A Play of Dux Moraud (25 page)

Or . . .
listening
now, to judge by her forward-pricked ears as her head went on turning, so that she had to be looking toward the woods now . . .

Joliffe sat up, frowning toward the trees. The trackway ran along the wood’s edge. He and Tisbe had come along it, coming here, and he didn’t remember seeing even a footpath into the woods there, let alone a track wide enough to ride a horse easily. Why were they going into the woods where there wasn’t a path?

With one part of his mind very clearly telling him to stay where he was, he got to his feet. Tisbe swung her head to look at him. Suspecting that her look was much the one Ellis would have given him had he been there, Joliffe patted her on the flank and went away from her toward the curve of woods where she had last been looking. The riders would be past there by now. He would be able to follow them. Which would be better than meeting them.

Once through the brush along the woods’ edge and among the trees, he found he had been wrong about there being no path through the woods there. It was narrow and a rider would have much ducking under tree limbs, but it was there. What was not there, he saw when he looked back to where it must start, was any break in the brush along the woodshore. The path began
in
the wood itself.

That would need closer looking at, but more immediately he wanted to know where Sir Edmund was going, and he followed the path the other way, farther into the woods. With all the rain there had been, the fallen leaves were too softened underfoot to make a betraying rustle. He had only to avoid cracking any sticks as he walked, and that he did. The horses could not. He could hear them ahead of him; and when sound of their going stopped, so did he, except he stepped sideways off the path to lessen his chance of being seen should someone back-track the trail to be sure they were unfollowed.

When no one did, he went carefully on, not wanting to come on them suddenly and be seen. What he came on instead was the path’s end as it met a trackway undoubtedly far more traveled than ever the path was. The track’s hard-packed earth and the smooth-worn grooves running equally apart from one another along it made him guess it was used for sledges rather than wagons. For hauling firewood probably. Or maybe there was a charcoal burner’s camp somewhere near.

Whichever it was, even with the rain there had been, the way was too firm to show certainly which way the horses had gone. Joliffe listened, heard nothing, decided they were more likely to have kept going away from the village than back toward it, and turned and went that way along the track.

That was nearly his undoing. He had gone less than twenty yards, the track making a long, easy curve to the right, when a sudden jink of horse-harness, as if a horse had shaken its head, warned him he was far closer to the riders than he had thought he was. He froze. There was no hoof-fall. They were stopped. Waiting for him? Waiting for someone else?

He slipped sideways into the underbrush, more careful than ever of his feet. Hidden behind a hazel bush that had not fully lost its leaves yet and was covered over with the grey-white haze of traveler’s joy for good measure, he stood still, listening, but heard nothing more than the same sound of a restless horse. No voices. Nothing. He eased forward, not back to the trackway but through the trees toward the horse. A little later in the season and he would have had no cover, but while many of the trees had begun their leaf-fall, the lower bushes and lesser trees had not; he could move from tree to tree with little chance of being seen unless he was careless. Or watched for.

He kept from being careless nor, he found, was anyone keeping watch. In truth, when he crouched low to look through a last screen of hazel bushes and more vining traveler’s joy between him and a long clearing widened out to either side of the trackway, the man sitting nearby on one horse and holding the reins of two others looked to be doing nothing so much as wishing he were somewhere else. In the first few moments Joliffe watched him, he shifted his seat to one side in his saddle, then to the other, drummed impatient fingers almost silently on his saddle’s pommel, then shifted his seat again. Of Sir Edmund and Mariena there was no sign, but he was Sir Edmund’s man and those were Sir Edmund’s horses, so unless Sir Edmund and Mariena had decided to walk for a while—which struck Joliffe as unlikely in the dripping woods—they could only be in the small woodsman’s hut across the clearing.

