The Bishop’s Tale

by Margaret Frazer

  Enveloped in her aunt’s embrace and overflow of words, Frevisse murmured only, “Dear aunt,” which seemed to be sufficient.

  But then there was the necessity of being introduced, first to the room at large: “My very dear niece, Dame Frevisse of St. Frideswide’s Priory. Dear Thomas was so fond of her, and she’s come too late to bid him farewell, but she’s here to my comfort, and I’m so glad.” Then to the three people still seated in front of the tapestry on the room’s only chairs: “My lord of Winchester, may I present my dear niece Dame Frevisse.” Aunt Matilda drew Frevisse directly in front of him. “Frevisse, this is the Cardinal Bishop Henry Beaufort. He came all the way from Westminster—imagine that—to be with Thomas at the end. He and Thomas are cousins. You remember him, surely.”

  Frevisse sank in a deep curtsy. “My lord bishop,” she said, and took the hand he held out to her, to kiss the proper ring among the many that he wore. All of them were ornate, most set with red stones shaded from ruby to garnet. To go with his cardinal’s robes, she supposed, noting that his gown was of the richest wool and lined with black fur. The jewels and sable showed he was undoubtedly as wealthy as rumor said. And that was only one of the many things rumor said about him.

  But apart from what little Chaucer had said of him to her, rumor was all she knew about him. She was disconcerted, as she straightened and met his gaze, to find him regarding her with a speculative assessment deeper than the commonplace nature of their meeting.

  But all he said, in most formal wise, was, “Your loss is as mine in this.”

  So it was sufficient for her to answer, with an acknowledging bow of her head, “A great loss and a deep grief to us both.” Then she was free to move away from him to meet her cousin Alice.

  She had seen her uncle fairly often and her aunt occasionally since she had entered St. Frideswide’s. But she had last seen Alice seventeen years ago, when Alice had been thirteen and already two years widowed from her first husband. Since then, she had grown into womanhood, married the earl of Salisbury, been widowed again by his death at the siege of Orleans, and a few years ago married the earl of Suffolk.

  When Frevisse had known her, she had been a quiet, mannered child, neither unsatisfactorily plain nor noticeably lovely, and much better at her sewing than Frevisse had ever hoped to be. Remembering her then, Frevisse was disconcerted now to be confronted by a woman as tall as herself and quite lovely, her blue eyes perfect almond shapes and brilliant with warmth and intelligence as she rose from her chair and took Frevisse’s hand. “It’s been a long while, cousin, and now a sad occasion to meet again,” she said, her voice as gracious as her movements.

  Frevisse murmured a reply, trying to reconcile her memories of her little cousin to this poised, grown woman. She was not perfectly beautiful; her face and nose and upper lip were all somewhat long, but they were in proportion with each other, and to judge by her eyebrows and rose-sweet complexion, she was still pale-fair. It was not difficult to see how she had married twice into the high nobility, even putting her father’s wealth aside.

  Alice’s husband, William, the earl of Suffolk, had also risen to be introduced. He was taller than Alice, his brown hair attractively graying at the temples, his demeanor suitably grave. But he had a merry mouth, given to laughter at other times, Frevisse supposed. He was handsome in the expected ways—his strong features even, his jaw firm, his brow broad, his nose well-shaped. He made a striking mate to Alice; their children should be good to look on. But he patted Frevisse’s hand with condescending comfort after he had bowed to kiss it, and as he spoke a few sentences perfectly suited to the occasion, he was more aware of how well he said them than whether they were a comfort to her. Frevisse decided she would avoid him as much as possible.

  The arrival of servants with supper freed Frevisse from receiving other condolences. Alice and Suffolk and most of the others were going down to dine in the hall with the household, but Aunt Matilda was to dine in the parlor with Bishop Beaufort. “And I’d have you dine here, too, my dear. With your—Dame Perpetua? You’re both exhausted, I’m sure, and this will be so much easier than the hall.”

