The Outlaw's Tale Read online

  “I've agreed to deal with Uncle over your pardon. Master Naylor isn't going to bother with escape when you'll be letting us go this morning anyway."

  Evan put a warm bowl of stew into her hands. She took it without looking away from Nicholas who showed slight embarassment and some amusement as he answered, “Cousin of my heart, I can't let you go so soon. You haven't written the letter and I haven't Chaucer's promise back."

  “Nicholas! You cannot keep us until you have an answer from him! We were expected somewhere last night and there'll be trouble when we don't come today. And who knows where Uncle may be? He has manors all over southern England. He could be anywhere. Even in London. It's going to take time for a messenger to find him."

  “He's at Ewelme," Evan said, handing a bowl to Sister Emma.

  “Peddler's knowledge?" Frevisse demanded.

  Evan smiled his smile. “When one knows how to ask – or who to listen to – one can learn all manner of things."

  Frevisse turned back on Nicholas. Ewelme was in reasonable reach, a solid day's riding away, but that did not solve other problems. “We're expected at Sister Emma's cousin's early today at the very latest."

  Sister Emma swallowed stew and sniffed moistly. “And at my brother's tonight. There'll be no end of trouble if we're not there."

  “Naylor will take a message from you to your cousin or your brother or whoever best needs it," Nicholas said. “You're right that we don't want trouble stirred up that way. He can be on his way when he's finished eating and that will be one problem settled."

  Master Naylor straightened. “I'm not taking a message anywhere nor leaving these women here alone. They were put in my charge and in my charge they stay. When I go, they go."

  Anger tightened Nicholas' face. “They're in my charge now. You'll do what you're told."

  “I want to go," Sister Emma fretted. “I could be warm there, and dry. I feel a chill, I really do. I do need to be warm and dry or I'll catch one of my dreadful rheums. I know I will." She sneezed as if to prove it.

  The men ignored her. “I'm not leaving them," Master Naylor said.

  “You will if I say so," Nicholas answered.

  Master Naylor shook his head, face stubborn-set. Nicholas closed on him with a rising fist, but Evan caught his arm with seeming casualness and said, “I think it's for Dame Frevisse to persuade him, Nicholas. He'll take her word long before he takes your blows. And you're frightening Sister Emma."

  Sister Emma had begun to pat at her gown and peer up her sleeves. “My handkerchief. Where is it? It's white linen, very nice, with leaves embroidered on it. Green leaves. I really do need to wipe my nose."

  Frevisse, annoyed, said, “Here's mine," and handed her a plain one, then laid a hand on Nicholas' other arm as she said to Master Naylor, “We'll be well enough here. We'll be well taken care of, I'm sure." She kept her voice casual and even, but her gaze was intent on Master Naylor's, willing him to listen. She had never known him to give way to temper, but she suspected he had one, and that he was now near to losing it. “Nicholas is seeking a pardon and won't endanger that or his soul by letting us come to any harm. He probably has the right of it that we'll all be better off if you go to quiet any fears there may be growing. We'll come to no harm in his keeping. Truly."

  “I'm getting wet," Sister Emma complained. The outlaws around the stewpot – more interested in breakfast than in someone else's arguing – had jostled her halfway out into the rain. She shook her damp skirts and crowded up against Frevisse's elbow. “Is it ever going to stop?"

  No one answered her. Master Naylor and Nicholas stared at each other past Evan and Frevisse, until Frevisse said as persuasively as she might, “Please, Master Naylor. Sister Emma and I are in no danger here." She wanted to add, But you are. Nicholas had never been able to endure authority; and Master Naylor was not about to give his up. Keeping her tone mild, she said, “It's better you go ease the minds of those worrying over us. Nicholas and I will work out what needs to be said to Master Chaucer, and then surely he'll give us escort back to St. Frideswide's."

  “Will he?" Master Naylor said with an edge of scorn, his stare not wavering from Nicholas' own glare. “Which of his men's necks will he risk on that venture on the open road, do you think?"

  “We'll manage something," Frevisse said. Once the warning was out, it would indeed be less safe than ever for Nicholas or any of the outlaws to show themselves.

