Joliffe found himself liking the boy for his effort and the woman for her kindness, but it was still Lady Benedicta’s loveliness and Mariena’s beauty that most often drew his eyes, so that only gradually did he become aware of someone’s eyes on him. Set at the bottom of the hall, the players and the household folk at the facing table were served by lesser servants whose duty was to get the food on the tables with no bother of ceremony about it. That suited Joliffe well enough, but he finally began to note that the woman serving them tended to linger a little longer over the business than necessary; and when she asked him if she should bring more bread and he looked full at her, he found her fullness of breast leaning toward him more than need be, delaying the lift of his eyes to her face. That did not repel him either. In fact, her smile was very welcoming and he swallowed before saying he needed no more bread. “Thank you anyway,” he added.
“You’ve but to ask for what you want,” she said, still smiling as she straightened and headed away with a pleasant swing to her hips.
Down the table, Ellis snorted on a badly smothered laugh. Rose preferred to pretend she had seen nothing but did it in a silence that told what she was thinking. Piers, typically, was more interested in his food, but Gil was leaned forward to stare along the table at Joliffe in open-eyed wonder. Joliffe kept his dignity, refusing to know about anything but the food in front of him until Basset hastily put down his spoon and began to rise to his feet.
Looking up then, Joliffe found one of the servants from the hall’s upper end was standing across the table, holding out a small pewter dish with a fine, thick slice of chicken breast in a white sauce on it. “From Sir Edmund,” the man announced for the hall to hear. “In token of his pleasure at your presence and that of your company, with thanks to his right well-honored lord, Lord Lovell.”
He set the plate down in front of Basset, and as the rest of the players rose to their feet, Basset bowed toward the high table and said in a carrying voice, “My thanks and that of my company to Sir Edmund, with our hope that we may please him tonight at supper with a play.”
Sir Edmund lifted a hand and bent his head in acceptance. Basset and all the players bowed to him in return and sat again and the meal went on. Sir Edmund might be only a knight but he knew high manners and the grace of ceremony. Their stay here was looking better at every turn.
At the meal’s end, while the rest of the players returned to the cartshed, Basset lingered to talk with Master Henney about their supper being had early, so they would be ready to perform during supper or at supper’s end, whichever Sir Edmund preferred. Happily, there was no need for them to rehearse tonight’s play. All of them but Gil could probably have done it sleeping, and a few moments of work showed him how to do what little he would do at the end. That left them an easy time then for Rose to get out the garments for
The Steward and the Devil
and the rest of them to talk a little about what else they would do while here before going on with more of Gil’s training.
Joliffe, supposing that Basset and Ellis could see to Gil, asked if he could spend this uncommon leisure time writing over
Dux Moraud,
an old play among the ones they hadn’t used for a time, while he had the chance.
“Are you still set on trying to make that thing work?” Ellis said. “It’s ugly.”
“People will love it,” Joliffe returned.
“It’s sickening.”
“You’ll play the duke.”
Ellis glowered. Whatever he thought about the rest of the play, the duke’s role was too good for him even to pretend he would not savor it. Their argument over the play always went this way, but this time he said, “So you’re thinking Gil would play the daughter and you’d be the wife?”
“Yes.”
“Then,” said Ellis with great satisfaction, “I could at least play from the heart the part where I order your death.”
Piers laughed. Joliffe feigned a clout along side of his head, and grinning, got out the small, slant-topped box where he kept ink and quills and what paper they could afford. With that and a cushion, he was about to go to the cartshed’s corner beyond their cart and set himself to work when the boy Will came around the corner of the carpentry shop. The look he gave over his shoulder as he came betrayed he was supposed to be somewhere else, and Basset asked him, friendly enough and much as he would have Piers, “In flight from lessons, young master?”
“From my mother. She said I should spend the afternoon with the women. I told her Father Morice wanted me. He’ll tell her later he didn’t, but by then I won’t have been with the women all afternoon.”
“Surely your Father Morice wouldn’t betray you,” Basset said.
