8 The Maiden's Tale

by Frazer, Margaret

  Apparently no one did. They crossed the yard into the shadow of the wall-thick gateway to the river, past guards who did not bother with them, and out onto the wide stone landing at the top of stairs down to the river where two barges were tied up, both with their oarsmen waiting in place. The downriver barge was surely the duke of Gloucester’s, painted scarlet to the waterline and with his heraldic colors of scarlet and azure on the canvas curved over the tall half-hoops of the tilt toward the boat’s stern. Equally sure, the upriver barge was Suffolk’s, painted prow to stern in azure and gold, its tilt’s canvas cover painted to match and the curtains tied back to show cushions and at least one furred lap robe piled inside.

  The tide was lapping at the second step down from the landing and still on the flow, Frevisse saw in the moment before the steersman in Suffolk’s blue livery and badge came forward to greet them with the warning they would lose the tide if they delayed longer and, asking no questions as to why there were four where he had been told to expect one, hurried them toward the barge as the oarsmen began to set their oars. Orleans stepped in first, onto the flat walkway up the barge’s center, then turned to take the boys one after the other as the steersman swung them over to him before moving away toward his place at the stern, leaving Orleans to hold out his hand to Frevisse. She hesitated, but he said, “You have to come. If you were noticed leaving with the boys but then coming back without them, someone might wonder. We do not want wondering.”

  No, they did not, and slight though the risk seemed, it was still a risk and so, deeply not wanting to, she gave him her hand, and managing her skirts with the other, stepped over into the barge, letting Orleans bring her balanced and well-footed to the walkway and keep hold of her to make certain she was steady on the slight give and roll of the deck for the few steps back to the tilt where Edmund and Jasper had already ducked under the canvas and were shoving around among the cushions. As she ducked in after them, the ropes were already being cast off at the steersman’s orders and the barge pushed away from the landing, a darkness of water widening along its length. Edging further in under the tilt to make room for Orleans, Frevisse sank down on a feather-stuffed cushion embroidered with the Suffolk leopard heads, gathered her skirts and wits to her, and considered how far the day was gone out of the shape she had expected for it. That pardon necessary from Bishop Beaufort would have to be extensive to cover all of this.

  Forward of the tilt the rowers bent and straightened in easy rhythm with each other, taking the barge well away from the shore into the current and heaviest throng of boats. Beyond them the Thames stretched broad away in a shimmer of dark and crystal tipped and streaked with sunset orange under the westering sun, and since there was no help for being here, Frevisse would have been content to sit and enjoy it, but the boys were crawling over the cushions, lifting the lower edges of the tilt’s canvas to see out, pushing at each other, until Orleans said, “By your leave, my lady,” and loosed the tilt’s covering on both sides and with cords attached for the purpose tied it part way up to loops there for it, saying to the boys, “Now you can see. So sit.” And to Frevisse, “Had you not better put that on?”‘

  She had forgotten she carried his cloak and gratefully wrapped it around her against the cold wind following them up the river. The sun was setting rapidly, taking even illusion of warmth with it; they would finish their journey in the dark, she judged, and looked back while there was still light, trying to tell if they were followed; but what boats she could see were going one way or other across the river, not west with them, and if someone was hiding pursuit by staying close inshore, he would probably be left behind before Blackfriars.

  The boys, untroubled by such considerations, questioned and pointed at everything around them, and Frevisse held quiet while Orleans, seemingly as untroubled as they were, gave ready answers, telling them not only every sort of boat they saw but the subtle differences between the sorts and named to them the various landings as they passed—Hay Wharf, the Steelyard, Three Cranes Stairs, Salt Wharf, Paul’s Wharf— and most of the grander buildings, besides St. Paul’s—“Well, that’s one we know,” Edmund said, sounding offended at being told the obvious—and pointed out, too, the black-mouthed gap between buildings where the Fleet River poured into the Thames, and the Temple Inn gardens. “Where the men of law walk and talk,” Orleans said.

