The Traitor's Tale (32 page)

Even then things did not go at the speed he wanted. Seemingly everyone in castle as well as town was more occupied with market day than with any other business that might present itself. He only finally was able to see the castle's chamberlain, present the token that affirmed he was from Sir William Oldhall, and give his warning.

The chamberlain grew grim at hearing how Sir Thomas Stanley was gone hot-saddled to Wales at word of York's planned return.

"Under orders for something," the chamberlain said darkly. "That's what you thought and that's what I think."

"If I had to put money to it," Joliffe said carefully, "I'd lay wager he had orders to stop my lord of York, either from landing or else from reaching England."

"Stop his grace? Sir damned Thomas Stanley is supposed to stop my lord of York? How? Arrest him?" the chamberlain scorned.

Grimly Joliffe said, "I've heard from Sir William Oldhall himself that there are men around the king who want his grace accused of treason, that there's secret order for at least one of the oyer and terminer commissions to claim they've found he's behind these uprisings this year."

The chamberlain swore in Welsh. It was a good language to swear in, ripe with ways of damning to hell, both specific and general and especially for Englishmen. Then he said, There's no telling, then, what Sir Thomas has been ordered to do against York. Sir Thomas is just the mean-minded wretch to do the worst he can. Not that my lord of York will let him do much of anything, I'll warrant. Right. In any case, you'll be wanting to get on to Ireland to warn his grace. I can give you ..."

I fear someone else will have to go," Joliffe interrupted.

"I've business in the other direction and it's waited too long as it is."

The chamberlain looked ready to protest that but held back long enough to take good look at him and instead asked, "My lord of York's business, is it?"

"My lord of York's business, and as weighty, maybe, as getting warning to him."

"Then someone else can go to Ireland. I can see to that. For you, do you need any help I can give?"

"Some money wouldn't come amiss, and a day's rest and keep for my horse and me."

"You can have all that and a fresh horse, too, if you want."

"Better the devil I know," Joliffe said lightly. Or, rather, a horse he knew was sound, good for the miles he was going to ask of her. "But my thanks for the offer anyway. Just some money, food, and rest, and I'll be away sometime tomorrow."

"You'll have all that. In the meantime I'll have a messenger away to Ireland."

"Better secretly than not," Joliffe suggested.

"It would seem so, wouldn't it? My wife has been at me to send someone to Shrewsbury with a list of things she wants. I'll start him out as if for that and he can cut away toward the coast when he's well away from Ludlow. There should be no trouble about it."

"Except from your wife," Joliffe said.

The chamberlain grunted agreement.

Joliffe made the most of that evening's supper, a full night's safe sleep, and the next day's midday dinner, before he rode out of Ludlow by the road toward Shrewsbury. He made no haste about it, so that when nightfall came he did not have so far to ride back on his tracks to be sure he had not been followed away from Ludlow before circling the town to take the road to Worcester, the opposite way from Shrewsbury. Favored by both the weather and moonlight, he covered a good many miles before, toward dawn, he gave himself and Rowan a rest along a particularly lonely stretch of road, unsaddling her and leaving her to crop the long'

dewed grass of the wayside, her lead-rope in his hand while he slept dry under a hedge, pillowed on his saddle.

As he intended, he awoke to the dawn twittering of birds in the first light of the coming day. With sighing memory of the bed he'd had in Ludlow, he crawled stiffly to his feet, ate some bread and cheese with one hand while wiping Rowan's back carefully dry with a cloth in the other before saddling her. When she swung her head around to make a snap at him in token of her displeasure as he tightened the girth, he told her, "I couldn't agree with you more, good lady. But needs must when the devil drives."

She snorted her opinion of that but took the bit and her bridle with only one try at pushing him off his feet with a hard shove of her head.

He had prayed for dry, clear days for this part of his ride, and his prayer was half-way answered. That day and the others after it either started clear and ended with rain or else started with rain and ended clear. He did not find one was better than the other. Either way, he was rained on every day and twice had to stay the night at inns and once spent a whole midday in a village tavern while a pounding rainstorm wore itself out. He was only glad he need not press onward so hard as he might have. By now Vaughn would have Burgate's letter from the priest in Sible Hedingham. He would come there only to find that Vaughn had been and gone and then have to go on to Wingfield, in hope that Vaughn had played as straight as he was playing it and that Lady Alice was ready to carry through their bargain.

He little doubted that she would. She was frightened and m need of an ally and was not fool enough to think she could find a safe one among the greed-drooling pack around King Henry. He would have liked to think she would not want to lose her cousin Dame Frevisse's regard, either, by Straying their agreement, but he was not sure how much weight that might have in the balance. No, what he most counted on were Lady Alice's fear and her need of Richard duke of York.

His last miles of riding to Sible Hedingham were by green-hedged lanes through the easy roll of Essex countryside. He was back not so very far from where he had started when he left Hunsdon on his way to Alderton. He had made a ragged figure-eight across England and back, and now to end it all he was going to be rained on some more, he thought, eyeing the roil of clouds mounting the eastward sky ahead of him. He was becoming very tired of weather.

