The Stone-Worker's Tale Read online

  Surprised, Frevisse said, "Was he drunk?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Oh, yes," said Beth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "I never did!"

  "You did!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Will you give it to him?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "In bed. Asleep and not drunk."

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

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

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

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

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

  "You were drunk. There were no cups.”

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

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

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

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

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

  "You're a fool. You–"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "No, my lady." Still to the pillar.

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

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

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

  "They said nothing about leaving?" Alice pressed.

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

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

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

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

  "No!" Master Wyndford protested fiercely.

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

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

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

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