“He’s not
my
Father Morice,” Will said with an edge of scorn. “He’s Mother’s. She chose him. St. Augustine’s is her church, see.”
“Her church?” Basset asked, all mild and encouraging interest, not for the mere sake of talk but because the more they understood about the family, the less likely they were to set a foot wrong. “The manor came to your father by marriage, then?”
“Oh, no.” Will was brightening under Basset’s easy attention to him. “The manor was his all along, but Mother’s family held the church and half the village. The families had meant to marry together for years, because Father’s family held the mill by Mother’s family’s manor. If they married, they could trade properties, you see, and it would all suit better. They kept having all sons, though. Both families. Until Mother. So that’s why they married, but she kept the right to choose the priest here as part of the marriage agreement and she chose Father Morice.” Will dropped his voice as if to impart a secret, his eyes gleaming with mischief. “Father says Father Morice is a waggle-tongued old woman.”
Basset chuckled appreciatively. “So you don’t mind giving up your tutor for this week or so?”
“No!” Will was triumphant about it.
Openly musing, Basset led on, “It’s a long while they’re at this marriage talk.”
“It’s all the dealing they’re doing. Who gets what and gives what. Mother says Master Breche is too much the merchant.” Will put scorn into the word. “He’ll give up no more than he must and as little as may be and yet still have the marriage.”
Joliffe held back from pointing out that Sir Edmund must be “merchanting” just as hard if the dealing was going on this long. Instead, he offered, “Still, Father Morice must be well-witted enough, if Sir Edmund wants his help with it all.”
Will laughed. “Father says he finds more fiddling small points to be talked out than a mouse finds wheat kernels in a granary.”
So the priest was talkative but sharp enough that he was valued by Sir Edmund. And he liked plays. Basset had done well to gain his good will last night. A priest who took against players and could put his case well would have been a bother, if not an outright problem.
Probably thinking they had had enough out of Will for now, Basset said, “But you didn’t come to talk, Master William. You came to see what we’re doing, and what we’re doing is teaching young Gil here how to be a player. Do you want to watch?”
Will did and went willingly where Basset pointed him, to sit on the ground with his back against a cartwheel, out of the way. Joliffe went beyond the cart to the corner he’d chosen, put down the cushion, and sat himself down cross-legged to his work. By long practice, he could shut out what the others were doing when need be and did so now, only distantly aware of Basset and Ellis showing Gil the different stances a player might strike, depending on what sort of person he was playing. In time, if Gil lasted as a player, he would take the needed stance with hardly thinking about it, but for now it would be all dull and driven work for him.
Joliffe had decided yet again that whoever had first written
Dux Moraud
had little interest in people, only in preaching, and was trying to give the daughter something better to say than “Your will be mine in this, my lord and father” when ordered to kill the baby she’d had by him, when Piers gave a whoop of laughter on the other side of the cart and cried out, “You look like you’ve split something in your gut!”
Bending over with his head almost to the ground to look under the cart, Joliffe saw Gil in a straddle-legged stance probably meant to be heroic but closer to what Piers had said. Surely stung by Piers’ laughter, he jerked his feet together, but Basset said sternly at Piers, “You hold your tongue. I’d rather work at pulling someone back from overdoing than at trying to make some stiff-sinewed log of a fellow move at all. It’s easier to trim than add on, as your mother will tell you about sewing. Gil, give Piers no more heed than you would a cricket chirping. Ellis, show him again.”
Basset somewhat overstated the case for over-playing, but this was not the time to damage Gil’s confidence. That, Joliffe well knew from his own young days of Basset’s training, would come later when Gil started to be too cock-sure of himself. He’d then hear far worse about himself from Basset than what Piers had just said.
Ellis was just taking a heroic stand again for Gil’s benefit when a manservant—Joliffe thought the one who had been with Will yesterday in the village—came into the cart-yard. Will was scrambling to his feet even before the man started firmly at him, “You’ve been missed, Master Will. Best you come before your lady mother begins to worry.”
“Well enough, yes, I’m coming, Deykus,” Will agreed hurriedly, but he paused in his leaving long enough to tell Basset, “Thank you for letting me watch.”
