Lewis waved and called back. “Giles! I can’t come. She has my tail.”
The boy laughed as Basset gave his mother a bow and assured her that care was being taken.
Mistress Geva, who seemed no more certain how players should be dealt with than she had on Sunday, was apparently unsettled by Basset’s courtesy to her, and said stiffly, “Well. Just see it is.” She looked around as if for something else to say, did not find it, and with her chin a little jutted in the air, left the hall.
“Bitch,” muttered Ellis.
“Or maybe just very unhappy.” said Joliffe.
“About what? Living easy and not having much to do?”
“Living in someone else’s household with nothing to do but what she’s told?”
Ellis grimaced, seeing what he meant.
They let Lewis caper two more times before Basset traded looks with Matthew and said, “Well, that’s enough for now, I think, Master Fairfield. You have it to perfection and we, alas, are growing tired.”
“Once more?” Lewis begged.
Matthew, coming forward, said, “They must needs rest. If you tire them out too much, they’ll be no good tonight or tomorrow at the feast.”
“Rest, rest, rest,” Lewis muttered, but he let Rose help him out of his tunic, and when Kathyrn came into the hall he called happily to her, “I’ve been a good devil!”
“I don’t doubt it,” she answered, smiling.
Joliffe’s assessing look at her was different than it had been, now he knew she was meant for Lewis. She was somewhat young for marrying but not by much. Others, both girls and boys, were married off younger than she was for the sake of profit. But had anyone considered what might happen if she came to full womanhood still bound to a husband who was, to most intents and possibly purposes, forever a child? However it went between them in bed, their companionship would always depend on her care of him, with never an equal meeting of minds or hearts. Or if no one else had considered it, had she?
Presently anyway, she was saying to Basset with her pretty smile and far more ease than Mistress Geva, “Please you, my mother said I was to ask if the servants could ready the hall for dinner now.”
Bowing with an excessive flourish that made Kathryn laugh the way he had meant it to, Basset said, “It is our pleasure to oblige. I pray you tell your lady mother from me that Master Fairfield is so excellent at his work that we need do no more with him this afternoon.”
Lewis started to protest but Kathyrn said to him firmly, “You know she wouldn’t let you anyway,” and held out her hand. “Come. She’ll want to hear what you’ve been doing.”
“Come, come, come,” said Lewis disgustedly, but he went with her, Matthew following them out of the hall.
After an ample dinner and their return to the barn, Basset, with an unwonted inclination toward repose, said that he thought he would nap a while. “With maybe we rehearse Pride afterwards,” he added.
Joliffe waited until he had laid down and shut his eyes before taking Ellis aside and saying, too low-voiced to disturb Basset, “I think I’ll away to see how Tisbe is doing.”
“Mind you’re back before he wakes,” Ellis warned.
“But if I’m not, we won’t have to run Pride again, will we?”
Ellis brightened. “Have as long a walk as you like. No need to hurry back. None at all.”
“I want to come,” said Piers, nudging at Joliffe’s elbow.
“If Joliffe says you may,” Ellis said.
“And your mother,” Joliffe added.
Rose gave her leave. Joliffe complained it wasn’t fair that because they needed Piers for the plays this week he’d have to bring him back alive no matter how much a pain he was. Piers, used to being complained of, already had his hat on and was heading out the door as Joliffe added, “Of course we could always hire Lewis, I suppose.”
Piers turned back long enough to say, “Or I could come back without you, and we could hire Lewis to take your place. It wouldn’t make much difference,” then ducked outside as Joliffe set off after him.
They made a dodge and tag game of it out the rear gate and for a way along the lane before Joliffe bothered to catch him with an arm around his waist and a hand free to pull Pier’s hat over his eyes.
“Hai!” Piers protested. “My feather!”
