For his own part, Joliffe rather thought he could avoid being foolish over a duke’s widow. His years as a player had given him a very firm understanding of the perils of pushing beyond his low place in the world’s way of things. The understanding had not always kept him where he ought to be, but it had made him wary of being more of a fool than need be, and he did not think he was fool enough to fall into any pointless longing after a duchess, no matter how young and lovely and gracious she might be. If nothing else, dust-dry account rolls, stiff letters of business, and whatever Master Wydeville was going to require of him should be sufficient safe-guard against time for idle indulgence in pointless languishing over the fair and unobtainable.
“Oh,” said Strugge now as he strapped shut his bag. “Sometimes her grace will want you to read to her in English and talk English with her. My lord of Bedford spoke French like a Frenchman, but he wanted her to know English, too. Seems a waste of time now. It’s not likely she’ll go to England anymore. But she sometimes keeps it up. Just so you’re warned.”
Joliffe thanked him.
Strugge hefted his bag off the bed, looked around the small room, said, “That’s it, then. I wish you good luck with it all.”
“And to you good luck with your travel and homecoming,” Joliffe answered.
“I get seasick,” Strugge said glumly and left.
Feeling no need to see him through whatever other good-byes he might want to make, Joliffe stayed sitting on the joint stool for a few long moments more, partly waiting to be certain Strugge was truly gone but mostly savoring being alone for the first time in days. Then he rose and, by way of claiming the place for his own, emptied the sparse contents of his sack into a small chest beside the bed and shoved the sack down beside them. His cloak already hung on a wall peg beside the wall-pole where his daily clothing would hang at night. He had so far spent his nights on a thin straw-filled pallet on the room’s rush-matted floor. Minded now to try the bed, he lay down on it, to find its somewhat thicker straw-filled mattress on boards not much better, but being off the floor would be warmer, and given he had spent most of his nights these past years sleeping on the ground, he hardly had reason for complaint about boards; and the blankets were good. He would be comfortable enough, he supposed as he looked around this place that was now “his.” As high in the house and close under the roof as the dorter for the bishop’s men, the dorter here at least had board walls between the beds, and rough-woven gray curtains across their outer ends, giving the lesser men of Lady Jacquetta’s household a sort of privacy. If not a room—given its length and narrowness, it was more like a stall—at least it was his own.
He sat up. He could not expect this kind of ease after today, and he saw no use in wasting it lingering here in utter idleness. Tomorrow would be soon enough to take to Strugge’s desk—my desk, Joliffe reminded himself—in the small chamber the English secretary shared with the duchess’ French secretary and several other officers and clerks of the household, just beyond the room where he had met with Master Wydeville. What he needed was to learn more about this part of the hôtel. Strugge had led him over much of it yesterday afternoon, but had balanced fairly evenly between complaint and vagueness with very little detail in between: “That way goes to the kitchen. You shouldn’t ever have to bother with that,” and “The privy on this floor is along there,” with a vague pointing, as if that were sufficient for someone else to understand everything. Joliffe had never decided if people who did that simply supposed that if they knew a thing, then you must know it, too, or that they took a private delight in feeling superior because they knew a thing and kept you from knowing it.
Either way, now looked the best time to learn at least this half of the hôtel better than he yet did, before either Master Wydeville or Lady Jacquetta had need of him. Without Strugge, he might still be unfamiliar enough to be challenged, but he had his loose black over-gown that made him plainly a member of the household. It was part of his pay, this robe. They had been given out to much of the household after Bedford’s death, to make an outward show of mourning to match the inward there should be. Plain servants, such as had come to the quay, had to settle for wearing a black band across their usual livery, but Joliffe, being higher in the household, had the gown. As befitted his moderate place in the household, it was of well-dyed wool of medium weight and went to somewhat below his knees. The collar, standing high under his chin, and the long sleeves, close-fitted to his wrists, hid his far less worthy shirt. His own hosen were satisfactorily black, but the clerk of the household’s wardrobe, having given him the gown, had eyed his travel-worn brown leather shoes with disfavor and handed him a pair in black leather, made of finer leather than he was used to and meant for house-wear, not days and miles of solid walking. They still felt unfamiliar on his feet. Not uncomfortable. Just unfamiliar.
So did the gown, come to that. He was only used to wearing fine garments when he was playing a part in a play that needed them, not when simply being himself. But he was not being himself here, he reminded himself as he left the dorter by the same spiraled stairs that led down past the offices. Here he was being John Ripon, a disgraced clerk who—while not worth much himself—was at least used to being around life’s finer things. Whatever unease Joliffe might have, John Ripon, having been in Cardinal Beaufort’s wealthy household, would not be uncomfortable here. He had to keep that in mind.
