“Our hearts are gladdened that you approve,” Joliffe said with a mocking bow from where he sat.
Ellis suggested Piers could put his approval and his head into the water bucket and keep them there.
“Should you run it again?” Rose suggested.
They were spared saying what they thought of running it again by Basset’s return. There was a fine glow of pleasure on him that made Ellis say, before Joliffe could, “The good priest was kind with some rather good wine?”
“The wine was indeed good and he was indeed surprisingly kind,” Basset said. “It seems our vicar has a fondness for plays and is vastly looking forward to ours come Corpus Christi.”
Unimpressed by that, Rose asked, “You made agreement with him on payment?”
“There was talk that he needn’t pay us so much, since we weren’t having to pay lodging this week . . .” Rose drew in a sharp breath and Basset finished hurriedly, “. . . but we talked it around to where we’d started from and all’s settled. Guess who I met on the way back?”
“Trouble, if I know you,” Rose said.
“Jack Melton.”
Ellis slapped his hands down on his knees. “Melton! We haven’t crossed ways with him since that Midsummer gathering, what, two years back? How’s it going for him?”
“His company is doing The Birth of Christ at All Saints. That’s after us. We’ll be able to see them, like.”
“Hai, Piers.” Ellis reached out to punch his arm playfully. “Wasn’t there a sweet-faced girl you liked with them?”
“No,” Piers said with scorn. “There wasn’t.” And punched him back, less playfully.
“We’re to all meet at the Black Bull tonight after supper,” Basset said. “Talk over times, trade word about other companies . . .”
“Spend money we haven’t earned yet,” Rose said, threading a needle with unnecessary viciousness.
Ellis jerked his head for Piers to shift out of his way and moved over to sit beside her. Cautious because of the needle, he put an arm around her waist and, when she made no jab at him, gave her a small squeeze and said, “We’ve money, love. There’s not a farthing been spent from yesterday’s take and no necessities to spend it on all this week. What harm to have a little sport with it?”
Rose laid her sewing and her hands in her lap. “It’s not a ‘little’ sport I’m worried over. What I worry over is the ‘ale for everybody in the place’ kind of sport.” But she was jesting at him about it. Or half jesting. Willing to be persuaded, anyway, and she said past him to her father, “I’ll tell you what. It’s time we counted out shares from yesterday’s. Do it, and when you and Ellis have put yours into my keeping, I’ll give you each a penny for tonight. One each and no more.”
“Ah, sweetling,” Ellis started, clearly purposing to woo her out of more.
She cocked an eye at him. He silenced and Basset, knowing he’d not get a better deal without a quarrel, pulled a pouch out of his purse.
“We count,” he said.
They did, on a place smoothed in the dirt, and better than her word, after writing their shares into the small scroll she kept for it, Rose gave two pence apiece to Basset and Ellis from their shares, a half-penny to Piers from his and a penny to herself from hers, pushed Joliffe’s coins toward him and scooped the rest into the company pouch. Joliffe, as always, took out a few of his own pence and pushed the others over to her, to be kept with the rest.
“Now there’s unfair,” Ellis protested, as always. “Why give him chance to keep his and not me?”
“Because he’s halfway to having the sense of a goose about money in hand and you’re not,” Rose returned, tucking the pouch into her belt-hung purse, under her apron, to be hidden later in the cart.
Lewis showed up not long after that, faithfully followed by Matthew. To keep him happy they ran the devils’ part of his play twice through, before Matthew said it was time Lewis went to wash for supper.
“Tomorrow you’ll wear your tail,” Basset promised and Lewis went off happily.
While Rose was scrubbing around Piers’s neck, with a firm grip on his shoulder and no pity, Joliffe offered, despite it was her turn, to stay with the cart through supper since the promised padlock had not yet shown itself.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because I know you’ll talk whoever you need to into letting you bring my share back and I’ll probably get more that way.”
“On the other hand, I may just talk her into letting you starve,” said Ellis.
“On the other hand I may just offer the both of you to the cook for stew tomorrow,” Rose returned. “Yes, I’ll fetch you food back if you want to stay here.”
