16 The Traitor's Tale Read online

  “There’s fate,” Rhys agreed bitterly. “Send someone for a priest. We’re taking him to his room.”

  The climb up the stairs with Gough’s body fairly well finished the last of Joliffe’s strength, he thought. Until he crossed the threshold into Gough’s room. At sight of the strewn chaos—chair and table and joint stools overset, bedding and mattress stripped from the bed and dumped into a heap against the wall, everything that had been in the chests dumped and scattered across the floor, the chests themselves up-ended—he jerked to a halt. Behind him Owen started, “What …” and Joliffe forced himself forward.

  Like him both Rhys and Owen stopped on the threshold. Then Rhys snapped, “Let’s get him in,” and they carried Gough’s body to the bed, laid it on the floor long enough for the three of them to put the mattress and a sheet back in place, then lifted Gough’s body onto them.

  Only then did Rhys take a long look around and swear, “Bastards and curs!” while Owen started shaking his head in silent protest and went on shaking it. Joliffe settled for righting a joint stool and sinking onto it, his legs done for a while. Slowly, he set to ridding himself of helmet, arming cap, and brigantine, dropping them onto the floor beside him.

  Of nobody in particular, Owen demanded, “What happened?”

  “Robbery,” Rhys answered dully. He began to take off his own gear. “Only they didn’t find anything, because we’ve put it all somewhere safer than here.”

  “Then when they didn’t find anything, they came and killed him,” Owen said. “Bastards.”

  “That makes no sense,” Rhys said.

  Nor did it; but neither of them were any more ready for thinking than Joliffe was. Owen joined Rhys in stripping down to their arming doublets and hosen. With hair sweat-plastered to their heads and shirts to their bodies, they looked very much the way Joliffe supposed he looked, and certainly for a moment they stood as slackly as he felt, until Rhys said with a nod at Gough’s body, “Let’s have him out of his armor anyway.”

  Taking Gough’s armor off him after a fight was something they had surely done many times before now, but this time, the last time, their fingers were slowed by weariness and the weight of their grief and Rhys’ sometimes-falling tears as he bent to the work.

  Joliffe saw them but made no move to help. He had no place here. Gough and Rhys had likely started young together in the war; had maybe been surprised to find themselves both alive at the end of it; had probably talked of what they’d do with themselves now it was over; and now, when least looked for, all that could be planned was where to bury Gough and how many Masses for his soul could be afforded.

  Joliffe had known Gough too briefly for grief anything like Rhys’ and Owen’s must be. What he had instead was a slowly growing anger at the way Gough had died and he kept that to himself, leaving the two squires to their grief and duty until Rhys lifted off Gough’s breastplate and set it aside. Then Joliffe forced himself to his feet and said, “You can come at that letter now. I still want it.”

  Both squires turned to stare at him. Owen started angrily to say something, but Rhys said first, “Best you have it. Yes.”

  He made quick work of unfastening the front of Gough’s arming doublet to come at a thin, many-folded square of parchment tucked tightly into the waist of Gough’s braies. He pulled it out, faced Joliffe, and thrust it at him with, “This is what they killed him for, isn’t it? They didn’t find it here, came to kill him at the bridge, and meant to throw him into the Thames to be rid of him and it together. That was the way of it, wasn’t it?”

  His gaze locked to Rhys’, Joliffe took the thing from him with slowly nodded, silent agreement.

  “Then if I were you,” Rhys said grimly, “I’d watch my back from here to wherever you’re going with it.” And turned back to Gough’s body and what still needed to be done.

  Chapter 2

  The church was plain and not over-large, its windows small and set high to give no outward view to the world, only let the blessing of sunlight into the unpillared nave and the nuns’ choir where the two double lines of tall-backed seats faced each other, ready beside the altar for those six or seven times a day St. Frideswide’s nuns gathered there to their Offices of prayer.

