By the second morning after his fever had gone he was very weary of his thoughts and the rafters over his bed and the small room's plastered walls; and while Dame Claire was changing the poultice on his side, he brought himself to look at the ugly red line of the healing wound, to guess how long until he could ride again.
Seeing his grimace, Dame Claire said, "Yes. It's going to a fine new scar to add to your others."
"That's an ambition I've never had—to have scars or add to them," Joliffe said.
"Then you should keep away from other people's swords."
"It was a dagger."
"Then it should have been easier to keep away from. Now lie down. But if Tom here in the guesthall will help you, you should try being up and walking a little, to begin building your strength again. But not alone," she added. "Only with someone to steady you. Understood?"
"Understood." In truth, he would understand anything she asked of him if it meant he could leave this room for a while. But, "Since I'm so thriving, would it be possible Dame Frevisse be allowed to talk with me this morning?"
Dame Claire gave him a sharp, long look that made him wonder what was being said about him among the nuns, before she answered, "She likely could be."
As she began to gather her things back into her box, he asked, "Do you know if I talked much in my fever?"
"You did," Dame Claire answered, not pausing in her work.
"What did I say?" Partly not wanting to know but needing to.
"What I heard mostly made little sense. Mostly things from plays, I think. And a woman's name."
Joliffe forced a half-laugh. "Only one?"
"Only the one." Dame Claire closed her box and looked at him. "A great many times."
"Ah," he said.
"You would not care to send her a message, lest she be worried for you?" Dame Claire said, not unkindly. "Could she maybe come to you?"
Joliffe shut his eyes. "No." He let his head weigh more heavily into the pillow. "No." And listened as Dame Claire asked nothing else and left him.
She was true to her word that he should walk, though. She was not gone long before Tom came cheerily in to see if he was ready to be up and walking for a time. Joliffe was not in the least sure that he was, but Dame Claire was right that he needed to build his strength again and with Tom's help he shuffled the length of his room and back again a few times before Tom said that looked like all he'd better do and saw him back to the bed.
He was gratefully lying there, his right arm crooked over his eyes while he wondered when he'd next be fed, when someone paused in the room's doorway. "I'm awake," he said, taking his arm from his eyes to prove it.
"You are," Dame Frevisse agreed, coming to stand beside his bed, regarding him with no apparent favor. "Dame Claire says you're much bettered."
"I am. Or not dead anyway, and I count that as being to the good."
"One does," she dryly granted.
He eased himself a little up to lean against the wall at the head of the bed, careful of his side. "Also, I can feed myself low, and Dame Claire has let me walk a little."
"So she said."
"And I've been thinking."
"So have I."
"Should we make a wager our thoughts have been running the same way?"
"If you think you could depend upon me not to lie to win the wager."
She said it with so little change of voice and no change of face that Joliffe took a long moment to realize she had made a jest at him. Holding in the laugh that might have painfully jerked his side, he said as solemnly, "No wager then. Will we go unheard if we talk here?"
"I've set old Ela aside from the door and told her to send away anyone who makes to come in while I'm here."
Since they could not close the door, leaving her alone with a man, that would have to do, and he began to gather his mind for what he should and should not tell her; but she asked first, "Was it Vaughn did this to you?"
"Vaughn? No. We parted company two days after we left here. I don't know where he is, except not where I expected him to be. This was done by someone I'd never seen before."
"Can you tell me more about it all?"
"Tell me first where the packet is."
"With Domina Elisabeth. I told her it's something of Lady Alice's that needs to be kept secret and safe. It seemed better to give it to her privately in her room than be seen locking something away in the sacristy. I've likewise led her to think you're in Lady Alice's service."
If he had had more strength he would have mocked Dame Frevisse for that 'led her.' As it was, he let it go, said, because there might be help in her knowing, "This is how it went with me," closed his eyes and slowly—as careful o what he left out as what he said—told what he and Vaughn had decided here at St. Frideswide's, then made a brief tale of what happened after, through his escape from the priest's house.
Dame Frevisse listened in careful silence, making neither exclaim nor protest. Only when he had finished and opened his eyes again, she said, "There's this to add," and told him that Vaughn had written and left a message here that someone had collected after he and Vaughn had gone, and kept watch on the nunnery for nearly a week afterward.
"We never learned who he was or why he was here," she finished. "Everyone was too busy with the harvest to spend time hunting him down. My best hope is that he was someone of Alice's, set as a kind of guard for a while to be sure no trouble had followed me back here."
"There's been no other sign of trouble here since then, or since I've come?"
"None. No travelers not rightly accounted for, no guests asking wrong questions."
Slowly, thinking as he went, Joliffe said, "Vaughn's letter could explain Lady Alice's man dead at Sible Hedingham. Vaughn must have told her what Burgate had done with Suffolk's letter. It also means he knew Lady Alice had sent, or was going to send, someone here."
