The Widow's Tale (Sister Frevisse Medieval Mysteries Book 14) (12 page)

Helyngton set Jane down with a nod at Colies to free Mary, who instantly dodged away from him to grab Jane by the hand and run toward Cristiana, Sir Gerveys and Mistress

Say had let her go by then and Frevisse was stepped back from her, standing with hands tucked into her opposite sleeves to watch as Cristiana caught her daughters to her and Alice smiled on Helyngton and Master Colies as they mounted their horses.

Alice went on smiling while they and everyone with them rode out of the yard. That cleared way for the rest of her own escort to ride in, and as they did, she said to Mistress Say, “Don’t fear. I’m not going to put all of us on you, Beth. There’s baggage and wagons a while behind us on the road with everything needful if you’ll but tell Sir Robert here where my pavilion, tents, and all can be set up.”

With a look to her husband to be sure of his agreement, Mistress Say suggested the pasture along the stream below the house, and Master Say called one of his own men to show Sir Robert the way around through a field gate. “Go with them,” Alice said easily to all her people. “Master Say will see me safely there when the time comes.”

The Says then escorted Alice inside and through the great hall toward the parlor, with Sir Gerveys and Cristiana still holding her daughters’ hands and Domina Elisabeth and Frevisse following and the household servants bowing as they past. Frevisse glimpsed Pers and Ivetta, his arm firmly around her. Wherever they had been, she must have only belatedly heard what had nearly happened and was still drying tears from her cheeks.

But Alice was saying with bright-voiced cheer for everyone to hear, “I’m merely a messenger, you see. King Henry is making a short pilgrimage to Ely and to see how his college at Cambridge does. If his plans hold, he does mean to come this way, yes.”

Murmurs and soft exclaims went running among the servants.

Nearing the parlor door, Alice went on, “What we were wondering, my lord of Suffolk and I, was whether you and Beth could be imposed upon to provide a few hours of hawking along the Lea here. The river meadows being particularly fine for that, we thought it would well divert his grace and the court. And I took advantage of that thought to come ahead, for the chance to visit with Beth.” She linked an arm through Mistress Say’s. “I’ve missed my lady-in-waiting this while, you know.”

“We’ll be pleased beyond measure to do all we can,” Master Say assured her, bowing her and then his wife into the parlor, Sir Gerveys joining him to bow Cristiana, Domina Elisabeth, and Frevisse after them.

But when Master Say had shut the door between them all and the hall Alice dropped Mistress Say’s arm, swung around, and demanded at him with no smile, “John, what is all this about? Who was that obnoxious man and those women with him?” She shifted her look and demand to Sir Gerveys. “And what are you doing here, my lord of York’s man?” Without waiting for his answer either, she looked around for Frevisse and said sharply, “Come to that, how do you come to be here?” She waved an abrupt hand at them all. “Never mind. We’ll come to that later.” She faced Cristiana and said much more gently, beckoning toward the settle, “You should sit down, I think.”

Cristiana was indeed gray-faced, and Mistress Say and Sir Gerveys both went to her, Mistress Say seeing her to the settle while Sir Gerveys swept his nieces away and toward the parlor door, saying, “It’s time you went to Ivetta. Your faces need washing.”

Ivetta was hovering just outside the parlor door, Pers still with her, Sir Gerveys handed the girls over to them both, shut the door again, and returned to Cristiana as Alice refused Master Say’s offer of a chair with, “I’ve been sitting over-much today, thank you.”

That meant the rest of them must needs stand, too, since she had only given Cristiana leave to sit; and again she demanded of Master Say, “In the yard—what was that about?” In far fewer words than Frevisse would have though possible, Master Say told her, including why Sir Gerveys was there and the nuns’ part in it. His look at Frevisse had questions of his own he did not ask. When he finished, Alice sat down beside Cristiana, laid a hand over hers, and said, “There’s been a misunderstanding on my lord husband’s part and a great wrong done you. I’ll do what I may to right things.” Cristiana lifted Alice’s hand and kissed it.

“Thank you, my lady,” Sir Gerveys said. “You’ll have our prayers.”

Alice regarded him gravely. “At least your presence is well-explained, sir. I commend you for your care for your sister and her daughters.” She looked to Domina Elisabeth. “You had a duty unfairly put upon you but you’ve borne it well. Unhappily your Abbot Gilberd must have left Eltham before Master Say’s messenger came. The sorting out of things will take a little longer but it will come.” She shifted her gaze to Frevisse and gave way to a smile. “As for you, I’m right well pleased to see you where I would never have thought to.” Frevisse smiled back. “I, too, my lady.”

“We’re cousins, you see,” Alice said to everyone. “Our meetings are rare and we treasure them.”

