A Play of Isaac (13 page)

Piers brightened. “That’s a
good
thought. I’ll be older then, too.” He frowned up at Joliffe. “You aren’t going to try for her yourself, are you? I thought of her first.”

“No. I promise I’ll leave her to you,” Joliffe said, not a difficult promise since they both had as much chance of hitting the sun with a snowball as wedding a rich widow.

Head down, now swishing his stick through the grass beside the road, Piers was silent again before asking in a smaller voice, “
Is
Lewis likely to die soon?”

Surprised by both Piers’s quietness and the question, Joliffe said too lightly, “We’re all going to die.”

Piers looked at him with the scorn that deserved, and Joliffe answered him more fairly, matching his quiet, “Yes, he very likely is. They don’t usually last even as long as this, his sort.”

Piers went back to whipping the grasses, considering that for a while before saying, “I just hope he doesn’t while we’re here. I like him.”

“Or before he’s married to Kathyrn and can make her a rich widow?”

Piers brightened. “That, too.”

They walked on, Piers asking more questions about other things, but while answering them, Joliffe wondered how they all, even Piers, could talk so easily of Lewis being dead. He was an idiot, surely, born that way and never going to better, but Joliffe had known full-witted people with less warmth for life than Lewis had, full-witted people who used too little of their wits where Lewis used all he had. Who was to say which was more worthy in God’s sight—someone who wasted God’s gifts or someone who used what he had to the fullest that he could?

When they came into the yard among the byres and barns, Master Glover was leaning on the gate to the horse pasture, watching the horses graze. He looked around when Joliffe and Piers joined him and gave them greeting but did not shift. Joliffe leaned his crossed arms on the top rail beside him and said. “A peaceful life.”

“Just now it is,” Master Glover answered. “There’ll be something come up before I’ve turned around, likely. Especially now I’ve had to send one of my men to Master Penteney’s place in town to help ready for his lordly guests and two that are wanting to be away to whatever is happening in town as often as not.”

Piers had been peering through the rails of the gate but now asked if he could look around. Master Glover said he could, adding. “Just don’t touch or shift things, mind you.”

Piers went off. Tisbe was drifting and grazing among the other horses as contentedly as any of them. Joliffe said something about her looking fit and settled in.

“She’s made no trouble,” Master Glover said. “She’s a quiet one.”

“She’s that,” Joliffe agreed.

“How are things going for you there at Master Penteney’s?”

“Well enough. No trouble.”

“You’ll be moving on after Thursday, like?”

“That’s what we plan. Will you be free from here to come into town for the plays on Corpus Christi?”

“I don’t much hold with plays,” Master Glover said easily. “Or crowds. I like it here, where it’s peaceful.”

They made a little more talk, mostly about whether this summer would end up as wet as the last had been, before Joliffe looked around for Piers and didn’t see him.

“Went off around the end of the barn,” Master Glover said, pointing. “Not a paternoster ago. Toward the goose marsh, though I’ve no geese here until more nigh Michaelmas.”

“A marsh,” Joliffe said, pushing off from the gate. “He’ll mire himself to his knees if I know him, and his mother will kill us both.”

“Your wife?” Master Glover asked.

“No,” Joliffe said; but something in the way Master Glover had asked it had made him watchful and he saw the hardness of disapproval come into the man’s face so that he added with deliberate lightness, pretending he saw nothing, “Nor is Piers mine, thank all the saints. I only work for his grandfather.”

He wished Master Glover well and left him with that, unreasonably irked at him and irked at himself for being irked. There were always people who looked for what they saw as the worst in others. They couldn’t be cured of it and so, like the plague, they were best avoided when might be and thought about as little as possible the rest of the time. Better to think about finding Piers, which he did by going around the barn and through a gate into a pasture that sloped down from behind the barn and Master Glover’s house to obviously marshy ground along the stream that watered all the pastures.

Piers was already at the stream, poking with his stick at something in the water. Joliffe called him away, met him as he came, and steered him on across the pasture to a stile through the hedge and onto the road, thankful to see that he had had only time to muddy his shoes, not his hosen.