  Frevisse readily agreed. As the small table was set up, she went aside to where Dame Perpetua had fallen into quiet conversation with the priest who had brought Frevisse from the chapel. He was apparently staying to dine, too, and acknowledged her approach with a slight inclination of his head.

  Dame Perpetua made the introductions. “This is Sir Philip. He’s been priest here—” She looked at him questioningly. “Three years now?”

  “Come Advent,” he agreed.

  Frevisse bowed her head slightly in return. “Sir Philip.”

  “Dame Frevisse.”

  His voice was pleasant, even and well-modulated, matching the good bones of a face that would have been handsome except for the deep pitting and white webbing of smallpox scars from chin to cheeks to temples. His black hair was a smooth cap clipped fashionably short above the ears, and his black priest’s gown, like the bishop’s, was of rich wool despite its conservative cut. Unlike the bishop, he wore no jewels except a single, deeply etched gold ring, but it was plain he was no poor priest eking out a living on the margins of the Church; his manners were as smooth as any courtier’s. The three of them made polite talk concerning the weather and the discomforts of travel until they were called to the table.

  Conversation at the meal was strange in its normalcy, as if they had come together for the pleasure of each other’s company. It began predictably with Aunt Matilda’s comments on the bad weather. She was kind to include Dame Perpetua in her questions and comments, and Dame Perpetua was careful never to presume too much familiarity in her answers. She had been brought up in a home much like this, had learned to be both gentle and detailed in her manners. That was one of the reasons Domina Edith had chosen her for Dame Frevisse’s companion. “She will not add to your troubles, nor disgrace the nunnery with forward ways,” the prioress had said.

  Indeed, Dame Perpetua replied quietly and gracefully to anything said to her, and when the conversation went away from her, she let it go. She might have been totally unaware of the importance of Bishop Beaufort seated imposingly to her right at one end of the table, so perfect was her demeanor.

  For Frevisse it was less easy to be so gracious. Her aunt’s bright, familiar chatter was strained over a real and lacerating grief. And beyond that, Frevisse was uncomfortably aware that Bishop Beaufort was still watching her beyond the social needs of the moment. Frevisse did not want his interest. She wanted the evening to be over and to be alone in bed with her thoughts and grieving until tomorrow had to be faced. But first there was this supper to be endured, and now, amid the talk of the poor harvest, he asked her directly, “How are matters at your nunnery? Were you able to save any of the. harvest?”

  Careful to keep her voice neutral, revealing nothing but information and politeness, Frevisse answered, “Perhaps enough to see us through until next year if we’re very spare with it.” She should have stopped there, but honesty made her add, “And perhaps not if we need to give to the villagers, as we did last year.” Then, betrayed by the need to know, she asked, “Will there be any wheat brought in from abroad? How were the French harvests?”

  “France went much the way we did, except in the extreme south, which is of no use to us,” Bishop Beaufort answered readily. Below the Loire was French-held territory, where English rule did not run. “There is some dealing with the Hanse at present to bring wheat in from the Baltic east where the harvests have been good, we hear.”

  In the urgency of the matter—life or death for those who lacked money to buy wheat at prices inflated by the scarcity—Frevisse forgot her resolve to speak sparingly. If anyone present knew these things, it would be Bishop Beaufort. Leaning toward him, she asked, “And in the meantime will there be efforts to hold prices down here in England?”

  The bishop paused in spooning up his next mouthful.

  “Word has gone out from the
Council to every town to do as much as they can toward that end.”

  That was a politician’s answer. Frevisse’s politeness slipped a little. She demanded rather than asked, “How much toward that end do you think they’ll do?”

  “Frevisse, dear, have you tried one of these cakes?” Aunt Matilda gestured for a servant to hold out to her a plate with small white cakes studded with raisins.

  Frevisse began to shake her head, recognizing the tactic her aunt had employed frequently whenever Frevisse and Chaucer would fall into one of their cheerful, complex arguments over some matter Aunt Matilda had thought unseemly for the occasion. With abrupt meekness, and anger at herself for being more bold than she should have, Frevisse said, “Thank you, aunt,” and turned her attention to one of the cakes. The conversation shifted to the question of how many and who would come to the funeral, set for the day after tomorrow.

