The Traitor's Tale

by Margaret Frazer

  Vaughn stood up. "I have trouble liking you sometimes." Most of the time, I thought," Joliffe said, standing up, too.

  Vaughn let that go. Night was enough come that they had to go inside or else be wondered at, supposing they weren't wondered at already; but when Vaughn took a step that way Joliffe stayed where he was and said, "We have to settle what we're going to do. I could go to this Hedingham instead of you. I doubt I'm known as part of this at all and wouldn't be followed. But before anything I need to set word on its way to York in Ireland of what's being planned against him here. The sooner he knows that the better. Unfortunately, the nearest man I know for it is west of here." In the Welsh marches opposite the way to Essex, and damn Sir William for not having a tighter net where help could be asked for when needed. "So why don't you come with me tomorrow?"

  Vaughn was openly caught flat by that. "Come with you? To Wales?"

  Hiding pleasure at having out-flanked him, Joliffe answered evenly, "Your followers will be waiting to see where you go in the morning. So they'll follow us and we'll be obviously friends and that will make me as suspect as you are."

  "West from here?"

  "The better to mislead them. You need only keep with me for a day or so. Then we'll split up, and they'll have to split up to follow us. You can head north, then curve away east, losing your man on the way. I'll head south and lose my man before going on west. That should confuse matters."

  "Then I head for Sible Hedingham, get this letter, and return to Lady Alice at Wingfield. Yes." Vaughn liked the thought. "But will you trust me—trust her—to play fair with York if she gets it?"

  Steadily, Joliffe said, "I do. I'll set the warning on its way to my lord of York, then head back to meet you at Wing' field. Or better I go to Hedingham, too?"

  "On the chance I miscarry along the way?" Vaughn was practical rather than grim about it. "Assuredly. However it goes, let's plan we each go to Wingfield after we've been to Hedingham. Will that satisfy?"

  Since they were trusting each other—forced to it but nonetheless having to play it out as if the trust were true-rooted—Joliffe said, "Wingfield. Yes."

  "Good. Settled then," said Vaughn.

  As they started toward the guesthall, though, Joliffe noted that neither of them offered a hand to the other to seal the agreement, as either one of them would likely have done with a friend—or with someone they at least truly trusted.

  Chapter 17

  Frevisse made sure of not seeing either Joliffe or Vaughn before they were away in the morning, to seem to have no especial interest in them; but she did send Sister Margrett with her thanks to both of them— to Vaughn for accompanying them and to the minstrel for his kindness—and assurance that she was much better. She did not add that an evening spent pretending to be sleeping and ill until, finally, she had truly fallen asleep had done nothing for her ease of mind. Only when she was into the cloister again, safely back into her familiar life, would she be able to count herself done, finished, and free of all the business. She knew she did not hide well her urge to demand her release when Dame Claire finally came later in the morning, because Dame Claire's eyes lighted on her for a moment and brightened with mild laughter before sliding to Sister Margrett standing on the far side of the bed. Despite that, she was serious enough of voice as she asked, "How does our patient? She looks better this morning, I think," while lifting Frevisse's wrist to take her pulse. "Are you better, Dame?"

  Resisting the urge to snatch her wrist away, Frevisse snapped, "Yes. I'm well. Whatever it was, it's passed now."

  Dame Claire regarded her with that lurking inward laughter and said, "Still, a goodly dose of spurge might not come amiss."

  Knowing the purgative properties of spurge and most certainly not wanting a dose of it, Frevisse said firmly, "I think not. I feel entirely well."

  Dame Claire's laughter lingered but under it she seriously asked, too low to be heard beyond the bed, "It's done, then? Whatever it was, it's done?"

  As quietly, Frevisse said, "It's done. Yes." At least for her.

  "Well then." Dame Claire lifted her voice to where it had been. "This time I shall suppose the patient knows best how she does. Pray, return into the cloister and be welcome, Dame. You nursed her well, Sister Margrett."

  Through that day and the next Frevisse readily and gratefully settled back into the even ways of the nunnery's life—its carefully balanced times for prayer and work and rest. She let the deep comfort of the Offices, the pleasure of her copying work at her desk in the cloister walk, even the small scrapes of familiar aggravation among the nuns, wrap around her as cushion and curtain against what she wanted neither to think nor worry on, because neither thought nor worry were any use. Her prayers had to be enough, and she round most of them were for Burgate, because Alice stood best chance of coming least scathed from everything, and whatever present perils Joliffe and Vaughn were in, they were come to them by choices made out of fair knowledge of what they hazarded. She doubted the same was true of the secretary. He had likely never thought his service to Suffolk would bring him where it had. Like her, he had been brought into this spreading trouble through no wish or knowing choice of his own, and she was safely back where she belonged, while someone meant for Burgate to die.

