The Prioress’ Tale (16 page)

“Of course,” Lady Eleanor responded, matching her courtesy.

“But…” Sister Amicia protested.

Frevisse took hold of her sleeve and turned her away. They would go the long way around the walk to the door, leaving Benet to come the short way to Joice and Lady Eleanor.

“But…” Sister Amicia tried again, pulling back.

“What happened the last time I talked with Benet in the cloister?” Frevisse asked.

Sister Amicia gulped and went without arguing.

Little was left to show her in the new guest hall. They finished with time enough before Vespers to begin on the older one, but Sister Amicia as they left the new guest hall was wondering aloud not about her duties but why Mistress Joice would want to resist Benet, he was so handsome.

Wondering how Sister Amicia could resist ever having a useful thought in her head, Frevisse did not answer. In fairness—she was just able to be fair but doubted she could keep it up much longer—her irritation was not so much from what Sister Amicia chose to chatter on about but from the day’s exhaustion closing in on her rapidly now. She was convincing herself that it would probably be better not to go on to the old guest hall today but save it for tomorrow, when Sister Amicia asked, “What are they doing?”

Hoping it was nothing that would need her, Frevisse asked, “Who?”

“There.” Sister Amicia pointed across the yard at the well where a hand count of Sir Reynold’s servants were clotted, intent on something in their midst.

“It’s no concern of ours,” Frevisse said and kept on her way, only to come to a stop between one step and the next and turn toward them after all. She was tired; her mind was moving too slowly and it had taken that long for her to realize that the dirty heap among the men’s feet was the madman she had thought long gone since yesterday.

“Oh no,” she said.

“What is it?” Sister Amicia asked, somewhere between apprehension and eagerness.

Frevisse went toward the well without answering. Some of the men she recognized from yesterday; others were new to the sport; but all of them were too intent on their game to notice her approach. They had the madman crowded up against the well, hunched down among them, with no way for him to escape even if he had had the wits for it. A few were set down on their heels, prodding at him with daggers that were still sheathed but probably would not stay that way, while the rest were contenting themselves with gibing words and an occasionally shoe to whatever part of him they could easily reach. Frevisse knew how little time it would take for all of that to turn ugly and what would happen when it did. Her father had carried the scar across his shoulders the rest of his life from the time he interfered to save a beggar some men had taken against for no reason except they had nothing better to do. He had managed out of it alive when they turned on him as well, but the parish had had to bury the beggar.

The men here were turning uglier even as Frevisse approached. Someone’s boot dug into the madman’s haunch hard enough to shift him, and when he tried to scuttle a little sideways he was shoved back, hard enough to knock him over. Above the men’s laughter Frevisse ordered, “That’s enough now.”

A few of them looked at her over their shoulders. Most of them ignored her, and one of the men had unsheathed his dagger now and was flicking the point of it too near the madman’s face as he struggled to his knees. The madman threw up an arm to protect himself, and another man put a foot against his ribs and shoved him over. Others joined in, rolling him off the well’s top step and down the rest onto the cobbles. Angrily Frevisse started forward, intent on coming between them and the man. Sister Amicia squeaked, “You can’t!” and caught her by the arm while the men, probably enjoying it more now they had women to watch them being brave, kept the madman down with kicks and jabs and at least one more dagger unsheathed. Frevisse pulled loose from Sister Amicia, ignoring the pain it cost across her back, and thrust in among them, ordering in open anger now, “That’s enough!,” grabbing the nearest of them by the arm and pulling him around.

He started to swear something at her despite she was a nun, but above the dark snarl of sound from the other men still set on the madman, Joliffe asked cheerfully, “Isn’t it late in the day for a hunt?”

They all looked, Frevisse with them, to find him balanced on the well curb above them, crouched down on his heels and leaned forward on his toes to see better what they were doing. He sniffed audibly. “Though I can’t deny that the spoor is still lying strong.” He leaned farther, staring with exaggerated curiosity at the hunched madman among their legs. “What is it you’re hunting anyway? Boar? Hedgehog?” He seemed to overbalance into falling, changed it with a twist of his body to a light-footed spring to the foot of the steps, so that the men drew back, grinning. He sauntered in among them, bent over the madman for a closer look and said, “No, not boar or hedgehog. Wrong pelt.” He straightened to look around at the men incredulously. “You’re not wanting it for its pelt, are you?”

