A Play of Treachery

by Margaret Frazer

  “Niece, it is their duty to think of all things. The oath is as much to keep you safe as anything else.”

  “Ha! To keep me safe as a prisoner is kept safe!” Lady Jacquetta scorned at him. “Master Wydeville, of everyone here, you knew my husband longest. Would he have wanted me to swear this oath?”

  Was there pleading behind her defiance and demand? Joliffe was not sure, and whether there was or not, Master Wydeville paused a long moment before answering slowly, “I do not see that the king’s council will be satisfied without your oath in this, my lady, nor that my lord of Bedford would see any dishonor in you swearing never to marry from this time forth without the king’s or else the council’s consent.”

  Lady Jacquetta stared at him for a long moment with narrowed, considering eyes, then gathered herself with a long in-drawn breath and turned back to her uncle. “On Master Wydeville’s advice, I will swear. What he said, I swear to. Will that suffice?”

  Her tone suggested it had better. Bishop Louys, more than ready to be satisfied, said back readily, “Yes. That will suffice.”

  “Bon,” Lady Jacquetta declared. She bent her head to him in courtesy, turned away with a wide swirl of her skirts, and swept out of the room.

  M’dame made quick curtsy of her own to the bishop and followed.

  Bishop Louys looked at Master Wydeville and said, “I had thought to have her swear it in the chapel at the altar.”

  “That might be making too much of the matter. Do we want to make more of it than she already has?” Master Wydeville asked.

  “No.” The bishop said with great certainty. “No. She has sworn in front of witnesses and will surely keep her word, now that it’s given.”

  “Surely she will,” Master Wydeville agreed. He bowed. “By your leave, my lord, I’ll return to my duties.”

  Leave was given, and Joliffe followed Master Wydeville away, until in the long gallery Master Wydeville stopped, faced him, and asked, “What did you learn from that?”

  Joliffe paused. Wary of saying all that he thought, he finally said, “Lady Jacquetta believes in your continued loyalty to her late husband and trusts you to advise her well.”

  “Yes. When you’re questioned about what passed between her and her uncle, you can say that, and that he asked this oath of her on behalf of the English council, that she doubted the rightness of it, asked my advice, then gave her oath. That’s all that need be said of it. The less talk of it the better.”

  Joliffe bent his head to show he accepted that. But “less talk” was not the same as “no thought,” and Joliffe was thinking several things as he returned to his desk.

  Chapter 17

  Joliffe’s learning of weaponry went on. Much of it he enjoyed, but one evening Master Doncaster showed how to use cord or hands to throttle a man—“Or woman,” Master Doncaster said grimly—into instant silence and quick death, and Joliffe found he felt befouled at having that knowledge in him. Sword and dagger and quarter-staffs could all be used at least sometimes in sport, for the pleasure of the skill. With throttling, the skill was for nothing but killing, and while Joliffe was grappling at the lesson’s end with the dark thought that he now had that skill in his hands, the badly painted wall hanging on the wall of the practice room moved suddenly and oddly and Master Wydeville side-stepped into sight from behind it.

  He was not a man much given to smiling at any time Joliffe had seen, but was so grim-faced now that Master Doncaster immediately asked with a worried edge, “What is it?”

  “A fresh warning from Roussel. Support for Burgundy is running higher than ever in Paris.”

  He was not merely grim, Joliffe realized. He was angry, too, and Master Doncaster swore one of the rawer oaths Joliffe had lately learned and added with furious disgust, “Paris! The dukes of Burgundy have seen to buckets of blood being shed in Paris streets, then more than once have all but spit in the people’s faces instead of helping them when they could have. But every chance it gets, Paris cheers Burgundy through the gates like he’s Christ himself. I say let the damn place go, instead of draining men and grain out of Normandy to it, trying to keep it ‘loyal.’ ”

  “Come to it, there are plenty in Normandy would sing gloria ad deum if we gave up and left here, too,” Master Wydeville said with a bitterness Joliffe had not heard in him before this.

