A Play of Piety (11 page)

“Daveth?” Joliffe said with surprise.

“He has lessons from me most mornings. Just set it there,” Jack said, with a nod toward a broad shelf fastened table-height to the wall beside one of the windows.

“Joliffe,” Joliffe said, crossing to set down the tray. “That’s me. Daveth has lessons?”

“He’s a little slow but not hopelessly so. Sister Petronilla hopes he’ll be able to make his way as at least a simple clerk. Or maybe he can take over from me, fortunate fellow.”

That last could have been bitter, but the man said it cheerily enough, and indeed Joliffe could see his life here might not be so bad, all in all, particularly given the man’s no-chances in the world at large with his twisted body. The room was perhaps half the size of Master Soule’s, with plain-plastered walls and bare floor, but the window beside the shelf looked out on the road and the church and churchyard and some of the houses along the road into town there, while a window in the opposite wall looked toward the hospital, meaning Jack had a high, wide view of things and sunlight in mornings and late afternoons. A small fireplace in one wall would give comfort in cold weather, and for furnishings there were a plain, uncurtained bed, a chair, a stool, a small chest to hold what belongings the man might have, a wallpole with a cloak hung over it, a candle in a holder on the shelf, and—

“Books,” said Joliffe. “You have books.” Three of them piled on the wide shelf that served for a table. Not restrained as he had had to be in Master Soule’s and Master Hewstere’s presence, he reached out to see what they were, belatedly recalled his manners, and looked at Jack for permission.

Jack, limping to join him, said, “The
Epistolae
is Master Soule’s. He loans one and another of his books to me from time to time. Rolle, though, and the Macrobius are mine.” A claim he made with open pride.

“Which of Rolle’s purgative stages have you reached?”

Jack laughed. “As yet, I fear I only view them from afar. You?”

“I’ve read his
Incendium amoris
but, alas, have not yet been burned by it. I do carry a small book of Hoccleve with me, but he’s another matter altogether.”

“Hoccleve? I don’t know him. What did he—does he?—write?”

“Poems on life. Life as it is, mixed with complaints of how it isn’t what it should be.”

“That can be tedious.”

“So is life sometimes, after all, but he’s mostly wry about it all. I’ve found him good company.”

He saw Jack almost ask to see the book, then pull back. A book was not something to be handed around without thought. Still, if Master Soule trusted his books—books far more costly than Joliffe’s little one—to Jack, then—

Joliffe pulled the thought up short. No, he would trust his book to Jack not because of Master Soule but because of Jack himself, and he said easily, “Tell you what. I’ll bring it when I’ve had chance to dig it out of my bag. You can see for yourself what he’s like.” Jack gave a pleased nod of thanks while Joliffe went on, “But best I take myself back to the scullery now and leave you to your meal. We’ve let it grow cold. Do I come back for your dishes?”

“Daveth fetches them. Would you like if I asked Master Soule to lend you something of his books?”

Nearly Joliffe accepted eagerly, then thought better of it and shook his head. “Nay. By the look of things, I’ll be kept busy enough there’ll be not much reading for a while.”

“Bed-pots,” said Jack.

“Bed-pots and scullery work,” Joliffe returned, pulling a face that left Jack chuckling behind him as he left.

Chapter 9

A
t the hall Joliffe put his head briefly around the corner in hope of a chance to trade a few words with Basset, but the curtains were drawn between the beds again, and he saw Basset was sleeping. So perhaps were the other men, and he drew back and went along the walk and to the kitchen where he found only Rose, on her knees scrubbing the broad stone in front of the hearth. She sat back on her heels to tell him, “The women take a rest at this hour, if all’s well. When I’ve finished here and you’ve done the scullery, we can ease for a time, too, if things stay quiet.”

“Where do they go?”

“Their dorter. It’s above Mistress Thorncoffyn’s rooms. If her dogs are in a yapping humour, there’s not much rest, but at least they can lie down for a time.”

“Where do you go?”

“There’s the pallet in the pantry.” She returned to her scrubbing. “Now go to your scullery, or there’ll be no rest for either of us.”

A short while later, scouring away on the wooden bowls and cups and spoons for the second time that day, Joliffe began to suspect that the scullery was indeed going to seem, as Rose had said, “his.”

