A Play of Piety (34 page)

“I shall make certain to chastise them for their carelessness in that,” she said and went away, smiling.

Basset and Joliffe looked at one another, and Basset asked, “You’re ready to leave, aren’t you?”

“Whenever you’re able to,” Joliffe said and did not add, “Soon, I hope,” although he wanted to, because although time to move on was not just yet, he felt it coming. The familiar restless urge to be somewhere else had begun to rouse in him again these past few days. He hoped it was because his healing time here now had him well enough to take up his life again. If nothing else, the nightmares came less often, were less fierce than they had been. Knowing the uselessness of fleeing what was in his own mind, he had never tried to deny them, never tried to run from where they came. He doubted he would ever be fully free of them but hoped now that maybe they were behind him, following, instead of something he stumbled over at almost every forward step.

For one forward step, there was the matter of another horse for the company. The end of harvest meant a less pressing need for horses, making it a good time for buying—or as good a time as any. Joliffe had never enjoyed the challenge of horse-dealing, having been told all too often in his younger days that he was no judge of horseflesh. “You’d buy for liking of the beast,” his father had told him, disgustedly. “Not for the likelihood it’s any good.”

So after talk with Basset, he set Ellis to the business. Once Ellis understood what it was about and what he might spend, he gladly undertook it, saying, “There’s a good little bay gelding I wouldn’t mind us having. He’s pulled a few times in team with Tisbe and they got on. That’s to the good.” Then he fixed an acidly questioning gaze on Joliffe and said, “Whatever you’ve been at, it must have paid beyond ordinary well.”

“Well enough for a new horse and the harness to go with it,” Joliffe answered blandly. “Yet here I am again. Unable to stay away.”

“Yes. Here you are again,” Ellis agreed, not sounding as if he thought that made the matter any better. But he was able to buy the bay gelding and the harness and have money left over, and when he brought the gelding to the hospital’s rear-yard along with Gil and Piers, to show the new member of their company to Basset, Basset was able to walk out leaning only on a staff and no one’s arm.

Joliffe had thought to bring some bread with him, and while he stood at the gelding’s head, stroking him and feeding him the bread, the others—after Basset had approved him—set about considering what his name should be, since his present one of Nodkin appealed to none of them.

“If we still had Hero,” said Piers, remembering the company’s horse before Tisbe, “we could call him Leander.”

“Then we’d have to worry every time we crossed a ford,” said Gil, “for fear he’d take after his namesake.” Piers made a face at him.

“Much though I hate to suggest the straightest way,” Basset said, “don’t we have to call him Pyramus, to go with Tisbe?”

“We could change Tisbe’s name,” Joliffe suggested. That earned the expected glare from everyone before they ignored him and went on.

Of course at the end the choice did come down to Pyramus, but Joliffe could see nothing of the tragic lover about the horse and whispered in his ear, “You’re just Ramus, aren’t you?”

By the twitch and bob of his head, Ramus seemed to agree, and swung his head sideways to butt Joliffe firmly in the chest as if to confirm it.

Joliffe gave him over to Piers then, stood with Basset to watch horse, Piers, Gil, and Ellis leave the yard, and went on standing there a moment longer after they were gone, hearing the dry clop of Ramus’ hoofs along the cart track, before Basset said, very quietly, “A few more days. Once they’ve had harvest-home, then it will be time to go.”

Joliffe nodded, his agreement no less deep for being silent. If he looked on his while here as a healing time for him as much as for Basset, then like Basset he was well enough to be on his way.

And yet . . .

There were several parts to that “and yet.” One was his unwillingness to leave the sisters short of his help. The other was regret at not knowing what had come of the crowner’s search away from here. Willing though he always was to go on, sometimes there were things hard to leave behind undone.

Some of his unwillingness was solved that afternoon’s end. While he and Rose and all the sisters were readying the trays with the men’s suppers, someone loomed into the kitchen’s rear doorway. The sudden blocking of the light turning everyone’s head that way, and even before Sister Ursula said, somewhere between disgust and welcome, “So you’re back,” Joliffe guessed the wide, stoop-shouldered man was the wandering Ivo.

“I’m back,” Ivo agreed. He beckoned his head at Joliffe. “Who’s he then?”

