The Bastard's Tale

by Margaret Frazer

  The boy smiled his thanks, then held up the shoe and said darkly to John, “For Lady Soul. Father wants it to have spangles all over it, and because they’re horrible little things Mum says my fingers are small enough to do better at gluing them on than hers. I can’t wait to grow up.”

  ‘Your father will have you do other things instead,“ John said, hitching himself onto the bench beside him.

  ‘But when I’m big and clumsy like Ned, then I won’t have to do this trifling anymore. I’m Giles Wilde,“ he added to Frevisse. ”My father is Master Wilde. That’s him raving away over there. My mother is there with Joane, deciding how many more stars they can put on the heaven-cloth that will hang behind the tower, and everybody else here are our company, except my brother Ned isn’t here yet. He’s late and going to be yelled at, sure as anything.“

  ‘He’s not late yet,“ John said, swinging his heels. ”It’s not gone one o’clock yet.“

  As he said it, a bell from the abbey church’s massive center tower boomed once, the stroke heavy as lead over the rooftops.

  ‘Now he is,“ said Giles.

  Frevisse had not yet sat down and behind her a man said, “Well, Lord John, what have you done with your nurse? Something terrible, I suppose?”

  She knew his voice and turned. The fair-haired young man began a bow with, “My lady…” to her but paused, as if momentarily puzzled, then took a quick step backward for space to sweep her a very low bow, saying as he straightened from it, “Dame Frevisse of St. Frideswide’s, yes?”

  ‘Yes,“ Frevisse said and would have said more but he interrupted her, bending in another, quicker bow, saying, ”You won’t remember me so well as I do you, my lady. We met once when you were hosteler at St. Frideswide’s and I a grateful guest of your nunnery’s kindness. Master Noreys.“

  ‘I remember you very well,“ Frevisse said, matching him grace for grace. They had indeed met and almost in the way he had said, but she had known him only as Joliffe, not Master Noreys, and had learned both to be wary of him and yet trust him and now said only, ”Master Noreys,“ and nothing more, letting him turn his heed back to John, who finished explaining about the rheum-doomed nurse and schoolmaster just before Giles, watching the door, said, ”Here’s Ned finally come,“ and then with dismay, ”Oh, no, that’s why he’s late. Old Lydgate had him and has come, too.“

  Frevisse and Joliffe both swung around toward the hall’s broad doorway where a slender young man in a bright russet cloak and feathered cap was just come in, accompanied by a busily talking older man plump in the black robe of a Benedictine monk, his shiny forehead balded back into his tonsure and his smooth face round from years of indulgent living.

  ‘Lydgate?“ Frevisse asked with something of Giles’ dismay. ”As in John Lydgate, monk and poet?“

  ‘Exactly as in ’monk and poet,‘ “ Joliffe said.

  For three reigns now, Lydgate’s writings had made him known far beyond St. Edmund’s Abbey walls and he had often gone out into the world to keep his reputation company, willingly writing anything he was asked and paid for, from a lengthy Life of the Virgin to farces to be performed at the royal court and all of it in what Frevisse had always found to be singularly lame-footed verse. With no attempt to hide her dismay, she demanded, “Is this play you’re doing by him?”

  ‘It will be if he has his way,“ Joliffe answered. He bowed toward both her and John. ”I pray you, pardon me. I have to go save our playmaster from apoplexy.“

  Chapter 4

  Arteys stood at the gateway into St. Saviour’s Hospital, cloak-wrapped and a shoulder leaned against the gatepost, tired of his own company and considering what he could do besides watch the world go by.

