A Play of Piety (15 page)

And no one was trying to kill him.

Assured of all that, he closed his eyes, knowing it would take time to will the terror out of his knotted sinews enough for him to sleep again.

But beyond his eyelids, the darkness changed. Someone had come with a light outside his partly shut door, and he snapped open his eyes and was already shoving clear of his tangled blanket and sitting up as Sister Margaret said, low-voiced, “Joliffe? Are you well? I heard you cry out.”

So his dream-shout had not been entirely in his dream.

“A dream,” he said, matching her low voice. For courtesy’s sake, he rose and went to open the door a little wider. Sister Margaret stood with a lighted candle in her hand, her gray gown, white apron, wimple, and veil tidy upon her despite whatever night-hour it was. For some reason that added to Joliffe’s apology, tousled as he was from his sleep and nightmare, with his shirt hanging loose around him, as he said, “That was all. A bad dream. I’m sorry I woke you.”

As he said it, he realized she could not have been asleep, not been a-bed, even as she answered, “You didn’t. I was already up, seeing to Iankyn. He was wheezing and needed quieting. He’s asleep again now. But Tom Lyttle is dead.”

She said it so evenly that for a moment Joliffe did not fully take in the words’ meaning. Then it reached him, and he gasped, “What? Dead? When?”

“Just now. Or, rather, I only just found him as I looked in on everyone. But he’s yet warm. So only a little while ago. Will you come with me?”

“Yes. Yes, surely.” Joliffe fumbled his doublet down from the wall-pole. The night was warm enough that his bare legs would not matter, but there was chill enough he would want more than his shirt if he were to be up for any length of time. That practicality muddled with his other thoughts, his mind as clumsy as his movements, as he asked while shrugging into his doublet, “What happened?”

“He died in his sleep,” Sister Margaret said calmly.

“But he . . . at Compline he was . . .” Joliffe tried to align his mind and tongue with one another. “He was well then.”

“And he is now,” Sister Margaret said. “Only in a different way.”

“The Last Rites,” Joliffe said. “He never . . .”

“Here the men confess every week. The older of them are in constant likelihood of death and know it. I doubt he passed in much sin. There’ll be the Masses said for him, too,” she added practically.

She moved away. Joliffe followed her, across the passageway and into the hall where there was deep-night silence and curtained shadows around the beds, silvered by moonlight slanting in the high windows and barely touched by the small lamp burning over the altar in the chapel. It crossed Joliffe’s mind that his outcry could not have been so very loud after all, and he was thankful for that. Sister Margaret must have heard him only because she was awake and probably coming to wake him anyway, because the peace here was undisturbed, the only sounds the varied breathings between curtains—Ned Knolles lightly snoring; Iankyn gently wheezing, a little labored but even; the others only a general, gentle susurration. There was no way to tell there was one less than a little while ago.

Even when he came to stand beside Tom Lyttle’s bed while Sister Margaret set the candle on the bedside table, Joliffe could have thought the old man was only sleeping. Sister Margaret had already closed his eyes. Or perhaps, dying in his sleep, they had been closed. His jaw was sagged open, though, in that slack way only the dead achieve. That would have to be seen to before the body stiffened, Joliffe thought, using practicality to detach himself from other thoughts; but Sister Margaret was taking a long bandage from inside the front of her apron, and she bent to pass it under Lyttle’s slack jaw and up around his face to the top of his head, lifting the jaw decently closed before she deftly knotted the cloth. Still keeping his thought to elsewhere, Joliffe noted she must have been bringing the bandage when she heard him. Better yet. For some reason, it mattered greatly that his outcry was as unknown as possible.

“There,” Sister Margaret said softly as she straightened. “It’s good to give what dignity we can.”

Her calmness gave it all a dignity, too. She must have seen a quantity of deaths here—enough to give her the calmness of familiarity, Joliffe supposed. Or even of indifference, perhaps. After all, Lyttle had been just an old man without family.

Then the candlelight glistened on a tear sliding down Sister Margaret’s cheek, and Joliffe changed his thought. Indifferent she was not.

She wiped the tear away with the back of one hand, saw him watching her, and said, with an effort toward a smile, “How many of our tears are for the dead, I wonder, and how many are for ourselves, grieving to be left behind and at the same time newly fearing what will come to us in our turn.”

