The apostate's tale (25 page)

Cecely
had given up pacing, could no longer sit on the hard bench, would not read their damnable breviary anymore, was tired of lying down on the thin pallet, was tired of everything and all of it. All she wanted was to grab Neddie and get as far and as fast from this place as possible.

Except neither grabbing Neddie nor fleeing here were possible. Not while she was trapped in this room. Trapped here, all she could do was sit on the pallet with her back against the wall, her legs drawn up, and her arms around her knees, staring at the room’s nothingness.

Both of her times with the abbot had gone badly. There was no disguising that from herself. He had had no interest in anything she had to say except admittance of her guilt and had been angry when she would not give it to him straight out and in so many words. Before she was brought before him, she had promised herself she would be humble to him, but when it came to it, she could not,
could not
. He had demanded of her where she had been and what she had done since she fled St. Frideswide’s, and she had refused him even a straight answer to that until she found he already knew all the answers, that he had already talked to John Rowcliffe and knew everything he wanted to know.

The unfairness of that still overwhelmed her—that he was so openly ready to believe John Rowcliffe before he believed her.

Nor had he cared at all about her grief for Guy. “Your paramour,” he had said coldly.

“My husband!” she had said sharply back at him, no matter she had meant to gain time by seeming what they wanted her to be. Gain time until…

And then what he had said about her dead babies. He ought to be damned to hell for that alone, let be all the rest!

The doorway darkened with a nun coming in.

Cecely did not bother to rise, simply raised her head, was not pleased to see Dame Frevisse, and stubbornly said nothing. Neither, at first, did Dame Frevisse. Instead, they stared at each other across the room’s small width until finally Dame Frevisse said, “Did it go well with Abbot Gilberd?”

Cecely nearly spat into the rushes with disgust. “
Him
,” she said angrily. “Do you know what he said of my dead babies? He said that was God’s mercy, taking them in their innocence but sparing me, that I”—she deepened her voice in mockery of the man—“might have time to repent my sins here on earth, rather than pay for them in Hell after my death.” She went back to her own voice. “Hateful man! God’s mercy,” she mocked. “What God is is cruel.”

Dame Frevisse snapped, “What God is—” but stopped.

Pleased at having stung her into even that much, Cecely jibed, “What? What are you going to tell me God is? That he’s a loving god? That because Guy and I loved one another, my babies died because God
loves
me?” She grabbed up a handful of rushes and threw them down. “I can do without that kind of love!”

“What God is,” Dame Frevisse began again, coldly now, “is a victim of our foolishness. Loving us, he’s hurt by the hurts we bring on ourselves. The way you would hurt with any hurt Edward might have. The way…”

“Neddie!” Cecely cried. “How does he? Is he well?”

“He’s well,” Dame Frevisse said stiffly.

“When can I see him again? It isn’t right to keep a mother from her child.”

“Given the wrongs you’ve done,” Dame Frevisse said, still coldly, “you’d do well not to invoke ‘right and wrong’ for anything you want.”

Cecely made an impatient noise at the woman. There was no way through these women’s thick skulls to their shriveled brains, and going a different way, she demanded, “How does Master Breredon?”

“Much better. He’s far along to being altogether well again.” She paused as if waiting for something else from Cecely.

What Cecely wanted was to know when he would be fit enough to find a way to carry through what she wanted of him. Hardly able to ask that, she said sullenly, “It was the Rowcliffes did it to him. I told you that. They should have been sent away after they did it. But no one listens.”

“If you’re so certain the Rowcliffes did it,” Dame Frevisse said, “you’ll have to find why Symond Hewet is ill, too. Or you might want to ask how he does. He is, after all, something like kin to you and certainly to Edward.”

Rage flowered like fire in Cecely, welcome for its heat and brightness against all the cold fears gathering around her. “Symond!” she hissed. “That treacherous, miserable
cur
! If it wasn’t for him, none of this would be happening! Isn’t he dead yet? I thought he was dying.”