  Just now, though, with the dawn Office of Prime and morning Mass past and time for Tierce not yet come, the church was empty save for a single nun kneeling in her choir stall, head bowed forward on her hands clasped on the slanted board meant to hold psalter and breviary through the saying of the Offices. Veiled and gowned in Benedictine black, her bowed head hiding the white wimple that encircled her face and hid her throat, she would have been a shadow among shadows save the morning sunlight through the church’s east window had banished shadows to the rafters and corners for the while. Only the shadows in her mind held her, and against those the church’s deep quiet at this hour was a balm laid over the raw, hurt edges of her thoughts.

  To her very heart, Dame Frevisse knew here was where she belonged, here inside these cloister walls, in this nunnery, in this church in this far corner of Oxfordshire. In all the world, this was her place, and most especially here in this choir stall that had been her own—as much as anything in the world was a nun’s own—since the day she had taken her vows. Day after day, through all the years into years she had been in St. Frideswide’s, she came here to pray and chant the daily Offices with St. Frideswide’s other nuns. There were only ten of them now, because St. Frideswide’s had never grown as its founder had hoped, but it survived and here were Frevisse’s comfort and certainty, here was where she wanted to live, reaching toward God. That reaching was the struggle and the joy to which she had given her life, and although sometimes, for other people’s needs, she was drawn out into the world, whether she would or no, here was where she wanted to be, with no wish at all, for any reason whatsoever, to leave her place and peace here.

  But she was going to.

  Her knees were complaining at her about too-long kneeling, and for pity of them and because their ache was growing into pain, she eased up and back onto the seat behind her, hands now clasped on her lap but her head still bowed, her eyes still closed.

  By constant edicts of the Church, nuns were supposed to be cloistered—enclosed inside their nunnery’s walls from when they took their vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience until their death. About that, bishops were very firm, but in practice the enclosure was not so narrow and there was sometimes unseemly laughter in the nuns’ daily chapter meetings when a new reminder from their bishop was read aloud, listing all the reasons for which a nun should not leave her cloister. There were always reasons for a nun to go out into the world—to visit relations in their need, or to go on pilgrimage, or to tend to nunnery business best done by no one else, or simply to enjoy some nearby pastime like fishing or watching the harvest in nearby fields. As Dame Amicia once said, the bishop’s list seemed to be longer each time it came; and although St. Frideswide’s prioress, Dom-ina Elisabeth, kept her priory more strictly than some were kept, there were nonetheless times …

  Frevisse bowed her head lower and lifted her hands from her lap to press them, still clasped, to her forehead. Try though she would, the one prayer that kept coming to her was, “Lord, give me strength,” which was a sort of answer to her need but not enough of one. For her cousin Alice of Suffolk’s sake she had been out of St. Frideswide’s all too lately, and almost everything—admittedly through no fault of Alice’s—had gone so far to the bad that at the end there had seemed no good to any of it, only varied layers of wrong. And now her cousin needed her again and Frevisse had been given leave to go to her.

  Or not so much been given leave as been ordered to it. Alice had written, as was proper, to Domina Elisabeth, asking that Frevisse be sent to her in her need; and less for Alice’s need than because Alice was duchess of Suffolk and wealthy and not without power despite lately widowed by her husband’s murder, Domina Elisabeth had told Frevisse she had leave to go. Leave that Frevisse did not want.


  But because obedience was one of a nun’s vows, Frevisse was here, trying to pray not only for strength to do what she did not wish to, but that she be not angry at Alice for demanding her help and even angrier at Domina Elisabeth for sending her away so readily.

  Or at least not so angry.

  Alice had chosen a life in the world. She had married and been widowed from her first husband very young, then had married the earl of Salisbury, and when he was killed in the French war, had married William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk. Through the years after that, Suffolk had risen to a dukedom and become the most powerful of the lords around the king, and Alice had risen with him. But he had used his power badly, had finally raised such a storm of hatred and protest around himself that King Henry had, early this year, exiled him to save his life.

  Instead, sailing to that exile, Suffolk had been seized at sea by unnamed English enemies—pirates, it was said— been crudely beheaded, his body thrown onto the beach at Dover and his head set on a stake beside it.

