Winter Heart

A Novella by Margaret Frazer

Part of the Dame Frevisse Medieval Murder Mysteries

Published by Dream Machine Productions at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 Margaret Frazer

http://www.margaretfrazer.com

* * * * *

The thin sunshine of a January afternoon lay quietly through the room.  There was no warmth to it, but in these short winter days any light at all was welcome, and for warmth there was the fire on the hearth, and there Domina Frevisse had her tall-backed chair and slanted writing desk.  Turned for the afternoon light to fall across the parchment roll open on the desk, she was working her way down the small-written lines of all that had been expended for the Christmas holidays and what was left to see St. Frideswide’s priory through the rest of the winter.

It was just as well that Lent was coming with its necessary fasting.  Not that there looked to be any likelihood of true shortages of food or fuel through the rest of the winter.  There was no real lack of anything.  It was simply that as prioress now of small St. Frideswide’s, a priory in the Oxfordshire countryside, Frevisse had to look more forward, consider things more deeply and at length, than she had ever had to do when simply one among the other nuns.  She would have been content to be left to her prayers and daily duties, an ordinary nun, but she had been raised to prioress despite herself and now had very many lives dependent – both here within the nunnery and beyond its walls – on the care she gave to her duties, and that meant spending what seemed endless hours going through account rolls from all the different offices of the nunnery that, despite they worked apart, needed to be welded into a whole by her, as well as dealing with all the other matters brought to her.

She sighed and laid down her pen, freeing her cramped fingers, curling and uncurling them until they unstiffened, then holding out both chilled hands toward the fire.  Her feet in their fur-lined slippers, raised above the draughts along the floor by the low railing of the desk, were warm enough.  So was the rest of her in the equally fur-lined gown that had been a gift from a cousin long ago.  She had resisted such ease for her body when she was a plain nun, had intended to continue doing so as prioress.  Instead, she found herself making more use of the privileges that came with her place than she had ever thought she would.  Except they felt less like privileges and more like mitigations.  There was so much about being prioress she had never wanted, and if she had to sit here by the hour, tending to accounts and other matters, instead of busy at tasks around the nunnery as she used to be, then, yes, she needed the gown to keep her warm, and the fire to keep her fingers supple and the ink from thickening past use on the pen’s point.

A soft scratching at the closed door made her sigh, draw her hands back into her lap, and call, “Benedicite,” in a bidding voice.

The door opened far enough for Dame Amicia to put her head through the gap.  “Please you, my lady, Master Naylor is below, asking to speak with you.”

Frevisse refrained from saying he would have to be below, wouldn’t he, because the prioress’ parlor and bedchamber were up a flight of stairs from the cloister walk.  Curbing her words was another necessary thing for her but nothing new:  She had been making that effort from long before she became prioress.  “Pray, bring him up.”

Dame Amicia gave a cheerful nod and withdrew, forgetting to shut the door.  Frevisse straightened in her chair and looked across the room at the shadow-line creeping along the wall as the sun crept toward its setting.  The afternoon was worn well away.  For the priory’s steward to want to see her at this hour argued a problem beyond the ordinary.  Because nuns were, in general, supposed to stay cloistered and not go beyond their nunnery walls except for greatest necessity, someone was needed to oversee, manage, and report on everything concerning their properties and people.  Master Naylor had been steward here a long while, was skilled at his work, and able to deal with nearly all problems as they came, reporting on them in due time and usually with them well settled. 

Frevisse braced herself for whatever was the trouble he felt he must bring to her so out of his usual time.

The two footfalls came up the stone stairs.  Dame Amicia, leading, said, “Master Naylor, my lady,” and stepped aside from the door.  Since no nun should be alone with a man, she would stay there quietly, hands folded into her sleeves and head bowed, through whatever business followed.

Master Naylor, coming in behind her, paused to bow to Frevisse, then crossed to her.  He had never grown fat in his office, which spoke well of him not battening on his charges.  For all the years Frevisse had known him, his long, lean face had been so deeply lined that concern seemed to sit constantly on him, whatever his true humour might be.  He wore a thick, short cloak with the hood pushed back over a doublet probably thickly padded against the cold, as likely were his knee-high boots.  To judge by that and his winter-reddened face, he had been out and about with his duties, and when he had said, “My lady,” to her, Frevisse gestured to the other chair beside the hearth with, “Please sit and warm yourself, Master Naylor.”

He accepted that bidding without hesitation, betraying he no long felt the need to stand on dignity and form between them – or perhaps only that he was getting well on in years – but even as he sat, he said, “We have a problem, my lady.  Tom Kelmstowe is come back.”

Frevisse considered the name blankly for a moment before she remembered and said, “The serf who ran away not long before Christmastide.”  Almost three weeks ago. 

Few serfs troubled to run away anymore.  Both they and their lords had long since found it far easier to settle on a money payment for their freedom.  That let the man or woman stay where they were and pay a straightforward rent to the lord for the land they worked, rather than the lord having to constantly reckon up (and constantly argue over) the complicated fees and services otherwise owed by a serf. 

“Ah,” she said, remembering more.  “He was accused of attempting a rape.”

“Aye.  He said then he didn’t do it.  He says so now.  To the good, nobody seems to want to take up the charge against him again, not even the woman or her husband.”

“No?” said Frevisse, raising her brows.

“No,” Master Naylor said glumly.  “Which makes me think what most folk thought at the time – that there was nothing in the charge to start with.”

“But this Kelmstowe then ran off.”

“He’d been in other trouble, too, just before then, remember.”

“I don’t,” Frevisse said.  There was so much to remember anymore that she no longer tried to keep in mind what could be let go.

 “Aye.  Seems two years back he got some demesne land into his hands that’s Lord Lovell’s, not the priory’s, and kept it hidden from the accounts.  It was his cousin’s, and he paid his cousin to go on doing service to Lord Lovell for the land as if still holding it, while Kelmstowe worked it and made a profit without paying any greater tithe to the priory.”

“Why would his cousin go along with that?” Frevisse asked. 

“His cousin is lazy to the bone.  Easier for him to have coin in hand from his cousin and slothfully work the days he owes Lord Lovell than trouble to work his own land day in, day out.”

The manor of Prior Byfield with its village and fields was divided between two lords.  Some of the people held their land from St. Frideswide’s priory and others from Lord Lovell.  Because St. Frideswide’s steward, in the person of Master Naylor, was close at hand and Lord Lovell’s steward – responsible for his lord’s far more numerous and scattered properties – was usually distant, it had long since been agreed Master Naylor would serve here as Lord Lovell’s agent.  As such, he held the manor court and oversaw the dealings of the village’s own officers, generally chosen by the villagers themselves – the reeve and hayward and others. 

For his service he was paid by Lord Lovell with grain when the harvests were good, with coin when they were poor.  Since he was likewise paid by the priory, he did well for himself and his family, but more importantly, unlike stewards that appeared as villains and the butt of angry jibes in stories – and too often in life – he was unbendingly honest in all his dealings, and as unbendingly fair as it was possible to be when faced with the tangles of law and angers and aggravations that villagers could boil up among themselves.

So Frevisse depended on his reports and judgment and said now, slowly, to be sure she understood, “That meant the land appeared in Lord Lovell’s records under the cousin’s name, but Tom Kelmstowe was the one working them and making no return to the priory.”  And finally remembering more of the matter, she added, “It meant, too, that if it had gone undiscovered long enough, in time there could have been confusion over just which lord held that land – the priory or Lord Lovell.”

“That was the more worrying part of it, yes,” Master Naylor agreed.

“I seem to remember, though, that you seemed nearly to admire him for how well he had carried it off.”

Not about to admit any such thing, Master Naylor said stiffly, “It was wrongly done.  There’s the point.  When John Adirton gave him away, Henry Barnsley as our reeve did right to take the land away and fine him.”  The reeve being someone of the village chosen to oversee that matters were kept fair between his fellow villagers and their lord – that his fellow-villagers did not deceive their lord nor their lord exact more than was right from them.

More of the matter was coming back to Frevisse.  “When the jurors brought it against him in the manor court, he abused them so violently he was fined for that, too.”

“Aye.  They didn’t much like being called straw-bred fools, mis-hung cokenays, and–”

Master Naylor broke off, probably belatedly thinking those were things a nun should not hear.  Frevisse would have had trouble holding back a smile at his discomfiture except that she recalled what came next.  “It was the reeve’s wife that claimed Kelmstowe attempted rape on her.  Early in Advent, as I remember.”

Master Naylor agreed glumly to that.  “He denied it and there were no witnesses and no evidence except her skirt was muddied where he’d thrown her down, she said.”

“Where did they find mud to fall in?  There’s been a hard freeze of everything since before St. Andrew’s day.”  At November’s end.

“She was gathering wood along the hedge of a field path that had thawed a little in the mid-day sun, she said, during those few somewhat warmer days we had early in Advent. Before the freeze went deep.  I went to see, and it was thawed there then, where she claimed it happened.”

“But she wasn’t actually raped?”

“She wasn’t.  Frighted him off with a scream and hitting at him with a stick, she said.  He had no bruises from any stick when we checked him, but then he might not, what with layers of winter clothes and her not being an overly strong-sinewed woman and all.  I don’t think anyone, even her husband, took her all that seriously.  He seemed more bewildered by it than outraged.  She’s given to flights of thinking one thing and then another and no one gives her much heed.  Last summer she took it into her head the alewife was weakening the ale after the taster had tested it, and nobody saying anything to the contrary satisfied her.  So even with Kelmstowe willing to say he’d been along that lane sometime that afternoon – out to check his snares in the woods, I’ll warrant, though no one would say that, him least of all – I didn’t think the matter would go far. But then, like a fool, Kelmstowe fled.” 

And under the law, to flee after being accused of a crime was taken to be the same as admitting guilt.  Tom Kelmstowe had fled, was therefore guilty, and so everything he had owned had been seized by Master Naylor in the priory’s name, just as if Kelmstowe had been tried and sentenced by a jury.  By now his land was given to someone else and his goods sold.  Kelmstowe was come back to nothing.

Frevisse wanted to prop an elbow on an arm of the chair and rest her head, heavy with its thoughts, on her raised hand, but wimple and veil and dignity were against that.  She stayed straight and said, “Kelmstowe had to know he’d be coming back to nothing.  Do we want him here?  What’s in his mind?”  And why had Master Naylor brought the matter to her?

Master Naylor answered her unasked question rather than the others, saying, “He’s asked to plead his case to you.”

Frevisse closed her eyes.  As prioress, she was lady of all that the priory owned and thereby, by right, head of the manor court.  In practice, her place was taken by Master Naylor, with only the most complicated matters brought for her to sort out.  Full too often she felt that what the priory supposedly owned actually owned the priory, the demands of it all on her were so unceasing.  But she held in the sigh she wanted to give, opened her eyes, and asked, “Why?”  Both why Kelmstowe wanted to plead before her and why Master Naylor thought she should listen to the man.  Because Master Naylor obviously thought that, or he would not have come to her with it.

“He claims he was taken away against his will, that–”

The sweet-toned bell in the middle of the cloister began to ring, saying the hour was come for Vespers.  It likewise enjoined an instant end to talk among the nuns, in a readying for their coming prayers in the church.  Frevisse held up a hand to stop Master Naylor, who was already stopping; he knew nearly as well as she did that the Offices of prayer came before all else.  But as they both rose from their chairs, she gave herself permission to say, “Tomorrow, in the guesthall, just after Tierce.”

