“Hewe?”
“Hewe’s in the guesthall with friends,” Frevisse repeated patiently. “He’s taken care of.”
Meg’s eyes closed. “There’s no hurting in him. He’s not like his father. He’ll be all right.” Her eyes closed and probably as much from exhaustion as Dame Claire’s medicine her breathing evened into sleep as they watched her.
The clear weather held next day, and the cold with it. The services were blurred with snuffling and the chapter meeting with coughing; and Frevisse, who had been nearly over her own rheum, found it was come back, probably from her short sleep and being out in the icy night. Handkerchief in hand, she went about her duties until, as she was crossing the courtyard back from the old guesthall to the cloister, Father Henry intercepted her.
“Dame Frevisse, Dame Claire asks if you could come to her in the new hall,” he said.
Busy with her running nose and her aches, she did not ask why, but with a resigned sigh, only nodded and turned from her way to fall into step beside him, back across the yard and up the stone steps to the new guesthall, built for their higher-ranking visitors, with separate chambers and its own kitchen.
Sym, alive, would likely never have entered it. Now he was laid on a blanket on one of the hall’s trestle tables. Dame Claire was there, with a basin of warmed water steaming into the cold air on the table beside him, and a pile of clean rags and a folded cerecloth showing she had come to clean the body and ready it as far as might be for burial before the crowner came.
“Where are his mother and brother?” Frevisse asked.
“The boy is with the players. Meg was still sleeping when I left her,” Claire answered. “Which is just as well.” She made a small gesture toward the body. “There’s a problem.”
Probably with Father Henry’s help she had begun to strip it for washing but had gone no further than beginning to remove the doublet and shirt. Sym’s chest and side were laid bare, and the ragged cut along the right side of his waist, smeared with dried, blackened blood, showed plainly. To Frevisse’s eye it looked no more than a shallow scrape that in the heat of his temper and the fight, Sym could quite possibly have not heeded right away.
It was the other wound, the smaller one, on his side between the lower left ribs and almost unbloodied, that held Frevisse once she saw it. She looked and went on looking, her mind knowing but not ready yet to admit what it meant. Only after a long pause did she say, knowing that Dame Claire knew as well as she did, “That went into his heart.”
“Directly in,” Dame Claire agreed.
“And if it did…”
She did not finish. There was no need. From a dagger thrust like that, into the heart and out again, and no more blood around it than would have followed the exiting blade, Sym must have died almost on the instant. Would have fallen and probably been dead before he was down.
15
FATHER HENRY, LOOKING from Frevisse’s face to Dame Claire’s, said, “I don’t understand.”
Frevisse waited for Dame Claire to say something but she went on staring at Sym’s body, brooding over a death that should not have happened. At last, instead of answering the priest’s question, Frevisse asked, “You were in the village last night when Meg went looking for help?”
“One of the women was sick and had asked for me and-” Father Henry betrayed embarrassment. “-and I stopped at the alehouse before I came back here. To warm myself. It was cold out.”
“And Meg came there and said Sym was hurt?”
Father Henry nodded. “All afraid, she was, and glad to see me. She told the men her boy was hurt, that the player had stabbed him, she needed help. And then, seeing me, she begged me to come.”
“She’d left his brother with him and come looking for help?”
“The other boy was gone. She’d had to leave Sym there alone. That was part of her fear. That she had left him all alone. She kept saying we had to hurry so he wouldn’t be alone.”
Dame Claire raised her eyes from the body. “He must have died almost immediately. With hardly any pain.”
Frevisse lifted the boy’s hand. Or had he been old enough to be called a man? she wondered. In the quiescence of death his face was younger and more vulnerable than she remembered it being in life. Not that it much mattered now, she supposed. Young or old or in between, he had been murdered. That at least was certain. She went to his doublet and shirt lying at the far end of the table, turned them over, held them up. A ragged tear on the right side showed where one dagger blow had slid in and torn out. There was no other rend.
“His mother must have pulled these up from his chest and side, to better see how he was hurt. And left them open when she went for help.”
“Then someone came in after she was gone,” Dame Claire said.
“Someone he didn’t fear. Or didn’t fear enough to be wary of. He was lying flat and quiet when the dagger went in the second time. Or would he have lost enough blood to be unconscious, do you think?”
Dame Claire shook her head. “No. That first wound is messy but shallow. Even bleeding, it took so long to soak through his doublet, he was home before he knew he was bleeding, didn’t Meg say? There wasn’t enough lost for him to faint. Unless he was the sort who does when they see blood.”
“He was aware enough to be afraid and plead for help. His mother said so. And ask for absolution and the rest.”
“How do you know he was lying down when he was struck?” Dame Claire asked.
“The angle of the blow. In a fight a dagger coming into someone’s side like this one seemingly did has to be held underhanded, and comes almost always in at an upward slant. But this one went straight in. I’d guess the person had to have been standing directly at his side when they did it, and Sym not expecting it at all.” Frevisse turned to Father Henry. “How was he lying when you came in?”
The priest had been looking from one to the other of them while they talked, his large features registering his bewilderment. Now, glad of something plain that he understood, he said, “On a bed by the far wall, on his back, his hands folded on his chest. Like he was asleep and peaceful. I thought he was until I touched him.”
“Was he covered?” Frevisse asked. Father Henry nodded, and she prodded, “How? With what and how much?”
“A blanket. It was pulled up to his chin.”
“And his hands were outside of it, folded on his chest?”
“Yes.”
Frevisse came back to the corpse and carefully folded the arms so the hands rested one on top of the other on his chest. “Like this?”
Father Henry nodded.
Dame Claire met Frevisse’s look. In that position Sym’s arm completely covered the fatal wound in his side.
“Oh, no,” Dame Claire said.
“Oh, yes,” Frevisse answered. “A murderer not only sure of his blow but very considerate and respectful afterwards.”
“Murderer?” Father Henry asked. “It was accident. That’s what was being said last night.”
“What happened in the alehouse was an accident. It wasn’t that wound he died from. It was this second wound, here, directly into his heart, that killed him. At home, while he was lying on his bed.”
That seeped with some degree of slowness into Father Henry’s understanding, but as it did, his eyes widened. “Someone killed him while he lay there hurt and needing help?”
“It seems so, yes.”
Father Henry crossed himself. “That’s horrible.”
“Maybe more horrible is the fact that we don’t have any idea who might have done it. Or why.”
Dame Claire wrung out a cloth in the cooling water. “He was quarrelsome, I gather, from what his mother said.”
“And by what the men said last night,” Frevisse agreed. She watched as Dame Claire began to wash the body.
She knew Roger Naylor had already sent for the crowner. The messenger had gone that morning; but there was no certainty as to where Master Montfort might be at this holiday season or of how long it would take the messenger to find him, and so no way of knowing when he would come.