Joliffe paused, then said in all seriousness, “I wasn’t certain how welcomed I’d be.”
“Joliffe! Considering all else I’d seen you at, you think I’d balk at you being a player?”
“There was . . .” Joliffe searched out the best word. “. . . scant approval of my leaving, as I remember.”
They were nearly to the gateway into St. Edmund’s yard. Thamys stopped short of where they might be heard by the porter sitting easily on a barrel beside the gate, keeping eye on who came and went. “I don’t know how you’d remember whether there was approval or not of your leaving,” Thamys said, “let be whether it was scant or otherwise. One morning you were here and then, come supper time, there was only your note saying you were gone and weren’t coming back. Nor did you. I think that was the only time I was ever truly angry at you. Except,” he added thoughtfully, “for when you put the dried toad inside my borrowed copy of the Polychronicon.”
“There was naught wrong with that toad,” Joliffe protested. “It couldn’t have been flatter than it was.”
“Flat or otherwise, the Polychronicon is no place for a dried toad.”
“Better a dried toad than a wet one,” Joliffe pointed out. “Consider, too, that it cost me a right sum from the apothecary, when I could have had a live one free for the catching.”
“True, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to thank you for the dried one.”
“Better it was a dried one anyway,” Joliffe mused, “considering you threw it at me.”
“I would have thrown the Polychronicon at you, too, if it hadn’t been only borrowed.”
Joliffe shook his head in mock sorrow. “It’s a sad thing when mortal man is so adverse to one of God’s creatures.”
“Nor do I much like toads either,” Thamys said blandly.
They laughed together again. Joliffe had forgotten how easily he and Thamys had been friends—better friends than he had remembered, for them to take it up so readily from where they had left off.
Thamys nodded toward the gateway and its watching porter. “I’m not going to ask you in.”
Joliffe would have been surprised if he had and said, unoffended, “Better not to be seen with someone as riff-raff as me?”
“Precisely so,” Thamys agreed. “Though if anyone asked, I suppose I could always explain I wished to show you to my students as example of what happens to someone who deserts the scholar’s life for lesser ways.” Thamys shifted from the blandness that nearly always meant he was jesting, said crisply instead, “No, you idiot. I have to deliver this to Master Bryton and then ready lessons for tomorrow that I should have done yesterday. Where are you staying?”
“We’ve been taken on by a Master Penteney for the week.”
“Master Penteney the victualler?” Thamys asked.
“You know him?”
“Somewhat. A good man and something of a friend to St. Edmund’s. He gives us good consideration on what we buy from him. I’m to dine with some others at his house Wednesday evening.”
“Then you’ll be seeing me. We’re to perform for his guests that night.”
“Good then,” Thamys said with what looked real pleasure. “I’ll look forward to it.”
“Until then,” Joliffe said, beginning to draw away in parting, then thought to add, “Oh, by the way, if for some unlikely reason you hear me called by the name Southwell, don’t mind. It seems to be who I presently am.”
Thamys frowned. “Are you in trouble of some sort? Will I give away too much if I know you?”
“No. It’s nothing more than that when I met Master Basset, I wouldn’t tell him all my name at first. For the sport of it, he gave me one of his own choosing and ever since then gives me a different one now and again, as the fancy takes him.”
“I may like your Master Basset,” Thamys said, smiled farewell, and turned away into St. Edmund’s gateway with its paved courtyard with the usual long buildings of student rooms and lecture halls on either side, leaving Joliffe to go his own way.
Joliffe did, wondering as he went why Thamys had not asked why he had left Oxford as he had. Was it because he thought the business was Joliffe’s own and not his . . . or because he knew the reason?
Chapter 4
Joliffe reached the Penteneys’ in time to go into the house to supper with the other players. There in the great hall they were shown to a place near the low end of one of the two long tables that faced each other down the length of the hall for those of the household who were not serving the meal, while Master Penteney sat at the center of the table on the dais at the hall’s other end, able to overlook the lower tables. A round-faced, smiling woman who must be Mistress Penteney was seated beside him, with Simon next to her, then Lewis, then a somewhat younger fair-featured girl. To Master Penteney’s other side were Mistress Geva and Master Richard.
