The other men nodded, agreeing. “Aye, that’s true.”
“Makes you wonder,” the first one said.
It made Frevisse more than wonder. Master Naylor had sent his family away almost a month ago, and he had been ready to leave before ever he came into chapter this morning.
He had known what was going to come of his confronting and defying Domina Alys and he had made ready for it.
He had more than made ready for it. He had caused it.
Thinking of what he had said and how he had said it, she was sure of that. Which left her with the question of why.
“Who do you think will be taking his place, my lady?” the third man made bold to ask.
“I don’t know.” Just now it was enough that Master Naylor was gone beyond her reach and she had put herself in peril of Domina Alys’ wrath to no gain at all. “There’s been no time to think on it,” she said vaguely, then gathered her mind back to what was to hand, raised her voice, and said, “But for this morning anyway, you all must know what needs doing and you’d best be doing it, whether Master Naylor is here or not.”
It was more order than hint. The three men backed off from her with hasty bows, the few others who still lingered within hearing suddenly seemed to remember where else they should be, and Frevisse, to follow her own advice, turned back to the guest halls and her morning’s duties.
Chapter 7
The morning went on with an outward calm that did not match the disquiet of Frevisse’s thoughts. Near time for Sext, as she passed along the east side of the cloister walk with a book Dame Perpetua had asked her to fetch from the book chest in the storeroom above the sacristy, she glimpsed Benet following Margrete along the cloister’s other side, toward the stairs to Lady Eleanor’s chamber. She could not clearly see his face, but he walked more like someone being led where he did not want to go than like a hopeful lover.
She wondered what he thought of the choices being made for him and waited until he and Margrete were gone before she went on around to the small room that Dame Perpetua used as her schoolroom and was not surprised to be met at the door by Lady Adela’s bright face looking up at her eagerly and not, Frevisse suspected, because of the book she carried.
As the priory’s precentress as well as sacristan, Dame Perpetua was charged with tutoring their novices, when they had any, and any children boarded with them, which presently was only one, little Lady Adela, Lord Warenne’s daughter. She had been in St. Frideswide’s four years now, was ten years old-or was she eleven?-and aside from reasonably regular payments toward her keep, there was no sign her father had thought about her at all since sending her there. He had sons and another daughter, and so little Lady Adela, perhaps unmarriageable because of a malformed hip, was not a vital matter to him. There was an occasional murmured hope by Dame Perpetua and others that he would decide she should become a nun, but Frevisse had never seen any great turn toward devotion in Lady Adela despite her years in St. Frideswide’s. Not that that would matter- except to Lady Adela-if her father decided on nunhood for her, but assuredly just now a prayerful life was the farthest thing from the child’s mind as she asked eagerly, leaning out the door to look along the walk the way Benet had gone, “Is that who carried off Mistress Joice? Is that him?”
“Is that he?” Frevisse corrected without thought.
Lady Adela did not care. “It was, wasn’t it?” she insisted.
“It was,” Frevisse agreed.
“Lady Adela,” Dame Perpetua said from behind her, “you were told to stay in here. The young man is no concern of yours. Of ours.”
“I’m in,” Lady Adela protested. “Most of me.”
Most of her except her head and shoulders and almost down to her waist as she craned out the doorway, still looking along the empty walk in the clear hope of another glimpse of Benet.
“Lady Adela,” Dame Perpetua repeated.
“He’s gone,” Frevisse said firmly.
Lady Adela sighed and regretfully straightened back into the room.
Frevisse followed her in. Dame Perpetua was beginning to find it difficult to keep the child sufficiently occupied. Lady Adela’s reading and conversation in both English and French were as good as almost anyone in St. Frideswide’s. Dame Perpetua had reached the end of what she could teach her of mathematics. Dame Claire’s lessons on herbs and healing were only occasional. She could not be kept at needlework or spinning all day, every day, or be left out to play in the garden. Dame Perpetua had turned to Latin.
She had already given the child the rudiments of it, sufficient for her to find her way through the breviary and prayers. Now she had decided to go further and asked Frevisse to bring her the priory’s one collection of Latin works, a volume of extracts from the most profound of the church fathers. Frevisse had sometimes labored at that particular book over the years and she felt a momentary sympathy for Lady Adela as she laid the fat, dull-bound book on the table in front of her. Then, seeing the set look of loathing on Lady Adela’s face as she looked at the book, she thought that possibly her sympathy should go to Dame Perpetua because the girl’s narrow-eyed look did not bode well for her dealings with St. Augustine and the other church fathers, or anyone who tried to force them on her. Lady Adela was a sweetly featured, rose-and-cream-fair child who rarely gave overt trouble. She was mostly biddable but only, Frevisse had discovered in the past, to a point, and it seemed that Dame Perpetua might have reached that point.
Happily oblivious, Dame Perpetua directed, “Say thank you to Dame Frevisse.”
“Thank you, Dame Frevisse,” Lady Adela obligingly echoed but her eyes strayed to the door, betraying what interested her more as she said wistfully, “I wouldn’t mind being carried off by him.”
“Yes, you would,” Dame Perpetua corrected her.
Frevisse left them to it.
During Sext she nearly managed to escape the troubled turning of her thoughts, losing herself in the lovely complexity of the prayers and psalms that even Domina Alys seemed almost concentrating on for once; but as they neared the end there was a wild shout of men’s voices from above and then the thunderous crash of stone falling inside the tower and shattering as it hit bottom close behind the boarded doorway.
With screams and exclaims, all of the nuns except Sister Thomasine sprang to their feet. Sister Emma began to sob and Domina Alys slammed her prayer book shut. “That’s it for them! I’m not paying them to smash my stone to bits. Sit down!” she directed as she lunged out of her own choir stall and toward the boarded doorway. With both fists she pounded on its reverberating wood and yelled upward, “You come down and meet me in the orchard, Master Porter, and I mean now! Don’t think you’ll hide by perching up there on your undone, worthless, miserable tower like some broody-minded bird! You come down now! To the orchard!”
Without so much as a glance back at her nuns, she stormed down the church toward the shortest way around into the orchard. Overhead men’s shouting still mixed with curses but without the desperate yelling there would have been if anyone had been hurt. In the choir, no one had sat down at her command. Sister Emma’s sobbing was straggling away to silence, but Sister Amicia and Sister Cecely were tentatively beginning to giggle.
Sister Thomasine, unmoving until then, stood up and in her clear, light voice took up the office where it had been broken off. “Domine, exaudi orationem meam.” Lord, hear my prayer.
She should have been answered then by the nuns across the choir from her with the next line of the prayer. Instead Sister Emma hiccuped on a final sob and began to giggle, too.