A Play of Treachery (8 page)

“Your chamber first,” the servant said. He added something else too quickly for Joliffe to catch and then, “Go. Go.”

Cauvet went, and Joliffe followed him, asking, “What did he say?”

“We go to our chamber first. After that, we will see.”

The stairway curved upward, first past a closed door and then, higher, past an open doorway through which Joliffe glimpsed a high-ceilinged room and a tapestried wall. Cauvet, probably recognizing the tapestry, said with satisfaction, “Ah. My lord’s bedchamber. Good.”

Their climb brought them finally to another open doorway, the men passing through this one into a long space of bare floorboards and slanting rafters that told it was directly under the roof. Wooden bedsteads with thin mattresses were lined along one side, a heap of bedding on the foot of each. Except for an unlighted candle on a wall pricket beside the doorway, that was all. Without being able to make out exactly what was being said among the men, Joliffe guessed from their voices there was some grumbling as they spread along the dormer to the various beds. Perhaps they had had it better at the bishop’s palace? Or was that properly also called a
hôtel
here?

What he did not catch quickly enough was how the men were choosing their beds. Cauvet, abandoning him, joined another man in claiming the two beds at the far end, near the brick wall of a chimney that would give out warmth rising from the fires in rooms below. Joliffe belatedly guessed the other men were sorting themselves according to their greater or lesser place in the household, and he found himself left to the bed nearest the door—and also nearest a screen in the corner there, behind which were the pottery pots of the dormer’s necessarium, to give the polite name.

Resigned, and ignoring the sniggering glances of the nearer men, Joliffe set his sack on the floor and shoved it under the bed. Just so he was not the one who was supposed to empty those pots, too, he thought, and copied the other men in spreading a coarse linen sheet and then a thick woolen blanket of undyed wool over the straw-filled mattress. If he laid his cloak over the top of that, he thought he might sleep warm enough. If the weather got no colder, he silently added, looking up at the laths between the rafters and the roof slates held to them by wooden pegs, all there was between the attic chamber and the wind. He had slept with less between him and the weather often enough, and he silently laughed at himself because he had hoped for better while in a bishop’s household.

With nothing else to do and unable to join in the general talk around him, he sat down on the bed to wait for whatever came next. Used as he was to doing almost all the time—even if the “doing” was simply walking along the road toward wherever the players were next going or, on board the ships coming here, taking in all there was to see and learning what he could—idleness felt strange, the more so because everyone else seemed to have some thought of what they should be doing next. Cauvet, for one, had already disappeared down the stairs, taking the chest he had brought from the ship. After him, the other men went, too, one by one or several together, none giving Joliffe heed, until as the last several of them went past him, he decided it was pointless to stay here alone and stood up and followed them. Master Fowler had said he was to make himself known to Master Wydeville and he would never do it by staying here among the rafters.

The men he followed descended first to what Cauvet had said was the bishop’s bedchamber. Wide and long, it had windows at one end that must overlook the courtyard, and at the other end the bishop’s bed, raised above the floor on a low dais and enclosed by tall carved posts holding up a canopy of white and red striped cloth that matched the bed’s coverlet and the curtains drawn back to the bed’s four corners. The wall-hung tapestries around the room were woven with tall, vividly colored figures of undoubtedly allegorical men and women that Joliffe supposed he would have chance enough to look at, because besides bedchamber, the room was furnished—as was common—at the end opposite the bed for the gathering of men to attend on the bishop and, guessing from the low desk in one corner, for some secretary’s work.

Joliffe could guess that because Bishop Louys’ journey to England had been half-secret—in other words, no secret at all but kept as low-viewed and little flaunted as possible—the bishop had traveled with very little of his household and none of the rich flourish a bishop’s travel usually entailed. Because so little of the bishop’s goods had been with him, there was not the fuss and flurry of much unpacking and readying the chamber there might have been. The shift of his goods from his
hôtel
to here having been already done, the chamber was complete, simply waiting for his presence. Only the tall-mantled fireplace on the chamber’s far side told this had been someone else’s place: across the pale-stone surround were carved, over and over again, the image of a long-rooted tree-stump. A woodstock—a badge of John, duke of Bedford. So this had, in all likelihood, been the duke’s great bedchamber and, presumably, his duchess’. She must have moved—or been moved—to make way for her uncle. Joliffe wondered to where.

