The Maiden’s Tale

The Maiden’s Tale

Margaret Frazer

Chapter 1

It was said Coldharbour House had been built near to a hundred years ago by Sir John Poultney, four times lord mayor of London, to show his wealth and power to the city that had led him to them both. Off Hay Wharf Lane in Dowgate Ward, it stretched east along the Thames with courtyard, great hall, garden; everything needful for a rich man’s proud living, with London all around him to admire what he had done. He had even had a son to inherit all his wealth and property, but the son, though outliving him, had died with no children of his own and since then Coldharbour had passed from hand to hand, no one having it for long. But the hands it passed through were always noble. The earls of Hereford, Huntingdon, and Cambridge; King Henry IV and later his heir the Prince of Wales; and now the earl of Suffolk and his lady wife, with all their hundred and more household folk.

Jane paused with a stitch half-made in the cuff she was setting to the sleeve of the shirt meant for William to wear on their wedding day and raised her head to look out the window.

William, she thought. Trying his name in her mind as if that would make him somehow familiar to her. William Chesman. Tried her name the way it would be when she had his. Jane Chesman. Tried them together. Jane and William Chesman.

Tried to imagine marriage and could not. William Chesman. The man the earl of Suffolk and his wife had, out of their great kindness, arranged for her to marry.

Or, to be more accurate, the man they had bought for her, because she was my lord the earl of Suffolk’s niece and must therefore be provided for. And since she had refused the nunnery there had to be a husband. And since the only likely way that she would come by any was by buying one, they had bought William Chesman for her and sometime not far off— after Christmas but before Lent—she would be married to him. Or he to her. Or however one wanted to look at it.

Jane, on the whole, found it better not to look at any of it too closely and bent her head to finish running her needle into and out of the fine white linen in another of her even, small stitches but only the once and then, her mind not holding to the work, looked up, out of the window again. Coldharbour’s lady chamber was high, up a long spiral of stairs from the great hall that was itself set well above the courtyard. From here on the cushioned window seat at the easternmost of the chamber’s two south-facing windows, she could either look steeply down into the courtyard with its constant come-and-go of housefolk—liveried servants in blue, plain servants in grays and browns and an occasional bold russet or green—or sideways down into a corner of Coldharbour’s garden— winter-dead now behind its green-painted gate and high gray stone walls—or else out over the river wall to the great, sheened, flowing darkness of the Thames, to the low spread of Southwark’s houses and St. Mary Overie’s proud spire on the far shore, or farther still to the distant Surrey hills.

The nunnery they had meant to leave her in for all her life was somewhere there, among those hills.

The thought, like William’s name, slipped unbidden into her mind, and as carefully as she had turned away from thought of him and marriage, Jane turned away from it, looking instead at the Thames. Today it was like dull steel under the gray November sky, rucked into small, fierce waves by the snow-wishing wind, busy as always with a myriad of rowed boats, mostly ferrymen’s simple flats, often small-sailed, ever-busy lighters, sometimes a nobleman’s swiftly passing, gay-painted barge, its double row of oarsmen leaning to their work: all on their ways to somewhere else—upriver, downriver, across river—while the Thames went simply on, deep and certain and unceasing. Jane had found in the week since they had come from Ewelme to Coldharbour that letting her thoughts flow away with the Thames was far better than leaving them free to slip away to other places they could go. She knew that a little further down it roiled into cream foam and roaring around London Bridge’s sterlings, held back on its way to the sea—on still days here in Coldharbour she could hear it when the tide was on the turn and the river had to fight against itself as well as the Bridge—but she also knew that always, soon or late, ebb tide or flow, the Thames won through and on its way, seethed, fought, and flowed on, spreading wide and wider to the sea.

Away.

In her sleep and sometimes, if she was incautious, when she was awake, Jane dreamed of away. Dreamed of being somewhere where neither her face nor who she was supposed to be made difference in the slightest against who she was.

It was a useless dreaming. If she had managed to learn anything in her twenty-and-four years, it was that her face and who she was were the two things that were never going to go away from her. The nunnery had been the nearest she could have come to escaping them and she had refused that. And so she was left with marriage. To William Chesman.

Across the room Aneys and Millicent were beginning another of their not particularly impassioned quarrels over what color one of the flowers should be on what would be a cushion’s cover if they ever finished with it. For them, quarreling was as much a part of sewing as stitching was but it was tedious for everyone else to listen to, and because somehow, tacitly rather than openly, Lady Alice had given her a kind of authority over the other ladies-in-waiting, possibly because she had no friendships with any of them to be damaged, Jane said at them, to put an end to the quarreling, “That shade of pink would be too strong for what you’re doing. A dusky rose would better serve.”

Aneys and Millicent paused, looking surprised to be interrupted; then Millicent asked doubtfully, “Do you think so?”

Jane refrained from saying that if she had said it, she must have thought it; to judge by the quantity of unthought things that came out of people’s mouths, thought-before-talk was not an obvious truth, and she contented herself with answering patiently, “Against that dark a green, that pink would be too sudden. All anyone would ever notice when they looked at the cushion was how pink that flower is.”

“But I like pink,” Millicent said and brightened with, “After all, it’s going to be mostly sat on so it mostly won’t be seen anyway!”

“Then it doesn’t matter if we use it here instead of there,” Aneys put in promptly, taking up her own side of the argument.

