A Play of Knaves (3 page)

Although not always true, it held more often than not, and as they went merrily along the street, doors opened and people looked out. As they reached the church, they found that where their lane crossed another beside the church there was enough widening of the streets along the churchyard for them to set up to play without troubling whoever was priest here, and Basset said, “We look to be in ever-better luck.”

Even more to their luck, they could
not
set up just now because today must be the village’s market day: half a dozen tables and a few canvas-sheltered booths crowded the street’s widening, with among them a gathering of men and women and children who greeted the players with shouts and waves. Adding the villagers drawn from the houses by the drum and pipes gave a goodly crowd to whom Basset proclaimed that the company would, “by your good grace, perform a play, if there be none to say us nay!”

If there were any nays, they were lost among the many shouted “Ayes!” and Basset bowed as if in submission to their will and stepped aside with a wordless sweep of his arm to bring Ellis forward. What they had been playing most places since leaving Minster Lovell was Joliffe’s rude play about the duke of Burgundy, it being quick and with no need to set up a particular playing space, and while Basset had proclaimed to the crowd, Joliffe, Ellis, and Gil had been behind the cart slipping out of their tabards and into the needed garb. Helped by Rose and Piers into wigs and loose gowns over their usual clothing, Gil became “Lady Honor” and Joliffe “Mistress Greed,” while a red cloak, a pair of horns, and a swagger sufficed to turn Ellis into “the Devil,” ready to come forward to take Basset’s place and hold the crowd with a speech about the joys of seizing souls, giving Basset time to go behind the cart and put on a “rich” chain of office—oversized and gaudy, made of brass-dipped tin and false jewels—and the company’s brass crown to become the Duke and ready at the end of the Devil’s speech to come forward hand in hand with Lady Honor.

It was just as well the farce was brief, because as they finished to loud laughter and cheers at the Devil and Mistress Greed dragging the yelling, kicking Duke away to Hell behind the cart, leaving smiling Lady Honor curtsying to the crowd and Piers skipping out with bag in hand to collect whatever coins people might be pleased to give, a man came shoving through the crowd along the churchyard wall, demanding as he came, “What are you doing here? What’s this pollution?”

Behind the cart Ellis and Joliffe let Basset go, knowing the sound of trouble when they heard it. Hurriedly stripping off the Duke’s chain and crown, Basset handed them to Rose while Ellis took off the Devil’s horns and cloak and tossed them into the cart, freeing him to go with Basset back around the cart to face the trouble.

Joliffe took longer to be rid of wig and gown but followed bare moments later, to find Basset and Ellis facing a stout, balding man in a priest’s long black surcoat loudly railing at Basset for his blasphemous work. Basset seemed to have yet to get a word in edgewise, but having long experience at such trouble, he was standing with hands clasped and head respectfully cocked to one side, waiting for the priest to run down before attempting any answer. Behind the priest, none of the villagers were leaving, as willing to enjoy this new show as the last. Piers, intent on the most important part of everything, was still weaving among them, gathering coins, while Gil in Lady Honor’s wig and gown still stood where he had been, giving the priest someone to point at while ranting, “There is only one of the blasphemies! A hitherto innocent boy lured and corrupted into playing at being a woman! Making mock of the Lord’s creation! You!” He all but spat at Basset. “A man of your years, making sport . . .”

While the priest went on, Joliffe said in Gil’s ear, “Go on and change. He can yell at me for a while.”

Gil gasped out a breath he probably had not known he was holding and willingly retreated. Behind the priest, two men were now pushing to the front through the crowd. Tall and fair-haired, they were well-dressed in almost-matching, short, dark houppelandes split for riding, with tall, soft-leathered boots that told they had horses somewhere nearby. It was easy to tell they were not plain villagers even before the older of them said, “Father Hewgo. What’s toward here?”

“Medcote,” the priest said without need to look around. “These men, these servants of the Devil, these . . .”

“By your leave, sire,” Basset inserted with firm respect. “We’re the Lord Lovell’s men, not the Devil’s.”

That stopped the priest, at least briefly. It was one thing to confront the Devil’s servants, another to cross a lord whose power in the world might not be as great as the Devil’s but was more immediate. And in that pause Medcote said at Basset with cold authority, “Have you proof of that?”

