The Bishop’s Tale Read online

  The Bishop’s Tale

  Margaret Frazer

  Chapter 1

  The room was in darkness except for the candles burning at the head of the bed and a gray line of thin daylight along the edge of the closely shuttered windows. The coals in the brazier in the corner had burned too low even to glow, though the room was still thickly warm with their heat and the crowding of people who had been there.

  Now there were only two men, and one of them was dying.

  Thomas Chaucer lay motionless in the wide bed, raised a little on his pillows. It was a rich bed, with the glint of gold threads in the embroidered coverlet and hung with pattern-woven curtains. And what could be seen of the room in die small reach of the candlelight was equally rich, the furnishings deeply carved, the ceiling beams painted in twined vines and singing birds. Now, for this occasion, one of the chests along the wall was covered with a white cloth and set out for priestly matters. Between two stately burning beeswax candles were a small vessel of sacred oil, another of holy water, and a golden box for the consecrated wafers. Cardinal Bishop Beaufort of Winchester, tall beyond the ordinary and seeming more so in his furred, scarlet gown and in the low light, moved from the chest to stand beside the bed again. His voice moved richly, surely, through the Latin words.

  “Accipe, frater, Viaticum Corporis Domini nostri Jesu Christi, qui te custodial ab hoste maligno, et perducat in vitam aeternam, amen.” Accept, brother, the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, who keep you from the evil host, and lead you into eternal life, amen.

  With great care and gentleness, the bishop laid the fragment of Christ’s body on Chaucer’s tongue. Weakly, he swallowed it, then whispered, “My last food. And the best.”

  “To nourish your soul rather than your body,” Beaufort agreed. He moved away, his back to the bed and the dying man.

  “Hal,” Chaucer said.

  Not turning around, Beaufort said huskily, “Yes?”

  “Stay with me this while. It won’t be much longer.”

  Still with his back to the bed, Beaufort bent his head, wiped his eyes, then straightened and turned. “You are probably the last person who will ever call me Hal,” he said, his lightness strained over grief. “The last who remembers when we were young.”

  “Bedford may.”

  “Bedford is in France and sick with what’s been done to him. I doubt he’ll ever see England again.”

  Chaucer took that in silence awhile. “Then consider the benefits of there being no one left to remember your disreputable youth and tell stories on you.”

  Beaufort gave him the smile he wanted and laid a hand over his cold, thin arm. “I’ve learned to live with your exaggerated memories of my disreputable youth. But you’d best guard your tongue and thoughts lest I have to absolve you all over again.” Belatedly, he removed the purple stole from around his neck, kissed it, folded it, and set it aside.

  Beaufort and Chaucer were cousins. Their mothers had been sisters, the daughters of a Flemish knight in the queen’s retinue five kings ago. Chaucer’s mother had suitably married an officer of the royal duke of Lancaster’s household named Geoffrey Chaucer. From their solid and respectable marriage, by his father’s connections and his own considerable talents, Thomas had built a fortune and his life.

  Beaufort’s mother had been less conventional. She had borne the royal duke of Lancaster four children without benefit of marriage. But years later, to everyone’s surprise and for no reason except love, the duke had actually married her. Their children had been legitimized under the name of Beaufort, and Henry—sometimes Hal—their second son, had risen high in both the Church and England’s government. And built a fortune so great he was chief lender to the Crown in its necessity.

  Despite the differences between them, they had been and were good friends, with deep respect for the men they each had become. The silence between them now was companionable under its weight of grief.

  A candle hissed over a flaw in its wick, and Beaufort said, “You don’t want Matilda to come in again? Or Alice?”

  Chaucer’s wife and daughter had left the room during the last rites, taking the servants and attendants and Matilda’s contained but continuous weeping with them. If any returned, all returned, and the room would be crowded and intense with them again. Eyes closed, Chaucer said with the barest movement of his lips, “No.” And then, after another silence, he said, “There’s something I want you to do for ”Anything in my power.“ Which was considerable.

  “In the aumbry, there…” Chaucer moved his head slightly to show which cupboard along the wall he meant. “There’s a book. Wrapped in cloth. It’s not in my will, but give it to my niece. The nun. Dame Frevisse.” A smile turned the corners of his mouth. “But don’t you look at it. Leave it wrapped.”

  “Secret books to young women, Thomas?” Beaufort teased mildly. “Am I supposed to approve?”

  “You’d have to officially disapprove if you knew what it was, but I believe I imperil neither her soul nor my own with it.” He added irrelevantly, “Nor is she so young anymore.”

  “I suppose she isn’t, is she? She’s been in her nunnery quite a while.” Beaufort looked in the aumbry for the book and found it. It was small, hardly as long as his hand, but bulky, even allowing for its wrappings. He ran his fingers along the edges he could feel through the cloth. “Not something I’d want for my own library, I trust?”

  Chaucer smiled a little more. “All the best of my books are already safely named to you in my will. No, this is a plain thing that Frevisse valued in the while she lived here. I like to think of her having it.”

