He started to swear something at her despite she was a nun, but above the dark snarl of sound from the other men still set on the madman, Joliffe asked cheerfully, “Isn’t it late in the day for a hunt?”
They all looked, Frevisse with them, to find him balanced on the well curb above them, crouched down on his heels and leaned forward on his toes to see better what they were doing. He sniffed audibly. “Though I can’t deny that the spoor is still lying strong.” He leaned farther, staring with exaggerated curiosity at the hunched madman among their legs. “What is it you’re hunting anyway? Boar? Hedgehog?” He seemed to overbalance into falling, changed it with a twist of his body to a light-footed spring to the foot of the steps, so that the men drew back, grinning. He sauntered in among them, bent over the madman for a closer look and said, “No, not boar or hedgehog. Wrong pelt.” He straightened to look around at the men incredulously. “You’re not wanting it for its pelt, are you?”
Most of the men laughed and one made a rude comment on what they wanted “it” for. Joliffe shook his head in mock seriousness. “I doubt I can recommend that,” he said. “Not when we don’t even know what it is. Dame Frevisse, is this a common sort of animal around here? Do you know what it is?”
Following wherever he was taking this, Frevisse came forward. The men drew back and apart to let her through, and since it seemed to her the farther they were from the madman the better, she copied Joliffe’s pretense of studying him while half circling at an overly fastidiousness distance so that, unwittingly, the men drew back more. Slowly, as if deeply considering the madman still crouched at Joliffe’s feet, she said, “It does bear some resemblance to something I know. I might…” She drew her consideration out, copying her aunt whose indecisions on even the most minor matters had made uncomfortable suspenses for everyone around her. In her aunt’s case it had come from a natural incoherency of thought; for Frevisse it was a play for time until Joliffe let her know what he had in mind. He had better have something in mind. She was watching him more closely than she was looking at the madman, and when she was most between him and the men and they least likely to see, he flickered his fingers at her in a horn sign-middle fingers and thumb bent down, the outer two fingers pointed out.
Frevisse recoiled violently, letting her voice scale up in pretended shock. “It isn’t! It can’t be!” She made the sign of the cross widely in the air between her and the madman. “Blessed St. Anthony against the demons! It’s… it’s…”
Joliffe joined in her overplayed horror. “It is!” His sign of the cross was wilder and wider than hers. “You have it!” He struck a pose of shock and dismay. “It’s a failed fiend!”
The men were laughing, enjoying the show. Joliffe grabbed the madman under one arm and wrenched him to his feet, exclaiming at Frevisse as if her stupidity stood between them all and salvation, “Don’t you see? That explains the stench of hell about it!” He looked around frantically and pointed at the church door. “What it needs is the odor of sanctity!”
Too rapidly for anyone to stop him, he dragged the madman up and along the well steps, outflanking the nearest men, heading for the church’s wide west door, close across the yard.
“Wait on!” one of the men called out in surprise. “Where are you going with him?”
Frevisse, following Joliffe with her skirts grabbed up to let her move more quickly, swung around, her hands raised in prayer, between him and the men to exclaim in pious, ringing tones, “We’ve been in the presence of hell! Pray!
Pray for your souls! St. Anthony, who faced the demons in the desert, guard us here. St. Amable, who…“
The men jostled each other in a confused change of direction, less interested in their souls than in their escaping prey; and even though Frevisse slowed them a little, forcing them to go around her, they would have had Joliffe before he reached the church and sanctuary, except the madman somehow managed to break into a run with him, not fumbling, pulling back, or falling. They reached the door with time for Joliffe to thrust it open, shove the madman in and himself after him, and on the safe side of the threshold lean back out to exclaim cheerfully, “It’s all right! I’ll see to him from here!,” before drawing back inside and slamming the door shut for the first of the men to run hard up against it.
The heavy thud of the bar dropping across it inside told how thoroughly he had it fast against their fists and angry yells, leaving Frevisse free to retreat the other way, toward the cloister, catching Sister Amicia by the arm as she went with, “We’d best go in, too. Come.”
Sister Amicia came, and inside, when Frevisse turned to bring the rarely used bar there down across the door, was enough recovered to ask, a little shrill with excitement and fear, “They wouldn’t dare try to come in here, would they?”
The men’s pounding yells on the church doors were muffled but not faint, and Frevisse was about to say that she did not want to find out the hard way what they would dare, when behind them in the passageway Domina Alys demanded, “What are you doing? What’s toward out there?”
Frevisse and Sister Amicia swung around to face her, dropping into curtsies, Frevisse answering while they did, “It’s some of your cousin’s men. They’ve hunted a madman into the church and want him out again for sport.”
“They’re beating my church door down because they want sport?” Domina Alys started forward in heavy-treading fury. “I’ll show them sport!”
Frevisse swung around to jerk the door open ahead of her while Sister Amicia shrank back against the wall, but Domina Alys as she stalked past them ordered, “Sister Amicia, come. It you’re hosteler, you have to learn how to handle fools and dolts like this!”
Sister Amicia gaped, then looked to Frevisse, asking help. Frevisse shook her head with none to give, and forced to it, Sister Amicia momentarily shut her eyes, then followed Domina Alys, leaving Frevisse surprised by her for the first time-both that she went and that she did it silently.
Given no other orders herself, Frevisse went the other way, toward the church’s cloister door, reaching it as Dame Juliana, Sister Emma, and Sister Cecely came from somewhere else in the cloister, drawn by men’s pounding and yells. To their alarmed questions, Frevisse said quickly, “It’s only some of Sir Reynold’s men making trouble. Domina Alys has gone out to them. She’ll-”
The pounding and yells cut off.
Frevisse smiled with more assurance than she felt. “There. You see? It’s done. She’s taken care of it.”
Sister Cecely looked a little regretful and Sister Emma started to protest, but Dame Juliana said, “Good. We can all go back to our work,” and firmly shepherded them away despite Sister Emma beginning to protest that, too.
Chapter 14
From inside the church, Domina Alys’ general fury, if not her actual words, was audible beyond the west door, and Frevisse for once wished her joy of her rage.
Joliffe was partway down the nave, the madman slumped to the floor beside him and Dame Perpetua confronting them both indignantly, with Lady Adela close behind her, intent on missing nothing, and Sister Thomasine, drawn from her prayers, rising from her knees below the altar. Apparently in answer to a challenge Dame Perpetua had made him, Joliffe was saying, “He needs sanctuary. I’m asking it for him.”
Dame Perpetua returned stiffly, sounding set on letting them come no further, “He has to ask sanctuary for himself. If he wants it, he has to ask for it.”