Frevisse looked to the steward. “Well? How much of that was truth from him and how much lies, do you think?”
Master Naylor shook his head. “I’d not care to say. I think he and Barnsley’s wife will be the only ones who ever know what happened between them.”
“If anything.”
“If anything. As for the being taken off to London, seems he was there, from what he says. It’s his going that makes me wonder.”
It made Frevisse wonder, too, but she said, “He may have run off on a moment of anger made up of the whole mix of having been found out about his cousin’s land and losing his place as reeve and being accused of the rape.” Although a moment of anger seemed hardly sufficient to have carried him all the way to London. To Banbury or Oxford perhaps, but London? “However it was, we’re unlikely ever to know.” She stood up, ready to return to the cloister. “I liked he did not beg me for his land and all back.”
“I warned him against that. That it would do him no good.”
“His goods were sold of course. Who was given his land?”
Master Naylor held back his answer a moment, then said with a grimace, “Henry Barnsley.”
Frevisse, who had begun to move toward the outer doorway, stopped short. “The same reeve who ruled against him in the manor court, whose wife he was accused of attacking.”
“Aye.”
“So Kelmstowe has come back to nothing much and has to live with seeing Henry Barnsley with just about all he’s lost.”
At his most dour, Master Naylor agreed, “That’s the way of it.”
“And you think this is going to go well?”
Master Naylor paused as if considering precisely the answer he wanted to give, then said, “I think so. However foolish some of what he’s done has been, Kelmstowe is no fool. He’s tried running off...”
“You don’t hold with his story of the drovers then.”
“Who can know?” But plainly, pushed to it, Master Nayor did not believe it. “He’s tried running off and found it didn’t answer. He’s sharp enough, he could have made a life for himself somewhere else. One no worse and likely better than he was going to have here for a time. Only he found he couldn’t after all just leave his mother and sister to fend for themselves. So even knowing he’d only made everything worse for himself and them by running off, he’s come back. He’s no fool. He’s found out what doesn’t work and what does. I think he’ll do well enough, and finally pull himself back to where he was and better. In the long run.”
That was a great deal for the steward, usually tight with his words, to grant about anyone. Frevisse accepted it with a nod. She did not tell him to keep eye and ear on the matter; he did not need that telling. Instead, as the cloister bell began to ring, summoning her to the next Office, she said, “Let me hear sometimes how it goes.”
Two weeks later Henry Barnsley was dead.
Frevisse was seated at the window in her parlor for the sake of the morning’s rare sunlight. The days had been particularly gray of late, making today’s open winter-pale sky particularly welcome. Even the occasional flurry of snow from some drifting wisp of cloud was beautiful in its diamond sparkling as it fell. A long session with Dame Juliana between Tierce and Sext, going over the cellarer’s accounts to be certain all was in readiness for Lent so far as the kitchen was concerned, and then another while spent with Dame Johane after Sext considering the possibility of the nuns making a new cope for Father Henry for Easter, had left her knowing she must do “nothing” for a time, to ease her mind in readiness for the rest of the day. So she had taken up the psalter that had been her uncle’s gift to her at his death and sat down on the cushioned bench in the sunshine to read for a time.
The psalter was in English. As required, she had shown the gift to her then-prioress, Domina Edith, for approval. It being deemed fit to go into the nunnery’s small collection of books that were given out for Lenten reading and such other times as the prioress chose, Frevisse had rarely seen it afterward. Domina Alys, who came after Domina Edith, had seen small use for books at any time. After her, in Domina Elisabeth’s time, Frevisse had once been given it for reading during Lent and several times seen other nuns reading it. When, upon becoming prioress, she did the necessary inventory of everything the priory possessed, she had come on the psalter in the priory’s chest of books and taken it and kept it ever since with only the barest tremble of conscience.
She knew her psalms in Latin, of course, but there was an odd comfort in reading them in English. They seemed somehow new, and the knowledge that her uncle had wanted her to have them was an occasional balm in the loneliness and work of her days. Thus:
Blessed be men undefiled that go in the law of the Lord. Blessed be they that seek his witnessing, that seek him in all their heart. For they that work wickedness, go not in his ways... I would God heart. For they that work wickedness, go not in his ways... I would God guided my way...
