The Sempster's Tale Read Online Free Page B

garth enclosed by the paved cloister walk and crowded buildings of St. Helen’s nunnery, leaving the roofed cloister walk pleasantly in warm shadow, with the quiet of Sunday rest between the day’s longer Offices of prayer lying over everything. If Dame Frevisse was displeased with it all—and she was—she knew the fault lay in herself, not in St. Helen’s. Used as she was to her own St. Frideswide’s priory set small among the fields of northern Oxfordshire, the change of place should—if nothing else—have pleasurably diverted her because St. Helen’s was neither small nor in the countryside but in London, with all London’s busyness of people and churches spread around the priory’s own gathering of church, chapter house, hall, refectory, library, dormitory, kitchen, workrooms, parlors, and the prioress’ private rooms, with the cloister walk and its garth in their midst, a high-walled garden at the back and, toward the street, the foreyard, guesthall, and the wide double gateway opening to broad, busy Bishopsgate Street running down toward London bridge and the Thames. And if that very busyness and crowding were what she disliked, here was the peace of the cloister walk, familiar to her from every nunnery she had ever been in, from her childhood times as a sometimes boarder in French nunneries to all her years in St. Frideswide’s.
     
    No matter if a nunnery were large or small, rich or poor, a nun’s life was lived around the cloister walk. She passed along it to the church for the Offices and to all her other duties elsewhere inside the nunnery, sometimes worked there and often took her recreation, as Frevisse was now, walking around it. The very familiarity should have been a comfort to her but it was not, and for once she would have welcomed the chance to distract herself in talk with someone else; but while the Benedictine Rule of silence had grown slack in nunneries since she had become a nun, here the nuns still kept to silence on Sundays at least, denying her even the diversion of talk. Nor could she sit still and read as usually she would have gladly done and as other nuns were doing, including Dame Juliana who had accompanied her here from St. Frideswide’s.
     
    Seated in the shade on the low wall between walk and garth with a book of saints’ lives open on her lap, she was probably more dozing over it than anything, Frevisse thought sharply, not in the humour for charitable thoughts toward anyone, however blameless. In truth just now she was ready to blame everyone, including herself, for everything; nor did knowing that was unjust and made no sense change her humour in the slightest. Which only served to irk her the worse as she continued to walk, her pace measured, her hands tucked quietly into the opposite sleeves of her black Benedictine gown, her head a little bowed, around the walk and around and around again, wishing she could settle, knowing it would be better not only for herself but for the seeming that she was come to London for only the plain reason given to everyone, including Dame Juliana.
     
    The plain reason but a false one.
     
    For the world and all to know, she was here on the matter of funeral vestments her cousin Lady Alice meant to give to St. Frideswide’s in memory of Lady Alice’s late husband, to go with provision of special prayers for his soul. That Lady Alice’s late husband had been the powerful duke of Suffolk and murdered not two months ago on his way into exile made the gift less ordinary than it might have been but still straightforward enough: Frevisse was to meet with the vestment-maker to agree on the patterns to be embroidered and the cloth to be used and then confirm the commission on Lady Alice’s behalf. Prevented as Lady Alice was by her present mourning from making the London journey herself, it was reasonable she had asked Frevisse be allowed to go in her stead, a measure of her favor and trust toward her cousin, with no reason for anyone to