While Joliffe was still bowing to her, Lady Jacquetta said at him, “It was Master Fouet who requested you come. We are not agreed about your play. Since it is yours, he said you would be best able to say. I agreed you might be.”
Joliffe took special note of that “might be.” As with her household, Lady Jacquetta was giving no ground until she had to.
Master Fouet, a man embattled, said, “You see, Master Ripon, I came here to try out her ladies’ voices, to choose who would do well for which Virtues. But I found this. The Virtues are to be gowned in shining white, to show . . .”
“Then I don’t want to be a Virtue,” Blanche declared.
“No,” said Marie. “I want to be Envy and wear this green!”
An outcry of counterclaims and laughter from the others answered that, while Master Fouet said desperately, “No, no. The Sins are to be played by men. For ladies to take on any seeming except of virtue . . .”
Indignant, laughing outcries and exclaims interrupted him, Lady Jacquetta’s the most firm with, “It will be Mardi Gras. Carnaval! Everyone takes on seeming then and it means no more than sport.”
Master Fouet looked ready to continue his protest, but from a corner where she was sitting much like a watching black crow, M’dame said, dry-voiced, “Given that the Church teaches insistently that women are the fount of all sin, to have the Sins played by women does not seem unreasonable, Master Fouet.”
That was the last opinion Joliffe would have expected to hear from M’dame, and it surely brought Master Fouet to startled silence, staring at her. She turned her look on Joliffe. “So. Can the speeches you gave to the Sins be done as well by women as by men?”
Lady Jacquetta took that up eagerly. “Yes! Could the Sins be played by women and the Virtues by men?”
Warily, Joliffe granted, “There’s nothing in the play that says they could not.”
Glad exclaims among the women and a few hands clapped met that answer, before he added (lest Saint Genesius, patron of players, strike him down), “But it is also every player’s duty to obey what the master of the play tells them to do. The play is in Master Fouet’s hands. It is for him to determine how it is to be done.”
That was true as well as fair, although Master Fouet probably little appreciated having the problem handed back to him. But it was his to determine, and showing only a little desperation, the choirmaster looked around at all the young, eager gazes fixed on him and finally at Lady Jacquetta to whom he bowed and said, “If my lady gives her permission that her ladies be Sins rather than Virtues, I can but gladly obey.”
Joliffe thought that “gladly” was a deft touch. While seeming to give complete surrender, it meant that if Master Fouet hereafter suggested something counter to Lady Jacquetta’s wish about anything, she should see him doing it only as someone careful in his work and duty, not as a resentful foe. Certainly Lady Jacquetta’s smile and accepting nod were his reward now as she said, “I do give my permission, Master Fouet.”
General merriment among the women answered that, and across the room Guillemete, who had been standing with a long swathe of rose-pink draped over her shoulder, did a happy twirl, moving from in front of the woman who had been kneeling behind her.
Perrette.
Or was she?
For a moment Joliffe was unsure, the difference was so great between the woman at Master Doncaster’s, strong even in her pain, and this mouse in a dull gown and apron, a simple headkerchief over her hair, and her lips pursed around several pins as she put out a protesting hand in per-forced silent protest after Guillemete.
“Guillemete,” Lady Jacquetta said. “Stay still for Perrette. How can she work if you dance about?”
Laughing, Guillemete twirled back into Perrette’s reach, and a thin, aged woman Joliffe had not noted before among the welter of cloth and other women said, “Thank you, your grace.”
At a guess, she was the sempster who would oversee the coming gown-making, Joliffe supposed. Then Perrette was . . . ?
Master Fouet made a small gesture toward the doorway and said, “My lady, I will want a different speech to try your women’s voices on. If your grace will pardon me, I will go for it.”
“Of course,” Lady Jacquetta said graciously. “Pray, go.”
“And might Master Ripon come with me?”
Lady Jacquetta waved them both away with a smiling nod and was turning to the cloth merchant, saying, “Now, Master Labbat . . .” as Joliffe followed the choirmaster out of the room.
He was half-glad to be out of there, half-wary of Master Fouet, and indeed once in the gallery and well away from being overheard, the choirmaster turned on him, pointing a shaking finger back toward the parlor while exclaiming, “That’s what I found when I came there. They were already planning all those colors for Virtues!”
“Why shouldn’t a Virtue be colorful?” Joliffe asked, honestly curious. “Virtues have a hard time enough holding out against all the delights of Sins without being dull to look at, too.”
“But they aren’t going to be colorful now! Now the women are going to be Sins!”
“But that means you can have the Virtues all in white after all, just as you want,” Joliffe pointed out. “Or—” He stopped himself. He did not mean to become part of this. It was not his business to become part of this. But the words kept coming. “Or they could be all in white and gold, carrying golden spears. And if there were some way to have the points of the spears flaming . . .”
Master Fouet went from harassed to suddenly excited. “Yes! Flaming spears. That would be something. Yes.” His hand clamped down on Joliffe’s arm. “Have you any thought about Lord Justice and Lady Wisdom? Here’s what seemed possible to me—”
Joliffe had the sudden and terrible sense that he had yet again opened his mouth one time too many.
