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Authors: Margaret Frazer

BOOK: A Play of Heresy
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But Ned Eme was not there, had not come back from wherever he had gone, and Joliffe went aside to Sendell to ask, “What happened to Ned? He disappeared well before we were done.”
“Before we started he asked if he could leave when his part was finished,” Sendell said easily. “I said if everything went well, he could. He went.”
So much for hoping to strike up talk with him tonight. Joliffe did not hide his guilty relief from himself while asking Sendell, “Join me in a drink to celebrate we’ve made it this far and it’s looking well?”
“I think that if we try,” said Sendell merrily, “we might even make it several drinks before curfew. I, at least, am in need of them.”
 
 
They got their several drinks, and went their separate ways to bed, and on the morrow Joliffe spent the day doing nothing to Sebastian’s purpose. He knew he might try to find Ned Eme but made no effort to think of an excuse he could give Ned if he did. Instead, tired of Coventry’s streets and taverns and not wanting to meet Sebastian even by chance, he dug the horse brush out of the cart and went out again to see Tisbe and Ramus in their pasture. Both he and they enjoyed the while he spent grooming them, although Tisbe, as ever, showed her displeasure at having to share him with Ramus by butting Joliffe hard with her head and snapping at Ramus’ flank. Despite she might have been grateful to share the pulling of the players’ cart with another horse and despite the months they had been together, she never forgot there had been a time when she had had Joliffe’s heed all to herself. Joliffe, to reassure her she was still the best of horses, spent a long time combing out her mane, talking to her all the while, leaving her mellow and drowsy-eyed when he finished.
He spent the rest of the day loitering along a stream among willow shadows at the pasture’s edge, with a meat pasty he had brought on his way out of Coventry and his book of Hoccleve’s poetry for company, although he read little, content with watching the water purling and listening to the day’s small wind among the willow trees. He stayed until nearly suppertime and came back into the town by way of Gosford Gate, not all that far from Mill Lane. He got his supper at a cookshop and strolled on to the yard, coming somewhat early for rehearsal and regretfully bracing himself to the necessity of being particularly friendly with Ned.
He found the pageant wagon had been drawn out of its house into the middle of the yard. Sendell and Burbage were atop it, wrestling an upright post into place at its far end, to finish the frame of the playing house that—later hung all around with cloth for walls—would give the players somewhere to disappear when their parts were done and to change garb. The boards that would become its flat roof—to be set with the high altar of the Temple and likewise give the angels somewhere “heavenly” to appear—and the stairs that would go up to it were in a careful pile on the remaining long open bed of the wagon, with the wooden pegs to fasten it all together probably in the basket standing beside them. The steps that allowed players to come down from the wagon to the street and up again were already attached to the wagon’s rear end, hinged so they could be swung up onto the wagon while the wagon was pulled from playing place to playing place through the town.
Delighted excitement stirred all through Joliffe at the sight. He had seen, once, the great pageant of plays done in the city of York. York, being larger and richer than Coventry, had more plays, beginning not in the New Testament but with the Creation of the world and running on through both Testaments and to Judgment Day itself. Besides the thrill of the stories, what had stayed with Joliffe through the years—he had been, what, eleven years old or maybe twelve the time his family made that almost-pilgrimage to see the plays?—was the flare of delight at the sound of one pageant wagon, its play finished at one place, rumbling away along the street to its next playing place while the following wagon rumbled up, pulled by laughing apprentices and journeymen of whichever guild the play belonged to. Each wagon had promised new and unforeseen delights, and something of that long-past gladness leaped up in Joliffe at simply seeing “his” wagon here. But if he was feeling that gladness again, then it was not long-past, was it? He paused on that unexpected thought. Did gladness last as surely in the heart as sorrow seemed to?
