A Play of Piety (7 page)

He was saved from following through on that thought by hearing voices calling good-nights and other things from the far side of the orchard where another field track must run. That would be folk coming home from the fields. Since there was never any saying when the weather would turn, harvest work began as soon as might be in the mornings and went on until it had to stop for darkness, everyone kept at it by the constant spur of knowing that what was not harvested now would not be there to feed them in the winter. Ellis, Gil, and Piers were going to be tired—ready for their supper and more than ready to sit down, Joliffe thought.

He found he had forgotten to stop stirring the pottage once he had started. He stopped now, took a taste from the spoon, and found it good. As always, Rose had made a plain pottage into something savory by whatever herbs she had added.

Rose sat up and said, “Take it from the fire, if you would, please.”

While Joliffe used a cloth she kept for pot-handling to shift the heavy pot from the tripod onto the trampled grass beside the firepit, she stretched and got slowly to her feet. “It’s done, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Done and delicious.”

“Lid it, please.” Rather than covering her hair, braided and coiled at the back of her head, again, she went to the cart to put her headkerchief safely away in her own small box of belongings such as they all had for what little was possible to carry with them in their life as players.

Several familiar voices were coming along the cart-path, accompanied by a soft thud of hooves. Joliffe, having put the spoon aside and the lid on the pot, went to meet them, glad to see as they turned from the track into the orchard that Tisbe had been rid of her harness somewhere, had only her halter and rope still on her. Ellis, Gil, and Piers were all stripped down to their shirts and short braies, with their hosen rolled down below their knees. They were sweat-marked by the day’s heat and probably twice as tired as they looked but had plainly paused along the way to wash something of the day’s sweat and dust from them—their heads had been lately ducked deep into water or had buckets poured over them—but they were all of them walking with the heavy tread of one-foot-in-front-of-another tiredness, and Joliffe was pleased all over again that he would not join them in the fields tomorrow.

Gil saw him first and called out, “Hai! Look who has come wandering back!”

“Look who’s been doing honest work for a change!” Joliffe returned.

“Not you, that’s sure,” Ellis growled.

“Here,” Piers said, thrusting Tisbe’s lead-rope at him. “Your turn.”

It was all so familiar that Joliffe wanted to laugh aloud, but instead scowled at him while taking the rope and demanded, “Have you been growing?”

“Like the proverbial weed, and just as useful,” Ellis said.

That Piers made no fast answer to that showed just how very tired he must be. Nor did he run ahead to see what his mother had ready for supper but continued to trudge on Tisbe’s other side. She rubbed her head against Joliffe’s shoulder to show she was pleased he was there, and he rubbed her on the hard bone between her eyes, letting her know he was pleased, too.

At the cart, Ellis, Gil, and Piers dropped down onto the waiting cushions. Joliffe, leading Tisbe to the cart to get out her hobbles so he could let her free to graze the long orchard grass, caught Rose’s worried look around at all of them, to judge how tired they were and make sure they were none of them hurt or in need of anything but food and sleep. The food they got immediately, Rose ladling pottage into wooden bowls and handing them around while Joliffe saw to Tisbe, wiping her down with a dry cloth, brushing her some—meaning to do more later—and putting tansy ointment around her eyes to keep the flies away, then giving her a portion of oats from the bag they kept for her. By the time he finished and joined the others, Ellis, Gil, and Piers were to their second bowlfuls, with large pieces of bread to go with it, but the first headlong thrust of hunger was gone, and as Joliffe sat down and took the bowl Rose held out to him, Ellis said, “No fatted calf for you, I fear.”

“We could make do with your fat head,” Piers suggested around a mouthful of bread.

“Isn’t it pity,” Joliffe said to Rose, “how his mouth has grown bigger along with the rest of him?” He fixed a glare of feigned threat on Piers and added, “We might have to cut you down by a few inches all around. That would save your mother the trouble of making you new clothes.”

“Ha!” said Piers widely around the half-chewed bread.

That earned him, “Don’t talk with a full mouth,” from Rose, sitting now to her own meal between him and Ellis. “Nor half-full neither,” she added, seeing him shift some to his cheek and swallow the rest.

