The Novice’s Tale (30 page)

“And she told you.”

“She knows me. And I met mis Owen Tudor of hers for good measure. He may not have any birth to speak of but Her Grace has a fine eye for a well-made man. Small wonder our King will have a half brother by spring. Or a half sister. But none of this is talk for your ears. And it had certainly best never come out of your mouth.”

“No fear of that,” she said fervently. “And this somehow concerns Lady Ermentrude?”

“I warned Her Grace what Lady Ermentrude had said and nearly said, but Queen Catherine knew her well enough and had made sure before she left that there was someone paid among her women to keep eye and ear on what she did. If she looked like becoming too free of tongue, she was to be reminded there were ways she would suffer, too, if the Queen did.”

“Or be silenced,” Frevisse said. Thomas did not even nod; he would not admit a queen might even think of giving order for a murder. “Maryon,” she said.

“That’s the name Queen Catherine gave me, yes.”

Frevisse felt a momentary, airy relief that it could all be so simple. Then she lost the feeling. “Maryon wasn’t here in the parlor to hear Lady Ermentrade be nearly indiscreet.”

Chaucer asked, “Was she with her to the Wykehams‘?” At Frevisse’s nod he looked grimly satisfied. “Then Lady Ermentrade said something on the ride. Or for all we are knowing, her almost indiscretion here wasn’t her first. She may have been doing it ever since she left the Queen, and with one thing and another, Maryon may have decided the risk was great enough to warrant her death, and at the Wykehams’ was her first chance.”

“The marriage that Lady Ermentrade wanted undone!” Frevisse said excitedly. “It wasn’t Lady Isobel and Sir John’s, it was the Queen’s! But why would she have told them about it?”

“I’ve no idea on that, but I mean to ask them very soon,” Chaucer said grimly. “At any rate, Maryon must have heard enough to think it best to end her then.”

“There’s no question of the Wykehams’ marriage being doubtful?”

Chaucer made a dismissive gesture. “We managed it between us, Lady Ermentrade and I, since Lady Isobel’s father was already ill then. All things were rightly done and they’re firmly married. That at least is certain.”

“So if now Sir John and Lady Isobel are insisting it was their own marriage they were quarreling over, it would be because they’re frightened and trying to cover the real cause of it. But then why…” Frevisse fell silent a moment. Chaucer waited until she firmly said, “But then why did Lady Ermentrade come back here insisting Thomasine had to be taken from the nunnery? That’s not of a piece with the rest. It doesn’t make full sense.”

“We don’t have to make full sense of it,” Chaucer said. “It may have been the henbane working in her, so there’d be no sense to anything she did. For our purposes, we only have to be sure of who did the poisoning. And that brings us to the little problem of how I am to take the woman Maryon from here without Sir Walter knowing it.”

“Without him knowing it?” Even as she echoed him, Frevisse caught at his unsaid thought and felt her face, like his own, go very still and unrevealing. Carefully she said, “He has to know it. How else do we call him off Thomasine?”

“The matter of Thomasine will have to wait. The matter of the Queen’s secret is more important. If we accuse this woman Maryon, our reason for it has to come out and that is not possible.”‘

Frevisse’s chin came up. “Then Thomasine remains in danger of her life?”

Chaucer held out his hand and said quickly, “No, assuredly not. All I need do is have the woman away from here without Sir Walter or Montfort having their hands on her first. Word can be sent back what I’ve done and then the priory and Thomasine will both be clear. It’s Montfort’s questioning her we can’t have. Once away, she’s the Queen’s concern, and the Queen can deal with both Montfort and Sir Walter. But I have to have the woman out of their reach.”

There was sense enough in that, and ways out for the priory and Thomasine and Chaucer and the Queen all at once. Frevisse sighed and asked, “How?”

He had already thought that far. “At my asking, Sir John will surely be willing to help. There’s no reason for him to stay longer. He can claim his own pain, or his wife’s concern for their children, and make his departure in the morning. The woman Maryon can go with them, as if Lady Isobel had taken her into their household. But she’ll be under Sir John’s arrest, and he’ll keep her for me until I can come, no more than an hour later. I think Sir Walter and good Master Montfort—”

Footsteps heavy with hurry and clumsiness beat suddenly on the steps outside the open door.

“Benedic
—” Frevisse began, but the servant Ela flung into the room without waiting. All panting and red-faced, disheveled from her limping haste, she gasped out, “They’re going to take her! Sir Walter’s men, they’re all outside the church and they’re going to break in and take her!”

Chapter
13

Ela clutched at Frevisse’s sleeve. “When I saw what they were doing, I went the back way round, into the church! To Domina Edith. She said I was to come get you! And him!” She gestured wildly at Chaucer. “She said to hurry!”

“Damn him,” Chaucer said without passion, and went for the door.

Jerking her sleeve free from Ela’s fingers, Frevisse followed him, overtaking him at the foot of the stairs as he hesitated, unsure of the way.

“Here!” Frevisse said sharply, shoving open the door into the open cloister walk. No men were supposed to come so far into the nunnery, but it was the shortest way to the church from here. “Your men?” she asked. “Can they be of use?”

Chaucer shook his head. “There’d only be blood shed to no purpose. I’ll have to stop him with words or nothing.”

Breathless with fear as much as haste, Frevisse nodded, gathered up her skirts and ran. Chaucer followed her.

The cloister door to the church had been left wide in Ela’s haste. Only the sudden shadows of the church after the gray daylight of the cloister slowed them as they entered. And then, together, they completely stopped, held by the same shock that already held Sir Walter and his men in crowded disarray in the church’s short nave.

