The Clerk’s Tale (6 page)

Lady Agnes, having nudged Nichola along the gallery railing toward Stephen and Master Haselden, put herself between her and Frevisse and set to cheerfully telling her who each of the jurors were and her opinion of them. Frevisse neither particularly cared nor particularly listened but gathered that, since there were no witnesses to the actual murder to serve as jurors, Master Christopher had given order for the eight male householders nearest to the nunnery to take the duty of viewing the body with him and coming to conclusions about the murder.

‘Ah, but there’s Master Gruesby,“ said Lady Agnes with more interest, pointing. ”Montfort’s clerk. The little, uneasy man with the pair of spectacles there, being shown to the bench behind the jurors by one of the crowner’s men. Remember I told you he found Montfort dead?“

He was, indeed, the man Frevisse had always seen as Montfort’s clerk and now she had his name. As the finder of Montfort’s body, his testimony would be maybe the most awaited, something some men would have enjoyed, but he gave no sign of being comfortable to be there, sitting on the very edge of the outer end of the benches where he had been put as if he expected it to burn him, adjusting with both hands his wooden-rimmed spectacles, held on by loops of ribbon around his ears and then adjusting them again and altogether seeming to wish he were somewhere else.

But, “Ah!” Lady Agnes said with great satisfaction. “Here comes the widow, and better yet, Domina Elisabeth is with her. That’s good. She’ll be a comfort to her, poor lady.”

And be able to tell Lady Agnes everything about her afterward, Frevisse thought wryly. Accompanied by Domina Elisabeth and a maidservant, Mistress Montfort was escorted by one of the men now done with the jurors to a cushioned place on a bench well to one side, where her son would not readily see her whenever he looked up. Certainly now, as she shifted the cushion a little further along the bench and sat down, the maidservant on one side of her, Domina Elisabeth on the other, mother and son traded no look, her head still bowed too low for Frevisse to see her face, Master Christopher busy in talk with his clerk at the table end.

‘Letice,“ Lady Agnes asked impatiently, ”where are her children? Didn’t I hear some of her children had come with her?“

From where she stood a proper few paces behind her lady but still able to see nearly everything and hear all, Letice said, “Two daughters and two other sons came with her is what I heard, but she didn’t want them here for this, it’s said. They’re at the nunnery.”

‘They’ll hear all about it anyway. Servants talk, even if no one else does,“ Lady Agnes said. Then she stiffened, with a hissed intake of breath through her teeth, fierce with an anger that both startled Frevisse and turned her gaze with Lady Agnes’s to the man and woman just being let into the hall. There was nothing particular about them, a middle-aged couple, soberly dressed, with a certain stiffness to them perhaps, the woman’s hand resting on the man’s raised one more as if they were making formal entrance to the royal court at Westminster than to a crowner’s inquest in a country town, and with maybe an excess of cloth in the woman’s skirts and a little too much length in the liripipe swung down from the man’s broad hat and around his shoulders, but surely nothing worth Lady Agnes’s open ire at seeing them.

It was Stephen who said over his wife’s head, laughter behind the words, “Steady on, Grandmadam. You knew they’d be here.”

‘That doesn’t make seeing them any the easier, the slinking weasels.“

‘If you frown like that, you’ll give yourself wrinkles,“ Stephen suggested, ”besides letting them see how much they irk you.“

Lady Agnes flashed him a look of dislike to match what she had given the man and woman but he went on cheerfully, “Besides, you don’t want to waste all your fury on them. Rowland and Juliana are here, too.”

With another furious intake of breath that left Stephen laughing, Lady Agnes whipped her look from him back to the hall where a younger man and woman were entering in the first couple’s wake, following them up the hall to the bench in front of Mistress Montfort.

‘Oh, yes, putting themselves to the fore,“ Lady Agnes said with rich dislike. ”That’s just their way.“

‘You’d like them none the better for sitting in the back,“ Stephen pointed out.

‘What I’d like is them standing outside in the cold until they’re needed,“ his grandmother returned sharply.

‘What you’d like is them in the Thames up to their necks, with hopes there’d be a flood,“ Stephen answered, then laid his hand over Nichola’s resting on the railing and said, because she was looking worriedly from him to Lady Agnes and back again, openly uncertain whether anger or laughter had the upper hand between them, ”It’s all right.“

‘Not while they’re breathing it isn’t,“ Lady Agnes snapped.

Frevisse held back from asking who they were for fear of rousing Lady Agnes more but watched with interest as the older of the two women paused to say something to Mistress Montfort who briefly raised her head to answer and then looked down again, leaving the two couples to sit ahead of her, the two women in the middle, the men at either end.

A few others had been let in behind them, to take places on the rear benches, but apparently they were the last who were meant to be there by right or necessity because way was now being given to whoever else would come in and the hall’s orderly quiet broke under the hurry and talk of men and women crowding in, trying for a better place than someone else at the hall’s far end and along the sides; but before it came to elbow-pressing, the guards at the door lowered their halberds to bar the way and exchanged a few short, sharp words with the foremost of those they had cut off before Master Christopher rapped once on the bare wood of the tabletop, bringing sudden silence to the hall except for the scuffle and shift of people still settling themselves.

