A Play of Treachery

by Margaret Frazer

  “I do,” the man said back, meeting Joliffe’s gaze straightly. “I’m to say that my lord of Winchester hopes you remember your agreement of last autumn.”

  Despite something lurched under his breast bone, Joliffe said steadily, “I remember it.”

  “I’m bid to tell you thus. The fourth day from now, an hour after Vespers, you’re to meet a man you’ll know in the Crown of Roses tavern in Southwark.”

  “To what purpose?” Joliffe asked.

  “That I was not told.” The peddler looked to Basset. “I was told, though, to tell you not to look for him until he comes back.”

  “He will come back, though,” Basset said. It was less a question than a half-hidden demand.

  “God and the saints willing. That’s all any of us can go by. But my lord of Winchester intends it. I was to say that, too, if I were asked.”

  Basset gave a curt nod, accepting that assurance, with small choice but to do so, “my lord of Winchester” being the powerful Henry Beaufort, cardinal and bishop of Winchester, the king’s great-uncle, and a high force in the government.

  The peddler said, still to Basset, “You and your company will maybe want to travel other than your usual way for the while he’s elsewhere, to forestall questions from anyone who might remember him and be curious about why he’s not with you. I’m likewise to pay you for the inconvenience your company will have because of this. What would likely have been his portion in your work for this half year to come?”

  “Half year?” Joliffe echoed, in question and almost-protest together.

  Both the other men ignored him. “In a good year or a bad?” Basset asked.

  The peddler gave him a shrewdly approving look. “A good year. Why not?”

  Basset named a sum that was very fair by what Joliffe knew of the company’s earnings.

  The man raised his brows. “That’s in a good year?”

  “In a good year,” Basset confirmed.

  “You’re not at this to grow rich, are you?”

  The question so openly did not need answering that neither Basset nor Joliffe did, merely followed the peddler as he went around to the cart’s open back, there took coins from the small satchel hung over his shoulder—rather more whole silver coins than a peddler might be expected to have—and counted out the sum Basset had named onto the high wooden floor’s one clear space, where the kitchen box would go when Rose had packed it. Finished, he hesitated, then added a few more coins. “For luck,” he said. “Good enough?”

  Basset looked up from the coins, his face straight. “Good enough,” he agreed.

  “One thing,” Joliffe said. “How do I find the company again, when I’ve finished whatever my lord bishop of Winchester wants of me?”

  The peddler hesitated as if uncertain he should answer that, but finally said, “Someone will know where they are. You’ll be told. After all, I knew where to find you.”

  The thought that some sort of watch had been kept on them without they had guessed it was discomfiting. That it was no more comfortable to know that someone would go on watching the company, even when he was not there, was in the look that flashed between him and Basset, but Joliffe contented himself with a nod of understanding to the peddler, who nodded back, hefted his pack onto his back, and trudged away toward the awakened village to be about his business of selling this and that, on his way to somewhere else and then to somewhere else again.

  Joliffe stood watching him go, then said to Basset, “I feel like a whore that’s been sold and bought.”

  Basset, who had been gathering up the coins, answered flatly, “You should. You have been. For maybe something worse than whoring, but sold and bought, yes.” But his voice went suddenly cheerful as he slapped Joliffe heartily on the back and added, “Still, we got a good price for you. Don’t look so dire. It’s not as bad as all that. It’s what you wanted, and we’ve all been getting flat and fat and too much used to what we’re doing. The shaking up will do us all good. You as well as the rest of us.”

  Joliffe was not sure how much he believed in Basset’s heartiness, but he played back to it, holding out a hand and saying, “If I’m doing you that much good by going away, how if I have some of those coins to see me on the road?”

  “You,” said Basset, “will have all of them,” and held them out.

  “No. Enough to see me to London. No more.”

  Dropping the heartiness, his hand still out, Basset said, serious to the bone, “All of them. You don’t know what you’re heading into. We’re well enough, and there’s what we left with young Master Penteney to fall back on if need be, and that’s because of you, too. So these are yours. I’m still master of this company, and you’re still part of it, and this is what I’m bidding you do—take them.”

  “Half of them,” Joliffe countered.

  Basset hesitated, then agreed, “Half then.”

  Basset made a rough split and still in Joliffe’s favor, but Joliffe made no more protest and was tipping the coins into his belt pouch when Piers said, coming with some of the rolled up blankets from the tent, “Hai! If you’re handing out coins, where’s mine?”

  “We get what we earn,” Joliffe said. “I’ve earned some coins. You’ve earned—” He raised a hand suggestive of a box on the ear. Piers wailed in completely pretended fear, “Mam! He’s going to hit me!”

  Behind him, Ellis growled as he and Gil came with the rolled, strapped tent, “It’s not his turn. It’s mine. Shift aside, fryling. You’re in the way.”

  Piers shifted and went with Gil to fetch the kitchen box while Joliffe went to finish harnessing Tisbe, leaving Basset and Ellis to deal with the tent. When all was ready, Basset gathered his company around him, which was warning enough that something had shifted even before he told them that for a certain reason to do with that business in London last autumn, Joliffe would be gone a time, to rejoin them later.

  “That’s all we’re to know?” Ellis demanded. “That he’s going to go away and that he’ll come back?”

  They all knew something of what had happened in London last autumn but not much, because that had seemed safest. Basset, as master of the company knew most, and he demanded back at Ellis, “Do you truly want to know more than that about it?”

  “No,” Ellis returned bluntly. “I just want to know that whatever trouble he’s made for himself, it’s not going to turn into our trouble.”

  Basset beamed at him. “Oh, it’s most assuredly going to turn into your trouble. With him gone, we’ll be three men and a boy again. We have to change all our plays back to what they were before Gil joined us.”

  Ellis groaned. Gil grinned. He was as used as the rest of them to Ellis’ groans, and besides, these past weeks since London, Joliffe had had him studying the plays as they had been before he joined the company close to a year and half ago and Joliffe had changed them to include him. The several new ones Joliffe had written since then would have to be put aside for the while that he was gone, but there was no help for that, and Gil would do well in the old ones. He was too sensible to ask questions where no answers were going to be given, and although his long look on Joliffe was full of questions, he kept them to himself. It was Piers who refused to accept being told so little, and while the players finished readying the cart he prodded and pried until Joliffe silenced him by promise of a silver penny if he stopped. In hope of the coin, Piers left him in peace while Rose gathered a change of shirt and hosen and some few other things into a sack for Joliffe to carry away with him. She almost kept to herself her worry at his going, but as she handed him the sack, in a moment when they happened to be alone, she started a question to him.

  Not waiting for her to finish it, Joliffe said quietly, “Don’t,” and she let it go. Worry was too much Rose’s share in the company, and Joliffe was sorry to add more of it to all she already had, but all he could do was regret, give her a light kiss on the cheek, and promise, “I’ll be well. Truly. And think—one less of us to trouble you.”

 
; “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.

  Chapter 2

  Only 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—

  Of long abiding here I may repent.

  Lest out of hastiness I at the last

  Answer amiss, best be that I leave fast,

  For if I among these people step amiss,

  To harm it will me turn and to folly.

  —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.