Frevisse had thought to pray while she sat there, but she found herself watching Domina Edith's face instead. The gentleness of her dying had taken much of the age from it. She seemed small and smooth-skinned as a child, but the serenity she had lived in showed in her sleeping face with a completeness that only years gave. She was past being old; she was no longer really here at all but well along the way that could only be gone alone, no matter how you went about your dying, no matter how much or little you were loved.
Tenderly, for her own sake even more than Domina Edith's, Frevisse leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead. Gently, as gently as the prioress's breathing there in the summer stillness of the room.
When Sister Lucy returned, Frevisse gave her back her place without comment and went away, her grieving quiet in her for a while.
This time she paused deliberately at the window on the stairs to look out, over the nunnery wall to the green distance of fields and the forest and the blazing clear sky beyond them all. She had chosen long past to make St. Frideswide's the world to her, closed into it so she could set her mind and heart free in quest of matters beyond the world. But whatever she had chosen, the world beyond the walls was still there with its fears, its dangers, its ambitions.
Its beauties.
Here, from the narrow window, only its beauties could be seen, but that did not mean the fears, dangers, and ambitions were not real. Nor did their reality mean that beauty was a lie.
All of them were real. The error lay in denying the reality of one because the others existed, too.
And there was the trouble with how she had been looking at the pieces of the problem. They had to fit together some way, and she had not yet found it.
Chapter 21
The stairway's warmth was suddenly too much to bear, and Frevisse went hurriedly down. She needed somewhere else to think. Not the cloister walk, somewhere she would be unlikely to be interrupted. Somewhere . . .
As she came out at the bottom of the stairs, Sister Juliana bustled past her toward the outer door. Sister Juliana was not given to bustling; distracted, Frevisse watched her. And then heard the firm, ongoing knocking at the outer door. A knocking heavy enough she should have heard it herself. By Sister Juliana's sharp glance as she passed, she agreed, but there was no help for it now and Frevisse began to withdraw discreetly from whatever outward business was demanding attention. If she went the other way along the cloister walk . . .
Sister Juliana's alarmed cry echoed along the passage from the outer door. Frevisse spun around and went back to help. But in the passage, as she came in sight of the door now open and Sister Juliana standing there, her step faltered as if suddenly there were insufficient floor under her feet. Nearly filling the doorway—and no way to stop him if he chose to come in—was a man in helmet and breastplate, with a glimpse in the yard beyond him of mounted, armored men.
Quelling an urge to retreat, Frevisse steadied herself and went forward. In a clear, assured, and carrying voice, she said, "What is it, Sister Juliana?"
Sister Juliana turned to face her, eyes wide, mouth working soundlessly. Frevisse laid a gentle hand on her arm and spoke past her to the waiting man. "Can we help you in some way, sir? If you want shelter for the night, I pray you go across the yard to the guesthalls. You and your men will be seen to there."
The man was fumbling at the chin strap of his helmet. As she spoke, he loosed it and pulled his helmet and coif off to show his sweat-matted hair. He was suddenly far less threatening. With a slight bow, he said, "My lady would speak with a Dame Frevisse, said to be in this house. Is it possible?"
"Your . . . lady?" Frevisse asked, her voice level with outward politeness while she tightened her hold on Sister Juliana's arm to keep her silent and hold her there, thinking for a shocked moment he must mean the boy's mother, God forbid, and she did not want to face that alone.
But with a nod across the yard the man said, "The countess of Suffolk."
Frevisse could not stop an audible gasp of relief. She looked past him and aside from the armored men directly in sight of the door to the other riders across the yard. There were perhaps a dozen of them, men and women mostly dressed in the dark blue of the Suffolk household, as the soldiers were under their light armor, she realized now. Some of them had dismounted and one of the women was bringing a filled goblet from the well to the most richly dressed of the women. Still mounted on her tall gray palfrey whose dark blue harness was embossed with the de la Pole arms of golden leopard heads, Countess Alice took the goblet with murmured thanks, but her head was already coming around toward the door, drawn by her name.
Her cousin's loveliness startled Frevisse as it usually did. With her cream complexion touched with rose and her finely drawn features and fair hair, Countess Alice was an ideal of fashionable womanhood. Her houppelande was a plain-cut one for travel, its sleeves hanging no more than a foot below her wrists; but it was of rich cloth as deeply green as the young fields, and while her women wore wimples and simple veils for riding, her own hair was gathered up and hidden under a padded roll with liripipe drawn under her chin and thrown over her left shoulder with an elegance that bespoke both ease and assurance.
"Frevisse! Cousin!" she called, and waved with her free hand, not needing to bother with her reins since a squire was holding to her horse's bridle.
"My Lady Alice," Frevisse returned with a curtsy.