  Then they were well into the Thames’ wide southward curve toward Westminster, the southern shore opening out to fields and orchards, the northern shore lined with the landings and river walls and gardens of great lords’ houses, their turrets and steep-pitched roofs of red and blue tiles and dark slates showing beyond the bare treetops, with here and there lighted windows and torches early-burning beside water stairs, bright in the gathering dusk. The boys’ questions fell off as they tired, though they roused to stare when Orleans pointed ahead to Westminster’s pale, piled mass of abbey church reared high over everything else in sight, winged by its massive buttresses, its highest windows still orange with the sun’s last reflected light, and Westminster Palace spread along the Thames below it.

  “And there’s the archbishop of Canterbury’s Lambeth Palace,” Frevisse said, pointing to the sudden gathering of buildings on the other bank.

  But the boys were rapidly losing interest now, and Jasper asked, “How far are we going? I’m cold and I think I’m hungry.”

  “I know I’m hungry,” Edmund declared.

  “Your brother’s palace at Kennington,” Orleans answered. “None so far now.”

  “You’ve come this way before, my lord, to know so much of what there is to see and how it goes.” Frevisse half made it a question, to which Orleans agreed easily, “When I was first brought to England, I was much kept in the Tower and often brought up the Thames to Westminster for various reasons. As with the boys, asking questions helped pass the time.”

  Jasper yawned and slid down from leaning on a gunwale to burrow and curl into the cushions. Edmund followed, using him for a pillow and snuggling near for warmth. At this hour in the nunnery they should have been having their supper, with bedtime near; it was more than reasonable they were hungry and tired but their patience with it was unexpected. Quietly across them, Frevisse asked one of the other things she wanted to know. “Why did Suffolk send you in his own barge rather than something less likely to be known?”

  “He said,” Orleans answered dryly, “that I am the duke of Orleans and should not go to the king as if I were nobody.”

  “Is he really that…” Frevisse started but thought better of the question.

  Orleans finished it for her. “Foolhardy? Yes. His grace is the best of company, but he truly thinks that if he wants a thing to be a certain way, the thing will be that way. If he wants no one to notice that his barge is going to the king, then no one will.”

  “The thought he could be wrong doesn’t occur to him?”

  “Never that I have seen.”

  “That’s dangerous.”

  “Yes,” Orleans agreed. He reached out absently to stroke Edmund’s sleeping head. “To those around him and to Suffolk, too, I fear.”

  The last daylight was gone into the sunset’s afterglow, the first stars pricking out and a few lights along the shore, and the steersman called to one of the forward oarsmen to light the prow lantern, then leaned down to say to Orleans, “Those are Kennington’s lights ahead.” Torches burning at either end of a landing thrust out from the gape of a gateway in a long wall running along the river, the red reflections of their flames scattered outward in broken pieces across the water’s broken darkness.

  “She’s turned,” the steersman said, meaning the tide, and despite the darkness and uncertain light, sure of himself and his men, brought the large in a little above the landing rather than directly to it, ordering oars up and letting the drift of the river bring them down to the landing stairs while Orleans and Frevisse woke the boys, who stirred and sat up and accepted where they were without fuss.

  Chapter 23


  Frevisse did not know the hour except that it was late and she was still sitting alone on a bench inside the guardroom of the gatehouse beside the landing, with a cup of ale and a bowl of rewarmed stew and near a brazier that gave out a welcome glow of heat and light. Edmund and Jasper had been there with her for a time, after the knight in charge of the gate guard had refused anyone to go on to the palace itself except Orleans and the escort provided for him. Orleans had gone, promising Edmund and Jasper they would be summoned, leaving Frevisse to pray he was right, not knowing what she would say to the boys if they were left there, unwanted; but the order had come, and Edmund and Jasper had gone, and since then she had been waiting; had tried saying Vespers and Compline to herself with no great success and settled for being satisfied that the room was warm, she had been fed, and the Suffolk barge was still tied up to the landing, meaning that sooner or later there would be a return to Coldharbour.

