A Play of Lords

by Margaret Frazer

  “Ready as may be and calm as a midwinter field of snow,” Basset said. He held out a hand, trembling it as if with ague, looked at it ruefully, and added, “Or perhaps not.”

  Ned laughed, as he was meant to. He was now stretching his arms over his head. “I’ll not trouble you with everyone’s names,” he said. “You’d not just now remember them anyway, likely.”

  “Very likely,” Basset agreed. “But we’re not the only company of players here, are we?”

  “Ah, you read those speculative looks you were getting as you crossed the room, did you?” Ned said. “No, besides the strays like me, there’s Robin Newcum’s company will be doing their Sir Orfeo after the first remove. We think most of high table won’t have seen it yet.” He grimaced. “But the rest of us surely have, and much of London.”

  “They’re a London company then,” said Basset.

  “They go southeast and then around through Hampshire and back to London, with some hires into Essex and Hertfordshire,” Ned answered. “Always here for the mayor’s procession, though, and any time there’s a parliament.”

  “So they have a feeling that London is their own?” Basset asked.

  “Something like. They’ll have an eye on you tonight, that’s sure.” Ned’s gaze went past them and brightened. “There’s Pet. I’ve not seen her for a time. Pardon me.”

  He left them, heading for a tall and slender woman quietly dressed in cloak and headkerchief, just come in and being greeted by everyone else as if they knew her.

  Left to themselves, Basset said quietly, “Here we are then, with a goodly wait ahead of us. Let’s set to running those lines.”

  While Rose settled herself on the hamper with the one copy of the full play in hand, the rest of them sat on the floor—there being nowhere else—facing each other in a tight circle, sketching their gestures as they said their speeches to one another, from the beginning of the play to the end.

  It went badly. There were gaps and fumblings where there had been none this afternoon. Once Ellis twisted his lines around so badly there was no straightening them; he had to stop and go back to the beginning of that speech; and once toward the play’s end Basset began a speech he had already said at its beginning; and more than once Rose had to prompt one or another of them with some line altogether.

  When they finished, they sat looking glumly at each other until Piers said brightly, “Anyway, I didn’t make any mistakes.”

  Ellis gave him a not-altogether-friendly shove on the back of his head. “You have two speeches. ‘Hail, noble duke. ’Tis I, Dishonor, come to court and keep you company, ’ and ‘I’ll go with you and be your lady all your days.’ Saint Genesius! I know your lines!”

  “Too bad you don’t know your own,” Piers said and ducked under the swing of Ellis’ hand that was never meant to hit him.

  “Enough,” said Basset with good cheer that surely must be forced. “Let’s all just settle to go through our own speeches to ourselves. It will surely all come together when the time comes.”

  If only out of naked desperation, Joliffe thought.

  Food and drink were brought to the chamber by servants who left as soon as they had set the platters down. There were cheeses, bread, and ale—servant food, as someone among Newcum’s players muttered—but a plenty of it, and no one grabbed more than was fair. Only Ned took none at all, patting his flat stomach and saying, “Mustn’t eat. Must bend.”

  Supper’s beginning for those in the hall was announced by a flourish of trumpets and the merry beating of drums from the minstrels’ loft above the screens passage. Newcum’s company, which had been sitting or standing about in various stages of dress and undress, set to painting their faces and putting on the rest of their garb. Various other people left the room, Ned and the tall woman Pet among them. At some time while the players had been at work at their words, she had taken off her cloak and headkerchief and let down her dark red, shining hair that hung smoothly past her waist. Her orange-tawny gown fitted her close from shoulders to hips, then flared out in a full, soft, swaying skirt to the floor, slit at front and back and sides, showing a red skirt underneath when she did a short twirl, laughing over her shoulder at Ned as they went out together. Joliffe had a momentary pang of envy at Ned, while beside him Gil said almost reverently, “There’s a woman worth looking at.”

  “You shouldn’t be looking,” Joliffe said. “You’re too young for her. Now Ellis and I . . .”

  “Not me,” Ellis said quickly and took Rose’s hand.

  “Lines,” said Basset direly, and Gil ducked quickly back to his work. Past his bent head, Ellis and Joliffe traded laughing looks but kept their jibes to themselves and rightly went back to their own lines, Ellis still holding Rose’s hand and Rose looking content.

  Time went on, with occasional trumpet calls announcing the serving of some particularly special food to the guests in the hall. Ned and the woman and others who had gone out returned. To someone’s question, one of them said, “None so good. The side tables are well enough, but at the high there’s minds gone elsewhere.”

  The red-haired woman laughed. “I had to almost somersault on the table before they much noted me.”

  She did not seem to mind, but someone else said, “Uhoh,” and people looked at each other around the room. If the lookers-on weren’t in humour for what was being offered, it didn’t matter how well you played. As Basset had long ago explained to Joliffe when an audience had been dull, “When they’re in that humour, you could lay your heart out in front of them and dance on it and they’d not care.”

