A Play of Knaves (22 page)

“Um. No,” Joliffe granted, then waved an easy hand. “We’ll have to find out. Well, find out if he exists and then who he is. Along with where the Ashewells and Walter Gosyn were last night.”

“That’s something Kyping will surely see to. As well as already knowing how many others besides Jack Hammond will be dancing most merrily now Medcote’s dead.”

“Of those there’s no lack, and because Medcote made no secret of what he was intending last night, there’s no way to know how many of his servants knew it and who they may have told over ale in the alehouse.” Joliffe shook his head with deep dissatisfaction. “It’s a hard thing when a murdered man was hated by nearly everyone who knew him. Even Father Hewgo didn’t look very liking of him by the time we finished in the sacristy yesterday.”

“True,” Basset agreed. “They’re said to be two of a kind and to work as one, but yesterday was the second time we saw Medcote cross him.”

“And with Medcote that means there were likely other times, and Father Hewgo had maybe had enough. Or maybe he thought it was his Christian duty to put a stop to Medcote’s fornications. No,” Joliffe corrected himself. “Given what I’ve seen of Father Hewgo, he’d rather have the sport of imposing heavy penance on Medcote for his sins and setting the bishop on him if Medcote didn’t comply. Or maybe Medcote knew something Father Hewgo didn’t want him to know. Or maybe Medcote knew something someone else didn’t want him to know. Or—”

“Enough,” Basset said, running his hands through his hair and clasping them together at the back of his head. “My brain is overheating. Let’s drop Medcote and decide what you’ll all play tonight for the Gosyns.”

Joliffe caught that “you” and asked, “What about you?”

“I’m thinking someone should stay with the cart and it shouldn’t be Rose,” Basset said grimly. “Or not Rose alone. Besides,” he added with his Evil Sheriff smile, “what’s the use of being master of this company if I can’t order someone else to do all the work once in a while?”

Chapter 14

The Gosyns’ manor lay farther out in the Vale. Drained by reedy ditches between the road and the broad fields and pastures, the land here was rich both for crops and grazing, Joliffe thought as he, Ellis, Gil, and Piers walked along. There was the hopeful green of young growth across the ploughed fields, but that was a promise of harvest-to-come that had proved false these past two years of wet summers and harsh winters, and there were not so many cows or even sheep at graze as there might have been. That had been true everywhere the players had traveled so far this year. When the haying failed in a rain-drenched summer, fewer cows could be over-wintered and that meant fewer calves come the spring and that meant fewer cows in years to come. And if too little was left from a ruined harvest to feed a family through the winter, then what should have been saved to plant the next year’s fields too often went to ease present hunger, lessening even further the next year’s hope. And because when all this happened, the hunger was everywhere, there was nowhere to go to escape it, nothing to do but stay and see it through until the fat years came again. Or die where you were if you didn’t last that long.

Joliffe had seen how that trap went when he was very young and had taken his first chance to slip free and away from it, first by one way, then by another, and then into being a player. But he was older now and knew there was no true going free. For one thing, all in life was too much bound piece to piece to piece, was too much a whole, for anyone to be wholly free while they still drew breath. For another thing, whatever sort of life someone might choose, there were burdens to it, and any manner of “escape” left an emptiness where the might-have-been would have been, with sometimes—after some “escapes”—that emptiness a burden in itself.

Not that Joliffe had any wish to go back on the choices he had made, but neither was he so cowardly as to try to deny their costs. Nor was he so young anymore that he thought life could be lived without burdens. In truth, he had found that in bearing a burden honestly and with a whole heart there was often a surprising freedom.

What was needed, he had long since decided, was to find the balance between burdens rightly accepted and burdens stupidly borne, between escapes rightly made and the fool’s escape that led to nothing but worse burdens than those left behind.

He had also decided there were few people able to tell one choice from the other until too late—and he wasn’t at all certain he was any better at it than anyone else.

But he also knew that on the whole he would rather starve as a player than as something else, so here he was and, thanks to the vagaries of fortune and Lord Lovell’s favor, less close to starving than the company had been for years.

