“There is still the matter of Tom Kechyn,” said Master Roussel.
Master Wydeville dropped his hands with a sound not quite a groan. “Kechyn. I had forgotten. You had him out of Paris easily?”
“No. There was trouble at the end. I’m worried that word came as fast as we did, that there will be watch and search for him here in Rouen.”
Master Wydeville swore, but he was thinking while he did because he followed with, “Then best he be away more quickly than they will suppose likely. The Bonhomme sails on the dawn tide. He will have to take his own chances at Honfleur, but he should be ahead of pursuit enough by then if he sails now.”
“Perrette came in this afternoon. She could see to having him aboard.”
“Good,” Master Wydeville agreed. “Did it go well with her?”
“So she said, the few words we’ve had. She’ll tell you more later, surely.”
Master Wydeville accepted that with a nod. “I haven’t asked you, either, how matters go in Paris.”
Master Roussel paused before answering tautly, “I would not go back there if I did not have to.”
“What of your father?”
“He still thinks there may be hope. I wish he was out of there.”
“So do I,” Master Wydeville said grimly. The silent pause between the two men then had many unsaid but understood things between them, before Master Wydeville added, “Take Master Ripon to go with Perrette and Kechyn. He can serve to guard their backs.”
Something to eat and the chance to lie down and sleep were what Joliffe had been hoping for, but seeing Perrette again would be good, and he dragged himself to his feet as Master Roussel stood up from the tabletop and Master Wydeville left the room. In silence, Master Roussel lighted the small wick in the oil of a shallow clay lamp he had brought with him, put out the candle, and still in silence, led Joliffe out the other way and across Master Doncaster’s practice room to where another poorly painted wall-hanging hid another low door that let them into what plainly served the Roussels as a storage chamber. Handing the lamp to Joliffe for a moment, Master Roussel shoved a large and apparently heavy willow-woven hamper to block and hide the door, took back the lamp, and led the way down through the house, first by way of ladder-steep stairs into a bedchamber where no one stirred, either behind the bedcurtains or on the blanket-humped truckle-bed beside it, then across that chamber and down more stairs to a passage and along it to the expected kitchen door. It was shut, and although there was candle-glow along its sill, there were no sounds beyond it. Master Roussel made an uneven pattern of knocks on its wood, paused, then opened it wide, all the way back to the wall.
To be sure of no one behind it, Joliffe thought as he followed Master Roussel into the room’s welcome warmth, and wondered what it was like to live a life where you could not be sure of going into your own kitchen safely.
A man unknown to Joliffe sat on the bench near the hearth, leaning wearily forward on his arms. Beyond him, Perrette was turning from the fire with a thick slice of newly-toasted bread on a long-handled fork. Master Roussel’s lamp guttered out as he set it beside the candle already burning on the table, and the man straightened, to greet him with, “How does it go? Anything further amiss?”
“You’re to sail with the present tide,” Master Roussel returned. “The sooner you’re in England with what you know, the better. Perrette, will you be able to get him to the Bonhomme unnoted, do you think?”
Having closed the door, Joliffe was going toward the table as Perrette slid the toasted bread from the fork onto a wooden cutting board beside a quarter of cheese while answering, frowning, “Yes. Probably. Will they be looking hard for him?”
“I don’t know. Possibly.”
Rising and going to the table, the man who must be Kechyn drew the board, bread, cheese, and a knife toward himself and said, “If it’s Ambroise le Jeusne heading the hunt, they’ll be hunting hard.”
He had began to cut a piece of cheese, and Perrette asked Master Roussel and Joliffe. “Are you hungry?”
Master Roussel said, “No.” Joliffe said, “Yes.”
She turned the fork and offered it to him handle first. “So am I. Thank you.”
