A Play of Lords

by Margaret Frazer

  “The Tub?” Ellis said. “That’s the name of the place? That was the best they could do?”

  “Just come on,” Rose said.

  Despite the questionable nakedness on its sign, the Tub proved to be like most other bathhouses Joliffe had known, with two large rooms, one for men, the other for women, with large wooden tubs, some for single bathing, some for several at a time that cost less than for single bathing, and a long hearth where large, water-filled kettles sat over constant fires that warmed both the room and the water that servants scooped out by the bucketfuls to pour into the tubs where the bathers sat at their ease, soaking, scrubbing, and soaking some more. For more money, a board would be laid across a tub and food and drink be served, but the players chose simply bathing.

  “And why,” asked Joliffe when they rejoined Rose in the streetward room where they had paid before going in, “do I always feel more virtuous after being thoroughly scrubbed and in fresh clothes?”

  “Because cleanliness is next to godliness,” Ellis said, “and clean is as close to godliness as you’re likely to get.”

  Joliffe found he had no quick answer to that.

  What the players had forgotten in the midst of their own matters was that today was parliament’s opening, but they remembered it quickly enough when they came back to the street back into London and found themselves in a press of people lined along the way and all around them loud talk of the lords who had just ridden past on their way to Westminster. Piers—held firmly on one hand by his mother and on the other by Ellis—started to hop and exclaim, “There’ll be more! Ivo Hyche was telling me. We have to see! We have to see!”

  “I don’t know how,” said Basset, sounding willing but looking around at the press of people that would keep them from getting anywhere near the street.

  Mak appeared at Joliffe’s shoulder, suddenly enough that Joliffe startled as Mak said cheerily, “Ha! Think of meeting you here! You want to see more than the back of people’s heads? Come this way.”

  The players traded quick looks among themselves, then shrugs, except for Piers who was already tugging to follow Mak. There seemed no reason not to, so they did, his red hat making him somewhat easy to keep in sight as he ducked and twisted through the crowd, going crosswise to the forward press of people and into a narrow alleyway between two tall, shop-fronted houses. The late morning light was at just the slant to strike along the passage and into the small, stone-paved yard at the end of it. Dark though it would be for most of these autumn days and the winter ones to come, it was a swept, clean place. Of the several doorways opening into it, Mak headed for the one that was standing open, a brown pottery pot of rosemary sitting by the doorstep, and rapped loudly on the frame at the same time he stuck his head inside and yelled, “Auntie, be you there? We’re coming up!”

  Somewhere inside a woman’s voice shrilled back at him. He gave a grin over his shoulder at the players, and went in. The players traded looks again but followed, Piers first, with his mother’s restraining hand still on him. Inside was a small, square, well-scrubbed kitchen with a swept hearth where a small fire burned under a hook-hung pot that promised someone a hot dinner. On the far side of the kitchen, a shut door hid the house’s foreroom that faced the street, but a steep, narrow twist of wooden stairs going upward was this side of the door, and that was the way Mak led them, calling as he went, “I’ve brought guests, Auntie. You’ll share your window, won’t you?”

  “Folk are paying good money to look out windows today,” a woman’s voice called back at him, but it was a merry voice, and as Joliffe came last behind the others off the stairs and into the long room there, the woman standing at the wide window overlooking the street was smiling at Piers straightening from what had undoubtedly been one of his best bows, his hat with its green popinjay’s feather held to his chest to leave his golden curls uncovered. Joliffe added his bow to Basset’s and Ellis’, but if there had been any question of their welcome, it was probably Piers’ sweet smile and wide-eyed, trusting gaze that won her over. Joliffe was looking forward to when the whelp grew into his awkward years and had to do without his charm, but in the meanwhile he was useful.

  Or possibly she would have welcomed them anyway. She was a little woman, with a wholesome plumpness to her and a kindly face, and while Mak said, “This is my auntie, who married out of fishmongering to a butcher who has his stall in Newgate. Auntie, these are Lord Lovell’s players,” she smiled away from Piers to the rest of them, not seeming put out at their sudden coming or even at them being players.

  Instead she said, “Players are you? Are you any good?”

  “We’re Lord Lovell’s,” Basset said. “It’s for him to say.”

  “Three days ago they played for Bishop Beaufort,” Mak said stoutly. “Last night they played for the earl of Mortain, and tonight they’re to be at Philip Malpas’ place.”

  “Humph,” Auntie answered as if displeased. “I’ll forgive them Malpas and the bishop for the sake of the earl.” But she was smiling while she said it and beckoned Rose forward, adding, “You come here first, girl, before these louters crowd you out. Your little boy, too. I’ll warrant he’s not the angel he looks, is he?”

  From somewhere along the street a trumpet sounded.

  “Here come the first of them,” Mak said, and they all moved quickly to join Auntie, Rose, and Piers at the window. It was a four-light window, with room enough for all of them, the shutters set fully open and no glass, so they could lean out to see better.

