The Traitor's Tale (19 page)

"Suffolk had the marriage done very quietly last winter," Alice said, as if glad to say it aloud. "Secretly. On the chance things might go to the bad. Which they did."

"John is too young to have made the marriage completely sure," Frevisse said. Far too young to have consummated it.

"So is she. Nor are they ever likely to. I suspect that Somerset will do what he can to have the marriage annulled and get her into his own hands, to his own use. After all, the king has two half-brothers available for marriage."

Frevisse startled. She knew those two children. Edmund and Jasper. Or had known them when they were small boys. But, yes, they were young men by now and, yes, she could see how Somerset would like to place himself more closely to the king by marrying his niece to one of them.

"Not that I much mind the thought of having her off my hands," Alice said. "I like young Meg Beaufort very little."

"Alice!"

"Well, I don't. It's why I left her at Ewelme. She's lovely to the eye, is little Meg—she hates being called Meg, so I'm afraid I do it. She's all large eyes and sweet-shaped face, but even at seven years old she's pie-faced with piety. Walks around with her prayer book clasped to her breast and her eyes raised to heaven." Alice mimicked a child's voice simpering, " 'I'd be Christ's bride if I could, but God has willed otherwise for me.'" Alice returned to her own voice to say disgustedly, "When she says 'Christ's bride', what she sees is herself sitting in glory on a throne beside him, draped in cloth of gold. She wouldn't last a month in nunnery life. I do not like her, nor do I like Somerset, or his wife, or his miserable sons. He's welcome to her! I just want to be left alone for awhile!"

She made a small, angry, almost flailing movement with both hands, then clamped them together, shoved them down onto her lap, and said, looking straight at Frevisse, "There's something else."

Frevisse's momentary urge to comfort her was instantly quelled. Warily she asked, "What?"

"Remember I told you I was afraid of something else but wouldn't say more?"

"I remember."

"Through the last weeks before Suffolk left, he was in a seethe of anger. He kept saying he'd been betrayed. That he'd been betrayed and someone would pay along with him if things went any worse for him."

"He had to mean the duke of Somerset," Frevisse said.

"How had Somerset betrayed him? Everything in Normandy was going and has gone as they planned."

"So far as we know," Frevisse said quickly. "You and I, we truly know very little." And that little had come only by chance.

"But what if there were others in it with them? We don't know for certain there weren't. And if there were others, what do they know? What if they have proofs they could use against John, to his loss?"

Strongly, to convince herself as well as Alice, Frevisse said, "If there is someone else, they can do nothing without betraying themselves. Alice, Suffolk was likely talking out of his fear and anger, and there's no one."

"Mayhap." Despite her voice stayed steady, Alice's hands had begun to twist together in her lap. "But what if he wasn't? And there's this. Frevisse, he was going into exile in
Prance.
Knowing all he knew and angry as he was, what if he decided to tell everything to the French? How better to assure his welcome than to tell King Charles everything he knew? About the war, about King Henry, about ..."

"Alice, he would never have been that great a fool!"

"Oh, yes, he could have been," Alice said with a deeper and darker bitterness than she had yet betrayed. "Believe me. He very well could have been. And whoever else was with him in losing Normandy . . ."

"If there was anyone else in it besides Somerset," Frevisse said.

". . . had to be afraid he might truly do it, meaning I have to fear that someone while having no thought of who they are."

"If there's anyone at all," Frevisse persisted.

"Why is Burgate missing instead of simply dead like Hampden and Squyers? Why did he go missing weeks before anyone moved against them?" Alice was speaking more rapidly, as if having the words out might stop them hurting her. "The thing is, after Suffolk's . . . death, when some of our people came back and Burgate didn't and I asked if anyone knew where he was . . . Remember, I told of that?"

"I remember. You said no one knew where he'd gone."

"They didn't, no. But two of them offered that he'd been much with Suffolk just at the end, the day before they'd sailed. That Suffolk and Burgate had been away in another room, writing things."

"The letter to John."

"He had that nearly done before he left here," Alice said with cold scorn at Suffolk. "He showed it to me."

"You didn't go with him to
the coast?"

"We parted here. There was nothing more to be said between us."

Alice's coldness ended any more questions that way, and Frevisse tried, "Other letters then."

"If so, they were never sent. There were no messengers. I asked that."

"What you fear is that Suffolk was writing out—or was saying for Burgate to write out—his accusation against whomever he meant when he said he'd been betrayed. And you're afraid that Burgate has this accusation with him, wherever he is."

"That. Yes," Alice said. "Or maybe nothing was written at all- If I could find him and he would tell me that, it would be something. As it is, the not knowing is torture in its own right."

Slowly, Frevisse went on, seeing it more clearly as she said it and watching Alice while she did. "But anything Suffolk may have written in accusation of someone else would suffice to condemn him, too. Why would he do something so foolish as put in writing what would surely destroy him along with anyone he accused?"

"He surely only meant it to be used if he
was
destroyed.”

“Even if it could ruin John along with them?”