The road curved and sloped down to cross a stream, probably the one that ran past their camp. It was wide and shallow here, with an easy ford for cart or wagon, and stepping stones by which Joliffe, Ellis, Gil, and Piers crossed dry-footed. Beyond it, the road curved again, bringing them into a scatter of perhaps ten houses. There were signs there had been more of a village here upon a time. Between the present houses there were here and there wide gaps that told where other houses had likely stood, with some of the gaps now made into someone else’s kitchen gardens but others simply left bare, one with the stub of housewall still standing, while in another what looked to have once been a house was turned now into a byre or barn.

A dying village, its life draining away to other places, Joliffe thought. The players came to such now and again. Time was past when men and women were tied to one place for life. More and more lords found it easier to take money in place of services, and then money in place of a man or woman altogether, letting villeins buy themselves free to try their luck elsewhere, leaving the lord able to hire others to whom he owed nothing but their wages and none of the tangle of rights and privileges that his erstwhile villeins had acquired through the generations. In some ways it was a freeing of the lords as much as it was a freeing of ordinary folk—which of course was why the lords were willing to do it.

Of those peasants who stayed where they were, many did simply because they could not imagine doing otherwise, could see no further than where they already were. Others stayed because they saw how to make use of what new chances there were, and from what Joliffe had heard, Walter Gosyn was one of those—an up-coming man and resented for it by the likes of Wat Offington who wanted what Gosyn had but, lacking the wits to get it for themselves, settled for being angry about it.

Of course, Joliffe added to himself, Gosyn’s ways might be as likely to kill off the village’s life as other men’s ignorance, but that was the way things went—chance and foolishness happened to all men.

From Sy, the players knew Gosyn’s place was on the village’s far side, the last house, and Ellis had said as they walked along, “Shall we give the villagers something, too, as we pass through? Just for the sport of it?” The others had agreed, knowing more than sport was part of it. Villagers made friendly now could be villagers friendly in the future for other players who might come this way—though any players come this far from any main way were probably in more need than could be helped in a place like this.

Aside from that, it was easier to pass through a village doing something other than simply walking with everyone staring, maybe none too friendly, wondering why they were there. So as they came up from the ford, Piers began to tootle on his pipes and rat-tat on his tabor, leading the way for Ellis and Gil, who set to making a show of juggling the bright-painted leather balls, while Joliffe thumped the curved bottom of his lute and sang an idiot song to let folk know the players were come to town, tra-la, to sport and play today, hey-hey.

In the clear early evening, folk were at work in their gardens or sitting in ease by their doors, so the players had audience enough for their going, as well as a merriness of children who gave up some circle game they had been playing in the street to dance and laugh around the players for the hundred yards or so to Gosyn’s gateway. At the gateway, though, they spread aside and fell back from the players. Ellis gave the word, and Piers, just gone into the yard beyond the gateway, left off his pipes and tabor while Ellis and Gil deftly caught all the juggling balls. Together with Joliffe they all turned back to their following of children and a few men and women who had joined them, and bowed deeply, with Joliffe and Piers sweeping off their hats with flourishes and Joliffe saying, “Our thanks and more, good folk, for your good welcome . . .”

“Judas!” a child yelped, pointing at him.

Joliffe bowed again, smiling, and said, “Nay, that was yesterday and only for the while. Today I am myself. Though mayhap in a while I may turn into a devil. One never knows.” He twisted his face into a mocking, leering grin at the child, who yelped with delighted fear while others laughed or pretended to be frightened with him.

With more bows and flourishes, the players turned away, toward the house and its open doorway where at least a servant should have been waiting for them by now to see them in. They had made noise enough that no one could be ignorant of their coming, but no one was there, and that surprised Joliffe.

The house itself was set back from the street on the other side of a small, dusty yard flanked by the usual byre and barn and separated from the street by only a waist-high wattle fence. While beyond argument the house was the best in the village, it was a far lesser place than either Medcote’s or Ashewell’s. Reed-thatched and half-timbered, with white-plastered daub walls, it had plainly been only a small yeoman’s house of probably two rooms and a loft until, at one end, a two-floored short range of rooms had been added, end on to the yard, not so long ago—both timbering and thatch were still golden-new, not weathered to gray with time and weather—with what had been the house probably made into the hall.