  “They’ve forgotten it was their own lords ripping the guts out of the country well before we came,” Master Doncaster returned. “Master Ripon, I think we’re done here for tonight.”

  Joliffe would have been willing to hear more, but he bowed to both men and made for the stairs, catching up his cloak from a stool on the way and hearing, as he started down, Master Doncaster say, “I’m thinking of following Fastolf’s lead.”

  Joliffe did not know who Fastolf was or the why of the dark layer of unsaid things in Master Doncaster’s voice, and he was at the stairfoot before Master Wydeville answered, level-voiced, “Are you?”

  “Aren’t you?” Master Doncaster returned as levelly.

  Joliffe stopped at the stairfoot to swing his cloak around his shoulders, holding quiet through the pause until Master Wydeville said slowly, “For one reason and another, yes.”

  “There then,” Master Doncaster said.

  “There then,” Master Wydeville answered, flat-voiced.

  Not daring a longer lingering, Joliffe went on, taking their words’ discomfort with him. Were matters really so desperate that Paris could be lost? Master Wydeville, who likely knew matters best of anyone, seemed to think so. And if Paris could be lost, how secure was England’s hold on all the rest it held here?

  Through the next few days the weather at last began to gentle into enough hope of spring that Lady Jacquetta took to walking with her ladies in Joyeux Repos’ greening gardens some early afternoons, cloak-wrapped and hooded though they still needed to be, but although Joliffe watched and listened sharply, he heard nothing of what Master Wydeville had said about Paris, nor anything new about the war at large, and finally, to satisfy at least a small corner of his curiosity, in the hall one evening he asked Cauvet who Fastolf was, saying vaguely he had heard the name.

  “Sir John Fastolf, yes,” Cauvet answered readily. “One of our best captains in the war. A knight of your Garter and all. But of late he sold away his lands and rents and all he held here in Normandy and France, and went home to England, a very rich man, it’s said.”

  And a man whose example Master Wydeville and Master Doncaster thought they well might follow.

  The next day the usually gray sky gave way to fat drifts of white clouds across a sky scrubbed to a shining blue by a cold-gusting wind that kept at bay any feeling of spring; but something was different in the air, and Joliffe knew he was not alone among the secretaries and clerks in being restless. They were so obvious at it that perhaps a full hour before sundown Pierres put his head through the doorway from the outer chamber and said in his sober way, “Master Wydeville has gone out, but he gave me leave, if you were plainly doing your work badly, to give you leave to end early, while there was still sun to enjoy.”

  George and Jacques whooped and made quick work of shuffling papers away, closing inkwells, and cleaning pens. Henri and Bernard were less headlong about it, yet not far behind them in being done and out of the office, while Joliffe, having told George and Jacques he would catch them up at the Crescent Moon, took time over his going, thinking maybe he would not catch them up but wander on his own for a while, minded to be out of walls and into the open for a time. Not outside Rouen’s walls and into the countryside, surely, but maybe to the quay, for the wideness of river and sky there.

  He went up to the dormer for his cloak and hat and was coming down, headed for the foreyard, when he had near-collision with Foulke coming through the doorway from the long gallery. Crowding behind Foulke was Alain, who burst out over the chamberman’s shoulder, “Have you seen Lady Alizon today?”

  “Or at least since early in the afternoon,” Foulke said more temper
ately, drawing back from the doorway into the gallery, making Alain back away, too.

  Joliffe followed them, answering, “I’ve not.”

  “No one has,” Alain fretted. “Foulke said we had to ask everywhere before starting an outright search. We’re to the clerks the last thing.” He was trying to edge around to the stairway, but Foulke kept resolutely in his way.

  Not shifting either, Joliffe said, “They’ve been set free for the rest of today. They’re all gone.”

  “Then we’re away to search the gardens,” Foulke said. “Lady Isabelle and Lady Blanche say maybe she went out to the gardens sometime while Lady Jacquetta was at the chapel. I’d say that’s nonsense, in this cold and wind, but we have to look since she isn’t to be found elsewhere. You’ll come, too, to make it go the faster?”

  With no real reason to refuse, Joliffe said, “If you will.”