As usual, no one thought twice about him wanting only his own company; nor did anyone probably think at all about Rose turning back as they were going out of the barn, taking off her apron and calling out to Joliffe to come take it. He did, unsurprised as he took it from her to feel the weight of the coin pouch hidden in its folds. He gave no sign, merely leaned against the barn door, watching until they were all into the hall and the two men crossing from the stable were gone in after them and the yard was empty of anyone. Only then, leaving the apron on Rose’s cushion, did he take the pouch—pleased with the weight of it in his hand—and step up into the cart, make his way around and over the hampers they’d not bothered to unload, and finally crouched among them just behind the driver’s seat. The seat was made of seemingly a single thick slab of wood, but he felt along the slab’s bottom until he found the slit there, big enough for him to put two fingernails in. Pushing carefully, he was able to slide aside the panel set so cunningly in grooves that anyone who did not know about it would need to have the seat out and upside down in full daylight to know it was there.
Rose had said when showing the hiding place to Joliffe, “He’s good with wood, is that man I married. That I’ll say for him. I had him make this so I’d have a secret place for things. I’ve not ever even told Basset. It’s so no one can come at our money except me, and now you.”
“Why me?” Joliffe had asked, more in protest than pleasure.
“What if I drop dead? Better someone knows where our money is than only me.”
“Why not trust Basset?”
“Because if it comes to buying a play or some other thing he thinks might help our playing, he’ll spend all we have without half thinking whether he’s paying too much or whether we really need it or that there might be dire need of money to hand somewhere down the road. You know that.”
Joliffe also knew better than to ask why not Ellis. The one thing he doubted Rose would ever do again was trust a man she deeply loved; her judgment had been too deeply betrayed by Piers’s father. Instead he had said, “So don’t trust Basset. But why trust me?”
Rose had smiled a grim little smile at him and said, “Because you’re just idiot enough to be honorable.”
He had not much liked hearing that, not liked having her know him so well, because, yes, he was just idiot enough not to betray a trust if he could help it. Aside from that, he loved the game they had between them—of her sometimes giving him their money to be hidden or, other times, having him be the one to secretly bring it out and slip it to her, so that neither Basset nor Ellis had yet figured out how she managed to keep their money hidden from them.
With most of the money safely put into the leather pouch waiting in the hiding hole, and the panel carefully closed, Joliffe crawled back out of the cart, put the other pouch back among the folds of Rose’s apron, and settled down on a cushion with his back against one of the hampers, his legs stretched out in front him with ankles crossed, ready to have the evening go as simply as the day had. Given the tangles into which life could twist itself, a simple day like today, full of straight-forward work and no problems, was as near to wealthy as he ever expected to come, and he was watching sparrows flitting among the rafters and not thinking about anything much at all when, true to expectation, Rose came back with a goodly portion of supper fo
r him. He did not rise, just smiled up at her and thanked her as she set the tray down beside him. A padlock and its key were lying beside the thick, broad slice of meat pie and the berry tart in a bowl of cream, and as Rose straightened to stand over him, hands on hips, she said, “We can lock up now, with no need to keep watch, so what about this going out to the tavern? Basset says you have one of your black humours on you and will want to stay here. Do you?”
“My humour is more the shining blue of a summer day’s clear sky,” Joliffe said.
“There is no blue humour,” Rose pointed out. “You can have black, yellow, red or . . . What would phlegm be? Gray? White? You cannot have blue.”
The four humours ruled the health and passions of human bodies: the black bile of the melancholic; the yellow bile of the choleric; the hot red blood of the sanguine; the cold, pale phlegm of the phlegmatic. If the humours were in good balance, all was well. If out of balance, they made for disease of body and mind. But Joliffe gestured her protest aside with, “It’s an oversight on the part of physicians throughout history. There is a sky-blue humour and I am filled with it.”
Rose heaved an impatient sigh at him. “Are you staying or going? Basset is having a few words with Master Penteney. The others are waiting at the gate.”
“I’m by all means staying.” Because he had not liked Jack Melton the other times they had met. As Basset well knew. Joliffe waved a hand at her. “Go and disport yourselves. I’ll tend to my own business here.”
