8 The Maiden's Tale

by Frazer, Margaret

  “What of tonight and tomorrow?” Frevisse asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” Alice said. “For now we’ll simply make as sure of today as possible and see to those when they come, blessed St. Jude aiding.” The saint of desperate causes, whose goodwill was likely going to be all too necessary in this, Frevisse thought.

  It went as Alice intended. When she told her women while they dressed her of how Lady Jane and Frevisse were to spend the day, no one questioned it except Lady Sibill, who murmured, “Without even going to Mass?” but let it go when no one bothered to answer her; and after they were all gone down to breakfast and the maidservants were tidying Lady Alice’s bedchamber, Frevisse and Lady Jane gathered what they needed. Frevisse took her breviary and Lady Jane’s and another book Lady Jane gave her, while Lady Jane put stoppered ink pot and paper and pens from Alice’s worktable into her sewing box. Standing to block what she was doing from view if anyone chanced to come out of the bedchamber, Frevisse asked, “Who is he likely to be writing to?”

  “He writes poetry,” Lady Jane answered, closing the box and picking it up. “He says that setting his mind to the necessities of making a poem frees him from thinking on other things, and since his mind’s freedom is the only freedom he can have, he does it much.”

  “You’ve had chance to talk with him?”

  “I? No.” Lady Jane led the way toward the stairs somewhat more quickly than seemed necessary. “He left my uncle’s keeping two years or so ago but Lady Alice talks of him sometimes.” And then was very busy going down the stairs where conversation was difficult.

  They met no one, and though the cheerful morning rouse of voices in the great hall was clear enough through the almost-closed door there, they saw no one and Frevisse thought they were unseen, too, as they turned aside to the solar door. Lady Jane still had the key Alice had given her last night and with her sewing box balanced on one hip, unlocked the solar door and quickly entered, Frevisse close behind her.

  Orleans was standing at the window, one of the shutters set open to the pallid morning light that threw his shadow weakly across the floor behind him but sheened on the rich black of his clothing and glinted off his gold chain as he turned to face them.

  “I thought there would be no harm in unclosing the shutter,” he said. “There is nothing overlooks the window here.”

  “It should make no trouble,” Frevisse agreed, going to set the books on the table, leaving the door to Lady Jane. Both Orleans and the room looked wan in the thin-clouded daylight, but he did not look as haggard-tired as he would have done if wakeful the whole night, so he must have slept. How well he had rested was another matter, but he stood quietly, watching the locking of the door, the setting down of the books, Lady Jane crossing to set her sewing box on the table next to them, and seemed to Frevisse a man gathered into himself, waiting to judge how he should react to whatever came next. Was it always like that for him? she wondered while saying aloud with a look at the nearly dead embers among the ashes in the fireplace, “There’ll be firewood brought soon, and breakfast.” Belatedly a question came to her she should have asked Alice. “Did my lord of Suffolk purpose anything for you today?”

  “His grace only said his lady would see to everything and I was not to worry.” Orleans smiled at that, as if at a jest. “I see she has?”

  It was a half-question as he watched Lady Jane taking the inkpot, paper, and pens out of her sewing box. Frevisse, explaining what Alice purposed for the day and following his look, realized how carefully Lady Jane was keeping the marred side of her face away from him; realized, too, she had forgotten Lady Jane’s face, had ceased to notice it, and wondered how long Lady Jane thought she could keep it averted from Orleans if they were to be in the solar all the day.

  Orleans settled the question. As Frevisse finished telling of the day’s arrangements, while Lady Jane was putting her box’s disarranged contents to rights, he left the window to cross to her, take her by the chin and lift and turn her face toward him, to see her straight on, marred side and all. Frevisse drew angry breath, too late for saying anything, and Lady Jane, stiffened and blank-faced, stared into his face as he looked at hers until he let her go and said, much as he might have mentioned an interesting point concerning dog or horse or jewel he meant to buy, “That does you ill, my lady, especially considering the rest of you is lovely. You have my sympathy.” He made brief look at her left hand. “Nor are you married. Because of this?”

