A Play of Dux Moraud

by Margaret Frazer

  “And they would,” Basset said.

  “Probably,” Joliffe hedged. “Lady Benedicta has taken her pleasure elsewhere, but it was a long time ago and the man is dead.”

  “How?” Basset asked.

  Joliffe had wondered that, too. “It’s something to be found out. I think it’s said to have been only a few years ago, though. The thing is that he was John Harcourt’s father.”

  Basset said something curt and crude.

  “Yes,” Joliffe agreed. “So about him I’d like to find out more, but no one has said there was anything suspicious about his death.”

  “Any more than anyone here seems suspicious about John Harcourt’s death,” Basset said. “Nor that anyone was openly objecting to him marrying Mariena.”

  “She at least was willing to it. Very willing, from what Sia said.” Or maybe Mariena was just very willing generally, he added to himself.

  Like echo to that thought, Basset said, “It hasn’t stopped her being willing to this one, too. What about Harcourt? Was he willing?”

  “I’ve not heard otherwise. In truth, the only thing I’ve heard about him for certain is that while waiting for his marriage he was heartily availing himself of what else is on offer here.”

  “What else . . .” Basset started, then caught Joliffe’s meaning and lightly mocked, “Your Sia isn’t only your own?”

  “And wasn’t I taken aback to find that out,” Joliffe said dryly back at him, then took a tragic tone and added, “Alas, no, she has been other men’s, nor was she Harcourt’s only swiving-partner here.”

  “Not the daughter,” Basset said, firmly ready to disbelieve that.

  “No.” With an eye sideways on Ellis, he added, “Just with every servant girl who offered herself, I gather. And there’s several of them that offer themselves readily.”

  Ellis knew that jibe was meant for him and took it with a glare since Rose had her back to him, collecting the dried hosen from the drying frame so he didn’t have to pretend he didn’t know what Joliffe meant.

  Basset held to the point. “What about this Amyas Breche? Does he take his pleasure among the servant wenches, too?”

  “No.”

  “So there’s a difference there between them,” Basset said, considering.

  “That, and that there’s been no talk linking Lady Benedicta to any of his relatives.”

  Rose turned from the drying frame, her hands full of hosen, and demanded, “What are you two talking about?”

  Basset refuged instantly in earnest simpleness. “Just talk, my dear. To pass the time until we go to break our fast.”

  “Just talk,” Rose mocked back at him. “I hardly think so. What’s this about?”

  Joliffe and Basset traded looks, and Joliffe lifted his shoulders slightly, giving the problem over to Basset, who sighed and said, “Lord Lovell has doubts about the man Harcourt’s death and is somewhat uneasy about this Breche marriage. Since we were going to be here anyway, he asked us to learn what we could.”

  “It’s because Joliffe was too sharp-witted last summer. That’s the root of it, isn’t it?” Ellis said, hot with accusation. “Lord Lovell wants him to find out trouble the way he did then, doesn’t he?”

  “He wants me to find out there’s not trouble,” Joliffe defended.

  “That’s no more than word-play,” Ellis scoffed.

  “It’s not as if I had choice, is it? Not once he ‘asked’ it of me.”

  “You had choice last summer, before you put your nose in where it didn’t belong,” Ellis snapped.

  “Joliffe did what needed doing,” Rose said with her rare sharpness. “It was probably even because of it Lord Lovell took note of us.” She looked at her father, who shrugged and somewhat grimaced, acknowledging the likelihood of that; and she finished at Ellis, “So it better suits us to help than make trouble over what can’t be changed.”

  Her glare defied Ellis to disagree and he did not, although his, “I can see that, yes,” was given grudgingly, his truer feeling about it showing through the unwilling acceptance.

  “We’re none of us happy about it,” Basset said, to soothe. “But it’s as Rose says. We’ve little choice, do we?”

  “When did you mean to tell us what was a-foot?” Ellis asked, an edge of his anger still showing.

  “We’d hoped never to have to tell you,” Basset answered. “We hoped to see the thing through to a quiet end and no one else troubled about it.”

