The Stone-Worker’s Tale

A Short Story by Margaret Frazer

Part of the Dame Frevisse Medieval Murder Mysteries

Published by Dream Machine Productions at Smashwords

Copyright 2005 Margaret Frazer

http://www.margaretfrazer.com

When Domina Frevisse had last been in St. Mary's church at Ewelme, it had been a quiet place, its brief nave divided from its side aisles by graceful stone pillars, the chancel and high altar remote beyond a richly painted wooden screen topped by a gilded crucifix and saintly statutes.

Now its quiet and all its ordered peace were gone.  Near the high altar the south aisle was given over to scaffolding, stone dust, and workmen; the summer morning's heavy sunlight pouring unobstructed through the gaping hole in the wall that would someday be a stone-mullioned window of richly stained glass; and the crane with its ropes and pulleys still straddled Lady Alice's stone tomb chest from yesterday's lowering into place of the stone slab that was its top, complete with a full-length carving of Lady Alice lying in prayerful repose, gazing serenely up to heaven.

Presently, though, Lady Alice was anything but prayerful, serene, or reposed as she demanded at her master mason, "He's gone?  Just gone?  He was here yesterday and now, like that, he's gone?"

Around them the workmen were drawn back, idle instead of busy at their varied tasks, wary and watching while Master Wyndford said in open distress, "Yes, my lady," agreeing to what he had already admitted.  "In the night sometime it must have been," he added, as if that might help.

It did not.  When young Simon Maye had gone was not the point.  Even why he had gone was not Lady Alice's concern just now, and she said angrily, "What of my angels, then?  If he's gone, who's going to finish my angels?"

Her tomb was splendid with angels.  They were carved in a guardian array along both sides of the tall tomb chest, and more would go along the stone canopy that would someday rise above the tomb, and more would stand on the pinnacles that would rise above even that.  Already four of the panels that would edge the canopy were done, were sitting on the floor along the aisle well away from the work still going on, leaned at an angle against the wall so that their angels – three to each panel – gazed upward rather than downward as they someday would when in place above the tomb.  Domina Frevisse had admired those angels the other times she had come with Alice to the church to see how the work came on.  They were half-length, rising from their waists out of the stone, framed by the curve of their wings behind their shoulders, every fold of cloth, every feather delicately detailed.  Some of the angels were crowned and some were not; some had their hands folded on their breast, others had them raised in praise, others held them palm to palm in prayer; and their faces differed, too, so that each was more than simply the same again, and all in all they were as masterful a piece of work as Frevisse had ever found herself smiling at for the plain pleasure they gave.

But there were only four panels when six were intended, and only twelve angels of the eighteen there were meant to be; and Master Wyndford looked aside from Alice's anger to a heavy-shouldered youth standing nearby and said, "My son, Nicol.  He's as skilled a carver of stone as Simon Maye.  He'll finish the angels, my lady."

Lady Alice turned her critical look on Nicol Wyndford as he bowed to her.  He was dressed like the other workmen in a plain tunic and hosen, had pale, flat hair and a pale, flat face that just now was heavy with sullenness.   "Are you?" she demanded.  "Are you as good as Simon Maye?"

Nicol Wyndford looked from her to his father and back again, hunched his shoulders in not quite a shrug, and said toward the floor, "Nearly, my lady."

"Nearly."  Lady Alice said with raw displeasure; and to his father, "Master Wyndford, I am not paying for nearly."

She assuredly was not.  Frevisse was come from her cloistered nunnery of St. Frideswide's on a bishop-granted week's visit to her cousin.  These middle years of the 1400s were troubled with quarrels among the nobles around the king.  Favors sought and given were a way of binding alliances: The bishop had granted this favor for Alice and some day she would do something in return; or maybe this was the bishop's return for some favor Alice had already done him.  Frevisse had not asked, only regretted being summoned from her ordered life while at the same time glad of chance to see her cousin; but she had hardly brushed off the dust of travel before Alice had taken her to the church to show off the tomb and tell her at length how it would be when it was finished – all in the latest of fashions, Alice assured her.  Besides the stone-carved canopy with its praying angels above the alabaster image of herself atop the tomb chest where her body would eventually lie, the chest itself was raised on a stone-carved screen behind which, directly under the chest, was another full-length carving, this one of a shrouded corpse in the latter stages of decay, meant to remind those that lived of the fate that came to all, no matter what their earthly glory.

"Not that that's kept me from giving myself a glorious tomb," Alice had said, laughing at herself for it as they walked back to the manor house afterward.  "Given what it will cost when done, I thought I'd have it to enjoy while I was alive, rather than leave money for it in my will and never see it.  Besides, on the chance I may live for a long while yet, I thought it best to have my image done now, before I go any older."

"Ah, vanity even unto death," Frevisse had teased her.

"Well, it's not much use after death, is it?" Alice had answered back, and they had laughed together, their friendship firm despite how differently they had gone about their lives – Frevisse gladly into a nunnery and a life of prayer, Alice into worldly wealth and power by way of three marriages.  Now in her third widowhood, she was using that worldly wealth and power to have made for her a tomb fine enough to comfort her against the time when death would make worldly wealth and power of no more use to her.

Frevisse, as a Benedictine nun vowed to poverty as well as chastity and obedience, knew her own grave would lie nameless under a stretch of grass-grown turf in the nunnery orchard.  She found that a quiet, pleasing thought; but Alice's choice was Alice's choice, and this morning Alice was neither quiet nor pleased with either the young journeyman stone-carver Simon Maye who was so suddenly gone without word or warning, nor with Master Wyndford and the offer of his own son in Simon Maye's place.

