The Hunter’s Tale Read online

  Therefore, tomorrow Hugh would ride out with some of the hounds to find where best to hunt a roedeer stag in a day or two; and though neither he nor Tom had said it, they both knew the fact that the hunt would be the first one since Sir Ralph’s death made it all the sweeter.

  But this afternoon Hugh had spent helping Degory clean out the kennel and kennel yard and spread clean straw, and he was satisfyingly tired and hardly thinking of anything at all as he bent over the washbasin set on the bench outside the hall door to scrub his face and hands before going in to supper. The late afternoon sun was warm on his back through his shirt, and when he dried his face and hands, the linen towel smelled of the rosemary bush over which it must have been draped after laundering. Inside the hall there was the thud of tabletops going onto trestles as the servants set up for supper and his stomach growled with timely hunger; but the soft thud of a horse’s hoofs behind him turned him around to see Gib of the stable leading a saddled and bridled gray horse toward him across the yard.

  Frowning with puzzlement rather than displeasure, Hugh said, “That’s Master Selenger’s horse, isn’t it?” Knowing it was.

  ‘Aye,“ Gib answered. ”The man is back again. I make that three days running he’s been here.“

  ‘It is,“ Hugh agreed.

  Sir William, a few days after his promised visit to see what help or comfort he might give Lady Anneys, had sent Master Selenger to ask if Tom needed help with anything and promise that he had only to ask if he did. Tom had thanked Master Selenger but said, “It’s what I’ve been doing for years here. The only thing that’s changed is that it’s all easier done without Father to tell me what’s wrong with everything I do.”

  Master Selenger had laughed at that, said he was likewise charged with asking after Lady Anneys, and had ended by sitting with her in her garden, talking for a somewhat while. When he came back yesterday, he had brought Elyn with him and not seen Tom at all but kept company with Lady Anneys, Elyn, Lucy, and Ursula in the garden for much of the afternoon.

  And here he was back again. Without Elyn. And not to see Tom, who had gone past the kennel two hours ago on his way to the east field and not yet come back.

  Hugh, frowning, turned back toward the hall and immediately smoothed the frown away to greet Master Selenger coming out.

  ‘Hugh,“ Master Selenger returned cheerfully. ”Good day. I hear there’s to be a hunt.“

  ‘We mean so,“ Hugh said. ”Would you and Sir William be minded to join us for it when the time comes, do you think?“

  ‘Surely,“ Master Selenger answered and they talked hounds a little before he made his farewell, thanked Gib, and gave him a small coin for waiting with his horse.

  Watching him ride away, Gib gave the coin a toss and said, “He’s a gentleman, is that one.”

  Hugh agreed to that, but while Gib tucked the coin into his belt pouch and headed back for the stable, he stood watching Master Selenger out of sight. A man much about Lady Anneys’ own age. Well-featured, well-kept, pleasant-mannered.

  All things Sir Ralph had not been or bothered to be.

  Hugh went in search of his mother and found her in her garden, alone, standing at the gate toward the cart-track, looking outward across the field where the last of the hay, dried and carefully gathered into haycocks, was waiting to be stacked or else carted away to byres and the stable. In the westering sunlight they looked like heaps of gold, and in their way they were—food through the winter for horses and cattle. Lady Anneys turned as Hugh neared her and said, smiling, “I was thinking I might get a rosebush next year. When I was a girl, a neighbor had one in her garden. The flowers were more red than anything I’ve ever seen and smelled so beautifully. I’ve always wanted one of my own.”

  Hugh had not known that. He had never heard her want anything at all, he realized; and wondered, with a twitch of what felt like guilt for never having wondered it before, what else she had wanted and never had. Her silence about anything she felt or wanted had been a way of hiding from Sir Ralph, he suddenly thought. They had all hidden from him in whatever ways they could. Tom had used his anger, Miles his mockery, Hugh the talk of hounds and hunting. Lady Anneys had had her silence.

