A Play of Knaves

by Margaret Frazer

  Coldly, Lynche said, “There’d be no outcry with drowning. No chance someone would hear. That’s the more likely reason for it.”

  “How much likelihood was there anyone would be out and about to hear anything anyway?” Joliffe asked.

  “Not much at that hour,” Hod said. “A poacher maybe, but he’d move away from the sound of men, not toward it, likely.”

  “So it was well after dark it happened?”

  “It was after dark when he rode out,” Lynche said. “I closed the gate behind him.”

  “Rode out?” Joliffe looked around as if expecting suddenly to see a horse he had somehow missed until then.

  Lynche answered his look with, “Master Hal brought it back when he came with word he’d found his father.”

  “How did he know where to look? Or was it only chance he came this way?”

  “No chance to it. Hal knows this place as well as his father did and Medcote made no secret of why he was going out last night.” Lynche was flatly, glumly sure of that. He gave Joliffe a suspicious sideways look.

  “Never did, come to that,” said Hod. “Liked to leave the kettle boiling behind him when he went, as it were.”

  That meant that Medcote’s use of the place was as open a secret as Kyping had made it seem—and that almost any man in the household could have taken the chance to be rid of an unliked master. Joliffe would have liked to ask more questions that way, about the household and who might have been presently most angry at Medcote, but he’d have to leave those questions to Kyping or the crowner. Lynche was becoming restive with dislike at him being there. Joliffe doubted he’d have many more answers out of him and said with a shrug, starting to turn away, “Pity all the way around, I guess. Every time I saw him, he looked to be a man enjoying his life about as much as a man can.”

  “Nobody else was, sure,” Hod muttered.

  “What?” Joliffe asked lightly.

  “Enjoying their life while he was around. Not that it’s likely to be all that better now.”

  “That’s enough, Hod,” Lynche said, but Hod grumbled on, “Whether it’s to be son or widow we answer to now, it won’t be all that better and you can’t say it will be, Lynche, unless you lie. The only help will be if Mistress Eleanor marries again and goes off soon.”

  “Oh?” Joliffe said easily. “I thought she seemed pleasant enough the little I saw her.”

  “Must have been very little and at an odd hour on one of her better days,” Hod snorted. “As bad humoured as the rest of them she is.”

  “With more reason,” Lynche put in stiffly. “She was well and away from here and then her husband dies and she’s right back in the middle of it.”

  Given how short he was about most things, the steward’s readiness to say that much to the good about Eleanor Medcote told more than maybe he meant it to, but Joliffe was not sure whether that more was about Eleanor Medcote or Lynche himself, and he said, still easily, “Ah well, there’s trouble everywhere for everybody, isn’t there?” and walked away.

  He had learned more than he had thought he would and took his time along the road, in no hurry to rejoin the others while he thought about it. First, those nearest to Medcote—family as well as servants—were surely in no great grief for his death. Second, any number of people could have known where he planned to be that night, and not just his near and not-so-dear, because if he’d gloated to them, there was no knowing who else he might have gloated to. And any servants who knew what he purposed could have talked of it at the village alehouse last night if they’d gone there. Or someone might have overheard him when he told Rose to meet him, with no need for anyone else to be told anything.

  Add to that stretch of possibilities how many people would rather he were dead than alive—maybe beginning with his own family and certainly going outward from there—and the possibilities for who killed him spread out and out in a widening circle.

  A circle that could even include Kyping, since his life would be far easier without Medcote stirring up constant trouble.

  A circle that had to include Master Ashewell, quit of whatever had kept him bound to Medcote’s desire for marriage between Eleanor and young Nicholas. Of course Nicholas, too, had reason to want escape from that marriage, but Joliffe doubted the boy had the weight to hold down a man of Medcote’s size and likely strength.

  Walter Gosyn had the needed size and strength, though. But if he had gone for anyone, wouldn’t it more likely have been Hal with his unwanted heed of Claire?

