16 The Traitor's Tale

by Frazer, Margaret

  Joliffe closed his eyes. “Very possibly. But they wouldn’t know to look for me here. And if I reached here and then died, you’d know to tell Sir William Oldhall.”

  “Eat,” Dame Frevisse said.

  He did, but after a few mouthfuls could feel himself fading toward sleep again, turned his head away from the next spoonful, and said, “One other thing. If it does come to the worst with me and you have to send Sir William Oldhall word of it, the name he knows me by is Simon Joliffe.”

  “And that one your own?” she asked sharply.

  Joliffe quirked up one corner of his mouth into half a smile. “No.”

  She held quiet long enough that he hoped she was done with questions, until she asked, very gently, “Do you even remember, for a certainty, what your true name is?”

  His eyes were so heavily closed he did not try to open them but met the challenge under her question by saying softly, “Aren’t names simply tools? To give us something to call each other? If it’s sometimes better to use a knife than a spoon, why not sometimes use one name instead of another, “it better matches a present need?”

  “What I wonder,” Dame Frevisse said softly back to him, is whether, behind all the names you’ve been, you remember who you truly are.”

  Eyes still shut and sleep rising in a welcome tide, he whispered, “I remember.” Low enough that maybe she did not hear him.

  Frevisse was not sure he meant her to hear that last but she did and watched him either slip into sleep or make so good a feigning of it that she could not tell the difference. How much of his life was feigned, she wondered. Had she ever known him when he was not pretending to be someone he was not? Or was it that he was all the men he sometimes and another seemed to be?

  Among the reasons she had become a nun had been the hope she could pare away all the different guises that came with living in the world, rid herself of them to find out who she truly was, so that then she could give herself, freed of the world, to God. Time and life had taught her she was unlikely ever to have that pure of a self to give. The taints of the world went deep and the cloister was not so perfect a place to be rid of them as she could wish, but she was grown free, much of the time, of the confusions that came with passions and counter-running desires and needs. She was, blessedly, nearer to a single self than Joliffe was.

  Or was she? A crystal threw out rainbows of light and yet was single and whole in itself, made by God to make those rainbows. Was that how it was with Joliffe? Did he throw out all these different seemings of himself while somewhere behind them he was whole, was unbrokenly himself?

  She had no way of knowing. She could only pray it was so, because he would surely never tell her.

  Joliffe’s fever did not worsen but it held him in its burning grip through that day and much of the next. It finally broke late in the afternoon, leaving him far weaker than he panted to be. Through that night and the next day sleep came with disconcerting ease, and he welcomed it both for its healing and its oblivion. His body’s necessities now were sleep and food and time to lie quietly and heal, and he knew that if he did not heed that need, he would likely be dead after all. Knowing that at least made his choice straight-forward, and his weakness made the choice even easier. Simply sitting up long enough to be fed or rising long enough to tend to what could not be done lying down left him wanting nothing so much as to be flat and quiet again.

  It was his mind that proved troublesome. In the three-part division of the Self—body, mind, and soul—he had, over the years, done with and for his body as he chose and it needed, and given his soul such tending as he could toward what the Church said it needed for its salvation; but his mind had been his best companion. He had enjoyed letting it go where it would and as it would, had taken pleasure in most of its roamings; but as he lay on the straw-stiff mattress, he found his thoughts running along too many paths at once and none of them pleasant.

  At best, there was simply worry about his wound—that it might turn poisonous despite Dame Claire’s care and kill him after all. Worry over that was useless, since he could do no more than what he was, and the same was true at worry over whether he had truly shaken pursuit or would be found here after all, because there was nothing he could do about that either. Likewise worry that in his fever he might have said things he never meant to say. If he had, they were said and that was that. But sometimes his thoughts went a-drift without warning into that heart-aching flood of longing for where he could not be, not yet, and against that pain when it came, he grabbed at anything to stuff into the breach— songs, lines from plays, stray bits of poems, anything to turn his mind and take it elsewhere. Even prayer. Salve nos, Dotnine, vigilantes, custodi nos dormientes … Save us, Lord while we are awake, guard us while we sleep …

  But more than anything and beyond his wish to stop it, his mind went searching and circling through the past few weeks, trying to pry straight answers out of the tangle of all the questions there were and failing at it so badly he began to think there were no straight answers to be had.

  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 t
hat 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.