Read The apostate's tale Online
Authors: Margaret Frazer
Tags: #Historical Detective, #Female sleuth, #Medieval
“Yes,” Domina Elisabeth said wearily. “I’ll deal with them if you see to all the rest. And to Mistress Lawsell.”
“Ah. Mistress Lawsell.” Abbot Gilberd sounded no happier at thought of her than Frevisse felt, but it seemed he accepted her along with the rest of the burden Domina Elisabeth was setting down, because he next said, “Yes. Her, too.” He rose from the chair. “Now I shall leave you to your rest, dear sister. Dear sisters,” he added, including Frevisse.
He murmured a benediction over them both while making the sign of the cross in the air, then left, and Domina Elisabeth moved toward the chair where he had been, the prioress’ chair, where every prioress of St. Frideswide’s through the years had sat in her turn; but her step was so unsteady—as if merely moving was almost too much to ask of her body—that Frevisse put a hand under her arm and helped her the few steps until she could sink gratefully onto the chair’s cushion.
She gestured toward the room’s only other chair for Frevisse to sit, too, and Frevisse did, wishing Domina Elisabeth had dismissed her instead, but Domina Elisabeth, with her head leaned against the tall back of the chair and eyes closed, said, “What am I to do with the Pyes? Even if the Rowcliffes don’t demand the law on them, I’ll have to send them away. Alson stole from us and suborned her brother. He poisoned two men. How could they be such fools? They can’t stay here, and I can’t give them a good word to take with them. What could I say?”
“That they’ve been good workers,” Frevisse offered. “That much would be true about them.”
“That they’ve been good workers but will follow any stupid plan that’s offered them?” Domina Elisabeth shot back with a little anger-fueled sharpness.
“If all you write is that they’ve been good workers, whoever thinks to hire them will wonder, then, why you’ve let them go, but at least you’ve not turned them off with nothing for all the years they’ve served well here.”
“And it will let them say they left by their own choice if they want to lie further and…” Domina Elisabeth broke off, made a frustrated gesture with both hands, and gave up, saying with all her weariness returned on her, “It just goes on and on. It never stops. One trouble after another. I am so tired of it all. So tired.”
She was; but she was also being rescued by her brother and would soon have her longed-for rest. Frevisse wondered whether, if it had been someone other than his sister who made the plea, Abbot Gilberd would have agreed to her resignation and all else she wanted.
But she was still prioress for now, still bound by duty, and Frevisse asked, “What of Elianor Lawsell? Where is she? Gone back to the guesthall for the night?”
“On the abbot’s word, she’s been given a bed in the infirmary.” Domina Elisabeth shut her eyes. “One more trouble.”
Frevisse looked at her tired face and how slackly her hands lay on the arms of the chair. There was no doubting how near to the end of her strength Domina Elisabeth was, and Frevisse brought herself to say, “I shall regret your going from us. You’ve served St. Frideswide’s well.”
The faintest of smiles curved Domina Elisabeth’s mouth. “I’ve sometimes thought you did not approve of me, dame,” she murmured.
Sometimes Frevisse had not, but she answered honestly, “That doesn’t mean you’ve not done well. Only that I was wrong.”
Her eyes still closed, Domina Elisabeth gave a single small laugh. In the silence then the fire whispered among its coals and there was the tat of rain at the window glass beyond the shutters. Frevisse was waiting to be dismissed or for Compline’s summons, whichever would let her leave here, but into the quiet Domina Elisabeth said softly, “There is strong likelihood that you’ll be elected prioress in my place. You know that, don’t you?”
Frevisse strangled back her instant, urgent need to refuse even the thought, able only after a long moment of struggle to say evenly, “No. Nor do I wish it.”
Domina Elisabeth held silent, letting the knowledge lie there between them that once a nun’s vow of obedience was given, “wish” had nothing to do with “duty” except insofar as a nun should wish to do whatever duty was given her. Instead, finally and far too quietly, Domina Elisabeth asked, “On which of your sisters, then, would you rather lay the burden?”
The stroke of the bell calling to Compline saved Frevisse from answer.
I
t took two days and a little more for everything to be sorted out.
Sister Cecely, to no one’s surprise, made trouble over Edward. She cried out that he was hers and she would consent to nothing, nothing,
nothing
about him.
Frevisse, sent by Abbot Gilberd to deal with her, had told her coldly, “You may agree to this, or what is done with him will be done
without
your consent. And I will move Abbot Gilberd to change his mind and leave you here, to us, through the time of your punishment.”
Those threats were blunt enough that even Cecely could not simple-wit herself away from understanding them, and being deep in hatred of St. Frideswide’s and short on thought of what might be worse than here, she had signed the agreement that released Edward’s wardship to the Rowcliffes.
Frevisse had asked her then if she felt guilt for what she had brought on Alson and Alson’s brother, almost certain of the answer but wanting to hear it; and Cecely had given a harsh, short, angry laugh and said, “It’s their fault they were found out. They didn’t do as I said, did they? She didn’t take what I told her she should, and he didn’t give Symond enough.”
“You truly wanted to kill Symond Hewet?
“Of course I did! Him and his lies.”
“His lies?”
“Guy never betrayed our secret. He never would have done that to me. Symond is a liar. When Alson told me her brother had heard Symond saying that—”
Cecely had broken off, fury twisting her face, her hands clenching and unclenching in her lap, and Frevisse had left her, sad at the foolishness of it all, at the arrant, persevering stupidity of a life lived entirely by lies. Lies that Cecely had chosen to tell herself and was still choosing to tell, rather than have anything to do with the truth.