  Come to it, once Medcote was down, a well-sized woman could have held and drowned him. It needn’t have come to fists between them. There was nothing to say a club or just a heavy branch couldn’t have laid him out, couldn’t have dazed him long enough for a strong woman to have him helpless and half-drowned before he recovered enough to struggle. Anela Medcote was not of a size to do it, but her daughter was.

  But so were plenty of other women, common women grown strong with women’s heavy duties around the house and with fieldwork, and there was no telling how many of those there might be wanting revenge after being wronged by Medcote. And then there were men whose women had been wronged by Medcote, as well as all the men with other quarrels against him.

  Joliffe did not envy Kyping, or the constable, or the crowner when he came for the questioning that was ahead of them. Before there was much hope of knowing who had killed Medcote, they would have to narrow the circle of possibilities down past who might want to kill him to who could have killed him, and that might not prove possible, given the difficulties Joliffe saw so far.

  Altogether, he would settle for the players being given leave to go and never mind if they never knew who killed Medcote. Whatever Kyping said, they were still too easy to accuse, too readily at hand as a way to save everyone else the trouble of looking harder for a murderer. He’d maybe do well to suggest to Kyping to take note of whoever might first or most insistently point a finger their way, because the murderer might well do that, trying to end the matter before it came too near him.

  He stopped at a gate into a ploughed field softly green with young shoots of grain. A lapwing was crying pee-wit from somewhere, but that was the only sound, and he bent and picked a small daisy out of the grass and chewed on its stalk for its sharp taste, leaning on the gate and gazing up at the White Horse on its hillside. Yesterday at this hour Medcote had been alive and now he wasn’t. That Medcote wasn’t a man to be mourned was beside the matter. Living and dying were a mystery deeper than any one man’s murder.

  A man or woman lived and then they did not and mankind fumbled on its way and still there was the Horse, lifetimes old, in its flaring gallop across the hillside, its being a mystery among other mysteries.

  Why had Medcote been such a curse toward everyone? Apparently prosperous when he was a butcher in Wantage, his lot had only been bettered by coming into this manor by way of his wife, a comely enough woman. He lived more comfortably than most men, and there was nothing outwardly wrong with either of his offspring. So why had he been such a complete cur? Had he thought the power to make folk miserable was a greater power than to play fair with them? That was a mistake common to small-witted people—to think good was a weaker thing than evil. From all that Joliffe had seen, evil—in both its greater ways and in such petty ones as bullying—was the weak man’s way, taking a fool’s pleasure in his strength to destroy. To destroy was easy. To create was hard. And solid goodness to others was harder still, with maybe the hardest thing being to stand strong in the good against the anger and force of those who understood only ugliness and destruction. Against people like Medcote.

  And like whoever had killed him.

  Joliffe pushed back from the gate and went on toward the players’ camp, hungry for whatever was for dinner and ready to be away from his thoughts for a while.

  Chapter 13

  At camp Joliffe found the tent up again, Tisbe grazing as if she had never left, and the players sitting, waiting while Rose cut bread and cheese on
a board for them and a man Joliffe did not know. With the skill he had learned early as a player, he quickly judged by the way the man was sitting easily among them that he had likely neither brought nor meant trouble. That was to the good. Besides that, coming nearer, Joliffe saw that the man’s rough hosen and plain-made, serviceable tunic were all of good enough cloth and meant to last but more what a master would provide for a servant as part of his wages than what a man was likely to choose for himself. Add to that there was no horse of his to be seen and he did not look as if he was worn out with long walking, and it was an easy guess he was someone’s household servant and from nearby. Master Ashewell’s, likely, or maybe Gosyn’s.

  Nonetheless, as Joliffe joined them and they all looked up at him, he made the man a low bow, complete with a sweep of his hat and, “My lord. You grace us with your company.”

  The man gaped at him a moment, then caught the jest and threw back his head with a roar of laughter. There must be few jests around here, he took that one so much to heart, Joliffe thought as the man said, “Aye, that’s me. Lord Sy. Ya’ve seen through my disguise.”

