A Play of Knaves

by Margaret Frazer

  He went away among the trees, leaving Joliffe and Hal looking at each other again; and very quietly to Hal’s glare Joliffe said, “That thrust you made was meant to kill me, but not quickly. You were going to watch me die the way you watched the others.”

  Hal’s smile was ugly with anger and maybe the pain of his arms bound uncomfortably high across his back. Between clenched teeth he hissed, “Yes.”

  Surprised to find his legs were not so steady as he would have liked them to be, Joliffe wished there were somewhere he could sit, but he kept his voice even as he asked, “How would you have explained killing me? Or did you think to go uncaught for yet another murder?”

  “Oh, no, I meant to admit to this one freely enough. After all, you sent me word you knew something about my father’s murder and wanted to talk to me. I meant to claim you tried to extort money from me for what you claimed you knew and that I saw suddenly it was you who’d killed my father, and when I said so, you attacked me and I killed you because I had to.”

  “Then people would suppose I killed Gosyn, too, for who knows what reason, and there’d be an end to it.”

  “Yes,” Hal snarled, openly angry that he was thwarted, probably equally angry that Joliffe was alive when he should be dead.

  Joliffe found his own anger was gone into a cold quease in his stomach. No one had ever so deliberately wanted him dead before this and he did not like the feeling of it.

  Nor did he like his own urge just then to hurt Hal with his own hands. Hurt him badly. Hurt him not because there was need of it but for the pleasure of making him hurt.

  And very carefully, Joliffe sheathed his dagger and folded his arms in front of him to put the temptation out of ready reach.

  Chapter 23

  With one thing and another, it was well past dark when Joliffe rejoined the other players. He had paused to tell them all was well when he and Kyping passed with Hal as prisoner, but there had been time for little else and he was not surprised to find the fire still burning and everyone around it, waiting for him—except Piers asleep with his head on his grandfather’s lap. With a grateful sigh to be done with walking for a while, Joliffe sat down in the place left for him in their fire-lit circle, held his hands out to the fire’s warmth because the night was cool, and said, “That’s done then. We’ve leave to go tomorrow.”

  Ellis gave a satisfied exclamation and Basset nodded, pleased. It was Rose who said, “Tell us what happened.”

  He did. At one point Gil reached out and rapped knuckles on his chest and asked, “So where’s the breastplate now?”

  “Given back to Master Ashewell with thanks.”

  “Nothing like the thanks he owes you,” Rose said. “That they all owe you.”

  “Except for Hal,” Gil said. “He’s not thanking you.”

  “Did he ever say why he’d killed his father and Walter Gosyn?” Rose asked.

  Kyping and the crowner had both asked Hal that at different times. Watching the fire at play—light and liveliness against the tired heaviness of his thoughts—Joliffe answered, “By what Hal said, it came down to no more than that they were in the way of what he wanted.”

  “The saints defend we all take to killing for that reason,” Basset muttered.

  What Joliffe kept to himself was his own thought of Hal’s deeper reason—or unreason—for the murders: that he had killed not so much to have his father and Gosyn out of his way but because he could kill them.

  Some time, for Hal Medcote, the heavy line between could and should had broken and never mended.

  Silence sat for a while then among the players, whatever each of them was thinking, until Basset asked, “Did you ever learn what Medcote was using against Master Ashewell, to force the marriage?”

  “Kyping asked Hal that.” And Hal had laughed. In truth, through everything, including the crowner’s questioning, Hal—when he was not being angry at being bound and being questioned by men he would rather have scorned and ignored—had laughed over-much for a man faced with hanging. He had seemed barely able to believe these fools were daring to meddle with him, and if Joliffe had not thought it before, he would have known then that something was not linked altogether right in Hal’s head. But at least Hal’s ready tongue made answering Basset’s question easy. “It seems that somewhat many years ago Ashewell made too free with Gosyn’s sister. Hal made it sound like it was rape, but there’s no way to tell the truth by anything he says. However it was, it seems no one knew about it save the two of them, and she took her disgrace away with her.”

  “Her disgrace? Only her disgrace?” Rose said dangerously.

  Joliffe held up his hands in sign of peace. “It’s what Hal Medcote said, not me.”

  “He would,” Ellis growled.

  “Whatever it was between them,” Joliffe went quickly on. “Ashewell was married and she was not and she left without anyone but Ashewell knowing why and it seems not even he knew where she’d gone. She left home supposedly to visit a cousin in Faringdon but never went there or anywhere else her family ever heard of. Then, a few years ago, John Medcote chanced on her in Gloucester, not leading a very good life. From what Hal said, she was bitterly ready to tell her story in return for money. And afterward Medcote kept it to himself until he was ready to use it against Ashewell, who thought it was better to sell Nicholas into a Medcote marriage than risk whatever Gosyn’s wrath might be if the truth came out.”

  Rose said bitterly, “If men ever learned to control their loins, what a simpler place the world would be.”

  “Their loins and their greed,” Joliffe said. “But after all there’s no saying how much at fault Gosyn’s sister was in it.”

  “However much at fault she was, she’s the one who’s gone on paying the price, while Ashewell lost nothing,” Rose returned.

  “It nearly cost him his son,” Basset said.

