A Play of Isaac (18 page)

Piers made a rude noise. “Shut up behind walls, stuck with books,
and
having to wait on someone. Not for me, thanks.”

“For which any number of scholars may thank their lucky stars,” Joliffe said cheerfully.

The narrowing street took another turn and yet another, then straightened out toward Oxford’s High Street, past the church of St. Peter in the East, St. Edmund Hall, and Queen’s College. There were far less people here. The bustle and color were all ahead in the High Street except in Queen’s College gateway where perhaps a dozen dark-robed scholars were gathered laughing around something or someone in their midst.

“Go see what’s happening there,” Joliffe told Piers.

“It’ll just be another juggler or something,” Piers scoffed but ran ahead anyway and began to burrow under elbows as a series of shrill yips that brought more laughter suggested that whatever was happening involved a small dog.

Rose and Joliffe kept their easy pace and stopped the other side of the street from the small crowd. Because there was not likely to be better chance than this, Joliffe asked, “About the dead man this morning. About him maybe being a Lollard.”

“Oh, Joliffe,” Rose sighed. “I only want to forget about him.”

“There’s nothing we have to worry about, is there?” Joliffe persisted. “None of us have had anything to do with Lollardy, have we? That you know of?”

“Not unless you were one before you joined us,” she said so simply that he believed her because she was never good at lying. She refused to be that complicated. For her it was straight truth or nothing, and if she said none of them had ever had anything to do with Lollardy, then so far as she knew, none of them had.

To make a jest of his asking, he said, “No secret Bible tucked away among the properties? No bundles of Lollard pamphlets in the hidden bottom in a basket that you go out secretly distributing when I’m safely asleep at night?”

“That Master Barentyne would have found them if I did, the way he went at everything. Why this sudden taking up of Lollards? Why look for trouble?”

“I suppose because I’d rather be looking for trouble than have it sneak up on me from behind. Master Penteney said the dead man was maybe a Lollard. That crowner and bailiff will both be taking hard looks at that.”

“Um,” Rose said, which might have meant anything.

They stood silent a few moments, watching the group across the street. Then Joliffe said lightly, “So Ellis has had nothing to do with Lollardy ever?”

With both disbelief and scorn, Rose said, “Can you honestly imagine Ellis talking on about the will of God and holy writ?”

In all honesty Joliffe could not. “What about Basset then?”

“I can see him talking about it. He’ll talk about anything. But take it as darkly serious as Lollards do? Never.”

“I’ve never heard him talk about religion at all.”

“Then you can see how little he cares about it, if he doesn’t even talk about it,” Rose returned briskly. “Here, Piers.”

The small crowd was breaking up around a short, bow-legged man and his rough little terrier dog. The man was bowing and turning in a circle, thanking all and sundry for the tossed coins ringing into the round-brimmed hat he was holding out while the dog balanced and bounced on its hind legs in front of him. Piers ran happily to his mother, a hand held out for a coin. Joliffe was quicker than she was, had a farthing out of his belt pouch before she had unfastened hers, and handed it to Piers who took it and spun to run back, nearly into collision with a skinny scholar who said, scowling, as Piers dodged clear of him, “
Puer inurbanus!
”

Without thinking Joliffe called after him, “
Stultus eruditus!
” The scholar stopped short and sharply turned around, his mouth open to answer that, then thought better of his dignity than to trade Latin insults in the street with someone so obviously beneath him, and went on into St. Edmund Hall.

Having tossed the coin into the man’s hat. Piers came running back, exclaiming, “Joliffe, you know Latin! How do you know Latin?”

“What’s the dog’s name?” Joliffe immediately asked instead of answering.

“Riddelme,” Piers said. “Did you see him? He can do backflips and everything. Mam, could I have a dog like him? I could train him and he’d show off and people would pay me . . .”

He was still trying to convince Rose he would
too
take care of a dog
and
train it and,
no
, he wouldn’t lose interest in a week, when they came out into the broad High Street and turned right, heading back toward Northgate Street.

