The Traitor's Tale (10 page)

He had not drunk nearly so much as he had seemed to but put something of a drunken stagger into his steps back to the Green Cockerel, to see if anyone followed or wanted to overtake or waylay him along the street. Happily, no one did, but that did not lessen Joliffe's certainty that Hampden had not been chance-killed. Men drunk enough to stab a man three times before they realized he wasn't one of them weren't likely to have their wits about them well enough to make the clean escape these men had made. The thing was, they were long gone, and if whoever had hired them to do it was still here, he was probably clever enough to stay quiet, letting idle tavern-talk wear itself out rather than make trouble over it.

Had the man who set them on been the man keeping watch in the street? Because there had to have been one more. From where the three in the tavern had sat, they couldn't have seen Hampden coming from the direction Joliffe's late drinking companions had shown he'd come. Someone outside had signaled his approach in time for his murderers to start their sudden quarrel, lurch out the door, and kill him in a seemingly careless brawl. But murder it had most certainly been.

Gough murdered. Now Hampden.

It might be only his base, suspicious mind at work, Joliffe thought, but he did not much like that pairing, linked by Normandy and the duke of Suffolk as both men were.

Nor did he like, as he came into the Green Cockerel's now-crowded tavern-room, that the man he had earlier passed on the stairs was sitting now with his men and turned his head to watch him cross toward the stairs. Joliffe saw him only from the corner of an eye and briefly, but the sense of the man's gaze on his back made him uneasy all the way up the stairs, so that, although he went to bed, he did not let himself settle into sleep but kept awake until finally all five of the men had come upstairs to their own beds; and even then, with the man from the stairs gone into his own room and the door there shut, Joliffe waited until the four sharing the dorter with him sounded full asleep before he finally let sleep come to himself. And even then his hand was on his dagger under his pillow.

Chapter 6

The duke of Suffolk's funeral was more memorial than funeral, there being no coffin under the black damask pall laid over the carved, gilt-painted trestles that would have held it if it was not already interred with Suffolk's body somewhere beneath the church's paving stones, with no sign of where it lay. But that was the only lack. The church's altar and nave were draped in the heavy black of full mourning. There were carried torches in plenty and the dead man's heraldic arms hung on painted shields from the pillars. The Mass was done at full length, with the priest in black vestments embroidered with silver and gold that shimmered in the golden light of scores of candles gathered around the altar with its jeweled and golden chalice and paten, and the gorgeously gilded and painted Mass book. Alice herself was draped from head to floor in her widow's black, with John equally in black standing beside her, straight-backed and stiff-faced with a seven-year-old's determined dignity. But where the church should have been crowded to the walls with noble guests and other mourners come to give last respects, there was a thin gathering of household folk and no one else, not even villagers. It was a scant mourning for a man who, bare months ago, had held power greater than the king's.

The funeral feast afterward was likewise scant of guests and the removes sparse compared to how all would have been if circumstances had been otherwise.

How it would have been if William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, had been otherwise, Frevisse thought.

Like most of the thoughts she had had these past few days, she kept that one to herself. Alice did not want her thoughts, only the comfort of her presence and the relief of talking to someone to whom none of it mattered.

That it did matter was something Frevisse likewise kept to herself. Beyond the harm Suffolk had done to
England, she cared for what he had done to Alice and small John, left in worry and danger because of his deeds. From all she had heard and what little she knew for certain, he had grabbed hold on power and then used it with neither goodness nor conscience, had wielded it for no one's gain or good but his own and that of his close followers, nor been careful about the followers he drew to him—men who, like himself, had wanted power for no one else's good but their own and had not cared whom their ambitions ruined. Even given how easily any man in power could become hated simply because he had what others did not, the hatred turned against Suffolk had been—still was—great beyond the usual measure, not even his brutal death sufficient to curb it. That was the legacy his deeds had passed on to his widow and son. For John there was the burden of the dukedom laid on him years before it should have been. For Alice there was both her anger at Suffolk and her fear of what might come, knowing that hatreds not yet satisfied by Suffolk's death could still be turned on her and her child and followers.

In the face of
all that, Frevisse accepted Alice's need of her as someone to hold to when the weight of it all became too much and she had to let go the tight control she kept for everyone else to see; but it meant that mostly Frevisse had no more to do than sit aside and watch as Alice dealt with all her duties, both of the household and the dukedom, John being far too young to take on any of it.

Unfortunately, for Frevisse sitting aside and doing little did not come easily. Days at St. Frideswide's were full of duties as well as prayers. The Benedictine Rule of life was founded on
ora et labora
—prayer and work—in balanced measure, seeking the good of soul and body together. Here at Wingfield, Frevisse had no work and it wore on her to be so idle. There were books and she read for hours at a time. There were the summer-flourishing gardens and she walked in them, sometimes with Sister Margrett to keep her company; but Sister Margrett was often happily busy keeping company with John and his nurse. His tutor had been left behind at Ewelme; Sister Margrett not only helped the nurse with her endless sewing but John with his reading, and played with him and told him stories.

When Frevisse asked her about it, she said simply, "I like children."

Frevisse did not—or not to any great degree. An hour spent in John's room, watching him and Sister Margrett sit on the floor playing with a foot-high builder's wheel and crane, lifting small stone building blocks and swinging them into place to build a wall that John then knocked down with a small battering ram and much laughter, was enough for Frevisse. So she was left mostly to her own company, save when she and Sister Margrett withdrew at the appointed hours to say the Offices together in the chapel off the solar beyond the great hall.

