A Play of Treachery (3 page)

“There is that,” she agreed, forcing a smile and false cheer.

The peddler had well-placed his coming to them. Half that morning’s walk brought them, their cart, and Tisbe to a country crossroads where it made sense for Joliffe to turn leftward, the others to go onward. Considering how many years they had been in each others’ company, day in and day out, they made surprisingly short work of their farewells. Piers remembered to demand his penny, but little else was said on any side beyond, “Fortune’s favor on you” and “Take care.” But then, it was maybe those years of being used to each other that made the farewells short: knowing each other so well, there was little that needed saying. It was only when the familiar rattle of the cart and plod of Tisbe’s hooves were gone and Joliffe was left to only himself and a few birds hopping and chirping in the leaf-bare hedgerows along the road that the completeness of what he had done came home to him. The completeness . . . and the lack of any chance of going back to how things had been.

He had made his agreement with Bishop Beaufort not because he had wanted “other” than his life as a player but because he had wanted “more.” What he had now, at just that moment, was neither. Instead, he was standing alone on an unknown road, going to somewhere he barely knew for reasons he could guess at but not yet know. To get the more that he wanted, he had given up what he had—even if only for a while—and at just that moment, there alone on the road, there was a cold hollow in him that had very much to do with fear.

He was used to fear, though, he told himself. Life was full of things to fear—or at least be wary of. Too many people wallowed in whatever their fear or feelings might be, blindly indulging in them instead of straightly facing and dealing with them. Joliffe—as he did with most things in his life (fear among them)—took, in his mind, a small step back from this present fear and looked at it. Alone on that road between those hedgerows, he straightly faced that for just now he had to do without one of the things he wanted in his life so that, eventually, he could have both the things he wanted. Since that was the way of it and there was no use sorrowing over one hand being empty when the other was full of something good, he hitched his sack to rest more easily on his shoulder and set off along the unfamiliar road with a long stride meant to cover miles.

O
nly the next day did it come to Joliffe he could hire a horse, rather than walk his way to Southwark. He had grown so used to walking, he simply had not thought of doing otherwise, but when some of his silver pennies bought him a night’s lodging and supper
and
a goodly breakfast at a small, somewhat untidy inn, he bethought himself of how silver pennies could buy other, even less familiar, things, and in the doorway, on his way out to another day of walking, he turned back and asked the innkeeper if there were a hire-stable in town, somewhere he could get a horse for brief use.

The man, probably mindful that he had paid with good silver, said easily enough, “For where are you bound? London, you said?”

“I said London, but it’s to Southwark.”

“Better yet. Jack Duncell, he has horses to hire, and his brother has a place at the other end, in Southwark, where they can be left—and hired again for coming back, if that’s what you want. Mostly it’s for folk going back and forth to London, but the Duncells have agreement with other stablemen on to Canterbury for pilgrims and even to Dover for them as are fool enough to go further. Have stables the other way, too, west toward Cirencester and Gloucester, for such as are going the other direction, coming back, as ‘twere. Do a good business. You go along that way”—the innkeeper pointed along the street—“and you’ll know the place. If he’s a horse to hand, he’ll see you on your way, will Jack Duncell.”

Jack Duncell had several horses to hand and was glumly glad to hire one to Joliffe. “Travel falls off this time of year,” he said. “So here they are, eating their way through my purse. I’ve a good little chestnut gelding will see you to London, right and proper.”

Joliffe, finding unused knowledge coming back to him, turned down the chestnut gelding on suspicion of a sore hoof from the way the horse was lifting and setting down its right forefoot, but cheerfully took a black mare with a calm face and sturdy legs.

“She goes steady,” Duncell said while saddling her. “But you won’t get any turn of speed out of her. There’s not much fire to her.”

Given how many years it was since he had last done much riding, “fire” was among the last things Joliffe wanted from a horse. “I just need to be in Southwark the day after tomorrow.”

