The Novice's Tale [Mass Market Paperback]

Lady Ermentrude likes to drop in on the priory's guesthall without warning and *with* a large following of servants, men-at-arms, and obnoxious pets. ("'A monkey,' Domina Edith repeated, sounding as if she had been given a second hundred years in Purgatory.") Since one of Ermentrude's favourite pasttimes is arranging family marriages for fun and profit, every visit is accompanied by rude, half-teasing offers to take Thomasine away and arrange a marriage for her with a vigorous young husband (or an older rich one, whichever strikes her fancy). (Robert Fenner, the one young man who seems to admire Thomasine for herself, has sense enough to hold his tongue rather than let the pushy old lady make things worse - for one thing, he knows he's not a good enough match.)

On this visit, Ermentrude arrived when Thomas Chaucer was visiting his niece, Dame Frevisse. The current events discussion of the war in France - the Hundred Years' War - is interesting; Henry VI is still a little boy. After meeting with the prioress, Dame Frevisse (who's in charge of the guesthall), and Master Chaucer, Ermentrude leaves the bulk of her retinue to settle in while she dashes off for a quick visit to Thomasine's married sister Isobel. But Ermentrude returns the next day in a frenzy, swearing that Thomasine shan't be forced to take vows, and that she 'has a good husband coming to her after this' - and that she's taking her away from this horrible place at once. She's been nearly raving all day, as Isobel and Sir John, arriving hard on her heels, can attest.

Within a few hours, Lady Ermentrude is dead of poison, together with a kitchen servant who sampled one dish too many.

Far too many people had opportunity, and with Lady Ermentrude, there's not far to look for motive. Lady Ermentrude had recently left Queen Katherine's service, dropping broad hints of impending scandal - did someone take steps to shut her mouth? Dame Alys, cellarer and chief cook, comes of a family embroiled in a feud with the Fenners, and could be counted on *not* to use new bread for the lady's milksop, but that which could have been tampered with. The lady's servants led a hard life - did something become too much for one of them? Worst of all, of course, Thomasine brought the milksop meant to soothe Lady Ermentrude's throat.

Master Montfort, the local 'crowner' (coroner) of northern Oxfordshire at this point in the series, is intensely irritating; he'll bend over backward for an easy explanation. ('Easy' in this case is the quickest resolution that'll let Lady Ermentrude's son Walter return to his rich uncle's deathbed.) Montfort's also a pig; he badmouths any information from any of the sisters, especially Frevisse, who he thinks gets above herself. It galls him that the sisters are under Church jurisdiction rather than his own.

Frevisse, with her cleverness and the worldly experience of much travel on pilgrimage in her youth, is left to save Thomasine by figuring out what happened. (However, the expertise and intelligence is distributed among the sisters - for instance, Domina Edith, the prioress, is the first to realize what they'll have to cope with, and Dame Claire the infirmarian is the medical expert.) After her parents died, Frevisse was raised in her aunt's household, but was far closer to her uncle, Thomas Chaucer - Geoffrey Chaucer's son. Chauncer is an anomaly, a powerful, wealthy commoner who refuses all titles, with a lot of noble and even half-royal relations; through him, Frevisse is well connected.

All the Dame Frevisse stories have titles after the fashion of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. However, rather than being narrated by the title character as in Chaucer's tales, they're told in limited 3rd person, alternating between the title character and Frevisse. The title character is always a major supporting player in the story, but not necessarily a suspect. The means employed by each murderer vary from story to story, and unlike, say, Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael mysteries, years go by between events at St. Frideswide's. Set 24 years before the Wars of the Roses began, signs of the approaching turmoil, like tremors before an earthquake, can be seen.

This Benedictine priory differs from Brother Cadfael's abbey, for more reasons than the three centuries separating them. St. Frideswide's holds fewer than a dozen sisters, who are cloistered and who observe the rule of silence. While provided for, the priory isn't particularly wealthy, and since it's only a priory, it must answer to the abbot of another house. Apart from that of the prioress, elderly Domina Edith, the offices are swapped around each quarter, so a sister won't necessarily stay with one job all her life.