  Lady Jane answered rigidly, “I’m to be married at Twelfth Night. To the man who’ll be bringing your firewood and food.”

  “Our firewood and food,” Orleans corrected with a smile. His eyes were still on her face but looking into her eyes now, not at the mark. “We are in this very much together for this while, my lady. I pray you pardon my boldness but I need to know about my keepers. Dame Frevisse is my lady of Suffolk’s cousin. You are… ?”

  Frevisse realized Suffolk had never introduced her last night.

  “Lady Jane de la Pole, my lord of Suffolk’s niece,” Lady Jane answered, even more rigidly.

  Orleans lifted his head slightly, a flicker of rapid thought and reassessment across his face, before he stepped back from her, bowed more low than a royal duke need do for almost anyone including even so well-born a lady, and said kindly, “May your husband value you better than it seems your uncle has had wit to do. He’ll be a wise and fortunate man if he does.”

  A slow change suffused Lady Jane’s face. Not a blush but as if something had come alight in her that had never been touched before, and simply but with everything that needed to be said behind the words, she answered, “Thank you, my lord.”

  Orleans took her hand and kissed it. “There is never need for a lovely lady to give thanks to a lord for his compliments to her. But he is always grateful to receive them.”

  A light scratching at the hallward door brought them all to a sharp-edged, wary stillness for a moment before Lady Jane went to ask through the door who was there. The answer was muffled but enough, and she unlocked and opened to William carrying a basket of firewood that he took directly to the hearth and set down before he turned to bow to Orleans. “Lady Alice thought it best to bring the wood first, your grace. That you not all freeze before you could be fed, she said.”

  “Well thought, William,” Orleans agreed. “It is good to see you again. But have I the right of it? You are to marry Lady Jane?”

  William looked quickly to her and back to Orleans. “Yes, my lord.”

  “I have already wished her a husband with wit enough to value her. Now I can tell her she will have one.”

  William bowed his thanks, and as he straightened from it looked to Lady Jane who was looking back at him, with more shared between them in that look than Frevisse had thought to see there. Certainly more than there had been before between them, for her to see. But then it was gone as William knelt to clear the ashes and lay and light a new fire.

  That done, he left to fetch their breakfast, and Lady Jane when she had locked the door behind him, came to join Frevisse and Orleans at the hearth, to be warm against the room’s cold, and Frevisse, for her own part, would have been willing to stand in silence, enjoying the heat sinking into her face and outheld hands, but Orleans after a moment said mildly, “Dame Frevisse, Lady Alice did not choose you at random to help in this, last night and today, I think?”

  “No, my lord,” Frevisse agreed, equally mildly. And added nothing else. One way to learn about someone was to ask them questions and have their answers. Another way was to see what kind of questions they would ask. If his grace of Orleans wanted more from her he could ask for it, and then perhaps they would both learn something.

  He was patient. Frevisse willingly gave him that. He waited past time that Lady Jane was made uncomfortable and somewhat puzzled, looking from one to the other of them, while Frevisse went on looking at the fire, keeping her face deliberately bland, until finally with an unexpected and deep chuckle, Orleans asked, “Well, t
hen. How much do you know? Now that I know how discreet you can be.”

  Frevisse gave him an appreciative sideways look. There, finally, was something more of the man behind the very gracious manners she had seen so far, and in return she gave him back, “Neither Lady Jane nor I am random chosen, my lord. She has been, and I am now, used in passing messages between Lady Alice and Bishop Beaufort in your matters.”

  “ ‘Used,” “ Orleans repeated. ”Yes, “used,” is a good way to say what we are, is it not?“ But that was not a question he needed answered and he asked without pause for one, ”Then, perforce, you know something of those matters?“’

  Frevisse hesitated only to sort out what she knew from what she suspected, then said, “I know that the messages have to be passed, that they have to be kept secret, that peace in the French war seems to depend on your talking with the king without his uncle of Gloucester knowing of it and to that end you’ve been brought to London. More than that I don’t know.”

