A Play of Piety (25 page)

“That’s the root trouble, isn’t it?” Basset said. “We don’t know any good reason for anyone to want Aylton dead. Those men from the manors might have, if they couldn’t have turned Mistress Thorncoffyn against him, but as it was, they had to be satisfied Aylton was no more threat to them.”

“It’s not only a matter of wanting Aylton dead,” Joliffe brooded. “It’s a matter of chance. Who had chance at him last night?”

“If he left the hospital, anyone he might have happened on,” said Basset unhelpfully.

“Someone who fed him, killed him, then thoughtfully returned the body here.”

“Except of course that he wasn’t dead when his head went into the stream. But he wasn’t in his right senses then either, I gather.”

“No. There was no sign of struggle. I looked. There was no dirt or tearing to the fingernails like there might have been if he had scrabbled to push himself free while someone held him under. No bruises either, of someone forcing him down.”

“Just the old bruises from the afternoon.”

“Yes.” A new thought came, belatedly perhaps. “Maybe you’re right at thinking he never left here. Maybe he only went so far as to Mistress Thorncoffyn, thinking to plead for mercy or pardon.”

“From Mistress Thorncoffyn?” Basset said dryly.

“I’m not saying he was in his right mind,” Joliffe returned as dryly. “But suppose he went to her. Or maybe he sought out Geoffrey. Geoffrey was here all the night and maybe knows more of Aylton’s doings than he or Aylton admitted to yesterday. Aylton could well have not accused him then in just the hope of his help later.”

“So he somehow got Geoffrey away from his grandmother in the night, and Geoffrey fed him and got him senseless and hauled him to the stream,” Basset suggested, not very encouragingly.

“I didn’t say it was a likely thought. I’m only saying Geoffrey might well have better reason than anyone else to want Aylton dead.”

“Anyone else we
know
of.”

“Don’t go adding to the problem,” Joliffe said, aggrieved, then added to it himself by saying, “There’s Master Soule, of course. It would have been easiest of all for Aylton to have gone to him in the night.”

“I want to overhear you questioning Master Soule,” Basset said as if the thought diverted him.

“I’ll let you know when it’s likely to happen,” Joliffe returned. He knew his place here, and it did not include asking questions of the master. Why that suddenly irked him he did not know. As a traveling player, he was almost always among the lowest of the low, and it had never much troubled him before now. Possibly the “traveling” made the difference.

If you were always on the move, no one lorded it over you for long. This staying in one place was maybe beginning to wear on him. Restful in its way though it was after the rigors of the past months, it was not his own life back again, and yesterday’s playing had shown him how much, under his weariness, he wanted his own life back. “How much better are your feet?” he asked.

Basset stretched his legs out and flexed his toes, then his feet at the ankles. “Far better. Couldn’t do that three weeks ago without yelping with the pain, let be that two months ago I was in pain most everywhere else in me, too. Sister Letice and Sister Margaret know what they’re about with their herbs and all.”

“And Master Hewstere?” Joliffe asked despite himself.

In a tone that matched the physician in high dignity and assured authority, Basset answered down the length of his nose, “He says that Saturn has shifted sufficiently away from Mars for conflict to ease within those bodies of men whose humours are so regrettably unbalanced as to be balefully affected by their influence.” He dropped Hewstere’s masterful tone, returned to his own. “Which may well be, but I’m glad I had the sisters’ herbs and ointments in the meanwhile.”

From the hall’s upper end a rattle of curtain rings being pushed aside told something was happening, even before they both heard Sister Ursula quietly saying for everyone to hear that the crowner was come and had something to say to them all. As Basset set aside the bowl and swung himself around into his bed, Joliffe stood up, pushed back the curtain there, and went on to put back the next one along and the one after that, meeting Sister Ursula coming from the other way. Sister Margaret was doing the same on the other side of the hall, and when all the curtains were open, both sisters stood together between the last pair of beds, with Joliffe a servant’s few paces behind them, all facing the length of the hall toward Master Osburne now taking up a stance on the chapel step. From there the crowner swept a slow look over everyone until sure that everyone was looking back at him before he said, “Good men, you all know by now that one of you came to a bad end in the night. Master Aylton was here when you all settled for the night. Sometime after that he left. Did any of you hear him go?”

