The Traitor's Tale (6 page)

"Behind his uprising and all the other ones, too, very likely. That's why I want to know if you hear anything that way. Anything. From anyone."

Because after all, if an untried and unproved charge of treason had brought the king's own uncle, the duke of Gloucester, to his death, why couldn't a treason charge do the same for Richard of York?

And for any men too loyal to him, such as Sir William. And Joliffe.

Chapter 4

Only with St. Frideswide's behind them had the man in charge of seeing Frevisse to her cousin told her they were not bound for one manor or another but would meet with Lady Alice and her company somewhere on the road.

"To where?" Frevisse had demanded. "I believe my lady is going to her manor of Wingfield," the man had said. Wingfield, in the heart of the late duke of Suffolk's lands in East Anglia, at least three days' ride from St. Frideswide's.

Frevisse had wanted to know more but that was the last she had from him or anyone else; and they did meet Alice at some lesser crossroads near nowhere in particular so far as Frevisse could tell; but while Frevisse had thought to find her carried in a horse-litter with drawn curtains, making slow progress as a bereaved widow through the summer countryside, Alice was sitting on a black palfrey among some twenty other horses and riders and two lightly burdened packhorses, while her small son, John, played some running game with himself around the base of the tall wayside cross there, its shadow thrown long across the road by the late afternoon sun.

It was a lonely place, no village in sight, and yet there was a wary alertness to the men around Alice, one of them saying tersely to the leader of Frevisse's own company, "Any trouble?"

"None. You?"

"Only some, and that was yesterday."

Frevisse rode past them then to Alice, dressed all in widows black save for the elegantly tucked and pleated white widow's wimple around her face and over her chin as well as her throat, and even that subdued by the black veil over her head, hanging below her shoulders on either side. Only her face showed, making her as swathed from the world as a nun; and both her face and voice were likewise swathed from showing anything as she said formally, "Dame Frevisse. Thank you for coming."

Frevisse returned in kind, "Your need was enough to bring me, my lady," while trying quickly to assess how much was wrong here. A year ago, she and Alice had parted in anger and disappointment at each other. Since then, once, Alice had asked her secret help and Frevisse had given it despite deep doubts. She and Alice had briefly met afterward, had found last year's wounds still there but their kinship— their mothers had been sisters—still strong and their friendship maybe ready to stir to life again.

By Alice's stiff greeting it looked dead again, and in the same formal way, Alice looked past her to Sister Margrett and said, "You're welcome, also," but was gathering up her reins as she said it. Welcome was over. One of her men had taken John up in front of him in his saddle. The rest of her escort were forming a double column, half the men riding ahead, half behind, except for John's man who rode with Alice's six women, Frevisse, and Sister Margrett in the middle of them all.

Frevisse noted that the women, like herself and Sister Margrett, all rode astride rather than fashionably side-saddled, the better to match the men's pace, she supposed. She also noted that the duke of Suffolk's badge was nowhere to be seen, nor the ducal banner of three gold leopard heads on azure, a golden fesse between them, despite small John was now duke and had right to it. It was rare for a great lord— or even a great lord's widow—to ride in obscurity, unless there was grievous necessity for it. Was the hatred against dead Suffolk still so widespread that Alice had to hide who she and John were?

She could expect no answers from Alice any time soon, she supposed; could only meet Sister Margrett's questioning look with a shake of her head as the column rode on. At a trot as often as at a walk, and sometimes at a canter along straight stretches of the road, they kept on through the long end of the summer's afternoon. Their shadows stretched far aside from them, across the road's grassy verge into the thickening shadows of hedges, coppices, walls, and villages by and through which they rode. The sun touched the horizon and began to slide from sight. Time was come to stop at an inn or a monastery's guesthouse but still they rode with no word passed among them.

Even Sister Margrett, who might well have been querelous, asked nothing; bur on her own part, Frevisse warned very much to take hold on Alice and demand explanation for why their going had the seeming of a flight, of someone afraid or with something to hide. Even the two packhorses were so lightly burdened they kept up easily with the others; and now the sun was fully gone and still they rode. Twilight faded into full dark but the night was clear; even without moonrise there was starlight enough by which to ride, if only at a walk now. The hour was long past when Frevisse and Sister Margrett would have gone to their beds. Frevisse drowsed and jerked awake, drowsed and jerked awake again more times than she counted. Beside her, Sister Margrett did the same; and once one of the other women reached out to push the woman beside her straight in her saddle when she began to slump sideways.

By the stars Frevisse thought the hour was close to midnight when finally there was a general drawing of reins to a halt. Beside her, Sister Margrett whispered, "Where are we?" but Frevisse could only answer, "I don't know." As best she could make out, it was empty countryside around them. She could hear a stream but that was all. Around them everyone was dismounting. She and Sister Margrett did, too. A man led their horses away, toward the stream, Frevisse thought, and then she made out that a bustling away to one side was the setting up of small tents nothing like the fine pavilion she had known otherwise for Alice; but when she and Sister Margrett had eaten the bread and cheese someone gave them, had washed it down with warm ale from leather bottles shared around, and used the privacy given by a canvas screen stretched between poles for other necessities, they both willingly ducked into the tent pointed out to them. That they were to share it with four other women cramped together on scant bedding mattered less to Frevisse at that moment than that she was lying down; sleep came without trouble.

Morning was another matter.