“Our pleasure and honor, sir,” Basset said with a bow that Ellis and Piers and Gil copied.
Will almost bowed back but remembered in time they were only players and settled for raising a hand in farewell as he left.
Joliffe sat up straight again and put himself back to work, but shortly Basset said, “Skirts now, I think,” and called, “Joliffe, time to take your turn at this.”
“Coming,” Joliffe agreed, and while he stoppered the inkpot and cleaned the quill’s point and stored everything back in his box, Rose got out two of their damsel-skirts from a hamper, was fastening one around Gil’s waist when Joliffe stowed the box back into the cart.
Piers, a little more cautious after his grandfather’s warning, ventured, albeit grinning, “Gil’s blushing.”
“At least he’s not whining his head off,” Joliffe said, starting to put on the other skirt. “The way you do whenever you have to play Griselda’s daughter. You’d swear,” he added, mock-confidingly to Gil, whose face was indeed trying to reach the rich color of beets, “that he was being gelded instead of girled.”
“It’s just as bad,” Piers muttered.
“You get over pretending to be a girl a lot faster than you’d get over being gelded,” Ellis pointed out darkly, though he was no fonder of playing a woman than Piers was.
Still distracting Gil from his embarrassment, Joliffe went on, “Besides, you’ll be surprised how women take to a man despite of it. Or,” he added thoughtfully, “maybe because of it. They maybe want to find out how much a man he is after seeing him in skirts.”
“And St. Genesius knows you’re more than willing to show them,” said Ellis.
“Children,” Basset said in his schoolmaster-in-classroom voice. “Behave. May we begin?”
Despite his unwillingness at the start, Gil did well at his lessoning. By the end of it, he might not have had a girlish swing to his hips yet but he could drop a creditable curtsy. He did tread on his skirt’s hem much, but he fell over only once, and when they had finished, Basset allowed it was a promising beginning.
“Better than Joliffe,” Ellis said, sitting aside to watch. “Didn’t he turn an ankle, almost break it, while he was learning?”
“No,” Joliffe protested strongly.
“I remember mending his hems a great many times,” Rose offered. “He kept tearing them out with his big feet.”
“Everyone picks on me,” Joliffe complained.
“It’s because it’s such fun,” Ellis returned.
Lessons finished, Piers and Gil were sent off to fetch water and some hay for Tisbe. Rose took the afternoon’s pause to lie down for a rest, and Ellis set to scraping out a firepit in the packed earth floor. Joliffe, before taking a rest himself, went to check Tisbe, tied to the cartshed’s end wall and taking life easy. While he was feeling down her legs and seeing that her hooves were clean, Basset joined him, which was reasonable—Tisbe’s well-being was their well-being—but Joliffe supposed that Basset had more than Tisbe on his mind, and straightening from her last hoof, said to him, too quietly for anyone else to hear, “You hauled a good bucketful of information out of Will. We know more than we did.”
“Not that any of it seems any particular use,” Basset answered, stroking the mare’s neck. “But then we couldn’t expect that anything even the boy knows would be all that secret. And maybe we’ll be fortunate and there won’t be any secrets to find out here after all.”
“We can only hope,” said Joliffe.
Chapter 6
That evening, the play, done in the great hall by torchlight after supper when the household was at ease and ready to be diverted, went well. Gil joined in the deviling with Piers without stumble or fault. “Almost as if you knew what you were doing,” Ellis said, slapping him on the back as they made their way back to the cartshed by lantern-light through a soft rain.
“Now if we can just teach him to talk, he may make a player,” Joliffe said.
Gil, too happy to mistake their jibing for anything but the friendliness it was, kept saying, “I did it, didn’t I? I did it.”
“You did indeed do it,” Basset assured him.
“Wait until you’ve done it fifty times and see how you feel about it,” Ellis muttered.
“Don’t listen to him,” Basset said. “Every set of lookers-on and every place we play is different and that makes it a different play every time.”
“Not different enough,” said Ellis. Rose poked him none too gently in his arm to shut him up.