In truth, he was simply becoming tired, he admitted as he rode into Sible Hedingham. The village stretched along the road, with a slope down to pastures in a shallow valley on one side, on the other a rise of land to the village fields. As he had neared it, he had seen across the valley, above another village's roofs, the tall, stone square of an old castle's keep. Over there, he guessed would be the local market, because here all he came on was a slight widening of the street before it somewhat jogged and sloped into another stream valley, leaving the village. This wide place in the road was the village's center, he judged by a green-leaved branch thrust out above a door of one of the houses, telling there was new ale to be had there, with two trestle tables with benches set outside the door to invite folk to sit and drink.

But rather than the few lazing scruff that almost every alehouse seemed to have and the only folk likely to be there this time of day, what looked to be half the village men were there and not idle but crowded up to the tavern's open door and window, with a grumbling throb of voices from inside that told more men were there and, by a shriller note mixed among them, some women, too. Nor were they drinking. Joliffe saw one man raise a fist and shake it over his head, and inside someone roared a
"No"
that was answered with cheers.

As a traveling player Joliffe had learned to "read" any place he came to very quickly, judging whether its folk were likely to welcome a play or prefer the sport of throwing garbage or stones—or simply go on sullenly about their business, not interested if poor players starved for lack of work. As he drew rein in the other side of the road from the alehouse, he thought that if he was come here as a player, he would have moved on without unpacking the cart. Something was getting ready to happen, and the sooner he learned for certain that Vaughn had been and gone so he could go, too, the better. Wherever he'd be when the storm came down on him, it would likely be better than here.

A little farther along the street three boys were kicking a stone back and forth across the dust to each other. Joliffe guided Rowan toward them and asked where the priest lived. They answered by pointing at a narrow lane running up-slope beyond the alehouse. "Just up there," one of the boys said. "Across from the church. You'll know it."

"Is he home?" Joliffe asked.

"Him? Yes," another boy said with unboyish bitterness. "Counting his coins and planning how to get more, likely."

"Yah," the first boy said. "That's your father talking."

"Your father, too!" the other boy defended, while the third boy nodded vigorously.

Joliffe thanked them and dropped a silver half-penny to each of them, bringing wide smiles to their faces and an offer from the second boy to tell him anything else he might want to know.

Joliffe smiled back at him, said, "Later, maybe," and reined Rowan toward the lane. It proved to be brief, steeply sloped with the church set on his right on the point of the slope where the lane ended against another road running both ways from it, making another widened triangle of road. There were more houses here, along the lane and the road it met, but as the boy had said, Joliffe knew without having to ask again which was the priest's house. Like its neighbors, it sat flat-faced to the street, so there was probably a large garden behind it, and probably a byre and barn beyond that for the priest's livestock and the tithes-in-kind from his parishioners' fields, unless—as it seemed from the boys' talk—he had brought his folk to paying their tithes in coin instead of with dried beans and peas and grain. Then only what came from his own fields would be in the barn.

Most priests of villages and even small towns lived the double life of priest and landlord of whatever local land had been given to the parish church. The more fortunate priests could make a very comfortable life of it. The less fortunate did well to scrape by from one year to the next. John Smyth did not look to be among the latter. Not only was his house larger than any of his neighbors, it was newly thatched and all its front freshly plastered, with both windows of the out-thrust upper story glassed and the broad front door painted a warm red as yet unmarred by any winter. It was a rich man's house in a place that looked unlikely to have many rich men, and Joliffe tied Rowan to the iron ring hung from a wooden post set in the street beside the door and knocked with confidence at the door. When dealing with the rich it was usually better to seem confident rather than craving.

He expected a servant would answer—this looked too fine a place for the priest to do his own door-answering— and indeed a thin older man with a chicken-scrawny neck and servant's plain tunic did finally open the door, to give Joliffe a narrow-eyed stare that lacked the warmth of Christian welcome before he demanded, "What?"

Here was a servant looking to be offended at anyone who dared to darken his master's doorstep, so in return Joliffe looked down his nose at him and said, "I need to speak to Father John."

"Sire John," the man snapped. "He's Sire John."

"A learned as well as holy man," Joliffe said, smooth as oiled ice. "I'll be most pleased, in my need, to meet him.

The man's glare said he wanted to find fault with that, but unable to, he finally grunted, said, "You stay here until I've seen if he'll see you," and disappeared from the doorway, leaving the door barely open. Hardly a moment later he was back and made an ungracious gesture for Joliffe to come in. Joliffe went past him without thanks, into a pleasantly large room with a scrubbed board floor, stairs to the upper floor against one wall, a door to the probable kitchen at the back, and a wide, wooden-mullioned window facing the street. The walls were painted saffron-yellow, the roof beams a deep red that matched the outer door. On one long wall hung a painted hanging of St. John the Evangelist with his goblet and serpent, St. John the Baptist with his lamb, and St. John of Beverley with his shrine and cross-staff. Sire John must take his own name seriously, Joliffe thought. The end of the room away from the stairs was taken up with a beam-high aumbry of closed doors below and open shelves above. Because there was a slant-topped writing table near them, the open shelves might have held a scholar's books but instead served to display an array of polished pewter plates, platters, goblets, and cups.

Beside the writing desk, there was a long-legged stool on which Joliffe doubted Sire John perched very often: the priest looked far too settled where he sat on a long, high-backed, well-cushioned bench near the middle of the room, holding in one hand a small plate with a thin-sliced apple, in the other hand an apple slice on its way to his mouth. Like the bench, he was well-cushioned—ample, one might say—and his priestly gown was austere only in being black, with nothing humble about its fine-woven wool.