Why? It looked to be a common enough woodsman’s hut—was small, with low-eaved, roughly plastered, wattle-and-daub walls, the roof rough-thatched with bracken, and no bother about a chimney. A hole at the top of the gable wall under the point of the roof would serve to let out smoke from any fire made inside, though there was presently no smoke and so likely no fire. It was a place to warm yourself and briefly shelter from wet weather, nothing more, and Sir Edmund and Mariena had to be in there. There was nowhere else for them to be. But why? To get out of the rain would have been reasonable, except it was not raining. Nor was the day so cold they should need to shelter for warmth a while with the manor so short a ride away.

He considered creeping to better vantage but decided he had pressed Fortune’s favor as far as he should. Instead, he shifted silently to a slightly easier crouch and settled down on his heels to wait. Except for the sometime drip of water from leaves and the occasional heavy-hoofed shifting of one or the other of the horses, the forest was muted around him. Even the servant provided no interest, slumped in his saddle with every appearance of trying, not too successfully, to doze. He wasn’t keeping watch, that was sure. Even when he did rouse to restlessness in his saddle again, his long stares at the hut and sometimes a roving look at the woods around him were more to pass the waiting time than any watching out, and Joliffe did not worry about being seen. In his plain clothing of grey and muted browns—best for not showing the stains of travel—and motionless behind the bushes, he doubted he would be seen even if the man looked directly his way.

The man never did, and Joliffe had no doubt that, if he wanted to, he could withdraw as unseen and unheard as he’d come—very probably a better thing to do than crouch here, cramped and beginning to be chilled. But he stayed. He knew too well that curiosity was one of his failings. Even without Lord Lovell’s behest to find out what he could, his curiosity would have kept him here. Although maybe this time he could forgo blaming himself for his weakness, could lay the blame on Lord Lovell. A satisfying thought. He could so rarely, fairly, blame someone else for his failings.

The woods went on dripping. He went on waiting, and at the end it was the servant who came alert first to the hut’s door finally opening, had straightened in his saddle and was giving a long look all around the clearing as if in careful watch when Sir Edmund came out, head bowed to go under the low lintel. Clear of the doorway, Sir Edmund straightened, too, looked all around and then at his servant, who nodded in silent answer to whatever silent question Sir Edmund had asked. Sir Edmund turned back, held out his hand, and led Mariena from the hut and toward the horses.

The servant was dismounted by the time they reached him. Sir Edmund took his own horse’s reins from the man and drew it aside for room to swing himself into his saddle, leaving the man to hold Mariena’s horse for her to mount, his back to them both, so that so far as Mariena knew, there was no one to see her brush her hand along the servant’s thigh as she went past him. Her hand lingered just long enough to leave no doubt she did it on purpose. From where he crouched, Joliffe saw the man’s back stiffen and his head twitch toward Sir Edmund to be sure he did not see it, while Mariena, as coolly as if she had done nothing, swung up into her saddle and was settling her skirts when her father turned his horse toward her.

The servant remounted his own horse, and with no word among them, they rode away, not back the way they had come but on along the track that Joliffe supposed would finally bring them out somewhere near the manor.

He was supposing other things, too, and didn’t like his suppositions. They kept him where he was until he was well assured Sir Edmund and the others were truly gone and not coming back. Only then did he stand up and even then waited a little longer, listening, before he left hiding and crossed the track and clearing to the hut. He did not expect it to be locked and it was not. A simple pull of the latch string loosed the latch and let him in, bent over as Sir Edmund had been as he stepped across the threshold, then standing up straight under the low, bare-raftered roof to look around, not able to see much in the gloom. There was a shuttered window in the rear wall, though. Making his way around the small, expected hearth in the middle of the floor, he opened it and with that and the light from the open door he could see enough.

Not that there was much to see. The walls were almost as bare inside as out and the floor was hard-trodden dirt. Enough dry kindling and logs to see a man through a wet night were stacked against the wall just inside the door, and two crudely made joint stools squatted beside the hearth. The small pile of ashes there was cold, though, when he put a hand over them. Sir Edmund had not bothered with a fire nor—to judge by the unmarred dust on the box of candlestubs Joliffe found beside an empty, equally dusty candlestick on a shelf fastened to one side wall—had he bothered with more light than he might have had through the window, supposing he had opened it.