  Being among England’s great pilgrimage sites, Bury St. Edmunds did not lack lodgings for travelers. There were the abbey’s guesthalls, inns in plenty and, for the sick of body, church-endowed hospitals on all the main roads into town. The hospitals’ first purpose had been the care of wayfarers and pilgrims either come to St. Edmund’s shrine in hope of healing or else fallen ill on their journeying, but over the years they had begun to provide, as well, a comfortable living and lodging not only for their wardens but for guests neither aged nor infirm, merely sufficiently important to warrant hospitality, and of Bury’s six hospitals the richest was St. Saviour’s outside Northgate. Everywhere in and around the town and abbey was crowded full with those come to Parliament, those come to serve them, and those come to make money off them all. Gloucester, coming late and knowing St. Saviour’s from other times, had sent Sir Richard ahead with Arteys and two squires to claim place for him. They had, though it meant Master Grene the warden had to turn out the abbot of St. Mary’s and the earl of Salisbury. Their displeased lordships had removed farther out from town, to the Franciscan friary that was already overcrowded with the duke of York and his men and—as Sir Richard said—if ever Gloucester needed help anytime soon, he had best not ask it of the abbot of St. Mary’s or the earl of Salisbury.

  That had been four days ago and neither Gloucester nor any word why he was late had come, so that yesterday Sir Richard had ridden out to find him, leaving Arteys, Tom Herbert, and Hal Chicheley with the two large chambers to rattle around in like three dried peas in a bushel box until Gloucester arrived with men enough to fill St. Saviour’s lofts and corners and the warden’s hall, too. “A hundred men,” Gloucester had said. “I’m not going with less. I’m the king’s uncle. You want I should ride in looking like some beggar?”

  Sir Roger had talked him down to eighty by the time Arteys left, with Arteys hoping he had talked him down more by now, wherever they were.

  ‘Gloucester not sending word is only a bother, not a worry,“ Sir Richard had said while readying to ride out. ”You know that as well as I do.“ And Sir Richard should know. As he often said, he had been in Gloucester’s service since the year Gloucester’s brother, King Henry of blessed memory, ”took us all to France and we beat the French into the mud at Agincourt. We were both striplings then, your father and I. You should have seen him then, him and his brother standing together, a matched pair all in scarlet and blue and gold. When your father went down in the middle of the fight, King Henry, God keep his soul, fought forward and stood over him until he could be carried off. St. Michael, but that was a day worth the remembering.“

  But King Henry V had died too soon and years of quarreling had followed between Gloucester and his uncle Bishop Beaufort of Winchester over who would govern England until their infant nephew King Henry VI came of age to rule for himself. As Sir Richard said, “If the damned bishop had choked on his bags of gold and died, we’d all be happier today.” But he had not and through these past ten years Gloucester had been shoved steadily out of power, though not by Bishop Beaufort, who was grown old—“But not dead yet, damn him.” Instead, it was by the men risen to power and favor around young King Henry now he had the government in his own hands. “And a bandy-brained lot they are,” Sir Richard had said to Arteys in the stableyard yesterday when he had been tightening his saddle’s cinch and no one else was close enough to hear him. “They’re handing France back to the French with all but a thank-you for taking it off our hands, and all because they can’t turn a penny from it fast enough to suit them. With them it’s all give-me and profit and be damned to anything or anyone that gets in their way. It’s what they’ve had against your father all this time. Against him and his.” Meaning Lady Eleanor. “So watch yourself here. For all that Gloucester thinks everything is changing to the good for him, there’s some of us…” Sir Richard had paused again, made up his mind to something, and went on, “There’s many of us have our doubts. So you be careful, Master Arteys. If it were me, I might choose to lie low these few days and not get noticed.” He had gathered his reins and swung up into his saddle, then sat looking down at Arteys for another moment before adding, “If you’ve need, you might ask his grace the duke of York for help. He’s sound, from all I know of him, and not much liked by those that least
like your father either.” He had smiled then. “But better you just stay out of trouble, yes?”

  Arteys had smiled back and said, “We’ll see.” Which was a jest because he was never one for being in trouble and Sir Richard, knowing it, had nodded and ridden away satisfied.

