A Play of Isaac (22 page)

Living the life they did, they did not get to Mass so often as might have been right. Joliffe knew that bothered Rose, but today there was especially no help for it. Having made doubly sure they had everything they would need today, he and Rose were just strapping the second basket closed when four men appeared at the barn door. They looked somewhere between doubtful and eager, but once it was agreed that they were from Sire John at St. Michael’s and that they had indeed found their players, it was smiles all around. They took up the two hampers, two men to each, and set out in a small procession across the yard and into the street, Piers leading, spinning and dancing while tootling merrily on a shrill pipe held in one hand, rattatapping with the other on a small drum slung at his hip by a strap over his shoulder. The men with the hampers followed close behind him, calling out “Make way! Make way!” while Basset, Ellis, and Joliffe came striding straight-backed, shoulder to shoulder, and heads up behind them as if daily used to having their way cleared through the streets. It was the best show they could make with so small a company and better than no show at all, but even so it was probably hardly noticed in the crowds of folk and the sellers of foods and drinks and this and that, everyone cheerful and loud and looking to have a good time by way of either fun or profit. Rose, having stayed to lock the barn, followed enough behind to make no show of herself at all.

Piers was just drumming and tooting their way into the churchyard when trumpets called out from the far end of town, announcing the beginning of the Corpus Christi procession outside the East Gate. The town fathers were moving things along at a goodly pace; some priests from farther churches must have had to bustle after their own Masses to be there already, Joliffe supposed. He had seen enough Corpus Christi processions here and elsewhere to know how this one would go. Trumpeters, drummers, and staff-bearing officers of the town would come first, clearing the way. After them would walk the important laymen of the town—officers and officials of government and guilds; then the University’s officers and heads of colleges and any others of the University with unavoidable claim to being worthy to be seen; then all the important churchmen of nearby abbeys, priories, friaries, and churches in a glory of ecclesiastical finery. There would be a high-colored glory of rich robes, furs, and gold-glinting chains of office; high-borne banners and holy images beautifully robed; burning torches and innumerable candles; a small army of shrill-singing choir-boys; and somewhere among all that, Lord and Lady Lovell riding as honored guests of the town. Here in Oxford the procession would make its way along the broad length of High Street, the crowd drawing back to either side as it passed, then closing in behind it, some simply to go on with what they had been doing before but a good many of them following the procession on its way out of the High Street past Carfax into Great Bailey and Castle Streets to its end on the green along the castle’s moat, not far from the church of St. Peter-le-Bailey in whose churchyard the first of the day’s plays—
The Creation and the Fall
—would be waiting to start.

Lord and Lady Lovell and others of sufficient worth would be escorted to the churchyard to watch from some favored place and then move on with the crowd to
Noah’s Flood
at St. Martin’s church. After that would come the turn of
Abraham and Isaac
at St. Michael Northgate, and that left time and enough to set up here and hopefully time to deal with any problems there might be.

Today, though, so far as problems went it seemed the company’s luck was in. The scaffold was ready when they arrived, hung around the bottom under the stage with the curtains green and scarlet Sire John had promised, and the large chair for God’s throne was already in place, raised on several shallow, broad boxes to make sure “God” was not blocked from view. Sire John was perforce not there, gone to be in the procession, but the men who had carried the hampers were ready for anything Basset asked them to do. Rose joined them while they were hanging the backcloth around the scaffold’s upper frame and helped heave the large painted-gold cloth that would cover God’s throne and the steps out of its hamper and onto the stage. Warned to be particularly careful of it, the St. Michael’s men were but still made short work of unfolding and spreading it over the throne and steps. Then, while Basset was draping the throne cloth in ways that satisfied him, two of the men nearly elbowed each other off the scaffold’s edge to be the one to take the ram-in-the-bush from Joliffe when he handed it up from the properties basket.

