Court of Traitors (Bridget Manning #2) (9 page)

Once she was inside, Bridget threw off her travelling cloak and was met in the hall by one of the maids, Tilly Burnard. “Oh, my lady, you have come home! I am so glad. We have all been driven half out of our minds with worry. Mistress Joanna has been so ill that Abbess Joan and Sister Margaret have scarcely left her side. We tried to get a message to you and the master earlier, but there is talk of plague in the city, and we have been afraid to step outside our own front door! Truly, it has been terrible, madam, but now—”

“All right Tilly, all right, there is no need to distress yourself any further. I understand that everyone has had a bad time of it. As you see, the master has not returned with me; he has gone on to Windsor with the king.” Tilly’s brown eyes widened. “But
I
am home now and there is no need to fret.” Bridget smiled at the maid encouragingly. “Now then, is Joanna in her usual bedchamber?”

“No, my lady,” Tilly replied, ushering Bridget toward the great staircase. “Abbess Joan thought it best to move the young mistress into her own rooms, where the fireplace is larger and the bed more spacious. We all had to pitch in and help Abbess Joan and Sister Margaret carry Mistress Joanna down the passageway and into the abbess’s rooms, as she could not walk on her own.”

Bridget’s stomach contracted in dread at this morsel of news, but she put a brave face on for the maid. “Tilly, I thank you for taking care of Mistress Joanna. I know you have done all you can for her. I am confident that she will soon be recovered and up and about in no time, completely under her own power.”

Tilly looked unco
nvinced and her eyes sparkled with tears as she knocked upon and then opened the door to the abbess’s rooms. Bridget had to stop her own tears forming as she stepped out from behind Tilly and walked into the chamber.

              Joanna lay rigidly upon the tester bed, partially buried under a great heap of furs and coverlets, her lank, red hair fanned out around her on a pile of pillows. Her eyes were closed and seemed somehow to have retreated into her face, which was unnaturally pale and running with sweat. Her breathing was rapid, and each time she inhaled, a rattling sound emanated from her throat. She gave every appearance of being half-dead, her skin stretched so tightly across her countenance that her cheekbones jutted upwards like blades.

              “Bridget! Oh, thank Jesu you are here. Joanna has been asking for you. As you see,” the abbess stood up from her position next to the bed and gestured to its occupant, “she is grievously unwell. We think it is . . .” She pulled Bridget into a hug and whispered in her ear, “the Sweat.”

In the corner of the chamber
, Sister Margaret gathered up her embroidery and quietly left the room, nodding a welcome to Bridget as she went. Bridget returned it with a sigh, and gave herself up to the comfort of the abbess’s familiar embrace. Then, once she had allowed herself a minute or two of despair, she set about her business.

              “I know, Mother. Sir Richard informed me of the contents of your letter, but we must not think the worst. It may not be the Sweat, after all that affliction usually claims its victims very quickly. Joanna may have contracted only a mild dose. That means she has an excellent chance of survival. She will survive, I
know
she will. She is young and strong. We must imbue into her every last drop of our faith. In the meantime, is there any need for her to be so well covered in furs? It is unbearably hot in here, what with the fire burning and the windows shuttered. She may become overheated and that cannot be a good thing. In fact, I think I will open a window, just to let in a little air.”

              The abbess stayed her arm and fixed her with a determined gaze. “Leave the windows closed. I had twenty years dealing with illness at the abbey, and I know how to oversee a sickroom. It is imperative that Joanna remains warm. Sister Margaret and I have taken it in turns to take care of her, but we do need another pair of hands to assist us. That is why it was imperative you came home. Oh, do not misunderstand me—Tilly and the others do their best, but they fear catching the
illness
. They creep up and down the staircase like frightened children. But you will not be afeared. I know you are made of sterner stuff.”

