The Sempster's Tale (43 page)

‘I’ll find a way to that,“ Daved said. ”What we need first to do—“

He broke off and moved with a suddenness to the bed, pulling the near curtain across it and swinging around to face the doorway all in a single movement, so that he was standing as if he had not moved at all, with one hand raised to hold Frevisse and Mistress Hercy silent as he asked, “Who’s there on the stairs?”

Anne had slept a little and awoken uncertain of the hour and restless enough she had not dared stay with still deeply sleeping Lucie and Pernell. Finding Dame Frevisse gone from the parlor, she had gone restlessly downstairs into the silence there, hesitated, then come in search of Mistress Hercy. For comfort? For company? Simply for some place else to be, rather than parlor or bedchamber? She didn’t know but had hardly started up the stairs when Daved demanded who was there and now she stood on the threshold, startled to find him, Mistress Hercy, and Dame Frevisse all there together, all looking at her as if she should not be.

Then Daved crossed to her as Mistress Hercy stood up, asking sharply, “Is it Pernell? Has her birthing started?”

Letting Daved, his hold too tight on her arm, draw her farther into the room, Anne said, “She’s sleeping. She and Lucie both. I only thought, when I found Dame Frevisse gone…” She did not clearly know what she had thought, but looking at all their faces she asked, “What’s amiss? What’s happened?”

With no effort to ease it, Daved answered, “Mistress Hercy has killed Raulyn.”

Anne gasped. But even as she made to deny it, she knew by Daved’s grip on her and the look on his face that there was no time for the indulgence of refusing to believe him, and she forced herself to steady, so that Daved, seeing she had, let her go and said, “We’re deciding now how to be rid of his body and hide what she’s done. For now, I say we wrap it in a sheet and stow it under the bed here. By your leave, of course, Mistress Hercy.”

‘Of course,“ she said. ”Yes, of course.“ The frozen resignation of despair was leaving her. Daved had given her hope, thin though it was, and beginning to shiver, she gave the bed a sudden, frightened look. ”Blood. If he’s bled through to the mattress, we’ll never…“

‘I’ll see,“ said Daved. ”Anne, see to her while I do.“

More than willing to be told what to do, Anne took a cloak hanging from a wall-pole and laid it around Mistress Hercy’s shivering shoulders. Mistress Hercy grabbed one of her hands and held on, while at the bed Daved straightened Raulyn’s body and partly rolled it over, then said, “All’s well. The blade didn’t go through him.”

Mistress Hercy began to retch, and Anne hurriedly threw the cloak aside, helped her to her feet and to the basin on a table beside the door, keeping a steadying arm around her while she lost whatever of supper had been still in her stomach. Afterward, while Mistress Hercy washed her face, all the while saying under her breath, over and over, “God have mercy, Christ have mercy,” Anne looked over her shoulder to where Daved and Dame Frevisse were finishing wrapping Raulyn’s body in one of the bed’s sheets.

Raulyn’s body.

In some part of herself she did not believe that was Raulyn there—laughing, gallant, jest-laden Raulyn—a dead body wrapped into a sheet, with Daved now lifting it to the floor and thrusting it with no particular care out of sight under the bed. It wasn’t Raulyn and none of this was happening. It was all nightmare. Everything for two days past was nightmare. When was she going to awake from it?

Plainly not yet. As she led Mistress Hercy back to the chair, Dame Frevisse and Daved finished straightening the bedcover over the bed, with Dame Frevisse asking him when they were done, “You have some thought of how to have him out of here with no one knowing?”

‘London is going to rise against Cade and his rebels within a day, I would guess,“ Daved answered. ”If we can keep Raulyn’s body hidden until then, and when the trouble starts send most of the household men out to the fight and gather the women upstairs to the parlor…“ He paused with that a question to Mistress Hercy. She nodded it could be done. ”… that gives me a clear way to shift Raulyn’s body away, out of the house.“ He looked to Dame Frevisse. ”Perhaps with your men’s help?“

‘No,“ she said flatly.

Daved accepted that without question and went on, “We’ll set them to guard the front gate then, leaving the rearyard to me. Some guard has to be kept, and the fight isn’t ours. That’s reason enough to explain why we don’t join in. I’ll take Raulyn’s body out, away somewhere, and leave it in a street or alley as if he was killed there. There’ll be bodies enough no one is likely to ask close questions about his.”

Mistress Hercy had been regathering both her wits and her strength while he talked. Now she nodded and said, “That could work. Yes. We’ll make it work.”

‘Understand,“ Daved said, his voice hard. ”All of today you will have to seem as if nothing has happened or is going to happen. All of you. If we’re found out, if Pernell ever knows, all of this is for naught.“

‘We’ll do what has to be done,“ Mistress Hercy said. With hope, her will had come back. ”All of us.“

‘Then do you and Dame Frevisse go away now to your beds. Sleep if you can. At least lie down and rest or you’ll be no use to Pernell or even yourselves this day.“

Mistress Hercy stood up, this time without Anne’s help, but said suddenly, “The knife.” She looked around to where it had fallen. “It has to go back to the kitchen.”

‘I’ll see to it,“ Daved answered, taking it up and putting it through his belt at his back before he started for the stairs, saying, ”Put out the candle.“ Dame Frevisse did, and in the instant darkness Daved ordered, ”Give your eyes a moment to be used to it, then come.“

They did, Anne standing aside to let Mistress Hercy and Dame Frevisse feel their way from the room and down the stairs ahead of her. Behind her, Daved closed the door with a small snick of the latch. In the hall the starlight through the unshuttered windows lessened the darkness enough for her to see the two women going away from her, but she stayed where she was, no word needed between her and Daved as he drew her into the solar.