  A servant came to say the first remove was about to end, and Newcum’s company went away. Ned and the woman and the others kept together in a far corner, heads together in close talk. By the gestures among them, they were planning what they would do during the second remove to better rouse the hall. An approving roar of laughter from there at whatever Newcum’s company were doing turned their heads that way with some smiles because surely that was to the good—must mean the feasters were coming alive.

  Unfortunately, that did not lessen Joliffe’s unease. In truth, it was growing, and he could easily guess the rest of the players felt the same, although none of them said it aloud any more than he did. Basset had them go through the play together one more time. They did better at it but not well, and into the gloomy silence afterward Ellis muttered darkly, “We can’t do this. We needed another day at least. This is going to be a disaster. We’ll be skulking out of London at dawn.”

  Joliffe instantly brightened and said with pretended relief, “Ah! I couldn’t think what was missing. It was Ellis foretelling we’re doomed. Now he’s done that, we’re saved and will surely do wonders tonight!”

  Ellis growled at him, Rose laughed softly, and Basset declared, “We will indeed. We can do this thing, and we will.”

  Newcum and his players came crowding through the doorway in laughing, loud talk, and Newcum announced to the room at large, “We’ve loosed them!”

  “Or the wine has,” one of his men jibed at him, stripping off a doublet hung with scarlet ribbons. “They look to be drinking it fast enough.”

  “The wine merely opened their minds to wisdom sufficient to realize our greatness,” Newcum returned. He was a wiry little man who had probably played damsels in his youth and likely now did comic demons, skulking villains, and old men. Still in his garb and face-paint while his company changed into their own clothing, he came over to Basset and said, one company’s leader to another, “At the high table they’re giving more heed to each other than anything else, but they can be drawn. It’s not easy, but they can be got. What are you playing for them?”

  “A new thing. The Duke and the Dauphin,” Basset said, as lightly as if there were no trouble to it at all.

  Newcum shook his head a little doubtfully. “Politics. Don’t know if they’re in the humour for that.”

  Basset gave an easy shrug. “It’s what we were asked to do.”

  “Uh. No choice t
hen. Bad fortune, that.” He gave Basset a hearty, companionable slap on the shoulder that their few brief words together did not warrant and said, cheerfully condescending to an unfortunate lesser being, “Saint Genesius be with you,” but not as if he thought the saint would be.

  As he turned away, he ran an admiring eye over Rose before he rejoined his rejoicing company. With him gone, Basset turned to his own people. With no one else to see it, he had a look on his face that matched Joliffe’s own irk at Newcum.

  It was an irk that Ellis plainly shared, saying fiercely, “Saint Genesius put a thorn in his shoe next time he plays. We’ll show them who the saint is with!”

  The rest of them nodded fierce agreement with that, and Basset said, “They’ll be out of here soon. Then we’ll get painted and garbed and be ready when the time comes. No more doubting, right?”

  “No more doubting,” they agreed in low-voiced chorus.

  Newcum and his company finished changing, packed their gear, and left, still merry among themselves. Ned and the others were at work in the hall again, and with the chamber to themselves, the players pulled their hamper to the room’s middle where the light was best and set about readying themselves, first stripping to their hosen, then setting to painting their faces. Often enough when playing on village greens, in village streets, or narrow innyards, they did not bother with that, but for somewhere like the great hall here, with all its distractions and uneven candlelight, it was worth their while to do it, to make the shape of their faces, their eyes, and their mouths bolder and more readily seen. With no mirror among them—glass ones being too costly and too likely to break, good ones of polished metal likewise costly, and lesser ones not clear enough for their purpose—they did each others’ faces, then helped each other with their garb, glad of Rose there to sort and straighten them.

  With the prosperity that had come with being Lord Lovell’s players, they had been slowly bettering their over-worn garb, buying used clothing that Rose could make even better when need be, “doing her wonders,” as Basset said. Now, however else they might not have confidence, they knew themselves well turned out, and when they lined up for Rose to look them all over for anything not right, her father paused her, kissed her on the forehead, and said, “My thanks, dear heart. My very deep thanks.”

  Rose turned a pleased red, gave her father a quick kiss on his cheek in return, brushed a speck that was not there from the wide-furred collar (well-dyed cheap squirrel) of the Duke of Burgundy’s long, rich robe (of thin wool gathered into thick folds to look better than it was so long as no one looked too closely), and said with mock sternness at them all, “Just mind you play well enough to be worthy of my garb.”

  Then they waited. Ellis set the chamber’s door open, so they could hear not only the trumpet calls and drumrolls as various special dishes were carried in but now and again bursts of laughter and scattered clapping that had to be for whatever Ned and the others were doing in the hall. Basset nodded to no one in particular and said, “That sounds as if folk are loosening up.”

  Which was good. But the unease that Joliffe had been trying to hold at bay slid out of the back of his mind into a heavy coil in the pit of his stomach and started trying to crawl up into his throat to strangle him.

