The Squire’s Tale

by Margaret Frazer

  The Squire’s Tale

  Margaret Frazer

  Chapter 1

  The spring evening was drawing in to blue darkness under the tatters of low black clouds streaming away to the east on a warm-edged wind that promised a fair dawn tomorrow. A tomorrow he had almost not lived to see. Robert felt at the edges of that thought while he stood watching the darkness come, his good hand cradling his hurt one against his chest. From here at the parlor’s open window in the west tower he could see out over the garden’s low turf wall into the orchard’s gnarl of upper branches, barren yet this early in the spring. Their black shapes were darkening into the darkness now that the last fade of sunset light was gone but Robert went on watching, not ready yet for the room behind him, for the lamplight and talk and people who had not been almost dead today. Better the darkness for just now and thinking of other things, rather than trying to belong with them just yet.

  It was the orchard that brought him back to Brinskep Manor early in every Lent, to be here when the bare black branches frothed out into a sea of creamy blossoms. It was something that every time joyed his heart to the core in much the same way that first sight of each of his children had. With the children the moment passed and never came again, succeeded by the other joys they gave—from sometimes no more than something as simple as Robin holding tightly to his hand while pretending not to be frightened of his mother’s new horse or John ceasing to cry when he saw his father had mended his broken wooden sword or Tacine wrapping her arms around his neck in a hug—and were the richer for coming uncertainly and unexpected. But the orchard’s beauty and his joy in it came every spring, and because Brinskep was the largest of his wife’s three manors, her household had always been there six months out of a year, but when Blaunche had married him those six months had run from Whitsuntide to Martinmas, midsummer to early winter. “Because that’s how it’s always been,” she had said simply when he had asked her why.

  It had been only chance that brought him to stay a night at Brinskep the first spring of his marriage, on his way to Fen Harcourt for business with Sir Walter, when the orchard had been in its full bloom. He had spent half a morning walking alone there when he should have been on his way, for once able to do what he chose because he had been travelling with only two servants and no certain time he had to be anywhere. And when he had returned to Blaunche he had, for the first time in their marriage, insisted on a change in how their lives were run, that Blaunche, still happy in having married him, had agreed to with only small protest and thereafter they were at Brinskep from sometime in Lent until almost Lammastide, then moved the household on to stay through Allhallows at Wystead Manor, then shifted to Northend before winter set in, spending Christmas and the weeks afterward there until time to return to Brinskep.

  The pattern was an easy and familiar one after all these years but Robert doubted he could have brought Blaunche to any such change so easily now; her pleasure in having won him was too far in the past, and she remembered too easily now, when it suited her, that the manors she had brought to their otherwise landless marriage had been hers before they were his. And he was weak, he supposed, still to think of them that way, too, when by law whatever property a wife held became her husband’s when they married. That Blaunche had decided on him for her third husband and forced the marriage on him made no difference to the law: when they married, she and her properties, even those inherited by dower right from her first two husbands, had become his, no matter whether he had wanted them or Blaunche at all.

  ‘Robert, shut the window, pray,“ she said from across the room behind him. ”The wind is coming in.“

  It was, and not warmly, either, but it smelled of young growing things and the rain there had been all day and the clear day there would be tomorrow and*just now Robert had a craving for anything that promised life was an ongoing thing, not something that had nearly ended for him on a sword’s blade in the orchard this afternoon, but he loosed his hurt hand to reach out his left one to the shutter and pull it closed. The window was of three stone-mullioned lights with a wide seat built into the wall below it and only the upper quarter of each light was glassed; their lower portion had either nothing between indoors and out or else heavy wooden shutters painted gaily on the inside with vines and flowers. One was already shut against the night; now Robert unfolded the other from where it sat flat against the stone thickness of the wall, closed it across the gap and slid its wooden bolts into the wooden catches on the other, locking them closed and to each other.

  When Brinskep Manor had been built about two hundred years before, defense rather than comfort had been the concern. It had been barons then, Robert vaguely knew—barons against the king and king against the barons and barons against each other for good measure, with no one sure of not finding himself in the middle of trouble before he had time to blink twice—so Brinskep was stone-built, with only small-windowed storerooms and the kitchen at ground level. The hall was a story above them, reached from outside only by an outer stair from the yard and flanked at its west end by a squat, three-storied tower, uncrenellated because of the cost of a license to do so but defensible nonetheless. There had been no need of defense for more than a hundred years, thank God and all the saints, and even as poorly as the war in France was going in this year of God’s grace 1442, the nineteenth year of the reign of King Henry VI, there was no fear of a French invasion so far inland as here in southern Warwickshire. Timber-and-plaster buildings had long since been built around the hallyard’s other sides to the gateway to the outer yard, and in the hall and tower comfort came before wariness; it was a pleasant room Robert turned to, warm with lamplight, soft with Master Geoffrey reading aloud from a book of Breton lays while Blaunche, Mistress Avys and Emelye sewed and listened.

