A Play of Lords

by Margaret Frazer

  Piers stared, watching, then looked up at his grandfather and said in a small voice, “It’s awful.” He looked around at Ellis, a smile spreading wide across his face. “Really, truly awful. It’s great!”

  Ellis grinned back at him.

  Rose took the mask from her father, looked at the inside of it, and said, “I can line this with cloth so it won’t chafe, Piers. And better than ties, I can fix it to a black hood, I think, to keep it on and steady.”

  “Ellis,” said Basset, “could you give it a red tongue lolling out, too?”

  “I could,” Ellis answered somewhat tartly. “Or I could learn my lines for tonight.”

  “Tonight,” Gil moaned in what sounded like soft despair. He bent to his writing again.

  “So best we get to it,” Basset said bracingly. “Are you almost done, Joliffe? Gil?”

  “I’m on the last speech,” Joliffe said. And it was practically writing itself; the Devil’s lines were always easiest to do.

  Gil neither spoke nor looked up, only used his free hand to shove some finished sheets toward Basset, who took them up, separated them, handed most of them to Ellis, kept his own, set Joliffe’s back on the table, and said, “Best we start learning these. I’ve bespoke that room for the rest of the day from late morning. We can’t put off being on our feet with this any longer than that.”

  “On our feet and out of our wits,” Joliffe muttered.

  He was ignored because it was best not to admit what they all already knew: that to write, learn, and perform a play in this handful of days was nigh to impossible.

  Yet even while knowing the thing was madness, Joliffe knew they would succeed because, first, “nigh to impossible” was not the same as “impossible.” Then, by the mere fact they were players they showed they were mad, and therefore, being mad, could do mad things.

  And, if nothing else, they would succeed because they had to.

  The day was a long and hard one. The heaviest part of it fell on Joliffe and Ellis because while much of what Basset and Gil had to say at the beginning was simply lifted almost entire from the other play, almost everything Joliffe and Ellis would say as the Dauphin and the Devil was new, meaning they needed to learn the words and find the best way to say them and learn and remember the movements to go with them, mostly at the same time they were settling the words into their heads.

  Not that Basset had anything easier. He had to learn all his new words for the latter part of the play as well as deciding everything else that had to be done by the rest of them as well as himself. Gil might have less that was new for him, but everything he did had to work with what the others did, and they were all learning that together. Nor was the play written so well as Joliffe would have liked it to be, but there was no time to better it except by a word here or there, and all in all, the day was not long enough, no matter how hard they had worked. When the westering light through the window told them they were out of time to do more, the play still felt raw and unready, but Basset heaved a deep breath with what could have been either relief or resignation and said, “I think we have it. If we keep our wits about us, I think it will work.”

  No,” he added resolutely, throwing back his shoulders. “It is going to work! Just because we can see all the raw edges doesn’t mean anyone else will. Onward, my stout fellows! Onward!”

  The rest of them met that with about equal weight of protesting groans and acknowledging smiles and, surprisingly, no despair because there was good chance the thing would go well enough if—as Basset rightly said—they kept their wits about them.

  Back in their own room, Rose had bread and cheese and ale waiting for them and water warm by the fire, and they ate and washed and she tried Piers’ garb on him now it was finished, including the mask that she had lined with a scrap of cloth, then stitched to a black hood to which she had found time to sew long, narrow strips of red and black cloth like tatters of hair.

  “I can snip those off if you don’t want them,” she told her father, but when Piers had tried some practice prancing and leaping with the hood pinned tightly below his chin, the mask stayed in place and the streamers flipped color-fully around him, and Basset declared himself very pleased and gave her a hearty kiss on the forehead, saying, “You’re our treasure, Rose.”

  “I am that,” she agreed. “I’m coming with you tonight, you know. I’m not sitting here waiting to find out how it goes until you all come back.”

  “Assuredly,” agreed Basset. “Our trembling fingers will surely need your deft hands to see us into our garb when the time comes.”

  “Saint Anne preserve me,” Rose said toward the ceiling. “Piers, let me take that mask off you. If you mess it now, we’ll all skin you.”

  She had most of what they would need already packed into a hamper. Piers’ garb and the mask were the last. While she put those in and strapped the lid tightly closed, the men and Piers were putting on their red and gold tabards over the plain shirts and doublets that would see them through the streets, and they were all just finished when Mak and Harry, the other man who had seen them to Bishop Beaufort’s, came to carry the hamper and lead the way to the earl of Mortain’s house. With Mak and Harry leading with the hamper, they set out, Basset and Ellis walking side by side behind the hamper, then Joliffe and Gil, while Piers strutted at the rear with Rose following at a little distance, meaning to go unnoted. How much the fine little show of their going was noted at all in the ordinary busyness of London’s streets was hard to say, and anyway they did not have far to go. At first headed as if back to Bishop Beaufort’s, well before the bridge Mak turned them all rightward out of broad Thames Street down a paved way between high stone walls going straight toward the river. Short of the Thames, though, there was a gatehouse on their left, and a guard brought them to pause until Mak had announced loudly, “My Lord Lovell’s players, come to play for my lord, the earl of Mortain!”