From the back of the crowd someone said, “That’s my question to ask, not yours, Medcote.”

Heads turned and the crowd shifted, making way for a dark-haired man somewhat less tall and more plainly dressed than Medcote in surcoat and low riding boots but fully as assured as he came into the open, followed by a boy of maybe fifteen or sixteen years who was enough like him surely to be his son or some other near relation.

“Then why haven’t you asked it?” Medcote demanded at the man.

“Because I saw them come up the street wearing Lord Lovell’s colors and badge on their tabards.” His tone added, And aren’t you a fool not to know that?

Medcote faced the newcomer, hooked his thumbs into his broad leather belt, and said with insulting challenge, “Well, I didn’t.”

“That doesn’t change that it’s my business, not yours, whether or not they play here in the village,” the newcomer said, with an edge to the words that made them almost an affront.

The priest, his voice still ripe with indignation, declared, “It’s
my
business more than anyone’s, here in my own parish.”

That was answered by a few scattered jeers from well back in the crowd. The priest ignored them, pointing again at Basset and insisting, “His kind make mock of the Lord’s grace with their mincing and prancing and profaning. If you saw them arrive, then you saw that, Master Ashewell.”

“I saw them making mock of the kind of men who betray honor and serve greed,” the newcomer answered. “You were not here and did not see what they did at all and so are without grounds to judge.”

Father Hewgo opened, closed, and opened his mouth soundlessly, looking for something to say but apparently offended past words. It was the man called Medcote who challenged, “Anyone can stitch a badge, Ashewell.”

“True,” Master Ashewell granted. “Therefore I shall ask, with something like due courtesy—” he turned to Basset “—have you something more to prove whose men you are?”

Basset bowed to him, saying with equal courtesy, “We do, sir,” and held a hand out to the side, not needing to look around to know Rose was already there, ready to put into his hand the folded parchment that was their signed and sealed license from Lord Lovell, assuring the world they were in his service and under his protection. Taking it, Basset went forward and handed it to Master Ashewell, who unfolded and read it, then said solemnly, “I find no fault with this,” and solemnly handed it back. The hint of laughter behind his solemnity was just enough to offend without being enough to be challenged as he added to Father Hewgo and Medcote, raising his voice enough to be heard by everyone, “On Lord Lovell’s behalf I am more than ready to welcome these players here. Am even glad to do so.” And to Basset again, “Master Player, welcome to Ashewell parish, both in Lord Lovell’s name and in honor of your skill.”

If he noted Father Hewgo was gone rooster-red—choking on his own choleric gall, Joliffe hoped—Master Ashewell gave no more sign of it than Basset did, bowing to Master Ashewell again and answering in kind, “Good sir, your ready welcome does both yourself and my Lord Lovell honor. My thanks and that of all my company.”

Copying his thanks, Joliffe and Ellis bowed and Rose curtsied.

Master Ashewell bent his head in gracious return, but Father Hewgo started, “I still protest that . . .”

“Protest to your heart’s content,” Master Ashewell said sharply. “Just not to me. Maybe Medcote likes to hear you gabble. I don’t.”

The priest turned toward Medcote in clear expectation of his support, but Medcote said, as if having duly considered it, “Since they indeed have Lord Lovell’s approval
and
Master Ashewell’s, I think objection can hardly be made.”

Father Hewgo’s rooster-red deepened toward a dangerous purple and again—probably most unusually—words failed him. Master Ashewell, with smooth pleasure at probably that as well as other things, said, “With that agreed on, Master Basset, may I offer you and your company a place to stay, with hope you’ll perform for my family tonight at supper?”

Basset bowed to him. “It will be our pleasure. Thank you, sir.”

“But there’ll be no more of your profanity here in the village!” Father Hewgo said. “I forbid it!”

Master Ashewell looked about to make sharp answer to that, but Medcote cut in first and smoothly, “On that I’ve had a thought, Father Hewgo. Since Lord Lovell vouches for them and they’re here, why not use them to the church’s good?”

“To the church’s good?” Father Hewgo made it sound as if he’d been asked to eat hot worms.

