A Play of Lords

by Margaret Frazer

  As if at her bidding, Ellis slipped down and rolled a little onto his unhurt side, tucking an arm under his head, and the players stood silently, waiting while his breathing evened into sleep. Then Joliffe said softly, “Isn’t it strange how tenderly you can feel toward someone sleeping, even when—awake—they’re nothing but trouble?”

  Rose looked up from Ellis and said with mock displeasure, “Have some wine and be quiet.”

  Joliffe grinned at her, she smiled back, and he went obediently to pour himself some wine, then held up the cup and said, keeping his voice low, “To us. May this happen to us often.”

  Basset handed a full cup to Rose and declared as they all raised their cups together, “To us.”

  Soon after that the weariness that their triumph had kept at bay came down on them all. First Piers and then Basset drifted into drowse, Piers on his mattress because Rose made him lie down, Basset sitting on the pile of cushions, leaning against the wall, his chin sunk on his chest. Gil gave Rose help with emptying the day’s hamper so she could see if anything needed mending before it was all put tidily away. Joliffe took himself and a last cup of wine to the doorstep and sat down, leaning against the doorpost, to see what there was to see in the yard and savor the day’s triumph.

  As it happened, they were come to the slack time of almost-late afternoon; the yard was empty of anyone for the moment. Likely anyone who had anywhere to go was gone, and everyone else must have had something better to do about the inn than wander in the yard. That suited Joliffe well enough. He wanted to think for a while, not talk; the day had left him much to think on, and not just about their playing.

  Basset had firmly forbidden any watching of the duke’s players’ play for the very sufficient reason that, “We don’t want the distraction.” Or the comparison, he did not say, although that was likely in his thought, too.

  The duke’s players, on the other hand, had surely watched them. They were coming off the stairs from the musicians’ loft as Joliffe and the rest went toward the waiting chamber at the end of The Duke and the Dauphin, and one of them had even said, “That went well for you,” but Master Cawode, unsmiling, had given Basset only a nod, and the last among them had unnecessarily jostled against Gil.

  But that was the last they saw of Master Cawode and his men, and back in the waiting chamber Basset and the rest had given way to back-slapping each other and were only partly out of their garb when John Trebell came not only to have his pay and their thanks but to say they should come to the minstrels’ loft, to have good sight of who they had been playing for.

  While playing, a player was mostly unable to have a good look at his lookers-on. Unless his part called for him to speak directly to them, he had to stay within the play, seemingly unknowing of anything beyond it. So they had all willingly gone with Trebell, taking this chance to look at those who had been looking at them. Still in only shirt and hosen, Joliffe was shrugging into his doublet as he went last through the doorway and met the red-haired woman there, just come from her own work in the hall. Her face was damply glowing, and as Joliffe and she both turned sideways to pass each other in the doorway, she very deliberately looked him down to up, smiled up into his eyes, said, “Um,” in a way that suggested much, and turned just enough that her thigh brushed his as they finished passing.

  That left him distracted enough by his own immediate rouse of . . . interest . . . that he was not thinking of much else while going up the narrow stairs to the minstrels’ loft behind the other players and John Trebell. The musicians who were there for the whole meal and for the dancing afterward if there was any were just blaring out a flourish of horns and drum announcing whatever was the latest splendor of the feast. Following Trebell’s lead, the players kept against the loft’s rear wall, where they were least likely to distract the musicians or be noted from below, and although from there they could not see much of the hall, the dais and high table at its far end were in clear sight, and Joliffe lost thought of the red-haired woman.

  Sunlight spreading through the curved window at the dais’ end shone along the table and an array of gold and crystal goblets, golden plates and platters, the gold fantasies of several salt cellars, the wide golden chains and jewels worn by the men and women seated behind that wealth, with each and every one of them wearing a matching wealth of gowns and doublets, houppelandes and surcoats of silks and damasks and velvets, Joliffe guessed from their sheen and glow in the flooding sunlight, all richly-dyed in crimson and scarlet, greens dark and bright, and blues from as clear as a summer-sky to deep as twilight, costly-furred with sable and ermine.

  Joliffe gaped and knew he was gaping, but he was seeing in that one place more wealth than he had maybe ever seen in his whole life.

  And not merely wealth, but Wealth and Power. Because seated there beneath the canopy of estate with its embroidered royal arms at the center of the long table was Humphrey, duke of Gloucester. Son and brother and uncle of kings and heir to his nephew’s throne.

  There was Power for you, and all around was evidence of his Wealth.

