A Play of Treachery (2 page)

So they stayed one more day in Oxford, and Joliffe took the chance to spend a few hours with the master of St. Edmund’s Hall. He and John Thamys had been friends since the long-past time when their paths had first crossed here in Oxford, and despite how wide apart their ways had gone since then. “I having chosen,” Thamys said as they sat near his comfortable fire in his comfortable room, “to roam the paths of scholarship while you roam the roads of England.”

“I’m rethinking my choice,” Joliffe said amiably. “You live warm, you live dry, and this is very good wine.”

He raised the polished pewter goblet to Thamys who raised his in return, saying just as amiably, “You wouldn’t last a month at it and you know it.”

Joliffe laughed, because it was true. Sitting in Thamys’ chamber with a goblet of warm, spiced wine in hand, a quantity of books in reach, a pleasant fire on the hearth, and his and Thamys’ talk rich with varied thoughts, it was easy to imagine this was a world he, too, could have had, if only he had stayed put.

It had been that “stay put” part that had defeated him those years ago, and the next day as he left Oxford, walking beside the players’ laden cart pulled by their horse, Tisbe, he knew trying to “stay put” would defeat him just as surely now as it had then. The January morning was crisply chill under a winter-blue sky lightly fretted with dawn-cream clouds, the road was firm underfoot, there was no likelihood of snow that day or next and no certainty of where the players would fetch up that night; and Joliffe had no doubts that he had chosen rightly for his life when he walked away from his life in Oxford those years ago. Just as Thamys had chosen rightly for his. To each their own, and to own their each, as the saying was. Each man had to find for himself what his own way was, and today at least, Joliffe’s way was the high road to Wantage town.

For one reason and another they did not make it that far that day, but it was no great matter. Toward the afternoon’s end, in the last golden light of the fading day, they played
Saint Nicholas and the Thief
on a village’s green, earning a few pence by way of halfpennies, plus three half-loaves of bread, and two wedges of cheese. Proportionate to what some wealthier places had paid for their playing, that was very generously done, and Ellis and Piers gave the villagers a show of juggling by way of thanks, while Joliffe and Rose and Gil loaded what little they had taken from the cart for their playing back into it and Basset sought leave from the village’s reeve for them to camp on the edge of the common for the night, there being no inn in so small a place, nor even a sufficient alehouse.

Permission was readily given, and in the glowing after-light of sunset Basset and Ellis made quick work of setting up their tent, while Joliffe saw to Tisbe—unhitching her from the cart, wiping her down, tethering her to graze for the night—and Gil built a fire with the bundle of fagots bought in Oxford for just this case (since villages closely protected their wood-rights), and Piers fetched water from the village well, and Rose readied their supper that tonight would be thick slices of bacon (likewise bought in Oxford; it kept well in this cold weather) to go with toasted bread and cheese.

Time had been when they would have had to glean wood from under hedgerows as they traveled along, and bacon would have been a rare treat and the bread and cheese stretched to serve for breakfast as well as supper. But prosperity had come on them when Lord Lovell became their patron, giving them some certainty of income by his favor and a place in a world that could be harsh to landless, lordless men. The boundary between survival and failure was become a little wider, and therefore there was often bacon for supper now and sometimes beef, and they did not have to hoard this evening’s pay of bread and cheese; there were coins enough in the company’s purse to buy more tomorrow.

So it was with contentment they gathered around the fire to their supper. And it was just then the peddler came plodding out of the last of the gray twilight.

He looked a hale and hearty man but tired, as well he might be after a day walking under the pack he had on his back, and he asked leave to set down by their fire and sleep out there, saying, “I’m not minded to go knocking on doors at this hour, looking for a roof to sleep under. I’ve my cloak and blanket and was thinking it would be the hedge for me, but if I could share your fire instead, I’d be much obliged.”

