The Stone-Worker's Tale (Sister Frevisse Medieval Mysteries) (3 page)

Nicol, rubbing at his forehead as if it hurt him, said, "I don't remember," and began to turn away.

"Remember your courtesy to the lady," his father snapped.

Nicol dropped his hand, turned back, bowed to Frevisse without looking at her, and made to turn away again, his hand rising to his head again.

Frevisse, not wanting him to go, wanting to have more from him to learn just how deep his jealousy against Simon Maye might be, asked, "Are you ill?"

Still turning away, Nicol said, "The weather is in my head, that's all.  The heat, I think.  Or there's a storm coming."

"You drank too much last night," Master Wyndford snapped.  "You always drink too much."

"I don't," Nicol said in the flat voice of someone who’s said the same too many times and yet would not give up the argument.  “You and I, we sat there at the table after supper and drank together last night.  I filled my cup twice and no more, and it would take stronger ale than that to get me drunk on two cups.  I wasn't even half way to drunk.”

But what if he had been just drunk enough to go out looking for the man who was his rival in both work and love? Frevisse thought.  What if Simon and Elyn were not fled after all?  What if Nicol had found them together...?

Hoping to draw him on to say more of the evening, she said, her voice carefully light, “It was so warm last night.  Sleeping did not come easy for those of us who went straight up to bed before the evening cooled.” 

Nicol, already half swung away from his father and her, stopped, stayed standing oddly where he was a moment longer with hand still to his head and frowning at the floor as if tracking a fugitive thought across the paving stones, before he lowered his hand, turned back toward his father, and said slowly, "Last night.  I woke up from some bad dream.  I don't know what time it was, but I wanted a drink, something to settle my stomach.  I went down to the kitchen."

Sharp with surprise, his father said, "You went downstairs?"  Then with disgust, "You didn't.  I never heard you. You dreamed it."

"No.  I did.  I was awake.  I don't know where you were..."

"In bed.  Asleep and not drunk."

"...but you'd left the shutter open.  There was moonlight in the room."

"So I forgot to close it," Master Wyndford said impatiently at him.  "That happens.  Best you give up ale altogether if it sets you to muttering through the next day like this.  Get back to work."

Nicol lifted and twisted his shoulders, shaking his father's words away, intent on whatever he was remembering.  "I could see the room in the moonlight and there were..."  He stopped, then said slowly, as if only beginning to be sure of what he wanted to say.  "There were three cups on the table." 

"There weren't any three cups,” Master Wyndford said impatiently.

Frevisse went very still, willing the son and father to forget she was there as Nicol said more strongly, seeming to take firmer hold on the thought, "I saw three cups there."

"You were drunk.  There were no cups.”

"I wasn't drunk.  I wasn't dreaming.  Why were there three cups?  I put my own away when I’d finished.  I know that.  I put it back on its shelf and went to bed.  'Put away now and you'll not need do it later.'   That's what Mother beat into me when I was little.  She's three years dead but I still do it.  Sober or half-drunk, I always put away, and last night I wasn't even half-drunk.  I was..."  He put a hand to his head again, his uncertainty returning.  "I was something, but I wasn't drunk."

"You were drunk," Master Wyndford said flatly.  "And I'd not say you were sober now.  Best you get back–"

Nicol lowered his hand, stared at his father.  "They were there last night, weren't they?"

"Nobody was there," Master Wyndford said, sounding angry and uneasy together.  "You went to bed drunk.  You dreamt things.  That's all."

"I wasn't drunk!" Nicol shouted.  He took a step toward his father, his uncertainty gone suddenly to anger of his own.  "You put something in my ale, didn't you?  Whatever it is you take when the pain is too bad.  The draught that lets you sleep when you can't otherwise.  You put that in my ale!"

"You're a fool. You–"

"So I'd be asleep when Simon and Elyn came to see you.”  With rising anger, he crashed onward, into the same thought clutching Frevisse.  “Simon and Elyn were there last night, weren't they?” he demanded.  “That's why there were the three cups on the table.  Because Simon and Elyn–"

"You're off your head!" his father said back at him.  "I haven't enough of my dose that I'd waste any of it on your thick head for anything, and they weren't there last night!"