Joliffe took one of the slices of bread lying already cut on the table, speared it on the fork, and went to crouch on his heels beside the low fire, leaving Perrette and Master Roussel to sit down on a bench opposite Kechyn and begin talking of possible ways to have him safely and—for preference secretly—to the ship, to keep the hunt up for him here in Rouen while he was well away. Not knowing who Kechyn was or why he was hunted or by whom, Joliffe only somewhat listened at first, intent on getting food into his hungry stomach. He surrendered the first slice of toast to Perrette. When he came with his own to sit on the bench, Perrette, without turning from her talk, handed him a piece of cheese already cut. He did not interrupt their talk with thanks but settled to eating, finally taking a full look at the man Perrette was expected to get unnoticed to a ship.
His first thought was “small chance” if any kind of watch at all was being kept. To the good, the man was only of average build and probably height, but he was an even-featured, rosy-cheeked Englishman with curly yellow hair. A hood might serve to cover the hair, but anyone looking for him would be watching for something as obvious as a close-fastened hood; it would merely draw their suspicious heed to his face, and it was an open, easily remembered face.
That was Perrette’s thought, too, it seemed. She was arguing they should wait and send him with some pilgrims leaving for Canterbury and other English shrines in a few days, saying, “Better he reach there alive and later than be dead here because of our over-haste.”
“If I thought keeping him a few days hidden would better his chances, I would agree,” Master Roussel returned. “But I greatly doubt they will. He would have to be moved from here, as well. I’ve nowhere for him, and neither Wydeville’s nor Doncaster’s is altogether safe anymore.”
Around a mouthful of bread and cheese, Joliffe said, “I know how to get him away.”
Master Roussel, Perrette, and Kechyn all looked at him as if he had suddenly appeared from nowhere. Joliffe swallowed the bread and cheese and said, “I’ll show you.”
It did not take long. Some grease from the pot kept near the hearth for greasing pans served to flatten the man’s curls, and ashes combed into it turned his hair a weary gray. Then Joliffe asked for honey, lard, and brown flour. Master Roussel, probably with a wary thought of what his wife would have to say about this rifling of her kitchen, found them and brought them to where Joliffe was now straddling the bench with Kechyn seated facing him. Master Roussel was about to sit down with Perrette on the table’s other side to watch whatever Joliffe would do next, but Joliffe asked, “Can you get me some women’s clothing?”
“Hai!” Kechyn protested.
“Not for you,” Joliffe said and added to Master Roussel, “A gown that will cover me, and a coif and a headkerchief. Very plain if possible.”
By the time Master Roussel returned with a faded green gown, a coif, and headkerchief, Joliffe had almost finished with the man, who now had a round, fat nose, lumpy cheeks and a dull-fleshed face.
Master Roussel, stopped in the doorway with a soft exclaim. Perrette, who was having trouble holding back from laughter, looked around to him and asked, “Yes?”
“Yes!” Master Roussel agreed.
Joliffe stood up and stepped back to judge his work, wiping his hands on a cloth and warning, “It won’t hold for long, so we had best leave now. Give me the gown.” He was glad to see it would go over his doublet. His cloak would serve, hopefully, to hide the unlikely shape of him in it.
Master Roussel handed him the gown while looking a question to Perrette, who answered, “It seems the fellow had an overly merry last night in Rouen. His two lady-friends are loath to part with him. Or maybe we fear he will not find his way to his ship on his own.”
When Joliffe was ready, Kechyn took up a strapped sack
he must have brought with him. Led by Perrette, they went out by way of Master Roussel’s rear yard into the alley but only a short way along it before she opened a well-oiled gate and led them into a passageway so narrow it was barely there between two houses that joined above it, roofing it into pitchy darkness. Lesser darkness at its further end showed where it ended at a street, partly blocked by another gate at which Perrette ordered in a whisper, “Stand.”
Both men obeyed while she opened this other well-oiled gate, thrust her head and shoulders out, looked both ways with over-played care, went out, and—giggling—turned to beckon Joliffe and Kechyn to her. As they joined her, she put a finger to her lips and hissed, “Ssshhhhh!” very loudly, before hooking her arm through Kechyn’s and starting to pull him along the street in a tipsy-slipsy way.