“If you’re lucky,” Joliffe told him, “the mud will dry and you can brush it off before your mother sees it.”

“We’re always getting muddy,” Piers protested. “It’s not trouble.”

He was right about the muddy. They walked too many miles on dirt roads not to get muddy when it rained or snowed; it was simply part of their life; but Joliffe said, “We’re trying to keep well-kept while we’re with well-kept people.”

“Why?” Piers demanded, offended.

“So they won’t find out we’re savages who eat small, wet-footed boys,” Joliffe snapped.

Piers laughed.

Chapter 8

The Penteney yard was busy when Joliffe and Piers returned to it. Where it was cobbled, men were sweeping the cobbles clean and where it was paved outside the front door women were scrubbing the paving stones.

Piers looked at the busyness and with the sure instinct of someone who objected to being scrubbed himself asked, “What’s all the cleaning for today? I thought it wasn’t until tomorrow Lord Lovell comes.”

“Better to start cleaning today. Less to do tomorrow,” Joliffe said.

With probably fear it would all give his mother thoughts about him, Piers said, “I’m going to see if Lewis is in the garden,” and sheered away in a dash toward the gap between the sheds. He paused to look back, to see if Joliffe was going to object, but Joliffe only shrugged at him and let him go on. It wouldn’t save him, Joliffe knew. Sooner or later Rose would catch up to him and he would be washed but at least Joliffe wouldn’t be the villain when it happened.

He went his own way, into the barn, to be greeted by Basset asking from where he sat on one of the cushions, “How goes it with Tisbe?” and Ellis saying as he picked up the water bucket, “Where’s the whelp?”

“Tisbe is doing so well she may be too fat to fit her harness when we’re ready to go,” Joliffe answered. “And the whelp has run off to see if Lewis is in the garden.”

Rose put her head out from the back of the cart. “Someone can fetch him, then. I want to clean him up for tonight. Joliffe, you had him last.”

Basset started a slow climb to his feet, stiff with sitting. “I’ll try to see Master Penteney now, before the afternoon’s any later.”

“What for?” Joliffe asked.

“About tonight. To be sure all’s set for how and when. You know.”

Rose put her head out of the cart again. “Best ask him about tomorrow, too, while you’ve the chance. Likely he’ll be too busy for us then. Haven’t you gone yet, Joliffe?”

“Just going.”

“Ellis, have you done what I asked yet?”

“Just about to,” Ellis protested. “Have a bit of mercy, woman.” But he and Rose were smiling at each other as he said it.

Joliffe left them to their smiling and Basset to see Master Penteney, and before he reached the garden gate could tell by the noisy laughter that Piers had found Lewis. Stopping in the gateway to see what was worth so much noise, he saw an elderly maidservant seated on the bench among the trees with sewing on her lap and Lewis hopping up and down beside her, chortling, “Cold, cold, cold!” at Piers crawling around one of the trees on his hands and knees.

Not minded to stop their game in the middle of it, Joliffe went aside along the path to a wooden bench set against the housewall, warm in the afternoon sunlight. A gray-and-black cat already curled up there opened one green eye at him to see if he was going to spoil things, but Joliffe held up his hands to show he meant only peace and sat down at the bench’s other end. The cat closed its eye and settled a little deeper into a comfort with which Joliffe silently agreed: there were few things better than sitting at ease in the soft summer sun of a quiet garden.

So long as there was not something better to be doing.

Joliffe smiled at the familiar restlessness of his own thought. Here and now was good but just a little farther down the road there might be something better. Or—at the least—something different. But for now he leaned back, head and shoulders against the house’s stone wall, and closed his eyes. Across the garden Lewis declared, “Warm! Warm! Warm!”

As he sat down, Joliffe had vaguely noted the window near him, had vaguely supposed it was the one in Master Penteney’s study from which he’d seen the garden when he and Basset first came here, and then forgotten it. Now a door closed sharply from inside, as if someone had contained an urge to slam it, and Master Penteney said with impatience and anger, “You’ve no business being here. That was agreed on from the first. From the very first. Why are you here?”

