The Maiden's Tale: Dame Frevisse Medieval Mysteries, #10

The Maiden’s Tale

A Dame Frevisse Novel by Margaret Frazer

Book Eight of the Dame Frevisse Medieval Murder Mysteries

Published by Dream Machine Productions at Smashwords

Copyright 1998 Margaret Frazer

http://www.margaretfrazer.com

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

* * * * * * *

Author's Note

About the Author

* * * * *

But thogh this mayde tendre were of age,

Yet in the brest of hir virginitee

Ther was enclosed rype and sad corage...

The Clerk's Tale – Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer

* * * * *

Chapter One

It was said Coldharbour House had been built near to a hundred years ago by Sir John Poultney, four times lord mayor of London, to show his wealth and power to the city that had led him to both. Off Hay Wharf Lane in Dowgate Ward, it stretched east along the Thames with courtyard, great hall, garden; everything needful for a rich man’s proud living, with London all around him to admire what he had done. He had even had a son to inherit all his wealth and property, but the son, though outliving him, had died with no children of his own and since then Coldharbour had passed from hand to hand, no one having it for long but the hands it passed through always noble. The earls of Hereford, Huntingdon, and Cambridge; King Henry IV and later his heir the Prince of Wales; and now the earl of Suffolk and his lady wife, with all their hundred and more household folk.

Jane paused with a stitch half-made in the cuff she was setting to the sleeve of the shirt meant for William to wear on their wedding day and raised her head to look out the window.

William, she thought. Trying his name in her mind as if that would make him somehow familiar to her. William Chesman. Tried her name the way it would be when she had his. Jane Chesman. Tried them together. Jane and William Chesman.

Tried to imagine marriage and could not. William Chesman. The man the earl of Suffolk and his wife had, out of their great kindness, arranged for her to marry.

Or, to be more accurate, the man they had bought for her, because she was my lord the earl of Suffolk’s niece and must therefore be provided for. And since she had refused the nunnery there had to be a husband. And since the only likely way that she would come by any was by buying one, they had bought William Chesman for her and sometime not far off—after Christmas but before Lent—she would be married to him. Or he to her. Or however one wanted to look at it.

Jane, on the whole, found it better not to look at any of it too closely and bent her head to finish running her needle into and out of the fine white linen in another of her even, small stitches, but only the once and then, her mind not holding to the work, she looked up, out of the window again. Coldharbour’s lady chamber was high, up a long spiral of stairs from the great hall that was itself set well above the courtyard. From here on the cushioned window seat at the easternmost of the chamber’s two south-facing windows, she could either look steeply down into the courtyard with its constant come-and-go of housefolk—liveried servants in blue, plain servants in grays and browns and an occasional bold russet or green—or sideways down into a corner of Coldharbour’s garden—winter-dead now behind its green-painted gate and high gray stone walls—or else out over the river wall to the great, sheened, flowing darkness of the Thames, to the low spread of Southwark’s houses and St. Mary Overie’s proud spire on the far shore, or farther still to the distant Surrey hills.

The nunnery they had meant to leave her in for all her life was somewhere there, among those hills.

The thought, like William’s name, slipped unbidden into her mind, and as carefully as she had turned away from thought of him and marriage, Jane turned away from it, looking instead at the Thames. Today it was like dull steel under the gray November sky, rucked into small, fierce waves by the snow-wishing wind, busy as always with a myriad of rowed boats, mostly ferrymen’s simple flats, often small-sailed, ever-busy lighters, sometimes a nobleman’s swiftly passing, gay-painted barge, its double row of oarsmen leaning to their work: all on their ways to somewhere else—upriver, downriver, across river—while the Thames went simply on, deep and certain and unceasing.

Jane had found in the week since they had come from Ewelme to Coldharbour that letting her thoughts flow away with the Thames was far better than leaving them free to slip away to other places they could go. She knew that a little further down it roiled into cream foam and roaring around London Bridge’s sterlings, held back on its way to the sea—on still days here in Coldharbour she could hear it when the tide was on the turn and the river had to fight against itself as well as the Bridge—but she also knew that always, soon or late, ebb tide or flow, the Thames won through and on its way, seethed, fought, and flowed on, spreading wide and wider to the sea.

Away.

In her sleep and sometimes, if she was incautious, when she was awake, Jane dreamed of away. Dreamed of being somewhere where neither her face nor who she was supposed to be made difference in the slightest against who she truly was.

It was a useless dreaming. If she had managed to learn anything in her twenty-and-four years, it was that her face and who she was supposed to be were the two things that were never going to go away from her. The nunnery had been the nearest she could have come to escaping them and she had refused that. So she was left with marriage. To William Chesman.