  “Then she will.” Beaufort laid the book on the white-clothed chest and returned to Chaucer’s side. “By the way, won’t your son-in-law protest the gutting of your library on my behalf?”

  “My son-in-law judges a book by how many jewels are set in its cover and how bright with gold the pictures are. I’ve left the gaudiest for him. He’ll be content.”

  “He’d best be,” Beaufort said. “I doubt he’d care to deal with me over the matter.” Chaucer’s daughter had married William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, for her third husband. He had a great inherited fortune, a handsome face, a remarkable degree of charm, influence in the government, and—in Chaucer’s and Beaufort’s opinions—not much in the way of brains, and even less in the way of common sense. There was no doubt that Suffolk would come off the worse if it came to a dispute, for Beaufort was a match for anyone in the kingdom.

  No, it had not been lack of ability that had kept Beaufort from rising to the highest place in the royal government— Protector to the young King Henry VI—but a regrettable clash of character between himself and his own half-nephew on his father’s side. If plain hatred—God forgive him for it—could have killed, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, would have long since been quite dead. As it was, they had succeeded in crabbing each other’s ambitions; though each had high power and place, neither of them had as much as they wanted, and neither had gained control of the young King’s government. Nor were they likely to, now that he was nearing an age to take more responsibility to himself. Unless one could keep near enough to him to win his favor and support.

  Beaufort realized he had lost himself in his thoughts. And that Chaucer was watching him with familiar mockery, or the faint shadow of it that was all he had strength for.

  “All right,” Beaufort said. “I was ‘indulging in my ambitions,” as you have been wont to say. Will it be a comfort to you if I admit I’ve begun to think you were right to refuse so steadily to be drawn into the morass I’ve willingly braved all these years?“

  Chaucer moved his head in weak denial. “No. I’ve always known I was right to avoid Westminster like the plague. Though, like the plague, it
cannot always be avoided.” With a smile, he added, “But I’ve also known you were where you belonged, Hal, given your very different ambitions from mine. I’d be sorry to hear you’ve wearied of it?”

  Tentatively—and Chaucer was probably the only man in England to whom he would show that side of himself— Beaufort said, “The King is growing older. Things are changing.”

  “To your advantage perhaps.”

  “Perhaps,” Beaufort assented. If Bedford died in France— the man who had both supported him and curbed him, keeping a balance among the court factions no matter how they resented it—then there would be new possibilities.

  Chaucer’s eyes closed, not in sleep, Beaufort thought, but simply because he lacked strength to hold them open. The pulse in his throat fluttered and lost beat. Beaufort leaned forward, a sick feeling in his own heart. But the pulse steadied, weakly, into a slow rhythm again and went on. Chaucer had been dying for three months now, had known for certain he was dying, though the wasting disease itself had begun to come on him a while before that. Nothing he ate gave him any strength; despite everything done for him—and he could afford the best physicians in England—he had wasted as simply as if he had been deliberately starving. Now there was very little of him left; his failing body could not hold on to his spirit much longer.

  Without opening his eyes, Chaucer said, “Lydgate.”

  Beaufort almost looked around the room to see who had come in.

  “If he sends a poem about me,” Chaucer said, his eyes still closed, “I strictly charge you that it isn’t to be read at my funeral or at any of my memorials. Not a word, not a line of it.”

  “But…” Lydgate was England’s master poet, brilliant, popular, prolific. He wrote on every great occasion, at length. His many-versed cry of pain at Chaucer’s departure for a stay in France won high praise. And he claimed Thomas’s own father Geoffrey as his inspiration. So it was perhaps surprising that Thomas had always been, privately but unremittingly, rude about his work.

  “Unless you are quite sure I won’t come to haunt you in some particularly horrible guise, don’t let any of his work be read anywhere near me, dead or alive. Not at my funeral, my month’s mind, my year day, or any other time.”

  Beaufort twitched his lips tightly over a smile he could not help, while allowing the tears to flow. Customary as tears might be among the gently born, yet he had not cried as wholeheartedly for anyone since his mother died, far more than thirty years ago. It was a minute or two before he could say, “You have my word you’ll be spared him, even in death.”

  Chaucer’s eyebrows lifted, but his eyes did not open. He took a shallow breath, and another, and said more faintly, “My niece. The nun. I’ve told you about her?”

  “You’ve told me. I have the book. I’ll give it to her.”

  “Tell her… I’ll miss her.”

  Chapter 2

  Frevisse bent lower and rested her forehead on the cold stone of the altar step, her clasped hands pressed against her breast, her knees aching beneath her. She had been there since the end of Tierce, the mid-morning office. Soon it would be Sext, and the other nuns of St. Frideswide’s Priory would be returning. She would have to rise and take her place with them in the choir, and she was not certain her knees would hold her when the time came to stand.

  She sighed and straightened, raising her eyes to the lamp burning above the altar. Its oil was renewed by caring hands every day, its small flame deeply cupped in the curve of red glass. It burned without wavering, simple and enduring among the shadows and cold air eddies of the church, and life.

