A Play of Lords Read online

  “We’ll have rivals for people’s farthings, of course. We aren’t the only ones drawn here by parliament meeting. There’ll be everyone from bearwards to tumblers to probably other companies of players come from all over because of it.”

  “A good many will surely head for Westminster, parliament being there,” Ellis said.

  “But most of the lords have their inns in London, or between it and Charing Cross,” Basset said. “So this is where the more money will be.”

  “We’re going to need a license before we do anything,” Ellis pointed out.

  Towns kept watch over what sort of strangers might infest their streets by requiring players and suchlike to be licensed before they performed in a place. London was unlikely to be different, and Basset said easily, “We can see to that this morning as soon as we find out where to go for it.”

  With a sharp rap on the open door, Mak stuck his head into the room and said cheerfully, “I heard that, and I can tell you where. Can take you there, if you like.”

  “We’d thank you for it,” Basset said. “What of your duties here, though?”

  “That’s what I’ve come to tell you.” Mak followed his head the rest of the way in. “Lord Lovell wants I should hang about and help you, knowing you’re new to London and all.” He spread his arms wide. “So here I am.”

  “You’re a Londoner yourself, aren’t you?” asked Ellis.

  “I am that. Born and bred and here til I’m dead, as they say.”

  “So you’re only part of the Lovell household when it’s in London? What do you do when it’s not here?” Basset asked.

  “Ah, I moves about somewhat, but mostly I’m here.” Mak pulled the joint stool from under the table and sat down. “The inn’s let to some of the cathedral priests, see, when his lordship isn’t here, and when any Lovell household folk come on his lordship’s business to London, it’s here they stay.”

  Ellis grinned. “Where do the priests go when Lord Lovell wants the place for himself?”

  Mak tipped his head in the direction of St. Paul’s. “Mostly they take rooms in the monastery there, grumbling every step of their way out of here. You’d swear they’d never heard they would ever have to shift or ever had to do it before.” He leaned back, clasping his hands around one knee. “So. What are you going to want to do today? Get your license, yes. And then?”

  “We thought to do some street-work this afternoon,” Basset said. “Nothing much, maybe. Just something to give us a feel for London. A small farce in a marketplace or maybe a saint’s play in a churchyard if we can get a priest’s leave.”

  “There’s churches enough in London; I should be able to find you one that won’t mind a bit of holiness. You’ll want me for the rest, too. I can tell you where’s safe to play and where you want to stay away from. The Steelyard for one. There’s rumor the Hanse merchants are letting some Flemings hide out there. There’s other places, too, you won’t know to stay away from until too late. Places they have houses. Flemings, Zealanders, Hainaulters, anyone else as belongs to the duke of Burgundy. Anywhere near one of them, you’re too likely to walk into people throwing stones or whatever else comes to hand.”

  Joliffe, who had been listening whether he wanted to or not, now put in, “They’re after anyone with anything to do with the duke of Burgundy, then.”

  “They are that,” Mak said. “As for those three he sent here on ambassadry to the king, it’ll be as much as their lives are worth if Londoners ever get hands on them.”

  “Who did he send?” Joliffe asked.

  “You’d not heard?” Mak’s face lighted with merriment. “A friar and two heralds. That’s what the pox-brained duke of Burgundy thought made fit ambassadors to King Henry. Just one scruffy friar and two heralds! The king’s refused to see them, or let anyone of his council see them. They’ve been put in a shoemaker’s house here in London and don’t dare put their noses out of doors, even to go to Mass, without a guard around them. Word is they’re supposed to urge King Henry that it’s his duty before God to make peace by accepting that piece of ordure that Burgundy and the Dauphin are calling a treaty. All that means is that Burgundy will feel the better about being foresworn on all the oaths for revenge he made after his father’s murder, if he can get King Henry to be foresworn with him. King Henry, God keep him, is having none of it. Nor any of his lords. They’ve all sworn to see Burgundy and his Flemings, Zealanders, Hainaulters, Brabanters, and all in Hell first, and there’s not a Londoner but’s willing to help the lot of them on their way.”