  “We'll manage by my staying with you. Or your coming with me. Those are the only choices."

  “I make the choices here," Nicholas snarled. “And I give the orders."

  “Not to me, you don't!" Master Naylor snapped back.

  Nicholas' jerked loose of Evan's hold to smash his fist at the steward's face. Faster than Frevisse could follow, Naylor's left arm came up to block the blow while his right fist drove up under Nicholas' chin. Nicholas staggered, lost his balance, and went down on his rump in the mud beyond the firepit.

  Shock held everyone motionless the length of an indrawn breath. Then Nicholas, scrambling to his feet, started for Naylor in unleashed fury. Frevisse moved to come between them but Evan was faster. He threw himself against Nicholas, pinning his arms while shouting “Hold!" in a roar that stopped both Nicholas and the other outlaws, who had begun coming to his aid.

  “Now, listen," Evan said in the brief advantage of silence then, directing his words at Master Naylor but meaning them for everyone. “The choice is neither yours nor Nicholas'. The choice lies with the ladies. They surely want people to know they are well so no hunt will be set up for them. That could be dangerous for us and therefore for them, too. They also must know that we'll work something out for their safely returning to the priory. It can be done. We only need to think on it. But not now." He looked at Sister Emma. “You're willing to miss the christening?"

  “Oh, yes." Nicholas had clearly persuaded her of his penitence last night; she was definite. “The pardon is far more important than a christening. It's Nicholas' life in peril, you see."

  “The christening is to guard a soul," Master Naylor pointed out.

  Considering two sides of a problem at once was not among Sister Emma's talents. Her face puckered with the beginning of thought. Frevisse interposed, “Someone else can stand godmother to the child, but no one else can see to Nicholas' pardon."

  “And if Sister Emma is willing to stay, and so is Dame Frevisse," Evan quickly said, “and they're both willing for you to go–“ Nicholas, still glaring at Master Naylor, pulled against Evan's hold but Evan's grip did not slacken. “–then there are no grounds for your staying, not when you're needed elsewhere to reassure people of their safety."

  Master Naylor looked straightly back at him, as if nothing this side of the word of God would shift his opinion. “Sister Emma, you can't want to be left here like this," he said. Sister Emma looked from Evan to the steward to Nicholas, who - finally grasping what Evan was about – had relaxed in his hold and smiled at her. The faintest lift of the sad corners of his mouth and his eyes said he would understand and forgive if she failed him now.

  Sister Emma with final resolve and a wipe at her nose said, “I can't go. I really can't. Dame Frevisse can't be left here alone, and Nicholas needs her for his pardon. And you really should let my family and Domina Edith know we're safe."

  Master Naylor turned to Frevisse. “Dame Frevisse–"

  But Nicholas, shaking off Evan's loosened hold, said briskly, “That's settled then, so you'd best be on your way. Cullum, Will, Ned, see Naylor to his horse and the highway."

  Chapter Five

  There was nowhere comfortable to sit and almost nowhere dry. Sister Emma had made shift to sit on a log dragged near to the fire for her convenience. Still clutching her blanket around her shoulders she began eating one-handed, her bowl balanced so precariously on her knees that Frevisse expected it to tip and spill at any moment. It did not, but after a few moments of studied sipping Sister Emma gave a deep sigh and announced that it was
a pity she had no ale. Nicholas, just taking his own bowl from Evan, sketched her a gallant bow.

  “My pleasure, lady, to serve you. Let me bring you some," he said, and went away with his own full bowl and a nod of his head to Frevisse.

  Frevisse was too relieved to have Naylor safely away to want to push Nicholas now. She let him go and, preferring to stand rather than find a damp seat, set to eating her own stew before it cooled more than it already had. She fully meant to talk to Nicholas about his intent that she stay until it was settled, but warmth and food first, to face the day a little better.

  She ate quickly, then huddled her blanket up to her ears under her veil and around her shoulders and went to walk some warmth into her bones. If she kept under the edges of the trees, she could stay almost dry and keep the chill at bay.