"Your cousin?” Sister Juliana breathed beside her, fear forgotten in wonder. It was known that Alice Chaucer was Frevisse's cousin, their mothers being sisters, and that she was married to the earl of Suffolk, but knowing that by way of priory gossip and actually seeing the countess and her retinue and guard in St. Frideswide's courtyard were two vastly different things. "Your cousin," Sister Juliana repeated almost reverently.
Impatiently, Frevisse said, "Yes, I know. You'd best go tell Dame Claire."
Reminded that hovering in the outer doorway staring hardly suited with her dignity and the priory's propriety, Sister Juliana curtsied quickly toward Countess Alice and retreated out of sight.
Frevisse, her mind running quickly through possible reasons Alice might be here without warning, waited while a squire lifted Alice down from her fashionable box saddle and one of her ladies brushed travel dust from her skirts. When the woman, satisfied the countess was presentable, stepped back with a low curtsy, Alice came across the cobbles to Frevisse, hands held out in greeting.
Their lives had gone such widely different ways that they rarely met, but of late an affection that had barely been there when they were girls together had grown between them, partly out of shared memories and affection for Alice's parents, both dead now, and partly out of newly discovered respect for each other, for the women they had become. It was with unfeigned warmth that Frevisse took Alice's hands. Across the yard she could see Dame Alys looming at the top of the guesthall steps and said, "Your folk will be seen to, but you'll come in, won't you?"
"Gladly, Cousin." Smiling, graceful, Alice swept past her into the passageway; but as Frevisse turned from closing the door, Alice said, low-voiced and intent, her smile and light manners gone, "Is there somewhere private we may talk immediately? The prioress's parlor if there's nowhere else?"
Even wary as she already was, Frevisse was disconcerted by her cousin's intensity and said, "Not her parlor. Domina Edith is dying."
Alice's concern was instant and real. "Frevisse, I'm sorry to hear it! Father spoke of her sometimes. He thought very well of her. I'm indeed sorry."
Frevisse shied from the sympathy. "There's the lower parlor, just here at the end of the passage. We can talk there."
All smiles and lightness again, chatting about the warm weather and wasn't it good for the haying—Frevisse had never known her to take particular interest in haying before—Alice followed her into the cloister walk and along it to the parlor door. It was an austere room, kept for the nuns to receive their personal guests, anyone not needing the prioress's attention. There was a bench,
a few stools, a table where refreshments might be put, a chair, but neither Frevisse nor Alice sat.
Alice had all the elegant loveliness her own fair features and her and her husband's wealth could provide, but it was her father's intelligence that lived behind the elegance, and as Frevisse closed the parlor door, Alice dropped her lightness and smiles again and said, "Your letter reached me. What have you heard about Queen Katherine that made you so curious you wrote me of her?"
"What's so desperate that you came here because of my letter?" Frevisse returned as quickly.
Countered, Alice paused, her expression revealing how rarely someone met a demand of hers with an answering demand. Then she shifted past annoyance to acceptance of Frevisse's challenge and with a straight-lipped smile nothing like her earlier one answered, "I showed your letter to Bishop Beaufort—"
"Beaufort!" The bishop of Winchester. The duke of Gloucester's great rival in the royal government.
"He and my lord husband are together in all matters around the King now."
"Then why show the letter to him rather than your husband?"
"Because Suffolk is bound for France with the latest muster. Your letter reached me barely in time for me to tell him of it before he sailed. He said Beaufort should know, that I should show it to him, and when I did—"
Frevisse swung away from her, hands clenched together, and paced the small length of the room. "I never thought it would go so far!"
Ignoring her outburst, Alice said, "My lord bishop thinks very well of you, from that matter at my father's funeral."
Frevisse shook her head; she did not want the bishop of Winchester to think of her at all. "He thought, as I did, that there was more than idle curiosity in your letter and that we should know more and immediately. For him to take an open hand in it would be too notable—"
"But for my cousin to come visit me would be a smaller matter."
Alice nodded. "Exactly. Now, why did you write that letter? What do you know here about something that's so far gone barely farther than the lords of the Council?"
It was request and demand both. And a just one.
Frevisse pressed her hands over her face and drew a deep, steadying breath, then tucked her hands quietly into their opposite sleeves, lifted her head, and said, "Queen Katherine's two younger sons are in sanctuary here."
Alice hissed in her breath through her teeth. "Frevisse, this is dangerous."
"That I know," Frevisse agreed tersely, and told her of the attack on the boys' party before they arrived at the priory, explaining in brief how the boys came to be here, ending with, "And now two more of the men who came with them are dead."
"Dead? How?"
"One drowned, the other stabbed. And two attempts have been made to kill the boys."
"Do you know by whom? Or why?"
"No. Ideas but no answers. Alice, are they truly so important that they should be costing men's lives?"
"They're the King's half brothers, and their mother's brother is king of France, for all our government refuses to say so. Yes, they're that important."
"And you mean to take them away. To Bishop Beaufort."