And this one especially, Frevisse thought, because two years ago Suffolk had forbidden them ever to meet again; but no one here, save themselves, knew that and Frevisse doubted Alice was any more inclined to reveal it than she was. And lightly Alice went on, “It was because she very pointedly sided with Mistress Helyngton in the yard that I knew which side I should take in whatever was the trouble.” With everyone looking at her, Frevisse took refuge in a slight, acknowledging bend of her head and lowered eyes. Only when Master Say said, “You never told us you were my lady of Suffolk’s cousin. Why?” did she look to him and answer very mildly, “There seemed no reason to. What more could you do for us than you were?”

“We were courteously and comfortably kept,” Domina Elisabeth said. “You’ve been more than kind enough.”

A scratch at the door announced servants bringing wine and wafers. Talk fell away to simple courtesies while they were there: Alice asked after Mistress Say’s children; Mistress

Say asked after hers; Alice asked Domina Elisabeth if the harvest promised to be good in northern Oxfordshire; Domina Elisabeth assured her it did. All was graciousness and pleasantries and Frevisse trusted none of it. Alice had come here with an escort too large and well-armed for no more than a simple ride through peaceful countryside, and in a haste so great no word had been sent ahead of her. Frevisse wanted to know why. And when the Says drew Alice to the window to point out something, Frevisse from where she still stood near the door, head bent to hide how much she was watching rather than listening, saw a questioning look pass warily between Cristiana and her brother. Wary of what? Alice, surely. Questioning what? The same thing Frevisse was— her sudden arrival? Or something more?

Despite the seeming ease they were all showing, Frevisse doubted that—save maybe for Domina Elisabeth—there was any ease here at all.

W
hen the servants had withdrawn
, Alice shifted immediately to talk of the king’s purposed hawking. “He’ll stay the night at Waltham Abbey and be here by late mid-morning, very likely,” she said. “A few hours hawking, then a meal, and then on his way again to Buntingford for the night, I think.” Mistress Say gave a hunted look toward the great hall. Less than three days to ready everything for a royal visit and set forth a feast sufficient for king and queen and however many of their court were with them.

Alice saw her look and laughed. “I know. We’d best pray for fair weather so tables can be set up outside and everyone eat with no ceremony.”

“But if the weather isn’t fair?” Mistress Say asked, her despair only half-feigned.

“Then everyone will ride straight on and dine in Ware,” Alice answered lightly.

Leaving the Says with all the expense of a royal visit without the royal favor that could come from it, as well as far too much readied food on their hands.

“My lady,” Master Say said, “what have you brought on us?”

“You’re to blame, Master Say,” Alice protested, still lightly. “It’s your doing that your good service has gained the king’s heed and you live where the hawking is so fine.” Her smile went kind. “Besides, there are wagons behind me on the road with pavilions and tents enough there’ll be no need of your hall even if there’s rain, and a tun of wine for come the day is on the way, too.”

Mistress Say laughed with relief. “My lady, you’re kind as ever!”

“I’ve had royal parties come my way on short warning, too. But I’ve interrupted your day, Beth, all without Warning, and yours, too, John. You surely have things that want doing and Mistress Helyngton looks as if lying down would do her no harm.” Alice smiled on Cristiana but moved toward Frevisse. “Therefore, asking your pardon, I’ll take my cousin for a walk in the garden, that we may talk together a while and leave the rest of you to what you must.” She linked her arm through Frevisse’s, turning them both to the door so that it was over her shoulder she added, “Dame Frevisse will show me the way to your garden, Beth. My thanks . . .”

On the waft of her words, Alice had herself and Frevisse from the parlor, everyone else left behind them, but Alice kept up her lightsome word-flow through the hall among the scattering of servants and along the screens passage and out the door—talking of her ride to here, her new horse, the pleasure of seeing Frevisse again, how fortunate they were in this weather for the harvest. Even when they were down the stairs and going along the foreyard toward the garden, she went on murmuring pleasantries about her garden at Ewelme.

Frevisse said nothing all the while, waiting for whatever lay behind Alice’s pretense of ease; but in the garden Alice kept on, saying how pleasant it was, until they had crossed to its far side and were looking over the gate. Down the pasture slope a long, canvas-hooped wagon and carriage stood beside an ant-busyness of men setting up Alice’s round, blue-and-gold striped pavilion, but it was ahead, toward the green thickness of treetops beyond the kitchen’s roof, that Alice pointed, asking, “That’s an orchard there, isn’t it?” Without waiting for Frevisse’s reply, she opened the gate. “Let’s go there.”

