A Play of Lords Read online

  In any case, Bishop Beaufort was nodding agreement to Joliffe’s guess, which emboldened Joliffe to add, “What you want is for me to write a play that somehow lessens the anger there is against Burgundian and Flemish merchants here in London.” The weight being heavily on “somehow,” Joliffe thought a little desperately.

  “Habes,” the bishop said.

  Joliffe cocked his head sideways. “Your grace?”

  “You have it,” Bishop Beaufort translated. “Your present play expertly shows the duke for the villain that he is. I would like one that instead makes him look more a fool than a villain. One that shifts most of the blame onto the Dauphin. So our Londoners might be willing then to turn their anger toward him and his followers, more than at the Flemings.”

  Joliffe was silent a moment, considering how possible that might be, then tried, already knowing the answer, “If I were fool enough to refuse . . .”

  “. . . then you’d be too great a fool to write the play for me,” Bishop Beaufort said quite easily and with a smile that said they were two men who understood each other. “How soon can you have it done?”

  Sharply aware that he was a nobody of a player answering a great and royal bishop, Joliffe said, “Three days to write it. How long to have it ready to play is for Master Basset to say.”

  “Three more days,” said Basset.

  “Six days,” Bishop Beaufort said. “If you can have it sooner, good. Then I want it played all over London.”

  “What of our present Burgundian play?” Basset asked. “What if we’re asked to play it in the meanwhile?”

  “Play it at any lord’s house where you’re asked but not in the streets, not for the commons.”

  “My lord,” Basset said, accepting with a bow. Because what else could he do but accept?

  Bishop Beaufort turned to the table and took a leather pouch from under some papers. “Here’s my thanks for your company’s good service here today.” Turning back to hold it out to Basset, he added, “And toward your good service in time to come.”

  Chapter 3

  Having been seen out of Winchester House by a servant and left in the courtyard to make their own way to the gate and away, Basset and Joliffe paused for a moment to look at one another, not needing to say any of the things they were reading in each other’s face.

  Instead Basset said only, “So,” which seemed to sum it all up nicely. And then, “Do you think we can make good our boast that we can find our way back to Lord Lovell’s inn?”

  “We’ll find out,” Joliffe said easily. The chance of being lost seeming presently the least of his problems, he headed for the gateway, wanting out and away from here.

  Happily they neither saw nor had any trouble between there and Lord Lovell’s inn. Beyond the bridge they turned westward along the first wide street, making toward St. Paul’s steeple above the rooftops. The day was late enough that the narrower streets were already deep in shadow as the sun westered, but in the broader ways the clear October sunlight was striking brightly off the many-paned windows in the tall houses’ upper storeys thrust out one above the other over the shop-fronts tucked under them to better shelter shoppers in less lovely weather than today’s was. As it was, shops and streets were everywhere busy, mostly crowded with afternoon trade. If he had not been distracted with his own thoughts, Joliffe would surely have lingered over some of all there was to see and hear and smell. A sudden richness of spices caught his nose as he and Basset passed near one open shop-front, while an array of varicolored glassware that could only have come from Venice glinted gaudily against yellow cloth on one shopboard and another showed pewterware ranging from small children’s cups to broad platters. From a cookshop came the warm odor of roasting beef, and everywhere were street sellers with their wares on trays strap-hung from their necks, their varied cries vying to be heard among rumblings of occasional carts over the paving stones and the shouts of boys and even a few girls running and dodging about their own busyness.

  By one turn and another he and Basset came finally out under the cathedral’s east end that rose in a shadowed cliff of stone and lightless windows while its spire still speared into sunlight, showing the unmistakable way to heaven. It was as overwhelming a sight today as it had been yesterday, and Joliffe came to a brief pause, standing with his head craned back to look at it more. Sight of it was something Londoners must grow used to seeing, he supposed, and come to that, he had seen cathedrals and spires enough in his travels himself, although none that quite matched this one. As always it made him wonder that some men could conceive and make such powerful beauty while other men stayed—stubbornly stayed, it sometimes seemed—mired down in earthly wrangling and common greeds, able to raise their eyes to beauty but not their minds.

  Not that he had much room to think well of himself that way. He knew too well how mired his own mind often was, and besides that, he had just committed to write a play not of great and goodly things but of precisely such earthly wrangling.

  Basset elbowed his arm to remind him they should move on, and they went rightward, circling the cathedral’s yard, then weaving their way through the people and carts toward the crowded line of buildings across wide Cheapside and the suddenly welcome sight of Lord Lovell’s arms above his inn’s gateway. In the largeness of London, it was suddenly good to come back to somewhere known. Good, too, to be rushed by Piers and Gil as soon as they reached the gateway, Piers grabbing his grandfather’s hand, wringing it, and demanding, “What happened? What happened? What happened?” while Gil asked at them both, “You saw him? The bishop? The king’s uncle? You saw him and he talked to you?”