“Tend to your lines in Pride,” Rose said, to remind him all wasn’t as well with the world as he might think, and left.
Too used to her ways to be bothered at all, Joliffe took his time over the food. It was both plentiful and good which spoke well of Mistress Penteney’s housekeeping. She did not do the cooking herself but surely she had chosen and oversaw whoever was the cook and she likewise determined what was cooked and how it was apportioned, and he thought he might fall in love with her on account of the meat pie alone, never mind the berry tart in its cream.
Food finished, a long drink of ale taken to wash it all down, and the bowl cleaned and set by to be returned to the hall, he took out The Pride of Life’s playbook and, not to suit Rose but because he had intended to, went twice over his lines. By the time the light was faded enough that reading was passing from difficult to impossible, he knew both his part and Ellis’s well enough to count on making fair fun of Ellis tomorrow when they practiced.
The playbook put away, he strolled to the barn door again and stood looking out, stretching his back and considering what to do next. It was too early to sleep and he was weary of words, spoken or read, and even if he had felt like going to some tavern after all and locked the barn behind him, there was no spare key to the padlock, no way for the others to get back in if they returned before he did. That was no problem, though, since he did not feel like being in company of any kind. Nor did he look in any danger of having any here, that was sure. On a warm summer’s evening of a holiday week, with the day’s work done and sports of one kind and another to be had all over Oxford, no one seemed to have lingered around the yard for someone to find something for them to do. The place had an air of pleasant desertion. Except for . . .
Joliffe cocked his head, listening to laughter from beyond the line of sheds, muffled by them but seeming to come from behind the house.
Deciding he could leave the cart to itself for a while, he pulled the barn door shut without padlocking it and crossed the few open yards between the barn and the sheds to the narrow gap out of which Piers and Lewis had come this morning. The sheds were made with close-joined plank walls instead of wattle-and-daub, and the roofs were of slate instead of simply thatch. All of that and the locks on every door testified to the worth of whatever goods and foodstuffs Master Penteney kept stored here. Since he was a victualler and therefore dealt in a variety of things, not all of them on the hoof, that was very reasonable and expected. What was not reasonable—and still in Joliffe’s mind—was that moment of understanding between him and Basset when they first met. They were two men with nothing alike in their lives except they were something of the same age. Where or how had they come to know something about each other that made them want to keep secret they knew each other at all?
Tiredness and satisfaction yesterday and work today had kept Joliffe from wondering about that, but the wondering came back now as he went into the gap between the sheds. He knew nothing about Master Penteney beyond these two days but the man looked so set and settled into his life that it was hard to think he had ever been other than he was. And Basset, on his side, had the thorough seeming of someone born under a player’s cart and never away from it since then. But Joliffe had that same seeming, he knew, and for himself at least, it was not the truth. So Basset’s seeming could likewise be not the truth. And Master Penteney’s seeming, too.
But since none of that was something about which he could question Basset—and certainly not Master Penteney—he shoved his wondering away as useless.
The gap proved to be a short, narrow alleyway, with at its farther end a closed gate between the sheds’ back walls and too high to see over. The laughter that had drawn him came from beyond it, and Joliffe, not in the least bothered to be spying, put his eyes to the thin opening between the gate’s latch-edge and the gatepost. On the gate’s other side was the garden he had seen from Master Penteney’s study yesterday. From what he could see now by shifting a little, he could guess it stretched along the back of the house and sheds to where a high wall cut it off from the lane behind the barn. He could glimpse a gravelled path and flower beds but what he mostly saw was a stretch of the close-cut green grass with three birch trees in the middle, their shade and the round bench set among them surely making a pleasant place to be through much of a summer’s day. Even now, in the thick gold light of the westering sun, the low-swept branches gave a flickering shade, and Mistress Penteney and her daughter-in-law were sitting there, with sewing in their laps but watching their husbands and Simon, Lewis, Kathryn, and a very little boy playing catch-and-chase around the garden with a large canvas ball. The ball had to be lightly stuffed, to judge how even the little boy could lift it, big as his head though it was, and throw it, albeit he sat down on his bottom thereafter and had to scramble up, laughing, to run after Simon who had caught it and was trying to dodge being tagged by everyone else, only at the last moment before Master Penteney laid hands on him throwing the ball to Kathryn who squealed with delight and horror and raced to put her mother and Geva between her and everyone else until—as her brother and father came around for her from both sides—she threw the ball at Lewis who caught it surprisingly well but promptly threw it at Master Penteney too wide aside for him to catch it so that there was an immediate free-for-all of everyone after it at once, with Mistress Penteney and Geva laughing so hard that Mistress Penteney was wiping tears from her eyes and Geva had wrapped her arms around her hurting sides.