"You knew they were coming!  You wanted me out of the way!  You–"

"I pray your pardon," said Alice, cold and precise on every word.  "Is this about my tomb?  Because otherwise I can see no reason for such shouting in a church."

She had come in by the far door, must have crossed the nave at an angle that kept her hidden beyond the pillar nearest where they stood.  Not by design, surely – she was lady here, with no need not to be seen – but it made her appearance sudden, and both men spun to face her, bending in hurried bows.  Frevisse turned, too, curtsying but saying with very false calm while she did, "It seems Elyn and Simon talked with Master Wyndford last night.  Now he's going to tell us why."

Not so willing to accuse a nun of lying as he was his son of drunkenness, Master Wyndford stared, trapped and speechless, from her to Lady Alice and past her to the three of her ladies who had followed after her.  When he did not promptly answer, Alice said crisply, "Well, Master Wyndford?  I came to say I was willing to let your son work on my angels.  Now I won't say it until I've heard more about this.  You talked with Elyn and Simon last night, my cousin says."

Stiffly, more to the nearest pillar than to her, Master Wyndford said, "Yes, my lady."

"And yet you didn't see fit to say so when I was here earlier this morning."

"No, my lady."  Still to the pillar.

Seeing Alice's displeasure growing, Frevisse put in, still feigning a calm she no longer felt, "What did they come to see you about?"

Master Wyndford gave her a look as black as any he had had for his son and answered sullenly, "About being married."

"And to tell you they were running off," Alice said.

"No."  Master Wyndford heaved a breath far too heavy to be called a sigh.  "They didn't say anything about running off.  They wanted to talk about marrying.  How soon I thought they could do it and all.  I told them not to be fools.  They went away.  That was all."

"They said nothing about leaving?" Alice pressed.

"Nothing," Master Wyndford said bitterly.  "We talked and then they went away."  His face and voice darkened with deep-set grief and long-nurtured rage.  "I told Simon that marriage would rob him of everything, the way it robbed me.  I told
her
that if she loved him, she'd let him go.  But that wasn't what they wanted to hear.  They didn't listen.  They would never have listened."

"And so you poisoned them," Frevisse said quietly.

Master Wyndford jerked his head around to stare at her, along with everyone else.

"While they sat there, trusting you," Frevisse said, her voice hardening, "you poisoned them.  And while you were ridding yourself of their bodies, Nicol came downstairs and saw the cups on the table."

"No!" Master Wyndford protested fiercely.

But Nicol, his stare gone from Frevisse to his father, said wonderingly, "You dosed me enough to make me sleep.  So I wouldn't know they'd been there.  Then you gave them more.  You gave them enough to kill them."  The thought took hold on him, going past guess into belief, and with an on-rush of anger he yelled, "You killed them!”

“No!” Master Wyndford denied as fiercely as before.

Alice made to say something.  Frevisse stopped her with a small gesture and slight shake of the head as Nicol cried out, “I can see you killing her.  You hate women because of Mother.  But Simon?  How could you kill Simon?  Of all people, you love him!"

"I couldn't!" Master Wyndford cried back at him.  "I didn't!  I..."  But his eyes were going from Nicol to Frevisse to Alice to Nicol again, and he must have seen their growing certainty and arrayed anger, and the same weakness that had betrayed him to ruin by a vile-humoured wife betrayed him now.  Defiance and denial went out of him, turned only into weak assertion and a pleading that they understand with, "I didn't kill them.  Death...  Death is so empty.  There's nothing there when someone is dead.   I couldn't bear...  I couldn't see Simon that way.  I gave them sleep, that's all.  With my syrup of poppies.  I gave them sleep.  That's all I did."

"Where are they?" Frevisse asked.

Master Wyndford shook his head, refusing that.  "They're sleeping.  Leave them.  They'll never know.  They'll sleep away and never find out all the ugliness that comes afterward, never have to live through all the years after this love they think they're in is gone.  They'll just sleep.  They'll just..."  A man who had worked more with his hands than words through his life, he gestured outward with his hands, groping for words, needing to make someone, anyone, understand.  "They'll sleep and go free and never know..."

