A Play of Knaves (30 page)

“Besides all that,” Joliffe said, “Medcote’s murder was one thing; Gosyn’s is another.”

“It is that,” Kyping agreed heavily. “There was nothing false or foul about Gosyn. Even most of those who didn’t like him will grant you that. People can understand Medcote being murdered. Not Gosyn. Supposing his murderer isn’t found, everyone’s suspicions are as likely as the crowner’s questions to tear the parish apart.”

It was shrewd of Kyping to know that, Joliffe thought. Not comfortable, but shrewd, which was to the good because there were times when being comfortable was dangerous. This looked to be one of them, and aloud he asked, “So, would I be welcome, do you think, if I went to play quiet music for the widow and all?”

Kyping, about to swing into his saddle, stopped to look at him. “You mean today?”

“Today. Yes.” While everything was still raw enough that someone guarding what they said and did might show against others too lost in grief to protect themselves. Untoward wariness could betray as much as open guilt.

Kyping held quiet a long moment—whether thinking that or not, Joliffe did not know—before saying, “It’s not your business.”

Joliffe made a small gesture back at the players, Tisbe, and the cart. “So long as we’re trapped here by it, it’s our business.”

Kyping considered that before finally saying, “You might be welcome at Gosyn’s. You can try anyway. If you learn anything . . .”

He left that hanging, but it was enough. They understood one another.

Chapter 20

By the time Joliffe walked into Gosyn’s yard, the rain had dwindled to a stop and the clouds thinned enough for hope there would be sun before the day was over. There could be little work in the fields yet, but the village was oddly empty of people, even children, as Joliffe walked through it. He expected at least a clot of folk at the manor gateway, standing about in the useless way that people had, as if they hoped something worth seeing would happen now that the worst had, but the gateway was empty.

In the manor yard the several tethered horses by the barn showed neighbors were come, but such servants as he saw were glumly quiet, neither speaking to him nor making an effort to stop him. He even stood for several minutes on the hall’s threshold before anyone there took note of him, and he took the chance for a long look at who was there and how they were among each other. He learned little. Except for a servant standing at a table where food and drink had been set out, only a few men were gathered, Master Ashewell and Nicholas among them and the others of like kind, to judge by their clothing and bearing. None of them were plain villagers anyway, but looked to be folk like the Gosyns and Ashewells—yeomen on their way into gentry and all the more sure of themselves because there were no near-neighbored high gentry or lords to overbear them and make them feel their place.

Joliffe supposed that, if he tried, he might know some of their faces from the church ale’s crowd or yesterday’s funeral and inquest, but he did not particularly try. He wondered if their low-kept voices and strained faces were entirely for grief at Gosyn’s murder or if they were thinking, too, of how they could come to like sudden end, all hopes and ambitions gone to nothing between one minute and the next.

He wondered, too, as he had to, if any of them had had quarrel with Gosyn.

But Kyping was the one who could ask questions. The most he could do here himself was see and hear what there was to see and hear, and presently that did not seem likely to be much; there was little talk going on among the men. But there had been pads behind some of the saddles on the horses in the yard for women to ride pillion. Mistress Ashewell was surely here, and other women must be, too, and probably in the solar, giving Geretruda what comfort could be given. Or else in the bedchamber if Geretruda had been laid completely low by this blow.

He could walk into neither solar nor bedchamber without bidding, but since no one was troubling to give him greeting or even heed here, he went aside from the hall’s doorway and toward the solar, to a bench against the wall there that gave him somewhere to set one foot so he could rest his lute on his knee while putting it in tune. Keeping watch on the gathered mourners, and especially the Ashewells, he began to play, at first drawing quiet notes at almost random, letting them fall beneath the low-kept voices, only slowly after a while weaving them into a softly sorrowing song.

He did not sing. For one thing, the lament was one familiar enough that the words would be in people’s minds without he sang any of them. For another, singing would draw too much heed to him and he was here to note things, not to be noted himself. Or, rather, to be noted just enough to be taken to soothe Geretruda.

