A Play of Lords Read online

  Somewhere among them all was Lord Lovell, with everyone there aware that these players were his players, because they had been so announced; but when all came to all, what mattered was the same as what always mattered: there was a play to do and a place to do it in, and once they were begun, Joliffe gave himself over to the work and not to any thought of where they were or who was watching them. Basset as the Duke of Burgundy declared his allegiance to Gil as Lady Honor, only to be led astray by Ellis as the Devil and Joliffe as Mistress Greed, who then dragged him off to Hell with Piers capering around them as a merry demon, leaving Lady Honor to regret the fall of “so fair a man as he once was.”

  It went well. Went very well. The laughter and shouted mockery at the “Duke of Burgundy” were just as they should have been, and at the end there was loud clapping and even some pounding of goblets on tabletops—they being too fine an audience to use their dagger hilts, Joliffe thought, as he and the others ran back into the hall to join Gil in bowing to the high table and then to either side and again to the high table while backing rapidly the length of the hall until able to vanish into the screens passage.

  Only when they were back in the small room they had been given to change their garb and leave their gear and Gil had shut the door and there was no one to see them did they give way to their triumph, pounding each others’ backs joyously, with Ellis saying, “They have to be used to the best players in the kingdom! In Europe even! And they loved us! Our rich and mighty bishop and his household loved us!”

  Joliffe, with the devilry Ellis so often brought out in him, said, “Of course these days they’d likely love anyone who made sport of the duke of Burgundy.”

  Ellis was in too high humour even to give him a glower, but Basset said at him cheerfully, “Idiot,” and Piers and Gil gave him friendly shoves from either side.

  They were mostly out of their playing garb and halfway into their usual clothing when there was a quick rap at the door and Mak came in, all smiles and exclaiming, “Did you hear them? You did Lord Lovell proud. When you were gone, his grace the bishop raised a goblet to him and thanked him there in front of everyone for his excellent players, and my lord stood up and thanked the bishop back for the honor of performing for him.”

  “So they were both pleased,” Basset said with the satisfaction of someone who wanted to be told again what he already knew.

  “Everyone was pleased,” Mak assured him. “Lord and bishop and everyone in the hall.”

  “Where were you, to see all that?” Joliffe asked.

  “Ha!” Now Mak was pleased with himself. “Harry and I crept with some servants into the back of the minstrels’ loft. Nobody notes if there’s a few more heads up there among the minstrels if you don’t do something foolish. We saw it all. You’re made men!”

  There was more back-pounding among them, with Mak included because he had said what they had worked years to hear and very often thought they never would. Ellis even grabbed hold on Basset’s elbow with one hand and his hand with the other and wrung them both thoroughly, speechless with his delight except to say, “We have to tell Rose!”

  “As soon as ever we can,” agreed Basset. “Let’s finish dressing and be out of here.”

  “I’ll fetch Harry,” Mak said and left.

  They finished dressing, widely smiling all the while, and were repacking their garb and properties into the hamper, to be ready when Mak and Harry came back, but it was not Mak or Harry who shortly rapped at the door but a man in Bishop Beaufort’s red livery who said at them, “Which one of you is Basset?”

  Basset took a step toward him. “I am.”

  Clearly considering himself, as a servant, well above players, the man said very much down his nose, “His grace the bishop wants to see you. And whichever of you it was that played Mistress Greed. You’re to stay here. When he’s done at table he’ll send for you.”

  Drawing himself up straight and very much down his own nose back at him, Basset said, “We’re pleased to hear it. Thank you,” thanking and dismissing him with an equal balance between the respect due the bishop’s livery and the distain due the fellow’s rudeness.

  The man blinked, somewhat thrown off his arrogant stride, paused as if still expecting something more groveling from them, finally said, “Good, then,” and left.

  Gil went forward and shoved the door hard-closed behind him, but the fellow’s rudeness did not lessen the import of his message, and turning from the door, Gil said, somewhat awed, at Basset, “The bishop wants to see you.”

  “And Joliffe,” Ellis said with a look at him somewhere between a glare and puzzlement.

  Joliffe understood the glare and shared the puzzlement. Why him in particular from among the others? He had written the play, yes, but he doubted Bishop Beaufort knew that, and he’d not made his own part better than anyone else’s. He held up his hands in apology. He would have said it wasn’t his fault, but Ellis probably wouldn’t have believed him, and Basset was already saying, to ease trouble before it started, “Joliffe was probably too convincing as Mistress Greed. The bishop wants to cast the evil out of him.”

  “Wait on!” Joliffe protested, playing up to that, while Ellis snorted and said, “None too soon that would be,” and the bad moment passed.

  They finished packing the hamper, with Gil just fastening the last strap when Mak came back with Harry, ready to leave, and Basset said, “The rest of you may as well go. No reason Rose should have to wait longer for the good news. We’ll surely be close behind. His grace likely wants to give us a gold coin with his own hand in thanks and that’s all.”