To that he bowed, then stood aside for her and Dame Amicia to go from the room ahead of him in a whispered sweep of skirts and the quiet footfall of soft-soled shoes.

* * * * *

Frevisse loved the quiet of the cloister.  Much had been lost since her early days in St. Frideswide’s when the rule of silence had held for almost all of every day.  An ill-judging prioress, too fond of the sound of her voice to curb herself, had let go the rule for all the nuns before she was done.  The prioress after her had not tried to bring that particular strictness back to nunnery life, and Frevisse had had only some success at it.  She held to hope that, given time, she might bring it altogether back, but for now she had to be satisfied – if not content – with silence at meals and from Compline, the last Office of the day, through to Tierce part way through the next morning, the only break until then being the daily Chapter meeting when all the nuns gathered into the warming room to deal with nunnery business and complaints, confessions, and punishments among themselves.

The warming room was the only place in the cloister besides the prioress’ parlor and the kitchen to have a fireplace.  Frevisse was often diverted by how Chapter business could go very slowly among the nuns when the weather was cold and there was a fire on the warming room’s hearth, some of the nuns deliberately tarrying for the sake of the warmth.  She sympathized and more than once when the weather was at its most bitter had set them tasks that could be done there during the day.  Wood was costly, but so – in a different way – were ill nuns, and Frevisse preferred care of her nuns to too careful care of pence.

The weather had taken a turn toward mild the next morning, though, and she did not let them either linger over business in Chapter or let them hurry through the Offices in the church despite the deep chill there – a coolness blessed in summer but not welcomed at all in winter.  The Offices, with their garland of prayers and psalms woven out of the worship of generations past and meant to weave forward through generations to come, were the reason for the nunnery’s existence.  They were also Frevisse’s great joy more days than not, giving her a time to leave aside her duties and lose herself in the prayers reaching toward Heaven.

But each Office only lasted so long, and Tierce was among the short ones of the day.  All too soon it was done, and she left the cloister to cross the cobbled yard to the guesthall that every Benedictine house – by St. Benedict’s Rule – had for the care of travelers seeking shelter.  Time had been when Frevisse was the nunnery’s hosteler, charged with overseeing the guesthall and guests, and had passed freely back and forth from cloister to guesthall as her duties required.  Now, burdened with the dignity of prioress, she went accompanied by Dame Perpetua.

Master Naylor was already there, waiting in the wide hall where most guests ate and slept but empty of anyone now except Master Naylor and a young man who could only be Tom Kelmstowe.  In a common man’s plain clothing, with his legs wrapped against the cold and a tuft of straw straying out of the top of one of his ankle-high shoes, there was nothing particular about the man as he pulled off his cap and, along with Master Naylor, bowed to her.  Frevisse slightly bent her head in return and went to sit on one of the benches near the hearth where a slight fire burned, she having earlier sent order for it.  She nodded for Dame Perpetua to sit too, hesitated, then gestured for Master Naylor and Kelmstowe to take the bench facing hers.

Kelmstowe sent a startled, questioning look toward Master Naylor. In the usual way of things, he would expect to stand in her presence; but he had had a cold walk from the village, would have a cold walk back, and despite Frevisse saw now the sharp, harassed intelligence in his eyes and the taut set of his mouth, she also saw a bone-deep, sagging weariness in the effort he was making to hold himself straight and shoulders back.  This was a very tired man, and at the little beckon of Master Naylor’s head, Kelmstowe gratefully sat.

There being no point in lingering over niceties, Frevisse said, “Master Naylor tells me you claim you didn’t run away, that you were taken away against your will.”

“Yes, my lady.  I went out to the jakes one night and was coming back to the house when I was clouted over the head and a bag put over my head and my hands bound before I got my senses ordered enough to know what was happening.”

That all came glibly enough.  Showing neither belief nor disbelief, Frevisse said evenly, “Then?”

“Then I don’t know.  I think I smothered some in the bag.  When I had my wits back, I was in a cart being jounced along somewhere.”  His gaze was fixed on her face, trying to tell if she believed him or not.  She merely gave a small nod for him to continue.  He leaned somewhat forward and let the words pour out. 

“It was drovers took me.  They told me they were headed for London with their cattle, and if I gave no trouble, they’d make none and let me free when we got there.  They said they’d been paid to take me there.”

Drovers were men who moved herds of cattle from places like Wales and the North, where the land favored pasturage rather than tilled fields, to towns or cities where the meat would bring a price worth the trouble of ambling with a herd of cattle for miles and days. 

Frevisse looked to Master Naylor.  He answered her unasked question.  “There were some came by about the time.  Were bound for London, I heard.  Probably had the thought the market would be good with the holidays then and after that everyone getting their eating in before Lent starts.”

“Aye, that’s what they said,” Kelmstowe agreed. 

“So you were in the cart that carried what they needed while they traveled,” Frevisse said.  “Out of sight.  Not out of sound, though.”

“They had me trussed like a calf being hauled to market, and gagged most of the time, and hidden.  They fed me, let me out often enough for need, and said if I kept quiet, I’d be let loose when the time came.  If not... well, they never said what it would be ‘if not’, only I didn’t want to find out.”

If he was a liar, he was good one.  Frevisse silently granted that, but kept the thought and all others from showing on her face as she said, “And so they kept their word in the end.  They let you go.”

Kelmstowe grimaced.  “That they did.  Right in what must have been the middle of London.  They’d left the cattle somewhere.”  In some butcher’s pasture outside the city, Frevisse supposed.  “But two of them drove the cart with me in it right into the city, let me loose, set me down on the step of a big fountain spewing water, and drove off.  By the time I had wits enough to see straight, they were gone, out of sight in all the rush of people and carts and all there.”  His voice had gone a little high with strain, remembering it.  “Have you ever been to London?”

“I have,” Frevisse said gravely.

“Then you know.”  The horror of it was still with him.  “Nor I couldn’t find my way out!  Those streets – there’s so many of them and they twist around so.  Nor folk there don’t talk right and there’s so many of them all talking at once.”

“I know,” she granted, just as gravely.  Even though he had probably been sometimes to Banbury on a market day, in his first few minutes in London he had undoubtedly seen more people than in all his life before.  And they did say words differently in London than here in northern Oxfordshire.  Kelmstowe would have indeed had trouble both in understanding and in making himself understood.

“I just wandered at first, thinking I’d find my way out.  Only I didn’t.  I kept getting twisted around.  Saw things like you’d not believe.  That church there with the spire!  We could put the whole of Prior Byfield into it, I swear.  There were churches everywhere – not so big as that one, but dozens of them, maybe.  And what I saw in the shops.  Things I couldn’t hope to buy in a hundred years of working.  And the river.  Enough to swallow here and all, and a bridge across it as long as the whole village and full of houses, and people living there!”

“We know all that,” Master Naylor said quellingly.  “Get on with how you came back.”

Kelmstowe nodded, straightened, and went on, “It was seeing the river did it.  I knew we hadn’t crossed anything like that coming into London.  It’s loud.  I’d have heard it.  So that was one direction I could forget going.  If only the sun had been out, I could have told east from west and all, but the overcast was thick.  But it came out the next day.  I slept in a church porch that night, and then at dawn there was the sun.  I knew the drovers had been heading south most of the time.  Sunlight through the cart’s canvas, see.  So I knew I had to head north.  I got out of London by a wide street and a gateway that’s wide as my house.  I asked at an inn for Oxford.  Thought that would be more likely known than Banbury or here.  They set me on the right road and–”  He shrugged.  “–I walked, found Oxford finally, and came on from there.”

Like Anneys Barnsley’s claim of rape, there was nothing to say all that was true or not.  Surely he had been in London.  For the rest...

Kelmstowe either guessed at her doubt or saw it in her face, because he shoved up his sleeves, one after the other, from his wrists and held out his arms.  “See.  The marks of the ropes are still there.” 

There were indeed faint marks that could be from rope, but whether they were old and nearly healed or lately made and lightly was hard to tell.  Frevisse nodded with no comment, and he pulled his sleeves down, hiding the marks.

“What did you do for food and places to stay?” she asked.

“One of the drovers gave me sixpence.  By way of farewell, he said.  So there was food, and there’s monasteries that have to take you in if you ask.”  He looked around the guesthall.  “Like here.”  Some of the stiffness had gone out of him while he talked.  Now weariness seemed to be taking over.  “It was slow going and a long way.”

“And you walked all of it?” Frevisse asked.

“Aye.”

“Are those the shoes you wore?”

“Aye.”

“Let me see the bottom of them.”

Kelmstowe held up one foot, then the other.  The thin leather soles of both shoes were worn through in several places; they looked to have stray bits of leather put inside for a kind of cheap patching.  “They’re all I have,” Kelmstowe said, somewhat defensively.  “Everything else I had here is gone.  I’ve not even a change of clothing left me.”

“Yet you’ve come back,” Frevisse said, her voice even.

“There are my mam and sister, aren’t there?” Kelmstowe returned.  “They couldn’t just be left to fend for themselves, could they?  Not knowing what’d happened to me and all, and no one to see to them.”

Frevisse looked at Master Naylor inquiringly.

“They’re well,” the steward said in answer.  “The house is the mother’s, so it wasn’t lost.  She has her dower acres left to her, too.  It’s not much, but it’s something.  The sister found work here in the nunnery.”

“That’s not what I want for her,” Kelmstowe said sullenly.  “We were set for better.”

“There was one of Gilbey Dunn’s sons would marry her if she had a better dowry,” Master Naylor said by way of explanation.

With earnest, seeming honesty, Kelmstowe said, “Aye.  He still would, they’re that set on each other.  It’s his father and mother won’t have it otherwise.  That’s part of what I was trying for with–”  He made an uncertain gesture, probably meaning to show the trick with land that he had been caught at.

“You tried the wrong way,” Master Naylor returned sharply, “and see where it got you.”

“It wasn’t that trying that got me snatched and taken away!” Kelmstowe shot back.  “That’s something else altogether and I’d give something to know what!”  He visibly remembered where he was and with whom he was speaking and pulled his temper back down to sullen again.  “If I knew what that was all for, I’d know a whole lot more.”

“Surely,” Frevisse said.  “But since we’ll know no more without the drovers to question, we have to set your word against likelihood and let it go at that.”  She waited to see if he would contest that.  When Kelmstowe, although his lips tightened with the effort, showed his good sense by saying nothing and even bowed his head a little in acceptance, she turned her heed to Master Naylor to ask, “Do I understand rightly that his mother’s and sister’s well-being fairly well depend on him?”

“It does.”

“Will the rest of the village have him back?”  Meaning not only the allegedly wronged husband and wife but, as importantly, the women of the village who could, among them, make a man’s life hell if they took against him.

“Aye,” Master Naylor said. 

That made matters simpler anyway, Frevisse thought, and was grateful for it.  Looking down at her hands folded in her lap, she considered what she had heard from both men, matched it with what she had heard from and about Kelmstowe and knew of Master Naylor, and finally looked up, met and held Kelmstowe’s gaze, and said, “Then, on Master Naylor’s word, and for the sake of your mother and sister, and in the hope of your good behavior hereafter, the priory grants your return.”

