The Maiden’s Tale (10 page)

If she meant that as warning to the man to stay out of sight, they were not alone, he did not take it but came boldly out behind her, paused so that Frevisse had ample time to see he was young, very good to look on, a household squire in short doublet and well-fitted hosen, before he bowed to her so that she had to bend her head in answer to him, insuring Lady Jane knew she knew he was there. Then he turned and left with an open, confident walk far too assured for someone caught out as he and Lady Jane had been, in private talk apart from everyone. But except that she visibly stiffened, Lady Jane refused to admit he was there, and preferring the lady’s discretion to the man’s boldness, Frevisse kept up the pretence with her, saying, “I’d be pleased of your company, my lady, both for its own sake and because I’m likely to lose my way otherwise.”

With cheerfulness she almost made believable, Lady Jane answered, “When I first came here, I found myself forever heading for the garden when I meant to go to the foreyard, or to the rearyard when I was trying for the church.”

“I’d likely then end up in the stables when trying for the lady chamber. How long until I know my way about, do you think?”

“Not long. I’ve been here but three weeks and know my way.”

“I thought his grace and Lady Alice came to London every year.”

“They may,” Lady Jane said in a carefully light voice, “but I’ve only been with them since Easter.”

And where were you before then, Frevisse wondered, to be the age you are and never married? She might even have asked it, but Lady Jane abruptly let go of pretence, cast a look over her left shoulder to be sure the man was gone, and said, “It would be very much to the good if you said nothing of seeing us together here.”

Unable to hold back from probing, Frevisse murmured, “He’s good to look on.”

“He’s someone who thinks that’s the same as having brains,” Lady Jane snapped back.

“A fairly common error.”

“Indeed.” Lady Jane tried to make light of it but couldn’t. “Truly, it mustn’t be known we were talking together here.”

Frevisse held quiet, committing herself to nothing, wanting to know more. Lady Jane hesitated, then gave way to explain, “Robyn thinks it’s clever to make trouble. That’s all he’s doing. He knows I dislike him and led me into talk here by saying he had something to tell about that matter Lady Alice has asked your help with.”

Abruptly wary, Frevisse asked, “You know about that?”

“It’s my place you’re taking.”

“I thought I was taking the place of someone who died.”

“Eyon Chesman. He was the link for messages in and out of Coldharbour. I was his link to Lady Alice. When he died, it was decided to make a new route altogether, for a while at least. But that’s why Lady Alice had me stay when she sent everyone away last night. Because I’ve had part in it.”

“And so does this Robyn?”

Lady Jane hesitated again before saying, “We aren’t supposed to know who does and doesn’t, except for who we directly work with, as I did with Eyon.”

“If this Robyn is turned troublesome, Lady Alice…”

“She knows,” Jane said, too quickly. “She knows. There’s no need to speak to her about it. Or to anyone else. In all this matter, the least said is the best said.”

Frevisse supposed so, also supposed there was more about fair-faced Robyn than Lady Jane had said, but only said herself, “It’s cold here. Shall we go?”

Servants were setting shutters open to the uncheering day as they went back toward the great hall; Lady Jane said, “You were fortunate in your journeying,” giving them chance to talk of travel. That and weather were always useful for conversation between slight acquaintances, although by the time they reached the hall Frevisse had noticed that Lady Jane, unlike most people, asked more about Frevisse’s travelling than told of her own. Frevisse was readying to turn that around when distracted by a household yeoman crossing their way, nothing particular about him except that when he made a deep bow of his head to them, as he should in passing, Lady Jane made an equally deep curtsy to him in return, far more than courtesy required from her, the man not pausing his going or Lady Jane in her talk until they were well away from him, when she said as if Frevisse had asked, “He’s my betrothed. We’re to be married at Twelfth Night.”

Frevisse held her surprise in check. If Lady Jane was wellborn enough to be a lady-in-waiting to Lady Alice, surely she should be marrying higher than a yeoman, no matter what her face. There had been no sign of particular affection in either of them at their greeting or in Lady Jane’s voice now, and if the wedding were not for another a month and a half, the matter was not of haste, to cover some shame. Then for what?

Another question to add to the ones about well-featured Robyn, because Frevisse did not comfortably believe what Lady Jane had said of him.