  Frevisse shivered. She was lately caught in a cold eddy of life and could not seem to escape it, despite all her prayers and penance. Half a year ago she had made choices and a final choice that had come because of them—and since then had lived with what she had done, and found no peace. There were people dead who might have been alive except for her choices. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. By my fault, by my fault, by my most grievous fault.

  As if in sympathy with her sorrow, the days had been gray and damp and chill under lowering skies for seemingly as long as she could remember. It had been summer, a long time ago, but there had been few warm days among the chill and wet. Then had come the rainy autumn, and what there had been of harvest had rotted in the fields. Now, hardly passed Martinmas, late November in the year of God’s grace 1434, there was nothing to look forward to but a famine winter and much dying, as if the world were a reflection of her soul.

  Frevisse’s mouth drew down tightly at the thought. That was her self speaking, the worldly self she had been so harshly purging all these months.

  The prioress had understood her sickness of heart. In the shifting of duties she had made at Midsummer, Domina Edith had ruled that Frevisse would cease to be hosteler, seeing to the priory’s guests and always in contact with matters outside the cloister. Instead, she was made novice mistress, her duties to oversee such novices as the priory had—which was presently none, and none expected. In place of them, she was set to copying in her fine hand any books the prioress had promised to someone or had borrowed for the priory—which in the months since Midsummer had been one.

  Frevisse had been grateful for this lessening of outward responsibility, had understood that Domina Edith had given it to her so she would have the chance to mend her sins and inward hurt. And she had tried. But there was still no joy or even simple pleasure in anything she did or prayed. And that was another sin, the deadly one of accidie. God forgave all sins repented of, but one’s heart had to be open to receive the forgiveness.

  The cloister bell began to clang flatly, telling it was time for Sext. Wearily, Frevisse crossed herself and rose painfully to her feet. The offices, seven times each day, from midnight through to bed again, were her comfort and refuge. She almost always could forget herself in their complex beauties of interwoven psalms and prayers, and find a momentary promise that this dryness of her heart and spirit would not last forever.

  But it was not ended yet. Weary of herself, she went the little way beyond the altar to her place in the choir, knelt there and waited, her head bowed.

  Quietly in their soft-soled shoes, with only a rustle of skirts, the other nuns came from whatever tasks they had been doing throughout the priory. St. Frideswide’s was a small Benedictine house; there were only ten nuns and their prioress. Frevisse could identify them all by their footfalls. Sister Thomasine first, her light, hurried steps reflecting her eagerness. To serve as a nun had been her only desire since girlhood, and, still hardly more than a girl, she cherished it with her whole heart. It had been a shock to her when Domina Edith had appointed her infirmaress in place of Dame Claire. And a shock to Dame Claire, who had been taken from her beloved herbs and potions and tending to the sick to become cellarer and kitchener, supervising the priory’s lay workers, storerooms, and kitchen. Dame Claire’s firm, even footsteps followed Sister Thomasine’s, with a mingling of two others close behind her—Sisters Emma and Juliana, neither hurried nor lagging, simply tending to another of the tasks of a nun. Behind them, with no mistaking her heavy tread, came Dame Alys. She had taken her loss of authority as cellarer with ill grace, and made a discontented sacrist. After her, by a goodly while, rushed Sister Amicia, nearly late as usual.

  Domina Edith did not enter until Sister Amicia was in her place. The prioress’s dignity required she not be part of the crush and bustle of her nuns. But she was only waiting, and entered as soon as Sister Amicia had settled breathlessly into her stall. Dame Perpetua and Sister Lucy were on her either side, hands on her elbows to steady and support her as she shuffled to her place in her own elaborately carved choir stall. Domina Edith was very old, and last winter’s deep cold had dealt harshly with her. She had survived a heavy rheum in her chest but not recovered her strength. Frevisse, risen to her feet with the others, watched her slow coming and painful easing down into her seat with concern. Domina Edith had been prioress since the year Henry of Lancaster had mad
e himself King Henry IV; Frevisse could not and did not want to imagine St. Frideswide’s without her.

  The prioress had just been settled in her stall when the bell in the church tower began to ring the hour of Sext.

  Sext was a brief service. Frevisse refuged in it as deeply as she could for its little while, and at its end prayed with especial longing, “Domine, exaudi orationem meum, et clamor meus ad te veniat.” Lord, hear my prayer, and let my cry come to you.

  The prayer faded to the church’s silence. For a moment there was no stir or whisper, only a silence heavy with the holy weight of the many prayers offered in this place.

  Then Domina Edith leaned forward, and Dame Perpetua and Sister Lucy came quickly to help her to her feet. The others rose respectfully, holding their places until she was gone before going their own ways, brisk now to be about their other duties. As they left, Frevisse slid forward onto her kneeler again, returning to the words of Sext’s opening hymn. Rector potens, verax Deus… Confer salutem corporum veramque pacem cordium… Lord of might, God of truth… Give the body health and true peace to the heart…