Free The Stone-Worker's Tale (Sister Frevisse Medieval Mysteries) by Margaret Frazer

The Stone-Worker's Tale
A Short Story by Margaret Frazer
    When Domina Frevisse had last been in St. Mary's church at Ewelme, it had been a quiet place, its brief nave divided from its side aisles by graceful stone pillars, the chancel and high altar remote beyond a richly painted wooden screen topped by a gilded crucifix and saintly statutes.
    Now its quiet and all its ordered peace were gone.  Near the high altar the south aisle was given over to scaffolding, stone dust, and workmen; the summer morning's heavy sunlight pouring unobstructed through the gaping hole in the wall that would someday be a stone-mullioned window of richly stained glass; and the crane with its ropes and pulleys still straddled Lady Alice's stone tomb chest from yesterday's lowering into place of the stone slab that was its top, complete with a full-length carving of Lady Alice lying in prayerful repose, gazing serenely up to heaven.
    Presently, though, Lady Alice was anything but prayerful, serene, or reposed as she demanded at her master mason, "He's gone?  Just gone?  He was here yesterday and now, like that, he's gone?"
    Around them the workmen were drawn back, idle instead of busy at their varied tasks, wary and watching while Master Wyndford said in open distress, "Yes, my lady," agreeing to what he had already admitted.  "In the night sometime it must have been," he added, as if that might help.
    It did not. 
When
young Simon Maye had gone was not the point.  Even
why
he had gone was not Lady Alice's concern just now, and she said angrily, "What of my angels, then?  If he's gone, who's going to finish my angels?"
    Her tomb was splendid with angels.  They were carved in a guardian array along both sides of the tall tomb chest, and more would go along the stone canopy that would someday rise above the tomb, and more would stand on the pinnacles that would rise above even that.  Already four of the panels that would edge the canopy were done, were sitting on the floor along the aisle well away from the work still going on, leaned at an angle against the wall so that their angels – three to each panel – gazed upward rather than downward as they someday would when in place above the tomb.  Domina Frevisse had admired those angels the other times she had come with Alice to the church to see how the work came on.  They were half-length, rising from their waists out of the stone, framed by the curve of their wings behind their shoulders, every fold of cloth, every feather delicately detailed.  Some of the angels were crowned and some were not; some had their hands folded on their breast, others had them raised in praise, others held them palm to palm in prayer; and their faces differed, too, so that each was more than simply the same again, and all in all they were as masterful a piece of work as Frevisse had ever found herself smiling at for the plain pleasure they gave.
    But there were only four panels when six were intended, and only twelve angels of the eighteen there were meant to be; and Master Wyndford looked aside from Alice's anger to a heavy-shouldered youth standing nearby and said, "My son, Nicol.  He's as skilled a carver of stone as Simon Maye.  He'll finish the angels, my lady."
    Lady Alice turned her critical look on Nicol Wyndford as he bowed to her.  He was dressed like the other workmen in a plain tunic and hosen, had pale, flat hair and a pale, flat face that just now was heavy with sullenness.   "Are you?" she demanded.  "Are you as good as Simon Maye?"
    Nicol Wyndford looked from her to his father and back again, hunched his shoulders in not quite a shrug, and said toward the floor, "Nearly, my lady."
    "Nearly."  Lady Alice said with raw displeasure; and to his father, "Master Wyndford, I am not paying for
nearly
."
    She assuredly was not.  Frevisse was come from her cloistered nunnery of St. Frideswide's on a bishop-granted week's visit to her cousin.  These middle years of the 1400s were troubled with