The Clerk's Tale by Margaret Frazer

Author:Margaret Frazer [Frazer, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

The bed had been made since Frevisse and Domina Elisabeth had left it that morning but nothing had been done to warm the chamber. Frevisse eyed the open window, its shutter lowered to let in fresh air, but decided against bothering to shut it. Simply closing it would do nothing toward warming the room, nor was she minded to call for a warming pan or anything else that would, even briefly, bring her company.

Instead, she wrapped herself in her cloak, sat on the bed with her feet tucked up under her safe from the floor’s draughts, and turned to thinking while she had the chance, beginning with what Christopher had told her of Montfort’s death and then about what she had learned on her own. Set out and looked at, there was not much. Of what she had learned, most was on the Lengley side, with very little about the Champyons, and none of it bearing plainly on Montfort’s murder.

But Montfort was dead. He had either angered someone sufficiently or been threat enough to someone that this person had killed him, and that anger or threat most probably had to do with this manor of Reckling.

It might not, of course. There was always the possibility he had been killed because of something else. But if he had been, the likelihood of discovering the murderer was even less than it already seemed to be. So, like Christopher, she would work at the problem from the only sure way they had, and that brought her to the question, What was the threat that had been worth Montfort’s death? If it came from something he had found out, then likely the threat still existed, a danger to whoever else might find it out.

Unless it was some sort of written proof and Montfort had had it with him when he was killed and now his murderer had it. Or more likely, had by now destroyed it. In which case threat and proof and hope of learning anything about them were all gone together.

But proof of what? The most damning, to one side or the other, would be something that showed Stephen was—or else was not—Sir Henry’s legitimate son.

So ... who was most concerned with that?

Stephen, of course. To have the manor of Reckling, the Champyons had to prove he was illegitimate, and if that was proved against him, then he lost all claim to any inheritance at all from his father. All the Lengley lands would cease to be his.

That made it Lady Agnes’s problem, too. Frevisse suspected she had the fierceness to want a man dead and she was openly bound, both by oath and love, to the claim that Stephen was the son of her son Sir Henry and his wife. That she had a key to the garden’s gate was no use, because no one but Montfort and then Master Gruesby had been seen or heard to go in that way, and besides that, she was hardly strong enough to

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