  The gate guards, who knew no more what to make of her being there than she did, left her alone, and she even drowsed, until the weight of her head falling forward twitched her awake; then her mind turned to thinking, and because she did not want to think of Orleans and Alice, she took up the problem Lady Jane had given her with Eyon Chesman’s death and—were they linked?—the problem of the duke of Gloucester’s coming to Coldharbour today. She wondered briefly what had happened after they left, but more important was why Gloucester had come at all. If Orleans had been betrayed to him by way of someone in the household, that would limit who was the traitor because, in theory, very few knew Orleans was there. The question then was: who among those few had done it? William Chesman? He was involved in both the matter of this Eyon’s death and, from the very first, Orleans. He had surely been in good position to have poisoned Eyon and to betray Orleans. But that, for all she knew, could be equally true of Suffolk’s squire Fulk. And of Master Bruneau, too. There would need be questions about all of them. But what if it was William and he was found out? What would that mean to Lady Jane?

  At least when Orleans was returned, as he must be soon, to whoever had the keeping of him, the urgency of it all would ease, except for the matter of the murderer. If there was a murderer. Frevisse had heard nothing yet that made that certain, and even Gloucester’s coming to Coldharbour might be happenstance, nothing to do with anyone in Suffolk’s household. Or someone of Bishop Beaufort’s household might have given Orleans away.

  She was going nowhere useful with any of her thoughts, she realized, and was relieved to be distracted by a stir of movement in the yard that raised the guards’ heads from their card game to listen as the guard on turn outside called something unurgently. Someone unurgently answered him, and one of the guards across the room said, “They’re back,” to no one in particular, but Frevisse rose, putting on Orleans’ cloak again as she went to the outer door where the winter night was waiting for her, and she cringed a little at the cut of the air as she stepped out into the torchlight under the gateway arch just as Orleans was arriving with his two-guard escort. But without the boys.

  Even in the warm light of the torches, he looked tired, as if too much living had happened to him while he was gone, but at her question, “Edmund? Jasper?”‘ the touch of a smile eased his face’s weariness-drawn lines.

  “His grace their brother took such pleasure in their company, he has chosen to keep them with him. He purposes to have them in his household from now on.” Where they should be, because of their mother’s royal blood, rather than shoved out of sight and left to be forgotten because of their father.

  And that, Frevisse saw, was what Orleans had hoped for in bringing them; but she only said, because neither that nor the matter that had actually brought Orleans here could be freely spoken of in front of the guards, “And now?”

  “Now we go back to Coldharbour.”

  It was going to be a cold, dark journey. If moonrise had happened, there was no sign of it; the night had clouded over and the wind risen, shoving the torch flames sideways, and beyond their reach there was only unremitting darkness. But the barge’s crew had been summoned, were gathering to their places hurriedly, nor did she and Orleans waste time in taking theirs under the tilt, where someone had had the forethought to let down the curtains all around, tying tightly all but the one by which to enter, and the cushions had been piled to the sides, making room in the middle for a wide, short-legged, metal stand holding a small pottery brazier of burning charcoal. Whether it would give warmth enough was problematical; the wind drew and shoved at the canvas cover around them and the night-deepened cold was already fingering in for Frevisse’s spine as she settled among the cushions and pulled one of the furred robes around her. Outside, the steersman was giving orders for casting off as Orleans tied the door-curtain closed, shutting them into shadows and the brazier’s small red fireglow through the trefoil holes in its lid; and the barge was moving as he pulled the other furred robe around himself, saying, “They’ll waste no time having us back.”

  They held their hands out to the brazier, flinging black moth-shadows around and over them, so that Frevisse could not read Orleans’ face well as she asked, now there was chance, watching him across the brazier’s glow, “How went it for you? Will there be peace?”

  “By spring, if all goes well.”

  He said it so evenly that for a moment Frevisse was not sure she had heard him rightly.

