“You talked your way out of it.”
“We did. We swore Roger had never told us anything about the University seal or that he planned to disappear. We swore that the last time we saw him, we argued with him against lollardy while he argued for it, and we swore he’d never said anything about running off. We swore it to anyone and everyone who asked until finally they believed us—both the archbishop and Hal’s parents.”
That answered much but not all, and carefully Joliffe asked, “Then why this unwillingness now to have anyone know you two know each other, if you were cleared so completely then?”
“Because we’d lied,” Basset said flatly.
“Basset!”
“More than that, I think everyone fairly well knew we’d lied but they couldn’t prove it.”
“You mean you did know Roger was going to run.”
“More importantly, we knew more than we wanted to know about that damned University seal. We knew Roger had helped Master Payne do it. We didn’t want to know. The idiot told us. Worse than that, he told us how they had done it and what Payne was planning next. That was why Hal and I decided to lie and say we knew nothing about anything, because if once we admitted to knowing something, nobody would have left off until they had it all. If we were going to tell, we should have told it right off, at the first; but if we had, it might have meant Roger being found and caught. So we lied.”
“And your lies succeeded and it’s been, what, twenty-five years since then? You were cleared. The thing is over and done with and long since forgotten about.”
“We were cleared, yes, but we weren’t in the clear. The taint was there and it stayed. Roger was gone but we were still here—the boys who’d been questioned about heresy. Six months later there was still talk and people were still wary of us. Old Master Penteney had been trying to arrange marriages for his sons. Now Hal was sole heir to everything, but nobody was willing to marry a daughter into such a suspect family. His father finally had to deal through acquaintances all the way to Exeter to find someone who had a daughter they’d marry to Hal. About then was when I asked out of my apprenticeship. Old Master Penteney let me go so fast I was out the door and on my own within two days, with the understanding I’d take myself away from Oxford and stay away.”
“You haven’t, though.”
“It was years before I dared come back. Not until I’d heard old Penteney was dead and I was changed enough no one would likely match me with the stripling boy I’d been. But I still kept away from Hal. You see, old Master Penteney had warned me that once I was gone, he’d let it be known I had been cause of all the trouble with his sons. That he’d finally found me out and thrown me out.”
“You were the scapegoat. He put all the sins of the family on you to leave them clean.”
“It was the price for being freed from my apprenticeship. I accepted it because it was worth it. I’d never have been able to buy my way out any other way. Even so it’s always seemed best to stay away from Hal, for both our sakes. Us together would maybe remind people of what’s better unremembered. We aren’t so old that everyone has died off that ever knew about it. Like that fool in the street today. Fat-headed Adam we used to call him and he hasn’t changed. I knew him, even if he didn’t know me. If ever his memory was stirred awake, he’s just one of the people who would make talk that would do neither Hal nor me any good.”
“But you’ve stayed here at the Penteneys’ despite that.”
“Once we were here, it would have looked strange to back out, so Penteney and I have simply played it that we don’t know each other and I don’t doubt there would have been no trouble from it, except Hubert Leonard showed up and got himself murdered.”
“And left outside our door.”
“And that,” Basset agreed. “Nobody would have looked twice at us and we would have been gone tomorrow and no one the wiser that Penteney and I ever knew each other. But now we have to worry someone is going to look too closely at things we’d rather not have looked at and start thinking things we’d rather they didn’t think.”
“Except you didn’t kill Leonard, and I doubt Penteney did.”
“Neither of us did, no.”
“What Master Penteney has done is send his heretic brother money.”
Basset looked surprised. A little too surprised. “Send his brother money? For all these years? Don’t be daft.”
“I didn’t say anything about years,” Joliffe said dryly. “Why couldn’t it have been only once or twice? Except you know better.”
Basset mouthed a silent curse.
Joliffe persisted, “What I’ve guessed is that this Leonard didn’t come here out of nowhere, demanding money by pure happenstance. He knew something about Master Penteney and his brother and money. Now you’ve told me I was right and we can go on from there. Where is this Roger? Where’s he been all this time?”
“Joliffe, this is no business of yours.”
“It’s my business if you’re in danger because of it. Because you in danger puts all of us in danger.”
Basset held silent, considering the ground beside them rather than answering.
“Basset,” Joliffe said.
Without looking up, Basset said, “Roger is in Bohemia. With the heretic Master Payne. He goes by the name John Penning.”
“So all these years, Roger has been in Bohemia, keeping company with heretical Master Payne and demanding money from his brother.”
Basset looked up sharply. “No. Roger has never demanded or asked anything from Hal. After their father died, he let Hal know he was still alive. Penteney chose to send him money and has gone on sending it. In return he gets his brother’s messages of thanks and word that he’s still alive. That’s all.”
“How does he send it?” Since it was hardly something that could be done openly.
“By Lollards. From what Penteney told me—and he didn’t tell me much, I’m guessing some of this—there’s a net of heretics across Europe, working with each other, helping and hiding each other when there’s need, passing along information when they can.”
“Information and money.”
“And money.”