He finished there as the sisters came back to the later afternoon’s duties. For Joliffe, those proved to be much like the morning’s, with bed-pots to empty and clean and various tasks and errands given him, including opening the curtains between the men’s beds again. He did take chance when bringing Tom Lyttle’s pot back to pause at Basset’s side and ask quietly, with a tilt of his head toward the fevered John Oxyn and the priest seated beside him, one of the sick man’s hands clasped in his own and his head bent in prayer, “Father Richard?”

“He comes every day,” Basset returned as quietly. “Whenever he’s not needed elsewhere, he’s here, to pray over whoever needs him or asks. With Oxyn there, he’s usually as quieting as any of the medicines the sisters give. That makes us always glad to see him.”

There was not much to be told about him from his back and bowed head as he sat there, but Joliffe remembered, “He’s the one who does the Offices and Mass sometimes, instead of Master Soule.”

“That’s him. But how goes it with you so far?”

Keeping his voice low because of the nearby praying, Joliffe gave a carefully crafted tale of over-work and woe in which bed-pots and firewood figured strongly. He soon had Bassett and Tom Lyttle in the next bed laughing and Dick Leek on Lyttle’s far side asking, “What? What are you laughing at?”

Father Richard finished his praying, briefly laid a hand on the fevered man’s forehead, said something, then stood up and turned away. He was far too thin for his height, as if maybe he took too much to heart the churchly admonitions on the value of poverty and fasting. Joliffe, having kept a corner of one eye on him, now looked full at him, half-expecting to be rebuked for story-telling while the man prayed. Instead, Father Richard gave him a friendly smile, a small nod, and a slight gesture of one hand that told him to go on with his tale. Then the priest looked past him to the door and his face lost all its friendliness.

Looking that way, too, Joliffe found Idany standing there, her mouth twisted as if she were disapproving of everything she saw and of the priest in particular as she said, “Father Richard”—making the “f” a hiss—“my lady has been waiting all day for you. You
know
she’s ill.”

“Others’ needs are more immediate,” the priest returned, coldly even-voiced.

“You’re wrong if you think that,” Idany huffed tartly. “You’ll come now.”

She swung around and left. Father Richard followed her, his hands clasped tightly together and against his waist. Possibly to keep from grabbing Idany’s scrawny neck, was Joliffe’s thought.

He looked at Bassett who, along with everyone else, had been watching, too. Bassett made a wry face and shrugged at him. Joliffe made an answering wry face, gave a shoulder-lifting sigh of over-played woe, and said glumly, “I’d best be about my work, too,” and scuff-footed out the door with a hanging head, leaving Basset and Tom Lyttle laughing behind him, as he had meant them to be.

Despite all that, he was not truly in woe about the work. He knew himself well enough to suspect that in a somewhat short time he would be finding it all tedious, but at present everything and everyone were new enough to him to be diverting. But shortly, when Mistress Thorncoffyn—probably looking for some other diversion after she finished with Father Richard, sent Idany to bid Sister Ursula come to her—he amended his suspicion to a certainty that Mistress Thorncoffyn would become wearisome long before anything else did.

Sister Ursula went, not graciously, and returned, fuming, to tell Joliffe, “What she wanted was to tell me you were to have the task of seeing her dogs out about their business twice a day or so. To spare Idany, she said. I told her no.”

Before Joliffe could say his thanks, Sister Letice inquired, a little smiling, “No? You only said no?”

“I only said no. Although perhaps not so pleasantly as I might have.”

“She’s going to make complaint about you to the wardens,” Sister Margaret warned.

“Again,” Sister Ursula said, not as if worried. “None of them care for her meddling any more than we do. Letice, by way of parting, she said I should remind you she wants her medicine fresh-made every day, not something stale from yesterday.”

“So long as there’s sufficient sugar in it, she wouldn’t care if it were last week’s,” Sister Letice returned.

“Let us be thankful she brought her own loaf of sugar with her,” Sister Margaret said.

Joliffe ventured, “When I saw her, she didn’t look all that ill. What troubles her?”