"Something neither you nor I was told," Dame Frevisse said coldly. "Which makes me wonder what else we weren't told."
It made Joliffe wonder, too, but aloud he said, "If the man held here a week before he took the message that could be why Lady Alice's man reached Sible Hedingham only two days before me. And of course I'm supposing the message was to her. But either way, where is Vaughn? He could have been there far sooner than that, whatever happened."
Whatever she might have answered was stopped by the Roister bell beginning to ring for the day's next Office, a Summons supposed to enjoin silence on a nun. Dame Frevisse turned her head toward it, then she looked back to him, saying nothing, but slipping a small book from her sleeve. She held it out and he took it, saying, "To pass my time with? My thanks, my lady."
She wordlessly nodded and left, and he carefully shifted himself somewhat higher against his pillow, opened the book's plain parchment cover to the book's beginning, and choked back laughter. She had given him a copy of Chaucer's Boethe—. The Consolation of Philosophy.
Chapter 22
Having had small comfort from None's prayers and psalms and had the midday meal, Frevisse again asked and was given Domina Elisabeth's leave to return to the guesthall. This time she found Joliffe sitting more up, propped on a pillow against the wall at the bed's head, with Luce sitting on the bed's edge beside him, a bowl of thick soup on her lap and just slipping the spoon from Joliffe's mouth, smiling at him with her eyes locked to his as if something far more than only feeding soup were going on between them. Certainly she startled at the sight of Frevisse and only barely saved the bowl from spilling as she stood quickly up to bob a curtsy and say, "My lady."
"Luce," Frevisse returned as evenly as if she had seen nothing in particular. She held out her hand for the bowl.
"I'm here to talk to Master Noreys and can feed him while I do, freeing you to go about your other duties."
Luce gave over the bowl and spoon with a regretful sideways look at Joliffe, who gave her a smile and said, "Not to worry. I promise I'll be here when you come back."
Luce left on a laugh and a lingering
backward look. Frevisse, standing beside the bed with soup bowl in hand, said at Joliffe, "You should be too weak for bringing servant girls to calf-eyes. What were you saying to her?"
Joliffe laid his right hand over his heart and said languishingly, "Only that stories say sight of a fair woman can wound a man to the heart with love, but that sight of her had put heart into the healing of my wound." Still languishing, he added, "May I have more of that soup?"
Frevisse thrust the bowl at him. When she first saw him this morning, she had been unsettled by the grayness shadowed under his eyes and the deep-drawn lines of pain on either side of his mouth, but impatient with his foolishness, she said tartly, "Use your strength for other than flattering our servant girls. You told me you could feed yourself."
His grin was unrepentant as he took the bowl. "Kind words make for kind hands," he said.
"Was it an unkind word of yours, then, set someone so unkindly at you?" she asked with a nod at his side.
"You wrong me, my lady," Joliffe said, sounding aggrieved. "There was never a word said between us at all. I'd done nothing."
"Except be there, taking the thing he'd probably come for, too," Frevisse said at him. "Eat." While he began to obey her, she went on. "The priest there, killed the way he was. That was the same way Suffolk's priest died. Killed by his own parishioners and his head cut off."
Joliffe swallowed and said, "Noted that, did you?"
"I gather, too, you don't think the man who tried to kill you was simply another villager."
Joliffe's face went bleak with memory. "The villagers were one thing. They were no more than a dog-pack turned savage, the wits gone out of them. This man, he was enjoying himself in a whole other way and apart from them. I'd lay good odds he's the one who stirred them up and set them on. Not that the stirring up may have been that hard. The whole of the south and east have been seething for months now, uprisings coming and going like pots going on and off the boil. Someone who set to it wouldn't have that hard a time roiling up a village that's unhappy at their priest anyway. Not given there are always men ready for trouble for the hell of it anyway, even at the best of times."
"And these are nothing like the best of times. Nor, I gather, either of those priests the best of men."
"No," Joliffe said tersely. "It seems they were not."
"Even then, village displeasure rarely goes so far as to kill," Frevisse said.
"And even more rarely to the cutting off of heads," Joliffe said, his voice flat and dry. They looked at each other for a long moment, and then he said for both of them, "Two priests dead in a somewhat uncommon way and both of them linked to Normandy's loss. However unwittingly on Sire John's part."
"Eat," Frevisse remembered to order, and while he did, she said carefully, "There's Suffolk's steward, in Wales, too."
Joliffe set the spoon back into the bowl. "You see that, too? The thing that's like among all three murders? Routs of parishioners savaging their priests. A sudden tavern scuffle that 'happens' to break into the street as Hampden passes by. Always no one man to blame. And Matthew Gough," Joliffe added grimly. "The men who killed him and Hampden were hired to it, unlike the villagers, but his death and Hampden's were meant to look the same as the priests'— deaths with no one to blame by face or name. That's four men linked, one way or another, to Suffolk and Normandy, and all of them. . ."