I would God guided my way...
Holding the words in her mind, a prayer all in themselves, she gazed out the window at the winter sky and only gradually realized her free hand was stroking at a cat on her lap. She looked down, and indeed the nunnery’s cat was there, curled and comfortable in the sunlight, purring gently. Frevisse looked toward the door and saw it was opened the slightest bit, enough to let past a slender cat, which was somewhat unsettling because she was certain she had latched it. But apparently not, because the cat was very definitely on her lap. Where she never encouraged it to be.
But then she never encouraged it to be in her parlor either, and yet it nonetheless too often was, with an insolence to which she had finally given way. She did not know which generation of cat this was of the one Domina Elisabeth had introduced into the cloister, or whether it was a descendent at all. They had been kept to usually one, never more than two at a time, and kept the cloister clear enough of vermin to make keeping them worthwhile. That did not mean Frevisse wanted this one on her lap. Yet she found she was still stroking it when she heard the soft footfall of one of her nuns hurrying up the stairs.
“Enough,” she said, pushed to show the cat it was to shift itself, and slanted her lap to help it slide to the floor.
The cat did not even trouble to throw her an offended look. It understood the rules of the game between them and strolled away, tail high and twitching, to slip out the door past Dame Amicia’s skirts, unnoticed, as she came in at Frevisse’s bidding.
Frevisse had already closed the psalter and folded her hands upon it, readying herself for whatever new trouble had arisen in the cloister to bring Dame Amicia in such unseemly haste. It had not taken her long, after becoming prioress herself, to understand the calm with which Domina Edith, all those years ago, had faced every happening: When everyone else was in a flurry, the last thing needed was to join in with them. So she did not rise to her feet in alarm at sight of the nun’s face, simply put the psalter aside and asked quietly as Dame Amicia dipped in a hasty curtsy, “What is it, Dame?”
“Word from Master Naylor, my lady! They’re bringing a woman from the village to Dame Claire...”
“Hurt?” It would have to be badly; the village’s herbwife was capable of seeing to most troubles of the body there.
“Gone mad! She’s found her husband murdered – lying there in his own blood and all – and she’s gone mad and they want Dame Claire to do something to quiet her! The man from Master Naylor said they’re bringing her now and–”
“Murdered? Who?” But that was not to the point at present. Frevisse swept her own questions aside with a gesture and rose to her feet. She was about to order Dame Amicia to go to Dame Claire, but looking out the window, she saw a cluster of men and several women coming through the gateway from the outer yard and changed her mind, ordering instead, “Tell them to take her to the guesthall. I’ll fetch Dame Claire.”
Dame Claire was the nunnery’s infirmarian. Well-learned from both experience and books, she was skilled in medicines and, of necessity, some surgery, since St. Frideswide’s and its village were remote from other help. She and the village herbwife Margery had worked well together for many years. Were growing toward old together, too, but each with someone trained to be their successor when the time came. There was little that could throw either woman into a fluster, for which Frevisse was grateful as she went with Dame Claire across the yard: A woman’s wailing met them at the stairs up to the guesthall door.
Once in the guesthall’s long hall, Frevisse was the more grateful that she need do little more than stand aside, giving authority by her presence while Dame Claire and the herbwife Margery took matters well into hand. There was plainly no present hope of any clear answers from the village woman. Her wailing was mixed with sobs and shrieking as she pulled at her tumbled hair with clutching fingers, her headkerchief and coif gone, probably lost in her frantic thrashing against anyone trying to hold and quiet her – presently three tall men from the village. Although she was not a large woman, she had the strength of someone used to hard work all her life, and in her wild, writhing grief, she was not holding back any of it; the men were having a hard time of it. Margery, wisely keeping beyond reach of the widow’s thrashing, was standing with another village woman who just looked frighten. As the woman bobbed an uneven curtsy at the nuns, Frevisse saw that she was clutching to her breast a wad of white cloth that were likely the missing coif and handkerchief. A neighbor, surely.
“Sit her there,” Dame Claire ordered, pointing to a bench. And added as after-thought, “Then keep her there.”
