Morality Play (7 page)

I was near to sleeping when Martin got up and came over to me and asked me to walk with him, speaking quietly, not including the others. I rose at once.

i cannot sit still or keep in one place after the playing,' he said, as we crossed the inn-yard. 'I am too stretched in my mind over it, not in the body so much, but the mind draws the body with it. It is not work like labouring, to make the limbs heavy and bring sleep, unless one is like poor Springer, who has fears but no nerves and is only fifteen and still growing. It is worse tonight because of the money.'

For a while we walked through the streets of the town. There were not many folk abroad now. The mud was hardening with frost. It was a black night with no stars visible - that earlier clearness of the sky was quite gone. We carried a lantern on a stick and this swinging light was all we had to see by. I could smell snow on the air and feel the massing of snow clouds in the dark, making the night thicker. We came to a small tavern, a single mean room with benches and rush mats on a floor of beaten earth. The light was poor and the smoke stung our eyes but there was a fire burning and places near it.

We drank thin ale and ate salt fish - all the place could offer. Martin was silent at first, staring into the fire. When he spoke it was again about playing and he kept his voice low so as not to be overheard - he guarded all to do with his trade very jealously. 'My father was a player,' he said. 'He died of the Plague when I was the age Springer has now. When we played in the towns, the folk came in numbers to see us. Now a few jugglers and a dancing bear can take half the people away. We are only six. For our playing in Durham before the cousin of our lady we can do

the Play of Adam and the Play of Christ's Nativity, since these we have practised. With time for preparing we can also do the Play of Noah, the Rage of Herod and the Dream of Pilate's Wife.'

He looked up sombrely and met my eye. 'We are only six,' he said again. 'What can six do? All we own goes on the back of a cart. Now there is coming more and more the big cycles of plays that are put on by the guilds. From Scotland to Cornwall it is happening, wherever people live together in numbers. In Wakefield now, or in York, they will put on twenty plays, they will go from the Fall of Lucifer to Judgement Day and they will take a week to do it. They have all the wealth of the guild to call on and they do not count the cost as it serves the fair name of their town. How can we match them?'

His eyes had widened. He spoke feelingly, but there was a look of vagueness on his face as if the words he was saying were not the true source of his feeling. 'We cannot match them,' he said. 'In Coventry I have seen Christ resurrected from the tomb with block and wheels and hoisted up to heaven, where clouds were hanging from cords not visible to the eye. I have seen a beheading of the Baptist where the player was changed for an effigy by the use of lights and trap-doors and so cleverly was it done that the people noticed nothing and they shrieked to see a headless corpse. I knew it then, when I heard them shriek at a bundle of straw dripping with oxblood. The day is over for poor players who travel with the Mysteries. We have worked and done our best and we are skilled and we sit here and drink stale beer. Between here and Durham we shall have little more than acorn meal to swallow, with our own snot for a sauce, unless Tobias can wire a rabbit, which in this frozen weather is not easy. No, brother, we must find another way. The others look to me, I am the master-player.'

He nodded heavily as he regarded me, but there was a brightness now in his look. 'Springer spoke good reason, even though he slept as he spoke,' he said. 'The story of the Fall is an old one, the people know how it ends. But supposing the story were new?'

'A new story of our parents in Paradise?'

'This murder you were talking of,' he said, 'we heard something of it on our way to see the priest.'

I am gifted with foreknowledge, as I began this account by saying. Sometimes we do not know we are waiting until the awaited thing arrives. It arrived now with these words of his, which should have come as a surprise but did not. The first dread, I felt it then, in that poor place, seeing the light on his face, light of temerity. 'The ostler at the inn spoke of it,' I said. 'I did not think you had taken notice of this talking.'

'Why, yes,' he said. 'It is our trade to take notice of such things. These were all women. They had voices long drawn-out, as women have when they agree together about a bad thing and find pleasure in so agreeing.' He opened his eyes wide and turned down the corners of his mouth and in a voice little louder than a murmur he imitated this talk of the women: 'Ye-e-es, she was always so seemly, who would have thought such a thing of her, eyes for men she had not ... Well, neighbours, what man would want her for a wife?' He stopped and looked seriously at me. 'All the voices were the same,' he said. 'Like a chorus. Why would no one want her?'