Joliffe sorted them to his satisfaction: Master and Mistress Penteney; and their son (their one son?) Master Richard and his wife; and Lewis and Simon Fairfield, Master Penteney’s wards. That left only the fair-featured girl unplaced. Was she a Fairfield or a Penteney or someone else altogether? Perhaps another profitable ward to Master Penteney?
Servants began to bring in food then and Joliffe lost interest in the high table. He could not see what was carried up the hall to the Penteneys, but what came his way among the lower servants was rabbit in a spiced sauce, a salad of greens, leeks, and garlic, and a date-laden cheesecake, all of it cooked well, nothing scanted or burned or underdone, and all of it in generous portions. Joliffe said something to the household man on his right about how the eating looked to be good here, and the man readily agreed, “Aye. There’s no stinting in this house. They’re a good master and mistress, are the Penteneys.”
“They’ve just the one son?” Joliffe asked.
“Master Richard, aye. There’s nothing to be said against him either. He has his father’s head and enough of his mother’s heart to do him good.”
“I’ve met him and his wife. Mistress Geva, is she?”
“That’s her. Mistress Geva. She does well enough, too. Given us a grandson, she has. Master Giles. It goes hard with her, though, I’ve heard some of the women say, her not to have place of her own but being under Mistress Penteney’s sway. Still, she’s young. Her time will come.”
Joliffe had learned early on from Basset that the better a player knew a household, the better was his chance of doing well in it, and since this fellow seemed ready to talk, he tried. “I’ve talked with Master Fairfield and Master Simon, too.”
The man, having just spooned a piece of rabbit and sauce into his mouth, nodded while he chewed, swallowed, and said, “Same as family, they are. Grew up here after their father died and Master Penteney got their wardships and all. Master Simon likes books out of the ordinary but is good enough. It’s pity he’s not the heir, but there it is. When you get used to Master Fairfield, he’s none so bad either. Wouldn’t want that Matthew’s job, though.”
Making busy with cutting a piece of rabbit to stir into the sauce, Joliffe murmured, “I’m surprised, though, Master Fairfield hasn’t been set aside in favor of his brother.”
“There’s many as is surprised by that.” The man was cutting his own share of rabbit into smaller bits and so had chance to talk but that was all he said.
Joliffe, though, had been thinking things through in his walk and ventured, “Is it because if Master Simon was heir, when he came of age he’d take over his properties and all? With Lewis as heir, it’s likely, isn’t it, Master Penteney will keep control of everything?”
The man favored him with a sharp, approving look and agreed, “Aye. This way, look you, he’ll not lose by having kept such good care of him all this time, see.”
He knifed a bit of rabbit into his mouth and Joliffe took the chance to say, “Sounds good sense to me. Now, who’s the girl sitting next to Lewis?”
“Kathryn Penteney, aye,” the man answered around his mouthful “Master’s daughter. Going to be
betrothed . . .”
The woman on the man’s other side jostled his arm, wanting him to pass over the tall mug of ale they were sharing, and Piers on Joliffe’s other side began to pester for Joliffe’s share of cheesecake.
Their lengthy debate over why Joliffe was not going to give it to him saw them through to the meal’s end and then, during the general upheaval of servants starting to clear away the meal’s dishes and table linens so other servants could take the tables down and out of the way, Basset gave the word and the players slipped together out of the hall, back to the yard and away to the barn. If they lingered in the hall there was likelihood someone among the household folk would think that since they were players they should play something. Then there would be hard feelings on the household side if they did not, and hard feelings on their own if they did. That made it easiest just to leave, but as soon as they were back at the barn, Ellis said, “Who’s for going out for a drink?”
“Plans first. Ale later,” Basset said. “It’s time we talk about this week.”
“Money first, ale later, plans tomorrow?” Ellis suggested hopefully; but when Basset shook his head against that, he sat down on a cushion beside where there would have been a fire if they’d had one and said on a martyred sigh, “Where’s the horse, Piers?”
