The Midwife's Tale (Sister Frevisse Medieval Mysteries) (5 page)

Elyn, staring at something in front of her that was not there for anyone else to see, did not answer.  It was Pers, his voice raw with disbelief and hurt, who asked, "But why?"

Elyn did not answer nor her expression change.  Surprisingly gently, Dame Frevisse said, "Why, Elyn?  What was the reason?"

Where there had been nothing, feeling shimmered at last in Elyn's eyes.  "Because I couldn't bear him.  Not anymore."

"Jenkyn?" Ada asked, her disbelief an echo of Pers'.  "You couldn't bear Jenkyn?"

Still staring in front of her, Elyn nodded and finally said, in a low voice, "He was so nothing.  No matter what I did, he was nothing.  And last night, at the bonfire, I was watching Pers."  Her gaze slid up to him and then away to the floor in front of her feet.  "I watched him dancing with his Kate.  Both of them so beautiful.  And happy.  And then I had to come home with Jenkyn, because he wouldn't dance.  It was too much trouble, he said.  Nor he didn't like staying up at night nor Midsummer wandering.  He didn't much like anything that cost him any effort."  Bitterness and scorn and the anger that must have been in her for a long time before last night tightened her voice.  "I tried to talk with him when we were home, trying to make him see how things could be different, better between us.  But everything was too much trouble for him.  I always had to talk a week to make him do a day's work.  He was forever dragging back on everything I asked him.  He wouldn't... "  Her hands, knotted in her lap, clenched and unclenched.  "I suddenly couldn't bear him any longer.  He stood up, saying he was going to bed, and I... I took him and threw him... He doesn't weigh much, never did... backwards against the wall.  I'd wanted to do that to him... do something to him... hurt him... for so very long.  I didn't know, I didn't mean..."  She stopped, then said dully, "Or maybe I did.  Maybe I did mean it to kill him.  I don't know."

Gently but with the same remorseless searching, Dame Frevisse said, "So he was lying there, and you were trying to decide what to do when Ada came to say you were needed, and you thought maybe there was a way out of what you had done after all."

Elyn nodded toward her hands.  "The idea came to me all at once and I knew what I could do.  Make it look like a thief came in, a stranger, and killed him.  I made the footprints, just as you said.  The shoes are in the midden by the byre.  Then I went to Cisily.  I thought he'd be dead when I came home.  He wasn't and that was awful.  And there was the blood but he wasn't bleeding anymore so I shifted the rushes, buried the bloody ones under clean ones, meaning to be rid of them later and no one the wiser, and put his coif on him to cover what was in his hair.  I'd be the one to ready him for burial and no one would have to see and likely no one would have thought about it anyway."  She raised sad, accusing eyes to the nun.  "But you did.  I should have waited until you'd gone before I came out crying about him.  Then it would have been all right."

Stirred at last out of the silence holding them all, Father Clement said, "You've sinned, Elyn.  And sinned worse in meaning to let him die unshriven, his soul likely bound straight for hell."

Ada shivered and was not the only one to cross herself at that.  But Elyn only said bitterly, "He never sinned enough to go to hell.  And purgatory wouldn't hurt him any worse than he's hurt me these years.  Only -- "  Now she wrapped her arms around herself and looked toward the bed resentfully.  " -- only I hadn't thought he'd go on alive so long.  And with that breathing.  Isn't he ever going to stop it?"

He did, a little later.  One last, faint rasping out of breath and, this time, nothing after it.  Only the silence drawing out and out, until they knew he would not breathe again.

And afterwards, freed at last to go on home, matching her long stride to Dame Claire's shorter one as they walked again along the lane's grassy verge toward the priory, Frevisse tried to find a prayer that would answer, for her at least, some of the pain the past hours had held.  And Dame Claire's mind, too, was behind them rather than ahead, because out of the quiet between then she suddenly asked, "Would you have paid so much heed to the footprints if it hadn't been for the spider's web?"

"No.  I doubt it.  I'd probably not have thought about them at all.  Or wondered about the blood."

"So it wasn't the footprints or the blood that trapped her."

"No.  Only the spider's web."  And the fact that Frevisse had chosen to think about it.

A spider's web and a moment's thought.  So small a pair of things to be so deadly.

As small as the break in a woman's heart between enduring and despair.

Margaret Frazer is the award-winning author of more than twenty historical murder mysteries and novels. She makes her home in Minneapolis, Minnesota surrounded by her books, but she lives her life in the 1400s. In writing her Edgar-nominated Sister Frevisse (
The Novice's Tale
) and Player Joliffe (
A Play of Isaac
) novels she delves far inside medieval perceptions, seeking to look at medieval England more from its point of view than ours. "Because the pleasure of going thoroughly into otherwhen as well as otherwhere is one of the great pleasures in reading."

She can be visited online at http://www.margaretfrazer.com.

Beginning in the year of Our Lord's grace 1431, the Sister Frevisse mysteries are an epic journey of murder and mayhem in 15th century England.

The Novice's Tale

The Servant's Tale (Edgar-Award Nominee)

The Outlaw's Tale

The Bishop's Tale (Minnesota Book Award Nominee)

The Boy's Tale

The Murderer's Tale

The Prioress' Tale (Edgar-Award Nominee)

The Maiden's Tale

The Reeve's Tale (Minnesota Book Award Nominee)

The Squire's Tale

The Clerk's Tale

The Bastard's Tale

The Hunter's Tale

The Widow's Tale

The Sempster's Tale

The Traitor's Tale

The Apostate's Tale

Cover Art: Julien Dupre, The Gleaners, 1880.

Cover Design: Justin Alexander