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Authors: Margaret Frazer

BOOK: A Play of Heresy
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“What I need is a new pair,” Piers complained.
“Not until we’re sure you’re done spurting upward for a while,” Ellis growled.
Enwrapped in the glad familiarity of them all, Joliffe laughed, threw an arm over Gil’s shoulders, and said, “As the one closest to whole-witted here,
you
tell me how it’s been going.”
They all told him, of course, while taking him along the yard, past their cart to the yard’s far corner and up wooden stairs to a room that—whatever its usual use might have been—was presently half given over to a long table piled with various cloths and scattered with scissors and pipes of thread and a small cushion stuck full of pins, and set about with stools. Out of the way of all the sewing that clearly went on there, the rest of the room looked to be given over to the players, with their bedding and pallets rolled and stacked atop familiar wicker hampers against the wall. Joliffe, having already gathered some things out of the happy talk around him, said, “So this is Rose’s domain here.”
“It is indeed,” Basset said.
“Mine and Mistress Silcok’s,” Rose said, a little edged.
“You have her well in hand,” Basset assured her and added for Joliffe, “Her husband is high among the tailors. She thought that gave her the right to be the same here.”
“She’s quite skilled at the sewing,” Rose said, fair as always.
“But
you
know what will work best for players,” Ellis said. He reached out an arm around her waist, to bring her close to his side so he could bend and plant a kiss on her forehead. “For which we thank you.”
Rose smiled up at him. Her husband had disappeared while Piers was a baby and never been heard of since. That meant there could be no marriage between her and Ellis, and for years she had resisted there being anything else. Those had been hard years for both her and Ellis and occasionally for everyone around them, but at last their care for each other had won out over the strictures of the Church: in every good way but law they were wed now, and everyone was the far happier for it.
Joliffe lifted the folds of a scarlet cloth at the near end of the table and was surprised by its weight and fineness. With open surprise, he said, “
This
is to be for the play?”
“For Herod,” Basset said. He had taken one of the players’ floor cushions from their pile beside the hamper and was easing himself down onto it where he could lean back against a wall.
“And the blue, the green, and the saffron yellow here are for the Three Kings,” said Gil, going farther along the table where apparently partly finished robes were folded. With a wide smile, he laid a hand on the yellow and added, “This will be Ellis’, so no matter what he says, he’s happy enough about it all.”
“Blessed Saint Genesius,” Joliffe breathed. There was a good-sized fortune in cloth here, all for new playing clothes when the usual way was to be satisfied with over-worn clothing given by guild members for their company’s play or, with the players, what could be had secondhand from those who sold such. Rarely was there the pleasure of something made new, let alone made new with cloth of this richness. “Of course it’s the Shearmen and
Tailors
Guild’s play,” he said. “I suppose the tailors have cloth enough. Still—” He stroked the scarlet with an admiring hand. “All of this new at once?”
“It seems it was years since anything new had been done for their play,” Basset said. Pleasure shone from him. “The whole thing was showing its age and over-use—garb and pageant wagon and all. Many in the guild were already half-persuaded it was time to do it all anew. I persuaded them the rest of the way.”
Moving along the table, Joliffe turned back the corner of clean sacking wrapping a bundle and gave a low whistle at what he saw. He looked back at Rose. “What is this?”
“Chainsil.”
Joliffe shook his head to show that told him nothing.
“A most fine and costly linen,” Rose said grandly. Here bleached to a shining white. “It’s for the Angel’s robe.”
Joliffe covered it again almost reverently. “Saint Genesius,” he breathed again. “We’ve fallen into a featherbed this time.”
“
We’ve
fallen,” Ellis said. “
You
haven’t.”
Joliffe looked to Basset. “No part for me?”
“Not in ours. There’s been the usual contesting among the guildsmen for who will do which.”
“Has not there just?” muttered Ellis. In a doddering voice, he mimicked, “I’ve always played the First Shepherd. The First Shepherd is
mine
and no one else can
ever
be the First Shepherd.”
“It’s that bad?” Joliffe asked of Basset.
“It was. Nearly.”
“These days the fellow who says he’s always been the Second King can hardly hobble even with a staff,” Ellis said heatedly. “As for remembering his words . . .”
Gil had gone aside to where the players’ large sitting cushions were stacked in a corner. He now threw one at Ellis, breaking off his grumble enough for Basset to come in with, “You know how it is with guildsmen and their pageants in these towns. They cling to what they think is ‘their’ part until both they and the part are creaking.”
Rose, on her way to Ellis with her own cushion, paused to kiss her father on a cheek and say, “But you have wooed them out of it, and everything is better.”
“Getting that way,” Basset said, pleased and showing it. “New gear, new garb, mostly new men in the parts, some of them quite good, it turns out.”
“With enough hard work by us to make them that way,” Ellis muttered, but he let Rose pull him down to sit beside here, getting a kiss on his cheek in return.
“But no part for me?” Joliffe persisted to Basset.
“Or for me!” Piers said indignantly. “Gil is a Shepherd. Ellis is a King. Basset is Herod’s Servant.
I’m
not anybody.”
“You liar,” Gil said good-humouredly, throwing a pillow at him. “You’re a demon in the girdlers’ play, leading a pack of other demons.”
Piers threw the pillow back at him. “But I’m not in my own grandfather’s own play!”
It was indignation for the sake of indignation, not even Piers serious at it. The pillow went back and forth another time until Joliffe snatched it in mid-flight, threw it on the floor, and sat on it himself beside Basset. Grabbing another pillow, Gil sat, too. Taking a small wooden recorder from his belt, he began to play softly, idly on it. Piers flopped flat to the floor with his head in his mother’s lap, for her to stroke his curls while she and Ellis talked quietly together above him.
“So what am I to do if I’m not in your play?” Joliffe asked of Basset.
Chapter 3
 
