A Play Of Heresy Part 4

"That's where what you did with Joseph, reading his part here, was so different and so good."

Sobering, Powet gave him a sharp look of mingled surprise and wariness. "You're saying that for kindness' sake," he challenged. His tone made clear how deeply he would scorn that manner of "kindness."

"I mean it. You didn't play him only for laughter at the old man. You added the sense that he's someone who cares for his wife and child and is maybe afraid he can't be good enough for them."

Powet regarded him with narrowed eyes, silent for a long moment before saying, "Aye. That's what I was trying for. It was there, then?"

"It was there, and it was very good. I don't make light of my craft to anyone. If I say it was very good, it was."

Powet held silent a moment, his eyes fixed on Joliffe's face, then made another sound in his throat as if he were halfway to believing Joliffe's words.

From the other end of the benches Sendell said, "That's it for tonight, then. The light is gone anyway. You work at learning your words, and we'll see how things go tomorrow."

d.i.c.k stood up with great readiness, rolling his scroll closed while saying to his uncle, "If you want to go on home, Uncle Eustace, that's well. I just mean to go around to . . ."

"You just mean to go home with me, that's what you mean, just as your mother said, or we'll both be in trouble." Powet stood slowly up with a stiffness that told how far to the bad his joints were indeed gone. "I don't mean to suffer her tongue-lashing for your sake, and you don't want another thrashing from Herry this week, do you? Come along." He started for the gate.

d.i.c.k, slouch-shouldered and scuffling, went with him, muttering, "I'll warrant n.o.body ever threatened to thrash Christ when he was a boy."

"I'll warrant there was never a need to thrash Christ when he was a boy," his uncle returned and was rumpling the boy's hair as they went out the gate.

Sendell and Joliffe looked at one another in the now silent and deeply shadowed yard.

"It's not hopeless, is it," Sendell said, not quite making a question, not quite daring to hope it was true.

"It's not hopeless by a long way," Joliffe said. "You've a very good Joseph, for one thing, and I think your Mary should come along well. There's no trouble with Simeon, the others are mostly sound enough, and of course your First Prophet and Ane are the uttermost of fine."

"Beyond doubt," Sendell said sourly. "Nor don't think I don't note you say naught about my Second Prophet or Christ."

"Your Second Prophet you'll have to keep a hard rein on," Joliffe granted. "Far too pleased with himself, is Richard Eme. Your Christ-" He did not finish. He and Sendell both knew young d.i.c.k was going to take much work.

Another moment's silence fell between them until Sendell tapped his rolled script on his knee and said, "Well, that's all there can be tonight. I'm for bed. Tomorrow I'll set to finding the new garb and seeing if there's much to be done with the old."

He sounded tired, as well he might. He had put in a good day's work, talking the masters of the Weavers Guild into spending on their play and then rehearsing with a cast hardly of his own choosing. But he also sounded halfway to discouraged just thinking about what came next, as if hope and effort were both almost beyond him, and Joliffe heard himself saying before thinking better of it, "Want me to join you over the garb? A pair of heads and two sets of eyes being better than one, as they say."

He felt Sendell nearly refuse him, then abruptly shift and say, "Depends on the worth of the second head and set of eyes, doesn't it?" with something of his old, cutting impatience before adding, "That would likely be helpful, yes. I'll come for you sometime in the morning?"

"I'll strive to be awake," Joliffe agreed and rose to take his leave.

"If you're not, a toe in the ribs does wonders. Can you find your way back?"

"Out the gate. Turn right. At the corner, not falling over the paving stones, turn right again and keep going until I see the Silc.o.ks' gateway. Or a likely looking alehouse. Whichever first comes."

"You have it. Mind curfew," Sendell said and waved him on his way.

Joliffe left him still seated on the bench in the gathering twilight, maybe thinking about the play or maybe just summoning the strength-or the will-to get himself off the bench and up the stairs to his bed. It could be either, and Joliffe did not know which, only that Sendell was maybe as worn down almost as far as a man could go without finally breaking.

Chapter 7.

The players were readying to bed when Joliffe came up the stairs. Someone-probably Rose-had already laid out his pallet, pillow, and blanket. When Ba.s.set asked how the practice had gone with Sendell and all, Joliffe said, "Not so bad as he feared. He has some players who will do."

"But then there's you," Ellis said.

