8 The Maiden's Tale

by Frazer, Margaret

  Increasingly wary, Frevisse asked, “What help of mine is Bishop Beaufort hoping for, that you’ve told me all this?”

  “One of the men we used to pass messages has died. Not because he was our messenger,” Alice said hastily. “He drank too much one night and died of it. But part of our secrecy lies in having a number of ways to send the messages, so nothing becomes a pattern. We need someone to replace the link this man was. Bishop Beaufort thinks that you would serve for a time.”

  The urge to outright refuse was so great Frevisse had to fight to hold it back, to say reasonably, “I don’t see how I can be expected to pass messages quietly to Bishop Beaufort. Or have them from him.”

  “You’ll have nothing to do with him. Your abbot will. They’ll be meeting at Parliament. No one will think anything about it. Your abbot will be the link between Bishop Beaufort and you. My lord bishop meant to speak to him tonight, before they left here, and thought he’d agree readily enough.”

  Frevisse didn’t doubt he would. Abbot Gilberd would agree on his own behalf and hers, glad of the chance to be of service to the powerful bishop of Winchester. Unfortunately that left her with small choice of refusal herself but she said, with small hope it would do any good, “I may not be in London long.”

  “Oh, your abbot can give you leave to stay as long as need be and you’ll stay here with me,” Alice said happily, “and you and I will have more time together than we would have otherwise.”

  That was the one thing in favor of it and not sufficient, to Frevisse’s mind. But neither did she see a way out that would not put her in great disfavor not only with Alice but with Abbot Gilberd at the least. Bowing her head to hide how much she disliked it, she began to give way, asking, “How do I meet with Abbot Gilberd? Do you invite him to supper here again?”

  “Frevisse, please,” Alice said, answering her overt displeasure rather than her question. “If there were another way as readily to hand, as likely to go unnoticed…”

  “I know,” Frevisse said, tempering her voice. If there was no way out of this, she could at least seem gracious over it, for both their sakes. “It’s just I’m so tired tonight.”

  “It won’t be difficult,” Alice said encouragingly. “He’ll have occasion to visit his sister in St. Helen’s while he’s here in London, and so will you. Any message by way of me for Bishop Beaufort to hand on to Orleans, you can leave with her for her brother to collect. Any coming the other way, through him, he can leave for you to collect. At word from him, she surely won’t ask questions over anything he leaves there for you or you leave for him.”

  But she might wonder a great deal, Frevisse thought darkly, and asked, “Did Bishop Beaufort work all this out this evening, after we arrived together?”

  “Of course,” Alice said.

  That meant he had thought it through while conversing at apparent leisure with one person and another on other things all through supper and the evening. He had made occasion to pass it on to Alice and by now had spoken to Abbot Gilberd about it and was quite probably back at Winchester House across the Thames and readying for bed with no doubt in his mind that everything would go precisely as he purposed. Even more likely, he was probably already in his bed, sleeping the sleep of a satisfied mind.

  Frevisse wholeheartedly wished him no joy of it at all.

  Chapter 7

  For too long a moment when she first awoke Jane could not remember where she was and lay rigidly still, not daring to move, her half-wakened mind racing through the possibilities before she caught hold of remembrance that she was only in Lady Alice’s chamber, in the truckle bed, and the darkness looming beside and above her were Lady Alice’s bedcurtains, nothing more. Her mind lurched to slow again, she drew a deep breath and let it out, willing her body to go slack and her heart to steady. She had no way to tell the time and from where she lay little of the room could be seen but there was no sound of any servant come to rouse the morning fire or a stirring in the bed above her so she need not think of rising yet, and she burrowed deeper under the blankets, curling in more tightly on herself, enjoying the pleasures of warmth and ease and no one there to see her. She even thought of falling asleep again but instead found running through her mind: Christe, Fili Dei vivi, miserere nobis… Miserere nobis. Gloria Patri… Christ, Son of the living God, pity us. Pity us. Glory to the Father… Jane clamped her mind shut, stopping them. They were part of the long prayers for Prime, dawn’s office, that she had daily said through all her remembered years before she left the nunnery. Year in, year out, day after day: Christe… miserere nobis…