Sister Ursula made a brief, rude sound for answer, but Sister Margaret said more moderately, “She brought some ongoing trouble in her stomach from home with her. Master Hewstere hasn’t been able to make certain what it is, but a brew of herbs from Sister Letice eases it.”

“My own guess is that someone at her manor finally set about slow-poisoning her,” Sister Ursula said cheerfully. “The wonder is that someone hasn’t tried the same on those dogs of hers, too.”

“Oh, but they’re sweet,” Sister Letice protested.

“It may come,” Sister Margaret said, not cheerfully at all. “There are too many of them, just as there’s too much of her.”

Fortunately the talk had turned other ways when Idany shortly came again, this time to complain that the two boys were too loud at their play on the greensward outside her lady’s window, and Sister Petronilla was not curbing them. Sister Ursula left with her again, soon returning alone to say that of course it was Daveth who was too loud, that Heinrich was only sitting on the grass between Sister Petronilla’s knees while she and Daveth rolled a ball back and forth between them, or else Sister Petronilla would roll it far aside for Daveth to run after.

“His laughter was upsetting her dogs, Mistress Thorncoffyn said. I told her to have Idany take them for a walk,” Sister Ursula said disgustedly. “I barely held back from suggesting
she
take them for a walk and do herself some good.”

 

 

When time for Vespers came, the sisters took advantage of Joliffe’s being there to go together to the hall to hear the Office, leaving him to help Rose finish readying the men’s suppers. This gave Rose chance to ask him, much as Basset had done, “How goes it with you this far?”

“None too badly. A pause in the bed-pots would be good. Nor would Mistress Thorncoffyn be much missed. Did you say she’s likely to stay until Michaelmas?”

“If she holds to her usual way. It seems that once she reaches a place, she doesn’t shift easily.”

“I’m hard-put to see how she can shift at all, even from chair to bed and back again. Is it disease that’s misshaped her, or just greed and gluttony?”

“Greed and gluttony,” Rose said with immediate certainty. “She eats enough for three people at every meal and has a lust for sugar greater than even Piers does, and has the wealth for such indulgence which, thank goodness, he does not.”

“So it’s just as well,” Joliffe said, “that she’s chosen to get most of her meals from some cookshop. Otherwise the trouble of her here would be tripled, yes?”

Rose looked around the kitchen with over-large, pretended care, as if someone might somehow be lurking there, then leaned a little toward him and said, low-voiced and merrily, “She gets most of her meals from the cookshop because somehow almost any meal made for her here at the hospital is poorly cooked and badly seasoned.”

“This morning’s beef?”

“Oh, there’s little can be done wrong to pan-cooked beef when we’re forbidden to season it at all.”

“But everything else?”

“Except her medicines. Yes.”

“I take it not by chance?”

“Not even slightly by chance.” The merriment went from Rose. “Not that Sister Margaret does it, but the others do, which is other than you’d think it would be, given that if I were Mistress Thorncoffyn, it would be Sister Margaret I’d not want anywhere near my food and drink.”

Surprised at Rose’s sudden seriousness, Joliffe asked, “Why?”

“Because Sister Margaret was married to her only son.”

“She’s Mistress Thorncoffyn’s daughter-in-law?” Joliffe heard his voice scale up and pulled it down. “Then how is it she’s a sister
here
?”

There was plainly wealth in the family. There should have been dower properties enough for the widow of the only son to live in comfort, not as a hireling sister in a hospital.

“She’s here,” Rose said, “because Mistress Thorncoffyn saw to it after her son’s death that Sister Margaret got nearly nothing of her dower. Mistress Thorncoffyn and her grandson and a lawyer working together left her with almost nothing and hardly any choice but to become a sister here. Not that Sister Margaret ever says anything about it, but Emme seems to know all there is to know about everyone here, and she does like to talk.”

“This grandson—not Sister Margaret’s own son, surely?” But who else could he be?

“Sister Margaret’s own son but entirely his grandmother’s boy.”

“And Mistress Thorncoffyn is brave enough to come here and stay,” Joliffe marveled. “Or fool enough,” he added.

“I think she enjoys seeing Sister Margaret brought down to this. Oh, there’s Vespers ending. Let me show you how the trays are set for supper. Bring the bowls here.”