The Maiden’s Tale (17 page)

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 tastes 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.”

“And my lord the earl of Suffolk,” Frevisse said. “And Lady Alice.”

“Then John Beaufort, earl of Somerset, nephew to his grace of Winchester, here for his first parliament and apparently favored by his uncle. And Sir John Popham, a former treasurer of the royal household and long involved with the governing of Normandy, and his lady wife beside him.”

Frevisse supposed she would have been more greatly impressed at being in such company if she had not known that most of them were there, like her, more for the purposes it was hoped they would serve than for their own sakes. Lord Cromwell claimed Master Tresham’s attention again, and the feast went on through another remove and more talk and food and entertainings, until a fanfare from the minstrels’ gallery announced the feast’s final, greatest subtlety, a sculpted confection mounted on a gold cloth-covered board carried by four men in matching gold cloth tabards up the length of the hall and down again to drums that matched their stately progress, giving ample time for everyone to see the figures of Christ enthroned in majesty, his mother Mary before him interceding for a kneeling man wearing England’s royal colors and a crown, flanked by saints, one holding up the heraldic arms of England, the other those of France, while, represented as a woman, Peace held a wreath of victory over the king’s head. Appreciative exclaims accompanied its progress, while servers spread along the tables setting out dishes of white apple slices fried in a caraway batter before each pair of guests and whisking away empty dishes and bone-filled voiders. To her great relief Frevisse realized the feast was ending. The overwarm hall, the constant rise of noise around her, the late hour—it must be nigh to eight of the clock and she was used to nunnery hours of to bed not long past dark—were all joining with the too-rich food to make an uncomfortableness in her midward parts, though for form’s sake she nibbled at an apple slice, making it last until Suffolk rose in his place, waited while talk and movement died away all through the hall, and then in a voice that carried to everyone and even the minstrels’ gallery, expressed his pleasure they were all here and asked Bishop Beaufort to give closing thanks.

Bishop Beaufort rose in his place, tonight wearing his red robes of a cardinal, prince of the Church, to let men clearly understand how powerful and highly placed were those who favored the French peace; and despite he bowed his head, he gave the grace in such a way it was impossible of doubt that God would hear and heed him.

Assuredly the servants did. At his closing amen, they surged forward from the walls where they had been waiting to draw back the high table’s chairs, the lower tables’ benches, freeing the guests from their places to move out of the way of more servants closing in to clear away food and dishes, then the tablecloths, then the tables themselves, to leave the hall clear for dancing and mingling and talk through the rest of the evening.

Frevisse’s preference was to escape up the stairs to bed but politeness forbade that, and in the swirl and shift of servants along the dais, she found herself moved somehow away from Master Tresham to beside Bishop Stafford, who seemed to feel he should say something to her and so commented on how fine a feast it had been. She agreed, adding nothing to encourage him to more, but he peered owlishly up at her, not being quite her height, in a way that suggested he wore spectacles when not in public and went on to the weather with “It will be a cold ride home tonight, that’s certain. I understand it isn’t expected to better either. The cold, I mean.”

He had the well-kept, more-than-adequately fed look that seemed to go with bishops, always making Frevisse wonder where Christ’s poverty had gone to, and she answered a little more tartly that perhaps she meant to, “No, I expect it won’t, it being winter and all.”

Whether that would have been sufficient to break off their talk she did not learn because Bishop Beaufort loomed up behind his fellow bishop, laid a large hand on his shoulder, and said, “My lord, Somerset is wondering if you’ll have word with him about something. That little trouble with heretics in your diocese? How far you want the justices to go with it?”

Bishop Stafford noticeably brightened. “Very good. Yes. Where is Somerset? By your leave, lady?”

“Actually,” Bishop Beaufort murmured to his departing back, “what Somerset said was that he hoped to high God the bishop wouldn’t start in on him again about it. Ah well. It served to rescue him from you.”

Below the dais the servants had finished with the tables and the guests were spreading out across the hall. The musicians who between drum rolls and fanfares had played quietly in their gallery were taking up livelier tunes, meant for dancing rather than digesting, and Alice and Suffolk were going down to lead the way into the first set. Watching them while wondering what Bishop Beaufort’s purpose might be in talking to her—their acquaintance had never had occasion for casual conversation or even distant friendliness—Frevisse said for the sake of saying something, “He was not unpleasant.”

“He rarely is. Not being much given to wit or complicated thought in any matter, he does no great good in the world but no great harm either.”

“Except the harm done by men who refuse to do much good,” Frevisse responded.

Bishop Beaufort shifted his gaze back to her. He was a large-built man grown larger with rich living and confident with years of power expertly wielded, and Frevisse wished he would go away, leave her alone; but he went on, consideringly, “I must remember to be careful around you. In some ways you remind me too much of Lady Alice’s father whom I trusted and then I grow careless in what I say. But I think that, as it was with him, what I say will go no further than your hearing it, will it?”