She was not sure what questions-or of whom-until, going into the infirmary’s outer chamber, she found Dame Claire standing at the wooden worktable there, the infirmarian’s book laid open in front of her. It was a battered volume, its parchment pages dog-eared and stained. From her turns at helping in the infirmary, Frevisse knew there were leaves of various plants pressed among its pages, and that here and there dried plant stalks and other things marked places used by the several generations of St. Frideswide’s infirmarians for reasons long forgotten but left by their successors because, Dame Claire had once said, “They were put there for someone’s reason sometime. It makes me feel I’m keeping company with them, those other women, all of us leaving something of ourselves for the ones who come after us.”
Just now she looked up, frowning, from a page showing a thin-lined drawing of some plant with carefully written script below it and less carefully written notes in various inks around it and said, “Poison doesn’t seem to have been of much interest to my predecessors. There’s nothing here that helps.”
“Are you certain it was poison both times? Is it possible Master Breredon was honestly ill, and someone then used something against Symond that copied his illness?”
“Anything is possible,” Dame Claire said wearily and somewhat shortly. “It’s ‘likely’ that limits matters. Even if that was the way of it, from where did this opportune poison come from, since they would hardly be likely to have it to hand?”
Almost as one, they both looked up and around at the array of dried herbs hanging from the ceiling beams and the shelves of pots and small boxes along one wall; and after a silent moment, Frevisse asked, “Can you tell if anything has been taken?”
“Probably not.” But Dame Claire was already going to a small chest sitting at a far end of the shelves. She kept her stronger medicines there, Frevisse knew, to keep anyone from laying hands on them mistakenly. The chest had no lock, though. Dame Claire simply raised the lid and looked inside, shifted the variously colored and tagged cloth bags and small, stoppered bottles around a little, held a glass vial up to what light there was through the window, shook her head, returned it to the box, closed the lid, and said, “I can’t tell. Everything is here, but I’m not certain of quantities. There’s never been need to be that precise about them.”
Frevisse nodded that she understood. Dame Claire came back to the table, stared down at the book again, then turned some pages but not as if she thought to find any needed answers in it. Frevisse asked, “But you’re certain it was poison?”
“You keep asking me that,” Dame Claire said somewhat impatiently. “I’m as certain as may be. That’s all I can tell you. Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know.”
“Have you told anyone that it’s probably not disease that struck them?”
“I haven’t even let anyone know I’m awake yet,” Dame Claire said. She closed the book. “I’d best go see how the men do before Tierce.” She paused, frowning again. “How long did we sleep? Surely it’s time for Tierce by now.”
When they went into the cloister walk, they found out that it was more than time for Tierce. Dame Margrett, presently sitting guard outside Sister Cecely’s door, said at them, “You’re awake. Best you tell Domina Elisabeth. She had us called silently to Tierce, to keep from waking you.”
“I’ll go to Domina Elisabeth,” said Frevisse, then laid a hand on Dame Claire’s arm and said, too low for Dame Margrett to hear, “I’ll tell her what we think, but that we think it best to keep it to ourselves for now.”
Dame Claire gave a small nod of agreement, and they went their separate ways, she to see how the sick men did and release Dame Johane from her duty if she were still there, Frevisse up the stairs to the prioress’ parlor where she was not much surprised to find Abbot Gilberd.
He and Domina Elisabeth were not alone, of course. Dame Thomasine was standing just inside the door, and of those who might have been there, she was best, Frevisse thought, because Dame Thomasine hardly ever spoke about anything and never beyond what she had, of necessity, to say. Her silence on whatever was said here need hardly to be asked.
As Frevisse made her low curtsy, Domina Elisabeth echoed Dame Margrett with, “You’re awake. Good. Dame Claire, too?”
“She’s gone to see how her patients do,” Frevisse said.
“Do we know yet what it is they have?” Abbot Gilberd asked. “Or ate?”
Frevisse paused, brought herself to look at him straightly, and answered, “We think they were poisoned. Purposely.”
Both Abbot Gilberd and Domina Elisabeth stared at her as if what she had said did not make sense to them. Dame Thomasine crossed herself. A moment later both the abbot and Domina Elisabeth did, too, Domina Elisabeth saying, “God forbid,” and Abbot Gilberd demanding, “By whom? With what?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“Then you will have to find out,” he ordered. “You have a marked skill at doing such. Do it.”
The sharpness of his order startled her into momentary silence. She did have a skill at finding things out, and Abbot Gilberd knew it. Besides, whether he had bade her do so or not, she would have tried, and so she lowered her head, her eyes, and her voice, and said most meekly, “Yes, my lord.” Then said, without raising her head, eyes, or voice, “I would ask, though, that nothing be said of poison, that people may go on thinking it’s disease.”
That silenced Abbot Gilberd a moment in his turn, before he asked, “Why?”
“So that I may ask questions without the poisoner knows he is suspected. Also, if we claim contagion, we can insist no one leaves, to take it with them. If poison is thought of, then there will be those who will want to go, claiming they want to escape it happening to them.”
“Or to escape detection, if they’re the guilty one.” Abbot Gilberd said. “Yes. We’ll keep silence on it. You, too, Dame-”
He broke off. Domina Elisabeth supplied, “Thomasine.”
“Dame Thomasine. You will say nothing of what you heard just now.”
Dame Thomasine bowed her head a little lower in assent.
From the cloister the bell began to call to…Sext, Frevisse reminded herself. To have slept straight through Tierce meant she was disordered in the day, but she gratefully accepted the summons and the silence it enjoined on them all, made quick curtsy to Abbot Gilberd and Domina Elisabeth, and all but fled the room for the stairs. They would have to follow in more seemly wise and Dame Thomasine come after them, but Frevisse made full use of the excuse to be away and in the sanctuary of her choir stall lost herself gratefully in the prayers and psalms of the Office. She had missed not only Tierce, but Matins and Lauds and Prime today. There was no blame to her in that, except maybe for sleeping through Tierce, but being guiltless did not lessen her relief as she joined in the opening, “Deus, in adjutorium.”-God, come to help.-And for the while of the Office she was able to keep her mind only there, in that now that was at the same time a freeing of the heart and mind to join the soul’s reaching out into the Forever beyond the world’s bounds.
It was very hard, at the Office’s end, to come back into the day and its troubles, but by the time Frevisse left the church with the others and received Domina Elisabeth’s benediction in the cloister walk, her thoughts were already slipped away from her momentary peace to questions again.
She would set aside for now the matter of what had been used against both men and from where had it come. It was sufficient that Dame Claire was certain something had been used. And since she had no way yet to know the why of the poisoning, asking how it had been done seemed presently the best way to go.