  “Not the first of them,” Auntie said. “Lord Cromwell and the earl of Warwick went past a while ago with their folk. I think I saw Lord Berkeley, too, but he wasn’t making much of himself. Nor you won’t see those that have their inns farther toward Westminster or on the river along the Strand. But there’ll be enough for you. Ah! It’s the earl of Stafford. He gives us something worth looking at!”

  He did. Ahead of him came five foreriders in tabards parti-colored gold and gules, two of them with slender, long trumpets hung with the earl’s heraldic arms, two others riding honor to the fifth bearing the earl’s banner with its heraldic red chevron on gold. The earl came next, riding a tall bay palfrey with scarlet harness hung with golden bells. The earl himself was wearing a deep green surcoat with sleeves that hung to his gold-spurred heels and a wide-rolled padded hat, fashionably black, with its liripipe draped long over his shoulder. Several dozen more of his men followed, not in livery but all of them in one shade or another of the colors of his arms and all with his badge high on their left chest. They made a cheersome display in the morning sunlight, and they were only the first. The last of the company was hardly past Auntie’s window when other trumpets announced another lord’s approach, this time the earl of Suffolk, Auntie told them, seeing his banner.

  “She knows them all,” Mak said. “No matter what she says, it was so she’d be able to sit here and watch the lords come and go that she married old Symkyn Bocher.”

  “That and to get away from the smell of fish,” Auntie said. “Nor I don’t hear that you spend any of your time with the fish if you can help it,” she added sharply; but it sounded like an old jest between them, and neither she nor Mak took their happy gazes from the street the while.

  Lords both lay and spiritual, all of them with foreriders and banners and followers, began to pass in a steady flow, with Auntie indeed knowing each one by his banner and often having something to say about the lord himself, much of it rude, as, “Pity he’s no better now at paying his debts than he ever was,” and “His wife’s got a goodly face to look at. Too bad there’s so little brain behind it.”

  For Joliffe, her talk made a better show of it all than it would have been. Without what she had to say, the on-going procession of banners, men, and horses would have soon palled since he otherwise knew next to nothing—or nothing at all—about anyone he was looking at. For another, if Bishop Beaufort should want more plays aimed at present matters, the more Joliffe knew, the better he would know what to
write.

  Or not to write, as the case might be.

  The companies were coming close together now and, “Here’s the earl of Mortain, looking very fine,” Auntie said. “Wearing black in mourning for his cousin the duke of Bedford. Very right of him. Not that black suits him. He’s too sallow. Still, he meets the eyes well enough. Indeed he does.”

  Having had chance for hardly any look at Mortain the night before, Joliffe took it now, and Auntie was right. Black did not suit him, but his doublet surely did, shaped tight to his lean waist but wide across the padded shoulders to give the waist an even leaner look while well-displaying the broad collar of gold flashed with red jewels across his chest and over his shoulders. High-puffed sleeves tapered to a close fit along his forearms, and his high riding boots were of red-dyed leather. Besides all that, he had a well-boned face, with a nose much like his uncle Bishop Beaufort’s, Auntie pointed out.

  “The bastard blood doesn’t show at all, does it?” Mak jibed.

  “That bastard blood is a whole generation back,” she snapped in return. “Nor is his blood any the less royal despite his grandparents didn’t marry til after their children were all born. They were all legitimated anyway, years ago, by parliament.”

  All that was true enough, from what Joliffe knew about it, but to his mind Mortain’s fine show was somewhat marred by Mortain’s all-too-obvious awareness of just how fine he was, the upward cock of his chin making him seem to be looking down that nose of his at everything around him as he turned his head side to side to the happy shouts of the lookers-on and sometimes raised his hand graciously toward them.

  When he and his perhaps score of followers—many in the same crimson and azure as the banner one of his men carried and all on horses as fine as Mortain’s own black palfrey—were past, Ellis said, his envy almost hidden, “If he’s only the earl of Mortain, I can barely wait to see how finely the duke of Gloucester will ride, being the king’s own uncle.”

  “Will he come this way, too?” Rose asked eagerly. “Or will he go by river, do you think?” Auntie had already said some lords, nearly all the bishops, and many of the commons went by boat up the Thames to Westminster, rather than bother with horses and crowds and whatever the weather might change to.

  “I’ve heard he’s been at Westminster these two days past,” Auntie said regretfully. “More’s the pity. He’s something to see, he is. Not so fair or young as he was—who of us is—but he knows how to look a royal duke. Rides with a hundred men and all and . . . Oh, Saint Magnus!” she exclaimed, catching sight of whoever next was coming along the street. “Now here’s something to see and no mistake! Just look!”

  The players all looked. Even Joliffe, who was becoming tired of the show, leaned past Ellis’ shoulder to see better, while Rose asked, “Who is it?”—keeping a grip on Piers’ belt as he tried to crawl farther over the windowsill.