Kelmstowe let out his pent breath with a gasp of open relief and slumped, his spine suddenly unrigid.  He rose, went down on one knee in front of her, and said with bowed head, “My deep thanks, Domina.  For my mother and sister even more than for myself.”

“My blessing on you and them,” Frevisse said.  She signed the cross in the air above him.  “I trust you will not fail Master Naylor’s faith in you.”  She pretended not to see the twist of Master Naylor’s mouth at that.  She was, perhaps unfairly, putting on him the burden of responsibility for Kelmstowe’s good behavior, and he knew it.

Kelmstowe rose and bowed to her.  “I will not, my lady.”

“Then best you go and tell your mother and sister how it now is.”

“Yes, my lady.”  He moved to go, then as if compelled, turned back and said, “I never touched Anneys Barnsley.”

“However that may be, it was your running off that undid you,” Master Naylor said before Frevisse could answer. 

“Nor I didn’t do that neither,” Kelmstowe said, but with a weariness that had no fight in it nor any hope of being believed.  He had wound himself taut to face his prioress’ judgment.  Now the let-go of that was taking over, opening him to the exhaustion against which he had been holding out.  He bowed to both her and Master Naylor and left the guesthall. 

Frevisse looked to the steward.  “Well?  How much of that was truth from him and how much lies, do you think?”

Master Naylor shook his head.  “I’d not care to say.  I think he and Barnsley’s wife will be the only ones who ever know what happened between them.”

“If anything.”

“If anything.  As for the being taken off to London, seems he was there, from what he says.  It’s his going that makes me wonder.”

It made Frevisse wonder, too, but she said, “He may have run off on a moment of anger made up of the whole mix of having been found out about his cousin’s land and being accused of the rape.”  Although a moment of anger seemed hardly sufficient to have carried him all the way to London.  To Banbury or Oxford perhaps, but London?  “However it was, we’re unlikely ever to know.”  She stood up, ready to return to the cloister. “I liked he did not beg me for his land and all back.”

“I warned him against that.  That it would do him no good.”

“His goods were sold of course.  Who was given his land?”

Master Naylor held back his answer a moment, then said with a grimace, “Henry Barnsley.”

Frevisse, who had begun to move toward the outer doorway, stopped short.  “Our reeve.”  The man who had ruled against Kelmstowe in the manor court and whose wife Kelmstowe was accused of attacking.

“Aye.”

“So Kelmstowe has come back to nothing much and has to live with seeing Henry Barnsley with just about all he’s lost.”

At his most dour, Master Naylor agreed, “That’s the way of it.”

“And you think this is going to go well?”

Master Naylor paused as if considering precisely the answer he wanted to give, then said, “I think so.  However foolish some of what he’s done has been, Kelmstowe is no fool.  He’s tried running off...”

“You don’t hold with his story of the drovers then.”

“Who can know?”  But plainly, pushed to it, Master Nayor did not believe it.  “He’s tried running off and found it didn’t answer.  He’s sharp enough, he could have made a life for himself somewhere else.  One no worse and likely better than he’s going to have here for a time.  Only he found he couldn’t after all just leave his mother and sister to fend for themselves.  So even knowing he’d only made everything worse for himself and them by running off, he’s come back.  He’s no fool.  He’s found out what doesn’t work and what does.  I think he’ll do well enough, and finally pull himself back to where he was and better.  In the long run.”

That was a great deal for the steward, usually tight with his words, to grant about anyone.  Frevisse accepted it with a nod.  She did not tell him to keep eye and ear on the matter; he did not need that telling.  Instead, as the cloister bell began to ring, summoning her to the next Office, she said, “Let me hear sometimes how it goes.”

Two weeks later Henry Barnsley was dead.

* * * * *

Frevisse was seated at the window in her parlor for the sake of the morning’s rare sunlight.  The days had been particularly gray of late, making today’s open, winter-pale sky particularly welcome.  Even the occasional flurry of snow from some drifting wisp of cloud was beautiful in its diamond-sparkling as it fell.  A long session with Dame Juliana between Tierce and Sext, going over the cellarer’s accounts to be certain all was in readiness for Lent so far as the kitchen was concerned, and then another while spent with Dame Johane after Sext considering the possibility of the nuns making a new cope for Father Henry for Easter, had left her knowing she must do “nothing” for a time, to ease her mind in readiness for the rest of the day.  So she had taken up the psalter that had been her uncle’s gift to her at his death and sat down on the cushioned bench in the sunshine to read for a time.

The psalter was in English.  As required, she had shown the gift to her then-prioress, Domina Edith, for approval.  It being deemed fit to go into the nunnery’s small collection of books that were given out for Lenten reading and such other times as the prioress chose, Frevisse had rarely seen it afterward.  Domina Alys, who came after Domina Edith, had seen small use for books at any time.  After her, in Domina Elisabeth’s time, Frevisse had once been given it for reading during Lent and several times seen other nuns reading it.  When, upon becoming prioress, she did the necessary inventory of everything the priory possessed, she had come on the psalter in the priory’s chest of books and taken it and kept it ever since with only the barest tremble of conscience. 

She knew her psalms in Latin, of course, but there was an odd comfort in reading them in English.  They seemed somehow new, and the knowledge that her uncle had wanted her to have them was an occasional balm in the loneliness and work of her days.  Thus: Blessed be men undefiled that go in the law of the Lord.  Blessed be they that seek his witnessing, that seek him in all their heart.  For they that work wickedness, go not in his ways...  I would God guided my way...

I would God guided my way...

Holding the words in her mind, a prayer all in themselves, she gazed out the window at the winter sky and only gradually realized her free hand was stroking at a cat on her lap.  She looked down, and indeed the nunnery’s cat was there, curled and comfortable in the sunlight, purring gently.  Frevisse looked toward the door and saw it was opened the slightest bit, enough to let past a slender cat, which was somewhat unsettling because she was certain she had latched it.  But apparently not, because the cat was very definitely on her lap.  Where she never encouraged it to be. 

But then she never encouraged it to be in her parlor either, and yet it nonetheless too often was, with an insolence to which she had finally given way.  She did not know which generation of cat this was of the one Domina Elisabeth had introduced into the cloister or whether it was a descendent at all.  What mattered was that it kept the cloister clear enough of vermin to make keeping it worthwhile.  That did not mean Frevisse wanted it on her lap.  Yet she found she was still stroking it when she heard the soft footfall of one of her nuns hurrying up the stairs.

“Enough,” she said, pushed to show the cat it was to shift itself, and slanted her lap to help it slide to the floor.

The cat did not even trouble to throw her an offended look.  It understood the rules of the game between them and strolled away, tail high and twitching, to slip out the door past Dame Amicia’s skirts, unnoticed, as she came in at Frevisse’s bidding.

Frevisse had already closed the psalter and folded her hands upon it, readying herself for whatever new trouble had arisen in the cloister to bring Dame Amicia in such unseemly haste.  It had not taken her long, after becoming prioress herself, to understand the calm with which Domina Edith, all those years ago, had faced every happening:  When everyone else was in a flurry, the last thing needed was to join in with them.  So she did not rise to her feet in alarm at sight of the nun’s face, simply put the psalter aside and asked quietly, as Dame Amicia dipped in a hasty curtsy, “What is it, Dame?”

“Word from Master Naylor, my lady!  They’re bringing a woman from the village to Dame Claire...”

“Hurt?”  It would have to be badly; the village’s herbwife was capable of seeing to most troubles of the body there.

“Gone mad!  She’s found her husband murdered – lying there in his own blood and all – and she’s gone mad and they want Dame Claire to do something to quiet her!  The man from Master Naylor said they’re bringing her now and–”

“Murdered?  Who?”  But that was not to the point at present.  Frevisse swept her own questions aside with a gesture and rose to her feet.  She was about to order Dame Amicia to go to Dame Claire, but looking out the window, she saw a cluster of men and several women coming through the gateway from the outer yard and changed her mind, ordering instead, “Tell them to take her to the guesthall.  I’ll fetch Dame Claire.”

Dame Claire was the nunnery’s infirmarian.  Well-learned from both experience and books, she was skilled in medicines and, of necessity, some surgery, since St. Frideswide’s and its village were remote from other help.  She and the village herbwife Margery had worked well together for many years. Were growing toward old together, too, but each with someone trained to be their successor when the time came.  There was little that could throw either woman into a fluster, for which Frevisse was grateful as she went with Dame Claire across the yard:  A woman’s wailing met them at the stairs up to the guesthall door.

Once in the guesthall’s long hall, Frevisse was the more grateful that she need do little more than stand aside, giving authority by her presence while Dame Claire and the herbwife Margery took matters well into hand.  There was plainly no present hope of any clear answers from the village woman.  Her wailing was mixed with sobs and shrieking as she pulled at her tumbled hair with clutching fingers, her headkerchief and coif gone, probably lost in her frantic thrashing against anyone trying to hold and quiet her – presently three tall men from the village.  Although she was not a large woman, she had the strength of someone used to hard work all her life, and in her wild, writhing grief, she was not holding back any of it; the men were having a hard time of it.  Margery, wisely keeping beyond reach of the widow’s thrashing, was standing with another village woman who just looked frighten. As the woman bobbed an uneven curtsy at the nuns, Frevisse saw that she was clutching to her breast a wad of white cloth that were likely the missing coif and headkerchief.  A neighbor, surely.

“Sit her there,” Dame Claire ordered, pointing to a bench.  And added as after-thought, “Then keep her there.”

“Dead!” the woman wailed as they forced her down.  She was somewhat hoarse by now.  “Dead and lying there in his blood!  Dead!”

“Aye, we know, we saw it,” Margery snapped, her lengthy patience apparently gone.  “But your squalling isn’t helping him a bit.  Nor you.” 

Indeed not, but the woman had worked herself into too high and fine a wildness to give it over, Frevisse thought.  Grief was one thing, but to Frevisse’s mind the woman’s shrieking had more self-indulgence than grief about it, as if it was not the dead man who mattered but herself.

One of the men coping with her asked rather desperately, “Is there naught you can give her to quiet her?”    

To Dame Claire rather than him, Margery said, “I tried what I had, but she’s far past my herbs working on her.”

“I have poppy syrup and wine,” Dame Claire returned, already taking the vial of the syrup from her snatched up box of medicines.

“Let go the wine and just give her the syrup to make this quick,” Margery said.  “Give over your shrieking, Anneys.  It’s not helping aught.”

Dame Claire took advantage of one of the woman’s wide-mouthed wails to thrust in the spoon with the syrup.  Taken by surprise, the woman gulped and swallowed.  Her concentration on her grief broken, she stared at Dame Claire, then around at everyone, then threw back her head and began a keening moan that grated on the ear but was less than the wailing had been.  Dame Claire hesitated over filling the spoon again and decided against it, but a gesture from Frevisse had already sent one of the guesthall servants scurrying for wine; the guesthall kept some for when better guests came.  It was brought in a pottery bowl, and Frevisse went forward with it, and in what she thought of as her prioress voice, ordered as if she expected immediate obedience, “Now drink this for the sake of your raw throat.”