Ignoring them, Master Christopher in a voice pitched to be heard without being raised, said, firm with authority, “The inquest into the matter of the death of Master Morys Montfort, esquire and of this shire, is now begun.”

With most sudden deaths there was little question of how they had come about, whether by accident or open murder, but in any where there had been real question, his father’s preferred method of inquiry had been to gather as quickly as possible enough facts or seeming-facts to allow him to come to a conclusion that suited him and thereafter overbear the jury into agreeing with him. That Master Christopher’s way differed from his father’s was immediately clear. In a level, easily carrying voice he said to the jurors, “You have all viewed the body and the site of the murder in company with me?”

They agreed with scattered “Ayes” and head-nodding that they had.

‘Would one of you be pleased, then, to describe what was seen and concluded by you all? Master Wilton.“

Master Wilton had been agreed on beforehand, to judge by how readily he stood up, an underbuilt man with a reedy voice and the forward manner of someone always overready to put himself forward before others could. Eager with his brief authority, he told in careful detail that they had all seen where the deceased’s body had been found, in the small garden of St. Mary’s priory, and looked at the said body where it presently lay in St. Mary’s priory.

‘What did you conclude?“ Master Christopher asked.

‘That the deceased had been stabbed once with a long-bladed weapon too narrow to have been a sword and therefore likely to have been a dagger or knife.“ Master Wilton was firm and clear about it and equally firm as he went on, ”Nor did the body seem to have been moved from where it fell. We therefore judge from that that the deceased was probably killed there.“

Frevisse bit down on the urge to say, if only to Lady Agnes, that if the deceased was indeed dead and his body not been moved, then yes, “probably” that’s where he had been killed.

Either unnoticing or undisturbed, Master Christopher asked, “When would you judge that this murder took place?” And added a shade more quickly than Master Wilton could open his mouth, “We know it was the twenty-first of January this year of God’s grace. The time of day is what we need.”

Master Wilton caught back what he had all too clearly been going to say, swallowed with a large bobbing of his Adam’s apple, and said instead, “We judge he was killed in the afternoon of the said day, shortly before the body was found.”

Rather than after it was found, Frevisse thought, curt with impatience.

Master Christopher thanked Master Wilton and bade him sit, then spoke to his clerk, who left off his busy scratching of pen on paper to call on Master John Gruesby, finder of the body.

Slowly, maybe hoping the whole business would go away if only he took long enough, Master Gruesby rose to his feet, looking nowhere but at some papers clutched with both hands. But his hands did not tremble, Frevisse noticed, and though his voice did not rise much above a whisper, it held steady as he confirmed he was John Gruesby, late clerk to Master Morys Montfort, subescheator of Oxfordshire, and that he had found Master Mont-fort’s body the afternoon of the twenty-first of January just past as had just been said.

‘How did you come to happen on the body?“ Master Christopher asked.

‘I was in search of Master Montfort.“

‘Did you know he would be in the said garden?“

‘I did not know for certain he would be. I was told he had gone that way and followed him.“

“Why were you looking for him?”

‘A message had come for him. When he could not be found in the priory’s guesthouse, where I expected him to be because that was where we were staying while here, I began asking after him. Someone had seen him go out of the guesthouse. Another had seen him going toward the nunnery’s stableyard. A man there told me he thought he’d seen him going toward the way to the infirmary garden. I went that way and found him dead there.“

‘Isn’t the infirmary garden part of the cloister?“

‘Yes. I believe so.“

‘But it’s open for anyone to come or go as they choose?“

‘I believe not. There is a door to it inside the cloister and another, the way by which I entered, from the stable-yard through a door said to be kept always locked.“

‘Did you find this door locked?“

‘No.“

‘How did it come to be unlocked?“

‘I don’t know.“

‘You and the priory’s infirmarian dealt with the body before anyone else. You found no key on him?“

‘No.“

‘Did you look for one?“

‘Yes. I also looked in the garden. There was none there, either.“

Frevisse wanted to hear more about the unlocked door but Master Christopher turned his questions to where and how the body had been lying. Nothing that Master Gruesby said varied from what Frevisse had already heard from Lady Agnes, except that Master Christopher asked if he had seen any weapon there that might have been used for the murder, either when he first found the body or when he had searched the garden for a key. To that Master Gruesby answered he had not. He had yet to look up.

There were other things Frevisse would have asked but Master Christopher moved on to, “Why was Master Mont-fort here in Goring?”

‘He was come in his office of escheator.“

‘In what matter?“

‘The inheritance of Henry Lengley, esquire of this shire, lately deceased.“

‘Was there dispute in the matter?“

‘There has been disagreement,“ Master Gruesby murmured.

‘Between whom?“

‘Between the said Henry Lengley’s younger brother Stephen Lengley…“