Grinning, Piers leaned sideways to bump his shoulder against her arm friendliwise and, for a wonder, kept his mouth shut while Gil said to Joliffe, “You’re not in hope you can hide here in the orchard, are you? The reeve is keen. He’ll find you out and invoke the statute. You’ll be at the barley with us by noon tomorrow.”

“He’s already been caught,” Rose said. “Sister Ursula saw him first. She’s hired him to replace that Ivo for the while.”

“I’m even to have a room there, and a bed, and my meals,” Joliffe said grandly.

“You and your life of ease,” Ellis grumbled. “We spend the year walking our feet flat on the road, then get stuck here working the fields, while you take your ease at some bishop’s palace, hardly stirring a sweat, I’ll warrant.”

“When it’s my wits that are wanted rather than your brawn, what can I do?” Joliffe protested sweetly.

Ellis suggested, unsweetly, what he could do.

Joliffe kept to himself that he had not spent the past months in anything like a life of ease, and especially the past weeks at a plain manor in an out-of-the-way corner of nowhere in particular where the lessoning had been unceasing, including—all too often—alarums in the night when he was supposed to be awake on the instant and knowing what to do. He likewise kept to himself the paling scar across his upper left arm from a dagger wound five months ago and the yellowing remains of a bruise under his left ribs where, a week ago, he had failed to block the thrust from the padded end of a wooden practice dagger. The fight-master had stepped back from him, saying, “See the angle I had the dagger? Up into the heart is where it would have gone. If this had been steel and me in earnest, you’d be dead by now,” then had set to making him block that manner of thrust over and over again, and afterward shown him how to give a thrust unlikely to be blocked.

Gil asked, “Have you seen Basset yet?”

“Seen him and had a goodly talk with him,” Joliffe answered. “He’s pleased with how much better he is but can’t say when he’ll be ready to be away.”

“Not until harvest is well and truly done, would be my guess,” said Ellis. “The reeve has likely given word there that he wants us to the end. It was so the reeve could have our bodies for the harvest that Basset got taken into the hospital at all. I swear it.”

“Nah,” protested Gil, reaching for more bread. “It was for our playing the day before. He can’t bear to part with us after that.” He explained to Joliffe, “The village was mostly in the fields when we came into town that day. So Basset asked at the hospital if they’d like us to do some holy saint’s play for the men there. The master was willing, only he said maybe something to make them laugh would be best. So we did
Saint Uncumber and the Bad Husband
to give them both.”

The play, where the determinedly virginal Uncumber, after fending off her new, unwanted husband’s attentions in various laughable ways, prayed to be made ugly to keep him away from her and was promptly blessed with a thick beard, to her delight and her husband’s dismay, always set folk to laughter.

“Then we did
Robin Hood and Maid Marian
for the village in the evening,” Gil said.

“Short and sweet,” added Ellis. “Before full dark came on.”

That made them note that while they had eaten and talked, today’s dark had come on in its turn. With the fire in low coals in the firepit, their eyes had grown used to the thickening shadows around them without their thought about it until now. The year was something like two months past mid-summer, so the nights were lengthening but still not long enough after a long day’s work in the fields: it was time and past to be to bed, and Ellis finished, “Then the next morning Basset was so stiff and pained there was nothing for it but to ask help at the hospital, and here we are.”

Rose stood up, asking as she gathered the empty bowls out of everyone’s hands, “Does anyone want to finish the pot?”

Gil and Piers both quickly scooped out and ate what little pottage was left, leaving it to Ellis and Joliffe to take bedding and straw-stuffed pads and pillows from the cart. With the nights warm and dry, there was no need for the tent. They simply laid everything out on the grass, Ellis asking of Joliffe, “You’re here for tonight?”

Joliffe, holding back from pointing out that was why he was laying out a bed for himself, simply said, “Saves me from the walk back.” He did not add how he had been sleeping under roofs and inside walls for weeks now and was ready to have the sky over him again. Or, presently, sky and apple branches.

