A Play of Knaves (10 page)

“But here’s my young and sadly widowed sister,” Hal said. “Ready to have her head turned by such rascals, poor innocent that she is.”

He reached out and tweaked her cheek as she tried to duck away and had to settle for slapping his hand aside, hopefully hard enough to hurt, as she snapped, “My late, unlamented husband was sufficient to put me off men a while, thank you.” She was her brother’s height and not a dainty woman and did not bother to hide that she was angry. As well she should be, Joliffe thought, seeing the red mark on her cheek where Hal had twisted it.

“Eleanor,” her mother said, not in surprise but in warning. At such open talk or against provoking her brother further? Joliffe wondered.

Over his mother’s warning Hal said, still goading, “You chose him, Eleanor. He was your choice.”

“I chose him instead of another beating from Father,” she snapped back.

“That’s
enough
,” Anela Medcote ordered, whip-sharp and stone-hard, silencing them both long enough for her to turn to the players and say somewhat more stiffly than before, “Again, our thanks. I look forward to Sunday.”

They all bowed to her again, including Ellis, who had given up on the hamper to watch the quarrel, and Basset said, “It’s been our pleasure to serve you.”

Anela Medcote nodded her gracious belief of that and left them, taking hold of Hal’s arm as she passed him to draw him away with her and gathering Eleanor with a look to follow them. Eleanor did, saying just loudly enough—and still angrily—that Joliffe heard her as well as her mother must have, “I should have taken the beating.”

Ellis slammed shut the lid of the hamper, Piers and Gil leaped to fasten the straps that closed it, and Basset said, “Let’s get out of here.”

Chapter 6

They left the Medcotes’ manor yard with more haste than grace. Not until they were well away along the highroad, almost to the turning to the downward lane, did Joliffe offer, “Would you say there’s a family that doesn’t like each other?”

“Or anybody else,” Basset said.

“What were we paid?” Ellis asked.

“Four pence.”

Ellis grunted, seemingly irked at not being able to disparage that. As such things went, that was a good wage for what they’d done. “So we’ve no complaint against the wife anyway.”

Joliffe, gone elsewhere with his thoughts, asked, “Do you suppose that’s the daughter Medcote wants to marry to young Nicholas?”

The others all gave him startled looks, but only Gil protested aloud, “No!” before Basset granted, “No one’s talked as if there’s more than one Medcote daughter. She must be it.”

“She’ll eat that boy alive,” Ellis said.

“I liked her,” Piers said stoutly.

“You would,” Ellis said at him.

They had reached the turning to the lane. Joliffe stopped and said, “You go on. I’ll catch you up later.”

Ellis, carrying the hamper with Gil, nodded and kept going, taking Gil with him. Piers did not pause either, but Basset did, asking quietly, “Where will you be?”

Joliffe beckoned with his head toward the steep rise of the Downs. “Up there for a while.”

The players were all used to Joliffe’s sometime-need to be away and by himself. Basset gave him a nod and followed the others away, and Joliffe went on along the highroad until he found what he vaguely remembered should be there—a cart-track cut deep into the white chalk flank of the hillslope, leading upward between bramble-grown banks that had been covered with blackberries in the autumn he had last been here. He had picked and eaten them by the handfuls and their remembered sweetness was in his mouth now, though this was spring and the brambles were bare of anything but young green leaves.

It was good when memory brought back the sweetness there was in life and not just the sorrows.

The sun that had been almost set when they left Medcote’s manor was fully gone now and its yellow afterglow was draining down the sky. The light would last long enough to see Basset and the others back to the field, but the deep-worn trackway was already into thick twilight and Joliffe sure of his footing only because the white chalk showed pale in the shadows. He supposed that, like the White Horse and the highroad, this track must be ages old. It had probably been the way up to the wide circle of earthworks on the very crest of the hill above the Horse that were supposed to have been a Saxon fortress, though some said it was even older, had been made against the Romans, or that the Romans had made it against the Saxons. However it was, the track itself was surely old, to be worn as deep as it was into the hillside by cart-wheels and men’s feet.

