16 The Traitor's Tale

by Frazer, Margaret

  “Yes.” Alice drew a deep and trembling breath and let it go. “Yes. Some sea-surge of circumstance. That’s what I’m afraid for. That something will come that will unbalance and overthrow everything.”

  “Is it likely?”

  “I don’t know!” Alice spoke with both despair and anger. “That’s the trouble. I don’t know. I only fear there’s something but don’t know what, so there’s nothing I can do about it.” She flung to her feet again. “I just want to be done with Suffolk! I want to give him his funeral so that’s off my conscience, and then get on with John’s life.”

  “And your own,” Frevisse said gently.

  “My own? I don’t know that I have one anymore. Or not one worth the living, now Suffolk has so thoroughly destroyed it.”

  Frevisse let go by that declaration of despair. Whatever else came, Alice was wealthy in her own right, not merely her husband’s, and well-witted and strong-minded. Given time enough for her raw wounds of heart and mind to heal, she would survive and almost surely even prosper again. Probably Alice, under her grieving and anger, knew that, too, because she turned from that particular course of misery and said with sudden, quiet gratitude, “Thank you for coming, Frevisse. I haven’t seemed grateful, but …” She broke off as if her throat had closed. Tears swam into her eyes and she looked away, out the window again. “Just ‘thank you’,” she whispered.

  Chapter 5

  To Joliffe’s mind, the only fault with Wales was that, more often than not, it was so far from where he was when he had to go there. Added to that Sir William had been unable to give good reason why Suffolk’s steward Sir John Hampden was there, only that he was and therefore Joliffe should be and as soon as might be, never mind that Wales was the other side of England from where he started, so that even with mostly fair weather and the best will in the world—and Joliffe was never certain how best, or even good, his will truly was—he had had five days of steady riding from Hertfordshire to Chester and something like another half-day’s ride to come, finally, into Flint, where Hampden was reported to be.

  His somewhat concern was that he would find Hampden had moved on. That of course would be solved by following him. Of greater concern was how to have from him what Sir William wanted to know without the world and its cousin coming to know of it.

  Sir William had been sanguine about it. “He’s a man who’s lost his lord. As Suffolk’s man, he was laying hold on properties and getting royal offices. With Suffolk dead, he can’t be sure of anything, including keeping what he has. Offer him money and let him understand, without you saying it in so many words, that you’re from a lord very near the king who’s hoping to be nearer. Someone who could do him good in time to come.”

  But no names, Joliffe noted. Since York was nothing like “near the king”, and the lords around King Henry looked to keep him that way.

  “You’ll have to feel your way once you’re in talk with him, that’s all,” Sir William had said. “Maybe let him think you’re from the duke of Buckingham.”

  Riding into Flint’s marketplace, however, Joliffe’s interest was more in finding somewhere to stay than in finding Hampden. A bank of dark clouds had been rising up the eastern sky behind him since midday, promising the fair weather was going to turn to rain, and before he did anything else, Joliffe meant for him and Rowan, his roan mare, to have somewhere dry to stay the night.

  As it happened, that proved easy enough. Flint was built outward from one of the great castles used to hold Wales to English obedience; was set on the wide coast road across northern Wales and, besides that, was a seaport as well, and so there was more than one inn in the town and several facing onto the marketplace. He chose the Green Cockerel for its sign of a green, crowing cock hung out over the street and asked a half-grown boy in the stableyard about bed and stable-room there for the night.

  “Two days ago you’d have been without,” the boy said with a gap-toothed grin. “Today’s good enough, though.”

  Joliffe gave him a farthing to hold Rowan and went into the tavern-room where there was only an aproned man setting pottery cups along a shelf above a wooden cask that was bunged and spigoted and ready for when business came. The long tables around the walls were well-scrubbed, the rushes on the floor clean, and the man cheerful as he admitted Joliffe could have a bed there tonight. He tipped his chin toward the raftered ceiling and said, “A good, clean bed in a good, clean room. You’ll maybe have it to yourself, too. The bed, not the room. The only one-man room I’ve got is taken. It’s his men have the other room, though, and they seem a quiet lot. No trouble out of them. They …”

  A grumble of thunder turned both his head and Joliffe’s toward the streetward door, standing open to the afternoon light that was gone gray and darkening in just the little while since Joliffe had come inside.

