The apostate's tale (18 page)

Whatever they were hoping for, Sister Cecely’s head was bowed too low and she retreated too quickly deep into the shadows of what was become her cell for anyone to see if she had been crying as Dame Margrett said to them all, “I’m to take Edward to them now,” and to Dame Perpetua who was nearest, “Will you—” She beckoned with her head toward the parlor.

For answer, Dame Perpetua came forward, pulled the parlor door shut, and put herself in front of it, making it plain that Sister Cecely was going to have no chance at her son. Dame Margrett gave a tight-lipped, agreeing nod and went to fetch the boy.

Mistress Petham had surely foreseen he would be wanted. Dame Margrett came promptly back with him, Edward holding tightly to her hand. He was scrubbed and combed and tidy, but as they went past her, coming the direct way along the cloister, not the long one, Frevisse saw him roll his eyes toward the door shut between him and his mother, much like a frightened horse wary of a possible trap. Poor child, she thought.

He was rather a longer while with Abbot Gilberd than Frevisse would have thought necessary. Once Sister Cecely rapped on the inside of the door and demanded loudly if she couldn’t have the door open again and at least glimpse her little boy. When Dame Perpetua did not answer, Sister Cecely hit the door hard with a fist and afterward was silent again.

Edward did finally come down, tear-stained and in Father Henry’s care this time. The priest swept him along the cloister walk with what looked to Frevisse like anger—and not at Edward, Frevisse thought.

Dame Margrett was close behind them, and where the nuns had stood back from Father Henry’s way, they flurried to her, wanting to know what had been happening, but she shook her head at them, saying, “We’ve been strictly enjoined to silence about it. I can’t tell you.” She added to Frevisse, still at her desk, “You’re to go up. Domina Elisabeth wants you to see Abbot Gilberd to the guesthall now.”

Frevisse willingly took her own curiosity up the stairs to Domina Elisabeth’s parlor, to be met by a heavy quiet that answered none of her silent questions, only told her things were not well. Dame Johane stood beside the door with head down and hands folded into her opposite sleeves, still as a statue. Domina Elisabeth and her brother stood at the window in a matching stillness until at Frevisse’s scratch at the doorframe they both turned. With her own eyes now properly downcast, Frevisse could not read their faces, but Domina Elisabeth sounded both weary and taut as she ordered, “Please see my lord abbot to his chamber, dame.”

“Yes, my lady,” Frevisse said, making a curtsy of obedient willingness to both her and Abbot Gilberd. “My lord.”

Holding out his hand to Domina Elisabeth, he said, “I will see you tomorrow, when I’ve had chance to talk with these Rowcliffes.”

Domina Elisabeth took his hand, went down in a low curtsy, kissed one of the large-gemmed rings he wore, and rose. She let go his hand, but he took hers back in both of his, patted it comfortingly, and said firmly, “We’ll talk more. Don’t worry on it,” then swept away from her toward Frevisse, who quickly turned and led the way down the stairs, out of the cloister, and away to the guesthall, hurried along by him following close on her heels.

He said nothing the whole way and therefore neither could she. Nor did he trouble, as Frevisse curtsied to him outside the door to his chamber, to offer his ring to her to kiss, merely went past her and in without a word, and she was suddenly fiercely glad he had provided food and drink for himself. He clearly had the wealth for it, and St. Frideswide’s very much did not, and just at that moment she did not feel charitable toward him.

Also, as she returned toward the cloister, she found that she was angry—not at his wealth or even his neglect of courtesy to her but at whatever he had done to reduce everyone who had come near him in Domina Elizabeth’s parlor to one degree or another of rigid quiet or strangled anger.

Domina Elisabeth did come down to Vespers and sat at supper in the refectory with her nuns, but she barely raised her eyes from her breviary during the Office or from the table during supper, and afterward she disappeared to her rooms again. As thwartingly, during recreation’s hour Dame Margrett and Dame Johane held to their own silence, neither of them looking happy but both of them refusing to say anything of what had happened in the prioress’ parlor today, meaning that everyone, including Frevisse, went to bed that night dissatisfied.

