Slowly Adam nodded.
Sister Thomasine nodded with him, saying gently, “Heaven is even more beautiful than that and the saint is looking into heaven. That’s why he doesn’t smile. Because what he’s seeing is too beautiful for smiling.”
His gaze still clinging to her face but unfeared now, Adam took a deep, slow breath. “That’s why you don’t smile, either, isn’t it?” he whispered.
Sister Thomasine touched his cheek and laid the wet cloth over his forehead and eyes, and in a little while, when he was surely asleep, she rose to her feet, stood for another moment over him, hands folded, head bowed to prayer, then turned to Frevisse and said softly, “He’ll do well now.”
He looked no better to Frevisse, the fever-flush still on him, his breathing still ragged, but she nodded agreement. Together, they made sure all was well throughout the nave before going to say Matins and Lauds together in the chancel until part way through Laud’s third psalm, a child roused, whimpering, and when there was no sound of anyone moving to quiet it, Frevisse broke off with a hasty crossing of herself and went, finding it was a little girl who had bettered yesterday and so her mother was gone to see to things at home for tonight. When Frevisse had given her a drink and settled her to sleep again, Sister Thomasine had finished Lauds and was gone to bed, and Frevisse stood in the aisle between the clusters of mattresses and dark, low humps of sleeping bodies, listening to soft snufflings and snores without finding anything that needed her and, for lack of something else to do, returned to Adam.
Since yesterday’s morning Frevisse had been afraid of exactly this watch, midnight through to dawn, when, even at the best, life ebbed low and death so often subtly came. She did not want to watch a child die. Nor see his parents’ grief. Nor have to try to give comfort where there was none to be had. With those uncompaniable thoughts, she sat down on the joint stool between the mattresses, feeling that the only present mercy was that Anne Perryn looked likely, at last, to sleep a night through. If Adam died…
Frevisse put the thought from her, took the fever-dried cloth from his forehead, soaked it again, wiped his face and throat and arms, and relaid it on his forehead. He never stirred the while except to go on breathing in that light, labored, frightening way, and when she had finished, Frevisse lay her hands in her lap and began to pray, for him, for all the children, for help in the matter of Tom Hulcote’s murder…
How long and how deep she went into the praying she could not have said, but when the bright caroling of bird-songs outside in the last darkness before dawn brought her back and she tried to straighten, she found herself stiffened with long sitting and, hand pressed to her spine, eyes still shut, had to draw herself upright bone by bone, feeling every one of them. Then froze to stillness as she heard something besides the birdsong. Heard Adam’s breathing. Changing.
Quieting.
With a heart-thud of fear, she leaned over him, starkly far from her prayers’ peace of a moment before, until she saw as she stripped the cloth from his forehead and laid her hand there that his face was sheened with sweat. With blessed sweat.
He was drenched with it, all over. The fever was broken.
Quickly she shook Anne by the arm, telling her even while waking her, forestalling her fear, and watched while she felt of her son’s face, kissed his damp forehead, laid her hand over his even, easy breathing, and began to cry.
Frevisse had expected prayers and thanks to God but watching Anne’s huge, silent tears swell and slip down her face, she knew they served as well for thanks as any prayer ever could.
Behind her, come so quietly Frevisse had not heard her, Mistress Margery said, “He’s strong. He’ll do well now.” She was carrying a cloth-covered pottery jug and to Frevisse’s glance at it, she answered, “It brewed well.” But she was looking at Frevisse in return and asked, “How do you, my lady?”
‘Tired is all,“ Frevisse said though her head felt as stale as the nave’s air.
Mistress Margery’s look at her did not lessen. “Best you step outside a time, maybe. I can see to things here the while.”
Frevisse accepted the offer gratefully and found, even before she had left the church porch, that the cool dawn air worked on her much as a strong draught of rich wine would have done. For a few deep-breathed moments she simply stood on the churchyard path, breathing, feeling, deliberately not thinking. The day was barely there, the world still mostly only shapes and shadows in the cool and colorless dawnlight, with no more than the barest trace of rose and peach tinting the eastern sky but the birds still in full-throated song, and Frevisse softly joined them with a prayers from Prime. “Domine Deus omnipotens, qui ad principium huius diet nos pervenire fecisti...” Lord God all powerful, you who to the beginning of this day have made us come…
It was a prayer that almost always served to lift her heart but its other words struck too near to what else the day was going to ask of her. “… semper ad tuam iustitiam faciendam nostra procedant eloquia, dirigantur cogitationes et opera.”… may always our words lead, our thoughts and works be directed, to fulfilling your justice.
Because today she would have to go on with what she had started yesterday.
But not yet, she prayed. For just now let there be simply the dawn and a quietness of heart and mind and soul.
The riot of birdsong was ending as the daylight grew and the world took on colors-summer greens of grass and trees, gold of the grain in the field beyond the churchyard wall, subtle blues rising across the sky. Without haste, Frevisse began to walk, her gown’s hem sweeping over the churchyard’s long, dew-damp grass, keeping her mind away from what she would all too soon have to deal with, thinking instead that the worst of the plague was past now Adam’s fever had broken. Even better and for a wonder and against all likely hope, it seemed no one was going to die. And three and more days were gone by without any new mesels now, and that made it likely there would be no more, and soon she and Sister Thomasine would be free to go back to St. Frideswide’s.
There was still the harvest to face but that seemed simpler now…
And the matter of Master Naylor’s freedom…
And Tom Hulcote’s murder…
Frevisse sighed to find she had come back to that.
And that she was standing looking down at the raw brown, clodded earth of Matthew Woderove’s grave mound.
Even as she said a prayer for his soul, she noted there was no sign to show that more had happened here than a hole been dug and the dirt then shoveled back into it for maybe no good reason.
She had talked to Elena Dunn about Tom Hulcote’s murderer being someone who was unhappy, but now that she thought on it, unhappiness was part of both men’s deaths. By all she had ever heard of Matthew Woderove, he had been unhappy in his life and now, to judge by his grave, he was not even mourned in death. An unhappy man come to an unhappy end.
Like Tom Hulcote.
Frevisse paused on that thought.
She had only thought of Tom Hulcote as angry, but behind the anger he had to have been unhappy-unhappy in the life he had and unhappy in not being able to better it, his best hope broken that day at the manor court and no likely way it could ever be mended. An unhappy man brought to an unhappy end.
Like Matthew Woderove.
Frevisse shook her head, still not wanting the two deaths together in her mind.
But what if they should be?
What if the matter of Hulcote’s death had to be taken back a step? To Matthew Woderove’s. What then?
She didn’t know.
Her head bowed, she turned and walked away from the grave and only as she was passing the churchyard gateway heard soft-soled footfalls and looked up to find Simon Perryn there.
He bowed and said, “Good morrow, my lady,” as she stopped, and she bent her head in return, wondering if she looked as under-slept as he did.