A Play of Treachery

by Margaret Frazer

  George laughed, and Joliffe kept to himself his thought that Master Doncaster had too much the straight feel of true steel to be other than he said he was.

  The Crescent Moon proved to be a clean-kept place, the strewn straw on the floor none too old and the benches and tables well-scrubbed. The men whom George and Estienne led him to join looked to be, like George and Estienne themselves, middling clerks of the respectable sort or else journeymen in one craft or another. Joliffe gathered as they talked that none of them had wives waiting at home; gathered, too, that George and Estienne were seen as somewhat above the rest of them, given the households they served, and that same reflected worth came Joliffe’s way, too, and the more so because it was already generally known among these men that he had been in the bishop of Winchester’s service. That he was here because of disgracing himself there seemed not to count.

  Joliffe reminded himself never to under-guess men’s ability at gossip, for all that women had the worse reputation for it.

  Unfortunately, these men’s gossip this evening was mostly of Rouen folk and matters, until the stationer’s journeyman commented grumpily that the latest shipment of paper from Paris, needed by his master, was being held up by Armagnac raids along the Seine. That brought on general head-shaking and obviously familiar muttering about taxes being wasted on garrisons that didn’t do the work they were paid for, and Joliffe took the chance to bring up John Ripon’s worry over how dangerous things might be, even here in Rouen.

  Just as George had done, everyone jibed at him for his worry, with George adding to the jesting by saying, “He’s so worried that he wants to learn how to fight. Does anyone know where that Englishman lives that teaches swordwork?”

  That brought a rude jest from someone about knowing where some “swordwork” could be done that needed no teaching, and Estienne asked didn’t he want a Frenchman to teach him since it was the French he was afraid of.

  Joliffe protested, “It’s just that everyone says it’s going to come to fighting, but what do I know about fighting? Nothing! I just want to know more than I do about what to do with a dagger, that’s all.”

  That brought an array of rude suggestions, and the stationer’s journeyman called him “an old woman.” Playing John Ripon, Joliffe got a little sullen, and that brought more laughter at him, until finally the cutler’s man took pity on him and recommended not only Master Doncaster but another man, and several of the others gave him jumbled directions to both.

  “But you’re not going there now,” George said. “So drink up.”

  Joliffe muttered he had had about as much to drink as he should, but Estienne beside him poured more wine into his bowl from the pitcher being passed around and said, “This wine is too watered to do anyone’s head any harm.”

  That was not true. If anything, the wine was surprisingly good, but Joliffe pretended to take Estienne at his word, drinking deep and then asking, as if somewhat drunkenly suspicious, “This isn’t Burgundian wine, is it?”

  “It’s Gascon,” the stationer’s man assured him.

  “Good old Gascon,” Joliffe said. “We used to get tun-fulls of Gascon every year. Comes into Southampton with the autumn wine fleet. For my lord of Winchester’s household.” He blinked owlishly around him at the other men. “We don’t want Burgundian anything, do we? Not their wine. Not their duke. Not anything.”

  The others agreed to that with general head-noddings and varied mutters and oaths at Burgundy. As Joliffe had hoped, their talk turned to the war. He was surprised at how little any of the men seemed worried by Burgundy’s new rage over the letters to the Zealand towns or had any doubt that Rouen was safe enough.

  “The Armagnacs already threw their best at us these past two months, and Talbot and Scales put them back where they belong,” one of the men said. “They’ll do the same for Burgundy if it comes to it.”

  “We’ll have to take the treacherous bastard down sooner or later anyway,” one of the men said. “Might as well be sooner.”

  They all drank to that, but afterward the talk slid away to how old Bremetot had proposed marriage to a widow and been accepted. “Although I’ve heard he proposed something else first,” the mercer’s clerk said. “But she threatened him with a fry-pan for it, and he changed to marriage to save his pate.”

  “More than his pate will need saving if he marries her,” George said. “Did you hear . . .”