Oxford’s High Street stretched east to west the whole length of the town, and since it was the main marketplace, the crowding of people and booths was greater here than everywhere else. In the crowding it was easier to let Rose and Piers, hand in hand again, go ahead, leaving it to Rose to sort out for Piers why he was not going to have a dog, while Joliffe trailed behind, keeping close but taking this first chance he had had today to think about this morning.

He had watched Basset as much as he watched the others. When Master Penteney began his lying to Master Barentyne and Master Crauford about Hubert Leonard, Basset had been almost not breathing, he was listening so intently. Only when the questions went beyond the dead man’s possible Lollardy had Basset eased. Why? What about that part of the questioning had mattered so much? There had never been any sign of heresy about Basset in all the years Joliffe had known him—and they all lived too much together for anything like that to have gone unseen. But this morning Basset had been . . . afraid. Straight-forwardly worried about the trouble that could have come to them because of the dead man would have been right enough, but Joliffe would nearly swear he had been outright afraid of something that could have been said. When whatever it was had gone unsaid, he had eased.

Setting that against whatever he and Master Penteney had secret between them and adding to it the fact that both of them had known Leonard before yesterday—despite what they had told and not told Master Barentyne—Joliffe found himself having to think, to almost the point of certainty, that their shared secret might well have something to do with this dead man. Because if it did, then the fact that Master Penteney had so carefully lied about what had actually passed between the man and him yesterday
and
willingly brought up the Lollard could well mean their secret had to do with something even worse than heresy. Worse enough that it was better to have people looking for Lollards than some other way.

Joliffe began to be more than curious about Basset’s secret with Master Penteney. He began to consider, following Basset’s lead, being afraid.

Chapter 11

By the time Joliffe, with Piers and Rose, had made their way back to the barn, Bassett and Ellis were already there, with Ellis beginning to be impatient for them. Rose turned his worry aside with a kiss on his cheek before setting to the work of persuading Piers that he was indeed going to lie down for at least a while.

“It will be a long evening. You’ll want to stay awake for it,” she said, laying out his mattress and pillow for him. “Now lie down.”

Piers started a grumble that Basset cut off with, “That’s your mother talking but this is your playmaster saying likewise. Lie down until she says differently.”

Piers glowered and gave up. He could argue as well with his grandfather as with his mother or Ellis or Joliffe, but when “grandfather” turned into “playmaster” there was no more arguing and Piers lay down, flat on his back, stiff as a board, arms rigidly folded across his chest. Everyone else went on about their other business, ignoring him, and as usual in very little time his arms fell loose, he rolled over, curled onto his side, and was well away into sleep.

“He’s so sweet when he’s like that,” Ellis said, lifting one of the garb baskets out of the cart. “Couldn’t we give him a sleeping draught every now and then?”

“Say with every meal?” Joliffe suggested.

The four of them went over their clothing for tonight’s play to be certain nothing needed doing—no trim restitched or button tightened or hem secured—but Rose had spent what time she could these past few days seeing to their garb for tonight and tomorrow; nothing needed to be done on anything. Then they brought out the properties, saw to them, packed tomorrow’s away in one hamper and tonight’s garb and properties into two other hampers, except Ellis kept out the King of Life’s brass crown and sat down to polish it to a better sheen while Basset stretched out on his bed, laced his hands comfortably together over his stomach, and was soon snoring gently.

Rose smiled on him much as she had on the sleeping Piers, sat down on her cushion and took up a plain white shirt she was sewing for his everyday wear. When she had taken money to buy the cloth for it a few weeks ago, she had said, “Your old one is almost past scrubbable to whiteness anymore.” And added as Ellis opened his mouth, “You’ll have a new one next.”

Rose would do as much for him, too, Joliffe knew, but he intended, maybe before they left Oxford, to buy a shirt for himself ready-made from a tailor and spare Rose at least that work. For the present, though, he occupied himself with sitting down, leaning back against the cart’s near wheel, and running his lines for tonight through his head, shutting out the murmur of Ellis doing the same. It was Rose who kept an eye on the barn door’s slant of shadow and in a while said, “It’s probably time to go for our supper.”