  Jane stopped them again, patiently. Considering how completely she had wanted to leave the nunnery, she was sometimes dismayed to find how completely it had in some ways come with her. But she had always loved the offices, had loved the prayers, the psalms, the praises of God; the petitions for grace so beautifully made; the rich, lovely words with all their possibilities of meaning making realms for the mind to roam in. And the church itself, particularly at Prime, with the candles paling as daylight began to gray the windows, fill the church, overhead the stone-arched roof seeming to form out of the darkness as if new-made in the moment, not there until the light created it, the light seemingly called forth by the nuns’ voices weaving together in the darkness.

  All of that was still there, as it had been all the years before and while and since she had been in St. Osburga’s. But no longer for her. For her there was… what? She did not know, really. Willing service to Lady Alice. Marriage to William Chesman. And then… ? She supposed marriage would become familiar to her. Even pleasant, she hoped, and under the blankets made a small cross over her breast, whispering, “Dies et actus nostros in sua pace disponat Dominus omnipotens.”‘ The almighty Lord order our day and actions in his peace. And let me understand what your peace is, Jane added silently. Let me find it and know it and learn to live in it.

  Distantly, then near to hand and all around, London’s bells began their ringing to Prime, too many of them to be much muffled by stone walls and shutters, and Jane shoved her bedcovers away and rose to take up the day’s necessities, beginning with readying herself and then joining the other ladies in readying Lady Alice. Breakfast came next and accompanying Suffolk and Lady Alice to Mass in Coldharbour’s chapel, reached through a range of rooms beyond the great hall without need to go outside, a comfort on mornings like this one, with a thin snow driven out of a low gray sky by a wind that found its way under doors and around shutters to whisper and eddy along the floors. At least the chapel was reasonably warm, with braziers set about and, where the earl and Lady Alice prayed, thick carpet on the floor.

  As was her way, Jane lingered when Mass was finished, rather than be caught up among the other ladies, their tongues loosed and thoughts turned elsewhere before they were out the church’s door. She had found she had few things to say to any of them. She liked most of them well enough but her life had been too different from theirs; she had never learned how to chatter about clothes or who had danced with whom last night or speculate at length on this man or that. She had tried but was no good at it, and on the whole it was simply less trouble, whenever the other ladies clustered, to find excuse to keep apart from them, beginning with Mass, by staying where she was, head bowed for one more prayer, until everyone was gone but the priest, sometimes Master Bruneau, sometimes one person or another making especial prayer or penance, none of whom ever talked to her. By the time she reached the lady chamber, the others ladies would be sorted into their little groups and she could slip quietly to her own place apart or, surprisingly often, be asked by Lady Alice to join her at whatever she was doing.

  This morning in the chapel Master Bruneau and Dame Frevisse both stayed, kneeling with bowed heads. Master Bruneau prayed for his dead wife, Jane supposed. Lady Alice’s cousin was perhaps trying to make up the prayers she had missed and would miss because Lady Alice had prevailed on her not to return to St. Helen’s; out of affection, Jane supposed, because surely she gave n
o sign of being a gadding nun, out in the world for pleasures.

  Master Bruneau left. Jane, realizing she was thinking more than praying, crossed herself and made to go, too, leaving the chapel to Dame Frevisse, but as she passed the side door through the rood screen that separated the altar from the rest of the chapel, Robyn Helas stepped out of it into her way. In the week since Eyon Chesman’s death he had tried some few times to talk to her but she had always avoided him, and this time, like the others, she would have passed him with only the slightest inclination of her head and no word and been satisfied, but Robin held something up in front of her for her unavoidably to see. A narrow blue satin ribbon edged in finely stitched gold with small goldthread tassels at either tapered end, and an unfolded piece of paper hardly larger than her own hand with perhaps a dozen uneven lines written neatly down its center.

