A Play of Piety (9 page)

Daveth came limping back.

“Is he done?” Sister Margaret asked.

Daveth nodded.

Sister Petronilla said, gentle and firm together, “Say it aloud, Daveth.”

Just above a whisper, Daveth said, “He’s done.”

Sister Petronilla prompted, “Who is done?”

Daveth gave a small sigh, sounding disconcertingly like Piers when much put upon, and granted softly, “Master Soule is done.”

“Thank you, Daveth,” Sister Margaret said.

Daveth started back for the door. “Daveth,” Sister Petronilla said. He turned back, grudged toward the floor, “You’re welcome, Sister,” and continued on his way. Behind him, Sister Petronilla shook her head while the other women traded smiles. Then they all became busy taking the breakfasts to the men. With Joliffe able to carry two trays at a time, the task went quickly, except for Sister Letice who sat down to persuade John Oxyn, the fevered man, into eating even a little something. “Or at least drink,” Joliffe heard her saying gently as she raised him from the pillow and held a cup to his mouth.

Even Deke Credy in the bed by the door was more interested in eating than in talk, but Bassett took the chance as he took his tray from Joliffe to say, “Not made a break for it yet, I see.”

“Not yet. I’m waiting to see what comes next.”

“Mass. Then bedsheets,” Bassett said with the authority of someone who knew only too well.

But when Joliffe returned to the kitchen, just behind Sister Ursula and Sister Margaret, a woman—tall and thin, gray of hair and grim of bony face—turned from poking a doubtful spoon at what pottage was left in the pot and said sharply at them, “There you are,” as if they were remiss in being somewhere else when she wanted them here. “My lady wants that cooked for her.” She pointed to a perhaps half-pound slab of meat on the table, lying on the oiled cloth in which it had been wrapped.

Just as sharply, Sister Ursula said back, “This is early for her to be up. Didn’t she sleep well?”

No love lost there, Joliffe thought. Neither between Sister Ursula and this woman here, nor between Sister Ursula and whoever “my lady” was. Certainly the woman did not bother to reply. It was Sister Margaret who said, moderately, “Sister Letice will make a stronger sleeping draught for her.”

“She’ll have Master Hewstere’s or no one’s,” the woman snapped. “She wants to see him when he comes today.”

“She always does,” Sister Ursula said, well above a mutter but away as she headed for the pantry, so that the woman could ignore her and did, while Sister Margaret answered, “He’ll come to her, of course.”

The woman gave a sharp nod, acknowledging that, then turned gimlet eyes on Joliffe. “Let
him
bring her breakfast. She wants to see him.”

Sister Margaret responded with a wordless nod. The woman looked around as if wanting to find something else to snap about, but had to satisfy herself with a disparaging sniff and stalked out. When it seemed she was safely gone, Joliffe asked, “And that was?”

“Idany,” Sister Margaret said. “Handmaid to Mistress Thorncoffyn.”

Sister Ursula, taking up a broad knife and advancing on the meat, said, “I know she pays the butcher well for seeing she gets the first and best whenever he slaughters, but a meal this heavy at this hour of the day—” She shook her head. “We’ll suffer right along with her after she’s downed this.”

Sister Margaret, going to set a three-legged fry-pan over the fire, said, “She’ll eat as she chooses. Master Hewstere might as well say nothing at all to her.”

Rose came in through the rear door.

“Cleared out, did you?” Sister Ursula said. She had begun to slice the meat into small pieces.

“I heard her tread in the passageway and fled.”

“Well done,” Sister Margaret approved.

Rose came to take over the slicing from Sister Ursula, who gave way willingly and sat down on one of the stools. Joliffe cleared the children’s dishes away to the scullery and scrubbed them. By the time he returned, the meat was sizzling in the pan and Rose was setting a tray—larger and better made than the men’s—with a pewter pitcher and several thick slices of bread, some buttered, some not. Sister Margaret, despite the meat could hardly be more than browned by now, asked for “the bowl,” and Rose pointed Joliffe toward a high shelf where a broad pewter bowl sat by itself. He realized he had seen the pewter pitcher there, too. Mistress Thorncoffyn’s own, they must be. He fetched the bowl to Sister Margaret who said, “Nor does she like her meat too cooked, either,” and shifted the reddish meat into the bowl while Joliffe went on holding it. Then she lifted the fry-pan with both hands and poured the drippings into the bowl, too.