  Eyeing them with interest, the guard gave a nod and pointed a thumb over his shoulder, as if they would not know which way to go through the gateway if he did not tell them. “There’ll be someone there will know where you’re to go,” he said.

  The yard beyond the gateway was narrow and stone-paved, with buildings all around it, some of stone, some of timber and plaster, all with blue slate roofs. The great hall bulked ahead of them, with a wide stairway up to its broad doorway. There were servants busy about the place, but no one who looked like guests yet. As he had meant to do, Basset had the players here early, to give them chance to see where they were to play and hopefully time to say their lines together at least one more time.

  Joliffe knew he was not alone in having the rolled pages tucked into the front of his doublet. They might all know what they were to say and do tonight, but they did not know it the way best to know a play: with words and movements so set into the mind and body that there was never a sudden, frightened wondering of what was supposed to come next. Judging by how their last run through it had gone before they left Lord Lovell’s, they were a long way from that. Their hope lay in the fact they all knew there was nothing like sufficient fear to spur them forward past every difficulty into giving a fine performance. And whatever the others were feeling, Joliffe knew he was more than sufficiently fearful.

  Mak took care of where they should go by asking the first servant they met wearing the household’s livery of red and green, a badge of a portcullis on his shoulder.

  “The chamberlain,” the man said. “He’ll know. I’ll take you to him. I’d say the usher usually, but you don’t want to be near him just now. He’s fit to rip his ears off with worrying over whom to put where.” Precedence being a grave matter not only at the high table itself but down the whole length of the hall to the bottom-most place along the tables.

  “Who’s to be here, then?” Mak asked.

  “The earl of Warwick and the earl of Suffolk and their ladies. That French bishop that’s chancellor in Normandy.” He named some names of men Joliffe guessed were Londoners, or at
least English, and then, “An Italian merchant. Francesco something-I-can’t-say. And a fat Hanseatic merchant who wears too many furs. Scheurl?”

  “Don’t know,” said Mak cheerfully. “I don’t keep company with rich German merchants. What you’re saying is that there’s someone here from everywhere but Burgundy, right enough?”

  The fellow paused part way up the stairs, bringing all the rest of them to a halt, too, as he half-turned to look down at Mak while saying as if surprised into thought, “You’re right. Huh.” He laughed and started upward again. “Burgundians. That would make for a lively time here!”

  “We’d not need my Lord Lovell’s players for sport,” Mak said on a matching laugh. “We’d be busy beating the London mob back from the walls to pass the time.”

  “Better we just tossed the Burgundians out to them,” the man said and did not sound like he was jesting.

  In the usual way of things, the players would likely have been left to wait in the screens passage, just inside the outer door, but as in most places, the screens passage ran the full width of the great hall, shielding it both from draughts from the outer door and sight of servants coming and going from kitchen and butlery during a feast, and just now it was bustling with servants going back and forth, and because no matter where the players might have stood, they and their hamper would have been in the way, their guide saw them hurriedly through the screens’ wide doorway into the hall itself, pointed them to a place aside from the door and against the screen, and said, “Stay here. I’ll find who’s to see to you.”

  He went and they stayed, Mak and Harry setting down the hamper with hearty sighs while the players took the chance for a long look at where they would play. The hall was a fine one, well-proportioned length against width, its walls plastered a rich cream white and hung, end to end, with tapestries woven with bright scenes of lords and ladies, horses, hounds, and flowered woods. At the hall’s far end, behind a low dais, there was a broad, high hanging showing two rearing beasts—a crowned golden eagle and a silver creature with gold spots and back-curving horns on either side of a shield with the heraldic arms of England—gold lions and lilies on vermilion and azure—differenced from the king’s own arms only by a bordure of silver and azure, reminder to anyone who might be forgetful of just how close in blood Bishop Beaufort’s family was to King Henry VI himself.

  The long table below the hanging was raised by its dais a step above the two lines of tables running the hall’s length on either side, and all the tables were covered by gleaming clean white cloths and being set with actual plates at every place, rather than the bread trenchers that would usually serve along lower tables at ordinary meals; and while the plates near this lower end of the hall looked to Joliffe to be well-polished pewter, he would have been willing to wager they were silver higher up the hall and that those on the high table would be gold. It looked to be that rich a household. When the dozens of candles waiting in their tall stands around the hall’s outer sides were lighted, the place would fairly glow and gleam.

