A Play of Isaac (3 page)

There was time only to wonder at it in passing. Lewis, persuaded by Simon that at least some of the players were coming with them and the rest would follow, was eager to go; but after taking Simon’s hand he turned back to say at Joliffe again, “You were the Devil.”

Joliffe admitted that with a slight bow. “I was, indeed.”

“I liked you.”

“You were supposed to,” Joliffe said, answering Lewis’s grin with his own.

“Lewy, come on,” Mistress Geva ordered from ahead, already away into the innyard on her husband’s arm. “Be a good boy.”

“Good boy, good boy,” Lewis repeated under his breath, as if the words tasted bad, but Joliffe patted his shoulder and said, “Go ahead. We’ll be with you,” and Lewis went away with Simon, leaving Joliffe and Basset to follow in their wake as they left the innyard.

Joliffe took the chance to shift near enough to Basset to say, private under the general talk of passers-by around them, “What are you about? You really think they’ll have us to stay? Or are you just being obliging, helping them take their idiot home?”

“Obliging, to be sure, my lad, and at the worst likely to have a few pence for our trouble. Then again, this is a very well-kept idiot. If they indulge him this far, they’re likely to indulge him farther, maybe even to keeping us these few days to keep him happy.”

“And if they do,” Joliffe said, catching up to Basset’s thought, “we won’t have to pay for lodging and maybe not for food the while.” And so save what they’d made today and be that much ahead, along with whatever else they might make in the streets in the three days between now and Corpus Christi.

Basset laid a comfortable hand over the pouch hung from his belt. “A little trouble and a large profit is how it looks to me.”

“How was the take today?” One of the two constant questions that rode with any company of players. First there was: Would they find an audience? Then: If they did, would they collect enough coins at the end of their playing to pay for the next meal and to see them to the next town?

“Today’s take?” Basset said with satisfaction so thick it could have been laid on with a trowel. “It was good enough that even Master Norton didn’t growl too deeply over his share of it.”

So even if this possibility with the idiot didn’t go through, they would still be comfortably off for a while to come, and a while was all, even at best, they could ever count on. It went with being a player, especially one with no noble patron to fall back to for protection from such troubles as the world—or, to be more precise, as mankind—might choose to visit on them. Comfortable “for a while” was boon indeed, and added to a warm, bright summer’s day, a well-performed play behind him, and almost a week’s sure work ahead of him, Joliffe enjoyed the easy walk along Northgate Street with its narrow shops rowed in front of tall, narrow-fronted houses crowded wall to wall, and out through North Gate into broader St. Giles beyond the town walls.

The houses were larger here, for richer folk who wanted out of the town’s crowding, but the people in the street were the same, a mixed crowd of townspeople and students out to enjoy the good Sunday weather. Ahead, the Penteneys and Simon and Lewis turned leftward through a stone gateway arch leading through a building that ran blank-walled along the street but above was timber-built, with windows looking out. Joliffe and Basset followed through the gateway’s passage into a cobbled yard that was wider and longer than the inn’s. The far end was closed off by a plain gateway and a large barn, while along one side were what looked to be stables and a cattle byre, and across the yard from them a house that lived up to the rich look of all the rest. Stone-built below, its two upper stories rose in timber and plaster work, with glass in every window and in the midst of it all the steep-pitched roof of a great hall, with a square stone porch for entrance from the yard.

Joliffe whistled almost silently with admiration and said for only Basset to hear, “If this goes our way, we’ve fallen in clover this time.”

Basset didn’t answer, probably because the Penteneys and Lewis had gone inside but Simon Fairfield had turned back at the porch, waiting, saying when Basset and Joliffe came up to him, “Master Richard has gone to tell his father what’s toward and see if he’ll see you.”

