The Traitor's Tale

by Margaret Frazer

  Frevisse regarded him in a steady silence for a long moment, understanding what he was saying even while wishing she could refuse it. There was too much ugliness in the thought of someone who could so coldly carry out such business. But finally she said steadily, "The question then is not so much who was the man who tried to kill you but who is behind him, ordering it all."

  "The duke of Somerset being the open choice," said Joliffe. "As always."

  "Especially when you add the murder we've missed out."

  "Missed?" Joliffe did not straighten from the pillow but his eyes were darkly alert. "What murder have we missed?"

  "The duke of Suffolk's. His death was much like these others."

  Joliffe stared past her at the far wall as if needing time to take in what she had said.

  He took so long to answer that she added, very slowly because of her own uncertainty, "Come to it, we might well add in the bishop of Chichester's murder in January and the bishop of Salisbury's in June."

  Joliffe's gaze snapped back to her, harsh and sharp. "Damnation twice over," he swore softly. "There's a distance I was nowhere near to going yet. Both of them almost as high in the government as Suffolk and Somerset, with Chichester killed by soldiers rioting against him, Salisbury by men of his own bishopric. Again, no blame to be laid to one man."

  "Or it may be only that their deaths gave someone thought on how to do these others," Frevisse said quietly but with anger taut behind her words.

  "Suffolk was murdered after Chichester," Joliffe pointed out, "and before Salisbury. Which isn't to say Chichester's death didn't give someone an idea for all the others. And whether Chichester's and Salisbury's deaths are part of it or not, the 'why' behind the murders stays the same, I think."

  "To be rid of proof that Suffolk and Somerset deliberately set about to lose Normandy, yes," Frevisse agreed. "Which leaves us with the duke of Somerset, since Suffolk is dead."

  "And Somerset could well want to be as rid of Suffolk as of Suffolk's messengers, making very much one less to know his part in it all."

  Frevisse sat down on a joint stool near the foot of the bed. "The one trouble with that is that he was in Normandy until hardly a month ago. As we've thought before, that's somewhat a long reach for him to keep a hand on what he might want done here."

  "But not an impossible one."

  "No," she granted. "Not an impossible one. But . . ." She paused, staring at the floor, trying to thread her thoughts onto a single string, instead of scattered and swirled. Joliffe waited, but the coming-together did not happen. There were too many pieces all shoving at one another, and finally she said slowly, "There's something not altogether right about how we're seeing this. The pieces we have make sense, and yet ... I can't let go this worry that there's more to it all. A piece or pieces we're missing that would altogether change what we think we know."

  "The piece or pieces we don't have are the ones that would make certain Somerset is behind all this," Joliffe said.

  "Somerset or someone else," Frevisse said. "Or Somerset and someone else. Remember Burgate's 'others'."

  Joliffe had never found Dame Frevisse to be a comforting woman. She went at matters with a straight eye and a readiness to say what she thought that probably won her few friends. On his own part, that straight eye and ready tongue were much of what he liked about her; but for just an instant now he thought how well he could have lived without she had said that. Burgate's "others" had slipped from his mind.

  He slid slowly down to lie flat on the bed, tucked his right hand behind his head, and said, staring up at the rafters, "There's this that goes that way. Having finished with Suffolk, the common folk have been in full cry against Somerset these past months, raging and demanding answers. You could well think the lords around the king would be doing the same. But they have not."

  With the slowness of seeing what she did not want to see, Dame Frevisse started, "Which likely means ..." She stopped, maybe not liking anymore than he did where that thought led.

  There was no turning back from it now, and Joliffe said, "It's been over half a year since Suffolk slid from power and more than four months since he was killed. Somerset has come back from Normandy hardly a month ago. If this is all his doing, I can see he might well have long enough reach to order murders from there, but a reach long enough and strong enough to keep a strangle-hold on all the lords and other men around the king? That's harder to believe, because those are mostly men who live to have power. Somerset out of power would mean more power for them. They should be after him like hounds after a downed deer's throat, but so far as I've heard, no one among them has made any outcry against Somerset at all. No demands that he explain Normandy's loss. No accusations of treason from the men with most to gain by his fall. You see where that goes."

  Still slowly, Dame Frevisse said, "It goes toward the likelihood that Burgate's 'others' have to be among them. Among the high lords around the king. Others besides Somerset that we've no guess toward at all." Like someone determined to grasp a nettle tightly enough to stop the sting, she Went on more strongly, "Men close to the king and with power enough to keep questions from being asked and accusations being made by any other lords."

  "Lords," Joliffe said grimly, "who want to go on as unsuspected as they presently are."

  "Or as he presently is," Dame Frevisse said slowly. She was staring, frowning, at the wall beyond the bed. "I'm trying to remember Burgate's own words. Sometimes he said 'others', but at least once, when he was talking of his fear he'd be tortured, he said, 'he' had ordered against it. I tried to have him say who, but he wouldn't. He fumbled back to saying 'the others'."

