The Maiden’s Tale (21 page)

“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

The rest the page was a welter of half-written lines and deleted words, but what she had read was enough to tell her that despite the years of unfreedom there had been for him— and might yet be—he was not come to terms with it. More than that, he was someone who sought out the words to say who he was and what he felt and to ask why it was this way. Fortune—Fate—Chance—God—Life. All words that gave somewhere to ask the question Why?

A question not always safely asked or answered. A dangerous question but one that Orleans dared ask.

But he said easily, taking the paper from her, “There will be more if ever I make my rhymes come right. Which so far they have not wanted to.”

“The thought behind it is assuredly true enough. Fortune hasn’t been kind to you.”

“Not to be readily noticed,” Orleans agreed, laying the paper aside. “Still, there is the fact that I am alive, though I have written poetry about my doubts of the worth of that, too.”

He was being charming and was very good at it. She wondered if it was a skill he had always had or something he had learned while a prisoner, finding it better to charm his captors than hold himself aloof in arrogance and pride. After all, more was likely to be done for a friend than for a prisoner, and if worse came to worse friendship might serve to keep him alive when nothing else would.

Was it only friendship, or something more, he had with Alice?

Frevisse jerked her mind aside from the thought, telling herself she had no right to ask it. Or did she, since it might be the matter of her cousin’s soul was at stake in it?

At least it seemed Orleans had given up trying to find out her mind for the while. Or else, she suddenly suspicioned, he was circling around to come another way, and to forestall that, she grabbed at random for something reasonably safe to say and said, “That was kind what you did for Lady Jane this morning.”

Orleans looked momentarily puzzled, visibly reaching back in his memory before answering with an acknowledging inclination of his head, “It was also the truth. There is a loveliness to her beyond the marring.”

“It’s nonetheless a truth she needs to hear and a truth not easily said. It was good of you to say it.”

“That is one of the advantages of being prisoner so long. I have learned to make the most of what freedoms I have. Fair words to fair ladies is one of the most readily to hand and costs nothing.”

“Costs nothing if done judiciously,” Frevisse corrected.

“If done judiciously,” he agreed.

And always considering that if there did, after all, happen to be a cost, it would probably be paid especially by the lady, Frevisse did not say aloud.

But Orleans was taking their talk another way with “My Lady Alice spoke of you sometimes in the while that I was in my lord of Suffolk’s keeping. Spoke well of you.”

“As I trust I always do of her,” Frevisse answered evenly, smiling but disconcerted to hear Alice had talked of her to him.

Orleans leaned a little toward her. “And surely you always speak truly of her, too. So tell me, I pray you, how does she?”

The lightness, the play of words, were suddenly set aside; and because she could not tell where he meant to go with whatever she answered, Frevisse took the straightest way, answering as truly as she could, “She’s well. From all that I can tell these few days I’ve been with her, her life agrees with her and she with it.”

“She is happy then?” Orleans insisted. “She is… content?”

Still trying to guess what he was at, Frevisse said cautiously, “Within what anyone’s life allows for contentment, for happiness, yes, I think she is. Happy enough, content enough.”

Orleans’ gaze held to her face a little longer, as if looking to find what was there behind what showed, until, seemingly satisfied of something, he leaned back into his chair and said, “Then it is well. Thank you.”

Across the room Lady Jane rose to her feet, saying. “Your doublet is done, your grace.”

She brought it to him as he put aside his cloak and helped him on with it since it was most fashionably cut and therefore somewhat tight in the shoulders at putting on though comfortable enough afterwards to judge by how he shrugged and settled into it before bending his head to see to lacing it closed. Frevisse used the diversion to murmur, “If you’ll pardon me, my lord,” and followed Lady Jane away to the window bench. There they sat to either side of Lady Jane’s sewing box, Lady Jane taking up the wedding shirt, Frevisse turning her back as much as she could from the room, toward the window with her breviary open in her lap as if she meant to try her prayers again. The day that had had some hope of sunshine at its start was going gray under closing clouds that promised snow again but there was more than light enough to read by. Or feign reading by. Because despite her book, she was watching from the side of her eyes to see if Orleans would follow and was relieved when he did not, merely finished fastening his doublet, then went to the settle and took up
Confessio Amantis
again.

He had disconcerted her badly. Whatever his years as prisoner had done to him, they had not made him into someone who sat in idle waiting for his life to happen to him. Even brought to the confines of this room and such slight company as herself and Lady Jane, he was finding out in every way he could who it was he had to deal with, how much or how little they were for or against him, or if they did not matter.

But was sure enough of Alice that all he had wanted to know of her was if she was happy, if she was content.

Frevisse held to her pretence of being intent on her book while Orleans read and Lady Jane embroidered an intercurving pattern of green vines and leaves onto a cuff. A few large snowflakes fell slowly into the garden and from the hall there were occasional noises now of the tables being set up for dinner. When a log broke and fell in the fire, Orleans rose, pushed it back among its fellows with his foot, and sat again. And quietly Frevisse closed her breviary and said to Lady Jane, her voice low and carefully mild because intensity would carry where words would not, “What did you mean by your warning in the yard yesterday?”

Lady Jane paused at her sewing but neither looked up nor answered.

“That I should be careful,” Frevisse urged. “That the man whose place I’ve taken with the messages didn’t ‘simply die.” What did you mean?“

Lady Jane’s hands sank into her lap, onto the shirt, and still saying nothing, she lifted her head and looked out the window for a time before saying, as low as Frevisse, “He wasn’t a man who drank to excess. He wouldn’t have that night in particular because I’d passed a message on to him he was to take out first thing in the morning. He was too careful to be that drunk that night.”

“No one is always careful.”

Lady Jane did not answer that.

“Does Lady Alice know this, suspect this?”

Lady Jane shrugged a little. “There’s nothing to know. Everyone accepts what the doctor said except William and me. He’s asked questions, trying to learn more, but there’s no proof that points to anyone, only likelihood that it was done.” The despair of frustration in Lady Jane’s voice on the sudden changed to indignation as she looked at Frevisse angrily to say, “Of course Lady Alice doesn’t know! She’d not have made you part of it if she’d thought there was danger in it.”

That at least was good to know, Frevisse thought more soberly than she would have wished.

Lady Jane, letting go the indignation, sighed. “And anyway it hardly matters now. With his grace of Orleans here, there’ll be no messages for a while and so no danger.”

“Except that, if you’re right, there’s someone in the household willing to kill,” Frevisse pointed out.

“No one knows Orleans is here save you and me and Lady Alice, his grace of Suffolk, and William,” Lady Jane as quickly pointed back.

“And Bishop Beaufort and the men who brought him, they know, too,” Frevisse returned. “And someone besides them, besides us, knew he was at Winchester House. By now it has to be known he isn’t, and they’ll be looking to find where he’s gone.”