"... murdered by too many men for one man to be singled out as their murderer," Frevisse said, finishing his thought with her own. "Murdered in ways that, for Gough and Hampden seem by chance, and with the priests, no one man's fault."
"Except I saw him," Joliffe said quietly. "The man who didn't belong where he was. The man who wasn't a villager and knew on the instant that I wasn't either."
"You truly think he goaded the villagers to both priest-killings?"
"I think it . . . possible."
"But even if we bring ourselves to suppose that this man deliberately set to causing these four murders ..." Frevisse paused, frowning. Did she believe that?
"There's enough alike among their deaths," Joliffe said quietly, "to make it more than just the fever burning odd patterns into my mind."
"And I'm without the excuse of a fever for thinking it," Frevisse said. "But why would this man trouble to be so subtle at these murders? I have to doubt he has any other link to these men. Gough I can see would be better not to do alone, but the others . . . He could have killed them and been away, with no one to know who did them."
"You surely have a thought on 'why'," Joliffe said.
"And so do you," she returned.
He nodded but paused for another spoonful of the soup before saying, "My guess is that these killings aren't for his own sake, that someone is setting him on to them."
"Someone who wants to keep secret the true reason for Normandy's loss," Frevisse said. "So the murders all have to look like something other than plain murder, to lessen chance someone will see how they're linked."
"With now the added slight problem," Joliffe said evenly, "that I've probably become someone else this someone will now want dead."
"Yes," Frevisse agreed, her voice as level as his own.
He handed her the emptied bowl and closed his eyes. "I think I'll go to sleep again."
Not that he looked to have choice about it. Given his body's present weakness, sleep probably took him when it would, Frevisse thought, and she stood still, waiting while his face slackened and his breathing evened, until he seemed gone too deeply into sleep for her to disturb him as she quietly left, taking her thoughts with her back into the cloister.
Her duties kept her there through the rest of the day. She did not go back to the guesthall until the next morning, again with Domina Elisabeth's leave but earlier, between Tierce and Sext, and found Joliffe on his feet and out of his room, leaning on Tom's arm and not walking steadily but with more color in his face than yesterday. Luce hovered nearby, more than ready to help if need be, until at Frevisse's sharp look she seemed to decide she was needed elsewhere and went away.
Tom scowled after her, either because she had abandoned him or else unhappy with her heed to Joliffe; and old Ela, sitting a little aside from Joliffe's door instead of in her corner, chuckled and said, "You help get him better so he goes and she'll remember you soon enough, Tom-boy. Better the ass in the barn than the horse gone down the road."
Tom grumbled something under his breath and Joliffe wisely did not laugh but said, "I'm ready to lie down, I think."
Back in his room again, he eased himself onto the bed, thanked Tom, and added, "I suppose I'll have to do it again this afternoon."
"Aye. So Dame Claire says," Tom agreed. Frevisse had followed them into the room. He jerked a bow to her and went out.
Joliffe, settling himself against the pillow against the Wall, said, "So. I've thought more, and likely you have, too."
"I have," Frevisse granted. She did not bother to hide she was not happy with her thoughts. "We're well-agreed, I think that these murders were done to keep secret that Suffolk and Somerset set out with purpose to lose Normandy, yes?"
"Yes," Joliffe agreed. "From that it comes that whoever ordered the murders has to be someone who knew that Hampden and Suffolk's chaplain took messages to Somerset in France. Burgate, too, of course, and he'd surely be dead along with them if he hadn't written and then hidden that letter for Suffolk. Instead, his cousin died. In his place, as it were. Though for all we know, Burgate is dead, too, since they knew where to go looking for the letter."
"Unless Lady Alice got him out of Kenilworth before it came to that," Frevisse said, "and it was from him, rather than from Vaughn, she learned where the letter was and sent her man to Sible Hedingham."
"And if that was the way of it, we can guess that someone followed Burgate to Wingfield," Joliffe said, "and then followed her man to Sible Hedingham. It would be easy enough for a spy in her household to tell someone there was a link between Burgate talking to Lady Alice and that man being sent, without the
spy knew why."
"And when her man came away from the priest's," Frevisse said, "he was killed because whoever followed him thought he must have the letter."
"Except he didn't, and the man I saw had to set about getting it the longer way."
"Why? When he could have simply forced the priest to tell him and then killed him, if he had to have him dead."
"Again, to keep from having questions asked," Joliffe said. "One stranger dead in the road and no way to tell who did it—that happens. A priest murdered soon afterward and nearby, again by someone unknown—not so easily dismissed. But one more hurly of villagers killing a hated priest . . ." He shrugged. "This year, with all else going on, who's to take special note of that or link it to the dead stranger? The law would be satisfied with seeing there's enough justice done to close the matter, and there's an end."
The Traitor's Tale Page 27