  That thought came to her during Sext in the morning of her third day back at St. Frideswide's, in the choir as the nuns were chanting, their voices twining around each other. "Ad te, Domine, confugio . . . In justitia tua libera me . . . Educes me e reti quod absconderunt, quia tu es refugium meum ..." To you, Lord, I flee for refuge ... In your justice free me . . . You will bring me away from the snare they have set, because you are my refuge . . .

  Someone meant for Burgate to die.

  As quickly as the thought came, she denied it. Whoever held Burgate prisoner wanted him alive, able to tell his secret. If ever he told, then yes, he might well be killed to be sure he told no one else. That was the straight-forward way to see it. But the sudden thought come to her was that he could have been kept prisoner otherwise than as he was. He could, God forbid it, have long since been tortured to have out of him what was wanted. Torture was against the law, but so was his imprisonment, uncharged of any crime as it seemed he was. Why had whoever held him held back from torture?

  And who had the power to have him held prisoner in a royal castle at all?

  In their pressing need to lay hands on whatever Suffolk had confessed into writing at the last, neither she, Joliffe, nor Vaughn had spent time over that question. It was not even that Burgate's imprisonment was a great secret. Queen Margaret had known of it, had lightly sent Frevisse off to see him.

  Or had that been done not lightly at all? Vaughn had sent a man ahead with word they were coming. Had it been planned for her to see Burgate on the hope he would tell his secret to her and she had made it easy for them?

  And then she had been followed from Kenilworth.

  She had seen Vaughn knew it, but since he had kept silent about it, so had she, with the thought that once she was back in the nunnery, the problem would be all his and he could handle it as he thought best. But that did not stop her wondering who had given the order for it. Queen Margaret? That was possible but was it likely? Young as she was and foreign, could she have that kind of power and know how to use it among the lords elbowing for their own places and power around the king? Far more likely was that one of those lords, ambitious and already beginning to be successful in replacing the duke of Suffolk, had dared Burgate's imprisonment and ordered her to be followed. The duke of Buckingham was there at Kenilworth, well able to set someone on to follow her and Vaughn in hopes of making use of whatever damage had been done by their discovery.

  Or could it be someone among the household officers, acting on some lord's behalf. Somerset's? Or Sir Thomas Stanley, apparently far more powerful than he seemed behind his seemingly plain knighthood? Or could Stanley be working for and with Somerset? Or . . .

  Did it matter who it was, now the thing was done an
d she was out of it? Not to her. But Burgate's imprisonment joined with the murders of Suffolk's steward and priest wade it easy for her to believe someone among the lords around the king was intent on taking Suffolk's place in power with no scruple over men's deaths.

  And yet that someone had scrupled against using torture on Burgate. Why?

  All three men had taken messages from the duke of Suffolk to Somerset in Normandy. That was certain. And Burgate, as well as that, had written out—not so much Suffolk's confession of guilt; nothing so humble as that—but his accusation of those guilty with him, and that was why Bur. gate was still alive—because someone wanted what he had written. But except by the vileness of his prison he had not been tortured to have what he knew. Why? Kept as he was, his death by neglect or disease was almost assured. It was almost as if it was what was hoped for.

  But surely they didn't want him dead before he told where the accusation was hidden, because surely whoever held him had considered that Burgate must have made provision for what would happen to the accusation should he die or even be missing long enough to be supposed dead.

  The pieces did not fit together with any way that made ready sense. It was as if whoever held Burgate was of two minds how they wanted this to play out. It was almost as if they were leaving whether Burgate would live or die, with whatever would come of it either way, to God's choice.

  That was maybe only her own piety speaking—to see it that way and think someone else might, too. It was maybe simply what it most seemed to be—a brutal foolishness not clearly thought through by someone valuing power over all else.

  But then why no torture?

  She was suddenly aware that the voices around her were fading toward silence on, "... misericordiam Dei requiescant in pace." ... by the mercy of God rest in peace, and that her voice was not with them. She did not know when she had fallen silent with her thoughts, and rather more hurriedly than reverently, she joined in the Amen that ended the Office, while a quick, guilty look sideways toward Domina Elisabeth found her frowning from the prioress' higher place at the end of the choir stalls.

  Her failure had been noted.

  As with other such failures of duty, nothing would be said about it now, unsettling the day. Both confession and rebuke would come tomorrow in the morning's chapter meeting, a practice meant to keep the hour by hour life of a nunnery undisturbed and give the erring nun time to consider her fault and reach a humility that let her freely admit her wrong and accept her punishment when the time came. That the practice did not always reach perfection did not lessen the value of the intent. Frevisse's own good intention to keep her mind to her tasks and away from where it did not need to go was helped by her afternoon work being presently the copying out of prayers to the Virgin from the breviary, as a gift from the nunnery to a butcher's wife in Banbury who had promised her younger daughter as a novice there when the girl was old enough. Frevisse always silently added to that "and if the girl be willing", but just now there was soothe in laying the letters evenly in firm black ink across the paper, filling what had been emptiness with the beauty both of the letters themselves and the wonder held in the words.