  Ellis grumbled something that Joliffe did not try to hear, while Mak asked, “Can you find your way back on your own?”

  “We can,” Basset said. “If nothing else, we can ask the way to St. Paul’s.”

  “That will do it,” Mak approved. He and Harry picked up the hamper, and shortly Joliffe and Basset were alone in the small room, looking at each other.

  “Well?” Joliffe asked.

  “Well,” Basset answered, confirming he had no more thought than Joliffe did on why the bishop wanted to see them. Or had too many thoughts, with no way to guess which one was right. So they waited in silence, Basset pacing in a slow, deliberate way from one side of the room to another, while Joliffe leaned against one wall, his arms crossed to hide his own restlessness. They had performed between the meal’s two removes. Given the ceremony with which a bishop’s dinner in his great hall was surely served, they easily guessed they had a while to wait, but it was not over-long before a different liveried servant came for them. More courteous than the other one had been, he bade them come with him, which they willingly did, and he led them back to the screens passage and into the great hall again. The guests were gone, and a busyness of servants were clearing and taking down the tables. Weaving their way among them, Basset and Joliffe were led to almost the hall’s upper end, then through a stone-framed doorway, through the several rooms beyond it, and up a straight set of stairs to a closed door where the man knocked very lightly, as if to disturb as little as possible whoever was beyond it.

  At someone saying from inside, “Come,” he went in, bowed, and stepped aside, out of Basset’s and Joliffe’s way. Hats in hand, they entered, too.

  Joliffe had not known what to expect. He had never been in a bishop’s private room before this, and he swept a single swift glance around it. The room was not overly large but paneled in golden oak along the lower part of the walls, with the upper walls painted with a bright procession of graceful lords and ladies riding through green countryside. A glassed, stone-mullioned window looked out over the sun-glittering Thames, and a low fire burned in a stone-surrounded fireplace beside another door. Standing close to the fire’s warmth was a scarlet-cushioned chair with a tall, carved back, while across the room was a table with several books on it, an inkwell with pens, a few papers, and a small, closed chest. There was a plain, but again cushioned, chair behind it and behind that a large chest st
anding against a wall that was painted with the processing lords’ and ladies’ goal: Christ on a cross surrounded by a host of fire-winged angels.

  A private room meant for both comfort and work, Joliffe judged as he made his low bow to the man standing between the window and the table; and although he had been unable to have a clear look at any of the men seated at the high table in the hall, he knew beyond any doubt at all to whom he bowed, and his bow and Basset’s were accordingly very low and without flourish. A man as highly placed as Cardinal Bishop Beaufort did not need flourish, only respect almost as deep as would be given to the king himself, and not until Joliffe straightened did he presume to look fully at the man looking back at him and Basset.

  The bishop was a tall and large-built man, somewhere in his late middle years, smooth-faced and maybe beginning to go to bulk under his fine, floor-long robe of deeply black, close-woven wool widely banded at neck and wrists with dark, sheened fur. The hand he held out with its large-stoned episcopal ring was surely that of a man who had not used it for harder labor than wielding a pen and turning books’ pages, yet it did not have the look of a weak man’s hand, Joliffe thought as Basset went quickly forward to kneel on one knee and kiss it, then stepped back and aside for Joliffe to do the same. Joliffe was straightening and stepping back in his turn when a small snick of the door latch told that the servant had gone, that they were alone now with Bishop Beaufort, who could—so word ran—make or break almost any man in the realm.

  “Master Basset,” the bishop said. “You are to be commended on your company.”

  Basset bowed. “Thank you, your grace. We were honored to play for you.”

  Bishop Beaufort turned his gaze to Joliffe, who was startled to find it was a gaze like a well-sharpened knife-blade, maybe able to cut through layers of men’s seemings, although the voice stayed mild enough as the bishop said, “You’re Master Southwell, then.”

  That was more dignity than Joliffe was usually given and only the name by which Lord Lovell knew him, but seeing no point in correcting the bishop, Joliffe bowed and answered, “Yes, your grace.”

  “You well-played Mistress Greed.”

  “My thanks, your grace.”

  “I’m told you also wrote the play.”

  “Yes, your grace.”

  “Could you write a play that I asked of you?”

  Being a player was useful: Joliffe had learned how to keep his face to the look correct to the part he was playing, come what may. Just now he was being a very respectful nobody to a very powerful man, and at Bishop Beaufort’s question, the only surprise he showed was a single blink before he answered evenly, “I think I could, my lord.”

  Bishop Beaufort continued to look at him with far more heed than Joliffe found comfortable; nor did his comfort increase when the bishop said, “Lord Lovell has had interesting things to say about you.”

