The Traitor's Tale (38 page)

Whatever she might have answered was stopped by the Roister bell beginning to ring for the day's next Office, a Summons supposed to enjoin silence on a nun. Dame Frevisse turned her head toward it, then she looked back to him, saying nothing, but slipping a small book from her sleeve. She held it out and he took it, saying, "To pass my time with? My thanks, my lady."

She wordlessly nodded and left, and he carefully shifted himself somewhat higher against his pillow, opened the book's plain parchment cover to the book's beginning, and choked back laughter. She had given him a copy of Chaucer's
Boethe
—.
The Consolation of Philosophy.

Chapter 22

Having had small comfort from None's prayers  and psalms and had the midday meal, Frevisse again asked and was given Domina Elisabeth's leave to return to the guesthall. This time she found Joliffe sitting more up, propped on a pillow against the wall at the bed's head, with Luce sitting on the bed's edge beside him, a bowl of thick soup on her lap and just slipping the spoon from Joliffe's mouth, smiling at him with her eyes locked to his as if something far more than only feeding soup were going on between them. Certainly she startled at the sight of Frevisse and only barely saved the bowl from spilling as she stood quickly up to bob a curtsy and say, "My lady."

"Luce," Frevisse returned as evenly as if she had seen nothing in particular. She held out her hand for the bowl.

"I'm here to talk to Master Noreys and can feed him while I do, freeing you to go about your other duties."

Luce gave over the bowl and spoon with a regretful sideways look at Joliffe, who gave her a smile and said, "Not to worry. I promise I'll be here when you come back."

Luce left on a laugh and a lingering backward look. Frevisse, standing beside the bed with soup bowl in hand, said at Joliffe, "You should be too weak for bringing servant girls to calf-eyes. What were you saying to her?"

Joliffe laid his right hand over his heart and said languishingly, "Only that stories say sight of a fair woman can wound a man to the heart with love, but that sight of her had put heart into the healing of my wound." Still languishing, he added, "May I have more of that soup?"

Frevisse thrust the bowl at him. When she first saw him this morning, she had been unsettled by the grayness shadowed under his eyes and the deep-drawn lines of pain on either side of his mouth, but impatient with his foolishness, she said tartly, "Use your strength for other than flattering our servant girls. You told me you could feed yourself."

His grin was unrepentant as he took the bowl. "Kind words make for kind hands," he said.

"Was it an unkind word of yours, then, set someone so unkindly at you?" she asked with a nod at his side.

"You wrong me, my lady," Joliffe said, sounding aggrieved. "There was never a word said between us at all. I'd done
nothing."

"Except be there, taking the thing he'd probably come for, too," Frevisse said at him. "Eat." While he began to obey her, she went on. "The priest there, killed the way he was. That was the same way Suffolk's priest died. Killed by his own parishioners and his head cut off."

Joliffe swallowed and said, "Noted that, did you?"

"I gather, too, you don't think the man who tried to
kill you was simply another villager."

Joliffe's face went bleak with memory. "The villagers were one thing. They were no more than a dog-pack turned savage, the wits gone out of them. This man, he was enjoying himself in a whole other way and apart from them. I'd lay good odds he's the one who stirred them up and set them on. Not that the stirring up may have been that hard. The whole of the south and east have been seething for months now, uprisings coming and going like pots going on and off the
boil. Someone who set to it wouldn't have that hard a time roiling up a village that's unhappy at their priest anyway. Not given there are always men ready for trouble for the hell of
it anyway, even at the best of times."

"And these are nothing like the best of times. Nor, I gather, either of those priests the best of men."

"No," Joliffe said tersely. "It seems they were not."

"Even then, village displeasure rarely goes so far as to kill," Frevisse said.

"And even more rarely to the cutting off of heads," Joliffe said, his voice flat and dry. They looked at each other for a long moment, and then he said for both of them, "Two priests dead in a somewhat uncommon way and both of them linked to Normandy's loss. However unwittingly on Sire John's part."

"Eat," Frevisse remembered to order, and while he did, she said carefully, "There's Suffolk's steward, in Wales, too."

Joliffe set the spoon back into the bowl. "You see that, too? The thing that's like among all three murders? Routs of parishioners savaging their priests. A sudden tavern scuffle that 'happens' to break into the street as Hampden passes by. Always no one man to blame. And Matthew Gough," Joliffe added grimly. "The men who killed him and Hampden were hired to it, unlike the villagers, but his death and Hampden's were meant to look the same as the priests'— deaths with no one to
blame by face or name. That's four men linked, one way or another, to Suffolk and Normandy, and all of them. . ."

"... murdered by too many men for one man to be singled out as their murderer," Frevisse said, finishing his thought with her own. "Murdered in ways that, for Gough and Hampden seem by chance, and with the priests, no one man's fault."

"Except I saw him," Joliffe said quietly. "The man who didn't belong where he was. The man who wasn't a villager and knew on the instant that I wasn't either."

"You truly think he goaded the villagers to both priest-killings?"

"I think it . . . possible."

"But even if we bring ourselves to suppose that this man deliberately set to causing these four murders ..." Frevisse paused, frowning. Did she believe that?

"There's enough alike among their deaths," Joliffe said quietly, "to make it more than just the fever burning odd patterns into my mind."

