A Play of Heresy (26 page)
Authors: Margaret Frazer
Despite that, he lingered at St. Thomas’ altar long enough to light a candle and make a silent prayer. Saint Thomas the Doubter appealed to him today: he felt full of doubts. But with the prayer said, he had equal urge to be out of the church and away and left the way he had come. For reward—if it could be called that—he found Sebastian sitting in apparent ease on the broad stone edge of the horse trough.
Joliffe stopped beside him with the idle air of a man who had nowhere in particular to go happening on another idle man doing nothing in particular. Sebastian, hands loose in his lap, one foot swinging easily, said with no ease at all or any greeting, “What’s this about Eme killing himself? When? How did you get into the middle of it?”
Joliffe told him how he had got into the middle of it and all the rest. Only at the end, having deliberately saved it, did he say, “But he didn’t kill himself. Someone else did for him.”
Sebastian, who had been letting his gaze drift everywhere except at Joliffe, constantly making sure no one was within hearing of them, snapped his head around to stare at him. “What?”
Joliffe repeated himself and went on to tell what he, his fellow jurors, the crowner, and bailiff were all agreed on.
As if unable to contain himself, Sebastian stood up from the trough’s rim, took several deep, apparently angry breaths, and sat down again. “Damnation.”
“Indeed,” Joliffe agreed.
They contemplated a pair of women going into the church with their market baskets on their arms and then a passing rider and horse before Sebastian said, “So how does this change how we see Kydwa’s death?”
The question, although aloud, was more to himself than Joliffe, but Joliffe answered anyway. “That someone else killed them? Ned Eme suspected who, let them know it, and was killed in his turn?”
“Who?” Sebastian demanded.
Joliffe shrugged to show that not only did he not know, he had no one else to suggest for any of the murders.
“No,” Sebastian said. “No, I think we should hold to it being Eme who killed Kydwa and his man. What we learned holds too well together for it to be someone else. If he didn’t kill them with his own hand, he helped someone else with hiding the bodies. We can well suppose he did it because Kydwa must have found out something against Lollards here. Eme and his family being Lollards, that would give Eme reason to kill him, to protect his people. Or help someone else kill him.”
“They were rivals for a woman, too,” Joliffe pointed out.
“Another reason, yes. Added to the first, it would have made killing Kydwa all the easier, I suppose.” His tone laid open his low opinion of mankind as a whole, able to use such a fool’s reason for murder. “So if we hold to Ned Eme having killed Kydwa or helped in killing him and hiding the body—bodies—we’re left with the question of who killed him.”
“And why.”
“Why is easy enough. Lollards covering their tracks.”
“One Lollard,” Joliffe said. “Two or more would have made a better business of hanging him. It was clumsily done.”
“One Lollard then.”
“But why would any Lollard need to kill him, if any Lollard did? He either killed or else helped in the killing of Kydwa and his man. I think we’re right about that. But no suspicion was turned toward him or toward anyone in Coventry at all. Why need him dead?”
Sebastian swung his foot, kicking his heel against the side of the trough in several dull thuds, before answering, “I don’t know. There must be something else.” He stood up. “So find out. I’ll see you just past mid-day tomorrow at the Angel outside Spon Gate.” And he strolled off like a man taking his idleness elsewhere, having used up all he could of it here.
Joliffe carefully did not watch him go, simply turned and strolled off another way in apparently matching idleness, as if he had nowhere in particular to go or anything in particular to do. Unfortunately, both were true. He did not know where to go and he had no clear thought of what he should do. He settled the first part of that by going back to the smiths’ pageant wagon yard. He was somewhat surprised to find the gate still unlocked and more surprised to find no gawkers in the yard itself. The folk who always came to see where something bad had happened must have already gawked their fill. After all there was not anything to see except an empty yard. Both body and rope had been taken away yesterday. There was only the empty pageant wagon to be seen in its shed and even he had no interest in that. What he wanted was to try out the way he had seen Piers and the other boys come and go from the yard, by that narrow alleyway between sheds to a rear gate.
