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Authors: Margaret Frazer

BOOK: A Play of Heresy
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Sendell brooded at him. “I could use you for Ane the Prophetess maybe. Nobody wants to be her. I’d rather have you for the Angel, but there’s no hope of pulling Ned loose from that.”
“He won’t be shifted,” Burbage confirmed. “Fancies himself in flowing robes and those high wings too much. He could have my Second Prophet, though, and welcome.”
Sendell looked at him, surprised. “You’d give it up?”
“Willingly. I have the demons in the Harrowing of Hell on my hands, remember, and could do with less here. I’ll stay a Doctor in the Temple, and Master Joliffe can face off with Richard Eme.” He added to Joliffe, to explain that last, “Our Richard fancies himself giving those great, long prophet-speeches.”
“Fancies himself altogether too much,” Sendell muttered. “I may have to start the organ playing even before the Angel comes on, just to drown his droning.”
Basset clapped him on the shoulder. “Heart up, Will. Have Joliffe look at your script. He’s done some bettering of mine. There might be something he can do to yours.”
“Like turn it into a different play,” Sendell said. He stood up. “I’m off to talk with Master Grynder, to see what money the weavers are willing to put toward this thing. I’ve hope of prying some more out of them than they’ve muttered about so far.” He gave Basset a one-sided twist of a smile. “They’re a bit worried about what they’re hearing the shearmen and tailors have in hand for the Nativity and all.”
“Tell him you’ve heard talk they’re dealing with the goldsmiths to have real jewels and better than well-shined brass for the Three Kings’ crowns,” Basset said.
Sendell stared, startled. “Are they?”
“No, but just now you
heard talk
of it.”
Sendell’s smile came back and spread into a fox-grin so that he looked suddenly something like the high-hearted rascal Joliffe remembered he had been. “I have, haven’t I? Just now I have indeed
heard
talk.”
Chapter 5
 
B
efore he went his way, Will Sendell offered to come for Joliffe late in the afternoon, to take him where his company (said somewhat scornfully) would have their practice. He added, “If we’re somewhat before the others, you can have a chance to look through the script, to see if there’s aught to be done with it.”
True to that, he came for Joliffe just past Vespers. Plainly he had been at the Silcoks’ before: he came up the stairs to the players’ chamber as if familiar there and was greeted easily by everyone, even Ellis, who had spoken the harshest about him at the company’s breaking up. The women who had spent the afternoon sewing with Rose were long since left to see to their households’ suppers, and the players were just readying to go to their own in the Silcoks’ hall. “We’ll buy ourselves something on the way,” Sendell told Joliffe, sounding in far better spirit than he had been earlier, before saying triumphantly to Basset, “The guild masters did not like hearing what I’d ‘heard by the way.’ They’ve turned most of the money they had set aside for new banners toward their play instead!”
“Well done!” Basset enthused. “White samite for Christ then?”
Sendell laughed. “Probably not, but finest white wool maybe. There’ll be gilt and gilding for Simeon and the Doctors anyway, and that will help. At least there’s hope of us
looking
good now.”
Some of his high spirit faded when he and Joliffe had left the others. As they stopped at a cookshop for small pies, he said, broodingly, “There’s still the script. There’s not much to be done with that, I fear.”
“We’ll see,” said Joliffe, giving over coins for his pie and Sendell’s as well. “I remember you were good at finding more in a part than looked to be there at first.”
That was truth, not simply flattery, and Sendell agreed to it with a nod but said as they walked on, pies in hand and eating as they went, “One thought I’ve had is about those two Prophets at the beginning. There’s something I want to try. Couldn’t hope to have it work with the two townsmen I have. For one, Richard Eme has decided prophets are as stiff with dignity as a bishop’s crozier
and
already made it plain he’s someone who knows how to play a part better than I can tell him and won’t shift no matter what I say to him.”
Joliffe made a wincing sound of sympathy. Those kind made poor players and worse playmasters, if ever anyone was benighted enough to give them power.