Joliffe linked his arm through the man’s other arm and copied her, giggling, too. Kechyn did not immediately get into the spirit of the business, at first only staggering because Joliffe and Perrette pulled him into it, even protesting as Perrette turned at the first corner, “This is the wrong way.” He started to point. “The harbor is . . .”
Perrette swung herself against him, stopping his arm and heartily kissed him before hissing into his face, “Just do what I do and don’t talk if you can’t sound drunk.”
He lurched a fairly convincing step back from her, giving Joliffe reason to lean hard against him as if to steady him while whispering to Perrette, “No kissing. The masking won’t hold.” As it was, he was counting on the cold to hold it a while longer than otherwise.
Perrette giggled drunkenly at him and pulled them onward. It was late enough in the night that many of the lanterns hung by doorways had gone out, leaving the streets mostly to shadows and cold starlight. Likewise, it seemed that such of the watch as might have been in the streets were gone, too—Joliffe guessed out of the cold into somewhere warm. Only a few other revelers—probably too drunk to feel the cold—and several skulking lone figures happened into sight as Perrette led them unevenly through Rouen. Kechyn grasped now what she and Joliffe were trying for, joined in their faked argument at a corner of the marketplace on which way they should go from there, and by the time they reached one of the city gateways to the quay, was lurching and singing as well as either of them.
Because tides kept their own time, there was no curfew at the harbor’s gates. Lanterns and torches blazed everywhere, there being more than one ship readying to leave on the tide’s turn, and the guards made no trouble over a drunken man and his two whores swaying past. Perrette had cut the time fine: men were starting to loose the ropes holding the Bonhomme to the quay. At the gang-board, a sailor placed there to keep the unwanted from going aboard demanded to see Kechyn’s coins, to show he would be a paying passenger. “But not them,” he added with a nod at Perrette and Joliffe.
“No,” Perrette agreed with shrill merriment. “Not us.” She elbowed Joliffe rudely aside, pulled Kechyn around and to her by his cloak, and gave him a long, hard kiss and a grind of her hips. In his startlement, he let his strapped sack thump to the cobbles. The sailor laughed and said something rude. Giggling, Perrette staggered back from Kechyn and sideways into Joliffe so that they tangled “drunkenly” with each other, staggering away together as Kechyn snatched up his bag and went aboard. Giggling and holding each other up, they waved and watched, making certain none but crew followed Kechyn onto the ship before the gangplank was hauled in and the ship cast off.
They went on leaning on each other and waving farewell until Perrette said, “He’s away. If he isn’t safe now, that’s how the dice rolls and it’s beyond our helping it. We’re done here. Come.”
Still playing the somewhat drunken whores, they lurched back into Rouen, Joliffe letting Perrette choose their way as she threaded them through several back alleys and passageways. They lost their seeming-drunkenness along the way, well before they came into the street where they had started. Joliffe supposed they were bound for Master Roussel’s house again, or else Doncaster’s or Wydeville’s, but as they went careful-footed along the dark slit of the passageway toward the alley, Perrette paused, snicked a latch, opened a door Joliffe had not known was there, and let them into a small room that was—guessing by the barely glowing coals on a small hearth—someone’s kitchen. Those should have been covered for the night but were not, which was good or they would have had to make their way blindly to another door and into another small room.
There, with the kitchen door shut behind them, they were in full darkness, and Perrette took him by the hand. She led him across the room, said softly, “Stairs,” and set his hand on them. In the darkness he could only tell they were of wood and steep, but he could guess they were probably also narrow, with a wall on one side and nothing on the other.
“Don’t stumble on your skirts,” Perrette said, still softly, and started up them.
Joliffe bundled his skirts up and out of his way over one arm, used his other hand to feel his way, and more or less crawled up behind her. At their top, Perrette said, “Wait,” and he listened as, invisible, she padded away from him, until with a scrape of wood on wood she opened a shutter to the lesser darkness of the night outside, relieving the room’s utter blackness but doing nothing to relieve its damnable cold. Able to see at least shapes now, Joliffe guessed by a curtained bed against the further wall that it was a bedchamber.