  The talk went on to some quarrel between merchants in Rouen’s court and then to taxes, none of it any interest to Joliffe. What did interest him was how, under cover of the talk around them, his bowl was kept full by Estienne beside him while the clerk asked him questions about what was said in England about matters in France and Normandy. Most especially what was said in the bishop of Winchester’s household. And then more questions about the bishop himself. Since Joliffe had never been part of Winchester’s household, there was little he could accurately tell Estienne. He made do with oddments he had heard in the players’ travels, telling them as if learned in the household itself and embroidering where possibility suggested itself to him, mostly because Estienne’s interest was somewhat too-intense and gave Joliffe questions of his own that increased as the clerk’s questions began to go deeper, trying for more particular information about Bishop Beaufort himself. How did matters presently stand between him and his nephew the duke of Gloucester? Who among the English lords did he seem most to favor? Was he much around the king? Who was much around the king?

  John Ripon, not too sharp-witted to begin with and increasingly fuddled with wine, was unlikely to wonder much about Estienne’s insistent interest, but Joliffe was not fuddled with wine and he did wonder. As he ran out of answers he wanted to give, he retreated into Ripon’s ignorance, grumbling he did not know anything about any of that, all he had been was a clerk at one of his grace’s god-forsaken palaces in god-forsaken Hampshire, and if he had been given some place worthy of him, he wouldn’t have been driven to drink and he wouldn’t be here. He kept up his weak man’s whine that his life was all someone else’s fault and none of his own doing, slumping lower on the bench, his nose closer to his wine bowl while he did, until Estienne lost interest in him.

  Along the bench a corn merchant’s clerk was complaining about the lack of good grain because of last year’s poor harvest. Someone else was going on about a ship supposed to be bringing pine planks from Norway but still not come in. The stationer’s journeyman brought up his master’s troubles with paper again. And suddenly Joliffe had had enough. It was a long, long while since his life had been so bound into a single place as these men’s lives were. The smother of that life had helped to drive him to become a player, and it was that same sense of smother that now brought him to his feet like a man with a sudden need for an outside wall. The laughter of his erstwhile companions followed him as, somewhat staggering, he left the tavern.

  He kept his walk wavering until he was around a corner and away from anyone maybe watching him from the tavern’s doorway. Night was fully come but curfew was a while away. The cold was a welcome slap to his heated face after the crowd-warmth of the tavern, and he was not minded to go back to the hôtel yet. The streets’ darkness was eased by lighted lanterns hung beside doorways—town laws must require that here, as in England—and there were people about, so he felt safe enough to wander a while, and for something to do, tried the directions he had been told to Master Doncaster’s from here.

  He was surprised to find they did indeed bring him into a street where he recognized the sign of the crossed swords hanging among the uncertain lantern-shadows. Other than a man and a little boy hurrying toward and past him, hand in hand and homeward bound, he guessed, he and a cloak-wrapped woman ahead of him had the street to themselves, leaving him space to be surprised when she stopped at the door below the sign of crossed swords, stepped up onto its step, and knocked—must have knocked, although Joliffe did not hear it, or else she had a key, because the door opened readily to her and she disappeared insid
e without pause for speaking to anyone there. So she was probably the housekeeper or else the kitchen girl he had seen there yesterday, late home from some errand. But as he came abreast of the door half of a moment later, meaning to pass by, it was still standing open, and with his inevitable curiosity he looked in and saw in the shadowed passageway, by uncertain candlelight coming down the narrow flight of stairs, the cloaked woman stretched out motionless on the passageway’s stone floor, and a man crouched over her.

  Chapter 11

  Joliffe had just time for his stomach and heart to lurch before the man stood forcefully up, demanding, “Who—” with a dagger in his hand that Joliffe would have sworn was not there an instant earlier.

  But in that same moment he and Master Doncaster knew each other, and the dagger disappeared.

  “Come in,” Master Doncaster ordered. “Shut the door. Drop the bar. Help me. I need her into the light.”