  “Best get your horse into stable and yourself in here,” the man said, still cheerful. “It’s two pence the night for you, another two pence for the horse, but that covers his feed and drink. Your food and drink cost more.”

  “Fair enough,” said Joliffe. Knowing that paying ahead without being asked was ever the way into an innkeeper’s good graces, he brought out eight pence from his belt pouch and handed it over. “For tonight and tomorrow night,” he said. “Do you lay on a supper here or …” Thunder rolled closer overhead. “… or will I have to go out?”

  “We do meals, master. There’s a lamb on the spit in the kitchen right now, and I’m minded my wife made berry pies this morning. Very good pies she makes, does my wife.”

  “Then I’m like to be a happy man,” Joliffe said and went out to the stableyard again.

  He found the boy still holding his reins but eyeing the over-clouded, grumbling sky like someone willing to be elsewhere. At the other end of the reins, Rowan was standing hipshot and disinterested, unbothered by thunder over her head. In truth, few things bothered her. She and Joliffe had kept company together long enough to be accustomed to each other, and he had decided that if a horse could have a philosophy, then hers was that life happened, there it was, and she wasn’t going to make a bother about it unless she had to. Her answer to Joliffe’s light slap on her rump as he said to the boy, “To the stable, then. I’d see where she’s to be,” was to stir and straighten with the sigh of someone much put upon, and start toward the stable at the yard’s far end, taking the boy with her.

  The stable looked to be as well and cleanly kept as the tavern-room itself. Joliffe was well content to leave her to the stableman’s care, with a penny given to win her the man’s favor. He gave the boy another farthing to carry his saddlebag for him back to the inn, playing the gentleman to have chance to ask him as they recrossed the yard among the first spatters of rain, “So why would I’ve been out of luck for a bed here two days ago?”

  “Because of the murder, look you,” the boy said happily. “We had the crowner here and all his folk. The sheriff’s man and his men and a brace of Sir Thomas Stanley’s, they had to stay at The Lion across the way. Right to the rafters with guests we all were.”

  “The Cockerel and The Lion are the only inns in Flint, then, that they were all here?”

  “Well, the murder happened at The Rolling Man,” the boy said cheerily. “Or just outside it, anyway. So they couldn’t stay there, like. It would have been …” He paused to find the word, then offered triumphantly, “… prejudicial, see.”

  They had to break then into a sharp, short run to the inn’s door as the rain began to come down in earnest. They ducked together into shelter just as the clouds dumped their buckets, as the saying went. The boy laughed at their escape and Joliffe was glad both to be done with riding for the day and to see the innkeeper holding up a wide drinking-bowl in one hand and a pitcher in the other, asking, “Ready for refreshment now, maybe?”

  Joliffe agreed he was.

  “See the gentleman’s bag to his bed, Jack,” the innkeeper said. “Then your mother wants you in the kitchen.”

  Joliffe, for whom
being called “gentleman” was still a source of hidden mirth, sat down on a bench at one of the long tables, saying with a nod toward the open-backed stairs at the far corner of the room where Jack had disappeared with all the clattering eagerness of youth, “He’s a ready-witted boy.”

  “He is that.” The innkeeper set the bowl in front of him and began to pour a clear, golden ale from the pitcher. “I’m thinking to keep him at school a while longer, to see if there’s the makings of a lawyer in him. He has a way with words, does our Jack.”

  “He was telling me I’m in luck to have a bed here tonight.”

  “True enough. Today there’s just five, come in yesterday. Two days ago we were full up. The boy likely told you why.”

  “He did,” Joliffe agreed, and asked, with a gut-set feeling he wasn’t going to like the answer, “So who was murdered?”

  “Some fellow named Hampden,” the innkeeper answered easily.

  Joliffe had deliberately raised the bowl for a deep drink as he had asked his question. That served to mask his face and saved him having to make quick answer while he drank, and when he finished and held the bowl out for more, he only said, “Grand ale. Your wife brews it, Master …?”