  Everything in it was familiar, from his high-backed, green-cushioned chair to the tapestry painted with some scene from the Trojan War hung on one of the white plastered walls to the scatter of the children’s toys across the floor’s golden rush matting, left behind when they were taken off to bed a while ago, to the women quietly busy while the household’s clerk read to them, but tonight Robert was seeing all of it more sharply than he had seen it in a long while because this afternoon he had come near to being never here to see it again. This afternoon Robert had nearly been…

  ‘Many a bold baron lay writhing in his blood, / So much was spilled the field did seem to flood…“ read Master Geoffrey in his smooth, strong voice from across the parlor. The long settle in front of the fireplace that was Blaunche’s chosen place to sit of an evening, with room around her for her sewing and sometimes for the children or, like now, for Master Geoffrey to be at its far end, reading aloud from the tale of the Earl of Toulous, by light from lamps burning on the tall wrought-iron lampstand set for their light to fall evenly over the book and Blaunche’s sewing both. Tonight her work was a shirt for Robin, Robert thought, because their elder son was presently being the proverbial weed, outgrowing all his clothing at once. That at least meant John had hand-me-downs for now, but what it would be to keep Tacine in dresses when she was no longer small enough to wear the smocks that had served her brothers when they were toddling did not bear thinking on.

  Thinking on it anyway, Robert smiled as he bent to pick up with his unhurt hand the less-loved of his daughter’s two rag dolls, abandoned when Tacine carried the other off to bed with her; but as he straightened, his hurt hand gave a heavy throb, and dropping the doll onto his chair, he shifted the hand higher and cradled it against his chest with the other one again. It was only a pair of sprained, bruised fingers, nothing worse, he reminded himself, no matter how much they hurt. “Didn’t you ever learn,” Ned Verffey had jibed at him while binding the small splint to them, “that i
t’s better to catch a blow on your dagger blade than with your knuckles?”

  ‘Better on the knuckles than not at all,“ Robert had jibed back. ”And best not to be in the way of it at all.“

  They had both of them been making light of the hurt because if the rider’s blow had not been as awry as Robert’s, there would have been no making light about anything at all. As it was, the man’s horse, being a palfrey instead of battle-trained, had misliked finding itself among shouting men and sword and dagger blades and women’s screaming and had shied as its rider had struck down at Robert and Robert had flung up his dagger in defense, so that the sword’s pommel instead of its blade had struck his dagger hand and he still had his fingers.

  The trick, he reminded himself, as the throb lessened to ache, was to keep his hand raised higher than his heart so it did not gather blood, and mindful of that, he shifted Robin’s wheeled horse to safety under a chair with his foot instead of bending to it. He also considered reminding Emelye she was supposed to tidy things away tonight since Katherine was helping see the children into bed, but Emelye, the younger of his wife’s two maids-in-waiting, was finally quiet after a few hours of sobbing and exclaiming, as if the danger this afternoon had been hers instead of Katherine’s, and was sitting on a cushion on the floor near the settle intently sorting bunches of embroidery threads by color; on the principal of letting sleeping dogs lie, Robert preferred to leave her quiet, but too restless himself to sit, he paced past his chair to the solar’s far end, then back to his chair, then around the small, tall-legged table, with its evening plate of wafers and pitcher of spiced perry. He was neither hungry nor thirsty, but he would maybe after all take the valerian tonight, because if he was unable to walk away from his thoughts now, he assuredly wouldn’t escape them in bed and even more assuredly did not want to lie awake with them for company. Nor with his hand’s pain, come to that. He hadn’t even felt the pain until everything was over, until the men were spurring away and he’d been certain Katherine was safe…

  ‘Robert, will you sit, please?“ Blaunche said with the slight edge that made it demand rather than request.

  Robert bent and straightened too swiftly for his hand to resent it, taking up Tacine’s doll and then sitting in his chair, seeing but not caring about the upward-through-her-lashes look that Emelye gave him in hopes he would sit nearer to her. Had Blaunche noticed yet the silly girl had decided to be infatuated with him now? Last year it had been Ned she fluttered at, and over Christmas it had been Benedict, and now for no good reason except lack of anyone else, Robert supposed, she had set her girlish heart toward him these past few weeks. He could only hope Sir Walter would find a husband for her soon to take her off their hands, and ignoring her sidewise looks at him, he set to straightening the doll’s dress and tidying its hair.

  ‘… I near die of grief. Dear Lady, grant me your love, / For love of God that sits above…“ Master Geoffrey read on. The duties for which he was paid were in the main the daily tediousness of writing letters, keeping manorial records in order, and checking over accounts of in-come and out-go between the main audits at Easter and Michaelmas. Besides all that, the year or so he had had of legal studies was of late proving useful in the matter with the Allesleys wanting back the dower land Blaunche had been wrongfully given by her second husband, and certainly evenings had been more pleasant since he had joined the household two years back with his good voice for reading and a feel for the words. In addition, when reading was not wanted he made easy conversation. None of all that would have been enough, though, if Blaunche had failed to like him. Their last clerk had left because, he had said, he’d not take being screamed at by any woman over anything and assuredly not when the fault wasn’t his. Robert, knowing the fault had indeed not been his, had paid him half a quarter’s extra wages and recommended him to Ned who had hired him and since then thanked Robert for the favor rather too often.