  The word “interesting” made any answer to that difficult. “Interesting” could mean so many different things, and Joliffe settled for a slight bow of his head and the ever-useful, “Your grace.”

  Bishop Beaufort went on looking at him for a long moment more, before saying, “I need another play like the one you played today.”

  Wondering what was wrong with that one, Joliffe said, “Another one against the duke of Burgundy, you mean?”

  “Somewhat and not quite.” Bishop Beaufort looked at Basset. “Have you been long in London?”

  “Only since yesterday, my lord.”

  “Then you may not know how high angers are running against the duke of Burgundy. Against all Burgundians and Flemings.”

  “We saw something of it on our way here,” Basset said. “A man was attacked by men yelling he was a Burgundian. Whether he was or not, we don’t know.”

  Bishop Beaufort’s mouth tightened with displeasure. “What happened to the man?”

  “He escaped into a church. He was unhurt so far as we saw.”

  Bishop Beaufort gave a curt nod of satisfaction. “Good. There’ve been attacks on Burgundians and Flemings and at least one killing these past few weeks, both in London and elsewhere. It’s good that this one escaped safely.”

  Joliffe ventured, “From what we’ve heard in our travels, people aren’t taking the treaty between Burgundy and France at Arras well anywhere we’ve been.”

  “No,” Bishop Beaufort said dryly. “People aren’t. Nor should they.”

  Indeed they should not. As a piece of treachery the treaty made at Arras was hard to match. A quarter-century ago, Philippe, then newly duke of Burgundy and lord of the Flemish Low Countries, had sworn vengeance for his father’s murder against the French king’s son, the Dauphin Charles, who had allowed—and maybe actively urged—his French lords to that murder. To further his vengeance, the duke of Burgundy had forsaken the Dauphin’s father, the French king, taking his considerable power to the English side, and although through the years since then he had not always been the most useful of allies, too often ignoring his pledges to the English in favor of taking more care of his own affairs, his vow of vengeance against the Dauphin—now claiming the title of King Charles VII of France after his own father’s death—had continued to hold until this past summer when he had forced a conference—against English wishes—of English, French, and Burgundians at his town of Arras, with ecclesiastical arbiters from the pope himself overseeing the arguments among them all.

  Burgundy’s avowed purpose had been to bring about a final peace, but to anyone except a complete fool it had been clear well before the conference ever met that his true purpose was to justify abandoning of his English alliance in favor of rejoining the French, never mind his oath to avenge his father against the man now claiming to be France’s king. Such reports as came back and spread through England had shown that the conference was a farce from the beginning, with no terms ever offered to the English that anyone, on any side, thought they would accept; and while public talks went nowhere, with every offer the English made toward agreement turned flatly down, the French ambassadors and Burgundy held private meetings together—“Close as fleas in straw,” was how Joliffe had heard someone say in an alehouse—with Burgundy, proclaiming to the world at every step that all he wanted was to make an honorable peace, ignoring at every step his dishonor in dealing with his father’s murderer at all and in despite of all his vows to be the Dauphin Charles’ destruction.

  The English, on the other hand, had refused the dishonor being offered them, had taken their only other choice and left the conference, led out of Arras in a heavy rain by Cardinal Bishop Beaufort.

  That had been less than a month ago, and now that Joliffe had had chance for longer look at the bishop, he could well guess that the failure at Arras and the journey home by land and sea and land again to whatever political troubles had been waiting for him very probably accounted for the gray curves of tiredness under his eyes and a certain weary heaviness to his face’s flesh.

  But if Bishop Beaufort were as tired as he looked, he was keeping it to himself and now asked briskly of them both, “What have you seen and heard about all this outside of London? Is the anger there anything like here?”

  “I would say so,” Basset answered. “These past weeks we’ve heard the duke of Burgundy damned to Hell in as many ways as men can think of, everywhere we’ve been. London’s only difference seems to be in being able to strike at Burgundians with more than words.”

  Bishop Beaufort gave a tight-lipped smile. “An advantage the Londoners are doing their best to make full use of, yes.” He looked to Joliffe again. “Can you guess why I might ask you to write me another play about the duke of Burgundy?”

  Among the last things in life Joliffe had ever expected was to be asked to guess the bishop of Winchester’s reason for doing or wanting anything, but this was one of those fortunate moments when his brain worked as quickly as it needed to, and the pause while he grasped at an answer maybe passed for mere startlement before he said with outward and utterly feigned certainty, “You’r
e looking for ways to lessen the general anger against the duke of Burgundy. Anger against him but taken out on Burgundians here make a threat to trade with the Low Countries, and whatever else may be happening and no matter how much a cur the duke of Burgundy is, the trade is too valuable to lose.” Not least—although it seemed best not to say it to the bishop’s face—because, from what Joliffe had heard, a great amount of Bishop Beaufort’s own great wealth came from sales of English wool to the Flemish Low Countries.