That brought a general looking at one another and then back to him, followed by a general shaking of heads. Because he had surely already been told of the sleeping draught by now, Master Osburne did not look surprised or press further that way; instead tried, “Do any of you know anything about why he left?”

“To escape Mistress Thorncoffyn coming after him with lawyers instead of her staff!” Deke Credy readily answered.

Laughter skittered among the men. Master Osburne permitted himself an agreeing smile before asking, still to everyone, “Did he say anything to any of you while he was here?” The general shaking of heads came again. Master Osburne fixed his look on Basset. “To you?”

“Nothing, sir.” Basset was all humble respect. “He took to his bed and the sisters drew the curtains around him, and except for a groan now and again when he moved, that was all I saw or heard of him.”

Master Osburne shifted his gaze to Dick Leek on the other side of the empty bed that had briefly been Aylton’s. “You?”

Leek beckoned his head toward Basset. “As he said. No more than that.”

Master Osburne spent a moment giving a long look around at everyone again before nodding as if satisfied. He stepped down and, followed by his clerk, came down the hall toward the sisters. “My thanks,” he said to Sister Ursula as he reached her, and added past her to Joliffe, “I’d speak with you now.”

Without waiting for answer, he went out the near door. Joliffe, carefully not trading even a glance with Basset and aware of the clerk at his back, followed him into the passage and out to the foreporch that was maybe too near Mistress Thorncoffyn’s door, because Master Osburne went from it to well out into the yard before he turned around and said bluntly, “The most likely way for this Aylton to have left was past your room. You didn’t hear him go?”

“No.”

“You didn’t hear him, follow him, kill him?”

Hiding how much the crowner’s boldness diverted him, Joliffe said with the startled surprise and protest of a simple man, “No! Why would I do that?”

“That’s for you to tell me.”

Joliffe thought better of telling him anything at all, just stared at him as if utterly bewildered to be asked at all.

Master Osburne paused, accepted his silence, and accused, “Come to it, you might not have followed him by chance. You could have lured him out on purpose to kill him.”

Truly taken aback, Joliffe exclaimed, “What?”

“You were maybe hired to it by Master Thorncoffyn. To save his grandmother trouble. Or to save
him
trouble if he was deeper with Aylton’s mischief than anyone yet knew.”

The crowner was very sharp. From what he had probably been told while coming here and from the questions he had already asked since arriving, he was shifting possible pieces of who and why and how around with fine speed. But Joliffe would just as soon he shifted them some other way than toward him and said, “That’s more than I know about Master Thorncoffyn’s business. Nor he didn’t ask anything of me. I don’t know the last time he spoke to me, but it’s not since early yesterday or longer. Long before there was any trouble over Master Aylton. Besides, Master Aylton didn’t drink the evening drink. The sisters surely told you they found it in his bed-pot.”

“They did.”

“So he must have been meaning, all on his own, to leave from the very first.”

“On his own? Or at someone’s instigation?”

“That I couldn’t say,” Joliffe said with the firmness of a simple and innocent man. “It wasn’t me. That’s what I know. I know, too, he didn’t go past my door in the night. I sleep light and I’d have heard him.”

It was the only solid help he could give the crowner, for what it might be worth, and Master Osburne did not seem to think it was worth much, his gaze still fixed on Joliffe’s face with no sign of belief in it; but giving no sign of what he believed was maybe a deliberate trick, like now letting the silence draw out between them, waiting for some guilty filling of it. That being a trick Joliffe knew, he said nothing but shifted from foot to foot and blinked with the uneasy, bewildered, almost-resentment of an innocent man who did not understand why he was being questioned and doubted. It was a manner he had perfected over the years as a player, because among the troubles of not belonging where you were was that when the untoward happened, folk looked first at you, hoping that if someone were guilty, it was someone no one much knew. The problem had eased when the company gained Lord Lovell for a patron, and now, beyond Lord Lovell, at the last push he could claim protection from Bishop Beaufort.

