Both Master Naylor and Margery nodded agreement.
“Then, last night, he and his mother and sister are given tainted broth, keeping them ill at home, and Barnsley is murdered.”
“You’ve forgot one thing,” Margery put in. “Anneys Barnsley’s sister starting her birthing yesterday afternoon.”
Frevisse looked at her, startled and a little discomposed at having left that out.
Then of a sudden she was seeing in her mind something of the pattern she had been seeking. She had been wondering where the sense in all of this was. Why would someone go to the trouble – and cost – of having Tom Kelmstowe carried away, only to let him return? If someone wanted to be rid of him, why stick at simply killing him, especially if they had not stuck at killing Barnsley? Supposing, of course, that Barnsley’s murder and Kelmstowe’s disappearance had anything at all to do with one another. But they
must.
And if they did, then rather than a welter of jarring pieces having nothing to do with one another, she could begin to see a fine-woven plan under it all.
One of the guesthall servants approached at a hesitant sideway shuffle, clearly uncertain if she should interrupt. Margery saved her the trouble by asking, “Is Anneys Barnsley coming round, then?”
“She be. You said to tell you,” the woman said, bobbing a curtsey.
Frevisse said thanks on Margery’s behalf and her own and stood up, bringing Master Naylor and Margery to their feet with her. “I want to hear what she has to say,” she said. “Best you hear, too.”
They found Anneys Barnsley rolling her head fretfully from side to side on the pillow, making small sounds of awakening and distress, as if she was trying to awaken and could not – or was being shoved out of sleep against her will. There was a stool beside the bed. Frevisse sat on it to bring her near the woman’s ear, and began persuading her toward wakening, but after a moment Margery touched her shoulder and said softly, “Asking your pardon, my lady, but you don’t have a soothing kind of voice. Not for this, leastwise. Mayhap I should do it?”
Frevisse stood up and stepped out of the way, joining Master Naylor in the doorway of the small chamber, aware Sister Elianor was as close behind them as she dared to be, craning to see over their shoulders. Frevisse shifted a little, to give her easier view as Margery sat down on the stool, took Anneys Barnsley’s near hand, and began to talk to her softly, soothingly, saying her name, assuring her that she was safe, that she need not be afraid. The woman’s eyelids flickered and even briefly opened, but she continued to twist her head restlessly on the pillow.
“Anneys,” Margery said, still gently but insisting now. “Anneys, it’s all right. You’re safe. I’m here. I won’t leave you.”
Anneys Barnsley seemed to hear her, rolled her head sideways, moaned, “John... You said... John...”
Whatever John had said slipped away along with her brief almost-consciousness. Giving up the struggle, she went slack, back into sleep. Margery patted her hand, tucked it under the blanket, looked up at Frevisse and Master Naylor, and said softly, “It’s a more natural sleep now. It will last a while and then she’ll properly awake.”
Since Margery seemed inclined to stay with the woman, Frevisse simply nodded and withdrew across the hall to the hearth again, taking Master Naylor with her, Sister Elianor trailing behind. There, before Frevisse could say it, Master Naylor said grimly, “That’s not her husband’s name. He’s Henry. Never John.”
“Then which John in the village might it be?”
“There’s the question, isn’t it?” All of Master Naylor’s displeasure at the business showed in his voice, not helped by the name being altogether too common a one. “There’s John atte Bush, but his wife is the village alewife and never lets him carry enough coin for more than a few rolls of the dice and rarely beyond reach of her ladle. There’s John Wryght who’s said he’ll see to the Barnsleys’ cow and all, but he’s a straight lad with no eyes for any but his Jonet. John Smith at the forge. He could have split Barnsley’s skull right enough, and he’s been without a wife these past two years. John Adirton, but he’s so lately widowed it’s hard to think he’s already looking again. His wife died not long after–” Master Naylor stopped, an odd look on his face, then finished slowly, “–not long after Kelmstowe came back.”
A small quiet came after his words, until Frevisse said, “Sister Elianor, bid Mistress Margery come to us.” And added as Sister Elianor made a quick curtsy and spun to obey, “Seemly, sister.”