“Ah. She’ll have you there sometime tomorrow without pushing.” He cocked an eye skyward. “Weather should hold that long for you, too.”

Duncell proved right about the black mare and only a little wrong about the weather. The next afternoon, as Joliffe rode between the spread of houses, gardens, and orchards that were the outward sprawling edge of Southwark, the first light flakes of snow swirled down from the gray clouds that had been lowering since dawn. A mean wind came with the snow, sharp around his ears, making him huddle deeper into his cloak and pull his hood up over his slight-brimmed cap and welcome when the road became a street crowded between shoulder-to-shoulder houses that gave some shelter from the wind if not from the suddenly bone-biting cold.

His acquaintance with Southwark was slight, but there was not much chance of mistaking his way. Stretched around the southern end of London’s bridge, the town’s main purpose lay in serving travelers. All the main ways into it drew toward the bridge, and Joliffe had no trouble coming on the swinging sign of St. Christopher that marked the inn where the Duncells had their Southwark stable. In the inn’s yard, Joliffe gave the mare over to a man enough Jack Duncell’s twin to surely be his brother, and then, with the day getting no warmer and early dark coming on with the swirling snow, he took a room at the Christopher. More than that, he took not just a bed among other beds in some long room—a bed quite possibly shared with someone he did not know—but an actual chamber all to himself. He was spending his pence madly, but not knowing into what he was heading, come tomorrow’s meeting, he chose to favor himself this far, and at least the room came with not only a clean-blanketed bed with a sheet, but a small table and even a candle. With the shutter closed over the one window and the candle lighted, the low-beamed room was a haven from the strangeness of the past three days and the uncertainty of whatever was to come, and just now he wanted that haven.

Added to that, the room was warm from the kitchen below it, and he brought his supper of beef and parsnip pottage, rye bread, and spiced wine back to it, to eat and drink in splendid solitude, the wine reminding him of his time with Thamys just—five?—days ago. The shift from that while in Thamys’ comfortable room to the next day spent on the road and working had been wide enough but had held nothing unexpected. It was the shift from there to here that was so far aside from anything foreseen that he found he did not want to look at it, instead firmly put aside his thoughts that way and brought out from his sack the small book he had bought, probably foolishly, in Oxford’s High Street the other day.

Since everything in a player’s life had to be carried either on the cart or on himself, there was little place in a player’s life for unneeded things, and for a long time past, books had been among the things Joliffe had not let himself need. For much of that time, too, there had been no money to spare from the company as it barely survived, but now—despite the first still held—the second was no longer true, and the other day after leaving Thamys Joliffe had paused at a scrivener’s stall. Just to look, he had told himself, and kept himself away from the more costly books set out to display the scrivener’s skill, instead looking only at the plainer works done for such scholars as could afford a ready-written text, rather than have to copy out with their own hand what they needed from someone else’s copy of a book.

The particular book that Joliffe now laid on the table was about the length and width of his hand and no thicker than his finger. Small enough to carry easily, he had told himself as he stood at the stall, turning its pages, finding it written in plain black script on moderately good paper stitched into an unadorned parchment cover. It was poems. The first lines his eyes chanced on—
—had made him want to read more, but with the scrivener’s eye already on him—able to tell he was neither student nor scholar nor master but unable to place him as a townsman either and therefore doubly suspicious of him—Joliffe had given way to that ever-dangerous thing—a sudden urge—and bought the book.

The thing about such sudden urges was that as often as they could work against him, they could also be to the good. The trouble there was that by the time he knew which way the outcome would go, it had already . . . come out.

He supposed the day would come when, full of wisdom and good judgment, he would make all his decisions in a well-considered manner, thinking them through before deciding his way, but that day still looked to be a long way distant, Joliffe thought with silent laughter at himself as he opened the book.