Standing a little aside and behind her cousin, Frevisse was sorrier for Master Wyndford's discomfiture than for Alice's disappointment.  Sorry, too, that he could not offer himself for the work, as master of the lesser workmen here. But even if, in his day, he had been a master carver of stone figures as well as a master mason – and the two often went together – he had no hope of being one now.  Not with both his hands misshapen as they were by arthritics, the fingers swollen and crooked and bent sideways at the knuckles, past hope of ever doing fine work again.  They pained him, too, or at least ached.  The other times she had come with Alice to see how the work went, Frevisse had noted him gently rubbing one hand's thumb in slow circles on the palm of the other hand, first one, then the other, easing what must be a constant aching there, probably unconscious he was doing it.  Today the ache had shifted; he was holding one hand against his chest, gently rubbing and rubbing at the back of it with the fingertips of the other while he talked to Alice, still not seeming to know he did it.  Frevisse suspected that the ache of them and the bitterness of his lost skill accounted, even more than his years did, for the deep lines down his face and the sour look he seemed always to wear

His voice was quiet with respect and certainty, though, as he said now, "I promise you, my lady, the work will not suffer if you charge Nicol with it."

"Nicol doesn't think so," Alice pointed out sharply.

Master Wyndford sent his son a hard look.  "Simon Maye is his friend.  He speaks from that rather than honestly about his own skill."

And his father would take him to task for it later, Frevisse thought.

Alice, unsatisfied, looked from father to son to father again, and said impatiently, "I'll think on it and tell you later."

She swung away from him in a swirl of long skirts and fine veiling.  It was to her back that he bowed, saying, "My lady," Nicol and all the workmen bowing, too, as she swept away across the church toward the outer door in even worse humour than she had come.

Outside the church, her ladies were waiting for her, already under her disapproval, come to it long before Master Wyndford, when one too few of them had come to her bedchamber at dawn to ready her for the day.  She had looked around and asked, concerned, "Where's Elyn?"

Lady Sybille, senior among her ladies-in-waiting, in her service for years, had looked at Beth and Cathryn, youngest among Alice's ladies – girls whose noble families had set them to serve and learn in Lady Alice's household until they were old enough for the marriages made for them.  "Tell my lady," Lady Sybille had said sternly.

Beth and Cathryn had traded guilty looks, with Cathryn shifting uneasily a little aside, leaving answering to Beth, who had said with sufficient boldness to show her innocence in the matter, "We don't know, my lady.  She went out last night and never came back to bed."

The three of them shared a bed in the chamber beyond Alice's bedchamber where her ladies-in-waiting and waiting women slept. Lady Sybille, who oversaw them all, had her bed there, too, but it was curtained, giving her such privacy as befitted her higher place in the household.  Alice looked at her, and she answered, not needing to hear the question, "We saw you and Domina Frevisse to bed.  Then they saw me to mine.  So far as I knew, Elyn then settled to bed with the rest of them.  I had no reason to think she did not, the other women were paying no heed, going to bed themselves, and these two did not see fit to say anything."

"She said she would be back!" Beth protested.  "Then we fell asleep and didn't know she didn't come!"

"Not until we woke up this morning," Cathryn added.

"Do you at least know where she meant to go?" Alice had asked.

Cathryn had looked at the floor.  Beth had whispered as if in the confessional, "To see Simon Maye.  We think.  She didn't say."

Lady Sybille drew in a sharp, impatient breath.  "At that hour?  Surely not," while Alice had said angrily, "Has it gone that far between them?"

Spurred by Alice's anger, Beth had said with sudden enterprise and some desperation, "She maybe did come back and we were asleep too heavily to know it, and she woke up before we did and is only gone out for an early walk."

"She'll be back for breakfast, surely," one of the other women had offered.

"That's somewhat too late," Alice had snapped.  Already in her undergown of cream-colored linen, she had pointed at her green outer gown and ordered, "Finish dressing me."  And to Lady Sybille beginning a protest over the tray waiting with bread and cold meats for her to break her fast,  "No, I'll eat when I come back."

"Come back?" Lady Sybille had faltered.

"From seeing what Simon Maye has to say about this," Lady Alice had said grimly.

Severe as Elyn's foolishness was, Frevisse supposed Alice would likely have left dealing with it to Lady Sybille and the household priest except Simon Maye was part of it and that meant that so was work on her tomb.  Frevisse had seen the young man each time she had gone with Alice to the church to see how the work went.  The first time, intent on his work, he had been unaware of anyone else was there until Master Wyndford had said behind him, "Simon, my lady has come to see your work again."  Then Simon had hurriedly laid down his tools and turned and bowed, a young man with stone-dust greying his brown hair but otherwise nothing about him different from uncounted other young men.  That had been Frevisse's first thought, before she had looked past him to the angel he was just finishing.  Then she had known he was something more than only another journeyman stone-carver.  There was a fineness to his work – an other-worldness to the angel's stone features, an aliveness to the very feathers of its wings – that went past ordinary skill to the something more that came to some craftsmen, but only some, as if God had touched them and let them see and do beyond what others saw and could do.

