A Play of Lords

by Margaret Frazer

  Despite Joliffe’s disappointments, the evening went well, with afterwards a quite satisfactory purse as reward for their work, and their return to the inn, their guard marching beside them, went without trouble.

  Morning was less pleasant, coming with a thick overcast of clouds and a sharp-edged wind that took great care to slide in under the door, chilling feet no matter how near the fire they were. There was nothing that Basset felt needed practice, but neither did any of them have a particular wish to go out into the chill, dull day, even Piers who, for once, was content to sit warm near the fire with his grandfather, sharpening his somewhat blunt skill at reading under Basset’s patient guidance through one of their scripts. Rose and Ellis sat close together on cushions away to one side, his arm around her, she holding his other hand in her lap, playing with his fingers while they talked softly. Gil had laid out his bedding again and was lying on it, hands behind his head, seemingly studying the ceiling beams because his eyes were open and that was where he was staring.

  Meaning to work on a play he had had in mind for a while, Joliffe had out paper, pens, and ink; had sat at the table first, only to find that working that way was become too unfamiliar to him; had shifted to a cushion on the floor, his back against the wall in a far corner from everyone else; and still found his thoughts would not hold on the foolishness of fond lovers—that would be Ellis and Gil—and their thwarting parents—Basset doing the necessary paternal roaring and Joliffe the maternal nagging and hand-wringing—and the wily page taking messages and money from everybody—Piers, of course. Instead, as he had hoped they would not, his thoughts went insistently back to yesterday, until finally he gave up, wiped his pen dry, stoppered his ink bottle, set aside his writing-box, stood up, stretched his back and legs, then sauntered the few paces to where Gil was still considering the ceiling, sat down on his heels beside him and, quietly enough the others did not have to hear him if they did not want to, said, “So. Tell me about the wool trade.”

  Gil rolled his head toward him. “What?”

  “Tell me about the wool trade. Your father serves Lord Lovell. You must have heard talk about the wool trade all your life. Tell me about it.”

  Gil rolled his head back to where it had been, gave a sigh worthy of Piers at his most put-upon, and said, “The wool trade is the best way to get very wealthy. Of the many different kinds of wool from many different kinds of sheep in England, the finest is very fine indeed, and most of it is sold to foreign merchants. The Flemish and Italians mostly. The German Hanse, too, but somewhat less. Some is kept for our own weavers. Not that we’ve had so many of those, but there’s more of them all the time because men are starting to see there’s enough more money in finished cloth to make it worth the bother of weaving it. They’re likely going to see that even faster with the Flemish trade being cut off.” He yawned, sat up, stretched—making sure one out-stretched fist hit Joliffe lightly on the head—and went on, “Come to it, Lord Lovell is ahead in the game there. He’s been building up weaving at one place and another on his lands for a few years now. Maybe he saw this present trouble coming.”

  “So he’s not as worried as some that it may go past just insult-slinging to outright war with the duke of Burgundy,” Joliffe said.

  “Don’t know.” Nor did Gil sound as if he cared. “He has to sell the cloth somewhere, once it’s woven. Flanders and the Low Countries are nearest. Saves on shipping if he can sell it there, so better there’s not war, I suppose.”

  “What about, say, Bishop Beaufort? Is he turning to weaving, too?”

  “Couldn’t say.” Gil leaned over as if to impart a deep secret and whispered near to Joliffe’s ear. “Because if I’d cared about wool and weaving and all, I wouldn’t be here.” He straightened and said firmly, “I’d be home with the sheep, making my father happy.”

  Joliffe gave a snort of laughter.

  With a knock and not waiting for an answer, Mak opened the door, put his head in, looked around, said, “Good. You’re all here,” and came in. “My lady sends to say you’ll be wanted at supper tonight. To play your new play for guests. It’s only supper, though, I hear. Not a feast.”

  “Whenever and however my lord and lady desire our work,” said Basset, “it is our pleasure and our honor to obey.” Then he added, plainly and without flourish, “What’s the trouble, Mak?”

  Mak did indeed look as twitching as if he were footing on hot bricks and answered edgily, “Flemings again. There was bad trouble and heads broken yesterday with a riot against them. Now word is running there’s to be another one today. Maybe a bigger one.”

  “If there’s already word of it, won’t it be stopped before it gets going?” Ellis asked.

  “Don’t know how far word’s run of it,” Mak said. “Anyway, something like that can’t always be headed off without making it worse instead. I’m just warning you to stay in, that’s all.”

  Joliffe stood up and headed for the door, taking up his cap and cloak as he went, saying, “I’ll be back.”