Most of the men laughed and one made a rude comment on what they wanted “it” for. Joliffe shook his head in mock seriousness. “I doubt I can recommend that,” he said. “Not when we don’t even know what it is. Dame Frevisse, is this a common sort of animal around here? Do you know what it is?”

Following wherever he was taking this, Frevisse came forward. The men drew back and apart to let her through, and since it seemed to her the farther they were from the madman the better, she copied Joliffe’s pretense of studying him while half circling at an overly fastidiousness distance so that, unwittingly, the men drew back more. Slowly, as if deeply considering the madman still crouched at Joliffe’s feet, she said, “It does bear some resemblance to something I know. I might…” She drew her consideration out, copying her aunt whose indecisions on even the most minor matters had made uncomfortable suspenses for everyone around her. In her aunt’s case it had come from a natural incoherency of thought; for Frevisse it was a play for time until Joliffe let her know what he had in mind. He had better have something in mind. She was watching him more closely than she was looking at the madman, and when she was most between him and the men and they least likely to see, he flickered his fingers at her in a horn sign—middle fingers and thumb bent down, the outer two fingers pointed out.

Frevisse recoiled violently, letting her voice scale up in pretended shock. “It isn’t! It can’t be!” She made the sign of the cross widely in the air between her and the madman. “Blessed St. Anthony against the demons! It’s… it’s…”

Joliffe joined in her overplayed horror. “It is!” His sign of the cross was wilder and wider than hers. “You have it!” He struck a pose of shock and dismay. “It’s a failed fiend!”

The men were laughing, enjoying the show. Joliffe grabbed the madman under one arm and wrenched him to his feet, exclaiming at Frevisse as if her stupidity stood between them all and salvation, “Don’t you see? That explains the stench of hell about it!” He looked around frantically and pointed at the church door. “What it needs is the odor of sanctity!”

Too rapidly for anyone to stop him, he dragged the madman up and along the well steps, outflanking the nearest men, heading for the church’s wide west door, close across the yard.

“Wait on!” one of the men called out in surprise. “Where are you going with him?”

Frevisse, following Joliffe with her skirts grabbed up to let her move more quickly, swung around, her hands raised in prayer, between him and the men to exclaim in pious, ringing tones, “We’ve been in the presence of hell! Pray!

Pray for your souls! St. Anthony, who faced the demons in the desert, guard us here. St. Amable, who…“

The men jostled each other in a confused change of direction, less interested in their souls than in their escaping prey; and even though Frevisse slowed them a little, forcing them to go around her, they would have had Joliffe before he reached the church and sanctuary, except the madman somehow managed to break into a run with him, not fumbling, pulling back, or falling. They reached the door with time for Joliffe to thrust it open, shove the madman in and himself after him, and on the safe side of the threshold lean back out to exclaim cheerfully, “It’s all right! I’ll see to him from here!,” before drawing back inside and slamming the door shut for the first of the men to run hard up against it.

The heavy thud of the bar dropping across it inside told how thoroughly he had it fast against their fists and angry yells, leaving Frevisse free to retreat the other way, toward the cloister, catching Sister Amicia by the arm as she went with, “We’d best go in, too. Come.”

Sister Amicia came, and inside, when Frevisse turned to bring the rarely used bar there down across the door, was enough recovered to ask, a little shrill with excitement and fear, “They wouldn’t dare try to come in here, would they?”

The men’s pounding yells on the church doors were muffled but not faint, and Frevisse was about to say that she did not want to find out the hard way what they would dare, when behind them in the passageway Domina Alys demanded, “What are you doing? What’s toward out there?”

Frevisse and Sister Amicia swung around to face her, dropping into curtsies, Frevisse answering while they did, “It’s some of your cousin’s men. They’ve hunted a madman into the church and want him out again for sport.”

“They’re beating my church door down because they want sport?” Domina Alys started forward in heavy-treading fury. “I’ll show them sport!”

Frevisse swung around to jerk the door open ahead of her while Sister Amicia shrank back against the wall, but Domina Alys as she stalked past them ordered, “Sister Amicia, come. It you’re hosteler, you have to learn how to handle fools and dolts like this!”