  Of more immediate matter to the players, though, was that the space lying open between the tables, where servers would make procession with whatever fine foods were being presented to their lord and lady and guests tonight, was wide and free of any troublesome hearth. As Basset was pointing out in case any of them were too busy staring to note it, that made one less thing they would have to take into account. Ellis nodded vaguely that he had heard but kept on staring at the wealth displayed on the tables as he breathed, “Saint Genesius have mercy. For an earl I’ve barely heard of, Mortain doesn’t do badly for himself.”

  “The place is his brother’s, come to that,” said Mak helpfully. “The duke of Somerset, you know. But Somerset’s been prisoner in France for fourteen years or thereabouts, and since the place was given to their father, him that was Bishop Beaufort’s brother, Mortain has the ready use of it when he’s in London. Word is that it’s liable to be sold, though, for money toward Somerset’s ransom. Bets are being laid who’ll take it. I’m laying mine on the earl of Suffolk.”

  “You’d think Bishop Beaufort had money enough to ransom his own nephew,” Basset said.

  “Surely,” Mak agreed. “But the battle he was captured in was that at Bauge. The one where the late king’s brother was killed, remember? What I’ve heard is that King Henry that was, God keep his soul, was so bitter angry at his brother for having let that fool of a battle happen and being killed in it into the bargain, that when he heard that Somerset had encouraged him to it and was still alive, he gave order that neither of Somerset’s uncles were to do aught toward helping get him free, despite Bishop Beaufort was one and the other of ’em was duke of Exeter, God rest him. So there Somerset’s been these fourteen years.”

  Joliffe had to wonder how ready was Mortain to have his brother home, anyway, but it was Mak who said aloud, “So here’s Edmund, earl of Mortain sitting high and fine and married not so many months ago to Lord Roos’ widow, her that’s the earl of Warwick’s daughter. That would be one reason the earl of Warwick’s likely backing him for governor of France, as I hear. Ah, here’s someone for us.”

  The man coming toward them was dressed more as a plain servant than as the officer of a rich household, but whoever he was, he plainly considered himself well above players, saying impatiently at them, “Come with me. That fool should have known where you were to go,” turning away even while saying it.

  The players rolled eyes at each other, Mak and Harry grabbed up the hamper, and they all hurried in the man’s wake, out of the hall, along the screens passage, and through a doorway into a room Joliffe had no time to see as they passed through it to yet another room beyond it.

  “You’ll wait here until you’re summoned,” the man said. “You’re to play between the second and third remove. Be ready,” and he went abruptly out, leaving them to the stares of all the other people already there.

  Chapter 8

  he room was far different from the great hall, was low-ceilinged, with bare plastered walls and unpolished floorboards; its single window looking out on a small courtyard, probably the kitchen yard, enclosed by equally plain buildings. This was without doubt the working part of the house, from where came the comforts for the earl and his lady, and also without doubt this was the room where those who were to play at this evening’s feast were being kept. It was under the long stares of more than a dozen pairs of eyes that Mak said, discomposed, “Well, here you are. We’ll leave you to it,” setting down his end of the hamper as quickly as Harry did and Mak only pausing in their retreat to raise a hand and call, “Don’t break anything tonight, Ned!” before he was out the door.

  “Stay sober!” Ned called after him. Propped with one hand against the wall at the room’s other end, he was stretching a leg as straight up past his head as Joliffe thought no leg should ever go. But Ned set the leg down and announced to the room at large, “These are Lord Lovell’s players, my fellows. They’re only lately come to our fair London for their first time of all and have already played for the bishop of Winchester. So they’re blooded, and no need for us to do more.”

  Joliffe was just as happy not to learn what that was about. It must have satisfied something, though, because there was a general easy raising of hands in their direction and some greetings, while an older man among them all pointed to the far end of the room, not far from Ned, and said, not unfriendly, “If you’re not needed until after the second remove, you’ll do best over there for the time being.”

  “Our thanks,” Basset said, and Joliffe and Gil picked up the hamper and followed him, Ellis, Rose, and Piers to the room’s far end where Ned was now standing on both feet but bending so far over from the waist he looked about to set his elbows on the floor, even if that was not possible, Joliffe thought. As he and Gil set the hamper down, Ellis was explaining Basset and Ned to each other, and Ned—having straightened—smiled friendliwise and said to Basset, “Welcome to London.” He gave a bow to Rose. “It’s good to see
you again, fair lady.” And to the rest of them, “Are you all calm and settled and ready for tonight’s fine set of noble lords and fine merchants?”