Where was Joice?
Frevisse opened her eyes, looking for her. St. Frideswide’s was a plain church; there were few places in it to be out of sight, and Frevisse circled quickly behind the farther choir stalls, to the door into the tower. The boards closing it looked solidly set, just as always, but when she took hold and lifted from one side, they shifted, just as Joliffe had said. Not much but enough that a slender person would go through. But how could Joice have known? And even if she did, what would be her purpose in going out of the nunnery now?
Frevisse shut the boards again and turned away toward the altar, more from habit than purpose, not thinking of the madman until she came past the end of the choir stalls. From there she could see both the altar and behind it, where he had been bedded. Obscure in the shadows, he was sitting up on his pallet now, instead of huddled into his blankets. And Joice was kneeling in front of him, her green cloak spread out around her as she leaned toward him in what looked to Frevisse like familiar, earnest talk.
The madman was leaning toward her, too, their heads close, but he looked suddenly sideways to Frevisse and jerked back at sight of her. Joice looked and jerked back too; and as Frevisse went toward them, she stood sharply up and moved to hide the madman behind the full swing of her cloak, saying quickly, “I came to pray, then thought it would be… wonderful to talk to someone who… the miracle… I wanted to ask him…”
Frevisse stopped almost near enough to push Joice aside if she wanted. Whatever else she was, the girl was a poor liar; and Frevisse, trying to hold her growing anger of disbelief behind an outwardly calm voice, said accusingly, “You know him.”
“No!” Joice answered a little desperately. “It’s that he’s not mad anymore! It’s safe to talk to him. Sister Thomasine cured him. He…”
Behind her the madman rose to his feet.
Joice turned quickly on him, exclaiming, “Edmund, no. Don’t!” grasping his arm as if to force him down again; but he took hold of her hands, refusing, saying, “Joice, she’s not a fool. She knows.”
“Quite probably.” Unhuddled, standing straight, he was tall. His hair, dark golden now that the mud was washed out of it, was combed back from his face, which had been scrubbed clean, too, and as if it had been washed off him with the dirt, there was no sign of madness in him as he met Frevisse’s look. “My deep apology for our deception, my lady.”
Momentarily ignoring him, Frevisse said accusingly at Joice, “You recognized him yesterday. You put your cloak around him not from pity but because you knew him!”
“Of course I knew him!” Joice said angrily. “I should have let him freeze!”
“Joice,” he tried again.
“It might be best,” Sister Thomasine said gently from beside the altar steps, “if you went on seeming mad awhile. Things being as they are,” she added hesitantly, looking from one to another of them as if to be certain she had it right.
Frevisse stared at her, blank-minded with surprise. Joice, frozen, stared, too; but Edmund, after a moment, collapsed back into a crumpled heap on the pallet behind him, gone useless again to all appearances except for the long look of understanding between him and Sister Thomasine.
Half disbelieving, Frevisse managed to say, “You know that he was never mad?”
“Oh.” Sister Thomasine pushed her hands a little farther up her sleeves and ducked her head shyly. “Yes. I knew.”
“From the very first?”
Sister Thomasine ducked her head lower. “Yes,” she said softly.
“And you let us think he was? Let us think you’d made a miracle?”
“I knew you’d find out it wasn’t a miracle,” Sister Thomasine said in almost a whisper. “It was just it seemed he’d be safer if everyone thought he’d been mad and that he’d been cured for a while.”
“But you know he wasn’t, that he hadn’t been,” Frevisse insisted. “How did you know he wasn’t?”
Sister Thomasine turtled back into her wimple as if she would have altogether disappeared if possible. “It was just…” She hesitated, then said with surprising firmness, considering she was still whispering, “It was just he didn’t feel mad.”
He had not felt mad.
Frevisse had been worrying at the back of her mind over Sister Thomasine’s hurt when she found she had worked no miracle. Apparently it was not Sister Thomasine she needed to worry over, and she was distractedly trying not to follow the implications of that as Edmund said warmly, “She was protecting me.”
“You need protecting!” Joice said. “What did you think you were doing, coming here like this?”
That told Frevisse they had not had much time for talk before she came, and Edmund’s edged answer said some of that time had been spent in Joice being angry at him.
“I told you. I was trying to find out how it was with you. Word had gone to your father of what had happened before someone came to your uncle with rumor of where you were, and then it seemed well for me to find out if you needed help sooner than the sheriff could be here.”
“Oh, yes,” Joice said scornfully. “How great a help did you think you’d be, drooling and filthy and stinking?”
“I didn’t drool. And the filth and stench were to keep people at bay.”
“It did do that,” Joliffe agreed from the corner of the choir stalls behind Frevisse.
Frevisse startled around as Joice exclaimed in alarm and Edmund jerked up to his knees, a hand going to his waist for a dagger he was not wearing. Only Sister Thomasine looked toward Joliffe with no particular alarm, and he gave her a small bow before he strolled toward the rest of them, making a general bow and saying to Edmund, “You did the madman very well. You fooled me along with the rest.”
Edmund settled back onto his blankets. “Thank you, and more particularly my thanks for your help yesterday.”
Joliffe sat down on his heels to come head level with him and said cheerfully, “A pleasure. So besides being Edmund and an occasional madman, who are you?”
“Edmund Harman, a clerk to her uncle.” Edmund nodded at Joice.
“A merchant’s clerk?” Joliffe grinned with delight. “But come knight-erranting to save the lady. What you ought to be is a player, you did your madman so well.”
“What he ought to be is locked away,” Joice snapped, then demanded at Edmund, “What do you think will happen to you if Sir Reynold’s men find you out? What were you thinking of, coming here like…”-she gestured at him in a frustration for words-“like that?”
“How should I have come?” Edmund asked back. “What chance would I have had if I’d just come knocking at the gate with inquiries after your welfare? None of us were even sure you wanted help. At least this way I could wander off again, no harm done, and no one the wiser except me if that was the way of it.”
“Knew if I wanted help?” Joice exclaimed indignantly. “You think I asked to be grabbed in the street and carried off?”
“How should I know? Knowing you, you might very well have!”
Joice gasped, momentarily driven beyond words.
“So,” said Joliffe, still cheerfully, “with that settled, what do we do next?”
“You might begin with taking all this somewhat more seriously,” Frevisse said curtly. She had neither prayed nor eaten yet today, and she wanted, suddenly, simply to sit down for a while and cope with nothing. “For one thing, someone besides me has mentioned you as possibly Sir Reynold’s murderer.”
“Ah, yes.” Joliffe stood up. “Who better to blame for any new ill than the passing player, the wandering minstrel, the lordless, landless nobody? Always the favorite for anything gone wrong.” His tone was slight but his eyes were bleak and unjesting. He knew as well as she did how much danger he was in. “In other words, the question is not, am I suspected, but have you learned anything that might save my neck? And I hope you have because I haven’t. Or Edmund’s neck either, come to that, because an unknown madman who, it turns out, isn’t mad, will be first choice after me when they’re looking for someone to hang.”