Morality Play (19 page)

Tobias, as was usual with him, took a more sober and practical view. 'You see that these champions bear the emblems of their armourers also,' he said. 'They are paid good fees to do it. The makers of chain-mail and plate armour get good custom by these means.'

These interruptions were a source of irritation to Stephen, who had been listening intently to the heralds and exclaiming from time to time in admiration and wonder. 'Shush,' he said. 'That is the second son of Sir Henry Bottral. His father married into the Sutton family - you see he has the Sutton arms impaled with his own.'

Meanwhile the knights danced their horses and turned their iron masks from side to side and stretched out their silk-clad legs below the hem of their armoured skirts for the benefit of the ladies.

Then the visors were closed, the lances levelled and these first two rode against each other at a slow canter and met with a heavy shock of lance on shield. Both were jolted back in the saddle but neither was unhorsed, so it was a bout with honours even. This encounter, the heart of the play, took less time than saying the first three words of a Miserere.

So it went on through the morning, the trumpets, the shouts, the pounding of hoofs slightly muffled by the snow, the resounding clash as the two heavily armed men hurtled together. I was waiting to see the Knight of the canopy and the scarred face. Roger of Yarm was the name the herald gave out. He had fought in the Holy Land and also in Normandy. At his first encounter he bore himself well, changing the tilt of his lance at the last moment so that he struck his adversary on the right shoulder, above the shield, sending him clear over the horse's rump, with his left foot still caught in the stirrup so that the squire had to run forward to free him. In the space of a few moments Roger of Yarm had won the prize of a war-horse, worth fifty livres at least, and he need not have fought again. However, whether led by the desire for glory or gain, in the afternoon he elected to do so and was matched with an older knight, a veteran of Poitiers, who had come from Derby to fight here.

They came to the barrier to salute and Sir Roger's fantastically wrought helm gave him a good ten inches of height more than the other. I have a divining soul, as I have said. As they took their places in the lists I had a premonition of harm and this grew stronger.

The signal was given and they urged their horses forward and brought their lances to the level. How it happened exactly I did not see. The older knight's lance was deflected, but not fully; it slid across the other's shield and rose towards his head. At the last moment, with great address, Sir Roger raised his shield to send the lance-point clear beyond him. Had he been wearing a helm of more customary make, this might have succeeded. But the point of the lance, blunted by its coronet, must have hooked in the filigree of the crest and sprung the pins that hinged his visor, so that he received a raking blow along the crown of his head and pitched heavily sideways from his horse to the ground, where he lay without moving.

First to reach him was the squire. Then several followed and among them they bore him away from the lists. There was blood on the snow, where he had fallen.

One further contest there was, then the Lord stood to announce the end of the day's jousting. The afternoon was well advanced, the dark not far away. The knights rode off, with their squires making haste behind them. The Lord crossed the yard and passed inside the castle, followed by his attendants and then the noble guests. Servants came out to take down the cloths of red and gold that draped the pavilions. The daylight ebbed into the snow and there was nothing left now but the bare rails of the lists and barriers, the empty stands and the darkening stain of blood.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It was not until late that ne called for us. We had been brought food again, black puddings and bread and some thin beer. The candles had been lit and we were stretched out on the straw.

The steward came for us with two armed men in attendance. We were not taken to the great hall, as we had been expecting, but through a series of passages narrow and dimly lit and so into the private apartments that lay beyond the hall. In passing I glanced down a dark passageway leading off from our own and at the moment I did so a door opened some way along it, there was a stream of light and a figure stepped out into this light. It was a woman, a religious, thickly veiled so that it was not possible to see anything of her face. She was carrying cloths, or perhaps towels, white, draped over the sleeves of her habit. I saw her for moments only, then the door was closed and the light went and she passed farther along the passage and disappeared into the dimness there. But in those moments, while the door opened and closed and the light came and went and the nun shuffled away into the darkness, there was a stench of decay so strong that I almost choked on it, not the smell of death but of disease, of poisoned tissue and corrupted blood, the rot of the living body. It was a breath I knew, as all who have lived through these times of plague must know and fear it. When that breath is in your nostrils you know it for the smell of the world.