  Behind him, Gil scrambled to his feet. “I’ll go with you.”

  Piers stood up, only to be sat down by his grandfather’s firm hand as Rose said, “No, Piers. Nor you either, Ellis.”

  Ellis, not trying to get loose from her tight hold on his hand, protested, “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Should you be?” Basset demanded at Joliffe’s back.

  Joliffe turned around, not even trying to put merriment into his gaze as he met Basset’s. “Yes.”

  Basset said none of the many things he could have. His face said enough, and instead of any of them, all he did was order, “Keep Gil out of trouble then.”

  “I can keep myself out of trouble!” Gil declared, but Joliffe gave Basset an unsmiling nod that not so much acknowledged the order as the cunning of it, because Basset knew as well as Joliffe did that an order to keep himself out of trouble would likely be of little use, but giving him the duty to keep Gil out of trouble might—just might—serve to keep them both safe.

  Or it might not.

  Chapter 19

  Joliffe threw an arm around Mak’s shoulders, taking him out the door with him and through the gateway, Gil following them. Only in the street did Joliffe pause and let Mak go, at the same time asking, “Which way?”

  “It’s only word there’s to be trouble,” Mak muttered. “It’s maybe wrong.”

  “Which way?” Joliffe repeated, somewhat less friendly.

  “Stocks Market again,” Mak said grudgingly. “Somewhat witless, that. Doing it the same place twice.”

  “Were you there yesterday?”

  “Wasn’t. Missed that one.”

  “What do you know about who’s doing it?”

  “Not enough.”

  He started to move away. Joliffe took hold on his arm to keep him where he was. “What do you know?”

  “Nothing. That’s the trouble. I’m supposed to find out, and I haven’t. Do that and keep watch on you, too,” he added, sullen. “How’m I supposed to do all that?”

  “Keep watch on us?” Gil asked.

  “That’s for later,” Joliffe said. He shifted his grip to Mak’s elbow and started away, taking Mak with him along Cheapside. “Let’s go see what we can learn this time.”

  “Keep watch on us?” Gil persisted, falling in on Mak’s other side. “What’s he mean, ‘Keep watch on us’?”

  “I’ll tell you later. For now, while we go, tell me more about the wool trade and weavers and all.”

  Gil made a wordless noise of protest and said, “Why?”

  “Curiosity. Always a good thing, curiosity.”

  “Not for some cats, they say,” said Mak. The thought seemed to cheer him somewhat.

  “Only by the light of knowledge can we find our way to wisdom,” Joliffe said in the plump tones of a lecturing master of scholars.

  “Is there wisdom in our heading toward a riot?” Gil asked cheerfully.

  “Alas, likely not. But only by learning may I perhaps
gain knowledge enough to give me wisdom sufficient to keep me from riots afterward,” Joliffe returned. “What else can you tell me about the wool trade and all?”

  “Saint Blaise, you don’t give up, do you?” Gil complained.

  Joliffe looked to Mak. “I’ll take whatever you know about it, too. Who, from what you know about it, stands to gain the most if the Flemings are driven out of it altogether?”

  “All I know,” Mak said, “is that Bishop Beaufort wants the trouble stopped. That’s the sum of it.”

  It might be the sum of it, but the pieces that added up to that sum were not yet in sight, and Joliffe persisted, “Gil?”

  Gil sighed and said, “If the Flemings are cut out of the wool trade, the greatest gain will probably be to the Italians and the Hanseatics, because they won’t have to compete for a share with the Low Countries. That will likely mean a drop in wool prices. That’s likely Bishop Beaufort’s deepest interest in the matter.”

  “Why?” Joliffe prodded.

  “Because his loans to the government—his thousands of pounds of loans—are mostly repaid, one way and another, out of customs duties paid on whatever goes out through the ports. If the worth of wool and cloth goes down, so do the customs and so does how fast the bishop gets his money back.”

  That about the bishop’s loans to the government was true enough, Joliffe knew. There had been times when his loans had been all that had kept the government able to afford the French war. There also had been times when Bishop Beaufort had been chancellor that he had brought merchant-outrage down on him when he kept trade flowing freely by using his power to ride over new laws against the Flemings and Low Countries.

  Reminder of all that side of the matter at last fairly well finished Joliffe’s last lingering worry that Bishop Beaufort was somehow playing a double game in all of this. Unfortunately, he was still left with no more than not-very-good guesses at whether it might be an English lord wanting to gain power by bringing Bishop Beaufort and the duke of Gloucester to blows or if it was someone interested enough in ending Burgundian trade to go to the trouble of making this much trouble. If it were the latter, then the Italians and the Hanse were the best guess for guilty, but, “What about English cloth-makers?” he asked at Gil. “If the trade of wool to foreigners narrows, won’t there be more wool at probably lower price for them?”