  “We won’t need to find someone else, then. Three’s enough,” said Foulke.

  Alain spun around and led the way, jigging with worried eagerness, through the unused great chambers to the private spiral stair by which Joliffe had gone down to the gardens from Lady Jacquetta’s bedchamber the day M’dame had sent him after Lady Jacquetta and Master Durevis. Beyond the door at its foot, the wind instantly found way through Joliffe’s cloak, gown, and doublet, and he echoed Foulke with, “It’s surely too cold for her to be out here,” while sweeping a long look over the garden.

  “We looked from my lady’s windows but didn’t see her,” Foulke agreed.

  “But Isabelle and Blanche said she went out,” Alain insisted. “If she’s in the laurel walk or the small garden, we wouldn’t see her. That’s where we must look.”

  “I’ll take the laurel walk,” Joliffe said, because the thick ever-green leaves would give some shelter from the wind.

  Foulke gave him a dour look of understanding, but agreed with a nod and, “The small garden for me then. Alain, you cut straight through the center, looking along all the paths, on chance she’s fallen and is lying somewhere.”

  That was well thought. The garden beds were raised. If the angle of sight was wrong and Alizon was lying somewhere, she might well be hidden from the windows.

  Leaving Foulke and Alain to go their ways, Joliffe went aside and into the laurel walk. It did indeed give comfort from the wind, but because it was deep in late afternoon shadows, he would have to walk its length to be sure Alizon was not there. If she was, she would be sitting on one of the sheltered, shadowed benches along it and very likely unwilling to be found, because even out of the wind, the day’s chill bit deep, and she had to have some deep reason to be still out here, if she was. Or ever had been.

  He did not find her along the first arm of the arbor and had just turned its corner to follow it along the garden’s rear side when a desperate shout ahead of him stopped him between one step and the next, then broke him into a run toward the arbor’s far end.

  There, he came out onto a narrow path between the arbor and an open-work wrought iron gate in the high brick wall of the small, enclosed garden he had only seen from a distance until now. From other such gardens he had known, he could guess there would be turf-topped benches around the inside of the high walls, probably with flowering vines—climbing roses very likely—spread over trellises behind them. There would be smooth-kept grass and perhaps a fountain. There might be . . .

  Foulke was in the gateway, hands braced to either side of it as if to hold himself up, staring into the garden and moaning, “God. God. God. God.”

  Alain, just arrived at the same hard run as Joliffe, cried out, “What? Is she there?” and tried to crowd past him.

  Foulke swung around, stumbling from the gateway, shoving Alain back and out of his way while gasping, “There’s blood. Oh my god and saints! There’s blood! We have to tell someone.”

  Alain twisted past Foulke and into the gateway, but froze there as Foulke broke into a run toward the hôtel. Joliffe let him go, went instead to see past Alain’s shoulder into the garden. Then could have wished he had not.

  There was indeed blood. A wide spread of it. Red on the pale gravel path between the gate and a white stone fountain burbling clear water quietly in the middle of the garden. And Alizon, lying there on her side, her back against the fountain’s low curb as if she had rolled backward out of the blood and come to rest there, her left arm stretched out across the blood-pool, her right arm hanging limply across her body. Her head was cast a little back, her wide-open eyes staring upward into a long, low slant of sunlight that gave them a glint of the life they no longer had.

  Alain made a sound between cry and howl and made to go forward. Joliffe caught him by the arm, saying, “Best we wait for . . .” He did not know what French officer matched an English crowner or sheriff. Or would it be the marshal of the household who came first?

  “She might be alive,” Alain protested.

  “She isn’t,” Joliffe said flatly. Not with that much blood gone out of her. Not with those staring eyes and slack-hanging mouth. She was dead. Had died where she lay, with her life’s blood draining out of her.

  But then whose blood was that?

  Against what he had said about waiting, Joliffe put Alain aside and went forward, circling wide from Alizon’s body and the blood, going leftward part way around the fountain and then a few steps toward it, close enough to be certain there was indeed the red—the bloody—print of a man’s hand on the white stone curb of the fountain.

