A Play of Piety (16 page)

And if Mistress Thorncoffyn did not worry about that, Idany did, Joliffe thought. He shook his head over the pity of it all and went to tell Master Soule that Mistress Thorncoffyn wished to see him as soon as might be.

Master Soule received the message with down-drawn mouth and, “To complain of something, no doubt. Do you know of what?”

A sensible servant would have denied any knowledge or at the least answered circumspectly. Joliffe, who had never had inclination to be a sensible servant, said, “That Sister Margaret and Father Richard didn’t foresee Tom Lyttle was going to die and weren’t there when he did.”

“Even over that she has to make trouble. As if to go to God in sleep isn’t one of the more merciful ways to pass.” Master Soule shook his head and gestured for Joliffe to go.

Joliffe went back to the kitchen. All the women except Sister Petronilla were there, with Sister Letice just finishing pouring something from a pot through a sieve into a pottery cup. He heard the pad of soft-soled feet behind him but was not in time to turn before Idany shoved at his arm to have him out of her way, demanding as she came into the kitchen, “Where is my lady’s drink? Didn’t you tell Sister Ursula it’s wanted?”

In the moment of warning there had been, Sister Letice had moved away from the table, was several yards away, her back to it as Sister Ursula took up the cup and held it out to Idany, saying, “It’s just finished steeping. You’ll add the honey if she wants it?”

“Of course.” Idany took the cup with her usual brisk ill grace, no bother of thanks, and ordering over her shoulder as she left that, “She’ll want more in a while. Her stomach is badly uneased.”

Too low for Idany to overhear, Sister Margaret murmured, “It might better if she chewed her food instead of gobbled it.”

The day went its solemn way. Late in the morning, Father Richard and Joliffe carried Lyttle’s shroud-wrapped body across the road to the church where it would lie until its burial tomorrow. Since there was no family to keep vigil over him, the sisters were to take turns at it through the day, with Father Richard to keep the watch in the night. Meanwhile, in the hospital itself the curtains were left drawn around what had been his bed, but the bedding, blanket and all, went to the laundry, and at Sister Ursula’s order, Joliffe carried out the straw-filled mattress and pillow and hung them to air over the garth’s fence in the sunlight.

The quiet familiarity with which it was all done showed these were all-too-usual duties. Only little Heinrich showed himself unsettled, not keeping to his usual silent place under the table despite Sister Petronilla putting him there several times. Instead he wandered the kitchen vaguely, sometimes straight into the table or, worse, into a wall where he would stand gently knocking his head against it until someone turned him away to his wandering again.

“He’s like this whenever there’s a death,” said Sister Petronilla. “He somehow senses it and is unsettled. Daveth will be back from lessons soon and take him.”

“What about a quieting draught of something?” Joliffe suggested.

“Whatever we’ve tried, he never seems to take it same way twice. Sometimes what ought to quiet him only makes him worse.”

“Can’t he be tied to a table leg or something?” Rose asked a little desperately, leaving off stirring the mid-day pottage in time to turn him aside as he wandered blankly toward the fire.

“He wails and rubs himself raw on the rope,” Sister Petronilla said, catching him as he turned around and headed toward the hearth again. Even her usual serenity sounded strained.

“Joliffe,” Sister Ursula ordered impatiently, “take him and do something with him for this while until Daveth comes back.”

Dismayed, Joliffe caught the child by one shoulder as Sister Petronilla let him go. Then he mercifully had a thought and said, “Come, Heinrich,” and steered him from the kitchen with the same light touch and gentleness Sister Petronilla and Daveth used.

Did Heinrich even know the difference between one person and another, or was everyone and everything much the same to him in the small and shadowed place that was his mind? There was no way to know. At least he was biddable: he went the short way to Joliffe’s own room without trouble and sank straight down cross-legged onto the floor when Joliffe, with a slight downward press on his shoulder, told him to sit. There he began his usual rocking front to back, which was safe enough, and Joliffe left him to it while getting out his lute from his hanging sack, then sitting himself down cross-legged in front of the boy and setting to fussing the strings into tune. After the lessons he had been put through—done in the evenings after the brutal weapons work of most of the days—his skill with the lute was still nothing that would excite the truly skilled but assuredly better than it had been. Not that he would have to stretch himself to divert Heinrich, he thought. If Heinrich heeded music at all, of course.

