The Bastard's Tale (3 page)

‘Enough and more than enough,“ Alice had said, trying to make a jest of it and almost succeeding but not quite.

That had been when Frevisse’s first unease had prickled awake. Alice’s mother had been a champion at fussing, a misplaced thimble as great a matter for upset as the need for new slates on the great hall’s roof, but from girlhood Alice had taken after her father, going at problems with thought beforehand, rarely unsettled by anything, even sudden troubles. It had driven her mother frantic—“Don’t you
care!
Don’t you
understand!”
— that a moth hole had been found in a tapestry or the steward said they would run out of salted beef a week sooner than expected. Alice’s care, like her father’s, had been shown by quietly dealing with matters, neither fussing at things nor being fussed by them and surely not by so common a trouble as the overcrowding that always came to anywhere with royalty, let be a parliament added on.

Frevisse had put that first small prickle of worry aside, willing to forget it, but there had been other prickles since then, each small, each easily ignored if she tried, but…

John was going on happily about pulleys and ropes. If he was as attentive to his lessons as he had been to whoever had told him all that, he was going to be a very knowledgeable boy, Frevisse thought, and regretfully gave his hand a small tug to draw his attention, telling him, “We should be going, I’m afraid.”

John’s sigh was heavy as he obediently dropped his heed from the heights to present necessity.

As Alice had explained it, Abbot Babington had, among other entertainments to divert the present crowd of nobility in his abbey, provided that a play be presented. “Of course not simply a play,” Alice had said and for a moment had sounded very like her father, wry over a jest most people would not see. “It’s one of the good abbot’s gifts to the king, you understand.”

‘Oh my,“ Frevisse had said, because something presented to the king and queen and royal court would probably be, at best, beset with strange beings, fantastical clothing, and over-long speeches. At worst it would be so tangled with allegory and other obscurities that no one would know or care what it was about.

‘Oh my,“ Alice had agreed. She had nonetheless found a way to use the thing to her own ends. When Abbot Babington had consulted with Suffolk about the play, she had taken the chance to read it for herself, had found there was place in it for small children, and suggested John would suit well. ”No one,“ she said to Frevisse, ”is ever too young to be brought to the king’s favorable notice.“

So John was bound for practice with the players and it was Frevisse’s duty to see him there, keep watch over him, and afterward take him back to whoever of Alice’s ladies was waiting for him. For her own part, Frevisse was glad of something to do besides sit about, but John trudged beside her back to the guesthall yard with its crowd and rise of the abbey’s cloister buildings on the right and, ahead, the gateway back to the Great Court and more buildings stretching leftward from that to enclose the yard around to St. James church that opened onto the marketplace outside the abbey’s great gateway. Frevisse was so sorry for him that she took him aside from the flow of people and leaned down to ask, “Do you know where we go from here?” She was fairly sure she knew but she also knew how tedious it was, even at four years old, to be all the time told what to do without ever being asked, and indeed John brightened, pointed toward buildings leftward from the Cellarer’s Gate, and said, sounding somewhat less unhappy, “It’s there. One, two, three doors along.”

He pulled on her hand, leading her now, toward the wide doorway set in a fine stone arch into what looked to be a great hall, the principal building along that side of the yard, telling her, “This isn’t where we’ll do the play for the king and everybody. We’ll be in the King’s Hall in the abbot’s palace then. But we have to practice here and Master Wilde says that’s a cracked crock because here is so different from there that nobody will know what to do when we’re there instead of here and everything will go wrong. Noreys says not to worry, though. He says that two practices there will set us up fine. But he doesn’t say it to Master Wilde because, he says, Master Wilde likes to worry.”

‘Does he?“ Frevisse ventured.

‘Yes.“ John seemed quite cheerful about it. ”I like him.“

Meaning Noreys rather than Master Wilde, Frevisse supposed.

As they neared the doorway, a man plainly dressed in doublet and hosen and dun-colored cloak straightened from his lounge against one side of the arch to bow to both of them and ask, “You’ve lost your nurse, then, Lord John?”