  Basset laughed, the triumph of what had happened suddenly out-weighing the trouble of it. “Inside,” he ordered, shooing Piers ahead of him into the players’ room where Rose and Ellis came as eagerly toward them as Piers and Gil had done, Ellis demanding, “What happened? What did he want?”

  “Hai!” Joliffe exclaimed, pointing at Ellis. “What’s that?” Because instead of the tired, long-worn gray doublet Ellis had worn for more years than was good to think about, he now sported a long doublet of almost peacock blue, smoothly fitted to his shoulders and gathered in wide pleats across his chest and down to his belted waist.

  Ellis threw back his shoulders, turned around to show it back as well as front, and answered, “My new doublet.”

  “From where?” Joliffe demanded.

  Rose stroked a hand admiringly down Ellis’ near sleeve. “A shop that sells clothing second-handedly not far from here. Maud was showing me the near shops she favors—bakers and butchers and all—and I saw this and thought how well it would suit him.”

  The room was shadowy, but Joliffe thought she had begun to blush. And well she might. The only one of them who had had a new doublet in several years was Piers, and only because he had hopelessly outgrown his old one.

  “Who’s Maud?” Basset asked.

  “John Hyche’s wife.”

  Ellis was so pleased with himself and Rose so happy, no matter she was blushing about it, that Joliffe—now circling Ellis for closer view—could not stop grinning. “And the rest of us?” he asked. “When do we get to be beautiful, too?”

  “Soon,” said Basset, taking Bishop Beaufort’s purse from inside his own plain brown doublet and tossing it onto the table in the middle of the room. It landed with a satisfying thud and clink of coins, and every head turned toward it, Ellis’ new doublet momentarily forgotten.

  Basset made a fine telling of what had passed with Bishop Beaufort. Part way through it, Ellis put an arm around Rose’s waist and drew her to him. She put one arm around him and the other around Piers, hugging them both to her but having to let Piers go because by the end of Basset’s telling, he was jiggling up and down with excitement and burst out as soon as his grandfather had finished, “We’re made then, aren’t we? We’ll be rich after this, won’t we!”

  “That,” said Basset, his feet firmly on the floor both plainly and figuratively, “remains to be
seen. As the proverb says, he who hopes at sunrise may weep at sunset.”

  “Don’t spoil the sport!” Gil protested. “Your favorite proverb is ‘Take Fortune by the forelock—”

  “—because she is bald behind!” everyone else chorused, including Basset, who added now, “Bald behind and, for us, too often short-cropped in front, but yes, my Piers, I think the turn in our fortunes that came with Lord Lovell’s favor has maybe just turned even further.”

  “The only stumble in it all,” Gil said, excessively woeful, “is that Joliffe has to write us a play to the bishop’s liking.”

  “I get enough of that from Ellis. Don’t you start,” Joliffe protested, swatting at his head, deliberately missing as Gil ducked away.

  “It’s a point, though,” said Ellis, suddenly frowning. “What if the bishop isn’t satisfied? If he isn’t, we could be ruined instead of made.”

  “That’s the way, Ellis,” Joliffe jibed back at him. “I’ll write so much the more readily with that in the back of my mind.”

  Piers asked suddenly, “Are we still Lord Lovell’s players?”

  Everyone looked at him, surprised, and only after a moment did Basset answer seriously, “We are. Come to it, I doubt our good bishop of Winchester wants it known how much his hand is in this. Best we keep it under our tongues.”

  They all nodded agreement to that, but Ellis added glumly, “I’ve heard stories about the ‘good bishop.’ There’s been fighting here in London’s streets between his men and the duke of Gloucester’s, when the two of them were quarreling over the government. Remember hearing about that?”

  Rose moved away from him, saying impatiently, “Oh, Ellis, let’s just be glad for a while. All that was years and years ago.”

  “Ten years,” said Basset firmly. “And the duke of Bedford sorted and settled everything between them long since.”

  “But now the duke of Bedford is dead,” Ellis said stubbornly.

  “And so will you be, because if you keep this up,” said Rose with sudden fire, “I’ll kill you myself. Father, let’s see what’s in the bishop’s purse.”

  “Whatever there is,” Basset said cheerfully, going to the table and beginning to untie the strings, “I say that before we spend a penny of it on anything else, Rose gets a new gown. One she doesn’t have to sew for herself.”

  Because it was Rose’s sewing skill that had kept them all clothed and their plays garbed all these years, there was nothing but loud and ready agreement to that, and Rose’s blush of pleasure was bright enough that even in the shadowy room there was no doubt of it.