  She was watched, she knew, but no one stopped her, and she did not try to leave the clearing, though she suspected there were other clearings close by and that Nicholas had probably gone to one of them. Let him come when he would; he would have to seek her out sooner or later and she found she was willing to wait. In fact, she found she needed to bite the inside of her lower lip to keep a smile from her face as she walked. All the encrustation of little rules from the nunnery was dropping away here in the forest. For just today she had no duties, no one to answer to, no one to heed what she did. Under the overcast she could not even tell the time of day for prayers, for her the best part of the great Rule she lived under. In place of them, she could at least have solemn thoughts on the trouble she was in; but she found instead that a child-simple tune and its words were running unquenchably through her head. “Rain before seven, done by eleven. Rain before seven, done by eleven. Rain before..." And a memory of dancing down a muddy road with her irrepressible parents one warm and rainy spring day in – France? Probably France. She had been very small and it had not mattered where they were. Her parents, holding her by either hand, had lifted her off her feet at every repetition of “seven" and “eleven", all three of them laughing at the rain and for pleasure of the road and traveling together.

  The memory was too clear; she realized she was humming aloud as she walked and that nearly her feet were starting the skip and run that went with the words.

  Startled, she clamped her mind down over both urges. A tendency for her thoughts to wander had been one of her weaknesses in her first nunnery days. She had used the psalms as discipline: Whenever she had caught her mind beginning its wandering she had turned it instead to any of the many psalms she had memorized, to shelter her from her own lack of concentration. Now, firmly, and seemingly at random, her mind went to Psalm 148, finding the Latin first – Laudate Dominum de coelis – but shifting without intention to the English of her uncle's Wyclif Bible. “Praise the Lord you beasts and useful beasts, praise him you blooming trees and you cedars. Praise him you storms and floods-“ And you drizzling days and damp, her mind irreverently interjected so that she nearly laughed out loud. She was happy. Simply, unreasonably, unsuitably, happy.

  “Dame Frevisse, I'm wet!" Sister Emma's complaint penetrated the dripping breadth of the clearing. “Can't you do something?"

  Jarred back to other people's realities, Frevisse sighed and crossed to the shelter over the fire.

  “I'm wet," Sister Emma repeated, deeply aggrieved. “And I can't seem to warm."

  “If you walk, you'll be warmer," Frevisse said.

  “I'll be wetter!" Sister Emma returned sharply. “I don't want to be wetter. I want to be dry. And warm. We simply can't stay here. You know we can't."

  “You wanted to help Nicholas. This is part of it."

  “I want to help him from indoors. We should have gone with Master Naylor."

  This was Sister Emma at her most tedious, and worse because there was no cure for it. Frevisse could neither give her her own way nor force on her the Rule of silence, one of the mercies of the nunnery. So she tried to woo her with, “But this is an adventure. Adventures always have to be at least a little uncomfortable or who would know you'd had one? Think what you'll be able to tell when we're back in St. Frideswide's. You've stayed among outlaws and sustained us with your prayers. That's more than even Dame Alys has done." Dame Alys was St. Frideswide's ferocious kitchener, a lady who daunted almost everyone who came in her reach. “And all to save a man in peril of his life and soul."

  Sister Emma stared up at her, wiping at her nose and shivering slightly, but flattered enough by so exalted a view of what she was doing. Firming her little mouth, she said, “I'll pray, for all of us."

  “And so will I," Frevisse said. But not near Sister Emma, she added to herself, as Sister Emma bent her head over her clasped hands, sniffing and murmuring.

  Frevisse meant to go back to their shelter to see if there was still a dry corner where she could sit. It was surely time for the morning's office of Tierce. But Evan called to her from another leafy lean-to near her own.

  “If it please you come here, my lady, you'll find this more dry than most."

  The rain was thickening; Frevisse's hesitation was hardly longer than the glance that told her that her own shelter was dripping freely all through its roof. She turned aside and ducked under Evan's.

  He was sitting at one side on the end of a blanket-covered pile of straw. He nodded her to the other end of the pile and went on touching the strings of the lute he held as she sank gratefully down. The straw was nearly fresh, the blanket clean, his shelter certainly drier than anywhere else Frevisse had been today.