  “Nicholas would have paid more for his father’s sin than his father ever paid,” Rose said, giving no ground. “Always everyone but Ashewell paid. And now again, with the Medcotes finished, he still doesn’t pay.”

  “He will if someone doesn’t keep their mouth shut and his wife hears about Gosyn’s sister,” Ellis said grimly. Then quickly, before Rose might answer that, he added, “At least the boy is spared. There’s that much to the good.” He warily made to slip an arm around Rose’s waist, almost asking pardon for doing so.

  For a moment Rose looked as if she might refuse him. Then her face softened and she said, “There’s that, yes,” and shifted a little sideways, leaning against him and into his arm’s curve.

  Basset poked a stick at the fire. “So. Nicholas Ashewell will likely marry Claire Gosyn as both their fathers wanted. The manors will prosper, the nuns will have their profits peacefully, and Lady Lovell will be pleased with us. What of the Medcotes? Do you think there’s hope of Kyping’s interest in Eleanor Medcote coming to anything?”

  Joliffe shrugged. “Who knows? Given how little liking I ever saw among the Medcotes, I doubt she’ll hold Hal’s arrest against him. She might even marry Kyping to spite both Hal and her father, never mind who’s alive and who’s dead.”

  “Or to spite Kyping,” Ellis said. “I doubt she’s a comfortable woman.”

  “She’s a landed woman anyway,” Basset said. “There are men who’ll put up with a great lot of spite for the sake of that.”

  Or maybe, without her father and brother to goad her, she might be as different as she had sometimes seemed to be, Joliffe thought. But that was Kyping’s look-out, and unless they sometime came back this way, the players would never know how it went between them.

  That was one disadvantage his curiosity suffered. In their wandering the players saw bits of other people’s lives—a few moments out of lifetimes, that was all—and he could only wonder what came to them afterward. Supposing he wondered about them at all. After all, how much of anyone’s life was worth anyone else’s knowing? Rarely much at all. It was enough for someone to live and leave others to do the s
ame, giving help when help could be given and not giving pain where pain need not be.

  At least he hoped that was enough, but as he looked across the fire at Ellis and Rose, her head now resting on his shoulder, his cheek resting against her head, both of them for the moment content and at peace, he had to think, too, that if love could be added to the business of simply being alive, it was to the good.

  Under a sky of thinning clouds that promised fair-weathered travel for the day at least, they were on their way in the morning as soon as there was light enough to see the lane. By the time the sun showed a golden rim above the horizon behind them, they were a satisfying few miles beyond Ashewell parish. But when Joliffe looked back, the White Horse was still to be seen in its endless gallop high on its hillside. Mankind fumbled onward, but there the Horse was, ages old and always young, with more beauty in its being than most lives ever had, and Joliffe raised his hand to it in both greeting and farewell, then turned ahead and did not look back again.

  Author’s Note

  The White Horse of Uffington and White Horse Vale are of course real. On the other hand, Ashewell village and parish, while both realistic to that time and place, are imaginary, bearing no intended relationship to anywhere to be found today in the Vale where I’ve placed them. St. Mary’s Abbey—sometimes known as Nunnaminster—in Winchester did hold lands in the Vale, though not where I’ve placed Ashewell parish.

  It’s no longer believed that the White Horse and the hillfort above it were made by the Saxons a mere eight hundred years or so before this story. By the time the Saxons saw it, the Horse was already more than a thousand years old, the work of Bronze Age or Iron Age people long before the Saxons or even the Romans were ever in Britain. Made by the digging of trenches that were then infilled with blocks of white chalk, the White Horse would be lost under spreading soil and grass in very few years if left un-tended, which means that for something like three thousand years the people of the Vale have kept the Horse cleared. At various times this was accompanied by a “Pastime,” as detailed in Thomas Hughes’ book The Scouring of the White Horse about one such occasion in the 1800s, from which I have extrapolated backward. For the archaeology, there is Uffington White Horse and Its Landscape by G. Lock et al., and for a novel imagining the Horse’s making, there is Sun Horse, Moon Horse by Rosemary Sutcliff.

  But best of all is to see the White Horse itself and walk the hillslope there, to visit it and the hillfort and the even older monuments near it.

  One thing: older guidebooks will have the White Horse in Berkshire. Due to a shift in county boundaries, more recent books will have it in Oxfordshire.

  Master Ashewell’s career as villein, free man, soldier, and finally prospering landowner in his own right is no stretch of imagination on my part. By the late Middle Ages, buying out of villeinage was common and making your fortune in the French war very possible. The feudal system still existed but no longer had the stranglehold on society that it had had even two hundred years before. Times do change. Think how different the lives we lead now are from those of two hundred years before our present time, and how different those times were from two hundred years before then. The Middle Ages were not a monolith that clunked down upon Europe with the fall of Rome and lasted like a solid, witless lump until the Renaissance arrived to Make Everything Better. There was change and growth, experiments in government and thought and religion that made the Renaissance possible.

  But of course there were villains as well as villeins. Medcote’s cheating of Jack Hammond over his inheritance is derived from an example given in E. B. Fryde’s Peasants and Landlords in Later Medieval England, a richly detailed, balanced study of rural medieval life, showing the good as well as the bad and the powerful societal shift going on at the time.