15 The Sempster's Tale Read online

  That had not been given, either, and since then prayer had come less easily to her. Not because her faith was less, but because she doubted how much use her prayers were. God’s will was God’s will, and what good were prayers?

  She had not said that to anyone. Most certainly had not said it to her priest. She had bought Masses for Matthew’s soul; still went to church on Sundays and holy days and some saints’ days; still made confession and Communion at Eastertide; had even confessed her sin of lust, naming no names, and faithfully did penance for it two days a week by fasting. Since her longing for Daved was unabated and she gave way to it whenever he was here, she didn’t know how much good that penance did her soul and did not want to know, because knowing would make no difference. She would have Daved while she might and, when she could not, then make what fuller recompense she could.

  And, despite herself, she prayed that recompense would be long in coming.

  So here she sat in darkness waiting for him. Worried because he wasn’t yet here. Afraid, as always, that something had happened to him. Knowing the day would come when he would never come to her again, that time would come when even these little whiles of him would end and she would maybe never know why. Life held so many perils, and more perils for him than for most because he was a merchant and traveled, and more beyond that because of his deadly secret. And there was always illness. And he might decide he loved his wife after all, or at least owed her the duty of faithfulness.

  Anne’s hands in her lap clutched tightly to each other. Mostly she kept away from thought of Daved’s wife. Like her own marriage to Matthew, Daved’s marriage had been made for him, but he had been hardly fifteen at the time and not even met his wife before their wedding but, “There’s nothing against her,” he had said the one time he had talked of her. That had been before he and Anne first came together, when he had been warning her about himself. “She sees well to everything that’s ours when I’m gone. When I’m with her, she sees well to me. But for no one’s fault, except maybe mine for being gone so often and long, there’s never been more than duty between us.”

  Because she and Daved had both known where their talk was going, what they both intended before they were done, Anne had been able to ask, “Do you… bed her?”

  Gently, steadily, Daved had answered, “I do all a husband’s duties. It’s her right.”

  ‘Will she know about me?“

  ‘I will not tell her, no.“

  But this woman whose name he had never said would be the one told if anything befell him. She would be the one able to grieve for him as his widow if, God forbid, he died. And Anne—whether she ever learned his fate or he simply never came back to her—would never be able openly to grieve at all. No matter what their love, all she could ever be was one of the secrets in his life. And the secrets in his life were beginning to frighten her more, the more she knew of them. This secret shifting of gold for one. He was very at ease with the secrecy of it. How much of such things did he do? That Raulyn was part of it still a little surprised her but…

  Sitting there in the dark, able to look at nothing but her thoughts, she looked inward for her surprise that Daved did such a thing and found no surprise at all. Why not? But she knew. Had known from the first that there was more to him than his outward seeming.

  Or did she tell herself that to ease the new fears that came with knowing yet more of how deep that other part of his life must run, how much besides “merchant” he was?

  How many seemings—how many lies—did Daved live with?

  The question came unbidden and unwanted. He seemed to be only a merchant but he was more. He seemed to be a Christian and he was not. He seemed to love her…

  Was that another lie among the rest?

  With a certainty that went beyond thought, Anne refused that. Their love was no lie. And if it came to lying, what of herself? She seemed a chaste widow and that was a lie as deep as any in which Daved lived. She was anything but chaste, and at that moment she heard his footfall and was on her feet before his first soft knock. She had not barred the door, only needed to lift the latch, slightly open the door, and he was there, slipping past her, briefly a blackness against the light of the lanterns hung at either end of the street, then simply a felt shape behind her while she shut the door and swung the bar down across it.

  With all the world and its fears shut out, she turned to him, put her arms around him, drew him to her even as he pressed her back against the door, his body to hers, their mouths finding each other in the darkness. With fiercely matched need, they took each other there against the door; and later, naked then, in her bed; and then again, until finally they lay quiet in each other’s arms, satiate and tired at last.

  She slept a little, her head on his shoulder, and awakened to his hand slowly stroking down her spine. She shivered with pleasure and lifted her head to smile into his eyes, able to see him in the starlight through the open gardenward window. She had always slept with windows closed until one warm night Daved had said he spent many a night, shipboard and otherwise, without a window to shut and had never suffered for it, so would she risk the night vapors or did he have to smother here? She had laughed and set the shutters wide, and often did now, even when alone. That Daved brought her to dare things and see things in ways she would not have without him were among the reasons she loved him.

  Whether, at the last, that would be to the good or bad she mostly kept from wondering—most carefully kept from wondering it when they were together, because in those brief whiles she wanted no thought of anything but him, no thought of otherwise or afterwards, and now she smiled into his eyes, and he smiled into hers, said softly, “My love,” and touched her cheek with the gentleness that always came to them after their desperate need of each other was eased. “My very love.”

  “My very love,” Anne softly echoed, kissed him gently, and settled her head into the curve of his shoulder again. They lay content to be with one another; but before long the night’s deep silence and their peace was stirred by, first, a bird’s twittering under the house eaves and then a cautious bird-trill from the garden. Dawn was nearing and Anne’s arm tightened across Daved, both of them knowing he should leave in darkness the way he had come in darkness. But for a little longer…

  Daved sighed and stirred and Anne let him go. Careful not to touch each other, they slid from the bed and dressed. Hers was the easier. She only slipped on her chemise, and Daved, sitting on the bed-edge to pull on his hosen, glanced at her and whispered, “That’s unkind.”