And Elyn?  Frevisse had seen her among Alice's women and other girls without particularly noting her, a girl neither especially lovely or especially plain.  With merry eyes, though, Frevisse seemed to remember.  Too merry, it now seemed.  And Alice's displeasure was only going to be the worse because her foolishness had brought the stone-carver Simon Maye into a disgrace which Alice could not ignore.

But whatever her anger, Alice had had to sit for her simple morning headdress of cauls and crimp-edged linen veiling to be put on her before going anywhere, and in the while she had to sit otherwise still she had let Lady Sybille prevail and a little broke her fast between sharp questions at Beth and Cathryn who unfortunately seemed to know no more than what they had already said.  Frevisse, needing no help to dress herself in her plain black Benedictine gown and the white wimple that surrounded her face and hid her throat, had kept aside from the bustle around her cousin; had pinned her black veil over the wimple by touch, not needing to see what she did, and ate a little of her own breakfast while watching and listening to Alice, her ladies, and the two girls, and only at the last, as Alice gathered herself to go out, had asked quietly, "Elyn has never done this before?"

"She most assuredly has not!" Lady Sybille said indignantly.

But Frevisse saw yet another guilty look pass between Beth and Cathryn and  asked at them a little more strongly, "Has she?"

Cathryn began hesitantly, "She's..." and stopped.   Beth, with the impatience of someone who had been wronged by another's foolishness, said, "A few times, yes.  Gone out at night to meet him, I mean.  They hardly have chance otherwise for any time together, do they?"

"But she's always come back!"  Cathryn wailed, "She's never not come back!"

"Because she knew what trouble we'd be in if she didn't," Beth had said with a grimness to match Alice's and probably with something of her own in mind to say to the erring Elyn when she was found.

But Simon Maye was missing, too.

From the church Alice went, restless with growing anger and frustration, to her gardens beyond the house.  "To pace off my anger at them both," she said.  The hour was still so early the dew was not yet gone off the grass, but the day promised to be warm and fair.  All too plainly, though, Alice was not going to enjoy it nor let anyone around her enjoy it.  At the garden gateway she ordered at her ladies, "Go to your duties.  I only want to walk with my cousin," and left her women making hurried curtsies behind her as she went into the garden.  Frevisse followed her, and when they were by themselves, walking side by side along the long walk between the herb-bordered beds, Alice said angrily, "It's Sir Reginald Barre.  He's a jealous cur and always has been.  He and his wife both.  I should never have talked about my tomb where they could hear.  They've bribed Simon Maye away from me to make trouble and he's foolishly taken foolish Elyn with him.  How could they both be so stupid at once?"

"Love?" Frevisse suggested.

"Love," Alice repeated sharply.  "Love is all very well, but there's no good reason to let it take the place of common sense."

Frevisse had rarely seen love and reason keep company together.  Far too often when love came in, reason went out.  And if it were lust instead of love, then reason was likely to have even less hold.  Having barely seen and never spoken to either Elyn or Simon, Frevisse had no way of knowing whether it was lust or love between them, but either way reason seemed to have gone completely out.  They had gained only trouble – and worse trouble to come – by this running away from their duties.

"What I don't see," Alice said, snatching a spire of flowers from a lavender plant as she walked past, "is why Elyn would do something this headlong.  She's always showed sensible until now.  Even in this dalliance with Simon Maye, this thinking they might be in love, hasn't been foolish until now.  She's even asked if I'd speak favorably to her parents about him, and I'd said I would."

"She did?  You would?" Frevisse said in surprise.  "They'd countenance such a thing?  Marriage between her and a journeyman stone-worker?"

"Oh, they're none so fine as all that," Alice said easily.  She held the lavender to her nose and breathed deeply.  "Elyn's grandfather on the father's side was a merchant out of Gloucester who bought himself into land and his son into marriage with a squire's daughter.  He was a friend of my father.  That's how I know the family.  Elyn isn't even their eldest or heir, just a younger daughter, here to be given some graces.  If she had caught the eye of a young lord while in my household, they'd not have minded."  Alice's small laughter at that was her first lightness of the morning.  "But they'll not mind a master stone-worker for her, which is what this Simon Maye will shortly be."

"And Elyn knows that?"

"Oh, yes."   Alice's humour darkened again.  "She only had to wait.  What are they thinking of?  It's Sir Reginald.  He's behind this some way.  I swear I'll tell everyone he can't find good workmen of his own but has to steal mine.  I'll making a laughing-stock of him.  He found some way to turn Simon Maye's head..."

"How would he go about that?" Frevisse asked calmingly.  "Wouldn't anyone he sent be noted here?"  Ewelme being a small place and most of it centered on Lady Alice's household.  "Wouldn't any stranger who's only business was with one of workmen be talked of?"  And talk of it would almost surely be brought to Alice by way of any of her household officers whose duties included knowing such things as went on around her.  Alice's frown acknowledged as much and Frevisse went on, "Besides that, is Simon Maye such a fool?"

"I wouldn't have thought so," Alice snapped.  "But I'd not have thought it of Elyn either.  Oh, how could either of them have been so foolish?"

That seemed the morning's refrain, Frevisse thought. 

"And no matter what Master Wyndford avers about his son," Alice said fiercely, "I won't have the drunken lout working on my angels."

Surprised, Frevisse said, "Was he drunk?"

