A Play of Isaac (5 page)

“Ask for Walter Glover,” Matthew said “He’s Master Penteney’s pasture-master there. He’ll see you right. He’s a stiff man, is Master Glover. Keeps things the way they should be and has trouble keeping men to work there for him because of it. He knows his business there, though, so he’ll never be let go. This time of year there’s only need for one or two other men there anyway. If you’re in luck, it’ll be one of them you meet up with, rather than him.”

“They’re off away,” Rose said, watching out the door as Piers and Lewis, with Lewis in the lead now, disappeared down a narrow gap between two of the sheds.

“That’s Mistress Penteney’s garden they’re headed for. No harm there,” Matthew said, making to follow after them, adding over his shoulder as he went, “If you don’t see us before, you’ll catch up to us in the hall at supper, no fear.”

He disappeared the way they had gone and the rest of them set to the settling in. It went easily enough. With the cart brought into the barn but no need for the tent here or a fire for warmth or cooking, even though the barn’s bare dirt floor would have made that easy enough, their unloading was only some small wooden boxes of belongings, some canvas-covered cushions for sitting, and their bedding. For all their beds, Joliffe and Ellis brought a few armloads of hay so fresh it still smelled of sun and summer. While Rose spread their blankets over the long, thick heaps they had made—humming to herself while she did, sure sign that she was happy—Basset sat down on a cushion, looking tired but satisfied, his brow for once unfurrowed with worry, and Joliffe went to unharness Tisbe from the cart. Looking around, Ellis said, “I’d say this time we’ve fallen into it properly for a change.”

Chapter 3

Joliffe did not mind walking Tisbe to the pasture. Besides the mare being good company, he never minded a chance to go off on his own and well the rest of the players knew it. Basset, Rose, and Piers were family to each other, being father, daughter, and grandson, and Ellis was as near family to them as he could be short of marriage and actual fatherhood. That maybe made the difference for Joliffe, but Joliffe suspected not. He did not remember a time in his life when he hadn’t sometimes simply liked to have himself to himself, and living as the players did—practically in each other’s shoes days and nights together—wore on him sometimes more than it ever seemed to wear on the others. No one would be surprised if he made no haste over going to the pasture or coming back, and he and Tisbe strolled together the whole way, past other people’s backgates and rearyards into the more open country of Oxford’s city burgage meadows, the lane lazy between summer-sprung hedges, with people Sunday-wandering in no more haste to anywhere than he and Tisbe were.

Pacing along roads was mostly an everyday thing for Tisbe and him but this walk was, in its way nothing for the two of them because she was without the cart for once and for once he had no need to worry over where supper and the night’s stay would be.

Master Penteney’s place with its green-painted gateposts along the lane was as easy to know as Matthew had said it would be. The yard beyond them was enclosed along one side by a long shed, a cattle byre, and at the far end a pigpen where, by the squealing, piglets were waiting to be someone’s pork-roast dinners. On the yard’s other side was a small timber-and-plaster house against a barn as large as where the players were staying. Everything, from house to pigpen, looked to be as well kept, clean, and prosperous as the Penteney place in town, and the man who came from the house as Joliffe passed through the gateway with Tisbe was well-kept, too. Dressed in a doublet and loose surcoat better than a plain servant would have worn, he stood on the doorstep and demanded, “What do you want here?”

It was a fair enough question but could have been asked more courteously. Still leading Tisbe onward, Joliffe—having long since found that a firm stand on his dignity often threw people out of their stride toward despising him—answered courteously back but with a look down his nose and the slightest hint in his voice that told he had heard the insolence but was willing to overlook it this time, “Master Penteney has given leave for our horse to graze in his pasture these few days our company is in his service. Master Glover, are you?”

“Aye.” The man started across the yard toward him. “Company of what?”

“Players.”

Glover regarded him with mingled disbelief and disapproval. “Master Penteney has taken on a clot of players?”

“For Master Fairfield’s pleasure,” Joliffe said, giving no ground.

“Ah. Master Fairfield.” That seemed to answer everything for Glover. Some of the unwelcome went from his voice. “Well, we’ve grass enough.” He reached the middle of the yard when Joliffe did, enough into his way that Joliffe stopped. Master Glover walked around Tisbe with a judging eye. “She looks healthy enough.”

