A Play of Treachery (11 page)

The household yeoman on guard at the head of the stairs shoved forward from the wall where he had been leaning and said, “You’re on your own today. Strugge is gone?”

Joliffe remembered he was Foulke, that he had been at duty here the other day, and that Strugge had been haughty at him. So Joliffe grinned and said, “Well and truly gone and expecting to be sick as soon as the ship sails.”

Foulke grinned back. He was hearty English, part of the thorough mix of English and French the late duke had preferred for his household, and ready to be friendly if Joliffe was. “You want to see my lady? I’ll ask,” he said and opened the door to what Joliffe remembered was Lady Jacquetta’s parlor.

It was a pleasant room, with a long window overlooking the gardens, and the walls hung with tapestries woven in wide bands of blue and white and red emblazoned with the gold-crowned red lion of Luxembourg and the golden woodstocks of the duke of Bedford. When Joliffe was here with Strugge, the duchess had been seated on the window seat with two small white dogs nested in the trailing hems of her skirts. Her half-dozen ladies had been sitting here and there on cushioned chests or else cushions on the floor, and an older woman he had supposed was the dragon M’dame had had a chair near the hearth. One of the women had been reading aloud in French from some book. The others, including Lady Jacquetta and M’dame, had had one manner or another of sewing in hand. In their black mourning gowns, they had been a drift of darkness around the otherwise bright chamber, but all had been ordered, quiet, and gracious.

Today it was not. Today, although Lady Jacquetta again sat at the window, her ladies were in flurry about the room, turning over cushions and looking under things in seeming search for something. One of the chests stood open, its contents disemboweled onto the floor beside it, M’dame was not to be seen, and the dogs were scampering and yipping into everyone’s way.

Joliffe’s first instinct was to retreat, but Lady Jacquetta saw him and said, “Ah! You. You are Master Ripon, yes?”

The flurry in the room stopped, everyone—even the dogs—pausing to look at him.

Joliffe bowed low. “Yes, my lady.”

She gave a graceful beckon for him to come to her. As he obeyed, Foulke closed the door behind him and the two dogs leaped toward him, shrilly delighted to bark at someone new. Lady Jacquetta said quietly, “Ryn. Kywaert. Enough.” And to her ladies, “Search on. It must be here somewhere.”

The dogs went mercifully silent. The women flurried back to their task. Joliffe, crossing the chamber as when Strugge first presented him here, was again taken with Lady Jacquetta’s loveliness. She was young and slender, her face delicately boned and pale and made all the more pale and delicate by her tight, face-surrounding widow’s wimple. A hint of golden-fair hair showed at her temples, but all the rest of her was lost in the yards of her black widow’s gown and the veil trailing from her wimple, save for her white hands graced with various golden and gemmed rings.

Now in front of her, Joliffe bowed again, and she gestured for him to kneel there. In the bustle of the room, they had to be near to talk together, but to talk with him standing over her would have been awkward for her neck, and to have him sit beside her would have been unseemly. He went down on one knee, the dogs began to circle him, sniffing interestedly, and she asked him in English, “Strugge is gone?”

“Yes, my lady.”

“Good.” She patted the seat beside her and ordered at the dogs, “Here.” They jumped up, one beside her, the other onto her lap. “He was a tedious man. Are you going to be tedious, Master Ripon?”

“Should I prove so, I trust your grace will tell me, that I may improve.”

Lady Jacquetta laughed at him. “Good. Already you have less tedious than he did.”

Her words were made the more charming by the French glide she gave to them, but Joliffe made bold to say, “Your grace may mean ‘you are less tedious than he was.’ ”

“What? Oh.” Momentarily, she was not pleased to be corrected and showed it. Then her face cleared and she said, “Good. I need to know. We will talk English, and you will tell me what I say wrong.” Then, in French, she snapped impatiently at everyone else, “Oh, let it go! If we stop looking for it, we will find it. That is always the way.” As the flurry fell away, she added to Joliffe, “We came here a week ago and still everything is not found out and in its place.” She looked around, and Joliffe could not tell what her deeper thoughts were as she went on, “Where I lived as my lord of Bedford’s wife is too splendid for his widow, yes. So that is now my uncle’s, and I am here.” She nodded firmly. “Yes. It’s well. Even though my lord husband had there built, I think he always liked here better. I think I do, too. These are quieter rooms. Except”—her voice sharpened and rose—“my women still cannot find everything.” Then she smiled on Joliffe, and her brief tartness was immediately nothing against her sweet, young loveliness.

