A Play of Isaac (19 page)

“Master Fairfield,” the maid said firmly. “You know that’s what you’re supposed to say.”

“It won’t make any difference,” the boy said cheerfully. “He’ll still be an idiot and he still won’t be at any feast, even if he protests until he’s gone blue—which he does do,” he added to Joliffe. “They say his heart mis-beats and he goes all strange until it steadies again.”

“As if you know everything,” the maid scoffed.

Before that turned to an argument Joliffe asked with a jesting nod at the pitcher, “Wine?”

“A week past Hell freezing solid is when any of us will see wine come this way,” the boy jested back. He set the pitcher carefully in the center of the tray for best balance. “You going to be all right with this?”

Joliffe slightly lifted the tray, judged the weight, and took it confidently. “Fine.”

The maid gave him a flutter of floury eyelashes. “You’re very strong.”

“Have to be,” Joliffe said, “to carry all those words in my head,” and escaped out the door. Still, he wondered briefly what the odds were of keeping company with her a while before he left Oxford this time, but went on from there to thinking he might be no more wise than when he’d gone to the kitchen, but he knew far more about how things stood with Lewis. That there had been not one mention of the murder or the dead man suggested, too, how firm a hold Master Penteney had over his household.

At the barn Basset and Piers were awake, and as he set the tray down Joliffe voiced aloud his wondering about that lack of talk.

“Let go about the dead man,” Ellis said. “If nobody is making trouble at us about it, why do you have to?”

“Somebody wanted to make trouble for us or they wouldn’t have put the body where they did,” Joliffe insisted.

“Or it was Penteney they wanted trouble for. We just happened to be here,” Ellis said.

“Or maybe not. Basset, why do you think nobody asked me anything?”

“Likely because Master Penteney gave order that way,” Basset answered before popping a peascod into his mouth, then saying around it, “Haven’t you taken hold on the fact that for today at least, impressing Lord Lovell matters more than a happenstance dead body? If I was Master Penteney, I’d have given orders everyone was to tend to their work and save the talk for later. Come to that, I think I will give that order, because it’s probably best we don’t talk about it either.”

“Piers,” said Joliffe, “if you get your hand any closer to my food, you’ll be playing your part in a sling tonight.”

Piers took his hand back from the bit of goose for which he had been hoping and the rest of the meal went peaceably. They had finished and Rose had the tray readied for return to the kitchen when a knock on the barn door was followed by one of the Penteneys’ serving men coming in. Knowing he was a step or two better than players, he gave them no bow but said, friendly enough, “Master Penteney sent to tell you my lord and lady and their folk have gone up to ready for the feast. All’s clear for coming in.”

Basset thanked him with the grace of a lord bestowing a favor, which caught the fellow so unready that he bent his head in respectful acceptance of the thanks and left with the puzzled look of someone trying to reason out what had happened.

“There then,” said Rose, taking up the tray. “You shift things while I see this to the kitchen and I’ll join you in . . . the parlor, is it?”

“The parlor,” Basset agreed. “We’ll be there before you.”

Rose made a sound that might have been doubt, but among them, Basset, Ellis, Joliffe, and Piers did have the hampers of garb and properties into the parlor before Rose rejoined them. Like Master Penteney’s study, the parlor was beyond the dais at the high end of the hall. The problem of how the players would ready for the play and wait for the time to make their entrances to the hall without being seen beforehand or being in the servants’ way—or the servants in theirs—was another thing Basset had settled with Mistress Penteney. By agreement players would come to the parlor before the hall had filled with people for the feast, to be out of everyone’s way there and everyone out of theirs while they readied and waited for their time.

