The Bishop’s Tale (4 page)

Indeed, Dame Perpetua replied quietly and gracefully to anything said to her, and when the conversation went away from her, she let it go. She might have been totally unaware of the importance of Bishop Beaufort seated imposingly to her right at one end of the table, so perfect was her demeanor.

For Frevisse it was less easy to be so gracious. Her aunt’s bright, familiar chatter was strained over a real and lacerating grief. And beyond that, Frevisse was uncomfortably aware that Bishop Beaufort was still watching her beyond the social needs of the moment. Frevisse did not want his interest. She wanted the evening to be over and to be alone in bed with her thoughts and grieving until tomorrow had to be faced. But first there was this supper to be endured, and now, amid the talk of the poor harvest, he asked her directly, “How are matters at your nunnery? Were you able to save any of the. harvest?”

Careful to keep her voice neutral, revealing nothing but information and politeness, Frevisse answered, “Perhaps enough to see us through until next year if we’re very spare with it.” She should have stopped there, but honesty made her add, “And perhaps not if we need to give to the villagers, as we did last year.” Then, betrayed by the need to know, she asked, “Will there be any wheat brought in from abroad? How were the French harvests?”

“France went much the way we did, except in the extreme south, which is of no use to us,” Bishop Beaufort answered readily. Below the Loire was French-held territory, where English rule did not run. “There is some dealing with the Hanse at present to bring wheat in from the Baltic east where the harvests have been good, we hear.”

In the urgency of the matter—life or death for those who lacked money to buy wheat at prices inflated by the scarcity—Frevisse forgot her resolve to speak sparingly. If anyone present knew these things, it would be Bishop Beaufort. Leaning toward him, she asked, “And in the meantime will there be efforts to hold prices down here in England?”

The bishop paused in spooning up his next mouthful.

“Word has gone out from the Council to every town to do as much as they can toward that end.”

That was a politician’s answer. Frevisse’s politeness slipped a little. She demanded rather than asked, “How much toward that end do you think they’ll do?”

“Frevisse, dear, have you tried one of these cakes?” Aunt Matilda gestured for a servant to hold out to her a plate with small white cakes studded with raisins.

Frevisse began to shake her head, recognizing the tactic her aunt had employed frequently whenever Frevisse and Chaucer would fall into one of their cheerful, complex arguments over some matter Aunt Matilda had thought unseemly for the occasion. With abrupt meekness, and anger at herself for being more bold than she should have, Frevisse said, “Thank you, aunt,” and turned her attention to one of the cakes. The conversation shifted to the question of how many and who would come to the funeral, set for the day after tomorrow.

But when she glanced up once toward Bishop Beaufort a while later, he was gazing at her with even more of an assessing look than he had had before.

Chapter
4

Aunt Matilda rose the next morning still gray with grief, and Alice, who had shared her mother’s bed, showed her own weariness around her eyes. Frevisse and Dame Perpetua, with their hurried journey’s ache and weariness still in them, had slept on the servants’ truckle beds, while the servants and Alice’s lady-in-waiting slept on straw-filled mattresses, all now pushed out of the way and out of sight under the tall bed.

For the two nuns, the morning preparations were simple: they were washed and dressed and their wimples and veils neatly pinned in place while Alice’s lady-in-waiting was still combing out and braiding her lady’s hair before dressing her. With hardly three words said between them, they drew aside to stand out of the way.

Frevisse, watching the bustle and chatter around her cousin and unnaturally silent aunt, remembered Chaucer once saying that men who are tired grow quiet, while women grow talkative. Aunt Matilda had clearly passed weariness to the edge of exhaustion. While laying out her lady’s black gown for the day, Aunt Matilda’s woman, Joan, in a tone only a servant of long standing would dare to use, said abruptly, “You’ve no business being out and about today, my lady. No one expects it of you. There’s people enough to see to what needs doing.”

“But the guests. Thomas would want—”

Alice cut in with, “Father would want you not to make yourself more ill than you already are.”