  ‘Sir?“ Anne asked innocently.

  He reached out and cupped a hand over one of her breasts. “To put so little over your loveliness that I want to strip you naked again.”

  Anne laughed softly and reached toward him in return; but Daved stood abruptly up and away from her, saying, “Oh, no you don’t.”

  Anne laughed again and stayed where she was, admiring his legs while he took his shirt from the floor where it had fallen. With it, he took up the narrow length of soft-woven wool, tasseled at each corner, that he wore under his shirt, wrapped around his waist and always out of sight. She knew the thing had something to do with being a Jew and that was all, and she turned her eyes away until it was hidden under his shirt and he was putting on his doublet. While he buttoned the doublet’s front, she picked up his belt and its purse and sheathed dagger from the floor where they had dropped when she had undone the belt from his waist in her eagerness to have him. She held them ready while he tied his hosen to his doublet’s lower edge, sat on the bed again, groped for his shoes, and put them on. Standing, he took the belt, buckled it on, settled the purse on one hip, his dagger on the other, and paused, one hand on the purse as if he had remembered something. Not the gold. The one thing they had done between coming upstairs and reaching the bed was he had given her another pouch that she had already locked away. But with apology in his voice, Daved said, “There’s one more thing I’d ask of you. I’ve lacked the chance to do it myself and
don’t know, now, if I’ll have the chance.” He brought out a folded, sealed paper from his purse. “This is a letter that needs go to Joanne of Dartmouth in the House of Converts outside Ludgate. Do you know it? Could you take it to her?”

  ‘Of course,“ Anne said and held out a hand as if her mind had not paused and jerked at his words. What had Daved to do with the House of Converts? The place had been founded, when there were still Jews in England, by a long-gone king as somewhere for Jews to live after they had become Christians. Because by Christian law every Jew in Christendom was the property of one lord or another, with each lord free to make what profit he could from them, and because no lord relished his loss of profit when one of his Jews turned Christian, a Jew who converted forfeited all that he held—land, house, all lesser goods, even his clothing and the tools of his trade—to his lord. The House of Converts had been endowed to shelter and support Jews impoverished by their baptism, and through all the years since Jews were gone from England it had sheltered Jews who came from abroad to its safety. Anne could remember at least twice when prayers were asked in London’s churches for the soul of a Jew newly come to Christ and England. But what business did Daved have with anyone there?

  ‘It’s a thing my uncle and I sometimes do,“ he said. ”We bring letters that can’t come into England any other way.“

  Letters. Another thing about him she hadn’t known, and a small corner of her mind went cold with wondering yet again how much else there was in his life secret from her. But she only said, “Joanne of Dartmouth. Yes. I’ll take it to her.”

  Still with apology, Daved said, “She may not be there anymore. I don’t know how long ago it was she converted. Her family disowned her when she did. Or her brother did as head of her family and no one else had a choice. He’s lately dead, and there are some who want to know how she does and to tell her how they do. But that’s a thing best not done openly, for her good and theirs. If you can find a way to give this to her with no one else the wiser, that would be good. Anne, I’m sorry. I wouldn’t ask this if so much else wasn’t happening.”

  She went to him, as if closing the distance between their bodies might close the distance her thoughts were making between him and her. Since she had known from the first the necessity of secrecy in his life, should it make difference there was more secrecy than she had ever guessed at? With a quick, firm kiss she resealed their never-spoken bargain against questions between them, and Daved held her tightly to him, his face pressed against her hair.

  But there was ever more birdsong in the garden, and Anne drew back. He had to go while darkness held and they both knew it, and he turned from her, gathered his loose, open-fronted surcoat from the chair, and went down the stairs, Anne following him. In the shop he shrugged into the surcoat while she unbarred the door, and when she turned from doing that, he gathered her to him for a last kiss. Then he was gone, slipped out through the barely opened door and away into London’s dawn-darkness.

  Silently, with the great care of wanting to think of nothing else, Anne shut the door behind him, barred it again, and stood listening for any outside sound that might mean trouble but heard only Bette’s even breathing from the kitchen. Staying where she was, Anne prayed him safely away through the streets. Their small whiles together were all they had— were all they were ever likely to have—and in those whiles she wanted no question in her heart or mind about what had gone before or would come afterward. It was when he was gone from her that questions came. Questions and grief for all they would never have, all she must never hope for.

  Pressing her hands flat to the door and leaning her forehead against the wood between them, she let the hot, slow tears slide down her cheeks.

  Chapter 7

  The clear dawn was slowly blooming into a spread of gold, greens, reds, and blues through the painted glass of St. Helen’s church’s east window above the choir stalls where the nuns were making their way through the sunrise-welcoming Office of Prime with psalms and prayers of hope for a good and godly day to come.