Add that loveliness to her wealth as the dowager duchess of Bedford, thought Joliffe, and her powerful Luxembourg relatives would have no trouble finding another marriage for her. Which was surely what they had in mind: she was not someone to be wasted in widowhood when she could bring another useful alliance to her family.

Just now, though, her smile was on him as she made a small lift of her hand to bid him rise, and said, while he did, “I would hear how you read. Better than Master Strugge, I hope. Tonight come here after supper. You will read to us. Monday we will begin on my accounts my uncle brought from England for me. The Michaelmas accounts, yes?”

Joliffe bowed. “As it pleases you, my lady.”

Understanding he was dismissed and aware of her ladies brightly watching him, he retreated, only belatedly noting M’dame now standing in the room’s other doorway, likewise watching him. Strugge had said, “M’dame watches over my lady like a dragon over its hoard of gold.” Which Lady Jacquetta indeed was. And being “a hoard of gold” wrapped in a woman’s fair body, she was surely in need of such a dragon as M’dame, to keep all safe against thieves.

But of course this was a “hoard of gold” with a mind of its own, which might make the dragon’s task more challenging and the dragon that much fiercer; and Joliffe made sure he looked no more than very humble as he bowed at the parlor’s outer door and escaped.

D
one with seeing what he wanted of the hôtel and with no thought of what better he might do, he changed his mind and decided to venture a little acquaintance with his work. After all, he had to do better than
seem
Lady Jacquetta’s English secretary. He had to
be
her English secretary, and if she did indeed intend to make a beginning on the Michaelmas accounts the day after tomorrow, he might do well to look at them today.

When he passed through Master Wydeville’s chamber to reach that shared by the secretaries and clerks of the duchess’ household, Master Wydeville was standing at the desk beside the window, talking to Pierres over some papers there. Joliffe gave a brief bow of his head as he went by them, but neither man gave even a glance his way. In truth, Master Wydeville had shown no interest at all in him these past days. Joliffe was waiting with mingled curiosity and wariness for when that would change, but for now facing the men at their desks in the next chamber, all of them looking up from their work at him as he came in, was sufficient challenge.

Save for Henri, who oversaw Lady Jacquetta’s letters of business in Normandy and France, they were clerks of the ducal household, charged with keeping record of everything the household bought, spent, gave, and got day by day—from how much bread, meat, and other foods were provided at the day’s meals, to the hay for horses in the stable, the bundles of firewood used in ovens and hearths, and how much spiced wine was taken to the duchess’ bedchamber each evening. Strugge had brought Joliffe here long enough to show him his desk, name him to his fellow clerks and all of them to him, and say how to go about getting ink, pens, paper, and parchment when need be. Afterward he had bothered to add, “You may do well enough with George. He’s English. The others, well, they’re French. You’ll have to decide for yourself,” making it plain his own decision had been unfavorable.

Joliffe suspected his fellow-clerks were probably as glad of Strugge’s going as Strugge was.

With all of them looking at him, he paused, smiled brightly, and said, deliberately clumsily, “Good afternoon. Er. Um.
Bon jour?
”

Jacques and Bernard frowned as if trying to remember who he was. The secretary Henri frowned as if remembering him but not much pleased about it. Only George gave him a friendly nod and said, “He’s gone, then, is he?”

“He’s on ship by now and waiting for the tide,” Joliffe said.

There were general nods in answer to that—of satisfaction, Joliffe thought—before they all bent back to their pen-scratching. Taking his cue from their diligence, he went to the desk that he had to think of as his. The rolls of papers and parchments and the sealed letters that were now his duty were in the small locked chest beside it, and with the key Strugge had given him, he knelt, unlocked and opened the chest, and took out not the leather bag on top but the strap-bound gathering of parchment rolls below it. The label hanging from it told they were last year’s records, and he thought that beginning with those would help him better judge what this year’s records had to say. With perfect awareness that he knew very little about what he was doing, he sat at the desk and began to read.

