The Squire’s Tale (32 page)

Nowhere near the death wound or Dame Claire’s cutting.

Nor did it have the look of someone having wiped their hands there. That would have made a shallow smear. This was a long, narrow, soaked-in-seeming stain, dark against the gown’s blue, as if it had had time to dry.

Frevisse clasped her hands more tightly, resisting what she wanted to do until Father Laurence finished, but the moment he had and they had all echoed the final
“Requiem aeternum,”
she crossed herself with more haste than piety, grabbed for the skirt and turned it back, wanting to see if the blood had soaked through the thick velvet from the inside to out or from out to in.

There was almost no stain on the inside.

So it had come from the outside to in, and for that to be, either something long and narrow and bloody had lain on the skirt or the skirt had lain on it.

‘Dame Frevisse?“ Dame Claire asked, now standing over her.

Frevisse stood up and turned away, shaking her head, wanting time for thinking. Around the bed the others were rising, too, save for Robert still on his knees, head still bowed. Frevisse gazed down at the back of his head for a moment, then looked around, saw Master Verney with Gil at the doorway, uncertain if he should come in, and Master Geoffrey standing up stiff-kneed from the prie-dieu. But it was Master Skipton she wanted.

‘Dame Frevisse,“ Dame Claire said, ”we should…“

Frevisse shook her head again and left her, going past Master Verney and Gil into the parlor where the steward was directing several maidservants to build up the hearth fire and bring a pot to heat the water for cleansing Lady Blaunche’s body, with someone to take word to the laundress that there would shortly be sheets in need of immediate washing. He did not say,
Before the blood set and could never be washed out,
but the tense set of his whole face betrayed he was holding steady and to his duty with an effort that broke a little when he had dismissed the maids and turned to Frevisse. In a shaken voice he said, “First Master Benedict and now this. It’s terrible.”

‘Have you been steward here for long?“ Frevisse asked without heed for what he was saying.

Surprised enough not to ask why, he answered, “Fifteen years. And my father and grandfather were stewards here before me.”

It was often that way with smaller manors, sons of a family carrying on an office from one generation into the next, their familiarity with the people and place to everyone’s advantage. Frevisse had hoped it was that way here and asked, “Then you’d know, if anyone does, whether there’s any secret way into the tower here. Is there?”

He looked at her as if she had somehow taken leave of her good sense. “What?”

‘A secret way in. Hidden stairs. Some way to come and go unseen.“

‘Of course not. Why would there be?“ He was catching up now without quite believing she was asking such a thing. ”A stone tower is costly when just built simply. Add something like that… Besides, how could it be secret with everyone on the manor watching the place being built?“

‘This was built a goodly while ago.“

‘A hundred and fifty years. Maybe more. Very likely more.“

‘People could have forgotten.“

‘They remember whose grandfather kicked a cow and broke his foot three generations back. I think there’d be talk about ’that secret way to the lord’s parlor.‘ Don’t you?“

She did and turned sharply back toward the bedchamber, ignoring Master Skipton beginning to ask, “Why…” because she did not have time to tell him why. There was one more thing she wanted to see, and returning to the bedchamber where Gil still guarded the doorway, she found Robert had risen and moved away from the bed, was now in the middle of the room, standing with head down and shoulders slack, listening to Master Verney and the priest, with Master Geoffrey to hand in case he was needed while at the bed the women, including Dame Claire and a maidservant, were readying to go on with what next needed to be done with Lady Blaunche’s body as soon as the men were gone.

Circling past the men and away from the women, Frevisse went to the prie-dieu and found what she had hoped was there—dark on the pale, woven-rush matting that covered the floor, a streak of blood much the same in length and breadth as the stain on Lady Blaunche’s skirt.

So Lady Blaunche’s skirt had lain on whatever had lain there, and sickly sure that she was guessing rightly, Frevisse knelt on the prie-dieu’s cushion, as Lady Blaunche must have done, and looked back over her right shoulder to where her own, far less full, skirts now covered the stain. On the rush matting to the left of her was the greater spread of Lady Blaunche’s blood from the wound under her left breast, where she had slumped sideways and down and bled, far from that streak. Just as on her gown that streak had been far from the wound.

Beside her, startling her, Master Verney said, “She must have braced the dagger’s pommel there.” He leaned over to point to a marred place on one leg of the prie-dieu, just under the edge of the slanted top where a prayer book still lay open. It was a rounded dent that looked, as he said, to be made by the rounded pommel of a dagger’s hilt pressed heavily into the wood. “She braced it there, then thrust herself onto it.” He sounded as sick at the thought as Frevisse felt.

Frevisse put out her hand, ran two fingers around the curve of the marred wood. “Who noticed this?”