The woman broke off her keening to stare up at Frevisse with startled eyes.  Frevisse held out the bowl.  She said to the men, “Let her go,” and to the woman, firmly, “Drink.”

Still staring up at Frevisse, the woman took the bowl with both hands and drank, unsteadily at first, then in great gulps.  Wine was unlikely to have come her way very often, if ever.  Too, the poppy syrup was probably beginning work.  Frevisse stepped back, said over her shoulder toward the servants, “A bed in the small room.  Ready it.”  She missed old Ela who would have already seen to it being done, not needing to be told. 

Still, by the time Dame Claire and Margery had helped the woman to her feet and directed her now-stumbling feet across the hall and into the small chamber kept for guests in need of greater privacy than sleeping on pallets in the hall, there were a sheet and pillow and blanket on the bed.  Frevisse helped them lay her down and waited while Margery took off the woman’s shoes and Dame Claire covered her.  By then the widow’s drugged eyes had fallen closed in enforced sleep.

“There,” said Margery.  “That will do for a time.”

Frevisse waited until they were leaving the room together to ask, “Who is she?  Who is her husband that’s dead?”

Margery blew out her breath in a weary sigh and answered, “Henry Barnsley.  Him that was made reeve just last Michaelmas.”

Frevisse had raised her hand to sign the servants to bring ale for Margery and the village men and woman still waiting across the hall.  At Margery’s words, her hand dropped to her side as if suddenly weighted with lead.  “Barnsley?” she echoed, but so faintly that it was lost under Dame Claire’s more to-the-point question of, “Was it murder?  Has the hue and cry been raised?”  The pursuit by neighbors required by law when outcry went up after a crime was discovered.

“Surely murder,” Margery returned.  “The cry’s gone up, but not much likelihood of that being any use in trailing whoever did it.”

“There’s the snow still on the ground,” Frevisse said, her wits gathering back to her.

“Old snow,” Margery pointed out.  “It’s tracked and trampled all over the village.  There’ll be nothing for anyone to follow.  Besides, everyone has thought already on who it was done by.”

“No chance it was her?” Frevisse said with a nod toward the room they had left.

“Nay.  Anneys had been down the village since yesterday helping her sister with birthing her third one.  You’d think it would go faster, being the third, but her sister has always been a slow one.  It wasn’t until this morning Anneys was able to go home and found her man dead.”

The three villagers had picked up what they were talking of, and now the woman put in, her voice high with excitement, “Brained with an axe beside his very own hearthplace and left lying there in his blood.  I saw Anneys trudging to the door, asked her how the babe was doing, saw her go in, then heard her scream, and saw her come out shrieking.  There wasn’t time between for her to have done it.”  She turned to one of the men standing there.  “You were right there when she came out, must have seen her go in.  There wasn’t time, was there?”

“There wasn’t,” the man agreed.  “I saw her go in, right enough, and there wasn’t time for her to have more than seen him before she started screaming and came out.”

Margery, her own voice flat, said, “There’s that, and the blood was dried on the hearthstones.”

“So it likely happened in the night,” Frevisse said.

“Seems so,” Margery said.

“Master Naylor is questioning Tom Kelmstowe right now,” one of the men said.

Yes, Frevisse thought with weary resignation:  Kelmstowe would have to be the man everyone looked at for this. 

Fortunately, the ale was brought just then, and the bell began to ring for the Office of None.  While Dame Claire hurriedly closed up her box of medicines, Frevisse signed the cross in the air in blessing toward Margery and the others before she and Dame Claire went away together to the church.

Not that she had much comfort from the Office’s prayers and psalms.  Not today. To her shame, what she wanted just then was not prayers but to talk to Master Naylor, and at her first chance after the Office’s end, she sent a servant to summon Master Naylor to her.  She supposed he was still in the village or he would have come of his own accord by now.  That meant she could do nothing but content her soul in patience until he came.  Except she could find neither contentment nor patience in herself.  Only by finally taking firm hold on her mind was she able to make herself cease pacing her parlor and sit down.  There were still the accounts to finish, she reminded herself.  She unrolled one on the table, set down the small lead bars to hold it open, shifted the inkpot and quill nearer to hand, and... found she was frowning out the window at the blameless sky.

It would seem she and Master Naylor had been wrong about Tom Kelmstowe, and now a man was dead because of it. 

She rose to her feet and began to pace again.  If Master Naylor did not come soon, she would go to find him.  Would go as far as the village if necessary.  She was prioress and could give herself permission to leave the nunnery if she chose, but fortunately before she let herself be driven to that extreme, she heard a hushed rush of skirts up the stairs, and with a duplicity for which she silently admonished herself, sat down as if to the account roll again.

This time it was Sister Elianor, the priory’s only novice, who came.  She must have been nearest the cloister’s outer door when someone knocked, and to Frevisse’s relief she did bring word the steward was below and wanted to see her.  Quite outwardly calm, Frevisse bade her bring him up, adding, “You will then stay with us.”

Sister Elianor made a quick curtsy and hurried out.  Frevisse sighed on a slight smile.  There were some months before Sister Elianor would take her final vows – time yet for her to learn moderation in a few more things, including in eagerness to serve.  When Sister Elianor remembered, she could move as calmly as any of the older nuns desired.  When she forgot herself, her rush along the cloister walk was – as had been pointed out to her – unwarrantably disturbing.  Just now, though, Frevisse had no wish to bid her go more slowly and had only rolled the account scroll closed and stood up from the table when Sister Elianor was back.  The girl managed not to burst into the room, and though her mouth was open to announce the steward, she remembered in time that silence was better than unnecessary words and, as there was no need to introduce Master Naylor, closed her mouth, stepped aside from the door, made a curtsy, then tucked her hands into her opposite sleeves, placed them quietly at her waist, and bowed her head, the perfect portrait of patience. 

Some day Sister Elianor would have inward patience, too, but for now the outward form would do, Frevisse thought. 

Her next thought was a wry inward admitting of her own impatience as she barely waited for the steward’s bow before demanding, “Master Naylor, what word do you bring?”  But as he straightened from the bow, she saw both the day’s cold and his own tiredness on his face, and she said before he could answer, “No.  Sit first.”

She went to sit herself in her chair by the fire so he would take the other, and had momentary anger at herself for not fore-thinking to have something for him to drink and eat here; but he was as ready to talk as she to listen, saying even as he held his hands out to the low flames among the coals, “You’ve heard what’s happened?  You’ve seen Anneys Barnsley?”

“Only briefly before Dame Claire had her quieted and asleep.  All I know is that she found her husband murdered.  Was it indeed Kelmstowe did it?”

Master Naylor sighed and sank backing his chair.  “I don’t know.”

Surprise startled “What?” from her.

The steward rubbed at his face.  “There’s nothing to show he did it.  Not him or anyone else.”

“But everyone must be supposing–”  Frevisse broke off.  They both knew what everyone must be supposing.

“Aye,” Master Naylor agreed.  “But there’s nothing that shows he did.” 

“No useful tracks in the snow,” Frevisse remembered.  “And Barnsley’s wife gone all night to her sister’s birthing.  Where was Kelmstowe then?”

“At home with his mother and sister, all three of them being sick and none of them stirring further than the rear door, to vomit into the snow there.  So they swear.  As they’re bound to, if they mean to protect Kelmstowe.”  Gloomily he added.  “There’s proof enough of someone being sick anyway.  There hadn’t been time – or strength maybe – for Kelmstowe to shovel it up and away to the dung pile.”

“So someone was sick.  But was it truly all of them?”

“Can’t tell that.  They all look peaked enough to have spent the night that way, though they’re past the worst of it now, seems.”

“Do we know what it is they’re ill with?”  Please God and all the saints, not plague.  There had been no outbreak of the great plague in the village or nunnery in all the years Frevisse had been here.  Not that there were not lesser illnesses and plagues in plenty to make life perilous, but nothing so deadly as the great plague – the great death, it was often called.  Kelmstowe had lately been in London; there was no telling what he might have brought back from there, including plague of one kind or another.

But Master Naylor was saying, “Some food gone bad, seems like.  Someone left a pot of broth on their back step yesterday evening.  Folk have been doing that.  Leaving them a bit of food now and again to help them along.  They ate it.  Then they were sick.  They say they were all feeling well as can be expected this far along in winter, but then got ill all of a sudden.  So they suppose it was the broth.”

“How likely are his mother and sister to be swearing falsely he never left them last night?” Frevisse asked.

Master Naylor’s answer was forestalled by a light tap at the closed door.  At Frevisse’s nod, Sister Elianor opened it, and Dame Claire entered, bearing a tray with a cloth-covered plate and a pottery pitcher.  Crossing the room to the table, she said briskly, “Sister Elianor had sense enough to ask for this.  You must be cold to your bones, Master Naylor.  Warmed wine.  Only lightly spiced, I fear.” 

The two silver goblets that were one of the few benefits to the nunnery from the excesses of the regrettable prioress-before-last stood on their shelf across the room.  Dame Claire fetched them, filled them, and brought them to Frevisse and Master Naylor, saying while she did, “I fear the widow is still sleeping.  Nor can I answer for her wits when she awakes if she chooses to continue being madly in grief.”

“Chooses?” Master Naylor asked, surprised.

“I’ve talked with Margery,” Dame Claire said while returning to the table to uncover the plate of gingerbread slices.  “I gather Anneys Barnsley is not the wisest of women.  More given to feeling things than thinking about them?” 

“She’s that,” Master Naylor agreed as Dame Claire held out the plate, first to Frevisse, who refused with a small shake of her head, then to the steward who took one with thanks. 

“But devoted to her husband, and he to her, Margery says,” Dame Claire said.

“I’d say so,” Master Naylor agreed.  “Nor have I heard aught otherwise from anyone I’ve talked with in the village today.”

“Besides that she was with her sister all night,” Frevisse said.  And given it was a birthing, there would have been several women there to swear she was, including Margery, likely.  “Was Barnsley seen anytime after she’s known to have gone to her sister’s?”

“You’re not thinking she killed him,” Master Naylor said.

“Merely making certain of things.”

“Aye, he was seen.  Stayed late at the alehouse.  There’s no chance she could have done for him and, aye, I asked for certain among the women at the birthing, just to be certain sure she never went out for a while long enough to go the length of the village and back.”

“Did Barnsley have anyone else who might be thought an enemy?”

“No.  That was one reason among others to make him reeve.  All in all, he got on well with his fellow villagers.”

“The broth that made the Kelmstowes ill – do they know who gave it to them?”

“They don’t, nor has anyone else said it was their doing.  Don’t want to admit to making a neighbor ill, likely.”

“Has anyone else in the village been ill that same way?”

Master Naylor paused over his answer, looking hard into her face before saying slowly, “I never asked that.  Nor no one’s said.”

Dame Claire said aloud what was probably in his mind and was assuredly in Frevisse’s.  “Someone else should have been.” 

No one was going to have broth or anything else sitting around long enough to go bad on its own.  You made broth or pottage or whatever and you ate it.  Besides that, it was the wrong end of winter for giving away food and leaving none for yourself.  Anyone able to make sufficient broth to give as a charity would have had enough to keep for themselves, too.  Why had no one else been ill?

Master Naylor said, “If the Kelmstowes are telling the truth, someone must have been.”  He made to rise.  “That has to be asked about.”