“To Suffolk's way of seeing the world, if he was ruined, then all was ruined," Alice said with raw bitterness. "For him, if he was dead, what was left alive that mattered? Now he's dead and Burgate is missing and my fear has to be there is an accusation and it will come to the wrong people. And there are so
many
wrong people," she said, her bitterness laced with despair.

Frevisse tried, "But Suffolk didn't know he was going to
be killed. Even if he wanted to have everything written down, why trust any man to know it? Why trust this secretary?"

"Oh, Burgate." Alice flicked one hand, dismissing him. "He's been Suffolk's man since he was a boy. In truth, they were boys together. He was the son of Suffolk's father's head clerk and followed his father's way. He probably knows more of Suffolk's secrets than Suffolk's confessor does." Her voice darkened again. "But if there is something and Burgate has it, where is he? Or where is it? If our enemies have it, why haven't they used it? If he doesn't have it, and they don't, who does?"

"If this Burgate were dead, you'd have heard.”

“Would I? He could be dead and no one know except whoever killed him. Or look how I'd not heard Somerset was returned to England. How much else is there I've not heard?" She sounded both grim and desperate now, her hands again clamped together in her lap. "I'm tainted by Suffolk's taint. I'm losing—or have maybe lost—my place at court and near the queen, and without that there'll be no one between me and all the enemies Suffolk made for us." She turned toward Frevisse. Her eyes were huge with staring into her fears, and with barely held desperation she said, "Everything is coming to nothing and I don't know how to stop it!"

"You've not come to 'nothing' yet," Frevisse said sharply, in ruthless comfort. "Your place in the world is maybe lessened, but so far you still have your wealth and your wits. Unless you let your fears tear you apart, you're not helpless. You've still time to work against whatever you're afraid may come."

Alice straightened as if from a slap. Momentarily her face tightened with anger; but then it cleared, and she said almost calmly, "There you're right. I'll be defeated when I'm defeated and not before. So, do I tell this Joliffe of yours about this possible written accusation or not? How far do we trust him? Always remembering that you like him and that may undermine your judgment of him."

"You trusted him yourself three years ago."

"Three years," Alice said, as if it were three lifetimes ago. "I've learned a great deal more about distrust since then, with everything that's gone so far astray from where I thought it would."

"Life has that way of going astray from where we thought it would," Frevisse said dryly.

"Has yours?" Alice asked in sudden sideways thought. "You wanted a nun's life and you have it. Aren't you happy in your nunnery?"

"I'm not in my nunnery," Frevisse snapped, hearing too late the betraying anger in her voice even as Alice said back with matching sharpness, "I'm sorry. I've told you I'm sorry-It was wrong of me to . . ."

"No," Frevisse said with quick contrition. "The wrong is mine, to grudge you my help because I'm ..." She caught on the word, then brought herself to finish, ". . . because I'm afraid, too. For you and John both."

Unexpected tears came into Alice's eyes and she reached out and grabbed hold on one of Frevisse's hands, saying, "Oh, Frevisse, then you know. I'm so frightened I don't know anymore if what I do and decide is driven by fear or reason. That's why I need your help. We have to decide how much more to trust to this Joliffe, and I don't know, I simply and just don't know ..."

Chapter 11

The afternoon was clouding over. The parlor had been warm with light a little while ago but was gathering gray shadows now, and Joliffe, standing at the window, said without turning his head, "It's likely coming on to rain."

Vaughn, still seated at the low table behind him, shuffling the cards with which they'd mostly passed their time, made a meaningless sound, and the heavy silence fell again between them.

They had tried through the past hours to find a way around their several days of distrust into a semblance of ease between them. They had tried talk, Joliffe asking if Vaughn had been long in Suffolk's service, to which Vaughn said tersely, "I grew up in her grace's service and have never wanted other."

Joliffe noted he had made plain he had served Lady Alice, not the duke. Was that a new distinction, meant to distance himself from Suffolk, or something he held to out of a long dislike of the man?

"What of you?" Vaughn had returned. "Have you been York's man for long?"

"Only a few years." If he stretched a point.

Vaughn had cocked a curious look at him. "These few years haven't been the best of times to take service with someone like York."

"No," Joliffe had agreed. These past few years were in fact a very foolish time to have taken service with a man so openly fallen from royal favor as York; but he had added nothing to his single word, and their talk had mostly ended there, neither of them ready to give away more or trust each other further.

They had tried chess next, because Vaughn knew where a battered board with plain wooden pieces was kept in an aumbry built into one wall of the room—"Not good enough to pack up and take whenever the household moves on," he said as he brought it out—but they were neither of them much good at the game. After one game, that Vaughn stumbled into winning with neither of them quite sure how, they turned to cards with a battered pack from the same aumbry. They had laid the cards out to be sure none were missing, found they were all there, and settled to the least challenging games they both knew, where the shuffling, sorting, and slapping down of cards occupied the mind without need for much actual thought about it.

Getting drunk would have served the same purpose but taken longer and been less quickly recovered from. Besides, they had only the weak ale that Vaughn had brought from the kitchen when he fetched their midday meal.