  But when she glanced up once toward Bishop Beaufort a while later, he was gazing at her with even more of an assessing look than he had had before.

  Chapter 4

  Aunt Matilda rose the next morning still gray with grief, and Alice, who had shared her mother’s bed, showed her own weariness around her eyes. Frevisse and Dame Perpetua, with their hurried journey’s ache and weariness still in them, had slept on the servants’ truckle beds, while the servants and Alice’s lady-in-waiting slept on straw-filled mattresses, all now pushed out of the way and out of sight under the tall bed.

  For the two nuns, the morning preparations were simple: they were washed and dressed and their wimples and veils neatly pinned in place while Alice’s lady-in-waiting was still combing out and braiding her lady’s hair before dressing her. With hardly three words said between them, they drew aside to stand out of the way.

  Frevisse, watching the bustle and chatter around her cousin and unnaturally silent aunt, remembered Chaucer once saying that men who are tired grow quiet, while women grow talkative. Aunt Matilda had clearly passed weariness to the edge of exhaustion. While laying out her lady’s black gown for the day, Aunt Matilda’s woman, Joan, in a tone only a servant of long standing would dare to use, said abruptly, “You’ve no business being out and about today, my lady. No one expects it of you. There’s people enough to see to what needs doing.”

  “But the guests. Thomas would want—”

  Alice cut in with, “Father would want you not to make yourself more ill than you already are.”

  She looked to Frevisse over Matilda’s head, and Frevisse immediately said, “Truly, Aunt, you’ve been through weeks of enduring. Today will be full of people arriving for the funeral, and everyone wanting things from you if they see you, when what you need just now is to gather your strength for tomorrow. There’s nothing today that Alice and I can’t oversee or come to you when we need direction. Please, Aunt, listen to us on this.”

  Matilda shook her head refusingly through all of Frevisse’s words. But at the end of them, Alice knelt before her, took her hands, and pleaded very sweetly, “Please, Mother. Let us do this for you.”

  Matilda closed her eyes over sudden tears. Her body slackened its rigid determination to go on, and in a faltering voice she said, “Perhaps, perhaps you’re right. It’s tomorrow I should be thinking of, when we… when we…” She could not say, “bury Thomas,” but when, with visible effort, she had regained control, she opened her eyes and began to tell them everything that needed doing today.

  Check the linen closet for blankets and set the stable hands to filling pallets with straw, she told them, then make sure the preparations for the funeral feast are under way and nothing is lacking in the kitchen, find sweet herbs to strew on the church floor, note every guest’s rank on arrival—be there yourself to greet them, of course—and make sure they are in correct order for the procession to the church tomorrow and at the feast, see to it there is plenty of clean water so guests can wash up on arrival, don’t let anyone mistake a washup bucket for a chamber pot, ensure families who are feuding with one another sleep far apart tonight and are not seated next to one another tomorrow, keep a fire burning in the great hall all day so arriving guests may warm themselves…

  Alice and Frevisse shared a small grimace of mutual sympathy over Matilda’s head as Joan encouraged her back into bed and the endless list faded to a weary murmur.

  By early afternoon the influx of guests had become heavy. Nearest neighbors would come and go on the day itself, but the November days were short and anyone more than a few hours’ ride away would come today and stay over at least two nights. Thomas Chaucer’s connections had ranged from the ranks of merchants in London to the innermost circles of court power, with all of them important, but precedence had to be noted and scrupulously given. To her relief, Frevisse found that receiving the highest ranking among them fell naturally to her cousin Alice. As widow of the earl of Salisbury, and now wife of the earl of Suffolk, as well as daughter of the house, Alice was already acquainted with most of them; gracious in her duties, she reminded Frevisse both of the self-possessed little cousin Frevisse had last known, and of Chaucer himself.

