8 The Maiden's Tale

by Frazer, Margaret

  “There’s a garden next the house, of course. It’s all vegetables and greens now, but there’s part of it used to be for flowers when my grandmother lived there and we can put it back that way, if you like. Or we can make one for flowers elsewhere, just as you want, if you’d rather.”

  Suddenly they were back to the reason they were talking of Bruesham at all. Jane saw it come into his face, along with her own clear remembrance that their marrying was for no more—and certainly for no less or there would be no marriage—than the properties her dowry would add to what the Chesmans already held in Suffolk; and she dropped her eyes away from William, murmuring some politeness about gardens that was unclear even to herself.

  “Yes. Well,” William said uncertainly back, lost, too, as to what they could say next. For a moment they stood, and then seemingly out of nowhere William said, “About Eyon.”

  Jane’s breath caught. There was nothing more to be said or thought about Eyon. Nothing that she wanted to say or think, and she said nothing, until William asked, “Has he been replaced?”

  They were neither of them looking at each other now but at the dancers in two large circles, hands linked, turning and singing with the music. No one would overhear what was said between them, and Jane dared ask, “How much do you know about… what he was doing?”

  “Only what I guessed. Messages. Are you still part of it?”

  Jane jerked to look at him. “No. I’m not.”

  “Good,” William answered and that should have been enough, the end of it. But Jane before she knew she was going to, blurted out, “There was something wrong about his dying, wasn’t there?” And William, turning his head to meet her gaze said, “There was something very wrong about it.”

  Chapter 11

  The morning’s sun was warmthless, as if scoured thin by the unabated wind, with yesterday’s snow lying in unmelting patches and streaks between the cobbles and along the edges of the yard below the lady chamber window where Frevisse stood watching the come-and-go of people below her in the yard, household folk about their daily business that this morning included a wherry she had watched veer in on the strong upriver wind to the landing beyond the riverward gateway. She had lost sight of it behind the buildings that ran along the riverward side of the yard, only the mast’s tip showing above a roof, rocking on the wind-chopped river, but barrels presumably unloaded from it were being rolled out of the gateway, spun to the side, and rolled away through a side doorway by men quite plainly expert at the work. Watching them at it was possibly the most interesting thing she had yet done today, and she sighed and thrust her hands a little further up her sleeves for warmth against the wind nagging its way in around the leaded window frame. This morning she was rather glad of the fur-lined gown.

  Alice had been called away to discuss some matter with Suffolk, saying, “It’s Parliament. We’re trying to be certain of who favors us and who we can to win to us and who not.

  It’s tedious, and I apologize for leaving you yet again.“

  She meant the apology but Frevisse doubted the “tedious.” Whatever matter she was going to consult on with her lord husband, Alice was looking forward to it, smiling as she went, but it left Frevisse to her ladies again. After St. Frideswide’s where everyone and everything were so known that on any probable occasion she could usually say rightly what would be said and done by everyone, Coldharbour should at least have diverted her with unfamiliarity. But nothing was really unfamiliar, assuredly not the women’s talk, and she had come to stand here at the window away from it. Across the room, Millicent was still commenting on the weather with “…so cold. It can’t be like this all winter. Cold and snow and all.”

  “If there’s ice in November will hold a duck, February will be all rain and muck,” Lady Sibill quoted the well-used proverb.

  “But then there’ll be Lent,” someone bemoaned. “Fasting and freezing both. Don’t you wish…”

  Bells’ broken pealing, tattered and tossed by the wind, turned Frevisse’s mind from the talk behind her. Was the day no more along than Sext? She preferred being busy to so idle as she was here, but at least she still had prayer and she bent her head to what she could say of the office alone and standing here. Pater noster, qui est in caelis… Our father, who is in heaven… Dominus regit me, et nihil mihi deerit. The lord rules me, and nothing will be missing to me. In loco pascuae ibi me collocavit. In a place of pasture then he has placed me. And I shall grow fat with feeding and leisure, Frevisse thought, then firmly pulled her mind back to finishing the office and at its end stood waiting while the intensity of prayer drained out of her, leaving her quiet of soul and mind. Set against what others lived or had lived with, her discomfort here in Coldharbour was nothing, a thing that would end finally, with no harm done to her soul, only to her patience, and her patience was a thing she had to deal with rather more often than she liked, wherever she was.