“He was near to dying, yes.” An edge came into Dame Frevisse’s voice that sounded to Cecely like mockery. “But no, he isn’t dead. He even looks likely to live.”

Cecely trembled with doubled rage. “All of this is his fault! All of it! I didn’t do anything against him. It’s all his doing! Guy was hardly cold in his grave and I was mad with grief and…”

“I thought Guy drowned at sea.”

“The bodies washed up on the shore, didn’t they? That’s how the wreck was known!” How stupid could this woman be? Vicious with her rightful anger and the scraped-raw edge of her grief, Cecely said sharply, “I didn’t know which way to turn. All I had left was Neddie, and Symond came to me, saying he wanted Neddie. He said he and Guy had talked of it and that Guy had wanted him to have Neddie. I called him the liar he is and said he’d best leave me alone or I’d tell John about Jack’s debt. That stopped him. He said he’d let me think on it, and we’d talk about it later. The way he said that, it frightened me. He meant to hurt me! I know it! And Neddie! That’s why I wanted us away from him!”

Dame Frevisse regarded her in unfriendly silence a moment, then said, “But you were willing to sell your son’s wardship to Master Breredon.”

“That was different. I needed…They were against me, always. All Guy’s family, not just Symond. They were going to turn on me now Guy was gone. They were going to take Neddie from me, and I’d rather anyone had him but them! Anyone but Symond most of all!”

Grief and anger at all the wrongs done against her rose up, choking her. She had always deeply delighted in knowing that she and Guy lived together inside a secret that only the two of them knew. Their secret had made a world where there were only the two of them and no one else, a place where
Guy
was all her own and no one else’s. That he had told someone else—that he had broken their secret, broken their world—that was a betrayal as great as his death had been, and giving way to the boil and pain of her anger, she burst out, “How
could
he have told Symond our secret! Why did he tell him?
Why
?”

She was demanding that, yet again, at God rather than at Dame Frevisse, but it was Dame Frevisse who answered coldly back, “He likely did it to protect his son from whatever foolish things you might do. Any such foolish things as what you
have
done.”

Cecely gasped at the unfairness and cruelty of that and cried out on the higher-mounting wave of her anger at God and Guy and this hateful nun, “Neddie didn’t need protecting from anything! He had me! He
has
me! Except you’ve taken him away from me!”

Dame Frevisse, untouched by any answering anger—cold bitch of a woman—said, “But you’re willing to sell him to Master Breredon when no one else in his family wants that.”

“Only because they made me! If they had just left us alone…”

“Did you threaten to tell Master Rowcliffe about his son’s bill of obligation?”

“Only because Symond made me! He…” Cecely broke off on a gasp, strangled on a new fear. “How do you know about the bill?” she demanded, then answered that herself, saying bitterly, “Symond told you.”

“Symond did not.”

“Then—” Cecely sprang to her feet. “Then you stole it from Neddie! The deeds and the bill! You stole them from him!”

“He gave them to me. Of his own choice. Because he thought it was wrong that he have them.”

“You stole them from him! From a little boy! You stole them! They’re mine!” She started toward the nun. “Where are they?”

“They are not yours,” Dame Frevisse said, still not raising her cold voice. “They were never yours, and they are back in the hands of the men to whom they belong. The bill to Symond Hewet, the deeds to Master Rowcliffe.”

Cecely took a step back in mingled horror and disbelief. Her heel caught against the edge of the pallet and she stumbled a little and was forced to turn sideways and brace a hand against the wall to keep from falling but all the time not taking her horrified stare off the nun. The woman meant it! She had given everything away! Nothing was left! Guy was gone, and her hopes were gone, and there was only Neddie and what she could get from Breredon for him. But she didn’t know how she was going to get her hands on Neddie and away from here. And even if she did, what Breredon could give her wouldn’t be enough now. But there had to be some way. There had to be!

But she did not see it. All she could see was Dame Frevisse watching her. A cold, unbending woman who was, at best, uncaring about her pain or, more likely, was enjoying it.