When great sorrow came, it always seemed to shatter all gladness there had been, but that was a false seeming. Somewhere in the heart and mind the gladness still was. Did sorrow so often seem the stronger because people dwelt in it, clung to it, rather than turn to the gladness there had been and hold whole-heartedly to it? Was sorrow easier to have than joy? It was sorrow’s pain that gave sorrow such strength, he supposed. Pain in its first, terrible moments had a way of taking the mind away from everything else, and the worse the pain, the longer it held the mind. But to never let go of it? Never return to the gladness that still was if the mind and heart still held it?
There were things in his own life he would sorrow for until his death, almost all of them entwined beyond separating from some gladness that had gone before. Both were there in his heart and mind, so why let the sorrows outweigh the gladnesses? He had found all too terribly how sorrow could cling to mind and heart like a poisonous vine, but he had also found that treasured gladness could be a burning sun that withered sorrow, stopped its smothering growth. He would have his sorrows forever, yes, but he would hold to his gladnesses, too, treasuring them for their light and joy against sorrow’s darkness.
And thinking of sorrow’s darkness, he saw Cecily Kydwa sitting on a bench against a far wall of the yard. All the benches that had outlined the playing space these past days were gathered there now, out of the wagon’s way. Folded piles of clothing were set out along them, and Cecily was stitching at a seam in a length of dark cloth laid across her lap. Instantly guessing everything there was playing garb, Joliffe went to see it. The girl briefly looked up at him and quickly bent her head to her work again. She was not presently crying but Joliffe had glimpsed the swollen redness around her eyes and the strain of grief tightening her face. For her, alas, now was far too soon for any remembered gladness to be more than pain, he thought, but schooled his voice to ordinary curiosity as he asked, “So is this the last of the garb?”
“Most of them are only roughly together,” the girl said, stitching steadily without looking up again. “For you all to try on tonight. Then if they’re right, I’ll finish them.”
Voices from the gateway behind him told others were come in. For form’s sake, knowing it was of little use to her, he said gently, “I’m very sorry for your brother’s death.”
“Thank you,” she choked softly, still to her lap and hands, and Joliffe went to head off Hew and Dick and Tom crossing the yard to see the garb in their turn.
“We have to leave her alone,” he told them. “Else she won’t finish with what she needs to.”
Sendell and Burbage had finished with the frame for the playing house and now demanded Joliffe and Master Smale come help with putting the stairs together, with Hew and Dick to hand over the wooden pegs and mallets for pounding them when need be. While they worked, the rest of the company came in, singly and by pairs, and were swerved from going to look at their garb by Sendell, still struggling with the stairs, immediately calling for them to come put up and fasten down the boards for the playing house’s roof that would make the upper playing space. “Because I doubt our angels want to truly try hovering on air there,” he said.
Sight of the pageant wagon and the promise of trying on their garb seemed to work on everyone the same glad way it had on Joliffe. They joined to the work eagerly, and maybe Joliffe was the only one to notice that neither of the Emes were there yet. Only as the last pegs on stairs and boards were being knocked into place did Richard Eme stalk into the yard and over to the wagon.
“Here at last, are you?” said Sendell, tossing his mallet into the now-empty basket but not sounding particularly irked as he wiped sweat from his forehead. “You chose a good evening for being somewhat late. Where’s your brother?”
Richard Eme frowned around the yard as if expecting his brother to conjure himself out of thin air. When Ned failed to, Richard said, very irked, “I don’t know. I was hoping he would be here. Feckless as always, the fool.”
Now Sendell was frowning, too. “This isn’t the time for him to turn feckless if that’s what it is. Ah! I don’t need this now of all times!”
Powet put in easily, “Likely he’ll show up soon. He’s lost track of the time or some such foolery. He won’t miss a chance to wear those wings, that’s sure.”
Sendell gave an unwilling laugh at that, recovered at least his outward demeanor, and said, “You’ve God’s truth there. Come. Let’s try the garb. No,” he ordered, slowing everyone’s surge toward the benches. “Keep your hands off it all until Cecily gives you what’s yours. Prophets first. The rest of you after that as you come on in your parts.”
