The Stone-Worker's Tale (Sister Frevisse Medieval Mysteries) (2 page)

"She most assuredly has not!" Lady Sybille said indignantly.

But Frevisse saw yet another guilty look pass between Beth and Cathryn and  asked at them a little more strongly, "
Has
she?"

Cathryn began hesitantly, "She's..." and stopped.   Beth, with the impatience of someone who had been wronged by another's foolishness, said, "A few times, yes.  Gone out at night to meet him, I mean.  They hardly have chance otherwise for any time together, do they?"

"But she's always come back!"  Cathryn wailed, "She's never not come back!"

"Because she knew what trouble we'd be in if she didn't," Beth had said with a grimness to match Alice's and probably with something of her own in mind to say to the erring Elyn when she was found.

But Simon Maye was missing, too.

From the church Alice went, restless with growing anger and frustration, to her gardens beyond the house.  "To pace off my anger at them both," she said.  The hour was still so early the dew was not yet gone off the grass, but the day promised to be warm and fair.  All too plainly, though, Alice was not going to enjoy it nor let anyone around her enjoy it.  At the garden gateway she ordered at her ladies, "Go to your duties.  I only want to walk with my cousin," and left her women making hurried curtsies behind her as she went into the garden.  Frevisse followed her, and when they were by themselves, walking side by side along the long walk between the herb-bordered beds, Alice said angrily, "It's Sir Reginald Barre.  He's a jealous cur and always has been.  He and his wife both.  I should never have talked about my tomb where they could hear.  They've bribed Simon Maye away from me to make trouble and he's foolishly taken foolish Elyn with him.  How could they both be so stupid at once?"

"Love?" Frevisse suggested.

"Love," Alice repeated sharply.  "Love is all very well, but there's no good reason to let it take the place of common sense."

Frevisse had rarely seen love and reason keep company together.  Far too often when love came in, reason went out.  And if it were lust instead of love, then reason was likely to have even less hold.  Having barely seen and never spoken to either Elyn or Simon, Frevisse had no way of knowing whether it was lust or love between them, but either way reason seemed to have gone completely out.  They had gained only trouble – and worse trouble to come – by this running away from their duties.

"What I don't see," Alice said, snatching a spire of flowers from a lavender plant as she walked past, "is why Elyn would do something this headlong.  She's always showed sensible until now.  Even in this dalliance with Simon Maye, this thinking they might be in love, hasn't been foolish until now.  She's even asked if I'd speak favorably to her parents about him, and I'd said I would."

"She did?  You would?" Frevisse said in surprise.  "They'd countenance such a thing?  Marriage between her and a journeyman stone-worker?"

"Oh, they're none so fine as all that," Alice said easily.  She held the lavender to her nose and breathed deeply.  "Elyn's grandfather on the father's side was a merchant out of Gloucester who bought himself into land and his son into marriage with a squire's daughter.  He was a friend of my father.  That's how I know the family.  Elyn isn't even their eldest or heir, just a younger daughter, here to be given some graces.  If she had caught the eye of a young lord while in my household, they'd not have minded."  Alice's small laughter at that was her first lightness of the morning.  "But they'll not mind a master stone-worker for her, which is what this Simon Maye will shortly be."

"And Elyn knows that?"

"Oh, yes."   Alice's humour darkened again.  "She only had to wait.  What are they thinking of?  It's Sir Reginald.  He's behind this some way.  I swear I'll tell everyone he can't find good workmen of his own but has to steal mine.  I'll making a laughing-stock of him.  He found some way to turn Simon Maye's head..."

"How would he go about that?" Frevisse asked calmingly.  "Wouldn't anyone he sent be noted here?"  Ewelme being a small place and most of it centered on Lady Alice's household.  "Wouldn't any stranger who's only business was with one of workmen be talked of?"  And talk of it would almost surely be brought to Alice by way of any of her household officers whose duties included knowing such things as went on around her.  Alice's frown acknowledged as much and Frevisse went on, "Besides that,
is
Simon Maye such a fool?"

"I wouldn't have thought so," Alice snapped.  "But I'd not have thought it of Elyn either.  Oh, how could either of them have been so foolish?"

That seemed the morning's refrain, Frevisse thought. 

"And no matter what Master Wyndford avers about his son," Alice said fiercely, "I won't have the drunken lout working on my angels."

Surprised, Frevisse said, "Was he drunk?"

