A Play of Treachery

by Margaret Frazer

  Uncertainty at all the strangeness began to twist toward fear in him, only to be suddenly overtaken by silent, saving laughter. The uncertainty was much the same feeling that came when he was about to stride out into some barely known place to make a play for some great gathering of unknown onlookers and that familiarity steadied him. At such a time there was nowhere to go but onward. However far larger beyond usual this present playing-place was, he was after all here to play a part. He was to be—already was—“John Ripon,” and he had long since decided that John Ripon was a man full of self-consideration and no deep awareness. So for John Ripon, it was Rouen’s problem that it was foreign, not his.

  “Eh,” Cauvet said as somewhere ahead the straggling line of the bishop’s men began to come to a halt that spread unevenly backward until they were all standing still, while at the forward several men argued about something.

  “What is it?” Joliffe asked.

  “Robert is arguing we are to go where the bishop lived before. Jehan is insisting we are to go to Joyeux Repos. Robert, he never listens and always thinks he knows better. Here.” Cauvet shifted the box into Joliffe’s hands, then went to join the other men now joining in the arguing.

  Joliffe, having made certain he had good hold on both the box and his sack, used the pause for the chance to look at the cathedral huge in front of him across the marketplace, its front of fretted stone flanked by towers, one of them stunted as if unfinished, but also looking as if it had not been worked on for some time, being bare of scaffolding or anything else that showed it was on its way to going higher. While he considered what that neglect meant, one of a pair of men passing by burst into laughter and said in English to his fellow, “You never!”

  “Sure as sinning, I did,” the other returned.

  Joliffe gave them a swift look. By their padded jerkins, and the helmets slung by straps over their shoulder, and the sword as well as the usual dagger each wore at his waist, he judged they were men-at-arms, probably of the English garrison here. Not on duty, though. That was plain. But wearing their swords nonetheless, and with their helmets ready. Joliffe was not used to men going that heavily armed in the ordinary way of things. Was there such constant likelihood of trouble here the men felt obliged to be so ready for it? As the bishop’s men started moving again, he added that unsettling thought to the others he was gathering.

  Cauvet stayed ahead, not returning to reclaim the box, so Joliffe made sure to keep well up among the others, not wanting to lose them by any chance. The line of men swung rightward, skirting and circling the cathedral’s yard and finally turning into another straight-running street, this one angled eastward. Joliffe guessed that, just as the other straight street had led inward from a gateway, this street ran outward toward another gateway, and he had a spasm of worry that—unlikely though it seemed—this Joyeux Repos was outside the city’s walls. From what he had seen so far of France and by all he had heard, Joliffe knew he would much prefer to have city walls around him, not open countryside.

  It was a fine street, though—wide and stone-paved like the other, flanked by houses mostly stone-built, rather than of timber-and-plaster. At one point, the bishop’s men were passing what Joliffe took for a long, stone, two-storied housefront standing flat and blank to the street, until ahead of him, the other men were turning through what proved, when Joliffe reached it, to be a gateway high enough for a horseman to ride through without bending, wide enough for a large cart to pass through easily, but its pair of metal-banded gates showing it could equally be closed against the world.

  Beyond those gates, Joliffe found himself in a courtyard of irregular shape, four-sided, and larger than he had thought it would be, with buildings on all sides, but the one directly ahead of him across the yard catching and holding his startled gaze. The blank wall along the street had not readied him for—the hôtel, Cauvet had called it. Certainly it was more than only a house and other than a castle. Long and of three tall storeys, its pale-stone front was fretted with elaborately carved stonework and surprisingly many windows. A steep roof of blue slates with sharp-pointed windows gabled out from it made it all the taller, while at one end a wide round turret reached even above roof-height and there were lesser turrets elsewhere along its front. For richness of detail and grace Joliffe had never seen a building more lovely.

  Cauvet, rejoining him, said unnecessarily, “Joyeux Repos.”

  Chapter 5

  Bishop Louys and the others must have arrived well ahead of them; there was no sign of him or them or mule or horses in the yard. In truth, just then there was no one in the yard but Joliffe and the men around him, all come to a stop just inside the gateway, and he asked of Cauvet, “What now?”

  Cauvet shrugged. “Now we wait to see how we’re to be fitted into here. Joining my lord’s household with that of her grace the duchess will be none so simple, no matter there’s been time to consider it.”

  His tone implied he doubted anyone had troubled to consider it, but he was proved wrong when a pair of servants with the bishop’s badge on their doublets came out a lesser door toward one end of the long hôtel-front and to them. One gave orders in rapid French while the other shepherded them toward the door like an over-eager dog among a flock of sheep. Not understanding anything that was being said, Joliffe kept close behind Cauvet through the doorway, into a stone-floored passage leading to somewhere in the house. But the servant was shooing the men to the left, up a narrow, twisting stairway. Cauvet paused to protest, making a gesture with the chest, “This is for my lord’s chamber.”

  “Your chamber first,” the servant said. He added something else too quickly for Joliffe to catch and then, “Go. Go.”

  Cauvet went, and Joliffe followed him, asking, “What did he say?”

