A Play of Isaac (7 page)

Bitter though that was to him, Ellis accepted it because, as he’d said once to Joliffe when they were swaying home from a tavern together and there was no one else to hear it, “She’s right, so what else can I do?”

“Leave her?” Joliffe had suggested, though Basset would have flayed him if he’d heard. By that time, after the disaster, they had been barely enough to be a company as it was. “Go find someone else?”

“Can’t.” Ellis had shaken his head, staggered sideways, righted himself, and said, throwing an arm around Joliffe’s shoulders, a thing he would never have done if sober, “It’s that I love her, you see. I love her.”

He’d gone on tearful about his love the rest of the way back to camp, until Joliffe, not so drunk, had dug an elbow into his ribs and told him to shut up.

“But I love her,” Ellis had insisted.

“So I gather. But you’ll wake Piers if you keep on about it and then, love or not, she’ll skin you.”

“And well I deserve it, tormenting her with my love. Tormenting her . . .”

Joliffe had given him to understand that if he didn’t shut up, he’d be the one who was tormented and not with love but a pail of cold water over his head and a solid kick where it’d do the most good. Ellis had settled to mournful but safe muttering.

Not that he was always without comfort. Sometimes, out of her own need or Ellis’s—or both—Rose gave way and for a night, sometimes two, it was as it should have been between them, until her conscience took hold and she drew away again. She would make confession then as soon as a priest or friar could be found and do penance for her sin, made the heavier because Ellis, grim and short-tempered for days afterwards, refused both confession and penance, darkly insistent there was no sin in them being together and that penitent was the last thing he was.

While the cycle was at its worst between them, not only Joliffe but Basset and even Piers carefully kept from jarring Ellis until the darkness passed, its end usually announced by Ellis demanding why everyone was so brooding, had he missed some trouble they all knew about but he didn’t?

At present they were a few weeks past the last time and everything was peaceable for now. While Basset sat himself down on his cushion and readied himself for talk, Ellis set to carving on the horse, with Piers leaning against his shoulder to watch and Rose quietly listening from where she sat on her hay-piled bed. Joliffe sat beside the cart, leaning back against a wheel, ready to prop his head against the spokes and drowse if talk went on too long.

Basset started off briskly enough anyway, saying, “Foremost of everything this week, we have to be sure as possible of the
Abraham and Isaac
. First thing come the morning, before breakfast even, we’ll run through our lines.”

“For Christ’s sake . . .” Ellis started in protest.

“Precisely,” Basset said. “For Christ’s sake we want this to be as good as can be. Then we owe the Penteneys a play and we want to make it a good one in return for all that Master Penteney is doing for us. So we have to decide what we’ll do and rehearse it, too.”

Ellis groaned and Joliffe could have echoed him but didn’t, just put his head back against the wheel and looked up at the broad barn rafters disappearing into shadows while he waited for more.

“Then there’s Lewis to keep pleased.”

Ellis did not even bother to groan, just shook his head and kept on carving.

“Piers,” said Basset, “if we put on
The Steward and the Devil
for the Penteneys—not for Wednesday night when there’ll be the feast and fine company, but tomorrow maybe, for just the household—do you think Lewis could be a devil with you in it?”

Ellis gave a disbelieving croak and stopped carving to look at Basset, apparently expecting to see other signs he’d lost his mind. Even Rose frowned slightly. Joliffe just waited, somewhat interested.

“No lines,” Basset went on. “Just capering with you on the stage. Could he do that, do you think?”

“Aye, he could do that,” Piers said, poking Ellis to set him carving again. “Lewis isn’t stupid. He’s just . . .” he made a face, looking for the word, “. . . simple.”

Ellis, who had started to carve again, stopped and cocked his head around, eye to eye with Piers. “You understand the difference there?”

“Aye,” Piers said with the patience of someone much put upon by lesser folk. “It’s like there’s not as many wits in his head as other people have, but what he has he makes good use of. Not like some who have all their wits and don’t half use them. Like Joliffe.”