“Stay, Master Naylor,” Frevisse ordered firmly.  “You’ve done enough in the cold today.  Send Master Richard in your stead.”  Master Richard being the steward’s son, who had been Dickon all the years of his growing up here but was now second to his father in all steward matters around the nunnery’s properties, and so – when Frevisse remembered – respectfully Master Richard.

“And you can wait to send him,” Dame Claire added.  “If someone was sick, they’ll remember it as well in an hour as now.  Drink your wine while it’s warm.”

Frevisse dismissed the possibility that it was actually amusement that tugged at one corner of the steward’s mouth as he settled back in the chair again, to sip obediently at his wine.  Her thoughts still moving forward, she said, “There’s no problem, on the face of it, in believing that Kelmstowe did the murder.  He has reason to be angry at Barnsley over the matter of those wrongly held acres.  He may have already attacked Barnsley’s wife.  Then Barnsley got everything Kelmstowe lost after Kelmstowe ran off.  Even without more proof, the pieces lie in a reasonable line toward his guilt.” 

She had been staring into the fire as if drawing her thoughts from the flames.  The coals fell in among themselves, the flames briefly danced a little higher, and she raised her gaze to Master Naylor.  “But suppose Kelmstowe didn’t do it.  If we try that thought, what pieces can we see differently?”

Master Naylor and Dame Claire traded a look too long to be called a glance.  They had had experience before now of how she could take what seemed a straightforward matter and give it a twist in her mind that turned it into something not straightforward at all.  They both returned their looks to her.  Carefully, Master Naylor said, “What pieces can we look at differently?”

“First, let’s look at the pieces of this as they stand,” Frevisse said.  “We know Kelmstowe tried a fraud over those acres with his lazy cousin.  That shows he has ambition and wits.”

Master Naylor made a small grumpling sound that granted that while telling what he thought of that manner of wit and ambition. 

Frevisse ignored him and went on.  “Someone gave him away to Master Barnsley who – as reeve – rightly told you, for you to deal with it.  Kelmstowe lost those acres and was fined.  After that he was accused of attacking Anneys Barnsley.  He denied and still denies that he did, yet soon after the accusation was made, he disappeared.  There was no reason to think other than that he had run off because of the accusation, and so, under the law, he was assumed to be guilty as accused and all his property was seized, leaving his mother and sister desperate.  Barnsley benefited by receiving Kelmstowe’s own acres, the ones Kelmstowe had rightly held.  Then Kelmstowe came back.  Since neither of the Barnsleys have since shown any wish to pursue the matter of the attack, and Kelmstowe had already suffered loss of everything he could lose, nothing more has been done about the matter.  Kelmstowe has seemed to accept how things are and all was going as well as might be?”  She turned that last to a question. 

Master Naylor agreed by a nod of his head. 

“Now Barnsley is dead,” she said.  “Those are the things that we know for certain, yes?”

Master Naylor again nodded his agreement.  Dame Claire, who was hearing much of this for the first time, unexpectedly said, “No.  We know this Kelmstowe, his mother, and his sister were sick last night.  Master Naylor saw the proof of that.”

“Someone was surely sick.  I couldn’t swear to it being all of them,” Master Naylor corrected.

“But someone was, for a certainty,” Frevisse agreed.  “So we should count that in, too, as being true.  Now for what we don’t know to be true.  Kelmstowe claims he did not run off, that his disappearance was forced.  He claims drovers carried him off, that they told him they had been paid to do it, that they then set him free in London and even gave him money to help his return.  If all that is true, then someone wanted him gone but also wanted him back.  I suppose anyone who knew him could count on him not deserting his mother and sister?”

“Aye,” Master Naylor agreed.  “That was part of why his running off made less sense than it might have.  He’s sharp, is Tom Kelmstowe.  He’s never been anything but good to them until now, yet had to know they’d be ruined and hard put to fend for themselves with him gone and everything taken.”

“Which lends credence to his otherwise unlikely tale of being taken away by force.”

“Hm,” Master Naylor said, sounding as if he might be halfway to agreement but unready yet to commit himself altogether.

“Next is all the Kelmstowes’ claim that a charitable pot of broth that seems to have had something wrong with it, left for him and his, keeping them all home, unseen of anyone, last night.  You know them, Master Naylor.  Is this a lie Tom Kelmstowe’s mother and sister would have joined him in?”

“I doubt his sister could carry off the lie even if she wanted to.  She’s a pretty thing, and clever enough, but I’ve never seen anything like guile about her.”

“There’s been no complaint about her since she’s been working here,” Dame Claire put in.

“As for his mother,” Master Naylor went on, “she’s never been anything but as honest as a body can be, so far as ever I’ve heard.  When it came out in manor court what trick he’d pulled with those acres, I thought she was going to clout him up the back of his head like he was a small boy, she was so angry at him.”

“Then,” said Frevisse, “since we’re looking at maybe-things as if they are possibly true, if that broth was indeed bad and they were all sick from it, was it only chance that they were given it the same night that Barnsley was killed?”

“The same night,” Dame Claire put in, catching the trail Frevisse’s thought was on, “that Anneys Barnsley was with her sister at the birthing, so it was certain her husband would be home on his own.”

“We must ask Margery or someone when the woman’s labor began,” Frevisse said.

“Late afternoon,” Master Naylor said.  Both women looked at him in surprise.  “I was in the village,” he explained.  “I saw the flurry and flocking of women toward a house and asked what it was about.”

“So there was time enough for someone to poison some broth and leave it for the Kelmstowes, to have them sick and kept at home on a night Barnsley would almost surely be alone,” said Frevisse slowly.  “Which could well be the way of it, if we find that no one else in the village was sick, only the Kelmstowes.”  She was silent a moment, staring at the scrubbed stones of the hearth while she followed her own thoughts, before she finally said, even more slowly, “I think there’s good chance someone is missing in all of this.”

Neither Dame Clare nor Master Naylor was so benighted as to echo, “Missing?”  They simply waited. 

Frevisse shifted her stare to her hands clasped together in her lap, seeing them no more than she had the stones of the hearth.  Slowly she untwisted her thoughts from one pattern and into another and finally said, “Still looking at it as if Kelmstowe has told the truth about being carried off, then someone paid the drovers to do it.  Paid them well, I would suppose.  That means someone who’s well off, as well as someone of the village.”  She looked at Master Naylor, a slight frown between her eyes.  “Does Gilbey Dunn want this marriage between one of his sons and Tom Kelmstowe’s sister?”  Gilbey Dunn being the wealthiest man in the village.

“He does,” Master Naylor said.  “If sufficient dowry be given.  He thinks Tom Kelmstowe is ‘right comer’.” 

And knowing Gilbey Dunn as she did, Frevisse had to suppose that Kelmstowe’s attempt to wrongly gain his cousin’s acres did not count against him in the least with Gilbey Dunn. 

“Someone else then, but surely of the village,” she said.

“Maybe Barnsley himself,” Master Naylor offered.  “He might have thought that once Kelmstowe was away from the village, he’d not ever return.” 

Frevisse nodded, accepting that possibility.  If that was the way of it, they would likely never know the truth, now Barnsley was dead.  Still...  “Who gained from Kelmstowe disappearing?” she asked.

“Barnsley gained the most, as it happened,” Master Naylor said.  “Getting Kelmstowe’s land as he did.  That’s why him being dead looks so bad for Kelmstowe.”

“Except that Barnsley being dead won’t get Kelmstowe back his land.  Kelmstowe knows that, and neither have you seen sign he’s fool enough to be pointlessly vengeful.”

“None,” Master Naylor confirmed.  “He’s no fool at all.”

Frevisse curbed her urge to stand up and pace.  She would not overtake her thoughts by pacing after them.  Careful not to lose the thread she was following, she asked, “Who will gain from Barnsley’s death?”

“His wife,” Master Naylor said promptly.

Who seemed beyond question not to have killed him.  

“Is she fit to have and hold what her husband did?”   Because although custom made it usual for everything to come to the widow, by law what she held from her lord – from the priory, in this case – could be taken away and given to someone else if she were deemed unfit to hold and run it.  That was a rare course to take, though, and made for bad feeling and distrust all around unless there was very clear and sound reason for it.

“Not fit in herself, no,” Master Naylor said, sounding as if he had already considered this side of matters.  “But there’ll be men enough willing to marry her.  That’s certain.  All she need do is choose one sufficient to the work and–”  He broke off.

Frevisse looked up.  Her steady gaze met his, and he finished, slow over the words, “–all will be simple.”          

Because there, Frevisse thought, was the someone who had been missing in all of this.  She did not yet see clearly how – and assuredly not who – but he was there, that someone, and they must find him out.

Or else find a way to prove Tom Kelmstowe guilty.  Because if none other were, then he must be.

Frevisse rose to her feet.  “I think we must needs talk with Margery.  And I would see Anneys Barnsley again.”

“You won’t need me for that,” Dame Claire said serenely.  She moved to take up the tray from the table.  “I’d return to my other work for this while, by your leave.”

Frevisse had meant to dismiss Sister Elianor in favor of Dame Claire coming to the guesthall then, but looking past the infirmarian at that moment, she saw Sister Elianor beside the door with her hands still correctly folded in front of her and her head still correctly bowed – but not quite so far that she was not watching them all, her eyes darting from one to another with eager interest until she caught Frevisse looking back at her.  Immediately she dropped her gaze and bowed her head further.

“Sister Elianor,” Frevisse said with mock sternness.

From the depths of guilty humility, Sister Elianor said softly, “Yes, Domina?”

“I’ll have you come with me to the guesthall since Dame Claire has other matters to attend to.”

Sister Elianor lifted her head, smiling, remembered herself, disappeared the smile, and bowed her head again to say with due obedience and humility, “Yes, Domina.”

Frevisse and Dame Claire shared a look of shared amusement.  Sister Elianor’s faith and eagerness to be a nun could not be faulted, but both women knew that curiosity was not a thing readily overcome.  Certainly neither of them had ever rid themselves of it, and their service to God was the better for it; there was no point in thwarting Sister Elianor’s. 

She, Master Naylor, and Sister Elianor were halted on their way across the yard toward the guesthall by Master Richard coming through the gateway from the nunnery’s outer yard.  From a boy busy about the nunnery, the village, and countryside, he had grown into a tall, lean match to his father, albeit with a merrier mind than his father had ever had but with his father’s skilled responsibility and deep sense of duty.  He had been this while in the village, dealing with the complications that inevitably followed a murder.  Given there was no knowing how long it would take for one of the county’s crowners to be found, let alone come, it was good to do as much as possible beforetimes, in readiness. 

As he bowed to Domina Frevisse and his father, Master Naylor asked, “Have you learned anything new?”

“Things stand as you left them,” Master Richard answered.  “I’ve set two men to keep watch on Tom Kelmstowe but left him at his home, as you said to do.  A neighbor woman is to take care of Anneys Barnsley’s chickens and the goose until she can for herself.  Will Hyde and John Wryght have said they’ll see to the rest, the cow and all.  We’ve left Barnsley’s body lie until the stiffness goes out of it.  If the crowner hasn’t come by then, well–”  He shrugged.  Then they would do what needed to be done and pay the fine imposed for moving a murdered body before the king’s officer had seen it where it lay.