Joliffe stood up and stretched. “I’ll go.”

“Comb your hair first,” Rose said without looking up and added to Ellis who had finished with the crown and was setting it atop the other properties in the hamper, careful his polished-smeared fingers did not touch it. “And you go wash your hands.”

Joliffe and Ellis looked at each other and rolled their eyes.

Basset had settled earlier with Mistress Penteney that because they would be performing between two removes of the feast tonight, they would—like the servants who served the feast—eat before it started. Because it was always easier to be on their own rather than with others before performing, it had been likewise settled they would eat apart, in the barn. Joliffe only hoped someone in the kitchen had remembered that, because a cook interrupted in the throes of readying a meal always seemed to know where were the gristly bits of meat and the undercooked pastry and made sure of who got them.

Happily, having crossed the yard—presently clear of people and horses, the Lovells and their people long since settled in—and circled the house’s far end to a small rear-yard and the kitchen door, he found that not only had the players been remembered but a skinny kitchen boy was loading their tray on a table just inside the door, almost out of the way of the bustling workers along both sides of the long worktable that stretched the kitchen’s length well clear of the two fireplaces where pots bubbled and seethed and pans sizzled at one end while at the other something large had been roasting on a spit, to guess by the deep pan of dripping just being drawn off the fire for gravy-making. The smells were mingled and wonderful and Joliffe was instantly starving.

The kitchen boy, setting a covered platter on the tray beside a bowl of heavily buttered peascods, a dish of carrots roasted with herbs, and a large strawberry pudding, greeted him with a wide smile and, “I know you. You were the Devil when Master Fairfield was chasing that other man with a spear.”

Joliffe rubbed himself behind as if remembering a wound and said ruefully, “You must not have seen when he missed the other man and got me.”

That had not happened but the kitchen boy laughed as Joliffe had meant him to, while Joliffe lifted the cover from the platter and sniffed admiringly at the slices of roast goose in a spiced sauce. “Beautiful,” he said. “If ever I give up playing, maybe I’ll look for kitchen work.”

“Do it in winter then,” the boy said. “It’s merciless hot this time of year.” Like everyone Joliffe could see, he was red-faced and sweating. He looked the tray over and said, “One more thing. Wait here. I’ll get it.”

He dodged away through the flurry of elbows and aprons, and Joliffe could see why it might be better to be thin and quick here rather than fat or slow. Work might presently be past the slicing and chopping stage but the swing of a heavy ladle or collision with a heavy pan or bowl would probably do a person no good.

The boy had disappeared but a kitchen maid came toward Joliffe, wiping her floury hands on her apron. He gave her a deep bow and a deeper smile and she smiled up at him prettily as she asked, “You’re one of the players, aren’t you?”

Hand pressed to his heart, he declared, “I am whatever you want me to be.”

“I saw you in the play the other night. All those words you have to remember. You’re doing something different tonight at the feast, aren’t you?”

“Tonight we do
The Pride of Life
. Will you be able to see it?”

“Master Penteney says we may watch from the screens passage if we keep quiet.” She glanced around as if about to impart a dangerous secret. “Master Fairfield has to watch from up in the gallery. He’s been carrying on all day because of that and because he hasn’t been with you folk today. He’s not happy about being left out tonight either.”

“He’s not going to be at the feast?”

“They won’t let him sit eating among people who aren’t used to his ways. You’ve seen him at table, haven’t you? Well, they don’t want such as Lord and Lady Lovell seeing it, that’s sure. I don’t know what Mistress Kathryn is thinking of, letting herself be married to him, I really don’t. No, his man will see to feeding him in his own chamber. That’s all settled. Then he’ll be let watch the play from behind the minstrels in the gallery along with little Master Giles and the Lovell children and then be put back in his room again.”

“Talking about that Lewis?” asked the boy, returning with a pottery pitcher covered with another towel.