Joliffe took the chance to look at the riders. One was a half-grown boy in a short scarlet riding tunic and green, rolled-brimmed cap, riding a rather fine bay gelding. The other was a burly, plain-faced man more plainly dressed and more plainly mounted. From that, Joliffe guessed the boy was likely Sir Edmund Deneby’s son, out for an afternoon ride, and the man an accompanying servant. Then it was time for him to go out again and on with the play. It must have pleased because at the end, when Gil and Piers went around with their caps held out for any coins anyone might want to give, the boy took a coin from his belt-hung pouch and leaned from his saddle to drop it into Piers’ cap, calling over the heads of the villagers starting to drift away, “I want another play.”
Basset turned from popping a walnut from behind the ear of a laughing child clinging to its mother’s skirts and bowed to the boy, but answered, “My lord, I regret to say we cannot please you with that at present.”
“Do another one!” the boy demanded.
Basset bowed again, no less respectfully, but answered, “You ride a fine horse, good sir. You’ll surely understand then that we players are like good horses. We must not be over-worked if you want us to go on being good. Besides”—Basset swept his hat and himself into another low bow—“you’ll see us tomorrow and for some few days afterwards. We’re sent by Lord Lovell to entertain your family for this while toward your sister’s wedding.”
The boy did not question Basset’s knowing who he was, but stared at him as if deciding whether he was telling the truth or not. He must have decided Basset was, because he said with a sudden smile, “Good! I’ll tell them you’re coming. You can play at supper tonight!”
“Please you, my master, we’ll welcome that you’ll herald our coming and thank you for it,” Basset said. “But we mean to stay the night here in the village and arrive at the manor fresh with the day.”
The boy regarded him carefully before the smile took firm hold again. “I see. I’ll tell them that then. That you’re coming.”
Basset bowed to him again. “That would be most good of you, my master.”
“Until tomorrow,” the boy said lordliwise and rode on with his servant.
By then all but the most curious of the villagers had dispersed and now the few left went away, leaving the players alone to pack away their goods, giving Ellis chance to ask while he and Rose were folding the hanging small and tight to go back in its hamper, “Why the night in the village? Why not go on to the manor tonight and save the cost of a night’s lodging?”
Basset, standing by to take the wooden pegs as Joliffe and Gil knocked them out of the wooden frame and Piers held it steady until it could all come down, said, “We’re going to be here a week or more. I want to know more about Sir Edmund and his people before we’re in the middle of it all. An evening in the village alehouse should tell us all we need to know.” He cast an eye at the sky. “Besides, I think the rain is done for a while. We can set up our tent, and maybe only have to pay for supper.”
Leaving them to finish packing up, he went to ask in the alehouse about supper and where they might set up their tent for the night and was assured they were welcome to use of the common land lying at the village’s end. Common land was kept untilled, with every villager having right to graze a set number of livestock there. The village pound was set there, too, where strayed animals were kept until their owners paid the fine to have them back. A milch cow presently imprisoned there lowed mournfully while they set up their tent, but as they finished, a girl came with stool and pail and set to milking it. Done with his share of tasks, Ellis strolled over to lean on the fence and talk with her. Joliffe, circling the tent to be sure all the tie-downs were secure—Gil tied firm knots, he found—saw Rose cast a long look after Ellis. Hurt and longing and anger were so mixed in her face that Joliffe momentarily felt an answering anger at Ellis, but in truth he would have been hard put to say for which of them he felt the more sorry. There was love between Rose and Ellis, deep enough it had kept Ellis with her when he could have been long gone to a less desperate band of players than they’d become until Lord Lovell took them on. The trouble was that, so far as anyone knew, Rose’s long-vanished husband, Piers’s father, still lived, meaning she could not freely give her love and herself to Ellis in the way they both wanted.
Sometimes she did give way, did give herself completely to him, let him give himself completely to her, and those were good days. Mostly, though, she held out against her desires and his, and sometimes in those times his need went wandering and he found elsewhere what he could not have from her. Then she was hurt and did not always hide it, and the rest of them had to live with that.
