A Play of Piety (6 page)

“I take my daily wage in food,” Rose said, seeing him look at all of that.

“They pay well.”

“Sister Letice adds what she calls ‘alms’ to what I earn. Thus the peas.” She prodded the bag. It gave a dry rattle. “Last year’s but still a kind gift.”

“Water?” Joliffe asked, because that would be needed to cook the peas.

“Under the front of the cart. Piers fetched a full bucket this morning.”

“From where?”

“There’s a well in the rear-yard beyond the laundry,” Rose answered.

“You’re sure he went that far?” Joliffe asked, bringing the bucket.

“I’m sure,” Rose said, soft laughter at him behind the words. “Nor it isn’t that far.” She nodded sideways. “We’re nearly at the corner of the orchard, with the garden just beyond it and then the rear-yard.”

“No one’s troubled the cart?” Joliffe asked. That was always a worry, there being no way to secure the cart beyond tying closed the flaps at front and back, so that usually one or another of the company was left to guard it, which was not possible here.

“None. With hayward and reeve and bailiff all prowling to be sure everyone is where they’re supposed to be and working hard at the harvest, anyone troubling things here would likely be easily found out.”

Having poured sufficient water into the pot for her, he sat down on his heels out of her way while she busied herself with stirring the peas into it and asked, his voice very low, “The money? Still safe?”

Her voice equally low, she answered, not pausing in her work, “Still safe.”

Years ago a secret place had been made in the cart for the keeping of the scant coins the company had been able to spare from daily needs. Of late there were a comfortable number of them there, but sometimes they had been very scant indeed and sometimes the only thing between the players and dire need. The secret place had been made by Rose’s husband. After he had deserted her and their son and the company, never to be heard from or of since in the years afterward, only Rose had known where the secret place was, with her father’s willing agreement because she, being the most careful of any of the company, was least likely to be foolish with the money. Only eventually had she shared the secret with Joliffe, that if anything untoward happened, someone besides herself would know. That
he
knew of it remained secret between them.

Now he asked, “Should you tell someone besides me?”

“No,” she said. She swung away to find something in the kitchen box. “You’ve come back. There’s no need to tell anyone else.” She turned back to the pot and added, not looking at him, “Is there?”

“No,” he said in his turn.

“You’re staying in the company?”

“Yes.”

“Until he wants you elsewhere.”

“He doesn’t want me elsewhere.” Neither of them saying the powerful bishop’s name.

“Where does he want us?”

“I don’t know. Wherever we want to be for now, I suppose.”

Rose sighed. “Well, here is where we have to be for now, want or not.”

The weight of that worry came down immediately on both of them, and Joliffe, to go a more cheerful way, forced though it might be, said, “And here is none so bad. Basset is bettering. You seem content. Ellis, Gil, and Piers are earning money. Tomorrow I’ll be. We’ve done worse.”

“We have done.” Rose matched his cheerfulness without he could tell how forced her own was. “Why don’t you fetch the cushions now?”

He did and sat himself down on one. The well-westered sun was striking long, golden light through the orchard, pooling deep green shadows among the trees. Supper was cooking. Tonight and probably tomorrow were taken care of. All in all, he had no complaints about the world at just that moment and after a comfortable stretch of silence he said easily, “So. Tell me about this place, these people.”

“Um.” Rose hesitated. “Ah.”

It seemed a more difficult question than Joliffe had intended. “Good? Bad? Mixed lot?” he prompted.

“Good,” Rose said immediately. “On the whole, good.”

“Mixed lot, then.”

Rose laughed at him. “Mixed lot. But none of them so bad. Or so I’d have said before Mistress Thorncoffyn came. She’s unsettled everything.”

“A cat come into a dovecote,” Joliffe suggested.

“If you grant the cat doesn’t want to make a kill, only keep everyone’s feathers ruffled. And that the cat brought dogs with it. Master Soule has all but disappeared from sight since she came.” Her tone suggested “fortunate man.”

“Master Soule?”