A path went that way from the gate. They took it, Alice falling silent, the only sound between them the swish of their skirts against the grass and summer weeds along the path as it ran along the kitchen yard’s wall and then the high withy fence of the kitchen garden and the ends of several timbersided sheds. Beyond those, a cart-track ran behind the rear buildings of the manor, with the orchard on its other side, encircled by a shallow ditch and low turf wall. The way through was a simple L-stile, to be twisted through rather than gone over. Alice crowded her skirts through the narrowness. Frevisse, with less skirts, followed more easily and trailed after her cousin going farther yet, well into the warm shadows under the apple trees.

It was an old orchard, the trees thick-trunked, the branches gnarled, some of them propped with posts under their weight of ripening apples. There were signs of the neglect there must have been until the Says came but more signs of present well-tending now, and the grass kept short underfoot, pleasant to walk on, by a lone sheep now tethered and steadily eating at the orchard’s other end. In the middle, well away from where anyone might have overheard them, Alice stopped, turned to Frevisse, and asked sharply, “What do you know about this Cristiana Helyngton and her brother?”

“I know about them what you heard in the parlor just now,” Frevisse said, more mildly than she felt at Alice’s sharpness. “Nothing else. I’ve come into their life unwillingly and will more than willingly go out of it as soon as possible.” With a suddenly terse edge of her own, she asked, “Why?”

“What?” Alice said. She sounded both surprised and offended at the question.

“Why are you interested in them? Very particularly interested, if I read you aright.” \

Alice abruptly turned and moved away from her. “If you know nothing else about them . .

Staying where she was, Frevisse Said quietly, “Alice.” Alice stopped, still with her back turned. Even more quietly, Frevisse said, “We’ve started on our wrong feet. May we try again?”

Alice stood staring down at the grass in front of her, then turned around and asked ruefully, “Is it so very obvious I’m here because of them?”

Relieved that the offended great lady whom no one questioned had returned to being her cousin, Frevisse said, “Not until now, when you asked me so directly about them. Though I wondered that the king knows his courtiers’ lives so well that he knows who lives where and with good hawking.”

“No.” Alice made a small sound that failed to be a laugh. “His grace the king does not know such things. The hawking was my lord husband’s thought. Something to lighten the king’s humour, things being somewhat heavy around him these days of late. Do you have any knowing of what’s happening in the wide world beyond your convent walls?”

Frevisse was not used to scorn from Alice but there was scorn behind that question and she paused, balancing both her answer and her voice carefully to neutral before answering, “I’ve heard a little. In Parliament the Commons were not much agreeable to the king’s wishes. There’s trouble in France again …”

Sharply Alice said, “There’s open war in France for the first time in three years. The truce has fallen into pieces and we look likely to lose all of Normandy.”

Frevisse stared at her, momentarily failing to take in what she had said. The French war had started more than a hundred years ago, near to the time St. Frideswide’s priory had been founded. There had been reverses and long times of no fighting, but these last thirty and more years—ever since the king’s own father, Henry the Fifth, won his great battle at Agincourt—there had been mostly victories. Admittedly, Suffolk had given the counties of Maine and Anjou free-handedly back to the French in return for the king’s French marriage, but Normandy was the rich heart of England’s lands in France. To lose Normandy was beyond thought.

“And after that,” Alice went bitterly on, “we’ll likely lose England.”

“Lose England?” Frevisse echoed. “To the French? You mean an invasion?”

Alice gestured impatiently. “No.
We’ll
lose England. Suffolk will. There are always men waiting for a chance to grab a place for themselves around the king. These losses in Normandy could make their chance to shove him out and themselves into power.”

The way Suffolk had probably shoved his own way into power, Frevisse thought but did not say. Instead she asked, “What’s happening in Normandy that’s so worse than usual?”

“Some captain made an ill-judged raid on a Breton border town under truce this spring. The French demanded reparation. The duke of Somerset, as the king’s governor of Normandy, refused it. Now the French have begun to attack and take our border fortresses in return.”

“I’d heard something of that, but even in truce-time there are raids and suchlike. We’ve had reverses before this.”

“This is more than a raid. The dauphin . . . oh, let’s call him what he is. King Charles of France, seventh of that name. He’s set a greater, more competent army against us than the French have had in the field since no one remembers when. Not that it need be much competent. Our border fortresses are mostly simply surrendering to him. One after another.”

“Surrendering? Their captains are simply giving them up? That’s treason. What’s Somerset doing?”

“Nothing, it seems,” Alice said, bitterly.

Unable yet to grasp fully that it could be as bad as that, Frevisse said, “And while this goes on, the king goes hawking, visits his new college at Cambridge, and rides out on a small pilgrimage to Ely?” Whose St. Etheldreda had been a holy woman and nun. At present a pilgrimage to the warrior king St. Edmund at Bury would have made better sense.

“I’m not here because of what the king is doing,” Alice snapped. “I’m here because of this Cristiana Helyngton and her brother. They have something dangerous to Suffolk. I want to have it from them.”