Crossing to the bed, Perrette pushed aside the nearer curtain, swung her cloak from her shoulders, and spread it over whatever covers were already on the bed. “It’s too late—or too early—for you to go elsewhere. I’m inviting you into my bed,” she said, a touch of laughter in her voice. “But you might want to take off your gown first.”
With a soft laugh of agreement, Joliffe freed himself from his cloak and copied her in laying it over the bed before ridding himself of the headkerchief, coif, and gown, folding them and putting them on a stool he had knocked against on his way to the bed. He was aware of Perrette undressing, too, down to her white undergown, a pale shape in the room’s darkness. In the normal way of things, in a house and with a bed, it was usual to go to bed naked, but she went no further, instead moved toward the bed, saying with a weariness that matched his own, “Come sleep now.”
Some other time Joliffe would have regretted she did not sound like she was inviting him to more than simply sleep. Just now, though, everything was so far in so many ways from where he had started the day, from what he had thought the day would be, from what the day had become, and he was now so tired, that he seemed to be moving half-brained through a strange dream that seemed to make sense now but might not in the morning when he awoke. Body and mind, he was weary; fumbling out of his doublet and hosen with increasing clumsiness, he wanted nothing so much as what she had offered—sleep.
She was in the bed now, holding the covers open for him. Still in his shirt and braies, he joined her. The sheets were as chill and damp as he had expected they would be. Sheets were always chill and damp this time of year unless there were bed-stones to warm them. And a fire to warm the bed-stones. And, with luck, a servant to warm the bed-stones and put them into the bed. Lacking servant, fire, or bed-stones, Joliffe and Perrette made do with each other—would surely have made more than do, except just then weariness and the need for warmth were stronger than lust, and when they had warmed the bed and each other enough for the shivering to stop, they fell simply to sleep, wrapped tightly together in each other’s arms.
Chapter 20
Matters were otherwise in the morning. Joliffe awoke first and lay for a long moment with his eyes closed, gathering memory of where he was and why, before opening his eyes to the gray light of a cloudy dawn in a strange room. Perrette was no longer in his arms. His body and mind both regretted that, until he found she had only rolled over and a little away from him in her sleep. By her breathing, she still slept, and he shifted to curve himself along the curve of her back, carefully put an arm over her, and stroked lightly at the softness of one breast. Perrette mad
e a small murmur of pleasure and wriggled her body backward, closer to his. Joliffe presumed then to kiss her uppermost shoulder, then gently moved her long hair aside from the back of her neck and shifted his kisses to there. By then she was at least half awake and softly laughing as she rolled over, keeping in the curve of his arm to press the length of her body against his and return his kisses.
What came next came naturally, and afterward they lay, again wrapped in each other’s arms, in utter ease. It was only after a while that Perrette stirred enough to stroke a hand along his jaw and murmur, “You’re fortunate to have a pale beard. Even this morning it hardly shows.”
“It saves on shaving,” Joliffe murmured in return. His own hand began to move along the lovely curve of her hip and thigh.
She shifted slightly to show she liked that and said, teasingly, “You played the woman well last night.”
“I’ve been . . .” Despite himself, Joliffe’s hand and answer paused before he finished, “When I was a player traveling with a company and all, we all had to play every part, sooner or later.”
Perrette, now running the tip of her forefinger in invisible patterns on his chest, murmured, “You also play the man very well.”
By the shift of her hips against him, she gave him to understand she was willing for him to play the man again right now. He was ready in every way and more than willing, and afterward, replete and content, they lay for a long time silent together. Beyond the window, both the day and Rouen were fully awake, and he was so late to his secretary-duties—beyond any good excuse he could make—that he saw no point in hurrying to be out of bed. Perrette seemed to feel the same about wherever she might be supposed to be.
Only necessity finally drove them from the comforts of bed and each other, Perrette saying, “The kitchen will be warmer,” as they gathered up their clothing in shivering haste.
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