As it happened, no one challenged his right to be anywhere in the while he roamed down and up and around Lady Jacquetta’s part of the hôtel. He did not waste time going all the way down the stairs from the dorter. Strugge had showed him that at their bottom a door opened into a corner where the forward courtyard and the stableyard met. “But you’re not likely to be riding,” Strugge had said. “My lady has ridden no further than the cathedral these months since my lord of Bedford died. Things haven’t been safe enough outside the walls, and that doesn’t look like changing.”
Since Joliffe had no desire to leave the safety of Rouen’s walls, that suited him well enough. He had noted, though, in the brief moment he stepped outside the door, that it was angled so that whoever came or went that way through the stableyard would not be readily seen from almost anywhere in the foreyard—something surely useful for the subtle coming and going of anyone Master Wydeville wished to come and go subtly, Joliffe had thought as Strugge turned back into the hôtel, saying, “If we were going to the gardens, it would be from here, around through the back gate from the stableyard, but it’s not the weather for gardens.”
Nor was it today, to Joliffe’s mind, and he chose instead to wend all the way down to the cellars instead, where a clerk was counting off the gallon pitchers of cider several servants were carrying out, undoubtedly drawn from a barrel somewhere among the stores of wine and foods and other goods stored vault-high among the thick stone pillars and cold shadows. After there, the warm, well-smelling, busy kitchen was welcome, but he no more than looked in, to avoid the likely irk of the cooks, their kind never pleased to have someone of no use to them in their way. He went on to try various stairways and put his head cautiously around open doors. He found both ways into the minstrels gallery that looked out on the great hall from above the screens passage, and roamed the three great chambers—outer, solar, and bed—off the long gallery that in the duke of Bedford’s lifetime were only somewhat less public than the great hall itself and intended to show his wealth and power to such lords and others as were granted the favor of coming there. Glass, both plain and colored, was in every window, and high-set hooks showed that ceiling-high tapestries had once hung on almost every wall, but the chambers were empty now, tapestries and furnishings gone, and undoubtedly the rooms—this whole side of the hôtel—were older and less fine than the side Bishop Louys now had. Joliffe had asked about that while Strugge was taking him briskly through them.
With a shrug and not much interest, Strugge had answered, “This side is what was here when my lord of Bedford bought Joyeux Repos. He had it made
over and used it while the new half was built, but Lady Anne died about the time it was finished, and he went cold toward it. When he married Lady Jacquetta, he gave it over to her, and she lived there without he ever really did. He always kept more to this side when he wasn’t at the castle or altogether gone from Rouen. Now that she’s his widow and living quiet in her widowhood, it’s better sense for Bishop Louys to have the finer side, and for her to shift here. Not these rooms of course. There’s no sense to having them opened, while she’s still living so private in her mourning. That’s why she has those lesser rooms above here. Where I made you known to her.” Said as if Joliffe might have somehow let slip from mind being shown to Lady Jacquetta the day before. Strugge’s voice had turned pious. “She has those, and her uncle has the fine new side of the hôtel, and the duke lies in the cathedral in that small room we all come to at the last. There’s the turn of Fortuna’s wheel for you.”
John Ripon had murmured solemn agreement with that piece of commonplace piety that Joliffe could have done without. What he wanted was to know more about how matters had been between the duke of Bedford and his apparently neglected young wife. He had held back from asking because the less Strugge had to remember or mention about John Ripon, the better, and the less John Ripon asked or said, the less there would be left about him in Strugge’s mind.
Always supposing Strugge didn’t forget John Ripon and everything else about Rouen as soon as he was safe in Gloucestershire again.
But Joliffe’s curiosity remained, and having seen as much as he freely could around the hôtel, he thought that perhaps time was come for John Ripon to betake himself deliberately into the Lady Jacquetta’s presence, to see if she might have any present use for him—and maybe to satisfy some of his curiosity.
The January day being gray, cold, and blustered by a strong wind, Joliffe supposed the duchess and her ladies were not in the gardens; and since there had been no bustle of them going altogether out from Joyeux Repos or even down to the great hall, they must be in her rooms. Those were reached by a stairway from a corner of the outermost of the three great chambers and were, yes, less fine, but to Joliffe, in the brief while he was there, they had seemed ample of space and comforts, being originally intended less to impress the world than for the more private living of Joyeux Repos’ lord and lady, he supposed.
The household yeoman on guard at the head of the stairs shoved forward from the wall where he had been leaning and said, “You’re on your own today. Strugge is gone?”
Joliffe remembered he was Foulke, that he had been at duty here the other day, and that Strugge had been haughty at him. So Joliffe grinned and said, “Well and truly gone and expecting to be sick as soon as the ship sails.”
Foulke grinned back. He was hearty English, part of the thorough mix of English and French the late duke had preferred for his household, and ready to be friendly if Joliffe was. “You want to see my lady? I’ll ask,” he said and opened the door to what Joliffe remembered was Lady Jacquetta’s parlor.