It clamoured after us like a creature cheated and grew fainter and died away. We passed through an arched doorway and came into an antechamber, a room with length and breadth enough for the movements of a play but not for holding many people to watch. There was a closet adjoining this with the door set open, and here we found our costumes and masks in a heap on the floor.

In the chamber itself there was a single high-backed chair, with padded rests for the arms, no other furnishing or object of any kind. We stood waiting there under the eye of the steward, while the two guards stood just inside the door with their halberds grounded. It was now that Martin, who had been all that day speechless and dull of eye, seemed to shake himself awake. Whether it was thoughts of the play that roused him so I do not know; playing was the sap of life to him and might have seemed a prospect of relief from the affliction of his love. Perhaps it was simply that he found this yoke of silence too heavy on his neck. Whatever the reason, he raised his head now and looked the steward in the eye. 'You are the one who came to see the lad buried,' he said. 'You paid the priest. Tell us, friend, why the haste?' He paused, still looking closely at the man. Then he said in a voice quickened with contempt, 'Or do you not ask yourself even so much?'

At once, with the words, we were under his direction still; even now, as fear grew among us, we were driven to follow him back into the play. Belligerent Stephen raised his head and looked at the steward. Straw uttered his sobbing laugh.

The steward's face had slackened with surprise at being spoken to thus by a man under guard, and moreover a player. 'Vagabond scum,' he said. 'Whipped from parish to parish. Do you dare to take that tone with me? I will have your life for it.'

Springer clapped his hands and made his crowing laugh. 'Was it you that hanged the Monk?' he said.

'What was his crime?' Tobias said.

We were back in the play again and we fell to questioning him, as if he were in it too, in a part, and so obliged to answer. We were on the edge of despair now, and this took the leash from our tongues. We had been keeping hope alive by clinging to a sense of what is customary. Players are brought sometimes to play in the halls of castles and great houses - this company had after all been sent to do so in Durham. At supper, when the people of the house and their guests are in jovial mood, players and minstrels are often in demand. But when we came into that bare room, with its single waiting chair like a throne of judgement, our poor hope lost all stuffing and collapsed, and we could not keep from knowing the danger we were in.

The steward's hand was on the hilt of his dagger but we knew he would not draw it. In his way he was as helpless as we were. How he would have behaved towards us I do not know. At that moment the door opened, the two soldiers drew themselves up with a crash of their halberd shafts on the stone and the Lord Richard de Guise entered the room.

He had changed his mantle of earlier for a quilted robe of dark red colour and he wore a low cap of the same stuff with a black tassel at the side. On his left wrist there sat a hooded falcon. 'Set the men outside the door, Henry,' he said. 'See that they stay within hearing of a shout. Then come back and stand behind my chair.'

He looked at us now for the first time, while the steward moved to obey. 'So,' he said, 'you are the players of whom I have heard.' He moved his eyes over us slowly. They were pale blue and heavy-lidded, opening to a starkness and fullness of regard difficult to meet. He wore no jewellery or ornament of any kind about him. The cap fitted close at the temples and gave to the long, thin-lipped face a look of bareness and severity. 'We shall find out your mettle now,' he said.

When he was seated in his chair with the steward in position behind him he moved a hand at us. 'I believe they have put your scraps there in the room behind,' he said. 'You may begin.'

Martin stepped forward from among us and made a bow. 'My Lord, we are greatly honoured, and we will try to please,' he said. 'With your indulgence, we had in mind to give you the Play of Our Lord's Nativity, as befitting the season.'

The long face remained impassive. There was a brief silence, then the voice came, slow and deliberate as ever. 'I have not had you brought here to see you make a mock of my religion. It is the play of the dead boy I wish to see. Henry, what was the boy's name?'