Joliffe, on the whole, wished her husband would happen into their way sometime. Then they could kill him and settle matters once and for all.
The girl went away with her pail of milk, and Ellis came back to say, “She says there was a new brew of ale made just yesterday and that generally the ale is good.”
“I suppose you told her you were good, too,” Rose snapped.
“I told her we’d be in to try the ale this evening,” Ellis said, sounding somewhat startled. He always seemed startled by Rose’s ill-humour at him. How he could be after all these years Joliffe did not know, unless it was by a willful forgetting—which did not better the matter in the slightest.
Leaving Gil to guard the cart and Tisbe staked out to graze nearby, the rest of them went back to the alehouse in the gathering shadows of early evening. The supper of pottage of late season vegetables was filling if not grand and afterward they sent Piers back with a bowl of it to Gil for his supper and Rose’s order for Piers to go to bed when he got there. He wouldn’t, but he’d take care to be in bed by the time she returned and that would serve well enough. Then the players settled down to finding out what they could about the household at the manor.
It helped that the ale was all the milkmaid had promised. Good ale made for good talk, and after Ellis and Basset did a brief juggling of bright leather balls between them, the villagers’ first wariness eased, letting Ellis and Basset fall into talk with them. Joliffe and Rose kept somewhat aside from them, listening to other talk but joining in little, so that all together they might find out as much as might be of how folk thought about the Denebys, because it would be a different way of looking than Lord Lovell’s. Lord Lovell was lord over Sir Edmund, but here Sir Edmund held sway over much of these people’s lives. Even those who had already bought their freedom from serfdom and no longer owed him service still lived on land he owned, worked fields that were his, came before his manor-court when there were troubles. A bad lord made for a sad, ill-humoured village, and that would be warning to the players of how much harder their task in pleasing him might be.
The crowd this afternoon had been pleasant enough, though, and talk in the alehouse tonight was easy, neither full of complaints nor sullenly afraid to make such as there were. One man grumbled over a fine lately put on him in the manor-court for taking fish from a stream, but his friends told him, friendliwise, to shut up, he’d had no business taking them from that part of the stream and he’d known it, and Sir Edmund had been easier on him than he could have been.
The heaviest talk was of the poor harvest, but that was eased by other talk of hoped-for feasting at the wedding.
“Not but what he’ll want to take some of it out of our stores,” the man who’d been fined over fish grumbled, “and leave us with less when we’ve not much anyway.”
“Shut your mouth, Jem,” one of his friends said, still friendliwise. “You don’t know aught. He’s sent to Oxford and Cirencester both, they’re saying, for what’s to be bought there, rather than having anything off us.”
“We’re to have our own feast here for the marriage and at his cost,” a woman said loudly. “So give over your complaining, Jem. It’s not Sir Edmund’s fault you’re bad at thieving and were caught.”
While everyone, except Jem, was laughing at that, a round young man in a priest’s black gown appeared in the outer doorway and was greeted with a general raising of cups and bowls and welcoming calls of, “Father Morice!” and “Where’ve you been?” and “Come in out of the chill,” with various folk shifting on benches to make place for him. He stood smiling and nodding to one and all, familiar and friendly, while he looked over the company and then, with smiling words and slaps on the shoulders of folk as he passed, made his way to where Basset and Ellis sat with a few other men.
Basset and Ellis both rose to their feet and made him respectful bows, to which he returned a slight bow of his head and said in a clear, easy voice, knowing perfectly well he was listened to by everyone, “You’re the players, yes? May I join you?”
Basset bowed again and Ellis and the men shoved sideways, clearing a place beside Basset. Both priest and Basset sat, the alehouse talk rose up again and closed over whatever their talk might be, and Joliffe and Rose raised eyebrows to each other. The Church had never quite settled how it felt about players. Their craft could be used the same way that paintings on church walls were used: to tell godly stories and show the error of sinful ways, but against that was set the lingering suspicion—and sometimes outright certainty—that the ways of wandering, lordless, land-less men were likely to be as sinful as anything their plays might claim to be against.