“But Master Penteney isn’t a Lollard himself? His only interest is in helping his brother?”
“Yes. But that’s meant he’s had to deal secretly with Lollards all these years. If ever that’s found out, he’s ruined.”
“So Leonard was here to pick up the present payment to Penteney’s brother and . . .”
“No.” Basset said. “Penteney isn’t fool enough to have any of this come close to here. He does it all when he’s away to other places about his usual business. He’s even dealt through Leonard before now, because Leonard was exactly what Penteney said he was—a Lollard agent. The thing is that Leonard knew better than to be here at all. Whatever he said, I’ll warrant he wasn’t here for Roger, he was here to force money for himself.”
And his being here had opened Penteney up to a danger he had been keeping distant all these years. That could have been reason enough for killing the man. But it was not a reason for bringing the body from wherever Leonard had been killed and leaving it lying in his own yard. That was someone else’s doing. Someone who knew about Penteney and his brother and wanted to make trouble. It was probably that someone who had killed Leonard, too. But why this someone had killed Leonard and why they wanted to make trouble for Master Penteney, Joliffe had not even a guess as yet.
What immediately mattered—and it was danger enough—was that someone very probably knew about Penteney’s present dealings with heretics.
“Maybe,” Joliffe said with a thought so sudden he said it aloud, “he was killed simply for being here.”
“Penteney didn’t kill him.” Basset said hotly.
“No, I know that. I mean, he was here trying to get the money from Penteney at an unsafe time and place. He can’t be the only Lollard in Oxford. Maybe one of them found out what he was up to, decided he’d put them all in danger by it,
and killed him for his recklessness.”
“Or more than one,” Basset said. “We don’t know there was only one person in at his death. But, yes, whoever it was knew he had something to do with Penteney or the body wouldn’t have been dumped here, and if they knew that, they knew about the lollardy side of it all.”
“But if his coming to Penteney was the trouble he was killed for, why make the link with Penteney obvious by bringing the body here?”
“Good point and good question,” Basset said. “Any good answer?”
“No.”
“Then let’s leave it where it is. It won’t take Master Barentyne long to decide that either there’s nothing against us or that he can’t find it if there is, and then he’ll give us leave to go. For now, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll have another nap.” Basset shifted around and lay down. Only as he tucked his head comfortably onto the crook of his arm did he add, “And why don’t you be a good lad and forget the whole thing, now that I’ve answered your curiosity and there’s nothing more you can do?”
Chapter 15
Rose, Ellis, and Piers returned in good time, and while Joliffe fetched everyone’s supper from the kitchen again, the others changed into their street-playing garb. Rose’s rose-colored gown that she wore for her tumbling had the skirts gored with bright blue cloth so that the color flashed out as she somersaulted and spun. The same blue cloth—they had been paid with a length of it when they performed at a cloth merchant’s wedding a few years ago—made Piers’s tabard, setting off his blue eyes and golden curls. “And what we’re to do when he outgrows it altogether, I don’t know,” Rose had lamented a year ago when adding a width of green cloth around the hem to lengthen it. “At least he’s growing up instead of out.”
He was doing both now and the tabard would soon fit him in no direction at all, but it served for the present, and the rest of the blue cloth had been used for half of Ellis’s doublet and one of his hosen, parti-colored on the other half and other leg with onion-yellow cloth that Rose had bought cheaply and dyed herself. They made a bright threesome, readily eye-catching and therefore more likely to be coin-catching, too. As Basset said, “There’s no point performing if no one’s looking and likely to pay you for it.”
Basset, on the contrary, was soberly dressed in his everyday brown surcoat and black hosen. When they played in the street, his part was to be an ordinary passer-by caught in the middle of the other’s sporting, at first bewildered by Rose and Piers spinning and tumbling around him, then indignant and offended as Ellis juggled balls over and around his head. The sight of his blustering always brought the lookers-on to high merriment, and then just when it seemed he would explode with indignation, he would snatch the balls out of the air and be juggling them himself and Piers would go skipping about with his cap, collecting coins from the laughing crowd. If they were fortunate enough to have a crowd.
Tonight, in the hall, they would play it differently, the others performing until interrupted by Basset coming in as if to make a formal speech to the high table. Offended at being interrupted, they would start performing around him and things would go as usual from there. Then Rose would tumble, and Basset and Ellis and Piers would juggle, and at the end Piers would sing a merry song as the rest of them left and then run out after them.
Joliffe, being a poor tumbler and a worse juggler, usually made do with wandering with his lute and singing. He did not make as much as the others but “some is better than naught” Basset said, and he balanced his lack in street-playing by his skill at changing plays to their use. This evening his plan was to play music for the children to dance by and set them to chasing games until they had worn themselves out, then tell them stories until he was rescued.
“You could juggle, too,” Piers said as they left the barn. “Then they could wear themselves out laughing.”
“I’ll wear you out with hickory stick one of these days,” Joliffe said. At least he was comfortable in his everyday doublet, letting the bright ribbons hung from the neck of the lute be color enough.