“The fellow who saw to it we’ve missed you not at all,” Sister Ursula said tartly. “Nor are you having him out of his bed just because you’ve showed yourself again.”

From where she was warming the milk at the hearth, Rose said, even-voiced, “But he’ll be gone in a few days, so nobody need fret about it.”

Everyone—not least Joliffe—changed their heed sharply to her. She looked away from the milk to Joliffe and added, still evenly, “We all will, I suppose, now that Basset is so well and everything.”

“Yes,” said Joliffe slowly; and to Sister Ursula, “I suppose we will be.”

The rest of his unwillingness was taken care of the next afternoon. He was sitting on the grass in the garth, giving Daveth a lesson on the lute, Sister Petronilla sitting close by with Heinrich on her lap and clapping his hands for him to match the music, no matter that he seemed not to hear it at all. Daveth, on the contrary, was showing a true ear and deft fingers, and Joliffe was just deciding that when time came to leave, he would gift him with the lute and get another for himself somewhere along the way, when Jack came limping along the walk to say the crowner was at the gate and wanted to see him. Sister Petronilla immediately looked alarmed, but Jack said, “Nay, it’s not trouble for Joliffe. Master Osburne just wants to tell him something, he says. He’s waiting outside the gate. Said he’d not come in.”

Joliffe got up, told Daveth trying to hand him the lute, “No, I trust you with it. Go on playing,” and joined Jack, only with difficulty matching his slow walk when what his curiosity wanted was for him to break into a run.

Jack, likely knowing that, said at the outer doorway, “You go ahead. It’s you the crowner wants to see. Best not to keep him waiting.”

“I’ll tell you what I can about it afterward,” Joliffe promised and lengthened his stride.

Master Osburne and half a dozen of his men were waiting on horseback outside the gate. They were dusty with travel and sat their horses as if they would be traveling more, and Master Osburne said, without troubling over greetings, “We’re on our way to Mistress Thorncoffyn’s to arrest Hewstere.”

“You found out what you needed.”

“I found it. About both him and Aylton. I followed both their trails back, past where they crossed and parted and crossed again, until I found people who knew them both, knew things about them that neither man would have been happy to have told here
and
gave the reason Hewstere would prefer Aylton dead to Aylton alive. It seems Hewstere is a physician only because he says he is. He never trained to be more than a poorly skilled apothecary. He and Aylton grew up in the same place, knew each other from their young days. Aylton went off and became steward to a gentry family two shires away and sometime recommended Hewstere as a physician to them and the neighborhood. How the two of them came to decide to do that, I don’t know, but it got Hewstere out of being an apothecary and into being a physician. That was eight years ago and their paths twined and untwined afterward, neither man staying long anywhere, until Hewstere had chance to recommend Aylton to Geoffrey Thorncoffyn after Aylton had had a falling out with the last man he worked for. The man did not want the bother of setting the law on him, so turned him loose without a recommendation instead.”

“I don’t suppose Aylton was above putting threat on Hewstere to give him away if he didn’t help him to a place with the Thorncoffyns,” Joliffe said.

“I don’t suppose so, either. Then of course they both had to keep quiet about the other, since one couldn’t give the other away without giving himself.”

“So when Aylton wanted to be rid of Mistress Thorncoffyn in favor of the more easily deceived Geoffrey, he could force Hewstere to help him under threat that he would take Hewstere down if he went down. Hewstere, being an apothecary, would know how to go about poisoning the candied ginger.”

“Just so.”

“And all that,” Joliffe summed up triumphantly, “would be why Aylton would go to Hewstere, confident of help in escaping,
and
why Hewstere would be happier simply to have him dead.”

“That is how it will be put to the jury, yes.”

Master Osburne sounded grimly satisfied it would suffice. He and Joliffe regarded each other in a momentary silence, Joliffe not knowing what else was in the crowner’s mind but with a sharp awareness in his own of how Hewstere’s and Aylton’s lives, seemingly made up entirely of selfish choices, had been crowned by a final, mutual ugliness.

Then Master Osburne gave a curt nod as if to acknowledge it was finished and said, “Tell Master Soule. Give my apology I didn’t tell him myself but I wanted no more than to pause. This is something best done as soon as may be.”

