A Play of Dux Moraud (23 page)

Given the line of corpses his sin left through the course of the play, that finish struck Joliffe as altogether too easy, both for the duke and for the player playing him. Ellis wouldn’t thank him for making the part more difficult, but then Ellis never thanked him for anything, so that made no difference, Joliffe thought with a wide smile to himself. He briefly tickled himself under his chin with the feathered end of his quill, considering, then began to write.

Ellis returned. Rose and Basset both awoke, and while Basset moved around—loosening his sorry joints, he said—Piers, Gil, and Tisbe returned, bringing firewood. Ellis complained that not much of it was dry. Piers said he was welcome to go hunt for dry wood in the wet woods himself if he thought he could do better. Rose said it was time for someone to fetch their supper from the kitchen, and since Ellis and Piers seemed to have so much strength to spare, why didn’t they? They left, still wording happily at each other, and Joliffe put away his writing, ready to turn his mind to this evening’s work and give over thinking about both Dux Moraud and everything there might—or might not—be wrong here at Deneby.

 
In the hall, with all the work of settling the marriage agreement done and the first banns read, everyone seemed in a festive humour, ready for the fall-about sport of
The Husband Becomes the Wife
. While the players waited in the screens passage, Basset had time to judge the level of general merriment and said, “I think we should do it ‘with them’ tonight.”

Joliffe, Ellis, and Piers all made muted groan together. It was one thing to do the play as it was, but “with them” meant they drew the audience into it as well, and while that made much more sport for the audience, it made much more work for them.

Giving their groans no heed, Basset went on, “Piers, you and Will can be twins. I think we should best leave Mariena and Lady Benedicta out of it?” He looked at Joliffe, who nodded ready agreement with that. “But Sir Edmund may join in if Will does, and that would be good. Maybe Amyas or Harry Wyot for the table . . .”

He went on quickly laying out his plan, and then it was time to begin, far too late, Joliffe thought, to smother Basset, hide his body in the hamper of properties, and escape into the night. Instead, perforce, they sallied forth and set to being merry. For this play, he and Ellis switched their usual parts, with Joliffe the husband and Ellis the wife, looking unlikely in a deliberately ill-fitted gown and over-large apron that overwhelmed Joliffe when given over to him along with the housekeeping.

It quickly became clear that Basset had read the hall a-right. Whether from plain high spirits or a plenitude of wine, everyone Basset gathered from behind the tables into the playing area came readily and with laughter. Will came eagerly to be Piers’ “twin,” their business being to lie on their backs and at the most awkward moments pretend to be wailing babies. Amyas became a table, down on all fours in the square laid out for the unhappy couple’s cottage, his laughter a constant threat to the plate and bowl set on his back. Harry Wyot was willingly the hearth, sitting cross-legged and waving his arms over his head to be rising smoke, although when the Husband laid sticks across his lap and set a kettle there, he laughed so hard along with everyone else that he nearly fell over.

With Joliffe confined to the “cottage” as the husband making a desperate mess of everything he tried to do, Basset and Ellis kept busy pulling one person and another from behind the tables to play “neighbors” come to call, including Father Morice (with Basset at his back to urge him on), who walked into the cottage, pretended horror at what he saw, signed a cross in the air, cried, “God’s mercy on you all,” and retreated; but that was enough to bring on roars of laughter from one end of the hall to the other.

It was all something the players had done uncounted times before here and all went as it usually did. Some people fell into the game eagerly, over-playing their part to everyone’s delight, including their own. Some, not sure at all what they should do, gamely tried, able to rise to nothing more than stiff dignity until released back to their places. But they all tried. Only Sir Edmund did not rise to the moment when Will forsook being a baby to jump up and run to help Basset bring him into the game. Pulled by his son, Sir Edmund came, and when Will had flung himself down beside Piers on the blanket that was their “cradle” and begun to wail and kick again, Sir Edmund let Basset guide him through the cottage doorway and even said, as Basset had directed but very stiffly, “Ho, good neighbor, aren’t we going fishing today?”