  Rose, the hosen set aside, came to Ellis’ side and slipped her arm through his and smiled up at him. “They didn’t do it simply to anger you, you know,” she said gently.

  As always to her slightest sign of affection to him, Ellis eased back from his anger. He made a small, accepting gesture at Basset with his free hand and said, “I know.” He pointed at Joliffe and added, only half-jesting, “But I still think he did it just to cross me.”

  Joliffe raised his shoulders in a high shrug. “There has to be some benefit to it.”

  “Children, children,” Basset said. “Let us not quarrel. All we’re truly doing is hearing what we can and making of it what can be made, and when Lord Lovell comes for the wedding, we’ll pass everything on to him. There’s hardly trouble in that.”

  Probably even Ellis would have granted that, but they were interrupted by Piers’ approaching voice, loud and happy beyond the carpenter’s shed, and Basset said, “We’ll keep it from Piers and Gil, though, I think.”

  “If we can,” Ellis muttered as they all turned to be doing something else than talking when the boys came into the yard, Will with them.

  He looked surprisingly cheerful for someone whose sister had been deathly ill last night, and Basset greeted him with, “Master William, we’ve been grieved to hear about Mariena. She’s better?”

  “She’s all well,” Will said with disgust. “My father says it was all trouble over nothing.”

  “She was very bad, though, wasn’t she?” Joliffe said, determined his trouble and the alarm weren’t going to have been for nothing.

  “She was vomiting and everything,” Will said. He had a small boy’s delight at that. “The servants were kept scurrying most of the night with it. She was so bad for a while that Father Morice had to come to confess her. But she wouldn’t!” Will seemed as enthused for his sister’s defiance of the priest as for her being ill in the first place. “She said she wasn’t going to die and she wasn’t going to confess. So now Father Morice is upset about that, and Mother is angry at her, and Father went to see Mariena this morning, now the vomiting and all has stopped, and he takes her side—he always does—and says Mother made much out of nothing and he’s angry at her for it, and he’s told Father Morice to read the banns today, just as planned, and don’t make fluster where there doesn’t need to be.”

  Will was forced to pause to take a deep breath, which he let out with a sharp sigh of satisfaction at having said all that.

  “Amyas must have been as sick with worry that Mariena was that ill,” Joliffe ventured.

  “It was something she ate,” Will said cheerfully. “Or ate too much of, Mother says. Amyas wore himself out with pacing back and forth along the gallery outside Mariena’s chamber until he was told she was better. Then he went to bed. Harry was there, too, but he didn’t pace; he just leaned on the railing, looking glum and keeping him company. Amyas told him to go back to bed. He said no point, what with his wife gone to help with Mariena—”

  “How are you this morning?” Rose interrupted.

  “Me?” Will sounded surprised at the question, as if yesterday’s fall had never happened. “I’m well. I didn’t eat whatever she did.” He turned his heed to Basset, Ellis, and Joliffe. “I almost fell on the floor laughing at you all last night! May I watch you practice today? Are you going to practice today? What are you doing tonight? I want to laugh like that some more.”

  “Tonight will be something more in keeping with the marriage banns being first read,” Basset said. “Something”—he tipped
a wink toward Will’s open disappointment—“only almost as much to be laughed at. And, yes, we’ll practice today, but as for watching us, won’t you be at lessons again, now Father Morice is no longer needed to clerk the marriage talks?”

  “He’s going to be busy fair-copying the agreement out several times over. He has the best hand on the manor, my father says,” Will said. “With that and going to the village to say the banns, he’ll be too busy for me most of the day.” Will’s face fell. “You don’t want me to watch you, do you?”

  That leap to expected disappointment seemed to come from nowhere, and Basset laid a hand on his shoulder, saying, smiling, “After we’ve broken our fast, you may watch us rehearse all morning if you want.”

