A Play of Piety (5 page)

“I won’t be free to take you to the others until supper is done with here,” Rose said.

“You do it alone?” Joliffe asked.

“The rest of the women will be here any moment, and unless you want to face us all at once, best you go to your room. Lie down for a while. You look tired.”

“But clean,” he pointed out brightly.

But she was right about him being tired, too. Not just the few days’ walking but the several months before them had him worn out more than he could deny to himself, and he went to his room, found Rose had made the bed with clean sheets and blanket and a pillow slip that smelled of lavender when he settled his head against it. He sighed contentedly, folded his hands on his chest, and slept.

It was a light sleep, though. For better air in the warm afternoon, he had left the door slightly ajar, and while he drowsed in and out of sleep, he was aware of women’s busy voices from the kitchen on the other side of the lathe-and-plaster wall at his bedfoot. Heard, too, for a while, a man’s voice raised in probably prayer to judge by the patterning of it. That would be someone saying Vespers in the chapel, he thought. The full Offices of prayer and psalms would not be kept here—this was no monastery—but some would be, and this was Vespers’ time of day. The voice was not a strong one, but it prayed firmly and without haste, and Joliffe rolled onto his side and slid into another drowse that broke when something large went suddenly lumbering past the door, accompanied by the clack of a wooden staff hitting the stone floor and the quick pattering of very many feet that was so ill-suited to the bulk of the other that he jerked full awake, confused at what he was hearing. He was struggling up on one elbow when the door moved, was pushed slightly more open to let in, at somewhat less than knee-height, a white, long-muzzled face, bright of eye and pricked-eared with interest at him. For a startled moment—startled on Joliffe’s side, at least—he and the dog stared at one another until a woman’s voice demanded, “Kydd! Here!” and the bright-eyed little face disappeared, followed by a quick pattering away of feet, not as many feet as there had first been but, “Dogs,” Joliffe thought as he sank onto the pillow again. It had been a pack of small dogs going past his door. He frowned at the ceiling. Small dogs and someone large. Assuredly not anyone he had yet met here.

Dull in the way that sleep in a warm afternoon was apt to make anyone, he was admitting to himself that he was not sufficiently curious to bother getting up about it when the same voice that had called to Kydd demanded from the kitchen, loud with indignation, booming through the lathes and plaster as if they were parchment, “If you know how it’s supposed to be,
why wasn’t it
?”

Whatever answer was made to that demand was too quiet for Joliffe to make out. At least he supposed an answer was made, but it must have been an unsatisfactory one because the strong-voiced woman declared, “You may say so. But I expect better. I will
have
better or else Master Soule will hear of it. Be sure of that!”

Not one of the patients,
that
was certain. First, because it was a woman, and Rose had confirmed only men were tended here. Second, because whatever was the matter, that was not the voice of anyone sickly.

Someone must have made another answer to the woman because now she ordered, “See to it then! Children, come!”

Joliffe rolled back to his side in time to see, through the slightly wider door-gap the dog Kydd had made, the surging past of a very large red gown, followed by a low seethe of white dogs, too many for him even to guess at their number in the instant before they were past, too, the wild pattering of their feet going with them.

A silence followed, ended by something flat and metal—Joliffe guessed a pot or pan—being slammed down on a hard surface in the kitchen.

Joliffe willingly stayed where he was, glad to be no part of whatever all that had been about. Westering sunlight came through the small, high-set window above the bed’s head, slanting down the wall at the bedfoot, and he guessed that whatever work was being done in the kitchen was end-of-day work, to be done while there was sun enough to need no lamps, for the saving of candles or lamp oil, and Rose would likely soon be free to take him to the other players. All he need do was lie here until she fetched him, he thought. So he did and, to his later surprise, slept again, not knowing he was that tired. Slept deeply enough that he dreamed that he was on the practice field where he had lately spent so many days, standing bare-handed while a bear on horseback charged at him with an upraised sword he knew he had to avoid while closing with the bear to pull it from the saddle. The part with the bear was wrong. So were the moor-topped hills beyond the field. It had usually been Hede on the horse, sometimes Therry, never a bear, and those moor-topped hills were from another place and time in his life altogether.