'Thomas Wells, my Lord.'

'Good, yes, that was it. I wish to see the Play of Thomas Wells.'

We had expected no less, but I felt my heart sink. Martin surprised us now and gave us back our spirit. He made the Italian reverence, which players use for the exaggerated courtesy of plotters and false servants, body inclined low, right hand sweeping from left to right in a shallow curve. 'As my Lord wishes,' he said. One by one we followed him in the reverence, mine executed but poorly, as it is more difficult than might appear and I had never practised it. Then Martin led us to the room behind, where our things were, and we dressed for the parts. We could not find anywhere the black murder-purse that Tobias had made, so had to be content with the smaller one in which Martin kept the common stock. There was no time for talk among us except for a hasty agreement to do all as before until the departure of Avaritia and then to have a Messenger arrive with news of the Monk's death, and to make this death the proof of his guilt and the symbol of God's justice, without inquiring further into the authors of it; in other words, to end the play where prudence should have made us end it the day before.

In this lay our only hope, and that a slender one. Of saving the girl we no longer thought. What none of us knew was that Martin had decided she could not be saved and so thought no longer of saving himself.

We followed our plan, keeping to the story we had agreed on, playing in the stark silence of that room with only the Lord and his steward for watchers. I think no parts were ever played before in such a silence as that, before such an audience. I longed for the clamour of the inn-yard and market square again, the laughter and shouts of the people and the movements of feeling that pass through them. Our steps fell hollowly in that bare room, we moved back and forth as if in some slow dance of the newly dead, with the Lord of the Damned on his spectral throne there, hawk on wrist, his Minion behind him prompt to do his bidding. Even our voices seemed unreal to us at first, the very accents of our quaking souls. But with the setting forth of Thomas Wells we grew absorbed in the parts, we began to play for ourselves. The mystery of the boy's death was still fresh to us. This was the third time of playing and we were more perfect in our parts now, at least in the first half, up to the appearance of Truth, played again by Stephen. There had been no time for him to paint his face and Pieta had the white mask, so he was obliged to don a thick mask made of pressed paper and glue and painted silver. From behind this screen his voice came slightly muffled but sonorous still. And he played well, better than I had ever seen him, moving with great dignity and state, making his rhymes without hesitation:

'Truth is here for all to see

On God's part I come to thee ...'

In a play with no written words much will depend on impulse and suggestion. Perhaps it was Stephen, by the boldness of his playing, who set Martin on his course that night, made him betray us and put us in mortal terror. At the point immediately before Avaritia was due to quit the place, Truth spoke directly to the people, as all the Figures do when they announce their properties. In this case, however, the people were only these two motionless watchers. Undeterred, Stephen uttered the same lines which had come straying into his mind when, drunken and distracted, he had played the part the day before. But now he uttered them with extraordinary force and conviction, accompanying the words with the sign of insistence, hand held out with fingers loosely curled, thumb and first finger touching, little finger extended:

'Truth sets no store by gold or riches

Nor by emperors, kings or princes ...'

It was strange, and also moving, to hear Truth pronounce these lines with such passion because in his own person, as we all knew, Stephen set great store by emperors, kings and princes, and this immobile figure he was addressing was a rich and powerful lord, master of lives and land. Stephen had forgotten himself, he was Truth. And as I stood there, at the edge of the space, waiting for the moment to come forward with my sermon on God's justice, I felt a gathering of tears, even in the midst of the fear that moved like another player among us, to see this servile man rise above himself and boom so boldly behind his mask.

But it was Martin, once again, who changed everything. Truth had asked his questions, Mankind and Thomas Wells had made their first replies. Concealed by the cloaks of Pieta and Avaritia, Straw had changed into the murder-mask. Still cloaked and masked as Avaritia, Martin moved forward into the centre of the space to speak his lines of farewell. He began as before: