The Bastard's Tale (31 page)

‘It’s my doing. It’s because Suffolk saw him.“

‘Probably,“ Joliffe agreed uncomfortingly. ”Saw him, found out he knew about the dead man, and not knowing how much or how little Arteys knows, he’s settled for supposing he knows too much and means to shut him up.“

Frevisse stepped back from him. “You shouldn’t be talking to me. Even if Arteys keeps silent about where he’s been, Suffolk saw him with me. If you’re seen with me, Suffolk could turn on you next.”

‘Too true, unless your cousin convinced him you and she were innocent in this.“

‘How do I undo this? What am I going to do?“

‘You’re going to do nothing except go back to your nunnery,“ Joliffe said. ”As soon as possible.“

‘I can’t just leave, not after making this trouble.“

‘You didn’t make it. Suffolk made it. We have to keep him from making more. And by we, I mean myself, Bishop Beaufort, and even Bishop Pecock if he chooses. Not you.“

‘Or you either, Master Joliffe, if I may say so,“ Bishop Pecock said from the chapel’s open end.

Both Joliffe and Frevisse startled, and Joliffe started, “You,” said Bishop Pecock sternly, “forgot to watch your back or you’d have seen me here.” He entered the chapel, making his bow to the altar while saying, “I, on the other hand, have left Master Orle outside with instruction to cough if anyone at all approaches into hearing.”

Dame Perpetua, forgotten and silent until then, stood up from the bench. “I’ll join him, if I may. All this is something I shouldn’t hear, isn’t it?”

‘Very probably, yes,“ Bishop Pecock granted before either Frevisse or Joliffe could. ”And Master Orle will welcome your company.“ He and Joliffe bowed her away before he turned back to Joliffe and said, ”Now, it’s advisable you remove yourself from this matter because you are far more easily assailed than is Dame Frevisse. If Suffolk should learn of your help to Arteys and decide to deal with you, it would probably be done and over with before Bishop Beaufort could move to save you. Of the three of us, I not only have the most power to act but, as a bishop, am the least easily assailed should things go wrong.“

‘Remember Becket,“ said Joliffe. An archbishop of Canterbury murdered on a king’s orders three hundred years ago.

‘Saint Thomas Becket was a great and holy man who worked long and hard to have his martyrdom. My ambitions do not lie that way. I’m merely being practical. I am better placed than either of you to go against Suffolk. Why make it harder by getting either of you into trouble if you need not?“

‘But if you do fall into trouble,“ Frevisse said, ”you can’t disappear as Joliffe and I can.“

‘Being a bishop, I don’t need to disappear, merely withdraw with dignity to my bishopric. Besides, I don’t see anything any of us can do at present anyway. Myself or either of you.“

‘You could tell the king that Suffolk ordered the duke of Gloucester’s murder,“ Joliffe said.

‘With what proof?“

‘Arteys. He saw the man you found in the river. He says it’s the man he killed.“

‘Which will serve to get Arteys into deep trouble and prove nothing against Suffolk, who can deny any knowledge of it. Which, for all we know, may be true.“

Joliffe threw up his hands impatiently. “Yes. I know. There’s no proof.”

‘And rather than make things worse for Arteys,“ Frevisse said slowly, ”you advise we wait quietly for… what?“

‘For what comes. For what I may find out. For whatever mistake Suffolk may make or someone else may make on his behalf. We wait to see what happens and do the best with it we can. For one thing, I doubt these treason charges against Gloucester’s men will ever come to anything, not now that Gloucester is dead, God keep his soul.“

He said that sadly and crossed himself. Frevisse and Joliffe copied him but Joliffe asked while he did, “When?”

‘About three of the clock this afternoon. Not long after I reached him.“

‘It was a quiet death?“

‘As deaths go, yes.“

‘No sign of poison or anything else amiss?“

‘Nothing.“

Not that that proved anything, Frevisse thought. Poisoning could be done with sufficient subtlety to leave no sign. But even Bishop Pecock forebore to point that out in the long moment they stood silent, before Joliffe said heavily, “You’re in the right. Everything being as it is, the best we can do is wait.”