  She raised her head to look out the window again at the pale, uninteresting sky while behind her in the unabated conversation Lady Sibill was saying, “… to Wingfield, think on that, and we’d better hope the roads are frozen or…”

  Frevisse went to the other window where Lady Jane, without the rest of the women’s need to cluster in constant company and talk, sat alone at her sewing, the marred side of her face turned as always, from what Frevisse had seen, away from the room. She looked up as Frevisse joined her and smiled her slight, onesided smile in polite welcome. Frevisse bent her head in equally polite, mild greeting, sat down opposite her, and said by way of conversation, “At least today there’s better light for sewing by than there was yesterday, my lady.”

  “And hopefully I’ll be done with this before it’s gone.”

  “You’re nearly finished then?”

  “With putting it together. Later I’ll embroider the cuffs and collar. You’re not enjoying being idle, are you?”

  Frevisse, hands folded in her lap in what she meant to be exemplary quiet, said, “Does it show so plainly as that?”

  Lady Jane laughed softly. “Aside from idleness, how do you like it here? Aren’t we a change from your nunnery?”

  “A change,” Frevisse granted, “but the talk is no different from what it was in my aunt’s household twenty years ago.”

  “And no different from what it will be twenty years hence, probably,” Lady Jane returned, not unkindly. “Is it any different in your nunnery? It wasn’t where I was.”

  “Not one whit different,” Frevisse granted unhesitatingly. “But there I’ve other things to do than listen to it.”

  Lady Jane regarded her for a moment before saying, “Your praying matters very much to you, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Frevisse said and was willing to leave the matter there, but “Why?” asked Lady Jane. And though Frevisse’s first urge was to make some meaningless reply, instead she said the truth. “Because beyond all things I want to clear my soul from the world’s uses and turn it only to God’s.”

  She did not say the rest: her deep longing to go beyond the world’s illusions and passing pleasures into pure reality, beyond all pretences into knowing things as they truly were. That was something she had told only two people in her life and they were dead now and she had no urge to share herself that deeply again.

  Lady Jane accepted in silence as much as she’d given, then in a while asked, “Would you care to walk in the garden?”

  Frevisse rose to her feet. “Yes.” At St. Frideswide’s the priory’s rooms were set around an open cloister and there was no going to church or meals or daily tasks or bed without being out of doors time and again. Since coming to Coldharbour she had only been inside and found sudden pleasure at the thought of being out for even a little while.

  “You’ll find it small,” Lady Jane warned while folding her sewing to put aside, “but the walls will keep off the wind.”

  Having fetched their cloaks and gone down the stairs to the small room at their foot, they went not into the great hall but rightward to a sh
ut door, unlike the one to the hall that seemed to be always open. “We go through the solar to reach the garden,” Lady Jane said in explanation. Then in surprise and greeting as she opened the door, “Master Bruneau!”

  The solar was far smaller than the lady chamber but more richly furnished with, among other things a long, cushioned settle in front of the fireplace, a carpeted floor and tapestried walls paneled in golden oak instead of merely plastered, with a long window looking out into the garden to fill the room with light. Nothing lacked for the comfort and ease of Coldharbour’s lord and lady, which made reasonable Lady Jane’s surprise at finding Master Bruneau there with some several score of parchment rolls spread across the carpeted floor and two clerks crouched on their heels, holding more rolls in their hands and others tucked in the crooks of their arms, the faces of all three and Master Bruneau’s voice tense with concentration as he pointed and said, “There, to your left, Ralph. That one, yes,” and as one of the clerks picked up a scroll from among the others, “Give it to Francis, it goes with his.”