‘Master Geoffrey.“

‘He showed it to you?“

‘When I came in.“

‘The dagger.“ She heard her voice dry with strain, not sounding like her own. ”Whose is it?“

‘It’s an old one of Robert’s. It’s kept there.“ Master Verney nodded to the chest beside the wall at the head of the bed. ”For need when another isn’t to hand, I gather.“

‘And anyone and everyone could know it’s there.“

Master Verney was openly puzzled. “Yes,” he said and waited as if expecting more questions but Frevisse had answers enough. Everything was come together into a whole, and when above her, Master Verney said heavily, “How could she bring herself to such a thing? Even…”

‘She didn’t,“ Frevisse said curtly, braced her hands on the prie-dieu and pushed herself sharply up to her feet. With the anger she had first had at Benedict’s death scalding in her now, she turned toward where Robert and the priest were still in talk, with Master Geoffrey still standing with them, and raised her voice for everyone in the room to hear her as she said, ”She
didn’t
kill herself. She was murdered. By the same man who murdered her son.“

The words rasped into a silence fully come before she had finished saying them, with everyone—the men, the women by the bed, Gil at the door—turned to look at her, but her own look only on Master Geoffrey, watching his eyes widen and the blood drain from his face as he understood what she was saying.

Robert turned his head to stare toward the clerk, then back to Frevisse. “What?” he asked.

Her gaze still locked to Master Geoffrey’s, Frevisse said, coldly now, “From all I’ve been able to learn, no one with cause to want Benedict dead had any way to come to him unnoticed last night or chance to put his body at the foot of the stairs except you, Robert. The other man best able to both come to Benedict and move his body is Master Geoffrey.”

‘Who had no cause to kill him,“ Robert said, but slowly, watching, as everyone was watching now, the slow mount of blood back into the clerk’s face and the rapid lift and fall of his heavy breathing, his stare still at Dame Frevisse still staring back at him as she said, ”No cause we know of. No more cause than we know of for him to kill Lady Blaunche. But he did, because she didn’t kill herself and there’s no one else could have done it except him.“

From the bed Mistress Dionisia said, questioning, “But we saw her when he left the bedchamber. She was at the prie-dieu, praying.”

‘She was dying,“ Frevisse said. ”He made sure we saw her there, to believe she was well, but she was dying even as he left her.“

‘How can you say,“ Master Verney asked carefully, ”that she didn’t kill herself?“

‘Because no matter how great a despair she might have been in, even despair great enough to thrust herself onto a dagger, she would not then have bothered to reach back and carefully hide the dagger under her skirts. Why would she? What possible reason could she have had for doing that? But that is where it was.“ Frevisse pointed toward the narrow bloodstain on the matting. ”There’s a stain on her skirt matching that, where her skirt laid over it. Look where it is. And remember how she was lying when we found her.“ She turned that demand on the women. ”There’s a dent in the prie-dieu where she’s supposed to have braced the dagger, and we found her fallen to the left, as if she had been kneeling and crumpled down from there. Why would the dagger be behind her to the right and under her skirts where the blood shows it was? And
you.“
She came fiercely back to Master Geoffrey. ”You found the dagger, showed it to us, before we’d barely begun to grasp that she was hurt, before we’d done more than turn her over, when it would have still been covered by the spread of her skirts. You knew it was there and the only way you could have known that was if you’d put it there.“

Master Geoffrey took a gasping breath and started, “I had no reason—”

‘Don’t tell me you had no reason!“ Frevisse flared. ”Whyever you did it, you were the only one who
could
have done it. And the only one besides Robert who could have killed Benedict and moved his body. You…“

Robert, all his grief-driven fury unleashed, went at Master Geoffrey to grab him by the front of his gown as less than a day before he had grabbed Benedict, and shove him backward, backward, backward, hard thrust after hard thrust, until they came up against the wall, there to jerk him forward and drive him back, cracking his head against the stone, yelling at him, “Why?” Jerking him forward and driving his head back again, still yelling, “Why? You bastard-get!
Why?”

Chapter 21

Three days. No… Four.

Four days since their deaths.

Standing at the parlor’s window, looking out over the orchard, its branches softened with pale, opening blossoms under a gentle sky, Robert made count of the days. Four days since they died. Three since the crowner came and left. Two since their burial. One since Sir Lewis had sent message from the grange that he was going home and there need be no haste in finishing the matter between them, that it could bide until Midsummer if Robert wanted. Four days.

And all the rest of his life ahead of him. And no desire in him to live it. An ugly stretch of time where grief, he knew, would flatten out under the burden of necessities, the way it had flattened for brief whiles these past four days. Flattened but not left him because it would never leave him, was now as much a part of him as the white scar along his right knee where he had fallen on a broken edge of a board when he was eight years old, on an afternoon that would have long since been lost to memory except for the pain there had been and the scar there was, and that was how his grief would be, with him forever from here onward, through all his days. Grief for what might have been between him and Blaunche but never was and now never would be. Grief for everything lost with Benedict’s death—beginning with the chance to have made peace with him.

Grief for all the things there would never be chance for now.

Ned and Gil had pulled him off Geoffrey Hannys before he had managed to kill him, there in the bedchamber four days ago. Robert supposed he was glad of that but he had not been at the time. At the time he had wanted the man as dead as Blaunche and Benedict and the unnamed baby were, but Ned and Gil had dragged him back, Ned saying, “Let be. We’ll see to him. Leave it, Robert!” But when Geoffrey had made a clumsy try for the door then, sidling away along the wall, it had been Ned who had turned to backhand him across the face, driving his head against the wall again; and when Geoffrey had started to slump toward the floor, it had been Ned who gave him a hard shove down, to be sure he made it.