  Jane stopped, staring, because neither the ribbon nor the paper could be there. They were both safely shut away with a dozen other papers, the ribbon tied around them, in a small, locked box in the bottom of the small, locked chest that held the best of Lady Alice’s jewels kept always in a large chest in her bedroom.

  “I have the others, too,” Robyn whispered cheerfully.

  “How?” Jane whispered back, too shocked to say more, then found her breath, and demanded fiercely, only barely remembering in her anger to keep her voice low, “Where are they?”

  “That would be telling,” Robyn chided her. He stepped back through behind the rood screen, beckoning for her to follow. She did but only into the doorway itself. Farther she would not go, not into the shadows where they would be alone and out of sight, though there was only Dame Frevisse to know.

  “How did you come by them?” she demanded.

  “Do you really think I’d tell you that?”

  “I can guess.” Jane’s mind was working with swift, bitter clarity. “Some fool of a maidservant stole them for you.”

  “Why a maidservant?,” Robyn asked as if truly interested in the answer. “Why not one of Lady Alice’s ladies?”

  “Because all of Lady Alice’s ladies can read. Whoever took those for you would have read them before giving them to you if she could and you wouldn’t want that.”

  “Why would I care if she read them or not?” he mocked.

  “Because the more who know a secret, the less valuable it is. You’d want her none the wiser what she’d done.”

  “And paid her in kisses afterwards because she knew no better,” Robyn said. He leaned forward to say softly near Jane’s ear, “Did you learn much about kissing in that nunnery of yours?”‘

  Jane fought not to draw back from him, to keep her anger hidden. “Whether I did or not, it’s surely nothing I want to learn from you.”

  Robyn drew back with a deep sigh. “You break my heart.” He refolded the paper with exaggerated care, wrapped the ribbon around it, and thrust them both into his belt pouch, smiled, and said, “Aren’t you going to ask me who I wooed into doing it?”

  Jane, resisting the urge to snatch paper and ribbon away from him, forced herself to smile in return. “You wouldn’t tell me and it hardly matters.” But that did not mean Jane would not find her out, the fool. Holding her voice even, she said, “More to the point is how you know about them at all.”

  Robyn shrugged. “I guessed. Could anyone as lovely as Lady Alice never have had love letters written to her in all these years? Surely not. And would she part with them? Knowing women, I thought not. It was only a matter of finding someone to find them out. But, oh, that they should be this good.”

  “There are no names given,” Jane said.

  “But I know who they’re from and who they’re to as well as you do and as well as anyone who reads them will.”

  Far more steadily than she felt, Jane asked, “What do you mean to do with them?”

  “Just what I’ve done so far. Make you talk to me.”

  Jane stared at him, then demanded, “Why?”

  Robyn laughed as if she delighted him and touched his forefinger to the end of her nose. She jerked back from him, and he laughed, admonishing, “My lovely, I’ve taken trouble over this only because I want you to talk to me. Is that so much? Her ladyship trusts you or you’d not have known her secret.” He laid the tip of his finger to the tip of her nose again, with warning in his eyes for her not to refuse him this time, as he said, still gently, “You want to protect her secret, don’t you? Lest this gathering of papers become nobody’s secret and everybody’s scandal? And all you need do is talk to me, fair damsel.”

  His hand trailed sideways then, toward her marred cheek. Unable to endure even the thought of his touch, Jane flinched back a step, then from the side of her eye saw Dame Frevisse was rising to her feet and somehow forced a smile at Robyn despite her sickening rage as she said, softening a little as if maybe she were beginning to see it his way, “But not here, sir. This isn’t the place or time, is it?” and turned away before he could answer or touch her again, toward Dame Frevisse who would be rescue from him only for a time, but any time and a chance to think what could be done about him besides give way to what he wanted was better than none.