  Frevisse, too wryly aware of how often that hope was unfulfilled, especially doubted today would be either good or godly. Nor were her feelings helped by being in an unfamiliar church among unfamiliar nuns. The Offices of prayer were the same across Christendom, but each nunnery was its own place, and the differences of pace and blended voices through the prayers and psalms might be slight but it was like the slight stubbing of a toe when walking a familiar way—it threw off the stride.

  Besides that, the midnight Offices had come, as always, in the middle of the night, with afterward return to bed until time to rise for Prime, and summer nights were shorter than winter ones. This near to midsummer, dawn came far too soon after midnight and last night Frevisse had slept little even in that little time meant for sleep. After Lauds, her thoughts had started up and refused to be quelled, and though she had hoped to weave her worries into Prime’s psalms and prayers and leave them there, this morning worry was stronger than intent.

  ‘… in Domino confisus, non vacillavi. Scrutare me, Domine, et proba me… Non sedeo cum viris iniquis… Odi conventum male agentium et cum impüs non consido.“ … in the Lord I trust, I have not wavered. Search me, Lord, and prove me… I do not sit with unjust men… I hate a gathering of evildoers and with the impious I do not sit down.

  Instead of shelter, the words brought up thoughts of the bag of gold weighing twice as heavy on her mind as it presently did around her neck. What wrongs had Suffolk done to gain such wealth? What more wrong was being done in the shifting of it out of England and back again? Was she, by helping at it, “sitting down with unjust men?” And how much more of it would there be? How could she hide it all well enough to keep it secret, now she had committed herself to this deception?

  And there was the bishop of Salisbury’s murder. Dame Clemens had been exclaiming over it when they rejoined her yesterday, and loud, satisfied talk of it had been in the streets all the way back to St. Helen’s, with the general anger at the king added in, one man loud among other loud men along the street declaring, “That Jack Cade has the right hold on things. By the sound of him, he’s nobody’s fool.”

  ‘Not so much a fool as the king is, anyway,“ someone else said, and they had all broken into rawking laughter.

  In St. Helen’s the talk had been more hushed, but a nun’s slight mention of Salisbury as a martyr had brought surprisingly rude laughter from more nuns than not.

  ‘There was nothing of the martyr about either him or that Chichester,“ an older nun had said bluntly. ”They were greed-ridden bastards, and the worms are welcome to them.“

  There was talk, too, that King Henry was gone from Westminster and not toward the rebels but north, maybe to Berkhampstead.

  ‘Why there?“ a nun had asked.

  ‘Because it’s on the road to even farther away from London,“ another snapped.

  It seemed even the nuns had had enough of the king, but Frevisse’s own great worry remained the gold. In the dorter here, as in St. Frideswide’s, she had a sleeping cell to herself, so at bedtime she had slipped the pouch under her pillow when she had undressed to the undergown in which she slept. Nunnery pillows were thin, though, and the pouch had made such an uncomfortable lump under her head that she almost welcomed slipping the cord around her neck again when she went to the Offices. How much more would there be? Suppose there was finally too much of it for her to carry unseen? What was she supposed to do then? Apparently that problem was to be all hers.

  Prime came to its end with the blessing, “Dies et actus nostras in sua pace disponat Dominus omnipotens.”—May the almighty Lord place in his peace our days and acts.—and she made the response, “Amen,” with her whole heart, little though she thought peace was likely to come to her soon. Indeed, she was worrying at the problem of the gold again by the time she and Dame Juliana were following the St. Helen’s nuns along the cloister walk to the refectory for their slight breakfast of ale and thickly buttered bread that was supposed
to curb their hunger until midday dinner.

  Today, though, dinner would be more than ample for her and Dame Juliana. A message had been brought after her return here yesterday, inviting her and Dame Juliana to Master Grene’s house to dine. It was for more than courtesy’s sake, Frevisse supposed. He likely meant it for chance to show them his best cloth, in hope Frevisse would buy from him what was needed for the Suffolk vestments, and Frevisse thought she very likely would, since he was unlikely to risk the duchess of Suffolk’s disfavor by ill-dealing with her. But going there might keep her from Mistress Blakhall’s today, and except she had to keep a goodly outward front for why she was in London, she would have been tempted to refuse.

  There was still the matter of the cloth for St. Frideswide’s, too. She had considered the possibility of hiding at least some of the gold in the cloth; but even if she somehow did, when time came to give Alice the coins how would she go about getting them out again from cloth wrapped and packaged for travel without curiosity if not outright suspicions being awakened? Her better thought—and the one she settled on while breaking her fast among the other nuns—was that the books she was supposed to buy unbound would surely be wrapped in waxed cloth to protect them. If she likewise demanded a box for them, too—a small, lidded chest—and had it with her in her sleeping cell, she would easily be able to spread coins flat in the box’s bottom or layer them between pages. With the box then strapped shut, the coins were unlikely to be found by chance, and it was against chance she had to guard, because anyone who knew she had the gold and looked for it would find it, whatever she did. That was the point of all the present secrecy—to keep anyone from even suspicion the gold existed. And if to justify buying the box she had to buy more books than first intended, then she would, and Alice could repay St. Frideswide’s for them. And for the box.