She found herself still dissatisfied when she came awake for Matins, groped her feet into her shoes in the darkness, slipped on her over-gown against the middle-night chill, and went from her cell and down the dorter stairs by the light of the single small lamp beside them to the dark cloister walk and the church. Besides the light ever-burning above the altar, another lamp waited there for them to light their candles along the stalls, but before even one was lighted they were all startled by running footsteps up the nave and Luce was suddenly there out of the darkness, her day’s gown loose about her and only a cap tied over her disheveled hair as she grabbed the edge of the rood screen’s opening to stop her headlong coming and cried out, “Dame Claire! You have to come! He’s sick as anything! The Rowcliffe man this time!”

T
he “Rowcliffe man” was Symond Hewet, and he was ill in much the way Breredon had been but far worse, vomiting blood before it was done. The fight to save him went on past dawn, so that when Dame Claire and Frevisse came finally out of the guesthall, it was into the clear daylight of another cool and cloudless morning. They stopped together at the top of the steps to take deep, grateful breaths, clearing the sick-room stench from their lungs, Frevisse breathing the air and feeling the sunlight as only someone could who had been dealing with death through the darkest hours of a night. It was a lovely morning, and Frevisse knew that when she stopped being so tired she could hardly think, she would be very glad there was a man alive who had been very close to dying, but just now all she felt was need to lie down and sleep for a goodly long while.

Beside her, echoing her feeling, Dame Claire said, “I am growing too old for that manner of night.”

“If I never have another such, I’ll be content,” Frevisse agreed as they started down the steps. “As infirmarian, can you rule that you and I should sleep before we do anything else today?”

“I can. I do. We break our fast, then we sleep, if only until Tierce.”

The other nuns were already gone to chapter meeting, so the two of them had the morning bread—with butter today, as a Paschal pleasure—and ale alone in the refectory, with Dame Claire telling Alson, who waited on them, to report to Domina Elisabeth that Dame Johane was sitting with the sick man and that she and Dame Frevisse were going to sleep now for a time. Then, because the dorter was forbidden to the nuns during the day without the prioress’ leave, they went to the infirmary. The few beds there were of course bare, but that was the very least of anything Frevisse cared about just then. She lay down on one and was asleep as she pulled the uncovered pillow under her head.

She awoke aware she was not ready yet to be awake. She tried lying very still to see if she might go to sleep again, but her mind had had rest enough that now it was remembering how in the night, with two men ill of quite surely the same thing, the fear of contagion had been as thick as the stench around Symond Hewet’s bed. But from there she remembered how at the night’s end, when she and Dame Claire had been aside from everyone, washing their hands in a basin and about to leave Symond to Dame Johane’s care, Dame Claire had said, too low for anyone but Frevisse to hear, “It’s not sickness. It’s poison. I’ve no doubt of it.”

Poison. Just as Dame Amicia had exclaimed yesterday and Sister Cecely insisted on.

And probably not a chance poisoning from food gone bad. Something chancing to be wrong in the guesthall’s food or drink might strike down Breredon and only Breredon. But for a full day to pass and then one—and only one—other man to fall ill the same way…

It could have been by chance. Chance was an odd thing.

Lying with her eyes still closed, Frevisse slightly smiled in mockery at herself. Chance was, by its very nature, of course odd. But that was not the point of her thought and her smile left her. She wanted it to be likely that Breredon and Symond Hewet had been felled by chance, but she had to look at the possibility they had been sickened by someone’s deliberate hand, because if they had been, whoever had done it had to be found out before more harm was done. Breredon had been ill, Symond Hewet very ill. Dame Claire had said that if he had had a weaker heart, he would be dead by now.

If someone else sickened, would it be to the death? Was that what someone was trying for?

