Free The Boy's Tale by Margaret Frazer Page A

better."
     
    Without waiting for their agreement or argument, she flitted away along the garden wall, quick on her feet despite her limp, to another gateway closed by a solid wooden door that gave no hint of what might be beyond. Beside it, Lady Adela squatted down on her heels to scrabble at a large stone beside the path. It was heavy, and Jasper crouched beside her to help. Over them Edmund reached to try the gate's handle.
     
    "It's locked," he said indignantly.
     
    "Of course it's locked," Lady Adela answered. To their pulling, the rock rolled up on one side and, quick with triumph, she snatched out a big, rusty key from underneath it. "This is a back gate to the cloister. People aren't supposed to just go in and out of a back gate. They have to use the ordinary gate."
     
    "Then what are we doing?" Edmund demanded.
     
    "Going out."
     
    Edmund and Jasper looked at one another. They both knew the answer they had to make to that. But matters of conscience tended to weigh more heavily with Jasper than Edmund, and he said for both of them, "We aren't supposed to go out of the cloister. Mistress Maryon said so."
     
    "Nuns aren't supposed to go out. Nuns aren't supposed to do anything. But we're not nuns."
     
    Edmund and Jasper looked at each other again, unable to argue that.
     
    Lady Adela elbowed Edmund aside to come at the lock. The key was very large; she needed both hands to manage it into the keyhole.
     
    "We shouldn't," Jasper said doubtfully.
     
    "No," Lady Adela agreed cheerfully, wrestling with the key to turn it. It yielded with a mild screech. "We shouldn't. But I'm going to anyway."
     
    Chapter 7
     
    It would soon be time for the small service of None. Set between midday's Sext and late afternoon's Vespers, None's interruption of whatever work she had in hand had annoyed Frevisse in her early days at St. Frideswide's, but she had long since come to value it for its reminder that the heart of her life was here and not in whatever worldly duties each day required. Since she was presently sacrist, with her duties mostly confined to the care of the church and its furnishings, it was of late easier to hold to that knowledge.
     
    Today, having already done what was needed to ready the church, she had come to sit in her choir stall for a quiet time of thought before the bell rang. This near midsummer the sun rode so high it only shone directly into the church at earliest morning and latest evening. In the early afternoon now, the church was gray with soft shadows and coolness, a world apart from the warm, busy day outside. A goodly place for thought as well as prayer, Frevisse felt, and she was in need of both.
     
    What she truly wanted to do was go to Domina Edith and talk through again the problem of the boys. Not that there was anything new to say; she only wanted it for her own comfort, and that was hardly fair to Domina Edith, so deep in her own necessity now.
     
    She had written the letter to Alice as Domina Edith had told her to, and given it over to Master Naylor the same day. It was gone by messenger to find Alice wherever she might be; and of course Frevisse could now, when there was no help for it, think of better, more subtle, more politic ways she should have asked about matters that ought to be none of her concern.
     
    She tried to keep it from her mind. A more reasonable worry—and still nothing to talk to Domina Edith about—was that the sheriff and Master Montfort, the crowner, would be here sometime this afternoon, according to their forerider who had come this morning. It all went well, they would make their inquiries and simply go away, perhaps as soon as tomorrow. If things went ill—if servants were questioned too closely and mentioned the boys and if some word had reached the sheriff about certain boys being missing and sought . . . But there was no reason the sheriff or crowner should talk to any of the servants. They would speak to witnesses of the attack. That meant to Sir