Later, at the end of that first day of trying to sort matters to sense, Frevisse had said something of her thoughts to Dame Claire during the hour before Compline when they were walking together around the cloister walk, and Dame Claire had shaken her head sadly and said, “So with all her lying about everything, she’s been lying to herself as well as us.”
But Frevisse had found herself hesitating rather than agreeing, then finally saying slowly, “I don’t know that she did.”
“You just said,” Dame Claire said patiently, “that everything she’s said has been a lie, from beginning to end.”
Not her love for Guy, Frevisse thought. That had likely been true enough, as far as it went. Although that was probably not very far, there being too little of Sister Cecely for anything to go far and certainly for nothing ever to go very deep. But still slowly, Frevisse said, “I mean I don’t think it’s always deliberate lying with her. She brings herself to believe that what she wants to believe is true. Having brought herself to believe it’s true, she believes it completely and so isn’t lying when she says a thing. She believes it. The lying came earlier, when she lied herself into that belief.”
And she and Dame Claire had looked across the cloister to the shut door of Cecely’s cell, with Frevisse more aware than she had ever been of the pity of it all.
And
Cecely in her darkness, companioned only by her anger.
By more than anger.
By rage.
Burning, helpless rage.
At everyone who had worked to ruin her.
At all of them for being alive when Guy was not.
At Guy for being dead.
At God for letting every one of her careful plans be broken.
Thought-blurring rage at all the unfairness of her life, but with nothing left that she could do except sit ripping, one by one, the pages from the breviary until it lay in a ruined pile on the floor around her feet.
With nothing left to do then but to sit and wait until they came for her.
Hating all of them for all the wrongs they’d done her.
Mistress
Lawsell left, not graciously, on the morning of the second day. Abbot Gilberd had had her in long talk, and Elianor remained behind, soon to put on the plain black gown and white veil of a novice.
Master Breredon looked likely to be able to travel in a day or so.
The Rowcliffes would be staying longer because of Symond, only very slowly recovering.
At some time Frevisse did not know, Alson and Tom Pye were set free, taken to the priory’s outer gateway, and told not to be seen here ever again.
So, with one thing and another, it was the late forenoon of the third day before Abbot Gilberd finally left. Cecely was given chance to say farewell to her son in the guesthall yard, with the abbot and all his retinue looking on. Warned by Abbot Gilberd to make it brief and keep a curb on her tongue, she said little, took Edward in a smothering embrace, stroked his hair once, then turned away and did not look back at him as she went to her horse.
Edward stood for a small, forlorn moment looking at her back, then turned and ran across the guesthall yard and up the steps and into the guesthall where the Rowcliffes were keeping quietly from sight.
A few minutes later Abbot Gilberd and all his men and Dame Elisabeth and Cecely rode in a clatter of hoofs out of the gateway and were gone, leaving St. Frideswide’s in quiet at last.
And in that quiet Frevisse stood alone at the window in the prioress’ chamber, looking out on the empty yard. Simply stood. In the room that was now hers.
The only vote against her in the election yesterday had been her own.
The ceremony that made her prioress had been this morning.
And here she was. Where she had never wanted to be.
Domina Frevisse, prioress of St. Frideswide’s.
O
ne problem in writing books set in medieval England is that people “know” what the Middle Ages were like, when all too often what they know are the Victorian clichés that were too often based more on nineteenth century narrow-minded arrogance than on facts. So readers find elements and attitudes they think are “modern” in these stories but are not. Take, for example, the idea of disease being contagious—a modern notion the primitives of medieval England could not have had? To the contrary, the words “contagion” and “contagious” date from at least the 1300s, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary
, and are probably older. Also “infect” and “infection.” There was even speculation that disease was caused by some manner of animals so small they could not be seen, but their existence was deduced from the observed evidence. A theory of germs before they were ever seen under a microscope.
Likewise, the words “detect” and “investigate” were in use in medieval England, putting paid to the idea sometimes expressed that to have a detective at all in medieval times is inaccurate because nobody understood about detecting then. Admittedly, the word “detective” is centuries later, but there are books extent from at least the 1200s detailing how to go about investigating a crime.
They were not fools in the Middle Ages. They were as varied a people as we are now—some wiser, some more foolish; some more capable, some less; some skilled one way, some skilled another—all living a complex and multi-layered life, not sitting about in squalid ignorance waiting in dull-minded violence for the Renaissance to enlighten the world (which it did not; it merely threw a different light).
In more cheersome vein, there are young Edward’s “boules,” which could not be “marbles,” although they so obviously are. Games with small balls made out of various materials go back into antiquity as well as forward to our own time, but only after machinery was developed in the 1600s that could readily shape stone into small balls did these small balls become known as “marbles.”
The lack of politics in this story may have been noted. There was a major confrontation earlier in this year between the Duke of York and the King’s party, but it did not come to battle, and so little more than rumor and slight report were likely to have reached northern Oxfordshire and then would be quickly lost under the more immediate interests of people’s lives. An advantage, perhaps, to not having twenty-four-hours-a-day streaming news: Without it, people have chance to go more deeply into their own lives, rather than distracting themselves by skimming along the surface of myriad other people’s.
Of course that very narrowness is what would drive someone like Sister Cecely out of a nunnery, while at the same time being what someone like Dame Frevisse values. Two different desires of how to live a life, and Sister Cecely’s tragedy coming because she was forced into the wrong one for her and she could not bear it.