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Authors: Margaret Frazer

BOOK: A Play of Heresy
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Basset gave him a half bow. “I’ve always taught that a player never turns down an offer to be fed. To be true to my teaching and set you a proper example, I must perforce accept your offer.”
Joliffe half bowed in return. “You are most kind, as well as faithful to your word.”
“Also,” Basset added briskly, “I know where Will Sendell is likely to be dining.”
Joliffe committed himself to no more than, “Ah,” being still uncertain how he felt about meeting up with Sendell after all this while.
Out of the yard and into the street, they turned the opposite way from the tavern where Joliffe had stopped yesterday. A slight early morning rain followed by a clearing sky had Coventry shining in warm summer sunlight, and the scattered crowd of various folk bustling about late morning errands or heading home or elsewhere to their own dinners seemed in a general good humour. Weaving their way among them, Joliffe said as much to Basset who agreed, adding, “This is their time of year, as it were. With Corpus Christi coming and the weather promising to go on as it has been, there’ll be hundreds of out-comers pouring into town for the plays, spending money to make the merchants, innkeepers, tavern-holders, and everyone who works for them joyous with prosperity.”
“And us.”
“I am already joyous with prosperity,” Basset said. “They can only make me more joyous.”
They turned into a narrower street than Earl Street, well-paved between scrubbed doorsteps of shop-fronted houses, then soon turned again, down a short passage into a cobbled yard set about with benches beside a few trestle tables. One table, set across one of the doorways into the yard, had a servant man standing behind it, pouring something from a leather jack into a wooden cup held by a man across from him. Perhaps a dozen other people were scattered among the tables with cups and food. Basset, with no apparent need to look around, turned toward a table and two men in the yard’s nearest corner. Both men were sitting with hunched shoulders, their hands wrapped tightly around the cups on the table in front of them, seemingly brooding into their cups’ depths as if there were their last hope on earth before damnation took them. They both looked up as Basset and Joliffe came their way. One of the men was altogether unfamiliar. The other . . .
Will Sendell had not aged well in the years since Joliffe had last seen him. Never a sturdily built man and already begun to lose his hair all those years ago, he was well toward bald now and as weathered away and roughened as an old gatepost beaten on by too many seasons of bad weather. He had always been someone full of thoughts and forward-driving ambitions, who would sit leaning forward beside the players’ fire in the nights, debating with Basset across the flames what the company should try next, where they should go. In the days before times turned to the bad, he had strode along roads with his head up and a readiness for whatever the next town or village or manor might offer.
Here, now, he looked only aged and tired.
And defeated? Was that defeat instead of only weariness in the slump of his head and shoulders?
At any rate, there was nothing there of him as Joliffe had last seen him, setting off on the road away from the company with no backward look or wave, a man just coming into the fullness of his life and ready to face all. Presently he looked ready to face nothing, including the effort of raising that cup to his mouth.
That Joliffe knew him immediately despite all that was as disconcerting as the rest. How much did a man have to change before someone who had known him would fail to know him again?
Just as disconcertingly, Joliffe found he was asking the question about himself.
“Will!” Basset said heartily. “Here he is. I said he’d finally show himself. Joliffe, sit you down. I’ll fetch ours.”
Basset veered away toward the serving table. Joliffe, feeling abandoned, sat himself down on the nearer bench beside the man he did not know, across from Will Sendell who had raised his head at Basset’s greeting and now stared at Joliffe as if he were trying to care he were there. Joliffe had more than half thought he would be drunk, but he was not. His gaze was fuddled with misery maybe, but not with drink. Clear-voiced enough and even with a kind of welcome, he said, “Joliffe. After all this time. Who would have thought it?”
Remembering what Basset had told him about Will Sendell’s past few years, Joliffe thought better of asking him how things were with him; instead said, “Who would have thought it indeed. How goes this play I hear you have in hand?”
Sendell’s face twisted into wry bitterness. “It’s a bastard of a play. Endless talking and nothing else. Worse, I have to find a half-grown boy who can look like holy Christ and not gibber his lines. Much luck may I have at
that
.”
“There’s Powet’s nephew,” the other man said. “You might as well try him. Powet says he’s likely to do if there’s none other.”
“I may have to,” Sendell said, much as if admitting need to have a tooth pulled, but his gaze had stayed on Joliffe, and he now demanded, “Ever got around to telling anyone your whole name?”
From the first, Basset had made a jest of Joliffe never telling his whole name and over the years gave him various names in place of the missing one, with “Joliffe” sometimes first, sometimes second, keeping the jest going and no one else in the company caring except Will Sendell. For him the whole thing had grown into some kind of offense. It still seemed to be, but when Joliffe answered, deliberately lightly, “No,” Sendell unexpectedly grinned and said, albeit with a bitter edge, “That’s the way. Don’t give away more to the world than you have to. Lesson well learned.”
Basset returned, a thick-pastried pork pie on a wooden plate balanced on top of the two cups he carried. Setting it all on the table, he said to the man beside Joliffe, “Master Burbage. How goes the world with you?”
“As ever. And you?”
“As ever and all the better for Joliffe being here.” Basset shifted around to sit beside Sendell, across from Joliffe. With his belt-hung dagger, he cut the pie into reasonably equal quarters and handed a piece to Joliffe while asking Sendell, “So. Think you can find a use for him?”
“Probably. Better than letting him wander around with nothing to do.” Sendell and Ellis had always shared a belief that Joliffe needed watching.
Joliffe, taking a first sip from his cup, made a surprised sound. He had been paying heed to Basset and Sendell, not to the ale he expected. Now he held the cup away from him, peering into it as he said, “Wine? When did we rise to heights affording wine?” He looked around the yard, with all its seeming of an alewife’s place, and added, “Coventry is so prospering that they drink wine where the rest of the world can only afford ale?”
