The outlaw's tale by Margaret Frazer Read Free Book Online

moments of studied sipping Sister Emma gave a deep sigh and announced that it was a pity she had no ale. Nicholas, just taking his own bowl from Evan, sketched her a gallant bow.
    “My pleasure, lady, to serve you.  Let me bring you some," he said, and went away with his own full bowl and a nod of his head to Frevisse.
    Frevisse was too relieved to have Naylor safely away to want to push Nicholas now.  She let him go and, preferring to stand rather than find a damp seat, set to eating her own stew before it cooled more than it already had.  She fully meant to talk to Nicholas about his intent that she stay until it was settled, but warmth and food first, to face the day a little better.
    She ate quickly, then huddled her blanket up to her ears under her veil and around her shoulders and went to walk some warmth into her bones.  If she kept under the edges of the trees, she could stay almost dry and keep the chill at bay.
    She was watched, she knew, but no one stopped her, and she did not try to leave the clearing, though she suspected there were other clearings close by and that Nicholas had probably gone to one of them.  Let him come when he would; he would have to seek her out sooner or later and she found she was willing to wait.  In fact, she found she needed to bite the inside of her lower lip to keep a smile from her face as she walked.  All the encrustation of little rules from the nunnery was dropping away here in the forest.  For just today she had no duties, no one to answer to, no one to heed what she did.  Under the overcast she could not even tell the time of day for prayers, for her the best part of the great Rule she lived under.  In place of them, she could at least have solemn thoughts on the trouble she was in; but she found instead that a child-simple tune and its words were running unquenchably through her head.  “Rain before seven, done by eleven.  Rain before seven, done by eleven.  Rain before..."  And a memory of dancing down a muddy road with her irrepressible parents one warm and rainy spring day in – France?  Probably France.  She had been very small and it had not mattered where they were.  Her parents, holding her by either hand, had lifted her off her feet at every repetition of “seven" and “eleven", all three of them laughing at the rain and for pleasure of the road and traveling together.
    The memory was too clear; she realized she was humming aloud as she walked and that nearly her feet were starting the skip and run that went with the words.
    Startled, she clamped her mind down over both urges.  A tendency for her thoughts to wander had been one of her weaknesses in her first nunnery days.  She had used the psalms as discipline: Whenever she had caught her mind beginning its wandering she had turned it instead to any of the many psalms she had memorized, to shelter her from her own lack of concentration.  Now, firmly, and seemingly at random, her mind went to Psalm 148, finding the Latin first – Laudate Dominum de coelis – but shifting without intention to the English of her uncle's Wyclif Bible.  “Praise the Lord you beasts and useful beasts, praise him you blooming trees and you cedars.  Praise him you storms and floods-“  And you drizzling days and damp , her mind irreverently interjected so that she nearly laughed out loud.  She was happy.  Simply, unreasonably, unsuitably, happy.
    “Dame Frevisse, I'm wet !"  Sister Emma's complaint penetrated the dripping breadth of the clearing.  “Can't you do something?"
    Jarred back to other people's realities, Frevisse sighed and crossed to the shelter over the fire.
    “I'm wet," Sister Emma repeated, deeply aggrieved.  “And I can't seem to warm."
    “If you walk, you'll be warmer," Frevisse said.
    “I'll be wetter!" Sister Emma returned sharply.  “I don't want to be wetter.  I want to be dry.  And warm.  We simply can't stay here.  You know we can't."
    “You wanted to help Nicholas.  This