  “Cockerel,” the man obliged with both answer and more ale. “Like the sign. Only I’m not green.” He chuckled at his own jest. “Nay. It’s her sister in the next street that brews for us.”

  Joliffe made a friendly gesture at the bench across the table from him. “Join me?”

  Master Cockerel took the offer by reaching for a cup from the nearby shelf, saying while pouring for himself, “I’ll not mind getting off my feet awhile, nay.”

  Jack came clattering back down the stairs and disappeared through a rear doorway.

  “This Hampden that got himself murdered, he was English?” Joliffe asked.

  “English, aye. More than that.” Master Cockerel leaned forward. “He was the duke of Suffolk’s man.”

  Joliffe took that with becoming surprise. “Was he? There’s ill fortune around that name these days.”

  “If I were one of Suffolk’s men, I’d be watching my back these days, that’s sure,” Master Cockerel said. “Things come in threes, and there’s two deaths.”

  “I’d have thought Suffolk’s death was part of the three made with those two dead bishops this year. Chichester and Salisbury.” Men who had been as high as Suffolk in the king’s favor and both murdered—Adam Moleyns of Chichester in January by a rout of soldiers angry at being denied their pay once too often; William Ayscough of Salisbury dragged from Mass in a parish church and beaten to death by more angry men in June.

  “Ah.” Master Cockerel paused in thought. “There’s that, isn’t there?” He chuckled. “Well, we’d best hope then that this fellow isn’t the start of another three.”

  Except he might be the second, rather than the start, if his murder were part of whatever Gough’s death had been, Joliffe thought darkly while sharing the innkeeper’s laugh. Then, since it never did to keep questions too long one way, he turned the talk to weather and how long the rain was likely to last and whether there would be more. That saw him through to the end of his ale, and then Master Cockerel showed him up the stairs to the long dormer room he would share—judging by the saddlebags much like his own lying on beds—with four other men.

  “There’s pots under the beds and the washbasin and towel here by the door,” Master Cockerel said. “If there’s anything you need, just shout down the stairs. You’ll be going out?”

  “Not for a while. I stopped riding to miss the rain.” Which was still battering on the thatched roof close above their heads and in the street beyond the open-shuttered window at the room’s far end. “I’m not minded to go wandering in the wet for no good reason.”

  “A man after my own heart,” Master Cockerel said and left him.

  Joliffe lay down on the one vacant bed. The mattress and pillow rustled with new-straw stuffing, the rough-woven wool blanket was thick and clean. He had slept worse in his day. Far worse. Besides that, there were small bundles of herbs hanging here and there around the room in a businesslike way that made him guess they were for keeping many-legged vermin away. Given all of that, and if Mistress Cockerel baked as well as her sister brewed ale, he was going to regret how short his stay was going to be. Hands behind his head, he looked at the rafters and considered things. He had come to find Sir John Hampden, had meant to follow him if he had moved on. Well, Hampden bad moved on, but Joliffe was not inclined to follow where he’d gone. What else to do, then? Ask questions, he supposed, but they would have to be about Hampden rather than of him, and The Rolling Man was probably the place to start.

  The rain was a steady downpour likely to last an hour or more. Joliffe shifted his arms, folded them across his chest and settled himself to sleep. Having so narrowly avoided getting soaked, he saw no reason to go deliberately into the rain. People would be as ready to talk about murder in a few hours as now, and looking forward to roasted lamb and Mistress Cockerel’s berry pie, he slept.

  Not so deeply, though, that he did not awaken the moment there were voices in the tavern-room below him—a sudden quantity of voices that made him think his fellow guests were come in, and he rose from the bed. The rain had slacked to nearly nothing, and though the overcast made judging the time difficult, he thought supper must be near. He was hungry enough for it, anyway, and headed down the stairs, meeting a man coming up. They both turned sidewise, Joliffe s back to the wall, the other man’s to the open side of the stairs, to clear way as they passed each other, Joliffe taking chance for a good look at him—a younger man, maybe no more than thirty; a long, smooth face with dark, sharp eyes; hair in the longer cut lately made fashionable by the king’s abandoning the above-the-ears crop of his father’s time.

