A Play of Piety (10 page)

“Good morrow, Will,” she said. “You’re
running
late.”

Looking past her into the chapel, he said breathlessly, “He’s not down yet? I’m not late then?”

“You’re late enough. Best you keep on hurrying. I think I hear him on the stairs.”

“Oh, saints!” Will exclaimed and bolted forward again, to disappear through a doorway at the far side of the chapel.

“That was one of our grammar boys,” Sister Letice said. “Master Soule keeps the school and the boys take turns, week and week around, helping at the Mass. Not that there’s school now, with everyone to the harvest.”

“There’s a school here, too, then,” Joliffe said as they went along the short passage to the kitchen.

“In season. In a room in the outer range, not to disturb our men.”

Somewhere inside the hospital a sweet-toned bell rang three times, paused, and rang once more. Sister Letice said, “We’ll put these in the scullery. Scrubbing them will have to wait. We all go to Mass.”

Indeed they did—not only the sisters but Rose, and Emme and Amice from the laundry, bringing a pile of folded sheets that Amice set on the foot of Basset’s bed, and Sister Petronilla and the two boys, and Jack from the gatehouse. They gathered at the hall’s lower end, to leave the bedded men with a clear view of the chapel, altar, and priest. Only as Master Soule, now in a priest’s Mass robes, was coming through the far doorway beside the chapel, followed by a suitably gowned and subdued Will, did Mistress Thorncoffyn come lumbering in, thudding her staff on the floor to support herself. Her dogs were not with her, just Idany carrying what looked to be—if it was intended for Mistress Thorncoffyn—a wholly unsuitable three-legged stool.

The women, boys, and Joliffe drew back and aside. Idany set the stool down firmly where her mistress would have open sight of the length of the hall to the chapel, and Joliffe watched with interest as Mistress Thorncoffyn lowered and settled herself on it. Great portions of her over-hung on all sides, but the stool held. Idany took her place behind it, and Master Soule, who had not looked around but had known how long to wait, began the Mass.

It went the usual way of Mass, with nothing required of the onlookers but to look and listen until the showing of the host. For that, in usual places, all were supposed to be standing. Here that was not required of the patients, and everyone else was already standing, save for Mistress Thorncoffyn who was helped to heave to her feet by Idany on one side and Sister Ursula on the other. To see the host was the important part of the Mass for the onlookers, giving safety to the soul for the rest of the day. Mistress Thorncoffyn, having seen it, apparently felt no need for more in the way of prayers. Her soul apparently sufficiently seen to for the while and not bothering to wait while Master Soule finished, she lumbered out of the hall, Idany carrying the stool after her. As Master Soule brought the Mass to its end, her dogs could be heard greeting her at the door across the passageway, with after that the tiny thunder of their feet as they ran out into the foreyard.

With the Mass done, Master Soule and the boy Will left the hall the way they had come, presumably into the sacristy. Talk started up among the men. The women readied to go back to their work. Joliffe, for his part, was given no chance for uncertainty over what he did next because Sister Ursula said to him, “Now is when we change sheets.”

He found that “we” meant now was when he and she changed sheets. “Four of the beds today. Four of them tomorrow. Turn and turn about,” she told him while Basset shifted to the stool beside his bed, out of their way. “Unless there’s need to do it oftener,” she added.

Since the making of beds was not a skill Joliffe had ever learned, he immediately proved unsatisfactory at it, but Sister Ursula crisply corrected his insufficiencies. By the third bed, working straight down the hall, he was becoming adept, but those were the beds of the men who could get up on their own. Joliffe suspected that tomorrow the beds of the bed-bound men along the hall’s other side—John Oxyn of the fever, Adam Morys of the broken leg, and perhaps Iankyn Tanner with his labored breathing—would be different matters. But a sooner, unexpected challenge came with Deke Credy in the last bed on this side of the hall.

For all his quick mouth, it turned out he was wasted away from the waist down, hardly able to shift his legs at all. He could manage some, but with him Joliffe learned how a bed was made while someone was still in it. It was a finer art than he would have supposed, supposing he had ever thought about it at all, which he had not. Even so, by Deke’s silence and the set of his jaw, Joliffe suspected there was some pain for him in the business, and was therefore untowardly pleased at the end when Deke gave a sharp nod at him and said to Sister Ursula, “He’s not so ham-fisted as Ivo. See if you can keep him.”

