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Authors: Margaret Frazer

BOOK: A Play of Heresy
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Joliffe followed the track. He had no way to tell which of the rear yards he passed belonged to the Byfeld house. He had to be satisfied with finding the track ended at the far corner of the orchard, did not go through to Gosford Street but went far enough that one of the yards it passed had to be the Byfelds’.
So now he knew how . . . someone . . . might have gone a long way round to the smiths’ pageant house without the near neighbors remarking on the lateness of the hour for a walk. It made what he had guessed a little possible and opened the next step he would have to take. The problem was how to take that step. He saw no way to it this afternoon.
Or was it that he did not want to see a way to it?
He shook he head against that as he went back the way he had come. No. This was something that had to be seen through to the end, no matter how much more grief that end was going to bring if he were right. For now, though, the only thing to do was wait, and he went off to join in whatever Basset, Rose, and the others were doing with their day.
Chapter 23
 
A
s it happened, Basset and the others were taking the afternoon at their ease. Against all likelihood, Rose had yesterday declared the garb for Basset’s play was done, so even she was having a restful day. She had seen to them all going together to morning Mass at Holy Trinity, that being the Silcoks’ church, but was not pushing their devotion further than that. When Joliffe came up the stairs into their chamber, he found all signs of sewing had been tidied away. The garb, carefully folded, was set out in piles along the work table, and the players’ sleeping pallets and floor cushions were scattered over the floor, with Ellis lain out on one of them, snoring slightly in pleasant sleep. Rose and Piers were sitting on cushions in the patch of sunlight through the far window, playing at something on the game board set between them. Basset, Gil, and—somewhat to Joliffe’s surprise—Will Sendell were sprawled at ease at the room’s other end, talking in apparent good cheer, with cups in hand and a pitcher set in their midst.
They all waved for Joliffe to join them. He did willingly and for the rest of the afternoon lost himself in the rich and satisfying talk of their shared world of plays and fellow players present and past, roads traveled and places seen, good times and bad. Their laughter over how, years ago, their playing of Noah and the Flood was washed out by a thunder-burst and downpour at the very moment Noah welcomed his wife into the boat wakened Ellis sufficiently for him to growl without opening his eyes, “It wasn’t that laughable at the time.”
“It wasn’t,” Basset agreed, his smile nonetheless unabated.
“But then there was the time,” Ellis went on, sitting up, “when—” and he was away on one of his own favorite stories that had them wiping the laughter-tears from their eyes by the time he finished.
All in all, it was a better afternoon than Joliffe had had in a long while, and at the end they all—Rose and Piers, too, of course—went out to supper together, with Rose reminding them as they went of how they had tried to use the infant Piers as the Infant Jesus and how that had turned out.
“I remember,” Will Sendell laughed. “He kept wiggling out of the swaddling bands. I didn’t know babies
could
wiggle out of swaddling bands.”
“They shouldn’t be able to,” Rose said with a dryness only Joliffe could have matched. “But he did.”
“Looking back, I can see it was done for kindness on his part,” Joliffe offered. “He didn’t want us ever mistakenly having hope he was sweet and biddable.”
“Hai!” Piers protested. “I’m biddable. You can bid me all you want.” His most mischievous grin spread over his face. “I just won’t do it if I don’t want to.”
A chorus of general agreement answered him, and Ellis tousled his hair in the way Piers claimed to most dislike. That was become a more perilous deed now that Piers was so well grown, but this time Piers only ducked out from under Ellis’ hand and punched his shoulder in friendly fashion, and afterward went along the street with Ellis holding Rose by the hand on one side and his arm over Piers’ shoulders on the other, plainly well-content in each other’s company.
They dined in a good inn on the marketplace. Basset insisted Sendell was their guest. Sendell insisted back that he would at least buy a pitcher of wine for them to share. That turned into several pitchers of wine, with Joliffe buying the second and Ellis the third, while Basset said he would pay for the meal. It was altogether as good an afternoon-into-evening as Joliffe had spent in a long, long while. Their players’ talk went on, continuing to call up the mischances and bon-chances that had come along their way. “Or that we’ve tripped on and fallen sprawling over,” Ellis mock-grumbled.
