The Murderer's Tale by Murderer's Tale The

him.
    But Lionel had wanted them to go. He had wanted to be left, to not be seen. The warning in his hand gave him time for that and in that much it was a blessing.
    But that was not the way Giles had made it seem when he had seen fit to tell Master Geffers and apparently the Stenbys. Or else that was not the way Master Geffers had heard it.
    Revolted both by the idea of Lionel seized in a demon-fit and by Master Geffers’ eager talk of it, Frevisse asked, “Giles told all of you that were traveling together? The Stenbys, too?”
    “All of us, to be sure. And said I should warn my servant, too, just in case.”
    A servant who probably talked as readily as Master Geffers did, so that in a day or so there would be no one here who would not be watching for Lionel to look at his left hand oddly, with the worst of them hoping he would. And although Master Geffers would go on his way tomorrow morning, he would surely go on talking about Lionel along his way. Having traveled with someone possessed by a demon was too prime a tale to go untold. Frevisse wondered if Giles fully knew how much a cruelty he had done Lionel with his “warning.”
    Remembering even what little she had so far seen of Giles, she rather thought he did.
    A servant in the Lovell livery bowed in front of her and said, “My lady asks if you’d join her for the evening, my lady.”
    Frevisse was glad to accept, both because it offered Lady Lovell’s pleasant company and an escape from Master Geffers. With a murmured farewell to the franklin, she followed the servant away among the cheerful crowding of household folk, asking as they went, “Were you to find my companion. Dame Claire, too?”
    “She and Lady Elizabeth have already gone, my lady,” the man answered.
    Frevisse noticed that most of the folk still here had been at the lower tables. Lady Lovell, her ladies, and what gentlemen there had been were gone, apparently as usual. The man led her deftly among the others, back to the dais and to the door at its opposite end from where Luce had taken them that afternoon. Beyond it was a small antechamber with doors on each side of it, the one to the left shut, the one at its far end open to a spiral stairway almost lost in the unlighted shadows, the one on their right open to lamplight. The man rapped lightly on the frame of the open door and stood aide, looking back, for her to go past him.
    The room she entered was large, low-ceilinged, pleasantly proportioned, with its three wide, stone-mullioned windows looking out on the garden where a clear blue twilight still lingered. Lamps set about on shoulder-tall wrought-iron holders showed golden rush matting covering the floor and the ceiling beams brightly painted in a weave of vines and flowers. Gaily embroidered cushions were strewn along the wide bench below the windows, and girls and women vaguely familiar from that afternoon in the garden and a few gentlemen Frevisse remembered from the hall at supper sat there and on other, larger cushions around the floor in talk and laughter. Opposite the windows a fireplace with elaborately carved stone mantel emboldened the wall. Lady Lovell sat in front of it on a long, backed, cushioned wooden bench, with Edeyn seated beside her, and Giles, Father Henry, the house priest, and Dame Claire standing near.
    From the doorway Frevisse’s guide made a low bow and said, “My lady.”
    Lady Lovell smiled and held out a hand in welcome. “Good, he found you! Come join us, please. We lost you in the hall.”
    Drawn easily into her company, Frevisse noted first that Dame Claire was apparently at ease and then that Father Henry and Sire Benedict were enjoying talk of their own to one side of everyone else’s. Something about St. Augustine, she thought from a snatch she overheard. She had not thought Father Henry would remember so much of his studies as even to recall St. Augustine, let alone discuss him.
    That was a mean-spirited thought, she realized in the same moment as