The Clerk’s Tale (26 page)

With nothing else she thought she could learn of Master Gruesby, she said, “I’d best go. Please, I pray you, tell Master Christopher I want to talk with him.” Master Gruesby bowed and she added to the top of his head, “Tell him, too, that he had better ask more strongly after that dagger.”

Chapter 16

She had learned what she could for now, Frevisse thought, but escape was most of the hall’s length away through the crowding of people. By weaving her course carefully, she kept well clear of where Lady Agnes was in heads-together talk with several other women but instead came face to face with Nichola just turning away from two other young women now drifting away toward the tables for more food or drink. As momentarily without anything to say as Frevisse was, Nichola paused, before good manners caught up to her and she said, “My lady, you haven’t even anything to drink? Would you like me to bring you something?”

‘No. Thank you, but no,“ Frevisse said, returning the courtesy, only just stopping herself from speaking as if to a child. Nichola was very young but not a child, was a wife and well along toward being a woman, and of everyone Frevisse had yet met here, she and Sister Ysobel seemed to be the best-hearted and least given to doing harm. ”In truth, having done my duty here, I’m trying to escape.“

Nichola smiled with delight. “I’d go with you if I could. Isn’t it dull? I thought there’d be someone different to see. The sheriff maybe or even Lord Lovell or that maybe he’d send his son. That would have been reasonable, I think. Master Montfort was escheator, after all. But it’s all just people I’ve seen before.”

‘There’s Master Montfort’s family,“ Frevisse pointed out.

‘They’re all dismal and weeping. And what can you talk to them about except Master Montfort being dead? And that’s no good. I didn’t even like him.“

‘You met him?“ Frevisse asked, carefully not showing great curiosity.

‘Oh, yes. The times he came to visit Father. They knew each other from Lord Lovell’s and when he was hereabouts he’d stop in to talk and be fed. Mother always hated it when he came. I don’t think even Father liked him but Master Montfort was someone you didn’t want to not like you, if you see what I mean.“

Frevisse saw. Montfort had had power to make other people’s lives difficult and had never paused, that she had ever seen, over using his power to do exactly that if he had the chance. It had indeed been better to keep on his good side. Even if she had never managed to do it.

‘Stephen says we’ll maybe go to Lord Lovell’s for Christmas next,“ Nichola chatted on. ”Just he and I. He says that I should be one of Lady Lovell’s ladies for a while sometime and that would be lovely, I think. He says we’ll go to London sometime, too. I wish I could have been there for the queen’s coming.“ When there had been processions in the streets and ceremonies everywhere to welcome Margaret of Anjou, a girl hardly older than Nichola but brought from France to be young King Henry’s wife. Nichola sighed. ”Though even going to Oxford would be a change. I’ve never been further than Walling-ford and that was just for one day and a night, and then straight back here we came and it was all some business of Father’s anyway.“

Frevisse almost said something tedious about the time would come for Nichola to go places and see things but remembered how much she had disliked having things like that said to her when she was young, and before she found something else to say, Nichola looked past her and stiffened into sudden silence. Frevisse turned her head to look, too, and saw Stephen and Juliana standing together in talk together farther along this side of the tables. Or not so much in talk together, Frevisse amended, as Juliana talking at him, her hand on his arm to keep him there while Stephen, with a small, round cake in one hand and a goblet in the other, looked more as if he wanted to be somewhere else.

‘I don’t like her,“ said Nichola stiffly. ”She won’t leave him alone.“

Frevisse held back from asking, “Does he want her to?” and managed to say instead, “They’ve met before this?”

‘Oh yes.“ Nichola’s voice was cold with scorn. ”She came up to him before the inquest, when we were on our way to Lady Agnes’s, and spoke to him. There in the street, in front of everyone. Before that, she even came to see him at home but he wasn’t there and Father wouldn’t have her in. He just kept her in talk in the hall awhile and saw her out again. Mother says that to do those sort of things she must have no manners.“

‘What does Stephen say?“ Frevisse asked, knowing she should not.