Master Naylor nodded approval of all that, then told him he was to go back to the village and ask about anyone else who had lately been ill, perhaps from food gone bad but otherwise too, for good measure.  Master Richard, being young, well-cloaked, warm-booted, and with a horse to his use, gave no sign he minded being kept out and about a while longer, just nodded easy agreement, bowed to Frevisse and his father again, and went back the way he had come.

The guesthall was peaceful.  Anneys Barnsley must still sufficiently sleep, because Margery had left her and come to sit on one of the benches beside the hall’s hearth where a small but pleasant fire was burning cheerily.  She stood up and curtsied as Frevisse and Master Naylor joined her.  At a wave of  Frevisse’s hand, she sat again, and so did Frevisse and Master Naylor, on a bench facing hers, with Sister Elianor standing a few paces behind but near enough to enjoy the fire’s warmth, too, and hear all that was said.

“She’ll likely be waking soon,” Margery offered without being asked.  “How much sense she’ll make, though, is hard to say.”  Her tone implied that Anneys Barnsley did not make sense at the best of times.

“Tell me about her,” Frevisse said.

“Tell you about her?” Margery echoed, somewhat puzzled.

“How you see her.  Is she a good wife?  Liked in the village?  Or a gossip and troublemaker?  Does she try to take advantage of her husband being reeve?  Has she been bothered beyond the ordinary by having no children?  There are no children, I take it?  Anything about her.”

“Well,” Margery said.  “There’s nothing of the troublemaker about her.  She’s good-hearted enough, so far as it goes, which isn’t far, to say the truth.  There’s just not that much to her.  She’ll not ever surprise anyone with her wit.  She enjoys a good gossip when it’s to be had, but there’s no ill-will in her.  She’s never disgraced herself at the ale house or tried to take advantage of being the reeve’s wife.  She does her work around the croft and does it well, and takes her turn in the fields like everyone else.  Came to me a few times early on in her marriage, asking if I could help her get to childbearing, but nothing served and she’s been quiet about that these past few years.  Is that the sort of thing you wanted to know?”

“Yes,” Frevisse said.  It gave her view of a simple woman adequate to the life she had and apparently content in it.

“Before you ask,” Margery went on, “she’s seemed happy enough with Barnsley, and he with her.  No trouble there.”

But somewhere in all of this thing something was awry.

Take the straightest way, she thought.  Go past Kelmstowe and the confusions around him.  Go to the one plain, certain thing in this:  Barnsley was dead. 

The first question after a murder always seemed to be “Who did it?”  With that not immediately answered, she was back at the one she had already asked Master Naylor, the somewhat more subtle, Who gained by Barnsley’s death?

Not Tom Kelmstowe, unless all he wanted was senseless revenge, and no one seemed to think Tom Kelmstowe was a senseless man.

Anneys Barnsley had to be suspected, maybe first before anyone else, but she quite obviously had had no chance to do it, unless someone suddenly remembered she had left the birthing for a time, which seemed unlikely by now, after Master Naylor’s questioning and all.

“Who’ll take his place as reeve?” Frevisse asked of Master Naylor.

“Simon Perryn says he’ll take it on again for a time.  It will probably be Easter court when we settle on someone.”

“Who was passed over in favor of Barnsley at Michaelmas?”

“No one.  There was no one else being thought on for it.  No one else wanted it.  Well, Gilbey Dunn, but he’s never going to have it.”

No, since it had never been a secret that Gilbey Dunn’s first and foremost interest was Gilbey Dunn.  Frevisse would have added “his only interest” to that, except against all likelihood he had been a surprisingly devoted husband and father these many years; but no one would ever seriously consider putting the village into his hands by making him reeve.

“These men who are taking care of the Barnsley croft and stock and all,” she said, “Who are they?”

“Will Hyde and John Wryght?” Master Naylor asked, seeming surprised by her question.

More prompt with answer, Margery said, “Will is a widower.  On in years.  Hale enough to be useful, but worn down enough that he gave all his holding over to his son a few years back.  Is settled in comfortably with him and daughter-in-law and grandchildren.  John is much about Master Richard’s age and betrothed to Rob Brewster’s daughter.  A good lad.”

“Would either have coin enough to pay drovers to carry Tom Kelmstowe off to London?” Frevisse asked.

Master Naylor looked startled, catching up to where her thoughts were going, and said, “Neither has that much ready money in hand.  That’s certain.  Nor why would they want to send Kelmstowe off like that?”

“Someone did.  Who?”

“Supposing Kelmstowe is telling the truth about it,” Master Naylor said dourly.

“Supposing that, yes,” Frevisse agreed.  “For now let’s suppose he is and see where it takes us.  Too many things are askew about what’s happened to and around Tom Kelmstowe these past months.  Now we have this murder.  First, someone gives him away to the reeve, and he loses his extra land.”

“His ill-gotten land,” Master Naylor said.

“Yes, but for now the point is that he lost it, and the reeve who saw to taking it from him was Barnsley.  Then Anneys Barnsley claims Kelmstowe attacked her, tried to rape her – not that he did, only that he tried.  He denies it, and it was going to come down to his word against hers, no proof either way, except he suddenly disappeared.  It had to be supposed he’d run off, so he’s perforce assumed guilty, and his land and other property are forfeit, impoverishing his mother and sister, despite he’s known to be devoted to them.”  She knew she was saying things already said before, but somewhere in them was what she needed to jar loose in her mind, or in Master Naylor’s or Margery’s.  “Then he comes back.  The Barnsleys show no wish to pursue the charge of attempted rape against him, so it’s let go, and he takes up his much-diminished life in the village, to the relief of his mother and sister and with no trouble from anyone over it.  That’s been the way of it, hasn’t it?” 

Both Master Naylor and Margery nodded agreement.

“Then, last night, he and his mother and sister are given tainted broth, keeping them ill at home, and Barnsley is murdered.”

“You’ve forgot one thing,” Margery put in.  “Anneys Barnsley’s sister starting her birthing yesterday afternoon.”

Frevisse looked at her, startled and a little discomposed at having left that out. 

Then of a sudden she was seeing in her mind something of the pattern she had been seeking.  She had been wondering where the sense in all of this was.  Why would someone go to the trouble – and cost – of having Tom Kelmstowe carried away, only to let him return?  If someone wanted to be rid of him, why stick at simply killing him, especially if they had not stuck at killing Barnsley?  Supposing, of course, that Barnsley’s murder and Kelmstowe’s disappearance had anything at all to do with one another.  But they must.  And if they did, then rather than a welter of jarring pieces having nothing to do with one another, she could begin to see a fine-woven plan under it all.

One of the guesthall servants approached at a hesitant sideway shuffle, clearly uncertain if she should interrupt.  Margery saved her the trouble by asking, “Is Anneys Barnsley coming round, then?”

“She be.  You said to tell you,” the woman said, bobbing a curtsey.

Frevisse said thanks on Margery’s behalf and her own and stood up, bringing Master Naylor and Margery to their feet with her.  “I want to hear what she has to say,” she said.  “Best you hear, too.”

They found Anneys Barnsley rolling her head fretfully from side to side on the pillow, making small sounds of awakening and distress, as if she was trying to awaken and could not – or was being shoved out of sleep against her will.  There was a stool beside the bed.  Frevisse sat on it to bring her near the woman’s ear, and began persuading her toward wakening, but after a moment Margery touched her shoulder and said softly, “Asking your pardon, my lady, but you don’t have a soothing kind of voice.  Not for this, leastwise.  Mayhap I should do it?”

Frevisse stood up and stepped out of the way, joining Master Naylor in the doorway of the small chamber, aware Sister Elianor was as close behind them as she dared to be, craning to see over their shoulders.  Frevisse shifted a little, to give her easier view as Margery sat down on the stool, took Anneys Barnsley’s near hand, and began to talk to her softly, soothingly, saying her name, assuring her that she was safe, that she need not be afraid.  The woman’s eyelids flickered and even briefly opened, but she continued to twist her head restlessly on the pillow.

“Anneys,” Margery said, still gently but insisting now.  “Anneys, it’s all right.  I’m here.  I won’t leave you. You’re safe.”

Anneys Barnsley seemed to hear her, rolled her head sideways, moaned, “You said... John... you said... you said... John...”

Whatever John had said slipped away along with her brief almost-consciousness.  Giving up the struggle, she went slack, back into sleep.  Margery patted her hand, tucked it under the blanket, looked up at Frevisse and Master Naylor, and said softly, “That’s better.  She’s gone into a more natural sleep now.  It will last a while, and when she properly awakes, she’ll know what she’s saying and you can ask her things.”

Since Margery seemed inclined to stay with the woman, Frevisse simply nodded and withdrew across the hall to the hearth again, taking Master Naylor with her, Sister Elianor trailing behind.  There, before Frevisse could say it, Master Naylor said grimly, “That’s not her husband’s name.  He’s Henry, not ever John.  She was moaning to someone else.”

“Who?”

“There’s the question, isn’t it?”  All of Master Naylor’s displeasure at the business showed in his voice, “John is altogether too common a name.  She might as well have said ‘Dick’ or some such.”

“Name me those in the village,” Frevisse said.

Master Naylor considered, frowning with thought, then answered, “There’s John atte Bush, but his wife is the village alewife and never lets him carry enough coin for more than a few rolls of the dice and rarely beyond reach of her ladle.  There’s John Wryght who’s said he’ll see to the Barnsleys’ cow and all, but he’s a straight lad with no eyes for any but his Jonet.  John Smith at the forge, he could have split Barnsley’s skull right enough, although I don’t know why.  Not for Anneys’ sake – he’s been contentedly without a wife these past two years.  There’s Dick Ford’s son John.  He’s not quite right in the head, but he’s never looked like harming anyone, and he’s right useful with a scythe at haying and harvest.” 

Master Naylor paused, probably working his way down the village to gather more names from his memory.  But Frevisse was remembering, too.  In the hours of waiting for anyone to come back and tell her things, she had had time and enough to think through all she had lately heard about the Barnsleys and Tom Kelmstowe, and now she asked, not quite certain, “Do I remember rightly it was someone named John who gave Kelmstowe away about his cousin’s land?”

“Oh, aye,” Master Naylor said readily.  “John Adirton that was, but he’s so lately widowed it’s hard to think he’s already looking again.  His wife died not long after–”  Master Naylor stopped, an odd look on his face, then finished slowly, “–not long after Kelmstowe came back.”

A small quiet came after his words, until Frevisse said, “Sister Elianor, bid Mistress Margery come to us.”  And added as Sister Elianor made a quick curtsy and spun to obey, “Seemly, sister.”

Sister Elianor, already in the midst of her first hurried steps away, brought herself up short, visibly re-gathered herself, and went on across the hall at what Frevisse in her younger, impatient days had called “cloister pace”.  Hurried but never flurried, as Domina Edith had used to say.

Frevisse’s own years of practicing patience – practicing but never seeming quite to master it – presently served her well as she and Master Naylor sat in matching silence, waiting for Sister Elianor to return with Margery.  They came nearly soon enough, and Frevisse said promptly, without explanation, “Margery, tell us about the death of John Adirton’s wife.”

Margery was getting on in years but had not left any of her wits behind her.  Her look from Frevisse to Master Naylor and back again was sharp, before she answered straightly, “It was a terrible griping in the guts.  It came on suddenly and went so fast I had no chance against it.”