"What else would you call how he looked this morning?  Or if he wasn't outright drunk, he was at least ale-addled.  Did you see when he bowed?  He swayed near to falling over.  He's not touching my angels."  She threw the sprig of lavender away.  Lavender was supposed to soothe and had maybe worked a little on Alice because, less harshly, more resigned, she said, "Ah well.  All this doesn't mean the rest of us should waste our day.  My chamberlain will be waiting.  And then my steward."  Because being lady of a large household and of lands spread over a goodly number of counties did not mean she lived a life of plain leisure.  Rather, it meant she was responsible for a great many people, must needs deal for hours at a time with her various officers and make decisions about a great many matters.

Frevisse, of no use to her with any of that, left her to her duties and sought out Beth and Cathryn at their morning work of tidying Alice's bedchamber, and asked, "Tell me, what did Elyn take with her?"

"Take with her?" Cathryn echoed a little blankly.

Beth was quicker.  "When she went out last night, you mean?  She didn't take anything that I saw.  Unless she had it ready, waiting for her somewhere else."

"But you haven't looked to see for certain," Frevisse said.

"No, my lady," Cathryn said, openly surprised at such a thought.  Living constantly together, people in a household learned the courtesy of leaving each other's possessions alone.  The thought of prying into Elyn's was plainly beyond Cathryn, but again Beth understood and said,  "Her chest is in the other room."

Nothing was gone from it.  As soon as Beth put up the lid, Frevisse could see that.  The chest was small, meant only to hold a few clothes, a few personal things, and it was full, everything carefully placed and with no space from which something might be missing.

"Is this the way it always is?" Frevisse asked.

"Oh, yes," said Beth.

"That's how Elyn is about everything," Cathryn added.

She sounded faintly aggrieved, as if at some affront or fault; but Frevisse was more taken up with the thought of how unlikely it increasingly seemed that this careful Elyn had run off into the night all unready and so foolishly, taking nothing of her own with her. 

Still, women thinking themselves in love had done far more foolish things than that, and Frevisse supposed the next question had to be: How foolish was Simon Maye?

Beth was slowly – and it seemed thoughtfully – closing the chest.  Cathryn, gazing wistfully into the air at some thought of her own, sighed, "They must be wonderfully in love, not to bear being apart anymore."  She smiled a little dreamily at Frevisse and confided, "We'd go with her sometimes when she was going to meet him.  Nicol Wyndford would be there because he's Simon's friend.  We'd talk with him while Elyn and Simon talked together."  She gave a sly, teasing, sideways look at Beth.  "Beth favors him.  Nicol.  But he favors Elyn."

"He doesn't!" Beth protested.  "I don't!"

"He does. You've even said you wished he'd look at you like he looks at her."

"I never did!"

"You did!"

"None of which makes any difference to Domina Frevisse," Lady Sybille said, crisp and disapproving from the room's doorway.  "Have you finished my lady's bedchamber yet?"

With curtsies and hurry, the two girls scurried away, while Frevisse made apology to Lady Sybille, taking blame for their delay on herself before leaving, too, but going the other way, out of the house and back to the church.

She found the half-made new chapel empty of workmen.  She could hear them, though, outside the window-hole in the wall, their voices mixed with the chink of chisels on stones telling her they were at work in the stone-yard there, readying the next stones for wall and window.  That was where Master Wyndford and his son likely were, too, and it was with them she wished to speak, but she stood for a little while in the aisle, looking at the proud, serene faces of Simon Maye's angels and found it harder by the moment to think a man with the skill of hand and eye and mind to create such beauty would desert his work for a lesser love.

Except, of course, he probably did not see his Elyn as a lesser love.

Master Wyndford came through the gap in the wall.  Not seeing her, he stood staring at the unfinished tomb for a long moment, one crippled hand rubbing at the other still held against his chest.  Worrying over how much the loss of Simon Maye was going to set back the work and wondering how bad Lady Alice's displeasure was going to be, Frevisse supposed, sorry for him.

The hard set of his mouth did not change as he turned and saw her, but she took no offense as he gave only a very curt bow and came toward her, saying with a nod at the panels of angels along the wall and more as if going on with a thought of his own than taking up talk with her, "Nicol will finish those well enough.  My lady need have no worry that way.  That carving there is Nicol's."  He moved one hand in a small gesture at the figure below the tomb chest.

Frevisse could acknowledge that in its ghastly way that figure of decay was as much a masterwork as the angels.  Every detail of a rotting body – the arch of the barely fleshed ribs, the gaunt thrust of the hipbones past the sunken belly – was done with exacting care.  There was no pleasure in looking at it, but there was not meant to be, reminding as it did of where all worldly pride and riches came at last.  That end was certain, though, and Frevisse felt no need to be reminded of it.  The thing ever in doubt was the soul's salvation, and rather than the corpse's reassertion of death, she preferred the angels' promise of hope beyond death and of love stronger than decay.

"They were Simon’s masterwork," Master Wyndford said broodingly at the angels.  "When they were done, he would have been his own man, a master in his own right, not a journeyman anymore."

"And now?" Frevisse asked.  "Now that he's broken his contract and gone off?"

Master Wyndford pulled his shoulders a little straighter – the broad shoulders of a man who had worked with stone all of his life – and said, as if trying to straighten his thoughts along with his shoulders, "Eh, well, he may come back.  There's no saying.  Once the lust has gone out of him.  If he's any sense he'll come craving pardon then and to have his work back."

"Will you give it to him?"

Master Wyndford held silent, seeming to brood on his answer before finally saying, with a nod toward the angels.  "There's little I'd not forgive a man who does that kind of work."