Sister Amicia gaped, then looked to Frevisse, asking help. Frevisse shook her head with none to give, and forced to it, Sister Amicia momentarily shut her eyes, then followed Domina Alys, leaving Frevisse surprised by her for the first time—both that she went and that she did it silently.

Given no other orders herself, Frevisse went the other way, toward the church’s cloister door, reaching it as Dame Juliana, Sister Emma, and Sister Cecely came from somewhere else in the cloister, drawn by men’s pounding and yells. To their alarmed questions, Frevisse said quickly, “It’s only some of Sir Reynold’s men making trouble. Domina Alys has gone out to them. She’ll—”

The pounding and yells cut off.

Frevisse smiled with more assurance than she felt. “There. You see? It’s done. She’s taken care of it.”

Sister Cecely looked a little regretful and Sister Emma started to protest, but Dame Juliana said, “Good. We can all go back to our work,” and firmly shepherded them away despite Sister Emma beginning to protest that, too.

Chapter 14

From inside the church, Domina Alys’ general fury, if not her actual words, was audible beyond the west door, and Frevisse for once wished her joy of her rage.

Joliffe was partway down the nave, the madman slumped to the floor beside him and Dame Perpetua confronting them both indignantly, with Lady Adela close behind her, intent on missing nothing, and Sister Thomasine, drawn from her prayers, rising from her knees below the altar. Apparently in answer to a challenge Dame Perpetua had made him, Joliffe was saying, “He needs sanctuary. I’m asking it for him.”

Dame Perpetua returned stiffly, sounding set on letting them come no further, “He has to ask sanctuary for himself. If he wants it, he has to ask for it.”

Joliffe started to answer her, stopped, and bent to take hold of the madman’s chin instead, forcing his head up. What the man had briefly shown of wits when he ran was gone now. He was back to being only a dirty heap, his hands clutched to his head, not resisting or, probably, comprehending as Joliffe demanded into his face, “Do you claim sanctuary?” The madman’s eyes did not even focus on him, and when Joliffe let him go, his head dropped and bobbled loosely; but Joliffe turned back to Dame Perpetua with, “You see? He nodded. He’s asking.”

“He never asked anything!” Dame Perpetua protested. “You did that.”

“He can’t ask,” Frevisse said as she joined them. “He never says anything, never makes a sound. But he does need sanctuary until we can find a way to be sure of having him safe away from Sir Reynold’s men.”

“So I’ve been told.” Dame Perpetua sent a displeased glance toward the west door and granted, equally displeased, “Yes, of course he may stay. It’s not as if it were a thing we can refuse, is it, if he needs it. Unless Domina Alys says otherwise,” she added for warning. She looked at the madman with unconcealed distaste. “But he’ll have to be washed somehow. We can’t bear that in here.”

Frevisse agreed with that readily enough. The madman’s stench—still principally pigsty muck but with undersmells of sweating horse—was thicker with being indoors. It was only by fighting her own disgusted urge to keep her distance from him that she went to take him by the chin and lift and turn his head, to be sure of what she had glimpsed there on the side away from Joliffe: a wide brightness of blood beginning to ooze through the matted hair and encrusted filth above his ear and between his fingers clutched to his head.

“He’s bleeding,” she said.

“That fool with the dagger.” Joliffe shifted so he saw it now, too.

Dame Perpetua made an annoyed sound and pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve, holding it out toward Frevisse without coming nearer, while ordering, “Lady Adela, go find Dame Claire and have her come. Tell her hot water and soap and a cloth and a towel are needed as well as her medicines. You bring them for her.”

Swift despite her limp, Lady Adela curtsied and left while Frevisse took the handkerchief, pried the madman’s hand enough away from his head so she could slip it under his fingers, and let him go so that whether he knew it or not, he was pressing it over the wound himself. Joliffe circled him, feeling expertly at his sides and back. The madman flinched and cringed but nothing else, and Joliffe said, “I don’t feel anything broken but he’s probably bruised from the kicks. We can’t tell much more until he’s been washed. Meanwhile.” He hoisted the unresisting madman up to something like his feet. A stone bench ran along the nave wall, meant for the weak and ill to rest during services. There was no place else for sitting in the church besides the floor and the nuns’ choir stalls, and Joliffe shuffled the madman aside to it, seated him with a twist and a push, and stepped back, wiping his hands on each other. The madman promptly slumped forward, hands still to his head.