It was courteously asked, and there was no reason to say him nay. He looked a respectable sort of peddler, the kind who made his living at it honestly, not the kind who used their pack as an excuse to wander in and out of trouble. They welcomed him, he slipped free of his pack and leaned it against a wheel of the cart, took some food of his own from it, and joined them at the fire. While night came on, they sat and ate and talked together, the peddler sharing a sweet cake he had bought that afternoon, the players sharing their ale. With the fire warm on their faces and their cloaks huddled high around their ears against the cold at their backs, they traded news of where he had lately been and what they had heard in Oxford about this and that. He warned them that the next village along their way had little welcome for strangers presently, and they told him the village here was likely to give him good business, being friendly folk. Then the talk turned to telling the kind of stories travelers always had to share, with the peddler able to raise laughter over his own disasters as readily as the players could over theirs, and all in all it was a merry evening, with everyone going to bed later than they would have otherwise and only when the fire was sunk low into its coals.

It was in the frost-touched morning, while Joliffe was hitching Tisbe to the cart, his breath and hers white in the air, that Basset came to him, bringing the peddler, and said, quiet-voiced for the others not to hear where they were packing away the camp, “He wants to talk to the two of us.”

Joliffe looked around from the harness buckle he had not quite finished buckling, saw that Basset’s face was too bare of any feeling and that the peddler’s had lost all its easy, merry lines. With a first shiver of warning, Joliffe turned back to the buckle, finished with it, and only then turned fully to face the two men. “Do you?” he said to the peddler.

“I do,” the man said back, meeting Joliffe’s gaze straightly. “I’m to say that my lord of Winchester hopes you remember your agreement of last autumn.”

Despite something lurched under his breast bone, Joliffe said steadily, “I remember it.”

“I’m bid to tell you thus. The fourth day from now, an hour after Vespers, you’re to meet a man you’ll know in the Crown of Roses tavern in Southwark.”

“To what purpose?” Joliffe asked.

“That I was not told.” The peddler looked to Basset. “I was told, though, to tell you not to look for him until he comes back.”

“He
will
come back, though,” Basset said. It was less a question than a half-hidden demand.

“God and the saints willing. That’s all any of us can go by. But my lord of Winchester intends it. I was to say that, too, if I were asked.”

Basset gave a curt nod, accepting that assurance, with small choice but to do so, “my lord of Winchester” being the powerful Henry Beaufort, cardinal and bishop of Winchester, the king’s great-uncle, and a high force in the government.

The peddler said, still to Basset, “You and your company will maybe want to travel other than your usual way for the while he’s elsewhere, to forestall questions from anyone who might remember him and be curious about why he’s not with you. I’m likewise to pay you for the inconvenience your company will have because of this. What would likely have been his portion in your work for this half year to come?”

“Half year?” Joliffe echoed, in question and almost-protest together.

Both the other men ignored him. “In a good year or a bad?” Basset asked.

The peddler gave him a shrewdly approving look. “A good year. Why not?”

Basset named a sum that was very fair by what Joliffe knew of the company’s earnings.

The man raised his brows. “That’s in a
good
year?”

“In a good year,” Basset confirmed.

“You’re not at this to grow rich, are you?”

The question so openly did not need answering that neither Basset nor Joliffe did, merely followed the peddler as he went around to the cart’s open back, there took coins from the small satchel hung over his shoulder—rather more whole silver coins than a peddler might be expected to have—and counted out the sum Basset had named onto the high wooden floor’s one clear space, where the kitchen box would go when Rose had packed it. Finished, he hesitated, then added a few more coins. “For luck,” he said. “Good enough?”

Basset looked up from the coins, his face straight. “Good enough,” he agreed.

“One thing,” Joliffe said. “How do I find the company again, when I’ve finished whatever my lord bishop of Winchester wants of me?”

The peddler hesitated as if uncertain he should answer that, but finally said, “Someone will know where they are. You’ll be told. After all, I knew where to find you.”

The thought that some sort of watch had been kept on them without they had guessed it was discomfiting. That it was no more comfortable to know that someone would go on watching the company, even when he was not there, was in the look that flashed between him and Basset, but Joliffe contented himself with a nod of understanding to the peddler, who nodded back, hefted his pack onto his back, and trudged away toward the awakened village to be about his business of selling this and that, on his way to somewhere else and then to somewhere else again.