  In truth, Arteys had not intended to go out of St. Saviour’s at all but with little to do now Gloucester’s rooms were readied, he was restlessly considering it. Yesterday he had simply wandered in St. Saviour itself, finding nothing out-of-the-ordinary interesting. Stretched narrowly along Northgate Road, its walls on three sides and the River Lark on the fourth enclosed the hospital ward for the bodily care of the sick and the chapel for the comfort of their souls; the necessary kitchens, bakehouse, barns, byres, stables, and gardens with yards and paths among them; and the warden’s hall with its cluster of private chambers and own small courtyard off the main yard and an outside stairway to what would be Gloucester’s bedchamber when he came and was presently Arteys’ way in and out, to be as little bother to anyone as possible. To see it all had taken hardly the morning and Arteys had spent the rest of the day alone, beside the fire in Gloucester’s bedchamber, rereading John Lydgate’s The Fall of Princes, found in the prior’s library.

  He had thought to spend today reading, too, but now regretted he had refused Tom and Hal’s offer to go into Bury with them. They had come back well after dark yesterday, a-light with ale and merriment, and Arteys did not think they minded he had turned down their company. They had possibly even been glad, being—like many people—unsure how to behave toward him.

  That was something to which Arteys was used. In any household, from peasant to merchant to gentry to noble, everyone from kitchen scullion to duke had their named and particular place, knew the duties and rights that went with it. When everyone knew where they fit into the shape of things, dealings among them were, on the whole, straightforward. Arteys had no place. He was the duke of Gloucester’s son and yet was nobody, with no named place or given rights and “What, exactly, are we?” his equally bastard half-sister Antigone had once demanded angrily at him. “Are we his dear children? Are we here because he ‘loves’ us? Or out of charity— hangers on at his royal cloak tail, better than beggars but not by much?”

  Arteys had tried, “All of that together?”

  ‘All of that together, yes,“ Antigone had flung back at him, ”and it adds up to our being nothing.“

  When he would neither argue with her or grow angry, too, she had stormed away. Antigone was always fierce, and finally her fierceness had burned a place for herself in the world. At her demand, Gloucester had found her a marriage. She had become Lady Powys, with rank and husband and household of her own, and had not, so far as Arteys knew, ever looked back at her father since then.

  Arteys lacked both her fierceness and her anger at Gloucester nor understood them. “He has the most generous heart,” Lady Eleanor had once said, “but he doesn’t see things, Arteys. You must ask for what you want. Or tell me and I’ll ask him for you.” But soon after that she was gone, and since then Gloucester had been too alone and in pain for Arteys either to leave him or ask anything, and things went on as they were, with people not knowing what to make of him.

  But come to that, Arteys supposed he didn’t know what to make of himself either. That was why, so far, he had made nothing, and therefore times like this one came on him, when all he had was idleness and no one to spend it with, and so was standing in St. Saviour’s gateway, uncertain what to do.

  Yesterday’s weather yet held but without the wind. The sky was bare and blue, with sunlight glinting off the smooth-frozen ice in the deep ditch between St. Saviour’s wall and the road, and none of the scattered crowd passing by on the road on foot or horseback or with the steady flow of carts going loaded toward Bury and empty from it was lingering. It was cold enough that Arteys had to cease lingering, too. Fur-lined though his cloak was—being a duke’s son, illegitimate or not, had advantages, and a fur-lined cloak was one of them—he was beginning to chill from the feet upward and must either go out or else back. A pair of monks passed him, crossing the bridge over the ditch and turning toward town, swathed heads to heels in black hoods and cloaks and complaining to each other of the cold as they went. For no good reason, Arteys straightened from the gatepost and followed them, thinking plague take it, he’d see what there was to see in Bury St. Edmunds.

  He was not far along the road when the bright-edged call of a trumpet, crisp in the cold air, warned of riders coming behind him. Along with everyone else, he moved as aside on the road as possible, on his part pressing back to a head-high fence with the sound of chickens about their day’s work on its other side, to clear the way for whatever lord and company were riding into town. Bury St. Edmunds was rife with lords and their people these days. Some of the highest, including the archbishops of Canterbury and York and the marquis of Suffolk, were quartered in the abbey itself, in the abbot’s palace and other of the abbey’s rich lodgings, and could stroll to their parliament meetings without much display, having no one to impress but each other except when they mingled their lordly selves with the Commons in some joint gathering. Other lords without sufficient rank or influence or, like Gloucester, simply preferring to stay elsewhere, had found their own lodgings in and around the town, not only in St. Saviour’s and other hospitals but wealthy merchants’ homes whose comforts would equal the abbey’s despite every citizen of Bury St. Edmunds’ unending tussle over their rights and freedoms and fees with the abbey because it owned their town.