Frevisse opened her eyes and made her unwilling body sit up. Dame Claire was gone and the light through the single, small window was the gray of an overcast day, keeping her from judging the time. As she rose stiffly to her feet, she felt the ill humour that came with too little sleep fraying at the edge of her thoughts. She tried to smooth them as she shook out her habit’s rumpled skirts, telling herself that her discomfort was the least of what was happening. Bracing her hands in the small of her back, she carefully stretched a little and tried to turn her thoughts toward what mattered more than her body’s discomfort. She would leave the question of what had been used to sicken the men to Dame Claire and Dame Johane. It was a lesser question. What mattered more, to her mind, was who had poisoned them. And why.

So far as “why” went, she could—barely—accept Rowcliffe might poison Breredon to have the bother of him out of the way, as Sister Cecely had wildly insisted. What she could not do was make it seem a
likely
thing for Rowcliffe to do. With him she could see a shouting match, a hard blow from the front, a rough scuffle, maybe a dagger drawn and even used. She could see all of that, but poison, like an ambush or a dagger from behind, did not suit with what she had seen of Rowcliffe.

But then again, how much had she seen of him, to know one way or another what he would do?

And even if he would poison Breredon, why would he poison his cousin?

To keep suspicion away from himself?

Or could it have been Symond himself who saw to poisoning Breredon, then poisoned himself to keep suspicion away? Except there had been no serious suspicion that Breredon was ill by anything other than mischance.

And would Symond have so badly misjudged the dose he gave himself, have made himself so much more terribly ill than Breredon had been?

Still, as Dame Claire had said, poisons worked different ways on different people, just as medicines did. What sufficed for Breredon might have been too strong for Symond without he intended it to be. He—or whoever had given it to him. Unless whoever had given it to Symond had intended him to die.

Still, poison did not seem either Rowcliffe’s or Symond’s way of doing things.

What of Breredon’s servants then? Would one of them have poisoned Symond as revenge for Breredon’s poisoning?

But no one had thought Breredon’s illness
was
poisoning. And even if Coll or Ida
had
taken hold on some thought that it was and set out on misplaced revenge, where had they got something to so nearly match Breredon’s illness?

Or could one or the other of them have poisoned Breredon for some hidden purpose of their own, then poisoned Symond to confuse matters?

But again, since no one else had been thinking of poison for Breredon’s illness, no one had needed to confuse anything.

Maybe it had gone the other way. Maybe the poison had been meant for Symond all along, and Breredon’s poisoning had been meant to mislead. Or been done by mistake.

But who had reason for poisoning Symond?

Frevisse could just see why a Rowcliffe might think poisoning Breredon would be to the good: he was an added problem to the trouble they already had with Sister Cecely. But surely he was not that great a problem—not so great a one to warrant murder—not with the Rowcliffes’ presence here having forestalled anything he and Sister Cecely might have purposed. Why make trouble that did not need making?

So back to Symond. She knew even less about him than she did about Breredon. Someone might have reason to want him dead without she had any way of even guessing what it might be. But then that someone would have to be either his uncle or his cousin, wouldn’t it?

She could not help making that a question, but who else was there? Breredon? Poisoning himself first to avert suspicion from himself? Then depending on one of his servants to see to Symond’s poisoning? Because surely Breredon had not been fit to do anything like that for himself yesterday.

Still, if this was about the Rowcliffe properties and Edward, John Rowcliffe would seem the more likely prey. Had it been Symond by mistake? He did not figure at the center of the trouble at all, so why poison him? Had he simply been simpler than Rowcliffe to poison?

All that seemed an even further stretch of likelihood than Symond being poisoned to divert suspicion from himself or from someone else when there had been no suspicion that needed diverting.

If Breredon and Symond had been on the same side in the matter of Sister Cecely, there might have been some sense to be made of it all—that someone wanted to be rid of them both. Or that one of them wanted to be rid of the other. But they weren’t on the same side. Were they? Could there maybe be something someone knew that gave reason to want them both dead?

This was useless. She could think of too many possible “whys,” too many “maybes.” They were making a maze in her mind without giving her any way to tell a true “why” from the rest. She should maybe start with “how” it had been done. “How” might tell her “who,” and “who” could then be brought to confess to “why.”