  A servant came for them, to lead them to where they were to wait in the screens passage. Servants came and went, clearing the tables of the finished remove and carrying in plates of sugared fruits and wafers and pitchers of wine to see the guests through the pause until the third remove, and Joliffe found himself taut as a wire, with a quease in his belly that was either acute unhappiness or else from the excitment of what they were about to do. Or else acute unhappiness at the excitment. Or . . . At that particular moment he could not be sure which or what it was but trusted he was showing it no more than the others were, except for Piers, unmasked as yet, who was jigging a little from foot to foot as if hardly able to hold back from leaping forward and to business.

  On a pursuing burst of laughter and clapping, Ned and the red-haired woman and the jugglers came running from the hall. Ned paused, panting, beside Ellis and said, “They’re warmed and all yours now. Good sport to you.”

  Ellis gave him a grin that was probably more hearty than he felt and said, “We’ll do what we can.”

  Ned laughed and went on, and Basset took the pause that came afterward to say to them all, “The thing is in our heads. We can do it. You all know we can. Remember, it’s the play that matters, not who we play it for. Only the play.” He grinned suddenly and widely. “And remember this, too: whatever happens, this lot isn’t likely to throw things at us, so it won’t be as bad as that time we played for—”

  He paused and the rest of them chorused, “Sir Walter Fenner!”

  In their company’s dark days Sir Walter Fenner had become their touchstone for how fully to the bad something could go. Whatever happened, if it wasn’t a Fenner, it wasn’t as bad as it could be, and the summoned memory surprised a laugh out of both Joliffe and Ellis, and even out of Gil, who had not been with them then but had been in the company long enough now to know what a Fenner was.

  Basset nodded his approval at them all and said, “It’s a play, my fellows. Just a play. If there’s anything in the world we can do, it’s a play.”

  And suddenly the tightness in Joliffe’s belly was no more than the good tightness of high-hearted pleasure that came when a play was going to be a challenge he knew he was good enough to meet. Someone in the hall was announcing Lord Lovell’s players, and Basset drew a deep, deep breath and became the head-held-high, proud Duke of Burgundy. With one hand resting on the hilt of the over-large sword slung from his waist, he held out his other hand to Gil, who was all grace and loveliness in Lady Honor’s long fair wig and blue gown, and together they swept through the wide doorway, out of the shadows of the screens passage and into the bright-lighted hall.

  From where they waited, Joliffe, Ellis, Piers, and Rose could not see more, but they could hear the general talk among the diners begin to fall away, so that by the time Basset and Gil had to be well up the hall, near to the high table, there was almost silence, into which the Duke of Burgundy declared with loud arrogance his delight in Lady Honor’s company and his own virtue, going on, “Never will come the day when I, the Duke of Burgundy . . .”

  That was met with scattered but very satisfactory hissing from some of the lookers-on.

  “. . . will fail his sworn word or his duty to you, my Lady Honor,” the Duke went on, and that brought the hooting, scornful laughter it was supposed to bring.

  Then Gil’s carefully lightened voice rose sweet and clear in answer to Burgundy, warning as Lady Honor that too great pride could lead to blindness against other virtues, such as constancy and faithfulness, but Burgundy swept all that aside, explaining—with grand gestures and much strutting, with sweeping about of his long robe and repeated adjusting of his ducal crown, if Basset was doing all he had done in rehearsal—how his greatness was enough to encompass all the virtues twice over.

  That brought rude shouts from the lookers-on that the Duke of Burgundy blithely did not hear.

  It was also sign for the Dauphin to appear.

  Joliffe had to suppose that very few here tonight had ever seen the present Dauphin of France, but every one of them knew well enough about his late father, the mad King Charles VI, prisoned in one place or another for years as his madness waxed and waned. It was hard to say which way his mind was swaying when he signed away inheritance of his crown of France to victorious Henry V, but no matter how sane or not he was then, the Dauphin’s followers refused what his father had done, refused England’s claim that the crown of France belonged now to Henry V’s young son King Henry VI. So no player could go wrong making sport of the Dauphin Charles, renowned for mostly shambling his life away at his pretended royal court in southern France among his squabbling nobles, and Joliffe scuffed into the hall stoop-shouldered and loose-jointed, garbed in the oldest and shabbiest of the company
’s long robes, its cat-fur trim molted away in patches and its hem—carefully pulled loose by Rose—dragging untidily behind him. He had a badly shaped sugar-loaf hat crammed down on his head and a dented, dulled crown shoved down around that to rest more on his ears than on either the hat or his head. He carried a brass scepter topped by fleur-de-lis, but Basset had had him dull the brass instead of shine it and had given the fleur-de-lis a brutal twist so that it bent to the side, as shabby and untidy as the Dauphin who carried it, which made laughter come all the more readily as Joliffe shuffled and shambled his way up the hall, looking around him with his face twitching with alarm close to outright terror. The Duke and Lady Honor drew aside at his coming, making themselves not there although still in plain view. Certainly the Dauphin never saw them as he came to a stop in the middle of the hall, turned in a ragged circle, staring in fright at everyone before making himself stand up something like straight, face the high table, and declare in a loud but squeaking voice, “The King of France am I . . .”