Across the room Aneys and Millicent were beginning another of their not particularly impassioned quarrels over what color one of the flowers should be on what would be a cushion’s cover if they ever finished with it. For them, quarreling was as much a part of sewing as stitching was but it was tedious for everyone else to listen to, and because somehow, tacitly rather than openly, Lady Alice had given her a kind of authority over the other ladies-in-waiting, possibly because she had no friendships with any of them to be damaged, Jane said at them, to put an end to the quarreling, That shade of pink would be too strong for what you’re doing. A dusky rose would better serve.

Aneys and Millicent paused, looking surprised to be interrupted; then Millicent asked doubtfully, Do you think so?

Jane refrained from saying that if she had said it, she must have thought it; but since to judge by the quantity of unthought things that came out of people’s mouths, thought-before-talk was not an obvious truth, she contented herself with answering patiently, Against that dark a green, that pink would be too sudden. All anyone would ever notice when they looked at the cushion was how pink that flower is.

But I like pink, Millicent said and brightened with, After all, it’s going to be mostly sat on so it mostly won’t be seen anyway!

Then it doesn’t matter if we use it here instead of there, Aneys put in promptly, taking up her own side of the argument.

Yes, but… Millicent answered her, and Elizabeth rose from her cushion to come look over their shoulders and join in while Katherine said from where she sat nearby, Couldn’t you use…

At the room’s far end Lady Alice looked up from the account roll on the table in front of her and caught Jane’s eye with a shared smile of covered laughter that said she could leave the girls to their mild quarreling if that was what they presently wanted to do, and despite that Master Bruneau was standing beside her, leaning over to point out something on the parchment while advising on how many tuns of wine should be carted from Coldharbour’s cellars to Wingfield manor now the roads had finally frozen—their talk had been in the corner of Jane’s hearing while her thoughts drifted elsewhere—Lady Alice raised a hand to beckon her to come to her.

Jane willingly set her sewing aside and went. The lady chamber was long for its width, not well-proportioned but beautifully furnished. There were Spanish carpets on the floor, their intricate patterns woven in vivid shades of garnet and sapphire, emerald and gold, and French tapestries telling the story of Tristan and Iseult warmed the walls. The table and chairs, the long seat before the fireplace and even the joint stools were of carved and polished golden oak, and the roof beams were painted with green-leaved vines and many-colored birds. The windows were glazed with clear glass, their shutters bright with my lord and lady of Suffolk’s family arms, and all in all, it was a room as gracious and wealthy as Lady Alice herself.  It said a great deal about my lady of Suffolk that Jane felt not only welcomed there but as at home as anywhere she had ever been.

Master Bruneau acknowledged her approach by straightening long enough to give her a brief bow but went on to Lady Alice, If you purpose to spend Christmas there, you’ll want that many more tuns at least.

But couldn’t they be brought from Ipswich? Lady Alice asked. The carting costs would be less and most of what’s here could go to Ewelme instead.

Master Bruneau unrolled backward through the scroll until he could point out another entry. He was French, had come back with the earl of Suffolk after the earl’s years in France to serve as the Suffolks’ secretary dealing principally with matters concerning their French properties, with presently the most important matter being whether the French wines that had come with the autumn wine fleet would be sufficient for the household’s necessities or if more must needs be bought. You see here, he said, how you’ll need more than what there is at Ipswich, if you purpose to have most of the household with you at Wingfield through to Twelfth Night and maybe Lent.

But there will still be some that can go to Ewelme? Lady Alice asked.

Yes. Master Bruneau was pleased to say it, but then added for warning, Unless you entertain too many folk here the while Parliament goes on.

As we probably will, Lady Alice said.

Master Bruneau sighed. Then we’ll have to buy more.

Lady Alice gave Jane a sideways glance and the corner of a smile. There was never fault to be found with Master Bruneau’s keeping of records. He was both diligent and accurate concerning anything that came into his keeping, but he was also famed for how reluctantly he let any of it out again, even for the uses it was purposed. Presently he was as intent over the matter of the wine as if its cost would come from his own purse—an attitude admittedly desirable in a household officer but not always to the lengths that Master Bruneau sometimes took it. But he was too good at what he did for Lady Alice to show irk or laughter at him, and her smile was merely between her and Jane as she lifted a hand to pause their talk and turn from him to say to Jane very casually, I’d thought to hear about that other matter by now. Would you find if it’s been seen to?

Jane made the small curtsy polite between kinswomen by marriage and answered, Yes, my lady, as easily as if the matter were as slight as Lady Alice made it sound. Lady Alice made a brief, acknowledging nod in answer and turned back to Master Bruneau and the question of whether there were carts enough at Coldharbour or if some would have to be hired. Jane, knowing the inward lurch somewhere near her stomach did not show but wishing she did not have it, quietly left.