Making show of ignoring that, Joliffe went on, "If he can better the others, he won't have a bad play on his hands. He'll have a good one, in truth. And the guild has given him leave to get better garb and will be painting the pageant wagon all new."

Ba.s.set was openly pleased at the news. So were Ellis and Gil as far as they cared at all. Rose, busy with washing Piers' ears and neck at the table beside the door where the pitcher of water, basin, and towel were, closest matched her father's pleasure, saying, "Oh, I'm glad for him, then."

All Piers offered was, "Yeow. That hurts, Mam!"

"Learn how to do it rightly yourself then," Rose returned with no noticeable mercy. "And more often."

Joliffe asked how their own play had gone. Their rehearsing being further along, there was more to tell, most of it to the good. By the end of that, they were all of them settled under their blankets, and the last of the long-lasting almost mid-summer twilight was gone, the chamber all in deep shadow. Ba.s.set made a last murmur about horses, and after that there was only a sleeping quiet into which Joliffe willingly slipped.

He and Will Sendell had some luck on the morrow among the fripperers, sellers of secondhand clothing. Besides that, their quest gave Joliffe chance to know Coventry better, with its wide main streets and the side lanes that curved off them and around and into one another in a maze that would take learning. Joliffe meant to wander the place when he had the chance, to see what there was to see and hear if there was any talk of Sebastian's missing merchant or of Lollards. Enough to satisfy Sebastian anyway. The merchant's disappearance mattered, and Joliffe would do his most there, but he lacked any great desire to hunt Lollards out from among ordinary folk. If they wanted to read their Bibles in English and find grounds therein to quarrel with the churchmen about which meant what, let them. G.o.d, Christ, and all the apostles knew the churchmen seemed to have been doing the same among themselves for going on fifteen hundred years.

Joliffe's guess was that it was not the poaching in their park the churchmen minded so much as that among the things Lollards found to challenge from their bible-reading was why they should pay either heed or-more importantly to some churchmen-t.i.thes to men they thought unworthy of acting in G.o.d's name. Hitting priests in their purse and their pride was always a sure way to stir them up to fury like a prodded wasps' nest. Still, there was nothing new-or particular to Lollards-about any of that, and nothing the least fresh in their claim that the world needed reshaping, that those who were high but unworthy in both Church and worldly government should be brought low, and that the poor be exalted into their places-and likewise into the wealth rightfully forfeited by the high and unworthy along with their power. People had been feeling and saying those same things time out of mind, so near as Joliffe had ever learned. If someone was up too high, someone else wanted him down, and there were always reasons on both sides for why or why not this should happen.

Where the hotter-hearted among the Lollards earned the church and government's ire was in purposing to reshape everything and everyone to their desires by weaponed uprising and revolt to throw down not only such churchmen as they found unworthy, but the king and n.o.bility and judges and all the civil government, too. The several times in the past few decades that some Lollards had raised rebellion toward that end had ended only in grief for the rebels and in black suspicion and distrust of all other Lollards.

Joliffe had to grant that the suspicion and distrust were fair enough. No one cared to have armed men trying to make good on threats to rob and kill you. Maybe the hotter-hearted Lollards should have heeded Christ's behest to "yield to the emperor those things that are the emperor's, and to G.o.d those things that are of G.o.d." At least then their more peaceful fellow Lollards would have been able to get on with their bible-reading and arguing without the hard eyes of spies on them, waiting to pounce at the first stirring of suspicion. And suspicion could be stirred by so very little.

For his own part, Joliffe's only reason to be wary against Lollards was that at least some of them had hauled up the old arguments against plays and players. False portrayals, mocking G.o.d's creation, and so on. That most folk took no heed of them about it kept it from being a great matter but still . . .

He was thinking about that as he and Sendell came out of a shop where Sendell had bought a long black robe with full hanging sleeves gathered to the wrists and trimmed with fur around the neck. The fripperer had said the fur was marten. Neither Sendell nor Joliffe nor how little Sendell had paid for it agreed with the claim, but Sendell was nonetheless pleased with it.

"It will do well for Simeon and perhaps one of the Doctors in the Temple," he said as they started along the street.

Joliffe, following the flow of his own thoughts, said, "It will indeed," and then, "Will, have you heard if there's any stirring here among Lollards against the plays?"