  And the duke of Gloucester himself? From where Joliffe stood, there were only outward things to see about him, nothing particular to the man. He was gowned in a high-necked houppelande of a blue that matched the azure in the royal arms behind him, with a wide gold chain over his shoulders and across his breast, a jewel of some sort hanging from it. He was neither fat nor lean, although his face was maybe going fleshy with years of good living, and he might be tall or he might not be; it was impossible to tell while he was sitting; and none of that was anything to do with what manner of man he inwardly was, and what lay inward—to Joliffe’s mind—was what mattered most about a person.

  The duke took up a tall, wide-footed goblet sitting between his place and that of the woman next to him, wiped its rim with a napkin in a carefully courteous gesture, and offered it to her. She took it with an equally courteous bow of her head. She was gowned in green, with a headdress of a padded roll curved heart-shaped over two gold-covered cauls covering her hair on either side of her head, its short veils drifting prettily with her movement. Something in the way she and Gloucester leaned toward each other as she gave the goblet back to him made Joliffe think that if she was not his wife the duchess, then the duchess had better look to her marriage because her duke was looking somewhere else. Who was she? And who were all the other men and women at the table?

  Unable to go unknowing any longer, he edged in front of Gil, Ellis, Piers, and Basset and to John Trebell’s far side, to say quietly in his ear, “Gloucester’s the man in the middle. Who are all the rest?”

  “The lady he just shared wine with is his wife.” So that was right enough, but Trebell added, “There was scandal there when they first met.”

  “I’ve heard,” Joliffe answered. Bigamy and faithlessness and betrayal and accusations of whore had all been part of it, but that was ten years gone, and he said, “All looks well enough now.”

  “I lost a shilling wager it would not last five years between them,” Trebell said with wry regret. “But, aye, you’re right. So far as any rumor runs, all’s well between them.”

  “And on Gloucester’s other side?” Joliffe asked.

  Trebell had gone on to tell him who all the rest along the high table were. Joliffe had already seen young Richard, duke of York—as royal-blooded and said to be as wealthy as the king—riding among his marriage-kin to parliament, but here his wife was with him, Duchess Cecily, whose brother the earl of Salisbury was here, too, with his wife and, “He has his title from her,” Trebell had said. “It was her father was the earl of Salisbury killed at the siege of Orleans.”

  Joliffe had nodded that he remembered that. It had been soon after that that the French witch had roused the Dauphin to his only show of courage, setting back the war for the English for almost a year. Now, if such talk as Joliffe had heard was true, this earl of Salisbury was maybe going to take the duke of Bedford’s place as governor of Normandy.

  B
ut Trebell had been going on, “Not that it isn’t a marriage of equals, what with Salisbury and his sister Cecily being Nevilles and their mother sister to Bishop Beaufort.”

  “But despite that, they’re all here feasting with the duke of Gloucester?” Joliffe had asked.

  Trebell had shrugged and answered, “Their mother is Gloucester’s aunt as well as Winchester’s sister, after all. That’s her there on Gloucester’s other side. The Lady Joane.”

  Lady Joane was a much older woman than any of the others, in a dark gown, her face surrounded by a widow’s white, close-fitted wimple and framed by veiling of black gauze.

  “Word is she’s told Winchester and Gloucester both that family is family and she won’t have politics changing that. You’re as likely to see her in the bishop’s company as here. That’s the earl of Suffolk beside her. His lady is at the table’s other end. A beauty. Alice Chaucer.”

  “Not the poet’s daughter?” Joliffe had asked, finding who Trebell meant—a slender woman with a shapely face of pale and rose, gowned in scarlet, laughing at something the smiling, older, long-faced man next to her had just said.

  “Grand-daughter,” said Trebell.

  “And the man beside her, and the man beside him?” Both of them noticeable both for the plain, sober cut of their black gowns and the quick work of their hands as they talked together.

  “Some of Gloucester’s scholars would be my guess,” Trebell said. “He brings them in from the universities, from Italy, even from France, and does things like that.” He nodded toward the high table. “Treats them like nobility no matter who they are.”

  “Acknowledging the nobility of the mind as well as nobility of blood,” Joliffe had suggested, serious.

  Trebell had looked at him with surprise, then accepted the thought with a careless, “I suppose.”

  A servant had found them then, bringing the duke’s request that the players play again at the feast’s end, and that had thrown aside every other thought.

  It was only now, seated alone and quiet on the doorstep, with London loud beyond the gateway but the yard momentarily peaceful in the thickening shadows of late afternoon, that Joliffe had time to cast back to all he had seen. All that wealth. All that power. Nor was it just today but every day since coming to London that he had been looking at wealth and power such as he had sometimes thought about but now found he had never truly envisioned.