Frevisse would not have thought his face could go more bitter than it was, but it did as he went on with open anger and frustration, "I warned him.  I warned him well no good would come of wanting a woman instead of his work.  I told him that letting her turn his head would only bring him to grief.  I warned him marriage would be his ruin."

"You're married," Frevisse said.  "Or you were.  You have a son.  Surely you..."

Master Wyndford interrupted her with raw bitterness.  "Oh, aye, I was married.  I was warned against it but I was set on her and married her anyway.” 

While he was speaking, Nicol Wyndford stepped through the gap in the wall.  He was very much like his father in face and build and made to look older than he was by the stone dust whitening his hair.  Master Wyndford turned a glower on him and went on, as if at him in particular, “But the young don't listen.  They think it will be different for them, no matter what's said to them.  They won't hear."

Nicol Wyndford bent his head respectfully to Frevisse as he came toward them, but said, sounding as resentful as his father, "I listened.  Haven’t I listened every time?  I left Elyn to Simon, and now he has her and I don't.  Can't that be enough to satisfy you?"

Frevisse sharpened her look on him.  It was easy enough to believe there was a craftmen’s rivalry between Nicol Wyndford and Simon Maye.  Now it was plain there was another rivalry, too.  Rivalry and jealousy and Master Wyndford doing nothing to ease either as he said angrily, "Satisfy me?  No!  To see Simon fail himself because of a woman?  Watch him ruin his life with a marriage he didn't need?  Watch him lose everything he could have been.  Watch him–"

He started a sharp gesture with both hands but curtailed it as Nicol said sharply at him, "It wasn't marriage that ruined your hands.  Mother was dead before that ever started."

"It was started before she died," his father said back at him with old, embedded anger.  "It only became the worse after I was rid of her, that's all.  What she did was keep me from what I could have done before they went to the bad.  She needed this and she wanted that.  She wouldn't let me go where the best work was to be had or give me peace enough to give my mind to what work I had.  She clung and nagged through every unblessed hour I was married to her.  The arthritics only finished what she started."

Nicol protested, "That's not how Elyn will be.  There's sweetness in her."

Master Wyndford, his hands fisted together and clutched to his chest as if to protect them, made a disgusted, dismissing sound.  "You think your mother didn't show sweet when she was wooing me?  It's after they have you, that's when you find out what they are."

Stiff with useless rebellion, Nicol tried, "Father..."

Master Wyndford swept over his words in rage and bitterness.  "If I let you, you'd waste yourself the same way.  Ruin your life for a woman the way Simon has.  Give yourself years of misery when you should have years of making instead."  He looked toward the angels, and his face and voice softened into regret and longing.  "I did work like that once.  Once."  His face and voice darkened back to anger and he turned again on his son.  "And then I married and it all ended.  Everything had to be what she wanted, the way she wanted it to be, and then this came."  He held his twisted hands a little out from his chest, then clutched them back against him.   "They're gone.  Simon and this Elyn.  Isn't that proof enough what a fool she's made of him?"  Then, dropping the quarrel that was all his own, he demanded, "You left your work to come in here for other than to pick a quarrel with me.  What did you want?"

Nicol, rubbing at his forehead as if it hurt him, said, "I don't remember," and began to turn away.

"Remember your courtesy to the lady," his father snapped.

Nicol dropped his hand, turned back, bowed to Frevisse without looking at her, and made to turn away again, his hand rising to his head again.

Frevisse, not wanting him to go, wanting to have more from him to learn just how deep his jealousy against Simon Maye might be, asked, "Are you ill?"

Still turning away, Nicol said, "The weather is in my head, that's all.  The heat, I think.  Or there's a storm coming."

"You drank too much last night," Master Wyndford snapped.  "You always drink too much."

"I don't," Nicol said in the flat voice of someone who’s said the same too many times and yet would not give up the argument.  “You and I, we sat there at the table after supper and drank together last night.  I filled my cup twice and no more, and it would take stronger ale than that to get me drunk on two cups.  I wasn't even half way to drunk.”

But what if he had been just drunk enough to go out looking for the man who was his rival in both work and love? Frevisse thought.  What if Simon and Elyn were not fled after all?  What if Nicol had found them together...?

Hoping to draw him on to say more of the evening, she said, her voice carefully light, “It was so warm last night.  Sleeping did not come easy for those of us who went straight up to bed before the evening cooled.” 

Nicol, already half swung away from his father and her, stopped, stayed standing oddly where he was a moment longer with hand still to his head and frowning at the floor as if tracking a fugitive thought across the paving stones, before he lowered his hand, turned back toward his father, and said slowly, "Last night.  I woke up from some bad dream.  I don't know what time it was, but I wanted a drink, something to settle my stomach.  I went down to the kitchen."

Sharp with surprise, his father said, "You went downstairs?"  Then with disgust, "You didn't.  I never heard you. You dreamed it."

"No.  I did.  I was awake.  I don't know where you were..."

"In bed.  Asleep and not drunk."

"...but you'd left the shutter open.  There was moonlight in the room."

"So I forgot to close it," Master Wyndford said impatiently at him.  "That happens.  Best you give up ale altogether if it sets you to muttering through the next day like this.  Get back to work."

Nicol lifted and twisted his shoulders, shaking his father's words away, intent on whatever he was remembering.  "I could see the room in the moonlight and there were..."  He stopped, then said slowly, as if only beginning to be sure of what he wanted to say.  "There were three cups on the table." 

