A Play of Piety (8 page)

What came next proved to be bed-pots.

As Sister Ursula explained while leading him to the hall, emptying and washing and returning the bed-pots to each man’s bed would be his first task every day.

“Now, you must understand that some of the men can rise to use their own. Others will call for you to help when the need comes on them, be it day or in the night. Don’t delay about it, or you’ll have to explain to Emme why there are extra sheets to wash. Today, the way their sleep was broken last night by Adam Morys’ trouble, the men may be troublesome in their turn. You’ll be patient with them, nonetheless, I know.”

That was pleasantly said, but left Joliffe without doubt that what Sister Ursula meant was that he had
best
be patient with them. There was a crisp certainty to Sister Ursula that left no doubt why she was huswife here, with all the overseeing of the place’s daily needs put in her hands. Joliffe judged that if he did exactly as she told him in his duties, he would do well enough. At the same time, there was nothing unfriendly about her, and he gave way to his curiosity and asked, “Why is it safer for Master Soule to do Prime today?”

Quite steadily but with something of the same laughter under the words as there had been in kitchen, Sister Ursula said, “Because Mistress Thorncoffyn will not be up this early.”

That again was no sufficient answer but it was all she gave. They were in the hall now. There was enough gray dawnlight through the windows that Sister Ursula paused beside a low-standing table just inside the hall’s door to put out the fat candle burning there. Several smaller, unlighted candles in holders waited beside it. “For use in the night, when you have to go to someone,” she explained.

She went to the nearest bed, said quietly, “Deke Credy, good morning,” and pushed back the curtain. “Wooden rings,” she said to Joliffe, nodding upward. “They make less of a noise than metal would.” As not really an after-thought, she added, “And are less costly.”

“More to spend on m’comforts,” mumbled the toothless old man grinning up from the bed. “Um’ll have roast pork for my dinner today, Sister.”

“You’ll have pains in your belly all the rest of the day and all tomorrow if you do,” Sister Ursula said back as if it were an old jibing between them. “This is Joliffe who’s taken Ivo’s place for the while.” And to Joliffe, “Deke is here nearest the altar because he’s more in need of blessing than most.”

“Um that,” Deke agreed cheerily. “Bad man all my days.”

“Leave the pot a moment,” Sister Ursula bade Joliffe who had bent to draw the cloth-covered pottery pot from under the bed. “You can meet the others while I set back their curtains to the day and gather up the cups from their night-time drink.”

Joliffe willingly put off the first bed-pot in favor of following her as she made her way back and forth and down the ward, opening the curtains beside each bed with cheersome good-mornings and sharing some talk with each man that told Joliffe a little about them. Only Deke and three others were decrepit with years. Another man was in hale middle-age save for a broken leg that had him bedfast and grumbling, his summer-brown skin beginning to pale from being away from the sun too long.

“Let a hay wain roll over him, did our Adam,” Sister Ursula told Joliffe, and added sternly to the bedfast man, “You’re lucky it wasn’t your head, drunk as you were, stumbling about like that.”

“I wasn’t drunk and you know it!” he shot back. “Nor don’t think I don’t hear the wild times and drinking goes on in that kitchen among you women, neither.” But he grinned as he said it, and Sister Ursula returned a smile of her own.

In another bed a hollow-chested young man much about Joliffe’s own age was lying quiet and pain-eyed, too taken up with the effort of his breathing to strain at talk. Sister Ursula spoke quietly to him, calling him Iankyn, and gentled him a little higher on his several pillows. As they left him, Joliffe asked softly, “Lung-sickness?”

“Of a kind, yes. It’s asthma, and sometimes he’s quite well, but some times of the year are worse for him than others, and at its worst there’s nothing but here for him, for us to do what we can.”

The man they came to now lay with his eyes half-closed, twisting his head back and forth on his pillow, clutching and unclutching at the sheet over him and muttering, seeming hardly aware of Sister Ursula as she bent over him to feel his forehead and say firmly, “John. It’s morning, John. There’ll be Prime soon. Master Soule will soon be saying Prime.” She looked over her shoulder at Joliffe to add, “He always quiets during the Offices.” A basin of water with a cloth in it sat on the floor under the table beside his bed. “If it’s set on the table, he’s likely to tip it off when he thrashes,” she explained, bending to wring out the cloth.