“I’ll do what I can,” she promised.

While they had been at their changing of beds, Sister Margaret had been going from bed to bed, back and forth across the hall behind them, feeling foreheads and wrists and talking quietly with each man. Sister Ursula had said, “She’s seeing how they do, to tell Master Hewstere when he comes later in the morning,” and Joliffe would have liked to ask Basset what she had told him, but had no chance, Sister Ursula saying now, “Now you take the used sheets to the laundry. While you’re there, Emme will have you shift firewood if she needs it and draw water if Amice has not. Then you’d best get to the scullery, to see to the breakfast dishes.”

Emme did indeed want firewood shifted from the woodstore, and Amice gladly let him haul up bucketful after bucketful of water and pour them into the wash-kettles while she and Emme got the washing of the sheets and other linens under way. At Emme’s suggestion, he likewise took a bucket of water away with him for the scullery, saving himself a return to the yard.

In the kitchen the smell of new-baked bread was warm in the air, and Rose and Sister Ursula and Sister Petronilla were busy with cooking. Mute little Heinrich was sitting cross-legged under the table, lightly whapping a small wooden spoon on one knee with the air of having done so for a long time and the likelihood of going on for a long time more. Daveth was not to be seen. Joliffe and the bucket of water went into the scullery where the wooden cups and bowls and spoons, the morning pottage pot, and other kitchen things all awaited him. Rose had more water heated by the fire for him, too, which helped at the work, but he soon began to find himself in deep sympathy with the vanished Ivo’s wish to be away, especially when he found he had finished with the washing of the cups and bowls and spoons just in time for them to be used to serve the men’s dinners, setting the cycle going all over again.

It was while taking the trays around to the beds that he first saw the oft-mentioned Master Hewstere, the hospital’s physician. He was standing beside John Oxyn, saying something across the bed to Sister Margaret on its other side. He was a hale-looking man, somewhere in his middle years and soberly dressed in a three-quarter-long gown of dark gray cloth with wide sleeves that gave him somewhere to tuck his hands in the way physicians often favored, their knowledge setting them, much of the time, above such base necessities as touching of the ill. Usually that was for the lesser learned to do. It was a physician’s place to view and question and give judgment on what was reported to them.

Presently, Sister Margaret was nodding and nodding to whatever he was saying. Once she shook her head and said something. With a shake of his head and a stern look, he answered her, and she went back to nodding. Joliffe would have liked to hear what they were saying, but it was Sister Letice who went to John Oxyn’s bed with his cool broth and ale—less and lighter fare than the other men were having, a fever being something to starve out of a man, not feed and make stronger. Joliffe had also seen Sister Letice put a powder of well-ground herbs into the broth, less as if for a seasoning, more as if medicine. Against the fever, he supposed.

Sister Margaret and Master Hewstere moved away from the bed, the physician ignoring the slight curtsy Sister Letice gave him. While she sat down and set to spooning broth to John Oxyn and gently urging him to eat, Master Hewstere, on his way out of the hall, likewise ignored Sister Ursula’s curtsy and Joliffe’s bow as he passed them, and behind his back as he left the hall by the same door as Master Soule had after Mass, Sister Ursula and Sister Margaret caught each other’s eye and shrugged, a little mocking, seemingly dismissing Master Hewstere’s careless way.

Joliffe, expecting to have little to do with the man, did not care. He was looking forward to his own dinner that he understood he and the women would have while the men ate theirs; but at the end of taking trays around he found one more tray waiting in the kitchen. It was a large tray like Mistress Thorncoffyn’s, its dishes covered by a white cloth, but Rose said, “It’s for Master Soule and Master Hewstere. They often dine together in Master Soule’s chamber at mid-day.”

Willing to indulge his curiosity before his hunger, Joliffe took the tray readily and went the way he had seen both Master Soule and Master Hewstere leave the hall. As he had supposed, the door led into the sacristy. He supposed, too, now that he saw it, that at some time before the house had been made into the hospital, this had maybe been part of a solar, the withdrawing place for the master and his family. It had been lessened by a wall added when the chapel was made by cutting through the hall’s end, and what had been a generous window in the outer wall was now mostly blocked, to make what was left of the solar into a secure place for the keeping of the robes and stuff of the chapel.

