Lady Eleanor reached up and laid her hand along his cheek, smiling, saying fondly, “That’s my good son.” She patted him lightly, briskly, affectionately. “Then you’d best be off. If it were me, I’d choose a place and time to meet and send the men off by different ways. Don’t bother with taking more than you can carry yourselves. Carts are only a bother. The priory can use whatever you leave.”
“Already considered and decided. Only I won’t tell you where we’ll be because then you can swear you don’t know.” He stepped back, took one of her hands, and kissed it. “You’ll hear from me.”
He gave a brief bow of his head toward Lady Adela and Joice, another to Frevisse, and would have gone with no more than that, but Frevisse said, disbelieving she had understood, “You mean you’re taking your men and going? Now? Before anything has been settled over Sir Reynold’s murder?”
Sir Hugh gave her a cold look. “You have it, my lady.”
“But Sir Reynold’s murder…”
“We’ll maybe find out who did it and we’ll maybe not. Right now it’s more important to have us away from here before your abbot comes.”
“If you leave, it will be said you did it.”
“If I stay, it may very well not matter whether I did it or not. If we’re kept here long enough for the Fenners to find us out, I’ll likely be dead anyway.”
He was moving for the door as he spoke. Quickly Frevisse asked as he went past her, “When you left Domina Alys and Sir Reynold last night, did you go directly back to the guest hall?”
“Where else would I go? Yes, I went directly back to the guest hall.”
He was to the door now, ready to forget her if she would let him, but Frevisse demanded at his back, “Did you see anyone else out then?”
He turned, letting her see she annoyed him but answering, “I saw Benet on the guest-hall steps. And, no, I didn’t see anyone else. And, no, I didn’t kill Reynold. Mother, take care, stay well.” He clipped a bow of his head toward Lady Eleanor and was gone.
Margrete shut the door behind him but was looking at Frevisse while she did. They were all looking at her, Frevisse realized. Joice, for whom it was essentially finished, the threat of Sir Reynold gone and Benet unlikely now to push any claim on her, so that all she need do from here on was wait. Lady Adela, never any part of it except in curiosity. And Lady Eleanor, whose part in the Godfreys being here seemed to have been far more than Frevisse had ever had reason to guess.
Silently she and Frevisse regarded one another across the room, Frevisse with no words for what was in her mind, until finally Lady Eleanor said mildly, not offended, only curious, “What are you doing? Suspecting Hugh of killing Reynold?”
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Frevisse said. And then because that was a lie, said, “Yes, I’m suspecting Sir Hugh of killing Sir Reynold. I’m suspecting everyone and asking questions I’d rather not be asking, because someone has to and no one else is.”
“And now you’ve found out something you’d rather not have known. About me,” Lady Eleanor said calmly.
“Yes.” Frevisse threw all her anger into that, glad to have it said. “You knew Sir Reynold was attacking the Fenners, didn’t you? Not just the other day but for months now. You’ve known about it and you want Sir Hugh to keep on with it.”
Lady Eleanor bent her head in quiet acknowledgment. “Yes. Exactly so.”
“Yes to all of it?” Frevisse asked a little desperately, wanting her denial.
“To all of it,” Lady Eleanor said.
“It was because of you Sir Reynold came here, wasn’t it? All the years Domina Alys has been here, he never came until now. It was you who thought how he could use St. Frideswide’s and told him.”
“I wrote to Hugh about it,” Lady Eleanor answered, undisturbed by the anger behind Frevisse’s accusation. “My husband, his father, paid most of the costs of the court matters that came to nothing against the Fenners. Hugh and I had talked of having our own back from the Fenners somehow, and this seemed a good chance to do it. He brought Reynold in on it.”
“Is this why you come to St. Frideswide’s? To use it against the Fenners?”
“Oh, no!” That, at least, roused Lady Eleanor to strong denial. “I came for exactly the reasons I gave. It was only after I was here that I began to see the possibilities.” She smiled, wanting Frevisse to understand. “We needed somewhere not readily thought of when raids started against the Fenners, but somewhere defensible if we were found out too soon.”
“But why?” Frevisse asked. “Why any of it at all? The Godfreys and Fenners have let whatever it was between them go by for years. Why start it up again? It was over.”
“It was never over,” Lady Eleanor said in gentle explanation, expecting her to understand. “They still have what’s ours. We fought it through the courts, hired lawyers, clerks, met the cost of paying judges off to hear the matter fairly when the Fenners were paying them to hear it otherwise. Years of that, all cost and no return, until we couldn’t afford to go on with it, particularly after my husband died, and had to let it lie, but, no, it wasn’t over, only at a standstill for a time.”
“But this raiding of them,” Frevisse said. “Why?”
“Partly as a way to have back a little of what they owe us.
They’ve gone unhurt too long. But more than that, now that we’ve shown how vulnerable they are, men enough will join us so we can go against them openly. Men enough we can take back our properties the same way the Fenners have held them. By force.“
Frevisse stood still, bringing herself to accept that all of this thus far-the thieving, at least two deaths, and possibly Sir Reynold’s-was, at the most, because of Lady Eleanor. Carefully keeping her feelings from her voice, she asked, “Did Domina Alys know any of this?”
“None of it,” Lady Eleanor said unhesitantly. “She would never accept her priory being used this way. You know that.”
Frevisse had thought she knew it; but she had thought she knew other things-thought she had known Lady Eleanor-and was finding she had been very wrong. “Why not have Sir Hugh do it alone, instead of giving it over to Sir Reynold?”
“Partly because Reynold could always bring men to follow him more easily than anyone I’ve ever known, no matter what he asked of them, and partly because Alys would believe whatever Reynold told her, never look past it, nor tire of him being here as soon as she would have tired of Hugh.” Despite she had been speaking calmly, reasonably, tears shone in Lady Eleanor’s eyes and she broke off, pressing a hand to her lips to stop their trembling before going on a little brokenly, “You see, when Reynold set his mind to it, he could charm a bird out of a tree, a badger out of its holt, a man or woman into doing anything he asked of them, and Alys more quickly than most.”
“And never mind that every word of what he said was likely a lie,” Margrete put in, handing her lady a handkerchief for the tears now sliding down her cheeks.
“An utter lie,” Lady Eleanor agreed. “He was bound to be killed for it sooner or later. But there was no way to change him. The most that could be done was find a use for him.”
“Bound to be killed?” Frevisse asked, trying to come back to the point. “Why?”
“Because with Reynold the only thing that ever counted in the long run was having his own way. He’d say and do whatever he had to, to have it.”
“And make everyone else pay whatever price they had to so he could,” Margrete said.
“Knowing all that about him, you thought you could use him, trust him?” Frevisse asked.
Lady Eleanor smiled faintly, fondly. “I’ve known him since he was a little boy. He couldn’t lie to me. I knew how he always dimpled in beside his mouth when he was lying.” Her tears were more for the boy maybe than for the man. “I’d tell him to his face when he was lying to me and he’d laugh and admit it, so we did well enough together when we wanted to. And in something like this against the Fenners where our purposes ran together, yes, I thought I could use him.”