The Maiden’s Tale (12 page)

“How can I?” she said curtly. “You can’t find me fair to look on. I’ve given you no cause to think my conversation pleasant or that I wanted yours. Why are you doing this?”

“Because I want your company, your sweet words, for you to show a little kindness toward me. That’s all.”

“For now,” she said coldly.

“For always.” He leaned toward her, warming the words with insinuation as he added, “Or until you choose to give me more.”

“I’m to be married.” She was fighting to recover her resolve to play him along but could not stop her refusal. “I’m past making any such choice. I’m betrothed.”

“All the more reason,” Robyn answered, unoffended, leaning nearer, “to find your pleasures while you may, before a ring and your vows come between you and them. And there’s always the poems to give you excuse. The poems and Lady Alice’s honor. Think of those.” He lifted a hand as if he were thinking of touching the marred side of her face and murmured, watching her, “I wonder what it feels like to the touch. Has it ever been kissed?”

Sickened, Jane drew back from him.

Robyn smiled and let his hand fall. “Have sport with me,” he murmured, “and you’ll have the poems. One by one. There’s how many of them? Enough to see us through the holidays, don’t you think? To fill up the time before you wed?”

She still believed she was only part of what he wanted and asked between shut teeth, “And what else will you want?”

Robyn feigned surprise. “Aren’t you enough for me to want?”

“The poems are worth more than that. What else will you want?”

Robyn straightened from the wall, giving up the game she would not play, to say as tersely, “I want to know how and to whom Lady Alice sends messages. And who she has them from. And what’s in them. Anything it’s possible for you to learn.”

Jane did not ask why. She could guess. He wanted things he could sell to someone and she was merely sport along the way. But with whom did he deal? The duke of Gloucester was the first and worst possibility but Lady Alice had warned her there were others. Not that it actually mattered who it was; anyone who had the poems would be able to do damage with them.

“Besides,” Robyn said, leaning toward her again, lowering his voice, “I find you interesting. So marred and yet most of your face so fair and your body promising.”

She had to silence him or escape him without offending him and she looked around for excuse of some kind to be away from him. The minstrels in their gallery above the screens passage were readying to play again and people were gathering to dance in the hall’s center or were busy in talk, no one close to hand or heeding her and Robyn. Except William Chesman just below the dais.

He was looking doubtful between coming nearer and staying where he was, but whatever he was thinking, watching her in such close talk with Robyn, he was an excuse that Robyn could not hold against her, and with more warmth than she had ever used, Jane held out her hand toward him, saying “Master Chesman,” eagerly, and to her relief, in the moment it took Robyn to look around at him, William started toward them, so that to Robyn it had to look as if she had been greeting, not summoning him.

On his own part, William gave no sign it was otherwise, bowed to her with “My lady” and to Robyn before asking, “By your leave, my lady, may we talk alone together?”

“Of course.” She bent her head to Robyn in outwardly courteous dismissal. “By your leave?”

It not being something he could well refuse, Robyn bowed acceptance but took her hand before she could refuse it, kissed it lingeringly, and held it a moment too long afterwards, saying warmly, “Until later then, my lady.”

He let her go, smiled at William Chesman a shade too pleasantly, and strolled away, leaving Jane to face William’s questioning look that made nothing easier. But all he said was, with what seemed actual concern, “Are you well? You’re pale.”

Her hands gripped together to keep from raising one to cover the marred side of her face in the old gesture she had worked so hard to conquer, Jane answered with what she intended to be calm, “The better that you please to ask, Master Chesman.”

“You’re certain? You look… not altogether yourself.”

“Truly, I’m well.” And truly, now that Robyn was gone, she was far better.

Silence started to stretch out between them while Jane sought something else to say, but William found it first with, unsurely, “I thought you looked as if you wanted Master Robyn to go away. I pray your pardon if I was wrong in that.”

“No!” Jane caught herself back from vehemence. “No, I’m very grateful he’s gone, Master Chesman.”

“If it please you, my lady, would you call me my given name? William.”