  Across the parlor Blaunche burst out her raucous laugh at something in the story, and Robert’s unhurt hand tightened on Tacine’s doll before he could stop himself. One of the first things he had disliked about Blaunche had been her laugh, even before he had known what she intended for him. She was a Fenner, with Fenner family looks and Fenner family ways enough to have put him off her even though he was a Fenner, too. Raised in his cousin Sir Walter Fenner’s household, he had been serving as a squire there in his young manhood when Blaunche first noted him. As the landless son of a landless younger son, with no likelihood of ever rising higher in life than service in someone’s household, he should have been grateful when she took a fancy to him. Older than him by only six years, twice widowed and holding the wardship of her eleven-year-old son Benedict, her second husband’s heir, she had quite sufficient properties to support another marriage and no one could see but what a piece of luck it was for Robert when she decided she wanted him for her next husband.

  No one but Robert.

  But he had had no true choice in the matter. Blaunche was a closer cousin to Sir Walter than he was, and far more in Sir Walter’s favor, and Sir Walter had bluntly pointed out to him, first, what he would gain by marrying Blaunche and, next, that if he did not marry her, he would have nothing, not even his place in Sir Walter’s household.

  ‘Nor hope of place in anyone else’s,“ Sir Walter had added cheerfully. ”I’ll see to that.“

  He would have. Sir Walter was a man who enjoyed both making threats and carrying them out, and Robert had been left with only the choice of being Blaunche’s husband or a beggar.

  ‘Robert, please sit down.“

  He realized he was on his feet again, pacing again, still restlessly untangling the doll’s hair while he did, but was saved from having to sit again by cheerful voices on the stairs warning that Ned and Benedict were returned from taking the children to Nurse at bedtime.

  Ned, like Robert, was a minor member of widespread family, the Verneys in his case, but unlike Robert, he had inherited a manor from his father just to the north of Brinskep and made a quietly profitable marriage of his own choosing with a Coventry merchant’s daughter. Meeting during Robert’s first year of marriage, while settling a quarrel between their bailiffs over a fishing place in the stream between their manors, they had fallen easily into friendship, with much going to and fro between their manors and Ned presently here for a few days together, his wife gone to Coventry to her sister’s lying-in and his company welcomed by Robert who paused to put Tacine’s doll under his chair with Robin’s horse, wondering as Ned followed Benedict through the narrow stairway door why Katherine was not come back, too, but only asking as he moved to the table to pour them some perry, “You saw them into bed?”

  ‘We saw them into bed,“ Ned agreed, ”and they nearly saw me into my grave.“

  ‘You’re too indulgent with them, Ned,“ Blaunche said. The woman who would send them to bed every night with too many sweets in their stomachs if she was given the chance, Robert thought. ”They need a firm hand, believe me.“

  ‘It’s not indulgence,“ Ned protested, taking the bowl Robert held out to him. ”It’s survival. My ungodly godson demanded three stories ere he’d let me leave or he’d not go to sleep, he said.“

  ‘Extortion, plain and simple,“ Benedict said and added, ”Thank you“ as he took the perry Robert next poured for him.

  ‘It’s Robert’s doing,“ Blaunche said. ”He too often spoils them at bedtime.“

  ‘What made it worse was that I’ve but two stories in my head,“ Ned went on, ”and it would have been desperate with me except Benedict had a third.“

  ‘John protested they already knew that one,“ Benedict said, ”but Ned pointed out that Robin had asked for three stories, not three new ones.“

  ‘You didn’t!“ Robert said at Ned. ”You teach him to see things that way, he’ll turn into a lawyer.“

  ‘There are worse things to be than a lawyer,“ Ned answered.

  ‘Not at bedtime,“ Robert returned.

  ‘Even if my b
rother is one,“ Ned added thoughtfully as Emelye asked, ”Where’s Katherine?“

  ‘Gone to brew something for Robert,“ said Benedict. He looked to his stepfather with belated concern. ”How’s your hand hurting now? Badly?“

  ‘It aches is all and that will pass.“

  ‘Benedict, come sit here with us,“ Blaunche said, tapping at a floor cushion with her foot. ”Geoffrey has just reached where they’re killing the child to make the empress seem adulterous.“

  Benedict went to fold his long legs under him and sit on the cushion beside Emelye’s who smiled on him and he obligingly smiled back. Above them, Master Geoffrey took up reading again and Blaunche held up her own bowl to let Robert know he could refill it. Robert did but was thinking more of Benedict who had been old enough when Robert and Blaunche had married seven years ago to go into someone else’s household for training as was the usual way, but Blaunche had claimed his stepfather could train him as readily as anyone else, indeed should train him so they could come to know each other. Despite she also claimed she gave way to her husband in everything, Robert had even then known better than to refuse her desires and after all it had worked out none so ill. He and Benedict liked each other, as it happened, and Benedict delighted in his small half brothers and half sister who in return delighted in him and that could only be to the good in future time.