His hat’s bright green feather from a popinjay’s tail had been given to him by a lady at a manor where they had played last autumn. She had been charmed by his sweet face and fair curls, been more charmed by the grateful kiss he gave her on the cheek and had given him a coin to go with it. He had refused to share the coin and had Rose fasten the feather to his hat, been careful of it all winter, and now wriggled free of Joliffe and snatched off his hat to see if there was damage. Joliffe had been careful of it, and assured his feather was unharmed, Piers put the hat back on and started to ask questions as they walked.
Joliffe had never decided whether Piers’s questions were a way to be sure someone was paying him heed or because he really wanted to know about whatever he was asking, but at least they were rarely dull. Today his questions were about Master Penteney and how he had come to be so rich. Joliffe explained as best he could what it was to be a victualler, and at the end, after silently thinking on it a while, Piers said, “Then he does no work with his hands himself. He gathers in what other men do and has the money from selling it to other people who’ll have to do the work with it.”
“The men he buys from have his money for their work, and a good many of the men he sells to probably make money from what they buy from him. The money doesn’t all go one way.”
“The thing is, he doesn’t have to do any heavy work, doesn’t have to put his back into anything,” Piers said.
“He has to put his brain into it,” Joliffe pointed out.
“I can do that,” Piers said, plainly quite taken with the possibility of using just his brain and not his back to make a living. “Where we’re going is where he keeps cattle and such until he can sell them to butchers and all, right?”
“You have it.”
“But he doesn’t own much land himself?”
“Maybe little more than what we’ll see today.” But the Fairfield properties might include lands, making them even more worth his while to keep.
“But he has the big house and all. I bet the people he buys from don’t have as big a house.”
“Some might. As well as from lesser folk, he likely buys from lords’ stewards making money for their lords by selling surplus stock.”
Piers was silent a while, swishing a stick through the branches of the hedge as they walked along, before he said, “I wonder if I could marry that Kathyrn instead of Lewis?”
“Where did you hear of that?” Joliffe asked.
“Lewis told me. He likes that he’s going to marry her. He says wives have to do what husbands tell them, so she won’t be able to give him orders any more.”
Joliffe did not point out the fallacy of that, only suggested dryly, “Wait to marry her yourself until she’s his widow. She’ll be richer then.”
Piers brightened. “That’s a good thought. I’ll be older then, too.” He frowned up at Joliffe. “You aren’t going to try for her yourself, are you? I thought of her first.”
“No. I promise I’ll leave her to you,” Joliffe said, not a difficult promise since they both had as much chance of hitting the sun with a snowball as wedding a rich widow.
Head down, now swishing his stick through the grass beside the road, Piers was silent again before asking in a smaller voice, “Is Lewis likely to die soon?”
Surprised by both Piers’s quietness and the question, Joliffe said too lightly, “We’re all going to die.”
Piers looked at him with the scorn that deserved, and Joliffe answered him more fairly, matching his quiet, “Yes, he very likely is. They don’t usually last even as long as this, his sort.”
Piers went back to whipping the grasses, considering that for a while before saying, �
��I just hope he doesn’t while we’re here. I like him.”
“Or before he’s married to Kathyrn and can make her a rich widow?”
Piers brightened. “That, too.”
They walked on, Piers asking more questions about other things, but while answering them, Joliffe wondered how they all, even Piers, could talk so easily of Lewis being dead. He was an idiot, surely, born that way and never going to better, but Joliffe had known full-witted people with less warmth for life than Lewis had, full-witted people who used too little of their wits where Lewis used all he had. Who was to say which was more worthy in God’s sight—someone who wasted God’s gifts or someone who used what he had to the fullest that he could?
When they came into the yard among the byres and barns, Master Glover was leaning on the gate to the horse pasture, watching the horses graze. He looked around when Joliffe and Piers joined him and gave them greeting but did not shift. Joliffe leaned his crossed arms on the top rail beside him and said. “A peaceful life.”
