16 The Traitor's Tale Read online

  Holding her gaze, Joliffe considered that and everything else that had been said, added it to what had passed unsaid among them, then looked at Lady Alice. “I serve Richard, duke of York.”

  That was probably not the best of the very many answers he might have made her. It meant he was a far greater matter than he might have been, and after a moment’s silence Lady Alice said, “Ah.” A flat sound that told him nothing of what she was thinking.

  It was Dame Frevisse who said, very quietly, “The duke of York. Is that wise?”

  No, it probably was not. Joliffe knew too well that if Sir William was right and someone close to the king was trying to find a way to charge York with treason, that was a charge that could all too easily be stretched to include those who served him, and traitors came to ugly deaths. But to Dame Frevisse’s question he merely lifted one shoulder and said wryly, “Isn’t the saying ‘Experience is the mother of wisdom’? How will I know if it’s wise until it’s too late to change my choice?” But having gone so far, he saw use in going further, and looking at Lady Alice, he said, “There’s this. Two of your household men have been murdered and a third is missing. There looks to be some manner of danger stalking your household and maybe you. In that you have some common cause with my lord of York, because he’s under threat, too. With those commissions of oyer and terminer being issued all over England for the finding out who’s had part in this summer’s rebellions and troubles, secret word has gone to at least some of the commissioners that they’re to find York guilty in it.”

  “Is he guilty in it?” Lady Alice asked.

  Sharp at the foolishness of that, Joliffe said, “Of course. From Ireland. To be sure he’s too far away to take any advantage of anything that happens or to protect himself when the accusations surely come.”

  As sharply Dame Frevisse said at him, “Her question is reasonable.”

  “It is,” Joliffe granted just as sharply. “But whichever way I answered it, she won’t believe me, so why ask me at all?”

  “You’re fighting so hard against being alive, I swear you want to be dead!” Dame Frevisse snapped.

  “And I swear I don’t!” Joliffe said angrily back at her. “I also swear I’m tired and hungry and in pain and I only want to lie down and sleep until my mind is fit for these games you all want to play!”

  That was an unmannered over-boldness at his betters and it came more from his tiredness than from good sense, but it was also true. He needed away from their questioning and his answering until he could better judge what was safe to say and bargain better than he had so far. He needed sleep and he did not flinch when Vaughn started to rise in angry response to his ill manners, because if Vaughn hit him, he meant to collapse as utterly as if he had been beaten.

  But Lady Alice slightly raised a hand, Vaughn settled back into his chair, and she said to Joliffe, “That’s fair enough, maybe. You’ve been hard used and we’re all tired and will maybe deal together better after a night’s rest. All I lack is for Dame Frevisse to vouch that you’re as good as your word.”

  She looked toward her cousin as she finished. So did Joliffe and found Dame Frevisse looking at him, considering father than answering. Or else deliberately holding back her answer long enough for him to begin to feel a shadow of doubt before she finally said, “I’ve never known him to do a dishonorable thing. Things that were suspect, maybe. Things doubtful. But never dishonorable.” She turned her gaze to Lady Alice. “And you know yourself what chance he ran three years ago with no likelihood of gain for himself. I think he’s likely to deal fairly with you.”

  Lady Alice returned her gaze to Joliffe. “You’ll not object, though, Master Noreys, when you’ve been fed and your hurts seen to, to being locked into a room for the night?”

  Joliffe rose and bowed to her. “So long as there’s somewhere to lie down and maybe a pillow for my head, I’ll be content and wish blessings upon you, my lady.”

  “I think we can allow you a mattress as well,” she said, and added to Dame Frevisse, “Will you see to his hurts if I send ointment and herbs for them?”

  “I will.”

  She stood up and respectfully so did Dame Frevisse and Vaughn as she said, moving toward the door, “Then I’ll go give orders for it all now. Nicholas, if you’ll stay here?”

  He bowed. “I will, my lady.”

