A Play of Lords

by Margaret Frazer

  He and Fyssher laughed at what was probably an old jest between them. Joliffe settled himself to one side of the padded seat under the tilt and was glad when the cloaked man settled next to him, leveling the boat. While the two boatmen settled themselves on their own bare-boarded seats, one behind the other, and set their pairs of oars into their oarlocks, the man beside Joliffe huddled deeper into his cloak and asked friendliwise, “So, what brought you to Winchester House? Your master in some sort of trouble with the bishop?”

  “Oh. Ah. Aye.” Joliffe almost chose to go back into a countryman way of talking, then decided against it, settling simply for a midland townman’s easy tones. “Or not trouble so much as a debt, like, that he’d rather others not know about. I was bringing some payment of it is all.”

  “That would be why old Fowler had you in hand,” the man said in apparently easy acceptance. “Why he wants you safely back where you came from, too.”

  “Aye!” said the boatman named Fyssher. “Anyone who brings money is going to have goodly welcome at Winchester House.”

  “Just as anyone’d have if they brought money to your door,” his fellow said.

  “I’d not know,” Fyssher said with a laugh. “No one’s ever done it!”

  They shoved away from the quay and began to draw out onto the river, the two boatmen matching their oars’ strokes to each other with the ease of long familiarity. They were not alone on the river. Light rippled on the water from a scatter of other lanterns bobbing here and there from boats either crossing or going up or down. Away to Joliffe’s right the arches of London bridge were a solid blackness over the river’s moving darkness. Above them was scattered the yellow merriment of a few lighted and unshuttered windows in the houses there. Ahead London showed fewer windows’ steady glow, but the various landing stairs and quays were marked by the orange and yellow flare of torches and the glow of lanterns. Joliffe could not tell for which wharf the boatmen were headed but was sure that if they worked for Bishop Beaufort they knew their work well.

  Not that anything about the boat or the men gave sign they were Bishop Beaufort’s, he noted. There were no livery colors or badges either on them or on the tilt, a usual place for lords to display on such boats as he had seen on rivers over the years. That made him guess this one must be kept for the bishop’s private business.

  Such as Joliffe.

  When time came, he was going to have more than a little to think about, but here and now was not the place or chance for it. He was too busy shoving aside his unease at the river, not wanting to waste time in mere fear when there was so much new to hand. The skill of the boatmen, for one thing. Fyssher and his fellow were well-bent to their work now, Fyssher keeping glancing watch over his shoulder for other craft and both men probably judging the river’s current and flow so as to make best use of them. That had to be a carefully learned skill all in itself, Joliffe guessed.

  “They know what they’re about,” said the man beside him, misreading his silence. “We’ll make it safe.”

  Joliffe gave an easy smile. “I can see that. Where in London are you bound?”

  “I’m just along for the ride and to watch your back to your door.”

  Was he indeed? Joliffe kept to being a plain man unused to city ways and asked, “London is that unsafe then? That a man can’t walk it at night without he have guard?”

  “Mostly there’s no trouble to it, but times are uneasy, what with the Burgundians and all,” the man said.

  Fyssher spat into the river. “Damn the Burgundians.”

  “Nay,” his fellow protested. “Just damn their duke. I’ve had good drinking with some of them that’s here.”

  “What you mean, Owyn, is that a Burgundian once bought you a drink,” the man beside Joliffe jibed.

  “Owyn?” said Joliffe, playing country-dumb. “Are you Welsh?” As if asking were he a strange animal as should be in the Tower.

  “I’m not. Do I sound Welsh?” Owyn asked scornfully.

  “Nay, he’s no more Welsh than the Thames is,” Fyssher said, as if defending their mutual honor. Then he spoiled it with, “Well, maybe just a touch on his grandmother’s side. But we don’t hold that against him. George, though—” He nodded at the man beside Joliffe. “He’s foreign-born and no mistake.”

  “I’m from Hampshire,” George said disgustedly. “That’s what a Londoner calls foreign.” Then he and Owyn and Fyssher all laughed, both with and at each other.

  Serving Bishop Beaufort seemed not to weigh on them at all, Joliffe thought, and since they were so ready to talk, he tried, “Well, surely I feel ‘foreign’ enough here. Can’t sort out one lord from another or a Burgundian from a cow. What of the king? Do you ever see him?”

  “Oh, aye,” said Owyn, as if seeing the king were the most common thing in his world. “Been seeing him since he was a babe on his mother’s lap. He’s nigh to fourteen years now. Coming along well. Tall-grown for his years and well-featured. There’s talk of giving him full power as king this parliament.”

  “That will put a shaft in the duke of Gloucester’s wheel,” Fyssher said. “He won’t be high dog on the royal council anymore.”

