Free The Sempster's Tale by Margaret Frazer

questioning what she did not need to know—too much of their time together, and maybe too much else if she knew more than he wanted her to know—and with a calm that surprised her she asked, “What do you want me to do with it?”
     
    Daved’s face lighted with laughter. He kissed her hands quickly, first one and then the other, and exclaimed from Solomon’s Song, “ ‘Behold, you are beautiful, my beloved; behold you are fair,’ my woman of valor,
eishet chayil.
”
     
    Anne leaned forward and kissed him lingeringly on the mouth, as much to hold at bay what else he would say as for the pleasure of doing it. But though he shared the kiss as thoroughly as she gave it, when they drew apart he asked, “Raulyn has spoken with you about a nun who’s to come about the duchess of Suffolk’s vestments?”
     
    ‘A week or more ago, yes,“ Anne said; and what she would be paid for that work would keep her secure for the year and maybe longer.
     
    ‘So far as the vestments go, all is as he said. This gold is by the side of it. When the nun comes about the vestments, you need only give her this purse, just as it is. Raulyn has told her of it. You give it to her and it becomes her trouble and not yours or mine. Tell her there will be more…“
     
    ‘More?“ More gold than was already there, lying on her bed as casual as if it were not a fortune?
     
    ‘I would risk only so much at a time, not all the gold at once,“ Daved said, and Anne tightened her hold on his hands.
     
    She lived with the smothered fear that if aught ever happened to him when he was away, she would never know why he never came back to her, but that was a fear for all those days and nights he was not with her. There shouldn’t be fear now, not when he was here with her and safe. But he had said there were “things” he did. There were other secrets, then, not just this gold, and if he had to be this careful of this gold, had to keep it so secret here, then fear was here, too, and…
     
    Pleased to hear her voice steady, she asked, “Does Raulyn know of the gold?”
     
    ‘He knows.“
     
    So Raulyn was part of Daved’s other secrets. How much more was there about Daved, about Raulyn, that she didn’t know? How much more was there for her to fear?
     
    That was probably something she would do better not to ask; and she took the pouch and went away with it to the chest beside the door, slipped it well down inside a back corner, under folded table linens and the small box that held her few documents, closed the chest’s lid, fingered its key out from the ledge hidden behind the chest’s right front leg, locked the chest, and put the key into her small purse hanging from her belt.
     
    Behind her, Daved had risen to his feet but stayed beside the bed. Anne returned to him, put her hands on his waist and stood looking up at him as he looked down at her, both of them searching into the other’s eyes before he asked, “No other questions?”
     
    ‘No questions,“ she said quietly. Because, still, what mattered most to her was that he was here.
     
    Chapter 5
     
    By evening Frevisse knew that her own and Master Naylor’s alarm over the rebels’ return was shared by almost no one else. Even among the nuns in St. Helen’s, there was less worry over the rebels than anger at the king and his nobles. As one nun declared, “The king will have to make an end of them now. They’ll not be given a second chance.”
     
    ‘They shouldn’t have been given a first chance,“ an older nun snapped. ”What ails the king, to let them away the way he did?“
     
    Dame Juliana joined in the talk excitedly, but Frevisse listened with an unease that shifted from worry about the rebels to worry at the deep-set discontent against King Henry. Anger at his present failures was one thing and not good, but that anger looked to be grafted now onto already deeply rooted discontent; and if discontent was this deep inside St. Helen’s, how much worse must it