  “It’s the Nevilles.” Auntie sounded as proud of them as if they were her own. “They always ride together to parliament if they can. The earl of Salisbury and his brothers. There’s Lord Fauconberg and Lord Latimer and Lord Bergavenny and, oh my, the bishop of Salisbury, too! And,” she added triumphantly, “the duke of York!”

  Mak slapped the windowsill in his excitement. “York! That will keep the hens a-fluttering in the coop, him riding with them!”

  “Why?” Joliffe asked without taking his gaze off the array of Nevilles, followers, banners, and trumpeters coming along the street.

  “Everyone’s been wondering which way York’s going to go, now he’s of age and all, what with all the power and lands he’s come into,” Mak answered. “Looks like he’s thrown in with the Nevilles, and that won’t hurt the earl of Salisbury’s chance at being made governor of Normandy.”

  “Well of course he’s thrown in with the Nevilles,” Auntie said, as if for him to do anything else were unthinkable. “His pretty little wife is a Neville, and Salisbury is her brother.”

  Nearly below the window now, the four trumpeters at the head of the coming company raised their long, brass-gleaming trumpets in a single flourish, and Auntie clapped both hands, and Rose her free one, to ears as the sharp, glad notes rang out, bright and crisp as the morning air.

  The people crowded out of the way along the house-and shop-fronts cheered back at the trumpets, and so did Piers. Ellis added his hold to Rose’s on his belt. Now the trumpeters were past, and the lordly banners carried by men in varied bright-clothed liveries were waving past the window, the duke of York’s foremost, easily known because, like the earl of Mortain’s, it had the royal gold lions and lilies quartered on crimson and azure, differenced for York by a white, labeled band with nine red roundels across the top, showing that, like Mortain and Bishop Beaufort, he was royal-blooded. He had no bastard taint like theirs, though, and that gave him precedence over the other lords he rode with, just as the earl of Salisbury after him had precedence over his lordly brothers, but all their banners were clustered close, all of them the bold white chevron on scarlet that Joliffe knew was the Neville arms, but every banner of them differenced from the others one way and another and each man’s arms quartered with that of his wife—or of the cathedral at Salisbury for the bishop.

  Joliffe had been long enough away from the North to have forgotten—having never much cared—how all the Neville marrying had gone. He knew that the earl of Westmorland had had very many children by his second wife and had provided for them by way of rich marriages, but that being about all that he remembered of it, he could not tell which banner was whose. Not that it mattered. The display was sufficient to show—as it was surely meant to—what a powerful gathering of kin the Nevilles were.

  But Mak was saying to his aunt, “Right enough, York’s married to Salisbury’s sister, but there’s nothing come of it yet. York’s not even set up his own household beyond what a bachelor lord might have. There’s some say he’ll break the marriage. After all, they were only kitlings when they were married to each other.”

  Auntie scoffed at him. “He’d not be riding with her brothers if that’s the way he meant to go with it.”

  With the lords now almost to them, Mak shrugged, not arguing against that, saying instead, “There. The one all in black. That’s York. He’s in full mourning for the duke of Bedford, them being close enough kin for it.”

  “But isn’t it good of the rest of them to be wearing black sashes for Bedford, too,” Auntie said, pleased as if the black slashes slantwise across the lords’ chests were done at her behest.

  “Only right,” Mak said. “Him being their mother’s nephew and all. Makes ’em cousins after all.”

  “Oh, look!” Auntie exclaimed with delight. “Salisbury has his son with him! Little Dickon.”

  From that, Joliffe was able to tell the earl of Salisbury must be the burly man riding on the duke of York’s right and slightly back, wearing a well-pleated houppelande of Neville-red, split for riding but long, down almost to his stirrups. York would have seemed more moderately garbed in his black gown only to his calves, except that the sunlight sheened on it showed it to be of pattern-woven damask, and surely the fur at hem and throat was sable. He was younger than his brother-in-law Salisbury by a good many years, Salisbury looking somewhere well into his thirties while York was perhaps no older than Joliffe.

  But it was at the copper-haired boy dressed to match Salisbury and riding proudly straight in his saddle half a length behind him that Piers protested, “He’s not even as old as I am!”

  “Isn’t he the sweetest little lordling?” Auntie cooed.

  Piers looked disgusted.

  “Blessed Saint Hippolytus,” Basset said, awed. “Their horses. They’re all matched. Every one of them.”

  With the bright array of banners and all, that had gone unnoted until he said it, but it was true. York, Salisbury, Salisbury’s son, and all the rest of the Neville lords now passing below Auntie’s window were mounted on high-stepping, curved-necked gray palfreys that from here looked to differ fr
om one another only in the colors of their harness.

  “That will be Salisbury’s doing,” Joliffe said. “The best horses in the North come out of his horse-runs up Wensleydale in Yorkshire.”