  Joliffe bowed, too, and Dame Frevisse slightly curtsied. All our manners fine and right, Joliffe thought, and stayed on his feet until Dame Frevisse had sat again before he slumped down into his chair with a suddenness that he knew—and did not care—betrayed how hard he had been holding himself together. For good measure he shut his eyes, hoping no one would want anything of him, but Dame Frevisse demanded at him, “Why are you still doing this? With …” She paused over what she had been going to say. “… that man you served dead and that other matter done, why didn’t you go back to being simply a player and out of all this?”

  Joliffe neither opened his eyes nor bothered to keep the bitterness from his voice as he said, “I haven’t been simply a player for a long time, my lady.”

  “How long? Since before we first met?”

  “No. No, then I was everything I seemed to be. A traveling player hoping for better days.” He smiled without opening his eyes. “Surprisingly enough, the better days came. Then other things came. Now, being a player is no longer something I can simply ‘go back to’.”

  “But wish you could?”

  “There are days, my lady. Believe me, there are days.” Days when he would rather have been other than he was, days when he searched back to find a time when he could have chosen differently. But mostly there were days when he knew himself well enough not to waste time in thinking too long on what was not and never could have been.

  Of course there were likewise times when he did not even want to think about the here-and-now. This was one of them, and given this respite, he took it, slacking his body and sinking into a silence in which the three of them waited until a servant came with warmed water, a jar of ointment, and some narrow-folded bands of clean cloth bandages, and said to Vaughn, “My lady said to tell you the rear storeroom would do, that you’d know the one she meant. She’s having bedding taken there.”

  Bedding. A divine thought. Bedding and no need to struggle to keep his mind clear.

  In a mercy of silence, Dame Frevisse tended to his wrists. She had kinder hands than, for some reason, he had thought she would, but she was thorough at the work and did not apologize when the cleaning of a deeper rope-cut made him wince. Thorough in her mind and in her ways, and practical beyond the point of pointless apologies. The several times they had met she had been a good ally. He did not want her for an enemy now.

  She finished bandaging his wrists, wrung out the wasting cloth in the cooling water, gave it to him, and still without looking at him, said, “You’ll want to clean the cut at the corner of your mouth, too,” before she turned away, bade both him and Vaughn good night without quite looking at either one of them, and left the room.

  She would not be his enemy in this, Joliffe thought as he began to clean the cut Vaughn’s fist had given him yesterday. But she might choose not to be his ally either. If he read her aright, she was very angry and not just at him. At her cousin, too? It had to be at Lady Alice’s doing that she was here at all, and it was little likely Dame Frevisse liked that, given to her nunnery life as she was. She might even choose to hold neutral in this whole business after tonight, helping neither him nor her cousin, and that could well be a bad thing for him. But worse would be if she set herself against him.

  Chapter 10

  Frevisse had not looked at Joliffe while she tended to his hurt wrists, and certainly had asked him nothing. Besides that Alice’s man was there to hear anything else he said, too much had been said already for her mind’s peace; she had kept the darkness of her thoughts to herself and took them with her when she left, going upstairs with slow feet and heavy mind. Alice was being settled into her bed b
y her women when Frevisse passed through her bedchamber on way to her own. She gave Alice, lying against the pillows, a light curtsy but Alice did not acknowledge her and she went on, to find Sister Margrett readied for their own bed but still up and a candle still burning.

  “I waited to say Compline with you,” Sister Margrett said. “And to hear what passed after you left?” Frevisse asked.

  That came out more tartly than she had meant it to. Sister Margrett looked startled, then said tartly back, “Only if you want to tell it and it’s something I should hear. Which I doubt it is. So, no, I wasn’t waiting to hear what passed after you left.”

  Immediately contrite, both for her own sharpness and for having unjustly goaded Sister Margrett to anger, Frevisse said, “I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair. I’m tired.” She raised her hands to begin unpinning her veil. “I am very … very tired. And no, what passed is not something you would want to hear.”