Joliffe, pretending a particularly frantic moment of trying to quiet the wailing “babies” by dandling over them a bright cloth ball on the end of a stick, turned with a despairing, “Here. Quiet these brats if you can,” thrusting the bauble toward him. Always before, whoever was there had taken the stick—out of surprise if nothing else—and dandled it over the babies, who immediately fell to quiet cooing. Sir Edmund did nothing. Neither took the stick, nor moved. Only stood there, rigid, blank-faced, staring at Joliffe. For a perilous moment the whole headlong forward rush of the play was in danger of stumbling. But Ellis, probably reading Sir Edmund’s back, entered sooner than “she” might have, coming into the cottage declaring loudly, “What is this wailing, these cries of grief? What have you done to my darlings dear? Have you been deeply into the ale, that even the children you can’t calm?” With bustle and busyness, “she” hurried Sir Edmund out of the cottage, for Basset to return to the high table while “she” snatched the bauble from Joliffe and quieted the children and set the play on to its roaring finish and a loud beating of goblets and spoons on tabletops by all the lookers-on, even Sir Edmund as if nothing awry had happened.

Despite they were tired to their bones, the players made their way back to the cartshed satisfied with the evening. After a little talk and a little ale around the fire and general agreement that they could put everything away in the morning, they made for their beds. It being Joliffe’s turn to bank the fire once their blankets were warmed, he was the last to lie down. By then Gil was slackly asleep with his mouth a little open, Basset was gently snoring, and Ellis was tucking a blanket higher around Piers’ neck with a tenderness that told Piers was soundly asleep already, too. All his angelic look was on him, his lashes soft on his rounded cheeks, a small smile curving his lips, everything belying what he was when awake. Ellis, turning, finding Joliffe’s look on Piers, scowled, maybe angry at being caught in such open tenderness, but Joliffe said quietly, to disturb no one else, “He’s better off than Will is, our Piers.”

Ellis cast a scornful glance around them. “I don’t see it.” But then added grudgingly, “Aye, he’s not frightened, for one thing. And he’s loved and wanted.” His look sharpened on Joliffe. “Though I’d break my own neck before telling him as much.”

Joliffe held up his hands in silent assurance that he’d keep Ellis’ secret. But Ellis was looking past him, eyes a little widening, and Joliffe looked over his own shoulder to see Rose was pulling Ellis’ mattress from its place beside the fire to beside her own bedding.

Turning back to Ellis, he asked, low-voiced, “No token on the cowshed for you tonight?”

“Shut up,” Ellis muttered, equally low, starting past him toward Rose.

“Poor Avice,” Joliffe murmured. “Thwarted of her prey.”

“Poor the other one,” Ellis muttered back. “She got you.”

Joliffe did not disabuse him with the truth. Why hand rocks to someone who enjoyed stoning you? Instead, listening to Ellis and Rose settling together behind him, he finished settling the fire and slid into his own bed, glad that at least sleep—if nothing else—was in his reach. But as he burrowed against his thin pillow, he found himself considering what Ellis had said about Piers being loved and wanted. Wasn’t Will both loved and wanted? As heir, as the son who would carry on his father’s name and blood, he had to be; and yet, once asked, the question sat uneasily among Joliffe’s other thoughts.

Why?

Joliffe wrapped his blanket more tightly to him and thought about it. What had he seen or heard that made him uneasy over it? Put to it, he could name nothing. If only as his only son, his heir, at least Sir Edmund must value Will. Or did Sir Edmund know something more about his wife’s unfaithfulness than others did? Had there been—or did he suspect there had been—a later lover than the one so readily talked of? Did he doubt the boy was truly his?

But Sir Edmund gave no sign of resenting Will, seemed neither to neglect nor abuse him. Nor was it his father that Will feared. Basset had said Will was relieved this afternoon when told it was his father who wanted him. In truth, everything Joliffe had seen between them had looked like affection.

Looked like affection.

Seemed neither to neglect nor abuse him.

More awake than he had hoped to be by now, Joliffe held his choice of words up in his mind and studied them.

Why “seemed”? Why “looked”? What—of the little he had seen between Sir Edmund and Will—gave him this feeling of something not right? He could think of nothing he’d seen or heard to make him doubt Sir Edmund’s affection for Will. So far as Joliffe had seen or heard, Sir Edmund said and did what he should both for and with Will.