There was no reason for that feeling, she chided herself as she circled down the stairs from the lady chamber to the great hall. Lady Alice had made clear when first asking her help with the matter how little trouble there was likely to be with it. So long as no one knew beyond the few who had to, everything would be well, and since there was no sign the secret was known or even suspected, it was not fear that jarred in Jane but the reminder that she was the one Lady Alice had chosen to trust. Out of everyone else there was, Lady Alice had chosen her, saying, The family’s fortune may hang on how well or ill this goes, and since you’re family, who better should I turn to?

She was family. A small acknowledgment maybe for Lady Alice to make, who had never been without family, never been unacknowledged, not while she was Alice Chaucer in her girlhood, or Lady Alice Philip from her first marriage, or Countess of Salisbury from her second, or now Countess of Suffolk by her third. It was Jane who had grown up merely Jane Pole, taken care of by the nuns who were paid to do it, with the expectation she would take her vows and become one of them when she was old enough. She had somehow known from an early age—it was no secret, simply not something ever discussed at length—that her father had been the earl of Suffolk, that he had died in Agincourt battle before she was born, and that she had been sent to St. Osburga’s nunnery while still a baby because her mother could not bear the sight of her. Later, when she had been old enough, persistent enough, to ask questions, she had learned that her mother and her own older sisters—my mother and my sisters, Jane sometimes repeated to herself but was never able to make them real—had resigned any claim they had on the Suffolk earldom in favor of her father’s younger brother, the heir of the male blood, now Lady Alice’s husband, and entered a nunnery together. Jane’s rights had been signed away, too, and she had been put into a nunnery but not the same one as her mother and sisters. 

That—since then—she had never seen them or they her was something about which Jane mostly managed not to care. It was over and done with, decided—the way her mother must have expected all of Jane’s life would be decided—by the fact she had been born with a blemished face.

Blemished.

The word was more kind than the actuality.

Jane with the blemish they had called her at the nunnery, to distinguish her from Jane Cufley, another girl kept at the nunnery, and Sister Jane, one of the nuns. Jane with the blemish, come here.

Tell Jane with the blemish to do it.

It was Jane with the blemish, Sister. Even if she had taken her vows, it would have gone on, she supposed. She would have become Sister Jane with the blemish…

A dark red stain was spread over all the left side of her face, curving out from her hair along her forehead to spread down past her eye, part way along her cheekbone, down past the corner of her mouth to under her jaw and along the side of her throat to her shoulder, ending out of sight under her clothing. Everywhere else her flesh was white, smooth, unmarred even by the pustulous pox she had had as a child, but no one ever saw the rest. They were either unable to look away from the marred half of her face or else were careful not to look at her at all and that was, in some ways, worse.

It was not true of everyone, Jane amended fairly. Lady Alice seemed to see her, actually see her, instead of her deformity. But for most…

She wished she knew how it was for William Chesman when he looked at her but thought she knew. To have her off his hands, her uncle had offered a large dowry to go with her marriage to anyone who would have her. William Chesman had taken it. It was the dowry and the earl of Suffolk’s favor he looked at, not at her.

He’s yeoman blood, no more, Suffolk had warned when telling her the agreement was made. But he’s as good as you’re likely to have. And he’s young, if that matters to you.

Jane supposed it did. What mattered more, though, was that since he had been married before and since it had been a full four years since his first wife’s death, he must have been waiting for a marriage with money enough to make it worth his while and that meant he was coming to this marriage as practically as she was, understanding that what they were to be was of use to one another. She was bringing him money and the earl of Suffolk’s favor and would probably be able to give him children. In return he was giving her a place in the world that would be, as much as she could make it, her own. 

Beyond those practicalities she mostly managed not to think much about being married or of William Chesman—except, as she sometimes admitted to herself, the relief she would have in wearing a wimple and veil. An unmarried maiden was not expected to have her head, her hair, covered. To wear wimple and veil, the face encircled and even partly concealed by the wimple, more concealed, at least from the sides, by the veil’s falling folds,  was the privilege of a married woman—brides of men or brides of Christ. When it was still thought she could be driven into being a nun, St. Osburga’s prioress had told her bluntly, Even when you’ve taken your vows and you’re finally veiled, your blemish will still show some. The wimple won’t cover it all but you’ll be better off than you are now and surely you don’t think you’ll do better, do you, going out into the world with that showing the way it does?  And Katherine here in Lady Alice’s household, trying to be kind, Jane supposed, had once pointed out blithely, At least when you’re married, you’ll have your wimple to mostly cover it during the day and you can always have the bedchamber mostly dark at night when he comes to you.

