Free The Widow's Tale (Sister Frevisse Medieval Mysteries Book 14) by Margaret Frazer

derelinquas me. Neque despicias me, Deus …” Lord, pity me … do not abandon me. Nor despise me, God . . .
    Frevisse slid her eyes sideways again to the woman. In her gray gown, lying so still on the gray stones, she seemed hardly there. Indeed, she went so silently and gray through every day that she would have hardly seemed to be in the nunnery at all save for the nuns’ talk about her, and even that would have to pall someday. Soon, Frevisse hoped.
----
    D uring a chill and rainy recreation hour a few days later, she and Dame Claire were walking at a measured pace around and around the roofed, square cloister walk. Because everyone else had chosen to stay in the warming room, save Sister Thomasine, gone, as was her way, to the church to pray, they were alone; and because silence was easy between them, they were silent, until Dame Claire said, “I’m worried about our widow.”
    Frevisse, who had been thinking about her copying work and how many days it might be before she finished with the present book, took a moment to shift her thoughts, then said, “Worried? Why? Do you think she’s ill?”
    “When I’ve asked her,” which would count as necessary talk from Dame Claire as infirmarian, “she says she isn’t.”
    “She’d surely tell you if she was, if only to win some ease in her life.”
    “Yes,” Dame Claire agreed but sounded no happier. “Or if she were the monster of sinfulness we’ve been told she is, she would lie that she was ill, so as to have that ease.”
    “If she were the monster of sinfulness?”
    Dame Claire gestured impatiently. “If I knew nothing about her, if I only saw her, watched her as we’ve all been watching her these days, it’s grief I would think of. Not that she was depraved but that she was in deep grief.”
    “She might well be in grief. For her sins, if nothing else. Or for having been taken away from her sins unwillingly.”
    “Or for both and other things we’ve no thought of, which aren’t my duty to consider but Father Henry’s.” The priory’s priest. “It’s her health I’m worried for. She’s too pale and growing thin.”
    “Thin will happen when every other day you have only bread and water,” Frevisse said. “Can you advise Domina Elisabeth to ease that part of her penance?”
    “I’ve presumed it’s by Abbot Gilberd’s order.” And therefore not readily ignored.
    They walked on in silence, turned the corner near the refectory, and began around the walk again before Frevisse said toward the paving stones, “Have you noted that Sister Thomasine doesn’t avoid her?”
    “Yes.”
    Dame Claire sounded no more comfortable with that than Frevisse was. Sister Thomasine in her early years in St. Frideswide’s had been almost cripplingly pious, but over the years her piety had deepened, steadied, was no longer something she forcefully asserted but simply lived in. It made her—for Frevisse at least—far easier to live with. It was only to be expected she would pray for their sinful widow’s soul; it was equally expected she would otherwise shun her. Perhaps not so openly as some of the nuns did, gathering their skirts away if Cristiana happened near them, as if her sins were a sickness that might be caught, but surely keeping her distance. Instead, she made no point of it at all and in the church knelt beside her at the altar as easily as if she were another nun.
    Frevisse had been disquieted by that, was pleased Dame Claire was, too, and said on a sudden thought, “What if she made confession to Father Henry? If she did and showed any degree of contrition for her sins, he would be able to ask Domina Elisabeth to allow her more food at least.”
    “That might help, yes.” Dame Claire’s voice rose with relief. “He’d do that. Especially if I prompt him that way first. Yes. That might very well help.”
    And if it did not, at least they had tried.

Chapter 5
    I n honor of St. Lawrence’s day, supper had finished with the rare pleasure