Sendell, busy counting coins into his belt-purse, answered easily, "None that have come my way. After the pounding they took hereabouts a while back, I doubt any would dare." He chuckled as he drew the purse closed with a tightening of the drawstring. "All the ones that were fool enough to stir trouble then met with the hangman. The ones that are left have wits enough to keep their heads down. Hai!" he added in greeting. "Master Powet."

It was indeed Master Powet coming along the street at a stroll that said he had nowhere in particular to be. He returned Sendell's greeting with a surprised, "Good morrow," and veered from his way to come to them. Coventry was not so large that meeting someone known was all that unlikely, but while for Joliffe, having spent the past few hours among throngs of unfamiliar faces, a familiar one was unexpectedly welcome, it crossed his mind that maybe for Powet, all too familiar with Coventry faces, the welcome was in seeing their less familiar ones. Or maybe it was just curiosity, because eyeing the black robe folded on Joliffe's arm and the bag slung over Joliffe's shoulder, bulging with their other purchases, he said, "You've had some success at finding what you want, then."

"We have," Sendell said. He nodded toward the robe. "That's our latest. Will do for Simeon, I think. There's a large, faded place high on its front where someone tried to clean a stain and ruined the dye instead, but some wide collar and frontlet of rich stuff wide down his chest will cover it." And a different frontlet or something when it became a doctor's robe, he did not add.

Joliffe shifted the robe to show the faded place. Powet nodded, fingered the fine cloth, and said, "That should do well for Simeon, yes. For the rest?"

"Meaning yours?" Sendell asked with a grin.

"Aye, mine," Powet said with an answering grin.

"You'll have to wait and see with everyone else."

"Ragged old Joseph," Powet said with a sudden gloom and all jest gone from the words.

"Hardly," Sendell said, sounding as taken by surprise as Joliffe was at his change of humour. "I see Joseph as a prosperous carpenter. Fine green doublet and-oh, no, you don't! You're not tricking me into telling you more. You can wait and see along with everyone else."

Joliffe did not think it had been a trick; he thought it had simply been Powet still unhappy at being Joseph. But Powet had brightened, although perhaps not so much at Sendell's words as at whatever he was looking at farther along the street, because, as if a new thought had come to him, he said, "I know what may serve for Simeon's frontlet. Come with me."

The broad street was lined by tall, lean buildings, most of them of the usual half-timber and plaster and with a shop at their front, facing onto the street below the two or three out-thrusting stories that somewhat narrowed the sunlight into the street but gave added s.p.a.ce in the rooms above and good shelter to pa.s.sersby on rainy days. Powet led them toward one of the wider-fronted ones. Its shop window was open, the st.u.r.dy board swung out and spread with varied mercery. In the shop behind the board, a young man was presently taking a box from one of the shelves there, saying to a plump goodwife waiting outside, "This is from the same dye-batch as what you bought before. I kept some back, thinking you might need more." Taking a pipe of red embroidery thread from the box, he held it out to her. "You'll see it matches perfectly." Without turning his apparent heed from her or changing his level, soothing voice, he said as Powet neared, "Uncle, Mother is hoping to see you soon."

"That she will," Powet said. "Mistress Aylesford," he added respectfully.

"Master Powet," she said with matching courtesy, not looking up from comparing the thread she had brought with her to what she had been offered. The men waited until finally she granted, "Yes, this will do," paid for it, and went satisfied on her way.

Powet, going to the board in her place, said to Sendell and Joliffe, "This is my nephew Herry Byfeld. He has mercer's blood in his veins and no doubt about it. Given the chance, he could sell coal to the Devil to keep the fires of h.e.l.l burning."

"And you'd smooth-talk him into giving it back to you for nothing," Herry Byfeld said with open affection for his uncle but a questioning look at Joliffe and Sendell.

Powet said who they were. Herry said, "You're going to make a Christ out of d.i.c.k, are you? Luck with that."

"What we're here for," said Powet, "is that length of lampas-woven silk. You know the one I mean?"

"Surely." Herry Byfeld went to a far corner of the shop, shifted some things, and came back with a folded piece of cloth that he opened with a flourish across the board. There was hardly a wide yard of it, but it was richly made with red and gray silks woven in a pattern of pomegranates and vines.

"Yes," Sendell breathed. "That would be perfect." He made to touch it but must have remembered that was not the way to bargain, drew back his hand, and said with belated solemn consideration, "Perhaps. What are you asking for it?"