‘She’s caught a rheum,“ John said, openly pleased. ”And Master Denham, too. Dame Frevisse is come instead.“

‘My lady,“ the man said. He made her another bow. ”You go on in, my lord. You’re not the last but Master Wilde means to start soon and you know how he is.“

John nodded and led the way inside and along a wide, low-ceilinged, wooden-walled passage, saying over his shoulder to her as they went, “Toller keeps people out who shouldn’t be here. Master Wilde doesn’t want everybody knowing what we’re going to do until we do it. You’re not to talk about it either. Even to Mother.”

Already warned of that by Alice, Frevisse said, “I won’t.”

‘I’ll show you where to sit, too, so you won’t be in the way.“ Openly eager now he was here, he turned through a broad doorway on the right and Frevisse followed him into a high-roofed, open-raftered hall clearly meant for great gatherings of people, almost as broad as it was long and well-lighted by windows set far above head height down both sides of the white-plastered walls. It was, Frevisse knew from Alice, the place where law matters in the abbey’s broad jurisdiction were heard and judged by abbey officials, but with abbey life enough confounded by the presence of king and Parliament, such matters were set by for the while and the hall given over to the players.

Even if she had not known beforehand, Frevisse could have guessed about the players when she saw the raw-wood tower at the hall’s far end, like seven giant boxes, each one smaller than the one below it, with a narrow, rough-built stairway going up the middle of this side to a platform topped by a joint stool. It was nothing likely to be found anywhere in the ordinary way of things. Besides that, near where she stood, among a scatter of large hampers and chests two women were holding up a swathe of blue cloth spangled and clattery with gold-looking—but probably brass—stars, and a little farther off three men with papers clutched in their hands were talking at each other in low-voiced but rhythmed haste, while at the hall’s far end, near the tower, a broad man with disarrayed hair was roaring at four other men, “It’s going to work because I’m going to make it work, by god!”

Before her nunnery days, Frevisse had seen enough of players and their ways to recognize all of this and found she was starting to smile with pleasure as John took her hand again and led her aside from the doorway and chests, hampers, women, and talking men to a bench along the wall where a somewhat older boy was sitting, his legs crossed tailor-fashion under him and a white satin shoe in his hands. He would have risen courteously to his feet but John said, “Don’t,” and Frevisse said, “Keep at whatever you’re doing.”

The boy smiled his thanks, then held up the shoe and said darkly to John, “For Lady Soul. Father wants it to have spangles all over it, and because they’re horrible little things Mum says my fingers are small enough to do better at gluing them on than hers. I can’t wait to grow up.”

‘Your father will have you do other things instead,“ John said, hitching himself onto the bench beside him.

‘But when I’m big and clumsy like Ned, then I won’t have to do this trifling anymore. I’m Giles Wilde,“ he added to Frevisse. ”My father is Master Wilde. That’s him raving away over there. My mother is there with Joane, deciding how many more stars they can put on the heaven-cloth that will hang behind the tower, and everybody else here are our company, except my brother Ned isn’t here yet. He’s late and going to be yelled at, sure as anything.“

‘He’s not late yet,“ John said, swinging his heels. ”It’s not gone one o’clock yet.“

As he said it, a bell from the abbey church’s massive center tower boomed once, the stroke heavy as lead over the rooftops.

‘Now he is,“ said Giles.

Frevisse had not yet sat down and behind her a man said, “Well, Lord John, what have you done with your nurse? Something terrible, I suppose?”

She knew his voice and turned. The fair-haired young man began a bow with, “My lady…” to her but paused, as if momentarily puzzled, then took a quick step backward for space to sweep her a very low bow, saying as he straightened from it, “Dame Frevisse of St. Frideswide’s, yes?”