Heinrich did.

As Joliffe stroked one simple song and then another from the lute, the child’s gaze never once strayed up from the floor in front of him, but his rocking slowed, almost stopped, then changed to a sway from side to side, not quite in time to Joliffe’s playing but nearly. Joliffe wondered if that might be the best approval his lute-playing was ever likely to have.

“He likes it,” said Daveth from the doorway.

“Has anyone ever played for him before now?” Joliffe asked without stopping.

“Not here. I don’t know about before here.”

Those were more words together at once than Joliffe had ever heard from Daveth without Sister Petronilla prompting him. The boy’s eyes were on Joliffe’s fingers, watching intently. Joliffe stopped playing. Heinrich went completely still for a moment, then began to rock forward and back again. Joliffe lifted the lute toward Daveth. “Do you want to try?”

Daveth hesitated, then limped forward. With his bent leg, sitting on the floor would be awkward. Joliffe stood up, nodded him toward the bed, sat there himself, and when Daveth joined him, handed him the lute. The boy took it, still uncertain. Joliffe showed him how to hold it against his body and then a simple placing of his fingers on the neck.

“Now stroke across the strings with your other hand. Gently. You want to learn the feel of the lute, not break its strings,” Joliffe warned, all too aware of most boys’ urge to strum vigorously.

Daveth, though, had a gentle touch. Leaving Heinrich to his rocking—at least he was not wandering again—Joliffe enjoyed, for a brief time, being teacher—the more especially after having spent the past months as mostly pupil himself. He thought Daveth was enjoying it, too, until from the doorway Geoffrey Thorncoffyn said, “So you’re a string-strummer, too, fellow?” and Heinrich, from near-stillness, flung himself sideways and made to crawl under the bed. Daveth pushed the lute into Joliffe’s hands and plunged forward in time to wrap his arms around him and hold him back. Joliffe, taken off guard in both directions, was momentarily uncertain whether it was Geoffrey or the boys he should deal with, then left Heinrich to Daveth and said, standing up from the bed, “Among other things, yes.”

“A player, for one, I hear,” Geoffrey said down the length of his nose, taking the unnecessary trouble to show how far below himself that was.

“The thing is,” Master Aylton said behind him, “until just now, when Master Soule did, no one had bothered to tell Mistress Thorncoffyn that your whole company is hereabouts.”

“So she wants you all to put on a play for her. Today, if possible,” Geoffrey said.

“It is not possible, sir,” Joliffe answered. “They’re at work in the fields.”

“Tomorrow then,” Geoffrey said, turned sharply enough that Master Aylton had to move smartly out of his way, and left. Master Aylton made a wry face and a shrug at Joliffe and followed him. Joliffe, his own face wry, set the lute aside and knelt down to do what he could to disentangle Daveth and Heinrich.

Chapter 13

E
llis glowered at Joliffe. “This is your doing, isn’t it? This gets you off your right work there, but us—after we’ve worked ourselves bow-legged, bent-backed, and shuffling in the fields all day—we’re supposed put on a play, all merry and capering. Is that the way of it?”

“We could do
Tisbe and Pyramus
,” Joliffe suggested, straight-faced. “There’s no merriment or capering in that.”

“Oh, I do laugh at your sharp wit. Hear me laughing,” Ellis said, not laughing.

“Or
Dux Moraud
,” Joliffe said thoughtfully. “No capering in that one, either.”

“I hate that play,” Ellis snarled. “So do you!”

Joliffe did, for more reasons than one, but that would not have kept him from a goading reply except Rose cut in with, “This isn’t Joliffe’s doing.” She paused as if in momentary thought, then added, “For once.”

“Hai!” Joliffe protested.

Rose went on, ignoring him, “It’s all because that Thorncoffyn woman is bored and wants diverting. Her and her grandson.”

Ellis grunted a grudging half-acceptance of that and pushed another stick into the fire under the pot of pottage heating for their supper. Rose was slicing bread, and Piers was cutting the day’s portion of cheese into large pieces. Gil from where he lay with his hands clasped behind his head on a pillow, taking his turn at having no evening task, said toward the tree branches above him, “Just not
The Baker’s Cake
or
Fox and Grapes
. Please.”