He finally escaped from Master Fouet’s eagerness by claiming need to return to his rightful duties, and the rest of his day went well enough. Except for the tedium of it, his work was not burdensome; he had time to think of other things while he did it, and the woman Perrette was among his thoughts, although he did not know what to think of her, the difference was so great between his first seeing of her and today’s. But then look at the difference between what he seemed, sitting here at this desk, and who he was. Except he was both, because he was not seeming to do a secretary’s duties; he was doing them. So he was the Joliffe who walked England’s roads as a player, and the Joliffe who was learning a spy’s skills here in Rouen, and the Joliffe who was sitting at this desk, quietly at work over letters and accounts. As with music, someone who was a single note would be a dull thing. But—as with music—the mingled notes should make a pleasing whole. Else they were a pointless jangling.
It was all very well to be curious about the woman Perrette and the seeming jangle between the two ways he had seen her, but he was not yet sure even about his own notes—whether or not their present jangling would someday make a whole.
With that uncertainty in mind, he gave the day’s end over to thoroughly being John Ripon, refusing George’s and Estienne’s efforts to persuade him out to a tavern with all of John Ripon’s regret and hesitance, and instead spending the evening playing games of draughts with Cauvet and several others in the great hall. He made a point of complaining about how sore he was from his time with Master Doncaster yesterday (although he was not so sore as he claimed to be) and showed off John Ripon’s new dagger. That drew laughter and jibing about having a “pig-sticker” of a dagger, and his feeble protest that, “Well, better to have it than not,” brought more laughter at him.
All in all, he thought that by evening’s end John Ripon was considered quite a fool, if not an outright coward. Poor John Ripon, he thought as he was going bedward. If the fellow did not annoy him so much, he would have felt very sorry for him.
Chapter 14
The days after that were an unsettling mix of ordinary and not. Mostly, it was work at his desk, with occasional need to consult with
one or another of the household officers over some small matter or, more rarely, with Lady Jacquetta herself. He avoided doing the latter when he could, wary of being drawn into anything about the play that seemed to have taken over her chambers and her demoiselles’ lives. Twice when he went to her, both parlor and bedchamber were over-filled by the necessities of the Sins’ bright gowns, the sempster there with scissors and pins, and Perrette on her knees, basting the hem of Ydoine’s gown the first time and Marie’s gown the next.
Each of the ladies now had her Sin, while the youths chosen from both households to be Virtues seemed to have been let off most of their other duties so they might learn their parts, which seemed to require they keep close company with Lady Jacquetta’s demoiselles. At least they certainly were one afternoon when Joliffe went with a question about a plan to drain some Northamptonshire acreage, wondering how Lady Jacquetta was expected to make sensible decisions about land she knew nothing about—although he understood why her steward in England was hesitant to make them completely on his own—and found Sins and Virtues sitting in their pairs around the parlor, heads close together as they supposedly memorized their speeches with each other under M’dame’s sharply watchful gaze from the bedchamber doorway.
Catching words being said by a sandy-haired youth near him, Joliffe judged he was Generosity, which meant Blanche, now answering him, was Greed; and away in a corner, Guillemete was waving a fist in a way that suggested she was Wrath, so Alain, there with her, must be Patience, the unsuitableness of both momentarily diverting Joliffe. The only pairing he knew without guessing was that of Sir Richard and Alizon as Lord Justice and Lady Wisdom, and he was somewhat surprised to see they were not sitting together. Instead, she was with the squire Remon Durevis and just putting a hand over her mouth, to cover laughter at something he must have said, while Sir Richard sat with Lady Jacquetta at the window, where she looked to be helping him learn his words. She was watching a paper on her lap, and he was muttering toward the ceiling, his eyes tightly shut as if his words might be written on the inside of his eyelids.
Sitting on cushions near the hearth, the demoiselle Marie and the well-favored youth with whom she was partnered leaned nearer each other with a shared warm look that had nothing to do with anything Joliffe had written between a Sin and a Virtue. As M’dame glided forward from the doorway, Marie and the youth sat back from each other, abruptly intent on the pages they held, and M’dame shifted her course to come to Joliffe. “You have need to speak with my lady?” she asked quietly.
“If I may. The matter is not urgent.”
“Neither is any of this,” M’dame returned.
At the window, Lady Jacquetta reached out a forefinger and gently touched the back of Sir Richard’s hand. His eyes flew open and to her face, his own face going scarlet.
M’dame, who maybe saw it from the corner of her eye, left Joliffe, crossed to Lady Jacquetta and said something at which Lady Jacquetta immediately beckoned for Joliffe to come forward. He did, thinking M’dame did well to keep her sharp-eyed watch here in the close-confines of a young and widowed duchess’ household, where too much could grow that should not.
In his own time, he continued to avoid Estienne’s attempts at “friendship” as much as he might, and once found chance to ask Master Wydeville about the possibility of a more skillful spy hidden behind Estienne, but for answer got only a level look and, “That would be something for you to find out,” leaving him uncertain whether such a finding out was a challenge to discover the unknown or a test to see if he could learn what Master Wydeville already knew.