  As quickly out of her anger as into it and Frevisse’s apology apparently accepted, Sister Margrett said quietly, “There’s blood on your right hand.”

  Frevisse turned her hand over to find a red smear of Joliffe’s blood along the outer side of her palm.

  “There was a man a little hurt. I saw to bandaging him,” she said in the same weary way she had admitted she was tired, and went to the waiting basin of water on a table beside one wall to wash it off, then took off her veil and wimple, leaving on only her cap for the night, and washed her face, both soothed and revived enough by that to be glad that Sister Margrett had waited Compline for her.

  There was peace in that final Office of every day—Visita, quaesumus, Domine, habitationem istam, et omnes insidias inimici ab ea longe repelle. Angeli tui… nos in pace custodiant; et bene-dictio tua sit super nos semper. Visit, we beg you, Lord, this house, and all the snares of the enemy from here drive back. Let your holy angels … keep us in peace, and your blessing be over us always.

  Frevisse gave herself up to it, sinking her mind into the comfort of the words, and afterward went to bed with quieted mind, able to leave until tomorrow what could not be helped tonight.

  * * *

  For all of that, though, morning came sooner than she wanted to face it, and despite she was ready for Alice’s summons after Prime and Mass and breaking the night’s fast were done, she did not go eagerly. Against good sense, she had liked Joliffe from the time they had first met. Against good sense, she still liked him. And beyond all her present angers, she still cared for Alice as kin and sometime friend. What hurt and frightened her was the doubt that either her liking or her care would be of any use at all against the dark tangles into which they were come, and she silently prayed from among last night’s prayers—Custodi nos, Domine. Sub umbra alarum tuarum protege nos. Guard us, Lord. Under the shadow of your wings protect us—before going into the small room beyond Alice’s bedchamber where she and Alice had talked together on their first coming to Wingfield.

  Cushions had been found and put upon the window seats but otherwise it was the same. Alice, though, had nothing sad or pleading about her this time. Straight-backed in her black mourning gown, her face encircled by the stiffly pleated folds of her white widow’s wimple and framed by the long blackness of heavy veil spread over her shoulders, she was the great lady in whose hands power lay with the familiarity of years, and neither she nor Frevisse spoke, only slightly bent their heads to each other, then stood waiting in silence the little while until Joliffe and Vaughn came in by the room’s other door.

  Both men looked better than they had last night. Rested, shaved, washed, combed, and presumably fed, Joliffe even had on a clean shirt under his doublet, to judge by the clean cuffs showing at his bandaged wrists; and when he had bowed to her and Lady Alice, he stood quietly facing Alice, leaving it to her to begin whatever their business would be this morning and giving no sign of his own thoughts.

  Vaughn, like Joliffe, had cleaned and straightened him-Self from last night, but he looked no happier about matters than he had then, and after his own bow to Lady Alice, he stood between the room’s two doors with one hand resting on the hilt of his belt-hung dagger as if on guard. Whether against Joliffe or against someone coming in was unclear.

  Against Joliffe was Frevisse’s guess.

  As the men had entered, she had faded aside, almost to a wall, and now slightly bowed her head and folded her hands out of sight into her opposite sleeves, making seeming of withdrawing from everything. Though Vaughn might believe that of her, she was certain neither Alice nor Joliffe would, but they were likely intent enough on each other to discount her for the while; and certainly Alice’s first words to him were no mannerly inquiry about how he was this morning or a nonsense hope that he had slept well but the blunt question, “Why should I believe you when you say you serve the duke of York?”

  As bluntly, Joliffe answered, “Because I’d be a great deal safer saying I served someone else.”

  “Why didn’t you claim another lord then?”

  “Because that would get us no further toward finding out who wants dead everyone who might betray what Suffolk and Somerset did in Normandy.”

  “You truly think that’s the root of these deaths?”

  “I do. Do you have a different thought about it, my lady? Or, come to it, how much about Normandy’s loss could you betray if you chose?”