But the rest was real enough, and in the dream he did as he had finally learned to do when awake without taking a whack from the wooden practice sword, which was good because in the dream it was a great blade of shining steel the bear had in its paw. But as he pulled the bear from the saddle he did not know what he would do next because somehow he seemed to have no weapon on him and the bear’s sword had disappeared and . . .

He was awake. That instantly awake he had also been learning in these past weeks, with one hand shifting to draw the dagger hidden along his forearm even as his mind caught up to where he was and that his dagger was not there, was not needed here, that it was only a tap at the door that had awakened him.

The tap came again. He opened his eyes and sat up, shaking his head to clear it while swinging his legs off the bed and saying, “Come.”

Players lived a wary life, never belonging wherever they were and therefore never quite trusted—or ever quite trusting. For their own company, very warily had been the only way to live in the years they had been lordless, before Lord Lovell had taken them for his players. That had lessened—not ended—the need for wariness, but all that had been a familiar wariness. This reaching for a dagger was another matter, and it troubled him. He was not surprised by how deep the past weeks of learning had gone in him, but he was not at ease yet with the wary someone who was come to live inside himself. It was as if—weaponed with skills he had never thought to have—he was now standing knife-edged to the world. He had always had a sideways way of looking at the world that had sometimes made him uncomfortable with who and where he was—had sometimes made uncomfortable the people around him, too. Among the players it had not mattered so much, since players always lived somewhat sideways to the world, belonging nowhere as they did and spending so much time and skill on pretending to be other than they were. It was his skill at that that had helped make him valuable enough to Bishop Beaufort he was come to where he was. He did not like that it was now a skill he must needs use to hide himself from his fellow players.

And nonetheless as Rose looked around the door’s edge, he smiled at her easily while stretching his arms out mightily to show he was just awakening, and asked, “Time we went?”

Chapter 4

H
e went with Rose to the kitchen where she picked up a cloth-wrapped bundle and tucked it under one arm without explaining it, then led him out the rear door again. This time, though, rather than crossing the yard, she led him rightward into a narrow alleyway between the kitchen wall and the laundry. At its far end a wide wooden plank took them across a narrow, deep, stone-lined runnel, flowing with water from somewhere to carry away waste from the hospital’s jakes, kitchen, and laundry. Beyond it, they passed through a gap in a line of thorny berry bushes and came into what could only be the hospital’s kitchen garden, wide and stretching well away to both sides, in one direction behind the kitchen, the other way behind the laundry and one of the long byres Joliffe had glimpsed from the yard, and ending at both ends in high wicker fences.

Its beds were held in by weathered boards; the paths were graveled; and judging from the flourishing greens of everything growing there, someone more than a little capable saw to its care. Joliffe guessed that someone was a nearby woman in the now-familiar gray gown and white apron, small shears in one hand, a spray of some green plant in the other, straightened from beyond a bed of enthusiastically growing herbs to see who had come. Her eyes were deeply dark in a smooth face that was round rather than long and momentarily austere and without welcome as she stared at them. Then, as if her thoughts had been so far away that it took that long moment to come back from wherever they had been, Joliffe saw her know Rose, and the warmth of the smile that came changed everything about her as she said happily, “Rose. And this must be your Joliffe.”

Joliffe bowed to her as Rose answered, “He is. Joliffe, this is Sister Letice. She oversees our cooking and is our herbalist. You’ll likely find yourself helping her here when you’re not needed elsewhere.”

“We’re come to that time of year when more hands are welcome,” Sister Letice agreed. “Can you tell one plant from another? Do you know any herbs?”

He pointed at the plants beside them. “Basil,” he declared confidently.

“Marjoram,” she corrected with dry resignation. She nodded at the bundle under Rose’s arm. “You remembered the peas?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

Sister Letice looked sideways at the sun. “Best you be on then, if you’re to have their supper cooked for them.”

She nodded farewell to Joliffe, friendly enough but already bending back to her herbs before he had finished his answering slight bow, a woman intent on her own business and little interested in anyone else’s, he guessed as he went on with Rose across the garden.