"What else would you call how he looked this morning?  Or if he wasn't outright drunk, he was at least ale-addled.  Did you see when he bowed?  He swayed near to falling over.  He's not touching my angels."  She threw the sprig of lavender away.  Lavender was supposed to soothe and had maybe worked a little on Alice because, less harshly, more resigned, she said, "Ah well.  All this doesn't mean the rest of us should waste our day.  My chamberlain will be waiting.  And then my steward."  Because being lady of a large household and of lands spread over a goodly number of counties did not mean she lived a life of plain leisure.  Rather, it meant she was responsible for a great many people, must needs deal for hours at a time with her various officers and make decisions about a great many matters.

Frevisse, of no use to her with any of that, left her to her duties and sought out Beth and Cathryn at their morning work of tidying Alice's bedchamber, and asked, "Tell me, what did Elyn take with her?"

"Take with her?" Cathryn echoed a little blankly.

Beth was quicker.  "When she went out last night, you mean?  She didn't take anything that I saw.  Unless she had it ready, waiting for her somewhere else."

"But you haven't looked to see for certain," Frevisse said.

"No, my lady," Cathryn said, openly surprised at such a thought.  Living constantly together, people in a household learned the courtesy of leaving each other's possessions alone.  The thought of prying into Elyn's was plainly beyond Cathryn, but again Beth understood and said,  "Her chest is in the other room."

Nothing was gone from it.  As soon as Beth put up the lid, Frevisse could see that.  The chest was small, meant only to hold a few clothes, a few personal things, and it was full, everything carefully placed and with no space from which something might be missing.

"Is this the way it always is?" Frevisse asked.

"Oh, yes," said Beth.

"That's how Elyn is about everything," Cathryn added.

She sounded faintly aggrieved, as if at some affront or fault; but Frevisse was more taken up with the thought of how unlikely it increasingly seemed that this careful Elyn had run off into the night all unready and so foolishly, taking nothing of her own with her. 

Still, women thinking themselves in love had done far more foolish things than that, and Frevisse supposed the next question had to be: How foolish was Simon Maye?

Beth was slowly – and it seemed thoughtfully – closing the chest.  Cathryn, gazing wistfully into the air at some thought of her own, sighed, "They must be wonderfully in love, not to bear being apart anymore."  She smiled a little dreamily at Frevisse and confided, "We'd go with her sometimes when she was going to meet him.  Nicol Wyndford would be there because he's Simon's friend.  We'd talk with him while Elyn and Simon talked together."  She gave a sly, teasing, sideways look at Beth.  "Beth favors him.  Nicol.  But he favors Elyn."

"He doesn't!" Beth protested.  "I don't!"

"He
does
. You've even said you wished he'd look at you like he looks at her."

"I never did!"

"You did!"

"None of which makes any difference to Domina Frevisse," Lady Sybille said, crisp and disapproving from the room's doorway.  "Have you finished my lady's bedchamber yet?"

With curtsies and hurry, the two girls scurried away, while Frevisse made apology to Lady Sybille, taking blame for their delay on herself before leaving, too, but going the other way, out of the house and back to the church.

She found the half-made new chapel empty of workmen.  She could hear them, though, outside the window-hole in the wall, their voices mixed with the chink of chisels on stones telling her they were at work in the stone-yard there, readying the next stones for wall and window.  That was where Master Wyndford and his son likely were, too, and it was with them she wished to speak, but she stood for a little while in the aisle, looking at the proud, serene faces of Simon Maye's angels and found it harder by the moment to think a man with the skill of hand and eye and mind to create such beauty would desert his work for a lesser love.

Except, of course, he probably did not see his Elyn as a lesser love.

Master Wyndford came through the gap in the wall.  Not seeing her, he stood staring at the unfinished tomb for a long moment, one crippled hand rubbing at the other still held against his chest.  Worrying over how much the loss of Simon Maye was going to set back the work and wondering how bad Lady Alice's displeasure was going to be, Frevisse supposed, sorry for him.

The hard set of his mouth did not change as he turned and saw her, but she took no offense as he gave only a very curt bow and came toward her, saying with a nod at the panels of angels along the wall and more as if going on with a thought of his own than taking up talk with her, "Nicol will finish those well enough.  My lady need have no worry that way.  That carving there is Nicol's."  He moved one hand in a small gesture at the figure below the tomb chest.