In the lady chamber Alice waved to them to join her at a table covered with papers and account rolls, saying to the dark-haired, small-boned man who was with her as she let an accounts roll close, “There, that’s all for now. I’m going to enjoy my cousin’s company the rest of this morning if there’s nothing pressing.”

“It’s all well in hand, my lady,” he said with a slight bow.

“Frevisse, this is Master Bruneau, secretary concerning all our properties in France and a good friend.”

Thinking she knew his accent, Frevisse said, “You’re from Normandy, sir? From near Rouen?”

Master Bruneau’s formality dropped away into a smile. “My lady is of Normandy? Named then for our Saint Frevisse?”

He gave her name the French pronunciation she had not heard since childhood. The English made shorter and less graceful work of it and she confessed, “No, my parents were entirely English, but I was born in France and, yes, was named for Saint Frevisse because she’s the same as our St. Frideswide of Oxfordshire.” Perhaps the only touch of home-longing her wandering parents had ever shown.

“Ah. That would be why your French is of France rather than of Stratford-at-Bow.”

“There now,” Alice said, feigning grievance. “He’s always doing that. Using Grandfather’s words against me.”

Master Bruneau gave her a deeply respectful bow. “For the sake of your grandfather’s many and most beautiful words, I will tell you your French is unflawed. ”All lies in you, do with it what you will. I all forgive, without a longer space.“ ”

“I’m supposed to know what that’s from, aren’t I?” Alice said.

This seemed an old game between them, and Frevisse joined in with, “ ‘For whoso gives a gift, or does a grace, Do it by time, his thanks is well the more.” “

Alice threw up her hands in protest. “That’s enough. I don’t need both of you doing it.” But she was laughing as she pushed some of the papers and three of the rolls in front of her toward Master Bruneau. “They’re yours. I don’t want to see that lot again until next year’s accounts have to be done.” And added warmly when he had gathered them up and gone, “He’s a sapphire among servants. Learned, of good understanding, capable, and entirely practical. Do you know how many people are of good understanding and learned and totally incapable of practicality?”

“And his English
is
better than your French,” Frevisse said.

“He’s been in England far longer than I’ve ever been in France,” Alice returned with dignity, “and that excuses neither of you quoting Grandfather so much more readily than I do.”

“Who’s to blame for that?” Frevisse asked innocently.

“You and Master Bruneau. It wouldn’t matter how little I had learned, if both of you had learned less.”

“That answer,” Frevisse responded, “didn’t work on your father when you were eight years old and tried it over your Latin lessons and it doesn’t work with me.”

They were laughing at each other by then, and Lady Jane was listening in open puzzlement, her head turning back and forth between them. Alice, noticing, said kindly, “It’s the trouble with having family who’ve known you for years. They leave you no dignity.” And then, her expression changing, she said contritely, “Oh, Jane, I’m sorry. That was thoughtless of me.”

Lady Jane’s smile was awry, as it must needs always be because of her blemish, but her eyes and voice were amused rather than hurt as she said, “I know. It’s no great matter, my lady.”

“Jaaane!” a girl shrilled from down the room. “Millicent is being wrong about colors again!”

“If you’ll pardon me, my lady?” Lady Jane asked.

“By all means. The saints forbid Millicent be left to go her own way with colors.”

Laughing softly, Lady Jane left them. Watching her go, Alice said, “I’ve grown most fond of her since she came to us. I’ll miss her when she weds. Come sit at the window. We’ll be comfortable and well apart there from everyone else. We’ve hardly had time to talk of how things are with you.” But when they were seated on the cushioned window seat next to each other, she went back to Lady Jane who was now showing bright-dyed yarns to a cluster of other women and girls, explaining something to them. “She may stay. We’re all the family she has, after all.”

“Family?” Frevisse prompted.

“Yes. Family.” Alice seemed puzzled by her question, then, “Oh! Yesterday, with everything, I never said, did I? She’s my lord husband’s niece. His older brother’s last daughter.”

“But she’s marrying a yeoman,” Frevisse said, showing her surprise. Suffolk’s older brother had died without a son and so Suffolk had come into the earldom, but his nieces were still noble, entitled to better marriages than that.

