The rood screen itself, between nave and chancel, had been carved in an open fretwork of black walnut maybe fifty years ago and its red paint and yellow stars had been kept fresh, redone whenever need be by whoever in the village had the best hand for it at the time. The other paintings in the church went untouched because no one dared say they had the skill. So far back that no one had any notion of when, the nave walls had been painted with Bible scenes in strong reds, greens, and blue-greens, with here and there a touch of yellow to be the gold of a king’s crown or an angel’s halo. Flanking the chancel arch were St. Chad himself and St. Peter, their robes falling in rigid, beautiful folds about their lean, long, tall-beyond-mortal-men’s bodies as they stared solemnly with wide ovaled eyes into an eternity somewhere above and far beyond the worshipers’ heads, while beyond them in the chancel Christ sat enthroned in majesty, as oval-eyed and formal as his saints, one hand raised in benediction, the other resting on the book of God’s word that all men should heed, with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John arrayed around him in their aspects of Lion, Man, Ox, and Eagle borne on clouds to show they were in heaven with him.
Rushes covered the nave floor for cleanliness and, in the winter, for warmth and besides what the priest and altar needed, there were no furnishings except the baptismal font and a few benches for those who came early enough to services, with no need for a pew because no lord lived in the village to warrant one. Today, the shutters open to give what light there was from the overcast day, the benches had been shifted end-on to the rood screen to serve the court and everyone else was left to stand and the villagers, not much damp from the softly falling rain, were gathered in clumps and clusters of family and friends, busy in talk, though heads turned and the hum of voices fell as Frevisse, Sister Thomasine, and Father Henry entered, only to take up again, a little lower and maybe faster, to have all said before they had to stop when court began.
Sister Thomasine, wordless since leaving St. Frideswide’s, her eyes lowered, her hands tucked into her habit’s opposite sleeves, went silently across the little width of the church to the corner beyond the baptismal font, raised on its single stone step, where no one else was, withdrawing as much as might be from everything and everyone around her. Frevisse, with people shifting, bowing, curtsying out of her way, went to the front of the nave, Father Henry following more slowly, pausing to speak to various folk. Simon Perryn and six men Frevisse took to be the jurors were waiting beside the benches. They bowed to her as she joined them, no need to remove their hoods or hats that were already off in God’s house, and she bent her head to them in return, no one bothering with giving names because Father Edmund entered then and passed up the nave with smiles and words to various folk, to take a seat at a table set ready with paper, ink, pens, and several closed scrolls behind the jurors’ bench.
‘By your leave, we’ll begin then?“ Perryn asked her, and Frevisse agreed with a slight nod. To be to the fore of so many people, all of them looking at her, was not something she liked, but Perryn, seeming to have no mind of it at all, said easily to the jurors, ”We’ll start then,“ and bowed her to a place on the bench facing the jurors on theirs across the space between them left for the court’s business to be done but angled enough to the nave that she could watch the people watching her.
While Perryn, the jurors, and Father Edmund took their places, she noticed Father Henry had shifted away to the nave’s north wall, from where he could come readily into the midst of things if there was need, though thus far there was no sign there would be, only the expected shift and shuffle of people making themselves comfortable on their feet. She glimpsed Anne well back and near the door, Dickon Naylor and her sons beside her. Of little Lucy there was no sign but there were other children in plenty, including a baby carried on its mother’s hip, fretfully rubbing its eyes and trying to burrow its head into the side of its mother’s neck while she talked with the women around her. Frevisse thought the woman with a face like a wizened apple might be Ada Bychurch, Prior Byfield’s midwife, but it had been years since Frevisse had seen her and she was not certain and none of the others were familiar at all, save Elena, Gilbey’s wife, standing to the side and fore of the crowd not far from the jurors, her hands folded quietly into each other at the waist of her rose-colored gown, her fair loveliness encircled by soft wimple and starched veil shiningly white in the nave’s gray shadows. Graceful even in her quietness, she looked what she was, a wealthy villein’s wife who had servants to see to such things as having her veil starched and smooth-pressed when she went out. Standing squarely beside her, his thumbs hooked into his wide, finely wrought leather belt, Gilbey was no balder than when Frevisse had seen him last-how many years ago was that?-with only a little more flesh on his stocky frame and nothing softened in his blunt face. To Frevisse’s eye he looked like what he was, too-someone bound to the world by the gold and silver circles of coins and-unless he was greatly changed from when Frevisse had last encountered him-by the lusts of the flesh.
The rest of the upwards of two score other folk crowded into the nave were only faces to her. Young faces fresh-fleshed and little touched by living yet. Older faces marked, less and more, by their years and their lives’ happenings and, especially for the men, by weather lived in day in, day out, no matter what it was. Old faces seamed and etched by all their years of living. Worried faces, wondering how much trouble there would be. Dull faces here to stare at whatever happened because they’d stare at anything. Faces eager with wanting trouble, a few faces angry, meaning to make it. They all lived through their days a scant half-mile, if that much, from where she lived her own, year in, year out, and she knew no more of them than they did of her and she was come here to help make decisions that would shape some of their lives and, that done, would go back to her own and leave them to theirs as utterly as she had left them to it until now.
Heart-felt and unbidden, the prayer that began so many of the daily Offices came to her. Deus, in adjutorium meum intende. God, come to my aid. And then the antiphon that was part of today’s Terce. Excita, Domine, potentiam tuam, ut salvos facias nos. Rouse, Lord, your power, that you make us safe.
And suddenly she was sure which of the men standing to the fore of the crowd was Tom Hulcote. His uneasiness, different from the men’s around him, gave him away as, restless-footed in the rushes, with both smothered anger and deep unease shadowing his face, he kept shifting his look toward and away from Gilbey who never bothered with so much as a glance his way.
Or it was maybe Elena, Gilbey’s wife, he was looking at? From where she sat, Frevisse could not tell.
He was younger than Frevisse had thought he would be. Not beyond his twenties. Why had she thought he would be older? Because Simon Perryn was of middle years and therefore likely his sister was, too, and so would be the man she was sinning with? But he was not, nor was he the surly, heavy-built bully with a rough face and rougher ways that had somehow been in her mind. Except for the in-held anger and open unease, he was simply a young man with nothing particular about him, plainly dressed in what was surely his best-though they were none too good-tunic and hosen and hood, with his brown hair trimmed and clean.