Her apologies and theirs mingled and she went on until, halfway across the courtyard she realized why they were there, and spun around to see them coming out again, Joliffe between them now, his arms firmly in their grasp and no gentleness in their hold on him.
Nearly she started back toward them. But the bell was still demanding that she come to prayers. And there was nothing she could do to change what was coming. All she had were unanswered or ill-answered questions, and none of them would do Joliffe any good.
Helpless, her feelings at war against her thoughts, she watched Montfort’s men drag Joliffe up the steps to the new guesthall. He kept his feet, but only barely, having to fight against their hold to do it. She saw them twist his arms, hurting him to keep their hold. Answering anger and fear surged in her. Fiercely, she did not want Joliffe hurt.
And that very fierceness was a warning, set against Domina Edith’s earlier one. She was caring too much about Joliffe, instead of about the truth. She was supposed to find the truth, let the guilt lie where it might. The players should be no concern of hers beyond that.
Finally, fully, she faced it. Domina Edith was right, these people had roused in her a long-dormant love for the endless journeying of her youth. They had brought alive again a part of herself she had loved and never fully left. She wanted them free to go their way, as she was no longer free to go.
But Joliffe had lied to her.
Grimly, she turned away to hurry into the cloister, away from Joliffe and the rest, if not away from her thoughts.
Crowded with the other nuns in the warming room, her head bent in what was supposed to be prayer, she stared down at her thick black gown, and felt her wimple’s tightness along her temples and under her chin. In the years she had worn them, they had become too familiar to be noticed; they were a part of herself. But now she felt their constriction and their meaning. Knew what they gave her. And what they denied her.
No, she said in her mind. No, this is where I belong, and this is what I should be doing. Here. Now is when I’m living, not in some memory of my childhood.
Forcing out of her mind her remembrance of Joliffe dragged between Montfort’s men, she gave herself to the service beginning around her, losing herself in the chanted repetition of the psalms, soaking in the words with her mind and soul, listening with a novice’s fervor for answers that had to be there.
And found a part of them in the New Testament lesson: “‘Wherefore…give diligence to make your calling and election sure; for if you do these things, you shall never fall.’”
And she had been near to falling. Not from her vows, surely, but from her devotion to her life. From her obedience and her acceptance.
But there, with the thought in clear words, she knew that danger was past. Feelings came and went, but her surety of why she was here was in her mind and in her heart deeper than feelings or a day’s passing inclination.
At the office’s end, she felt as cleansed and clear as if she was come from Easter Mass and communion, her thoughts no longer warring against her inclinations, but set and settled on what she had to do.
Dinner came after Nones. Frevisse said grace with the others in the refectory, sat in her place on the bench, and determined to heed the day’s reading rather than her own thoughts for a while. They were still hearing the history of the English people as written by St. Bede and still read poorly by Sister Thomasine.
“‘In Northumbria, there was a head of a family,’” Thomasine intoned, “‘who led a devout life, with all his household. He fell ill, his condition steadily deteriorating until the crisis came, and he died in the early hours of the night. But at daybreak he returned to life and sat up, to the consternation of those weeping about his body.’”
As was to be expected, thought Frevisse, dipping her bread in her mutton stew to soften and flavor it. We would be shocked and frightened if Sister Fiacre sat up and spoke to us. It would be hours before we’d have our wits about us enough to rejoice at the miracle.
Thomasine droned on. The Northumbrian divided his property into three parts and gave a third to his wife, a third to his sons, and a third to the poor before going off to become a monk.
What would a resurrected Fiacre do, being already a nun? Frevisse wondered.
Visitors came to the man, to hear stories of his experience in the world beyond the grave, and he told of seeing damned souls leaping from flame to bitter frost and back again in a fruitless search for comfort, and of a wonderful, fragrant countryside for the saved. “‘“I was most reluctant to return to my body, for I was entranced by the pleasantness and beauty of the place.”’” Sister Thomasine read, Bede quoting the man. “‘“But I did not dare to question my guide, and I suddenly found myself alive among men once more.”’”
Sister Fiacre, too, might be unhappy at her return, weeping and wringing her hands to find herself among ordinary people again.
The man was described as living in great severity in his monastery, breaking ice to plunge himself into a wintertime river, standing up to his neck in the flowing water, reciting psalms, until he could no longer bear it and must climb out, but refusing to change his wet clothes, saying to those who questioned him that he had seen it worse in another place.
Here Sister Thomasine stopped, not to savor the grim joke, but to say, “Tu autem, Domine, miserere nobis,” meaning that she had finished the reading.
Frevisse responded with the rest of the nuns, “Deo gracias,” but dinner was not quite over. The meal continued in silence, and without a voice to listen to, Frevisse’s thoughts went on their own way. Had that man truly been right and good in what he did? She had seen it happen-a person resolutely using punishment and privation to drive out the ability to enjoy life’s good things. Though didn’t that also make it impossible to enjoy the pleasures of the fragrant meadow promised to the saved? Having set their heart on earth to miseries, might not such people be happier in the rigors of Hell?
Frevisse caught the thought and suppressed its strangeness sternly. There was no doubt that strict disciplines could lead to sainthood, all authority agreed on that.
Unable to meditate on the reading to any purpose, she found her mind wandering to the murders. Was Domina Edith right? Could there be two murderers about, one with a knife and the other with a club?
And wandering past the murders to what Montfort was doing to Joliffe now.
Harshly, she jerked away from that thought. She had to find an answer-answers-to these murders and soon.
The need for immediate answers tightened in her. She laid her bread down, unable to swallow.
One of the murderers must be Gilbey Dunn. He hated Sym, who stood between him and his gain. Would Annie Lauder lie to save him if he promised to pay her leyrwite? And where was Father Henry, he with the answers to questions she needed to ask? He had been gone all morning. Out rabbiting again, she thought bitterly, while I’m trapped here. Almost always St. Frideswide’s walls were shelter and boundary to her, not limitations, but now she had a wild longing to leap clear of them, to follow where her questioning wanted to go, to the village, to Lord Warenne’s, to anywhere rather than going on circling here helplessly, blocked by the Rule.