By then Cecily had finished and folded the robe she had been sewing, had set it beside the others along the benches, and now, still with downcast eyes, began taking up garb to hand to each man and boy as they came forward. She had given Joliffe and Richard Eme and Hew their robes and was handing over Simeon’s when a man Joliffe did not know came into the yard. He gave a quick look around, then crossed directly to Burbage, last in line, who did not see him coming until the fellow took hold on his elbow. Burbage startled. The man leaned near to say something close into his ear. A moment later Burbage snapped his head around, stared at him for one frozen instant, then veered out of line.
“I have to see to something,” he said to Sendell.
Sendell, frowning, had been opening his mouth toward protest, but at the urgency in Burbage’s voice, he closed off his protest and nodded acceptance of his leaving.
Spurred by Burbage’s urgency and with no better reason than his perhaps damnable curiosity, Joliffe dumped his prophet’s robe onto the one in Richard Eme’s arms, said, “Here. Hold it for me. Thanks,” and followed Burbage without even the courtesy of excusing himself to Sendell.
He briefly wondered if it was not an oversight on the theologians’ part to have failed to include Curiosity among the Deadly Sins.
Burbage and the man who had come for him were going out the gate at a walk not quite a run. With his longer legs, Joliffe was able to overtake them in the street, asking as he did, “Burbage, what is it? Not one of your sons?”
Instead of Burbage, the other man answered, too rattled to keep it in. “It’s Ned Eme. He’s hanging on our pageant wagon.”
Chapter 15
 
T
he smiths had begun readying their pageant wagon, too, but had yet to roll it out of its shed into the yard. Their shed being higher than the weavers’, they had been able, so far, to work sheltered against the likely chance of rain. With the westering sunlight slanting low and long into the shed, Joliffe could see the steps from the wagon to the ground were already in place and that the stage house’s frame at the wagon’s far end was up. Deeply involved in his own work as he had been, he had not yet taken in much about other guilds’ plays, but here a thick post fixed to one side of the wagon, a high crosspiece thrusting out to one side, could only be the “tree” from which Judas was said to have hung himself in his despair and guilt. That meant the smiths’ pageant must be Christ’s Passion and Crucifixion, that being the play that usually had Judas’ death. When the wagon was rolled out of the pageant house, that cross-arm would thrust out over the yard and then over the street. Here it thrust merely toward a wall. And here and now it should have been bare, no more than an empty possibility of a gallows.
Instead a body hung from it.
The man who had come for Burbage had been gabbling all the way across the yard, saying he had come to measure for a new board needed to replace a broken one for the wagon’s floor, that he’d swung the doors wide to have enough light, had seen the body hanging and thought it was someone’s ill jest, a counterfeit man hanging there.
“Then I found it wasn’t. It’s Ned Eme. I swear it. I looked into his face. Even strangled, I could tell it’s him, Christ have mercy and all the saints defend us.”
He crossed himself, then fell abruptly silent as the three of them stopped together in the doorway, both he and Burbage apparently as unwilling as Joliffe was to go in. To go in was to take the first step toward everything that would come afterward, and everything that came afterward was going to be terrible.
But there was no going back from where they were. There was only onward.
Still, Joliffe held where he was, waiting for one of the other men to go first because it was not his place. He was an outsider, a looker-on to all these people’s lives—and now death. And yet when Burbage finally went forward, Joliffe could not help himself but followed immediately on his heels. Burbage gave a backward glance at him but did not protest his company. The other man stayed in the doorway, probably having seen enough. Nor did it take long for Joliffe to see enough, too.
A strangled man’s face was a mockery of his face alive. Blackened and swollen out of shape with gathered blood, tongue thrust out, eyes in a glazed glare . . .
Despite all that, there was no doubt. It was Ned Eme hanging there.
“Christ have mercy,” Burbage said in echo of the other man, as he and Joliffe, almost as one, signed the cross on themselves and stepped farther back from the dangling body.

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