"There weren't any three cups,” Master Wyndford said impatiently.

Frevisse went very still, willing the son and father to forget she was there as Nicol said more strongly, seeming to take firmer hold on the thought, "I saw three cups there."

"You were drunk.  There were no cups.”

"I wasn't drunk.  I wasn't dreaming.  Why were there three cups?  I put my own away when I’d finished.  I know that.  I put it back on its shelf and went to bed.  'Put away now and you'll not need do it later.'   That's what Mother beat into me when I was little.  She's three years dead but I still do it.  Sober or half-drunk, I always put away, and last night I wasn't even half-drunk.  I was..."  He put a hand to his head again, his uncertainty returning.  "I was something, but I wasn't drunk."

"You were drunk," Master Wyndford said flatly.  "And I'd not say you were sober now.  Best you get back–"

Nicol lowered his hand, stared at his father.  "They were there last night, weren't they?"

"Nobody was there," Master Wyndford said, sounding angry and uneasy together.  "You went to bed drunk.  You dreamt things.  That's all."

"I wasn't drunk!" Nicol shouted.  He took a step toward his father, his uncertainty gone suddenly to anger of his own.  "You put something in my ale, didn't you?  Whatever it is you take when the pain is too bad.  The draught that lets you sleep when you can't otherwise.  You put that in my ale!"

"You're a fool. You–"

"So I'd be asleep when Simon and Elyn came to see you.”  With rising anger, he crashed onward, into the same thought clutching Frevisse.  “Simon and Elyn were there last night, weren't they?” he demanded.  “That's why there were the three cups on the table.  Because Simon and Elyn–"

"You're off your head!" his father said back at him.  "I haven't enough of my dose that I'd waste any of it on your thick head for anything, and they weren't there last night!"

"You knew they were coming!  You wanted me out of the way!  You–"

"I pray your pardon," said Alice, cold and precise on every word.  "Is this about my tomb?  Because otherwise I can see no reason for such shouting in a church."

She had come in by the far door, must have crossed the nave at an angle that kept her hidden beyond the pillar nearest where they stood.  Not by design, surely – she was lady here, with no need not to be seen – but it made her appearance sudden, and both men spun to face her, bending in hurried bows.  Frevisse turned, too, curtsying but saying with very false calm while she did, "It seems Elyn and Simon talked with Master Wyndford last night.  Now he's going to tell us why."

Not so willing to accuse a nun of lying as he was his son of drunkenness, Master Wyndford stared, trapped and speechless, from her to Lady Alice and past her to the three of her ladies who had followed after her.  When he did not promptly answer, Alice said crisply, "Well, Master Wyndford?  I came to say I was willing to let your son work on my angels.  Now I won't say it until I've heard more about this.  You talked with Elyn and Simon last night, my cousin says."

Stiffly, more to the nearest pillar than to her, Master Wyndford said, "Yes, my lady."

"And yet you didn't see fit to say so when I was here earlier this morning."

"No, my lady."  Still to the pillar.

Seeing Alice's displeasure growing, Frevisse put in, still feigning a calm she no longer felt, "What did they come to see you about?"

Master Wyndford gave her a look as black as any he had had for his son and answered sullenly, "About being married."

"And to tell you they were running off," Alice said.

"No."  Master Wyndford heaved a breath far too heavy to be called a sigh.  "They didn't say anything about running off.  They wanted to talk about marrying.  How soon I thought they could do it and all.  I told them not to be fools.  They went away.  That was all."

"They said nothing about leaving?" Alice pressed.

"Nothing," Master Wyndford said bitterly.  "We talked and then they went away."  His face and voice darkened with deep-set grief and long-nurtured rage.  "I told Simon that marriage would rob him of everything, the way it robbed me.  I told her that if she loved him, she'd let him go.  But that wasn't what they wanted to hear.  They didn't listen.  They would never have listened."

"And so you poisoned them," Frevisse said quietly.

Master Wyndford jerked his head around to stare at her, along with everyone else.

"While they sat there, trusting you," Frevisse said, her voice hardening, "you poisoned them.  And while you were ridding yourself of their bodies, Nicol came downstairs and saw the cups on the table."

"No!" Master Wyndford protested fiercely.

But Nicol, his stare gone from Frevisse to his father, said wonderingly, "You dosed me enough to make me sleep.  So I wouldn't know they'd been there.  Then you gave them more.  You gave them enough to kill them."  The thought took hold on him, going past guess into belief, and with an on-rush of anger he yelled, "You killed them!”

“No!” Master Wyndford denied as fiercely as before.

Alice made to say something.  Frevisse stopped her with a small gesture and slight shake of the head as Nicol cried out, “I can see you killing her.  You hate women because of Mother.  But Simon?  How could you kill Simon?  Of all people, you love him!"

"I couldn't!" Master Wyndford cried back at him.  "I didn't!  I..."  But his eyes were going from Nicol to Frevisse to Alice to Nicol again, and he must have seen their growing certainty and arrayed anger, and the same weakness that had betrayed him to ruin by a vile-humoured wife betrayed him now.  Defiance and denial went out of him, turned only into weak assertion and a pleading that they understand with, "I didn't kill them.  Death...  Death is so empty.  There's nothing there when someone is dead.   I couldn't bear...  I couldn't see Simon that way.  I gave them sleep, that's all.  With my syrup of poppies.  I gave them sleep.  That's all I did."