Nothing was the way it was supposed to be! Guy had betrayed her. Neddie had lost what she’d trusted to him. Symond hadn’t died. Everything was lost and gone wrong, and with a cry she put her hands over her face and crumpled down into a huddled heap on the pallet, trying to hide not just from the nun but from everything, everything,
everything

S
haken, Frevisse stared down at the huddle of Sister Cecely. The grief and anger that had torn her voice, the outright terror on her face before she collapsed, had been of a woman in vast, staggering pain.

And yet Frevisse found herself turning away from her with no word said.

Found herself leaving the room.

Found Abbot Gilberd standing in the cloister walk just outside the door.

Dame Perpetua, surely having risen to her feet when the abbot approached, was standing, too, her head deeply bowed as she probably did her best to be invisible. She would have heard everything, but how much Abbot Gilberd had heard, Frevisse had no way of knowing. She started a deep curtsy that he stopped with a flick of his hand, then made a sharp gesture for her to follow him. With folded hands and her head as bowed as Dame Perpetua’s, Frevisse did, hearing behind her the whisper of Dame Perpetua’s skirts as she sank rapidly down onto the stool, probably in relief that it was not to her the abbot wished to speak.

On her own part and judging by her startled glimpse of his stern stare at her before she had started to curtsy, Frevisse very much doubted she was going to like the next few minutes and tried to brace herself as he led her along and around the cloister walk to the corner near the foot of the dorter stairs. There, most away from where they might be overheard by anyone while still in sight of anyone who cared to look, Abbot Gilberd turned to her and said, “You gave that woman no comfort.”

Even without Abbot Gilberd’s stern saying of it, Frevisse was unsteadied by that failure, now it was done past undoing. Whatever else Sister Cecely was, she was a woman in breaking-hearted torment and yet Frevisse had walked away from her with no offer of comfort at all. From where had that cruelty come? Frevisse did not know until slowly, staring at the paving stones between the hems of her black gown and Abbot Gilberd’s black robe, she found her way to an answer and, still slowly, feeling her way through the words, finally said, “Sister Cecely has lived comfortably in her lies for years. She’s lived in them happily and never cared what was the truth. Now all her lies are breaking down and taking her comfort with them. But to have the lies broken and all her comfort gone may be the only way she’ll ever be able to grow into facing the truth.”

And Frevisse prayed silently that it had been an innate knowing of that—even if not understood until now—that had kept her from giving any kindness to Sister Cecely just now. An innate knowing, not a cold heart.

Whichever way it had been, Abbot Gilberd said nothing for an uncomfortably long moment. Then he sketched a cross in the air above her, said, “Benedicite, dame,” and walked away along the cloister walk.

Keeping her head bowed, Frevisse said, “Thank you, my lord,” at his departing heels and stayed where she was. Only when he was well away, probably going to see Domina Elisabeth again, or perhaps Sister Cecely, did she move, going swiftly along the walk behind him as far as the door into the church. There she lifted the heavy latch and went in, closed the door with care for silence, and went—nearly fleeing in her need—to her place in the choir, sank to her knees in her stall, clasped her hands on the reading ledge, pressed her forehead to her hands, tightly closed her eyes, and began to whisper, “
Omnipotens deus, misereatur mei et dimissis peccatis meis. Omnipotens deus, misereatur nostri et dimissis peccatis nostris
.” Almighty god, have pity on me and dismiss my sins. Almighty god, have pity on us and dismiss our sins.

Repeating and repeating it until the upheaval of her feelings steadied and her mind cleared a little.

Then, falling silent, she lifted her head and eased carefully backward onto the seat behind her.

One thought at last came cold and calm to her.

There were still lies in this matter.

Cecely said Symond Hewet had asked for Edward’s wardship. She said that she had forestalled him with threat of telling Jack Rowcliffe’s father about the bill of obligation, that then she had become frightened and decided to flee.