“Master of the hospital. And please don’t make any jests about his name,” she added, although she had not been looking at Joliffe and could not have seen he had opened his mouth to do just that. As he closed his mouth, she went on, “He and Father Richard are our priests, with Father Richard priest at St. George’s across the road, too. Then there’s Master Hewstere. He’s our physician. He sees to the men’s bodily care, while Master Soule and Father Richard see to their spiritual.”

“I’d begun to wonder if I was the only man here besides the patients.” Although he had not truly wondered that, because every hospital had its priest or priests, they being necessary to the patients’ longer well-being than anything a physician could do for them.

“You saw Jack at the gate,” Rose reminded him.

“I’d forgotten. Yes.”

Rose spooned one of the peas from the boiling water, tried it for how cooked it was, and was turning to the kitchen box again as she went on, “Best you ready yourself for Mistress Thorncoffyn, though. She’ll want to know all about you.” Having taken the cloth bag of oatmeal from the box and opened the drawstring, she took out a handful of meal and let it flow into the bubbling water with one hand, spoon-stirring with her other hand while going on, “Besides Master Soule and Father Richard and Master Hewstere, there’s who you’ve already met. Sister Margaret knows as much of medicines as Master Hewstere does, I think, though it won’t do to say so. She and Sister Letice together know as much about herbs and what purposes they best serve as anyone is likely to. Then there’s Sister Ursula.”

“Who hired me.”

“And will be watching to see you earn your keep, never doubt it,” Rose assured him. “You’ve still to meet Sister Petronilla. She mostly sees to the children.”

“The children?”

“The children. Mistress Thorncoffyn’s father made this hospital for the care of aged and ill men, with ‘four discreet men of the town’ and the master to govern it, but with the provision that his heir of the next generation and the three generations after that have right of say and stay.”

“The right not only to stay here when they choose, but a right to a say in the hospital’s governing, you mean.”

“Just so,” Rose agreed.

“And when the four generations of heirs have passed?”

“Then all reverts to the next heir who will be free to continue the hospital or take all back into his own hands.”

“And the children?” Because a hospital was not the usual place for children. Ill children were cared for at home. Unwanted, orphaned children, if they were fortunate, went most often into the care of a nunnery or monastery.

“The older at least is Mistress Thorncoffyn’s doing,” Rose said. She was now slicing the onions, leaves and all, into the pot.

“It’s Mistress Thorncoffyn’s child?” Joliffe said incredulously.

Rose scorned that with, “No. I’ve never made out whether he’s the son of someone among the gentry she knows or of one of her servants she decided to favor, only that he’s the child of someone she knows who couldn’t or wouldn’t keep him. He’s twisted of body and was thought to maybe be slight in his wits, which he isn’t, as it’s turned out. By rights, there’s no provision in the hospital’s statutes for children to be here, but Mistress Thorncoffyn wanted it and she—” Rose paused, seemingly searching for a word.

“Forced?” Joliffe suggested.

“Persuaded,” Rose said quellingly. “She persuaded the others with say in the place to accept the boy. So I’ve gathered from the talk. Maybe it’s thought he’ll take over from Jack at the gate when the time comes. Anyway, since he was already here, that made it easier to let in the other boy when that was the only way to have Sister Petronilla here. She’s a widow, you see, and he’s her son and not at all right in the head, poor little thing. Sister Margaret and Sister Ursula are widows, too, come to that.”

Widows were preferred for work in hospitals and alms-houses, and the older they were the better, to put them beyond the temptations of the flesh. The trouble with that, Joliffe had always thought, was that someone old enough to be beyond the temptations of the flesh was likely to be too feeble for the necessary work. Certainly, the women he had seen here were not in the blushings of youth—save for Amice in the laundry perhaps—but equally certainly they were far from old and assuredly far from feeble.

“Then there are Emme and Amice in the laundry, but they’re not sisters here, only hired like me, with Emme having her gown and apron as part of her wages. That’s all of us. Not that anyone except Emme and Amice have any one set of tasks all and only her own. We all set our hands to whatever needs doing. The cooking. Tending to the men. The garden. Anything.”