“Just now it is,” Master Glover answered. “There’ll be something come up before I’ve turned around, likely. Especially now I’ve had to send one of my men to Master Penteney’s place in town to help ready for his lordly guests and two that are wanting to be away to whatever is happening in town as often as not.”
Piers had been peering through the rails of the gate but now asked if he could look around. Master Glover said he could, adding. “Just don’t touch or shift things, mind you.”
Piers went off. Tisbe was drifting and grazing among the other horses as contentedly as any of them. Joliffe said something about her looking fit and settled in.
“She’s made no trouble,” Master Glover said. “She’s a quiet one.”
“She’s that,” Joliffe agreed.
“How are things going for you there at Master Penteney’s?”
“Well enough. No trouble.”
“You’ll be moving on after Thursday, like?”
“That’s what we plan. Will you be free from here to come into town for the plays on Corpus Christi?”
“I don’t much hold with plays,” Master Glover said easily. “Or crowds. I like it here, where it’s peaceful.”
They made a little more talk, mostly about whether this summer would end up as wet as the last had been, before Joliffe looked around for Piers and didn’t see him.
“Went off around the end of the barn,” Master Glover said, pointing. “Not a paternoster ago. Toward the goose marsh, though I’ve no geese here until more nigh Michaelmas.”
“A marsh,” Joliffe said, pushing off from the gate. “He’ll mire himself to his knees if I know him, and his mother will kill us both.”
“Your wife?” Master Glover asked.
“No,” Joliffe said; but something in the way Master Glover had asked it had made him watchful and he saw the hardness of disapproval come into the man’s face so that he added with deliberate lightness, pretending he saw nothing, “Nor is Piers mine, thank all the saints. I only work for his grandfather.”
He wished Master Glover well and left him with that, unreasonably irked at him and irked at himself for being irked. There were always people who looked for what they saw as the worst in others. They couldn’t be cured of it and so, like the plague, they were best avoided when might be and thought about as little as possible the rest of the time. Better to think about finding Piers, which he did by going around the barn and through a gate into a pasture that sloped down from behind the barn and Master Glover’s house to obviously marshy ground along the stream that watered all the pastures.
Piers was already at the stream, poking with his stick at something in the water. Joliffe called him away, met him as he came, and steered him on across the pasture to a stile through the hedge and onto the road, thankful to see that he had had only time to muddy his shoes, not his hosen.
“If you’re lucky,” Joliffe told him, “the mud will dry and you can brush it off before your mother sees it.”
“We’re always getting muddy,” Piers protested. “It’s not trouble.”
He was right about the muddy. They walked too many miles on dirt roads not to get muddy when it rained or snowed; it was simply part of their life; but Joliffe said, “We’re trying to keep well-kept while we’re with well-kept people.”
“Why?” Piers demanded, offended.
“So they won’t find out we’re savages who eat small, wet-footed boys,” Joliffe snapped.
Piers laughed.
Chapter 8
The Penteney yard was busy when Joliffe and Piers returned to it. Where it was cobbled, men were sweeping the cobbles clean and where it was paved outside the front door women were scrubbing the paving stones.
Piers looked at the busyness and with the sure instinct of someone who objected to being scrubbed himself asked, “What’s all the cleaning for today? I thought it wasn’t until tomorrow Lord Lovell comes.”
“Better to start cleaning today. Less to do tomorrow,” Joliffe said.
With probably fear it would all give his mother thoughts about him, Piers said, “I’m going to see if Lewis is in the garden,” and sheered away in a dash toward the gap between the sheds. He paused to look back, to see if Joliffe was going to object, but Joliffe only shrugged at him and let him go on. It wouldn’t save him, Joliffe knew. Sooner or later Rose would catch up to him and he would be washed but at least Joliffe wouldn’t be the villain when it happened.
He went his own way, into the barn, to be greeted by Basset asking from where he sat on one of the cushions, “How goes it with Tisbe?” and Ellis saying as he picked up the water bucket, “Where’s the whelp?”