  Chapter 8

  Frevisse had slept the night skimming in sleep’s shallows, partly because of the bed’s feather mattress, thick pillow, linen sheets, her body too unused to comfort to sleep at ease, but mostly because her mind would not let loose of her talk with Alice, and when London’s bells began to ring to Prime she came full awake with the same thought she had poorly slept on: Alice and the others were playing games with people’s lives.

  The thought was unfair, she knew, because they saw no other way than this one and possibly there was no other, given the duke of Gloucester’s stubborness and the King’s youth. She couldn’t know, and so she would help Alice this while and go home to St. Frideswide’s as soon as might be, done with it. In the meanwhile a servant was shoving back the bed curtains, Alice was stretching awake on the bed’s other side, and it was time to begin the day.

  The ways of it were familiar to her from her years in Thomas Chaucer’s wealthy household, and as the sleepy-eyed, busily talking ladies entered to engulf Alice in their attentions, she drew aside to dress herself, her own readying for the day not taking near as long as Alice’s, leaving her time to pray much of Prime’s prayers before they went down to breakfast.

  The meal was done with little ceremony in the great hall, Suffolk joining his wife there, kissing her hand with warm affection and asking how she did. They were a pleasure to see together, assured and graceful, elegantly mannered, elegantly dressed, openly fond of one another, and at the meal’s end they went hand in hand to the chapel for Mass.

  A great many of their household folk went with them, and Frevisse, too, and at the Mass’ end said to Alice, “I’d stay to pray a while if I may.”

  “Of course,” Alice said, unsurprised. “I’ll be at accounts in the lady chamber. You can find me there when you want.”

  Frevisse made a curtsy to her and Suffolk, drew aside as their household folk followed them out, then turned back toward the altar and knelt with bowed head and gratitude for the quiet. Lady Jane and a man in the long surcoat of a household officer had stayed in prayer, too, and the priest was finishing tasks at the altar, but they were no disturbance to her, nor were the sounds from the street outside the chapel’s north windows where shopfronts were being opened with various slams and thuds and folk were calling early morning greetings to one another. Going well into her prayers, Frevisse ceased to notice them at all, until gradually a man and woman talking close at hand in low but… angry?… voices drew her, first, to awareness that she was kneeling alone now, and then to a certainty that whoever the man and woman were, they should take whatever their business elsewhere than behind the rood screen.

  With reminder it was no business of hers and if she was not praying, she should not linger, Frevisse made quick ending—“Et fidelium animae per misericordiam Dei requiescant in pace. Amen.”‘ And the souls o
f the faithful through the mercy of God rest in peace—and, determinedly not listening, stood up, crossed herself, and started to leave. She would have to pass the rood screen doorway to go out but that was no fault of hers, and her resolve to do it with head down to see nothing and ears as closed as might be only came to naught because the woman stepped backwards through the doorway into view, paused to say one thing more at her companion, and then, while Frevisse was still being surprised to see she was Lady Jane, turned and came her way with a show of pleasure, saying, “Dame Frevisse, well met! Are you going back to Lady Alice now? May we go together?”

  If she meant that as warning to the man to stay out of sight, they were not alone, he did not take it but came boldly out behind her, paused so that Frevisse had ample time to see he was young, very good to look on, a household squire in short doublet and well-fitted hosen, before he bowed to her so that she had to bend her head in answer to him, insuring Lady Jane knew she knew he was there. Then he turned and left with an open, confident walk far too assured for someone caught out as he and Lady Jane had been, in private talk apart from everyone. But except that she visibly stiffened, Lady Jane refused to admit he was there, and preferring the lady’s discretion to the man’s boldness, Frevisse kept up the pretence with her, saying, “I’d be pleased of your company, my lady, both for its own sake and because I’m likely to lose my way otherwise.”

  With cheerfulness she almost made believable, Lady Jane answered, “When I first came here, I found myself forever heading for the garden when I meant to go to the foreyard, or to the rearyard when I was trying for the church.”