  Probably a man’s hand. Although there were large-handed women. But beyond doubt far too large to be Alizon’s. Nor was it near her body, and Joliffe saw no sign she had ever moved beyond where she had fallen. Instead, he could imagine Alizon’s murderer, red-handed with her blood, kneeling there to wash it from his hands. The fountain’s flowing water would have briefly whorled with red, then flowed clear again in its unceasing soft burble and whisper, its purling probably the last thing Alizon heard as her life left her.

  Except the handprint faced the wrong way.

  A man kneeling to wash his hands and thoughtlessly putting a hand down there on the white stone—a singularly careless thing to do anyway, if he was aware enough of his bloodied hand or hands to want to wash them—would have done it facing the fountain. The handprint looked more like that of someone leaning one-handed on the fountain’s rim as he went past.

  But the curb was low. Not even a foot high. To put a hand down there, the murderer would have had to be passing on his knees?

  Alain had disappeared from the gateway, probably unable, after his first urge to go forward, to bear what he saw. Joliffe partly wished he could retreat with him, but even sickened and angry as he was, he was coldly considering what was there and raised his gaze from the bloody handprint, for the first time taking a hard look around the garden.

  The place was square with—as he had supposed—a turf-topped bench running around most of its sides with trellises grown over with bare, thorny stems that would be rose-covered come summer and fill the garden with scent on warm days. The fountain itself was a short stone pillar down which the water ran into the low-curbed pool around it, with the graveled path from the gate parting around it in a wide circle. Otherwise the garden was close-cut grass, winter-dulled now but probably like green velvet in the spring and through the summer. In the waning afternoon, the southern third of the space was already in shadow but not darkness deep enough to hide anything or anyone.

  Joliffe took in all that with a swift, sweeping look before he turned back to Alizon’s body. Keeping well away from the blood, he circled the fountain to come close to her head. Little though he wanted to touch her but wanting to know how cold she was, he leaned over and touched her white cheek. White not merely because she was young and fair. White not merely in death. White because so much of her blood had drained out of her as she died.

  There was still, faintly, warmth in the white flesh.

  Joliffe flinched his hand back from that fading evidence there had once been life in this de
ad, dead body. But it told him she could not have been killed so very long ago. In the chill day, her flesh would have cooled quickly.

  He would have liked to touch the blood, too, to tell how much it had congealed, but given how quickly men could jump to fool conclusions, keeping his hands clean of blood was probably better.

  He reached out again, this time to close Alizon’s eyes, holding the eyelids down until they stayed.

  It was as he made to draw back that he saw the footprint.

  Or what might be a footprint.

  The slant of sunlight and that he was bent over let him see it. Or think that he saw it. He straightened and saw—now he was trying to—how someone’s foot had been put down partly in the outer edge of the pooled blood sometime after the blood had dried enough to keep the shallow shape of the front part of a soft-soled shoe. Or of something shoe-shaped, but what else could it be but a shoe? A shoe that afterward had blood on it, surely.

  Unfortunately, gravel was not a surface to take and keep footprints, even bloody ones. Joliffe thought he saw smears in two other places on the pale stones that might have been made by a slightly bloodied shoe, but they only let him guess that maybe the murderer, after stepping in the blood, had taken a step or two backward.

  Or had Foulke come that close, then backed away? Not by the way he had been braced in the gateway and crying out, sickened even from that distance. But if not Foulke . . .

  Questions began to gather in Joliffe’s mind. Why had the murderer still been there so long after the murder, to put his foot into the drying blood? Was it that he had gone away and then come back? Had he stabbed her and fled, then come back to be sure he had killed her?

  Joliffe shifted to stand almost where the murderer must have stood to put his foot into the blood—if that was what that mark was. The sun was starting to slide below the top of the wall; the garden would soon be all in shadow and then in darkness. In the failing light there were going to be things he did not see, but he was seeing more than he had in the first moments of mind-blurring horror. By the look of it, Alizon had fallen face-downward. Had she, in her last moments of living, pushed herself onto her side, the way her body now lay, trying to rise?