  “Flemings, Zealanders, Hainaulters, Brabanters,” Ellis grumbled. “Just call them Burgundians and be done with it.”

  “But they aren’t,” Mak grinned. “Aren’t Burgundians. The duke took them over from one lord and another, one way and another. There’s those among them as don’t like it, so word runs. They’re liking it less all the time, too, because they all of them want London’s wool, and now they aren’t getting it. No trade with a traitor, we say, and their duke’s a traitor.”

  And so, as almost always, the common people had to suffer for the sins of their lords, thought Joliffe, while Basset said, “We’ll indeed have to watch we don’t walk into trouble, but surely that has to leave us plenty of places. Maybe we’ll just keep to churchyards, to be fully on the safe side.” He stood up, careful of his stiffness, and stretched his spine as if making sure all the bones there wanted to work together. “Let’s away then to get our license and get on with things.”

  Mak stood up readily. “It’s the Guildhall we’ll want.”

  “Ellis and Gil, you come,” Basset said. “Joliffe, you stay and work.” And to Piers, more eagerly on his feet than anyone, “You stay to help your mother.”

  “It’s London!” he protested.

  “You’ll see enough of it before we’re done,” his grandfather told him, and Piers sat down again with threat of a gloom in every line of him.

  Nobody heeded him, Rose asking her father, “What garb do you think you’ll want for this afternoon? And for tonight, if Lord Lovell asks for us then?”

  “I doubt he will,” Mak put in. “Word’s gone to the kitchen there won’t be supper wanted. My lord must be meaning to be out. I know he’s to dine out at mid-day.”

  “Then just what we’ll need for Saint Nicholas and the Thief,” Basset said. “We can do that without Joliffe. He can keep at work here.”

  They left. Rose asked Piers to help with getting out the garb, but he was rescued from that by a boy about his own age appearing in the doorway, saying, “I’m for fetching water. Mam said to ask if you wanted your boy to go, too.”

  Piers brightened on the instant, and before he could begin pleading, Rose said, “That was kindly thought. Surely he can go.” Adding as Piers darted for the door, “Take the bucket, Piers. It will make carrying the water easier.”

  Piers snatched up the bucket and was gone. Rose answered the silent question of Joliffe’s raised eyebrows with, “Better he learns something of London with someone who knows it than on his own.”

  “It’s not Piers I’m worried for,” Joliffe said. “It’s London.”

  Rose laughed. “London, I’m afraid, will have to look after itself. Get to work while you’ve some peace to do it in.”

  But in a while, when she had unpacked the various garb for which her father had asked and made certain no mending of it was needed, she interrupted him herself, asking, “It’s maybe too soon, I know, but do you happen to have some thought of what garb we’re going to need for this play of yours? Anything more than what we already have, so I can begin on it if need be?”

  Now that the play was come well together in his mind and was starting to come onto the paper, Joliffe did have some thought and said, “What we have will mostly do. The one thing we’ll want and don’t have is a black demon’s garb for Piers, and an ugly black mask to go with it. Ellis will have to make the mask.” The company did not have a store of masks anymore. Their cart’s sideways pitch from a broken
wheel a few years ago had shifted everything inside the cart to one side and crushed both a willow-woven hamper and most of the masks packed in it. Without money then to afford more, they had got used to not much using masks, but for this play Joliffe wanted one.

  “Ellis can do that,” Rose said confidently. “I’ll need to buy black cloth, though. Maud will probably tell me where best to get it.”

  “I’m going to need more paper, too,” Joliffe said.

  Rose smiled. “I dare say some can be found somewhere, this being London.”

  Joliffe smiled back. “Very likely.”

  It was good to be prospering—to be under a lord’s protection and have sure money for food and clothing. The years the players had been without either of those things had taken their toll, and among the best things about the change was to see Rose no longer taut with constant worry. But her smile changed to a small frown, and she said, “This play you’re doing. Are you going to be able to do it? Well enough to satisfy the bishop of Winchester, I mean?”