“But since Master Burbage is willing to give up playing Second Prophet, I’m thinking to shift Richard Eme from First Prophet to Second, set you for First, and have you play it as if all the ‘news’ you’re giving at such length about the star and the kings and all was actually
news
indeed and you’re all brim-full with the excitement of it all. Then Richard Eme can be as much like a post as he wants and it won’t matter.”
“Because he’ll be a counter-weight to me and the piece all the more diverting for it,” Joliffe said, easily seeing the possibilities. He grinned. “Almost in despite of him.”
“Yes! Saint Genesius, it’s good to talk with someone who knows what I’m saying!”
That was said so from the heart and with an edge of desperation that Joliffe wondered how long Sendell had been on his own, laboring forward in grief and defeats since his company died. Just staying upright under that double burden could wear a man down to nothing under the plain weight if the struggle went on long enough; no matter how great a man’s courage was, it could not save him if he had no strength left to make it good. Bleed a man dry and all the courage in the world would not be enough to keep him going. How close to bled dry by grief and defeats had Sendell come before he came to this chance here in Coventry? And how much longer could he keep going if this chance failed him?
Making no hurry of wending their way among the traffic of carts and others afoot, Sendell was saying, “We turn here. Mill Lane,” when someone called out, “Master Sendell,” and Sendell looked around and called in return, “Master Powet.”
The man crossing Earl Street toward them pulled up short to avoid being knocked over by a bustling woman laden with a market basket on either arm, then came on, cutting around the back of a trundling cart. Sendell, paused to wait for him, said low-voiced to Joliffe, “One of mine,” and, louder as the man joined them, “Master Powet. Well met. How goes it with you?”
“None so bad as it might and never so good as I wish,” Master Powet returned with an edge of grumble instead of lightly as he might have. He had likely been a goodly-looking man in his youth and none so bad in his middle years, but he was well-withered toward elderly now and no longer what he had been. The look he gave Joliffe was sharp enough, though, and Sendell answered it with, “Master Powet, this is Master Joliffe. He’s usually a player in the company that’s seeing to the Nativity, but he’s late-come and they’ve no place for him, so he’ll be with us instead.”
“Another cast-off, eh?” said Powet. There was no mistaking the grumble in that. “Mind the stones,” he added.
Indeed, not much around the corner that they were just turning a half dozen or so flat paving stones were stacked almost to toppling while two men in the street’s middle, at risk of being stumbled into by a careless passerby or run over by someone’s horse or cart, were levering the broken pieces of other flat stones out of the shallow, stone-lined gutter there, slanted with the street for water to flow into it and away rather than toward house fronts and doorways.
“Mending it at last, and about time they were at it,” said Master Powet somewhat more cheerfully as he led the way around the piled stones. “I said, Master Sendell, didn’t I, that you’ll see all the streets being cleaned and mended to a fare-thee-well these last days. Shop signs are being new-painted everywhere, and every rush-strewn tavern and inn floor will be fresh-rushed by the end of next week when folk can be expected to start arriving. By then all the usual troublemakers will have had the bailiffs’ hands laid heavily on their shoulders and suggestion given that they change their ways for this while or, better yet, leave town.”
“Will they?” Joliffe asked. “Change or leave?”
“Some will. Others, without the wit to do one or the other, will find themselves locked all together in someone’s cellar for the few days that matter.”
“It’s this way every year?”
“When the mayor feels he has a strong enough hold over things to make it happen. It’s good for the town when he does. Having the streets mended is never a bad thing anyway, Corpus Christi or no.”
“Here we are.” Sendell went leftward through a wide gateway. Joliffe and Master Powet followed him into a wide paved yard surrounded by a three-floored building, stone-built below, of timber and plaster on the upper floors. “The pageant wagon is there,” Sendell said, pointing to double doors at the yard’s far end. “We’ll have it out in a week or so, to begin readying it. Today we’ll be at practice here in the yard, but my room is above, if you want to have sight of the script before the others come.”
“If there’s time,” Joliffe said.
“If you read fast,” Sendell returned.
“I’ll bring out the benches,” Master Powet offered.