  Maybe offended that someone as slight in the world as Joliffe dared question her in return but accepting that offense was an unuseful thing just now, she answered coldly, stiffly, “My lord husband never told me a single thing about it.”

  Frevisse doubted Joliffe missed the evasion in that answer of how she had known about it, then; but Alice took the talk back her own way with, “You claim order has been given to link York to these rebellions so he can be charged with treason. I gather you likewise think that is linked to the murders of my household men.”

  With a lightness that was surely feigned, Joliffe said, “I hope it is, because if there are several such plots going all at once …” He made gesture as if casting something away.

  “Nonetheless,” Alice said, “there may be.”

  “There may be,” Joliffe agreed. “But one or all, they’re surely by men close around the king. They’re the men with the power to order such things. Power they must be in fear of losing.”

  “Who gave the order against York?”

  “It seems it was slipped sidewise and around the corner to at least the man who warned us of it. He gave no name with it.”

  “But you’re willing to consider it could be the same person or persons who ordered these murders and maybe Bur-gate’s disappearance.”

  “We have to consider something, and the simplest beginning is likely the best. But plot or plots, you’ll have better thought than I can about who around the king it could be.”

  “My lord the duke of Somerset for one,” Alice said without hesitance. “Except he might have found it hard to know enough and give the necessary orders. At least for Burgate being seized. For the others, who can say?”

  “And now he’s back from Normandy,” Joliffe said. “He landed at Dover with his household over a week ago.”

  Surprise—and alarm?—widened Alice’s eyes. Joliffe saw it as well as Frevisse, and he asked quickly, “You hadn’t heard that, my lady?”

  “No,” Alice said sharply. “I’ve heard nothing that way.” And plainly thought she should have. At Vaughn she demanded, “Have we heard anything from …” She seemed to think better of saying any names and said instead, “… anything from either of them?”

  “The last word we had was just before St. Mary Magdalene day. When I came back from Wales and found out there had been nothing since then, I sent someone to find out why. There’s not been time for his return.”

  So that was Vaughn’s place in things, Frevisse thought— master of at least some of Alice’s spies set to watch in other men’s households. That distrust and the ambition that fed it were among the things she found hardest to accept
about Alice’s life. But Alice was saying, “Nor was there reason to worry we hadn’t heard because we didn’t know there was news we should have had.” She looked to Joliffe again. “Since you know so much, do you know if the king has received Somerset or, better, ordered his arrest?”

  “No,” Joliffe said. “As I last heard it, Somerset was riding openly toward London, no let or hindrance offered him.”

  “Blessed St. Michael,” Alice said. “What is King Henry thinking of? Every person dispossessed out of France, every man, woman, and child who’s lost their home and everything they had in Normandy are going to want Somerset’s head. He has to be at least brought to trial. King Henry has to at least arrest him.”

  Dryly bitter, Joliffe said, “Our King Henry is a merciful man.”

  “This isn’t mercy,” Alice snapped. “It’s foolishness. I swear, he …” She broke off, again thinking better of her words, and sharply reverted to where they had been. “You say that someone is plotting to have York accused of treason. You say he’s guilty of none. I’m the more ready to believe that because it begins to seem to me that someone may be plotting much the same against my son. Not to find him treasonous but to betray into the open the full extent of his father’s treason and thereby have the dukedom from him.”

  Frevisse jerked up her head to stare openly at Alice-Vaughn made a sound that might have been a smothered oath. Joliffe, with a calmness that did not quite mask satisfaction, said, “Indeed, my lady?”

  By the twist of Alice’s mouth, she heard the satisfaction as clearly as Frevisse did; and she said, somewhat mockingly, “Indeed, Noreys. And, yes, to spare you pointing it out, we may therefore have more reason to work together than against each other. If my lord of York and I do truly have a common enemy, then we had better work together.”

  Joliffe bowed to her, respectfully agreeing, “My lady.”

  Vaughn stirred as if very badly wanting to say something.