‘Yes,“ Frevisse said and would have said more but he interrupted her, bending in another, quicker bow, saying, ”You won’t remember me so well as I do you, my lady. We met once when you were hosteler at St. Frideswide’s and I a grateful guest of your nunnery’s kindness. Master Noreys.“

‘I remember you very well,“ Frevisse said, matching him grace for grace. They had indeed met and almost in the way he had said, but she had known him only as Joliffe, not Master Noreys, and had learned both to be wary of him and yet trust him and now said only, ”Master Noreys,“ and nothing more, letting him turn his heed back to John, who finished explaining about the rheum-doomed nurse and schoolmaster just before Giles, watching the door, said, ”Here’s Ned finally come,“ and then with dismay, ”Oh, no, that’s why he’s late. Old Lydgate had him and has come, too.“

Frevisse and Joliffe both swung around toward the hall’s broad doorway where a slender young man in a bright russet cloak and feathered cap was just come in, accompanied by a busily talking older man plump in the black robe of a Benedictine monk, his shiny forehead balded back into his tonsure and his smooth face round from years of indulgent living.

‘Lydgate?“ Frevisse asked with something of Giles’ dismay. ”As in John Lydgate, monk and poet?“

‘Exactly as in ’monk and poet,‘ “ Joliffe said.

For three reigns now, Lydgate’s writings had made him known far beyond St. Edmund’s Abbey walls and he had often gone out into the world to keep his reputation company, willingly writing anything he was asked and paid for, from a lengthy Life of the Virgin to farces to be performed at the royal court and all of it in what Frevisse had always found to be singularly lame-footed verse. With no attempt to hide her dismay, she demanded, “Is this play you’re doing by him?”

‘It will be if he has his way,“ Joliffe answered. He bowed toward both her and John. ”I pray you, pardon me. I have to go save our playmaster from apoplexy.“

Chapter 4

Arteys stood at the gateway into St. Saviour’s Hospital, cloak-wrapped and a shoulder leaned against the gatepost, tired of his own company and considering what he could do besides watch the world go by.

Being among England’s great pilgrimage sites, Bury St. Edmunds did not lack lodgings for travelers. There were the abbey’s guesthalls, inns in plenty and, for the sick of body, church-endowed hospitals on all the main roads into town. The hospitals’ first purpose had been the care of wayfarers and pilgrims either come to St. Edmund’s shrine in hope of healing or else fallen ill on their journeying, but over the years they had begun to provide, as well, a comfortable living and lodging not only for their wardens but for guests neither aged nor infirm, merely sufficiently important to warrant hospitality, and of Bury’s six hospitals the richest was St. Saviour’s outside Northgate. Everywhere in and around the town and abbey was crowded full with those come to Parliament, those come to serve them, and those come to make money off them all. Gloucester, coming late and knowing St. Saviour’s from other times, had sent Sir Richard ahead with Arteys and two squires to claim place for him. They had, though it meant Master Grene the warden had to turn out the abbot of St. Mary’s and the earl of Salisbury. Their displeased lordships had removed farther out from town, to the Franciscan friary that was already overcrowded with the duke of York and his men and—as Sir Richard said—if ever Gloucester needed help anytime soon, he had best not ask it of the abbot of St. Mary’s or the earl of Salisbury.

That had been four days ago and neither Gloucester nor any word why he was late had come, so that yesterday Sir Richard had ridden out to find him, leaving Arteys, Tom Herbert, and Hal Chicheley with the two large chambers to rattle around in like three dried peas in a bushel box until Gloucester arrived with men enough to fill St. Saviour’s lofts and corners and the warden’s hall, too. “A hundred men,” Gloucester had said. “I’m not going with less. I’m the king’s uncle. You want I should ride in looking like some beggar?”

Sir Roger had talked him down to eighty by the time Arteys left, with Arteys hoping he had talked him down more by now, wherever they were.

‘Gloucester not sending word is only a bother, not a worry,“ Sir Richard had said while readying to ride out. ”You know that as well as I do.“ And Sir Richard should know. As he often said, he had been in Gloucester’s service since the year Gloucester’s brother, King Henry of blessed memory, ”took us all to France and we beat the French into the mud at Agincourt. We were both striplings then, your father and I. You should have seen him then, him and his brother standing together, a matched pair all in scarlet and blue and gold. When your father went down in the middle of the fight, King Henry, God keep his soul, fought forward and stood over him until he could be carried off. St. Michael, but that was a day worth the remembering.“