Joliffe, standing, his shoulder leaned against a tree trunk, understood the plea. Both of those plays called for far too much of the undesired capering and merriment.

“Nor
Abraham and Isaac
,” Ellis said. “We want something simple to set up and do. I’m not unpacking half the cart for this.”

“
Saint Nicholas and the Thief
,” said Piers. “It’s simple.” And one of the oldest plays in their set of plays. They could all do it in their sleep.

But Ellis asked in protest, “Without Basset?”

Indeed, it was difficult to think of the play without Basset being massively dignified as the statue of Saint Nicholas that comes alive to deal with a thief. Time was that Joliffe had played the woman who leaves her chest of treasure in the saint’s safe-keeping and has it stolen by Ellis as a thief. Later, while Gil learned his craft as a player, he and Joliffe had traded turns as the woman, but Gil had had the part all to himself in the months that Joliffe had been gone. That made it all the easier for Joliffe to say now, “I’ll play the statue.”

“You?” Ellis protested. “You’re not old enough to be the saint.”

“First, who says Saint Nicholas has to be old? Second, aren’t you fortunate that Basset isn’t here to hear you call him old?” Joliffe said.

“I never said he—” Ellis broke off, glowering at having been diverted, and returned to the main point. “You don’t look the way people expect Saint Nicholas to look.”

Joliffe rolled his eyes in a way that Piers had perfected and said, “I’d put on Abraham’s white beard and powder my hair with flour. Just as Basset does.”

Ellis glowered suspiciously at so reasonable an answer, but Rose said firmly, “With that and bishop’s mitre and robe and crozier, yes, Joliffe, you’d do quite sufficiently as Saint Nicholas.”

“So we do the
Saint Nicholas
,” Gil said before Ellis could make more trouble over it.

Ellis immediately said, “So where are we going to do it?”

By the time they had thrashed out both that
and
the matter of when they would play, twilight was well along toward darkness and Joliffe was late to his evening duties. He had warned Sister Petronilla that he might be. She had said not to mind, she could always have Daveth’s help if need be. “He’s reaching a size to be of some use that way,” she had said with her usual air of taking calmly whatever came. “Besides, we’ll put something in the men’s evening drink to help them settle better for the night. We always do after a death. Otherwise, the first night is almost always hard for everyone.”

So Joliffe might have hurried less than otherwise but in truth he hurried not at all, instead strolled at ease through the orchard, across the little stream, and into the garden. There, in the deepening blue twilight, where the herbs’ subtle mingled scents still hung in the lingering warmth of the ended day, he paused, put his head back to look at the first stars pricking into being overhead, and simply let the world be around him, not demanding anything from it.

Or, in that moment, anything from himself.

For that moment everything was simply there; everything simply was; and simply so was he. He closed his eyes and let the feeling deepen in him, grateful for the peace of it, then after a time opened his eyes, drew a deep breath, let go of his thoughts, and went on his way, quieter in himself than he had been for a long while.

The quietness was still there when he awoke in the morning after an unbroken sleep, letting him look at what he would not yesterday. Two mornings ago old Tom Lyttle had been alive. Today he was not, and some day, soon or late, Joliffe would not be either. He had no desire for his own end—he had seen too many ends of late—but in the quietness of himself just now he did not protest the inevitable. It was simply as things were. The pattern of things. Just as this year there had been spring and then summer, now harvest and all too soon winter, some day he would die.

But not today, probably, and here and now there was work to be done, and he got himself out of bed and set about the day’s necessities, grateful to the sleeping draught that had kept the men at peace all night.

Basset insisted on hobbling to the funeral that morning, using a staff, Joliffe’s arm, and soft shoes padded with folded cloth as thickly as might be. Only Ned Knolles among the other old men chose to go, too, shuffling along with Sister Petronilla’s arm and Daveth’s shoulder for his support. At the church there were only Father Richard, the boy Will, and the sexton. Candles were few, too, and there was no incense, but Father Richard was in full funeral vestments and said the Mass with all care, neither scanting nor hurrying.