She came off the last curve of the stairs into the great hall. This time of day, between meals and with everyone scattered to their morning tasks, there were no more than half a dozen people here, and Jane crossed from the dais and down the hall without particularly heeding them. It was the hall-steward’s duty to see they were well employed, and like anyone very long in my lord and lady of Suffolk’s service, he saw to his work well, knowing he would hear from my lady of Suffolk if he did not. It had not taken Jane long after she joined her uncle’s household to see that while he enjoyed all the pleasures and services his wealth and high rank allowed him, it was his lady wife who saw to the complexity of details that kept both services and pleasures flowing smoothly through their lives, and Jane had quietly set to learning all she could of how it was done so that she could bring that skill to her marriage.

That same urge to learn had brought her to Lady Alice’s more close notice, first to being taught, then to being entrusted with small matters of the household and then to… this.

The screens passage at the lower end of the hall not only closed off drafts and the mealtime business of buttery, pantry, and kitchen from view of diners at the high table but served as a passageway between the outer door to the courtyard and the back stairways down to storerooms and through to the range of buildings between the great hall and the chapel over the gateway into Hay Wharf Lane. On its lower floor, the range of buildings was workshops and more storage; above were chambers for the squires and household yeomen when they were not on night attendance to my lord and lady and for such others of the household staff as were of too high rank to sleep in the great hall or kitchen. Some of the better of the household, such as Master Bruneau, had their own chambers. Others shared—two, three, four, or more to a room, depending on their ranks.

No one was likely to remark on anyone’s coming and going there; folk constantly did, and Jane went openly, meaning to ask the first likely person she met if Eyon Chesman was anywhere around. He was her someday-husband’s cousin, as it happened, a household yeoman as he was and even sharing a sleeping chamber with him, though Jane had never noticed them much together otherwise and their being related having nothing to do with why she had to seek him out. Yester evening she had given Eyon the pattern for a particularly elaborate harness ornament he was supposed to take to Master Belancer the silverworker in Silver Street this morning. Lady Alice meant the ornament as a New Year’s present for her husband and wanted to know if Master Belancer would be able to do the work and in time.

At least that was what it was agreed among her and Eyon and Jane would be said if it ever came to questioning. Not that it likely ever would, but he should have been back by now and Jane ran the excuse through her mind, to have it smooth if she should have to give it as she went from the screens passage into the gateway range. The first of the rooms there was somewhat larger than the others, meant as a place for those not on duty to gather and keep idle company if they chose. There always seemed to be a few men and boys there, any time of the day, and Jane expected to find, if not Eyon, then someone who could say where he was.

Instead she found a crowding of men around Master Hyndstoke, the household’s physician. He was young, his Oxford education come by at the Suffolks’ expense so that he was serving in their household for a time in recompense, mostly an easy duty since both the earl and countess were in determinedly good health and kept their household the same. Presently he was gravely shaking his head at the questions being put to him by too many men at once and trying to go past them while he did.

Jane stopped where she was, momentarily frightened. But it was an unlikely time of year for plague and there was more curiosity than fear in the questioning. Then what was it? she wondered.

One of the men looked around, saw her, and broke from the others to come to her. Of anyone there, she would have least chosen Robyn Helas to tell her anything but he was already saying, even as he came, It’s Eyon Chesman. He’s dead. Just now, putting out a hand to steady her if she needed it. She stepped aside from his hand, neither needing it nor willing to have taken it if she had.

He was handsome, was Robyn Helas. No one would hesitate to admit it. But he was also fond of himself, and Jane was uncharmed by either his looks or the courteous attentions he sometimes made a point of giving her, because behind whatever he said to her, she always heard a hint of mockery, a lurking pleasure at paying her compliments both of them knew he did not mean.

So she did not want his comforting now, if that was what he intended, but demanded, Dead? How?

Not seeming to mind her shy from him, Robyn answered, From too much drink it looks like. He drank himself stupid last night and died of it.

Where was his cousin? Why wasn’t he there?

He was attending on the earl last night.

That meant William Chesman had slept with other yeomen and squires in the earl’s outer chamber after seeing him to bed and waited on him through all the early duties this morning.

And no one found Eyon until now?

You know as much as I do, Robyn answered with a shrug. He was standing too close to her in the way she particularly disliked, but she was less concerned over him than over what she should do now. Lady Alice had to be told, but she also had to have back the other paper Eyon had been given last night, the one that mattered, folded up with the pattern of the harness ornament but not meant for Master Belancer the silversmith at all.

As she hesitated over which way to go, Master Hyndstoke won clear of the men and Jane moved into his way, asking, What did he die of, sir? My lady will want to know.

For the earl’s niece and one of Lady Alice’s ladies, Master Hyndstoke stopped and, dropping none of his gravity, answered, I would say he taxed his body too heavily with drink last night and died of it.

It was only that? one of the men asked. Not anything contagious?

Nothing contagious, Master Hyndstoke said firmly, directing his answer to Jane. "It was drink gone against him, no disease. It sometime happens that way with some men. Too much drink and the body can’t maintain itself. It closes down