Frevisse could acknowledge that in its ghastly way that figure of decay was as much a masterwork as the angels.  Every detail of a rotting body – the arch of the barely fleshed ribs, the gaunt thrust of the hipbones past the sunken belly – was done with exacting care.  There was no pleasure in looking at it, but there was not meant to be, reminding as it did of where all worldly pride and riches came at last.  That end was certain, though, and Frevisse felt no need to be reminded of it.  The thing ever in doubt was the soul's salvation, and rather than the corpse's reassertion of death, she preferred the angels' promise of hope beyond death and of love stronger than decay.

"They were Simon’s masterwork," Master Wyndford said broodingly at the angels.  "When they were done, he would have been his own man, a master in his own right, not a journeyman anymore."

"And now?" Frevisse asked.  "Now that he's broken his contract and gone off?"

Master Wyndford pulled his shoulders a little straighter – the broad shoulders of a man who had worked with stone all of his life – and said, as if trying to straighten his thoughts along with his shoulders, "Eh, well, he may come back.  There's no saying.  Once the lust has gone out of him.  If he's any sense he'll come craving pardon then and to have his work back."

"Will you give it to him?"

Master Wyndford held silent, seeming to brood on his answer before finally saying, with a nod toward the angels.  "There's little I'd not forgive a man who does that kind of work."

Frevisse would not have thought his face could go more bitter than it was, but it did as he went on with open anger and frustration, "I warned him.  I warned him well no good would come of wanting a woman instead of his work.  I told him that letting her turn his head would only bring him to grief.  I warned him marriage would be his ruin."

"You're married," Frevisse said.  "Or you were.  You have a son.  Surely you..."

Master Wyndford interrupted her with raw bitterness.  "Oh, aye, I was married.  I was warned against it but I was set on her and married her anyway.” 

While he was speaking, Nicol Wyndford stepped through the gap in the wall.  He was very much like his father in face and build and made to look older than he was by the stone dust whitening his hair.  Master Wyndford turned a glower on him and went on, as if at him in particular, “But the young don't listen.  They think it will be different for them, no matter what's said to them.  They won't hear."

Nicol Wyndford bent his head respectfully to Frevisse as he came toward them, but said, sounding as resentful as his father, "I listened.  Haven’t I listened every time?  I left Elyn to Simon, and now he has her and I don't.  Can't that be enough to satisfy you?"

Frevisse sharpened her look on him.  It was easy enough to believe there was a craftmen’s rivalry between Nicol Wyndford and Simon Maye.  Now it was plain there was another rivalry, too.  Rivalry and jealousy and Master Wyndford doing nothing to ease either as he said angrily, "Satisfy me?  No!  To see Simon fail himself because of a woman?  Watch him ruin his life with a marriage he didn't need?  Watch him lose everything he could have been.  Watch him–"

He started a sharp gesture with both hands but curtailed it as Nicol said sharply at him, "It wasn't marriage that ruined your hands.  Mother was dead before that ever started."

"It was started before she died," his father said back at him with old, embedded anger.  "It only became the worse after I was rid of her, that's all.  What she did was keep me from what I
could
have done before they went to the bad.  She needed this and she wanted that.  She wouldn't let me go where the best work was to be had or give me peace enough to give my mind to what work I had.  She clung and nagged through every unblessed hour I was married to her.  The arthritics only finished what she started."

Nicol protested, "That's not how Elyn will be.  There's sweetness in her."

Master Wyndford, his hands fisted together and clutched to his chest as if to protect them, made a disgusted, dismissing sound.  "You think your mother didn't show sweet when she was wooing me?  It's
after
they have you, that's when you find out what they are."

Stiff with useless rebellion, Nicol tried, "Father..."

Master Wyndford swept over his words in rage and bitterness.  "If I let you, you'd waste yourself the same way.  Ruin your life for a woman the way Simon has.  Give yourself years of misery when you should have years of making instead."  He looked toward the angels, and his face and voice softened into regret and longing.  "I did work like that once. 
Once
."  His face and voice darkened back to anger and he turned again on his son.  "And then I married and it all ended.  Everything had to be what
she
wanted, the way
she
wanted it to be, and then
this
came."  He held his twisted hands a little out from his chest, then clutched them back against him.   "They're gone.  Simon and this Elyn.  Isn't that proof enough what a fool she's made of him?"  Then, dropping the quarrel that was all his own, he demanded, "You left your work to come in here for other than to pick a quarrel with me.  What did you want?"