Frevisse grabbed him by one wrist and wrenched his hand over to have clear look at what she had glimpsed as he gestured.  Across his palm the flesh was scraped red and raw.

As Master Wyndford jerked loose from her, Nicol grabbed him by his other wrist, dragged his arm out, fighting him for it, forcing his hand palm-upward.  The same fresh wound was there, too, and Nicol said as if only half-believing it, "Rope-burn!"  And together, in the same rush of understanding, he and Frevisse looked toward the crane with its ropes and pulleys still straddling Lady Alice's tomb; and Frevisse with the horror of certainty said, "No," as Nicol flung his father's hand away from him and bolted toward the gap in the wall to the stone-yard, yelling, "I need men here!  All of you!  Hurry!"

For Master Wyndford, working alone and in the dark last night, the work of lifting the stone slab with its alabaster figure from its place atop the tomb chest must have been brutal work, and lowering it into place again no easier, the pulley-ropes leaving raw testament of that on his hands. 

The workmen who came at Nicol's call made quicker business of it, and when the slab was lifted and swung aside, Simon and Elyn were there, still sleeping.  A little longer and they would have slept away to death, smothered in the sealed darkness without ever – if God were merciful – rousing. 

If the summer night had been longer, so that Master Wyndford could have set to his work at the tomb sooner; or if Frevisse had been less willing to question the twists in what at first seemed straight; or Nicol had refused his uncertain, half-dreamed memory of something that seemed to make no sense, that was the end to which they would have come.

Instead, they were lifted out of the stone darkness and carried from the church, into sunlight and wide air and life again.

And Master Wyndford stood in the church's stone-pillared shadows, tears sliding down his face, and Nicol went to him, leaving Simon and Elyn to the exclaims and care of Alice's women, and put an arm around his shoulders and stood with him, waiting for what would come next; and Alice, once she had given all the necessary orders, came to Frevisse, still standing beside the angels, and said softly, "They likely wouldn't have been found until the time came to bury me there.  Thank you."

Frevisse, her eyes on the stone-carved angels smiling as they gazed into eternity, said softly back to her, "And now you shall have the rest of your angels."

"And thank you for that, too," said Alice.

What you're about to read is a Lost Tale of Dame Frevisse... sort of.

By the late 1990's several of my Dame Frevisse novels had been translated into German. As a result, I was asked to write a short mystery story for a German-language Swiss magazine. And when I say “short”, I mean
short
: It could only be 800 words long. The magazine, sold mainly in railway stations, was publishing stories of this length with the idea they would be short enough for readers to complete during a commuter train ride.

To help me understand what they were looking for, my agent kindly sent me a sample story provided by the magazine. Being in German, this was not as helpful as it might have been: I don’t read German. A teacher of German at my son’s school kindly looked it over and gave me the gist of it, which did help insofar as it confirmed that, yes, it was a short murder mystery. I gave him a copy of one of my books in a German edition in return for his help and buckled down to the unusual challenge.

Fortunately, I didn't have to actually
write
it in German. (It would be translated by the magazine publishers.) The tricky part (besides the fact that I tend to be verbose) was less the story itself (although that had to be tricksy, too) but the fact that in a
history
mystery a sense of a different time and place have to be established along with everything else. Creating time and place take up a lot of words, and then there has to be some presentation of characters
and
a mystery
and
a solution, altogether making for a rather intricate challenge.

But when it was done and shipped off to Switzerland, the story continued dancing in my mind. It felt too short in some ways. The first rush of notes I had made for it had far more in the way of characters and relationships than were possible to use in the given word-count, and even after the necessary ruthless cutting the itch to further explore those characters and relationships stayed with me. A few years later, when Mike Ashley asked me for a story for one of his anthologies, I took the chance to expand the tale to its full and proper length. Hence "The Stone-Worker's Tale".

"The Sculptor's Tale", on the other hand, has remained unpublished in its original form since it first appeared in that Swiss magazine. But here it is, available in English for the very first time...