  But in keeping Sir Ralph shut out, they had kept shut away from each other, too. For safety’s sake you left as few gaps in your wall as possible. Even banded together the way he had been with Miles and Tom against Sir Ralph, Hugh knew how much he had never said. And Lady Anneys had had no one at all. No friends because around Sir Ralph friends had been impossible to have. Not her children. She could give them her love and what comfort there was in that but not her protection and assuredly not her thoughts.

  But none of that was anything he could say to her and he said instead, “I’ll find you a rosebush, come the spring. I’ll ride to Northampton, Oxford, or even London to do it, if I have to.”

  Lady Anneys smiled at him and said, “That would be lovely.” But not as if she believed it would truly happen. Which goaded Hugh to ask, a little more abruptly than he might have, “Where are Lucy and Ursula?” Had she been here alone with Master Selenger?

  ‘I sent them in with my sewing when Master Selenger left. I was ready to be alone awhile.“

  Hugh stepped back, ready to leave her, but she held out her hand and said, “But I’d welcome your company. You’re not a chattering young girl.”

  Hugh returned to her side. She tucked her hand into the crook of his arm and they stood together in companionable silence, Hugh looking out at the hayfield, Lady Anneys toying with the purple flowers of whatever it was growing tall beside the gate, until in what he thought might be a safe while, Hugh asked easily, as if merely making talk, “Was Master Selenger good company this afternoon?”

  ‘Very good,“ Lady Anneys said.

  Hugh waited but she said nothing more and in another while he said, “I wish nothing would change from how it is now.”

  Lady Anneys let that lie for a few moments before she said, “That would be good. But Tom will likely marry soon.”

  ‘Philippa?“ Hugh asked, despite he knew the answer.

  Lady Anneys a little nodded. “And Miles will go away to his manor before then. It’s time and past for him to take up his own life.”

  ‘This is his life,“ Hugh said and could not keep an edge from his voice. ”Here. With us.“

  Lady Anneys slightly shook her head against that. “Miles hasn’t had a life here. He’s had Hell. He needs to be free of here. He needs the chance to heal as best he can from everything Sir Ralph did to ruin him.”

  ‘Sir Ralph is gone,“ Hugh said stubbornly.

  ‘In body,“ Lady Anneys answered.

  And though his soul was surely gone to Hell, he lingered in other ways, Hugh bitterly, silently admitted.

  ‘And you,“ his mother went on. ”You’re free to go, too, if you want.“

  ‘There’s nowhere else I want to go.“ Why should there be, when everything he wanted was here? ”You, too,“ he said. ”You’re free, too. To stay or go.“

  ‘I’ll likely go,“ she said. She must have felt him tense under her hand because she squeezed his arm and added mildly, ”Once Tom is married, Philippa should be mistress here without a mother-in-law at her back, watching her every move. I have my dower lands to go to and I will.“ Her smile deepened. ”I can find you a wife and husbands for Lucy and Ursula from there as well as from here, probably. Unless you want to find your own?“

  Hugh made a sound that admitted to nothing.

  Lady Anneys laughed at him, squeezed his arm again, and let him go. “There’s no hurry, though. And after all, Ursula may choose the nunnery.”

  ‘Do you think she will?“

  ‘I don’t know.“

  Hugh tried to think of Ursula grown up and shut away into a nunnery but couldn’t. Not that she’d be any more lost to them in the nunnery than married, he supposed. And a nunnery might be easier to visit than a brother-in-law, he half-jestingly supposed to himself, ready to let go of thought
about what might come and be simply at peace in the summer-warm quiet, waiting to be called to supper.

  But quietly, hardly louder than the bees humming in the beebalm in the garden bed behind her, Lady Anneys said, “I think, when you return Ursula to St. Frideswide’s, I’ll go with her and stay, too, for a time.”

  Startled, Hugh demanded, “Why?” More roughly than he might have if she had not taken him so much by surprise.

  For a long moment she did not answer; then said only, still quietly, “It would be best, I think,” in a way that somehow stopped him asking more.