Joliffe, watching unwatched, smiled at their pleasure, at first surprised by, then ignoring the unexpected pang in him that was not jealousy but sharp awareness of how there had been a time when something like that much happiness with family had been a possibility for him. Just as John Thamys yesterday had been a reminder of yet another way he could have taken his life instead of the way he had. But everyone’s life always came down to choices. He was living out his choices and still preferred them to the ones he might have made and nonetheless was still smiling at the Penteneys’ pleasure as he drew back from the gate and returned to the barn.
He was stretched out on his pallet, a pillow comfortably under his head but no need for a blanket yet, the evening still warm though the sun was finally down, when Basset came into the barn, carrying a sleeping Piers. Joliffe, who had drifted to somewhere between thinking and dozing off, roused and rolled onto his side, propping up on one elbow to ask, “Just you and Piers?”
“Just us,” Basset said softly, laying the boy down on his bed. Piers did not waken, me
rely sighed happily, rolled onto his side, and curled up into deeper sleep.
“Talked somebody into playing nine-penny merels with him, did he?” Joliffe said, not trusting Piers’s happiness even in sleep.
“He did.” Basset straightened with a sigh of his own and pressed his hands to the small of his back. “He’s getting too big and I’m getting too old to be hauling him about like this much longer. He’s going to have to use his own feet after this to get home.”
“Did he take them for much?”
“Enough but not too much. Ever moderate when it counts, is the boy.”
Moderate in the hope of taking them again a few more times if he had the chance, before they caught on that nobody ever won against Piers at nine-penny merals except when he let them. Come to that, nobody won against him at quite a few other games either. Joliffe was sure that if all else failed him, Piers could make his living as gambler, at least while he was still young and golden-haired and looked like a guileless cherub. After he outgrew that, he might find the going a little harder. Or then again, being Piers, he might not.
Joliffe thought of asking Basset how things had gone with the other players but that was something that could keep until morning. He’d rather sleep now and Basset had probably been the one to bring Piers home because he was ready to be a-bed himself.
First, though, instead of undressing to lie down, Basset rolled his shoulders as if to ease them and said, “I think I’ll take a turn around the yard to work the twitches out, un-fume my head a little. I’ll be back.”
Already settled to his pillow again, Joliffe made a sound to say he had heard and in very few moments he would have been asleep, but as Basset went out, partly closing the barn door behind him with a soft creak, his eyes flew open and he lay staring into the dark. And not because of the door.
If Basset had said nothing, had simply gone out, Joliffe would have had no second thought about it at all. But to un-fume his head a little? All Basset ever wanted to do when he was fumed with drink was go to bed. Joliffe rolled off his own bed, stood up, and silent on bare feet, went to the door. It still stood half-open, with no need for him to creak it on its hinges. Easing his head around its edge, he saw Basset—or rather the black shape of him in the blue starlight—just as it merged with the shadows of the alley between the two sheds, the same way Joliffe had gone earlier. Joliffe slid out the barn door and sideways and, aware he could be seen in the naked starlight should Basset happen to look back, kept in the thicker darkness of the barn’s eave-shadow until he was past where anyone in the alley itself could see him unless looking out from just inside it. Basset had been moving with enough purpose to suggest he should be more than a few paces along it by now, able to see only a little of the empty yard if he looked back, not Joliffe crossing to the shadow of the nearer shed.
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