“Alys, my girl,” Sir Reynold started, not pleased.
“You come,” Domina Alys said and left no space for him to answer by turning sharply around and shoving her way out among the men, giving them no chance to move aside.
Godard seemed only partly conscious now. There was blood at the corner of his mouth, and Dame Claire leaned back from him, holding up her reddened hands. In the white encircling of her wimple, her face was set with the tight-mouthed anger and grief she always had when someone in her care was beyond her help, when someone was going to die and she could not stop it. “Where’s Father Henry?” she asked tersely. “We need him.”
“Here, Dame,” the priest gasped, short-breathed with hurry, his black robe tucked up into his belt to clear his hosened legs, and the curls around his tonsure in more disarray even than usual as he pushed in among the men. They pulled aside to make way for him, going down on their knees, one after another, as they realized he was carrying cradled against his breast in his large hands the small gilt box that held the pax and other things needful for the safeguarding of the soul of a man closing in on the death. “We were out hunting, Benet and I,” he explained as he came. “We’re only just back.” He was not listening to what he said, too intent on reaching Godard to care whether anyone heard. Frevisse glimpsed Benet behind him, rough-dressed for hunting afoot, with a bulging game bag still slung over his shoulder. He stopped at the inner edge of the gathered men, carried that far in Father Henry’s wake but able to see now there was nothing for him to do except kneel with everyone else. Someone must have found him and Father Henry as they were coming in, and Father Henry had turned aside only long enough to fetch the pax from his room.
Already on her knees, Dame Claire was turned aside, washing her hands in one of the waiting basins as Father Henry joined her beside Godard. He looked at the torn hopelessness of the wound and drew in his breath. Dame Claire made a small gesture of helplessness and rose to her feet, saying, “There’s nothing else I can do except mix something for the pain.” She looked at Frevisse, who understood and rose to her feet to go and give the necessary order to Ela.
When that was done, there seemed no more purpose to her staying in the guest hall; she slipped away behind the servants and out.
Evening had come far on while she was inside. The yard was shadowed and far colder than it had been. A rich smell of distant fresh-turned earth told that the winter plowing had been started in the priory’s harvested fields, and she breathed it in deeply, trying to find comfort in the thought of harvest, of the year’s end and quiet turning of the seasons, each one bound around and through by work and prayers as ordered and unending as God himself. That was the right way of things. That was how a life should be lived and ended, with simple inevitability.
Not in anger and on a sword’s blade.
She bent her head in prayer. Not for Godard yet. What could be done for his soul was being done, and Dame Claire was readying what small ease there could be for his body. For him, beyond that, there was only the waiting. It was the other man who needed prayers, the man Sir Reynold had killed, the man who had died with all his sins still on him and no chance of priest or prayers.
Someone went past her, down the stairs, and she looked to see it was Master Porter, headed back to his men, she supposed. Without thinking, she called quietly after him as he reached the foot of the steps, “Why did you goad Sir Reynold and Domina Alys like that just now? You did it of a purpose, didn’t you?”
He faced around to her. They were alone in the yard; everyone else was in the hall, but he glanced around to be sure of it, then came two steps back up toward her and said quietly, “You’d be Dame Frevisse then, wouldn’t you?”
She nodded.
“Master Joliffe said you were too clever to be comfortable with and out-of-ordinary to be trusted.”
How very like Joliffe to make what could have been a compliment sound like something else, Frevisse thought.
“He says you’d no thought we’d not been paid this while.”
“No, none of us knew,” she said.
Master Porter nodded grimly. “That sounds like what I know of her. And that cousin of hers. I was goading them, right enough, hoping one of them would turn angry enough to order me gone. If she ends the contract, it looks better for me than if I have to do it.” He lifted his heavy shoulders in a resigned shrug. “But it didn’t work and I’m not waiting around for the trouble that’s coming next, that’s sure. We’ll be out of here tomorrow if we can.”
“Sir Reynold may try to stop you,” Frevisse warned.
“Aye. He might,” Master Porter agreed with a solidity that suggested it would be better for Sir Reynold if he did not, and with a bow went on his way.
Thoughtful about a man who seemed to see Sir Reynold more as an inconvenience than a threat, Frevisse went on across to the cloister. She could hear that Vespers was not yet over, but rather than go in to it, she chose to sit on the low wall between walk and garth, waiting for Dame Claire, who came soon, carrying her box of medicines, and did not question Frevisse being there but crossed the walk to set her box on the garth wall beside her. Because there seemed nothing useful to be said about Godard, Frevisse asked instead, “How was it with the madman? Was he badly hurt?”
“Only a bare scratch that bled too much, in the way of head wounds. If it doesn’t infect, he’ll not have trouble with it.”
“And his madness? How clear of it does he seem to be?”
Dame Claire made a weary movement of her head that meant nothing. “I didn’t see him before. I don’t know how he was.”
“He was mute and near to completely witless.”
“He speaks now and has at least some wits.” Dame Claire slowly drew in and let out a deep breath. “Domina Alys thinks it’s Sister Thomasine’s doing, that she’s made a miracle.”
Frevisse did not want to hear that. To have to deal with the abbot, even the bishop, if it went that far, over a possible miracle as well as with everything else now so wrong… It was more than she wanted to think about just now. She could see why a miracle would well suit their prioress at present, but it would mean questionings, investigations, doubts, and-from the readily satisfied- passions and even hysteria-all of it turning on Sister Thomasine, and how would she, unworldly and forever lost in prayers as she was, endure all that?
“It’s Sister Thomasine I don’t understand,” Dame Claire said, paralleling Frevisse’s thought.
“She’s frightened?” Frevisse asked.
“Not even slightly, so far as I can tell. But when Domina Alys told her to pray for the madman, she said she wouldn’t.”
“Sister Thomasine refused to pray?” Sister Thomasine was always praying. For her to refuse to… Frevisse found nowhere to follow that thought.
“Well”-Dame Claire sighed-“that’s probably the least of our troubles at present. Prayers or no prayers, miracle or no miracle, we’ll have the sheriff here before we have the abbot.”
Frevisse shut her eyes and, in trying to avoid that thought, said aloud what she had only meant to think. “Besides that-or maybe it’s part of it-she’s lied to us about the tower.”
“Lied? Who’s lied? Domina Alys?”
“There isn’t enough money to finish it. There was maybe never enough money to finish it. The masons are planning to leave because they haven’t been paid in weeks.”