Basset laughed at him, and Master Burbage answered, “Master Dagette is a wine merchant here. This is wine that suffered enough in its travels that he doesn’t think it good enough for his high-paying folk. So he gives it over to his wife for this that used to be her ale shop. We get it not too highly priced, which makes us happy, and she and Master Dagette make a profit on it after all, which keeps them from being too gloomy.” He took up his own mostly-eaten pork pie from the table and added, “A while back, for good measure, Mistress Dagette decided the cookshop down the street was making money she would rather have. So she added food to what she sells here.”
“That can’t have pleased the cookshop,” Joliffe said.
“She buys it from the cookshop, then sells it to us for dearer than she paid. But the wine is here, so here we are, too, with no need to go anywhere else from day’s beginning to day’s end if we don’t want to.”
As he bit heavily into the pie and chewed away, Basset belatedly said by way of proper introduction, “Joliffe, this is Master John Burbage of Bayley Lane. Master Burbage, this is our straying player, come to roost. Likely he’s going to share the honors with you in Master Sendell’s play.”
“He can have my share and welcome to them,” Master Burbage said thickly around a mouthful of pie.
“Supposing Master Sendell is indeed taking me on,” Joliffe said.
“Oh, aye,” said Sendell. “No reason not to.” He brightened a little. “Likely you can have a try at leading Eustace Powet’s nephew toward being more Christ and less a Coventry street-brat.”
Seemingly much cheered by that thought, he set about finishing his own piece of pie as if food suddenly interested him. Joliffe went warily at his own, only to find it was richly savory. Nor was the wine bad, either. On the whole and aside from Sendell and his apparently despised play, he thought that, given the chance, he could get fond of Coventry. What pity he had met Sebastian on the way to here. Sooner or later, like it or not, he would have to give some manner of heed toward the questions Sebastian wanted asked. The trouble with those questions was that Joliffe could hardly, out of nowhere, ask someone, “Know anything about a Master Kydwa?” or—even less possible—“So. What do you know of Lollards hereabouts?”
That left him willing to suppose the best he could do for now was let the matter ride its own way. Here and now the wine was good, the pie was good, and he switched his mind back to the other men’s talk, with Sendell presently saying, “Aye, Basset. You’ll do well with the Nativity and all. I’m glad it’s you that got it. You’re someone who’ll make the most and more of what’s there. But what am I going to do with Christ at the Temple? There’s nothing there!”
Master Burbage nodded ready agreement. “A whole play of nothing happening. It’s painful, is what it is. Other years all the lookers-on have taken the chance to go to a tavern while waiting for it to move on and the next play roll into place.”
Sendell looked at Joliffe. “Do you know the play?”
Caught with his mouth full of pie, Joliffe shook his head that he did not. Not as it was done here in Coventry anyway.
Like a man who has to keep picking at a sore or digging at an itch, Sendell said, “Prophets. It starts with two prophets. They stand there talking about everything that was in the play everyone just saw. Basset’s play, that’ll be. Speeches and speeches of talking about what everyone has just seen.”
“That’s when people start going away to the taverns,” Master Burbage offered.
“The prophets finally finish, and then Simeon comes on, and
he
talks,” Sendell said.
“And talks,” Master Burbage added unhelpfully.
“Then Ane comes on and she and Simeon
both
talk. She leaves and an Angel comes and talks, telling Simeon what will happen next.”
“Angels can save a play,” Basset offered.
“Or at least slow its sinking like a holed ship,” Sendell returned. “That’s the best I can hope for here. I’ve some thought of keeping things afloat with some celestial music. Hire someone with a portative organ.”
“That could well be useful,” Basset agreed. A portative organ, with its short board of keys and single or double rank of pipes and easily carried, could well be used for a play.
Joliffe, swallowing, nodded matching approval. “That’s a good thought. Basset, you’re not having other than singing, are you?”
“Just singing by my angels and the cradle-song by the Bethlehem mothers.”
Sendell went on, “The Angel goes away and Simeon talks to his clerk. Then the Angel appears to Mary to tell her to take the Child to the Temple, and there’s a long bit between her and Joseph, with Joseph doing the foolish-old-man business that everyone expects of Joseph. Then the Angel appears to
him
and after that he and Mary take the Infant Christ to the Temple where everybody talks and Simeon does his Nunc Dimittis
.
”
“Which is no surprise to anyone,” Master Burbage said. “Those that are still there.”
“Then,” Sendell said gloomily, “it’s suddenly twelve years later, and Mary and Joseph are losing the twelve-year-old Christ at the Temple and finding him with the scholarly Doctors there. Talking.”
“Lots and
lots
of talking,” Master Burbage agreed. “I’m Primus Doctor.”
“Then it’s over,” Sendell said, “and everybody who hasn’t been listening to us comes back from the tavern and the pageant wagon is hauled on for us to be tedious at the next site.”
Joliffe could not deny that it was certainly tedious in the telling, but for something to say to the good, he tried, “Have you started to rehearse yet?”
“We read through the thing yesterday evening,” Sendell said. All too openly, that had given him no joy. “The trouble is that everyone knows the play. So, except for Master Burbage here, all among our good citizens who are any good at playing have chosen to go into other plays if they could. I’m left with a pack not fit for anyone else to take.”
“That’s not all to the fair,” Burbage protested. “There’s Eustace Powet and Ned Eme. They’re fit enough. That’s three of us.”
“And me,” Joliffe said with forced brightness, hoping to give an upward turn to the talk.
“And you,” Sendell granted. “Do you still play women’s parts?”
“Not much anymore, but I still can.” Joliffe was no longer as suited to playing maidens and fair damsels as when he had been a barely bearded youth. Those were Gil’s parts now, but he could still play an older woman if need be.

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