‘But will you?“ Bishop Pecock asked.

He and Joliffe exchanged a long, mutually assessing look before Joliffe bent his head slightly toward him and said with only faint mockery, “I will.”

‘Until we find something we can do usefully, rather than foolishly,“ Bishop Pecock said.

Joliffe bent his head again. “Until then.”

The pity was, Frevisse thought, that waiting would likely be, of almost all things, the hardest.

*       *       *

She found out all too soon how hard it was. A message sent that evening to Alice, asking to see her, brought no answer, leaving her to a night restless with circling thoughts and too little sleep. In the morning the church draped in the mourning purples of Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent did nothing to help. Even the weather was gone gray again. The only comfort was that the air still had a mild edge, giving hope for spring; and at the end of Prime one of Alice’s ladies found her, to say Alice would see her in the Lady Chapel after Mass if Frevisse would be so good. Frevisse sent back her thanks and word that she would be there.

It was by force of will that Frevisse held her mind to the Mass but, after it, parted from Dame Perpetua with a willingness she hoped did not show and crossed the church to the north transept and the Lady Chapel. It was newer than most of the church, all pale stone and painted statues below tall windows and a blue-painted, golden-ribbed ceiling, with a carpet woven mostly in the Virgin Mary’s blues on the altar steps.

Knowing she would fail, Frevisse did not try to pray but simply waited until soon—not soon enough—Alice came. Gowned in deep purple except for the wide curve of her high, gold-and-pearl-trimmed headdress and the pale gray yards of fine silk trailing from it, she left a gray-gowned lady-in-waiting behind her at the doorway and came, the long train of her gown whispering across the chapel’s tiled floor, to where Frevisse waited. Without greeting, she held out two folded pieces of parchment, each with a large red wax seal hung from it by a ribbon and said, “Your deed. Confirmed and sealed with the king’s own signet. You should have no trouble with it. And a grant from the queen after I reminded her of her promise to you. A small property of her own to St. Frideswide’s.”

Both taken aback with surprise and greatly pleased, Frevisse took the parchments, thanking Alice and asking that she thank the queen, too, on the priory’s behalf.

Alice waved that aside, saying bitterly, “What she gave you cost her nothing but a clerk’s effort and some ink, paper, and wax. She’s hardly had the property in her hands to know she’s given it away. It’s come from what they started grabbing from Gloucester before he was even dead and they’ll be taking more.” The bitterness deepened. “It’s like watching carrion crows on a corpse.”

‘Alice…“

‘There’s a jest running among them, too, that yet again Gloucester has taken the easy way out of trouble. ’Took it lying down, too,‘ that idiot Bart Halley said and they all laughed. King Henry has even ordered there’s to be no mourning. What’s the matter with him? With them all?“

‘What happened yesterday after I left you?“

‘Yesterday.“ Alice circled back through her thoughts as if going a long way and said no less bitterly, ”I told Suffolk the ’truth‘ we’d prepared of how we came to there. I said I knew no more than you did why Gloucester’s son wanted to see the body. That’s true, you know. You must know something about it but I know nothing and therefore know ’no more‘ than you do. Though Suffolk didn’t hear it that way nor did I mean him to. Then I asked him why, since the dead man was one of our people, he hadn’t been seen to properly. Suffolk laid his hand on my shoulder and told me it wasn’t something I need concern myself about.“ Darkly, she added, ”He’s going to do that once too often.“

And when he did, he was going to be sorry, Frevisse thought, but she only asked, “Did he say why he’d kept the man unknown?”

Alice’s voice and face closed over some hurt so inward that it was past anger. “He didn’t. Even when I asked. He didn’t say anything at all. He just walked away.”

