8 The Maiden's Tale

by Frazer, Margaret

  It was not her concern, Frevisse told herself firmly, leaving Jane to it and making her way up the hall among the swarming servants. None of it was her concern. Lady Jane had shown herself to be capable of gaining her own ends against the odds. She surely had wit enough not to make a fool of herself with Robyn Helas.

  Or rather, Frevisse amended, Lady Jane should have wit enough, but “should,” on the whole, was a feeble word. There were a great many things that “should” not be but very definitely were, and women in plenty, from Eve onward, had let their wits be turned by someone saying what they wanted to hear. Very likely Robyn said things Lady Jane wanted to hear, things that probably no one else had ever said to her or ever would, certainly not Master Chesman who was marrying her only for what the marriage would bring him.

  What was her concern was the warning in the yard just now. Why had Lady Jane suddenly felt need to give it? Because it had been sudden, not thought on beforehand, Frevisse was sure. What had brought it on and how seriously she had meant it were two things Frevisse meant to find out as soon as she could talk alone with Lady Jane, and then Alice must needs be told, if there was a danger here she did not know of. Not tonight, when there was already too much on her mind, but soon; and that, Frevisse thought with unguilty gladness, going up the stairs, might well mean the end of her being messenger and free to leave Coldharbour when she chose. Alice was making her most welcome but she by far preferred the pleasure of prayers, of reaching beyond the confines of the world into the unending wonders of the spirit, a thing difficult to keep up among so much ease and worldly plenty.

  But first matters first. The message to Lady Alice was still in her sleeve and should be delivered; and setting herself to look as outwardly quiet as if nothing more than a pleasant ride through London and a visit to St. Helen’s had happened, Frevisse entered the lady chamber, only to find it nearly empty of people. Two pages still flanked the door, bored and waiting to be given something to do, but rather than the usual gathering of ladies and damsels, there were only two maidservants sitting widely apart on the bench near the fire with the winter-blue gown Alice had worn the night Frevisse first came to Coldharbour spread carefully out between them, each with a long hanging sleeve in her lap, stitching with skilled haste to fasten around them a wide band of fur so dark and dense it could only be sable. Alice, in a simply cut russet gown, was standing idly by to watch them, and Frevisse asked in surprise as she crossed toward her, “What have you done with everyone?”

  “Sent them away to ready one another for tonight.” Alice answered lightly, coming to meet her, casually linking her arm in Frevisse’s and turning them both away to cross the room toward the window. “I’ve found that if they’re all gowned and ready beforetimes, they pay better heed to helping me in my turn, and I don’t have to sit about in headdress and veils and gown and all for an hour more than need be, waiting for them after they’ve finished with me. Were you all this while at St. Helen’s? Has Jane become homesick for her old life?”

  She asked it laughing and Frevisse answered the same. “Not in the slightest! No, I had your men bring us back by way of the Stocks Market, for her to see more of London. That’s what kept us longer.” She sobered. “Alice, we encountered some of the duke of Gloucester’s men there.”

  Alice looked at her sharply. “Was there trouble?” Her tone said she fully expected there could have been.

  “They were shaping to it but your squire Herry bluffed them out of it.”

  Alice’s face cleared. “There were only words then?”

  “Only words. He did it well.”

  “Clever Herry,” Alice said with relief and satisfaction. “I’ve had reason to think well of him before this and I’ll think better now. You don’t think, then, it had aught to do with…” Even between themselves she put the question roundabout. “… your going to St. Helen’s?”

  “It seems not.”

  Alice drew and let out a breath of deep relief. “That’s all well then. I don’t suppose you saw any peacock feathers for sale anywhere today?”

  “Peacock feathers? No,” Frevisse answered. “Why?”

  “Someone dropped the feathers for tonight’s peacock into something that soaked them. They’re unusable and I’m sending all over London to find more. With no success so far.”