There it was again, that including herself in this place as if she belonged. This time Joliffe might have taken her up about it, but she said, peering into the pot that she was stirring again, “And now there’s you, and I’m going to lie down for a time before Ellis and the others come.” She handed him the spoon. “Tend the pot. If supper burns, you’ll go hungry and no one will be glad you’re here.”

Pretending injured dignity, Joliffe said, “I think I can stir a pot of pease pottage to everyone’s satisfaction.”

“Um,” said Rose, admitting to nothing except her doubt, and went away with one of the cushions to an apple tree’s deepest shade.

Chapter 5

H
aving taken off her headkerchief, folded it, and carefully set it aside, Rose lay down with a self-betraying sigh of weariness and, by her breathing, was very soon asleep, her head on the cushion and one arm over her eyes, her other resting across her waist. Joliffe settled himself beside the fire with his back to her for what little privacy that gave.

The orchard was in early evening quiet, warm with the day’s gathered heat, no slightest breeze stirring among the trees, the shadows thickening toward darkness as, somewhere beyond sight, the sun must be nearly set. Unseen birds were twittering as they settled for their night, and Joliffe was contented to be alone in the peacefulness for a time, to catch his thoughts up. The long day had gone ways that, looking ahead to it, he would never have thought it would. Not that any of them were bad in themselves. He wanted more time to talk with Basset to judge for himself how he did, that was certain, but if Basset had been helped as much as he and Rose said he had been, surely he could be helped the rest of the way.

Surely.

Except Joliffe knew there was no “surely” about anything in the world except death. Even taxes could be out run if you weren’t tied down to place and property or were poor enough. Until lately the players had managed all three of those
and
avoided death into the bargain. Thus far, thus good, he thought. Nor was Basset going to die of the arthritics. But if he did not heal more than he was at present, the company was finished.

Joliffe circled that thought, unable to keep away from it. In a company like theirs, everyone had their share of work and everyone had to do it or the whole fell to pieces. Along with his skill in directing their plays and the parts he took in them, Basset’s sharp choosing where they would go and what they would play had kept the company going through the worst times. As much as the company needed his wits, though, they also needed his body upright and performing. True, until Gil joined them two years ago they had done with one less player—had done so again these past months with Joliffe gone, their plays changed back to how they had been before Gil joined them and parts been shifted around. Without Basset, there would be another shifting of parts, and any plays they could no longer do could be dropped. That was straightforward enough, but it still left the plain problem of travel. Their cart was loaded right to the edge of what Tisbe could draw. If Basset was going to have to ride from here onward, they would either have to abandon some of the things by which they made their living or go to the cost of changing their cart to a two-horse draw and getting another horse. Leaving behind any of the hard-bought necessities of their trade was hardly to be thought on, while the laughable part of it was that, with their wealthy bishop now in some sort—for the use he hoped to make of them—secretly their patron behind the front of Lord Lovell, there was surely money to be had to keep their company together and going onward. The trouble there was that if their company became so openly prosperous beyond the ordinary, would questions be asked about their prosperity? That would not be to the good. Their value to the bishop lay in no one thinking twice about them being other than they were.

Joliffe, having been sitting with the long-handled spoon idle in his hands, remembered to stir the pottage just before it would have begun to burn at the bottom.

He told himself that was reminder not to lose heed of the immediate moment in brooding about what had not, might not come to pass. Why should he worry overmuch just yet? Basset might altogether better and then the worry would be all a waste. If Basset did not altogether better,
then
would be the time to set to worrying.

The trick there, Joliffe knew too well, was to follow his own wise advice. And knew himself too well to believe he was likely to. But why shouldn’t he? Let things be as they were for a while. For the time being, Basset was bettering, Rose was content, the others were earning money. Beginning tomorrow he had easy work for himself, and if he had read her smiles at him a-right, Amice of the laundry had possibilities. What was there to be discontented about?