Basset bowed his acceptance of that and they were left with a pause that usually Basset would have filled with easy talk to make the waiting time pass less awkwardly. Instead, having taken off his hat when Simon turned to speak to them, he stood turning it slowly and steadily in his hands, looking downward as if in thought. Simon Fairfield, for his part, was equally, awkwardly silent, frowning aside into space with the look of someone trying to find something to say. Joliffe, too used to being kept waiting by his “betters” to be uneasy about it but unsettled by Basset’s silence and a little sorry for Simon, said, “Your brother seems a good-hearted fellow.”

Simon smiled with both affection and rue. “He is. He’s small of wit but very good of heart.”

“He was born so?”

“Born so, yes.”

And was the elder, since he was Master Fairfield and also—at a safe guess—was heir to something sufficient to make it worth Master Penteney’s while to have him in ward and keep him well. The oddness lay in the fact that usually an heir like Lewis would have been long since put aside in favor of a brother as well in mind and body as Simon apparently was. Joliffe was curious about that but manners meant he should not ask more and another pause began, this time ended by Simon asking, obviously grabbing at something to say, “You’ve been in Oxford long?”

“Only since yesterday. This time,” Joliffe answered when Basset did not.

“You’ve been here before?”

“Most years we’re here around Christmastide, usually through Twelfth Night. Sometimes we come again in spring or summer, depending.”

“On what?”

“On how the world is going.”

“Ah,” Simon said vaguely.

“You see, there’s good years for players to be on the road and bad years,” Joliffe explained. “The bad years, like these last few have been with the poor harvests, when there’s not much money and not much food to spare, folk may welcome us but they don’t have much to give and, alas, we need to eat, like anyone else. So we have to circle wider, farther, to more villages and towns, to make as much as we’d otherwise hope to make in fewer places.”

And a footsore, wearisome business it was. They had a cart and a horse: Tisbe served to pull the cart, the cart served to carry the necessities of their work and lives, neither served to carry any of them. Where they went, they walked, and while their usual route took them a long enough way, along the Chilterns and around through Berkshire and into Gloucestershire and up so far as Warwick-shire, these last two years they’d had to go as far eastward as Hertford and as far north as Nottingham in their quest to keep flesh on their bones.

“Ah,” Master Simon said again, this time with open interest. “Have you ever been as far as London?”

Basset finally roused to an actual answer, saying with something of his seemingly forthright way, “Alas, no, sir. Our company, fine as it is, is too small to venture there just yet.”

Master Simon looked ready to ask or say more, but a servant came to the door and while giving both Basset and Joliffe a sidewise look said, “Master Penteney says he’ll see them, please you, Master Simon. He’s in his study-chamber. Would you have me take them there?”

“I’ll see them to him,” Simon answered, and added to Basset with a smile, “I brought you to this. I should see you through it.”

The porch opened into the screens passage that protected the great hall from draughts. The servant went ahead of them and aside, through a doorway to the left, probably toward the kitchen. Simon led Joliffe and Basset the other way, through a rightward doorway into the great hall. At this hour of a fine-weathered Sunday afternoon, with even servants let off all but the most necessary work and folk able to be outside and elsewhere, the hall was quiet, its long, wide space, open to the raftered roof, empty so that the pad of their soft-soled leather shoes over the stone-flagged floor was nigh to loud as Simon led them up it to one of the doors flanking the dais at its upper end. Joliffe had time to note that the arras showing beautifully dressed men and women riding across a flowery meadow and covering all the broad end wall save for the two doorways, was painted rather than woven but that the painting was of the very best, before Simon knocked lightly at the open door and went through, into the room beyond it. Basset and Joliffe followed him.

The chamber was far smaller than the great hall, well-proportioned, with a low ceiling and much sunlight through a long window looking out on a stretch of close-cut grass and a garden bright with flowers, bounded on the far side by what looked to be someone else’s blank housewall. With a single sharp flicker of his eyes as he entered, Joliffe took in the tall, closed aumbry standing along one wall, the flat-topped chests to either side of it, the long-legged writing desk angled to the window so the light would come over the left shoulder of whoever worked there, and the smaller clerk’s table to one side of it, everything plainly made but of golden oak, while under foot, rather than the bare stone or rush matting there might have been, there was a carpet woven in strong and intricately patterned colors.