Joliffe stood watching him go, then said to Basset, “I feel like a whore that’s been sold and bought.”

Basset, who had been gathering up the coins, answered flatly, “You should. You have been. For maybe something worse than whoring, but sold and bought, yes.” But his voice went suddenly cheerful as he slapped Joliffe heartily on the back and added, “Still, we got a good price for you. Don’t look so dire. It’s not as bad as all that. It’s what you wanted, and we’ve all been getting flat and fat and too much used to what we’re doing. The shaking up will do us all good. You as well as the rest of us.”

Joliffe was not sure how much he believed in Basset’s heartiness, but he played back to it, holding out a hand and saying, “If I’m doing you that much good by going away, how if I have some of those coins to see me on the road?”

“You,” said Basset, “will have all of them,” and held them out.

“No. Enough to see me to London. No more.”

Dropping the heartiness, his hand still out, Basset said, serious to the bone, “All of them. You don’t know what you’re heading into. We’re well enough, and there’s what we left with young Master Penteney to fall back on if need be, and that’s because of you, too. So these are yours. I’m still master of this company, and you’re still part of it, and this is what I’m bidding you do—take them.”

“Half of them,” Joliffe countered.

Basset hesitated, then agreed, “Half then.”

Basset made a rough split and still in Joliffe’s favor, but Joliffe made no more protest and was tipping the coins into his belt pouch when Piers said, coming with some of the rolled up blankets from the tent, “Hai! If you’re handing out coins, where’s mine?”

“We get what we earn,” Joliffe said. “I’ve earned some coins. You’ve earned—” He raised a hand suggestive of a box on the ear. Piers wailed in completely pretended fear, “Mam! He’s going to hit me!”

Behind him, Ellis growled as he and Gil came with the rolled, strapped tent, “It’s not his turn. It’s mine. Shift aside, fryling. You’re in the way.”

Piers shifted and went with Gil to fetch the kitchen box while Joliffe went to finish harnessing Tisbe, leaving Basset and Ellis to deal with the tent. When all was ready, Basset gathered his company around him, which was warning enough that something had shifted even before he told them that for a certain reason to do with that business in London last autumn, Joliffe would be gone a time, to rejoin them later.

“That’s all we’re to know?” Ellis demanded. “That he’s going to go away and that he’ll come back?”

They all knew something of what had happened in London last autumn but not much, because that had seemed safest. Basset, as master of the company knew most, and he demanded back at Ellis, “Do you truly want to know more than that about it?”

“No,” Ellis returned bluntly. “I just want to know that whatever trouble he’s made for himself, it’s not going to turn into our trouble.”

Basset beamed at him. “Oh, it’s most assuredly going to turn into your trouble. With him gone, we’ll be three men and a boy again. We have to change all our plays back to what they were before Gil joined us.”

Ellis groaned. Gil grinned. He was as used as the rest of them to Ellis’ groans, and besides, these past weeks since London, Joliffe had had him studying the plays as they had been before he joined the company close to a year and half ago and Joliffe had changed them to include him. The several new ones Joliffe had written since then would have to be put aside for the while that he was gone, but there was no help for that, and Gil would do well in the old ones. He was too sensible to ask questions where no answers were going to be given, and although his long look on Joliffe was full of questions, he kept them to himself. It was Piers who refused to accept being told so little, and while the players finished readying the cart he prodded and pried until Joliffe silenced him by promise of a silver penny if he stopped. In hope of the coin, Piers left him in peace while Rose gathered a change of shirt and hosen and some few other things into a sack for Joliffe to carry away with him. She almost kept to herself her worry at his going, but as she handed him the sack, in a moment when they happened to be alone, she started a question to him.

Not waiting for her to finish it, Joliffe said quietly, “Don’t,” and she let it go. Worry was too much Rose’s share in the company, and Joliffe was sorry to add more of it to all she already had, but all he could do was regret, give her a light kiss on the cheek, and promise, “I’ll be well. Truly. And think—one less of us to trouble you.”