“Tisbe is doing so well she may be too fat to fit her harness when we’re ready to go,” Joliffe answered. “And the whelp has run off to see if Lewis is in the garden.”
Rose put her head out from the back of the cart. “Someone can fetch him, then. I want to clean him up for tonight. Joliffe, you had him last.”
Basset started a slow climb to his feet, stiff with sitting. “I’ll try to see Master Penteney now, before the afternoon’s any later.”
“What for?” Joliffe asked.
“About tonight. To be sure all’s set for how and when. You know.”
Rose put her head out of the cart again. “Best ask him about tomorrow, too, while you’ve the chance. Likely he’ll be too busy for us then. Haven’t you gone yet, Joliffe?”
“Just going.”
“Ellis, have you done what I asked yet?”
“Just about to,” Ellis protested. “Have a bit of mercy, woman.” But he and Rose were smiling at each other as he said it.
Joliffe left them to their smiling and Basset to see Master Penteney, and before he reached the garden gate could tell by the noisy laughter that Piers had found Lewis. Stopping in the gateway to see what was worth so much noise, he saw an elderly maidservant seated on the bench among the trees with sewing on her lap and Lewis hopping up and down beside her, chortling, “Cold, cold, cold!” at Piers crawling around one of the trees on his hands and knees.
Not minded to stop their game in the middle of it, Joliffe went aside along the path to a wooden bench set against the housewall, warm in the afternoon sunlight. A gray-and-black cat already curled up there opened one green eye at him to see if he was going to spoil things, but Joliffe held up his hands to show he meant only peace and sat down at the bench’s other end. The cat closed its eye and settled a little deeper into a comfort with which Joliffe silently agreed: there were few things better than sitting at ease in the soft summer sun of a quiet garden.
So long as there was not something better to be doing.
Joliffe smiled at the familiar restlessness of his own thought. Here and now was good but just a little farther down the road there might be something better. Or—at the least—something different. But for now he leaned back, head and shoulders against the house’s stone wall, and closed his eyes. Across the garden Lewis declared, “Warm! Warm! Warm!”
As he sat down, Joliffe had vaguely noted the window near him, had vaguely supposed it was the one in Master Penteney’s study from which he’d seen the garden when he and Basset first came here, and then forgotten it. Now a door closed sharply from inside, as if someone had contained an urge to slam it, and Master Penteney said with impatience and anger, “You’ve no business being here. That was agreed on from the first. From the very first. Why are you here?”
Joliffe half expected Basset to answer him but it was a voice he did not know that said back, “Agreements change.” Joliffe hated when someone put that much sneer into their words. “So do circumstances. There’s been trouble.”
“That’s not new. There’s always trouble,” Master Penteney snapped.
“He’s been jailed. He needs money. Pay over and I’ll get out.”
“I don’t ‘pay over’. I give. There’s a difference there you’d better remember, and the giving will stop if ever you show up here again for any reason. Nor do I want to know any more than what you’ve told me about what’s happening. Just have him send word when all’s well.” There was a pause. Joliffe supposed something was being done, but he heard nothing that told him what it was, only soon Master Penteney said, biting the words short, “There. That’s for love of my brother and no other reason. Remember that. How does he?”
“He lives. He does God’s work. That’s . . .”
A knock—at the door, Joliffe had to presume—was followed immediately by Richard Penteney saying, “Father, Basset wants . . .” before he broke off and started again, “I’m sorry. I thought you were alone. I’ll . . .”
“No need. Master Leonard is leaving,” Master Penteney said lightly, none of the anger of a few moments ago in his voice at all. He and Master Leonard made surprisingly polite farewells, with Master Leonard saying he would be in Oxford a while yet and Master Penteney saying perhaps they would meet again. It was all mellow, with not a snap or sneer between them, and then Master Leonard and Richard must have both gone out because at the soft sound of the door closing, Master Penteney said, “So, Tom, what do you think of that?”
A Play of Isaac Page 10