  Will stared at him, so openly uncertain whether Basset meant that or not that Joliffe wondered who lied to him so often he expected it. Basset must have seen Will’s uncertainty, too, because he said, “I mean it. You can watch for as long as you want, or until someone comes to fetch you.” Because, as he had otherwise said, there was never a bad time to encourage a love of plays in those who had—or, in Will’s case, would someday have—the money to pay for the playing. “It may not much benefit us here and now,” he had told Joliffe in his early days with the company, “but it may serve other player-folk when they come this way, and hopefully they’re doing likewise for us wherever they are.”

  “But,” Basset said now to Will, raising a warning finger, “you must keep our secrets and not give away aforetime what you see us do here.”

  “I won’t,” Will promised readily, happily. “I’m good at keeping secrets.”

  “Such as?” Joliffe asked.

  Will opened his mouth to answer, then broke into laughter. “I’m not going to tell you!”

  They laughed with him, except for Ellis, who settled for shoving Joliffe hard on the arm, rocking him to the side. Joliffe, for more laughter, turned that into a wild-armed tottering before he windmilled himself back onto the balance he had never lost. That made Piers, Gil, and Will laugh more as they all started away to breakfast, walking slowly because of Basset’s stiffness.

  Joliffe let himself wonder what they would do if this arthritic flare didn’t ease before it was time to move on again. Basset would have to ride in the cart and that would slow Tisbe and that would slow all of them, lengthening the times between when they could play. Still, that was not so desperate a matter as it might have been, not with Lord Lovell’s gold coin for comfort against lean times.

  The trouble with once having that comfort was that the thought of losing it was the harder to face. They had been cast adrift as lordless players before this, when they lost their last patron’s favor. It wasn’t something Joliffe wanted to happen again, but what if he failed in the task Lord Lovell had set him and Basset? It was a vague enough task at best—determine if something had or hadn’t been wrong about a death, and whether there was or wasn’t something to be worried over about the present marriage plans. Maybe Lord Lovell would be satisfied with a vague answer at the end of it all?

  Probably. He did not seem an unfair man.

  But neither did he seem a man who would take less than he paid for. If their vague answer at the end included another death, how less than satisfied was he likely to be?

  In a poor attempt to lighten his own dissatisfied thoughts as he trailed behind the other players across the wide yard toward the hall, Joliffe decided that would probably depend on who was dead.

  Of course, if Harcourt’s death had been murder, why was the pattern changed? Last time the bridegroom-to-be had died. This time it was Mariena who had fallen so ill that the priest was called. And yet, despite of that, she had been so certain she would not die that she had refused his help.

  Had that been merely from the blind refusal of mortality too many people had, or did it mean something else?

  And were Will’s accidents only accidents, or were they something more than they seemed, too?

  Had an attempt at murder been made against Will yesterday and another against Mariena last night?

  John Harcourt’s death had disappointed Sir Edmund’s plans of a profitable alliance. Mariena’s death would make an end of any other plans forever and at all. And Will’s death would disappoint Sir Edmund’s hope of a male heir. But if someone was that set against Sir Edmund, why not just straight-forwardly kill him instead? Because there was more satisfaction in destroying him piecemeal? Or because someone was simply against the whole family?

  The first person who came to mind that way was Harry Wyot.

  What if he indeed had a deep-running resentment against Sir Edmund for his disparaging marriage to this Idonea Coket? It could be he liked his wife and still resented Sir Edmund. Sia might be able to tell him if that were likely, Joliffe hoped, and on his own he’d assuredly be taking more careful look at them together when he had the chance.

  Chance didn’t come in the hall this morning, though, either to watch the Wyots or to talk to Sia. Neither she nor Avice were to be seen and there was no sign of their betters, but from the general talk and tired faces, Joliffe easily gathered everyone’s night must have been long and as fully unpleasant as Will’s telling had made it seem.

  When Basset reasonably asked after the family’s health, the clerk Duffeld told him, “They’re all having their breakfasts in their chambers this morning. With all the toing and froing last night there was hardly sleep for anyone until nearly dawn.” Including him, by the look of him.

  “You’re likely glad, then, that Father Morice is to copy out the marriage agreement, rather than you,” Joliffe said. Ellis looked at him sharply, instantly knowing what he was about.

