The Traitor's Tale

by Margaret Frazer

  It was that. And dark. And the stink of damp and mold and a slop bucket not emptied lately came to meet Frevisse and Sister Margrett as they followed him. Frevisse heard Sister Margrett slightly gag and said over her shoulder, "Cover your mouth and nose with your veil. Breathe through it," doing the same herself.

  The room below was the sort often used for storage— thick-walled and stone-vaulted to bear the weight of the tower above and stand against assault. Here, with the moat coming almost to the wall, the seeping damp made that use unsuitable: wood, cloth, and food, kept here, would rot.

  So they were keeping a man instead.

  What light there was came slanted and narrow through three slits hardly wider than a man's hand and maybe a forearm long, set somewhat above man-height. Pierced through the walls' thickness, they gave hardly even sight of the sky, certainly no warmth of sun or light enough to more than grope by. It was the rattle of a chain that told her where to look, just able in the gloom to make out a man slowly standing up from something along the far curve of the wall; but her eyes were growing used to the gloom and her nose to the smell. The chained man was trying to bow, and Frevisse felt sudden anger on his behalf. That he should still try for such courtesy after probably months in this death-hole said better of him than of his jailers, and she said sharply to the guard, "His slop bucket should be emptied. See to it."

  "There's someone does it when—" the man started.

  "Not often enough," Frevisse snapped. As a nun she had held too many offices in the nunnery, been in charge of too many duties and servants to hesitate at all over giving orders where orders were needed to those beneath her; and anyone who would leave a man living with his own filth when there was no need was very much beneath her. "Take the bucket. Empty it. Scrub it clean before you bring it back." Her eyes were more used to the gloom by the moment. "With a lid, like it's supposed to have. And take that water bucket, too, and do the same and bring it back with clean water in it."

  She felt the man hesitate. She sent him a look that, even in the shadows, decided him to do what he was told; but when he had picked up the two buckets and was heading for the stairs again, it was Sister Margrett who said to him quietly, "God's blessing on you for your mercy, sir," earning a respectful, quick duck of his head to her as he passed.

  A little shamed at her own curtness but with no help for it now, Frevisse moved more toward the chained man and asked, "Edward Burgate?"

  Chapter 14

  The thin, bent-backed man shuffled a little forward. Frevisse could see now that he was shackled around one ankle by a fetter attached to a chain fastened to the heavy wooden frame of a bed, the cell's only place to sit. "Yes, my lady," he said, making another bow. He was roughly bearded, his thinning hair uncut, his clothing fit only for throwing out, but he was clinging to what courtesy he could despite his voice croaked as if not much used. "Edward Burgate, if it please you, my ladies. Are you ... are you from my lady of Suffolk?"

  "We are," Frevisse said to him quickly. "She knows I'm here?" His voice broke and trembled. "She will, now that I know," Frevisse assured him. "She’s been searching to know where you were but we've only just now found you out."

  "Is she here?"

  "She isn't. She's at Wingfield, but I've a man will take her word immediately."

  Burgate shuffled a little backward and sank down on the edge of the bed as if unable to stand up any longer. His head hung low, his hands dangled between his knees, and Frevisse heard him say on nearly a sob, "Not here."

  She looked around at Sister Margrett. "I need to talk to him alone."

  "I'll stay here by the stairs," Sister Margrett said. She probably wanted no more than Frevisse did to cross that wet dirt floor embedded with smells and filth both old and new; but where she had choice, Frevisse did not and went forward, careful footed. The place was large enough that, if she and Burgate kept their voices down, their talk would be private and it was on him and what he might tell her that she had to fix her mind, not the stink and filth.

  Burgate, despite she gestured for him to stay seated, forced himself respectfully to his feet again as she approached. Seen nearer, he looked to be one of those men who hovered between old and young for a great many years, weakly neither one nor the other; but all else aside, he was plainly near the end of his strength.

  "A week," she said. "Lady Alice's man, riding fast, can be to her and back again in a week and have you out of here."

  If it were possible to have him out of here. There was something very wrong about him being here at all, and like this. Wrong enough that after his brief flare of hope, Burgate was apparently gone untrusting, because he said now, Peering at her, "Are you truly from her? This isn't another trap of theirs, to make me tell . . ." He faltered. ". . . tell that I don't know," he finished, almost believably.

  "Lady Alice told me that if you doubted, I should ask you where the account rolls for the manor of Cockayne might be. That if I said that, you'd know you could tell me whatever you needed to."

  On what might have been a smothered sob, Burgate said "Thanks be to whatever blessed saint has heard my prayers."

  "Then there is something you need to tell her, something she needs to know."

  He gulped on what sounded like a need to cry and said with plainly forced steadiness, "There is. I was my lord of Suffolk's secretary. You know that?"

  "Yes."

  "Yes. Of course you do." Burgate ran unsteady hands through his hair. "Yes. I wrote his letters. I wrote . . . whatever he needed written. I wrote . . . those last days in Ipswich ... I made copies of his letter to Master John and . . . It's a very fine letter. Have you read it?"