She found that at some point she had sat down on the bed again, was staring at the far white-washed wall without seeing it, and still had her hands pressed to her back because she had forgotten to move them. With a small grimace at that new stiffness, she let go of her back and stood up again. It was against the Rule to be this idle and alone during the day. Besides, she had gone as far as she could in her own mind. She needed to ask questions of someone besides herself.

She was not sure what questions—or of whom—until, going into the infirmary’s outer chamber, she found Dame Claire standing at the wooden worktable there, the infirmarian’s book laid open in front of her. It was a battered volume, its parchment pages dog-eared and stained. From her turns at helping in the infirmary, Frevisse knew there were leaves of various plants pressed among its pages, and that here and there dried plant stalks and other things marked places used by the several generations of St. Frideswide’s infirmarians for reasons long forgotten but left by their successors because, Dame Claire had once said, “They were put there for someone’s reason sometime. It makes me feel I’m keeping company with them, those other women, all of us leaving something of ourselves for the ones who come after us.”

Just now she looked up, frowning, from a page showing a thin-lined drawing of some plant with carefully written script below it and less carefully written notes in various inks around it and said, “Poison doesn’t seem to have been of much interest to my predecessors. There’s nothing here that helps.”

“Are you certain it was poison both times? Is it possible Master Breredon was honestly ill, and someone then used something against Symond that copied his illness?”

“Anything is possible,” Dame Claire said wearily and somewhat shortly. “It’s ‘likely’ that limits matters. Even if that was the way of it, from where did this opportune poison come from, since they would hardly be likely to have it to hand?”

Almost as one, they both looked up and around at the array of dried herbs hanging from the ceiling beams and the shelves of pots and small boxes along one wall; and after a silent moment, Frevisse asked, “Can you tell if anything has been taken?”

“Probably not.” But Dame Claire was already going to a small chest sitting at a far end of the shelves. She kept her stronger medicines there, Frevisse knew, to keep anyone from laying hands on them mistakenly. The chest had no lock, though. Dame Claire simply raised the lid and looked inside, shifted the variously colored and tagged cloth bags and small, stoppered bottles around a little, held a glass vial up to what light there was through the window, shook her head, returned it to the box, closed the lid, and said, “I can’t tell. Everything is here, but I’m not certain of quantities. There’s never been need to be that precise about them.”

Frevisse nodded that she understood. Dame Claire came back to the table, stared down at the book again, then turned some pages but not as if she thought to find any needed answers in it. Frevisse asked, “But you’re certain it was poison?”

“You keep asking me that,” Dame Claire said somewhat impatiently. “I’m as certain as may be. That’s all I can tell you. Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know.”

“Have you told anyone that it’s probably not disease that struck them?”

“I haven’t even let anyone know I’m awake yet,” Dame Claire said. She closed the book. “I’d best go see how the men do before Tierce.” She paused, frowning again. “How long did we sleep? Surely it’s time for Tierce by now.”

When they went into the cloister walk, they found out that it was more than time for Tierce. Dame Margrett, presently sitting guard outside Sister Cecely’s door, said at them, “You’re awake. Best you tell Domina Elisabeth. She had us called silently to Tierce, to keep from waking you.”

“I’ll go to Domina Elisabeth,” said Frevisse, then laid a hand on Dame Claire’s arm and said, too low for Dame Margrett to hear, “I’ll tell her what we think, but that we think it best to keep it to ourselves for now.”

Dame Claire gave a small nod of agreement, and they went their separate ways, she to see how the sick men did and release Dame Johane from her duty if she were still there, Frevisse up the stairs to the prioress’ parlor where she was not much surprised to find Abbot Gilberd.

He and Domina Elisabeth were not alone, of course. Dame Thomasine was standing just inside the door, and of those who might have been there, she was best, Frevisse thought, because Dame Thomasine hardly ever spoke about anything and never beyond what she had, of necessity, to say. Her silence on whatever was said here need hardly to be asked.

As Frevisse made her low curtsy, Domina Elisabeth echoed Dame Margrett with, “You’re awake. Good. Dame Claire, too?”