“Best use your wits to curb your tongue or there’ll be burrs under your blanket by morning,” Joliffe said without heat. Burrs in the bed were a constant threat between Piers and him. Once Piers had even done it. But only once, because in return Joliffe had put burrs in the toes of Piers’s hosen. Working them to the bottom of the hosen’s feet had been tedious, but Piers’s yelp when his toes met them and the grumbling he had done while working them out—with bits left behind to bother him through a few days afterward—had made it worth the while. Since then burrs had remained a threat, not a practice, and Piers made a face at him while Rose asked, keeping to Lewis, “Will his folk let him? Be in a play, I mean.”

“We’ll have to ask,” Basset answered. “I doubt there’s harm in asking and I’m willing to warrant they will. His man Matthew seemed to have no trouble with the thought, anyway.”

Ellis sighed and went back to his carving. “Ask away. It can’t hurt.”

Rose and Joliffe both nodded agreement.

They talked a while more, and the choice for Wednesday’s play came down to
The Pride of Life
, one of their best. It was more work than they truly wanted to do, with Corpus Christi the next day and the need to have the
Abraham and Isaac
as perfect as might be for it, but neither did they want to cheat Master Penteney.

“Besides,” said Basset, “it won’t hurt to do our best in front of Lord and Lady Lovell either, let alone whoever else may be there. But it’s been a while since we’ve done it, so best we run its lines tomorrow morning even before
Abraham and Isaac
.”

That brought groans from Ellis and Joliffe both:
The Pride of Life
was longer by far than
Abraham and Isaac
. But groan was all they did because Basset was right; it had been some few months since they had done it and the sooner they found out what they had forgotten, the better.

Dusk was thickening into dark now. Summer nights were short, there was small point in wasting candles to light them when sleep would be a better way to spend the time, and at Basset’s word, they made ready to go to bed, Joliffe finding out just how tired he was now he had stopped moving. It seemed to be the same way with the others; even Ellis was forgetful of his ale-thirst and rolled into his bed willingly enough, with very little restless rustling from anyone before sleep soundly took them.

 
 
Joliffe awoke in darkness with no way to tell what the hour might be, but when he rolled his head sideways and looked at the gap around the barn’s door, the line of paling gray in the darkness told him the night was nearly done. No one else was stirring, though, and seeing no need to be the first, he settled more deeply into the straw with quite an unreasonable sense of holiday, despite that holiday was likely the last thing the next few days were going to be. Not with an extra performance of
The Steward and the Devil
if it happened Lewis would be allowed to do it, and
The Pride of Life
to sharpen up, and
Abraham and Isaac
to finish perfecting, along with need to be sure all was well with everything they would wear and use for those plays and making right anything that was not.

But not to be loading and unloading the cart every day, and walking miles between one hope of work and the next with never certainty the work would be there when the time came—instead sleeping in the same place five nights in a row and certain of every meal—that looked like holiday to him.

The feeling stayed with him even after he rose with everyone else to go through the morning business of putting on the hosen and doublet he’d taken off for sleep last night, seeing to his body’s needs, washing his face and hands in the waiting water bucket, and combing his hair because Rose was firm on them looking no more unseemly than could be helped.

So as not to spoil the pleasure she took in ordering them around, he carefully kept from her that he at least—he would not answer for Ellis and Piers—would have done it anyway.

Only when Basset sat them down and said, “Now.
The Pride of Life
. From the beginning,” did the sense of holiday not so much fade as die a brutal death, as all too quickly it became plain that neither Ellis nor Joliffe had a firm hold on their lines anymore. Worse, Basset
did
have firm hold, and Rose, prompting from the script, shook her head over how often she had to give Ellis and Joliffe, turn and turnabout, a word or words to keep them going, until Basset stood up with a frustrated roar, swore at Ellis and Joliffe both for wash-brained idiots, said he was going to breakfast and that they’d better, too, though, “I’ll be mazed if either one of you has wits enough to keep straight the difference between chewing your food and breathing,” he snarled.