  With the patience of humouring the mad, Gil said, “I think I already told you that. It would maybe even give them chance to overtake the Flemings in the cloth trade. The Low Countries have a long lead over us that way.”

  “So a long blocking of the wool trade to there could shift things in the English clothworkers’ favor. Who is there here in London would have best benefit from that?”

  Gil and Mak traded looks, and Gil said, shrugging, “You know London. I don’t.”

  Mak gave a small twist of his arm, and when Joliffe let him go, he answered, “Nobody would have the good from foreign trade falling, I’d say. Not right off. But if it comes to there being more English cloth, then it would be the drapers in the long run, likely. Buying English cloth would cost them less than foreign-made. Same for the mercers maybe, though not so much.”

  From that then, Joliffe thought, the next question was who had wealth enough to ride out the losses there would be during the time it took English trade to turn around.

  Philip Malpas came readily to mind, but that was simply because he was one Joliffe knew by name. There were surely others, and unfortunately the world of wealth and power was not a world about which Joliffe knew much. As a player, he saw it and served it, but that was not the same as knowing it. Not the same at all.

  And of course it was not just the drapers and maybe the mercers he had to consider, but lords, too. There were surely other lords than Lord Lovell with interest in wool and the cloth trade, and lords were very plentiful in London these days.

  Which brought him back to wondering if someone among them might well have more interest in war with Burgundy for other reasons than the wool and cloth trade. Did the governorship of Normandy somehow play into it? What if this unbalancing of things was not about trade at all but about power? What if it was all part of someone looking to gain power where they did not have it—or to gain more power? As with the desire for wealth, the more the desire for power was fed, the more it seemed to grow and never be satisfied no matter how ugly-bloated it became.

  Joliffe wondered if he could make a play around the fat figures of Wealth and Power, setting them against the slender grace of, say, Good Heart and . . .

  “Where’s everyone?” Gil asked.

  Not that they were alone in the wide street, but Joliffe was suddenly aware there were far fewer folk about than was usual for a late morning.

  “Likely more than me’ve heard trouble’s rumbling,” Mak said. “They’re stayin’ home. Or are gone home. Look.” He pointed. “Even the lie-abouts around the Eleanor Cross are gone. Though they’re likely gone looking for trouble, same as you are. Trouble’ll get ’em on their feet when honest work won’t.”

  “It got Joliffe on his feet,” said Gil helpfully.

  Mak sharply stopped. “Listen!”

  Joliffe heard it at the same moment. From somewhere ahead of them, cramped and blunted by distance but not to be mistaken for anything else came the many-throated shouting of people working themselves into anger.

  “In the Stocks Market again,” Mak grumped. “Witless.”

  He had said that before, and Joliffe agreed with him as much now as then and nonetheless would have started forward except Mak said, “Uh,” and took hold on both him and Gil while giving a short sidewise jerk of his head toward a tight gathering of half-dozen or so men in sleeved leather jerkins and carrying wooden clubs moving fast and purposefully along the middle of the street and toward the Stocks Market. “Newgate guards,” Mak said and began a sideways, backward walk, away from them and the way they were going, trying to draw Joliffe and Gil with him.

  “Newgate guards?” Joliffe asked.

  “Newgate. The prison.” Because the men were past without giving them a glance and neither Joliffe nor Gil were moving, Mak stopped and said worriedly, “If they’re out and on their way, the watch’ll be out, too. There’s been too much fore-warning trouble was coming. There’ll be head-breaking and arrests for sure. I’m not going anywhere nearer.”

  Mak was not the only one to think that, it seemed. Such folk as were not stopped and staring after the guard were beginning to go two different ways: either after the guards or very purposefully in any direction except theirs.

  “No head-breaking for me, thank you,” said Gil.

  “Or me,” agreed Joliffe. He had wanted to see who was stirring up today’s trouble, but if it was already stirred, he was too late, was willing to retreat, and was giving way to Mak’s pull on his arm when he caught sight of someone he knew on the far side of the street.

  Yesterday’s riot-rouser.

  He had not yet turned his yellow hood, but it was shoved back off his head and the black hair was gone and he was coming away from the market, keeping close to the house-fronts and moving quickly while throwing sharp, wary sideways looks backward at the Newgate guards.

  Skulking.

  That was the word for what he was doing. If he had not been, Joliffe thought he would likely never have noted him, and that was something to remember. If you did not want people to wonder if you were guilty of something, don’t look as if you were.