The Novice’s Tale (5 page)

Chaucer rose, gathering up his hood and beginning to fold it into a coxcomb hat, using the long liripipe to bind it in place. “Ah then, I suppose Lady Moleyns will have to go on keeping the boy.”

“Hm?” said Lady Ermentrude. “Oh, yes, I suppose so.”

“And I, to judge by the slant of sunlight through this window had best take my leave. I’ve some few miles to go yet today.” He turned to Domina Edith. “Thank you for your hospitality, as always good and gracious.”

Domina Edith inclined her head to him and held out her hand for him to kiss. “You are always welcome, whenever you choose to come. Pray, make it often.”

“As often as I may.”

His kiss was warmer than the one he next dealt to Lady Ermentrude, though his leave-taking was as graceful. Her reply was formal but disinterested. Frevisse moved to the door to accompany him to the yard; at his gesture she preceded him down the stairs, until in the lower corridor they could walk side by side, not speaking, their silence companionable. In the eight years she had grown to womanhood in his household, they had become friends enough to simply enjoy each other’s company without words; in the years since she had entered St. Frideswide’s, their worlds had grown so far apart there was now little to be said between them, but the friendship held.

Not until they were nearly to the outer door into the yard, in hearing of Lady Ermentrude’s people still unpacking, did Chaucer say, “My deepest sympathies on your current quest. Will you be able to survive her?”

Frevisse’s smile was wry. “I think between you and Domina Edith, she’s impressed enough to be a little cautious. Now that she’s quite perfectly aware that I’m closely connected to your wealth and royal relations, she may even want to make a friend of me.”

“My deeper sympathies for doing you such a disservice. You know she’d treat me badly if matters were only slightly different.”

“If things were slightly different she’d never speak to you at all except to give you orders. Your father was a vintner’s son who happened to write stories and your mother’s sister had no more decency than to be a royal duke’s mistress. I would despair of anyone ever making a respectable figure from that.”

“The disgrace sits deep within my soul,” Chaucer said cheerfully. “All those impressive half-royal relations of mine but not a single drop of noble blood to be found in my own veins. It’s a shock to know that all this wealth and power I’m supposed to have comes from naught but my own wits and skill. Regrettable, I’m sure.”

Frevisse tempered her urge to laugh into a wider smile. Chaucer smiled back at her and asked with quiet seriousness, “You’re still contented here?”

“Most of the time. Would it be simplest to say that I’m content with being content?”‘

“If it’s true, it’s more than most people manage with their lives.”

“It’s true,” said Frevisse simply.

They had reached the door. Chaucer took her hand in his. “We’ve come, one way and another, by the turning of Fortune’s wheel and our own wills, to the places we want to be.” He kissed her cheek. “God’s blessing on you, my dear.”

“And on you, too, Uncle. Keep safe and come again when you may.”

“Be assured.”

From the doorway Frevisse watched him cross the yard to where his own escort was waiting, collected neatly out of the disorder of Lady Ermentrude’s people. Not until he had swung into his saddle and was riding out the gateway did she turn away, aware belatedly of someone bearing down on her from behind and surprised past words to find it was Lady Ermentrude, in full flow of veils and gown, striding toward her like a lord set on battle.

Frevisse had not anticipated facing the full rigors of her attention so soon. She sank quickly in a curtsey, bracing herself for whatever was coming. But Lady Ermentrude waved a dismissive hand at her and said briskly, “My plans have changed. I’m riding on to my great-niece Lady Isobel’s today. It’s hardly a three-hour ride. I’ll be there before full dark if I leave now.”

“But—” A variety of protests went through Frevisse’s mind. She chose the simplest of them and said, “Your people are half unpacked by now and settling in. Surely—”

Lady Ermentrude was already going out the door, forcing Frevisse to follow her. “And they can go on unpacking. I want haste, not a clutter of idiots slowing me down. A few men-at-arms, two of my women, that will do. I expect to be back tomorrow. You there!” She beckoned demandingly at a groom nearby.

Frevisse, with the thought that Lady Ermentrude’s going would leave her free to set straight certain matters concerning the guest halls and dogs and monkeys, contented herself with murmuring, “As you think best, my lady. We’ll await your return.”

“And have all in readiness, I’m sure,” Lady Ermentrude agreed sharply. The groom was bowing in front of her now, and she told him peremptorily, “I want my horse saddled. Now. At once. Go on.” Smothering a look of bewilderment, the man ran off. “Sheep-face,” Lady Ermentrude snapped, and began shouting, “Maryon! Bess! Bertram!”

The courtyard shifted from disorder to chaos, but more quickly than Frevisse had thought possible, Lady Ermentrude was mounted and riding out the gateway with a small cluster of her people behind her.

In the intense gap of quiet left by her going, Frevisse drew a deep breath and turned away to the tasks next to hand.

Chapter
3

The next day was as fair as the days before had been, mild with September warmth and quiet in its familiar pattern of prayers at dawn, then breakfast and Mass, and afterward the varied, repetitious business that was the form and shelter of everyday security for Thomasine.

But she had stayed in the church after the long midnight prayers of Matins and Lauds, kneeling alone at St. Frideswide’s altar in the small fall of lamplight, meaning only to give thanks for yesterday’s gift of courage against Lady Ermentrude and then return to bed. Then she had lost herself in the pleasure of repetition, murmuring Aves and Paters and simple expressions of praise over and over until all knowledge of Self melted away, and suddenly there was the sharp ring of the bell, startling her, because it meant the whole night had fled. She went as quickly as stiff knees and sticky mind allowed to the church’s cloister door, there to join the nuns in procession to their places in the choir to greet the sunrise with the prayers of Prime.