  "That maybe means there were more than one lord in this with Suffolk and Somerset, probably all along, but only one of them is protecting himself with murders." Joliffe shut his eyes, suddenly very tired in a way that had nothing to do with his wound. "A hydra of conspirators and one of them more deadly than all the others. If that's the way of it, St. Jude be with us. My lord of York is up against more than is any way fair."

  "It being about power," Dame Frevisse said dryly, "what has fair to do with it?"

  Little or nothing, Joliffe thought bitterly, and all the more bitterly because here and now he could see nothing to do about any of it at all. Warn York, yes, but of what? That there were men trying to destroy him? He knew that well enough. Knew it the better if word had reached him in time of what was purposed against him in Wales. Or if that word hadn't reached him in time . . . Very quietly, eyes still closed, he said, "There's been no word, even a rumor, about York the while I've been here, has there?"

  "Nothing that's come here," she answered as quietly.

  "If any comes and I don't chance to hear it . . ."

  "If I hear aught, I'll tell you. Though you're likely to hear it from Luce before you hear it from me. Do you have any thought on who these men or this man could be?"

  "No. Or too many thoughts and no proof."

  "The proof is in Suffolk's letter."

  "Suffolk's accusations are in that letter. That's all we know for certain." But he had to get it to York.

  "They'll be somewhere to start," Dame Frevisse said. She stood up as if to go, then paused and asked in the same calm and level voice, "Why, of all the choices you surely had, did you choose this manner of life?"

  Joliffe kept his eyes closed, considered pretending he had gone to sleep; but she waited, and from among the various answers he might have made he finally said, "It happened. And I didn't stop it happening."

  "Then why the duke of York? Why choose his service out of all the less deadly ones there must be?"

  "Because Suffolk was dangerous." He said it flatly, meaning for her to take that as his last answer, then found he could not leave it at that and opened his eyes to look not at her but at the roof beam again while he said, his voice low, "Suffolk corrupted more than the French war. He was destroying the government here in England for years longer than he was losing that war. For him, his own profit was a
ll. He was draining the country dry for his own gain and the gain of the men around him. That's much of what has driven men to all these revolts. Justice was dying, and it will still die and everything go to the worse if Somerset simply takes his place. Somerset and the other lords like him. They're dangerous in their ambitions, in their eagerness to grab more power than they can well wield."

  "And York isn't ambitious?" Dame Frevisse asked. "And grabbing for power?"

  Joliffe finally brought his gaze down and rolled his head enough aside to look at her. She was someone who did not simply let life happen at her. She wanted to understand the why of things, and he answered her straightly, "York has Power. He was born to more of it than any other lord in England. It's his power Suffolk and Somerset and the others have been trying to break."

  "Hasn't he tried to break theirs?"

  "He's stood out against them, yes, because if he hadn't they would have destroyed him by now. I think he hoped his accepting of this exile to Ireland would satisfy them that he'd leave them alone if they'd leave him alone. Instead, they've set to work against him while he's too far away to defend himself." Joliffe did not try to stop the anger edging into his voice. He even raised himself a little up from the bed on his elbows, strengthened by his anger. "Then there's what York has done with his power. He's used it for more than his own gain, has done other with it than make himself more wealthy at other men's expense. Have you ever heard that Suffolk, Somerset, and their kind have ever used their power for anything except their own gain?" The weakness that had betrayed him into that open anger reclaimed him. He sank back on the pillow and closed his eyes before saying with deliberate lightness, "Besides all else, there's the difference between the kind of men the king has let gather around himself—Suffolk, Somerset, Sir Thomas Stanley—there's a man with just enough wits to be a cur—and the kind of men the duke of York gathers to him."

  "Such as?" Dame Frevisse asked evenly.

  Joliffe smiled. "Myself, for one."

  She held silent so long that he finally opened his eyes to find she was still standing there, looking at him with a look he could not read except to know that whatever she was thinking, it was not good. And very quietly she said, "Then very likely whoever is behind these murders to keep their secret are the same men—or man—who want to falsely accuse your duke of York of treason."

  "Yes." Joliffe had settled on that likelihood some time ago.

  "They'll also claim that anyone who serves York is a traitor."

  "Yes." Another thing Joliffe had already faced.

  "Which includes you," she said quietly.

  Meeting her gaze, he agreed as quietly, "Yes."

  Through a long moment then she only went on looking at him, before saying evenly, "So long as you know it."

  Steadily meeting her gaze, he said, "I know it."

  Knew it included him in all the disgrace and ugly death that could come with being a traitor. Nor was he a nobleman, to die by the headsman's ax. For him a traitor's death would be by hanging until nearly dead, then having his guts cut and pulled out of his living body so he could see them while he died.