  Not doubting that the feast would survive the lack of a roast peacock with its feathers restored, carried in splendor on a gold platter up the hall to the high table between the ranked, admiring guests, Frevisse suggested, “Refeathered peacocks are so usual at feasts. Why not serve this one naked and claim you’re beginning a new fashion?”

  Alice stared at her a startled moment, then broke into laughter that made the maidservants across the room look up from their sewing. “Oh, Frevisse! A naked peacock in the third remove!” she said with delight. “I need reminding sometimes not everything’s as world-ending serious as I come to think it is. What have you done with Lady Jane?”

  “Left her in close talk in the hall with the squire named Robyn Helas.”

  Alice’s carefully plucked brows drew toward each other with either annoyance or worry. “He was talking with her last night, too, until William interrupted them.”

  “He’s most good looking,” Frevisse murmured mildly.

  “He’s indeed that,” Alice agreed but not as if it were to his favor. “And overly fond of himself in the bargain. Why do some women lose what wits they have when a man notices them? And lose them the worse if he’s handsome? Think of the duke of Bedford’s widow with young Woodville three years ago. She’ll live out her life with the consequence of that.”

  Frevisse instead thought of Alice who, although her own latest husband was goodly enough to look on, had never married any of her husbands on account of how they looked.

  “As for this Robyn,” Alice was going on, “I’ve variously had two of my ladies and three of my maids silly over him. Why is he trying his hand with Jane? She’s too newly out of the nunnery to understand these games. And… well…” Too newly’out of a nunnery and so soon bound into a marriage and surely unused to any man heeding her at all. The perils in all of that were too plain to need speaking of.

  “You might speak to her about it,” Frevisse suggested.

  “I would except we know how that can go the wrong way.”

  Frevisse knew. There was an odd alchemy in the mind that too often transmuted a warning into a desire to do the thing warned against. If it went that way with Lady Jane, warning her would be the worst way of protecting her.

  “And warning Robyn off might be no better.” Alice said the rest of what Frevisse was thinking. “But she has so good a marriage coming, I don’t want to see her spoil it.”

  “Is it that good?” Frevisse asked, giving way to her curiosity. “A duke’s daughter to a yeoman?” A marriage surely more disparaging by far than that of the duke of Bedford’s widow to a knight’s son.

  “Considering her circumstances, yes,” Alice said. “A third-born daughter whose inheritance was mostly signed away by her mother before she was born and marred as she is. There are better bargains enough in the marriage market we didn’t think she’d go easily. Or else not highly. My lord husband let it be known he was seeking a marriage for her and what her marriage portion would be and when William Chesman offered for her there was no reason to turn him away. We told her of it, I recommended she take him, she accepted. There was no reason for her not to.”

  Not after having been made to understand all her life how little she could ever hope for.

  “We’ll not be alone much longer,” Alice said quietly, letting the matter of Lady Jane go. “You’d best give it to me now.”

  Frevisse had been standing with her hands tucked up her opposite sleeves in her usual way, using their fullness to hide how she had worked the paper down from her undergown’s sleeve to have it ready. The small movement of passing it from her hand to Alice’s was hidden from the rest of the room by their gowns and sleeves and the way they sto
od, while Alice said, “I doubt it’s more than simply something to be sent on but it’s well to know and this is as private as I’m likely to be this evening.” She slipped a finger to loosen the blank wax seal, asking, “You’ll pardon me? And be so good as to go on talking?”

  Knowing it would not matter what she said, no one near enough to hear it, so long as the sound of a voice went on rather than a silence settling between them, Frevisse obligingly began to discourse on how cold it was, wasn’t it, tonight would be freezing, wouldn’t it, but at least the wind had dropped, did Alice suppose tomorrow would be as cold—gazing out the window while her tongue rambled, giving Alice what privacy she could. The short winter’s afternoon was slipping rapidly away, the cloudless, crystal-brittle sky pale with the thinning light of the westering sun, the lady chamber darkening. Behind them, one of the maids was rising to her feet to light a lamp. “… and if it stays this cold all winter…” Frevisse murmured on but saw sideways, without turning her head, that her cousin was no longer reading, had raised her head and was staring out the window at the failing day, her face gone still and inward; and carefully she asked, “Alice?”