  “We go to our chamber first. After that, we will see.”

  The stairway curved upward, first past a closed door and then, higher, past an open doorway through which Joliffe glimpsed a high-ceilinged room and a tapestried wall. Cauvet, probably recognizing the tapestry, said with satisfaction, “Ah. My lord’s bedchamber. Good.”

  Their climb brought them finally to another open doorway, the men passing through this one into a long space of bare floorboards and slanting rafters that told it was directly under the roof. Wooden bedsteads with thin mattresses were lined along one side, a heap of bedding on the foot of each. Except for an unlighted candle on a wall pricket beside the doorway, that was all. Without being able to make out exactly what was being said among the men, Joliffe guessed from their voices there was some grumbling as they spread along the dormer to the various beds. Perhaps they had had it better at the bishop’s palace? Or was that properly also called a hôtel here?

  What he did not catch quickly enough was how the men were choosing their beds. Cauvet, abandoning him, joined another man in claiming the two beds at the far end, near the brick wall of a chimney that would give out warmth rising from the fires in rooms below. Joliffe belatedly guessed the other men were sorting themselves according to their greater or lesser place in the household, and he found himself left to the bed nearest the door—and also nearest a screen in the corner there, behind which were the pottery pots of the dormer’s necessarium, to give the polite name.

  Resigned, and ignoring the sniggering glances of the nearer men, Joliffe set his sack on the floor and shoved it under the bed. Just so he was not the one who was supposed to empty those pots, too, he thought, and copied the other men in spreading a coarse linen sheet and then a thick woolen blanket of undyed wool over the straw-filled mattress. If he laid his cloak over the top of that, he thought he might sleep warm enough. If the weather got no colder, he silently added, looking up at the laths between the rafters and the roof slates held to them by wooden pegs, all there was between the attic chamber and the wind. He had slept with less between him and the weather often enough, and he silently laughed at himself because he had hoped for better while in a bishop’s household.

  With nothing else to do and u
nable to join in the general talk around him, he sat down on the bed to wait for whatever came next. Used as he was to doing almost all the time—even if the “doing” was simply walking along the road toward wherever the players were next going or, on board the ships coming here, taking in all there was to see and learning what he could—idleness felt strange, the more so because everyone else seemed to have some thought of what they should be doing next. Cauvet, for one, had already disappeared down the stairs, taking the chest he had brought from the ship. After him, the other men went, too, one by one or several together, none giving Joliffe heed, until as the last several of them went past him, he decided it was pointless to stay here alone and stood up and followed them. Master Fowler had said he was to make himself known to Master Wydeville and he would never do it by staying here among the rafters.

  The men he followed descended first to what Cauvet had said was the bishop’s bedchamber. Wide and long, it had windows at one end that must overlook the courtyard, and at the other end the bishop’s bed, raised above the floor on a low dais and enclosed by tall carved posts holding up a canopy of white and red striped cloth that matched the bed’s coverlet and the curtains drawn back to the bed’s four corners. The wall-hung tapestries around the room were woven with tall, vividly colored figures of undoubtedly allegorical men and women that Joliffe supposed he would have chance enough to look at, because besides bedchamber, the room was furnished—as was common—at the end opposite the bed for the gathering of men to attend on the bishop and, guessing from the low desk in one corner, for some secretary’s work.

  Joliffe could guess that because Bishop Louys’ journey to England had been half-secret—in other words, no secret at all but kept as low-viewed and little flaunted as possible—the bishop had traveled with very little of his household and none of the rich flourish a bishop’s travel usually entailed. Because so little of the bishop’s goods had been with him, there was not the fuss and flurry of much unpacking and readying the chamber there might have been. The shift of his goods from his hôtel to here having been already done, the chamber was complete, simply waiting for his presence. Only the tall-mantled fireplace on the chamber’s far side told this had been someone else’s place: across the pale-stone surround were carved, over and over again, the image of a long-rooted tree-stump. A woodstock—a badge of John, duke of Bedford. So this had, in all likelihood, been the duke’s great bedchamber and, presumably, his duchess’. She must have moved—or been moved—to make way for her uncle. Joliffe wondered to where.

  And what she thought of being so displaced.

  At any rate, Cauvet was not there, and when the bishop’s men, having milled about purposelessly, admiring the chamber but lacking reason to be there without the bishop, began to leave through one of the room’s several other doors, Joliffe went with them, wanting to see more of the place and hoping to find Cauvet along the way. At least one of the men was clearly acquainted with the hôtel, leading them through a series of lesser rooms and down a stairway to another large chamber as if he knew where he was going and from there into the great hall, coming out just below the dais where a brace of servants were spreading white cloths over the high table there in preparation for whatever welcoming feast was to come. Behind the table, several men on ladders leaned against the wall were putting up a long-hanging tapestry beside another already there, with a canopy extended forward from it over one of the two tall-backed chairs set there at the table, turning it into a chair of estate—the duchess’, presumably, with the other likely to be Bishop Louys’.