“We’d have small use for a sick horse, would we?” Joliffe said easily, not looking to make a quarrel with him.

Glover half-laughed. “You wouldn’t, no.” He slapped Tisbe lightly on the shoulder, said, “We might even manage some oats for you while you’re here, old girl.” He pointed toward one of the gates at the far end of the yard. “That’s where we keep the horses presently. Turn her in. She’ll do fine.”

He went back toward the house and Joliffe led Tisbe on to the gate at which Glover had pointed. There were three gates, all opening into well-hedged pastures, with a marshy stream running along the bottom of them to make for easy watering of any livestock kept there to wait for market. Just now some young sheep were in one, a few cows in another, while half a score of horses were grazing the thick-grown grass in the middle one. With all of that and the barn and byre and pigs and storage shed and being so near to town, this was a place suited and fine for a victualler supplying colleges, halls, and a monastery in Oxford. Besides there, Joliffe could guess that Master Penteney’s business probably went across a wide swathe of country from the Welsh border to London, with links overseas to France and Flanders at the least. It was not that Master Penteney owned or needed much land of his own, since he wouldn’t trouble to grow much of his grain and hay or breed his own livestock. As a victualler, he would contract with others who did that, would buy from them and sell in better markets than they could hope to reach, making fine profits for himself from it all.

Joliffe led Tisbe into the horse pasture and closed the gate behind him while he made his farewell, rubbing the deep hollow under her jaw while he told her, “Don’t eat yourself out of shape here, my girl. You’ll have to go back between the cart shafts one of these days, you know.”

Tisbe did not deign to answer. With head stretched out and eyes half-closed, she would have let him go on rubbing under her chin forever; when he stopped, she rolled a reproachful eye at him, still holding her head out in hope of more. Laughing at her, he slid her halter off, gave her a scratch behind the ears, and said, “That’s enough, you spoiled madam. Go enjoy yourself.”

Tisbe blew down her nose at him, swung her head to bump him in the chest for her own farewell, and ambled away, not toward the half dozen other horses in the pasture but in search of a patch of grass all her own. Usually she had only whatever grass was in the compass of her lead rope when they staked her out of a night beside a road or else a little plain hay if they were in a town, with—as Master Glover had certainly guessed—rarely a mouthful of oats from one month’s end to the next. Compared to the sturdy, smooth-flanked horses here, she was an unimpressive sight, under-tall and bony, but she had come cheap five years ago when their last horse, Hero, having lain down sometime in a night, had quietly failed to rise in the morning, fading from sleep to death with the players standing mourning around him.

They had had to pull the cart to the next town themselves and spend half a day looking for a horse they could afford, and even then Tisbe had taken most of the coins in Basset’s purse. They had lived on vegetable pottage and bread for a week afterwards, unable to buy any meat, but in the long go of things Tisbe had proved to be worth more than they had paid. She was not much to look at but she was what they needed—a plain horse that no one would ever envy or likely have urge to steal, but hardy enough to hold up to the work they asked of her. Besides that, she was sweet-humoured, and Joliffe was glad she’d have this while of rest along with the rest of them.

Leaving the pasturage, he turned back for Oxford with no particular thought of what he meant to do but in no hurry to rejoin the others. Since the few silver farthings in his pouch totaled somewhat less than threepence and he misliked spending himself flat out of coin unless there was black need of it, he did not have much choice of what he would do, but walking, sitting, and looking cost nothing, and he turned off the lane at the first stile he came to, going over it to a fieldpath headed vaguely eastward through the countryside. He made no haste: sat for a while on another stile between one field and the next to watch the world do nothing in particular around him, ambled on eventually, and when the path brought him to a stream’s bank, sat there among a scrub of alders for another while, pitching idle stones into the water. The path finally brought him, as he had supposed it would, to a narrow bridge over the River Cherwell and into another lane that he followed southward, back toward town, still in no haste. Among summer’s beauties was how long the days lasted. The sun had over an hour to go to setting when he reached the Iffley Road and joined the flow of townspeople and students turned back from their Sunday strolls or visiting, done with their day’s idleness and heading to the surety of supper and somewhere familiar for the night. Having no thoughts of home to draw him and fairly certain he had time before supper, he stopped on the bridge outside the town’s East Gate, to lean on the railing and watch the water flow away under him in satin darkness and rippled light. It was something, in other days, he had done often here, and he was paying no heed to the talk of passing people behind him—students as always louder than everyone else—until a man asked, “Joliffe?”