In St. Frideswide's the Offices' prayers and psalms wound through the days in a wreath of praise and hope, but here they seemed heavy with the weight of duty, and when they were done, Frevisse was still left with too many hours in which to work at calmness and not worrying, that she be ready to give calmness and comfort when Alice needed to make use of her company. So, a few days after the funeral, when the afternoon was softening among the long shadows of the westering sun, Alice found her where she had withdrawn into the gardens.

Gardens, with their square-cornered beds, graveled paths, arbored walks, and flowered bowers were an expected part of a great lord's home. Frevisse had never known one of Alice's houses to be without one, and she was sitting on the turf-topped bench at the far end of the farthest garden with a thin, softly-bound parchment book open on her lap when Alice sat down beside her, looked at the book, and said, "Father's book, where he collected verses and such as took his favor. I'd forgotten I'd left it here at Wingfield."

"One of your ladies brought it to me when I asked for something to read." And because Thomas Chaucer had been not only Frevisse's uncle-by-marriage but also her very good friend, it had been warming to see his handwriting again all these years after his death.

Leaning over her arm, Alice read aloud,

"
'Now well and now woe, Now friend and now foe, Thus goes the world, I know. But since it is so, Let it pass and go, And take it as it is.'

Yes, I remember him saying that sometimes."

"And this." Frevisse turned back a few pages to read, " 'Two lives there are for Christian men to live. One is called the active life for in it is more bodily work. The other is called the contemplative life, for in it is more spiritual sweetness. The active life is much outward and in more travail and more peril, because of the temptations that are in the world. The contemplative life is more inward and therefore more lasting, and more certain, restful, delightful, lovely, and rewarding. For it has joy in God's love, and savor in the life that lasts forever'."

Alice was silent for a moment when she finished, then said, "Richard Rolle. And so very apt at the difference between your life and mine." She stood up, moved across the path to pluck a spray of golden St. John's Wort flowers from among the herbs in the bed there, and returned to sit again. "I don't think Father liked my marrying Suffolk."

Frevisse suspected that was possible. Although the marriage had come long before Suffolk became what he became, Thomas Chaucer—like his father, Geoffrey—had seen more clearly into people than most people did, had been able to set what they said and seemed to be against what they truly were and did.

Alice began to strip the green leaves from the flower stem, dropping them to the path. "Did he ever say anything of it to you? Of my marriage? Or about Suffolk?"

"He never did. I was long gone into the nunnery by then, remember."

"Father came to see you there. He sent on a letter from you to me, too. After Salisbury died." Alice's second husband, killed by a chance-shot cannonball at the siege of Orleans the winter before the French witch called The Maid had made her trouble there.

Alice had never answered that letter, Frevisse remembered.

Alice had finished with the leaves, was now twirling the flowered stem between her fingers, staring at it while she said "If I had come back to England then, everything would have been different. But I was friends with Anne of Burgundy." Wife of the duke of Bedford, then-governor of France for then-infant King Henry VI. "So I stayed in France, and Suffolk was there and courted me and we married. Anne died, and then Bedford did, and Suffolk hoped to be made governor of France in his stead. When he wasn't, that's when he settled to winning young Henry to him and rising into power here in England. And here we are." She lifted her head, staring into some dark distance that had nothing to do with the herb-scented garden around them. "Father never said anything at all about him?" she asked. "Not then or later?"

"Nothing at all that I remember."

Alice gave a small, tear-denying laugh. "In its way, that's worst of all. That he wouldn't even talk about him." She dropped her hand with St. John's flowers into her lap and said wearily, as if even the words were almost too heavy to bear, "He became so small a man. My husband. It's as if the greater he became in the world, the less of him there was. That's been very hard to live with. To watch the man I loved change and dwindle until he was gone and I was left married to someone I would never have chosen to wed my life to."

Frevisse held silent. She did not think Alice wanted her words, anyway, simply her presence to lean on in the otherwise vast loneliness of loss almost beyond measure. To have given life and love to someone, only to find that neither was enough to save him from himself and then be left at the end of it all in danger and fear as well as bitterness—what could be said to that?

Alice abruptly tossed the flowers away, folded her hands firmly together in her lap, and said briskly, as if ashamed of having wandered into memory and now snatching at the first business that came to mind, "I sent an order a few days ago to my household priest that I want him back with me. I want Mass in my own chapel instead of needing to go out to the church every day. But do you know, this afternoon I had message back from him that he's presently needed where he is and begs leave to be excused a time longer. I'm minded to excuse him permanently."

"Maybe he
is
presently needed there," Frevisse said, less because she believed it than because Alice angry at a defaulting priest seemed better than Alice sinking further into the lethargy of her dark thoughts.

And Alice obligingly snapped, "It wouldn't matter to Squyers if he was 'needed where he is'. He's one of those well-fleshed, red-faced men who think God made the world for no better reason than to give them somewhere to live comfortably. 'Needed where he is'. They're probably praying to see the back of him there at Alderton." She suddenly laughed. "Poor man. He saw himself on his way to a bishopric by way of serving Suffolk. He was disappointed almost past bearing when Reynold Pecock was made bishop of Chichester instead of him this year, after Bishop Moleyns' death." Her momentary laughter dropped away. "After Moleyns' murder," she murmured.