Sir Edmund said and did.

Sir Edmund seemed and looked.

Sir Edmund said and did and seemed and looked but . . . There was a hollowness behind it.

Rain had begun to fall again, a quiet pattering on the cartshed’s thatch and yard, perfect to accompany him into sleep, but Joliffe held awake, caught by his thoughts, wondering from where that one had come.

Then he knew.

He had told Gil that a player needed to have layers in his mind while at his playing—that whatever passions were being outwardly played, an inner layer of the mind had to keep watch and control over all. In good time Gil would learn, too, that, beyond that, a player had to regard not only the passions of the person he played but the passions of all the others on stage, the better to play off them while they played off him, weaving the play into a tight-bound whole. Without that, a play was dead even while the players spoke and moved through their parts.

When Joliffe had first joined Basset’s company there had been a player in it—Serle; that had been his name—who played faultlessly in every outward seeming, yet gave nothing to anyone else on the stage with him. To play on stage with Serle had been much like playing to a wooden post. He said the words and made the gestures that went with whatever was supposedly taking place between him and anyone else, but nothing
did
take place between them. No matter what part he played or with whom he played it, all he gave was a flat front. He had given the needed words and gestures but with never a sense he
felt
any of it, and whatever another player tried to give him to bring the business alive between them had died somewhere in the air between them.

He had left Basset’s company for a larger one a few months after Joliffe joined, seen away with Basset’s good wishes. But afterwards Basset had said, “He’ll do better there than here. They won’t ask so much of him and that’s what they’ll get—not much of him.” And had added in answer to Joliffe’s questioning look, “You meet them sometimes, his sort. There are women like him, too. You can give them your heart’s core and it means no more to them than a rotted apple. They’re useless in life because they care for nothing but themselves and they’re useless on stage for the same reason.” Then Basset had pointed a sudden, fierce finger at Joliffe. “And if I ever catch you at anything so feeble as unfeeling playing, I’ll stick-wallop you the next three miles we travel.”

Sir Edmund reminded Joliffe of long-unthought-of Serle. Why?

Because when he had tried to thrust the fool’s bauble into Sir Edmund’s hand tonight, he had been looking straight into Sir Edmund’s eyes at that moment, and out of all the responses Sir Edmund could have had, there had been nothing. The players had played that game enough to know the responses there could be: laughter, eagerness, confusion, uncertainty, even offense. None of them had shown on Sir Edmund’s face. Looking into Sir Edmund’s eyes had been like looking into emptiness.

At the time there had been no time to think about it. Joliffe had simply swung away from him, intent on not letting the play falter. Only now, thinking back on it, did he see how like to long-forgotten Serle Sir Edmund had been in that moment. That emptiness had been there. For Serle nothing had mattered beyond himself. Was it that way with Sir Edmund? Or maybe was it not so much that nothing mattered as that everything beyond himself was no more than a puppet-show, that everyone around him were no more than puppets for his use—some puppets of more use, others of less; good puppets doing easily what he wanted from them, bad puppets needing to be forced.

Or killed?

In that moment of trying to bring him into the game, Joliffe had been a “bad puppet,” had been outside the part Sir Edmund allowed to him. If he had persevered, would Sir Edmund have simply, coldly crushed the sport and Joliffe with it, as he would have a fly that would not leave off troubling him? Because in his stare there had been no more regard for Joliffe than that. And for all that he had smiled when he talked with Lady Benedicta in her chamber, his eyes had been as blank on her as they had been on Joliffe. That had been what made Joliffe uneasy without he could name why. What Sir Edmund had been doing outwardly had been linked to nothing inward. There had been a hollow ring behind every seemingly true note he had struck.

How many years now had Lady Benedicta lived with that blank gaze turned on her above a smile she must have long since come to hate?

And Will and Mariena? Sir Edmund feigned “father” as well as he did “husband” and “lord of Deneby.” Knowing nothing better, was it enough for them—that seeming? Or was their father’s coldness corroding something in them? Were Mariena’s willfulness and furious humours her shield against him? And did Will take the other way, being ready to his father’s wishes in hope of keeping safely inside the circle of his father’s approval, not understanding how false-based that approval was?