  As any man of Bishop Beaufort’s was bounded to do, he sounded as if he thought that a very good thing, but George said, less sanguine, “That won’t be much to the good, though, if it sets all the lords to climbing all over each other for the king’s favor. They’ll be loosed to squabble for the power that will go begging when Gloucester’s set down.”

  “Hai,” protested Owyn. “Who’s to say our lord of Winchester won’t just take up the slack then?”

  “Any number of lords, that’s who,” George said.

  “Aye,” Fyssher agreed, abruptly gloomy. “With Gloucester set down, they’ll all be scrabbling to get up.”

  “Who?” Joliffe asked, interested in how things looked on a somewhat different slant than Mak’s. “Who’s likely?”

  “William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk,” Fyssher said, rolling the name and title large but with no particular liking.

  “He’d not be so bad,” Owyn protested. “He’s sharp enough. And rich besides.”

  “Ya, not so bad,” Fyssher mocked. “What about France?”

  “What about France?” Owyn said. “He wasn’t the only one ever captured there and had to pay ransom.”

  “I’m just saying he never did well unless someone was in command over him. Give him command all his own, and things never went well. That’s what my brother said—”

  “—and he was there,” Owyn finished along with him.

  Fyssher glared at the back of his head, then grinned along with him before saying easily,“‘Ware Lord Scrope,” and he and Owyn feathered with their oars while a long, fore-pointed barge with three rowers to each side crossed their way, headed upriver. It was a fair guess that every boatman on the river knew the heraldry of every lord who had their own boat on the Thames, and by the lighted lanterns at both ends Joliffe could see the tilt was painted brightly blue and with the slanted gold bend that was Lord Scrope’s arms.

  But George was saying, “His wife is something to look at anyway. Suffolk’s, I mean.”

  “Ah, no quarrel there,” Fyssher agreed.

  “Bit thin for my taste,” Owyn said.

  “You’d best say that, given the size of your wife,” Fyssher returned.

  “What about the bishop’s nephew?” Joliffe said. “I’ve heard my master say he’d lay odds he’ll come on well with the bishop to back him?”

  “Mortain?” Owyn said and made the one word sound somehow very rude. “His lousy worship, Edmund Beaufort, damned earl of Mortain?”

  George leaned toward Joliffe’s ear and said as if for him alone but loudly enough that Owyn could hear, “He doesn’t like the earl of Mortain.”

  “Right and all I don’t! Mean-mouthed, close-fisted little—”

  “Here!” Fyssher interrupted. “He’s my lord’s nephew and all.”

  “Doesn’t change what he
is,” grumbled Owyn, then explained to Joliffe with open dislike, “We were bringing him down river in the bishop’s own barge. Ten of us rowers. He goes and wants us to shoot the bridge when it’s at its worst.”

  “Go through one of the arches when the tide is on the turn,” George explained. “Have you seen what it’s like at the bridge then? With the starlings and piers half-blocking it, the river backs up like behind a dam and waterfalls through on the farther side.”

  Joliffe had seen enough from atop the bridge that he could imagine what that was like and said with unfeigned horror, “Saint Nicholas!” Patron saint of sailors. “You might as well kill yourself straight out as try that!”

  “Ah, it can be done,” Fyssher assured him. “We’ve done it and more than once, one way and another.”

  “But you choose your time,” Owyn said bitterly, “and you don’t do it when there’s a six-foot drop on the far side and the water churning to break your keel first and drag you under afterwards and only spit up you and the pieces of your boat when you’re good and dead. Wasn’t even like he was going somewhere below the bridge. He just wanted to do it. But we didn’t. We put him ashore at Cold Harbor stairs just as we’d been ordered. High and mighty Mortain, as he’s stepping out, all alive and dry, which he’d not have been if we’d obeyed him, he gives me a clout on the side of my head that left my ear ringing for two days afterward. Said, ‘That’s for your insolence in not obeying me.’”

  “Never gave any of us even a farthing,” Fyssher added.

  “No he didn’t,” Owyn said. “The mean-fisted, foul-brained—”

  “Still,” interrupted George, “my lord of Winchester has given and got him favors enough. He must see something in him.”

  “His father,” said Fyssher. “That’s who he sees.”

  “His father?” Joliffe asked.

  “The earl of Somerset that was,” George said. “This Mortain’s father. The bishop’s brother. Dead these good many years. Back in the late King Henry’s reign, God keep his soul. With him dead and then Thomas, duke of Exeter, dying a few years back, Bishop Beaufort is left the last of John of Gaunt’s bastards.”

  “Not so,” Owyn protested. “There’s his sister. The countess of Westmorland. Nor it’s not like his grace doesn’t have nephews enough besides Mortain he could favor. She bred plenty by Westmorland.”