On the other side, Symond Hewet claimed that she had tried to extort money from him with the bill, that he had warned her off with promise of trouble for her if she made trouble for him.

The stories were close enough to one another. Cecely had notably left out mention of stealing the deeds. Symond had said nothing about asking for Edward’s wardship. Both agreed that Cecely had tried to use Jack’s bill, whatever the reason. So, if nothing else, that was likely true, however little way it went to answering anything.

Maybe it was not necessary to know precisely what had passed between them. It was maybe enough to know that—whatever the truth behind her choice—Cecely had fled from the Rowcliffes, taking her son and the stolen deeds, not knowing that Symond knew her deepest secret and that, knowing it, he would have somewhere to look for her.

Even Cecely was not such a fool as to come here if she had known—even suspected—anyone knew her past.

Of course returning here at all had been a fool thing to do, whatever her reason, but Cecely had never been as well-witted as she plainly thought she was—well-witted while everyone else were fools; that was how she seemed to see the world.

Frevisse thought wryly that an almost greater question than who had poisoned Breredon and Symond was why no one had yet tried to do away with Cecely. Cecely was the root cause of everyone’s troubles, and yet it was at Breredon someone had struck first.

Another thought eased into Frevisse’s mind, drawn by that one. When Breredon had fallen ill, Cecely had immediately said the Rowcliffes had done it and should be sent away. She had said it again just now in bitter insistence.

Frevisse could see why Cecely wanted the Rowcliffes gone. If Cecely were fool enough to think she still had chance of escaping here, her hope of it had to hang on Breredon, and so long as the Rowcliffes were here, the thing would be impossible, even to Cecely’s poor thinking. Hence her insistence that they were guilty of Breredon’s sickness.

But she had been insisting on their guilt from the first, before anyone else had thought of poison at all. Because of her open anger at the Rowcliffes no heed had been given to her, but what if…

Frevisse felt her way carefully into her next thought.

What if Breredon had been poisoned not to kill him or even to make him very ill but only ill enough that the Rowcliffes might be accused of poisoning him? Doses were hard to judge. He may have fallen more ill than was intended by…whoever had done it.

But then had come Symond Hewet’s sickness. He had been far nearer to death than Breredon had been. Had that been meant? Or had both men been meant to die, and Breredon’s sickness been less and Symond’s greater only by chance? By ill chance for Symond.

But the first question was still—Why had they been poisoned at all?

Frevisse gave way and finally looked straight at the thought she had been circling—that somehow Cecely had seen to Breredon being ill so that the Rowcliffes would be accused and sent away.

So far as she had been able to learn, no one had reason to go to the trouble of having Breredon dead, not even the Rowcliffes now he was forestalled of getting Edward. But his
sickness
could have served Cecely if she could have made anyone believe her accusations against the Rowcliffes.

How she might have seen to Breredon being ill was something Frevisse would consider in a while. A question that came first was why, if Cecely had wanted Breredon ill as a way to having the Rowcliffes sent away, it would have made sense for her to then have Symond sicken, too. If what she wanted was for the Rowcliffes to go away, Symond’s illness only served to keep them here.

Unless…

Cecely made no secret of her angry bitterness against him, both for knowing her secret and for “betraying” it to the Rowcliffes, and just now she had been openly, resentfully disappointed he was not dead.

What if whatever had been given to Breredon had been meant to sicken him, but what had been given to Symond been meant to kill?

Certainly Cecely’s angry bitterness against him seemed almost sufficient to that.

Or fully sufficient?

Murder was a sadly short-witted answer to anger, Frevisse thought. Or to anything, come to that.

That being given, who was the most short-witted person in this business?

Cecely.

And given the anger she had just shown at her paramour’s betrayal of their secret to Symond and at Symond for leading the hunt to her here, with the added edge that Symond was in reach while her paramour was not—yes, Frevisse was afraid she could see all too readily how Cecely, short-witted, might give way to wanting Symond dead.