Joliffe always took odd companionship in the thought of all the others who had come along a way before him, and even in the thought of all the others who would come the same way after him. Even when alone in his going, as now, he was aware of them—of all those who had been and all those who would be on this way and all the other ways he had been over the years. A flow of folk going far back into times uncertain and forgotten and far forward beyond any years that he would see. A long wander and stream of people, and himself among them.

He wondered what happened to roads where no one came anymore. Did they grow sad with emptiness? Or did they sink into rest and relief at being no longer needed, no longer burdened with humankind’s necessities?

The trackway forked, giving choice of going forward, on and up and over the crest of the Downs, or else by a lesser way out onto the open hillslope. Joliffe took the lesser way, climbing upward out of the trackway and passing through a stand of wind-bent trees to come to a stop at their outer edge to catch his breath and look ahead along the long, curving flank of the hill now bare before him. Full night had come. If any last band of sunset light remained, it was out of sight beyond the trees behind him. Here was only the soft blue darkness of a clear night under early starlight, with a slice of moon hanging above a far shoulder of the Downs. On his left the slope dropped steeply away into the velvet darkness of the Vale where, here and there, a pinpoint of light showed where a lantern hung or someone was late about their business. Here there was only the star-touched darkness, and he walked out onto the soft turf of the hillside. The short, sheep-cropped grass was smooth and springy underfoot and ahead of him was the White Horse, shining almost silver in the moonlight, stretched along its outward curve of hill.

Joliffe’s thought was to go there, to sit on the green turf between its outstretched forelegs and the proud arch of its neck. Where he had sat with Mary through the end of that warm autumn afternoon six years ago.

The Scouring had been done that morning, the encroaching turf cleared back for another few years and the rest of the day given wholly over to the fair that went with it. From the hilltop the shouts and laughter and cheers from the races, greased pole climbing, wrestling, knife-throwing, and whatever other sports and contests there were, the happy raised voices among the booths selling food and nonsense, the cries and songs of those come to entertain among the crowd had come and gone as the warm wind went fitfully this way, then that. People, strayed from there, had been wandering over the hillside, many of them to the Horse, around the Horse, away from the Horse, as adrift and easily purposeless as the wind, but he and Mary had had their small part of the hillside to themselves.

They had both known what they wanted from each other. From the time she had brushed against him in the crowd on the hilltop and smiled at him and he had spoken to her, he had known she wanted what he did, but before they came to that, they had sat together there on the hillslope and talked. He did not remember how they had come to do that or much of what they’d said. They’d probably talked about the warm autumn and the good harvest. Maybe of where he and the players had lately come from and where they were likely going. Just talk, with no promises asked or given by either of them. She was a widow. He had learned that much about her. And her name, and that she was comely, young, and willing. That was all he had truly known of her, and except for what she had seen of him in the several plays the players had done that day, she had known no more of him either—his name and that he, too, was willing.

To say the least, he had been willing and all the more willing when he had understood that she was asking for nothing from him except a present pleasure, wanted no more from him than what they would have in this small while between them. Blessed St. Mary Magdalene, he had been young then. Gil’s age maybe. Young enough, anyway, to think the body’s momentary pleasure was all there was to having a woman. He had not even understood that when he had a woman, she likewise had him—that when the thrust and clutch were done, more was shared than only semen and sweat. However brief the meeting of their bodies, some piece of self was shared, too, a piece of self not to be reclaimed afterward.

But he had not known that then, and they had sat talking, had touched a little—her foot slipping sideways to touch his foot; his fingers briefly intertwining with hers on the grass—until the shadows had begun to lie long across the slope, and folk who were not going to go on sporting on the hilltop into the night by torchlight or did not have their camp there on the hilltop had begun to drift toward the trackway and downward to homes or wherever else they were going. The time was come and Joliffe had stood up, held down his hand for her to take and drawn her to her feet. Not into his arms. Not yet. Instead, she had kept hold on his hand and led him away from the Horse and the trackway, over the shoulder of hill and along the hillside’s curve and down into a fold of the slope hidden from sight from above and both sides. The only view was outward, across the Vale far away below them and beginning to be lost in the shadows that were already deep in this small, hidden place.