“There. That should hold her for an hour or so,” she said and set the fry-pan down on the hearthstone, clear of the fire, with somewhat more force than might have been necessary.

Joliffe, adding the bowl to the tray, asked Sister Ursula as she laid a white cloth over everything, “Where do I go with this?”

“Along the walk and to the first door on your left. Just go in. She’ll be in the farther chamber. Guard your back and watch your tongue,” she added as he took up the tray.

She did not seem to be altogether jesting. Or maybe was not jesting at all, because if the maid Idany was only the guard of the dragon, the dragon could be presumed worse and, from what he had overheard yesterday in the kitchen, probably was. But he went. As he had to. The morning was promising a day as warm and rainless as yesterday, excellent for the harvest, and he would not have minded lingering along the roofed walk along the small garth where the dew was still on the shadowed grass, but Mistress Thorncoffyn was all too likely to take note if her meat had too much cooled, and he kept going, passing from the walk into the passageway toward the foreporch and turning left as Sister Ursula had directed him.

The chamber there suited with the rest of the hospital, was plain, with white-plastered walls and cleanly kept, with a bed at one wall, possibly for when a patient could not be kept in the hall for one reason or another. What did not suit were the two wooden traveling chests and four woven hampers set at seeming-random in the chamber’s middle. Mistress Thorncoffyn’s, he supposed, as he passed them. If they were, she did not travel lightly; he had seen small households shift from one where to another with less.

Despite Sister Ursula having said he could simply go in, he chose wariness as his better part and scratched at the chamber’s opposite, closed door. The immediate response was a torrent of barking and many pattering feet coming his way. The woman’s bold voice of yesterday ordered, “Dogs! Here! Quiet!” and, for a wonder, the patter of feet went back the way they had come and the barking ceased except for a few yips from someone too excited to hold them in.

The maid Idany opened the door. She looked no more delighted to see him than she had in the kitchen but widened the door and stood aside as she said, “It’s him. The new one. With your breakfast.”

Joliffe went in, still wary but curious. Despite all that curiosity had done to him of late, he still could not curb it. Mistress Thorncoffyn and her dogs were something he wanted to see.

See them he did. The chamber was larger than the outer one, and he guessed it had sometime been someone’s good parlor. The floor was of green glazed tiles, and its windows looked onto the garth’s greensward and south to the orchard so that sunlight would fill the room most of the day. From the corner of his eye, he noted a curtained bed, but what he mostly saw was a pack of smooth-haired small hounds scrabbling toward him, nails clicking and slipping on the tiled floor. That they were no higher than his knees did not lessen the startlement of so many dogs coming at him at once but, to the good, they were bright-eyed and ear-pricked with friendliness and not barking now. As they surged around his ankles Joliffe found himself smiling down at their sharp-muzzled faces.

“Fawn. Fox. Kydd. Swan. Falcon. Here!” the same voice ordered.

As vastly enthused as they had surged toward Joliffe, they surged away, back to the woman in the chair in the middle of the room, and Joliffe saw Mistress Thorncoffyn for the first, full time.

There was much of her to see.

In truth, there was more of her to see than he had ever seen of any one person. There was enough of her to make at least two other people and not very slender ones, either. Or maybe three others if they
were
slender. Besides that, Joliffe guessed that if she had been standing, she would have been near to six feet tall. Presently, though, she was seated in a chair that had to have been made particularly for her; the wide bulge of her hips in her red gown filled it from side to side. Joliffe could not help wondering whether the gown had been made as tightly fitted to her as it was, or if she had simply continued fattening until she was as crammed into it as a sausage into its skin. A bulging, malformed sausage. The huge, falling mounds of her breasts rested on the top of the broad swell of her belly, and her neck was almost as wide as her head. She was not yet wearing a wimple and veil for the day nor even had her hair bound up; it was spread wide over her shoulders and of a red too even and unlikely to be anything but dyed, which was a strange vanity in a woman so distorted in every other way. Her face was smoothed to an undoubtedly false youthfulness by its fat. Did the maid Idany hold up a mirror to show her only her face, and Mistress Thorncoffyn, seeing that, ignore the rest?