“She’d not been ill before?”

“In good health enough, for the middle of winter and all.  I was surprised by how quickly she went, but that happens.”

“You have no thought on what caused her sickness?” Frevisse asked.

“When something goes to the bad inside a body, there’s not always way to tell what or why.  Often and often it happens and there it is.”  Margery said that with resignation, having long since had to accept as a bitter fact of life that death did not always come for a knowable reason.  “No one else sickened, thanks be to all the saints.  I’ve had to be satisfied with that.”

“No one else sickened until the Kelmstowes last night,” Frevisse said quietly.  “Except they all look likely to live.”

“Oh, aye.  She was worse than they by far.”  Margery stopped, was silent a moment, then went on slowly, “But otherwise all was the same.  The griping in the guts.  The vomiting.”  Still more slowly, she said, “But it can’t have been the broth.  John Adirton and his wife both ate the same for supper the night she fell ill.  I asked, because I thought it might be the food had somehow gone bad, but they both said, no, they’d eaten from the same pot.”

“But not the same bowl,” Frevisse suggested.

“Nay, there’d be no need for that.  John Adirton is well off, as things go in Prior Byfield,” Margery said.

Frevisse looked to Master Naylor.  “Well off enough to have coin in hand if need be?”

“Aye,” Master Naylor said grimly.

Margery, not knowing all that was behind Frevisse’s questions but not behindhand in understanding the sway of the talk, said, “He was about the first to the Barnsleys’ when Anneys started shrieking this morning.  He was one as helped to hold her and bring her here.”  Margery paused, considering, then added, “It was maybe him, now I think on it, who said right at the first I’d do well to give her something to quiet her.”

Quickly Frevisse asked, “Is he the same who asked that here in the hall, too?”

“Aye, that was him.”

Frevisse and Master Naylor looked at one another.  The steward’s frown had deepened.  “Shall I fetch him?” he asked.

“Yes,” Frevisse said curtly.  “Wait.  Margery, do you see where we’re tending with this?”

Margery had been flicking her sharp eyes from one of them to other, listening hard, and she said now, “I think so, aye.”

“Then I want you to go with Master Naylor, and when he’s laid hold on John Adirton, I want you to have a long look around Adirton’s place to see what you can find.  Anything that doesn’t seem right.”

“Like maybe what he might have put in someone’s broth,” Margery said shrewdly.

“That would be useful,” Frevisse granted.

* * * * *

Unfortunately for Frevisse’s quiet of mind, neither Master Naylor nor Margery nor any word from the village came back in the short while before the bell summoned her from her parlor to Vespers.  She did not deny to herself that she set her mind with more determination than devotion to the Office, but she knew after all these years that sometimes determination was all that could be brought to her prayers.  She also knew that sometimes determination sufficed to give opening for devotion to come after all. 

Today she found that her devotion and her distraction came together in one of Vesper’s psalms, it ending with Benefac, Domine, bonis et rectis corde.  Qui autem declinant in vias suas obliquas, abigat eos Dominus cum male agentibus. – Do kindness, Lord, to the good and honest of heart.  But who turns aside into their crooked ways, Lord lead them away amid evil doers.

Yes, that served her humour very well for now, and she was able to go to supper with the other nuns and sit with some quiet of mind through the meal while Dame Thomasine read softly from Dame Julian of Norwich’s Showings.  She was nonetheless relieved as they left the refectory to begin the hour of recreation before Compline ended the day to find one of the guesthall servants waiting in the cloister walk to tell her she was wanted in the guesthall, please it her.

It pleased her very well.  Asking Dame Claire to come with her – and then Sister Elianor, too, as she saw the novice’s face – she left the cloister.  Crossing the yard to the guesthall, she only with effort held her walk to “hurried, not flurried.”  Setting Sister Elianor a good example, she firmly told herself.

In the hall the rushlights were burning on their prickets around the walls, giving a warm light to the gathering of people there.  Foremost were Master Naylor and Master Richard, Margery, and a man who must be John Adirton.  He was indeed one of the men who had brought Anneys Barnsley here and moreover the one who had said he saw her go into her house and come out again screaming.  Standing behind him as if they were perhaps – but not quite – his guards were Simon Perryn and another village man whom Frevisse knew by sight though not by name. 

As Frevisse had asked her to, Dame Claire went away to see how Anneys Barnsley did, leaving Sister Elianor to stand correctly a few paces behind and aside as Frevisse acknowledged the men’s bows and Margery’s curtsy before saying, “John Adirton?”

He bowed again.  “My lady.”  Though he had to be worried why he was here, he did not show it.  He had a sharp and ready face, not unhandsome but with a certain cast of weasel to it, his eyes crowded somewhat too near his narrow nose.  But confident – oh, yes, he showed confident in his level gaze at her.

Frevisse deliberately turned her heed from him to ask of Master Richard.  “Has there been any illness in the village?”

“There’s been no one ill in the village all this week.”

He would have said more, but Frevisse slightly raised one hand to stop him, nodded her thanks, and looked to Margery.  The herbwife was carrying a folded bundle of cloth and shook it out to show a dark gray tunic.  “It’s his,” she said with a nod at Adirton.  “He says so.”  She held up the sleeves for Frevisse to see.  At their ends and part way up them they were dark with damp.  “Not blood,” Margery added before Frevisse could ask.  “Water.  They’ve been washed.”

“An odd time of year and weather for a man to take up doing even that much laundry,” Frevisse said, returning her look to Adirton. 

“There was blood on them, my lady,” he said quickly.  “This morning at Barnsley’s, when I was seeing if he wasn’t simply stunned, that he was dead, I got his blood on them.  I had to scrub it out before it set.”

“Here, too,” Margery said, turning the tunic around to show its front.  A wide area was damp; someone had never pointed out to Adirton that a dirty tunic only partly washed all too plainly showed different between the clean part and the uncleaned.  “He had it hung over a stool near the fire.  It’s farther toward dry than the sleeves because they weren’t hanging as free to the warmth.”

“I wiped my hands there,” Adirton said.  “After I’d touched him.  I wasn’t thinking and I wiped my hands there, and so there was blood there, too.”

Which could be true.  If it came to it, questions could be asked, to find if someone remembered whether or not Adirton had gone near Barnsley’s body this morning.  In the meanwhile...

“You were the man who told the reeve about Tom Kelmstowe’s trick with his cousin’s land,” Frevisse said.

Adirton blinked.  “Aye,” he granted.  For the first time he sounded wary.  Or maybe only surprised she had brought it up.

“How did you find it out?” she asked.

“Don’t remember.  Heard somebody saying something, I suppose.  Figured it out.”  He made an effort toward sounding bold instead of wary by adding, likely thinking it was for good measure but not thinking it through, “Women talk.”

Frevisse fixed her look on him.  “They do,” she agreed.

Across the hall Dame Claire had been standing in the doorway to Anneys Barnsley’s room these past few moments.  Now Frevisse looked toward her.  Dame Claire nodded and Frevisse nodded back, then said, “Master Naylor, if you’ll bring him this way, please.  Anneys Barnsley is better enough to see him.”

She noted that Master Naylor’s grip on Adirton’s arm was needed to set him moving, and when Adirton showed unwilling to follow Frevisse into the small chamber, it was Master Naylor’s strong pull that brought him through the doorway, while Simon Perryn and the other villager kept close behind him, blocking even slight retreat. 

At this sudden filling of the room with people, Anneys Barnsley turned her head on the pillow and stared among them, befuddled at first until her gaze caught on John Adirton.  With a whimpering cry, she rolled to her side and a little up on one elbow, to hold out her other hand to him as she exclaimed, the words still thick with the leavings of the drug, “Oh, John!  It didn’t keep him safe!  You said it would but it didn’t!”

Frevisse instantly moved between her and Adirton, asking, “What didn’t keep your husband safe, mistress?  Something you did?”  Anneys Barnsley blinked up at her, confused, and Frevisse urged, “Something Adirton said you should do?”

“Aye.  That.”  The woman’s blurred thoughts caught up to what she was being asked.  She let her hand fall to the bed while she peered up at Frevisse.  Fumbling, pulling the words almost singly from her befuddled mind, she said, “I was to say Tom tried to have me.  So he’d run off then.  Not be here to hurt my Henry.  Be gone, see.  It frighted me how he was so angry at Henry.  John said I should do it.  To make him go away.”

Behind Frevisse, Adirton said in an awed voice, “Her wits are altogether gone.  Seeing her man dead has turned them all the way over.”

Not seeming to have heard him at all, Anneys Barnsley whimpered, “But he came back,” and dropped to the pillow again.  Beginning to weep softly, she said at the ceiling beams, “John said he wouldn’t come back.  But he did.  Now he’s killed my Henry.  Killed him dead.”

As her weeping turned to a low wail on those last words, Adirton turned to Master Naylor and the other men and demanded, “You hear her, right enough?  She knows it was Tom Kelmstowe did it.  Who else but him?”

“Who else but Kelmstowe is just the question we’ve been asking half the day,” said Frevisse said, moving aside as she spoke, out from between Anneys Barnsley and Adirton. 

The woman, her heed drawn by the movement, returned her tear-blurred gaze to Adirton.  “You said,” she pleaded.  “You said if I lied it would keep him safe.  That you’d keep him safe.  Why didn’t you?”

“For the same reason he killed his wife,” Frevisse said. 

All the men except Master Naylor startled at that.  Adirton was apparently too taken aback for protest or denial, but she had said it less in hope of anything from him – or even from Anneys Barnsley, probably still too drug-addled to understand – as for the listening men who would be the witnesses at Adirton’s trial, and seemingly still to only Anneys Barnsley, she said strongly, “He did it so he could marry you and have all – both his holding and yours.”

“And Kelmstowe’s,” Master Naylor said.

“And Kelmstowe’s,” Frevisse agreed. 

Adirton had recovered enough to exclaim, “This is fool’s talk!  You’re making something out of a mad woman’s maunderings.”  He gave a jerk of his head at Anneys Barnsley, quietly continuing her weeping with a hand now over her eyes, her mind drifted away from them again, all Frevisse’s words lost to her.  Adirton made to leave.  Frevisse held up a hand to tell the men to let him go, but when he was from the room, sent them after him with another gesture.  She followed, passing wide-eyed Sister Elianor, who had been hovering as close to outside the door as she could be, able to see and hear though there had been no room for her in the small chamber. 

Adirton, walking quickly, was headed for the outer door.  “No,” Frevisse said after him.  “We are not done with you here.”

Adirton spun around, threat in the tension of his body.  He was instantly flanked by Simon Perryn and the other man, with Master Naylor and his son ready behind them.  Adirton assessed his chances and stood still, his glare fierce on Frevisse.  It seemed he was no fool – that he already understood who was his worst foe here.  Coming near, to confront him to his face, she said, “We have from Anneys Barnsley that you worked on her fear that Tom Kelmstowe might harm her husband.  That you persuaded her to accuse him of trying to rape her.  That you led her to think he would run away and her husband would be safe.”

“She’s addled with whatever you’ve given to shut her up.  There’s no one going to believe what she said in there.”  Looking back and forth between the men flanking him, he demanded of them, “You could see she’s not in her right wits.  You’re not set to believe any of that, are you, eh?”