His hope of that looked like it was happening when Claire shortly came from the solar and toward him. The black mourning gown she wore must have been made for her for someone’s death a few years ago; it was short in the hem and too tight, showing how far she had passed from girlhood toward womanhood between when it was made and now. But with her tear-reddened eyes and face blotched from crying, she looked very young after all, as well as deep in pain, and Joliffe stilled the lute strings, straightened, and bowed low to her in respect for grief that deep, despite that in her pain everything but pain was probably only a blur to her just now.

She was starting to say to him, “My mother would like . . . ,” when her gaze shifted past him to the outer doorway and her voice died as if all air had been suddenly pressed from her lungs. Everyone else in the hall had turned toward her when she came from the solar. Now everyone else and Joliffe followed her look toward the doorway.

To see Hal Medcote standing much where Joliffe had paused, taking in, as Joliffe had taken in, everyone there.

But where Joliffe had had no more than a glance from anyone, Hal was greeted by an array of stares, and one corner of his mouth twitched toward what looked close to in-held laughter before his gaze, sweeping over everyone there, fell on Claire. He instantly sobered and started toward her. She took a small step backward, as if toward flight, then steadied and held where she was, only putting her hands behind her.

From the corner of his eye, Joliffe saw Nicholas Ashewell take a step forward and Master Ashewell take hold on his arm, keeping him where he was as Hal bowed to Claire, saying as he straightened, “I’ve come to say how sorry we are, my mother and sister and myself, to hear of your father’s death.”

Stiffly, Claire said, “Thank you.”

Joliffe shifted his lute and said, seeming blind to any business but his own, “You were saying you wished me to play to your mother, yes?”

That was putting himself forward more than he should. Musicians, like players, were there to be ignored except when wanted, and Hal gave him an angry glance, but Claire said, short-breathed with relief at reason to escape, “Yes. She’s in here,” and fled more than led his way into the solar.

Joliffe gave a short bow at Hal and made to follow her, meaning to leave Hal to join the Ashewells and other mourners. But Hal flicked a hand at him, warning him back, and followed Claire himself. Joliffe, keeping to himself a small surge of anger, followed him in time to see Claire turn almost at bay between Hal and where her mother sat in her chair, hunched over with her arms wrapped around herself, rocking back and forth as if cradling her pain. Mistress Ashewell stood beside her, an arm around her shoulders, while another woman hovered near them, holding a cup she clearly wanted to give to Geretruda, who did not look up, either at them or at Claire, let alone at Hal or Joliffe.

The other two women, though, stared, startled, at Hal, and Claire looked to be trying to find words angry enough to use on him. But Hal, as if neither she nor the other women were there, went to Geretruda and down on one knee in front of her, saying, “Good lady, we’re all in sorrow, my mother, my sister, and I, to hear your husband is dead.”

Geretruda gave a shaken sob and rocked harder without raising her head.

Hal laid a hand on her knee, bold beyond courtesy, and said, “Good lady, I was willing to be your son before. Let it be some comfort to you that I’m still willing. Please know there’s no need for you and Claire to bear everything alone, without a man here.”

Mistress Ashewell hissed on an indrawn breath, but Geretruda was probably too far into her grief to understand much except her own pain. Joliffe’s guess was that all she truly took in of Hal’s words were “son” and “comfort” and “man.” What she surely heard was a promise of someone else’s strength to shelter her. She had been safe with her husband. He had been her strength, maybe always and surely since her disease came on her. If she understood she was dying, that must only add to her fear and need for comfort and someone’s strength—the comfort and strength of a “son”—and with a soft sob and barely raising her head, she put out a trembling hand that Hal seized and held in both of his.

Claire, as if it were more than she could bear to see, turned and fled to the solar’s far door, not the one back into the hall but the one Joliffe had supposed was to the garden. She fumbled the latch as if hardly able to see it, then was gone, leaving the door open behind her.

Hal, seeming to give Claire no heed, was rising from his knee, drawing a joint stool close to let him sit beside Geretruda, still holding her hand and saying something to her too low for Joliffe to hear.

Leaving Geretruda to him and the women, Joliffe followed Claire.