  “And do not care to know even that much?”‘ Orleans asked shrewdly but looked away to Lady Jane on his other side instead of waiting for an answer. “Is that all that Lady Jane knows of it, too?”

  Before Lady Jane could more than begin to look alarmed, another scratch at the door gave her reason to whirl away, taking the key from her belt pouch as she went to let in William, come back with their breakfasts. Frevisse moved the books and writing things aside on the table and Lady Jane took her sewing box to the window bench to make room for him to set out the food: the full loaf of bread still warm and wonderfully smelling from the oven and some of last night’s roast meat in its rich sauce in portions very large for two women supposedly deep in prayers. He poured spiced wine, then set the tall pitcher beside the fire to keep warm but did not stay to serve. Lady Jane would have when she had returned from locking the door behind him but Orleans forestalled her with, “I pray you, give me the pleasure,” and refusing their protests, saw them both seated and proceeded to wait on them with the gallant flourishes of an overearnest young squire determined to show he knew every nicety of napery and service. The fact that there was very little napery to hand or much serving to be done with so small a meal lent laughter to his excessive efforts, and Orleans kept that ease among them through the meal, even after he sat down to join them at it, asking small questions about one person and another he had known in the household in the years he had been in Suffolk’s keeping and then about last night’s feast and guests, all of it very lightly done but giving him, Frevisse saw by the meal’s end, not only fairly detailed knowledge of the Suffolk household as it now was but of a great deal that lay behind the feast, despite she had quite deliberately kept from repeating anything Alice had said about its purposes.

  They were rising together from the table when the brief rasp of a key turning the lock in the hallward door gave them only warning enough to look toward it before Lady Alice stood in the doorway, dressed for going out in a cloak of kingfisher blue from wimpled throat to floor, its hood pulled loosely up over her veil and headress, framing her face against the darkness of the stairway behind her. She came no farther in, only stayed there in the doorway, all her gaze on Orleans and his on her; and though neither made movement toward the other, the distance between them as nothing as she said in a soft, rushed voice, “I wanted at least to see you. To know it’s well with you.”

  As softly, quickly, Orleans answered, “It’s well. You will come later?”

  “Yes.”

  Only that, and she was gone, the door shutting, and the key turned and taken from the lock leaving behind her a deeper absence than should have been there.

  It was Orleans who stirred first, seemed to force himself back to when and where he was, to say with a lightness to the words that his face betrayed, “So. What shall we make of our day? What books have you brought, my ladies?”

  “Our breviaries,” Lady Jane said, “considering our excuse to be here, but…”

  Orleans slid out the lowest volume. “But Gower’s Confessio Amantis, too. Your choice, my lady?” To Lady Jane’s nod that it was, he gave a small bow of his head; Alice might never have been there for all he now showed. “My thanks. No matter what set of mind I might be in today, there will be stories in here to please and temper it. It was well thought of.”

  Was it? Frevisse wondered. It might be, with all its tales of loves lost and loves won, of all the joys and griefs and prices to be paid for love, come well or ill, but only if Orleans caught and kept in mind what bound all its stories into one: that for the wise man the time came to give up the pleasures of the body and instead pursue the matters of his soul.

  She did not want mere to be between Alice and Orleans what she was coming to fear there was.

  Lady Jane was offering to take Orleans’ doublet to mend and while he willingly unlaced it, Frevisse took up her own breviary and drew aside to a chair at the room’s far end, to do something toward at least some of the morning’s prayers. And while Lady Jane went with the doublet to the window bench and her sewing box, setting back another of the shutters for better light, Orleans, surely not warm enough in jerkin and shirt, wrapped himself in his cloak that had made part of his bedding on the settle overnight and sat himself down there to read. After that, except for the sometimes hiss of the fire and the occasional turn of a vellum page, there was silence in the room; no household sounds reached them, and for all they heard of anything from London’s streets, they could have been a world away from them, until away beyond walls and rooftops London’s bells began to ring for Sext.

