Free A Play of Treachery by Margaret Frazer Page A

fireplace on the chamber’s far side told this had been someone else’s place: across the pale-stone surround were carved, over and over again, the image of a long-rooted tree-stump. A woodstock—a badge of John, duke of Bedford. So this had, in all likelihood, been the duke’s great bedchamber and, presumably, his duchess’. She must have moved—or been moved—to make way for her uncle. Joliffe wondered to where.
    And what she thought of being so displaced.
    At any rate, Cauvet was not there, and when the bishop’s men, having milled about purposelessly, admiring the chamber but lacking reason to be there without the bishop, began to leave through one of the room’s several other doors, Joliffe went with them, wanting to see more of the place and hoping to find Cauvet along the way. At least one of the men was clearly acquainted with the hôtel , leading them through a series of lesser rooms and down a stairway to another large chamber as if he knew where he was going and from there into the great hall, coming out just below the dais where a brace of servants were spreading white cloths over the high table there in preparation for whatever welcoming feast was to come. Behind the table, several men on ladders leaned against the wall were putting up a long-hanging tapestry beside another already there, with a canopy extended forward from it over one of the two tall-backed chairs set there at the table, turning it into a chair of estate—the duchess’, presumably, with the other likely to be Bishop Louys’.
    Below the dais a scattering of men stood about in talk with one another while an intensity of more servants thumped through the business of setting up the trestle tables lined down either side of the hall’s length where lesser members of the household would sit to eat. The hall was not as large as some Joliffe had lately been in. Not so great-sized, surely, as the one lately built in London by Bedford’s brother, the duke of Gloucester. Rather than somewhere newly-made, here looked more as if it were an older place that had been changed and added to, but what had been added was splendid, with at the dais’ far end a stone-traceried window from floor to rafter-height curving boldly outward, paned below in clear glass but resplendent above with bright-hued heraldic shields and beasts. Further down the hall, one long wall was emboldened by a wide fireplace with a surround even more richly carved than that in the ducal bedroom, while facing it across the hall was a long sideboard whose four stepped shelves rising up the wall were draped in black cloth, probably in sign of the household’s year of mourning for Bedford’s death but surely showing to perfection the display of gold and silver dishes, goblets, basins, and ewers set out there. Joliffe had never seen such an array even in London, either at the gold-smiths’ shops in Cheapside or any lordly household where he had played.
    All too often, the world judged a man’s worth by the wealth he showed to his fellows’ eyes. The display there on the sideboard served to assert the duke of Bedford had been a very worthy man indeed. From what little Joliffe knew about the late duke, though, that was an assertion that might well have been made less from Bedford’s pride than out of plain necessity. Placed as he had been in the world—regent of France and Normandy for his young nephew in England and therefore perilously balanced between a war that would not end and the governments and politics of two kingdoms—Bedford had had every need to display his wealth, and thereby his power, as one more way to constantly impress on powerful men that he was an even more powerful man, with both right and might to rule here in his nephew’s name.
    Or, if it had come to it, to rule here in his own right, because Bedford had been his as-yet childless nephew’s heir. If it had been young King Henry who had died last year instead of the duke, Bedford would now be king of both