It was a pleasant room, with a long window overlooking the gardens, and the walls hung with tapestries woven in wide bands of blue and white and red emblazoned with the gold-crowned red lion of Luxembourg and the golden woodstocks of the duke of Bedford. When Joliffe was here with Strugge, the duchess had been seated on the window seat with two small white dogs nested in the trailing hems of her skirts. Her half-dozen ladies had been sitting here and there on cushioned chests or else cushions on the floor, and an older woman he had supposed was the dragon M’dame had had a chair near the hearth. One of the women had been reading aloud in French from some book. The others, including Lady Jacquetta and M’dame, had had one manner or another of sewing in hand. In their black mourning gowns, they had been a drift of darkness around the otherwise bright chamber, but all had been ordered, quiet, and gracious.
Today it was not. Today, although Lady Jacquetta again sat at the window, her ladies were in flurry about the room, turning over cushions and looking under things in seeming search for something. One of the chests stood open, its contents disemboweled onto the floor beside it, M’dame was not to be seen, and the dogs were scampering and yipping into everyone’s way.
Joliffe’s first instinct was to retreat, but Lady Jacquetta saw him and said, “Ah! You. You are Master Ripon, yes?”
The flurry in the room stopped, everyone—even the dogs—pausing to look at him.
Joliffe bowed low. “Yes, my lady.”
She gave a graceful beckon for him to come to her. As he obeyed, Foulke closed the door behind him and the two dogs leaped toward him, shrilly delighted to bark at someone new. Lady Jacquetta said quietly, “Ryn. Kywaert. Enough.” And to her ladies, “Search on. It must be here somewhere.”
The dogs went mercifully silent. The women flurried back to their task. Joliffe, crossing the chamber as when Strugge first presented him here, was again taken with Lady Jacquetta’s loveliness. She was young and slender, her face delicately boned and pale and made all the more pale and delicate by her tight, face-surrounding widow’s wimple. A hint of golden-fair hair showed at her temples, but all the rest of her was lost in the yards of her black widow’s gown and the veil trailing from her wimple, save for her white hands graced with various golden and gemmed rings.
Now in front of her, Joliffe bowed again, and she gestured for him to kneel there. In the bustle of the room, they had to be near to talk together, but to talk with him standing over her would have been awkward for her neck, and to have him sit beside her would have been unseemly. He went down on one knee, the dogs began to circle him, sniffing interestedly, and she asked him in English, “Strugge is gone?”
“Yes, my lady.”
“Good.” She patted the seat beside her and ordered at the dogs, “Here.” They jumped up, one beside her, the other onto her lap. “He was a tedious man. Are you going to be tedious, Master Ripon?”
“Should I prove so, I trust your grace will tell me, that I may improve.”
Lady Jacquetta laughed at him. “Good. Already you have less tedious than he did.”
Her words were made the more charming by the French glide she gave to them, but Joliffe made bold to say, “Your grace may mean ‘you are less tedious than he was.’ ”
“What? Oh.” Momentarily, she was not pleased to be corrected and showed it. Then her face cleared and she said, “Good. I need to know. We will talk English, and you will tell me what I say wrong.” Then, in French, she snapped impatiently at everyone else, “Oh, let it go! If we stop looking for it, we will find it. That is always the way.” As the flurry fell away, she added to Joliffe, “We came here a week ago and still everything is not found out and in its place.” She looked around, and Joliffe could not tell what her deeper thoughts were as she went on, “Where I lived as my lord of Bedford’s wife is too splendid for his widow, yes. So that is now my uncle’s, and I am here.” She nodded firmly. “Yes. It’s well. Even though my lord husband had there built, I think he always liked here better. I think I do, too. These are quieter rooms. Except”—her voice sharpened and rose—“my women still cannot find everything.” Then she smiled on Joliffe, and her brief tartness was immediately nothing against her sweet, young loveliness.
Add that loveliness to her wealth as the dowager duchess of Bedford, thought Joliffe, and her powerful Luxembourg relatives would have no trouble finding another marriage for her. Which was surely what they had in mind: she was not someone to be wasted in widowhood when she could bring another useful alliance to her family.
Just now, though, her smile was on him as she made a small lift of her hand to bid him rise, and said, while he did, “I would hear how you read. Better than Master Strugge, I hope. Tonight come here after supper. You will read to us. Monday we will begin on my accounts my uncle brought from England for me. The Michaelmas accounts, yes?”
Joliffe bowed. “As it pleases you, my lady.”
Understanding he was dismissed and aware of her ladies brightly watching him, he retre
ated, only belatedly noting M’dame now standing in the room’s other doorway, likewise watching him. Strugge had said, “M’dame watches over my lady like a dragon over its hoard of gold.” Which Lady Jacquetta indeed was. And being “a hoard of gold” wrapped in a woman’s fair body, she was surely in need of such a dragon as M’dame, to keep all safe against thieves.
But of course this was a “hoard of gold” with a mind of its own, which might make the dragon’s task more challenging and the dragon that much fiercer; and Joliffe made sure he looked no more than very humble as he bowed at the parlor’s outer door and escaped.
A Play of Treachery Page 8