‘You know Gloucester’s men are all being arrested?“

‘Yes. Has Arteys been taken, do you know?“

‘He was among the first, I think,“ Frevisse said quietly. ”Can you find out what’s to be done with him, with them?“

‘From what I hear, they’re being sent to a number of places, to be held until matters are ’sorted out.‘ I think Suffolk and the others are using them to show there was reason for Gloucester’s arrest. They’ll be held a time, then they’ll be freed. There won’t be a trial or even investigation worth the name.“

‘There won’t be?“

‘How could they risk something that might show there was no treason? There wasn’t, was there? So they won’t dare bring any of them to trial.“

That made good sense. Frevisse wished she believed that Suffolk had good sense, but there was no point in saying so and Alice, drawing a sharp, deep breath, was shifted to brisk business, saying, “You’ll want to be away to St. Frideswide’s as soon as may be, now you have your grants safe. If you can be ready by midday, I’ve given order for some of our men to go with you then. You can be a goodly number of miles on your way before dark.” Tears were suddenly in the way of her smile as she held out a hand to Frevisse. “I shall miss you.”

Her own smile as unsuccessful, Frevisse took her hand and said all the things that should be said for courtesy’s sake and not the thing they both knew—that she was being sent away as deliberately as young John had been, for her own good and to have her out of the way. There being no point to objecting, she did not but asked, because she had to, “Alice, do you want to know why it mattered for Arteys see the body?”

Alice’s hold on her hand tightened. “No. I know I said I wanted the truth but now I don’t. I can’t. Not if I’m to go on.” A moment longer she stood looking into Frevisse’s face before, with her tears beginning to slide free, she let go and turned away, with nothing Frevisse could do but let her go.

Chapter 24

When she and Dame Perpetua rode into St. Frideswide’s yard at the end of a few days’ easy journey, there were glad cries and then much talk. Even removed as the nunnery was into northern Oxfordshire, they had had some tangled word of the duke of Gloucester’s arrest but nothing after that and there had to be much telling of things seen and heard, with Dame Perpetua all too often saying, “But Dame Frevisse saw more than I did,” and questions turned her way. That meant several drawn-out days of balancing along a line of what she could truthfully tell among all the things she must not say, until finally the questions and talk wore out and the nunnery’s familiar quiet and familiar days closed around her.

They should have been like balm to a hurt and, a little, they were, but the hurt did not heal. She had her duties again, and the welcome hours of prayer and all the usual small troubles and small pleasures of ten women sharing cloistered life, but behind it all, under it all, around it all, there was the waiting, just as she had known and dreaded there would be.

She had thought it would be as much as a few weeks of waiting, but the weeks went on through all of Lent, past Easter, past the end of spring, into summer. From such travelers as came their way and servants’ talk brought back from Banbury, there was word of Gloucester’s body carried in barren procession to St. Alban’s abbey in Hertfordshire for its burial, of Parliament’s uneventful end, of Bishop Beaufort of Winchester’s death in April, with of course talk of how he and his life-long rival Gloucester had come at the end to die so nearly together. A packman on his way from London told there was a general rumbling there against the marquis of Suffolk, both over Gloucester’s death and the way the French truce was going, but everything that came as far as St. Frideswide’s was thinned and made uncertain by distance, with nothing about Gloucester’s arrested men beyond a passing mention that some had been freed, uncharged and untried.

Waiting became a hollowness in Frevisse, so familiar after a time that she hardly knew how she had felt before it. Midsummer came with its hot days and the haying was done and sheep shearing finished before finally word came and even then it told her nothing, was not even directly to her. In a letter to Domina Elisabeth, Alice asked that Frevisse be allowed to come to her in London, not bothering with a reason, simply asking it, knowing Domina Elisabeth would not refuse. She had even sent two men with the messenger for escort, and the next morning Frevisse rode out with them and Sister Amicia, who could barely believe her good fortune at Domina Elisabeth having chosen her to go not only out into the world but to
London.

Sister Amicia would not have been Frevisse’s first choice but her talk and exclaims and—after their first two days of riding—complaints at being stiff and sore kept a little at bay Frevisse’s worries and wondering about why Alice had summoned her; and at night when her thoughts might have closed in on her, the weariness of having ridden from first light until long into dusk drew her quickly down into almost dreamless sleep. That the men were pressing hard to be back to London was clear but no questions Frevisse asked brought answer why, nor did they talk much among themselves for her to overhear, until finally—not understanding but accepting it—she stopped asking anything of them.