“Dead!” the woman wailed as they forced her down. She was somewhat hoarse by now. “Dead and lying there in his blood! Dead!”
“Aye, we know, we saw it,” Margery snapped, her lengthy patience apparently gone. “But your squalling isn’t helping him a bit. Nor you.”
Indeed not, but the woman had worked herself into too high and fine a wildness to give it over, Frevisse thought. Grief was one thing, but to Frevisse’s mind the woman’s shrieking had more self-indulgence than grief about it, as if it was not the dead man who mattered but herself.
“I tried what I had,” Margery said to Dame Claire. “But she’s far past my herbs working on her.”
“I have poppy syrup and wine,” Dame Claire returned, already taking the vial of the syrup from her snatched up box of medicines.
“Let go the wine and just give her the syrup to make this quick,” Margery said. “Give over your shrieking, Anneys. It’s not helping aught.”
Dame Claire took advantage of one of the woman’s wide-mouthed wails to thrust in the spoon with the syrup. Taken by surprise, the woman gulped and swallowed. Her concentration on her grief broken, she stared at Dame Claire, then around at everyone, then threw back her head and began a keening moan that grated on the ear but was less than the wailing had been. Dame Claire hesitated over filling the spoon again and decided against it, but a gesture from Frevisse had already sent one of the guesthall servants scurrying for wine; the guesthall kept some for when better guests came. It was brought in a pottery bowl, and Frevisse went forward with it, and in what she thought of as her prioress voice, ordered as if she expected immediate obedience, “Now drink this for the sake of your raw throat.”
The woman broke off her keening to stare up at Frevisse with startled eyes. Frevisse held out the bowl. She said to the men, “Let her go,” and to the woman, firmly, “Drink.”
Still staring up at Frevisse, the woman took the bowl with both hands and drank, unsteadily at first, then in great gulps. Wine was unlikely to have come her way very often, if ever. Too, the poppy syrup was probably beginning work. Frevisse stepped back, said over her shoulder toward the servants, “A bed in the small room. Ready it.” She missed old Ela who would have already seen to it being done, not needing to be told.
Still, by the time Dame Claire and Margery had helped the woman to her feet and directed her now-stumbling feet across the hall and into the small chamber kept for guests in need of greater privacy than sleeping on pallets in the hall, there were a sheet and pillow and blanket on the bed. Frevisse helped them lay her down and waited while Margery took off the woman’s shoes and Dame Claire covered her. By then the widow’s drugged eyes had fallen closed in enforced sleep.
“There,” said Margery. “That will do for a time.”
Frevisse waited until they were leaving the room together to ask, “Who is she? Who is her husband that’s dead?”
Margery blew out her breath in a weary sigh and answered, “Henry Barnsley. Him that was made reeve just last Michaelmas.”
Frevisse had raised her hand to sign the servants to bring ale for Margery and the village men and woman still waiting across the hall. At Margery’s words, her hand dropped to her side as if suddenly weighted with lead. “Barnsley?” she echoed but so faintly that it was lost under Dame Claire’s more to-the-point question of, “Was it murder? Has the hue and cry been raised?” The pursuit by neighbors required by law when outcry went up after a crime was discovered.
“Surely murder,” Margery returned. “The cry’s gone up, but not much likelihood of that being any use in trailing whoever did it.”
“There’s the snow still on the ground,” Frevisse said, her wits gathering back to her.
“Old snow,” Margery pointed out. “It’s tracked and trampled all over the village. There’ll be nothing for anyone to follow. Besides, everyone has thought already on who it was done by.”
“No chance it was her?” Frevisse said with a nod toward the room they had left.
“Nay. Anneys had been down the village since yesterday helping her sister with birthing her third one. You’d think it would go faster, being the third, but her sister has always been a slow one. It wasn’t until this morning Anneys was able to go home and found her man dead.”
The three villagers had picked up what they were talking of, and now the woman put in, her voice high with excitement, “Brained with an axe beside his very own hearthplace and left lying there in his blood. I saw Anneys trudging to the door, asked her how the babe was doing, saw her go in, then heard her scream, and saw her come out shrieking. There wasn’t time between for her to have done it.”