“Oh, aye,” Simon Perryn said quietly.  “I think we are.  And whatever else Domina Frevisse will say, too.” 

The other man nodded agreement.  Adirton curled his lip with disgust at both of them. 

Frevisse went on, “That Kelmstowe went missing made it easy to believe you were right about him.  Except he tells an altogether different story of why he disappeared.  You’ve heard it?” she asked the two village men.  They nodded that they had.  She went on, “It’s an odd story, because how likely was it for someone to pay drovers to carry him off for a jest?  But neither did it make sense that he’d take all that trouble to run away to London – and it does seem he was truly there – only to turn around and come back again.  No more sense than it made to anybody that he would attack Anneys Barnsley and desert his mother and sister.  So everything about his story made no sense.

“But what if we think someone did indeed pay the drovers to carry him off, to make it seem he’d run off so he’d lose his holding, again at the hands of the reeve Henry Barnsley?  That Kelmstowe’s holding then went to Barnsley made it all the better, but what the man who paid the drovers was after at the first was simply to set up Kelmstowe as someone who would readily be blamed for Barnsley’s murder when it came.  That’s why he needed Kelmstowe not merely gone but to come back, too, as he assuredly would because of his mother and sister.  Then it was a matter of waiting and hoping things would time out rightly and, for him, they did.  Kelmstowe came back, and after he did, I’ll warrant a great deal there have been constant little threads of talk about how angry he must still be at Barnsley, how if Barnsley is wise he won’t turn his back on Kelmstowe, how it’s maybe just a matter of Kelmstowe biding his time.”

The glances between the men, a nod from one and a slight lift of a shoulder by Simon Perryn answered her half-question even before they looked back to her and together nodded, saying her guess was right. 

She went on, “But it wasn’t Tom Kelmstowe who was biding his time.  Anneys Barnsley’s sister was with child.  When the birthing came, Anneys Barnsley would be with her, Henry Barnsley on his own.  That gave Adirton–”  She finally named him, and no one objected.  “–a certainty his chance would come.  When it did, he left a pot of poisoned broth as apparent charity for the Kelmstowes, to see to it they were kept at home all the night when it was needful no one see them elsewhere.  The same poison that he had used to kill his wife not long before.”

“She died!” Adirton exclaimed.  “Everyone knows she just fell ill and died.  My wife.  It happens!”

“Happens she died of a sudden,” Frevisse said coldly, “with the same troubles that laid the Kelmstowes low last night.  Only worse.  I wonder – have you been sharp enough to rid yourself of whatever you used, or will a thorough search–” more thorough than Margery had been able to make in this while – “of your place find something you’d rather we didn’t?”

Adirton blanched.  Good.  His poison was still somewhere to be found.  If there was any doubt, a small dose could be tried on him to be sure of it, Frevisse thought grimly as she went on, “With Barnsley dead and Kelmstowe easily thought guilty, he would be free to comfort and then marry the widow, getting thereby a considerable holding without the trouble of having deserved it.”  She looked to Master Naylor.  “He would have been thought fit to take it over along with the widow, yes?”

“Yes,” the steward said.  He was more than usually grim.

“So, with no suspicion of murder falling on him because it was plain someone else had killed Barnsley, he’d be far better off than he had been and with a new wife.  Of course if it turned out the new wife did not suit him–”  Frevisse fixed a hard stare on Adirton.  “–he had his way of remedying that, to free himself to look for another.”         

Adirton’s jaw clenched as he apparently tried to hold back from saying anything, before he burst out, “That’s nothing but guesses!  First and last, nothing but guesses!  You’ll never find the drovers to ask, for one thing!”

“Drovers come the same way year after year,” Master Naylor said.  “If we have to wait until we’ve asked every one that comes through in the coming year, then that’s what we’ll do.”

“In the meanwhile,” Frevisse said, “the others that were there when Barnsley’s body was found will be asked if you indeed handled it enough to have blood on your sleeves and the front of your tunic.  I think we’ll hear that you didn’t.  So where did the blood come from?”

Adirton opened his mouth, perhaps to give an excuse for it, then must have remembered he had already said it was Barnsley’s blood and closed his mouth.

“That and finding the poison wherever you’ve hidden it, added to what Anneys Barnsley has already said, will go a long way to satisfying the crowner, I think,” Frevisse said. 

“That, and that I’ve heard him more than once warning folk in the alehouse that Kelmstowe was likely to break out again in some manner of hurt to someone,” Simon Perryn said.  “Aye.  We’ll stand behind all this when time comes to jury for the crowner.”

“That should suffice,” Frevisse said, her gaze locked with Adirton’s.

Adirton took a threatening step forward.  Simon Perryn and the other man clamped hold on his arms, keeping him where he was.  He wrenched once, more from anger than any thought he could escape, then spat at Frevisse’s feet, splattering the stone floor.  She did not move, only kept her cold gaze on his angry-weasel face until at Master Naylor’s order the two village men wrenched him around and hauled him from the hall.

* * * * *

Frevisse had John Adirton too much in her thoughts the next few days, troubled that she could form no more than the plainest prayers for him and those only by rote.

With such thoughts for company, she was grateful when Sister Elianor broke in on her thoughts the second morning, come to say Tom Kelmstowe was here, had asked to speak with her, was waiting in the yard.  Rather than have him come into the cloister, Frevisse went down to him.  As she came out of the cloister door, followed by Sister Elianor, into the sunshine of the yard, Kelmstowe shoved back his hood to bare his head, went down on one knee, and held out a folded bit of white cloth, saying, “From my mother and sister, my lady.  In thanks.”

At Frevisse’s gesture, he stood up, and she took the cloth from him.  While she unfolded it, he went on, running the words together in his eagerness to have them said, “I’ve nothing of my own to give yet except my thanks, but you have that, right enough and in full, and my promise of faithful service to you for always after this.”

“That’s thanks enough,” Frevisse said, smiling to assure him she believed him and gladly accepted his word.  She knew from Master Naylor that his lands were to be restored to him, and that in due course he would also be given such of Barnsley’s as were not bound to Anneys Barnsley as dower.  Having been victim as well as tool in John Adirton’s deceptions, she would be left that much but lose the rest because of her deliberate lie against Kelmstowe.  “But this is lovely,” Frevisse exclaimed, finding she held a linen nightcap, made to fit close to the head and tie under the chin, and embroidered around the outer edge with fine pattern of tendrils and leaves in thread probably pulled from the same cloth as the cap was made.

“Aye,” Tom Kelmstowe said, looking greatly pleased on his mother’s and sister’s behalf.  “They wanted you to have something but know there’s not much you can have, being a nun and all.  So they thought maybe this would be well enough, being so plain but prettied just that little?”

Frevisse answered his uncertainty with, “It is quite acceptable.”  She would not for the world tell him it was not, despite the embroidery made it questionable.  “Your mother and sister did the embroidery?”

“Aye.  They’re good at it, aren’t they?” Kelmstowe said, his relief at her acceptance probably making him bold to show his pride in them.

“They are indeed.”  And arthritic fingers in the older nuns and lack of skill in the younger presently meant the nunnery’s vestments and altar cloths were in need of such good hands to mend them.  Even, perhaps, to make new ones.  Frevisse tucked that thought away for the future as she thanked Kelmstowe again and received his repeated thanks in return, so that they afterward went their own ways, back to their widely differing lives, with good feelings on both sides.

It was the look on Sister Elianor’s face as she stood aside to let Frevisse go ahead of her along the passageway to the cloister walk that made Frevisse pause there and ask, “Is there something troubling you?”

The girl bowed her head, started to shake it, her lips forming No, before she changed her mind, looked up, and said, “It very nearly went wrong for all of them, didn’t it?  For that man and his mother and sister.  And the wife, too.  The widow.  It went altogether wrong for her, her husband being killed.  But it would have come to her death, too, wouldn’t it?”

“I think so, yes.”

“I didn’t know that someone could turn to so much – because he wanted what wasn’t his to have – could turn to so much–”  Sister Elianor fumbled for the word she wanted.

“Evil,” said Frevisse.

“Evil.”  Sister Elianor accepted the word almost unwillingly.  She hesitated, then asked very quietly, “May I go to the church and pray this while until None?”

Frevisse’s urge was to let her; it was what she wanted often enough herself; but the prioress part of her asked, “What are you supposed to be doing at this hour?”

“I’d finished helping Dame Margrett polish the altar candlesticks and was going to see if Dame Claire needed me for anything when the man knocked at the door and I came for you instead.”

“Go and pray then, since you’re not needed elsewhere.”

Sister Elianor made a grateful curtsey and turned away along the walk toward the church – going with bowed head and even pace – neither hurried nor flurried, Frevisse noted before going up the stairs to her parlor.  There she laid the cap on the table and stood contemplating it for a few moments before deciding that, yes, she would wear it.  Not for the sake of its prettiness, which would be wrong, but to keep her mindful of the people beyond the nunnery walls who needed her judgment and care as much – and sometimes more – than the nuns close around her.

Accounts were waiting for her on the other side of the table, but she drifted with her thoughts to the window and sat down.  She was glad for Tom Kelmstowe, his mother, and sister, but it was again toward Adirton her thoughts went. 

Had “evil” been too strong a word to give to Sister Elianor?  She was afraid she could not find a lesser.  There was too much wrong about him.  What he had done, he had not done from stupidity.  He had set about most cunningly to get what he wanted, never troubling to look past his own greed to any feeling for the people whose lives he was destroying.  Too many men had greed for more than they needed, cared nothing for what harm they did along their way, cared nothing about who they left hurt, impoverished, and desperately without life’s needs.  Nothing mattered except their own excessive greed be satisfied. 

Except of course such greed could never be satisfied.  Greed beyond need fed on itself, creating ever-greater hunger for more.  A hunger never able to be satisfied because it devoured even as it fed.  Devoured mind and soul as surely as disease devoured a body unless a balance could be found. 

John Adirton had never sought that balance.  He had outright murdered his wife and Henry Barnsley, and left the Kelmstowes ruined past apparent mending.  All so he could have more.  Never mind that the less he left to others barely let them go on living. 

There was a rot in John Adirton’s soul that let him see only his own necessity and feel nothing for anyone else’s.  There were so many ways to be cruel in the world.  Adirton had turned aside from none.

It was just as well that he would hang.

Blessedly, at that moment the bell began to ring for None.  Frevisse made to rise, found a weight on her lap, and sank back, surprised to find the cat curled there.  It knew as well as she did what the bell meant but gave no sign it meant to move.  If anything, it settled more heavily, as if defying her to push it off her lap.  She nearly did, but paused.  Just as there were cruelties great and small in the world, so there were kindnesses.  Great ones might be few and far between, but small ones came daily and often.  Christ had said “As long as you did such to one of my least brothers, you did so to me” without saying where “least” left off; and so, with silent laughter at herself, Frevisse gathered up the defiantly boneless beast, rose to her feet, and gently put it down where she had been sitting, leaving it to re-curl and settle itself on the warmed cushions as she left the room, called to the prayers in which she hoped to find her peace.

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 library of 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)</small

Winter Heart (Sister Frevisse Mystery)

Cover Art: Gustave Courbet - Poor Woman of the Village, 1866.

Cover Design: Justin Alexander