He nodded and said, “It’s to eat. I saw them doing that with them. Eating noranges.”
Meg looked doubtfully at the orange’s thick, tough skin and then at him.
“Like this,” Frevisse offered, holding out her hand. There had sometimes been oranges in her uncle’s household, and she knew how they could be peeled to reach the sweetness.
Hesitantly Meg handed over her treasure, but cried out when Frevisse dug a fingernail in at its crest, and jerked as if to snatch it away. She barely stopped herself, and clutched her hands together, her face raw with distress.
Frevisse looked at her with surprise. “You have to peel it. The peel comes off and then you eat what’s inside.”
Meg shook her head mutely, her mouth closed tightly over any spoken protest but her hands betraying how much she wanted the orange back in her keeping. Understanding, Frevisse held it out to her.
Meg took it back, clasping it with both hands to her breast again.
“It won’t keep long,” Frevisse warned. “Not like an apple.”
“Nothing keeps long,” Meg answered. “But for a little while?”
That was a plea and Frevisse answered it gently with a nod. “For a little while. A week or two. And if you save the peel and dry it, it keeps its scent a long while after.”
Meg did not answer but bent her head to smell the sweetness again.
Barnaby quieted as evening came on. In fact, Dame Claire, seeing to him after Compline, had been pleased. “He’s strong. His body seems to have steadied from the shock. I’ll be best able to tell tomorrow, but his chances are better with every hour.” She nodded toward one of the servants. “Eda knows where I sleep if you need me in the night.” Meg, hunched against falling asleep, glanced at the woman and nodded. Frevisse had thought a strong dose of Dame Claire’s potion for Meg, and a long sleep afterwards, would have been a good thing, but it was not possible and they had gone back to the cloister and bed and their own sleep.
But now she was awake. The night was sunken into the cold, dead time between Matins and dawn; the dormitory was long since settled out of the restlessness that always came after midnight prayers. There had been the expected coughing, snuffling, smothered sneezing, and finally silence except for the sounds of sleep. But Frevisse was still uncomfortably awake, propped up as best she could manage with her thin pillow.
She knew her wakefulness was partly because of her own cold’s misery, but there was something else, too, and the prayers and meditations that usually soothed her and kept her company when these wakeful hours came on her had neither done that nor helped her find why she was uneasy. The stark fact was that she was awake. She was awake and something was wrong and she did not know what or where the trouble was.
She had tried feeling it in the dormitory’s silence, listening for anything that should not be there; but everything was as it always was, from Dame Alys’s erratic snoring farther along the aisle to the gurgle of water through the necessarium. Nor could she remember anything left undone that could be troubling her. The only thing uneasy and wrong seemed to be her own mind and now, deliberately, Frevisse let it loose. Stopped trying to search out the trouble and let her thoughts drift in the night’s deep cold and darkness. If nothing else they might finally drift her back to sleep.
She found she was thinking of Meg’s orange.
Disconcerted, Frevisse circled the thought. Meg’s orange. She had held it only briefly but could still feel it. Could remember its smell and her knowing of how sweet it was inside. The pleasure of it in her hand.
Oranges.
Oranges on a tree. Where you could reach up and pick them if you were tall enough.
She had been too short, too young. It had been her father who had lifted her up gloriously high so she could pick her very own. She could still feel his strong hands around her ribs, hear his laughter, see his blue eyes in his tanned face smiling up at her when she held out the orange to show him before he put her down.
That was in Spain.
She had forgotten Spain.
Well, not actually forgotten it. If anyone had asked, she would have said she had been there, yes. There was even a cast-lead seashell in the chest at the foot of her bed to show that she had been to the great pilgrimage church at Compostela.
She did not remember her visit as a pilgrim; she remembered Compostela with a small child’s memories. Inside the church it had been sweating hot and crowded, and so reeking with incense that she had started to sneeze and could not stop and finally her parents had had to take her outside into the blazing sunlight where she had gone on sneezing until all three of them were helpless with laughter.
She had forgotten that sunshine. And the laughter.
And riding in the basket.
How had she forgotten that? The days’ journeyings had been so long that she could not walk with the others, but had ridden in a basket strapped on the side of an ambling donkey. Shaded by a wide-brimmed straw hat and lulled to dreaming and sometimes sleep by the donkey’s rocking gait along hours and hours of dusty roads to…where? To where there had been oranges for her father to pick for her.
She had gone on no journeyings for a long while now. And that, yes, that was what she wanted, more than an orange. Perhaps, come the spring, she could ask leave to go on pilgrimage.
To where?
The possibilities, like memories, rose up in her mind.
Canterbury, with its flint wall and the tall glories of its cathedral’s nave. Walsingham, waiting green and quiet at the end of miles of gentle riding. St. Denis and the exciting bustle of Paris. Compostela again, to be visited with true understanding of the grace it could bestow, sitting beyond the mountains and near the orange groves…
Reality slid between Frevisse and her dreaming. No nun from St. Frideswide’s would ever go so far as Compostela. Or even St. Denis. Oxford, maybe, to St. Frideswide’s tomb; that might be possible. Or Canterbury, if Domina Edith felt that St. Thomas had granted a particularly desperate prayer. But Frevisse had no desperate prayer-except that she wanted…wanted…
Unworded discontent pulled at her while she fought to leave the thought unfinished. She wanted…Sleep, she said firmly to herself. A good, deep sleep and no rheum left in her head when she awakened.
“Dame Frevisse?”
Frevisse realized her thoughts had taken her further away than she had known; the soft voice and the chink of the rings as the curtain closing her cubicle was pushed aside startled her into sitting up abruptly. She had heard no one moving, and whispered a little sharply, “Who’s there?”
“It’s Eda, my lady. About the man Barnaby. He’s dying, seems like. I’ve told Dame Claire and she said to ask if you would come.”
Why, Frevisse peevishly wondered, did people always choose to die in the middle of the night? But she immediately pushed the idea away. It was not her place to question; it was her place to serve those who came to the priory, whether to travel on or to die there. And if she told herself that often enough, maybe she would come to remember it first instead of second.
“I will come at once,” she said, matching Eda’s humble tone.
9
FREVISSE SHIVERED AND wrapped her arms more tightly around herself. There was nothing she could do to help Barnaby, and the hall was as cold as the night was black beyond the dimly lit windows, or even the corners of the hall beyond the reach of the small lamp Dame Claire had set beside the body while she checked it.
The servant Eda, anxious not to be idle, lifted the lamp in an attempt to give Dame Claire a better light, but was shivering so hard that Dame Claire bid her with an impatient gesture to put it down again. Obeying, she moved beyond Barnaby’s corpse to put both arms around Meg, and both of them stood shivering and looking everywhere but at Dame Claire. Frevisse wished she had thought to step down from her own dignity of office to comfort Meg. Now, instead, she was left to shiver alone.