Lady Jacquetta’s dower properties from her marriage were a small part of all the duke of Bedford had held, but not far through these reports of her lands’ and other properties’ worth, and her income from them, Joliffe began to be overwhelmed. As a player, he was used to eking out his days on pence, with some days very few of even those. At present, all that he owned was on his body or in the chest beside his bed in the dormer or else in the back of the players’ cart, wherever that might presently be. Except for the wits between his ears, that was all his full worth, while here in front of him was record of income reckoned in pounds and shillings to the point where the pence and ha’penny of the sums seemed hardly worth the bother of writing them down. As he worked his way through enough of last year’s rolls to begin to understand them, he did not know whether he admired or was appalled by her receivers’ skill in apparently missing nothing that was due—or overdue—to their lady and recording all of it in careful detail. The figures he was reading from the parchment were only ink, but his imagination was more than sufficient to translate them into acres of land, scores of buildings, and hundreds of people owing rents and other payments, all to the profit of the black-gowned girl he had lately bowed to. And these were only her English lands. How much more was hers in France?

Deep into his work, he hardly knew how far the afternoon’s gray light had faded, until Henri straightened on his stool and said, “There,” with the air of someone putting an end to his day’s work. “Is anyone doing anything that needs lamp-oil wasted over it?”

He was answered by a general shaking of heads and chorused “
Non”
as everyone else straightened from their desks, with Joliffe surprised to find how near his nose had come to the parchment he was reading.

He could have copied Jacques in groaning and pressing a hand to his back, but simply joined his fellows in a general rustling of papers and parchment, tidying work away into chests to be locked up for the night before they went down to the great hall where there would be warmth and light and others of the household gathering in the way of the hall-servants readying the long tables for supper. His brief wrestling with his own unfamiliar lock and its key made him last to leave, finding in the outer chamber that Pierres was gone, the shutters had been closed across the window, and a pair of oil lamps hanging on a tri-footed stand lighted, giving warm light to Master Wydeville standing at the open door of a squat ambry beside his desk, not looking up from the paper he held as Henri and the passing clerks, one after the other, gave quick bows of heads and murmured “Sir,” toward him as they passed. But as Joliffe did the same, he said, “Master Ripon. I’d speak with you.”

Joliffe stopped sharply enough he would have slid if on a slippery floor. George, just ahead of him, looked backward over a shoulder and grimaced with apparent sympathy before disappearing into the stairway after the others. Joliffe stayed where he was. Master Wydeville went on looking at the paper in his hand the few moments more until the men were far enough down the stairs to feel free of their work and gave way to talk and someone’s loud laughter.

Master Wydeville put the paper back in the ambry and said, “Close the door.”

Joliffe obeyed, then turned to him, carefully blending courtesy and curiosity on his face. He had long since learned that
some
look on the face was better than trying for bland or blank. Bland or blank suggested an effort to hide something and was therefore best not used when indeed trying to hide something. Or when having nothing to hide, as presently.

“You are settling into your place here, I trust?” Master Wydeville asked.

“I am, sir.”

“Master Strugge gave sufficient explanation of your duties?”

“I believe so. I’ll be better able to say in a few days.”

“Surely,” Master Wydeville agreed. He had turned to a silver pitcher standing at one corner of the table by the window and was pouring deeply red wine into two silver bowls. “You have also seen Lady Jacquetta. Her dogs did not bite you, so that went well.”

For a moment, Joliffe thought Master Wydeville had made a light jest, then decided by the look on his face that he was serious.

Oh.

Master Wydeville set down the pitcher, took up one of the bowls, and held it out to Joliffe. Joliffe took it, his fingers curving around its graceful shape. Too long used to the clumsiness of wood cups and alehouse pottery, he had a moment of awkward uncertainty before memory came back, and as Master Wydeville took up the other bowl and drank, Joliffe raised his own with the needed graceful bend of his wrist and drank, too. The wine was fulsome; he gave an admiring nod as he lowered the bowl.