Might want it enough to try somehow to kill him.

It was the “somehow” on which it all fell down.

Cecely had had no chance to do anything to anyone in the guesthall, and between the guesthall and the cloister the only link was Frevisse herself, if Dame Claire and Dame Johane were discounted, and Frevisse thought with a grim humour that they could be.

Oh, other folk went back and forth between the cloister and guesthall. Not nuns, of course, except by the prioress’ leave, and none of them would have helped Cecely at anything like this anyway. But servants did, when there was need to take or fetch something from one place to another, as was happened lately with the guesthall’s needs drawing heavily on the cloister’s stores of food. But how would a servant, briefly in the guesthall kitchen, have had chance at only Breredon’s or Symond Hewet’s food or drink? To have poisoned either one, let alone both, someone from the cloister would have had to be in the guesthall kitchen at just the right time, knowing just which food or drink was meant for either man, with just the right chance to poison either the food or drink.

Unless these attacks were not, after all, aimed at anyone in particular.

Frevisse stopped short on that thought and looked at it again.

What if the poisonings were without particular purpose, just happening to happen to Breredon and Symond?

That, in its way, was worse than imagining Cecely was behind them, because if the poisonings were, one way or another, Cecely’s doing, then there should be some way to find the trail between her and them. But if the poisonings were by someone run mad and taken to happenstance killing…

No. Better to hold to the thought that these were, somehow, Cecely’s doing, Frevisse thought. If, after following that trail as far as it went, she found that it went nowhere, then she would look at that other possibility.

She stood up. There might be time left before Sext to ask Dame Claire or Dame Johane about the medicines. If they could give a firm answer about them, she would be that little further ahead.

It was only while she was passing along the cloister walk toward the infirmary, past Dame Perpetua still sitting guard on Sister Cecely, that she suddenly wondered why Abbot Gilbert had not asked why she had taken it on herself to give up the missing deeds and bill. He had surely heard at least that much of what had passed between her and Sister Cecely. He might very reasonably have demanded an explanation of her. Instead, he had said nothing about it at all. Why not?

A twinge that was not quite worry, but might be if she had time to dwell on it, passed through her thoughts that were otherwise mostly on poison. She let it go, pleased, as she came to the infirmary, to find both Dame Claire and Dame Johane there, heads bent together over the infirmary’s book laid open on the worktable. They both looked up, their foreheads tightened with almost identical small frowns, and Dame Claire said, “If you’ve come for an answer about the herbs and all, the best we can tell you is that we don’t know.”

“Don’t know if you’re missing any, or don’t know what was used?” Frevisse returned.

“Either,” Dame Claire said.

“I think there may be some missing from several things,” Dame Johane said. “As if someone took a little from each instead of much from one.”

“What would they do, mixed together?” Frevisse asked.

“We don’t know,” Dame Claire said. “What may—and only may—be missing are herbs and drugs we’ve never mixed together. There was no purpose to doing so.”

“Unless to make someone very ill,” Frevisse said. “Or kill them.”

Dame Claire’s face settled into hard lines. “Or kill them,” she agreed. “Yes.”

“But you can’t be certain anything was taken at all,” Frevisse said.

“We can’t,” Dame Claire said. “Oh, I’m certain enough none of the truly potent things were taken. The dwale. The monkshood. Those are untouched. But among the herbs that could do what was done—” She shook her head. “We can’t tell for a certainty.”

“But I
think
there’s less than there should be,” Dame Johane put in earnestly.

Dame Johane, who was Cecely’s cousin and might have more loyalty to her than she had outwardly shown.

Frevisse shook off that thought. Surely, if Dame Johane had had her own guilt to cover, she would have been more firm that nothing was missing.

The bell rang to Sext, blessedly ending talk, but as she left the infirmary with Dame Claire and Dame Johane, Frevisse saw clearly how that brief squirm of suspicion was fresh warning of how deeply Cecely’s return was corrupting the nunnery’s peace.