  Ralph handed it over to Francis who took it with no obvious gratitude to add to the ones he already held while Master Bruneau looked up at Lady Jane and Frevisse and said with a tired smile and a bow, “My ladies, pardon.”

  “What’s happened?” Lady Jane asked in mingled curiosity and mild alarm. “What are all these?”

  “The records of my lord’s properties in France for these ten years past.”

  “But…” Lady Jane gestured at the disordered sprawl.

  Master Bruneau nodded agreement that this was neither the usual place nor way for dealing with records. “I purposed to go over them, to compare how they all did, one year against the next. I had them laid out on the shelves of an aumbry but Geffry stumbled over something, the club-footed idiot, the misbred…” Francis and Ralph looked up to hear what Master Bruneau had to say this time about Geffry but he stopped, drew breath, and said more temporately, “He grabbed the open aumbry door to save himself and pulled it over and these fell everywhere. So.” He spread his hands out over the chaos spread in front of him. “Lady Alice gave me leave to use here to lay them all out to sort them into order again.” His eyes were roving over his scattered work and he pointed at another scroll, “There. Francis.”

  “We’ll leave you to it and wish you Godspeed,” Lady Jane said with sympathy and led Frevisse on across the room to a door opposite where they had entered. There was a third door, at the room’s far end, that must lead into some other chamber or to a stairway, but theirs was beside the window and into the garden, and they opened, went through, and closed it quickly, lest a treacherous wind gust add to Master Bruneau’s troubles.

  “He’s a good man, is Master Bruneau,” Lady Jane said while making sure of the latch. “A kind man. I like him. Here’s our garden. I told you it was small.”

  It was. The merest scrap of a garden tucked tightly in between the blank backs of buildings and a short stretch of wall, with a few short gravel paths between a few empty flower beds, at the far end a single winter-barren tree tied out against a building, and a brief, winter-naked arbor that in summer with its latticing and leafed vines would have hid the narrow, closed, undoubtedly locked door that Frevisse judged led through the wall there into Coldharbour’s rear courtyard. She drew a deep, satisfied breath of cuttingly cold air not even slightly thickened with smoke and too many people too closely kept together, all London’s possible smells of streets and coal smoke and river swept away by the wind today. But though the garden walls gave protection, as Lady Jane had promised, there was no protection from the cold and they both close-wrapped their cloaks around themselves and up toward their ears as they walked the first gravelled path. There was nowhere far to go and little to see but blank housewalls and dead garden, and they reached, almost as soon as they began to walk, the path’s end and turned aside into another. It did not matter; Frevisse was simply glad to be out-of-doors.

  Beside her Lady Jane, following her own thoughts, said, “He’s lonely, I think, since his wife died. Master Bruneau.” She paused to poke at a root thrust out of the garden bed. “She died in the spring, not long after I’d come, and it’s only lately I’ve ever seen Master Bruneau smile.”

  “Was she French?” Frevisse asked.

  “From Rouen, like Master Bruneau. They came to England with my uncle Suffolk years ago, when he shifted his interest from serving in France to seeing how things would go for him here.”

  “What do you think of your…” Frevisse started to ask but thought better of it.

  “My uncle?” Lady Jane seemed unbothered by the question. “There’s not much to think. We’ve had little to do with one another, not even enough to come to like or dislike. To me he was my way out of the nunnery. To him I’m a trouble that my marriage will end.”

  They had reached the arbor end of the garden, were turning back, with men’s voices and a barrel being rolled over cobbles confirming Frevisse’s guess that the rearyard lay beyond the wall there, when Alice, uncloaked, came out from the solar, saw them, beckoned them, and started toward them, wrapping her arms around herself as she came. “Please God, no trouble,” Lady Jane murmured, matching Frevisse’s first thought at seeing Alice there unaccompanied, and they both went toward her, hurrying, but saw, meeting her midway along the path, that nothing was very wrong.