They all laughed, Ellis, too. All in all there was a great deal of laughter. Will’s lost company was not forgotten, nor some mischances over which there could be no laughter even now. But likewise there was the continuing thought under it all, in Joliffe’s mind at least, that all things pass and that, come what may, the present moment is when he and everyone lived. All the rest was past or to come, and if now was very good, it should be enjoyed to the full.
When time came he had to leave them, Joliffe’s regret was real and deep. He was jibed at for going, with laughing demands to know where he would have better time than with them. He jibed back that change gave life its savour. Piers declared he had found himself a girl somewhere in Coventry. Joliffe laid a finger along his nose and said as if imparting a deep secret, “The less said, the less pestered, youngling,” and sauntered out.
The long almost mid-summer afterglow of sunset still filled the western sky. Reportedly, curfew would not be very closely kept these last few days before Corpus Christi as the town filled with outside folk come for the festival and plays, when it was wanted they have as many hours as possible to spend their money. The long twilight at this time of the year aided that. Would aid him, too, with what he purposed. Supposing he was right in his guesses, of course. Supposing . . . supposing . . . supposing.
He had been supposing much through yesterday and today. Now he would find how much of his supposing was true.
 
 
She was already there, walking in the orchard, just as he had . . . supposed she might be. There were not many ways or chances to be alone from a house over-full of people. The orchard was there, just beyond the back gate, and no reason why she should not, as other people did, walk there in the last daylight, for ease after the day’s work. Given all her present grief, no one would refuse her that small solace nor force their company on her when she said she wanted to walk alone. It would be only kindness to let her do so, as well as perhaps a relief to everyone else in the house to have her away for a while, taking the weight of her grief with her.
Because there were others—not all of them couples—strolling along the paths wound through the orchard, she took no immediate heed of Joliffe until he came directly in her way and stayed there. Forced to halt, she lifted her gaze from the ground and for a moment openly did not know him.
“Mistress Deyster,” he said.
Anna Deyster rearranged her face from whatever stark place her thoughts had been. “My uncle is at home, I think,” she said, dropped her gaze again, and made to go around him.
Joliffe let her, but turned and fell into step beside her, saying, “It’s you I meant to see here.”
Her step faltered, then went steady again. Her gaze stayed down, and with taut dismissal in her tone, she said, “I don’t want to be seen.”
Everything about her, not just her voice, was taut. Joliffe thought she was like a tightly twisted rope that if released would go whipping wildly out of control, lashing around and around until finally limp. Watching her from the side of his eyes but carefully keeping only quietness in his own voice, Joliffe said, “My guess is that you’ve taken to walking alone in the orchard most evenings.”
“Yes,” she all but snapped. But since it seemed he was not going to go away, she made an attempt at easing her voice and said with strained lightness, “I think my mother worries that I hope to meet Robyn’s ghost here in the twilight.”
“Do you?”
“Do I what? Meet him? Or hope to meet him?”
“Either. Both.”
“No.” She bit down on the word as if she meant it to be her last, then said as if bitterly unable to hold it in, “Hope is gone out of everything.”
Joliffe waited three paces. He could feel her, in the darkness of her thoughts, begin to forget he was there. Into her darkness he said quietly, “I should think you’d be afraid it was another ghost you might meet here.”
Her look at him questioned what he meant, as if she truly did not seem to understand. Joliffe felt a qualm that he was very much gone the wrong way, but he finished his thought. “Ned Eme’s ghost.”
Anna Deyster jerked to a stop and turned on him. Even in the blue shadowing of the evening he could see the tightening of fury take her face. “Ned?” she spat out. “His ghost? His soul went surely straight to Hell the instant he was dead. There’ll be no coming back by him, nor ever prayers enough to shift his damned soul to Heaven. He died damned and he’ll stay that way.”
Joliffe waited the length of a slow-drawn breath before saying quietly into the evening darkness, “You made certain sure of that.”
Her rage against Ned had burned up her awareness of what she should and should not say. Remembering now, too late, she seemed to shrink. Even as Joliffe looked at her, she dwindled from a woman furyed enough to have killed a man to simply a woman very tired and ready to be done with it.