“There’s someone else here,” Ellis said with a nod toward one side of the yard where three saddled horses were tied to posts.

“So we’re to play for more than only the Gosyns,” Joliffe said lightly. “The two bay rouncys look like Ashewell’s.”

“But the gray is Medcote’s,” Gil said tautly. “I remember it from when he was at our camp.”

“Damnation,” Ellis growled. “It has to be Hal Medcote is here.”

“No trouble,” Joliffe warned.

“My quarrel wasn’t with him,” Ellis said sharply. “But I doubt him being here will add to the merriment, do you?”

Joliffe did doubt it, but before he could answer, Sy came out of the house door and scurried—that was the only word for it—toward them with much the frightened hurry of a hare pursued by hounds.

“Damnation,” Ellis said, this time in a mutter.

Joliffe silently agreed, but drawing together, the four of them kept on across the yard, Ellis pulling Piers by the shoulder back and a little behind them as if out of harm’s way as Sy reached them, urging as he came, “Come in, come in. Mistress Geretruda says come in, you’ll maybe help. They’ll maybe stop if you’re here.”

“Who’ll stop what?” Ellis demanded.

“Master Gosyn, Master Ashewell, and that Hal Medcote. They’re quarreling horribly. Mistress Geretruda doesn’t know what to do. Nor does Mistress Ashewell.”

“Neither do we,” said Ellis. “We’re here just to play, not put ourselves in the way of anything.”

“What are they quarreling about?” Joliffe asked, earning a furious look from Ellis.

“I don’t know!” Sy exclaimed. “Come!”

Ellis surely would not have, but at that moment the girl Claire came from the house and toward them, nearly but not quite running, her skirts lifted out of her feet’s way and fear very open on her young face. “Sy, hurry them!” she said. “It’s Mother. I’m afraid . . .” But she gave up on Sy without a pause, going past him to Ellis, so desperate that she laid a hand on his arm as she pleaded up at him with fear and tears in her eyes, “Come and make her think of something else. She’s so frightened, listening to them. She’s going to make herself sick. Please come.”

Joliffe knew they were lost. Ellis would likely have held out against Sy and almost any other man, but a pleading girl with tears in her eyes . . . In fairness, Joliffe had to admit that he started toward the hall in the same moment Ellis did. Nor was Gil behindhand, or Piers. Though Piers did not count. He liked trouble. But for the rest of us, Joliffe thought, we’re idiots. He also thought it was unfortunate that understanding they were idiots was not the same as stopping being idiots.

With a gasped, “Thank you,” Claire let go of Ellis and made to lead them inside, but Joliffe put out a hand to pause her, asking, “Where are they quarreling at? In the hall?”

“In the orchard. Beyond the garden. Father took them out there to be away. But we can hear them yelling.”

Joliffe wanted to ask again, “About what?” but more to the necessary point Ellis said, “Where’s your mother?”

Claire was going forward again and they followed her as she answered, “In the solar. Will you sing to her or something? Anything to turn her mind.”

She had them into the hall now. With its old hearth in the middle of the floor and smoke-blackened beams, it was raised above its former humbleness by a table set across its upper end, covered with a white linen cloth and set with good pewter dishes, waiting for a meal that had not happened yet. At the hall’s other end two women servants were standing by a doorway to probably the kitchen, hand-wringing and looking worried. Claire pointed Sy toward them, saying, “Make sure they don’t let supper spoil,” but headed herself toward a door that had to lead into the new range of rooms where the solar would be.

“Wait,” said Ellis. “We need a moment.”

They surely did, having no thought of what they were going to do, and they clumped together, heads close in quick talk. It was always best to have a thing practiced and certain before they played it, but they were also practiced at making up something on the moment—a needed skill when playing the streets with no certainty of what could happen next—and it took few words before Piers handed the tabor and pipes to Gil and hitched at his tunic and hosen to be sure they were loose enough, while Ellis said to Claire, “The solar is right through there?” beckoning his head toward the door beyond the table.