  It was only later, as they were laying out their straw-stuffed pallets for the night that Basset asked Joliffe, low-voiced and aside, for no one else to hear, “So. Now that the first flush has faded on the bishop of Winchester’s demand, do you think you can write the kind of play he wants?”

  Joliffe held back from snapping he could do it better if people keep didn’t keep asking if he could; instead he said easily, “I’ve already started it in my head.”

  Basset nodded, satisfied, and turned away to finish spreading his blanket.

  What Joliffe kept to himself as he lay down and pulled his own blanket over him was his nagging remembrance of Bishop Beaufort’s last words: that the purse of coins was for their good service today and “in time to come.”

  “Time to come” could mean so many things. It could mean no more than the few weeks of use the purposed play would be. It could mean the whole rest of time, until the world’s end.

  Of course, unless the latter was far closer than Joliffe supposed it was—and unless Bishop Beaufort knew more about it than was likely—he had to doubt that had been the bishop’s meaning, but that still left an unclear length of lesser time, and Joliffe somehow doubted that Bishop Beaufort was ever careless with words or unclear in his own mind about what he meant. He gave the sense of being a man who was never careless about anything. There had been a generous lot of coins in that purse, and Joliffe would have wagered his share of them that Bishop Beaufort knew, to the penny, how many. So what had he meant by “time to come”?

  Maybe nothing. Maybe much. All Joliffe had was an uneasy suspicion that wanted to be a worry, but worry by itself solved nothing, and he very deliberately set his aside and settled himself for sleep. Tomorrow’s work was going to be hard enough without he worried about something he would only find out . . . “in time to come.”

  Chapter 4

  Joliffe awoke sometime toward the next morning to the sound of rain on the stone paving of the yard outside the room’s one window. With a small complaining groan, he tried to bury himself in his bedding, but thin pillow, thin mattress, and one blanket did not allow for much burying. He was unable to shut out either the rain or Ellis’ muttered curse from across the room as he awoke and heard it, too.

  Rose murmured something to Ellis. There was, briefly, a sound of shifting bodies and then quiet again. Rose, of them all, was the one who could best soothe Ellis when his dark humour came on him. He matched that with a care of her that was tender and almost unfailing, and he was the nearest to a father that Piers knew, so that, all in all, it was pity he and Rose could not wed, pity that somewhere, if he still lived, Rose had a husband. It made no difference that long before Joliffe had joined the company, when Piers was still a baby, the fellow had walked away and never come back. Merely because he might still exist somewhere, what there was between Rose and Ellis was always threaded through with her guilt for the sin of it, and because of that she often brought herself to refuse both Ellis and herself the comfort they were to each other.

  Of late, though, her fight against herself had lessened. Joliffe did not know why—unless it was simply from weariness at her long effort to deny her heart—but Ellis’ dark humours had lessened with it, and the company was the better for it.

  But then the company was altogether better in so many ways since Lord Lovell had given them his protection. It was as much to do him deserved honor as to satisfy Bishop Beaufort that Joliffe meant to write a play that would satisfy the bishop and thereby surely please Lord Lovell.

  All he needed was some thought of how to do it.

  He had hoped some sharp-witted answer would come to him in his sleep but, sadly enough, none had, and he settled himself in the present dark and rain-whispered quiet to think about it, half-expecting to fall to sleep again, but he did not. By the time that a stir and lantern light in the yard told of household servants about their early morning business, he knew something of what he was going to do.

  Doing it, though, had to wait until there was light enough by which to write, and only after everyone was up, the early morning necessities done, and breakfast had among the household in the great hall across the yard was he was able to get out his wooden box with its inkpot, pens, paper, and carefully smoothed lid for writing on and sit himself near the room’s doorway where the best of the rainy gray light was to be had. At least the poor weather gave a curb to his urge to be out and about to see more of London. Time for seeing London would come when his duty to Bishop Beaufort was done and not before. Of course his added thought was that if he did not satisfy the bishop, he would only see London over his shoulder as he legged off to somewhere well away from the bishop, but he thought he could do better than that. Before long he was happily scratching possibilities onto a piece of paper and giving only a corner of his heed to the other players talking around him.

  Basset, being kind to his arthritics that were always worse in damp weather, was sitting on the stacked mattresses against one wall. The others, like Joliffe, were making do with the cushions that usually served them, except for Piers, who couldn’t sit still but was wandering around the table, sometimes trying to start a wrestling match with either Ellis or Gil, neither of whom obliged, while Basset laid out their possibilities for today. The rain having started before dawn, it was likely to be done by mid-day, and he was for doing street-work.