Read Online The Widow's Tale (Sister Frevisse Medieval Mysteries Book 14) by Margaret Frazer - Free Book Online

thing. Someone was saying that in Oxford.”
    “Suffolk,” the merchant said with disgust. “There’s setting the cockerel to deal with the fox. What I want to know is why should Suffolk or anyone have to go to Normandy to ‘deal with it’?” He had thumped a fist down on the wooden tabletop. “Why doesn’t King Henry send Somerset order to stop being an idiot? I say there’s something foul afoot about the whole business and that Suffolk and Somerset are hand in glove in it.”
    “I haven’t been able to make sense of what’s been done in France ever since they pulled York out from being governor,” said the other man. “And what about this Winnington business?”
    The merchant had thrown up his hands. “Don’t start me on the Winnington business!” Another source of ongoing anger across the country. Late in May one Robert Winnington— charged by the crown with safekeeping of the sea—had used the royal fleet to seize over a hundred ships of the Hanseatic League and its allies homeward bound to the Baltic with its yearly cargo of salt and other goods from the south. Because England was not at war with the Hanse, the seizure had been more bold than’ sensible, and in June a group of pilgrims from Gloucester, staying overnight at the priory on their way to the great shrine at Walsingham, had been full of talk and bitterness about it, one man complaining, “The Hanse is taking whatever English goods they find abroad, I hear. Eve a cousin will be ruined if that’s true.”
    “He won’t be the only one,” someone else said. “Nor king or council has made any move toward peace or to return the ships or to punish Winnington.”
    “And they won’t either,” a lean, aggravated woman had said sharply. “Winnington is their man and if you don’t know that you’re a fool. Suffolk and those jackals around him run the king and never doubt but they’ll all make a pretty profit out of it. God keep King Henry, but where’s his wits in this, I ask?”
    “Ah, there then,” a plump, easier woman had said soothingly, “it’s not the king’s fault, is it? He’s hardly to blame, being so young and lacking experience.”
    “He’s twenty-seven,” one of the men grumbled. “His father at twenty-seven was winning the battle of Agincourt.”
    “Well, we’re not all like our fathers, are we?” the plump woman returned.
    “True enough,” the first woman snapped, “but some miss it by more than is good for them.”
    Added to that, as the summer went on there was talk and worry of French raids along the south and east coasts, irk at a new tax laid on all wool going into Flanders, speculation on how ill an omen was the sudden star that had burned for a number of spring evenings in the west, report that an outbreak of plague had adjourned the Parliament from Westminster to Winchester, and all of that mixed in with a general seethe of discontent against the king and his council of lords like Frevisse had never heard before.
    “And anger,” she said one warm morning in the prioress’ parlor in answer to Domina Elisabeth’s question about what was being said.
    Because a prioress sometimes had to receive particular guests and conduct such business as was not suited to the chapter meetings with all the nuns, the parlor was a more comfortable room than any other in the priory, with glassed windows and a fireplace and a fringed carpet woven in a Spanish pattern laid over the carved-legged table. In Domina Edith’s time, when Frevisse had first come to St. Frideswide’s, there had been an embroidery frame with always some work on it and a small greyhound who slept in a padded basket beside the fire. With Domina Elisabeth there was a slant-topped writing desk near the window where—like her nuns—she copied books to earn much-needed money for St. Frideswide’s and a sleek white-and-gray cat presently curled on a cushion at one end of the windowseat, regarding Frevisse with a baleful green eye over a tail