  “There’s word come for you, Frevisse,” she said. “You’re asked to visit St. Helen’s Bishopgate, today if you could.”

  With sinking heart, Frevisse said, “Of course I can,” her hope ended that she need never, after all, be part of Alice’s secrets.

  “I’ve ordered an escort to meet you in the rearyard. They may already be there. It took time to find where you’d gone.” Lady Jane began to offer apology for that but Alice said, un-worried, “It’s no matter. I found you and you can easily go out this way. Jane, I want you to go with her. She has to be attended and you’re here and ready.”

  Lady Jane’s face went abruptly blank. “My head,” she said.

  Alice had turned them back toward the arbor door but stopped, saying, “Oh, yes. You’re uncovered.” It was one thing for an unmarried woman to go bareheaded at home, another thing for her to go out that way. “Go fetch something,” Alice said and Lady Jane turned quickly back for the solar door, leaving Alice to lead Frevisse on the other way, to take a key out of a crevice between stones of the wall beside the door with, “I’ll let you out this way and lock the door behind you. Jane will come out through the hall.” But as she fitted key to lock, she stopped, faced Frevisse, and said with smothered urgency, “Remember, for the world and his brother to know, you’re simply going to St. Helen’s to talk with your new prioress over something. There’s no need to make it look like anything more. But you understand that.”

  Frevisse did. It was Alice’s intensity about it that puzzled her. Was Alice’s ambition grown so great the messages mattered that much to her? But despite all their fondness for each other, they were not close enough for Frevisse to ask her anything like that and so said only, “You’d best go in before you take a chill and have to be put to bed with hot mustard plasters.”

  Those had been a favorite remedy of Frevisse’s Aunt Matilda and a horror of Alice’s childhood, and she cried out with mock disgust, “Frevisse! How vile of you to remember that!”

  “Of course if I take a chill,” Frevisse offered, “you can always order one for me.”

  “And I will!” Alice promised, laughing, and turned the key.

  Chapter 12

  It being not yet None and the day’s trade still at its height, the streets were far more crowded than when Frevisse had come from St. Helen’s, with not only London’s folk but all those come early into the city to do their business, whether selling or buying. The shop fronts were open, their shutters swung down to make their counters and their goods displayed to the crowd and jostle of people going by, much hurried against the wind’s busy tangling of their skirts, cloaks, veils, but making way for Fre
visse’s escort of six mounted squires good-humoredly enough, or her escort making way for them, whichever was best from one time to the next. As they rode out of Thames Street Frevisse leaned toward Lady Jane riding beside her and asked, voice raised to be heard, “Have you seen much of London?”

  “Only when we first rode in. Not since.” She was wearing a wimple and simple veil now, the wimple covering much of the blemished side of her face and her cloak’s hood pulled well up and forward hiding more of it though she had to ride one-handed to hold the hood in place against the wind.

  Frevisse began to name and tell her about places they passed, and Lady Jane responded with quick interest and questions until they rode into St. Helen’s yard, where squires and horses went one way, Frevisse and Lady Jane to the cloister door, to be told by Sister Clemens, who remembered Frevisse, that the nuns were at None and would be going to dinner afterwards but they were expected—or Frevisse was, at least— and they were welcome to wait in the parlor and their own dinner would be brought for them if they liked. “And hot, spiced wine, too,” Sister Clemens said happily. “We’re all having it at dinner today against this cold. Isn’t the wind fierce just now?”

  Lady Jane had put back her hood once she was inside. The red, raised mark along her face showed the more boldly against the white edge of her wimple, and Sister Clemens’ eyes kept straying to it, so that with a sudden thought Frevisse asked, “Might Lady Adela join us? Would it be allowed her to dine with us, do you think?” A belated consideration; she had not thought of the child since leaving her here, but Sister Clemens’ straying attention diverted fully back to her.