And what she thought of being so displaced.

At any rate, Cauvet was not there, and when the bishop’s men, having milled about purposelessly, admiring the chamber but lacking reason to be there without the bishop, began to leave through one of the room’s several other doors, Joliffe went with them, wanting to see more of the place and hoping to find Cauvet along the way. At least one of the men was clearly acquainted with the
hôtel
, leading them through a series of lesser rooms and down a stairway to another large chamber as if he knew where he was going and from there into the great hall, coming out just below the dais where a brace of servants were spreading white cloths over the high table there in preparation for whatever welcoming feast was to come. Behind the table, several men on ladders leaned against the wall were putting up a long-hanging tapestry beside another already there, with a canopy extended forward from it over one of the two tall-backed chairs set there at the table, turning it into a chair of estate—the duchess’, presumably, with the other likely to be Bishop Louys’.

Below the dais a scattering of men stood about in talk with one another while an intensity of more servants thumped through the business of setting up the trestle tables lined down either side of the hall’s length where lesser members of the household would sit to eat. The hall was not as large as some Joliffe had lately been in. Not so great-sized, surely, as the one lately built in London by Bedford’s brother, the duke of Gloucester. Rather than somewhere newly-made, here looked more as if it were an older place that had been changed and added to, but what had been added was splendid, with at the dais’ far end a stone-traceried window from floor to rafter-height curving boldly outward, paned below in clear glass but resplendent above with bright-hued heraldic shields and beasts. Further down the hall, one long wall was emboldened by a wide fireplace with a surround even more richly carved than that in the ducal bedroom, while facing it across the hall was a long sideboard whose four stepped shelves rising up the wall were draped in black cloth, probably in sign of the household’s year of mourning for Bedford’s death but surely showing to perfection the display of gold and silver dishes, goblets, basins, and ewers set out there. Joliffe had never seen such an array even in London, either at the gold-smiths’ shops in Cheapside or any lordly household where he had played.

All too often, the world judged a man’s worth by the wealth he showed to his fellows’ eyes. The display there on the sideboard served to assert the duke of Bedford had been a very worthy man indeed. From what little Joliffe knew about the late duke, though, that was an assertion that might well have been made less from Bedford’s pride than out of plain necessity. Placed as he had been in the world—regent of France and Normandy for his young nephew in England and therefore perilously balanced between a war that would not end and the governments and politics of two kingdoms—Bedford had had every need to display his wealth, and thereby his power, as one more way to constantly impress on powerful men that he was an even more powerful man, with both right and might to rule here in his nephew’s name.

Or, if it had come to it, to rule here in his own right, because Bedford had been his as-yet childless nephew’s heir. If it had been young King Henry who had died last year instead of the duke, Bedford would now be king of both realms, and his duchess a queen.

But it was Bedford who had died, and all that right and might must of necessity fall to someone else, while his wealth would presumably go to his widow.

Joliffe looked forward to seeing this wealthy, widowed duchess.

He had slowed while taking in all there was to see there in the hall and fallen behind the men he had been following; was starting after them again when he saw a man, just come from the hall’s other end, pause one of them and, by the look of it, ask a question, because the man he asked, and several others who had heard, searched around, found, and pointed toward Joliffe. The man gave a quick bow of his head in thanks and came onward. Joliffe stayed where he was, letting the man come to him, and was not altogether surprised when the man asked him in French-touched English, “You are John Ripon?”