He found the rear gate as unlocked as the fore gate. Given it was no more than a few thin boards nailed together by crosspieces and hung on rope hinges, the cost of a lock would have been wasted anyway. The gate was not even fully shut, sagging down to the dirt path outside it, leaving a boy-wide gap. Plainly the locked doors of the sheds were what mattered in keeping the wagons safe, and Joliffe had gathered that even those were left open as often as not this time of year.
He made to push the gate open sufficient for him to go out, but thought better of it and instead put only his head and one shoulder through and looked down at the path. The curved scrape marked in the dirt there showed that sometime lately the gate had been shoved wider open—or else been dragged, depending on which way someone had been going—to let someone larger than a boy go through. It had then been closed again as far as its sag would let it go. None of that meant anything. Joliffe pushed the gate wider open again, finding the scrape marked how far it would altogether go before it caught and stuck again about a third of the way to fully open.
He went through the gateway, onto the path. He was willing to guess it had been a field path before Coventry grew this far to the east. On one side of it, the houses along Mill Lane backed their narrow gardens along it, except where places like the pageant wagons’ yard instead had only the blank back wall of their buildings to it. On the path’s other side, the trees of an orchard showed above a tall wicker fence. Going left, a little walking brought him to the river. There the path split to run both ways along the riverbank. From his wandering through and around Coventry, he could guess that a short way to his left again the path would come to the mill that gave Mill Lane its name, while to the right it would curve with the river around the orchard, the river to pass under Gosford Bridge at the end of Gosford Street, the path presumably to come out there unless it first dead-ended against someone’s garden wall. He turned back to follow the path its other way, past the sagging gate and toward Gosford Street.
The houses along Gosford Street were the larger ones of merchants who had prospered enough to move somewhat out of the crowded center of Coventry. They had taken advantage of building anew to make large rear gardens, all abutting on the orchard, Joliffe presumed. A stone wall replaced the wicker fence when it came, at the pathway’s end, to run along the garden-side of the house that faced onto Gosford Street. The house itself had spread its upper storeys sideways, roofing the path into a passageway. Under the overhang of those upper floors, the path opened onto Gosford Street. Joliffe stood there at the path’s end for a moment, looking out and to either side along the street, busy with passersby at this early hour of the afternoon, just as it was most hours of the day. No one seemed to give him any particular heed, and he turned and went back to the gate.
For a few moments longer, he studied it and the path there but learned nothing more from it. The path was well-used. He knew boys certainly came and went along its way and without doubt other people did likewise, as a short cut away from the streets. The few inches of black thread he now bent to pluck from a rough bit of wood near the bottom of one gatepost could have come from anyone. Of itself it told him nothing, probably because it meant nothing. Most things in life seemed to mean nothing when all was said and done. Usually “meaning” came simply out of whatever passing urge people happened to put on a thing.
Except scholars. They were another matter altogether. Scholars, by what Joliffe had experienced of them, worked hard to give meaning to things no matter how great the effort needed, no matter how unlikely the meaning they devised. Then, having devised it, they began to disagree among themselves over whether that meaning was sufficient or even, after all, correct.
Joliffe looked for a long moment at the thread on the palm of his hand, but it still told him nothing, and he bent and put it back where he had found it, hooking it carefully to the wood again for no better reason than the completeness of the thing. Besides, he had no way to keep it safe, would only lose it if he took it with him, so why bother?
He went into the yard and stood a while, thinking. Ned and whoever else had come here two evenings ago had surely come by the path, not openly along the street. The bailiffs would undoubtedly ask folk hereabouts about both possibilities, but no one was likely to remember from two days ago seeing someone turn onto the path from Gosford Street or the Mill. The path was too used for anyone to take such note. Someone might remember seeing Ned Eme go that way, now he was made memorable by being dead.
Except of course he probably had not gone that way. Two days ago he had had supper with his family, then come to rehearse the play
and left early
. All he need have done then was go across and a little along the lane and into the yard here. Only his murderer need have troubled to come the back way.
and left early
. All he need have done then was go across and a little along the lane and into the yard here. Only his murderer need have troubled to come the back way.