  Duffeld, probably bored with watching other people eat, huffed agreement with that. “I am, and he’s welcome to it. With all the ‘and ifs’ and ‘shoulds’ he and Sir Edmund and Master Breche argued into it, the thing goes on forever.”

  “Worse than the one for the Harcourt marriage?” Joliffe asked. Ellis turned his back to him.

  “That one,” Duffeld said with open dislike and disgust. “That one I thought would never be finished. This one is nothing to that. With the Harcourt one, every point was looked at from fifty ways and then looked at again. And then for him to die before ever . . .” The clerk broke off, shaking of his head.

  “I’ve heard good of him,” Joliffe lied. “That he was well-liked and all.”

  “Have you?” Duffeld seemed surprised by that but discretion held sway; he only said, “Yes, well, my lady Mariena favored him, assuredly. She was nigh ill with grief and anger after his death.”

  “Anger?” Joliffe prodded lightly.

  “That he could be dead. Grief takes some people that way, you know.”

  Joliffe had to grant that it did. “Who was his heir?” he asked, making it sound like no more than shallow curiosity.

  “A cousin of some sort. No one we ever saw.”

  The other players had moved away, but there were still folk around the table, keeping the clerk in watch on them. Seeing no reason not to make use of the chance to ask him everything possible, Joliffe asked, “Sir Edmund could have pursued a marriage for Mariena with the cousin, couldn’t he? Or is the man married?”

  “I’d not heard he was married, no, but Sir Edmund never seemed to think of another marriage that way. A month on, Amyas Breche began to be talked of.”

  “That was Master Wyot’s doing, wasn’t it?” Joliffe said, deliberately wrong.

  “Master Wyot’s?” The clerk seemed to find that both improbable and laughable. “I doubt that very much. No, assuredly not. He’d never . . .” Duffeld stopped short, abruptly disapproving, maybe of himself, and said repressively, “Master Wyot is here only as Amyas Breche’s friend. He has nothing to do with the marriage.”

  Unrepressed, Joliffe asked cheerfully, as if simply making talk and not much interested in the question or any answer, “He was supposed to marry Mariena himself, wasn’t he?”

  “There was brief talk of it.” The clerk was be
yond repressive to curt. “It was decided otherwise.”

  “Hard on Master Wyot,” Joliffe said with a sad shake of his head.

  “He didn’t mind,” the clerk said coldly and walked away.

  Keeping unconcern all over his face, Joliffe took a long drink from the cup he held, sorting what he had learned. Besides making clear his disapproval of the whole subject, Duffeld had confirmed that it had been Master Wyot who did not want the marriage. About the proposed Harcourt marriage he had talked freely enough, though, and what he had had to say there had been as interesting, in its way, as his not wanting to talk about Harry Wyot at all.

  Ellis butted him with an elbow in his back. “We’re going. Time to work.”

  In truth, the play they meant to do tonight—The Husband Becomes the Wife—was one they did often and at most they needed no more than an easy run through it to be sure their speeches were crisp in their heads. With Will there, though, looking vastly eager, Basset made something more of the business than he might have, telling Joliffe to wear the rough rehearsing-skirt and making show, while they walked through it, of telling Gil what to note while he watched.

  The story was simply the old one of the husband who complained his wife’s life was too easy compared to his and all the misfortunes that came of him taking her place for a day. As the husband, Ellis got to swagger at first, and then fall about in hapless disasters. Joliffe as the wife got to shrill at him and flounce about, while Piers was the ill-mannered, whining child and Basset the husband’s mother-in-law, with a fine time had all around, especially by the lookers-on.

  At the end of their run-through, Basset said, “That was well. I think we need not go it again.”

  Ellis muttered for only Joliffe to hear that they need not have gone it this time so far as he could see: they could all do the old thing in their sleep.

  Basset sat down with stiff care on the piled cushions against the cart’s wheel. Rose had been brewing one of her herbal drinks to ease his pain and he took it from her with thanks, then asked, “Gil, what do you think?”