'When she had done such a thing-'

'No,' he said, 'they were speaking of the time before the murder. Perhaps she is ugly, perhaps she is a witch.'

I did not want to speak of it but his will was stronger, eclipsing mine - then and later. His desire, the light of interest on his face, compelled me. I fed this interest with the scraps he had given me himself. 'It was the Lord's confessor found the money,' I said. 'He found it in her house.'

'Not her house,' he said, 'her father's. She is a young woman, unmarried. She has no house.'

'How do you know this?' I asked him, and watched him shrug slightly. There was a strong smell of the privy out in the yard. The nightsoil gatherers had not yet passed this way. I was weary now and fearful, though I did not know of what. I had a sudden memory of the ostler's face as he turned from shadow into light.

'I spoke to the priest's woman while I was waiting,' Martin said. 'Tobias stayed outside because with him he had that cur he loves so.'

'You asked her ...?'

'Some few questions, yes.'

I waited for a moment but he said nothing more. Even then I could not leave the matter. 'All the same,' I said, 'it is strange, it is unusual, that a woman without help would kill a man in that fashion.'

'What fashion? We do not know how the killing was done.'

'I mean on the open road. A woman might kill a man in rage or jealousy, choosing a time when he was off his guard.'

'It was not a man, it was a boy of twelve years.'

I found no answer to this. Thomas Wells was a child then. Small puzzles removed do not make a lessening of wickedness. A woman could more easily kill a child, yes ... He had questioned the priest's woman more than a little, I saw.

He smiled now and began to speak in signs to me, something he did often, and always without warning, for the sake of giving me practice. He made the snake-sign of tonsure and belly for the monk; then the swift chopping motions of roof and walls; then the sign of urgent question, thumb and first two fingers of the left hand joined together and the hand moved rapidly back and forth below the chin - a sign very like the one that signifies eating except that in this latter case the thumb is uppermost with the elbow held out and the movements somewhat slower.

How did the Monk come to be in the house?

He waited, pressing back his head to show the need for an answer. I am sorry to say it but truth compels me, I craned forward my head to show eagerness and did my best to make the rapid tongue movements of lechery, though could not do it with the gibbering speed I had observed in Straw.

Martin laughed at this. He seemed in great good humour now. 'But she did not look at men,' he said, 'if we are to believe the good dames.' And he compressed his lips and made a gesture of the right hand against his cheek to sign blushes, then with both hands the motion of drawing close a shawl, like Chastity in the Morality Play.

It was all we said on the matter that night. And because in the end he had laughed and made a joke of it, my fear was overlaid. The wildness I had sensed in him, the readiness to transgress, these I found passing reasons for. He was disappointed at the poor custom for our play, he was unhappy at our poverty. Thus I sought to reassure myself. I did not properly know him yet, did not know that everything with him was serious. Perhaps that was why he chose to walk with me that night, one not so familiar with his nature, so that he could talk without betraying his intention. I am sure now that the intention was already there in him.

I know this from what more I know of Martin now; at the time it was beyond my suspecting. But the foreboding was there. With memory aiding, it is not so difficult to relate events as they follow in sequence. But the dread that comes to natures like mine, that is not so easy to trace, it moves in lurches, forward and back, it catches at new things. That fear I felt in the tavern at the power of human desire, a power for harm or good, I feel it still. The nature of power is always the same, though the masks it wears are various. The masks of the powerless are various also. I remember what was said between us that night and the changing expressions on that lean face of his. He had done already what he could always do with frightening ease: he had passed from notion to intention to strategy as if between them there were no curtain, nor even a screen of mist.

CHAPTER SEVEN

W
e all attended Brendan's funeral, even the dog - kept close by Tobias on a piece of chewed rope. I had thought at first to stay behind, because of the need we would be under to uncover our heads and I was still with the ragged tonsure of my other life.

