The Bishop’s Tale Read Online Free PDF Page B

in with, “Father would want you not to make yourself more ill than you already are.”
     
    She looked to Frevisse over Matilda’s head, and Frevisse immediately said, “Truly, Aunt, you’ve been through weeks of enduring. Today will be full of people arriving for the funeral, and everyone wanting things from you if they see you, when what you need just now is to gather your strength for tomorrow. There’s nothing today that Alice and I can’t oversee or come to you when we need direction. Please, Aunt, listen to us on this.”
     
    Matilda shook her head refusingly through all of Frevisse’s words. But at the end of them, Alice knelt before her, took her hands, and pleaded very sweetly, “Please, Mother. Let us do this for you.”
     
    Matilda closed her eyes over sudden tears. Her body slackened its rigid determination to go on, and in a faltering voice she said, “Perhaps, perhaps you’re right. It’s tomorrow I should be thinking of, when we… when we…” She could not say, “bury Thomas,” but when, with visible effort, she had regained control, she opened her eyes and began to tell them everything that needed doing today.
     
    Check the linen closet for blankets and set the stable hands to filling pallets with straw, she told them, then make sure the preparations for the funeral feast are under way and nothing is lacking in the kitchen, find sweet herbs to strew on the church floor, note every guest’s rank on arrival—be there yourself to greet them, of course—and make sure they are in correct order for the procession to the church tomorrow and at the feast, see to it there is plenty of clean water so guests can wash up on arrival, don’t let anyone mistake a washup bucket for a chamber pot, ensure families who are feuding with one another sleep far apart tonight and are not seated next to one another tomorrow, keep a fire burning in the great hall all day so arriving guests may warm themselves…
     
    Alice and Frevisse shared a small grimace of mutual sympathy over Matilda’s head as Joan encouraged her back into bed and the endless list faded to a weary murmur.
     
    By early afternoon the influx of guests had become heavy. Nearest neighbors would come and go on the day itself, but the November days were short and anyone more than a few hours’ ride away would come today and stay over at least two nights. Thomas Chaucer’s connections had ranged from the ranks of merchants in London to the innermost circles of court power, with all of them important, but precedence had to be noted and scrupulously given. To her relief, Frevisse found that receiving the highest ranking among them fell naturally to her cousin Alice. As widow of the earl of Salisbury, and now wife of the earl of Suffolk, as well as daughter of the house, Alice was already acquainted with most of them; gracious in her duties, she reminded Frevisse both of the self-possessed little cousin Frevisse had last known, and of Chaucer himself.
     
    Frevisse was left to see to the lesser folk, though lesser was a relative term. Landed knights and merchants wealthier than earls were hardly lesser. But it meant that she was waiting in the great hall when Sir Walter Fenner, head of the prominent and numerous Fenner family, was ushered in.
     
    The Fenners were among the more prominent patrons of St. Frideswide’s, though less generously and intrusively than they had been a few years ago, so Sir Walter and Frevisse were already acquainted. Seeing him ushered into the hall, she had time to put on a polite face of mild pleasure tempered by the formal grief of the occasion, and said graciously, “How good that you could come, Sir Walter.”
     
    “My deep sorrow that it’s for such a sad occasion, Dame,” he replied. The Fenners had a long memory for offenses, and the last time they had met, he had accused her of hiding his mother’s murderer. But he knew the needs of this moment; his politeness was brief but correct. “Your uncle’s loss