For what comfort was in it, he offered, “I would guess that, moment to moment, that’s all too mixed ever to sort out.”

She gave him slightly more of a smile. “Very likely.”

“Why don’t you go back to bed while you may? I can keep vigil by him until the day starts.”

As if his words freed her to be weary, tiredness was suddenly heavy in her shoulders and face. “I would be grateful for that,” she admitted.

“Then go.” Before someone else needs you, he did not add.

She went, a shadow of gray and white among the darker shadows. There was enough left of the candle that it might burn until dawn, but none of the shadows here were the foul and gibbering ones of Joliffe’s dream, and he pinched the flame out between thumb and forefinger. He did not mind honest darkness, and candles were costly. He meant to stay awake, but did not know how much he would actually pray and was debating whether sitting on the stool beside the bed would be sufficient or whether he should kneel at the bedside, at least for a time for respect’s sake.

“He’s dead then,” Basset said quietly from beyond the curtain.

“Gah,” Joliffe said back, startled. “Don’t do that in the dark like this.”

“You’re the one put out the candle. Put the curtain aside. I’ll keep vigil with you.”

Joliffe obeyed, trying to slide the rings as silently as might be along the pole and pausing to listen when he had finished, to hear if anyone had been disturbed. No one stirred, no breathing changed that he could hear, and finding he was glad of Basset’s company, he sat down on the stool between the beds.

“So what was with that outcry of yours?” Basset asked.

Joliffe was abruptly less glad to have his company. He tried, “What outcry?” Basset answered that with a contempting snort, so he changed to, “An ill dream. That was all,” and tried to take the talk away from himself with, “So why were you awake to hear me?” Then he wished he had said something else, because the answer to that was so obvious.

Basset gave it anyway. “Sister Margaret moving around here wakened me. But what was that with you shouting and thrashing? We’re to wake
you
in the night, not other way round.”

Joliffe wanted to make a lightly mocking answer back, but with the edges of the dream still raw in him, no light answer came in time, and Basset—as so often, too sharp for Joliffe’s ease—asked with solid concern, “What is it, then?” And when still Joliffe could not find words, added, “Not something here. Not even the Thorncoffyns are worth that kind of nightmare. Is it something”—he lowered his voice even more—“from when you weren’t with us?”

Joliffe swallowed down the tightness in his throat enough to force out, “Yes.”

“Will it help to tell of it?” Basset asked, level-voiced and carefully not too gentle.

Joliffe had control enough now to say as evenly, “I don’t know.” But suddenly, whether it would help or not, he wanted to tell at least some of it, and he said, “I was in France. That’s where I was sent after we parted ways.”

“Not Northamptonshire, the way you said,” Basset said, a little dryly.

“That was later. At the first I was in France. In Rouen. Then . . . in Paris.”

In the dark Basset made a sharp, startled movement. “Paris,” he hissed. “But Paris—” He broke off. A handful of months ago, Paris, that had been part of English-held France for these past fifteen years, had been brutally lost, along with much else England had won in France under the hero-king Henry V and since. Not everything had gone. Not Normandy. But Paris was, and it had not gone gently.

“I was there at the end,” Joliffe said. “In the midst of it. I got out. Others . . . did not.”

“Blessed Mary, Saint Genesius, and all the saints,” Basset whispered, not hiding his horror.

“And now I have nightmares,” Joliffe said flatly. And found there was nothing else he could bring himself to say.

Basset left him to his silence and each presumably to their prayers for Lyttle’s soul and—on Joliffe’s side, for other souls, too.

The night passed. Morning came. As understanding spread among the other men that one of them had gone, a silence different from the night’s peace filled the hall, made partly of prayers, partly of the other old men’s sense of their own waiting for their end. The sisters, for their part, saw to Lyttle’s body while Joliffe went about his morning duties, finding that Rose in the kitchen shared the sisters’ solemnity, and that even Emme and Amice were quieter than usual.

It had become a pleasant daily habit between him and Amice for him to suggest she was madly in lust for him and for her to laugh at him, and for Emme to say, mock-sternly, “You can do better than him that’s just wandering through, girl,” then threaten him with wet and soapy paddle, warning him to shift himself out of their way.

This morning there was none of that, and it made his return to the kitchen all the more jarring, to find Idany there, demanding at Sister Ursula, “She won’t want
her
coming nigh her. Who else was there? Someone else had to be there.”

