A Play of Lords

by Margaret Frazer

  Mak plunged down the unevenly worn steps with the ready eagerness of someone who knew them well. Joliffe, Ellis, Rose, and Gil followed more slowly, Ellis holding Rose’s elbow not only down the stairs but until they were through the several-foot-thick stone doorway into the room beyond it. The place was as long and narrow as the house above it, with a single line of stone pillars down its length holding up the low, stone-vaulted roof. Fat, smoking candles on prickets thrust out from the walls and some of the pillars, high enough to clear heads, their yellow light throwing shadows around from the maybe score or more of men and women there, some standing on benches to see over the heads of others closed around someone or something in the midst of them. Whatever they were seeing, it had them laughing, and Mak shoved friendliwise at two men standing on the first bench he came to, saying, “Shift, then. Let us see, too.”

  Without looking around, the men crowded together enough for room for Mak to step up, and when he was up, he held out a hand to Rose with, “Come you up, too. Let the tall ones fend for themselves.”

  Ellis took Rose by the waist and lifted her up, but he then went on standing beside her, his arm around her hips, that there be no mistake about to whom she belonged. Joliffe kept his grin at that to himself while craning with the rest at the back of the gathering to finally see what in the midst of them had everyone’s heed.

  It proved to be a man on the floor, stripped to shirt, small clothes, and hosen and twisted into some sort of knot that had him balled on the floor, one leg hooked up and over the back of his neck, his other leg entangled with his arms in an unlikely way. By the sweat beaded on his face, he had been at the sport for a while already, but he looked happy enough about it, saying just then, “And this is one of the Burgundian ambassadors trying to make us believe their duke turned traitor on us for our own good.”

  To the loud laughter that brought, the fellow untwisted himself and sat up, simply cross-legged. “All for now,” he announced, holding up a hand into which someone readily put a cup of ale, while a man near Joliffe spat into the rushes spread thinly over the floor and declared, “That for the Burgundians, damn them.”

  “Nan’ll have you for that, Raf,” someone else said in mock horror, just before a woman said, “That’ll be a farthing and I’ll take it now, thank you, Raf.”

  A well-scrubbed hand on a well-muscled arm came past Joliffe’s shoulder, palm up. Almost warily, Joliffe looked around to the woman who must be Nan—around and somewhat up because Nan was a large woman. Not fat, he saw. By no means fat. She was simply . . . large, as big-boned and square-shouldered as a man might be. Joliffe doubted she ever had much trouble from anyone in her tavern. Or if she did, he doubted it lasted long. Assuredly Raf was making no protest, only grinning sheepishly as he fumbled a small piece of coin from his belt-purse and gave it to her.

  She took it but then ordered, “Here,” and gave it back to him. “Put it toward your next drink to wish the bloody Burgundians to Hell.”

  There were several protesting “heys” raised to that and more than one jaw started to work toward a good spit, but Nan swept them all with a gimlet-sharp eye and said, “You do it, you drink it. One free one a year is all you get, and Raf ’s just had it.”

  Someone tried, “That was Raf ’s. What about mine?”

  “Not one free apiece,” Nan shot back. “Just one free, and that was it.”

  That brought laughter all around, and the man on the floor raised his cup high and declared, “Damnation to the Burgundians!”

  Raised wooden cups and leather jacks all around answered that, followed by deep drinking. Joliffe turned his head in search of where he could come by his own drink and instead met Nan’s gimlet gaze fixed on him. She was openly assessing him as a newcomer and judging whether he would be trouble, and he gave his best smile and nodded toward the floor. “Like your rule.”

  “Keeps the rushes clean,” she said without shifting her gaze from him. There was something discomfitingly like Bishop Beaufort’s about it. “Otherwise I’d be changing them every seven-night and have to raise my prices.” She looked past him to Mak just getting down from the bench and included Rose, Ellis, and Gil in. “They’re with you?”

  “With me,” Mak said cheerfully. “Never in London before. Couldn’t think of a better place to bring them than the Crow’s Toes.”

  Joliffe doubted flattery weighed much with Nan. All Mak got for his was a curt nod and, “That’s all right then,” before she went to take up other matters.

  As she passed the half-clad man still sitting on the floor, he put up a hand, and without a pause or any show of effort, she took it, pulled him to his feet, and kept going. Untwisted and upright, he was well-shaped enough, although almost skeletally lean. Nor was he ill-featured, and his smile was easy with friendliness as he sauntered toward Mak, who said to Joliffe, Rose, Ellis, and Gil, “This is Ned. Greatest bender of an almost-human body you’ll likely ever meet.”

  “Hai,” Ned protested. “What’s this ‘almost-human’?” Setting aside his emptied cup, he raised his voice. “Anyone seen my doublet?”