Either way, it gave an edge to his growing awareness of how much happened under the smoothly running surface of things among the double households’ scores of people that he did not understand and probably altogether missed.
What no one could miss was the steady flow of reports and rumors of what was happening—or said to be happening—or feared to be happening—in the rest of the world beyond Rouen’s walls. None of it was good, so far as Joliffe could tell, although he did hear someone among the men gathered to dinner one mid-day in the great hall dismiss the rumors that Paris was dangerously full of unrest with a laugh and, “It’s Paris! It would hardly be Paris if there weren’t troubles there!”
One evening during those days he went openly to Master Doncaster’s house for a weapons lesson. Somewhat early, he found the loose-limbed son of a Rouen craftsman having his own lesson. Joliffe gathered it was far from the youth’s first, but Master Doncaster set them to try each other’s skill with wooden daggers, and Joliffe’s first wariness turned to pity as it became quickly plain the youth had no instinct at all for fighting nor much grasp of what Master Doncaster had surely tried to teach him. Despite that, at the end of their short bout, the boy said, panting and pleased, “That went well, didn’t it? I did well, didn’t I? Did better, anyway.”
“No,” Master Doncaster returned bluntly. “You did not. Nor do I think you ever will. Tell your father there will be no more lessons.”
The boy’s face darkened into scowling anger. “I’ll tell him,” he snapped while snatching his doublet and cloak from the bench, and flung over a shoulder as he started down the stairs, “Then I’ll make him send me to Master Walters. He’ll be able to teach me since you can’t.”
Master Doncaster waited while he thundered down the stairs and slammed out the front door, then said grimly, “If he ever goes into a true fight, he’ll be dead before he’s struck three blows. Unless he meets someone as bad as he is. Then he may last six or seven.” He turned a hard eye on Joliffe. “You, on the other hand, went into that fight warily. Why?”
“Because I didn’t know how well he fought. I thought I’d best learn before I gave my own skill away.”
“Not so bad a way to go into a fight, yes,” Master Doncaster granted. He took up the youth’s abandoned wooden dagger. “Now let’s see to getting you good enough you won’t have too much worry that way because you’ll have your man dead before he’s trouble.”
A few days of good weather brought a messenger from England with general news including, finally, word the duke of York was to be the new governor. “Young for it,” was about half of what Joliffe heard. That was balanced by those who remembered when he had been in Normandy for the king’s French coronation six years ago, and how well Bedford had thought of him then.
Either way, on the whole there was simply plain relief to have the matter settled and, “All we need now is for him to get here, with a sizable army at his back,” George said.
Among the letters in the messenger’s bag were several concerning Lady Jacquetta’s English holdings. Those came to Master Ripon, and after consulting the account rolls in his keeping, Joliffe went to see if he could have word with Lady Jacquetta about some matters in them. He found her in the chapel, watching practice for the play, and he knew he should withdraw, bring his question to her later and elsewhere. But he stayed, watching, too, envisioning how Basset would have made a shining, living whole out of the wealth of words, people, and rich garb that Master Fouet had here. The choirmaster was doing well enough, from what Joliffe saw, but did he really think the Virtues were such dull things they should move with the dignity of wooden poles on stiff legs? Speaking for himself, if he were a Sin, Virtues like that were the last things in God’s creation to which he would give way. And if the demoiselle Isabelle giggled one more time when it was her turn to speak . . .
Better this was Master Fouet’s task than his, Joliffe thought, and went away. He would after all consult with Lady Jacquetta later.
By the morrow’s mid-afternoon he had all the letters’ business sorted to satisfaction and the rough drafts of the answers made, and when he was summoned to Master Wydeville, he left his desk with alacrity, hoping Master Wydeville had something of interest for him to do.
Unfortunately, it seemed not. Master Wydeville merely asked for report of how he—how Master Ripon—was doing with his work and if he was become at ease in the household
and in Rouen. Joliffe, on John Ripon’s behalf, answered that he was doing well, was well content.
“And keeping sober?” Master Wydeville asked.
Joliffe hung his head. “Mostly,” he muttered. “All but—once.” If only the time he had feigned it at the Crescent Moon was counted and not the twice he had deliberately become somewhat “unsteady” in the hall.
As if to be beyond hearing of his clerk Pierres pen-scratching across paper on the chamber’s far side, Master Wydeville gestured for Joliffe to come aside to the window. There, as far from any door as from Pierres, Master Wydeville said very quietly, “You’re doing well, both at seeming John Ripon and at your lessons at Master Doncaster’s, both with weapons and the maps. Tell me the way from here to Honfleur.”
Joliffe did.
“From here to Paris,” Master Wydeville said.
Joliffe did, with only one confusion that he sorted for himself.
“And from Dover to Winchester?” Master Wydeville asked, because a map of England had become part of Joliffe’s lessons, too.
Joliffe answered that most easily, and when he had done, Master Wydeville nodded in moderate approval and said, “Good enough. You will continue that learning. This evening, though, I’d have you go to Master Doncaster’s to begin your study of ciphers. Can you get away to that without trouble?”
A Play of Treachery Page 16