This time at least the urge had served him well. He was in no humour for tavern noise and drinking or Southwark’s famed other possibilities, but neither did he much want to be alone with his thoughts—his worries—about tomorrow. Against those, the book served very well, both for companionship and diversion, and he read by the golden candlelight until the candle was burned far down and he had worn out his brain sufficiently that sleep came almost as soon as the darkness when he blew out the candle and lay down.

With morning came a whole day to be gone through before he met “a man” in the Crown of Roses an hour after Vespers. He paid for another night in his room, for somewhere to leave his sack through the day as well as to be sure of somewhere to sleep, then broke his fast with more of last night’s stew, a small, round loaf of crisp-crusted, new-baked bread, and some fresh-brewed ale. Ready after that to face the day, he shrugged his cloak around him and ventured out. Yesterday’s snow still lay in thin lines along shadowed places close to buildings, and the sky was still low and gray, but the bitter wind had gone, shops were opening, people were out and about: workmen carrying their tools, bound to wherever today’s work was; women with their market baskets, on their way to market and baker and butcher; children to school or—older boys and probably apprentices—on whatever early errand their master had set them. A pair of the town’s scavagers were early about their business, shoveling into their cart the waste and rubbish left in careful piles beside doorsteps, a less odorous job at this time of year than at others.

Except that Joliffe knew that Southwark was where the brothels and gambling forbidden in London were gathered, out of the reach of London’s laws but not of customers, he could have thought it simply an ordinary town, its prosperity built, like so many others, on serving the monastery in its midst, St. Mary Overy along the Thames. Besides that, there was the added benefit of the bishop of Winchester’s palace only a little further up the river, because whenever the bishop was in residence with his large household, all of Southwark’s grocers, butchers, and bakers surely prospered. On his own behalf, Joliffe learned, by way of a simple question of the lazing guard at Winchester House’s outer gateway, that Bishop Beaufort had spent Christmastide away in Hampshire at one of his other palaces and was not yet come back here. So it was not to have a secret meeting with Bishop Beaufort that he was to meet someone in a tavern this evening. For what then?

Restless with his curiosity, Joliffe spent the day wandering Southwark’s streets and alleyways, learning his way around the town from one direction and then another, becoming familiar with more than the main ways on the chance that he would need to know them if Bishop Beaufort had a use for him here. Southwark not being that large of a place, by early afternoon he had done as much as he might without he became too noticeable, and with still several hours to fill, he took himself across London bridge and roamed some of London’s streets, to add to the acquaintance he had with London from the players’ while there last autumn.

Still, Bishop Beaufort had men enough in London and surely Southwark not to need Joliffe here as well. So why . . .

Try though he did to keep his wondering in check, he could not help his imaginings nor deceive himself that mostly he was no more than filling time to get through the day as best he could, and when bells finally rang out from various church towers for the hour of Vespers in the late afternoon that was gathering early into a gray evening under the day’s persevering clouds, he was already crossing the bridge back to Southwark.

As part of his day’s wanderings, he had of course made sure to find out the Crown of Roses tavern. Not that that had been a trouble. Its sign of a wreath of red roses thrust out boldly over the wide street that ran along the long side of St. Mary Overie not far from Winchester House. Maybe because it was so near to both the monastery and the bishop’s palace, it had looked from the outside to be only a tavern, with no other of Southwark’s less desirable businesses part of it. Or maybe, being so near to the monastery and bishop’s palace, it merely kept a better front to itself than some other places Joliffe had seen in his wanderings about the town. Either way, the room he came into from the street was welcoming, with long tables down both sides, benches along the wall behind them and more benches scattered in the open middle of the room, all well-lighted by horn-sided lanterns hung along the ceiling beams. The rushes thick on the floor were fresh, neither squishing nor giving out a stink underfoot as Joliffe crossed toward the trestle table set up across the doorway at the room’s far end where a woman of middle years, tidily-dressed in a dark gown, with a clean apron, and white starched wimple and headkerchief presided over several pottery pitchers and an array of vari-sized wooden cups.