  “By spring,” she repeated. “You’ll go free by spring?”

  “Yes.”

  “This time it’s sure? Despite the duke of Gloucester?”

  “Despite of Gloucester.” For the first time a fierce triumph showed behind Orleans’ voice. “His grace the king wants peace, for the sake of his soul, he said, and if France’s price for peace is my freedom, then he’s willing I should go free.”

  “Will he be able to abide by that?”

  “With Bishop Beaufort and all the lords and commons he is gathering in support of it, and believing his soul’s health depends on making peace, yes, King Henry will abide by that. This time he’ll let it happen.”

  Frevisse tucked her warmed hands back under the furred robe, sank her chin down and huddled her shoulders up, to let as little of the cold come at her as might be, while facing squarely a thought she did not want to have: How wise, how safe was it to let Orleans go free and back to France? The graciousness and courtesy he always showed were real enough, but so was a silken-covered sheath over a steel blade, with the blade none the less deadly for the silk that hid it. Orleans had spent more than twenty years in England, much of it in the company of great lords. How much had he come to know, to understand about them, about their rivalries, their ambitions, even how they thought? How much knowledge of England and her lords’ ways would he take back to France? And to what uses would he put his knowledge? Because he was not someone who idly let life happen to him. Were the lords right, including Bishop Beaufort, who thought only good would be gained by returning him to France? Or was the duke of Gloucester, who thought Orleans free and in France too dangerous a thing to risk?

  With that in her mind and Orleans silent with his own thoughts, they huddled to the smallness of warmth and light between them, Frevisse aware of the darkness and river all around and listening to the creaking of the oars and the water’s whisper along the barge’s sides without knowing how far they had come or how far they had to go. Not that she needed to know, she supposed. However far or little there was to go, the time it took would have to be lived through no matter what. Like life.

  Unexpectedly Orleans made a small sound like laughter that had taken him by surprise and said, “In my sleep of nights, I dream of France, of places and people there I have not seen in twenty and more years. But do you know, I think when I am there again, I will dream of places and of people in England.”

  It was probably tiredness betrayed him into giving that much of himself away. It was assuredly tiredness that betrayed Frevisse into saying back, “Will you dream of Alice, too?”

  To which Or
leans did not answer except to look at her from vastly farther away than the few feet between them, his face empty of everything but a shadowed shape of grief.

  Then behind them the steersman called out something and forward one of the rowers answered him and a moment later the rhythm of the rowing broke off. The barge lost way, swayed with what felt like the shifting of one of the rowers to his feet, and Orleans leaned to push the forward curtain slightly aside, looked out, let it fall, and leaned the other way to pull aside the rear curtain and demand of the steersman, “Why is he signaling with the prow lantern? What is that for?”

  “My lord of Suffolk’s orders, my lord,” the steersman said, looking ahead, over the tilt, as he spoke. He gave two small nods and then a large one, and the rowing began again. “For signal that we’re coming.”

  “We are too far from Coldharbour for that,” Orleans said curtly, “and your man was signaling the Southwark shore.”

  “Yes, my lord,” the steersman agreed.

  “Then what was it for?” Orleans insisted.

  “You weren’t told, my lord?” The man answered his own question, “No, or you’d not have asked. It’s signal for word to be passed on to Winchester House that we’re coming so a wherry can put out from there for Coldharbour with word his grace the bishop needs to come back. The thought is that what with the wherry’s men and Coldharbour folk and the bishop’s men and the bishop himself all milling about at the rivergate and landing just as we come in, you’ll maybe go unnoticed in the bustle. That’s the thought on it anyway.”

  “How did you come by these orders? Are they the earl’s?”

  “His grace’s by way of some yeoman, yes, though I think, from something as was said, the plan was Bishop Beaufort’s, my lord.”

  Orleans nodded he was satisfied and let fall the curtain but looked less than satisfied as he turned back to the brazier’s broken light. “So how many men know now that I have been at Coldharbour and gone to the king?” he wondered aloud.