Unfortunately that still left it unlikely he would be remembered by anyone, especially if he had kept Ned waiting and come by dark.
Well enough. To another question then, one that might do some good to ask. Why here? Why the smiths’ pageant wagon at all?
The immediate answer that came to Joliffe was: For the sake of hanging Ned on the Judas tree. But that brought another question: Why had someone chosen hanging for Ned when there were other, easier ways in plenty to kill a man?
The ready answer to that was that someone saw Ned as some manner of Judas and had wanted him to die as Judas had, hung on the Judas tree, that dark opposite to the Tree of the Cross where Christ had died in self-sacrifice. But then . . . who had seen Ned as a Judas? Who was Ned supposed to have betrayed?
Robyn Kydwa was the obvious answer. But that supposed someone else knew Ned had killed him and his servant. Always supposing that Ned really had and not someone else.
Joliffe had to face that there was chance he and Sebastian had got it wrong—that Ned Eme was not the murderer they had been seeking. But if not Ned, then who? And if someone else, then what was the why of Ned’s death?
There had to be a link. There
must
be a link. Otherwise it all became too strange, too beyond hope of reckoning any sense from it.
must
be a link. Otherwise it all became too strange, too beyond hope of reckoning any sense from it.
Not that life—or death—had to make sense. All too often they seemed not to. But in this . . . Somewhere there was a link between the deaths.
Unfortunately Joliffe had only the barest of guesses at what the link was. And if Sebastian was right and all of this had to do with Lollards, then his guessed-at link was no link at all.
Chapter 20
J
oliffe took his way along the streets slowly back to the Silcoks’ yard, thinking as he went. Maybe Ned had been
supposed
to kill Kydwa and his servant. Maybe everything had been set and settled for it to go just as he and Sebastian had already guessed at, except Ned had backed out, not done his part, had left the ugliness to someone else and afterward been seen as a link that had to be severed. Or maybe he was never meant to do more than provide the place for the murders and the hiding of the bodies, but because that meant he knew more than the murderer was comfortable with, he had to be done away with, too.
oliffe took his way along the streets slowly back to the Silcoks’ yard, thinking as he went. Maybe Ned had been
supposed
to kill Kydwa and his servant. Maybe everything had been set and settled for it to go just as he and Sebastian had already guessed at, except Ned had backed out, not done his part, had left the ugliness to someone else and afterward been seen as a link that had to be severed. Or maybe he was never meant to do more than provide the place for the murders and the hiding of the bodies, but because that meant he knew more than the murderer was comfortable with, he had to be done away with, too.
That all made sense, in its bent way. Except it made no sense when set against the hanging on the Judas tree. Why use that complicated way to kill a man unless it meant something particular?
In the Silcoks’ yard, standing beside the players’ cart, he considered going up to their room, but it was likely busy with sewing women at present. Sewing and talking. Possibly talking about the murder, so maybe there was something to be overheard and learned, but he was suddenly aware of being greatly tired, and instead of anything more ambitious, he loosed the rear flaps of the tilt, crawled in, and tied them behind him. With so much carried up to the room, there was presently place enough here for him to stretch out along the hampers that remained. He did, one arm bent under his head for cushion. He had slept in places no less uncomfortable. All that mattered was being tired enough, and it seemed he was because very shortly he went soundly asleep.
If he dreamed, his dreams were insufficient to trouble him after he awoke. Aware by the slant of sunlight against the canvas tilt that the afternoon was well along, he sat up, taking care to ease and stretch himself after his hard lying. He was still sitting, arms crossed on his up-drawn knees, when he heard Piers talking cheerfully about fishing with Tad Burbage. Not so cheerfully, Ellis answered him, “They’re all a bit younger than you, by the look of them.”
“Older means they’re apprenticed, not free to run anymore whenever they want to,” Piers said, sounding proud of his own freedom.
Ellis grunted in a doubtful way that made Joliffe wonder what he was thinking, but at the same moment Basset said, his voice slightly raised, “I’m hoping that’s Joliffe in the cart.”
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