“William,” she said, and then hesitantly, not sure how right she was to make the offer, “May I be Jane to you?”

“It would be my honor.” His smile left as he asked, “Was he bothering you? Should I warn him to leave you alone?”

Jane wanted greatly to cry out, “Yes!” but Robyn, thwarted, might waste no time in selling the poems to his profit and Lady Alice’s hurt, and she snatched her wits together to say lightly, “It would only make him think himself more than he is. Let him be. The fault more probably lies with me. It’s having been so long in the nunnery. Around so many people, with all this at once…” She moved a hand toward the dancing, music, laughter, talk all mingled into solid sound all through the hall. “… my wits go feeble, I’m so unused to it, you see.”

“Do you miss the nunnery?”

No one else had asked her that in the months since she had come into her uncle’s household. Too busy with the complicated consequences of having succeeded to spend time thinking how she felt about it, she had not even asked herself, and now she was surprised at how readily the answer came as she said. “I think the only thing I miss from there is the quiet.”

“The quiet?” William asked, curious, rather than disbelieving.

“The quiet,” Jane repeated, finding out how deeply she meant it, going on slowly, “There was a fountain in the cloister. A very small one, given by a grieving family to the memory of a daughter who died while a novice there, oh, years ago. Long before I was born, I think. No one is quite sure of her name anymore but her fountain still plays into its stone basin from the warm days of spring through summer into every autumn. Sometimes when I sat reading there the only sound was of the water plashing and the bees among the cloister flowers when the days were warm enough.”

William seemed to consider, then said as if carefully giving her something back, “It’s like that at Bruesham.” The manor where they would live after they were married. “Sometimes it will be so quiet you can hear the fish jumping in the pond below the house, at dawn and in the evenings.”

He was offering something of himself in return for what she had told him, and matching his carefulness, she said, “Tell me about Bruesham.”

“You know,” William said, a little surprised.

She supposed she did. She had read the parchment rolls that detailed the properties she would be marrying into. Bruesham manor first, with so many acres in demesne, worth so much an acre, and so many more acres otherwise, in arable and pasture, also worth so much; with one manor house in good repair; farm buildings, equally in good repair; an orchard; a wood large enough for fuel and pannage but not hunting; rents from a windmill and various other properties; a village of thirty households; fees from the manor court; and a fish pond. All listed in detail: properties, fees, rights, costs. And other parchment rolls detailing everything the Chesman family held, everything that would be William’s when he inherited after his father’s death, though Lady Alice had had her most particularly note Bruesham because not only would she and William live there at first, it was what she would have for her dower manor should William die before she did. So, yes, as far as what could be learned from legal descriptions of its buildings, furlongs, dues, fees, and pleas, she knew all about Bruesham manor. But, “Tell me what it’s like, what you see when you’re there.”

And after a moment William did. First of how the land there lay, the plowed fields curving around the flanks of the long, low hills, the pasture lands lying in the softer ground along the stream. Then how the orchard of pear and apple trees behind the manor house foamed white in spring with a wealth of blossoms and in the autumn glowed gold and red with the ripened fruit for perry and cider and dried apples through the winter. The manor house itself—“It was where my grandmother lived. I used to visit, stay with her there. It’s not a grand house but…” But he had been happy there. And he had loved his grandmother. He did not say it but Jane heard it in his voice and thought how strange it was she had not thought before about him being happy or having loved someone. She had thought about William being willing to marry her; about William tolerating how she looked; about how things might be between them once they were wed if all went well, but never about William as simply William, as someone who had sadnesses and gladnesses and… loved his grandmother.

“There’s a garden next the house, of course. It’s all vegetables and greens now, but there’s part of it used to be for flowers when my grandmother lived there and we can put it back that way, if you like. Or we can make one for flowers elsewhere, just as you want, if you’d rather.”

Suddenly they were back to the reason they were talking of Bruesham at all. Jane saw it come into his face, along with her own clear remembrance that their marrying was for no more—and certainly for no less or there would be no marriage—than the properties her dowry would add to what the Chesmans already held in Suffolk; and she dropped her eyes away from William, murmuring some politeness about gardens that was unclear even to herself.