  "It's a very fine letter," Frevisse agreed because Burgate thought so and Alice's feeling about it had no place here.

  "He was a noble man, my lord of Suffolk. A very noble man." The relief of being able to talk was overcoming Bur-gate's restraint but not enough to let him come straight at whatever he had not been saying these months since Suffolk's death. "I made copies of that letter and wrote his last words to my lady, his wife ..."

  He faltered again and stopped. Frevisse could guess he both wanted desperately to be rid of his secret and was desperately afraid to give it up after clutching it to him all these months, and carefully she said, "Your pardon, but I don't think that ever came to her."

  "It wasn't . . ." Burgate fumbled and stopped again, staring at her with a frightened man's great need for something to steady him. A frightened but brave man, Frevisse told herself. Even in his need and fear, he did not reach out for the hold on someone that he looked to desperately need; so, little though she wanted to touch him, sure he was vermined as well as dirty, she put out a hand to him and said with forced gentleness, "Sir, I'm here for her."

  With a gasp, he grabbed hold on her hand with both of his, clinging but steadying—like a man adrift and drowning given something certain to hold to for a while. At a whisper that Frevisse even at two arms' length could hardly hear, Bur-gate said, "It was something he hoped would never have to come to her. It was ... it tells how he and the duke of Somerset and . . . others dealt together to lose ..." The final word he mouthed more than whispered. ". . . Normandy."

  That finally said, he swallowed, then went on in a stronger, faster whisper. "My lord said that if they played him false—his grace the duke of Somerset and the . . . and the others—if they played him false, then my lady would know how to make the best use of what he was telling her. Against them."

  "But she never got it," Frevisse said.

  "No. Because after they played him false, they took me and I . . ."

  Surprised and alarmed, Frevisse said with forced care, "Suffolk wasn't played false, was he? It was pirates in the Channel took his ship. Men angry at him for ..." She broke off as Burgate shook and shook his head, refusing her words. "It wasn't?" she asked softly.

  "They weren't pirates. And our captain knew they were coming. He wasn't surprised. You could see that. What he did and what they did, it was unde
r orders, and the man there giving the orders he wasn't a pirate or anything like. He was ..." Burgate stopped, swallowed convulsively, and let her go. Stepping back from her a half pace with a rattle of chain, he straightened a little and said, "No, that's not for you to hear. Nor you wouldn't believe me anyway, maybe. No. It's the letter." He edged forward the little he had retreated, his voice fallen back to a low whisper. "The letter. My lord told me in Ipswich, when he'd finished it, he told me to keep it somewhere safe. Not among his other papers Safe. And that no one was to know of it but me. Unless he died. Then Lady Alice was to have it. But after they ... after they . . . killed him, other men seized me. At Dover. Someone must have told them there was something Suffolk had written, but they didn't find it and they're not sure of it and they want me to admit there's something and tell them where it is."

  "But you haven't. Haven't given them the letter or admitted it exists," Frevisse said. Because if he had, he would not still be here. He might not even be alive.

  Burgate had had time enough and more to think on possibilities she was just guessing at, and with a hunted look around his cell he said, "If I'd told them, they'd have killed me by now so there'd be no one else would know what it said. But I haven't even told them it exists, no. So it's safe. It's safe."

  "Where?" Frevisse asked.

  Wrapped in his months-long nightmare, Burgate jerked back from her, wild-eyed with distrust, before he remembered she had the right to ask. He was trembling, though, and grabbed his face between his hands as if forcibly to hold himself together, saying hoarsely between his fingers, "They're going to torture me. I know it. They only haven't because he's . . . he's ordered otherwise. But if he ... he . . ."

  "Who?" Frevisse asked before she could stop herself.

  Burgate began to shake his head strongly. "No. That's something I won't say. Won't ever say. No."

  "The duke of Somerset," Frevisse said. "The duke of Buckingham?"

  She was more thinking aloud than asking, but Burgate answered hurriedly, "No, not him, no. The . . ." Again he fumbled at words. "The others. Them. Yes." He seemed to become more certain. "Them."

  That was as much as she wanted to know. Come to it, she did not want to know even that much, and she said in an even, steady voice, "What did you do with this letter my lord of Suffolk meant Lady Alice to have?"

  Slowly, as if counting each word as he said it, Burgate half-whispered, "When it was done and closed and sealed and he gave it to me, I wrapped it in oil-cloth and sealed it with my own seal. Then I wrapped it into a package of two new-made shirts and a pair of hose and tied it so it was just a bundle. There was a boy at the inn there in Ipswich. He'd been saying he wanted to go to London. To find his fortune and all that nonsense." Burgate momentarily showed the pride of a man who had "found his fortune" in a far more sensible way, forgetting it had brought him to here. "I gave him money to help him on his way in return for him delivering the bundle to my cousin John Smythe in Sible Hedingham. Sire John. He's priest there, very safely out of the way of everything. I told the boy Sire John would pay him for the bundle and gave him a letter asking John to do so. In the bundle I enclosed another letter telling John that the sealed packet had to be safely and secretly kept. Not what it was. I never told him that. Only that he had to keep it for me until I came for it or ... or he heard I was dead. Then he should take it himself to her grace, my lady of Suffolk. It was the best I could think of," he apologized. "There wasn't much time to think of anything. We were to sail in the morning and I didn't want the letter on me. It was the best I could do. The thing was . . . the letter was . . . it's ..." He sank suddenly onto the edge of the bed again and hid his race in his hands. "Blessed St. Peter ad Vincula, I'm going to die here. I'm going to die here. Because of that . . . that . . ."