‘Oh, he says it’s because he knew her husband in Lord Lovell’s household that she likes to talk with him, but I think it’s because she wants him and Mother says that, being a man, he’s probably fool enough to be flattered that she does.“

So much for keeping thoughts out of Nichola’s head, Frevisse thought wryly but aloud said only and mildly, “Just now he looks as if he might want rescuing.”

Nichola brightened. “He does, doesn’t he? Should I, do you think?”

‘Most assuredly.“ And again knowing she should not, added, ”It will annoy Lady Juliana.“

Nichola smiled with mischief. “I’d like that. She annoys
me.
If you’ll pardon me, my lady?”

Smiling, too, Frevisse nodded her pardon and Nichola went, making her way among people toward her husband and Juliana. Frevisse, for her own part, went on toward the door again, reaching it but lingering before going out, long enough to see Stephen, as Nichola came up to them, move to meet her, smiling and holding out the cake and goblet to her. Nichola, sensible girl, smiled up at him as she took them and was still smiling as she turned to speak to Juliana, who was no longer smiling at all.

Frevisse’s last sight of them was of Nichola standing very close beside Stephen, her claim to him clear, and Frevisse took out-of-doors with her the thought that the girl seemed likely to hold her own far better than Lady Agnes thought she could. From what Frevisse had seen of her, she was not weak, merely young, still learning life, but had already discovered she need not obey everything she was told to do and shown she could think for herself. At a guess, there was more of her father than her mousey mother in her, and very possibly the time would come when she would surprise them all. And maybe Stephen more than anyone.

Frevisse meant to return to the church, to try to pray for Montfort’s soul better than she had so far. Thinking about Nichola, she even made it to the nave door and a few steps in before she stopped. The smell of incense still hung in the air and the pale, thinning cloud of it among the rafters, but from where she stood there was no other sign there had been a funeral here. A man’s passing from earthly life had been noted and dealt with and those who had been there were moved on, were even now eating, drinking, and making merry in the guesthall, in the full knowledge—willfully though they might ignore it in the forefront of their minds—that tomorrow might come their turn.

At the thought Frevisse made an impatient sound at herself. There were few things so true as old proverbs, but come what may—including tomorrow—she did not feel like praying for Montfort just now. Let him fend for himself, she thought, knowing she was in the wrong even as she thought it but nonetheless turned away, left the church, and crossed the nunnery yard to the gateway. A few poor folk were clustered there, waiting for whatever alms of food or money might be given out as was usual at rich funerals. Doubtless they did not wait in vain. Just as there would be enough and more left from the funeral feast for Dickon and any other servants in the nunnery, Montfort would have seen alms to the poor as necessary to his after-death glory as masses, candles, incense, and his wife’s mourning clothes.

Guilty that even now she could not think charitably toward him, Frevisse passed among them and into the street and turned not toward Lady Agnes’s but away. By right and Rule she should be out nowhere alone unless merely to Lady Agnes’s house, but she had suddenly had enough of this going back and forth from Lady Agnes’s to the nunnery to Lady Agnes’s like a feathered cork in a badly played game of shuttlecock. When she had chosen to become a nun, she had made willing trade between the freedom she would gain for her soul against the freedom she would lose for her body, but here in Goring that binding to other people’s will was coming between her and being able to do much at all toward finding out Montfort’s murderer. If she was slack at that task because she did not greatly care that he was dead, then she was grievously in the wrong and to put herself in a different kind of wrong by going to the mill alone was nothing compared to the wrong of being so uncaring over a man’s death.

Even Montfort’s.