There, finally, she had turned to him and they had drawn together. Their first kiss had been careful, each holding back a little from the other. After it they had each drawn back a step, and Mary had begun unpinning her veil from the proper widow’s wimple that circled her face. Joliffe had held her by the waist until veil and wimple were both off, baring her throat. Then he bent and kissed her neck. She had gasped softly, stiffening and shuddering with pleasure, and he drew back again, to take off the close-fitted cap still covering her hair, dropping it aside where she had already cast her veil and wimple, while she fumbled then at whatever pins held her hair until it came free and fell about her shoulders. And they had drawn together again in another kiss that was less careful than the first had been and then not careful at all as their bodies’ needs rose, overwhelming all other thoughts.

The night had been warm, the thyme-scented grass soft under their nakedness, and when the dew had finally gathered and the late night began to chill, there had been his cloak to cover them both while they took pleasure in giving pleasure to each other. They had made love more than once that night, their delight with each other enough for that. And once their bodies’ first lust was slaked it had been delight rather than only raw desire. They had said little by way of words, their bodies saying almost all that needed to be said between them. There had been laughter, though. Joliffe remembered Mary’s laughter as soft as the starlight by which he’d watched her face as they pleasured each other and as rich as the first dawn color in the east that told them it was time they parted.

And yet there was never once question that this one night was all there would be between them. He never learned what her need had been beyond the plain one of the body, but he’d known even then that there was more want than wantonness in her use of him, as he prayed to God there had been in his use of her.

God help him, he had been so very young, but even then he had known there was a difference between bodily lust and true loving. He had had something of both before then, enough to know how much better the latter was—and how much harder it was to come by. What he and Mary had between them that one night had felt like love, and they had taken as much comfort from it as they did pleasure.

And tonight, sitting on the long flank of the Downs under starlight and a young moon, with his arms around his updrawn knees and only his thoughts and the White Horse for company, he was glad for the gladness he had seen in Mary today—not only her gladness in her life as it now was but gladness at seeing him. It was good to know that what they had shared had stayed good for both of them.

He laid his face on his knees and hunched deeper into his cloak. The day’s rightful weariness was catching up to him, but his mind had taken hold on that “enough,” and he turned the word over in his mind. Why had that one sweet night been “enough” between him and Mary? Why had brief loving always been “enough” for him with any woman? He did not know. Knew it served other men well enough, but had found that whenever he was careless enough to let himself think on it, there was a hollowness of longing in his own heart that made him suspect it was not enough for him. Knew, too, there was no help for that because he was not about to leave the life he was living and what woman would be fool enough to join him in it?

 
He awoke when the sky was just beginning to lighten toward dawn, before there was any color to the world. The night had not gone so cold as it might have, and the turf where he was lying had stayed dry under him, but his cloak was heavy with dew, and as he moved and made to rise, he remembered why sleeping in the open was a poor idea—unless there were compensations. Besides that he was stiff and somewhat chilled, he was hungry, too, and while he rose with a groan to his feet, he took what comfort he could in knowing that the walk back to camp would ease the stiffness and the chill, and that breakfast would be waiting for him. And as he returned to the trackway and headed down, he found he was thinking not of Mary and a night six years gone but of yesterday at Medcote’s manor.

It had been more than the steward’s unfriendliness and knowing what had passed between Medcote and Rose in the afternoon that had made the whole business uncomfortable. Looking back at it, what made him least comfortable was what had passed among Hal and his sister and mother. There had been layers of anger there, and not new ones but an old warfare of grievances well-honed by use, of old bitternesses uneased by any forgiveness. That had been the poison in the whole air of the place, from the moment the steward greeted them at the gateway.