Its farther side was bounded by a wide, free-flowing stream with an orchard on its other side. They crossed dry-footed by a plank whose each end rested on a single large stone, into the orchard where Rose turned to the left to follow a well-walked path between the trees heavy-hung with apples. Joliffe, ducking past one low, laden branch, said, “It looks to be a good year for fruit as well as all else.”

“There’ll be cider-making in plenty,” Rose said. “We’re looking forward to the change from ale.”

The “we” in that disconcerted Joliffe. The company had sometimes helped at harvests, for the extra coin the work brought in, but there had always been a strong line between “we”—the players who would move on when the time came—and the “them” who belonged to the fields and would stay. This easy “we” from Rose said something else. He might have counted it as merely a word, but he had made his daily living by words for enough years to know there was nothing “mere” about words. Whether their user thought closely about them or not, they carried a power that was sometimes the more powerful for not being forethought by whoever spoke them, and Rose had used “we” as if “we” belonged with the fields and the harvest, instead of merely pausing here.

Was she betraying an unspoken understanding that Basset would not be sufficiently better any time soon? That the players would all be held here for weeks upon weeks more, no certain end in sight?

Joliffe stopped his mind going that way. There was use in a wary watching forward, but too much dwelling in trouble-maybe-to-come could waste a great deal of effort better used otherwise; and to take himself elsewhere, he asked, “So. The large woman with dogs. Who is that?”

“You weren’t sleeping then?” Rose asked.

“Something large going past my door woke me, and then a dog looked in. Then I heard her in the kitchen, and she and the dogs came past again. Not another of the sisters, is she?”

Rose made a sound that caught somewhere between a laugh and scorn and said with feeling, “She assuredly is not. That is Mistress Cisily Thorncoffyn. Her father founded St. Giles as a thanks-offering for having survived a sickness he had thought would kill him. He gave this manor for it and paid for changing the buildings to a hospital’s needs.”

“Very laudable,” Joliffe said.

“To a point. He included in his provisions for it that anyone of the family could stay in certain chambers provided for them when and as they wished, for their better health and refreshment of soul.”

“Ah. And Mistress Cisily Thorncoffyn is taking advantage of that provision.”

“She is.”

“With her dogs.”

“With her dogs.”

“Her very many dogs,” he ventured.

“Her very many dogs,” Rose grimly agreed.

“For how long?”

“For as long as she wants. She’s been here a week. From what Sister Ursula says, we can expect her to stay until at least Michaelmas. This is a yearly thing. Here we are.”

Where they were was the orchard’s edge and the deep-worn cart track that ran along it, bounded on the other side by a high hedge with a field beyond it. Drawn up on the track’s grassy verge and partly under the trees was the players’ familiar cart, its weather-daunted red and yellow painted canvas tilt muted among the leaf-shadows. His heart’s lift at seeing it again surprised Joliffe as he held back from patting its wooden side like he might have patted a familiar horse as he and Rose circled it to where a firepit had been dug into the turf. Setting on the grass the bundle she had carried, Rose said, “If you’ll open the cart and get out the kitchen box, I’ll bring up the fire.”

From there, no more time than yesterday might have passed since they last made camp together. While she lifted off the turfs that had banked the fire through the day, Joliffe untied the rear flaps of the cart and retied them out of the way, pulled out the wooden kitchen box and took it to the firepit where Rose was now carefully feeding dry twigs into the lingering coals to rouse them to a proper fire.

“More wood?” Joliffe asked.

“Whatever you can gather,” Rose said with a nod around at the trees.

All the near deadwood had been gleaned already. He had to go fairly far among the trees to find enough, bringing it back to Rose in small batches as she built up the fire, then gathering more until there was a small stack waiting to see them through the evening and maybe start tomorrow’s fire. By then Rose had the tripod standing over the flames and a pot set on the tripod and had opened the bundle she had brought from the kitchen to reveal two large, round bread loaves, a fat wedge of yellow cheese, several small onions still with their long green leaves, and a cloth bag that likely had the peas Sister Letice had mentioned.