Joliffe half expected Basset to answer him but it was a voice he did not know that said back, “Agreements change.” Joliffe hated when someone put that much sneer into their words. “So do circumstances. There’s been trouble.”

“That’s not new. There’s always trouble,” Master Penteney snapped.

“He’s been jailed. He needs money. Pay over and I’ll get out.”

“I don’t ‘pay over’. I give. There’s a difference there you’d better remember, and the giving will stop if ever you show up here again for any reason. Nor do I want to know any more than what you’ve told me about what’s happening. Just have him send word when all’s well.” There was a pause. Joliffe supposed something was being done, but he heard nothing that told him what it was, only soon Master Penteney said, biting the words short, “There. That’s for love of my brother and no other reason. Remember that. How does he?”

“He lives. He does God’s work. That’s . . .”

A knock—at the door, Joliffe had to presume—was followed immediately by Richard Penteney saying, “Father, Basset wants . . .” before he broke off and started again, “I’m sorry. I thought you were alone. I’ll . . .”

“No need. Master Leonard is leaving,” Master Penteney said lightly, none of the anger of a few moments ago in his voice at all. He and Master Leonard made surprisingly polite farewells, with Master Leonard saying he would be in Oxford a while yet and Master Penteney saying perhaps they would meet again. It was all mellow, with not a snap or sneer between them, and then Master Leonard and Richard must have both gone out because at the soft sound of the door closing, Master Penteney said, “So, Tom, what do you think of that?”

Quietly but strained, Basset said, “Which is the saint against ill luck and bad mischance? Because that’s what this just was, wasn’t it?”

This was too easy, Joliffe thought, ready to go on listening; but the crunch of gravel told him someone was on the path and he opened his eyes, saw Kathyrn coming toward him, and stood up to bow to her. She dimpled at him and motioned for him to sit, scooped up the cat and sat herself on the bench’s other end, the cat in her lap where it circled, kneaded a little, and curled down, all comfortable again and never a baleful look at her at all, while she said, “You’ve come for your boy and I’ve come for mine, yes?”

Given she was some few years younger than Lewis, that came oddly but Joliffe understood the point and said, “Indeed, but thought to let them finish their game first.”

“Then you won’t go anywhere until dark. Lewis can play hot-cold for hours. He likes it because for a while he knows more than somebody else does.”

“We’ll give them a little while longer and pry them loose?” Thwarted of his eavesdropping now that their talking, if not Kathryn’s footsteps, would have warned Basset and Master Penteney there were people near the window, Joliffe felt no need to thwart anyone else.

“Just a very little while,” Kathryn said. “Mother expects me back.”

She looked briefly back the way she had come, as if her mother might be coming after her already.

“Where’s his Matthew?” Joliffe asked with a nod toward Lewis who had just rolled off the bench with laughing too hard at Piers now peering under the back of the maidservant’s veil in search of whatever they were hotcolding over.

“Having a half day off. He’s very faithful but needs to be away sometimes, too.”

And you? Joliffe thought. When you’re married to him, will you be given half-days off sometimes? Or will it be forenoons, afternoons, and night times, too?

Kathryn looked back toward the door again and by her open delight at the sight of Simon just coming out Joliffe realized it had not been for her mother she had been looking. Simon gave a quick look around the garden and seemed to hesitate when he saw Joliffe, but Kathryn waved for him to come on, and when he did, she slid over on the bench, closer to Joliffe, to make room for Simon to sit beside her, asking him, “Did you bring it?” in a conspirator’s eager, uneasy voice.

Simon pushed his left hand, hidden until then, out the end of his doublet’s sleeve. In it was a small, parchment covered book, perhaps four inches by six, that he handed to her with an air of triumph, saying, “Of course.”

“Oh,” she said with pleasure and satisfaction, taking it from him.

That she could read was no surprise. Any woman who kept a household had to read and reckon to keep her accounts or else be left to the mercy of servants and shop-keepers. Mistress Penteney would have been teaching her—or seeing to it she was taught—since she was small. The surprise for Joliffe, looking over her shoulder, was that the book was in Latin. “
De Caelo et Mundo
,” he read. “
Of Heaven and Earth
, Albertus Magnus.”