  Only in the hour's recreation after supper, before the day's final prayers at Compline and then bed, did her guard against her thoughts fall as she walked in the evening light beside Dame Claire in the nunnery's walled garden along the graveled path between the carefully kept beds of herbs and flowers.

  She and Dame Claire often walked together in that hour because they were usually content to keep silent in their own thoughts, not needing to talk for the pointless sake of talking; but in that ease this evening Frevisse's thoughts went back to where they had been. Who had ordered those murders, and was someone purposefully waiting for Burgate either to live and break and tell his secret or else to die with his secret kept, whichever God willed?

  The latter question she could least answer. As for the outright murders, the duke of Somerset still seemed most likely. He must surely be hoping to move into Suffolk's place near the king and counting on King Henry's slack sense of justice to protect him against the accusations and outcries already being made against him. But even King Henry would not be able to hold ignorant against Suffolk's open charges in this hidden letter.

  The trouble remained that when Suffolk was murdered and Burgate arrested, Somerset had been still in Normandy, waiting to be besieged in Caen. He might of course have men in his service who dealt for him, but could they have acted so swiftly—with no time for orders back and forth across the Channel—against Burgate? Could they have had the secretary not only seized but away into a royal prison before word of Suffolk's death was hardly known? Possibly. But could they be the "others" that Burgate had been too afraid even to name?

  She doubted it. Those "others" had sounded more like men equal or nearly equal in power to Suffolk and Somerset themselves—and that would be how they had dealt so well at ordering the murders and Burgate's seizure.

  And then the matter of Suffolk's own murder. Burgate had denied the given story that he had been taken in the Channel and killed by no more than angry shipmen taking their chance against him. Burgate had claimed it was all planned. But again Burgate had shied from giving any name.

  She was hopelessly hindered by not knowing enough about the lords close around the king to make a strong guess about any of them and their ambitions. The duke or Buckingham, of course, because he was presently charged with the queen's safekeeping at Kenilworth and therefore with the keeping of the castle, which could be explanation for Burgate's imprisonment there. Where had Buckingham been in early May, when Suffolk was murdered and Burgate seized? Frevisse thought she remembered the king had been at the Parliament in Leicester all that month. His great lords had been with him there, including Buckingham. But maybe not. Maybe . . .

  She found she had come to a stop, was turned on the path and staring down into the dark heart of a red flower whose name she did not know, without knowing how long she had been there. Dame Claire had walked on; Dame Juliana and Dame Amicia were coming her way along the path in murmurous talk together; but for the moment she was alone save for a bee bumbling among the blossoms and she wondered why mankind couldn't live in simplicity with itself instead of with ambition-driven greeds for wealth and power and the lusts of the body. But there was no simplicity anywhere in life, she thought. There was nothing simple about the flower in front of her, with its deep colors and delicate, many petals and finely detailed veins and stem and leaves, each part of it as different from its other parts as all plants differed from one another. And likewise with the simple, bumbling bee that had nothing simple about it, if she paused to think on it. Even the gravel beneath her feet was not simple. Every rock of it was different from all the others. So why uselessly wish that mankind might be simple among itself? "Simple" was not the way the world was made.

  "Gone away again, Dame? In mind if not in body this time?" Dame Amicia asked—somewhat tartly, Frevisse thought; and wondered if there was jealousy about her time spent away from St. Frideswide's.

  But of course she had known there likely was, with no one to know how less than happy she had been in it or the burden she had brought back with her; and quietly, with no urge to answer tartly back, she turned and said, "No. Merely giving thanks I'm here again," before walking away, head down and hands tucked into her opposite sleeves, wishing she matched inwardly that outward quiet.

  She was ready, next morning in the chapter meeting, to confess on her knees before Domina Elisabeth her distraction of mind at Sext yesterday. Because praying was the center and reason of nuns' lives, failure at it was a grave fault, and her penance was grave to match it: to spend the hour before that same Office on her knees at the altar today, tomorrow and the day after, and to have only bread and weak ale for her midday meal those same three days.

  With deeply bowed head, Frevisse thanked Domina Elisabeth and returned to her low joint stool among the other nuns, both accepting her guilt and soothed at listening
to ordinary matters being settled in ordinary ways through the rest of the chapter meeting. Her coming penance did not weigh on her. She had prayed too little while she was gone. This would be chance to recover some of that lost time. And fasting was no longer the great trouble it had been when she was young, now that she understood how acceptance was the greater part of bearing it and knew how to accept.

  If only she could as well accept everything she did not know—would probably never know—about Suffolk's death and all the ills that were come from it.

  The chapter meeting ended with Domina Elisabeth's blessing on them. The nuns rose to go about their various morning work, but Domina Elisabeth beckoned for Frevisse to come to her as the others left and said as Frevisse curtsied to her, "Master Naylor has asked leave to talk with you, Dame. I've told him you'd see him in the guesthall courtyard after chapter. You have my leave to go. Afterward, I'd see you in my parlor."