“A church ale, Father Hewgo,” Medcote said smoothly.

The priest began what looked to be yet another protest, despite that a church ale was usually to a church’s profit. Parishioners were expected to donate food and drink to be sold for the parish church’s good, and although that donating was sometimes grudged by those who had to do it, folk were generally willing to make a holiday of the time, and Joliffe suspected that in the latter was where Father Hewgo’s objection most deeply lay. He did not seem a man who favored jollity. Probably because people busy with jollity, pleasure, and joy were less biddable than people kept bowed under a heavy sense of their sins and the world’s wickedness.

But Medcote cut over whatever protest the priest might have made, going on, “To raise money toward that east window you’ve been wanting.”

Father Hewgo’s look went from outrage to disconcerted willingness to listen. Medcote surely knew him well and how to deal with him, smiling while saying, “This Sunday coming would suit. That will give time for word to spread that, come Sunday after Mass, there’ll be a play here in the churchyard and . . .”

Father Hewgo bristled into new protest. “In the churchyard? No. That’s beyond all and into desecration.”

With mellow respect, Basset said, “By your leave, sir, all last week and on Easter Sunday afternoon itself, we performed in Minster Lovell’s churchyard by leave of my lord’s priest, for Lady Lovell and the household and half the countryside around. By the time we left, people had been moved by piety to such gifts that there was talk of building a new aisle for the church.”

That was more than Joliffe had heard, but he and Ellis both nodded their heads in agreement. Gil had rejoined them and nodded, too. After all, as Basset sometimes said, truth sometimes lay as much in what was possible as in what was. It was
possible
someone had talked of a new aisle to Minster Lovell church.

For now it was enough that Father Hewgo was paused; and into that pause Joliffe said, more as if thinking aloud than to anyone, “It’s in my mind that Lady Lovell may have said that in her Lenten time at St. Mary’s in Winchester, my lady abbess told how she’d a company perform there at Shrovetide. In the guest-yard, was it?”

Ellis took that up with, “Didn’t she say there was enough made to buy a new gold-embroidered altar frontal?”

“Might have been,” Joliffe agreed. Just as Lady Lovell might have said something about a Shrovetide play—but had not.

“There,” said Medcote. “If such as Lady Lovell and my lady abbess find no fault . . .”

“Yes, yes,” Father Hewgo snapped. “I see the point. Well then, yes, if it’s to be to the good of the church, it may be an allowable thing.”

Basset, knowing it was better settled now than later, said smoothly, “Our fee is a tenth of whatever good our work brings to the church.”

The priest opened his mouth toward either protesting that or else attempting to bargain it down, but before he could do either, the young man behind Medcote, silent until now, said, “I’ll take word to Faringdon myself tomorrow. There’s always some will come that far for a good ale, and the more the merrier.” Somewhat mocking, he added, “Since it’s for the church.”

Several men among the lookers-on cheered and maybe jeered that, and Father Hewgo swung around and said at all the crowd, his voice raised to pulpit-strength, “But never think I’ll not be giving heed to who comes only to the ale and not to Sunday Mass before it! Come to one and not the other and there’ll be a price to pay!”

There were priests who could have made that into a jesting jibe with their authority’s weight behind it nonetheless. Father Hewgo made it simply a threat, surveyed the crowd as if to be sure they understood it, then gave a curt nod of farewell more or less at Master Ashewell and Medcote and stalked away toward the church.

To no one in particular, Medcote said, “We’ve somewhat rumpled his tonsure, I think. I suppose I’d better go smooth it. By your leave, Master Ashewell.”

There was something lightly mocking in the words and the way he bent his head to the other man in a courtesy that Master Ashewell answered with a curt nod.

“Master Nicholas,” Medcote added to the boy behind Master Ashewell and seemed not to see the glare the boy gave him along with a barely jerked nod.

Medcote and the Ashewells might be united against the priest, but they were not friends with one another, that was clear. And as Medcote went away in the priest’s wake, the youth with him—looking as if he had found the whole business vastly laughable—gave Master Ashewell a nod and, behind his back after going past him, a look down his nose at the boy Nicholas, who flushed red and looked furious but was too young and not nearly tall enough to look down his nose in return.