Because he had been told when he went to the kitchen that the children were to have their supper and spend the warm evening with its long summer’s twilight in the garden, he parted company from the others in the yard, leaving them to go on to the hall while he took the back way to the garden, shouts and laughter telling the children were already there. He stopped outside the garden’s gate, unseen himself, to watch them a while and to judge into how much trouble he was bound. At least he wouldn’t be facing them alone. A comfortably rounded woman in a plain gown, apron, wimple, and veil sat on one of the benches watching them swarm across the grass in some sort of tag-game. After counting several times, Joliffe decided there were eight of them and that none of them looked to be above ten years old, with Master Richard’s little boy Giles the youngest. He did not know which were the Lovell children and which were some of this evening’s guests’ offspring but that did not matter. Of more interest was that there was no Lewis. That would make things easier and Joliffe did not mind things being easier, but why could Lewis be at tonight’s meal but not last night’s?
Confident that the nurse would have the answer and that he would have chance to ask her in good time, he shoved open the gate, announced his arrival with a loud strum of the lute, closed the gate behind him with his foot, and strode into the garden, starting to sing, “Upon a time a shepherd I was,” a carol he expected the children would know.
They did. Or enough of them did. Already running toward him, they grabbed each other’s hands and made a circle around him, dancing as they joined in the chorus, “With my fol de rol, a the riddle oddy O, With my fol de rol iday!”
He went through every verse he knew, the children dancing all the different ways the song called for—up on their toes through one verse, looking from side to side through another, then with backs to the circle’s middle, and with baby steps, and giant steps, and with their eyes closed—until at the end they all collapsed with laughter and dizziness. He had them immediately on their feet again with another song that kept them dancing long enough that when he finished and said, “Whoever wants a story, sit down,” everyone sat promptly down on the grass, willing to rest a while.
He sat down on the bench beside the nurse, they all scooted around to face him, and he told them, in varied voices and gestures, spinning it out, a tale about a Maiden, a Wizard, and a Ring. He had just finished when servants brought trays of food and drink, setting them on the grass for the children to help themselves while the maidservant who had talked with Joliffe in the kitchen yesterday set her tray on the bench between him and the nurse, ignoring the nurse but giving him a sidelong, eyelash-fluttered look. In answer he deliberately brushed his hand against hers where it lingered on the near edge of the tray as he reached for a piece of bread. She blushed very prettily, and he thought that having to stay a few days more at the Penteneys might have possibilities.
“How goes it in the hall?” The nurse asked her.
Without quite looking away from Joliffe, the girl said, “Oh, well enough. The second remove goes in soon.”
“Master Fairfield? Is he behaving?”
The girl gave a shrug of her shoulders. “As much as always. Dav came back to the kitchen complaining he’d spilled the green mustard sauce all over the table but Master Simon and Kathryn are used to that, I suppose.”
She was still looking more at Joliffe than the nurse as she answered and he was looking back. If he could find chance of time with her tonight . . .
Somewhat tartly the nurse said, “You’d best be back to the kitchen, girl. Everyone else is going.”
The other servants were, and the girl did, with a little wave over her shoulder at Joliffe, who made a little wave back at her.
“She’s betrothed,” said the nurse, reaching for the pitcher.
Joliffe took it before she could, pouring a cup of ale while he twitched his mind clear of the girl, saying, “Poor man. He won’t rest easy.”
He handed the cup to the nurse. She took it with an appreciative crinkling around her eyes. “You see that, do you?” she said.
“And a good deal more. What I don’t see is why Master Fairfield dines in the hall tonight when he didn’t last night.”
They were both setting to the food while they talked. The wine-cooked chicken looked particularly good but Joliffe took one of the mushroom pasties first.
“That’s easy enough,” Nurse said; but she had been watching the children while she talked and broke off to call, “Giles, no. Remember your manners.” She waited a moment to be sure he did, and then went on, setting down her cup and reaching for a mushroom pasty for herself. “Last night was all business and folk to be impressed. Tonight it’s folk who’ve known our Lewis all his life and will go on knowing him once he’s married to our Kathryn.” She briefly crossed herself. “The blessed St. Anne have mercy on our girl. So it’s only right they’re reminded now and again that he’s family and to be treated as such. Besides, last night the silly thing fretted himself near into a fit, being left out of things. My little Kathryn had to leave all behind at the end of the feast and spend the rest of the evening with him in the nursery. Missed all the dancing she so dearly loves. Well, there’s no help for that and she’ll miss more than dancing ere long, since they’re to be wed at Lammas, God willing.”
“That soon,” said Joliffe.
“Best to have it done and over with before she comes to understand all it’s going to cost her, poor lamb.”
“You don’t favor the marriage?”
“Well, it’s a shame she can’t marry Simon instead, and everybody says so that says anything at all, but there it is. And once she’s been betrothed to Lewis, even if he dies then, she’ll never be able to marry Simon, Church law being what it is. Still,” she said, looking to the better side of it, “some day she’ll have her widowhood and a goodly dower to make merry on. She can find herself a better husband then. Though it would be good if she has an heir or two by Lewis first,” she finished thoughtfully.
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