  Below the dais a scattering of men stood about in talk with one another while an intensity of more servants thumped through the business of setting up the trestle tables lined down either side of the hall’s length where lesser members of the household would sit to eat. The hall was not as large as some Joliffe had lately been in. Not so great-sized, surely, as the one lately built in London by Bedford’s brother, the duke of Gloucester. Rather than somewhere newly-made, here looked more as if it were an older place that had been changed and added to, but what had been added was splendid, with at the dais’ far end a stone-traceried window from floor to rafter-height curving boldly outward, paned below in clear glass but resplendent above with bright-hued heraldic shields and beasts. Further down the hall, one long wall was emboldened by a wide fireplace with a surround even more richly carved than that in the ducal bedroom, while facing it across the hall was a long sideboard whose four stepped shelves rising up the wall were draped in black cloth, probably in sign of the household’s year of mourning for Bedford’s death but surely showing to perfection the display of gold and silver dishes, goblets, basins, and ewers set out there. Joliffe had never seen such an array even in London, either at the gold-smiths’ shops in Cheapside or any lordly household where he had played.

  All too often, the world judged a man’s worth by the wealth he showed to his fellows’ eyes. The display there on the sideboard served to assert the duke of Bedford had been a very worthy man indeed. From what little Joliffe knew about the late duke, though, that was an assertion that might well have been made less from Bedford’s pride than out of plain necessity. Placed as he had been in the world—regent of France and Normandy for his young nephew in England and therefore perilously balanced between a war that would not end and the governments and politics of two kingdoms—Bedford had had every need to display his wealth, and thereby his power, as one more way to constantly impress on powerful men that he was an even more powerful man, with both right and might to rule here in his nephew’s name.

  Or, if it had come to it, to rule here in his own right, because Bedford had been his as-yet childless nephew’s heir. If it had been young King Henry who had died last year instead of the duke, Bedford would now be king of both realms, and his duchess a queen.

  But it was Bedford who had died, and all that right and might must of necessity fall to someone else, while his wealth would presumably go to his widow.

  Joliffe looked forward to seeing this wealthy, widowed duchess.

  He had slowed while taking in all there was to see there in the hall and fallen behind the men he had been following; was starting after them again when he saw a man, just come from the hall’s other end, pause one of them and, by the look of it, ask a question, because the man he asked, and several others who had heard, searched around, found, and pointed toward Joliffe. The man gave a quick bow of his head in thanks and came onward. Joliffe stayed where he was, letting the man come to him, and was not altogether surprised when the man asked him in French-touched English, “You are John Ripon?”

  Joliffe, trying to judge the man’s place in the household—his black clerk’s gown was without a badge but of good cut and cloth; the question was abruptly but not rudely asked; the man had made no bow; did he expect one to be given?—chose to follow Basset’s advice that you could not go wrong giving a man more respect than might be due him; and knowing that “John Ripon” was no one in the household yet and this man surely some manner of superior servant or clerk here, he gave a respectful bow, said, “I am, sir.”

  “The chamberlain of the household, Master Wydeville, has asked you be brought to him. Pray, come with me, Master Ripon,” the man said and started away, not rude, merely a man very busy.

  Suddenly sharply aware of the sealed packet tucked between his doublet and his shirt all these days from London, Joliffe went with him down the hall toward its further end. Halfway along it, though, the man paused and turned to look back toward the dais, and Joliffe copied him. The servants there had the second tapestry up now, were rigging its canopy to thrust out beside the other one already hung there, making both the tall-backed chairs into chairs of estate, as Joliffe had thought; and from here he could see that the newly-hung tapestry showed Bishop Louys de Luxembourg’s heraldic arms—those of his bishopric impaled with that of his family—while the other hanging showed the Luxembourg arms again but here impaled with those of England—the royal gold lions on scarlet and gold lili
es on blue, differenced by a five-pointed label of ermine and fleur-de-lis to show they were not the king’s but the duke of Bedford’s. That would be the duchess’ arms, then, showing both her family and her marriage, Joliffe supposed.

  This was going to be a complicated household if, as it seemed, she and her uncle the bishop were going to share equal honors here.

  The man beside him gave a sharp nod, as if satisfied at what he saw, and moved on. Joliffe perforce went with him, leaving the great hall through one of three broad doorways at its far end, all three leading into a wide passageway floored with squares of green and white tiles that at one end opened to the courtyard through a broad, stone-framed doorway—the way into Joyeux Repos for its lord and lady and other great folk, Joliffe did not doubt—while a scuttling of servants through doorways at the passage’s other end made him guess the more serviceable parts of the place—kitchen, pantry, butlery, and all—lay that way. His own way, in the man’s wake, was partly along the passage toward the outer door, then up a wide stairway well-lighted by windows as it curved upward through a turret to come out one floor up into a gallery that looked to run the length of the building here.

  Along one side, several windows with cushioned benches below them overlooked the courtyard. Joliffe could only guess to where the several shut doors along its other side led. Not to anywhere he was presently going, it seemed. His guide continued his brisk way to the gallery’s far end and through a doorway there to another stairway. Far narrower and darker than the other, it twisted tightly both downward and up, but Joliffe followed the man upward and then aside through yet another doorway into yet another room.