  The pity was that his death had done nothing to right the wrongs he had helped to make in England. From spring until now at almost harvest time, rebellions had been breaking out all over England. Jack Cade’s had been the worst. That one was ended now, but there were steady reports of lesser ones still happening, with men’s angers still fierce not only at dead Suffolk but at the men who had misgoverned with him and were still close around the king. Among loud demands for justice and good government, hatred of Suffolk seemed hardly dimmed. And now Alice, his widow, wanted Frevisse’s companionship and comfort.

  Fiercely and not quite as the words were in the psalm, Frevisse sharply whispered, “Eripe me. Domine, ab bomine malo, a viro vioknto custodi me.” Rescue me, Lord, from the evil man, from the violent man defend me. “Salve me, Domine, e manibus iniqui, superbi qui cogitant evertere gressus meos, qui abscondunt laqueum mihi.” Save me, Lord, from the hands of the wicked, the arrogant who plan to overthrow my course, who conceal a trap for me.

  She dropped her hands into her lap and opened her eyes.

  That was not the prayer she should be making. Or at the least not be praying it with anger. She did not believe Alice was evil or setting a trap for her, and if she could not pray better than that, she were best not to pray at all.

  But she needed prayer, and if not with words, then otherwise; and she closed her eyes again and with the deliberant skill she had learned through her nunnery years, steadied her breathing, slowed it, deepened it, let her mind rest on her breathing, rest in her breathing, let her breathing ease her out of her taut anger into quietness, breathing slowly, deeply, finding quiet in herself, drawing quiet into her …

  “Dame Frevisse?” someone whispered to her.

  Frevisse opened her eyes and looked at Sister Margrett hovering in front of the choir stalls. No nun should go out of the cloister unaccompanied by another nun. Sister Margrett, the youngest of St. Frideswide’s few nuns, was Domina Elisabeth’s choice to accompany Frevisse, and although Sister Margrett’s Benedictine clothing concealed, as it should, all of her except her face and hands, nothing could hide her glowing eagerness to be out and away as she said, “They’re ready.” The half-dozen men and two women whom Alice had sent with her message, so certain she’d been that Frevisse would be sent to her and their company be needed. She had slipped into the church while they were readying to ride this morning but they must be waiting now on their horses in the courtyard outside the cloister door, with nothing needed save Frevisse and Sister Margrett themselves. “Domina Elisabeth says you should come,” Sister Margrett urged, and with a nod that was already weary of the journey she had yet to make, Frevisse obediently rose to her feet.

  Chapter 3

  The manor of Hunsdon lay along a green swell of Hertfordshire countryside, quiet among its fields.

  The manor house was old, with parts added to and taken from it over the years, with newest to it a square, brick-built tower at one end. Sir William Oldhall had his study there, high enough that, with a squire left at the stair-foot, he could be certain nothing said in the wide room would be overheard by anyone.

  Not that either he or Joliffe was saying anything. With Sir William’s clerk sent out when Joliffe was shown in, the silence had settled while Sir William read the letter. Finishing it, he had laid it on the slanted top of his clerk’s desk and paced away to the window and had been standing there several long minutes now, looking out over the manor’s outer wall and the gentle roll of countryside all green and golden in the warm light of the quiet summer evening.

  Joliffe, leaning a hip against a corner of the heavy desk, watched him and waited. Sir William was much about Matthew Gough’s age, and Joliffe knew that, like Gough, Sir William had spent more years of his life than not in the French war. Unlike Gough, he had risen beyond the plain leading of men-at-arms to a place on the king’s council in Normandy and had served the duke of York when York was governor there for the king.

  York had depended heavily on men like Sir William, experienced in the ever-shifting warfare along the borders between English- and French-held territories, to advise him as he had steadied and strengthened matters into an uneasy peace but peace nonetheless.