  Alice stirred, closed her eyes, whispered, “I thought he was still at Stourton. But he’s there.” Opened her eyes, no longer staring away to nothing but looking across the Thames to Winchester House lying long and low behind its walls.

  “Who?” Frevisse asked.

  Alice roused, seemed to catch hold of her thoughts and remember she was not alone and said lightly enough to show it was a little matter after all, “Bishop Beaufort has had the duke of Orleans brought to London. That’s what the message is about. To let me… let us know.”

  Almost she did it well enough. Almost, and carefully Frevisse asked, “You weren’t expecting him to be brought to London?”

  “Not so soon.” Alice made a small, dismissing shrug, come fully back into control of herself. “His grace the bishop has his reasons, no doubt.” She refolded the paper and held it toward Frevisse, hidden between them as it had been before. “Would you take this and burn it unnoticed when you can? You’ll have better chance at it than I will.”

  Frevisse took it but asked as she slid it into her sleeve again, “Why is the duke of Orleans’s being here a secret?”

  “Because of Gloucester. He wants nothing done toward peace with France or Orleans being free. But it’s come down to peace pivoting on Orleans, and we’re trying to manage him to secret time and times enough with the king to bring everything too far along, to persuade King Henry so far toward peace that even Gloucester’s rages won’t make a difference… Oh, Frevisse, I’m sorry. I go on about this too much. It isn’t that Orleans is actually here secretly. He’s simply not here…” Alice hesitated before finding the word. “… openly.”

  How often did she play that game? Frevisse wondered. Changing not the thing itself, but the word used for it and thereby, somehow, making a thing seem what it was not. It was a damaging of truth that Frevisse found uncomfortable but here and now was not the time to deal with it and she asked, “All else aside, how safe is it to have Orleans here in London?”

  “How safe?” Alice asked sharply, seeming to have heard more in the question that Frevisse had meant.

  “It’s a seaport,” Frevisse said. “If he escaped, if someone chose to rescue him, he could be away to France or Burgundy on any tide.”

  “He wouldn’t. He gave his word a long while ago…” Alice looked away, out the window again, where the last of the light was draining away in the wake of the sinking sun, across the sliding darkness that was the Thames to where Winchester House was a shadowed shape pricked out with lamplight here and there from windows not yet shuttered for the night, and softly as the shadows, not really to Frevisse anymore, said, “… far longer ago than he thought it would ever be, to stay prisoner until he was ransomed or released.”

  Behind them there was a sudden bustle of two servants coming in at the stairway door with tapers to light the lady chamber’s lamps and candles and a flurry of Alice’s ladies and damsels through another door, laughing and talking, and the maidservants standing up, curtsying to Alice, one holding the dress, the other saying, “It’s done, my lady.”

  Frevisse, because she was looking at Alice and Alice’s back was to the room, saw her cousin very deliberately set down one set of feelings and equally deliberately take up another before turning to face them all, smiling her lovely smile, lifting her voice to order, “Lay the gown on my bed then, Elyn. Thank you for your haste with it, both of you. Aneys, pray see to whatever Dame Frevisse may need to be ready for the feast. Yes, go in, all of you. I’m coming!” Laughing, asking as she crossed the room toward her bedchamber, “Has anyone seen Lady Jane?”

  Chapter 16

  Preparing Alice for the feast and the night’s festivities went its usual well-ordered way, done by the time a squire came to say the guests were gathered and it was time for her go down.

  “I have you at high table again, Frevisse,” Alice had said while her women readied her and Frevisse had waited. “At the left end, companioning Master William Tresham, a lawyer from Northamptonshire whom we purpose to be elected Speaker. He’s a moderate man that others will follow and we want him to understand we favor him without making too much of him, lest it cost him the election.”