That being something to be called on only at the very furthest need, he presently put his hope in his own innocence and the crowner’s willingness to accept it and go on seeking the true answer, encouraged in his hope because, very unlike some encounters with other such officers, he did not have the sense that Master Osburne was intent on choosing him guilty to keep matters simple. The man was prodding and questioning to see what he could learn, not because he had made up his mind to what he would find, and for now it seemed he thought he had found out all he could from Joliffe, because after a long, fixed look at him, he gave a nod that seemed both of decision to himself and dismissal to Joliffe and said, “That will do for now. You can go about your business.”

The crowner went first, though, quick-strided toward the hospital again, his clerk behind him, while Joliffe was still bowing. Left to follow, Joliffe did. With presently no thought of how he might get answers to his own questions and satisfied that Master Osburne was being fair-handed at the business, he was thinking he might go back to his right duties for a time after all his neglect of them today, but was forestalled by Master Osburne and his clerk stopping in the passage outside Mistress Thorncoffyn’s open outer door. Joliffe expected them to go in, out of his way, but they did not, and as he stopped behind them he heard Mistress Thorncoffyn declaring loudly, hoarsely, “I’m not asking in holy ground, no! Don’t be a fool. All I want is a prayer or two over him. That much I’ll have!”

Joliffe stayed where he was, shamelessly willing to listen unless told to go on his way. Could Mistress Thorncoffyn be arguing against Aylton being buried in consecrated ground?

Master Osburne took a step backward, making his clerk shift quickly aside from his way. The crowner looked around to him and gave a short nod. The clerk nodded in return and went past him, rapped sharply at the door frame, and went in without waiting for leave. He must have spoken very quietly, because next heard was Mistress Thorncoffyn snapping, “Finally come to me, has he? I’m where he should have started. You go tell him he’ll have to wait now,” and returned to her harangue at whoever else was there with, “I’ll have it and no mistake. Either you or Father Richard, one or the other of you will say prayers over my poor Kydd at his burial or you’ll both be the sorrier for it.”

Master Soule’s voice was sharp with reproof as he said back at her, “You weep more over that dead dog of yours than you have for your man who died without the Church’s prayers.”

“I don’t weep for Aylton at all. Supposing anyone troubles to say enough prayers for him,
his
soul stands at least a chance of Heaven, no matter he meant to rob me. But my poor Kydd? He’s more worth my tears than Aylton ever was, but you priests say there’s no heaven for dogs.”

“They’re soulless animals,” Master Soule returned sternly. “They die and they’re done.”

“Then all the more reason to shed tears over their loss!” Mistress Thorncoffyn stormed. “Nor do I believe you! I’ve seen more of a soul in my dogs than ever I do in most people!”

“That,” Master Soule snapped back with sudden wrath, “would be because you look with more love at your dogs than ever you do at people! For which fault may God have mercy on
your
soul!”

Master Osburne’s clerk, either dismissed with a wave of a hand or giving up on being properly dismissed, came into the foreporch then. He raised eyebrows at the crowner who nodded back and straightened his shoulders as if bracing himself to go in, asked or no, only to be forestalled by Rose coming into the far end of the covered walk and along it at a flurried run, calling as she came, “Master Osburne! You’re wanted! Hurry!”

Chapter 19

M
aster Osburne, his clerk, and Joliffe all started toward her. Breathless with both alarm and haste, Rose cried, “It’s Sister Letice! In the kitchen!” The crowner broke forward into a run, his clerk an instant after him, Joliffe still behind them both. Rose stood aside to let them pass and would have followed at their heels but Joliffe slowed, caught her arm, and held her back to a swift walk as he demanded, “What is it? What’s happened?”

“Mistress Thorncoffyn’s vile candied ginger! She’s poisoned herself.”

“Sister Letice? With the ginger? How did
she
come by any of it?”

“Given the way Mistress Thorncoffyn was ill, she had the thought that it was poisoned. She had Sister Ursula ask Idany for a piece and ate it!”

“But why—” he started. Assuredly neither he nor Jack had said anything to Sister Letice about their guess at a link between Mistress Thorncoffyn and Kydd being sick. There had been no time to say anything about it to anyone.