Powet named a price likely far too low, because Herry looked at him with badly hidden dismay. Sendell offered something even lower. Powet countered, and for far less than Joliffe guessed the cloth was worth, they had it. Herry, with a sidewise look at his uncle that said they would talk about this later, began to fold it again as Sendell laid the coins out on the board. Powet, ignoring his nephew's look, said, "Now you have to find someone to sew it."

Herry, gathering up the coins, said, "Cecily. She could do it for you."

"Well thought!" Powet said. "Is she in?"

"Where else?"

"Come then," Powet said to Sendell. He paused. "Unless you've someone else in mind?"

Sendell looked to Joliffe. "Rose?"

"She'd probably stick a needle in me if I offered her more to sew than she has."

"Cecily, then," said Powet and led them through the door standing open beside the shop into a stone-floored pa.s.sageway and toward whatever rooms were beyond. As he went, he explained, "Cecily's family fell on hard times a few years ago. Or had hard times fall on them would maybe be the better way to say it. Mercers until things went bad for them. Now my niece rents them a room here-Cecily, her father, and brother-and Cecily helps for their keep while her brother tries to bring back the family's good fortune."

They came out of the pa.s.sageway into a kitchen that Joliffe guessed also served as the heart of the house, because whatever chambers lay beyond the doors they had pa.s.sed in the pa.s.sageway or up the stairs, this looked to be where the family did much of their living. Besides the well-scoured work table and expected gathering of cooking things near the wide hearth against the room's end wall, there were a scattering of three-legged stools, one with someone's abandoned shirt tossed across it, and a tall-backed bench with a writing slate with what looked like a half-finished lesson lying on one end and, at its other, a sewing basket, a black-worsted hose hanging out of it with a half-mended heel.

Presently, though, no one was there but an old man hunched in a round-backed, tall chair near the hearth, staring at the floor, and a young woman, her hair bound up under a simple coif, tending to a large kettle hung over the hearth's low fire. Not a woman, Joliffe amended as she turned from the hearth. A girl. The man did not stir in his chair but the girl, prettily flushed from the heat, looked with surprise at Sendell and Joliffe while she said to Powet with kind concern, "Have you had your dinner? There's pottage with lamb if you haven't."

"I'll want it shortly," Powet said. "Thank you, Cecily. First, though, this is Master Sendell who's doing what he can with this benighted play of ours, and Master Joliffe who's a player by occupation and going to show us how playing is properly done."

How much bitterness was under that jest? Joliffe wondered, while Cecily turned her kindness and a smile toward him and Sendell. "I wish you joy of it all," she said to them both and made to return to her cooking, but Powet said, "Master Sendell has a request to ask of you."

"A request for what?" a woman said, coming into the kitchen behind Powet, Sendell, and Joliffe. She had a covered basket on her arm, and d.i.c.k was behind her, carrying another basket.

"Help with the play," Powet said.

"Oh, Uncle," she laughed, setting her basket on the table. "From what you say, the only hope is for everyone to say their words as fast as may be and be done with it."

"That's maybe changing," Powet said stiffly. "These are Master Sendell who's already made it better than I thought it could be, and Master Joliffe who's helping and a player, too."

"But you'll still be Joseph and not happy about it," she said.

"My niece Mistress Deyster," Powet said by way of making her known, adding as d.i.c.k thumped his basket onto the table beside the other, "Her graceless brother d.i.c.k you already know."

The boy grinned. "I've started learning my words, Master Sendell. I've been saying them while we marketed."

"He has that, Christ help us all," d.i.c.k's sister said, beginning to take things from her basket.

Joliffe guessed she was not much older than Cecily, but there was sufficient difference between the plain-gowned girl at the hearth with her work-spotted ap.r.o.n and bare coif, and Mistress Deyster in her go-to-market gown of fine light linen and white, starched wimple, and many-folded veil to tell who was servant and who was mistress here.

"What we're in need of," Powet said, "is for Cecily to make a frontlet for this robe here"-he gestured to it, still hung over Joliffe's arm-"from this silk." Sendell held up the newly-bought piece. "Master Sendell will pay."

"There's other sewing we'll need done, too," Sendell said as Cecily turned from the fire, wiping her hands on her ap.r.o.n and looking interested. "Some garments to alter, some to make new."