Sister Elianor, already in the midst of her first hurried steps away, brought herself up short, visibly re-gathered herself, and went on across the hall at what Frevisse in her younger, impatient days had called “cloister pace”. Hurried but never flurried, as Domina Edith had used to say.
Frevisse and Master Naylor waited in silence the bare few moments until Sister Elianor and Margery returned. “Tell us,” Frevisse said without explanation, “about the death of John Adirton’s wife.”
Margery was getting on in years but not left any of her wits behind her. Her look from Frevisse to Master Naylor and back again was sharp, and she answered straightly, “It was a terrible griping in the guts. It came on suddenly and went so fast I had no chance against it.”
“She’d not been ill before?”
“In good health enough, for the middle of winter and all. I was surprised by how quickly she went, but that happens.”
“You have no thought on what caused her sickness?” Frevisse asked.
“When something goes to the bad inside a body, there’s not always way to tell what or why. Often and often it happens and there it is.” Margery said that with resignation, having long since had to accept as a bitter fact of life that death did not always come for a knowable reason. “No one else sickened, thanks be to all the saints. I’ve had to be satisfied with that.”
“No one else sickened until the Kelmstowes last night,” Frevisse said quietly. “Except they all look likely to live.”
“Oh, aye. She was worse than they by far.” Margery stopped, was silent a moment, then went on slowly, “But otherwise all was the same. The griping in the guts. The vomiting.” Still more slowly, she said, “But it can’t have been the broth. John Adirton and his wife both ate the same for supper the night she fell ill. I asked, because I thought it might be the food had somehow gone bad, but they both said, no, they’d eaten from the same pot.”
“But not the same bowl,” Frevisse suggested.
“Nay, there’d be no need for that. John Adirton is well off, as things go in Prior Byfield,” Margery said.
Frevisse looked to Master Naylor. “Well off enough to have coin in hand if need be?”
“Aye,” Master Naylor said grimly.
Margery, not knowing all that was behind Frevisse’s questions but not behindhand in understanding the sway of the talk, said, “He was one of the first into the Barnsleys’ house when Anneys started shrieking this morning. He was one as helped to hold her.” Margery paused, considering before adding, “I think, too, it was maybe him who said I’d do well to give her something to quiet her.”
Frevisse and Master Naylor looked at one another. The steward’s frown had deepened. “Shall I fetch him here?” he asked.
“Yes,” Frevisse said curtly. “Wait. Margery, do you see where we’re tending with this?”
Margery had been flicking her sharp eyes from one of them to other, listening hard, and she said now, “I think so, aye.”
“Then I want you to go with Master Naylor, and when he’s laid hold on John Adirton, I want you to have a long look around Adirton’s place to see what you can find. Anything that doesn’t seem right.”
“Like maybe what he might have put in someone’s broth,” Margery said shrewdly.
“That would be useful,” Frevisse granted.
Unfortunately for Frevisse’s quiet of mind, neither Master Naylor nor Margery nor any word from the village came back in the short while before the bell summoned her from her parlor to Vespers. She did not deny to herself that she set her mind with more determination than devotion to the Office, but she knew after all these years that sometimes determination was all that could be brought to her prayers. She also knew that sometimes determination sufficed to give opening for devotion to come after all.
Today she found that her devotion and her distraction came together in one of Vesper’s psalms, it ending with
Benefac, Domine, bonis et rectis corde. Qui autem declinant in vias suas obliquas, abigat eos Dominus cum male agentibus
. – Do kindness, Lord, to the good and honest of heart. But who turns aside into their crooked ways, Lord lead them away amid evil doers.
Yes, that served her humour very well for now, and she was able to go to supper with the other nuns and sit with some quiet of mind through the meal while Dame Thomasine read softly from Dame Julian of Norwich’s
Showings
. She was nonetheless relieved as they left the refectory to begin the hour of recreation before Compline ended the day to find one of the guesthall servants waiting in the cloister walk to tell her she was wanted in the guesthall, please it her.
It pleased her very well. Asking Dame Claire to come with her – and then Sister Elianor, too, as she saw the novice’s face – she left the cloister. Crossing the yard to the guesthall, she only with effort held her walk to “hurried, not flurried.” Setting Sister Elianor a good example, she firmly told herself.