Reached by a doorway at the opposite end of the dais from the door to Master Penteney’s study, the parlor was larger than the study, with equally much golden oak, including the well-polished floor, but where the study was meant for work, the parlor was plainly meant for pleasure and ease. The long, low-backed settle and all the curve-seated chairs around the room were softened with embroidered cushions in all colors. A long table to one side had a cloth woven in greens and blues laid across it, with silver candlesticks and beeswax candles waiting there for darkness. A blue-glazed bowl full of fresh-cut flowers was on the hearth in place of the unneeded fire and a yellow-glazed pot with a rosemary plant sat on the wide sill of the window that looked on out the yard. The walls were painted a creamy gold and on one of them there hung a tapestry showing the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt, Joseph striding out happily along a road through green, very rolling hills while Mary and the Child rode a merry-eyed donkey.

Joliffe took in all of that with admiration while he and Piers set down their hamper beside the table. Not only were they going to have more than time enough to ready, they were going to do their waiting afterward in comfort.

He saw Rose give the room a long look when she came in, saw her face momentarily soften with pleasure and a longing that did not surprise him. But she put the longing aside almost before it was there and set to work, helping them all with what painting of their faces was needed, then sorting them into their garb and Joliffe into his wig as the King of Life’s queen. By then the hired minstrels in the gallery above the screens passage at the hall’s far end had begun to play and by the cheerful rise of voices it was easy to guess the guests were gathering to their places. The play was to come after the second remove, giving the feasters a long pause in which to digest before setting to the last remove. With plenty of time to spare, Joliffe moved in his trailing gown and long, false, fair hair—but without the queen’s crown yet—to stand by himself at the window, looking out at the yard. Though the shadows out there were growing long from the westering sun, this near to midsummer there were hours of daylight left. It would hardly have thickened to dark even by the time the feast ended.

Whoever had murdered Hubert Leonard had not had very many hours of darkness in which to shift the body. The lightless back lane and need for quiet would have made slow going of the business, so besides wondering where Hubert had gone after leaving here, there was question of how far someone could have moved his dead body in the dead of night, given the few hours of darkness there presently were.

Of course the fellow might have been killed close by, in which case there was no bother over time. Any time in the night would have suited. But what if he hadn’t been killed close by? Then someone had taken more than a little trouble to dump his body in the Penteney yard. Besides the why they had done it—to make trouble for Master Penteney, yes, but
why
—how had they moved it? Carried it over a shoulder, possibly, but that would likely mean the murderer getting blood on himself. By horse or mule then, or else a cart or wheelbarrow. Whatever it was, it should have made some noise. Hoofs plod, wheels creak, and there was always the chance that even in the middle of the night someone might be awake to hear them.

He was grateful at that point, knowing he was no further along than he had been and unlikely to get further, for Piers to bring a small gameboard and dice and challenge him to a game to pass the time. Since it was a game at which even Piers had trouble cheating, once Joliffe had made sure of the dice, they played peaceably through the feast’s first remove. But during the interlude of singing by scholars from one of the colleges before the second remove, Piers, tired of the game because Joliffe was not losing enough, suddenly left off playing and started across the room toward his mother who was sitting quietly, leaned back in a chair with her eyes closed and no work in hand. Seeing no reason she shouldn’t stay that way for a while, Joliffe called Piers back with an offer to play coin-toss with him. The promise of profit brought Piers immediately back, and by the end of keeping score, when a servant slipped in from the hall to say there was only one more dish to be served in the remove, Joliffe owed him a penny and they were both content to stop.

Basset sat up from his doze on the bench, stretched, stood, and began to hum and mutter, loosening his voice. Ellis stopped pacing, went to Rose to be tidied and straightened, and began working his own voice. Joliffe made sure of Piers’s hair and doublet, had him pull up and smooth his hosen, then went to Rose for his own tidying. She made sure of his wig and set the crown firm and straight on his head, and then he and Piers set to trading odd noises, readying their voices, too, until with a slight rap at the door, the Penteney’s chamberlain put in his head to say the time was come.

Basset said, “Very well,” and the man disappeared. Ellis went to open the door all the way, letting them watch the chamberlain proceed with great dignity past the end of the high table, step down from the dais and go out into the open center of the hall, cleared now of servants between the two tables stretched the hall’s length below the dais. The several score of guests sat only along the tables’ outer sides, to make the servants’ serving easier, meaning that they were all facing inward to where the chamberlain now rapped the end of his tall staff of office on the tile floor for their attention. Talk dropped unevenly away to something close to silence and in ringing tones worthy of a player the man announced, “My lord and lady, my master and mistress, good sirs and gentlemen and ladies all,
The Pride of Life
!”