"For how much by way of pay?" Mistress Deyster asked.

Sendell named a sum. Mistress Deyster looked ready to bargain on Cecily's behalf but was forestalled by the girl saying, "Yes. That's fair. I'll do it."

She was right-it was fair. Mistress Deyster gave a shrug and went back to putting eggs from her basket into a waiting bowl. Cecily said, "d.i.c.k, will you stir while I see what Master Sendell wants done?"

d.i.c.k obliged while Powet said to Joliffe, "We'd best shift out of everyone's way," and led him out the rear door into a short, paved yard between the blank wall of a neighbor's building and a two-storied rear wing of Powet's house. A well was cramped into the far corner of the yard near a low gate that gave glimpse of green trees beyond-likely the garden that went with most town houses-but Powet sat down on the stairs to the wing's upper floor, gestured for Joliffe to do the same, and said, "Let me ask pardon for my niece not being as welcoming as she might. She's had to put up with much these two years and more since her husband died and she had to come back to live with her mother and us and all."

"This isn't her house, then?" Joliffe asked, surprised.

"Nay. It's her mother's. Mistress Byfeld's. In truth Mistress Byfeld is my niece, as happens. Anna-Mistress Deyster, that is-and her swarm of brothers are my greats, properly speaking. Then there's old John that my niece-she being friends with his wife-took in when they lost all. But she's dead now, is his wife, G.o.d keep her soul, and old John sits by the fire with his wits gone and his daughter seeing to the cooking and not much more than the life of a servant to look forward to unless her brother can remake the family's fortune. He may do. He's a sharp young fellow. But my niece is not best pleased about the understanding that's been growing between him and Anna. She wants Anna to marry better than what he has to offer yet. But Anna married *better' the first time and see how that turned out."

"Not so well," Joliffe hazarded, mildly interested.

"Not so well," Powet agreed. "Master Deyster was sound enough. My niece wouldn't make a mistake that way. But"-Powet suddenly dropped his voice low, as if there might be listeners lurking somewhere in the bare yard-"the trouble came from his son from his first marriage. The young fool got mixed into that Lollard business a few years back, and his father wrecked himself to buy him out of trouble. Then, wouldn't you know, the young fool goes and dies of lung sickness two winters later, and his father just gives up. By the time he dies there's nothing left but debts. To buy free of them, Anna had to sell off all that should have been hers except for one place she's held onto out of what should have been her dower." The portion of a man's property he gave at his marriage for his wife to use if she were widowed. He could leave her more in his will, if it came to that, but her dower property was hers no matter what, if things went as they were supposed to. "A shop and house near Gosford Gate. She rents it out, and there's her income she uses to build her share in the Byfeld side of things and all, and here she is and not likely to listen to her mother on who to marry next."

Powet shook his head, in a brooding sort of way, but Joliffe with studied indifference asked, "So Master Deyster and his son were Lollards?"

Powet snorted. "Deyster was never so dusty as that. He wouldn't have given the fools the time of day. My niece wouldn't have had him for Anna if he did. Nor did that son of his care half a pin for any of all they argue about. He just took to the chance to take up billhook and run about yelling and making trouble with other fools. Got more than they bargained for when Duke Humphrey came down on them all." He sounded both disgusted at them and satisfied by their fate.

So no Lollards in this household, Joliffe guessed. He was looking for an unsuspicious way to ask other Lollard-shaped questions, only to be forestalled by Powet changing away to what likely interested him more than family troubles, saying as he rubbed a hand on the shadow of gray along his jaw, "I've begun to grow my beard for Joseph. Likely there'll be something to show when the time comes. Save hanging a false one on my face."

Fortunate man, thought Joliffe. No Lollards for him, just the challenge of playing.

Still rubbing at his jaw, Powet made a tching sound and shook his head. "I should have been a player like you and Master Sendell. I did n.o.body any good staying here in Coventry all my days." He dropped his hands between his knees. "You truly think I can make Joseph into something more than an old fool to be laughed at?"

For Powet's sake as much as for the sake of Sendell's play, Joliffe said strongly, "It's maybe not there so much in the words, but you were finding it there last night." He poked Powet's near leg, friendliwise. "Next practice, just wait and see what I do with the First Prophet. That will show you how far you can play beyond the words."