With the door shut, they were as alone as they could hope to be, and still with no word between them, he guided her to the room’s middle, turned her toward him, and took her in his arms. Wordless, they held to each other for a long, long moment, until Anne lifted her face to him and they kissed with a hunger not simply for each other but for comfort and some promise of safety that neither of them could give, until Anne pulled back a very little, drew a long, trembling breath, and said, hushed as if there were someone else there to hear her, “He’s truly dead and she truly did it? This isn’t a bad dream in a bad night’s sleep?”

‘He’s truly dead and she truly did it,“ Daved said quietly. ”Nor are we sleeping.“

‘Pernell…“

But the mere thought of Pernell kept Anne from going on. It was for Daved to say gently, “It’s better she have this grief than the grief of knowing what Raulyn had done. He could not be left to go free, knowing what we know about him. But how could Pernell have lived with knowing her children had been fathered on her by the man who murdered her son? Mistress Hercy saw it clearly enough. There was no other way than this.”

‘I know,“ Anne whispered. ”But Raulyn… I can’t make it hold true in my mind that he killed the friars and Hal, too.“

‘I know,“ Daved said, the words hard and bitten. ”I’ve had to work at holding to it. I thought he was my friend. I’ve trusted my life to him here.“

Anne wished she could see his face, the better to guess how deeply his pain went, but all she could offer was, “He never meant for Brother Michael to know of you. He never meant.”

Harshly, tightening his hold on her, Daved said, “He never meant that, no. What he meant was to have me gone so he could have his chance at you. What he meant was to open his way to greater wealth through Lucie’s marriage. What he meant was to keep himself safe by way of the friar’s death. Everything he did was for himself. At least when Mistress Hercy killed, it was for someone else.”

Anne nodded, understanding all that, and leaned her head against him. Gently against her hair he said, “Pernell will have grief but never know all the worst. For that, your silence as well as Mistress Hercy’s and the nun’s will be needed. Can you do it?”

‘Along with all else I keep silent about?“ Anne gave a single, broken laugh. ”Oh, surely.“ But the tears of her fear and misery were too close behind that laugh, and Daved gathered her more closely to him and for a long moment that was enough, simply to have him holding her.

But it was not enough when so much else was still unspoken, and against her hair he said softly, “You know that when this is done—as soon as I’ve done this thing—I’ll leave London. Make my way to the coast, probably, and take ship from there. Away from England.”

Holding more tightly to him, Anne whispered, “Yes.”

‘Let be whatever questions there will be about Raulyn’s death, all that the friar found out against me may come out. I do not count on Master Naylor to keep silent on it, once other danger is past. I must not be here if he tells.“

‘I know,“ she whispered.

‘You know that I’ll not…“ There was a break in Daved’s voice that matched whatever was breaking inside of her; but despite her silent willing of him to say nothing more, he went on, ”You know that when I leave, I’ll not be back soon.“

For a long moment Anne held off from answering that, then said quietly against his chest, “If ever.”

A longer silence passed between them then before Daved agreed as quietly, “If ever. Yes.”

Chapter 29

There was upset in the morning when Raulyn was nowhere to be found and those who had kept the gates swore he had come in and not gone out. Mistress Hercy fixed a hard look on Pers and declared someone had not been looking when he had. Pers protested loudly he’d kept good watch last night, which seemed to fix in everyone’s mind that he had not and that their master had gone out for reasons of his own and would come back when he would, it was none of their business.

What Mistress Hercy told Pernell to keep her from worry, Frevisse did not know, nor did she see Pernell at all, which made the day somewhat easier than it might have been. But it was a long day, as days perforce were at midsummer, and made the longer with waiting for even one of the things that might go wrong to go wrong. Frevisse spent it mostly at the parlor’s southward window, pretending to read and trying to pray when the hours for the Offices came but mostly thinking around and around where her thoughts had already gone too many times. Now and again shouting surged from one place and another along London’s streets, and there were shouting matches more than a few times at the barriers either end of St. Swithin’s Lane, but still nothing came to fighting that she heard and that far, at least, her prayers were answered.

Anne, too, kept to herself except when with Pernell, sometimes pacing the parlor, sometimes sitting at the other window, twice sitting to sew with Lucie, taking both their minds from other things by teaching her a new stitch for her sampler; but never once did any word pass between her and Frevisse the whole day.

Father Tomas came in the late morning and spent a time with Pernell and Mistress Hercy, but he no more than sketched a blessing in the air at Frevisse and Anne as he passed through the parlor. Emme, when she brought dinner upstairs, said he had brought men who had carried Brother Michael’s body away to the church, to lie there for the crowner to see and until the streets were safe to return it to Grey Friars. “Whenever that may be,” Emme gloomed as she went away.

Frevisse expected Daved Weir to bring some word of what more was happening, if only to have the chance to speak again with Anne, but he did not. Master Naylor came in early afternoon during one of the whiles she was alone to say that all was much as yesterday in the streets. Keeping impatience from her voice—if only barely—Frevisse said, “That much I’ve been able to hear for myself.” Then brought herself to ask, “Has Master Grene returned?”

‘Not sign of him nor any word. Master Weir has been up and down the street asking after him.“ Master Naylor paused. Frevisse could almost see the question he was chewing over before, not sounding much as if he wanted to, he asked, ”What do you mean to do about this Master Weir and his uncle being Jews? Since I doubt Master Grene will do aught, now the friar is dead.“