And then what he had said about her dead babies. He ought to be damned to hell for that alone, let be all the rest!
The doorway darkened with a nun coming in.
Cecely did not bother to rise, simply raised her head, was not pleased to see Dame Frevisse, and stubbornly said nothing. Neither, at first, did Dame Frevisse. Instead, they stared at each other across the room’s small width until finally Dame Frevisse said, “Did it go well with Abbot Gilberd?”
Cecely nearly spat into the rushes with disgust. “Him,” she said angrily. “Do you know what he said of my dead babies? He said that was God’s mercy, taking them in their innocence but sparing me, that I”-she deepened her voice in mockery of the man-“might have time to repent my sins here on earth, rather than pay for them in Hell after my death.” She went back to her own voice. “Hateful man! God’s mercy,” she mocked. “What God is is cruel.”
Dame Frevisse snapped, “What God is-” but stopped.
Pleased at having stung her into even that much, Cecely jibed, “What? What are you going to tell me God is? That he’s a loving god? That because Guy and I loved one another, my babies died because God loves me?” She grabbed up a handful of rushes and threw them down. “I can do without that kind of love!”
“What God is,” Dame Frevisse began again, coldly now, “is a victim of our foolishness. Loving us, he’s hurt by the hurts we bring on ourselves. The way you would hurt with any hurt Edward might have. The way…”
“Neddie!” Cecely cried. “How does he? Is he well?”
“He’s well,” Dame Frevisse said stiffly.
“When can I see him again? It isn’t right to keep a mother from her child.”
“Given the wrongs you’ve done,” Dame Frevisse said, still coldly, “you’d do well not to invoke ‘right and wrong’ for anything you want.”
Cecely made an impatient noise at the woman. There was no way through these women’s thick skulls to their shriveled brains, and going a different way, she demanded, “How does Master Breredon?”
“Much better. He’s far along to being altogether well again.” She paused as if waiting for something else from Cecely.
What Cecely wanted was to know when he would be fit enough to find a way to carry through what she wanted of him. Hardly able to ask that, she said sullenly, “It was the Rowcliffes did it to him. I told you that. They should have been sent away after they did it. But no one listens.”
“If you’re so certain the Rowcliffes did it,” Dame Frevisse said, “you’ll have to find why Symond Hewet is ill, too. Or you might want to ask how he does. He is, after all, something like kin to you and certainly to Edward.”
Rage flowered like fire in Cecely, welcome for its heat and brightness against all the cold fears gathering around her. “Symond!” she hissed. “That treacherous, miserable cur! If it wasn’t for him, none of this would be happening! Isn’t he dead yet? I thought he was dying.”
“He was near to dying, yes.” An edge came into Dame Frevisse’s voice that sounded to Cecely like mockery. “But no, he isn’t dead. He even looks likely to live.”
Cecely trembled with doubled rage. “All of this is his fault! All of it! I didn’t do anything against him. It’s all his doing! Guy was hardly cold in his grave and I was mad with grief and…”
“I thought Guy drowned at sea.”
“The bodies washed up on the shore, didn’t they? That’s how the wreck was known!” How stupid could this woman be? Vicious with her rightful anger and the scraped-raw edge of her grief, Cecely said sharply, “I didn’t know which way to turn. All I had left was Neddie, and Symond came to me, saying he wanted Neddie. He said he and Guy had talked of it and that Guy had wanted him to have Neddie. I called him the liar he is and said he’d best leave me alone or I’d tell John about Jack’s debt. That stopped him. He said he’d let me think on it, and we’d talk about it later. The way he said that, it frightened me. He meant to hurt me! I know it! And Neddie! That’s why I wanted us away from him!”
Dame Frevisse regarded her in unfriendly silence a moment, then said, “But you were willing to sell your son’s wardship to Master Breredon.”
“That was different. I needed…They were against me, always. All Guy’s family, not just Symond. They were going to turn on me now Guy was gone. They were going to take Neddie from me, and I’d rather anyone had him but them! Anyone but Symond most of all!”
Grief and anger at all the wrongs done against her rose up, choking her. She had always deeply delighted in knowing that she and Guy lived together inside a secret that only the two of them knew. Their secret had made a world where there were only the two of them and no one else, a place where Guy was all her own and no one else’s. That he had told someone else-that he had broken their secret, broken their world-that was a betrayal as great as his death had been, and giving way to the boil and pain of her anger, she burst out, “How could he have told Symond our secret! Why did he tell him? Why?”
She was demanding that, yet again, at God rather than at Dame Frevisse, but it was Dame Frevisse who answered coldly back, “He likely did it to protect his son from whatever foolish things you might do. Any such foolish things as what you have done.”
Cecely gasped at the unfairness and cruelty of that and cried out on the higher-mounting wave of her anger at God and Guy and this hateful nun, “Neddie didn’t need protecting from anything! He had me! He has me! Except you’ve taken him away from me!”
Dame Frevisse, untouched by any answering anger-cold bitch of a woman-said, “But you’re willing to sell him to Master Breredon when no one else in his family wants that.”
“Only because they made me! If they had just left us alone…”
“Did you threaten to tell Master Rowcliffe about his son’s bill of obligation?”
“Only because Symond made me! He…” Cecely broke off on a gasp, strangled on a new fear. “How do you know about the bill?” she demanded, then answered that herself, saying bitterly, “Symond told you.”
“Symond did not.”
“Then-” Cecely sprang to her feet. “Then you stole it from Neddie! The deeds and the bill! You stole them from him!”
“He gave them to me. Of his own choice. Because he thought it was wrong that he have them.”
“You stole them from him! From a little boy! You stole them! They’re mine!” She started toward the nun. “Where are they?”
“They are not yours,” Dame Frevisse said, still not raising her cold voice. “They were never yours, and they are back in the hands of the men to whom they belong. The bill to Symond Hewet, the deeds to Master Rowcliffe.”
Cecely took a step back in mingled horror and disbelief. Her heel caught against the edge of the pallet and she stumbled a little and was forced to turn sideways and brace a hand against the wall to keep from falling but all the time not taking her horrified stare off the nun. The woman meant it! She had given everything away! Nothing was left! Guy was gone, and her hopes were gone, and there was only Neddie and what she could get from Breredon for him. But she didn’t know how she was going to get her hands on Neddie and away from here. And even if she did, what Breredon could give her wouldn’t be enough now. But there had to be some way. There had to be!
But she did not see it. All she could see was Dame Frevisse watching her. A cold, unbending woman who was, at best, uncaring about her pain or, more likely, was enjoying it.
Nothing was the way it was supposed to be! Guy had betrayed her. Neddie had lost what she’d trusted to him. Symond hadn’t died. Everything was lost and gone wrong, and with a cry she put her hands over her face and crumpled down into a huddled heap on the pallet, trying to hide not just from the nun but from everything, everything, everything