A Play of Treachery (7 page)

 

 

A change in the rhythm of men about the ship told him when they were nearing Rouen, even before a yards-long standard streamed out from the mast, bright against the clouded sky, showing a red lion rampant and what Joliffe supposed were the heraldic arms of the bishopric of Therouanne. So near to Rouen, it was safe to let the world know the bishop was here, aboard this very ship, and to give warning ahead to any sharp eyes on watch from one of the towers in the city appearing now below the high-rolling hills that curved to make a wide bay of land along the river’s north side. There, behind a stretching town wall fattened here and there by towers, a thick scatter of church towers and spires rose above steep house roofs. From their midst, higher than them all, were the long stone intricacies of two massive churches, while on the city’s side toward the hills the higher walls and close-built towers of a castle bulked huge.

Something that promised to be as large was being built this downriver side of the city, and as Cauvet joined him at the railing, Joliffe pointed and asked, “What’s that to be?”

“That would have been King Henry’s new castle.”

Joliffe sorted out the verb’s tense and said, “Would have been. It will not be?”

“Work on it has gone on for more than a dozen years. Or it is maybe better to say work has mostly
not
gone on. Building is costly. So is war.” Cauvet made a gesture of balancing one hand against the other, then sank the left one lower. “When choice is made where the taxes will go, war wins.”

The river here was busy with the coming and going of other ships, with barges and vari-sized boats. The bishop’s ship was slowing among them, heeling in a long turn toward the low quay that ran along all of the riverside of the town wall, and Cauvet said, spreading an arm outward, “But there she is. Rouen. The queen of Normandy. In all of France, only Paris can claim to be greater, and that is Paris, and Paris is not in Normandy. Normandy is Normandy. But you are missing one of Rouen’s wonders. Look there.”

He turned, making another wide gesture, this time to the ship’s other side, upriver, and was probably well-satisfied by Joliffe’s sharply in-taken breath. The river here was wider than even the Thames at London and with the same treacherous tidal flow, and yet there was a stone-built bridge of—how many arches? More than London’s, anyway. Joliffe tried to count them but settled for “many.”

“Five hundred years it has been there,” Cauvet said, proud as if he had built it. “Five hundred years. Made by a great queen for her people. It is a marvel, no?”

It was, and Joliffe said so. For him, France had always been a place simply talked of. It had been words in his mind, not sights. Through these past few days his mind had been spreading to take in all the new he was seeing, and here, with more than ever to take in, he stayed at the railing while Cauvet went away to whatever his duties presently were at the end of Bishop Louys’ travels.

Others, elsewhere, were busy at their duties, too. By the time the ship had been brought around and to the quay, with ropes thrown and tied and the landing-plank run out, a swarm of liveried servants and several saddled horses and a white mule with purple saddle and trappings were waiting on the quay. Most of the men were in ecclesiastical black with the bishop’s badge on their doublets, but there were others in green with a black band of cloth worn over one shoulder and slantwise across their chests, and it was one of the latter who stepped forward to greet the bishop with a deep bow as he descended from the ship. Joliffe was too far away to hear what few things were said between them, but their brief exchange ended with the bishop making a gracious bow of his head, the man bowing deeply in response, and the mule being brought forward for the bishop to mount while the man and several others took the horses and rode away, surrounded by a flow of liveried servants and at least some of the men who had been to England and back.

Left behind with the baggage and those who were to see to it, Joliffe got himself off the ship and aside from the ordered hurry of unloading the many boxes, bags, and chests, unsure what he should be doing with himself. Should he have gone when the bishop did? Or . . .

Cauvet paused in passing with a small, locked chest that must contain something of particular worth, and said, “You look lost.”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

“Come with us. We’re away to Joyeux Repos.”

Joliffe picked up the sack he had set at his feet, slung it over his shoulder, and asked as he joined Cauvet in the flow of laden men toward the nearest gateway through the town wall along the quay, “That’s the bishop’s place here in Rouen?”

In England at least it was common for bishops to have not only their episcopal palace in their dioceses, but a house in London where the government was centered. Here in Normandy, Rouen was the government’s center, and Bishop Louys was the duchy’s chancellor; so never minding where his bishopric was, he had more reason than most to have a place here.