She looked to Frevisse over Matilda’s head, and Frevisse immediately said, “Truly, Aunt, you’ve been through weeks of enduring. Today will be full of people arriving for the funeral, and everyone wanting things from you if they see you, when what you need just now is to gather your strength for tomorrow. There’s nothing today that Alice and I can’t oversee or come to you when we need direction. Please, Aunt, listen to us on this.”

Matilda shook her head refusingly through all of Frevisse’s words. But at the end of them, Alice knelt before her, took her hands, and pleaded very sweetly, “Please, Mother. Let us do this for you.”

Matilda closed her eyes over sudden tears. Her body slackened its rigid determination to go on, and in a faltering voice she said, “Perhaps, perhaps you’re right. It’s tomorrow I should be thinking of, when we… when we…” She could not say, “bury Thomas,” but when, with visible effort, she had regained control, she opened her eyes and began to tell them everything that needed doing today.

Check the linen closet for blankets and set the stable hands to filling pallets with straw, she told them, then make sure the preparations for the funeral feast are under way and nothing is lacking in the kitchen, find sweet herbs to strew on the church floor, note every guest’s rank on arrival—be there yourself to greet them, of course—and make sure they are in correct order for the procession to the church tomorrow and at the feast, see to it there is plenty of clean water so guests can wash up on arrival, don’t let anyone mistake a washup bucket for a chamber pot, ensure families who are feuding with one another sleep far apart tonight and are not seated next to one another tomorrow, keep a fire burning in the great hall all day so arriving guests may warm themselves…

Alice and Frevisse shared a small grimace of mutual sympathy over Matilda’s head as Joan encouraged her back into bed and the endless list faded to a weary murmur.

By early afternoon the influx of guests had become heavy. Nearest neighbors would come and go on the day itself, but the November days were short and anyone more than a few hours’ ride away would come today and stay over at least two nights. Thomas Chaucer’s connections had ranged from the ranks of merchants in London to the innermost circles of court power, with all of them important, but precedence had to be noted and scrupulously given. To her relief, Frevisse found that receiving the highest ranking among them fell naturally to her cousin Alice. As widow of the earl of Salisbury, and now wife of the earl of Suffolk, as well as daughter of the house, Alice was already acquainted with most of them; gracious in her duties, she reminded Frevisse both of the self-possessed little cousin Frevisse had last known, and of Chaucer himself.

Frevisse was left to see to the lesser folk, though lesser was a relative term. Landed knights and merchants wealthier than earls were hardly lesser. But it meant that she was waiting in the great hall when Sir Walter Fenner, head of the prominent and numerous Fenner family, was ushered in.

The Fenners were among the more prominent patrons of St. Frideswide’s, though less generously and intrusively than they had been a few years ago, so Sir Walter and Frevisse were already acquainted. Seeing him ushered into the hall, she had time to put on a polite face of mild pleasure tempered by the formal grief of the occasion, and said graciously, “How good that you could come, Sir Walter.”

“My deep sorrow that it’s for such a sad occasion, Dame,” he replied. The Fenners had a long memory for offenses, and the last time they had met, he had accused her of hiding his mother’s murderer. But he knew the needs of this moment; his politeness was brief but correct. “Your uncle’s loss must grieve you deeply.”

“Indeed it does, sir.”

That was sufficient for both of them; but as he turned aside to follow the servant who would show him in, she saw that the squire with him was young Robert Fenner, who had aided her against Sir Walter’s anger at St. Frideswide’s that same time ago. In the three years since she had last seen him, he had left the last of boyhood for young manhood, Frevisse observed. But the brief, warm smile he cast her as he followed Sir Walter showed he remembered her.

Then the little, bouncing man—whom she had learned was Gallard Basing, the usher here—advanced on her with another newly arrived guest. “Sir Clement Sharpe,” Gallard announced with unusual terseness, and stood aside.