  Frevisse was somewhere near the end of Tierce’s prayers without having much heeded what they were. She finished them, and turned to Sext’s. Orleans left off with Gower’s tales, sat quietly a while, then shifted to the table, the scritch of his pen on paper soon joining the small sounds of the fire. Lady Jane rustled in her sewing box for thread and went on sewing, the rend in Orleans’ doublet probably needing a deal of skillful stitching to make a hidden mend of it, Frevisse supposed, found herself thinking of that instead of prayers, tried to shift her mind back to where she wanted it to be, but finally gave it up. There were too many questions come all together in her head with nothing like answer to any of them and no way of sorting out which of them might be the more necessary to follow from which ones were best left alone.

  Or if maybe all of them were best left alone.

  Orleans had asked her what she knew of “these matters.” Beyond what she had told him, what did she know?

  She knew she was afraid of what there might be between Alice and him but had no certainty there was anything to fear.

  She also thought that something had changed between Lady Jane and William. If so, why? When? How? Or if they had been hiding that warmth she had seen between them this morning, why had they felt the need to?

  And why had Lady Jane shown even that small alarm at Orleans’ question of how much she knew in these matters? Surely she wasn’t afraid of Orleans. So had it been the question that frightened her? But again, why? Because she somehow knew more than Frevisse about “these matters,” and that “more,” whatever it was, frightened her?

  Yesterday she had been frightened, too, when she gave that warning in the yard. There had been no chance to question her about it since then, hardly even time to think about it with everything else happening, but among all the questions, what she had meant by that warning was one at least that could be asked and an open answer fairly demanded.

  And maybe something about Robyn Helas, too.

  Frevisse closed the breviary and stood up, meaning to join Lady Jane at the window; if they kept their voices low, they could talk without Orleans needing to notice them. But Orleans looked up, with a small beck of his head asked her to join him at the table, and hoping she hid her reluctance, she did, Orleans rising to pull out a chair for her and not sitting again until she had. She had already judged that courtesy was as much a part of everything he did as breathing was, but courtesy could be a shield against giving
away too much of oneself and it served Orleans that way very well, Frevisse thought as she settled, facing him, hands folded on her breviary in her lap, and he asked, “Your prayers went well, my lady?”

  “No,” she answered honestly. “I let my mind to wander, I’m sorry to say.”

  Orleans nodded in sympathy. “The mind will do that. Go wandering even from prayers when it has too much else to think on. Or things on which it doesn’t want to think. Or… shouldn’t think.”

  He was straightly watching her while he said it, the words half questioning and deliberately weighted, to see her reaction to them, Frevisse realized, and she said lightly, “Ah well, there are prayers enough in the day I can hope to make up for it later when my mind is more to the task.” She cast a brief look at the table. “You’ve been writing?”

  It was a question unsubtly meant to turn the talk from where it had been toward something else. That she understood his need to know as much as might be about whoever had him in their keeping did not equally mean she had to help him at it. He might probe and she might avoid, fair to fair, and so she smiled and put out a hand toward the paper on the table. It was more in his reach than in hers; he took it and handed it to her. “Poetry,” she said, the uneven lines giving it away without her need to read any of it. “Lady Jane said that you write poetry.”

  “It occupies the mind.” Orleans’ lightness matched her own. “When the mind would go wandering and I would rather it did not.” Letting her know he understood that her diversion was as deliberate as his questioning. “This one is to the goddess Fortune, questioning her use of me.”

  Finding her way among the crossed-out words and overwritten lines, Frevisse read aloud, “ ‘Goddess Fortune, I think you are unkind this case, To suffer me so long a while endure So great a pain without your mercy or your grace. Why stand you still my adversary, To every hope contrary, Make always all my sorrows to increase, My heart be always far from ease