  Chapter 5

  Although dawn’s cobweb-gray shadows were barely gone from the cloister walk, the day was already warm and promised to be warmer and Frevisse made no more haste than the other nuns as they left the cool inside of the church after Mass to go the short way along the roofed walk to their morning chapter meeting.

  St. Frideswide’s was neither a large nor wealthy nunnery. It maintained itself but barely more and the room used in the mornings for the daily chapter meeting, where a chapter of St. Benedict’s Rule was read and matters of business and discipline were discussed, was a plain place, like nearly everywhere in the nunnery, with plastered but unpainted walls, a chair for Domina Elisabeth, stools for her nuns, a small wooden worktable, and nothing more. In wet or cold weather it served for the nuns’ evening hour of recreation before Compline’s prayers and bed, and in winter it was their warming room, having the nunnery’s only fireplace save for those in the kitchen and the prioress’ parlor.

  Presently, though, the hour of recreation was a long summer’s day away and there was most definitely no need for warming. Instead, the door stood open and someone had already lowered the shutter from the window, letting in the soft-scented morning air and a long-slanted shaft of richly golden light from the newly risen sun. Nuns whose joint stools were in its way shifted aside and turned their backs to it with a scrape of wooden legs on stone, except Sister Thomasine went to stand directly in its brightness, her eyes shut, her face held up to the light. Sister Thomasine had always lived her nun’s life more intently than most did. Given her choice, she would have been in the church praying on her knees at the altar more hours of the day and night than not. There was even sometimes whispered hope among some of the nuns that she might prove to be a saint, and Frevisse—who only slowly over the years had come to accept her as other than merely annoying—granted to herself that for Sister Thomasine the touch of the sunlight was probably like the touch of God’s hand in blessing on her.

  But then it was God’s blessing, Frevisse thought. All of life was God’s blessing, forget it though mankind might and ill-use it as mankind surely did. Sister Thomasine’s skill—or gift—was that she did not forget but lived her life in certainty of the blessing.

  It made her very hard to endure sometimes.

  ‘Sister Thomasine, sit, please,“ Domina Elisabeth said. Already seated herself in the tall-backed chair that had served all of St. Frideswide’s prioresses through the hundred years since the priory was founded, she did not wait to be obeyed but leaned forward to say something to Dame Claire, the priory’s infirmarian, about an ache she had in her back. Sister Thomasine, with the same quietness she had given to the sunlight, sat down on the remaining stool, clasped her hands on her lap, and bowed her head to pray through the wait for Father Henry to put off his vestments and join them. Around her, the other nuns went on in steady talk. The rule of silence—that there be only necessary words within the cloister save for each evening’s recreation—had slackened in the years since Frevisse had entered St. Frideswide’s. She missed the quiet it had enforced but saw no sign that anyone else did. Dame Emma was explaining to Sister Margrett the value of cutting the kitchen garden’s green onions fine when for a salad while Sister Amicia tried to convince Dame Juliana there was no need to weed any herb bed today and Dame Perpetua and Sister Johane discussed some copying work they meant to begin.

  Content to keep her own silence, Frevisse followed Sister Thomasine into prayer for the little while until Father Henry hurried in, rumpled and flushed with heat and hurry, his fair hair in unruly curls around his tonsure. In his time as the priory’s priest he had grown from young manhood into middle age and a certain stoutness of girth that came with the aging of a burly body rather than from sloth or self-indulgence. He never slacked his priestly duties to the souls in his keeping but he was not a deep-minded man; Frevisse had never found any spiritual challenge in him, only the challenge of putting up with the unfailingly simple goodness he brought to everything he did, until finally experience had taught her how deeply difficult “simple” goodness could be.

  She rose to her feet with the other nuns and bowed her head willingly to receive his blessing for the day and found herself smiling to remember how she had struggled against that lesson. Humility, she too well knew, was a virtue to which she was coming only very slowly. Her smile, kept to herself by bowed head and the fall of her veil to either side of her face, went wry as she considered how much easier everything would have been if she could have started out wise and been done with it, instead of having to learn by effort and errors how far she still had to grow.

