The Murderer's Tale by Murderer's Tale The Page A

she had it; but before she could follow where it had come from, John Naylor came in with the man he had been with at supper. They bowed to Lady Lovell without approaching and moved away into one of the groups across the room. Frevisse noted where, with intent to talk with young John before the evening was done. For now it was enough that for the first time since coming to Minster Lovell, she knew where all of their company was and how they seemed to be.
    In something like an echo to her thought, she heard Lady Lovell saying, “We’re a sadly diminished company, I fear, with my lord and so many of the men gone with him, and no notion of how long they’ll be about it.”
    “Is it going to be complicated?” Edeyn asked.
    “If it involves France and money, it’s always complicated,” her husband pointed out, and there was wry, agreeing laughter among them.
    “Dame Frevisse told me a little of what’s toward,” Dame Claire said. “Is there trouble?”
    “Mostly only for my lord of Warwick.” Lady Lovell shook her head. “He really does not want the office or to go to France. There’s rumor that he’s ill, would prefer to take to his bed. But King Henry is insisting on it. So he’s called various of his people to him for advice on what to expect and what to ask of the King before he agrees, as agree he must. Hence, my lord is gone.”
    “Your husband served in France,” Dame Claire said. “For a long while, I think?”
    “Long enough to know he doesn’t desire to go back. But then there’s this that came from it.” Lady Lovell looked around at her rich room, with the sense of all of Minster Lovell that lay beyond it. “His profits from France have helped to build all this without too deeply draining regular revenues from our lands, so we’ve little cause of complaint, I suppose. So long as he doesn’t have to go back,” she added with a laugh.
    The talk moved along easy ways to nowhere in particular. Weather and crops and pilgrimages and how the roads were. Father Henry and Sire Benedict wandered away with whatever they were discussing, and eventually Frevisse was sitting at one end of the long bench beside Edeyn, who turned away from Dame Claire and Lady Lovell’s deep conversation over which herbs companioned well with others in a garden to ask, “You’re well recovered from your walking?”
    “Very well, thank you. I have to confess we’ve not been striving to see how many miles we can make but rather taking our time.”
    “But it isn’t going so well for Dame Claire, is it?” Edeyn asked with concern. “She’s not so used to it?”
    The girl’s perception surprised Frevisse. She had been seeing Edeyn as more a girl than a woman because she seemed uncalloused yet by the pains life would bring, still holding to that wonderful belief of the young that they could not be touched by the worst things in life. Not a belief that lasted but potentially immensely aggravating while it did. Probably much of her innocence came from the simple fact that she had had no children yet; and she was likely protected by her husband and even Lionel from full understanding of what Lionel’s affliction meant, even though she and her husband lived with him.
    But to Edeyn’s question about Dame Claire, Frevisse said mildly, “No, she’s not. Nor am I of late, come to that, but I had more of such walking in my girlhood and the way of it comes back to me when needed.”
    Edeyn asked more questions then, careful ones that showed she was ready to pull back if she were shown she went too far, but Frevisse talked a little to her about a childhood spent on roads across England and through Europe, until Edeyn sighed and said, “I’ve never really been anywhere. There was home and then here, around to their manors with my lord and lady, and once to London, and now we go between Knyvet and Langling every year, but that’s all.”
    “And hither, thither, and yon on Lionel’s pilgrimages these three years we’ve been