“Something dangerous? To Suffolk?” Frevisse echoed disbelievingly.

“So I’m told. A document or paper of some kind. I’m here to get it from them.” She forestalled Frevisse’s coming question with a quickly lifted hand. “That’s all I know of it—that it’s Something that it could be used against my lord husband. I have to have it. It
must not
come into the hands of men who’d use it against him.”

“How would Cristiana or her brother come by something like that?”

“We don’t know. We wish we did. Probably by way of her husband. He served in the king’s household for years. But how they have it is less an immediate worry than this Sir Gerveys.”

“He’s here because of his sister’s need.”

“There’s surely more to it than that.” Alice moved away, impatient with her own need to be doing something. Frevisse went with her, finding it difficult to read her face well in the apple shadows and sunlight flickering over it as they walked. “The woman will probably be easy enough to persuade to give me the thing. I judge she’ll agree to anything to have her daughters’ wardships back, but her brother may be more trouble. That he hasn’t raced off to the duke of York with it already argues he may be less loyal to him than I was afraid of. If so, he can maybe be bought. I have only to find out his price. Or else decide how else to get the thing.”

Despite the warm day, her cousin’s words made Frevisse cold. The gap there had always been between her life and Alice’s widened with them, and far more careful to keep her voice even, she asked, “How do you know they have this document?”

“Someone here sent word to my lord husband.”

“Someone here? Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was it Master Say?” While seeming Sir Gerveys and Cristiana’s friend, had he served his own ends and betrayed them to Suffolk?

“I said I don’t know. No, not him. They were overheard talking about whatever this thing is by whoever is paid to hear things here and send us word.”

Slowly Frevisse said, “The Says think you’re their friend.”

44 T»

1 am.

“But you’ve set a spy in their household.”

Alice stopped, faced her, said more impatiently, “Besides that John Say has a high and favored place at court, he was Speaker in the last Parliament. That makes it altogether worth our while to know what he thinks and does away from the court. Things go on in any household, friends or not, that are better to know about than not.”

“And now you’re using him against his friends.”

“These ‘friends’ will come to no harm if they deal honestly with me.”

Honestly meaning if they gave Alice what she wanted without making over-much trouble about it, Frevisse thought; and heartsick and giving up discretion, she said, “Alice, besides knowing you must be spied on, too, how can you live a life that has you spying on people, even friends, and setting out to twist their lives to your own ends?”

“It’s necessary,” Alice said curtly. She turned away and began to pace again between the apple trees. “More necessary all the time. If Suffolk should lose his place near the king, everything will come unbalanced. There’s no knowing who would take over governing the realm then.”

“King Henry himself?” Frevisse ventured.

Alice grabbed a low-hanging apple branch as she passed, pulled it with her, then let it snap violently back behind her as she said bitterly, “King Henry doesn’t want to govern. It’s the great secret all of us keep. Except it’s no secret to those best placed to take advantage of it. An advantage Suffolk doesn’t dare lose.”

Behind Alice’s bitterness, Frevisse finally heard the fear. Not corroding ambition but plain, deep fear behind everything she was saying. And gently she said, “Alice, how has it been with you these two years since we last saw each other?” When Alice had only been beginning to see her husband’s willingness to treachery.

Alice stopped. For a wordless moment she stood very still, her head bowed, then whispered toward the grass, “Worse by the month I sometimes think.” She raised her head and looked at Frevisse, not only bitterness but raw pain showing now. “My lord husband tells me next to nothing anymore. This business. He set me on to it like I was his errand-runner. ‘Go there’. ‘Do that’. Hardly a ‘because’ to it and only when I demanded some reason for it all.”

“But you’re doing it anyway.”

“It’s necessary.”

“Or so Suffolk says.”

Alice returned suddenly to impatience. “Frevisse, your prayers for me are valuable and welcome. But there in your nunnery you know nothing about how it is to be in the world, nothing of what has to be done to hold a realm and a government together.”

Frevisse was used to people’s thought that living apart from the world was the same as being ignorant of it, but Alice at least should know far better than that and impatient in her turn at such willful simplicity she snapped back, “You mean I’m ignorant of why ‘being in the world’ requires you to spy and lie and mislead people you call your friends. Because if that’s what you mean, I’m not so ‘ignorant’ I don’t see you’re afraid of more than whatever Cristiana and Sir Gerveys have here. I’ll grant you I don’t know for certain what you fear, but there are so many possibilities. Is it you’re afraid you’ll lose Suffolk’s love if you don’t do what he tells you to do, no matter how treacherous—or that you’ve already lost his love because he no longer loves anything but his power? Or are you afraid there’s nothing left in you yourself except ambition? That friendship and kinship and any love except for power are gone out of you, too? Are
those
the kind of things you mean I know nothing about?”