The Bastard's Tale Read online

Chapter 3

  The strong east wind had broken the morning’s clouds and was streaming them white across the bright, scoured sky. To Frevisse, standing small in the wide courtyard below the long, high-windowed flank and thrusting towers of St. Edmund’s Abbey church with her cloak and skirts shoved against her legs and veil fluttering over her shoulder, it was not the clouds but the church itself that looked a-drift toward the town beyond the abbey walls, like some great ship too vast to be troubled by any storm.

  It unsettled her head and stomach and she lowered her gaze, but at her side small John de la Pole, holding to her hand, stood with his head flung back to sky and clouds and church and laughed aloud with delight. He was all of four years old and her cousin’s son and heir, and Frevisse smiled at his pleasure with more pleasure than she usually had toward small children.

  Still watching the church, he said, “It makes me…” He whirled one of his hands at his head.

  Frevisse raised her free hand to hold her flapping veil back from her face and offered, “Confused?”

  John tried the word and liked it. “Confused. Confused, confused.” He was merry as a sparrow and bright as a finch in his cherry red cloak and hosen, short green gown, and blue roll-rimmed cap. He gave a small, hopeful tug on her hand. “Can we see where it all fell down?”

  ‘It didn’t all fall down,“ Frevisse corrected. ”Only the west tower, and now they’re building it up again.“

  ‘Build it up and fall it down. My fair laaydee,“ John sang with another hopeful tug and she gave way, letting him lead her toward his favorite place in all of St. Edmund’s Abbey. His mother had suggested they had set out early to do just that anyway this afternoon. Accompanying him should have been his nurse’s task, or maybe his schoolmaster’s, but both were laid low with heavy rheums and sent to stay somewhere away from the household. ”Because with all else there is, I don’t need coughs and running noses added in for all of us,“ Alice had said.

  For her part, Frevisse was glad enough of something different to do. Time had been hanging heavy on her these two idle days since she and Dame Perpetua had come to Bury. After a little trouble, Dame Perpetua had settled to work in the abbey’s library, and Frevisse would contentedly have joined her, except that she could not well “observe” things while hid away among books and desks and inkpots, nor be readily found by Bishop Beaufort’s person if she were needed. So she was here instead, going from the Great Court through the broad Cellarer’s Gate into the smaller guesthall yard toward the church, John skipping beside her, wanting to run but held back by stern order to keep hold on her hand while they were out. That was the only hindrance to his pleasure, though. From what Frevisse had so far seen of him, he was both a biddable child and, as the marquis of Suffolk’s heir, always companioned, either by his nurse or his schoolmaster or else with his mother and her ladies. Therefore Frevisse suspected that much of his present joy was at being free from them all, nor did she feel like curbing him, happy herself to be out and away from too many people and so much talk.

  Not that she was really away from people. Within its walls the abbey probably covered more acres than the whole village of Prior Byfield near St. Frideswide’s. It was a warren of courtyards, gardens, and buildings ranging from stables to kitchens to halls to chambers to chapels, all crowded around and spread out from the great abbey church that towered above them all, hugely visible for miles whichever way someone might come to Bury. In the usual way of things, the place would be busy enough with the perhaps fifty monks of the monastery itself, all the household officials, craftsmen, and servants necessary to the abbey’s life, the constantly shifting tide of pilgrims to St. Edmund’s shrine, and the daily come and go of Bury St. Edmunds townsfolk in and out and around on business if not worship, but to all of that was presently added the royal household, with King Henry himself and his Queen Margaret—as yet not even glimpsed by Frevisse—with all the many attendants and officers necessary both to their comfort and such governing of the realm as daily needed the king’s own hand upon it, with all the servants and attendants required by all those royal officers for their own care and comfort. And added to all of them was Parliament, a tidy name for an untidy gather and sprawl of not only the ninety and more royally summoned lords and high churchmen, Alice had said, and their servants and attendants but also the almost three hundred knights and commoners elected from counties, cities, towns, and boroughs through all of England and all their servants and advisors and even wives come with them.

  The town had perforce taken the overflow of them, to the undoubted great joy of innkeepers, foodsellers, and merchants, but the abbey was swarming full, too, the hum and bustle remindful to Frevisse of a beehive as she and John passed out of the guesthall yard, between the octagonal bulk of the abbey church’s northwest tower and the east end of St. James parish church that served the townsfolk, into the broad foreyard between the abbey church’s west front and a stone-towered gateway to the town’s marketplace. This was the way that pilgrims were supposed to come, entering through the gateway to be confronted across the open yard by the wide, high west front of the abbey church.