While he spoke, Ellis and Joliffe moved through the parlor doorway and stood ready. As he finished, there was a trumpet flourish from the minstrel gallery, Ellis held out his hand, Joliffe laid his free one upon it, holding his trailing skirts clear of his feet with his other, and in all the glory of royalty they swept forward together, past the end of the high table into the middle of the hall where they struck a regal pose. Behind them Basset came with stately stride. He was the Prologue and knew, to a fine-tuned instant, how long an audience would hold on their first sight of the players. He stopped on that instant, raised a hand, turned around, and began in a fulsome, rolling voice, “Peace and hearken, all you here! Rich and poor, young and old . . .”

Too used to great halls readied for feasts, Joliffe had given scant heed to this one as they had passed through on their way to the parlor but as he stood there now, his gaze set with serene adoration on Ellis’s face (some parts were harder to play than others) he was aware of the rich play of candle- and lamplight on white-cloth covered tables; the glint of gold and silver tablewares finely crafted to catch the eye and light, the sheen of the guests’ brocades and velvets and even silk. Was aware, too, of how the light must play like gold off his own and Ellis’s brass crowns, giving them a spurious wealth to match that around them.

“Now disturb not this place, for this our play shall begin and end through Jesus Christ’s sweet grace,” Basset declared, ending the prologue as if bestowing a blessing on everyone here.

As he swept out the way he had come, hand still lifted in that blessing, Ellis began, “King I am, with this wide world to rule as I will.”

The play ran its course, although not quite the same course as the copy of it with which Joliffe had started. Theirs was too small a company for everything that script had called for, and he had trimmed, shifted, and tightened it until their few could play its many parts. Ellis remained the King throughout, but Basset, by way of dignified exits, changes of garb, and returns, went from the Prologue to a Bishop to finally God, while Joliffe held on as Queen until the King’s death, then exited in tears to return as the Devil (yet again), his transformation covered, first, by the Bishop’s somewhat prolonged prayer over the dead King and then, when the Bishop exited to become God, by Piers who by then had already been Page and Messenger and now was a Demon tormenting the King’s soul until the Devil could come for it. The Devil and the King’s Soul (still Ellis of course) then debated while the Demon left to return as a rather small Angel accompanying God for the final debate between God and Devil and the King’s Soul over the King’s final fate.

The trick of it—or of any play—was, when once started, never to pause but to go at it as if there were no chance of failure and that the end would crown all, as Basset was fond of saying. Fortunately,
Pride of Life
was something they had done often enough that, with the work they had put in on it these past few days, they had it firm and ran it straight without fumble or lost lines. At the end they took their bows to fine applause and glad faces all around, and escaped into the parlor to the flourishes of a trumpet and drum from the minstrels’ gallery announcing the first dish of the final remove.

With the parlor door shut behind them, they laughed and quietly cheered each other and Ellis collapsed into a chair with a huge breath of relief. Rose promptly prodded him up again, to get his garment off him, while Joliffe saw to Piers’s angel wings, telling him, “They don’t suit you,” and Basset stood waiting to have God’s fulsome robe lifted off of him. Of heavy linen painted with gold, God’s robe was one of their best garments and at the same time the most troublesome, made of so many yards of cloth it took up almost half a hamper by itself and always needing careful handling and the greatest care, both because of the paint and because they had no hope of affording another one anything like as good.

The angel wings safely given to Rose to put away, Ellis and Joliffe lifted God’s robe off Basset and, with Rose’s help, smoothed and folded it, ready for tomorrow. By the time a servant tapped at the door to be let in, their faces were cleaned and they were all into their usual clothing, with their hampers packed and closed and the servant eagerly welcomed because he carried a tray with sweet cakes, dried fruit, a pitcher, and goblets.