“Yes, but…” Millicent answered her, and Elizabeth rose from her cushion to come look over their shoulders and join in while Katherine said from where she sat nearby, “Couldn’t you use…”

At the room’s far end Lady Alice looked up from the account roll on the table in front of her and caught Jane’s eye with a shared smile of covered laughter that said she could leave the girls to their mild quarreling if that was what they presently wanted to do, and despite that Master Bruneau was standing beside her, leaning over to point out something on the parchment while advising on how many tuns of wine should be carted from Coldharbour’s cellars to Wingfield manor now the roads had finally frozen—their talk had been in the corner of Jane’s hearing while her thoughts drifted elsewhere—Lady Alice raised a hand to beckon her to come to her.

Jane willingly set her sewing aside and went. The lady chamber was long for its width, not well-proportioned but beautifully furnished. There were Spanish carpets on the floor, their intricate patterns woven in vivid shades of garnet and sapphire, emerald and gold, and French tapestries telling the story of Tristan and Iseult warmed the walls. The table and chairs, the long seat before the fireplace and even the joint stools were of carved and polished golden oak, and the roof beams were painted with green-leaved vines and many-colored birds. The windows were glazed with clear glass, their shutters bright with my lord and lady of Suffolk’s family arms, and all in all, it was a room as gracious and wealthy as Lady Alice herself, and it said a great deal about my lady of Suffolk that Jane felt not only welcomed there but as at home as anywhere she had ever been.

Master Bruneau acknowledged her approach by straightening long enough to give her a brief bow but went on to Lady Alice, “If you purpose to spend Christmas there, you’ll want that many more tuns at least.”

“But couldn’t they be brought from Ipswich?” Lady Alice asked. “The carting costs would be less and most of what’s here could go to Ewelme instead.”

Master Bruneau unrolled backward through the scroll until he could point out another entry. He was French, had come back with the earl of Suffolk after the earl’s years in France to serve as the Suffolks’ secretary dealing principally with matters concerning their French properties, with presently the most important matter being whether the French wines that had come with the autumn wine fleet would be sufficient for the household’s necessities or if more must needs be bought. “You see here,” he said, “how you’ll need more than what there is at Ipswich, if you purpose to have most of the household with you at Wingfield through to Twelfth Night and maybe Lent.”

“But there will still be some that can go to Ewelme?” Lady Alice asked.

“Yes.” Master Bruneau was pleased to say it, but then added for warning, “Unless you entertain too many folk here the while Parliament goes on.”

“And we probably will,” Lady Alice said.

Master Bruneau sighed. “Then we’ll have to buy more.”

Lady Alice gave Jane a sideways glance and the corner of a smile. There was never fault to be found with Master Bruneau’s keeping of records. He was both diligent and accurate concerning anything that came into his keeping, but he was also famed for how reluctantly he let any of it out again, even for the uses it was purposed. Presently he was as intent over the matter of the wine as if its cost would come from his own purse—an attitude admittedly desirable in a household officer but not always to the lengths that Master Bruneau sometimes took it. But he was too good at what he did for Lady Alice to show irk or laughter at him, and her smile was merely between her and Jane as she lifted a hand to pause their talk and turn from him to say to Jane very casually, “I’d thought to hear about that other matter by now. Would you find if it’s been seen to?”

Jane made the small curtsy polite between kinswomen by marriage and answered, “Yes, my lady,” as easily as if the matter were as slight as Lady Alice made it sound. Lady Alice made a brief, acknowledging nod in answer and turned back to Master Bruneau and the question of whether there were carts enough at Coldharbour or if some would have to be hired. Jane, knowing the inward lurch somewhere near her stomach did not show but wishing she did not have it, quietly left.

There was no reason for that feeling, she chided herself as she circled down the stairs from the lady chamber to the great hall. Lady Alice had made clear when first asking her help with “the matter” how little trouble there was likely to be with it. So long as no one knew beyond the few who had to, everything would be well, and since there was no sign the secret was known or even suspected, it was not fear that jarred in Jane but the reminder that she was the one Lady Alice had chosen to trust. Out of everyone else there was, Lady Alice had chosen her, saying, “The family’s fortune may hang on how well or ill this goes, and since you’re family, who better should I turn to?”

She was family. A small acknowledgment maybe for Lady Alice to make, who had never been without family, never been unacknowledged, not while she was Alice Chaucer in her girlhood, or Lady Alice Philip from her first marriage, or Countess of Salisbury from her second, or now Countess of Suffolk, by her third. It was Jane who had grown up merely Jane Pole, taken care of by the nuns who were paid to do it, with the expectation she would take her vows and become one of them when she was old enough. She had somehow known from an early age—it was no secret, simply not something ever discussed at length—that her father had been the earl of Suffolk, that he had died in Agincourt battle before she was born, and that she had been sent to St. Osburga’s nunnery while still a baby because her mother could not bear the sight of her. Later, when she had been old enough, persistant enough, to ask questions, she had learned that her mother and her own older sisters—my mother and my sisters, Jane sometimes repeated to herself but was never able to make them real—had resigned any claim they had on the Suffolk earldom in favor of her father’s younger brother, the heir of the male blood, now Lady Alice’s husband, and entered a nunnery together. Jane’s rights had been signed away, too, and she had been put into a nunnery but not the same one as her mother and sisters, and she had never seen them or they her since then.

It was something about which Jane mostly managed not to care. It was over and done with, decided—the way her mother must have expected all of Jane’s life would be decided—by the fact she had been born with a blemished face.

Blemished. The word was more kind than the actuality.

“Jane with the blemish” they had called her at the nunnery, to distinguish her from Jane Cufley, another girl kept at the nunnery, and Sister Jane, one of the nuns. “Jane with the blemish, come here.”

“Tell Jane with the blemish to do it.”

“It was Jane with the blemish, Sister.” Even if she had taken her vows, it would have gone on, she supposed. She would have become “Sister Jane with the blemish…”