'They're plainly in deadly danger else. Once they're in my care, under my protection in Suffolk's name, they're safe."
"From whom?"
"Frevisse, you could just let me take them. You might be better not knowing all this."
"There have been a great many dead men on the priory's hands because of whatever this is. Four of the men who were traveling with the boys, the five men who attacked them, whose names we don't even know."
"I know them," Alice said.
"What? Who were they?"
"They were our men. From our household."
"Alice, they tried to kill the children!"
"If they did, it was wholly against orders. No, I think they tried to intercept them, as they had been told to do. They were the ones who were attacked. They had been most strictly told the boys were to be kept safe and brought to me."
"Why?"
Alice drew a deep breath. "Frevisse, this is dangerous."
"I've gathered that," Frevisse said dryly. "So is ignorance and right now I'm very ignorant of what is toward here."
They stared at one another, not in challenge but in assessment—Alice determining how much could be told, Frevisse judging how much truth there would be in it.
"It's this way," Alice said. "We learned the boys were gone almost as soon as their mother sent them away, their brother one direction, these two another. We could guess where they were going and sent men to intercept them if they could."
"How did you know?"
"By a spy in the queen's household," Alice said simply. "The same way we knew about the boys at all."
"How long have you known about them?"
Ruefully Alice admitted, "Barely two months. No one has been concerned about Kathenne. She's been living so quietly, away from court, making no trouble for anyone, we thought. Only lately has there been any rumor that that wasn't the truth of it, so only lately did we manage to . . ."
She paused, looking for the word. Frevisse offered, "To insinuate someone into her household?"
"To corrupt someone already there," Alice said. "Their secret depended on their people keeping it. They were very careful of who was around them."
"Not careful enough, it seems."
"There is a point for everyone—" Alice reconsidered. "—for nearly everyone, where the price is high enough to buy their loyalty."
"And you found your person and the price."
"And apparently so did Gloucester."
The duke of Gloucester, the King's uncle, known to resent the limits of his power in the government.
"Do you suppose his agent found the same person your agent did?" Frevisse asked.
"I don't know. I suppose once you begin to be treacherous, you may be indiscriminately so. The point is, Queen Katherine is in deep trouble for marrying one Owen Tudor without the royal Council's permission, and for having royal children by him. It was foolish of her. Careless."
"At least three children's worth of carelessness."
"How did you know there are three?" Alice asked sharply.
"We have two here and you said their brother went another way, meaning at least one other."
"Well, there's going to be a fourth. The queen is pregnant yet again."
It did not seem to Frevisse that four children instead of three would make the matter much worse, so she simply asked, "What will happen to her for this?"
"She's been put under guard, discreetly, at Hertford for the time being. Tudor has been arrested—"
"For what?"
"Gloucester will think of something. It was his doing. What could be handled quietly he's going to turn into a wide-blown scandal, like the fool he is."
Frevisse almost asked why again but stopped herself. Enough of her curiosity was satisfied, and whatever politics were going on, with Queen Katherine, her husband, and their children as pawns and probably helpless ones, it was not her business. Edmund and Jasper were, and she asked instead, "What do you want with the children?"
"Someone has to have control of them. Better us than Gloucester. Especially since it seems he wants them dead, judging by what you've told me."
Frevisse refrained from asking exactly who "us" might be. Presumably, whoever in the government was presently ranged against Gloucester, and that undoubtedly included the earl of Suffolk. Her letter to Alice had raised trouble she had not counted on. "And if you have control of them?"
"If?" Alice questioned.
"They've been given sanctuary here. We have to know what's intended by you or whomever you'll give them over to, before we'll allow them to go with you."
Alice lifted her eyebrows slightly. "Pardon me? I don't know if I understand you."
"I mean that the children are under our protection." Such as it was, but Frevisse did not add that. "We can't simply give them over to you because you've come for them."
&
nbsp; "You wrote to me about them."
"In confidence, for advice, and unaware you had so deep an interest in them. I trust you, but I need to know more. What do you intend for them?"
Alice's momentary haughtiness eased. "You're right. I'm too used to giving commands to those who have to take them without explanation. You won't and you shouldn't. This is the way it is. Gloucester is outraged by this marriage. He sees it as a desecration of royalty and his late brother's memory. He'd execute Owen Tudor if he could, but I think that will be stopped. The queen will be put into honorable confinement in a nunnery, near London probably. Gloucester won't be satisfied with less, and her foolishness has earned it." Alice had never let her own warm heart interfere with her common sense or her ambitions. "As for the children, they're a complication for so many different reasons it can't be said what will become of them eventually, but I purpose to put them into Barking Abbey outside London. My husband's sister is abbess there and they'll be as safe as anywhere, beyond anyone's reach until we know what to do with them. King Henry is gentle-hearted. I think he won't reject them or their mother—his mother—when the matter comes to him."
The Boy's Tale Page 20