"Where are they?" Frevisse asked.

Master Wyndford shook his head, refusing that.  "They're sleeping.  Leave them.  They'll never know.  They'll sleep away and never find out all the ugliness that comes afterward, never have to live through all the years after this love they think they're in is gone.  They'll just sleep.  They'll just..."  A man who had worked more with his hands than words through his life, he gestured outward with his hands, groping for words, needing to make someone, anyone, understand.  "They'll sleep and go free and never know..."

Frevisse grabbed him by one wrist and wrenched his hand over to have clear look at what she had glimpsed as he gestured.  Across his palm the flesh was scraped red and raw.

As Master Wyndford jerked loose from her, Nicol grabbed him by his other wrist, dragged his arm out, fighting him for it, forcing his hand palm-upward.  The same fresh wound was there, too, and Nicol said as if only half-believing it, "Rope-burn!"  And together, in the same rush of understanding, he and Frevisse looked toward the crane with its ropes and pulleys still straddling Lady Alice's tomb; and Frevisse with the horror of certainty said, "No," as Nicol flung his father's hand away from him and bolted toward the gap in the wall to the stone-yard, yelling, "I need men here!  All of you!  Hurry!"

For Master Wyndford, working alone and in the dark last night, the work of lifting the stone slab with its alabaster figure from its place atop the tomb chest must have been brutal work, and lowering it into place again no easier, the pulley-ropes leaving raw testament of that on his hands. 

The workmen who came at Nicol's call made quicker business of it, and when the slab was lifted and swung aside, Simon and Elyn were there, still sleeping.  A little longer and they would have slept away to death, smothered in the sealed darkness without ever – if God were merciful – rousing. 

If the summer night had been longer, so that Master Wyndford could have set to his work at the tomb sooner; or if Frevisse had been less willing to question the twists in what at first seemed straight; or Nicol had refused his uncertain, half-dreamed memory of something that seemed to make no sense, that was the end to which they would have come.

Instead, they were lifted out of the stone darkness and carried from the church, into sunlight and wide air and life again.

And Master Wyndford stood in the church's stone-pillared shadows, tears sliding down his face, and Nicol went to him, leaving Simon and Elyn to the exclaims and care of Alice's women, and put an arm around his shoulders and stood with him, waiting for what would come next; and Alice, once she had given all the necessary orders, came to Frevisse, still standing beside the angels, and said softly, "They likely wouldn't have been found until the time came to bury me there.  Thank you."

Frevisse, her eyes on the stone-carved angels smiling as they gazed into eternity, said softly back to her, "And now you shall have the rest of your angels."

"And thank you for that, too," said Alice.

THE END

The Lost Tale of Dame Frevisse

What you're about to read is a Lost Tale of Dame Frevisse... sort of.

By the late 1990's several of my Dame Frevisse novels had been translated into German. As a result, I was asked to write a short mystery story for a German-language Swiss magazine. And when I say “short”, I mean short: It could only be 800 words long. The magazine, sold mainly in railway stations, was publishing stories of this length with the idea they would be short enough for readers to complete during a commuter train ride.

To help me understand what they were looking for, my agent kindly sent me a sample story provided by the magazine. Being in German, this was not as helpful as it might have been: I don’t read German. A teacher of German at my son’s school kindly looked it over and gave me the gist of it, which did help insofar as it confirmed that, yes, it was a short murder mystery. I gave him a copy of one of my books in a German edition in return for his help and buckled down to the unusual challenge.

Fortunately, I didn't have to actually write it in German. (It would be translated by the magazine publishers.) The tricky part (besides the fact that I tend to be verbose) was less the story itself (although that had to be tricksy, too) but the fact that in a history mystery a sense of a different time and place have to be established along with everything else. Creating time and place take up a lot of words, and then there has to be some presentation of characters and a mystery and a solution, altogether making for a rather intricate challenge.

But when it was done and shipped off to Switzerland, the story continued dancing in my mind. It felt too short in some ways. The first rush of notes I had made for it had far more in the way of characters and relationships than were possible to use in the given word-count, and even after the necessary ruthless cutting the itch to further explore those characters and relationships stayed with me. A few years later, when Mike Ashley asked me for a story for one of his anthologies, I took the chance to expand the tale to its full and proper length. Hence "The Stone-Worker's Tale".

"The Sculptor's Tale", on the other hand, has remained unpublished in its original form since it first appeared in that Swiss magazine. But here it is, available in English for the very first time...

* * * * *

The Sculptor's Tale

The ordered peace there had been in Ewelme church when Frevisse was last here was now given over to scaffolding, stone dust and workmen, the chancel's south aisle raw with being enlarged for my Lady Alice's tomb. The summer afternoon's heavy sunlight poured unobstructed through the unglazed holes that would someday be stone-mullioned windows of richly stained glass, and the crane with its ropes and pullies still straddled the tomb chest from yesterday when the slab that sealed it shut had been lowered into place for final carving. But work was paused just now, the workmen standing silently while Lady Alice questioned the master sculptor on the loss of Simon Grene, his best journeyman, here yesterday and now, with no warning, "Just gone?" she demanded. Master Atwell uncomfortably agreed to what he had already admitted. "And my woman Elyn with him," Lady Alice complained. The youngest of her waiting women. "Which is all very well for them, but what about my angels? Who's going to finish them?"