“Yes. Well,” William said uncertainly back, lost, too, as to what they could say next. For a moment they stood, and then seemingly out of nowhere William said, “About Eyon.”

Jane’s breath caught. There was nothing more to be said or thought about Eyon. Nothing that she wanted to say or think, and she said nothing, until William asked, “Has he been replaced?”

They were neither of them looking at each other now but at the dancers in two large circles, hands linked, turning and singing with the music. No one would overhear what was said between them, and Jane dared ask, “How much do you know about… what he was doing?”

“Only what I guessed. Messages. Are you still part of it?”

Jane jerked to look at him. “No. I’m not.”

“Good,” William answered and that should have been enough, the end of it. But Jane before she knew she was going to, blurted out, “There was something wrong about his dying, wasn’t there?” And William, turning his head to meet her gaze said, “There was something very wrong about it.”

Chapter
11

The morning’s sun was warmthless, as if scoured thin by the unabated wind, with yesterday’s snow lying in unmelting patches and streaks between the cobbles and along the edges of the yard below the lady chamber window where Frevisse stood watching the come-and-go of people below her in the yard, household folk about their daily business that this morning included a wherry she had watched veer in on the strong upriver wind to the landing beyond the riverward gateway. She had lost sight of it behind the buildings that ran along the riverward side of the yard, only the mast’s tip showing above a roof, rocking on the wind-chopped river, but barrels presumably unloaded from it were being rolled out of the gateway, spun to the side, and rolled away through a side doorway by men quite plainly expert at the work. Watching them at it was possibly the most interesting thing she had yet done today, and she sighed and thrust her hands a little further up her sleeves for warmth against the wind nagging its way in around the leaded window frame. This morning she was rather glad of the fur-lined gown.

Alice had been called away to discuss some matter with Suffolk, saying, “It’s Parliament. We’re trying to be certain of who favors us and who we can to win to us and who not.

It’s tedious, and I apologize for leaving you yet again.“

She meant the apology but Frevisse doubted the “tedious.” Whatever matter she was going to consult on with her lord husband, Alice was looking forward to it, smiling as she went, but it left Frevisse to her ladies again. After St. Frideswide’s where everyone and everything were so known that on any probable occasion she could usually say rightly what would be said and done by everyone, Coldharbour should at least have diverted her with unfamiliarity. But nothing was really unfamiliar, assuredly not the women’s talk, and she had come to stand here at the window away from it. Across the room, Millicent was still commenting on the weather with “…so cold. It can’t be like this all winter. Cold and snow and all.”

“If there’s ice in November will hold a duck, February will be all rain and muck,” Lady Sibill quoted the well-used proverb.

“But then there’ll be Lent,” someone bemoaned. “Fasting and freezing both. Don’t you wish…”

Bells’ broken pealing, tattered and tossed by the wind, turned Frevisse’s mind from the talk behind her. Was the day no more along than Sext? She preferred being busy to so idle as she was here, but at least she still had prayer and she bent her head to what she could say of the office alone and standing here.
Pater noster, qui est in caelis…
Our father, who is in heaven…
Dominus regit me, et nihil mihi deerit.
The lord rules me, and nothing will be missing to me.
In loco pascuae ibi me collocavit.
In a place of pasture then he has placed me. And I shall grow fat with feeding and leisure, Frevisse thought, then firmly pulled her mind back to finishing the office and at its end stood waiting while the intensity of prayer drained out of her, leaving her quiet of soul and mind. Set against what others lived or had lived with, her discomfort here in Coldharbour was nothing, a thing that would end finally, with no harm done to her soul, only to her patience, and her patience was a thing she had to deal with rather more often than she liked, wherever she was.

She raised her head to look out the window again at the pale, uninteresting sky while behind her in the unabated conversation Lady Sibill was saying, “… to Wingfield, think on that, and we’d better hope the roads are frozen or…”