A Play of Knaves (2 page)

In return, of course, he had claim on their skills and they had spent this just-past Holy Week performing plays seemly to the time for Lady Lovell, her children, and the household at his manor of Minster Lovell. Unhappily, Lord Lovell had not been there, gone on one of his sometimes ventures to France where the war was presently stumbling over the duke of Burgundy’s unwillingness to continue as England’s ally because, as Lady Lovell had said firmly and loudly in the great hall at one mid-day dinner, “Burgundy sees better profit to be had in joining with Charles, so-called king of France, than in keeping faith with all his oaths. For profit, the duke is willing to forget his father was murdered on so-called King Charles’ order. So much for Burgundy’s honor, for all that he proclaims it to the world.”

For the players, the duke of Burgundy’s honor was neither here nor there. More to their own point, Lady Lovell was as generous a patron as her husband, and through their stay at Minster Lovell they had been well-fed in the hall with the general household, well-housed in a clean barn in the outer manor yard, and at the end had been sent well-paid on their way with Lady Lovell’s great thanks, given publicly in the great hall after their playing on Easter. At supper she had called Basset to the high table and given him a gift of coins, saying for the household to hear, “These you’ve well-earned. I’ve rarely been so moved and ready in heart and mind for Easter as by your plays this week. Myself and my household owe you much.”

And well they did, Joliffe still thought. When Lady Lovell had sent them word a month ago that she wanted them at Minster Lovell for all the week before Easter, Basset had determined, “We should do something beyond the ordinary. What of a run of plays right through the week? On Palm Sunday we can begin with Christ’s coming into Jerusalem and carry on to the Resurrection on Easter Day.”

Joliffe had started shaking his head against all that before Basset had finished saying it, had said, “No!” and if he had not been sitting down, would have been backing away. They had no plays like that already fitted to their small company, and because he was the one among them most skilled with words, he had known what was coming next.

But Basset had gone cheerfully on. “We have that rough-handed copy of the Coventry plays I bought off Jack Melton, what was it, eight years ago? It has all the plays of the Passion. You can rework them to our use, easy as anything.”

“Rework them and have done in time for us to learn the lines once I’ve written them, let alone do all the rest of it in a month’s time?” Joliffe had returned. “You’ve gone witless.”

He had looked to Ellis and Rose for their good sense, but while Rose would have agreed with him, Ellis had already been seeing himself as Christ, the part he would surely have; and Piers and Gil had added their voices in favor, probably thinking of how many lesser parts there would be for them to share in. They had all joined in eager talk with Basset, leaving Joliffe and Rose shaking their heads hopelessly at one another.

And yet, against all likelihood, they had somehow succeeded. Joliffe, working madly—“And mad I must be to be trying this,” he grumbled—had trimmed and reshaped the plays, keeping barely ahead of Basset rehearsing them, everyone learning their lines as they went, while Rose sewed her fingers sore readying their garb. She had even submitted, in their necessity, to taking parts, sometimes wearing a man’s long robe and a false beard to be an Apostle and fill out a Crowd—with only six in their company, Crowds were difficult. And of course she was the Virgin, gowned in blue and veiled in white, weeping and wringing her hands at the Crucifixion on Good Friday and exclaiming with joy at the Resurrection on Easter Sunday.

She did stand firm, though, on never, ever having to say anything.

Despite the Church’s muttering at the unseemly display, women were able to be players, but surprisingly few chose to be. Or not so surprisingly, Joliffe had thought more than once and especially on those days when the going was harder than ordinary because of weather or mishap, or a village was unwelcoming, or a town outright refused to let them play at all. On days like that he thought that women must be, on the whole, simply smarter than men. Not that Rose was a fool. Far from it. Her trouble was that as Thomas Basset’s daughter, she had been born to the life, then had married herself to it, too, taking a player in her father’s company for husband.

That husband was long gone. No one knew—nor anymore much cared—where he might be, but her father was still master of the company and here she and her son Piers still were, and Joliffe feared to think what the company would do if ever she left them. She managed their money and them with a steady hand, sewed and mended their players’ garb and properties, made meals worth eating out of whatever food came their way, and for good measure nursed any of them who fell ill. She was even able to bring Ellis out of the dark humours that sometimes came on him. But when Joliffe had pleaded to write one speech for her as the Virgin Mary—“Just one. A short one”—she had answered, “No,” in the voice with which none of the players, including her father, ever cared to argue, and he had let it go.

