The Stone-Worker's Tale (Sister Frevisse Medieval Mysteries) Read Free Page A

blankly.
    Beth was quicker.  "When she went out last night, you mean?  She didn't take anything that I saw.  Unless she had it ready, waiting for her somewhere else."
    "But you haven't looked to see for certain," Frevisse said.
    "No, my lady," Cathryn said, openly surprised at such a thought.  Living constantly together, people in a household learned the courtesy of leaving each other's possessions alone.  The thought of prying into Elyn's was plainly beyond Cathryn, but again Beth understood and said,  "Her chest is in the other room."
    Nothing was gone from it.  As soon as Beth put up the lid, Frevisse could see that.  The chest was small, meant only to hold a few clothes, a few personal things, and it was full, everything carefully placed and with no space from which something might be missing.
    "Is this the way it always is?" Frevisse asked.
    "Oh, yes," said Beth.
    "That's how Elyn is about everything," Cathryn added.
    She sounded faintly aggrieved, as if at some affront or fault; but Frevisse was more taken up with the thought of how unlikely it increasingly seemed that this careful Elyn had run off into the night all unready and so foolishly, taking nothing of her own with her. 
    Still, women thinking themselves in love had done far more foolish things than that, and Frevisse supposed the next question had to be: How foolish was Simon Maye?
    Beth was slowly – and it seemed thoughtfully – closing the chest.  Cathryn, gazing wistfully into the air at some thought of her own, sighed, "They must be wonderfully in love, not to bear being apart anymore."  She smiled a little dreamily at Frevisse and confided, "We'd go with her sometimes when she was going to meet him.  Nicol Wyndford would be there because he's Simon's friend.  We'd talk with him while Elyn and Simon talked together."  She gave a sly, teasing, sideways look at Beth.  "Beth favors him.  Nicol.  But he favors Elyn."
    "He doesn't!" Beth protested.  "I don't!"
    "He does . You've even said you wished he'd look at you like he looks at her."
    "I never did!"
    "You did!"
    "None of which makes any difference to Domina Frevisse," Lady Sybille said, crisp and disapproving from the room's doorway.  "Have you finished my lady's bedchamber yet?"
    With curtsies and hurry, the two girls scurried away, while Frevisse made apology to Lady Sybille, taking blame for their delay on herself before leaving, too, but going the other way, out of the house and back to the church.
    She found the half-made new chapel empty of workmen.  She could hear them, though, outside the window-hole in the wall, their voices mixed with the chink of chisels on stones telling her they were at work in the stone-yard there, readying the next stones for wall and window.  That was where Master Wyndford and his son likely were, too, and it was with them she wished to speak, but she stood for a little while in the aisle, looking at the proud, serene faces of Simon Maye's angels and found it harder by the moment to think a man with the skill of hand and eye and mind to create such beauty would desert his work for a lesser love.
    Except, of course, he probably did not see his Elyn as a lesser love.
    Master Wyndford came through the gap in the wall.  Not seeing her, he stood staring at the unfinished tomb for a long moment, one crippled hand rubbing at the other still held against his chest.  Worrying over how much the loss of Simon Maye was going to set back the work and wondering how bad Lady Alice's displeasure was going to be, Frevisse supposed, sorry for him.
    The hard set of his mouth did not change as he turned and saw her, but she took no offense as he gave only a very curt bow and came toward her, saying with a nod at the panels of angels along the wall and more as if going on with a thought of his own than taking up talk with her, "Nicol will finish those well enough.  My lady need have no worry that way.  That carving there is Nicol's."  He moved one hand in a small