Sister Ursula pointed at Joliffe. “He was.”

“You,” Idany said. “Come with me. My lady wants to hear all.”

Joliffe cast Sister Ursula a questioning look, hoping for rescue. Rather than rescue, she merely nodded, and perforce he went with Idany away to Mistress Thorncoffyn’s chamber where indeed she wanted to hear everything. Which old man was it had died? At what hour? Who was with him? No one? Who found him dead then?

“Sister Margaret,” Joliffe said.

“Too late at her night round of the men, it would seem,” Mistress Thorncoffyn sniffed. “Master Soule will have to speak to her. Nor was Father Richard there, I take it.”

“No.”

“Remiss in
his
duties, too.” Mistress Thorncoffyn’s eyes, small above her fat cheeks, were bright with looking forward to making trouble. “See that Master Soule knows I want to see him as soon as may be.” She laid a hand over the highest swell of her belly. “Too, tell Sister Ursula I’m in need of more of that drink she makes with ginger and mint. My stomach was unquiet in the night.”

Joliffe took that for dismissal, bowed, and made to withdraw. Idany followed him to the door, apparently to be sure it was rightly closed behind him but taking her chance to say at him, very low and with frowning fierceness, “You see to it that it’s Sister Ursula who makes that drink. Not Sister Margaret. Nor that Sister Letice. Tell Sister Ursula I said so.”

Joliffe did not see how she supposed it was his place to tell the sisters what to do or not do, and anyway no one but Rose was in the kitchen when he returned. He told her, both about the drink and Idany’s demand for Sister Ursula to make it, then asked, “What’s the complaint against Sister Letice? I can understand distrusting Sister Margaret, but why Sister Letice? What’s Mistress Thorncoffyn done to her?”

“To her brother more than to Sister Letice herself,” Rose said. “Or to her brother and her parents, rather. But thereby to Sister Letice, I suppose. I doubt either she or he would be here if their parents hadn’t died the way they did and if her brother didn’t take it the way he does.”

“Her brother is here?” Joliffe said in surprise. As he tried to think who he could be among the bedridden men, Rose said, “Father Richard.”

Her brother. Then that small, easy exchange he had seen between them had been only sister to brother, no greater matter than that. Good. But he asked, “How did their parents die, to make such difference to them?”

“Unshriven,” Rose said grimly. Meaning their souls’ chance of Heaven was imperiled, if not altogether broken. “Six winters ago they fell ill together of a rheum in the lungs. You know how that can sometimes go. It starts out seeming none so bad, turns worse, seems to better, then suddenly goes very bad and kills quickly. That’s what happened with them. Letice was tending them, understood what was happening, sent for her brother to come quickly. He was here, this being his parish even then. So was Mistress Thorncoffyn, making one of her visits and somewhat unwell with a slight, aching fever. She’s the sort who knows that whatever she has, it’s worse than whatever someone else has. If someone else is dying, she’s dying sooner. She wanted her own Last Rites before Father Richard left her. No one thought she was dying, so he refused it. She clamped down on his arm and wouldn’t let him go. Those ham-hands of hers look like no more than much meat, but there’s strength in them. Sister Ursula was here then. She says that Father Richard argued and argued with her, and that when he finally gave up trying to persuade her and fought to break her hold on him, they left bruises on each other. Mistress Thorncoffyn was that determined to have what she wanted. His sister had been right—their parents were dying very quickly. He came just in time to hear his father’s death-rattle. His mother was already dead. He was too late for both of them. He’s made his life a penance for it ever since, Sister Ursula says.”

Joliffe held silent a moment, taking in the full, cruel weight of the burden Father Richard must carry. Then he asked, “And Sister Letice?”

“When her brother sold off everything their parents owned, he should have provided her with a dowry out of that, but he begged her to put her share along with his into Masses for their parents’ souls, to try to save them in death since he had failed them in life. He was in such a pitch of misery, so determined on a wrenching penance for his failure, she could not say no. So the money went to pay for Masses at Ely, to add to Father Richard’s own prayers for them. Since all that Letice had left in her life by then was her brother, she took service here. That’s been to the hospital’s good, what with her skill with herbs, but it means she and her brother have to deal with Mistress Thorncoffyn time and again.”