  Through his years as a player, certainty of the next few meals had often been the height of his prosperity. Lord Lovell’s favor had changed that, but only in degree. He and the others still walked country roads, played to villagers and in country towns and sometimes to lordly households—but never lordly like he had seen here in London. Lord Lovell’s wealth was nowhere near to what Joliffe had seen these past few days.

  He tried to stretch his mind to grasp what so much wealth and so much power meant and found he did not like the shape into which the effort pulled him.

  That disconcerted him. Unless a man had ambition to great godliness—and Joliffe knew very well that he did not—why not desire that kind of wealth and power? Not that he himself had any real hope of ever getting them. What surprised him was finding he did not want them. Why not?

  Because they would be too much trouble.

  That answer had him smiling at that himself, finding he was comfortable with whatever kind of fool it made him, when Mak came into the gateway from the street. Wherever he had been since he and Harry had set down the players’ hamper, he was not come back happy from it. Nor did he seem markedly pleased to see Joliffe, faltering between one stride and the next, then coming almost shuffle-footed toward him. Joliffe gestured to the other end of the step and said, “Sit. Ease your feet. What’s the glooming face for?”

  Mak sat down as heavily as if his bottom were lead-weighted and said low-voiced, staring glumly at the cobbles in front of him, “There’s been one of the bishop’s men killed last night.”

  “Someone you know?” Joliffe asked.

  “Knew him somewhat. Not much.” Mak dug out a pebble from between two cobbles and threw it angrily across the gateway. “He was one of the bishop’s men that’s known to be. Not like me.” He gave Joliffe a resentful sideways look, plainly still not happy about yesterday.

  “Was it a brawl or robbery or what?” Joliffe asked.

  “Murder. Plain murder. He was headed home from his brother’s just short of curfew, no trouble or anything behind him. Was attacked from behind. Was dragged into an alley and stabbed. Wasn’t even robbed. Just killed.”

  Joliffe considered all that and Mak’s anger for a few silent moments, then said, matching Mak’s low voice, “You think he was killed because he was Bishop Beaufort’s man.”

  “I’m not the only one who thinks it. Not by a long way,” Mak said grimly. He grubbed up another pebble and threw it angrily after the first. “Damnable town is turning into Paris, people being cut down in the streets every time you turn around. His grace the bishop wants to see you.”

  Still thinking about murder, Joliffe did not come immediately around to that last, then had to cover his startlement, only asking with an outward calm that did not match his inward lurch, “What?”

  “Wants to see you. Bishop Beaufort. Tonight.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. You think he tells me these things?” Mak said testily. “I had word from the fellow who brings me word like that, that’s all. The fellow who takes what I have to tell back to the bishop. I’ve never traded one word with the bishop himself, not me.” Mak stood up as if sitting any longer had become intolerable. “And that suits me fine enough. If what happened to Tom White last night has aught to do with the bishop’s business, I’m going to want more distance between me and his business, that’s sure. Anyway, you’re to come just past dark, when supper is done.” He dug in his belt-pouch and pulled out a folded square of parchment somewhat the length of Joliffe’s little finger. “Say at the gate that it’s Master Fowler you want to see. This will see you in.”

  He held it out and Joliffe took it, was surprised at the weight, and unfolded it to find a short piece of black ribbon fixed to the parchment by an uneven blob of wax impressed by someone’s seal.

  Mak stood up, said, “I was told to tell you, too, it might be best if you tried to seem not who you are,” and walked off, out the gateway again.

  Behind Joliffe, Basset said, “Better you than me,” and moved into the doorway.

  Looking around and up at him, Joliffe quirked half a rueful smile. “Best would be none of us.”

  Basset’s agreeing nod matched him for ruefulness.

  What Joliffe hoped he did not show as he refolded the parchment and put it carefully into his pouch was his inward shiver of curiosity. He might not want great wealth or power, but the chance to learn things, to know things, that was something he wanted very much indeed. And there was surely much to be learned from time spent with my lord the cardinal and bishop of Winchester.

  Chapter 15

  With a twist of his face at the ache of his back, Basset sat stiffly down where Mak had been and then asked dryly, “Is there something about Mak that I should know?”

  “You heard enough—”

  “—to know there’s something a-foot.”

  Besides that, this was not something it was fair to keep from Basset, and Joliffe answered, “I made him confess yesterday that he works privily for Bishop Beaufort.”

  Basset considered that silently before asking, “Does Lord Lovell know?”

  Joliffe had wondered that and so was able to say, “My guess is he does and it’s why he set Mak rather than someone else to help us.”

  “To keep an eye on us.”

  “More, maybe, to watch our backs for us.”

  “He didn’t do so well the other night.”

  “He didn’t, no.”

  “You’ll go tonight?”