Piers was already fetching the thing from the small chest beside the cart where his own things were kept. The horse had started as a piece of beechwood picked up at the edge of a clearing where they’d camped last week. Piers had claimed its rough shape was something like a horse—“If you’ve had enough to drink or a cant-eye,” Joliffe had said unhelpfully—but it looked much more like one now that Ellis had been whittling at it a few evenings. It would be a warhorse, Piers had decided. “Then next you can make a knight to ride it and then we’ll do like we did before.”
Which did not mean Piers would play with it. Joliffe could not recall when last he had seen Piers play with a toy, not counting the rag doll he dangled in the St. Ursula play when he was supposed to be a sweet little girl saved by St. Ursula from an evil stepmother’s plan to kill her. Joliffe’s own thought was that if the little girl was anything like Piers really was, it was the stepmother who would likely have needed rescuing, but no one would let him rewrite the play in her favor.
As for the wooden horse, if things went the way they had other times with other bits of wood, Ellis would make what Piers told him to make and it would be quite good because Ellis was good with his hands that way. Then Piers would paint whatever was made with some of the paint kept for touching up the painted cloths that mostly dressed their playing places, and then he would sell it to someone—a mother, a peddler, a shopkeeper, whoever seemed likely to pay the most. Then he’d keep all the money for himself and Ellis would let him because Ellis was besotted with Rose and happy to make her son happy. For all the good it did him. Despite Piers’s father had gone his own way before Joliffe ever joined the company, with never word heard from him since, Rose held that until she knew differently she had to believe she was still married and therefore there could be nothing between her and Ellis except friendship or else adultery.
Bitter though that was to him, Ellis accepted it because, as he’d said once to Joliffe when they were swaying home from a tavern together and there was no one else to hear it, “She’s right, so what else can I do?”
“Leave her?” Joliffe had suggested, though Basset would have flayed him if he’d heard. By that time, after the disaster, they had been barely enough to be a company as it was. “Go find someone else?”
“Can’t.” Ellis had shaken his head, staggered sideways, righted himself, and said, throwing an arm around Joliffe’s shoulders, a thing he would never have done if sober, “It’s that I love her, you see. I love her.”
He’d gone on tearful about his love the rest of the way back to camp, until Joliffe, not so drunk, had dug an elbow into his ribs and told him to shut up.
“But I love her,” Ellis had insisted.
“So I gather. But you’ll wake Piers if you keep on about it and then, love or not, she’ll skin you.”
“And well I deserve it, tormenting her with my love. Tormenting her . . .”
Joliffe had given him to understand that if he didn’t shut up, he’d be the one who was tormented and not with love but a pail of cold water over his head and a solid kick where it’d do the most good. Ellis had settled to mournful but safe muttering.
Not that he was always without comfort. Sometimes, out of her own need or Ellis’s—or both—Rose gave way and for a night, sometimes two, it was as it should have been between them, until her conscience took hold and she drew away again. She would make confession then as soon as a priest or friar could be found and do penance for her sin, made the heavier because Ellis, grim and short-tempered for days afterwards, refused both confession and penance, darkly insistent there was no sin in them being together and that penitent was the last thing he was.
While the cycle was at its worst between them, not only Joliffe but Basset and even Piers carefully kept from jarring Ellis until the darkness passed, its end usually announced by Ellis demanding why everyone was so brooding, had he missed some trouble they all knew about but he didn’t?
At present they were a few weeks past the last time and everything was peaceable for now. While Basset sat himself down on his cushion and readied himself for talk, Ellis set to carving on the horse, with Piers leaning against his shoulder to watch and Rose quietly listening from where she sat on her hay-piled bed. Joliffe sat beside the cart, leaning back against a wheel, ready to prop his head against the spokes and drowse if talk went on too long.
Basset started off briskly enough anyway, saying, “Foremost of everything this week, we have to be sure as possible of the Abraham and Isaac. First thing come the morning, before breakfast even, we’ll run through our lines.”
“For Christ’s sake . . .” Ellis started in protest.
“Precisely,” Basset said. “For Christ’s sake we want this to be as good as can be. Then we owe the Penteneys a play and we want to make it a good one in return for all that Master Penteney is doing for us. So we have to decide what we’ll do and rehearse it, too.”