So it was much each churchman’s choice how well or ill he regarded players and happily this Father Morice seemed among the happier-minded sort. Joliffe couldn’t watch how things went between him and Basset for long, though, because a village fellow was inching somewhat too close along the bench to Rose on her other side, with an interested look and his hands beginning to stray her way. A fight being among the last things the players wanted, Joliffe gave the man no apparent heed but draped an arm over Rose’s shoulders with seemingly absent-minded affection. Understanding what he was at, she leaned against him in return and held up her bowl of ale for him to drink from it. The village fellow eased away and turned his heed to the woman on his other side, whose lowering stare at Rose turned to smiles at him.
Instead, it was Ellis’ hard stare across the alehouse Joliffe met, but Rose saw it, too, and twitched her head slightly sideways, meaning Ellis to understand there was reason for Joliffe’s arm around her. Ellis flicked a glance at the now disinterested village fellow, slightly nodded back at Rose, and returned to his deep talk with the woman who had lately crowded onto the bench between him and the next man, all their hips against each other but her eyes for Ellis.
Under her breath, disgustedly, Rose said, “Men.”
“Hai,” Joliffe protested.
“You, too,” Rose said and shifted, without making show of it, from under his arm as she turned to the woman formerly glowering at her and struck up talk across the man between them.
The last Joliffe heard was Rose asking if anyone in the village might be willing to do laundry for pay. “Just keeping these men mended takes all my time,” she said—unfairly, Joliffe thought; but the other woman nodded with full understanding and started a friendly answer, while the man between them began to look uncomfortable. Leaving Rose to it, Joliffe rejoined the talk of the other men around him.
Basset made to leave not long thereafter when Father Morice did, the two of them talking together all the way to the door and out, Father Morice giving wordless, good-humoured waves and nods to all the farewells called out to him. Joliffe, Rose, and Ellis broke off their own various talk and followed them, finding them still talking outside in the spread of yellow light from the lantern hung beside the alehouse door. Beyond the light’s reach, the over-clouded darkness was like a black wall, save for another lantern hanging beside a door across and farther along the street. As the players joined Basset, Father Morice was pointing that way and saying, “There’s my door. Might I offer you a light to see you on your way?”
“My thanks,” Basset said, “but I think my daughter has provided for us.”
Used to the deep country darkness that came with nightfall, Rose had indeed brought their own lantern with its panes of thin-cut horn. It had been between her feet in the alehouse and now she handed it from under her cloak to Ellis, who lighted its candle-stub at the alehouse lantern’s while Basset made them known, each by name, to Father Morice, who said how much he looked forward to seeing them play. Then he and Basset made their cordial farewells and he went homeward with confidence through the familiar darkness between the alehouse and his own doorstep.
With less confidence, the players headed back toward the common, enclosed in their own yellow circle of lantern-light, fretted with their shadows so the ground was uncertain underfoot. Nor did they talk until they were as sure as they might be in the dark that they were alone, when Ellis, holding the lantern high but his other arm around Rose’s waist, said, “The priest came in knowing all about us, but did I hear right that he’d been at the manor all day, dealing over this marriage business?”
“He was and didn’t much want to talk about it,” Basset said. “Tired of it, I suppose. But, yes, everyone has heard we’re here and will be there tomorrow because, as we well guessed, the young man who wanted us to play again is Will Deneby, Sir Edmund’s heir. He’s also Father Morice’s student, though presently unlessoned while Father Morice helps with the marriage talks, and Father Morice speaks of him with affection and some praise as an estimable and worthy young man.”
“You drank too much,” Rose said. Observing, not accusing. An over-flourish of words was always sign that Basset had gone somewhat beyond sober limits.
“I did, but the last several cups were paid for by our good Father Morice . . .”
“Which ensures him being ‘good Father Morice’ for some time to come,” said Joliffe.
“. . . and while you younglings indulged in idle listening to all and sundry, I plied our priest for information at length about Sir Edmund and his family.”