  By the time Jolilffe had swung the heavy wooden bar down across the door and turned to the hall again, Master Doncaster had the woman turned onto her back and was lifting her shoulders from the floor. At the weapons-master’s sharp, wordless nod, Joliffe took her legs, bundling her cloak and long skirts around them, and followed as Master Doncaster backed along the passageway and into the light and warmth of the kitchen, where the woman and girl who had been there before were at the hearth and table. Looking around, they both made wordless exclaims, but as Master Doncaster started, “Matilde—” the woman said sharply at the girl, “Get your pallet. Here. Before the fire.” And to Master Doncaster, “You hold her half a moment more. Who is it?”

  “Perrette.”

  The woman made a distressed tching noise but was already swinging a kettle on its iron arm from the side of the hearth to over the fire as the girl pulled the thin mattress that must be her night-time bed from behind a tall cupboard and threw it on the floor in front of the hearth.

  “There now,” Matilde said, turning from the kettle. “You put her down there. Gently. Jeanne, your blankets, too. And mine.”

  Both men laid the woman down as gently as might be. Not that she gave any sign of feeling anything; she was as limp as if maybe already dead. Joliffe was careful of her nonetheless and at Master Doncaster’s order unclasped her cloak at her throat while the weapons-master fumbled to take off the white veil and wimple she wore. Matilde tched again and elbowed him aside, deftly pulled out pins to loosen the veil and, under it, the wimple that circled the woman’s face. By then Master Doncaster had shifted to the woman’s side and thrown open her cloak. She was dressed in a plain, long-sleeved gown of russet-brown wool that might well hide a bloodstain from first glance, and he demanded at Joliffe kneeling on her other side, “Do you see where she’s hurt?”

  “No.”

  Greatly careful, Master Doncaster eased her limp body far enough onto one side for him to see her back, said, “Nothing. No blood there either,” and eased her gently down again. “You must have been coming along the street when she was. You saw nothing? No one?”

  “I was maybe three houses behind her as I came. I didn’t see anyone near her or anything wrong. She seemed to be walking strongly enough.”

  “She would. Up to the point where she couldn’t anymore,” Master Doncaster said, then added in a mutter, “And probably past when she should have given up.” His hands were questing along both her sides. “There has to be something. If she’s been hit with a club maybe—if she’s bleeding inside—” He had his dagger out again. “We have to get this gown off her.”

  He was moving with the clear intent to slice the gown open when Matilde stopped him with a hand laid on his wrist, saying, “She won’t thank you for ruining her gown. You leave it to me.”

  “But . . .”

  “I’m saying,” Matilde said, elbowing him away and reaching out for the thin-bladed kitchen knife Jeanne was already bringing her.

  Master Doncaster let himself be elbowed. Joliffe copied him in shifting aside, leaving Matilde to turn up the gown at the hem, prick loose some threads of the gown’s front seam there, then quickly, skillfully, cut her way up the full length of the seam to where Jeanne was pulling free the lacing that closed the gown between the woman’s breasts, so that when Matilde reached there, the gown fell open from throat to feet, showing the white linen shift beneath it.

  “Gently now,” Matilde said to Jeanne, and together they lifted Perrette enough to slip the gown from her shoulders and free her arms before laying her carefully down again, Matilde saying while they did, “Whatever else is wrong with her, she’s gone hungry a while, too.”

  “What?” Master Doncaster said blankly.

  “Look at her face,” Matilde answered with the sharp impatience of having to point out what she should not have had to. “That’s hunger-sunk. She needs food.”

  “Why would she have been going hungry?” Master Doncaster asked, more of the air than of anyone, which was just as well because no one answered him.

  The linen shift was sleeveless, and Matilde was un-pricking the short shoulder seams as deftly as she had undone the dress. There was still no sign of any wound or wounds, the woman was still breathing, and her face did not have the odd graying that came with approaching death. All that was to the good, and even in his distraction Joliffe thought her face was not uncomely. Somewhat thin, surely, and no saying what it would be like when not slack in unconsciousness, but even-featured. Her hair was dark brown where it showed at the edge of the close-fitting coif Matilde had not taken off her, and there was nothing wrong with her breasts, Joliffe saw as Matilde and Jeanne turned down her shift, baring her to her waist.