Now, as the warm day wore away, she was finding her temper uneven and her frequent yawns a distracting nuisance. There seemed to be constant errands to be run, few chances of just sitting at a table in the kitchen pretending to peel apples, and every time she went out into the cloister the sound of her great-aunt’s people lofted over the wall. Heavy male laughter and the higher pitch of chattering women’s voices had no place in St. Frideswide’s cloister. They bruised the quiet and made Thomasine wish for a way to bundle them into silence.

As she hurried along the cloister walk to fetch ink for Dame Perpetua, the little bell by the door to the courtyard jangled at her, saying someone wanted in. Thomasine halted, exasperated, and looked around with impatient anger for a servant to signal to the door—then caught herself and offered a swift prayer of penitence. Anger was one of the seven Deadly Sins, and its appearance marked a severe departure from the holiness she was so desperate to attain.

The bell rang again, there was no servant in sight, and misery replaced her anger. Why were patience and courage always called for when there was the least supply of them available? She went to the door and opened the shutter that closed the small window at eye level. Peering through its bars, she saw no one, and the ends of her temper unraveled a little further. Then the curly top of a head bounced barely into view, and a child’s voice cried, “Oh, please! Open, please open! I need help!”

The cry was piteous and Thomasine’s annoyance dissolved into her quick sympathy. She unlatched and opened -the door.

The little girl standing there wore a less-than-clean dress in Lady Ermentrude’s livery of brown and cream. She was near to tears. “Please, m’lady, is Dame Claire within? I must’s-speak to her!”

Dame Claire was the priory’s infirmarian, tending not only to the nunnery’s sick but anyone who came there asking help. Thomasine tilted her head inquiringly, asking to be told more without breaking the silence that properly held her.

“Please, it’s little Jacques!” the child cried. Her tears had begun to spill now that there was someone to hear her. “He’s‘s-sick like to die, and oh, m’lady, you don’t know, it’s my life if something happens to him! Dame Frevisse said to ask for Dame Claire.”

Thomasine had had no idea there was a baby traveling with Lady Ermentrude. Or perhaps her great-aunt had acquired a dwarf since she was last here. Poor unhappy thing, to be sick in a strange place. Her sympathy for anyone hurting was as swift as her urge to pray for them, and she signed the child to follow her.

Dame Claire was, as nearly always, in her small workroom-storeroom off the infirmary, counting sheets this morning. She looked up as Thomasine tapped on the door frame, began to smile at seeing her, then saw the child’s tearful face beside her and came quickly. Dame Claire was small and neatly made, precise in all her movements, with a quiet dignity that belied her scant inches, as deeply quiet in her ways as her voice was when she asked, bending down to the child, “What is it, lamb?”

“It’s little Jacques,” the girl sobbed. Met with such open kindness, she felt free to cry as fiercely as her fear demanded. “I fell asleep and he fooled his way into a box of my lady’s sweetmeats and overate them and now he’s sick and he’s going to die and if he does, I will too, because my lady will kill me!”

“We have very good things for bellyaches,” Dame Claire said soothingly. “I doubt he’ll die. Come tell me about him.”

She went to her worktable below the shelves of stored herbs and compounds and salves. The girl followed her, her sobs already fading as she looked around at the various bowls and pestles, the grinding slabs, baskets, and boxes that were outward signs of a high and esoteric knowledge that had always fascinated Thomasine, too, whenever she was permitted to help Dame Claire here.

Now she yearned to display some of her own little learning to the child, but instead remembered the rule about unnecessary conversation and held her peace.

“Tell me Jacques’s size. How big is he? How old?”

The child, already calmer and beginning to hope, answered Dame Claire a little doubtfully. “A year?” She held up her hands perhaps a foot-and-a-half apart. “This big. I can carry him, he’s not very heavy. But you have to be careful because he scratches. And bites. His tail is as long as he is.”

Dame Claire’s face froze in astonishment, but horrified realization broke on Thomasine. Before she could stop herself, she cried out, “It’s Lady Ermentrude’s monkey that’s sick! Oh, I wouldn’t have brought her if I’d known it was only that horrible monkey!”

Dame Claire swallowed her shock, then looked at Thomasine reprovingly. “Suffering is suffering and if I can ease it I will.” Behind the reproof, amusement sparkled in her eyes, and Thomasine stifled further apologies. Claire turned back to the child and said gravely, “You’ve told me what I needed to know. Now here, you have this while I mix my powders and everything will be all right.”

She gave the child a horehound drop to quiet her and turned to her shelves of herbs. “Angelica, perhaps,” she murmured. “Or betony. Tansy surely.” Then to the child, “Do you know when the monkey was born? It helps to make a cure if you know your patient’s astrological sign at birth.”

Eyes wide at such a notion, the child shook her head dumbly.

Dame Claire touched and crumbled into a bowl dried leaves from several hanging bunches, ground them to a mixed powder, and poured the mixture carefully into a little cloth bag. Tying it shut with a triple strand of tough grass, she said, “There now. That will be remedy for even a monkey’s well-earned bellyache.” She gave it to the girl. “It has to be mixed with wine. Does the monkey drink wine?”

“Oh, yes, my lady. Lady Ermentrude likes to make him drunk. He’s very funny then.”

“I daresay,” Dame Claire said. “Then mix this powder with half a small cup of wine and give it to him to drink.”