  Frevisse was left to see to the lesser folk, though lesser was a relative term. Landed knights and merchants wealthier than earls were hardly lesser. But it meant that she was waiting in the great hall when Sir Walter Fenner, head of the prominent and numerous Fenner family, was ushered in.

  The Fenners were among the more prominent patrons of St. Frideswide’s, though less generously and intrusively than they had been a few years ago, so Sir Walter and Frevisse were already acquainted. Seeing him ushered into the hall, she had time to put on a polite face of mild pleasure tempered by the formal grief of the occasion, and said graciously, “How good that you could come, Sir Walter.”

  “My deep sorrow that it’s for such a sad occasion, Dame,” he replied. The Fenners had a long memory for offenses, and the last time they had met, he had accused her of hiding his mother’s murderer. But he knew the needs of this moment; his politeness was brief but correct. “Your uncle’s loss must grieve you deeply.”

  “Indeed it does, sir.”

  That was sufficient for both of them; but as he turned aside to follow the servant who would show him in, she saw that the squire with him was young Robert Fenner, who had aided her against Sir Walter’s anger at St. Frideswide’s that same time ago. In the three years since she had last seen him, he had left the last of boyhood for young manhood, Frevisse observed. But the brief, warm smile he cast her as he followed Sir Walter showed he remembered her.

  Then the little, bouncing man—whom she had learned was Gallard Basing, the usher here—advanced on her with another newly arrived guest. “Sir Clement Sharpe,” Gallard announced with unusual terseness, and stood aside.

  Sir Clement was a lean, pallid man with thinning hair the dull brown of dead leaves, and eyes that matched it. He was elegantly dressed in a wide-cut dark blue houppelande amply trimmed with gray fur, and a long-liripiped hat that he had already removed for his bow to her, a bow a little more deep and flourished than need be.

  “My lady, my profound regrets for your uncle’s death.”

  “Thank you. We greatly appreciate your coming. Aunt Matilda will be pleased.”

  She did not understand the twitch of his mouth, or his answer. “Assure her we’d settled the matter before he fell finally ill, and I’ll not take any advantage over it.”

  She smiled and said, “I’m sure you won’t.” Because whatever the matter had been, it would not be Aunt Matilda he dealt with, but the earl of Suffolk’s lawyers, for Suffolk and Alice were Chaucer’s heirs.

  “May I introduce my ward?” Sir Clement asked, and put back his hand to draw a girl forward. At first Frevisse thought she was a child, but a more careful look revealed she was more likely sixteen or seventeen, only small for her years and daintily built. “Lady Anne Featherstone.”

  Lady Anne curtsied. She was dressed in plain dark wool for travel, but her manners were as pretty as her face. Frevisse curtsied back but Sir C
lement was already adding, less graciously, “And my nephew, Guy Sharpe.”

  There was little family resemblance between lean and pallid Sir Clement and the broad-chested, handsome young man who stepped forward on Lady Anne’s other side. He bowed and said appropriate words of greeting, but rather than his words, Frevisse noted the warm, sideways look of affection that Lady Anne gave him as he did.

  Frevisse was not sure if Sir Clement saw it, too, but before Guy had finished straightening, Sir Clement had begun to move away, drawing Lady Anne with him and to his other side, away from Guy, in one neat gesture. Frevisse saw the young man’s face tighten, his eyes on Lady Anne even as he finished speaking to her, before he followed in Sir Clement’s wake.

  Frevisse hoped they kept in abeyance whatever coil of trouble they were building until they had left Ewelme.

  A gap in travelers came late in the afternoon, and Frevisse left her duties to go to the chapel. Except for a brief time this morning, she had not been there since yesterday about this hour.

  Neither the shadows nor the candlelight nor the cold had changed since then. Nor her grief. And she was still tired, though now from dealing with too many people and talking more than she was used to, rather than from cold and travel. Even the watchers around the coffin might have been the same as yesterday’s; and then she saw that at least one of them was: the household priest, Sir Philip.