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

married, don’t forget,” her husband put in from where he leaned on his crossed arms on the high back of the bench behind her. “Not that those are any great delight. Monks and shrines and too much praying.” He bowed slightly to Frevisse and added with a smile, “Begging your pardon, of course.”
    Frevisse, in mind of what she had heard from Master Geffers about him, found neither his smile nor him charming. She replied, “A pity, though, that his pilgrimages have done him so little good. Master Geffers was talking in the hall about what happens to him. That was an attack coming on him in the garden, wasn’t it?”
    She had been wrong about Edeyn. The girl’s stricken expression and her involuntary, almost angry half turn toward her husband betrayed she was far from untouched by what happened to Lionel.
    But it was Giles whom Frevisse was set at now and she pushed on with, “How does he?” and saw that her directness made no noticeable impression on Giles. He only shrugged and answered, “Well enough. The fit was a brief one. He’s sleeping it off now, with his knave Martyn hovering over him. That man was born to be a nursemaid. And a scavenging hound. He’s found his garbage heap in Lionel, that’s for certain.”
    That sounded like a song often sung and one Giles would have gone on with, but Edeyn interrupted him, asking Frevisse, “Master Geffers told you about Lionel?”
    “When I talked with him in the hall after supper. He seemed to know all about it.”
    Edeyn looked up at Giles. “You told him, didn’t you?” Giles shrugged, dismissing what was close to an angry accusation, but Edeyn said, the accusation more open, “That was unkind. The man talks. Everyone will know.”
    “Everyone here knows anyway. Why do you think we have the room we do?”
    “Because until the west range is done, I have none better to offer a loved guest like Edeyn,” Lady Lovell said, turning from her conversation with Dame Claire.
    Giles and Edeyn had kept their voices down to polite quietness. Skill both in keeping conversations private and in not heeding others’ talk was needed with so many living together, but they were too near Lady Lovell’s shoulder to have been unheard, and because she was their lady, she did not need to ignore them unless she wished. She smiled at them both and said, “You’re worried over Lionel?”
    “He’s been attacked again, my lady,” Edeyn said softly. “It had been two months or more. We’d hoped—”
    “You’d hoped,” Giles interrupted. “The rest of us know better.”
    Lady Lovell fixed her eyes on him in a look more sharp than Frevisse would have cared to have used on her, but her tone was mild enough as she said, “We pray and we hope, Master Giles. That’s how things change in this world.”
    Giles immediately bowed his head to her in gracious acceptance. “You have the right of it, my lady. I’ve been too close to it too long. Hope grows thin after so many disappointments. That’s all.”
    “Master Knyvet is afflicted?” Dame Claire asked. “With what?”
    “The falling sickness,” Lady Lovell said.
    “Ah, poor man. For how long? What’s been done for him?”
    “Everything that’s ever been known,” Lady Lovell said.
    “Concoctions, decoctions, electuraries, pilgrimages, prayers,” Giles put in. “A fortune’s been spent on it, first by his father and now by him.”
    “And none of it to any use?” Dame Claire asked.
    “As you see, he’s not with us tonight.”
    “Has pennyroyal been tried? Saffron, I’ve heard, can help. It’s expensive but very little is needed.” Almost to herself, her mind away on possibilities, she added, “But then only a very little is safe to use, I understand.”
    “If we could make his demon down a medicine direct, it might effect a difference,” Giles said dryly. “On Lionel there’s been none.”
    Drifting while they talked, the house priest Sire Benedict and Father Henry had come back to them in time for