He now had the choice of a shut door on the room’s other side or stairs going up from the farther corner. Voices in talk from above turned him to the wooden-treaded stairs. The door at their head stood open and he made no secret of his coming, but the voices went on, neither Master Soule nor Master Hewstere, seated on opposite sides of a table near a wide window, pausing in their even-toned talk as he came in. Master Soule simply gave a beckon at Joliffe and pointed to show where he could set the tray on the table’s clear corner while Master Hewstere tapped at a paper lying between them, saying, “Given he has no better thought of when he was born than in the spring in King Richard’s reign, it’s nigh to impossible to judge what will be best for him, not knowing under which planet or the time of the moon he was born.”

As Joliffe crossed to the table, he saw enough to guess that when the room below had been a solar, this had been the best bedchamber. There was a small but stone-framed fireplace; the plastered walls were still painted with fading pictures of trees among which birds flew and small animal-shapes showed between tufted grasses. The floor was of well-smoothed boards, bare of even rush matting, and the furnishings were few and plain, the bed at the room’s far end narrow, the curtains that hung around it of plain white cloth. It seemed Master Soule lived a surprisingly austere life. The only thing in excess here were books.

Supposing books could ever be said to be in excess, Joliffe thought.

On a thick shelf fixed strongly to the wall beside the window, perhaps a dozen were stacked or standing. Another was laid open on the slanted reading-board set on the table’s end nearest the window. Joliffe tried to see what the book was as he set the tray on the table at Master Soule’s elbow, but could not, only that—inevitably—it was in Latin. He stepped back from the table. Master Soule gave him a nod of dismissal. He bowed and withdrew, hearing as he went down the stairs Master Hewstere insisting, “More than that, we’re still deep in the
caniculares
. Keeping all the men’s humours in balance is all the more important and at the same time all the more difficult now.”

As Joliffe went beyond hearing, Master Soule was replying, “Um. Yes. However—”

He realized as he returned to the kitchen that likely he would have to take Mistress Thorncoffyn’s tray now, but found to his surprise that he did not, that he could join the sisters and Rose at the table for their own dinner that was not much different from the patients’, while the boy Daveth sat on the floor under the table with his own meal in a bowl beside the child Heinrich still occupied with the spoon. The pottage was good, savory with its bits of mutton, and he asked, “Is this what I’ll be taking to Mistress Thorncoffyn?” Because good though it was, he somehow doubted it would be sufficient to her apparent appetites.

The immediate answer to his question was Sister Letice’s and Sister Petronilla’s smothered laughter while Rose covered her full mouth with a hand, fighting a smile, and Sister Ursula said wryly, “No.” Only Sister Margaret showed nothing, simply went on tearing a bite-sized portion of bread from the piece she held. Seeing he was missing something, Joliffe swept a questioning look around the table, to be answered by Sister Ursula, suspiciously straight-faced, saying, “Mistress Thorncoffyn doesn’t care for our cooking of most things, you see.” That brought more choked laughter from Sister Letice and Sister Petronilla. Sister Ursula went on, “She has her dinners and suppers fetched from a cookshop in the town. She has what she likes prepared there particularly for her and brought here.”

Sister Margaret, very even-voiced and still intent on her bread, said, “The woman there cooks more to her taste, you see.”

That, for some reason, brought a burst of outright laughter from Sister Letice and Sister Petronilla, but no one explained further. With the meal done and everyone rising from the table, Sister Ursula said, “If you’re done eating, Joliffe, it’s time you took Jack’s dinner to him. Jack at the gatehouse,” she added on the chance Joliffe had not yet learned his name.

Joliffe nodded and went to set a tray with a bowl of the meat pottage. Rose, putting a half loaf of the day’s fresh bread beside the bowl, said, “He has ale. You needn’t take him that. Call up the stairs to him, then go up. Don’t have him come down.”

With the man’s humped and limping body in mind, it had not even crossed Joliffe’s mind to have him come down. Besides, he was curious to see where and how the man lived, there above the gateway. Accordingly, when his call from the foot of the stairs was answered by Jack bidding him come up, he willingly did and was greeted at the head of stairs with, “You’ve taken Ivo’s place, I hear, but Daveth didn’t know your name.”