“T
he other guilds have only lately begun to ready their plays,” Basset said. “Word is out that the shearmen and tailors are set to spare nothing this year to make their own splendiferous beyond anything it’s ever been before. It being the Annunciation and Nativity and . . .”
“And a half dozen other things, like jumble in a box,” Ellis muttered.
“. . . there are chances in plenty to fulfill their desire,” Basset continued, ignoring him. “And I gather that the other guilds are taking up the challenge to rival whatever the shearmen and tailors are doing. So there’s now something of a scramble for a greater leavening of skilled players among the general rout of once-a-year folk. Remember Will Sendell?”
Joliffe twitched his mind to follow that turn of the talk, groped half a moment, and said, surprised and showing it, “As with the Will Sendell who used to be one of us?”
“That’s him.”
Yes, Joliffe remembered him. He had been one of Basset’s company when Joliffe joined it, well before Gil’s time. Sendell had shared parts with Ellis, they being much of an age and skill, and there had been another man, too, John Vicar who had been about to outgrow the women’s roles he had been playing in the company. That was why there had been place for Joliffe, although that had made the company on the edge of being too large. To the good, Joliffe had shown skilled at changing their plays to fit the whole company into them, doubly earning his place. There had been prospering times then, before their then-patron turned on them. In the bad times after that, Sendell and Vicar had found the margin of the company’s survival too thin, even for players, and had left—deserted was how Joliffe had thought of it then, before he stopped thinking of them at all. The company had struggled on, never quite dead although often just barely surviving, until Lord Lovell had decided to favor them. Now, with Gil joined to the company, they were thriving so far as players ever throve, and so thought of Will Sendell’s desertion was not the irk it might have been, and Joliffe said, “He’s here in Coventry?”
“He’s directing the weavers’ play for them. He says he could use someone’s help with showing the folk he has to use how to do more than declaim and strut.”
To have paying work and something to do here—something besides finding out murderous Lollards—would be better than not, that was sure, but Joliffe put off the acceptance he supposed he would give by asking, “What’s he been at these years since he left us?”
“He took himself back to Lincolnshire where he came from, put together a company of his own, and swung along the east coast from there into Yorkshire and back. Then two years ago the company got caught in an outbreak of plague in Hull. Two of them died. The other two decided they were tired of a player’s life and left to go back to whatever they had been before. Since then Sendell has been scraping by with what work he can find. I gather it’s mostly been directing plays for church ale-fests.”
Joliffe winced. That was catch-as-catch-can work for the most part and meant working with whatever folk and whatever play were to hand around the church for the sake of raising money by a day of merriment and drinking. With drinking the most important part of the day for all too many of the folk there.
“Now he’s here,” said Basset. “I’ve talked with him some. I think he can still do fit work when he has something and someone fit to work with.”
“Which you say he presently doesn’t,” Joliffe said warily.
“That’s what you’d be for,” Basset said grandly. “You would be the hammer and saw and carpenter’s plane he uses to shape the rough folk he has to something fine and worthy.”
Ellis put in, “Better that Joliffe be the nail that gets hammered on the head.”
“Ha,” Joliffe said back at him, and to Basset, “The pay?”
“Good enough, I suppose, since there’s the rivalry now for the guilds to out-do each other, and the weavers are one of the best-prospering guilds here.”
“Seems a worthy way to pass the time,” Joliffe granted. “At worst it’s only for this couple of weeks. I’ll find him out tomorrow. How often do they rehearse?”
“I don’t know about him. With mine, I’ve talked our guild folk into letting me have the latter part of every third afternoon as well as evenings to work with one part of our folk or another.”
Joliffe did not stop the widening of his eyes. “That much?” Players, with all their skills well-honed, could get by with a handful of practices when need be, but the town folk for the most part did
not
have well-honed skills and nonetheless too often seemed to think a play needed little more than for everyone to learn their words, stand up, and do it. To persuade merchants and craftsmen to give up time from their work for something they thought needed little work was a true accomplishment.
“That much, yes,” Basset said dryly. “And it’s needful. The ones I have in hand who’ve never played before don’t know what they’re doing. The ones that
have
played before need to be wooed out of all their bad, familiar ways.”
Gil broke off his soft piping to put in, “It’s not a simple play, either. There’s the prophet Isaiah, Mary, Joseph, the angel Gabriel, the journey to Bethlehem, Christ’s birth in the stable, the Shepherds on the hillside . . .”
“And sheep,” grumbled Ellis.
“We’re
not
having sheep,” said Basset in a way that suggested he had already had to fight that out with someone.
Gil went on, “. . . a choir of angels, Herod and a Messenger, the Three Kings, the Bethlehem mothers with their babies . . .”
“
Not
real babies,” Basset said, although given what happened to those babies that had probably never been at issue.
“. . . and the Soldiers sent to murder the babies,” Gil finished.
“All on one pageant wagon,” Ellis grumbled. “Someone is going to be elbowed to death in the stage house.”
“You’ll never be in the stage house,” Gil pointed out. “You’re one of the Three Kings. You’ll be on horseback. And the Shepherds start out under the stage.”
“You’ll be in the stage house when it’s time you all change into the soldiers,” Ellis returned. “Not to mention that you and Basset have to somehow convince your fellow shepherds that they don’t have to be slap-my-thigh and fall-over-laughing on every speech
and
that soldiers should move differently than shepherds do.”
“True enough,” Gil agreed easily. “Meanwhile, all you need deal with are the other two kings.”

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