Ellis groaned and Joliffe could have echoed him but didn’t, just put his head back against the wheel and looked up at the broad barn rafters disappearing into shadows while he waited for more.
“Then there’s Lewis to keep pleased.”
Ellis did not even bother to groan, just shook his head and kept on carving.
“Piers,” said Basset, “if we put on The Steward and the Devil for the Penteneys—not for Wednesday night when there’ll be the feast and fine company, but tomorrow maybe, for just the household—do you think Lewis could be a devil with you in it?”
Ellis gave a disbelieving croak and stopped carving to look at Basset, apparently expecting to see other signs he’d lost his mind. Even Rose frowned slightly. Joliffe just waited, somewhat interested.
“No lines,” Basset went on. “Just capering with you on the stage. Could he do that, do you think?”
“Aye, he could do that,” Piers said, poking Ellis to set him carving again. “Lewis isn’t stupid. He’s just . . .” he made a face, looking for the word, “. . . simple.”
Ellis, who had started to carve again, stopped and cocked his head around, eye to eye with Piers. “You understand the difference there?”
“Aye,” Piers said with the patience of someone much put upon by lesser folk. “It’s like there’s not as many wits in his head as other people have, but what he has he makes good use of. Not like some who have all their wits and don’t half use them. Like Joliffe.”
“Best use your wits to curb your tongue or there’ll be burrs under your blanket by morning,” Joliffe said without heat. Burrs in the bed were a constant threat between Piers and him. Once Piers had even done it. But only once, because in return Joliffe had put burrs in the toes of Piers’s hosen. Working them to the bottom of the hosen’s feet
had been tedious, but Piers’s yelp when his toes met them and the grumbling he had done while working them out—with bits left behind to bother him through a few days afterward—had made it worth the while. Since then burrs had remained a threat, not a practice, and Piers made a face at him while Rose asked, keeping to Lewis, “Will his folk let him? Be in a play, I mean.”
“We’ll have to ask,” Basset answered. “I doubt there’s harm in asking and I’m willing to warrant they will. His man Matthew seemed to have no trouble with the thought, anyway.”
Ellis sighed and went back to his carving. “Ask away. It can’t hurt.”
Rose and Joliffe both nodded agreement.
They talked a while more, and the choice for Wednesday’s play came down to The Pride of Life, one of their best. It was more work than they truly wanted to do, with Corpus Christi the next day and the need to have the Abraham and Isaac as perfect as might be for it, but neither did they want to cheat Master Penteney.
“Besides,” said Basset, “it won’t hurt to do our best in front of Lord and Lady Lovell either, let alone whoever else may be there. But it’s been a while since we’ve done it, so best we run its lines tomorrow morning even before Abraham and Isaac.”
That brought groans from Ellis and Joliffe both: The Pride of Life was longer by far than Abraham and Isaac. But groan was all they did because Basset was right; it had been some few months since they had done it and the sooner they found out what they had forgotten, the better.
Dusk was thickening into dark now. Summer nights were short, there was small point in wasting candles to light them when sleep would be a better way to spend the time, and at Basset’s word, they made ready to go to bed, Joliffe finding out just how tired he was now he had stopped moving. It seemed to be the same way with the others; even Ellis was forgetful of his ale-thirst and rolled into his bed willingly enough, with very little restless rustling from anyone before sleep soundly took them.
Joliffe awoke in darkness with no way to tell what the hour might be, but when he rolled his head sideways and looked at the gap around the barn’s door, the line of paling gray in the darkness told him the night was nearly done. No one else was stirring, though, and seeing no need to be the first, he settled more deeply into the straw with quite an unreasonable sense of holiday, despite that holiday was likely the last thing the next few days were going to be. Not with an extra performance of The Steward and the Devil if it happened Lewis would be allowed to do it, and The Pride of Life to sharpen up, and Abraham and Isaac to finish perfecting, along with need to be sure all was well with everything they would wear and use for those plays and making right anything that was not.
A Play of Isaac Page 5