The Traitor's Tale (23 page)

Vaughn again sent one of their men ahead, this time to let Sister Margrett's family know she would soon be there, and despite they made good time, the road easily following a river valley between pasture and open fields, by the time they reached Northampton on its strong rise of ground and rode along and around and into a street near the marketplace, not only Sister Margrett's parents were waiting to greet her at their door, but her brothers and sister, their spouses and children, and a solid score of various other kin "whom Frevisse did not try to sort out in the two hours spent with them and with much talk and food and drink, until Sister Margrett said they must ride on.

That saved Frevisse or Vaughn being the villain in breaking up the happy family gathering, for which Frevisse thanked Sister Margrett as they rode away by the Warwick road.

Sister Margrett gave a forceful sigh. "I love them dearly but, dear goodness, there's a great many of them. It will be so good to be back in St. Frideswide's. Mind you, memories of the fine foods at your cousin's may trouble my mealtimes for a while, and St. Frideswide's is going to seem so small and quiet, but still, it will be good to be back. Enough is enough, after all. Except . . ." She turned her head to give Frevisse a shrewd look past the edge of her veil. "... I don't know what's troubling you and only hope it doesn't come back into St. Frideswide's with us."

That startled Frevisse, before she realized she had small reason to be startled. She knew she had not been hiding her worries very well; knew, too, that Sister Margrett was no fool: she had to have been seeing more than she had chosen to say. And Sister Margrett went lightly on, freeing Frevisse from need to answer, saying, "At least the weather has been good for most of our journeying."

They lost that good weather by mid-afternoon. The air turning sullen and heavy under thickening clouds, and a little beyond Daventry the rain began, sullen and heavy like the air, bringing no cooling with it, making worse that they had to put on their cloaks with the hoods up. The almost treeless fields to either side of the road blurred behind the screen of rain, the road turned slick under their horses' hoofs, and Vaughn brought his horse alongside of Frevisse to tell both her and Sister Margrett, "Ed hoped to reach Warwick for the night, because Kenilworth is an easy ride from there, but Em thinking now we'd best stop at Southam. There's a good inn there."

Sister Margrett nodded strong agreement to that, and Frevisse said, "Yes. Very good," the more readily because she was in no great hurry to reach Kenilworth. Later tomorrow would serve as well as sooner for such a useless errand as this one.

Chapter 13

Two main roads crossed in Southam, with Northampton and Warwick opposite ways on one of them, Coventry and Oxford their two directions on the other. The inn was of a size and comfort in keeping with that, and after an ample supper followed by a good night's sleep, Frevisse was in better humour to face the next day than she had thought to be. The rain was done, the clouds were thinning toward a fair day as the sun rose, and as they mounted their horses in the innyard Frevisse could not help thinking that Banbury town was merely ten miles to the south of here and St. Frideswide's not far beyond it. If they turned that way, they could be there before . . .

"Twelve miles or so to go, my ladies," Vaughn said, gathering up his reins. "With luck you'll be there not much after midday."

Frevisse took up her own reins and turned her horse to follow him out of the innyard.

The day had cleared to open sunlight and few high-drifting clouds by the time they approached Kenilworth's rose-gray walls and towers. From atop the square bulk of the Norman keep inside the walls, the queen's banner with her heraldic arms of Anjou impaled with her husband's lifted and fell in a small wind, showing crimson, blue, silver, gold.

"So she's still here," Vaughn said as they approached the outer gateway with its double stone towers.

In surprise, Sister Margrett said, "They told us in Warwick that she was."

"They can say that in Warwick without knowing that she's moved on without telling them first," Vaughn answered easily. "As it is, she's been here long enough she'll likely welcome what small change of talk you'll bring her."

He said that just as he turned his heed to the gate-guards, leaving Sister Margrett and Frevisse looking at each other, both unsettled at thought they might be supposed to divert the queen, however slightly. They neither of them said so, though, even to each other, while Vaughn explained their business to the guard and showed his warrant as the duchess of Suffolk's man. Given leave to pass, they rode on, through the cool shadows of the long stone gateway arch into the quarter-moon curve of the walled and garrisoned yard that protected the next towered gateway.

There they had to wait while the guards jested with the driver of a horse-pulled cart piled with hay before they let him through, plainly someone they knew and about his expected business. They gave Vaughn hardly more trouble, glanced at his warrant and waved him on. This time, though, as they rode out the far end of the gateway arch both Sister Margrett and Frevisse exclaimed and without thinking drew rein to stare to either side of them, because rather than riding into another wall-circled yard, they were on a wide causeway raised on an earthen bank across a broad, shining, blue lake that spread away on both sides, curving around the rose-stoned castle walls where ahead of them another stone-towered gateway waited.

Vaughn, stopping his own horse, turned in his saddle and said, grinning, "It's something, isn't it?"

"It
is,"
Sister Margrett answered almost breathlessly, while Frevisse nodded agreement. Most often, a castle's best outer defense was a steep-sided, grass-grown ditch, wide at the top, narrow at the bottom, meant to make assault by men and siege weapons difficult or, at best, impossible. This lake would serve the same purpose very well; and meanwhile served for pleasure: several shallow-bottomed boats were afloat on it, one with a man fishing, two others with several people in each, shaded under gaudy-painted canvas tilts, too far away on the bright lake to be certain what they did but looking as if merely easily drifting.

"Would the queen be out there?" Sister Margrett asked, wide-eyed.

"I'd say there'd be far more out there if she were," Vaughn said, and they rode on again.