Sir Clement was a lean, pallid man with thinning hair the dull brown of dead leaves, and eyes that matched it. He was elegantly dressed in a wide-cut dark blue houppelande amply trimmed with gray fur, and a long-liripiped hat that he had already removed for his bow to her, a bow a little more deep and flourished than need be.

“My lady, my profound regrets for your uncle’s death.”

“Thank you. We greatly appreciate your coming. Aunt Matilda will be pleased.”

She did not understand the twitch of his mouth, or his answer. “Assure her we’d settled the matter before he fell finally ill, and I’ll not take any advantage over it.”

She smiled and said, “I’m sure you won’t.” Because whatever the matter had been, it would not be Aunt Matilda he dealt with, but the earl of Suffolk’s lawyers, for Suffolk and Alice were Chaucer’s heirs.

“May I introduce my ward?” Sir Clement asked, and put back his hand to draw a girl forward. At first Frevisse thought she was a child, but a more careful look revealed she was more likely sixteen or seventeen, only small for her years and daintily built. “Lady Anne Featherstone.”

Lady Anne curtsied. She was dressed in plain dark wool for travel, but her manners were as pretty as her face. Frevisse curtsied back but Sir Clement was already adding, less graciously, “And my nephew, Guy Sharpe.”

There was little family resemblance between lean and pallid Sir Clement and the broad-chested, handsome young man who stepped forward on Lady Anne’s other side. He bowed and said appropriate words of greeting, but rather than his words, Frevisse noted the warm, sideways look of affection that Lady Anne gave him as he did.

Frevisse was not sure if Sir Clement saw it, too, but before Guy had finished straightening, Sir Clement had begun to move away, drawing Lady Anne with him and to his other side, away from Guy, in one neat gesture. Frevisse saw the young man’s face tighten, his eyes on Lady Anne even as he finished speaking to her, before he followed in Sir Clement’s wake.

Frevisse hoped they kept in abeyance whatever coil of trouble they were building until they had left Ewelme.

A gap in travelers came late in the afternoon, and Frevisse left her duties to go to the chapel. Except for a brief time this morning, she had not been there since yesterday about this hour.

Neither the shadows nor the candlelight nor the cold had changed since then. Nor her grief. And she was still tired, though now from dealing with too many people and talking more than she was used to, rather than from cold and travel. Even the watchers around the coffin might have been the same as yesterday’s; and then she saw that at least one of them was: the household priest, Sir Philip.

She stood awhile inside the doorway, letting the silence envelop and soothe her, before she finally knelt to pray. But she had barely begun when low voices outside the chapel’s shut door broke her concentration. She tried to pray in spite of them, but although their words were obscured by the chapel door, their emotions were not. A young man and a woman—or perhaps a girl—her tone desperate, urging something to the man, who answered with an urgency of his own.

Then there was a third voice, another man’s, raised loud enough to leave no doubt about what he said in anger and bitter satisfaction. “I
thought
you’d both disappeared most conveniently!”

The girl answered, her own words clear with matching anger now. “How did you know where we were? Who told you?”

“I’m not the fool you wish I were. There aren’t mat many places in a house this size and full of people you could go to be alone. Once Jevan said you were both gone, I could guess where you were easily enough.”

“Jevan!” the girl said bitterly.

The young man began to say something, but was cut off scornfully by the older man answering, “You’re just idiot enough to think that, boy!”

Goaded into raising his voice, the young man snapped, “Not so much an idiot as to think you can keep us apart forever!”

“You’d better think it, boy, because I can!”

The girl cried out desperately, “We love each other!”

Brushing past Frevisse on his way to the door, Sir Philip said under his breath, “Jesus, God in heaven.”

Supposing the young woman might take better to her presence and hoping the men might abate their anger because of it, Frevisse rose to follow the priest.

In the small antechamber to the chapel, Sir Clement Sharpe had his nephew, Guy, and his ward, Lady Anne, blocked into a corner. Neither of the young couple looked intimidated or shamed; side by side, they faced his towering anger at them with anger of their own, the girl’s hand laid possessively on Guy’s arm.