Instead he had added to young Gil’s speeches, which had pleased Gil. Part of their company less than a year, he was already well able to hold his own in anything asked of him. Besides that, Minster Lovell was his home manor and it could be only to the good for him to have a chance to show well there among his own folk.

Own folk or not, Minster Lovell’s priest had been stiff at first about having the playing scaffold set up in his churchyard. He had allowed it only because Lady Lovell ordered it, but as the week went on and each day they performed a different play not only for Lady Lovell and her children and household but for all the manor folk and—as word spread—to folk from neighboring manors and villages, and attendance at his Holy Week services and the offerings to his church grew, he had warmed wonderfully to the players. By the week’s end, when they had triumphantly performed the Resurrection on Easter Sunday afternoon, he was so mellowed toward them that he had hoped aloud they would do it all again, come next year.

Joliffe’s own unsaid thought was that they had succeeded so well only because they had gone so headlong and desperate at the whole business that ill fortune had not been able to catch up to them. They had, as it were, outdistanced it, and he would not care to wager on their chances of doing it again.

Nonetheless, after Lady Lovell’s harsh words about the duke of Burgundy, he had cobbled together a play with a fat, waddling “Duke” declaiming his allegiance to “Lady Honor” but being led, with much comic business, astray and to the Devil by “Mistress Greed.” The business was long on farce and short on piety, and the players had put it on in the great hall, with their speeches still raw and barely learned, the day after Easter. Everyone was ready to be done with solemnity by then, and the household had rocked with laughter, Lady Lovell so much enjoying it that she had had them do it again then and there, and afterward, there in the hall, given each of the men a silver coin in token of her pleasure.

With all of that behind them, they had been tired but well-contented the next morning as they waited with Tisbe harnessed to the loaded cart in the manor’s outer yard for Basset to return from formally asking Lady Lovell’s leave for them to go; and when he did, he had patted his belt-hung leather purse and said, “There we are. Well-paid as well as well-fed by our good Lady Lovell’s bounty. Geeup, Tisbe. We’re away!”

Piers had led them out of the yard playing a reed pipe held in one hand and rattling away with the other at the drum slung on his hip by a strap around his shoulders. They had passed through Minster Lovell village waving to folk who waved, smiling, back at them, and twice girls ran out into the road to give Gil quick kisses, so that it was in a general glow of good feeling they had left the village by the narrow bridge over the Windrush River and taken the steep climb of road up from the valley to the wide highway that could take them eastward toward Oxford or westward toward Cirencester, as they chose.

Until then they had thought their choosing was to go west and curve northward into a round of villages and town familiar from other years and meant to bring them back to Minster Lovell toward Michaelmas at the end of harvest. But that morning at the roads’ meeting, Basset had signaled Joliffe to halt Tisbe and said to everyone, “Lady Lovell has asked a favor of us, that we go south from here instead of elsewhere. What do you say?”

He had cheerfully made it sound a choice, but Joliffe’s own thought was that to choose other than what Lady Lovell asked of them would be stark foolishness.

He was saved from his urge to say that by Ellis demanding, “Why?”

Basset had surely known that question would come, and he answered promptly, “Because when Lady Lovell did her Lenten retreat at St. Mary’s Abbey in Winchester, the lady abbess was worried over something that may be shaping to the bad at one of the abbey’s manors in the White Horse Vale. The bailiff there has passed on word by way of the abbey’s steward for that part of the abbey’s lands that there are angers among her best folk there, but they won’t talk openly enough about whatever is the trouble for him to be certain what it is and put a stop it.”

“So Lady Lovell thought we could do . . . what?” Ellis asked. “What’s her interest, anyway, in a worry delivered at third hand about people that have nothing to do with her?”

“I gathered it’s a favor to the abbess,” Basset said, patient with Ellis’ impatience. “There’s worry the trouble will boil up and it will all turn to lawyers and other costly business. What she’s asked of us is that we go there, listen, look, hear what we can, and pass on to the bailiff anything we learn.”