Gil and Piers had finished with the pottage. Rose put the bowls and spoons in the pot and sloshed water from the bucket over them, sufficient to soak them overnight but leaving water enough in the bucket for face-washing come the morning. Necessities were done away among the trees, most clothing was taken off, and everyone lay down to their sleep, Joliffe no less readily than the others. He was maybe awake the longest, listening to their breathing go even around him and watching a bright star straight overhead appear and disappear with the gentle sway of apple boughs. Somewhere away in the darkness, Tisbe was tearing grass, and now that talk had stopped, he was aware of the unconsidered sounds of night-insects in trees and grass. Not for the first time in these past weeks, he wondered what had led him to be fool enough to accept Bishop Beaufort’s offer. A player’s life was a hard one, but in all the different ways of living there were, what life in its own way was not? You chose the hard one that had the most about it that you liked, and he had chosen to be a player and still loved the life that had come with that choice. Given that, why was he imperiling it all?

He did not know. Except that he had wanted not only the life he had been living but more. Not other, and not instead, but more. Bishop Beaufort had offered that more.

He realized he was not seeing the star anymore because his eyes had closed. His lids were too heavy to open again, nor did he want to. Sleep was a good place to go. He welcomed it.

So long as the dreams kept away.

Chapter 6

T
he day was in its first easing from night toward the promise of a clear dawn when Joliffe left the other players and Rose to their breakfast of bread and cheese and returned on his own through the orchard and kitchen garden and passageway to the rear-yard, all still shadowy gray in half darkness. In the kitchen, though, a stub of candle burned on the middle of the worktable, casting its soft yellow glow across the faces of the four women gathered there. Only one of them was not familiar from yesterday, and as they all looked toward him with a mingling of welcome and curiosity he made a flourished bow to them with, “Good morrow, my ladies.”

They all smiled at that, and Sister Letice a little laughed, friendliwise, before Sister Margaret said crisply, “ ‘Sister’ is sufficient here,” and added to the others, “Someone wake me after Prime, please, if I’m not awake before.”

The others nodded and she left toward the passage past Joliffe’s room, to wherever the sisters’ dorter was, Joliffe presumed, while Sister Letice explained to him, “She was up much of the night. One of our men was in pain again.”

“Have you eaten yet this morning?” Sister Ursula asked.

When he willingly said he had not, she pushed a pottery pitcher and a wooden cup toward him along the table, and the woman not yet named to him drew a wooden platter with thick slices of bread, a wedge of cheese, and a bowl of butter from the middle of the table into his reach, giving him reason to look full at her for the first time as he thanked her. She was a broad woman with clever eyes and answered his thanks with a smiling nod as Sister Ursula said, “Sister Petronilla. Joliffe.”

He acknowledged her with a bow of his head that she returned before he took up a knife lying to hand and cut a piece from the cheese while Sister Ursula, apparently going back to what they had been saying, asked Sister Letice, “How much longer does Master Hewstere think it will be?”

“There’s no knowing. Whatever the fever is in him, it’s kept its hold longer than Master Hewstere thought it would. He says all that can be done now is to let the thing run its course.”

“And to pray,” Sister Petronilla suggested.

A little silence fell, maybe for that prayer. For the seemliness of it, Joliffe paused his eating and only began again on what proved to be day-old bread and dry cheese when Sister Ursula said, taking up the day’s business, “There now. So you know, Master Soule will do Prime this morning, but Father Richard will take the rest of the Offices and Mass again today.”

Joliffe did not see why that brought smiles and some smothered laughter around the table, and in answer to his puzzled look Sister Petronilla said to him, “It’s safer for Master Soule that way.”

That widened Sister Letice’s and Sister Ursula’s smiles, although the latter made obvious effort to curb hers as she said, “Enough. It’s time we were on with things.”

The women, done with breaking their fast, bowed their heads, each making her own murmured prayer of thanks. Joliffe again paused his eating until they had done. Then, as Sister Petronilla and Sister Letice left the table, Sister Ursula said to him, “I’ll show you your duties today.”

Mouth full, he nodded to that, washed down his last mouthful of bread and cheese with the ale that was strong enough but not of the best—these women assuredly did not keep themselves in ease here—set his cup down with the others left on the table, bent his head in a quickly muttered grace, and raised his head to let Sister Ursula know he was ready for whatever came next.