  That was what would come to him if York should fall and he fell with him, and he knew it all too well.

  Chapter 23

  Dame Frevisse did not return that day, nor for several days. Joliffe did not ask after her, not of Dame Claire or Sister Johane as they saw to his wound each morning, certainly not of Dame Juliana who looked in on him rarely and never with any show of pleasure that he was there. He was left to his thoughts that were presently going nowhere except around and around on themselves—like a dog trying for a flea on its rump, he thought: moving much and getting nowhere—and to recovering his strength. That went well, anyway. The wound was healing cleanly and he walked twice and sometimes thrice a day now, and only old Ela reminding him from her corner not to be a fool and do too much kept him from doing more, because she was right. Pushing too hard before his body was ready would only set him back. Still, the morning that he reached the guesthall's outside stairs on his own and sat for a time in the sunlight was a triumph, and the next day when he walked to the far side of the yard and back a greater triumph, and never mind that when he returned to his bed he slept the rest of the day away.

  After his next morning's walk, he was lying on his bed, trying to judge how tired it had left him, when old Ela hobbled in.

  "Just seeing that you're awake and as decent as may be," she said. "Dame Frevisse is come to see you."

  Joliffe sat up and swung his legs over the bed's edge. "If she feels you have to see me first, I must be better than I thought."

  "Aye, you're better enough that I'm keeping my eye on that Luce. She's about decided you're well enough to be useful to her."

  "Ela," Joliffe protested. "I'm saving myself for you."

  Ela laughed at him. "You do that, youngling. You do that."

  She hobbled out. Joliffe heard her say, "He's as decent as he's likely to get, but if he tries to stand up, you stop him."

  Dame Frevisse entered, and to be perverse as well as courteous, Joliffe made to push himself up from the bed.

  "Don't," she said. "As you well heard Ela say." She eyed him. "You're better. But not well."

  "I'm well," he corrected. "But not strong."

  "You're better," she repeated. "You're not well. Dame Claire says the wound is healing, has closed better than you deserve, but ..."

  "Aren't all men deserving of mercy?"

  "Some are more deserving than others." And added before he could make answer to that, "I've thought further on our problem."

  "To more purpose than I have, I hope. I need to know more and can't learn it here. So . . ." He made a gesture as if casting away his frustration.

  "Will it help to have three more deaths to consider?"

  Joliffe sat straighter despite that pulled his side. "Three more? What have you heard?"

  "Nothing new. These were this summer in London when Cade had the city. Lord Saye and Sele, and his son-in-law William Crowmer."

  "As fine a pair of extorting bastards as ever disgraced a royal government," Joliffe said. "I heard of what happened, yes." James Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele, and his son-in-law had been of the court party, close among the men around the king. They had held a large piece of southeastern England in their greedy hands and for years had stripped it of wealth by every legal and illegal means they could. That they had been beheaded in London at the height of the rebellion after mock trials at the hands of rebels had had a certain illegal justice to it. More justice, anyway, than Fiennes and Crowmer had given to any number of other men, Joliffe thought.

  "What I've been wondering," Dame Frevisse said carefully, "is how they came to be in reach of the rebels. They were among the men the rebels had already named in their accusations to the king, but the only ones King Henry had had arrested."

  "A sop to the rebels," Joliffe said. "A 'Look, we've met one of your demands.' "

  "Yes. They were arrested and put in the Tower of London, and then King Henry and his lords fled London."

  "Leaving Fiennes and Crowmer behind, and Lord Scales in charge of the Tower," Joliffe said. "So they should have been safe enough, but they ended up dead anyway."

  "Do you know how?"

  "Beheaded, the both of them."

  "No, I mean how they came into the rebels' hands at all?

  "No," Joliffe said. "Too much else was happening, and I had no grief at Fiennes' and Crowmer's deaths. I never gave them thought at all."

  "I heard from men who saw it happening. Lord Scales took Fiennes out of the Tower to London's Guildhall for the trial that Jack Cade and the rebels were demanding."

  "That I'd heard. Didn't Cade threaten to set fire to London if Fiennes wasn't tried?"

  "If he did, it was an empty threat. London was still on his side then. He had to know that if he had even looked like using fire, the whole city would have turned against him."

  Joliffe frowned. "But Lord Scales gave way to it.
"

  "Even knowing that once Fiennes was out of the Tower, the several thousand rebels baying for his death would never let him be taken back. However the 'trial' might go, Scales had to know that Fiennes was as good as dead once he was out of the Tower." She was speaking rapidly, a smolder of anger under the words. "And then there's Crowmer. Why was he in the Fleet prison and not in the Tower?"

  Joliffe startled. "The Fleet?" The Fleet prison was on the other side of London from the Tower and not defensible. A prison was for keeping prisoners in, not attackers out, and he echoed, "What was he doing in the Fleet? Why was he there instead of the Tower?"