At any rate, her dogs were happy to have so much of her. Two of them, come at her summons, leaped from the floor to where her lap would have been if her belly had not reached nearly to her knees and scaled her outward bulges as if they were a steep hillside, to lick happily at her chin and cheeks while the other three—there were only five of them, Joliffe could see now—stood with their forepaws on her knees, hoping for their turn.

Idany pointed to a small-topped table near to Mistress Thorncoffyn’s right side and ordered, “Set it there, boy.”

Joliffe, who had left boyhood behind him a few years ago, obeyed with a servant’s properly downcast gaze.

“Now,” Mistress Thorncoffyn ordered, “come here, to in front of me.” She had pulled the two dogs away from her face, one to either side, was cuddling them against her in the crooks of her arms, leaving her able to give her full heed to Joliffe even before her meal.

Obediently he came to stand in front of her, eyes still down.

“Look at me,” she ordered.

He did and was disconcerted at how sharp and bright were her eyes looking out from the ample flesh, as if maybe the mind there had not gone doughy, fat, and slack like the rest of her. Whether it was a mind he was going to like, he fully doubted as she demanded at him, “Where are you come from?”

If he had paused, he might have answered otherwise, but the demand grated, and with face and voice both bland, he said, “From somewhere else.”

“That’s no answer,” she snapped.

“It’s an answer,” he pointed out mildly. “Just not the sort you wanted.”

“Respect my lady, you good-for-nothing vagabond,” Idany said and slapped the back of his head.

Joliffe’s last weeks of training had taught him instant and harsh response to any attack, but what he could have done to her was uncalled for here, and he clamped down on his first urge, kept his face frozen in its blandness, turned his head and upper half of his body until he was looking at her, and only then, with only her to see it, used his player’s skill to very deliberately let rage show in the narrowing of his eyes, the twist and tightening of his mouth. In truth, he felt only severe irk, not rage, but he doubted irk would trouble this Idany at all. The mime of rage did, though. She did not show fright—maybe she lacked sense enough—but she did show sufficiently startled that he thought she would not try striking him again. Satisfied with that, he turned back to Mistress Thorncoffyn, bland-faced again, and said, even-voiced, “Except for present matters concerning my ill master, patient here in St. Giles, I’m a travelling player. I’m always from somewhere else. Nor am I or any of our company vagabonds. We’re licensed players to Lord Lovell of Minster Lovell in Oxfordshire.”

“Are you indeed?” Mistress Thorncoffyn said, making it halfway to a challenge that Joliffe chose not to meet. He might be required to give her service; he was not required to account for his life to her; and still even-voiced he answered, “I am—and we are—indeed.” He bowed a servant’s bow to her, since servant he was supposed to be—but the hospital’s, not hers—and said, “Now, by your leave, I’m needed elsewhere.” And without waiting for her leave, turned and left.

The three little dogs not in their mistress’ arms followed him to the door with a busy flurry of clicking toenails on the tiles but no barking, and when he looked down at them as he closed the door after himself, they were all three looking up at him with friendly, dog-laughing faces, more as if merely seeing him to the door than hurrying him on his way. On the whole, they had far more charm than did their mistress, he thought as he shut the door and heard them go clicking back to her.

Chapter 8

R
ather than back to the kitchen, he went into the hall, finding he was in time to help Sister Letice with clearing the men’s breakfast trays away to the kitchen. Basset, handing over his own, gave him a grin and asked, “Been to see Mistress Thorncoffyn, I understand. You behaved yourself?”

“As well as she did.”

Understanding that a-right, Bassett pulled a false-dismayed face and said, “Oh, my.”

“And her maid slapped the back of my head for me.”

Both Bassett and Tom Lyttle in the next bed laughed outright at that, and Lyttle said, “The old toad and her sour-apple maid will chew you over all day, spit you out, and want you to come back for more.”

“I can hardly bear the waiting,” Joliffe said, returning their grins. Trying to keep up with brisk Sister Letice, he stacked their cups and trays and moved up the hall. As he and she reached the chapel end of the hall together with their gathered trays and cups, a half-grown boy bolted in at the hall’s other end and skidded in a turn past Basset’s bed. Then, seeing Sister Letice, he nearly fell over himself coming to a stop.