The Maiden’s Tale by Margaret Frazer Read Free Book Online

took seats again, Frevisse thought that at least Abbot Gilberd had not fobbed off a fool on them. Whatever else Dame Elisabeth might turn out to be, at least she was not that, and she proved it further in passing by discussion of the weather and how the roads had been to say to Frevisse and Dame Perpetua both, “Tell me about St. Frideswide’s.”
    “Your brother—um, Abbot Gilberd hasn’t told you everything?” Dame Perpetua asked, to cover the unexpectedness of the question.
    Dame Elisabeth gave her brother a glance and smile. “He’s told me abbot-things. How many properties you hold and your yearly income. That your buildings are in good repair. That there are nine of you. But not your names or if the priory is comfortable or what the countryside is like. So tell me, please.” Together, Dame Perpetua leading, they did, or at least began the telling, starting simply with such things as the other nuns’ names and how long they had been professed and something of what the countryside was like. Frevisse suspected Dame Elisabeth would make a deeper questioning later, when Abbot Gilberd was not there to hear it, and she raised her opinion of their new prioress slightly higher, cautiously beginning to hope that, abbatial brother or no, Dame Elisabeth intended St. Frideswide’s to come first in her considerations.
    Sister Clemens returned with wine and sugar wafers and the talk veered a little, into how long they would stay in London. Dame Elisabeth had various duties in St. Helen’s she could not simply leave but she had already begun to give them over to others and said, “A week. Surely not more than that.” She smiled at her brother. “We’ll have to leave you behind. Parliament will only be warming into its arguing by then. Subsidies and taxes and what else this time?”
    “The French war probably,” Abbot Gilberd said. “I fear this matter of the duke of Orleans isn’t going to go away.”
    “Ah.” Dame Elisabeth nodded, seeming to understand more from that than Frevisse did.
    What everyone presently knew of the war was that of late it had been no more than profitless skirmishing by the English and French into each other’s territories, with neither side sensible enough to quit or strong enough to win. That latter was the duke of Burgundy’s fault. He had been England’s great ally in the war until four years ago when he had turned his coat—though that was not how he put it—to the French. After over a dozen years of alliance with England, of calling the French dauphin, their shared enemy, nothing more respectful than “the king of England’s uncle,” Burgundy had of a sudden decided that the dauphin was after all Charles VII, rightful king of France, and had broken with the English when they would not agree with him.
    Since then talks to bring about a peace were constantly being proposed but never happening, or else happening but accomplishing nothing. There had actually been one at Calais this autumn that had involved the duke of Orleans, but no one at St. Frideswide’s had heard more of it than that or what had come of it so probably nothing had, and Frevisse asked, “The duke of Orleans? Is there trouble over him?”
    “Trouble, or maybe the end of trouble,” Abbot Gilberd said. “It seems that the talks at Calais went well but the French—pushed by the duke of Burgundy apparently—have decided to insist that peace hangs on Orleans going free.”
    “Oh my,” said Dame Perpetua. “The duke of Orleans. I’d forgotten about him.”
    A royal duke of France, the French king’s cousin and a prisoner here in England for more than twenty years, ever since he had been captured in Agincourt battle. The many other French lords taken prisoner then had long since been ransomed or died. Only Orleans remained still prisoner after all these years, never offered for ransom and so with no apparent hope of going free. And now the duke of Burgundy was saying peace hinged on him?
    “Some in the