The Widow's Tale (Sister Frevisse Medieval Mysteries Book 14) by Margaret Frazer Page B
Authors: Margaret Frazer
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blindfold and untie her. Cristiana had no more than a useless sight of a hedgerow along a dusty road before the curtain was closed again. With no hope of anywhere to run, she sat with her shaking hands clenched together in her lap until the litter stopped again and she was pulled out and taken into the nunnery’s guesthall.
After that she had had to endure Milisent only a little longer. To be unbound and ungagged and rid of Milisent and Laurence was such relief that only when she had been standing in the church, hearing her supposed shame exposed to the nuns and her punishment detailed, had she begun to understand how completely she was still trapped, still helpless.
She had not dared, while Laurence and Milisent held her, to be anything more than afraid, but as these days and nights of enforced silence and false penance went unendingly on, and with the pain of the hours in front of the altar on her face or knees, her understanding grew and her hopelessness deepened into a dark despair. And with the despair, fed by her grief for Edward and her fear for Mary and Jane, came hatred.
Her single hope was that somehow, somehow, Gerveys would find her. That he would find out where she was and come for her.
Only please, by all of Heaven’s mercy, let him come soon.
Chapter 4
W ith fair weather and hope for a fine harvest, the easy days of middle summer passed inside St. Frideswide’s walls in their familiar way, bound around and carried onward by the ever changing, constant pattern of the daily Offices. So many of the Offices’ prayers were the same from day to day, but through each week the psalms were spread through the Offices so that all one hundred and fifty were said between one Sunday and the next while other prayers came and went with times of the year and saints’ days. To Frevisse it was an unending garland, its strands woven beautifully around each other. She had joined the weaving when she became a nun. Some nuns who had been part of the weaving then were dead now but others were become nuns in their place, just as someday she would be dead and there would others here instead, the weaving of praise and hope and love going always on, as it had gone on now for a thousand years already and would go on until the World’s end came, God willing.
Still, her own handful of years—well, several handfuls— were enough with which to deal for now. This year especially, that was passing so fair among the priory’s fields, was fraught with trouble elsewhere. As hosteler she heard more than she might have—and certainly more than she wished—about how the world was going. Worst of the troubles was that the war in France looked likely to break out again. Toward the end of March an English raiding party out of Normandy had seized and plundered a border town in Brittany, directly against the truce there had been since the king’s marriage a few years ago. Frevisse gathered from stray bits of talk that both the duke of Brittany and his ally the king of France had first requested and then demanded a withdrawl of the English troops and restitution for stolen goods. That seemed a fair enough demand to Frevisse, but lately in the guesthall she had heard a Coventry merchant complain to another traveler, “That fool Dorset. . . No, he’s been made duke of Somerset, hasn’t he? He’s still a fool, either way . . . He’s refused to give the French anything except rude answers. Have you heard the French have seized some place of ours to show they mean business?”
“Pont de l’Arche, isn’t it?” the other man asked. “Now we’ll have to trade Fougeres to have it back.”
“What I want to know is how they took the place so easily,” the merchant had grumbled. “As soon as the truce was broken, every border town of ours should have been on double guard, and the more on guard because Somerset has refused every French offer toward peace.”
“I’ve heard Suffolk is supposedly gone to Normandy to deal with the whole
After that she had had to endure Milisent only a little longer. To be unbound and ungagged and rid of Milisent and Laurence was such relief that only when she had been standing in the church, hearing her supposed shame exposed to the nuns and her punishment detailed, had she begun to understand how completely she was still trapped, still helpless.
She had not dared, while Laurence and Milisent held her, to be anything more than afraid, but as these days and nights of enforced silence and false penance went unendingly on, and with the pain of the hours in front of the altar on her face or knees, her understanding grew and her hopelessness deepened into a dark despair. And with the despair, fed by her grief for Edward and her fear for Mary and Jane, came hatred.
Her single hope was that somehow, somehow, Gerveys would find her. That he would find out where she was and come for her.
Only please, by all of Heaven’s mercy, let him come soon.
Chapter 4
W ith fair weather and hope for a fine harvest, the easy days of middle summer passed inside St. Frideswide’s walls in their familiar way, bound around and carried onward by the ever changing, constant pattern of the daily Offices. So many of the Offices’ prayers were the same from day to day, but through each week the psalms were spread through the Offices so that all one hundred and fifty were said between one Sunday and the next while other prayers came and went with times of the year and saints’ days. To Frevisse it was an unending garland, its strands woven beautifully around each other. She had joined the weaving when she became a nun. Some nuns who had been part of the weaving then were dead now but others were become nuns in their place, just as someday she would be dead and there would others here instead, the weaving of praise and hope and love going always on, as it had gone on now for a thousand years already and would go on until the World’s end came, God willing.
Still, her own handful of years—well, several handfuls— were enough with which to deal for now. This year especially, that was passing so fair among the priory’s fields, was fraught with trouble elsewhere. As hosteler she heard more than she might have—and certainly more than she wished—about how the world was going. Worst of the troubles was that the war in France looked likely to break out again. Toward the end of March an English raiding party out of Normandy had seized and plundered a border town in Brittany, directly against the truce there had been since the king’s marriage a few years ago. Frevisse gathered from stray bits of talk that both the duke of Brittany and his ally the king of France had first requested and then demanded a withdrawl of the English troops and restitution for stolen goods. That seemed a fair enough demand to Frevisse, but lately in the guesthall she had heard a Coventry merchant complain to another traveler, “That fool Dorset. . . No, he’s been made duke of Somerset, hasn’t he? He’s still a fool, either way . . . He’s refused to give the French anything except rude answers. Have you heard the French have seized some place of ours to show they mean business?”
“Pont de l’Arche, isn’t it?” the other man asked. “Now we’ll have to trade Fougeres to have it back.”
“What I want to know is how they took the place so easily,” the merchant had grumbled. “As soon as the truce was broken, every border town of ours should have been on double guard, and the more on guard because Somerset has refused every French offer toward peace.”
“I’ve heard Suffolk is supposedly gone to Normandy to deal with the whole
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