Margaret it was who found the solution - simple enough, though none of us had thought of it, being still fixed on the idea that I should wear some form of head-covering at all times. 'We will shave him,' she said, in the flat tones she always used, keeping her mouth half-closed so that the words came out in a mutter without changing the lines of her face. Margaret had suffered much hardship and degradation of body and was unwilling now to offer the world anything superfluous. In spite of this she had a very deft and gentle touch, which I knew before by the way she handled poor Brendan. With Stephen's razor and water from the pump in the yard I was shorn without a scratch.

'And if anyone asks why, we will say it is because of the ringworm,' Springer said. Being a fearful and pacific soul he always thought of reasons and excuses; and he knew it was a good answer because he had suffered this affliction himself as a child, and had his head shaved by a barber.

The church was on a hillside and from the graveyard we could see across the wooded valley where the river ran, to the bare uplands beyond, which had a faint sea-light on them - the land tilted down from there to the sea. This was a country of low hills and wide valleys. The trees were bare now, save for the stubborn russet of the oaks. The slopes of bracken beyond the river were the colour of rust. All was still - the day was windless. The sky overhead was dark, gravid with snow.

Brendan's last costume was a pauper's shroud. There was no coffin. We watched him lowered into the earth by Martin and Stephen to wait there for the Last Days, that cannot now be long in coming. Our hope and prayer for Brendan was the same as for ourselves, that though his mortal body was lost in corruption he would be dressed again in glory when the graves give forth their dead.

The frost which had come with night had loosed from the tips of the grass-blades now and they showed a darker green. There was a tidemark of death in this graveyard, a mounded line where the victims of that summer's plague were buried in their common pit The Black Death has returned to these northern parts after a fallow-time of a dozen years. Death is never sated. Now once again in every graveyard we see this tide slowly gaining on the green. Over against the wall of the apse the priest's four sheep were grazing where the grass had grown in shelter and so escaped the frost. Beyond the plague-mound there was a single new grave, very small, a child's grave, with a tarred wooden cross. Beyond it, above the trees of the valley, I saw a heron rise on heavy wings.

The priest pronounced the final blessing in a hasty nasal and as he did so it began to snow, large soft flakes that paused in the still air and sidled, as if cautious how to fall, unwilling to gash themselves. At the first touch of the snow, the priest began to make his way back to the church with unseemly haste. He had taken his money already in the vestry. So there was nothing now to do, as the snow thickened, but to see the first spadefuls thrown over Brendan and then set out back towards the inn.

But Martin did not come with us at once. He lingered behind and I saw him go and speak to the grave-digger. As we passed along the path that led round the graveyard to the church gate, I fell back and left the others and crossed the frosted turf and the line of the plague-pit and came to the small grave. The earth was freshly dug. There was no name on the cross; there would scarce have been time to cut the letters. When had the ostler said he was found? The day before yesterday, in the morning. Swift justice in this town, as Straw had said. Swift disposing of the victim also. But perhaps after all this was the grave of some other ... I stood for some moments gazing while the snow darkened the earth of the grave, and as I did so I fell into a state of mind familiar to students, at once attentive and vague, as when faced with some faulty or imperfect text. Often it is when one waits without question that the truth of the author's intention comes drifting into the mind. Hesitant, circumspect, like this first snow.

I was in this state still when I rejoined the others. We waited for Martin at the lychgate, sheltering under the roof of the gateway. I was standing a little apart, just under the roof, at the roadside. For no particular reason I moved forward a little and looked down the road towards the town. The snow made a mist and at one moment there was nothing but this mist and at the next there were dark shapes in it, advancing slowly up the hill, two riders and with them a great black beast whose head rose high as theirs and it had red eyes and above its head there moved with it a shape of red, dark red in the white of snow, and I knew this for the flame of the Beast's breath and I knew what Beast it was and what manner of riders these were and I crossed myself and groaned aloud in my fear, seeing that the Beast had come and my soul was unprepared.