That was the sorest point in the matter, Frevisse thought, standing a little aside, listening to her cousin's indignation. Come from her nunnery on visit, she had quickly seen that Lady Alice's present interest was all for the making of her tomb and most particularly for the angels carved around it, each standing elegantly in its own niche, their faces proud, serene, the curve of their wings matching the arches of the arcading above and below them. They should have been of Master Atwell's making, as master sculptor, but his hands were beginning to distort with arthritis, no longer capable of such carving, so the angels were all young Simon Grene's – his masterwork that would leave him a master sculptor in his own right. But he was gone, with the last two angels unfinished, and Lady Alice said impatiently, "The need for work and wages lasts longer than young love. He and Elyn will return eventually, I suppose, but I don't like having to wait on them. I want my tomb finished."

Looking at the angels, Frevisse thought there was as much love given to their carving as could be given to a woman and she asked, "Master Atwell, when did you last see Simon and Elyn?"

"Last evening. They came to ask me how long they should wait to marry."

"And you told them?"

"I told them never," Master Atwell said darkly. He was holding his right hand in his left, the way he so often did, usually rubbing his left thumb in slow circles into his right palm to ease what must be a constant aching there. Today the aching must have shifted; his fingers were closed and it was his wrist he rubbed while he went on, "Marriage would waste Simon, steal his chances from him. The way it stole mine. I told him to forget her. I told her that if she loved him, she would let him go."

"But they didn't listen," Frevisse suggested quietly.

"No," Master Atwell agreed, but distantly, as if explaining now to something far inside himself rather than to her. "It wasn't what they wanted to hear. So we sat. We talked. I gave them wine. They didn't listen. They never would have listened."

"And so you poisoned them," Frevisse said, still quietly. "You poisoned their wine, didn't you? You killed them while they sat there, trusting you."

Master Atwell roused. "No! I gave them sleep, that's all! How could I bear to see them dead? Death is so... empty. It was only poppy syrup in the wine. I have it for the pain in my hands. I left them sleeping."

"Where?"

Master Atwell refused that. "Let them sleep. Now they'll never lose their love, not live through all the years of ugliness and hatred that come after it's gone. They'll sleep away to death and never know. Just leave them. Let them be done with it. Let them..." He had always used his hands, not words, to bring his visions to others' seeing. He gestured now as if reaching for a word the way he would have reached for a chisel. And Frevisse glimpsed his hand and grabbed his wrist to turn it palm upward, demanding at the red, raw rope burn there, "How did you come by that?" But let him go without waiting for answer and ordered at the workmen standing by, "The tomb chest! Open it!"

To lift and lower again the tomb's stone cover with the ropes and pulleys left from yesterday had been brutally hard for Master Atwell alone in the dark as he must have done it. The workmen made quicker work of it and Simon and Elyn were there, still sleeping. A little longer and they would have slept away to death, smothered in the sealed darkness without ever rousing, if God were merciful. Now, instead, they were lifted out, carried outside to waken in sunlight and wide air, given back to life, given a different mercy.

Unless, of course, Master Atwell had been right.

THE END

Margaret Frazer

Margaret Frazer is the award-winning author of more than twenty historical murder mysteries and novels. She makes her home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, surrounded by her books, but she lives her life in the 1400s. In writing her Edgar-nominated Sister Frevisse (The Novice's Tale) and Player Joliffe (A Play of Isaac) novels she delves far inside medieval perceptions, seeking to look at medieval England more from its point of view than ours. "Because the pleasure of going thoroughly into otherwhen as well as otherwhere is one of the great pleasures in reading."

She can be visited online at http://www.margaretfrazer.com.

Sister Frevisse Mysteries

Beginning in the year of Our Lord's grace 1431, the Sister Frevisse mysteries are an epic journey of murder and mayhem in 15th century England.

The Novice's Tale

The Servant's Tale (Edgar-Award Nominee)

The Outlaw's Tale

The Bishop's Tale (Minnesota Book Award Nominee)

The Boy's Tale

The Murderer's Tale

The Prioress' Tale (Edgar-Award Nominee)

The Maiden's Tale

The Reeve's Tale (Minnesota Book Award Nominee)

The Squire's Tale

The Clerk's Tale

The Bastard's Tale

The Hunter's Tale

The Widow's Tale

The Sempster's Tale

The Traitor's Tale

The Apostate's Tale

Player Joliffe Mysteries

In the pages of Margaret Frazer's national bestselling Dame Frevisse Mysteries the player Joliffe has assumed many roles on the stage to the delight of those he entertains. Now, in the company of a troupe of traveling performers, he finds himself double cast in the roles of sleuth and spy...

A Play of Isaac

A Play of Dux Moraud

A Play of Knaves

A Play of Lords

A Play of Treachery

A Play of Piety

Margaret Frazer Tales

Neither Pity, Love, Nor Fear (Herodotus Award Winner)

Strange Gods, Strange Men

The Simple Logic of It (A Bishop Pecock Tale)

The Witch's Tale (Sister Frevisse Mystery)

The Midwife's Tale (Sister Frevisse Mystery)

Volo te Habere...

This World's Eternity

Shakespeare's Mousetrap

The Death of Kings

The Stone-Worker’s Tale (Sister Frevisse Mystery)

Winter Heart (Sister Frevisse Mystery)

Cover Art: Gustave Courbet - Der verlezte Mann, 1844-1854.

Cover Design: Justin Alexander