It was easy to forget among the quiet patterns of St. Frideswide’s that its nuns were the daughters, granddaughters, sisters of men who held their inheritance by right of arms and battle skills. As nuns and women their daily life held little need for their inheritance of courage, but their blood remembered. With no weapons but their own anger and courage, they were standing in a closed rank of black and veiled white across the center of the choir, between Sir Walter’s men and Thomasine. She stood alone at the top of the altar steps, beside St. Frideswide’s altar, her right hand stretched out to touch it. Head raised, she was staring out at the men come to take her, and there was no show of fear in her at all.

In front of them all stood Domina Edith. She should have seemed small there, between Sir Walter’s men and her grouped nuns. But her age was like a mantle of authority, and she was not frail but fierce, her hand raised defiantly against the men, forbidding any of them to come so much as one step closer.

And behind her the nuns chanted in powerful unity the
Dies Irae,
the promise of God’s wrath, judgment, and doom on all men who crossed His will. Their voices rose together, flinging the words at Sir Walter and his men, making God’s wrath their own terrible weapon.
“Dies irae, dies ilia. Solvet saeculm in favilla. Quantus tremor est tuturus, Quando judex es venturus. Cuncta stride discussurus!”‘
A day of wrath that day will be, the world dissolved in glowing ashes. Trembling before the Judge’s throne, no sin going undiscovered, all sinners brought to their deserved fate.

As they chanted their defiance and a warning of God’s wrath, somewhere outside the day’s clouds shifted, letting a long and single golden shaft of brightness sweep the length of the church’s darkness, from the western window to Thomasine, where she stood above them all. She shone in its sudden brightness and, as if to answer it, raised her face, shining, into it. With pure and simple loveliness, as if she were seeing something more wondrous than any fearful thing before her, she smiled, and reached out into the light and emptiness in front of her, toward something there that no one else could see.

Beside her, Frevisse heard Chaucer draw in his breath through shut teeth. She could not have taken her own eyes from Thomasine to save herself.

But his startlement and her wonder were nothing to the effect on Sir Walter’s men. They had been ready for scurrying, frightened women and the huddling, unnerved novice some of them had glimpsed in the courtyard. Not for this. The rearmost of them began a furtive slipping backward out of the great door behind them. Others started to draw back after them, their fear of staying there stronger than their obedience to Sir Walter.

He was still at their head, already stirring out of his own frozen pause. He had his anger to protect him a little, but he must have felt their going and swung around on them. “This way, you fools!” he ordered and started for the altar again. Only the men nearest to him followed, and among them only Robert Fenner kept close at his back. The others let distance spread between them and Sir Walter and somehow after a few steps were not following him at all but staying where they were, uneasy on their feet, the farthest ones joining the drift toward the door.

Sir Walter was almost to the choir before he realized how alone he was. With an oath he swung around. “Buzzard-hearts! You’re going to let a pack of howling women stop you?”

Domina Edith moved her hand. The singing fell away to silence behind her, letting Sir Walter’s voice grate into the charged stillness.

“Come back, you bench-bred bastards! You’re supposed to be men!”

“And we want to stay that way,” an anonymous voice said out of the clot of men around the doorway.

“Step out and say that to my face!” Sir Walter roared, but there was only an uneasy shifting of the men nearest him and no obeying. “ ”The boy here is the only man among you and I’ll remember it!“

He clapped Robert on the shoulder and swung around to face the nuns and Thomasine again. But Chaucer moved forward now, not directly into his way but near, saying quietly, “My lord, think well what you are doing.”

Sir Walter snarled, “My mother’s murderer stands up there and I’ll have her to justice!”

But he did not move forward, and Chaucer said, “You blur the wrong done to your mother by making another injustice.”

“I’ll risk that to gain her murderer there!” Sir Walter pointed violently at Thomasine. The sunlight had diffused by now into simple afternoon light, but she still stood motionless beside the altar, enraptured and unaware of him. Sir Walter’s gesture lacked some of his former force, Frevisse thought. The crest of his anger was breaking on the nuns’ defiance, his men’s unwillingness, the sight of Thomasine, and the risk of the Church’s anger. It was one thing to override Montfort, another to cross wills with Chaucer, who had the weight of law at his back, the royal council’s good will, and nothing to lose by defying him.

He hesitated, looking from Chaucer to the nuns and back again, as if unsure where the greater threat now lay. Behind him more of his men disappeared through the doorway, leaving only Robert and three others. Frevisse for the first time looked fully at Robert.

He must have come intending to protect Thomasine if he could. Now he stood, unmoving, lost to all the sound and movement around him, looking at her. But while Thomasine was beholding something only she could see, Robert was looking at her with all his heart, knowing that he had lost her. All hope of having her died in his eyes as Frevisse watched, and he was no more ready than the rest of them when Sir Walter suddenly, savagely, slapped him on the shoulder and said, “So keep her for now! But don’t think you’ll be having her out of here and clear away. My men are still here. I’ll close this place so tight no one can go without my knowledge until I have the bishop’s writ for her!”

Stiff with rage and defeat, he spun away. Numbly Robert followed him, not looking back.

Outside the door, Sir Walter’s voice rose, roaring at his men, but this faded and was soon too remote to matter. In the stillness the nuns began to feel their victory, and a little spate of excited talking started. Domina Edith silenced it with a sharp gesture. “Not yet,” she said. “Thomasine…”