“Does this bailiff know we’re coming?” Joliffe asked. “Or are we going to surprise him with our helpful interest?”

“Lady Lovell is going to send word of us to him by way of the abbess.”

“It’s daft,” muttered Ellis. “What are we likely to learn in a night spent in a place we don’t know at all?”

“We should be able to draw it out to three nights likely,” Basset said. “There’s a village and several manors all in the same parish. Enough to keep us there longer than a night, anyway.”

“Where is it we’re going?” Joliffe asked, since choice didn’t seem part of it. “White Horse Vale is a long place.” Named for an ancient figure of a galloping horse carved into a white chalk hillside above the vale, the valley ran broad and for miles between the Cotswold Hills to the north and the Berkshire Downs to the south.

“A village called Ashewell. We do know the place a little, if we remember it,” Basset said. “We were there, what, six years ago it would be now. At one of the Scourings.”

The Scourings were when the local folk turned out every few years to clear the encroaching green turf from the Horse, to keep the chalk shining white, and although that in itself was no great draw, there was always a large fair held with it, with all manner of sports and other pastimes among and around the earthen banks of an ancient fortress on the hilltop above the Horse. Joliffe no longer remembered why the players had gone so far out of their usual ways to be there that year, but he remembered other things about it well enough and asked, “It’s not a Scouring time now, is it?”

“It’s not,” Basset agreed. “There’ll be just us, with everyone there surely ready to be diverted now Lent is finally done, same as any other way we might go instead. With all said and done, there are as many places to play to the southward as on the way we usually go. I doubt we’ll lose by obliging Lady Lovell in this.”

Or not lose so much as they might if they
dis
obliged her, Joliffe had thought.

Ellis, usually able to find something to grumble at, had simply shrugged and said, “Makes no odds to me. We’ll be walking whichever way we go, so let’s get on with it.”

They had, taking the highway toward Cirencester only to the first crossroads and there turning southward, the newly risen sun throwing their morning shadows long to their right across the wayside grass and the world bright with spring all around them.

That had been three days ago. The weather had held fair, the travel easy along roads gently twisting through the Vale’s mostly level miles, the villages where they stopped to play open-handed, and they were all in good humour now as they neared Ashewell. The flat fields here must have once been marsh; the road ran level between constant, reedy ditches sometimes fringed by pollarded alder and willow trees, but ahead were the smooth-flanked high downs, a great heave of land against the sky.

The White Horse was there but they were coming toward it at a slant, not able to see it from the road they were on. Their goal was marked by Ashewell church’s gray-stoned square tower, seen long before they neared it. The village was built on the first lift of land at the foot of the downs, and when the road began to climb toward it, narrowing into a steep-sided lane so deep between hedge-topped banks that the church and even the downs were lost to sight, the players stopped to put on the bright red and yellow tabards with the Lovell badge of a hound that proclaimed them Lord Lovell’s players. Then Joliffe set Tisbe to the climb, and the players matched their pace to her plod as she took the slope until the road gave a tight bend and suddenly they were at the beginning of the village’s narrow main street, with houses close-clamped along both sides and ahead the church’s tower again with its promise of a churchyard where they could set up to play if the street never widened enough to let them. Always supposing the priest was not one of those who held stiffly against allowing plays.

But come what may, it was lookers-on that were most needed or else there was no use to the players being there at all, and Tisbe, knowing the players’ business as well as they did, paused, without need of Joliffe to tell her, for Rose to take her place at her head while the rest of them, even Gil, who was not much limping now, arrayed themselves into procession ahead of the cart with Piers in the lead, having fetched the small drum and his reed pipes from their hamper in the back of the cart. With the drum hung from his shoulder by its belt, he began to beat on it with one hand while playing the pipes with the other, and Tisbe, again not needing an order, started forward behind them as they all strode onward as if sure of their welcome and happier to be at Ashewell than anywhere else on earth. As Basset had told Joliffe in Joliffe’s early days in the company, “If you come skulking in like a dog that expects to be kicked, kicked is what you’ll likely be. Show a lordly assurance of being welcomed and folk will believe you’re worth welcoming.”