A Play of Treachery (25 page)

All the while through those uneasy days, his lessons that were no part of his household duties went on. He was now become too familiar in Lady Jacquetta’s household to be of particular interest to anyone—even Estienne no longer troubled him with undue questions—but he could believably have only so many weapon lessons from Master Doncaster, and he learned to say sometimes, tipping a wink, that he was off to read in St. Ouen’s library. That brought winks and knowing laughter back at him from his fellows, “reading in St. Ouen’s” being off-talk for dice-play and whoring. To keep it the more believable, he complained of his losses or strutted a little about his wins, and avoided talk of the supposed whoring by saying that those who “did” had no need to “talk,” which got him laughter and fewer questions.

Laughably enough, among his lessons with maps, ciphers, and weapons, he
was
coming to know Rouen’s gambling holes and brothels. As Master Doncaster put it, “Where men are being most stupid, that’s where you’re likely to learn what they ought to keep secret,” and led by Ivo, a rough-mannered, scar-faced man-at-arms, Joliffe gambled some (“Be sure to quit while you’re losing. You’ll be the more welcomed when next you come.”) and whored not at all but sat listening to how much Ivo could learn in easy talk with a whore over a pottle of good wine in her room—in her room but not in her bed. (“And mind that it’s good wine. They know the difference, don’t think they don’t. You’ll get quality for quality, don’t think you won’t.”)

Likewise from Ivo, he learned a rough French of a sort not to be picked up in the ducal household—or to be used there either, once he learned it. He did, though, take George and Estienne gaming one evening at a place where John Ripon was known, and was satisfied to hear them laughing about it to others in the household afterward, but it gave him an odd feeling to know that, for them, John Ripon was real and he—Joliffe—did not exist at all.

He might have settled for thinking that was the base of the unease he increasingly felt in himself, or accepted that his years of being constantly on the move as a player had made him unused to being tethered so long in one place, so that with the newness of everything here worn off and his household duties become familiar, he was simply grown restless. There was more to his unease than that, though. When he looked closely at it, he knew it came from his deepening sense of the households’ undercurrents, even if he still could not clearly read them all. Taut worries over which way the world was going to jump were plain enough. Others, grown out of the likes, dislikes, ambitions, weaknesses, subtle alliances, and close-kept angers common to any household, were beyond Joliffe’s French to lay hold on, so that he had a feeling much like sitting in a kettle of water up to his chin, unable to see the fire beneath it but feeling the water getting hotter and closer toward boiling all around him with no way for him to get out. And there were moments when he very much wanted out, or else for something clear and sure to happen, to break the bonds of all the unsure waiting.

At the same time, he knew that when that something happened—as it surely sometime must—he would probably not be pleased about it. It was all very well to moan for “a change, a change,” but all too often when change came, the refrain altered to “not
this
change, not
this
change.”

Time with Perrette might have helped, but of her he saw and heard nothing. He once asked Matilde about her, but Matilde only answered, unconcerned, “She’s about somewhere. Comes and goes.”

He was left with his duties as Lady Jacquetta’s secretary and whatever lessons Master Wydeville set him and to listening to men’s talk in tavern and hall, with their mix of news and rumors of the wide world and reports of which Rouen alehouse had the latest brew of ale.

Some change came early in March, when Sir Richard, Remon Durevis, and others of the young men of both households left, to take their turn riding guard for the supply wagons going out of Rouen to the castles and lesser fortresses through Normandy and to do some brigand-hunting along the way. As Joliffe had foreseen, the change was not to the good. Their going lowered the humours of everyone left behind, not only among the few youths, like Alain, who did not go, but Lady Jacquetta’s, too. Joliffe was summoned more often to read to her and her demoiselles out of the solemn, suitable books, and in apparently casting about for new ways to occupy herself, she took more especial interest in her English properties than she had. Because of that, late one morning Joliffe was at his desk going through letters come with the latest messenger from England, to be ready when she would send to him to know about them, but rather than the expected summons, he heard her chamber-man Foulke saying hurriedly to Master Wydeville in the outer office, “My lady has been summoned to her uncle. She wants you to come to her. She’s gone to him.”

“Do you know why?” Master Wydeville returned.

“It’s about something from the king’s council in England? An oath?” Foulke said uncertainly. “I didn’t hear it all, but she ordered I was to say you were to come to her as soon as might be.”

“Master Ripon,” Master Wydeville called. “You’re her English secretary. Best you come, too.”

More than willing, Joliffe sprang to his feet and obeyed. Master Wydeville had already started down the stairs. Joliffe caught and kept up with him only by long-legged effort, all the way down from Lady Jacquetta’s side of the
hôtel
to the great hall and beyond it to the richly tapestried room that was Bishop Louys’ great council chamber. The bishop was there, standing with perhaps a dozen of his officers and men, Cauvet among them. Lady Jacquetta, attended only by M’dame, stood facing him—a slight, lone girl all in black among the men and the tall, bright figures of lords and ladies that filled the ceiling-high tapestries. She should perhaps have seemed small, but the tapestried lords and ladies were caught in the stillness of their woven moment while Lady Jacquetta—if Joliffe read her rigid back and raised chin a-right—was in a fury, while her uncle was saying at her with forced soothing, “It’s no great matter. It’s an oath often asked of widows.”

“I doubt that,” Lady Jacquetta snapped. “It’s asked of me because I am the duchess of Bedford.”

“Of course it is!” her uncle returned.

Lady Jacquetta lifted her chin a defiant inch higher. “Then you should say it is a common enough oath to ask of a duchess of Bedford. Not of ‘widows,’ as if we were all of a piece.” She looked sharply aside to Master Wydeville as he and Joliffe bowed to her uncle and her. “Good. You’ve come. My uncle asks something of me that I do not think he should. I wish to hear what you advise, so long my husband’s friend.”

“This oath is not my doing,” Bishop Louys said with thinning patience. “The king’s council in England has asked—”

“Demanded,” said Lady Jacquetta bitterly.

“—
asked
for her vow never to marry without the king’s consent. She objects to it.”

“Because the matter is not the king’s council’s concern. It is mine,” Lady Jacquetta returned.

“You are the king’s uncle’s widow. You have considerable dower land in England. The council is concerned that you—”

“That I will be a fool and marry someone who will use my English wealth against England here in France,” Lady Jacquetta interrupted. “Why should this council in England think I would so dishonor my late husband by making such a marriage? They have no right to think that!”

“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.

J
oliffe’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.