  He finished the blessing.

  Domina Elisabeth said, “Dominus vobiscum.” The Lord be with you.

  They answered, “Et cum spiritu tuo.” And with your spirit.

  They sat again, the opening prayer was made, and Father Henry read the day’s chapter from St. Benedict’s Rule, first in Latin, then in English, followed it with a short homily easily listened to—or not, in Frevisse’s case, despite her best intent. Then he blessed them and left and from there the chapter meeting went its usual way, with such complaints as any nun deemed necessary and the officers’ reports and confession of faults and giving of warnings or penance as Domina Elisabeth saw fit. Sister Amicia, presently Cellarer and therefore bound to worry over food, said someone had eaten so carelessly at dinner yesterday that they had wastefully left bread crumbs on the refectory floor. Domina Elisabeth gave warning that no one should eat so carelessly again. Sister Thomasine as Sacrist murmured that the silver polish was running low; Domina Elisabeth gave leave for Dame Claire to make more. Sister Margrett confessed to nodding to sleep during Lauds last night; Domina Elisabeth bade her say twenty-five mea culpas on her knees in front of the altar as soon as chapter was done.

  When there seemed no other business to report or deal with, Domina Elisabeth looked around at them all and asked, “What of Lady Anneys and Ursula then? They’ve been with us a week and, so far as I know, have given no trouble. Is that so?”

  Everyone looked at everyone else and there was a general shaking of heads that, no, neither Ursula nor her mother had been any trouble. “In truth,” Dame Perpetua said, “Lady Anneys has eased my work. She gives Ursula some of her lessons and has helped with the mending.” She frowned a little. “Although Ursula’s sewing has not improved.”

  ‘She keeps to herself,“ Dame Emma said. ”Lady Anneys, I mean. She comes to the Offices, of course—all but Matins and Lauds and Compline, of course, and that’s understandable—and she brings Ursula with her, which is good, it spares one of the servants the task. But she doesn’t talk. I’ve tried with her more than once but she ’saves her breath to cool her fingers,‘ as the saying goes. I don’t think I’ve had more than ten words with her at a time…“

  And if anyone could get away from Dame Emma with less than ten words, they had accomplished something indeed, Frevisse thought.

  Domina Elisabeth raised a hand, stopping Dame Emma’s present outpouring, and smiled on them all. “I shall take it, then, that all is well there. There’s nothing else? Then it’s time to tell you that because today is St. Swithin’s holy day and because we well deserve it, too, we will have holiday this afternoon. Not merely holiday from duties either. I’ve provided for something altogether different for us.”

  Sister Margrett forgot herself so far as to clap her hands and exclaim, “Oh! What, my lady?�
� with such delight that rather than rebuke her excess, Domina Elisabeth smiled and said, “You’ll see when the time comes,” but that was all she would say.

  Morning tasks were not so well attended to as they might have been and at each Office of prayer—Tierce, Sext, Nones—only Domina Elisabeth’s sternest looks stopped the whispers running among Dame Emma, Sister Amicia, and Sister Margrett before the Office could begin, and when finally at their midday dinner’s end Domina Elisabeth bade them gather in the cloister walk, there was an unseemly hurry of scraping benches and fluster of skirts. Dame Emma’s stiffening joints kept her behind the younger nuns’ rush out the refectory door, but even among the older nuns who chose to put on a front of more dignity, no one lingered. Most days in the nunnery were much like other days. The most constant change was in the Offices themselves as their prayers circled through the seasons of the Church—Whitsuntide just past, then the summer and autumn holy days, on to Advent and Christmastide, Lent and Lady Day and Easter, and around to Whitsun again. The promise of something other than the ordinary was welcomed by nearly everyone, save maybe Sister Thomasine, who had to be almost shooed ahead by Sister Johane to have her out the door quickly enough.