To that he bowed, then stood aside for her and Dame Amicia to go from the room ahead of him in a whispered sweep of skirts and the quiet footfall of soft-soled shoes.
Frevisse loved the quiet of the cloister. Much had been lost since her early days in St. Frideswide’s when the rule of silence had held for almost all of every day. An ill-judging prioress, too fond of the sound of her voice to curb herself, had let go the rule for all the nuns before she was done. The prioress after her had not tried to bring that particular strictness back to nunnery life, and Frevisse had had only some success at it. She held to hope that, given time, she might bring it altogether back, but for now she had to be satisfied – if not content – with silence at meals and from Compline, the last Office of the day, through to Tierce part way through the next morning, the only break until then being the daily Chapter meeting when all the nuns gathered into the warming room to deal with nunnery business and complaints, confessions, and punishments among themselves.
The warming room was the only place in the cloister besides the prioress’ parlor and the kitchen to have a fireplace. Frevisse was often diverted by how Chapter business could go very slowly among the nuns when the weather was cold and there was a fire on the warming room’s hearth, some of the nuns deliberately tarrying for the sake of the warmth. She sympathized and more than once when the weather was at its most bitter had set them tasks that could be done there during the day. Wood was costly, but so – in a different way – were ill nuns, and Frevisse preferred care of her nuns to too careful care of pence.
The weather had taken a turn toward mild the next morning, though, and she did not let them either linger over business in Chapter or let them hurry through the Offices in the church despite the deep chill there – a coolness blessed in summer but not welcomed at all in winter. The Offices, with their garland of prayers and psalms woven out of the worship of generations past and meant to weave forward through generations to come, were the reason for the nunnery’s existence. They were also Frevisse’s great joy more days than not, giving her a time to leave aside her duties and lose herself in the prayers’ reaching toward Heaven.
But each Office only lasted so long, and Tierce was among the short ones of the day. All too soon it was done, and she left the cloister to cross the cobbled yard to the guesthall that every Benedictine house – by St. Benedict’s Rule – had for the care of travelers seeking shelter. Time had been when Frevisse had been the nunnery’s hosteler, charged with overseeing the guesthall and guests, and had passed freely back and forth from cloister to guesthall as her duties required. Now, burdened with the dignity of prioress, she went accompanied by Dame Perpetua.
Master Naylor was already there, waiting in the wide hall where most guests ate and slept but empty of anyone now except the steward and a young man who could only be Tom Kelmstowe. In a common man’s plain clothing, with his legs wrapped against the cold and a tuft of straw straying out of the top of one of his ankle-high shoes, there was nothing particular about the man as he pulled off his cap and, along with Master Naylor, bowed to her. Frevisse slightly bent her head in return and went to sit on one of the benches near the hearth where a slight fire burned, she having earlier sent order for it. She nodded for Dame Perpetua to sit, too, hesitated, then gestured for Master Naylor and Kelmstowe to take the bench facing hers.
Kelmstowe sent a startled, questioning look toward Master Naylor. In the usual way of things, he would expect to stand in her presence; but he had had a cold walk from the village, would have a cold walk back, and despite Frevisse saw now the sharp, harassed intelligence in his eyes and the taut set of his mouth, she also saw a bone-deep, sagging weariness in the effort he was making to hold himself straight and shoulders back. This was a very tired man, and at the little beckon of Master Naylor’s head, Kelmstowe gratefully sat.
There being no point in lingering over niceties, Frevisse said, “Master Naylor tells me you claim you didn’t run away, that you were taken away against your will.”
“Yes, my lady. I went out to the jakes one night and was coming back to the house when I was clouted over the head and a bag put over my head and my hands bound before I got my senses ordered enough to know what was happening.”
That all came glibly enough. Showing neither belief nor disbelief, Frevisse said evenly, “Then?”
“Then I don’t know. I think I smothered some in the bag. When I had my wits back, I was in a cart being jounced along somewhere.” His gaze was fixed on her face, trying to tell if she believed him or not. She merely gave a small nod for him to continue. He leaned somewhat forward and let the words pour out.
