Winter Heart Read online

  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 d
one 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.