The Murderer's Tale by Murderer's Tale The Page B

it ill luck, come to that. Your fellow is young enough, but Constance’s husband was well toward the grave and two wives there before him when the match was made.”
    “The Lovells are very good at helping their people to marriages if our families ask,” Luce explained. “They’ve property in so many places and know so many folk, there’s almost always a match they can at least suggest if not arrange.”
    “There’s one they did well for.” A woman farther along the window seat nodded out into the garden. Frevisse looked up from her laborious hemming to see Edeyn strolling along one of the formal garden paths, Lionel beside her, Martyn and the white dog following.
    “Except for him, of course,” another of the women said, with a meaningful nod at Lionel.
    “But it’s not as if she were married to him,” Luce said warmly. “No one tried to do that to her.”
    “Nobody would!” the other woman exclaimed. “And they couldn’t anyway. He’s vowed never to marry, they say. So his cousin will inherit eventually, and that means she’s as good as lady of the Knyvet lands already.”
    “With a husband I’d not mind being in bed with,” the farther lady said.
    “I’d guess she doesn’t either. At any rate, she’s with child.”
    Exclaims of delight greeted that.
    “But can you imagine having a baby in a house with someone like that?” Luce asked. Her voice thrilled with a horror made pleasurable because it was something she did not have to face.
    “Can you imagine even walking with him the way she is?” the farther woman said. “She’s braver than I am, let me tell you.”
    Remembering this might be all new to Dame Claire and Frevisse, Luce asked, “Do you know about Master Knyvet? That he has demon-fits?”
    “We were told last night,” Dame Claire answered, nothing like interest showing in her tone, her attention back on her sewing.
    Frevisse held back from answering at all, not trusting what might come out if she were not careful. But she still looked out the window. Despite the avid talk around her, all there was to see were two men and a woman walking with a white dog in a spring garden on a fair morning. Part of her knew it was not so simple as that, and part of her very much wished it were, and part of her was unreasonably, seethingly angry at Luce and the others for their chatter over what for Lionel was a nightmare that never ended and inevitably included anyone near to him and anyone who cared about him.
    How much did Edeyn care? Frevisse suddenly wondered.
    Surprised, she cast through her mind to find from where that particular question had come and then shoved it away, along with her memories of them under the oak tree by the road yesterday noontide and walking beside each other in the rose garden yesterday evening. Edeyn’s and Lionel’s lives were no concern of hers. He would be in her prayers for a while after she had left Minster Lovell, until thought of him slid away under new matters and familiar ways and there would be the end of it. Or she would remember him, pray for him; but only his name and a thought attached to it would be there, nothing particular about him.
    Under Dame Claire’s quelling disinterest, the talk moved away from Lionel and even Edeyn, back to Luce and her marriage hopes and then on to the likely cost of Burgundian cloth this year and what had been used to dye a thread one of the other women was embroidering with so particularly rich a shade of yellow it was near to gold.
    Frevisse took no part in the talk. With a little effort she could make the hemming take all her concentration, fill up her mind past any thought except the necessities of even stitches and leaving no bloody marks from pricked fingers. As Dame Claire tied off her final stitch, Frevisse laboriously finished the smock’s hem and, heartily sick of it and afraid she would be offered another something to sew, said, “It must be near to Sext. Should we go to the chapel, do you think, Dame