  The trouble had been that governing and the garrisons that went with it in Normandy cost money; and while the war had been one thing when it was a matter of lands to seize and pillage to be had, it was another now it had ceased to be profitable, when there was neither glory nor fortune to be had, only trouble and costs. The war had poured wealth from France into England, and the lords around the king had not been minded to pour it back, too busy running the king’s household into wallowing-deep debt and the royal government to hell, their greed and corrupted justice grinding down the law and lesser men.

  King Henry—reputedly busy with his prayers—gave no sign of knowing or caring; and Richard of York had been recalled from Normandy, and with Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset made governor in his stead, the war was now being disastrously lost.

  Sir William had left France when York did; had become one of York’s household councilors and, quietly, the man who kept York informed, now he sent away to Ireland, of how matters went in England. And Joliffe was among the men used by Sir William to learn the things York needed to know.

  Sir William turned from the window and pointed at the letter. “It hadn’t been sealed. Did you read it?”

  “Yes.” If men were being killed because of the thing, and he was carrying it, he assuredly had read it.

  “It’s proof of nothing,” Sir William said. “It’s one man’s word of what he saw.”

  It was that, but, “Very detailed word,” Joliffe said evenly. “Who and where and when, and what happened afterward that made this Robert James remember about that who and where and when.” And a more damning set of statements he had never read, if they were true. They looked true, with anger there in every blot of ink and pen-gouge into the paper, with Robert James’ name scrawled furiously at the bottom, followed by an equally scrawled assurance that all the above was true, so help him Christ and Mary and all the saints.

  Joliffe’s own grim thought was that if what he claimed was true, there were men who were going to be in need of help from all the hosts of heaven far more than Robert James was.

  Sir William turned back to the window, his hands behind his back, the back of the right one slapping up and down in the palm of the left as he muttered, “But it’s still not proof. We could name names until blue in our faces and be no further along, because Suffolk’s people and Somerset would deny everything just as fast as we said it.”

  Which was true, but Joliffe offered, “It ties together pieces that otherwise hang oddly, left on their own, and it gives us somewhere to ask questions we didn’t have before.”

  “Where?” Sir William demanded, turning around again. Did Gough say where this Robert James is now?”

  “No.”

  “Probably dead. Somewhere in the rout the war’s become. Like Gough.”
/>   Joliffe held back from pointing out that Gough had not died in the war, had not even been killed by one of the rebels he’d been fighting. Sir William was right that this Robert James’ angrily written accusations were proof of nothing. A great deal more would be needed to bring an indictment that would hold against men so powerful as the duke of Suffolk had been and the duke of Somerset now was. But James’ accusations were a place to start, and Joliffe had thought Sir William would take them up more readily than this.

  “Damn it about Gough,” Sir William said. “He deserved better than that.”

  Joliffe kept to himself his thought that a great many men deserved better than what they got. Instead he said, “There’s use can be made of these accusations, even so.”

  Sir William moved away from the window, began to pace the chamber, still restlessly slapping his hands into each other behind his back. “There is. Yes. We have names, anyway.”

  “Men who might be ready to talk,” Joliffe prompted. “If asked.”

  “It’s just that this Robert James is nobody. Who’s going to believe him?” Sir William said. “He was with Surienne, too. That makes anything he says suspect. He could just be setting up to defend himself.”

  “He’s too nobody to need to defend himself,” Joliffe said, putting more patience than he felt into the words. “He’s a plain man-at-arms, briefly stuck with being lieutenant of Bayeux. He’s not anyone who’s likely to be sought out and blamed for anything.”

  Sir William pointed at the paper. “He saw things. He heard things. Surienne told him things.”

  “He saw what a lot of men must have seen. He overheard what Surienne said because Surienne said it in the great hall where surely any number of other men heard it, too.” And how dearly Joliffe wished they had those men’s testimonies to go with James’, because it was Sir Francois de Surienne who had kicked out the keystone that had held together the whole structure of peace in France. A mercenary captain under English command, he had, despite the truce, swept a force into the Breton border town of Fougeres early last year. His men had pillaged the town and then held it in the teeth of angry Breton and French protests to the duke of Somerset that he rein in Surienne and make restitution for the wrong.