              Over the next two days, the three of them quickly fell into a routine of nursing Joanna, with the abbess taking charge and Bridget obediently following her lead. Bridget’s presence in the house allowed the abbess and Sister Margaret to get some rest, a commodity that had wholly eluded them in the days before her return. Bridget took over the nightshifts in Joanna’s chamber, while the abbess took herself gratefully off to bed. Sister Margaret, a light sleeper, would often join her at Joanna’s bedside, a silent but attentive figure. Joanna herself kept drifting in and out of consciousness and was in a constant state of thirst. Mercifully, she did not seem to be in much pain and her fever was not increasing, but neither would it break. She was fighting the ague as best she could, but she grew weaker with every ragged breath she succeeded in dragging into her lungs.

              On the third night back, Bridget was sitting beside Joanna’s bed, listening to her tortured breaths when her eye fell upon a small wooden casket that sat in the corner of the room. The casket, a pretty, little oak coffer, was a familiar item to her, as it was a much-loved relic that the abbess had saved from the clutches of Cromwell’s men during the suppression of Rivers.
Cromwell
. His name fell into her mind like a single droplet of rain, and her thoughts returned at once to the last conversation she had had with him at the archery contest. A list of names silently uncoiled themselves one by one: the king, Exeter, Carew, Abbess Joan, Sister Margaret, and Robert Aske. Those rumours Cromwell had heard regarding Sister Margaret: that she was a “well-wisher” and possible “correspondent” of Aske’s. That she did not support the king. That the abbess, by association, was thus held to be suspect as well, since she had given Sister Margaret a place at Thorns. Bridget had jumped to the abbess and Sister Margaret’s defence naturally enough and had assured Cromwell that they were essentially harmless, old women. She was as certain as she could be about the abbess, she did not know about Sister Margaret. As Cromwell had alluded to, Sister Margaret had taken the suppression of Rivers very badly. Bridget could well remember her screaming and cursing at the agents on the day they were shut down. She could also remember her tears of desolation as everything she held dear was ripped away from her. After that Sister Margaret had gone to live with her brother and that is where she had been at the time of the Pilgrimage of Grace, at least when it had started— so perhaps she had been in contact with Aske and the rebels. She was no partisan of the king
that
much was true, and she clung with the stubbornness of a mule to the old ways. Was Cromwell truly in receipt of some damaging material about her? Had she indeed been so foolish as to write to poor, ill-fated Robert Aske? And what of the abbess’s role? The casket, so often the receptacle of the abbess’s correspondence in the past, could hold the answers she sought.

              Forewarned was forearmed, as far as all matters pertaining to Thomas Cromwell were concerned, and so Bridget felt only the merest pinprick of guilt as she approached the casket and quietly lifted the lid. It was not unusual to find it unlocked, as the abbess was often a little careless about such things, but Bridget still breathed a small sigh of relief when it opened up easily in her hands. She manoeuvred the light of the candle she carried over the casket’s contents and, at first, was not unduly alarmed by what she saw.

              The casket was filled with rolls and rolls of parchment, several piles of them, as well as a collection of rosary beads, three jewel-encrusted crosses that she recognised from the abbey and some pieces of jewellery that had once belonged to the abbess’s mother. There was also a leather-bound, beautifully illustrated
Book of Hours
, its pages made soft by regular use; this was one of the abbess’s most treasured possessions. So far then, nothing to be apprehensive about, but Bridget wanted to make sure, especially as far as the letters were concerned. She picked up one of the rolls of parchment, from the first pile, undid its shiny black ribbon and scanned its spidery contents.

              She went through it carefully, found nothing untoward, and moved on to the next. And the next, and the next. They were seemingly nothing more than old letters from the abbess’s days at Rivers, of interest to no one but Mistress Joan. Her heart did lurch once though when she read the signature written so boldly, and so confidently, at the bottom of the one of them—“Anne the Queen.” This must be the letter Anne had written to the abbess towards the end of 1535, offering Bridget and Joanna places at court. She ran her hands over the page with a kind of wondrous sorrow. It felt like touching a document retrieved from another lifetime.