The ram-in-a-bush was not so large as a real ram but large enough, with polished, curving horns and a wooden face painted with a happier look than Joliffe had ever seen on a real sheep. Ellis and Piers had argued over that, Ellis insisting the ram should look woebegone, Piers insisting—more for perversity’s sake than any actual conviction, Joliffe suspected—that the ram would undoubtedly be pleased to know it was going to die so worthily. Joliffe’s suggestion that it was a sheep and not bright enough to know what was going to happen to it one way or the other had been ignored; and because Piers had done the painting, the ram looked positively smug. Besides that, it was covered with a real fleece and stood on a board with wheels that let it be rolled across the stage and served as a base for the flat, wooden, green-painted bush along the side toward the stage’s edge.

The man who won the small tussle for the honor of lifting it lurched as he took it from Joliffe and exclaimed, “Saints! The thing’s heavier than it looks.”

Joliffe laughed and agreed it was.

“I thought it’d be no more than a straw-stuffed something,” the man said, holding it out for the other man to feel the heft of it. “What have you? A real sheep in there?

“The body is a wicker frame stuffed with straw,” Joliffe said, “but the legs are hollowed wood filled with rocks, to keep it from blowing away if we’re using it on a windy day.”

“That’s right clever,” the man said, as pleased to know it as if he’d thought of it himself. “No wind today, though. Couldn’t be better weather for it.”

Joliffe agreed wholeheartedly with that and left the two men telling each other about bad-weathered Corpus Christi days they had known.

Sounds from the procession, even muted by distance and buildings, had kept them aware of where it was, and now one of the men broke off, listened, and said, “They’re to Carfax. I told my wife I’d meet her and the younglings for the play at St. Peter’s.”

Basset looked around at everything and said, “All we’re still in need of are the hampers carried into the church. Then you’re free to go.”

“I’ll stay,” said the oldest of the men, the one who had been giving orders to his fellows all along. “I’m to watch the scaffold while you’re away inside. Sire John said I should.”

“Very good,” Basset said. “If you’ll just help the others carry the hampers in, while we finish here, we’ll ask no more of you. And the rest of you can go with our thanks. Ellis, you’ll go with them?”

Ellis did, not needing to be told he was to keep them long enough so they would not see what else the players would do. Not that what still needed doing took very long. As soon was the men were gone inside, Piers and Joliffe climbed the ladder to join Basset and Rose on the scaffold. Working together with practiced skill, Joliffe and Basset drove in the nail where it was needed on the right-hand upright post while Rose and Piers felt along the edge of the throne-cloth for the loop that, hitched over the nail, served to spread the cloth like a wide wing from that side of the throne to the edge of the scaffold, hiding the hanging backcloth there to almost waist-high. With a bundle of thick rods quietly taken from one of the hampers and laid at the back of the scaffold for this chance, Basset and Joliffe quickly put together a frame a little higher and wider than the ram-in-a-bush and slipped it into place, the backcloth draped over the top of it so it made a tunnel from backstage to front, but out of sight behind the raised throne-cloth.

By then Rose and Piers had taken more of the carefully made rods each with a metal loop at one end, and while Piers fixed some to hidden ties on the side of the ram’s head and one jointed foreleg, Rose crouched to run others under throne-cloth and backcloth and fix their looped ends to the throne-cloth, so that when the time came and the audience was more set on watching Abraham and Isaac at the fore of the stage than on anything else that was happening, she could use the rods, while staying hidden herself, to lift the throne-cloth, lay it across the low frame, and then push the ram forward to just behind Joliffe who would be standing there beside the throne, his spreading angel robes and long wings mostly hiding what she did. When he stepped forward to command Abraham not to kill Isaac, Rose would use the other rods to roll the ram forward, as close to appearing miraculously as they could manage it.

Basset was fond of saying, “It’s taking the lookers-on by surprise when they think they know it all that helps keeps them happy.” That this was usually followed by, “I have something I want to try,” with some troublesome new thing to be rehearsed made it no less true, and hence the haste and secrecy now to set up the ram-in-a-bush without any of their helpers seeing them because—sure as apples in August—one or more of them wouldn’t keep it a secret if they saw it. Then, when the players most wanted people to be heeding the play, someone in the audience would be telling someone else just how that bit with the ram was done, and that someone would tell someone else, and . . .