But Alice, seeming to feel nothing was wrong in it, said easily, “It’s a story indeed. When my lord’s brother died—in Agincourt battle, did you know?—he left two daughters, no son, and his widow well along with child. If she’d birthed a boy, he would have had the earldom but it was Jane and born marred with that blemish, poor thing, for worse luck. Her mother wanted nothing to do with her. She said the child was devil-marked with her dead father’s blood and only wanted to be rid of her.”

An array of uncharitable thoughts concerning Lady Jane’s mother passed through Frevisse’s mind but she kept them to herself, asking only, “And then?”

“She went through with what she’d already planned to do if she had no son. She’d been given wardship of her daughters as a matter of course and now proceeded to sign away all her rights and theirs concerning the earldom except for their dowries and retired with the two older ones into a Franciscan nunnery in Suffolk for life.”

Frevisse was trying to calculate years in her head: what she guessed Suffolk’s age to be against how many years since Agincourt, how old his brother might have been then and so to, “The girls must have been very young.”

“Babies. Simply babies,” Alice said. “Their father was only twenty, I think, when he died. It was all their mother’s doing, no choice of theirs.” Alice, who had made her own choices for most of her life and would never have made that one, showed her disgust.

“And Lady Jane?”

“She wouldn’t have the baby anywhere near her. She had her taken away to somewhere else.”

“A small nunnery,” Frevisse guessed, “well out of the way.”

“A very small nunnery and very out of the way. Her shame disposed of, never to be seen or thought on again,” Alice agreed.

“Only Lady Jane did not stay disposed of, I take it?”

Pleasure bloomed in Alice’s face. “Oh, no, indeed not.”

Wind-gapped clouds sent a broken burst of sunlight chasing down the Thames and across the Southwark rooftops beyond, drawing Alice to look and point at a bright-painted, canopied barge nosing out from a wharf there, the oars glittering in the passing sweep of sunlight as they rose and fell together, swinging the barge’s length around to head upriver.

“That’s Winchester House,” Alice said, “and that will be his grace our Cardinal Bishop Beaufort setting out for Westminster, I’ll warrant. I wonder.” She raised a hand, one of the pages standing attendance near the stairway door came to her, and she told him in a low voice, “Go tell my lord of Suffolk that his grace the bishop of Winchester has just set out up-river.”

The boy, a fair-haired child of maybe nine, clad in the Suffolk livery, repeated what she had said with solemn eagerness, and at Alice’s nod that he had it right, bowed again, and left.

“Lord de la Warr’s heir,” Alice said, watching him go. “He’s been here nigh a year now and is completely no trouble.

Unlike Exeter’s boy,“ she added, several worlds of dislike in her tone. ”I’m well rid of that one. But mostly the greatest trouble any of them are is how fast they outgrow their livery between one season and the next and are so hard on it the while that usually most of their doublets and certainly all their hosen are unfit for handing down to anyone but the ragmen.“

“Think what you’d save having fewer pages,” Frevisse jibed.

“Impossible,” Alice answered lightly. “People ally with us because we show them favor by taking their children into our household, and later the children, grown, favor us because we raised them. And one of these days we must needs move on who our daughter goes to in our turn. My own thought is the duchess of York would suit, but Suffolk hasn’t much liking for the duke after a while they were in France together. He favors the earl of Stafford just now, but there I don’t much like his wife. She’s a Neville, you know, and carries her nose a little too high for other people’s comfort. Well, Cecily of York is a Neville, too, for that matter. Her sister actually. But Nevilles seem to come in two kinds and Cecily is one and Anne is the other. Do you know, there are days I wish I’d chosen your way to live. None of these things to worry over.”

She did not say it seriously. They both knew that nunhood was an ideal, not a reality, for her, and Frevisse said freely, “You’re best as you are.”

“I’d better be because there’s no way out at present.” Alice laughed, then looked toward the stairway door and sighed. “And presently I seem to be needed.”

A short, rounded man was poised at the head of the stairs, waiting to be noticed, rising and falling a little on the balls of his feet, not impatiently but only as if he was unable to stand still in his eagerness to be about things. “Is that…” Frevisse searched for his name. “… Master Gallard?” She had not thought of him for years. “You’ve kept him on and here?”