Beyond the third gateway and its guards the castle's great yard opened in front of them, with all the many buildings needed to serve the castle's many needs—stables, storerooms, workshops, lodgings for lesser servants and workmen—and the great come-and-go of
the many people to meet those needs. Ahead, the stone tower of the keep bulked high above it all beyond yet another wall that Frevisse supposed closed off an inner yard and royal chambers. As they neared the plain, untowered gateway through that wall, their man that Vaughn had sent ahead came forward to meet them from where he had been waiting on a bench in a stretch of shade along one building, and to Vaughn's, "All's well?" he answered, "No trouble. I've told the chamberlain you'd be here. He says the queen will likely see them sometime this afternoon."

"Good. We'll leave the horses to you and Symond, then. When they're stabled, you can bring our bags. My ladies."

The gateguard here nodded them through without a question, into a courtyard surrounded on three sides by long buildings of the same red stone as the rest of the castle. The solid square of the keep with its narrow windows bulked against the sky to their right, but the other buildings were lower, graceful with tall, stone-traceried windows and steep blue-slate roofs. Ahead was the great hall, its wide doorway framed in deeply carved stone at the head of a wide stone stairway. At one end a tall oriel window curved outward into the yard, while beyond it the other buildings curved around the yard. Vaughn's question to a passing servant in a livery doublet of green and white turned him and the nuns toward the keep and up an outer wooden stairway to go through a doorway set deep in the eight-foot thickness of the wall to
a long room with tables and an array of men busy at writing on scrolls and papers or carrying other scrolls and papers from one place to another. This, Frevisse could see, was where the business of running the queen's household was done—the records kept and decisions made that let the queen and her people live in comfort and ease.

Vaughn clearly knew his way here. He and the man to whom he gave them over greeted each other by name before Vaughn left and Master Faber began to apologize there was nowhere near the queen's own chambers in the royal wing where they could be accommodated as they should in honor be, since that they came from the duchess of Suffolk. Still, there was a very good chamber here in the Strong Tower. If they would be pleased to come
this way . . .

A stairway in the thickness of the wall took them another story higher in the keep to where several chambers were wood-partitioned out of what had been a single large space in the keep's younger days. "These are where the queen's gentlewomen stay," the man murmured. And the serving-women who wait on the gentlewomen, Frevisse thought. No, they were not being accommodated as they might have been, coming from the duchess of Suffolk; and although the plain, small chamber into which she and Sister Margrett were shown suited her own needs very well, she had to wonder how much it reflected a lessening of Alice's place at court that those who came in her name weren't given better than this. Was it truly that they "couldn't be"? Or was it something else?

Master Faber pointed out that the beds were freshly made for them and there was water for washing in the pitcher there and a clean towel apiece. He said he would have their bags brought up as soon as they came and there were women in and out all day if they had questions or needed help with anything.

"You'll be summoned when her grace is ready to
see you and taken there when the time comes," he finished and bowed and left them.

Sister Margrett, looking somewhat overwhelmed, sat down on one of the two beds and said, "Oh, my." With which Frevisse, sitting down on the other bed, could only agree.

As it was, they had barely time to brush their habits clean, wash their faces and hands, and—after their saddlebags were brought—put on fresh wimples before a woman came to fetch them. They were as ready as they could be and followed the woman from the keep and across the courtyard to one of the other, newer buildings. Up a wide stairway, they came into an upper chamber, where the woman turned rightward through a doorway framed in ornately carved stone, opening into a broad chamber that was clearly a great lord's—or lady's—reception room. Richly dressed men and women were crowded around it in talking clusters. On both sides rows of ceiling-tall windows rose stone-traceried into arches set with heraldicly painted glass in strong colors above, fully glazed with clear glass below to let in a plenitude of light and give view, on one side, into the courtyard, and over the surrounding lake and countryside on the other, between the windows, the walls were a deep green painted over with patterns of yellow vines and bright-feathered birds, except at the chamber's far end where, ceiling to floor, hung a wide tapestry showing the royal arms of England— gold lions and lilies quartered on crimson and blue— against a sky of paler blue above white castle towers and green trees across the tapestry's lower half.

Centered below the tapestry was a wide and high-backed chair, painted and gilded and raised on the several steps of a square dais. It had all the seeming of a throne, and there could be no doubt that the young woman sitting upon it was surely the queen.

Margaret of Anjou had been sixteen years old when she came to England as King Henry's queen without either
o£
them having ever seen the other. She was twenty-one now, and all the reasons for which the marriage had been made were failed. The truce with France that had come with her marriage was not only broken but the war it had stopped was lost, and doubt was growing by the month that she would ever produce the needed heir to the throne.

Frevisse could only hope there was a deep affection between her and her husband, to make the marriage worth the otherwise wasted cost of it.

And despite everything and worried though Queen Margaret surely was at the troubles presently tearing England, she sat with outward calm enough, her head bent slightly to one side as she listened to two lords in earnest talk with each other beside her. Because she was a queen, her fair hair, instead of caught up and covered out of sight like all other married women, was uncovered, swept back in smooth wings from her face and spread smooth and gleaming behind her shoulders, bound only by the thin circlet of a simply crown. She was dressed simply, too, in a green, open-sided surcoat over a fitted gown of soft rose . . . silk, Frevisse thought as the light slid sleekly along the cloth as Queen Margaret lifted an arm to draw the lords' heed to her. Both men turned to hear what she had to say, and the woman leading Frevisse and Sister Margrett stopped and said quietly, "She's with the duke of Buckingham and Sir Thomas Stanley just now. We'll have to wait."