Too surprised to be wary, Joliffe straightened and turned around from the railing.

Drawn aside from the people-flow, the man was standing uncertainly a few feet away. Soberly dressed in a scholar’s dark, long gown, with a simple, brimless scholar’s cap over his smooth, short-cut hair, he was much about Joliffe’s own age and clearly of two minds as to whether he should have spoken or not. For a moment Joliffe was equally puzzled, until something in the slight, questioning turn of the man’s head jarred memory loose and Joliffe asked uncertainly back at him, “John Thamys?” Growing certainty surprised him into pleasure and he repeated, certain now, “John Thamys!”

“Yes!” Certain, too, Thamys shifted the leather case he was carrying—Joliffe would have bet his less-than-threepence that it held books—into the crook of his left arm and thrust out his right hand to clasp the hand Joliffe put out to him. “I thought it was you but couldn’t believe it,” Thamys said. “It was the way you were leaning there on the railing, looking as if you were seeing anything except what was in front of you. It made me think of you. I haven’t thought of you . . .”

“In years,” Joliffe said, smiling.

“Six months,” Thamys said. “At Christmastide. I thought of you then, when someone put double cinnamon in Master Bryton’s spiced wine and Master Bryton choked and coughed wine clear across the high table.”

“
That
brought you to think of me? I never did that.”

“That’s why you came to mind. I wondered how you’d come to miss that trick. You tried enough other things.”

“I never had the money to buy that much extra cinnamon. Nor,” Joliffe added thoughtfully, “cared to waste good wine that way.”

“That explains it,” Thamys said as if deeply satisfied on some point of difficult scholarship. He shifted the leather case again. “Which way are you bound?”

“Townward.”

“Go a ways with me, then? This thing is heavy and I’d rather be quit of it sooner than later.”

“Gladly,” Joliffe said, surprised to find himself more willing to company than he would have thought likely a few moments ago. On his side, he couldn’t have said when he had last thought of Thamys, but they had been friends in their time and it was good to see him again and see him so obviously thriving, too. His scholar’s gown was of good cloth and cut and he did not look under-fed, as scholars did whose love of learning outmatched their income and forced the choice of books over food.

Jostled together as they came off the bridge into the crowding of people toward the East Gate, Joliffe asked, “You’re still at New College?”

“Not these three years past. I’m at St. Edmund’s Hall, assistant master to Master Bryton now.”

“Are you? How did that come about?”

Thamys shifted his burden back to both arms, carrying it against his chest, but around its awkwardness he managed a shrug. “I was ready to move on from being only a scholar. I wanted to do as well as to learn. Master Bryton offered me this chance and I took it. Do you remember Master Bryton?”

“Maybe.” Joliffe had never clung to his Oxford memories. A great deal of lesser matter had faded, including Master Bryton. “Not to put a face to.”

“A good man, a solid scholar. Not brilliant, but then most of us aren’t.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“You weren’t brilliant. Merely brazen.”

Joliffe laughed. Into broad High Street now, they were walking less crowdedly, drifting toward the right through the homeward flow of folk. Toward Queen’s Lane, Joliffe guessed; if he remembered rightly where St. Edmund’s Hall was.

There were places like St. Edmund’s Hall all over Oxford, lacking the rich endowments and patronage that supported the great colleges and dependent on luck and their masters’ skills to keep them going, but they offered residence and learning to students who otherwise could not have afforded them. Such places rented spaces here and there as chance and their ever-imperiled finances allowed, gaining or losing students by the master’s reputation, flourishing or fading for, sometimes, no discernable reason at all. At best, running such halls was a chancy business, but St. Edmund’s was still here after more than a few years, and that Thamys had involved himself with it suggested it stood a good chance of going on a few years more. There had never been anything slack about Thamys’ wits.