"And I'm without the excuse of a fever for thinking it," Frevisse said. "But why would this man trouble to be so subtle at these murders? I have to doubt he has any other link to these men. Gough I can see would be better not to do alone, but the others . . . He could have killed them and been away, with no one to know who did them."

"You surely have a thought on 'why'," Joliffe said.

"And so do you," she returned.

He nodded but paused for another spoonful of the soup before saying, "My guess is that these killings aren't for his own sake, that someone is setting him on to them."

"Someone who wants to keep secret the true reason for Normandy's loss," Frevisse said. "So the murders all have to look like something other than plain murder, to lessen chance someone will see how they're linked."

"With now the added slight problem," Joliffe said evenly, "that I've probably become someone else this someone will now want dead."

"Yes," Frevisse agreed, her voice as level as his own.

He handed her the emptied bowl and closed his eyes. "I think I'll go to sleep again."

Not that he looked to have choice about it. Given his body's present weakness, sleep probably took him when it would, Frevisse thought, and she stood still, waiting while his face slackened and his breathing evened, until he seemed gone too deeply into sleep for her to disturb him as she quietly left, taking her thoughts with her back into the cloister.

Her duties kept her there through the rest of the day. She did not go back to
the guesthall until the next morning, again with Domina Elisabeth's leave but earlier, between Tierce and Sext, and found Joliffe on his feet and out of his room, leaning on Tom's arm and not walking steadily but with more color in his face than yesterday. Luce hovered nearby, more than ready to help if need be, until at Frevisse's sharp look she seemed to decide she was needed elsewhere and went away.

Tom scowled after her, either because she had abandoned him or else unhappy with her heed to Joliffe; and old Ela, sitting a little aside from Joliffe's door instead of in her corner, chuckled and said, "You help get him better so he goes and she'll remember you soon enough, Tom-boy. Better the ass in the barn than the horse gone down the road."

Tom grumbled something under his breath and Joliffe wisely did not laugh but said, "I'm ready to lie down, I think."

Back in his room again, he eased himself onto the bed, thanked Tom, and added, "I suppose I'll have to do it again this afternoon."

"Aye. So Dame Claire says," Tom agreed. Frevisse had followed them into the room. He jerked a bow to her and went out.

Joliffe, settling himself against the pillow against the Wall, said, "So. I've thought more, and likely you have, too."

"I have," Frevisse granted. She did not bother to hide she was not happy with her thoughts. "We're well-agreed, I think that these murders were done to keep secret that Suffolk and Somerset set out with purpose to lose Normandy, yes?"

"Yes," Joliffe agreed. "From that it comes that whoever ordered the murders has to be someone who knew that Hampden and Suffolk's chaplain took messages to Somerset in France. Burgate, too, of course, and he'd surely be dead along with them if he hadn't written and then hidden that letter for Suffolk. Instead, his cousin died. In his place, as it were. Though for all we know, Burgate is dead, too, since they knew where to go looking for the letter."

"Unless Lady Alice got him out of Kenilworth before it came to that," Frevisse said, "and it was from him, rather than from Vaughn, she learned where the letter was and sent her man to Sible Hedingham."

"And if that was the way of it, we can guess that someone followed Burgate to Wingfield," Joliffe said, "and then followed her man to Sible Hedingham. It would be easy enough for a spy in her household to tell someone there was a link between Burgate talking to Lady Alice and that man being sent, without the spy knew why."

"And when her man came away from the priest's," Frevisse said, "he was killed because whoever followed him thought he must have the letter."

"Except he didn't, and the man I saw had to set about getting it the longer way."

"Why? When he could have simply forced the priest to tell him and then killed him, if he had to have him dead."

"Again, to keep from having questions asked," Joliffe said. "One stranger dead in the road and no way to tell who did it—that happens. A priest murdered soon afterward and nearby, again by someone unknown—not so easily dismissed. But one more hurly of villagers killing a hated priest . . ." He shrugged. "This year, with all else going on, who's to take special note of that or link it to the dead stranger? The law would be satisfied with seeing there's enough justice done to close the matter, and there's an end."

Frevisse regarded him in a steady silence for a long moment, understanding what he was saying even while wishing she could refuse it. There was too much ugliness in the thought of someone who could so coldly carry out such business. But finally she said steadily, "The question then is not so much who was the man who tried to kill you but who is behind him, ordering it all."

"The duke of Somerset being the open choice," said Joliffe. "As always."

"Especially when you add the murder we've missed out."

"Missed?" Joliffe did not straighten from the pillow but his eyes were darkly alert. "What murder have we missed?"

"The duke of Suffolk's. His death was much like these others."

Joliffe stared past her at the far wall as if needing time to take in what she had said.

He took so long to answer that she added, very slowly because of her own uncertainty, "Come to it, we might well add in the bishop of Chichester's murder in January and the bishop of Salisbury's in June."

Joliffe's gaze snapped back to her, harsh and sharp. "Damnation twice over," he swore softly. "There's a distance I was nowhere near to going yet. Both of them almost as high in the government as Suffolk and Somerset, with Chichester killed by soldiers rioting against him, Salisbury by men of his own bishopric. Again, no blame to be laid to one man."