Joliffe, trying to judge the man’s place in the household—his black clerk’s gown was without a badge but of good cut and cloth; the question was abruptly but not rudely asked; the man had made no bow; did he expect one to be given?—chose to follow Basset’s advice that you could not go wrong giving a man more respect than might be due him; and knowing that “John Ripon” was no one in the household yet and this man surely some manner of superior servant or clerk here, he gave a respectful bow, said, “I am, sir.”

“The chamberlain of the household, Master Wydeville, has asked you be brought to him. Pray, come with me, Master Ripon,” the man said and started away, not rude, merely a man very busy.

Suddenly sharply aware of the sealed packet tucked between his doublet and his shirt all these days from London, Joliffe went with him down the hall toward its further end. Halfway along it, though, the man paused and turned to look back toward the dais, and Joliffe copied him. The servants there had the second tapestry up now, were rigging its canopy to thrust out beside the other one already hung there, making both the tall-backed chairs into chairs of estate, as Joliffe had thought; and from here he could see that the newly-hung tapestry showed Bishop Louys de Luxembourg’s heraldic arms—those of his bishopric impaled with that of his family—while the other hanging showed the Luxembourg arms again but here impaled with those of England—the royal gold lions on scarlet and gold lilies on blue, differenced by a five-pointed label of ermine and fleur-de-lis to show they were not the king’s but the duke of Bedford’s. That would be the duchess’ arms, then, showing both her family and her marriage, Joliffe supposed.

This was going to be a complicated household if, as it seemed, she and her uncle the bishop were going to share equal honors here.

The man beside him gave a sharp nod, as if satisfied at what he saw, and moved on. Joliffe perforce went with him, leaving the great hall through one of three broad doorways at its far end, all three leading into a wide passageway floored with squares of green and white tiles that at one end opened to the courtyard through a broad, stone-framed doorway—the way into Joyeux Repos for its lord and lady and other great folk, Joliffe did not doubt—while a scuttling of servants through doorways at the passage’s other end made him guess the more serviceable parts of the place—kitchen, pantry, butlery, and all—lay that way. His own way, in the man’s wake, was partly along the passage toward the outer door, then up a wide stairway well-lighted by windows as it curved upward through a turret to come out one floor up into a gallery that looked to run the length of the building here.

Along one side, several windows with cushioned benches below them overlooked the courtyard. Joliffe could only guess to where the several shut doors along its other side led. Not to anywhere he was presently going, it seemed. His guide continued his brisk way to the gallery’s far end and through a doorway there to another stairway. Far narrower and darker than the other, it twisted tightly both downward and up, but Joliffe followed the man upward and then aside through yet another doorway into yet another room.

Given where it was in the house, so high and aside from the great hall and lordly chambers, the room was well-sized—space to swing a cat around, as Ellis would likely have said—but with bare floor-boards and plain-plastered walls. A place meant for work, not ease, with several closed chests and an ambry with shut doors standing against one wall, a single window in the wall facing those, and where the light would be best, a slant-topped desk beside a shelf fixed to the wall holding various small boxes and some books. Joliffe’s guide bowed to a man standing there and said, “John Ripon, sir.”

As the man laid the book he had been holding back on the shelf, Joliffe bowed, too. He had worried how he was to come to Master Wydeville quietly, supposing it would be best to make no particular show of it. He had not been ready for it to happen this soon, this openly, and by no effort of his own; nor had he given much thought to what a duke’s spymaster would look like. Not “ordinary,” at any rate, but the man in front of him looked only that. Somewhat past his middle years, with his quietly furrowed face beginning to be dragged down by time and his remaining rim of fair hair gone mostly white, he was dressed in an ordinary three-quarter-long, high-collared black robe in keeping with the household’s mourning, with black hosen and low-cuffed leather shoes and no ornaments except a ring on either hand. He could have been a modestly prosperous merchant or landed gentleman rather than what he was—a well-placed officer of a noble household.

“Master Ripon,” he said in the ordinary voice of a man from the southeast of England, something welcomingly familiar after all of the unfamiliar foreign talk around Joliffe these past days.