              She carefully rolled up the parchment, re-tied the ribbon and started on the second pile. Once again, she found nothing. She rummaged through the rest of the casket’s contents and was about to give up when her hand brushed against the bottom of the box and she felt it move slightly. She let her fingers run over the wood until they found a part that was uneven. She removed all of the items, put both her hands in and worked them backwards and forwards until she could get her nails underneath the edges of the base. In no time at all, she slid what transpired to be a false bottom to one side and the casket’s secret was revealed: a cache of five small items. It consisted of four rolls of parchment and what appeared to be a folded-up piece of fabric.

              She took one of the rolls out and quickly untied it. The candlelight flickered across the pages, and she realised that the handwriting was entirely unfamiliar to her. Had this been penned by the abbess or by someone else? Puzzled, she frantically searched for the signature at the bottom. It was only just legible, and she struggled to read it, but finally she did. Once she had deciphered the name it seemed to start off the page at her, almost mocking her in its clarity—“Robert Aske.” Shaken, Bridget went through the remaining three, and each one bore the same name at the end. Aske, Aske, Aske. Bridget got up and glanced out into the hallway, sure that the sound of her heart beating must be audible to the rest of the house, as it was pounding so loudly in her own ears. The passage, mercifully, contained nothing but darkness.

              She padded softly back to the chest, past the form of the sleeping Joanna, and gathered up the incriminating letters in trembling hands. So there had been a correspondence, just as Cromwell had suggested, and since the letters were kept in the abbess’s casket in her rooms, it must have been between her and Aske and not Sister Margaret. What on earth had the abbess been thinking writing to Robert Aske, and why had she chosen to keep that correspondence now that the man himself had been hanged? Did she not know treason when she saw it, for that was exactly what Bridget now held so uncomfortably before her eyes. Treason written in bold, black ink and sealed in red wax. Unless she took action, unless she got rid of these letters, they might prove to be the abbess’s downfall. And it would not stop there.

              She had been so disconcerted, and so shocked, by her discovery that she had nearly forgotten about the last item in the chest, the piece of fabric that lay folded up in the bottom in a neat, small square. She took it up and unfurled it. Initially, she was not entirely sure what she was looking at. Then the wheels of her brain ground into gear and her mouth turned dry as dust. The Five Wounds of Christ, the symbol of the Pilgrimage of Grace, stared unflinchingly up at her from the white cambric. This was the banner that the rebels, or the pilgrims as some called them, had marched under and subsequently died for. If the Aske letters did not secure the abbess a place upon the gallows at Tyburn, then this little piece of embroidery most assuredly would. Others had died for far less.

              Bridget crouched on the floor and tried to control her fears. She had to think clearly but her mind was racing with too many possibilities. She considered writing forthwith to her husband but almost immediately discarded the idea. At the moment, as far as she was aware, only two people, herself and the abbess, knew of the existence of the letters. Cromwell said he had heard rumours, and with him it was always possible that he knew far more than he had let on, but Bridget had no definite proof of that. Aske was dead and could tell no tales. Bridget therefore wanted to keep the amount of people who knew about the missives to an absolute minimum and, to that end, she decided to keep Sir Richard out of it. Besides, an inner voice asked, could she be certain what her husband would do with such information? Would he seek to save himself by casting others to the wolves? Even with his
sister
involved? Was he capable of that?

              She instantly felt ashamed of herself for even contemplating that her husband would do anything to send his sister to the scaffold, but at the same time, what might a person do in order to save their own skin? Sir Richard was not directly involved in any wrongdoing and had made sure that he stayed safely on the side lines during the rebellion, but these letters were in his house, and the abbess lived under his roof. He could easily be portrayed as an aider and abettor, a secret sympathiser. A traitor. The king did not hesitate to sign anybody’s death warrant and misprision of treason, the crime of concealing knowledge of treason from the notice of the Crown was just as much of a hanging offence as the act of treason itself. No, the permutations got worse the more she thought about it. It was best to keep Sir Richard well away from this.