  Someone tossed him a yellow doublet. He called thanks and began to put it on while Mak said, “You’ll never get me to believe a man can do what you do to your body.”

  “What am I then?” Ned challenged as if it were an old, laughing matter between them.

  “I still favor a devil from Hell,” Mak said with wholly and openly false piety. “Come to distract good Christian men like me from holy thoughts by your depraved ways.”

  “That’s where your argument falls down flat, Mak. For you, at least. How can I distract you from what you’ve never had?” Ned smiled aside from Mak to the rest of them. “Who are your new friends?”

  “Some of Lord Lovell’s players. New-come to London, like I told Nan.”

  For all his easy friendliness, Ned’s look was as assessing as any Nan had given them, but it lingered on Rose as he said, “Come to be a brightness in a dreary world.”

  Joliffe expected Ellis would answer that by again putting an arm around Rose, but before he could, Ned smoothly shifted from heed of her to him and said, “I saw you at the Guildhall this morning, didn’t I? You and two others getting your license to play.”

  “We were there,” Ellis agreed. “You get around.”

  “I do.” Without apparently looking aside, Ned held out a hand, and a passing serving girl put a cup of ale into it. “I do indeed.”

  Joliffe watched the girl walking away and asked, “Does it work like that for everyone?”

  “Most everyone else has to pay,” Ned said. “I have drink and supper here for my wages.”

  “I noted no one tossed you any coins,” Ellis said.

  “They’d get lost in the rushes, wouldn’t they?” Ned answered easily. “No, I set people to laughing, put them in humour to drink more and stay longer, and Nan gives me food and drink. Fair trade, we find.”

  “Otherwhere than here he takes coin, though,” Mak said. “He’s even played at court for the king. He says.” Over what looked like the start of a protest from Ned, Mak gave a nod toward the players, telling him, “They played for our cardinal bishop of Winchester yesterday.”

  “Did you?” Ned said appreciatively. “I’m to work at the earl of Mortain’s two nights from now.”

  “So are we,” said Ellis.

  Rose gave him a nudge in the ribs with an elbow and said with a nod toward a table near one wall, “There’s where they’re selling. Why don’t you fetch us all ale?”

  “I haven’t hands enough,” he protested.

  “I’ll come with you,” Mak said. “That’s pretty Beth that’s selling tonight.”

  And please let pretty Beth have an eye for anyone but Ellis, Joliffe thought as Mak and Ellis edged away through the growing gathering. And Ellis have an eye only for Rose. Anyway, that Ned had stayed behind should help Ellis hurry back.

  Ned was suggesting now they take the bench behind them while there was chance for it, and he pu
t himself beside Rose as they sat, with Joliffe on her other side and Gil at the bench’s end, and with a nod after Ellis, Ned asked, “Husband?”

  “Close enough,” Rose answered, not unfriendly but sounding much as she did when curbing Piers before he was in trouble.

  Ned gave a laugh deeper than readily expected from so thin a chest. “Ah, my luck’s not in tonight, I see.”

  He sounded neither offended nor worried about it and went on to ask the usual questions about where the players had lately been and how their lord was toward them. He seemed more interested in having his answers from Rose than Joliffe, but Joliffe had questions of his own and asked, “You do well enough here in London, then? Or do you take to the road, too?”

  “London does for me,” Ned said easily. “All the world comes here sooner or later. Or as much of the world as I want to see.”

  “That was well done, the way you worked the duke of Burgundy into your business,” Gil said. “Do you do that all the time, or is he just presently an easy mark?”

  “There’s always someone to hit,” Ned answered. “If not so high as our pride-addled duke, then some merchant everyone knows, who’s been strutting too proud up Lombard Street. Even a morning’s overset cart in Cheapside can be enough when folk want something to laugh at.”

  “But just now it’s the duke of Burgundy,” Joliffe prompted.

  “It is, it is. We’ve had his idiot ‘ambassadors’ here these few weeks, wanting to explain the benefits of peace to King Henry.”

  “Meaning the benefits to Burgundy, not to us,” Joliffe said.

  Ned pointed a finger at him. “You have it.”

  “Aye,” said Mak, just back with Ellis and cups of ale. “He thinks we should break our word and look as much a fool as he does.”

  Ellis handed a cup to Rose and jerked his head at Joliffe to shift aside. There not being room for that without shoving Gil off the bench, Joliffe stood up, and Ellis sat beside Rose in his place, handing her one of the cups he carried. Mak held out the three cups he had balanced together in his hands for Joliffe to take one and Gil the other, saying while they did, “If they’re right sharp-witted, those heralds and that friar, they’re wondering how they’re going to get a-ship without being killed on the way.”