But Cauvet said, “Joyeux Repos? No, it was the duke of Bedford’s hotel. Though little joy or repose he had there at the end, God keep his soul. After his wife, the Lady Anne, died—Blessed Mary have her in keeping—he hardly could bear to be there. Now it is his widow’s place, and she is my lord bishop’s niece and very young. It was understood before we went to England that my lord would move in there, both for her good and as the duke himself wished as he was dying.”

“Wait. Wait.” In his confusion, Joliffe forgot to keep to his attempt to speak in French. “The duke’s wife died, but his widow . . .”

Cauvet threw him the pitying look of a man hardly able to believe another man’s ignorance. “He married again, yes? The Lady Jacquetta. My lord bishop’s niece. It was not a marriage that pleased the duke of Burgundy, but I think that by then my lord of Bedford was past thinking there was any pleasing the duke of Burgundy.”

Joliffe had lately written plays making sport of the treacherous duke of Burgundy, and Basset’s company had acted them everywhere, from village greens and gentry houses to the great halls of high lords, always to much laughter. But that had been there and this was here, and Joliffe was rapidly finding how very differently things looked to him now he was on this side of the Channel instead of the other. Until now, everything here had been happening somewhere else for him. He had felt no great need to think over much about whatever he happened to hear about it. But now that he was here, not comfortably somewhere else, he did not like he knew so little. He had vague remembrance of knowing that the duke of Bedford’s first wife had been the duke of Burgundy’s sister. If his widow was Bishop Louys’ niece, that meant . . .

He found he did not know what that meant. But great lords and ladies did not marry for simple reasons, nor was the duke of Burgundy likely to have been displeased about this marriage for any simple reason.

There was no time now, though, to think about it or to ask Cauvet. They were to the gateway, and the guards, accepting they were among the bishop’s men leaving the quay, let them pass without question into the wide, stone-arched passageway between the gateway’s towers, to come out the other end into daylight again. If Joliffe had been alone, he would probably have paused then, to give himself chance to take in that for the first time in his life he was somewhere that was not England; but Cauvet kept onward and Joliffe did, too, assuredly not wanting to be left behind. Basset had taught him early on to take in quickly as much as he could about any place the players came to, to judge what the welcome there was likely to be and whether they should ply their trade or simply keep on their way to somewhere else. As a traveling player, he was use to being in “foreign” places, because in England, folk used “foreign” as readily for a neighboring village as for Constantinople, but as he kept among the bishop’s men along a street running with surprising straightness between tall, narrow houses, the feeling grew in him that he was come to somewhere foreign in a wholly new way. He had known Rouen would be foreign in a way different from foreign among English villages, but somehow he had not expected Rouen to be
this
foreign. It was more than that he was not hearing English words anywhere around him. The townspeople moving out of the way of the bishop’s men had somehow a
look
to them that was not English. Was it a subtly different cut to clothing? Something in the way they moved? Those were things that, as a player, he was trained to note, knowing the difference they made, but just now he lacked chance to look long enough at anything or anyone to tell for certain. By the time the street opened into a wide marketplace in front of what had to be Rouen’s cathedral, all he had managed to acquire was the queasy, growing certainty that he was somewhere more foreign than anywhere he had ever been.

Uncertainty at all the strangeness began to twist toward fear in him, only to be suddenly overtaken by silent, saving laughter. The uncertainty was much the same feeling that came when he was about to stride out into some barely known place to make a play for some great gathering of unknown onlookers and that familiarity steadied him. At such a time there was nowhere to go but onward. However far larger beyond usual this present playing-place was, he was after all here to play a part. He was to be—already was—“John Ripon,” and he had long since decided that John Ripon was a man full of self-consideration and no deep awareness. So for John Ripon, it was Rouen’s problem that it was foreign, not his.

“Eh,” Cauvet said as somewhere ahead the straggling line of the bishop’s men began to come to a halt that spread unevenly backward until they were all standing still, while at the forward several men argued about something.