  Arteys therefore had no surprise when he turned with everyone else to see the perhaps dozen riders with the duke of York’s banner above them. Quartered scarlet and azure, with gold lions and gold lilies shining in the winter sun, it was almost the same as Gloucester’s banner that was almost the same as the king’s because Gloucester as King Henry’s uncle and York as a cousin to them both were all of the blood royal. That made York his something-cousin, too, Arteys thought, watching the men ride past. They were hatted, with the fashionable padded headrolls with a sweep of cloth down and around their shoulders, but for the short ride into Bury from the friary none of them had bothered with cloaks and their richly made houppelandes and doublets were a glad splash of many colors against the gray-brown February world. Arteys knew York from other times and had brief sight of him, clad in murrey-purple on a tall bay palfrey with its harness hung with bells and white-enameled roses, a man in his early middle years with a quiet face and something apart about him, even here, riding with probably the closest of his household around him. Arteys had often seen that same apartness in Gloucester, an awareness—except when he was with Lady Eleanor or nearest friends, with no one else there to see him—of being unceasingly watched by others who knew far more of him than he did of them.

  Once Arteys had asked, “Why?” And Gloucester had answered with a slight, accepting lift of his shoulders, “Because I’m me.” The duke of Gloucester, son and brother and uncle of kings and heir to England’s crown until such time as King Henry had a son. And after him in claim to the crown came York.

  And that, Arteys had thought more than once, was one thing to the good about his bastardy. No claim to any crown had claim on him. If that meant he did not, like York and Gloucester, go richly clad on fine horses with a knight bearing a banner over him to let the world and all know who he was, he did not care. There were things not worth their price and to Arteys’ mind being royal was one of them.

  The thought, unsought, came into his mind that he was afraid for his father.

  More than worried. Afraid.

  Around him, now that York and his men were past, everyone was reclaiming the road and going on their ways. Arteys hardly noted them. He had been worried how Gloucester would be if things did not go his way here in Bury but, “It’s Suffolk and Dorset and the others crowded in around young Henry,” Gloucester had said bitterly when last he had attempted pardon for Lady Eleanor. “They’re after power, but there’s only
so much power to be had and so they grab and scramble for it like piglets at a sow. It‘:, a foul game.” A game Gloucester had played as readily as anyone for more years of his life than not, until he had been shoved out of it, Arteys knew. Now King Henry had summoned him, and there were lords in plenty who might well fear how quickly Gloucester would take to the game again if given the chance. Lords with power enough to do something about their fear.

  The cold coming through his wool-lined shoes reminded him to move on. Ahead, the last of York’s riders were disappearing through stone-towered Northgate, but Arteys’ own going was slowed by the clotting of carts and people who had had to wait and were now all trying to go through at once. Being a-foot and unburdened, Arteys threaded his way through the crowd and the gateway’s dimness, coming out between two carts piled with firewood and a man with a basket smelling strongly of fish strapped on his back into town. From when he had been here a few years ago with Gloucester, staying overnight on way to Our Lady’s shrine at Walsingham, he knew going ahead from the gateway would bring him to the long marketplace in front of the abbey gates, but the lords and their people would be thickest there, he supposed, and he turned right at the first street beyond the gate, following its curve up and around to come out from between the houses into the Great Market.

  He didn’t remember if today was one of the town’s usual market days or not but it hardly mattered. With king and Parliament in town and the overflow of people that came with them, anyone with anything to sell was come to Bury from a score of miles around and probably farther—neither Cambridge nor Norwich merchants would miss a chance like this—and the wide market was crowded full of booths and stalls and, by the sound and look of it, enough folk to people another town, all of them busy selling, buying, talking, eating, drinking.