  “Therefore he’s at the high table but well to one side,” Frevisse said.

  “With my dear cousin for companion, to show him how well thought of he is.”

  Now as they entered the hall, Alice sweeping ahead across the dais to join her husband and Bishop Beaufort at the center of the high table and her women flowing away either to seats down the hall or to serve Alice at table, Master Gallard was there to see Frevisse to her place and make introduction between her and Master Tresham before hasting away to other duties. She and Master Tresham exchanged pleasantries, too briefly to tell her how an evening spent with him would be, before a bright fanfare of trumpets and drums announced from the minstrels’ gallery that everyone could sit, beginning at the high table, and then down the hall, the three score and more guests settling to their places in a scraping of benches and rustling of gowns along the outer sides of the two long tables stretching the hall’s length on either side. Drums and trumpets brought in the first wave of servers through the screens passage doorway, platters of gilded fruit borne on their shoulders.

  There were hours then of eating and talk, fanfares, processions of food, entertainments—jugglers, tumblers, an allegorical play of Sorrow finding out the Garden of Peace, supposed Moorish dancers, more tumbling and juggling with trained apes added for interest—more food…

  Frevisse ceased watching and went somewhat deaf to much of it sometime after the Moorish dancers but found Master Tresham to be a satisfactory companion. A quiet-mannered man much about her own age and faultless of manners, serving her the best of what was set before them, offering the goblet that they shared before he drank from it himself, wiping its rim after he had, all-of it so easily done that the carefulness did not show, only the courtesy. Faultless, too, in conversation, beginning with how grand was the occasion and moving on to the weather. He had been less fortunate than she, having arrived in London yesterday with the snow, and therefore they talked of travel, agreeing that the frozen roads had made good riding for them both, far preferable to mud. He was serving her with sliced roast venison with mustard sauce when Frevisse said to keep the conversation going, “I think Lady Alice said you’re from Northamptonshire?”

  He answered that he was, and that led on to talk of his family and then around to her as Lady Alice’s cousin and into why she was in London, which brought them to Abbot Gilberd whom Master Tresham somewhat knew because when Abbot Gilberd had been increasing the grammar school attached to his abbey, Master Tresham had funded a scholarship for poor but promising boys from there to study at the London inns of law and had given several books to the school’s use. That brought their talk to books, a mutual pleasure, with Master Tresham’s ta
stes proving to be broad but neither so light as to be unworth talking about nor so heavy as to be impossible of comment on in the constant interruptions of a feast, from Layamon’s Brut—“I’ve purposed for my son Thomas to read it when he’s old enough. We have to know where we’ve been to see better where we ought to go.”—to The Cloud of Unknowing—“It makes me wish I were that sort of man, rather than so constantly lost in worldly things.”

  Along the way they differed pleasantly on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Tales. Master Tresham thought them much too light while Frevisse contended that behind their laughter they were ruthless in showing men’s foolishnesses.

  “And very well they may be,” Master Tresham allowed, “but too often the laughter is stronger than the showing. Only the sport and not the moral is seen.”

  “Which can be a way to make the moral better heard than shouting it,” Frevisse returned.

  But there was no bite in their disagreement, merely pleasure in seeing matters from another’s view.

  He was sometimes drawn into conversation with the gentleman on his other side, and sometime in the third remove, when a herb-stuffed capon set between them allowed Master Tresham to return attention to her in the necessity of carving and serving it to her, Frevisse said “I suppose that I should know better who I’m at table with besides yourself?”

  With no fear of being overheard in the general noise of the hall, he immediately answered, “Beside me is Lord Cromwell, a member of the king’s Privy Council and Treasurer of England, and beyond him, John Stafford, bishop of Bath and Wells, Lord Chancellor.” He named them with sufficient respect but no undue awe, as if who they were and what they did were facts, not wonders. “Then his grace our Cardinal Bishop of Winchester.”