“It was drovers took me. They told me they were headed for London with their cattle, and if I gave no trouble, they’d make none and let me free when we got there. They said that they’d been paid to take me there.”
Drovers were men who moved herds of cattle from places like Wales and the North, where the land favored pasturage over tilled fields, to towns or cities where the meat would bring a price worth the trouble of ambling with a herd of cattle for miles and days.
Frevisse looked to Master Naylor. He answered her unasked question. “There were some came by about the time. Were bound for London, I heard. Probably had the thought the market would be good with the holidays then and after that everyone getting their eating in before Lent starts.”
“Aye, that’s what they said,” Kelmstowe agreed.
“So you were in the cart that carried what they needed while they traveled,” Frevisse said. “Out of sight. Not out of sound, though.”
“They had me trussed like a calf being hauled to market, and gagged most of the time, and hidden. They fed me, let me out often enough for need, and said if I kept quiet, I’d be let loose when the time came. If not... well, they never said what it would be ‘if not’, only I didn’t want to find out.”
If he was a liar, he was good one. Frevisse silently granted that, but kept the thought and all others from showing on her face as she said, “And so they kept their word in the end. They let you go.”
Kelmstowe grimaced. “That they did. Right in what must have been the middle of London. They’d left the cattle somewhere.” In some butcher’s pasture outside the city, Frevisse supposed. “But two of them drove the cart with me in it right into the city, let me loose, set me down on the step of a big fountain spewing water, and drove off. By the time I had wits enough to see straight, they were gone, out of sight in all the rush of people and carts and all there.” His voice had gone a little high with strain, remembering it. “Have you ever been to London?”
“I have,” Frevisse said gravely.
“Then you know.” The horror of it was still with him. “Nor I couldn’t find my way out! Those streets – there’s so many of them and they twist around so. Nor folk there don’t talk right and there’s so many of them all talking at once.”
“I know,” she granted, just as gravely. Even though he had probably been sometimes to Banbury on a market day, in his first few minutes in London he had undoubtedly seen more people than in all his life before. And they did say words differently in London than here in northern Oxfordshire. Kelmstowe would have indeed had trouble both in understanding and in making himself understood.
“I just wandered at first, thinking I’d find my way out. Only I didn’t. I kept getting twisted around. Saw things like you’d not believe. That church there with the spire! We could put the whole of Prior Byfield into it, I swear. There were churches everywhere – not so big as that one, but dozens of them, maybe. And what I saw in the shops. Things I couldn’t hope to buy in a hundred years of working. And the river. Enough to swallow here and all, and a bridge across it as long as the whole village and full of houses, and people living there!”
“We know all that,” Master Naylor said quellingly. “Get on with how you came back.”
Kelmstowe nodded, straightened, and went on, “It was seeing the river did it. I knew we hadn’t crossed anything like that coming into London. It’s loud. I’d have heard it. So that was one direction I could forget going. If only the sun had been out, I could have told east from west and all, but the overcast was thick. But it came out the next day. I slept in a church porch that night, and then at dawn there was the sun. I knew the drovers had been heading south most of the time. Sunlight through the cart’s canvas, see. So I knew I had to head north. I got out of London by a wide street and a gateway that’s wide as my house. I asked at an inn for Oxford. Thought that would be more likely known than Banbury or here. They set me on the right road and–” He shrugged. “–I walked, found Oxford finally, and came on from there.”
Like Anneys Barnsley’s claim of rape, there was nothing to say all that was true or not. Surely he had been in London. For the rest...
Kelmstowe either guessed at her doubt or saw it in her face, because he shoved up his sleeves, one after the other, from his wrists and held out his arms. “See. The marks of the ropes are still there.”
There were indeed faint marks that could be from rope, but whether they were old and nearly healed or lately, lightly, made was hard to tell. Frevisse nodded with no comment, and he pulled his sleeves down, hiding the marks.
“What did you do for food and places to stay?” she asked.
“One of the drovers gave me sixpence. By way of farewell, he said. So there was food, and there’s monasteries that have to take you in if you ask.” He looked around the guesthall. “Like here.” Some of the stiffness had gone out of him while he talked. Now weariness seemed to be taking over. “It was slow going and a long way.”