He had been right that there would be a garden there. It was a small one tucked along the back of the hall with a young growth of herbs and early flowers in its four square beds, but he hardly noted even that much about it because Claire was already gone from it, out the narrow gap in the low withy fence along its far side and into the orchard there. He saw her slender, black-gowned shape going away among the black trunks of the trees under their spring froth of pale blossoms, and he followed her, but not quickly now, able to guess where she was going.

Like the garden, the orchard was not large, perhaps twenty trees. As a young boy Joliffe had spent tedious afternoons in an uncle’s even smaller orchard, enforcedly listening to him go happily on at length about his cherry, apple, and pear trees. Whether he wanted to or not, Joliffe knew something about orchard-keeping because of that and was able to see that here every tree was well-pruned and in health. He remembered what Kyping had said—that this had been Gosyn’s first purchase of land when he began to better himself. A small beginning, maybe, but one that Gosyn had valued to the very end.

In truth, looked at against the wider world, all of Gosyn’s success could be measured as small compared to some, but that did not lessen what he had done. Where many others never tried at all, he had succeeded in bettering his family’s place in the world; nor was there way to say how much more he would have done if he had been left to live his life out. But he had not been left, and Joliffe found Claire at a far corner of the orchard, standing at the edge of a trampled stretch of grass not far from where a shallow stream made the orchard’s boundary, very probably the same stream he had forded on the other side of the village and the one that flowed past the players’ field.

He had not tried to follow her quietly, but her back was to him, and from several trees away he could guess by her bowed head and shaking shoulders that her sobbing had likely covered his footfall; and he stopped where he was, slipped his lute around, and stroked a run of notes from it as light as the petal-fall from one of the trees.

Claire instantly turned, almost as sharply as if it had been Hal Medcote’s voice she’d heard instead of the lute, but her alarm and anger faded as she saw Joliffe. Turning away from him, she said, “Go back to my mother. You’re not needed here.”

He was used to being spoken to as a servant. After all, he served. But he was not a hireling and that gave him some choice of which orders he obeyed and which he did not, and still stroking now-sad notes from the lute, he went forward, saying, “This is where your father died, isn’t it?”

“It’s where he was murdered,” Claire said with bitter force. “Go away.”

Much of the trampling had to be from after Gosyn’s death, done by those who came to see and deal with the body. Because of it, Joliffe supposed he would have to depend on what Kyping had told him of what had happened between Gosyn and his murderer, but there was more than that to be seen. Just here, for perhaps a dozen yards along the stream that made the orchard’s boundary, the willows and alders had been cut away instead of being left as usual to keep the stream’s banks stable. Standing where he was now—a little behind and a little aside from Claire and looking outward and beyond the stream as she was—he had a clear view of an open field ploughed in long, broad strips where this year’s young wheat was a green haze over the dark soil.

“Your father’s land?” he asked quietly.

“My father’s land,” she agreed, not looking at him again but not ordering him away, either, as if he were not worth her bother to care whether he was there or not.

Joliffe was willing to settle for that. He had followed her here on an unthinking urge to help someone in pain, but the urge was faded. There was no help he could give the girl, she being who she was and he being no one to her. But since he was here, there was no reason not to see all that he could. From what Kyping had said, Gosyn had walked in the orchard every evening, and here, where the trees were cleared along the stream, he must have stood on most or all of those evenings, looking out at his land. In triumph that it was his? Or for always renewed assurance he had succeeded? Or with thoughts of what he hoped to do next? Or simply with the quiet pleasure of knowing it was his?

However it had been with him, Gosyn would never stand here again, with hope or fear or any thought at all.

Had whoever killed him planned on him being here? Or had someone simply been late at work in the field, seen him, and on the sudden taken the chance at Gosyn with no forethought at all? This was the time of year for the first hoeing out of weeds among the crops and likewise when everyone was behind at all their work, there being so much of it that needed doing. It was not beyond thought that someone had been there in the field yesterevening and seen Gosyn. They might even have meant nothing more than to talk to him but instead had argued and given way to anger and ended by killing him instead.