  Evan nodded welcome without speaking, too busy tuning his lute, an instrument singularly sensitive to damp. He moved from tuning to formless playing, as if waiting for a tune to come to his fingers. It seemed part of the forest sounds of rain on leaves and hush of trees around them. Frevisse realized she had been hearing it behind her thoughts while she walked and while she talked with Sister Emma, but she could not have said when it began.

  “Do you know where Nicholas is?"

  “No, my lady."

  “Do you know when I’m to write the letter to my uncle?"

  “Ah," he said, and his fingers went still. “There is just a little problem with that."

  “What sort of problem?

  “I brought the vellum, ink, and pens, but Nicholas thought it was safer they be kept in his own hut. And that was a mistake, for last night the rain leaked in and--" He paused. “Do you know how to dry vellum?"

  Frevisse nearly laughed at his rueful face. She shook her head and said, “Sister Emma is not going to be amused at this further delay."

  Evan’s fingers went back to playing as he said with a nod at Sister Emma, “She’s not as happy with the carefree life of the forest as she was last night?

  “Last night was dry."

  Evan smiled. Like the rest of his uneven face, it was a crooked smile and difficult to read. “Is she ailing?"

  “Only complaining."

  “And you're not."

  “I've been wet before and have learned that I'll be dry again sometime and that until then there's no point in spending effort on complaining. Are you more peddler or outlaw?"

  Evan took the change of subject with hardly a pause of his fingers on the lute strings. “More peddler, I hope," he answered.

  “Have you robbed with them? Or only gathered the information that sets them on their way?"

  “Robbed?" Evan showed amusement at the word. “We don't do anything so base – and perilous – as that. Not for a long while past."

  “You just live merrily in the greenwood, poaching an occasional deer."

  “Alas, not quite so simply as that, either." He hesitated. “But those are the questions you're going to ask and want answers for before you write to your uncle, aren't they?"

  Frevisse nodded. They were indeed, and since Nicholas was not to hand, Evan's answers would do for a beginning.

  He had stopped playing. Now he looked down at one of his hands laid aside on his knee. A large hand, thickened across the knuckles, dark and rough
with years of raw weather and hard work. “I used to have some skill at the lute, but haven't the hands for it any more." He turned his head to look at Frevisse. “We're most of us like that here. Not comfortable at what we're doing, not able to go back to what we were."

  “You were a minstrel?"

  Evan grinned his sideways grin. “Not quite. But it's not me you want answers for. It's Nicholas."

  “You don't want pardon, too?"

  “Oh, very much. But Nicholas is the pivot point. If he receives pardon, we do, too."

  “So what do you do, if you're not robbers anymore?"

  “We gather gifts."

  Frevisse took a moment to absorb that idea, then asked, “From whom? For what?"

  “From those well able to afford them. They pay us and we see to it that no one else takes anything from them that they don't want to give. They pay us and we protect them. This is one of the safest parts of the realm."

  “You require folk to pay you not to rob them? I think the definition of `rob' is strained a little there."

  “For what they pay us - and it's only modest sums from each, well within what they can afford - we see to it that neither we nor anyone else offends their property or person."

  “No robbers but yourselves within your territory. Very apt. How far does Nicholas's `influence' spread?"

  Evan shrugged, and slid away from the question. “Far enough."

  “And your part is to go about as a seeming-peddler..."

  “Indeed I am a peddler. And good at it."

  “I remember. What use old Ela at the priory may have for green ribbons I cannot imagine, but you sold them to her."

  “Sold her one, gave her the other. She'll never wear them, I doubt, but they'll glad her heart just because she has them."

  “And that matters to you?" Frevisse said, surprised.

  Evan touched his lutestrings in a tuneless, ragged run of notes. “There's little enough gladness in the world. I'll not begrudge it to anyone, and assuredly not so small a corner of it."

  “But still, while going about your peddler's ways, you spy and judge who would be likely to pay for Nicholas's 'protection', yes?"