  “Well may they wonder,” Ned said. “It’s Roarin’ Rob and his lot that are keeping watch and ward outside their place.”

  “That’s what I’d heard. Though I’d have thought even Roarin’ Rob would have tired of it by now,” Mak said.

  “Not for what he’s being paid.”

  “Oh? Aye?” Mak’s ears all but pricked at that. So did Joliffe’s, but he was saved from asking what next he wanted to know by Mak asking for him, “Who’s paying them, then?”

  “That’s something others than you are wondering,” Ned returned. “Nobody seems to know.”

  “Then Roarin’ Rob doesn’t either,” Mak said. “He boasts like a jay.”

  “It’s kept some business from him in his time,” Ned granted. “Never been sharp enough to reckon out there’s those will pay for work that don’t want it talked of afterward.”

  “There’s some sign that Gibbe the Jack has that figured,” Mak said.

  “Has he? Then Roarin’ Rob better watch his back.” Not that Ned sounded much worried about what might happen to Roarin’ Rob’s back. “What do you hear about that bishop that’s come from Normandy?”

  “Luxembourg? What’s to hear about him?” Mak said, sounding surprised.

  “That’s the thing, isn’t it?” Ned said. “Here he is, fresh out of Normandy, just come from the king’s council there and sitting pretty as you could please at our bishop of Winchester’s. Why not with the king, I have to wonder. And what’s the talk in the streets about him? Nothing.”

  “Who’s this bishop of Luxembourg?” Joliffe asked.

  “Nay,” said Mak. “That’s his name. Louis de Luxembourg.” What Mak did to French names was not lovely. “He’s bishop of some place or other over there in Normandy. Was chancellor for the duke of Bedford and is supposed to be all in favor of Normandy for the English, and here he is. Why?”

  “Saint Eligius,” Ned said scornfully. “That’s clear enough. He’s here to give the Normandy council’s say in who’s to take Bedford’s place as king’s governor there.”

  “May be. But where’s the rest of them, eh? These fellows always come in packs, don’t they? But he’s here with no more than some of his household men, and keeping very quiet about it, too.”

  “Maybe they’re out of money for sending a pack of lords to say what one man can say well enough on his own,” Ned said. “Saving their pence for the war. How many men does it take to say who they want for the new governor?”

  “You’re so sharp then,” Mak returned, “who do you think it’s going to be?”

  “The earl of Mortain,” Ned promptly answered.

  “Ha,” Mak scorned. “You’re saying that because you’re to play there. You’re just puffing yourself.”

  “I’m not. Think on it. Who’s likely?” Ned clasped his ale cup between his knees and started to count on his fingers. “Not Talbot. ‘Terror of the French’ he may be, but he’s too plain-blooded to be a royal governor.”

  “Too plain bloody minded,” said Mak. “That’s what he is. Hit ’em first, tell ’em afterwards what you want. That’s his way.”

  “Just so,” Ned said. “Governing Normandy needs more than that.”

  “Earl of Suffolk,” Mak said.

  “Probably not, although I hear he’s flattering his way around the royal court in hopes of getting it.”

  “That’s more than I’ve heard,” Mak said suspiciously.

  “You don’t get the places I get,” Ned said. “Fat Ellen for one. Why, last night we—”

  “I don’t know why I talk to you at all,” said Mak. “I was with her myself last night.”

  “You weren’t.”

  “Was.”

  “Wasn’t.”

  There was no heat in their word-trading. It was more like Piers and Ellis poking each other friendliwise in the ribs than a quarrel, and Mak said, “Forget Fat Ellen. Why not Suffolk? He’s spent years in Normandy, what with one command and another.”

  “But what’s he done with them?” Ned demanded. “Lost more often than he’s won, that’s what he’s done. Bedford had had enough of him and got him back to England once and for all a few years ago. So never mind he now likes the thought of himself as governor of Normandy. He won’t get it.”

  “Likes himself altogether too much, if you ask me,” Mak gloomed. “Still, his wife’s a lovely one.”

  “Oh, aye, that’s reason enough to make him governor of Normandy,” Ned mocked. He drained his cup, set it on the floor in front of him, and touched a fingertip to a third finger. “Now, the earl of Salisbury.”

  “Aye,” Mak said. “You can’t say he’s failed at anything.”

  “Surely,” Ned agreed. “Been warden on the Scottish border all these years, so he knows warfare as down and dirty as it’s likely to get. Besides that, he’s half-royal on his mother’s bastard side. True, he’s Bishop Beaufort’s nephew that way, and there’s those that will be against him just for that. But on his father’s side he’s a Neville, and that counts for more than a little.”

  “Has it all,” Mak said. “Except?”