Everything told there was more than a little wealth in this place, whoever Master Penteney was—and almost surely he was the man standing beside the desk, a man who very definitely went with the room. He was of late middle-years, with his hair beginning to draw back from his forehead and his belt beginning to quarrel with his belly; but the belt’s buckle was silver and his knee-length houpplande was of a burgundy-dyed wool that came no more cheaply than the soft lambs’ budge that edged it at wrists and hem. Like the room, there was nothing of excess about him but everything there was was of the best.

What did not match was how, as he saw Basset, the easy welcome on his face began a sharp shift that Joliffe—seeing him over Basset’s shoulder—thought would be open startlement in another instant; but in the same moment that Master Penteney’s eyes began to widen and his mouth to open, Basset twitched his head in the slightest of denials, and Master Penteney’s expression shifted smoothly back to simply welcoming as completely as if nothing else had ever been there.

But something had been. What?

And why?

Chapter 2

Whatever had passed between Basset and Master Penteney, Joliffe thought no one but himself had seen it. Simon had been in the middle of turning from one of them to the other and Master Richard was across the room saying something at Lewis who was nodding and jigging a little on his toes, heeding nothing but that he was going to have his players. Now Basset was simply making the expected bow to Master Penteney, and Joliffe matched him, both their bows deep but, this time, unflourished, one of Basset’s dictates being that a player should always make a flourished bow to both country folk and the nobility—to the first because they were impressed by it, to the latter because it amused them—but that for merchants, craftsmen, and almost any other townspeople a plain bow was best. “Because,” Basset had said, “they’re on the watch, always, to keep from being robbed by their betters or cheated by their fellows, by lesser folk, and by assuredly such useless troublemakers as they’re sure we are. Be too fantastical to them and all they’ll do is distrust you the worse.”

So here Basset’s bow was carefully graded with respect to a wealthy man, and Joliffe’s bow was slightly deeper, to show that as Basset’s man he was even more humble—another of Basset’s dictates being that a man was always deemed more important if he had followers. Since players needed any slight bit of importance they could glean, Joliffe was his humble follower whenever necessary.

Master Penteney acknowledged their bows with a slight bending of his head and said, “I’m told you’re to perform one of the Corpus Christi plays.”

“At St. Michael’s Northgate, please you, sir,” Basset answered.

“The
Abraham and Isaac
, I believe?”

“But the sword won’t even cut butter!” Lewis interrupted happily. “The boy . . .”

He broke off, looking to Basset with a troubled, asking look.

“Piers,” Basset said.

Lewis’s face shone with happiness. “Piers!” he repeated, swaying happily from foot to foot.

Master Richard dropped a hand onto his shoulder, quieting him as Master Penteney went on, “You surely have plans for between now and then. Rehearsals and suchlike and somewhere to stay?”

“For where we stay, last night we were at the Arrow and Hind. Tonight . . .” Basset made a light shrug to show the matter was open, though in fact Master Norton had grudgingly granted they could stay where they were if they could pay and so long as he didn’t need the space for someone who would pay more. “As for rehearsing, we know the play well. Our practicing will be slight and otherwise our time is our own. Or yours, if we may be of service,” he added with a slight, respectful bow.

Master Penteney was probably no more deceived by Basset’s smooth words than Joliffe was. Just as Basset would not have survived his years as a player without sharp wits and skill at bargaining, neither would Master Penteney be where he was without the same. Apparently he likewise appreciated good bargaining when he met it, because he said, level-voiced but with a warm glint of laughter in his face, “Well, Master Fairfield has taken an interest in you . . .”

“Plays,” Lewis said happily. “They can do plays for me.”

“. . . and I see no reason to deny him the diversion, if it’s convenient to you. Besides, we’re to have guests this week. Somewhat many and of importance at an evening feast on Wednesday, a few friends and neighbors to Thursday supper. Would you be interested to perform for us those times?”

“In return for staying here?” Basset asked politely.