  He was instantly ashamed of the thought, as if he were no better than one of the Elders secretly, shamefully gazing at Susanna in her garden. He as instantly argued to himself that his response to a woman’s nakedness was against his will, wasn’t it? It was not his fault that he was male and she was female and that it was in the natural way of things that he would take a certain heed of . . . things.

  Then he saw what Master Doncaster had already seen, and Matilde, too, to judge by her sudden intake of breath.

  A black-blue bruise as big as a man’s outspread hand darkened the side of the woman’s lower right ribs. Something large and blunt had surely struck her there and, “Those have to be broken,” Master Doncaster said. He began to feel for the bones beneath the flesh.

  The woman flinched. Her eyes opened. She stared upward at the ceiling beams, a little startled for the moment before she slid them to one side and the other, taking in the faces clustered over her. Uncertainly, her right hand moved to touch her side, and she said, a little thickly, as if her mouth was dry, but quite clearly, “You had better have good reason why I am undressed in front of you all.”

  As directly as if to a stricken soldier, rather than to an injured woman, Master Doncaster said, “Perrette, you’ve taken a hard blow to your ribs.”

  She silently considered that, than said, “That would be why they hurt so badly, I suppose.”

  “I need to learn how bad the hurt is.”

  She closed her eyes. “Best that you do so, then.”

  Matilde took her hand, and as Master Doncaster began to feel firmly along her side, Joliffe saw the woman’s fingers tighten around Matilde’s; but she made no sound, and except that her lips pressed together with pain, her face remained still.

  Master Doncaster finished and said while covering her with her shift, “No bones are broken. How bad the bruising is, how deep it goes, it’s too soon to tell.”

  Perrette’s hold on Matilde slackened, along with her whole body that Joliffe had not realized was lying so rigid against the pain of Master Doncaster’s hands. “It was my cloak,” she said, opening her eyes. “It’s loose and thick. It muffled the force of the blow.”

  “Who was it?” Master Doncaster asked. “Where did it happen?”

  “Not far before I came to the bridge. I don’t know who. If you ask, you may find out something from the watch. There’ll be
his body.”

  Master Doncaster touched her left forearm. “Your dagger?”

  For the first time Joliffe saw the sheath of pale leather strapped there. An empty sheath.

  “He staggered me,” Perrette said, explaining with the care of someone tired almost past talking. “He did not stop me.”

  “His mistake,” Master Doncaster suggested quietly.

  “Yes,” she agreed, and closed her eyes.

  Joliffe in pity and worry would have let her rest then, but Master Doncaster laid a hand on her shoulder and asked, “Had he followed you, or was he waiting for you?”

  Perrette’s eyes stayed closed. “I don’t know. I thought I had no one behind me. Maybe he was waiting. Maybe he knew me.”

  She could not see the grimace Master Doncaster made then, but Joliffe did and understood it. Far away and what felt like long ago in Southwark, Master Fowler had said the present agents were all too well known in Normandy now and that was one reason Joliffe was wanted there. But he had also said no one was being killed for it, and if the attack on this woman had not been meant to kill, it had certainly been meant to cripple. And she seemed certain she had killed, whatever her attacker had meant to do.

  The kitchen’s warmth did not stop the chill that moved through him.

  Matilde, who had gone away for a moment, came back to kneel beside Perrette again, holding a cup that—having gentled an arm under the woman’s head enough to raise it a little—she put to her lips. Perrette sipped, paused as if to gather strength, sipped more, then more again before shaking her head slightly to let Matilde know she was done and smiled her thanks. Whatever had been in the cup had brought faint color back to her face. She shifted her hand to take hold on Master Doncaster’s wrist and said with new-awakened need, “Not the Armagnacs next. The Bretons. Richemont with a large force out of Brittany. That’s what they intend.”