Their helpers came back and were seen away, save for the man staying as guard. Rose and Piers went off to begin laying out the garb but Basset, Ellis, and Joliffe lingered a while with the man, making friendly talk because a friendly guard was much to be preferred to an indifferent one. Soon enough, though, Basset said, “Well, we’d best get ourselves ready. You’ll be all right on your own?”

“Not a trouble. There’s some others will be here soon as the procession is done. One of us on the ground at each corner of the scaffold to keep people back. That’s what Sire John said. Nobody’s to touch anything, he said, and that’s what we’ll see to.”

Basset gave him a bow and they went to join Rose and Piers in the room off the church’s chancel that Sire John had had cleared for their use. Because Piers needed do the least to ready himself—his face was hardly painted, his garb simply a plain tunic of bright green with painted trim around the neck and hem to look like rich embroidery—he made himself useful, first to Rose, handing things to her while she careful painted around Basset’s eyes to make them show the better from stage; then fitted and fastened God’s white wig and long beard on him. Time had been when God was always played in a mask but that was done less often of late and Basset preferred not to. That done, Rose and Piers together lifted God’s heavy robe over Basset’s head, careful of wig and beard and eyes, and settled it on his shoulders. As he was wont to grumble, “The weight alone is enough to make me believe I’m truly God Almighty bearing Creation’s weight on me.” But today he did not. They were all of them working in almost complete silence, too aware of how much depended on today’s going more than merely well. It was not only that they wanted to honor Christ with their work on this day particularly dedicated to him. There was the chance, too, that if they did well enough, they would be hired for next year’s Corpus Christi here, and besides that, Lord Lovell would be watching, giving them another chance to impress him.

Even Joliffe forewent any jibes while painting around Ellis’s eyes and fixing on Abraham’s dark wig and patriarchal beard, then sitting motionless while Ellis did his eyes for him in turn. At least he was spared wig and beard, his own fair hair and smooth face sufficient for an angel. On the other hand, Ellis’s robe was a straight-forward long tunic, easily put on and easily worn, while Joliffe now had to endure Rose and Ellis strapping the tall angel-wings to his back by a harness that went over his shoulders and circled his chest and never rode comfortably no matter what he did. Then came the floor-length white woolen gown—not pleasant even to think about wearing on a warm day like today—that trailed on the floor around his feet and had its opening to the back, especially fitted to hide the harness and make the wings seem actually to grow from his shoulders. Once burdened with the never-quite-steady wings and the too-many yards of garment, Joliffe was perforce all slow-crafted movement and outward dignity. But then, as Basset had said to “comfort” his complaining the first few times he’d had to wear it, “After all, you’re an angel living at the heart of all Creation, on the right hand of God who is the one immovable point in all the Universe. What else do you need to be but slow and dignified?”

“Able to breathe,” Joliffe had snapped, pulling at the harness where it dug into his chest.

“You can still breathe?” Basset had said. “Best let me tighten that buckle for you. Angels don’t need to breathe.”

This
angel needed to, Joliffe had said, and Basset had laughed.

Basset asked, “Everyone ready? Let’s go then.”

They returned to the churchyard where their guards were now at the four corners of the scaffold. Because the rough-and-ready entrances that were usually the best the players could have when performing in innyards or on village greens did not suit with the dignity of Corpus Christi day—or at least the dignity Sire John hoped for it—they were going to wait in the curtained back part of the scaffold from now until time to perform, rather than be seen taking their places by their audience when the time came. It couldn’t be helped that a few people had already gathered—older folk who would rather avoid the jostle of the crowd as it moved from one church to the next and so had come early, bringing their joint stools and something to eat with them, to see at least this one play in comfort and probably because it was closest to their homes.

Piers easily scampered up the scaffold’s ladder in his short tunic. Rose, too, made little of it, and together she and Piers held the curtains well aside so that the men, gowns gathered clear of their feet, could step from ladder to scaffold reasonably easily, Joliffe remembering to bend low enough to bring the wings in safely. That accomplished and the curtains settled into place, Rose checked to be sure all was well with the ram-in-the-bush and after that there was nothing to do but wait. Basset had had the foresight to ask for stools, so they did not have to stand. The waiting was made easier, too, when one of the men put his head between the curtains to tell them the first play had started.