“What is it?” Joliffe asked.

“Robert is arguing we are to go where the bishop lived before. Jehan is insisting we are to go to Joyeux Repos. Robert, he never listens and always thinks he knows better. Here.” Cauvet shifted the box into Joliffe’s hands, then went to join the other men now joining in the arguing.

Joliffe, having made certain he had good hold on both the box and his sack, used the pause for the chance to look at the cathedral huge in front of him across the marketplace, its front of fretted stone flanked by towers, one of them stunted as if unfinished, but also looking as if it had not been worked on for some time, being bare of scaffolding or anything else that showed it was on its way to going higher. While he considered what that neglect meant, one of a pair of men passing by burst into laughter and said in English to his fellow, “You never!”

“Sure as sinning, I did,” the other returned.

Joliffe gave them a swift look. By their padded jerkins, and the helmets slung by straps over their shoulder, and the sword as well as the usual dagger each wore at his waist, he judged they were men-at-arms, probably of the English garrison here. Not on duty, though. That was plain. But wearing their swords nonetheless, and with their helmets ready. Joliffe was not used to men going that heavily armed in the ordinary way of things. Was there such constant likelihood of trouble here the men felt obliged to be so ready for it? As the bishop’s men started moving again, he added that unsettling thought to the others he was gathering.

Cauvet stayed ahead, not returning to reclaim the box, so Joliffe made sure to keep well up among the others, not wanting to lose them by any chance. The line of men swung rightward, skirting and circling the cathedral’s yard and finally turning into another straight-running street, this one angled eastward. Joliffe guessed that, just as the other straight street had led inward from a gateway, this street ran outward toward another gateway, and he had a spasm of worry that—unlikely though it seemed—this Joyeux Repos was outside the city’s walls. From what he had seen so far of France and by all he had heard, Joliffe knew he would much prefer to have city walls around him, not open countryside.

It was a fine street, though—wide and stone-paved like the other, flanked by houses mostly stone-built, rather than of timber-and-plaster. At one point, the bishop’s men were passing what Joliffe took for a long, stone, two-storied housefront standing flat and blank to the street, until ahead of him, the other men were turning through what proved, when Joliffe reached it, to be a gateway high enough for a horseman to ride through without bending, wide enough for a large cart to pass through easily, but its pair of metal-banded gates showing it could equally be closed against the world.

Beyond those gates, Joliffe found himself in a courtyard of irregular shape, four-sided, and larger than he had thought it would be, with buildings on all sides, but the one directly ahead of him across the yard catching and holding his startled gaze. The blank wall along the street had not readied him for—the
hôtel
, Cauvet had called it. Certainly it was more than only a house and other than a castle. Long and of three tall storeys, its pale-stone front was fretted with elaborately carved stonework and surprisingly many windows. A steep roof of blue slates with sharp-pointed windows gabled out from it made it all the taller, while at one end a wide round turret reached even above roof-height and there were lesser turrets elsewhere along its front. For richness of detail and grace Joliffe had never seen a building more lovely.

Cauvet, rejoining him, said unnecessarily, “Joyeux Repos.”

B
ishop Louys and the others must have arrived well ahead of them; there was no sign of him or them or mule or horses in the yard. In truth, just then there was no one in the yard but Joliffe and the men around him, all come to a stop just inside the gateway, and he asked of Cauvet, “What now?”

Cauvet shrugged. “Now we wait to see how we’re to be fitted into here. Joining my lord’s household with that of her grace the duchess will be none so simple, no matter there’s been time to consider it.”

His tone implied he doubted anyone
had
troubled to consider it, but he was proved wrong when a pair of servants with the bishop’s badge on their doublets came out a lesser door toward one end of the long
hôtel
-front and to them. One gave orders in rapid French while the other shepherded them toward the door like an over-eager dog among a flock of sheep. Not understanding anything that was being said, Joliffe kept close behind Cauvet through the doorway, into a stone-floored passage leading to somewhere in the house. But the servant was shooing the men to the left, up a narrow, twisting stairway. Cauvet paused to protest, making a gesture with the chest, “This is for my lord’s chamber.”