So, at a firm walk, meaning not to tarry over the business, head bowed and hands tucked into her sleeves to maintain something of propriety, she went along the street and turned at its corner into the street leading down to the timber and white-plastered mill. That street Aided at the mill ditch and the high-railed wooden bridge across it into the millyard, and because her curiosity had more to do with the ditch than the mill, Frevisse stopped on the bridge to see what could be seen from there. From at the upstream railing, with the rush of white-foamed water loud below her, she could see at least one island in the river there and that the mill ditch had been dug off the river’s narrow curve around it, with still force enough from the Thames’s strong flow to drive the millwheel but probably the sluice gate that controlled the flow into the ditch easier to maintain without the full force of the river against it.

She crossed to the bridge’s other side, into the shadow of the mill and its tall, undershot millwheel, driven by the force of the water flowing against its blades down in the ditch, turning it steadily, steadily, the dark wood rising wet and glistening out of the deep ditch’s shadows into the daylight and around and down again with the familiar groan of wood and gears that went with all millwheels.

Looking first down into the ditch with its dark swiftness of water and then along it toward the nunnery, Frevisse knew she had been right to think no one would easily or readily have crossed it; but according to Master Gruesby, the ditch had been drained the day Montfort was murdered. That would have left it vilely muddy and undoubtedly with some water still in the bottom but not the obstacle it would be today. That day there would have been only the steep ditch sides to be overcome, and sliding down into it would be easy, while the stones that Dickon said were half-buried in the bank would maybe have been enough to make climbing up to the garden fence and down again possible without too hard a scramble at it. And afterward? For leaving the ditch? A scramble then would serve, she supposed, with a toehold here and there and a dagger thrust into the bank for a handhold, with a moment lying flat just below the crest of the bank, clinging to the grass while looking over the top to see if it was safe to go the rest of the way.

Once out of the ditch and on the path along it, there would only be overly muddied boots or shoes and maybe clothing to explain but with soft weather there would have been mud enough in more places than the mill ditch for a man to be muddied honestly.

Satisfied of all that, she crossed the bridge and the mill-yard to the mill’s door and pulled the rope on the bell— meant to be heard over the grinding stones—hanging there. The miller opened to her almost immediately, and while he was still staring with surprise to find a nun on his doorstep—and not even a Goring nun, as he could easily tell by her habit—she said, “I want to look out your upstairs window,” and started forward, supposing he would get out of her way.

She supposed rightly. He moved aside, saying, “Aye, my lady. If you like, aye,” as she passed him. Open-backed, thick plank steps went steeply up the near wall to the hole in the mill’s loft floor. The miller was still bemusedly saying, “Aye,” as she climbed them, to find that the loft was where the miller lived, a single, sparsely furnished room to which she gave no heed as she crossed to the window in the south-facing wall. The shutter was down, letting in what there was of the day’s thin sunlight and giving her a clear view of the nunnery’s whole west side and the length of the ditch, too, as well as the wide meadow that lay between it and the Thames and, at the meadow’s far end, the willows that blocked sight of Ferry Road, all as Dickon had said, and look as hard as she might, it told her no more than she knew already. There was everything she had expected to see and no more. Just that and no answers.

Nor were any answers to be had for certain about the nunnery windows she could see from here. Except for one, they all looked to her to be set too high for anyone to have sight of anything from inside them except sky. But the one nearest this end of the nunnery, looking out from the second storey of a steep-roofed building set against the church tower… She studied it and judged that from it there would be view of the ditch and meadow and she wondered how to find out to what room it belonged.

With seemingly nothing else to be gained from here, she returned down the stairs to the miller still standing beside his open door and asked him, “The day the man was killed in the nunnery, did you ever happen to look out your window up there? At any time?”

She could see him wondering why she was asking as he answered, “Nay, my lady. I didn’t. I wasn’t here. There was no point, the mill not running. I’d went to visit my daughter over in Streatley. She’s married to the miller there.”

‘You were gone all day?“

‘I made sure of the sluice gate at dawn, that it was tight shut, and was away on the first ferry of the day and didn’t come home until just at sundown.“

‘The mill hadn’t broken down unexpectedly then? You’d planned to shut it down?“