The only other things in the hut were a bed and its bedding and a pole fastened between two of the posts of the wall beside it. The bed itself was no more than could be expected in such a place, a pegged-together wooden frame on short legs and strung with rope to hold up the coarse-clothed mattress thickly stuffed with probably straw. There was a blanket thrown over it, another blanket carelessly tossed at its foot, a thin pillow, probably straw-stuffed, too, at its other end. That was all, but Joliffe stood looking at the bed a somewhat long while before he went to it and with reluctance ran his hand down the middle of the blanket covering the mattress.

He was willing to believe it was only his imagination that said it was still faintly warm, but his movements were slow with thought as he first ran a hand along the wall pole, then took up the blanket from the bedfoot, shook it out, folded it, and hung it over the pole; did the same with the other blanket; then hung the mattress, too, and propped the pillow beside it. That was how a woodsman who sometimes used the hut or any sensible passer-by who sheltered there a while would have left them. Hanging them up lessened the next-user’s chance of finding mice nesting in the mattress straw or pillow and holes eaten in the blankets. That the wall pole had been free of dust except near its ends made him think they
had
been hanging there. He likewise thought it likely that neither Sir Edmund nor Mariena would take the trouble to put them back after making use of them.

The question he did not want to ask was why they had made use of them at all. Or for what.

Chapter 17

When Joliffe retreated from the hut, making sure of the latch as he went, nothing was changed outside. The woods still dripped but the sky was not gone back to and rain yet. He had to acknowledge darkly that the increased gloom was all inside himself. He had not much thought ahead about what he might find out by following Sir Edmund. He had only thought he might find out something. And even if he had thought ahead, he would not have thought to find out this—not if he was right in his suspicion of what use Sir Edmund and Mariena had made of the hut and its bed.

The irony that he just now should be working on
Dux Moraud
—a play about a father’s ill “love” for his daughter—did not escape him.

Momentarily, he was diverted by watching his mind try to turn away from his suspicion, near though it was to certainty. Because what else would they have been doing there? Anything but that, he wanted to tell himself. It was a thought almost unthinkable and yet he was thinking it, even while trying hard to think of some other reason they had been there.

But he could not.

He gathered sticks savagely as he went back along the path and through the woods to Tisbe. He found her still grazing peacefully where he had left her, and she kept on grazing while he bundled the sticks onto her back, then gathered up his writing box. Only when he had loosed her hobbles and taken up her lead rope did she raise her head and huff a heavy sigh.

“I know,” he said as he turned them around toward the trackway. “I feel the same way. Over-burdened and under-fed. Though in a different sense, mind you. Over-burdened with thought and under-fed with answers. And with better reason than you have, my girl. Those sticks weigh next to nothing and you’ve been grabbing grass for quite a while, so don’t go huffing at me.”

To show there were no hard feelings, Tisbe butted her head solidly against his shoulder.

“Yes,” Joliffe agreed.

They were somewhat halfway back to the manor gateway when he looked up from watching his feet walk—he could shut off quite a bit of other thought by watching his feet walk—to find Rose and Ellis coming toward him. Because they were making no great haste, were in talk, their heads near together, he had no stir of alarm.

Neither was he surprised when Ellis lifted his head, saw him, and called, “There you are,” as if Joliffe had been deliberately invisible from them until then.

“And there you are,” Joliffe returned. “What I’m wondering is why.”

“To find you,” Ellis said, “and if ever there was a less rewarding errand . . .”

Rose poked him in the side and said, “We’re here to hurry you back. The play’s changed for tonight.”

Joliffe had reached them by then and at Ellis’ words instinctively increased his pace manorward, asking, “Changed to what? Why?”

“There’s some of the wedding guests started to arrive,” Ellis said disgustedly. “A day early. They’re somebody who matters enough that Lady Benedicta sent to ask Basset if we would do one of our better, longer plays tonight.”