  “Sy’s come from Walter Gosyn,” Basset said more temperately. “We’re asked to his place to play this evening.”

  Joliffe glanced at Basset for his cue. Basset gave it by a shadow of a nod, and without missing a beat Joliffe said, adding another bow for good measure, “It will be our honor and our privilege.”

  Sy laughed again. “You’re a merry lot, I’ll say that for you. I wouldn’t be so blythe, maybe, with a murdered man almost on my doorstep and the crowner’s eye likely to be turned my way.”

  As if he did not know Sy was fishing for talk he could take back to the Gosyn household, Basset held his hands out, palms up and shoulder-high on either side, in a kind of shrug meant to show the players’ innocence and unconcern. “We’ve gathered Medcote had men enough who wanted him dead for better reasons than we ever had against him, since we never had any. The crowner will have men in plenty to suspect without having to look at us.”

  “That’s not always been known to stop a crowner,” Sy said with unexpected shrewdness. “Pick who’s likely to be the least trouble and settle on them to have done it. That’s been known to happen.”

  “Ah,” said Basset, still with easy confidence. “But you see we’re not likely to be the least trouble. We’re Lord Lovell’s men, and he’s likely to be loathe to lose us to a crowner’s convenience.”

  “Aye. That’s true enough,” Sy granted. “You being Lord Lovell’s men was why my master was wondering if you’d play for his folk at all. Though he said if you’d play for Medcote, you’d play for anyone. Not that he meant that any bad way, look you,” he quickly added.

  Rose handed a thick-cut piece of bread and an equally thick-cut piece of cheese to Joliffe, saying, “These are from Master Gosyn’s wife. She took thought we might be short of food, having been turned back on our way.”

  Joliffe took the food gratefully, saying, “If his wife sends us new bread and fine cheese, Gosyn can say whatever he wants about us, good or bad.”

  “She’s a fine hand in the dairy,” Sy said, proud as if her accomplishments were his own. But he leaned toward Joliffe with a different eagerness and asked, lowering his voice, “Ya’ve seen him, then? Medcote? He’s dead, surely?”

  “Dead surely,” Joliffe assured him. Hungry, he would have rather eaten than talked, but to give Sy what he wanted, he told what he had seen. He would have been telling the other players by now anyway, so it made not that great a difference, except with a different audience, he put more into the telling than he otherwise might have.

  Sy was pleased at the end, anyway, sitting back like a man satisfied after a full meal, saying with a shake of his head, “Drowned and dead. Who would have thought it?”

  “Everyone’s glad to be quit of him, I gather,” Joliffe said.

  “You’d be hard put to find a man—or probably a woman either—with a good thing to say of him,” Sy said. “Nor will the rest of the Medcote lot be missed if they pack up after the funeral and take themselves back where they came from. But they won’t,” he added glumly. “They got their claws into Francis Brook’s lands and won’t be giving it up.”

  “I thought the manor came to Anela Medcote by right after her cousin’s death,” Joliffe said, half making it a question.

  “It did.” No matter how much Sy grudged granting it. “Shouldn’t ever have come to him dying, though. He was bettering from his hurt. You heard how that was?”

  “Young Nicholas Ashewell wounded him by chance, yes,” Basset said.

  “By chance it surely was.” Sy was as fierce on that as if Basset had said otherwise. “There’s never been harm in that boy and everybody knows it. It wasn’t even much of a wound, I heard, and Brook was bettering. That’s what was being said. Then here come his kin, that Anela and the rest, and next anyone knows, Francis Brook is dead, his heart given out or some such thing and no one there to say differently.”

  “No one was there when he died?” Basset asked. “He was left alone, you mean? That can’t be right.”

  “It was Our Lady’s day in harvest. Most were gone to church, and when they came back, it was over with him.”

  “Most were to church?” Joliffe prompted.