Joliffe could not hold in a smile. “Mistress Thorncoffyn won’t be best pleased.”

“Nor will Hewstere,” Master Osburne said, not smiling, “if I decide to let her have at him before I take him into custody.”

He gathered his reins, turned his horse, and rode away, his men with him. Joliffe, watching them leave, was aware feelings were mixed in him. On one side, it was hard not to be in at the end of the thing, hard to watch the men ride away to settle it and know he would know no more about it. But then again, on another side, he had a kind of relief that the ugliness was going to happen far away from him, where he would have no part in it since after all, given choice and on the whole, far away from him was how he would like all ugliness to happen.

 

 

Three days later, under a sky that looked like it might turn to rain—but no one caring, now harvest was done—Ellis, Gil, and Piers brought Tisbe, Pyramus, and the cart with its red and yellow tilt to a stop outside the hospital’s foregate where Basset, Rose, and Joliffe waited, Joliffe with his sack over his shoulder, Rose with a bundle in her arms that smelled of fresh baking that was the sisters’ farewell gift, Basset leaning on his staff. With no immediate need for words among them, Joliffe took Rose’s bundle to stow in the rear of the cart along with his sack—smaller by the lack of the lute he had left with Daveth—while Piers stayed at Tisbe’s head, and Ellis and Gil helped Basset climb into the forward seat.

Having slid his staff to lie at his feet, Basset straightened, looked all around, and declared, “I feel a king.” He patted the seat beside him. “Rose, come you and sit, too.”

Rose began a refusing shake of her head, but Ellis took her by an elbow and half-lifted her to step up onto the wheel and from there sit beside her father. Looking caught between pleased and uncertain, she smiled down at Ellis, who smiled back at her even while he caught Piers by the belt to forestall him clambering up, too, saying, “You walk with the rest of us, youngling. Give the new horse a chance.”

Joliffe, already gone to Tisbe’s head, clucked her forward on the road to who-knew-where-next, deep in the contentment of being where he chose to be.

Author’s Note

So many clichés about the Middle Ages are based on Victorian notions of the “Gothick” and are derived not from actual medieval circumstances but from a later time in English history, when societal and economic changes contributed to the over-population and decay of the towns, a slump in the general quality of life for ordinary people, and the destruction of long-established systems of charity for the needy. (I shall not resist the urge to insert a snippy and ironic “Well done, Tudors,” here.)

In the case of medieval English hospitals, the clichés are particularly unfair. To learn more about these hospitals and the people who worked in them, some reasonably easily available books are
The Medieval Hospitals of England
by R. M. Clay,
The English Hospital, 1070-1570
by Nicholas Orme, and
Medicine and Society in Later Medieval England
by Carole Rawcliffe. The bibliographies in the latter two especially will show the way to extensive other reading.

As for the level of the medical treatment patients might receive in one of these establishments, one should rightly suppose there was the same variation of good to bad that one may receive in the modern health care system. Physicians acted then with the same combination of knowledge and guesswork, care and carelessness, as their modern counterparts do, and like their modern counterparts, used the best techniques available to them. Or not, of course, depending— then as now—on the individual physician. That six hundred years of scientific knowledge had not yet happened for medieval physicians is hardly their fault, and it may be salutary to consider what will be said about our present medical care six hundred years from now.

A great many treatises and books were available regarding medicines and care of the sick. Somewhere like St. Giles in this story would almost surely have been gifted at some point with at least one volume, to be used by those involved in the care of the ill and aged. A number of these books have been reprinted and are available. One specific to the time of this story is
Healing and Society in Medieval England
, edited by Faye Marie Getz. That it is in Middle English adds to its delights.

The Seven Corporeal Acts of Mercy mentioned in Chapter 2 were an integral part of medieval religious life. They are: to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, bury the dead, shelter the traveler (today shifted from travelers to the homeless), comfort the sick, and free the imprisoned (today changed to visit them). In medieval England, the belief that performing these acts of mercy can lead to the soul’s salvation—and their neglect to damnation—led to the founding of many charitable institutions and bequests, most of which—being usually affiliated with religious establishments—were dissolved or seized in the Tudors’ Reformation.