“Yes,” she said, matching his quietness. “I made certain sure.” Still quietly, almost inevitably, she asked, “How do you know?”
“When Master Fylongley was questioning you and your family, nothing was said about when Ned had supposedly hung himself. Everyone seemed to be taking it he had done it the day he was found. We hadn’t said otherwise. But when Master Fylongley asked when each of you had last seen Ned, you shivered and crossed yourself and said not yesterday of course. The ‘of course’ was because you knew he had been hanging there all that day
and
the night before it, too, not merely for a few hours before he was found.”
She said, “Ah,” and moved on.
Joliffe moved with her, matching her slow walk, saying, “It was a little strange, too, that you didn’t remember when you last saw him. It’s usually the first thing someone remembers when they hear of a death: the last time I saw him was . . . But your brother had to remind you.”
“Ah,” she said again.
“Was it then, in the street that morning, that you asked him to meet you in the smiths’ pageant house that evening?”
Her eyes still on the path in front of them, she said, “Yes. We’d played there—all around there—as children. We both knew how to go there by the back way without drawing heed. I let him think I wanted to talk with him where we’d likely be unbothered by anyone. He didn’t think about the Judas tree being there.”
The anger and force of will that had let her do what she had done was again in her voice and the clutch of her hands together. Joliffe, keeping his own voice even and low, said, “But you thought of it.”
When she did not answer that, he asked his own inevitable question. “Why?”
She twisted her head from one side to the other, refusing an answer.
“He said something to you the day before that made you angry at him,” Joliffe pushed, his voice still quiet. “Made you angry enough to kill him. What was it? Did he tell you he’d killed Robyn Kydwa?”
Anna Deyster drew the harsh breath of someone struck a painful blow. She stopped, swaying a little where she stood. Joliffe held back from reaching out to steady her. This was not a woman ready to be touched.
“Yes,” she hissed. “He was at me again to marry him. He said he had waited so long to have me. He said Robyn wasn’t worth mourning over. He said Robyn was . . . was . . .”
She could not get the word out, was choking on it. Joliffe said it for her. “A spy.”
“Yes.” This time she spat the word. “He said Robyn was a spy against Lollards here in Coventry and that he killed him to protect his family and others.”
“Do they need protecting?”
“No! There’s no one needs protecting here! That was just Ned’s excuse. Ned’s
lie
!”
Not entirely Ned’s lie. Robyn Kydwa
had
been spying. But Joliffe could also believe Ned had used that for excuse to do what he wanted to do—rid himself of a rival for a woman he meant to have. Either way, at the last it did not much matter what was true in the layers of why Ned Eme had murdered two men, or what Anna Deyster believed or refused to believe. The end and sum of it all was that between them, she and Ned had killed three men in brutal, ugly ways. But Joliffe still had a question and now was the time for it, while she was still talking, before she maybe wound herself tightly closed again, not understanding that it was too late for silence to do her any good now.
“How did you do it? How were you able to hang Ned? He can’t have simply let you.”
She stopped walking and laughed, a bitter, ugly, terrible sound. Joliffe was almost glad the twilight had deepened enough he could no longer clearly see her face as she said with scorn and bitterness, “It was so easy. I was there first, to ready things. When he came, I was standing on the wagon, waiting for him just where I needed to be. I told him I was weakening toward him, that I hadn’t wanted to meet somewhere we’d be seen because it was too soon to be seen I was giving up Robyn, but still I was weakening. He believed that. He tried to put his arms around me. I backed away, said I was still torn over it all, asked him to turn away from me while I gathered myself to part from memory of Robyn forever.” Everything except contempt left her voice. “He truly believed I was that weak and a fool. He turned his back on me. The rope and the noose had been already up when I came there. I’d only had to make sure the noose was in reach when he turned away from me. I threw it over his head, jerked it tight while he was still too startled to do anything, and pushed him off the wagon to swing and choke. To swing and choke,” she repeated viciously, then choked herself on what sounded like her own anger and triumph and sickened memory all together.

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