  Unhappily, the west tower’s fall more than ten years ago had brought down much of the west front with it, and presently the yard was crowded and cluttered by piles of worked and unworked stones, stacks of timber, and the sheds of the stonemasons and other craftsmen who were slowly rebuilding tower and front. Because there was no trusting mortar laid in freezing weather, the yard and scaffolding were empty of workmen until spring, only the clink and clunk of tools on stone from one of the sheds telling that some of the more finely carved stonework was being done, to be ready when the rest of the workers returned.

  John cared about none of that. His delight was the great wooden tread wheel high and higher yet on the scaffolding. Large enough for a man to walk inside of it to make it turn, it served for the raising of stones and mortar and whatever else was needed from the yard to the high walkways around the unfinished tower, and he tugged Frevisse into the open middle of the yard to see it better.

  ‘He wants one of his own,“ Alice had said to Frevisse.

  ‘You’ll surely not deny him?“ Frevisse had solemnly mocked.

  ‘And give him a few masons and a stock of stone and timber all his own to go with it?“ Alice had mocked back, smiling. She mostly smiled when she talked of John, the son who had finally come to her after two barren marriages and several daughters. ”I think not. What I’ve promised is that if he does just as he ought in the play and makes no trouble while we’re here in Bury, he’ll have a toy of it afterward. I’ve already sent word to the carpenter at Wingfield to start one for him.“ Fond of her daughters though she seemed to be—she spoke of them affectionately the few times she spoke of them at all—John was openly her joy and Frevisse thought that only Alice’s prevailing strong good wit kept him from being unredeemably marred. Thus far.

  While John happily pointed out one thing after another about how the tread wheel worked, Frevisse nodded and murmured, taking pleasure in his pleasure. Someone among the workers or guards left here must have been brought out into the cold to talk with him about it and he, clever child, seemed to have remembered it all, but his interest was insufficient to keep her thoughts away from worry about Alice. Everything about coming here had gone as simply as might be hoped. Alice had returned prompt word that she would be glad of Frevisse’s company and that by this same messenger she was sending word to Thomas Stonor, one of Oxfordshire’s members to Parliament, that he should offer Frevisse and Dame Perpetua escort to Bury. “Since after all he is, in some way, my son-in-law,” Alice had written, “being married to my lord husband’s daughter, and as you are my cousin, it is therefore a matter of family. Whether you will thank me for this, I do not know. Master Stonor is of somewhat a strong nature.”

  From that, Frevisse had sorted that Master Stonor’s wife was Suffolk’s illegitimate daughter since she was not Alice’s child and Suffolk had had no other marriages, and was pro
bably from Suffolk’s bachelor days since she was old enough to be married. And Master Stonor had proved to be as Alice had said. Though he had welcomed her and Dame Perpetua to join with his company and been courteous throughout the days of riding to Bury St. Edmunds, there had been a grudging beneath his graciousness, coupled with far too much awareness that Frevisse was cousin to Lady Alice and therefore, possibly, important. At journey’s end Frevisse had parted from him with thanks and promise of prayers on his behalf and the thought that very likely Mistress Stonor had stayed at home for the pleasure of being without his company.

  Or perhaps Mistress Stonor had simply foreseen the trouble of where to stay plaguing almost everyone here. Even Alice, provided by Suffolk’s high place in the realm with three rooms together in the buildings that closed in the east side of the Great Court, part of the abbot’s palace, had been full of regret that she could not have Frevisse and Dame Perpetua with her there. “But we’re already sleeping six in our own bedchamber as it is. My ladies and some of the servants share what serves during the day as Suffolk’s council chamber and the men lie wall to wall in the outer room. There simply isn’t anywhere.”

  Frevisse had answered that she and Dame Perpetua had already supposed they would stay in the abbey’s guesthall kept especially for Benedictine monks and nuns come to Bury St. Edmunds for pilgrimage or whatever other reason.

  Alice had been relieved. “That’s good, and I’ve bespoken you both a place there. Otherwise, I don’t know there’d be a bed even there. What’s supposed to be the nuns’ dorter is full of the overflow of everyone’s waiting women and ladies. I only wish you could be here. I was afraid you’d mind. I was afraid you’d be…” Alice had hesitated.

  ‘Foolish?“ Frevisse had offered.

  ‘Foolish,“ Alice had agreed, from the heart. ”You wouldn’t believe the foolishness there is here over who stays where and why and is it according to their dignity and…“

  Words failed her, and Frevisse had said, meaning it, “There’s no need to worry over us. Let me be what help I can to you and otherwise we’ll fend for ourselves very well. You’ve enough and enough in hand without taking us on, too.”

  ‘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 giv
en 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.”