Sendell said thanks for that as he led Joliffe up a tired wooden stairway with a single thin bar for railing, to a door he paused to unlock before opening it into a room above the pageant’s place. The room was bare of comforts. There was a stuffed mattress with one pillow and a disheveled blanket on the floor against one wall. A cloak and a bag of probably Sendell’s belongings hung on wall pegs. Otherwise there were only a joint stool beside a table with a roll of parchment and a candle in a plain candleholder. The wooden floor was bare. So were the plastered walls. The shutter was slid down from a small window high up in the west wall, giving the room some afternoon light. The rest of a day the place would be fairly dark unless the door was left standing open.
“It was all they offered me,” Sendell said in answer to nothing Joliffe had said. “It serves, it’s free, and saves me the cost of paying for somewhere better. No meals given, except when one or another of the guild or someone invites me to one. Here’s the script.” He took up the parchment scroll from the table and handed it to Joliffe. “You look through it. I’m going to see about the benches being set the way I want them. Bring this when you come.”
He went out, and Joliffe sat down on the joint stool, unrolled the scroll at its beginning, and began a rapid read toward its end. He quickly saw that Sendell’s unsparing moan about it being all words and little doing was generally true enough. He hoped they had someone well-voiced for Simeon. For Ane the Prophetess, whom he was apparently going to be, he saw very little he could do except be there. He had only got to Christ and the Doctors when a boy put his head in at the door to say, “Master Sendell says you’re to come now and bring the script when you do.” Rather than retreat then, as he might have done, his message given, the boy waited, only starting down the stairs just ahead of Joliffe and asking as they went, “Are you truly a player? All of the time, not just for now?”
“I am. All of the time.” One way and another. “Are you one of the angels, or will you be Christ?”
“One of the angels,” the boy said disgustedly. “I want to be Christ, but I sing too well, so I have to be an angel, Master Sendell says, and my da says I have to do what Master Sendell said.”
“Your da being?”
“One of the masters of the Weavers Guild.”
“So you’re an apprentice weaver, I suppose.”
“I am that. Would rather be a player, though. If I could do something besides play angels.”
“Angels are hard,” Joliffe said in sympathy, knowing that was not what the boy had meant.
“That they’re not,” the boy protested. They had reached the stairfoot; he turned to face Joliffe. “All angels do is stand there, say something, and sing. Or just sing—I just sing. Then they go away. None of that’s hard.”
“It is if you sing like I do,” Joliffe said cheerfully. “But it’s the
looking
like an angel I’ve always found hardest.”
“That’s not hard,” the boy returned scornfully. “You’re put in a white robe, and they put wings on you, and you’re an angel.”
Joliffe slumped his shoulders, shifted to stand hipshot, and cocked his head to one side. “There. Imagine me with a white robe and wings. Would I look like an angel now?”
The boy laughed. “Not standing like that you don’t. Angels don’t stand that way.”
“What way do they stand?”
With hardly a thought, the boy twitched his own shoulders back, straightened his spine, centered his body on itself, and raised his chin. Then he looked startled at the difference. He raised his hands uncertainly, as if they suddenly did not belong to him. “These,” he said. “Where do I put these?” He answered himself by pressing them together prayerfully. “Like this?”
“I don’t know,” Joliffe answered. “Try different ways and see what feels best.”
Sendell called, “Hew, time to be over here.”
A cold sickness slid down Joliffe’s spine and into his belly. There had been another Hew who wanted to be a player, and the memories there were not good. This Hew, though, left off being an angel to obey Sendell’s call and headed toward the benches now set in a U-shape and sat upon by a variety of men and another boy. Joliffe, following Hew, saw him make to sit beside the other boy, but a strong-featured older man said, “Hew,” and pointed to a space beside himself. Hew grudgingly sat himself there while Sendell, taking the rolled script Joliffe offered him, said to everyone, just as he had to Master Powet, “This is Master Joliffe. He’s usually a player in the company that’s seeing to the Nativity—” A few good-humoured hisses answered that. “But they’ve no place for him as things are now, so he’ll be with us instead.”

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