  “Save for a few servants and Medcote and young Hal.” Sy laid a finger aside his nose with a knowing look. “Nothing to be proved then or afterward, but there was talk then and there’s talk now. And whether there was anything untoward or not in Francis Brook dying the way he did, the Medcotes didn’t waste more time on mourning than they had to. Were moved in, bag and baggage, before Holy Rood Day, just see if they weren’t. Now if they’d just go as quickly, that would be something to sing about.”

  “Jack Hammond wouldn’t be minding, anyway,” Joliffe said easily.

  Sy gave a crow of laughter. “Jack Hammond? He’d lead the rough music that saw them out of town.”

  “But doesn’t Master Gosyn have his trouble, too, with a villein who doesn’t want to know his place?” Joliffe said, still easily.

  From the corner of his eye he saw Ellis start and cut short a gesture probably meant to tell him to shut up, but Sy answered without hesitation, “Wat Offington. Him and a few others, too, that think Gosyn has made what he has of his life over their backs, not seeing the fault is theirs, not Gosyn’s, if he’s made much of what was his and they’ve made little with theirs.”

  “Instead of stirring each other up to trouble,” Basset said.

  “That’s the way of it,” Sy agreed heartily.

  “Folk don’t seem to resent Master Ashewell, though,” Joliffe said.

  “Ah, well, he’s another matter, isn’t he? He went off to war and made his fortune and nobody can quarrel with that, can they? He’s a quieter man, too. Always trying to cool things instead of stir them up.”

  “You’d think that would be Father Hewgo’s place,” Joliffe said innocently. “Him being the priest here and all. Peace and God’s love and all.”

  Sy bent over on another loud laugh and had to straighten and catch his breath before he could protest, still laughing, “Ah, you’ve seen enough of him to know better than that! Coals to kindling is that man. What Medcote doesn’t stir up, Father Hewgo does. He’s forever at Jack and Wat and George Lamb to ‘cease to trouble their masters,’ as he puts it. Like that’d be enough to settle those three.”

  “George Lamb?” Basset asked.

  “He’s fellow with Wat Offington in thinking he’s hard done by. Wants to buy out of his boon work but hasn’t the money for it. Might have if he and Wat didn’t spend so much at the alehouse washing their wrongs in ale. Thinks Gosyn ought to let him have what he wants for what he can pay, not what the work is worth.” Sy stood up. “Ah, they’re all of a kind, those three, but maybe matters will settle a bit without Medcote to stir them up every chance there was.”

  “Why would Medcote be doing that?” Joliffe asked from where he still sat. “If Wat and this
George aren’t his men?”

  “For the sport of it. To keep old Gosyn stirred up. No love lost there.”

  “So,” said Basset, “we’d do as well with a merry play tonight as a sorrowful one?”

  “No need for sorrow with us over Medcote’s death,” Sy assured him and started away.

  Ellis called after him, “Will there be supper in it for us?”

  “Sure to be,” Sy said over his shoulder cheerfully. “There’s nothing mean about my master!”

  The players held silent among themselves until Sy had disappeared into the lane. With him gone, Joliffe was about to say that Walter Gosyn looked to be liked by his household folk, anyway, but Ellis burst out at both him and Basset, “Lord god of madmen, you two never give it up, do you? We’ve done what Lady Lovell asked of us. All we have to do now is keep our mouths shut and our heads down until we’re let go from here. But there you sat, asking every question that came into your heads!”

  “It was just friendly, common curiosity, that’s all,” Joliffe protested.

  “Hah!” Ellis returned.

  “Leave off. The both of you,” said Basset. “We all want to be somewhere else other than here, but here is where we are, and since we are, it’s better that we know more than less.”

  “On the chance we’ll need to know that more,” Rose said quietly.

  She laid a hand on Ellis’ knee. Looking to her, he laid one of his own hands over hers, then clasped it, stood up, and pulled her to her feet with, “Let’s go for a walk, you and I. But not you,” he added at Piers.

  Before Piers, already half-way to his feet, could protest that, his grandfather caught his hand, pulled him back down, and clamped him firmly to his side with an arm around his shoulders, saying, “That’s right. You and Gil can help Joliffe and I argue out what play we’ll do tonight.”