The Prioress’ Tale (31 page)

“For what?” Frevisse asked. “Penance for what? You’ve done nothing to need penance for.”

“For all of us,” Sister Thomasine said. “For everything that’s been so wrong. For Domina Alys because she…”

Again she could not find the words.

“Because she couldn’t do it for herself?” Joliffe asked.

Sister Thomasine nodded gratefully. Frevisse, suddenly seeing something she should have known before, asked, “And your praying for so many hours beyond…” Sense, was the word that came to mind. She changed it to, more simply, “… what you used to do, is that for Domina Alys, too?”

“Because of the offices,” Sister Thomasine agreed. She looked down as if admitting it embarrassed her. “They’ve been so spoiled of late. We say them so wrong. I’ve been saying them again afterward.”

Frevisse drew in a shocked breath. According to the Rule, a mistake made in the offices was to be corrected then and there by whomever had made it, but that was all. For Sister Thomasine to take on all the failed offices Domina Alys had brought down on them, to say them all over again, alone, when none of it was ever her fault…

Sister Thomasine was looking at her anxiously, explaining, wanting her to understand, “It’s so the perfection of prayer won’t be broken, you see.”

And suddenly Frevisse wanted to cry for how far she was, herself, from that entirety of heart and mind and soul.

Joliffe, holding to the point where he had begun, said, “But the fasting. How far do you mean to take it?” Too far? he did not say aloud. To the death, the way some holy women did—

Sister Thomasine turned her gaze to him in open dismay. “Oh, no! That would be wrong!” Refusing the possibility more strongly than Frevisse had ever heard her speak of anything since she had taken her vows. “I’d be no use to anyone here if I were dead. God let me come here to pray and be of use. I can’t go until he says so.”

“Nor drag your body toward death with hunger in hopes he’ll take you sooner than he wants to?” Frevisse asked.

“Nor that either,” Sister Thomasine said, sounding almost impatient at their doubting.

“I’ll hold you to that,” Joliffe said but lightly now, teasing her. Unexpectedly, she started to smile back at him again and ducked her head to hide it, as if as taken by surprise at it as Frevisse was. Joliffe turned back to Frevisse. “As for you, besides saying farewell”—which was more than he had done the last time he had left St. Frideswide’s—“I wanted to warn you it looks like your Abbot Gilberd is going to scour your priory from top to bottom. You’d best be braced for it.”

Frevisse had already feared as much but it was worse to hear it said. “You’re saying that our ‘rescue’ is going to be as bad as our trouble has been?”

“Very likely.”

“What about you? Are you going to be able to leave here clear of any trouble? Sir Walter won’t give you away?”

“I told him my fee was double if he did. So far as everyone is concerned, he came here on a chance report from a chance peddler, nothing to do with me. I’m a mere wanderer who happened into this in all innocence and proved of noble use to Edmund in his peril. He’s already told in great detail how much a help I was to him, bless the man, and it’s planned I’m to ride out with him—the abbot is loaning us horses—when he leaves in maybe an hour to see Mistress Joice back to her loving family.”

“Who may reward you further for the help you gave him?” Frevisse asked dryly.

Joliffe laid an earnest hand over his heart. “I can only hope. For just now, I’m going to go suggest to Master Porter what manner of agreement he might try to make with your abbot over wages and unfinished towers and things. Supposing it’s possible to make agreement with your Abbot Gilberd. He seems to have come with a great many decisions already made.” He bowed lightly and was turning away toward the boarded doorway as he spoke, adding over his shoulder for parting, “I don’t envy you the next few days.”

“I doubt you envy me anything,” Frevisse said after him.

Joliffe turned back, with a look on his face that was disconcertingly like too many of Sister Thomasine’s—deep and quiet and with nothing hidden in it and yet nothing there that Frevisse could clearly read. “Oh yes,” he said most quietly after a moment. “There are things I envy you. Believe me.”

Then his laughter flashed up across his face and he fell back, made them both a deep, elaborate bow, swung around and was gone into the tower, the door dragged shut behind him.

Carefully gathering her mind back to itself, Frevisse turned to Sister Thomasine and slowly, finding her way, said, “You didn’t mind talking to him. To Joliffe. A man and a stranger.”“

“Oh, no,” Sister Thomasine said simply.

“Nor mind the madman being in the church, when we thought he was a madman.” Another man, another stranger, when ever since she had come to St. Frideswide’s, Sister Thomasine had kept from any dealings with any man that she could possibly avoid.

“I knew he wasn’t mad.” That was what she had said before—that he had not
felt
mad to her. Then what had she
felt
of Joliffe that she had accepted him, too?

And almost Frevisse asked, how
she
felt to her, then knew she did not want to know and said instead, “We’ve let go two offices so far today. Do you think there’s time for us to say them now?” Now, in the silence and the waiting before Vespers and whatever Abbot Gilberd would bring down on them. Here, with Domina Alys lying stretched out below the altar in what Frevisse hoped, for her soul’s sake, was the deepest of prayer.