In the hall the rushlights were burning on their prickets around the walls, giving a warm light to the gathering of people there. Master Naylor and Master Richard; Margery; a man who must be John Adirton; Simon Perryn and another village man whom Frevisse knew by sight though not by name, standing behind Adirton as if they were perhaps – but not quite – his guards.
As Frevisse had asked her to, Dame Claire went away to see how Anneys Barnsley did, leaving Sister Elianor to stand correctly a few paces behind and aside as Frevisse acknowledged the men’s bows and Margery’s curtsy before asking, “John Adirton?”
The man she had supposed was him bowed again. “My lady.” Though he had to be worried why he was here, he did not show it. He had a sharp and ready face, not unhandsome but with a certain cast of weasel to it, his eyes crowded somewhat too near his narrow nose. But confident – oh, yes, he showed confident in his level gaze at her.
Frevisse deliberately turned her heed from him to ask of Master Richard. “Has there been any illness in the village?”
“There’s been no one ill in the village all this week.”
He would have said more, but Frevisse slightly raised one hand to stop him, nodded her thanks, and looked to Margery. The herbwife was carrying a folded bundle of cloth and shook out to show was a dark gray tunic. “It’s his,” she said with a nod at Adirton. “He says so.” She held up the sleeves for Frevisse to see. At their ends and part way up them they were dark with damp. “Not blood,” Margery added before Frevisse could ask. “Water. They’ve been washed.”
“An odd time of year and weather for a man to take up doing even that much laundry,” Frevisse said, returning her look to Adirton.
“There
was
blood on them, my lady,” he said quickly. “This morning at Barnsley’s, when I was seeing if he wasn’t simply stunned, that he was dead, I got his blood on them. I had to scrub it out before it set.”
“Here, too,” Margery said, turning the tunic around to show its front. A wide area was damp; someone had never pointed out to Adirton that a dirty tunic only partly washed all too plainly showed different between the clean part and the uncleaned. “He had it hung over a stool near the fire. It’s farther dried than the sleeves because they weren’t hanging as free to the warmth.”
“I wiped my hands there,” Adirton said. “After I’d touched him. I wasn’t thinking and I wiped my hands there, and so there was blood there, too.”
Which could be true. If it came to it, questions could be asked, to find if someone remembered whether or not Adirton had gone near Barnsley’s body this morning. In the meanwhile...
Frevisse turned back to Master Richard. “Were you able to learn anything toward who gave Tom Kelmstowe away to the reeve about that land?”
Master Richard must have been aching to tell her that; his effort at dignity showed the strain as he answered quickly, “Most I asked didn’t know. The two that said they did said it was him.” He gave a sharp jerk of his head at Adirton. “That he slipped word to Barnsley about it on the sly, like.”
Master Richard had grown up here, around the nuns all of his life, and when he was eager over something he sometimes forgot propriety. A nudge of his father’s elbow to his ribs reminded him to add, “my lady.” It was lost under Adirton saying strongly, “I have enemies.” He added, likely thinking it was for good measure but unfortunately not thinking it through, “Women talk.”
Frevisse fixed her look on him. “They do,” she agreed.
Across the hall Dame Claire had been standing in the doorway to Anneys Barnsley’s room these past few moments. Now Frevisse looked toward her. Dame Claire nodded and Frevisse nodded back, then said, “Master Naylor, if you’ll bring him this way, please. Anneys Barnsley is better enough to see him.”
She noted that Master Naylor’s grip on Adirton’s arm was needed to set him moving, and when Adirton showed unwilling to follow Frevisse into the small chamber, it was Master Naylor’s strong pull that brought him through the doorway, while Simon Perryn and the other villager kept close behind him, blocking even slight retreat.
At this sudden filling of the room with people, Anneys Barnsley turned her head on the pillow and stared among them, befuddled at first until her gaze caught on Adirton. With a whimpering cry, she rolled to her side and a little up on one elbow, to hold out her other hand to him as she exclaimed, the words still thick with the leavings of the drug, “Oh, John! It didn’t keep him safe! You said it would but it
didn’t
!”
Frevisse instantly moved between her and Adirton, asking, “What didn’t keep your husband safe, mistress? Something you did?” Anneys Barnsley blinked up at her, confused, and Frevisse urged, “Something Adirton said you should do?”