  Frevisse moved quickly forward, laid hand on his shoulder, said strongly, "It's no longer your burden. You're rid of it. Someone besides you knows of it now. It's not yours to bear anymore. All you need do is hold silent and wait for Lady Alice to have you out of here."

  Burgate uncovered his face, grabbed her by her hands. "A week," he pleaded. "A week, you said."

  "A week," she repeated, with silent prayer that Alice would move that quickly and he would last that long.

  She made to step back from him and he loosed her, let her go, wrung his hands together in his lap and began to rock slowly back and forth where he sat. "A week," he said.

  "A week," Frevisse said again, in retreat now, back across the noisome floor to the stairs where Sister Margrett still waited, her veil still held over her mouth and nose.

  The guard was just coming down the stairs, carrying the two buckets, one with a wooden lid, just as she had ordered him. He would have gone past her without any look, but because her sharpness to him might all too likely be passed on to Burgate, she said quietly, "My pardon, sir, for speaking so harshly before. Thank you for your goodness. If you could give him such kindness after this, too, you'll have my prayers and blessing."

  With a look both disconcerted and embarrassed, the man said, "Aye, my lady. I'll do what I can."

  "The blessed saints have you in their keeping," Frevisse murmured, mild as honey and milk, ignoring Sister Margrett's surprise-widened eyes.

  Having done what she could to appease the guard, she went at haste up the stairs and through the guardroom, escaping the tower at just short of unseemly haste. Only when she and Sister Margrett were outside and away from it, in clear sunlight and clean air under open sky, did she slow her pace and say with sharp need at Sister Margrett, "I want to be away from here. Soon. And far." Meaning not only Kenilworth but whatever darkness moved here under all the outward grace and beauty of the queen's royal court.

  Chapter 15

  The yeoman who had brought them to the tower was gone about his other business, leaving Sister Margrett free to ask as they went back together toward the heart of the castle, "I shouldn't want to know more than I do about any of this, should I?"

  "No," Frevisse answered quietly; then, after a moment, added, "Nor ever speak of it at all to anyone, if you can help it."

  Sister Margrett was silent then with what Frevisse hoped was acceptance, until just short of the passageway back to the courtyard, she asked, "Will Lady Alice be able to have him out of there? Before he dies?”

  “I pray so."

  "So shall I," said Sister Margrett and then nothing more, to Frevisse's relief. She did not want to outright lie, but neither was she going to share any of the truth with Sister Margrett. For her patience through all of this—and more especially for holding back from questions she surely had—Sister Margrett deserved better than a burden Frevisse would not wish on her for any reason.

  In the courtyard below the keep they found a servant to send in search of Vaughn, followed the man as far as the gateway to the outer yard, then waited there while he disappeared into the busyness of men beyond it. He must have known where to go, because he came back soon with Vaughn, who tossed him a coin. The man bowed in thanks and returned through the gateway and Vaughn said, "My ladies?"

  Not needing to be told, Sister Margrett drifted aside, out of hearing, and Frevisse told Vaughn of Burgate. Vaughn went grim while she did and at the end said, "I'll send Ned off with word to Lady Alice within the hour. Did he tell you anything of why he's there. Or the other business?"

  "What he told me I think would be best saved to tell to you and Master Noreys together."

  Vaughn eyed her for a moment in a shrewd way that reminded her of Joliffe. She had thought he might protest that and she was ready not to argue with him, simply tell him that was how it would be—the fair sharing Lady Alice and Joliffe had agreed on in the business. But Vaughn only said, "My lady does well to trust you. You found Burgate when no one else has."

  "It was only by chance that I did and so readily," she said.

  "Some are more favored by chance than others are."

  "I'll count myself well-favored if we can leave here tomorrow." Because talk of chanc
e had made her suddenly wonder, belatedly, whether finding Burgate had been only chance. Had she been deliberately used to get from him what no one else had been able to pry from him? If so, she was now in the same danger he was. But no. No one here had known she was coming or could have known she would ask after the duchess of Suffolk's secretary. Or that the queen would think it of so little matter as to simply tell her. It had all been only chance. It had to have been.

  But then, when whoever kept Burgate here—those others he was too frightened to name—found out he had talked with her and that Alice knew where he was . . .

  The sooner she was away from here, the better she would feel. Vaughn was saying, "We can leave in the morning directly after you've broken your fast, if you will," and she agreed, "That would do very well. Thank you."

  He bowed and went away the way he had come, and Sister Margrett, returning to Frevisse's side, asked, "Done?"