16 The Traitor's Tale Read online

  “Not that he’s going to be so pleased about that,” Joliffe said with the ease of a man who thought himself well out of it. “That’s their fifth, and three girls besides.”

  He had used this imagined cousin before, moving him about the countryside as need be, with the number of children increasing every time. Now one of the men here, more sorrowful over his ale than the rest, sighed into his almost-empty bowl and mourned, “Not one do I have. Not one to carry my name on after me.”

  His fellow on the right poked an elbow into his ribs. “You’ve not a wife either, Dai. Try getting yourself one of those before you start in about having no children.”

  Dai straightened. “A wife?” he said indignantly. “Do I look mad, man, that I’d be saddling and bridling myself with a wife?”

  “Drink up,” said someone across the table and poured more ale into Dai’s bowl from the pitcher they were all sharing. Dai buried his face in that as solace for his griefs, and Joliffe said at large to the rest of them, “I hear I’ve missed a murder. Some fellow was killed in here lately, was he?”

  In some times and some places there was need to take the long way round to find out things, but he’d guessed rightly that here a straight question would be enough.

  “Didn’t happen in here,” one of the men said with good cheer. “It was in the street right outside.”

  “Started in here, though,” someone else said.

  “The fight started here. The dead fellow wasn’t part of it then, though, was he?” a third offered.

  “Wasn’t part of it at all,” Dai said, still brooding into his ale bowl. He seemed the sort given to brooding about all and everything. “The fellows didn’t even know him. Hell’s blowsy bottom, nobody here even knew them, let alone them knowing anybody.”

  Letting himself look as confused as he was by then, Joliffe asked, “It was all strangers? The dead man and the men who killed him?”

  “Nay,” the first man said. “We knew the dead man, well enough.”

  “He wasn’t dead then, though,” said Dai.

  His fellows ignored him, one of them saying, “Didn’t know him all that well. Had seen him hereabout now and again of late. Knew he was the duke of Suffolk’s man …” Two of the men spat aside into the rushes. “… and that he came sometimes to see Sir Thomas.”

  “Sir Thomas Stanley, that is?” Joliffe asked.

  “Aye. Him,” the man said, with no great liking.

  Another man spat into the rushes, maybe simply because he needed to, but by a swift glance around the table, Joliffe saw several other men who looked as if they wanted to. “King’s chamberlain here in North Wales, isn’t Sir Thomas?” Joliffe asked, raising a hand for another pitcher of ale to be brought, the present one running low.

  “That’s him, and a quicker man to the bribe you’ll not find this side of the border.”

  “Thank St. David he’s a royal officer. If he were not, he’d be the kind of thief as would have every sheep off the hills and into his bag.”

  “Not that he might not anyway, the way he goes on,” Dai said into his bowl.

  “Wasn’t for Sir Thomas that Hampden was this end of town that night, though,” one of the men said, grinning.

  Others chuckled or grunted appreciatively. Taking a guess, Joliffe said, “Some woman?”

  “One of Sweet Mabli’s, yes. Has her place in Trudge Alley. If you’ve a mind,” the man beside him on the bench said with a wink and a nudge.

  “Not tonight,” Joliffe said with a regretting shake of his head. “I’ve done enough riding for the day.”

  That brought laughter and let him lead the talk on about Hampden. The way the men told it—and they had all been here the night it happened and given testimony at the crowner’s inquest since then—there had been three men in here that night that no one had seen before. They had kept themselves to themselves, drinking, throwing some dice, not talking much among themselves but making no trouble.

  “Sitting right there,” Dai said, pointing at a table near the streetward door. “At that very table there.”

  Then suddenly two of them had sprung to their feet and started shouting and shoving at each other. The other one had joined in and without anyone had time to tell them to take it outside they had gone out the door, quarreling and shoving at each other.

  “None of us saw them with any daggers drawn,” the man next to Dai said now. “Those must have come out as soon as they were out the door.”

  “Hampden’s bad fortune was he was out there, too,” another put in. “On his way back to the castle from Sweet Mabli’s. Just passing by.”

  “In time to take a dagger-thrust under the ribs.” Dai shook a brooding head. “It goes to show. It does indeed.”

  No one asked him what it showed.

  “More than one thrust,” someone else said. “Three. One to the heart from the front. Another in the back. A third in the gut.”

  “Couldn’t have done it better if they’d been trying,” said Dai to his ale bowl.

  “So what’s happened to them?” Joliffe asked.

  “Nothing. Killing the wrong man must have sobered them out of their own quarrel on the instant. By the time any of us were into the street to see if they’d come to fist-punching each other yet, Hampden was lying there …”

  “Took us a moment to realize it was him and not one of them, but he was dead already anyway.”

  “… and they were run off into the dark. They had horses somewhere …”

  “… and sense enough to clear off while the clearing off was good. Never hide nor hair of them did we see again, no more than did Sir Thomas’ men out hunting them next day.”

  “Left us the trouble and cost of the crowner and not a single good hanging in return,” said one of the card-players.

  He threw down a final pair of cards and added, “Damn them.” Whether at the cards or the fled men was unclear.

  The game was over, anyway. His fellows threw down their cards, too. One of them scooped the little pile of farthings toward him from the center of the table, asking of Joliffe while he did, “Want to play?”

  That being as good a way out of talk about the murder as he was likely to get, Joliffe took it, meaning to keep at the game long enough for, hopefully, his questions about the murder to be lost in the general fog of drinking and good fellowship and no one likely to remember him particularly. For that to work, he had to be sure not to win too much, but given his usual luck at games of chance, that was no problem. By the time he drained a last draught of ale and stood up from the bench, saying he had to leave now if he was going to sleep in the bed he’d paid for, he had won some money and lost more, enough that the other players were sorry to see him go but were unlikely ever to think about him again.

  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 li
ke 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, dr
opping 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.”