If Ellis had any better answer to that than Joliffe did, he wisely kept as silent as Joliffe, neither of them moving as Basset stalked out the barn door, Piers beside him, their backs matchingly eloquent with indignation. Even Rose held silent while she put the script away in the box where all their scripts were kept, only giving Ellis a sideways look that Ellis answered with an uncomfortable, sheepish shrug; but she relented before she left, saying as she moved toward the door, “Come on then. You won’t do any better for being starved.”

“I think I’ll stay,” said Joliffe. “I’ll go in after you’ve come back. Someone should stay to keep an eye on things here.”

Ellis said, “Come on. Basset won’t bite your head off in front of others. We all went in to supper last night.”

“That was last night. By now all the Penteney servants and everyone up and down the street if not half of Oxford know we’re here. I don’t think we should leave our things simply to strangers’ good will.”

Ellis frowned at that, but Rose said, “You’re probably right. Well thought of, Joliffe.”

Basset would have thought of it if he had not been so irked this morning, Joliffe thought as he watched Rose and Ellis out the door. He waited until sure they were well gone, then leaped for the script box.

With reading, his lines began to crawl back out of whatever hole in his memory they had sunk into; he was feeling at least a little less a fool by the time Rose and Ellis returned. By then he was also more than ready to go to his own breakfast but asked as he pointedly held the script out to Ellis, “Where’s Basset?”

Taking the script ungraciously but willingly, Ellis said, “Gone to speak to Mistress Penteney. He asked the chamberlain or someone if he could see Master Penteney. The fellow said we’re a household matter now and it was Mistress Penteney who’d deal with him.

“Where’s Piers?”

“Lewis claimed him as soon as he’d done eating,” Rose said. “That man Matthew has them.”

“Good luck to him,” Joliffe said from the heart.

He made it to the hall in time to help himself to the last of breakfast, spreading a fist-thick slab of new-baked bread with soft butter, layering a few cold slices of beef onto it, and catching up a wooden cup of ale just ahead of the servants clearing the benchless single table set up in the middle of the hall. Breakfast in even the largest households was usually a simple matter, with bread and ale and yesterday’s left food set out for folk to help themselves without sitting down, the quicker to get them onward with the day. Accordingly, there were no servants lingering for him to draw into talk, and a long look around while he ate told him that wherever Basset was, he was not here, nor Piers either.

But Kathryn Penteney still was, standing not far away, near the doorway to the screens passage, in earnest talk to a man Joliffe guessed might be the household’s chamberlain: he plainly belonged to the household but his tunic was of better cut and cloth than a mere servant’s and his manner toward her was both respectful and assured, suiting someone who both served here and had authority. Joliffe was too far away to hear what was being said between them, but he took his time over eating his bread and meat, watching them.

Well, watching the girl more than the man he admitted, and liking what he saw. She would probably someday fill out with womanhood to her mother’s fullness of figure, but presently she was merely slender in her girlhood, with her fair hair in a long plait down her back, her hands moving quickly while she talked, her laughter brief and bright at something the man said.

He did not know Basset was behind him until Basset slapped him between the shoulder blades deliberately hard enough to stagger him a step and said, all his ill-humour seemingly gone, “Come on then, boy. Finish up. We’ve a new player to set to work.”

Joliffe gulped the last swallow of his ale, set the cup down, shoved the last bite of the bread and beef into his mouth, and followed Basset from the hall, pausing only at the basin and towel set by the door to wash his hands and wipe them clean, giving a last, quick look backward at the girl, still in talk with the man. She was no harder to look at close up than farther off, though maybe younger than he had guessed, but that was all he had time to note before Basset caught him by an arm around the shoulders and moved him out of the hall, saying as they went, “I don’t want to think what kick in the shins the goddess Fortuna will give us next time she turns around, but for the present I have to tell you we’ve landed hip-deep in a pot of cream.”

“Your talk with Mistress Penteney went well, I take it?”

“Well and better than well. No trouble over anything. She saw no reason Lewis couldn’t be in a play, simply that we weren’t to tire him. Seems he’s not so stoutly strong as he looks. She said to ask if there was anything we needed for that or anything else, and to speak with the chamberlain if there was something particular to how the hall should be set up for either Lewis’s play or Wednesday’s. We should be so lucky in our hire all the time!”