  “Aye, that’s true enough,” Fyssher laughed. “There was a man with powerful loins! A dozen childer by his first wife. Two dozen by his second.”

  “Nah, never so many as that, you dafter,” Owyn said. “Enough, though,” he added, “that you’d think the bishop could find someone besides Mortain to favor.”

  “The others don’t need favoring,” George pointed out. “With their Neville blood from their father and then the marriages he made for them, they’re all well-set enough.”

  “Besides,” said Fyssher, “a sister’s get is never the same as a brother’s, is it?”

  As a “sister’s get,” Joliffe could have said something about that but did not. He was far too interested in all that he was hearing. Not all of it was new to him, but seeing the same thing from different ways never hurt. Better to look on all sides of a jug you were buying. It lessened the chance of missing a crack.

  Except, of course, it was Bishop Beaufort who was buying him, not the other way around. What he was doing was learning what he could to make him worth the bishop’s purchase, because the more he learned, the more worth he would be.

  He was not completely in comfort with that way of seeing the business. His engrained tendency toward honesty about himself was sometimes regrettable.

  “Still, he’s friends enough with the Westmorland clot,” George said. “Likely to get closer, too, now that he’s lost so many others.”

  “Lost?” Joliffe said, truly not knowing.

  “That’s true enough,” Fyssher granted, answering George. “They’re mostly gone, aren’t they?”

  “Gone?” Joliffe persisted.

  “Those that his grace has been closest to over the years,” George said. “His brothers. The duke of Exeter was the last of them, and he’s been dead, what, oh, ten years maybe. Then Thomas Chaucer that was his cousin. That was just last year.”

  “God keep his soul. He was a good one, was Master Chaucer,” said Owyn. “Took it hard, his grace did.”

  “Now the duke of Bedford that was his nephew is gone,” George said. “His grace was closest to those two, I’d say. To Chaucer and Bedford. Now there’s only him. That has to be hard.”

  “But he’s a hard man, isn’t he?” Joliffe tried.

  Fyssher was looking behind himself, checking their course toward a large cresset burning to mark the landing place they were headed for, so he only shrugged one shoulder in answer. It was Owyn who said, “Ah, well, there’s hard and then there’s hard, isn’t there?”

  “You don’t want to cross him, that’s sure,” said George. “But he deals fair with those that deal fair with him. I don’t ask more of a man than that.”

  “He’s a good master,” Fyssher said. “That’s what I know. More right, Owyn. There we go. Hold there.”

  Taken up with the boat coming into the quay—Fyssher and Owyn doing, Joliffe and George watching—they let talk fall away until the boat nudged gently to a stop against the stairs, and Fyssher reached out to grasp a metal ring to keep them there. Skillful with familiarity, George stood up and stepped out easily, then turned to offer his hand to Joliffe. Still not sure of his footing on the gentle rocking of the boat, Joliffe took his help readily and with thanks.

  “I’m to see you to as near your door as you feel safe,” George said. “They’ll wait here for me.”

  Joliffe took coins from his belt-pouch and gave one each to Owyn and Fyssher, saying, “Here’s for drink to warm you once you’re home.”

  While Fyssher took the coins with thanks, Owyn pulled a leather bottle from under his seat, saying, “We’ve something for tonight, but that’ll pay for tomorrow’s. Saint Nicholas keep you well.”

  “And you,” Joliffe returned.

  With a pointing finger but in jest more than worry, George warned, “Just mind you don’t drink so much of that you can’t row me straight back.”

  Fyssher and Owyn laughed. The bottle was passing from one to the other as George led Joliffe away, across the quay toward the lantern-lighted mouth of a street. There were no people about, and Joliffe asked, “Has it gone curfew?”

  “Near enough. When the nights draw on cold like this, people tend to be home the sooner,” George said. “Whereabouts St. Paul’s do you want to go?”

  Joliffe found himself unwilling to let the man know where he came from and said, “If you see me past the east end, I can get myself from there.”

  “We’ll go this way then,” George said, “and bear up Bread Street. That’ll put us there without we come too near the duke of Gloucester’s palace and lessen chance of meeting any of his folk. If you’ve no mind against it, would you walk a pace or two behind my left shoulder? That way if anyone comes at us, one of us will have a little more warning than the other. You any good with a dagger?”

  “Good enough,” Joliffe said. He was better with a club, but that was beside the point since there was no club to hand. With a queasy remembering that two nights ago walking apart had not saved much, he asked, “Are we likely to be attacked?”

  “No,” George said, but Joliffe noted he had shifted his cloak back, leaving clear the hilt of the sword on his left hip. “The constables keep a tight hand on their wards, mostly, and our way should be lighted well enough. But always better wary than not, I say.”