“And you walked all of it?” Frevisse asked.
“Aye.”
“Are those the shoes you wore?”
“Aye.”
“Let me see the bottom of them.”
Kelmstowe held up one foot, then the other. The thin leather soles of both shoes were worn through in several places; they looked to have stray bits of leather put inside for a kind of cheap patching. “They’re all I have,” Kelmstowe said, somewhat defensively. “Everything else I had here is gone. I’ve not even a change of clothing left me.”
“Yet you’ve come back,” Frevisse said, her voice even.
“There are my mam and sister, aren’t there?” Kelmstowe returned. “They couldn’t just be left to fend for themselves, could they? Not knowing what’d happened to me and all, and no one to see to them.”
Frevisse looked at Master Naylor inquiringly.
“They’re well,” the steward said in answer. “The house is the mother’s, so it wasn’t lost. She has her dower acres left to her, too. It’s not much, but it’s something. The sister found work here in the nunnery.”
“That’s not what I want for her,” Kelmstowe said sullenly. “We were set for better.”
“There was one of Gilbey Dunn’s sons would marry her if she had a better dowry,” Master Naylor said by way of explanation.
With earnest, seeming honesty, Kelmstowe said, “Aye. He still would, they’re that set on each other. It’s his father and mother won’t have it otherwise. That’s part of what I was trying for with–” He made an uncertain gesture, probably meaning to show the trick with land that he had been caught at.
“You tried the wrong way,” Master Naylor returned sharply, “and see where it got you.”
“It wasn’t that trying that got me snatched and taken away!” Kelmstowe shot back. “That’s something else altogether and I’d give something to know what!” He visibly remembered where he was and with whom he was speaking and pulled his temper back down to sullen again. “If I knew what that was all for, I’d know a whole lot more.”
“Surely,” Frevisse said. “But since we’ll know no more without the drovers to question, we have to set your word against likelihood and let it go at that.” She waited to see if he would contest that. When Kelmstowe, although his lips tightened with the effort, showed his good sense by saying nothing and even bowed his head a little in acceptance, she turned her heed to Master Naylor to ask, “Do I understand rightly that his mother’s and sister’s well-being fairly well depend on him?”
“It does.”
“Will the rest of the village have him back?” Meaning not only the allegedly wronged husband and wife but, as importantly, the women of the village who could, among them, make a man’s life hell if they took against him.
“Aye,” Master Naylor said.
That made matters simpler anyway, Frevisse thought and was grateful for it. Looking down at her hands folded in her lap, she considered what she had heard from both men, matched it with what she had heard from and about Kelmstowe and knew of Master Naylor, and finally looked up, met and held Kelmstowe’s gaze, and said, “Then, on Master Naylor’s word, and for the sake of your mother and sister, and in the hope of your good behavior hereafter, the priory grants your return.”
Kelmstowe let out his pent breath with a gasp of open relief and slumped, his spine suddenly unrigid. He rose, went down on one knee in front of her, and said with bowed head, “My deep thanks, Domina. For my mother and sister even more than for myself.”
“My blessing on you and them,” Frevisse said. She signed the cross in the air above him. “I trust you will not fail Master Naylor’s faith in you.” She pretended not to see the twist of Master Naylor’s mouth at that. She was, perhaps unfairly, putting on him the burden of responsibility for Kelmstowe’s good behavior, and he knew it.
Kelmstowe rose and bowed to her. “I will not, my lady.”
“Then best you go and tell your mother and sister how it now is.”
“Yes, my lady.” He moved to go, then as if compelled, turned back and said, “I never touched Anneys Barnsley.”
“However that may be, it was your running off that undid you,” Master Naylor said before Frevisse could answer.
“Nor I didn’t do that neither,” Kelmstowe said, but with a weariness that had no fight in it nor any hope of being believed. He had wound himself taut to face his prioress’ judgment. Now the let-go of that was taking over, opening him to the exhaustion against which he had been holding out. He bowed to both her and Master Naylor and left the guesthall.