While she gently bathed his forehead and cheeks, Joliffe asked, “What manner of fever is it?”

“A cotidian, given the particular way it comes and goes in him daily. If it weren’t harvest time, he’d be cared for at home, but there’s only his wife and a half-grown son. They both have to be in the fields, so he’s here for the while.” She put the cloth back into the basin, briefly touched the man’s shoulder, and said again to him, “There’ll be Prime soon now,” before moving across the aisle to Basset who was wide awake. He laughed when Sister Ursula said they would begin taking up the bed-pots now and said to Joliffe, “Found your right place in the world at last, eh?”

With a great, grave dignity that did not go with the pot he was picking up, Joliffe said, “Humility and service will win me the better place in Heaven.”

Basset laughed again, and Sister Ursula said, benignly enough, “It’s to the good when a man is well enough to laugh,” but Joliffe suspicioned that she was laughing, too, if only inwardly.

While they collected the pots, Sister Ursula told him, “Usually, this will be your task alone in the mornings. It’s best if you can have it done before Prime, to be out of the way.” And she showed him how they were to be emptied in the necessarium at the far end of the kitchen and scullery but reached along one arm of the roofed walk that he now saw ran not only along the side of the hospital’s hall but also down the inner sides of the kitchen wing and the range of rooms facing it, across a square of greensward surrounded on three sides by the walk and presently being kept short by a tethered nanny goat. At its far end the greensward was closed in by a hip-high latticed fence beyond which he could see the orchard, so presumably the stone-lined drain and stream were there, too.

“We call this the cloister,” Sister Ursula said as they went along the walk. “Such as it is. Those of our men who aren’t bedridden can come out to sit on the benches here when the days are warm. Now, about these pots,” she went on as she led him into the necessarium. It was a narrow room. A stone bench with two suitably sized holes through it and low enough for comfortable sitting ran along its outer side, with the gurgle of water below it telling how waste was carried off along the stone-lined runnel. At the far end of the bench was a tub kept there for cleaning the bed-pots.

“You’ll do well to fill the tub the evening before, to make one less thing to do in the morning,” Sister Ursula said.

This morning, she helped him, probably for the sake of making sure he understood how to scrub a pot clean, but she talked while they worked, and not idly, telling him more of the men who would be in his care, beginning with, “Adam Morys, the man who has the broken leg. He was never drunk when he fell. He was grabbing Jack Denton’s grandson out of the wain’s way and slipped in mud and went under himself. He’s fretted with losing all the summer’s work his fields need. He needn’t be, though. His folk and Denton’s and others are taking it up for him. He’ll be back on his leg well before All Hallows. This being the first summer’s work he’s missed since he could toddle, you’d think he’d not mind the chance to rest, but he does. Keep something of an eye on him, that he doesn’t get restless and try to walk ere he should. They do that—not use their good sense. Not that Iankyn Tanner is likely to be up until he’s allowed. He tends to be too weak to be other than sensible. The old men don’t move about much, but they’re allowed if they want to. You’ll find them sitting in the sun in the cloister, as I said. Ned Knolles sometimes makes it as far as the foreyard, although when he does, Jack at the gate usually has to help him back.”

As they were fetching the last pair of bed-pots back to the hall, a bell began to be rung from somewhere outside the hospital.

“There’s Father Richard at St. George’s across the way,” Sister Ursula said. “The parish’s church. That will be for Prime. He’s ever prompt to prayers.”

Working to remember what he had heard so far, Joliffe said, “This Father Richard, he’s parish priest as well as the priest for here? Is that the way of it?”

“It is.”

“But he and Master Soule don’t take prayers and Mass turn and turn about here.”

“Since there’s no knowing when Father Richard will be needed somewhere in the parish, he and Master Soule have never tried to settle any pattern between them. They just do as choice and chance allow.”

Joliffe added that to all the other pieces he was gathering about St. Giles. Master Soule was master of the hospital and a priest. Father Richard served here but also for the parish, and they shared the Offices and, presumably, other priestly duties here in the hospital, while the sisters worked at keeping everyone clean and fed and tended to. And his own job was bed-pots and . . .

