too young to believe much in anyone’s dying, let alone a stranger’s, and though she was tying to keep a mourner’s face, she was looking about her with hardly inheld eagerness as Stephen led her in her parents’ wake toward Lady Agnes.

It was slow going, with constant pausing for greetings and brief talk with various people. Their way took them nowhere near the Champyons, Rowland, and Juliana, which was just as well. Likewise to the good, they made not even a look toward Master and Mistress Champyon’s proud and bitter glares.

Rowland, on the other hand, was studying either his toes or the ground in front of them and Juliana…

Her look was both aching and angry as her eyes followed Stephen across the yard, but all Frevisse curtly thought was that if it hurt that much to see him, then she should not look—unless seeing him with his wife would serve to remind her that neither should she touch.

‘We’re going in,“ Domina Elisabeth said.

Frevisse gladly turned both herself and her thoughts away from living troubles to the needs of the dead, with hope that Montfort’s funeral would help her find way to pray more whole-mindedly for him than she yet had. She and Domina Elisabeth were among the last to go in, passing from the day’s thin sunlight into the church’s twilight and column-shadows, stopping not far inside the door with no pretense of right to any forward place, here by chance and only because it was more seemly that they be than not. Through the shift and settle of people ahead of her, Frevisse briefly saw Mistress Montfort standing, veil-draped, in a cleared place in front of the rood screen, her two daughters on her left, Christopher and another man and a half-grown boy on her right. They made a black-clad cluster of mourning with their equally black-clad household folk gathered behind them, Master Gruesby probably among them.

Somewhere beyond the rood screen, near the altar, was Montfort’s body and, beyond the altar, the place readied for its burial beneath the chancel floor. From where she stood behind so many people Frevisse could see only the altar itself, shining in a halo of candlelight, with a glimpse of St. Mary’s nuns in their choir stalls, before the priest in gold-embroidered black vestments moved into his place at the altar. The Mass for the dead went its slow, mourning way, carried on the priest’s strong voice and the nuns’ singing, with incense from the swung censors making a golden nimbus in the many candles’ light around the altar, drifted among the rafters and down among the crowd. Carried on the wonder of the prayers wound through with the dark mystery of death and the golden hope of life eternal, Frevisse found that at last she had slipped past any troubled effort to pray for Montfort into the glory of praying a soul toward God. Death was the journey beyond journeys, and whatever Montfort had been in life, his soul was on it now, gone into eternity, and she could only wish him mercy, as she hoped for mercy in her turn when her own journey came.

At the end, when all was finished, she stood with bowed head, returning only slowly into the day, into ordinary time and where she was, grateful that Domina Elisabeth stood unmoving beside her until they were crowded back by others crowding out of the way of Mistress Montfort being escorted out by her household, Christopher beside her, the other children behind them, the two girls weeping as if they owed it to themselves to be as openly grieved as possible, the youngest boy stiff-faced with knowing he was being looked at by a great many people whom he did not wish to see him crying. When they were out of the church, people began to mill and talk, voices rising and interest turning, somewhat too openly among some of them, to what there would be in the way of food and drink in the guesthall now but no one making haste out the door, giving Mistress Montfort and her people time to be there ahead of them. For herself, Frevisse wanted to go the other way, following the nuns filing out through their own door into the cloister’s quiet, and nearly said yes when Domina Elisabeth, a little loudly against the mounting voices around them, said, “I promised Ysobel I’d tell her how the funeral went. Will you come with me?”

But this might well be her only chance to find a way to speak with Master or Mistress Champyon without being too noticeable about it. She might well have chance to talk to Master Gruesby, too, and regretfully she said, “By your leave, my lady, I think I’ll go to the guesthall with the others.” And added, not untruthfully, merely inadequately, in answer to Domina Elisabeth’s faint surprise, “I’ll be able to bring all the talk I hear there to Ysobel tomorrow.”

Domina Elisabeth smiled and nodded, satisfied by that, and turned cloisterward, leaving Frevisse to join the drift of folk now leaving the church, although once outside she made no haste across the churchyard back toward the nunnery’s foreyard and the guesthall but took time to gather herself, breathing deeply the sharp-edged air so welcome after the incense-laden church.

That excess of incense and candles had surely been Montfort’s doing rather than anyone else’s. As with his wife’s mourning clothing, he had probably provided for them beforehand by orders and money to their purchase, to be sure his funeral would suit him, and just as well he had because no one else was likely to care as much as he had about it, Frevisse thought.

And so much for where she had gone in prayer during the Mass, she added wryly. Already and easily she was, alas, as uncharitable as ever toward Montfort.

Nor was she much further—if any further—toward learning who had killed him, and the uncomfortable thought rose into her mind that maybe it was not lack of chance holding her back from knowing more about his death but lack of care. Maybe she cared so little that he was dead that it hardly mattered to her who had killed him.

As she passed through the penticed gateway from the churchyard, someone said, “Dame Frevisse?” and she turned to find Dickon standing a little aside from it, plainly waiting for her but looking unsure he should be there until she said, letting him know she was pleased to see him, “Dickon. How goes it with you?”

His unsurety vanished with a grin and he jerked his head toward the guesthall, saying, “That depends on how much they leave for the rest of us.”

He and the other St. Frideswide men, like most of the guests’ servants, had not been in the church for the funeral but neither would they have any part in the feast except for whatever leavings might come their way afterward.

‘I’ll eat as little as may be,“ Frevisse promised, walking on that way.

Falling into step beside her, Dickon laughed and said, still grinning, “I’ve done what you asked.”

‘Good! What did you find?“

‘That bank that closes in the garden on that side, it’s for the millstream.“

‘The millstream?“

‘The mill is there.“ Dickon pointed toward a building’s thatched roof showing over the high wall at the other side of the churchyard, not far off from where they stood. ”There’s been a deep ditch cut to bring water from the Thames past the mill and then the nunnery,“ Dickon explained. ”The ditch and the piled-up bank run all along that side of the nunnery before curving back to the Thames near the ferry crossing.“

That was something toward which she might have at least made guess if she’d thought about it, Frevisse realized. To run water through or beside a place was a common way of dealing with a common problem. At St. Frideswide’s the water to carry off kitchen and privy Wastes came from a nearby stream by way of a wide, shallow ditch dug past the nunnery and back to the stream.

Here the water came from the Thames and served first to turn a mill’s waterwheel as well.

‘Is there a path along it?“ she asked.

‘Not on this side. On the other side there is, beyond the up-banked earth but no way from one side to the other and on their in-sides both banks go down steep, into the water. And the water’s deep. It took a stick almost as tall as me to reach the bottom. And flowing fast, too.“

Frevisse could well believe that, what with the mill to drive and all the force of the Thames behind it. “But someone could make their way along the top of the bank on the nunnery side if they wanted to?”

Dickon shook his head. “There’s barely toes-room at its top. The buildings crowd right up to it and the bank is all grassy anyway. I wouldn’t even try it, for thinking I’d not go far without I’d slip off of it.”

‘That’s sensible, then,“ said Frevisse. And if a boy could not do it, neither could a man.