First, it came too soon. Called awake by one of the men, the women rose with soft groans of stiffness and little exclaims of pain and came out into dew-wet half-darkness, the sun not yet risen. The men had likely slept even less, taking turns at guard, and unsheltered, but neither they nor the women made any complaint or said much of anything at all. Frevisse, Sister Margrett, and the other women did what they could to straighten wimples and veils and shake wrinkles from rumpled gowns, all with very little talk. More bread and cheese and ale were handed around while the horses were being saddled, and Frevisse realized past her yawns and aches that they were going to ride on with no more explanation than there had yet been.

Enough was enough, and she went purposefully toward Alice, at that moment standing alone, a little apart from everyone, looking eastward as if to hurry the sunrise. To her back and with no friendliness, Frevisse said, "My lady."

Alice turned around. In the half-light of the almost-dawn her face was drawn with more than lack of sleep, with more than the weariness of hard riding; and instead of the demand Frevisse had meant to make, she surprised herself and maybe Alice by asking almost gently, "Alice, by all mercy, what is this about?"

Alice made as if to answer, stopped as if words would not come, then finally forced out, "This is me being afraid for my life and the life of my son. When we're at Wingfield I'll tell you more. Until then . . . please."

Alice was not someone given to pleading but that was a plea, and Frevisse said, "Yes."

Low and unevenly, Alice said, "Thank you," with tears sounding very near; but it was with dry eyes and lifted chin she moved past Frevisse and toward the man leading her horse toward her. In the saddle, she even smiled around at her people before nodding for her lead men to ride on.

They rode that day much as they had ridden the day before. When they paused at noontide to eat—more bread and cheese and ale, none of
it
very fresh now; they seemed to be avoiding market towns where new could have been bought— Frevisse judged they were all—men, women, young John, and the horses—nearing the end of their strength; and indeed sometime in the afternoon the packhorses and the men leading them fell behind and were left. Frevisse hoped that was sign they were near Wingfield, but more in early evening than late afternoon they rode under gathering clouds around a last twist of road, passed a church and straight toward a towered gatehouse set in a long wall the far side of a moat. "Wingfield" one of the women riding behind Frevisse sighed in aching relief.

They seemed not to be expected. At the shut gates the two men on watch took a while to grasp that Lady Alice was indeed there. Then one went shouting the news while the other unbarred and swung open the gates, letting them into the manor yard. As they rode across the yard to the fore-porch of the great hall, a man came out in flustered haste, catching Alice's reins and holding her stirrup while she dismounted, all the while apologizing that all was not fully ready for her yet, that he had thought she meant to arrive tomorrow, that he . . .

"The apology is mine to make," Alice assured him. "We're before our time. Whatever is ready will serve very well for now. We're very tired. Anything will be welcome, Master Thorpe. No, Sir Edmund, let the servants take the horses. All of you come into the hall. There'll be wine for everyone. You've deserved that of me, and more. I'm in your debt." Save that she was very pale, Alice gave no sign of being anything but the lady caring for her people. Smiling, she added, clear enough for all to hear, "Nor do I doubt that Master Thorpe will have a goodly meal on the table for us almost before we've had time to unstiffen from our ride."

"Be assured, my lady," Master Thorpe said with a low bow, sounding far more sure of that than he probably felt.

But Alice leaned near to him and said in a false whisper, meant to carry to everyone around them, "Mind you, we've lived on bread and cheese for two days, so any meal that's more than that is going to look most excellent to
us."

On the lift of the general laughter that answered that, Alice held out her hand for John to come to her from among the women. His eyes were large and shadowed. With that and the mourning-black of his doublet and over-gown, he looked even younger than his seven years; looked very young to be burdened with a dukedom and a murdered father and a very frightened mother. But straight-backed and head up, he went to take his mother's hand, and with Master Thorpe they led the way inside, through the foreporch into the screens passage low-ceilinged under the minstrels gallery and then into the great hall.

It was perhaps as large as St. Frideswide's whole church but far more elegantly proportioned with stone-mantled fireplaces and tall windows of clear glass set with heraldic beasts in bold color, and its high-beamed roof decorated with painted shields. For all that, it was presently less than it would usually be, with the walls naked of tapestries over the white plastering, the fireplaces empty, the floor swept clear and no fresh rushes yet laid down. But that did not lessen Sister Margrett's, "Oh. My," as she stared around her. Even as the daughter of a well-off merchant of Northampton town, she was unused to such display and withdrew, somewhat subdued, to
one side of the hall with Frevisse, who was as uncertain as Sister Margrett was of what their place was here.

The others were breaking into small clumps and beginning to talk among themselves in a mingling of weariness and relief. A haste of servants were setting up a trestle table down the hall's length and bringing out the household's cups from wherever the tablewares were locked away in the lord's and lady's absence. For her own part, Frevisse looked forward to the promised wine and then food and then rest, and beside her Sister Margrett groaned quietly, "I'm not going to be able to walk tomorrow."

"I only pray I don't need to ride again for a month," Frevisse said from the heart.

Sister Margrett groaned again, maybe at the very thought of riding; then said with startled dismay, "A month? Will we be here that long?"

"I don't know. Lady Alice has told me nothing about why we're here at all." And Frevisse was beginning, coward-wise, to think she did not want to know why Alice needed her.

She had not even seen Alice and John leave the hall, but looking around, she saw they were not here. But as she thought that, Master Thorpe, who must be the household's steward here, approached her and Sister Margrett, bowed to them both, but said to only Frevisse, "My lady asks that you come to her," adding to Sister Margrett, "She asks your pardon, but she would like to see her cousin alone."