As they were putting the last of the pots back under beds, Sister Ursula said, “Dick Leek’s needs emptying again. I’ll leave you to it. If you hurry, you can have it back and be out of the way before Master Soule begins Prime. We’re not asked to be at the Offices, only at Mass. Unless you want to attend?” Sister Ursula added, delicately questioning.

Joliffe had had his fill of prayerful hours before he became a player. Given a choice, he was not minded to have more if he could help it, so taking up the bed-pot, he said simply, “No,” and hurried to be done with it.

Chapter 7

A
lthough Joliffe made as quick work as he could with the bed-pot, by the time he returned Master Soule had already begun Prime, but since the master was facing the altar, his back to the hall, Joliffe made bold to slip to Dick Leek’s bed and slide the bed-pot silently under it, taking only a single quick look into the chapel as he slipped out again. All he saw of Master Soule was a narrow back, a floor-long black gown, and a tonsured head. The only other thing he could tell about the man was that his voice was somewhat thin but that he sounded as if he were giving actual heed to the words he was saying, which was to the good, Joliffe thought. With all the praying there should be here, it would be a shame to waste the effort by giving the prayers too little heed.

In the kitchen, he found Sister Petronilla and Sister Ursula gone but Sister Letice still there and that Rose had arrived and Sister Margaret come back. The latter surely had not slept enough to set her up for the day, but she was busy with the others, readying what Joliffe presumed were the men’s breakfasts, with something warming in the pot on the fire, bread being sliced at the table, and wooden cups being set out on waiting trays—flats of wood lap-wide and slightly hollowed in the center. Rose promptly sent him to fetch clean wooden bowls and spoons from the scullery. He brought them with the discomfortable thought that the next time those bowls and spoons were scrubbed, he would be doing it.

He had just set them on the table when Sister Petronilla came in, shepherding a small boy ahead of her and leading a slightly older boy by the hand. Joliffe supposed they were the children Rose had talked of earlier. As she had said, the younger was not right in his head. He shuffled forward as if uncertain where either his feet or the floor were, despite his head was deeply bowed toward them, leaving him unlikely to see anything else. Joliffe suspected only Sister Petronilla’s gentle hand on his back kept him moving at all.

The older boy was more aware of where he was, despite a lop-sided, rolling walk, his left leg seeming to follow his right only with especial effort, while his head and shoulders seemed set in a twist to the side that must be unrestful, but unlike the other boy, he was altogether aware around himself, and stopped when he saw Joliffe, immediately knowing him for a stranger.

“Daveth,” Sister Petronilla said quietly. “That’s Joliffe. Remember I told you he would be here.”

She touched the boy’s shoulder lightly, and he came on and climbed by himself onto a stool at the table, keeping a wary watch on Joliffe the while. Sister Petronilla lifted the other boy onto another stool, gave a single stroke of her hand to his fair hair, and moved away, to take up two of the bowls and go toward the hearth where Sister Letice was swinging the pot clear of the fire. After that, while Sister Petronilla saw to feeding the boys, Joliffe became busy with helping ready the bowls of oatmeal pottage, slices of buttered bread, and cups of ale that would be the men’s breakfast until Sister Petronilla said, “Daveth, go see if Master Soule is done in the chapel, please.” The boys had had cups of milk with their oatmeal and bread. Daveth wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, slid from his stool, and lopped away toward the hall. Sister Petronilla, catching Joliffe’s eyes as he looked back from watching the boy leave, said simply, “He’s a good child. They’re both good children.”

From lack of anything useful to say but feeling the need to say something, Joliffe offered, “Quiet, too.”

Again, she gave a single stroke to the other boy’s hair. “Most of the time. Daveth can speak when he wants to. Heinrich, I think, is mute.”

Joliffe echoed with surprise, “Heinrich?”

“I was married to a merchant of the Hanse. We lived in Danzig. When he died and there was no reason for me to stay there, Heinrich and I came home.” She said it with the simplicity of having long since accepted that was how things were with her. And with her son.