  Stranger-friendly, he said as they passed, “Wet out.”

  “It is that,” Joliffe agreed. “I rode in just before it broke.”

  “Your good fortune.” The other good-humouredly lifted the arm over which he was carrying a wet cloak. “I wasn’t so favored.”

  Then they were past each other, with nothing to think about it, except that Joliffe did not like his clear certainty that the other man had taken a deep, close look at him in passing, as if to be very sure of knowing him if they met again.

  The same kind of look that Joliffe had taken of him.

  In the tavern-room four more men, as openly just come in from the rain, were gathered to a table around a pitcher and pottery cups, dice already rattling out on the boards between them. Nearly Joliffe joined them, to learn what he could about and from them; but if they were only lately come to Flint, they had nothing to do with Hampden’s death, were not his problem. Besides, he was surely going to share the dorter with them and have chance enough then to learn as much as he likely needed. Best for now that he eat, then go out and about m Flint to learn what he could about Hampden—at best, why he had been in Flint and how he had died.

  He failed to set about that so soon as he could have, because both the roast lamb and the berry pie were so savory and served in such fulsome shares it would have been a crime to cram them down. Willing to be law-abiding when he could, Joliffe took his time over the meal, and the men across the room did likewise, even leaving off their dicing while they ate. The man on the stairs did not come down again, but Jack took a laden tray up to him, and before Joliffe was done, the room had filled with assorted, ordinary townsfolk— several men alone, a young couple with a small child, an older man and woman together. None of them looked likely for the kind of talk Joliffe wanted, even if he had not already asked enough questions of Master Cockerel that it would be better if he were not heard asking more, so when he had regretfully finished eating and had had a final tall cup of the excellent ale, he strolled out of the Green Cockerel.

  The rain had fully ended but the air was still thick with damp and late twilight was well-come, the first lanterns already being lighted beside doorways. The Rolling Man was easily
found in a side street not a far walk away from the marketplace. It was more tavern than inn, with no yard that Joliffe saw but a tavern-room facing the street under the sign of a man rolling a wine cask. With the heavy damp and evening coming on, Joliffe had supposed he would find it busy and it was, but differently from the Green Cockerel to judge by the mixed roar of laughter and angry shouts inside the tavern-room, and the man who lurched out a side door to relieve himself against the wall. That done, he turned his back to the wall and sank down in apparent stupor. It was early hours to be so publicly drunk or even a tavern to be so loud. It looked to be just what Joliffe had hoped for, and putting on a swagger, he went inside.

  Noise and smell hit him together. The first he was braced for. The second did not surprise him. The room was cluttered with battered, unscrubbed tables and benches already crowded with drinking men and some women, many of whom looked equally battered and unscrubbed and most of whom had plainly started their heavy drinking some hours ago. No one had troubled to sweep out the floor’s old rushes with their stinking spills and thrown-down food. Fresh rushes had simply been thrown on top of foul and not very lately, either. Slut-run, such places were called, though from what Joliffe had seen of them they seemed as often—or more often—run by men as women. Only when even the owner could no longer stand the stink and squelch underfoot—or maybe when he began to fear patrons would sink and be lost in it before they paid—would the floor be cleared, to start again.

  For his part, Joliffe had never understood either that degree of laziness or some people’s seeming delight in filth for filth’s sake, as if life were more real if it were dirty. But then neither had he ever understood people for whom cleanliness was all in all, as if a polished tabletop were enough to earn them a crown in Heaven.

  And if a polished tabletop were the way to Heaven, he had no hope of salvation.

  Having bought a tall leather jack of what proved to be poor ale, he sat himself on the end of a bench along a table where two men were slapping greasy playing cards down at each other and half a dozen other men were sitting somewhat watching them but mostly drinking and talking among themselves. Joliffe, as he had intended, was soon drawn into their talk. Asked where he came from and what brought him to Flint, he answered with ready ease that he was from Warwick way, heading to Caernarfon, to a cousin doing business there for the while, with papers for him to sign and word that his wife had safely birthed him another son.