  “Ah, you of little faith,” Joliffe said. “Doubt not but that I shall do all and more than his grace desires. When I’ve done, people will weep for pity at the duke of Burgundy’s lost honor and loathe the Dauphin Charles from the bottom of their hearts.” He paused, then added, “Or something like that, anyway.”

  “Just write it,” Rose said, slapping his shoulder lightly as she went past him and out the door.

  He did, making a good beginning at least. The play he had written against the duke of Burgundy in the spring gave him somewhere to start and that was a help, since a right beginning to a play was often the hardest part. But it was the hardest part only until time to write whatever came next. Joliffe had long ago found that no matter where he was in writing a play, the part that came next was always the hardest, and he was tickling the end of his nose with the feathered end of his pen, considering what the Dauphin was to say to lure Burgundy into treachery, when an unfamiliar man stuck his head through the open doorway and said, “You one of the players?”

  Because the man had Lord Lovell’s badge of a hound on the shoulder of his doublet, Joliffe answered evenly, keeping his irk to himself, “I am.”

  “Where be the others?”

  “Out.”

  “The one called Master Basset, too?”

  Unless he was hiding in one of the hampers, Joliffe wanted to say but settled for only, “Yes.”

  “Lord Lovell wants to see him. It’ll have to be you I take instead, seems.”

  “Seems,” Joliffe agreed. He would have met good manners with good manners of his own, but to pay the fellow back for his rudeness, he took his time at stoppering the inkpot, cleaning his pen’s point, and putting all away in his writing-box and the box away in a hamper, making neither haste nor hindrance about it, willing to go to Lord Lovell but not willing to oblige this fellow too readily. As it was, the man was shifting impatiently in the doorway before he finished. Joliffe therefore made play of straightening his doublet and smoothing back his hair, taking his cap from a peg beside the door and settling it just so on his head before finally saying, “You may lead me to him now,” for all the world as if he were a lord himself.

  Under his breath the man grumbled ahead of him all the way across the yard and up the stairs, stopping only as they went from the screens passage into the great hall where the household gathered to meals and for general matters during the day and in the evenings. Just now there was only a pair of servants, one of them cleaning the hearth, the other waiting with wood to lay the next fire. Beyond the hall’s upper end were the lord’s various private rooms, and Lord Lovell was in the first one, standing near a window, in talk with another man whom Joliffe recognized as the household’s chamberlain. To the bows of Joliffe and his guide, Lord Lovell raised a hand without looking at them, finished what he was saying, agreed with a nod to whatever the chamberlain said in answer, and dismissed him with a smile and a small gesture. His chamberlain made a slight bow and, smiling, too, went out by the chamber’s other door. Only then did Lord Lovell look to Joliffe and his guide who said, “This was the only one of the players I could find, my lord.”

  “He’ll do quite well enough. Thank you,” Lord Lovell said.

  Dismissed by Lord Lovell’s slightly raised hand, the man bowed, and Joliffe in his turn now bowed to Lord Lovell and said, “My lord.”

  “Your fellows are gone out?”

  “In quest of a license to play in London, yes, my lord. I stayed here at work on the play my lord of Winchester has asked of us.” Saying it as if he supposed Lord Lovell knew all about it.

  Which Lord Lovell confirmed he did by saying, “Good. It goes well?”

  “It does.”

  “Can you have it ready to play three evenings from now?”

  “No, my lord.” Startlement at the very thought made Joliffe abrupt. To soften the flat denial, he added, “I have it well-begun, but we’re a distance yet from even beginning to practice it. Besides the writing, there are the lines to learn once I’ve written them, and our movements to go with them, and a mask and a black devil’s garb to be made.” He realized that Lord Lovell’s unwavering gaze on him had him near to babbling. With effort he stopped himself, said, “It would be for Master Basset, not me, to say whether we could be done sooner than the six days he told my lord of Winchester.”

  Lord Lovell waited, as if expecting him to change what he had said. Joliffe held stubbornly silent, and Lord Lovell finally said, “I need Master Basset to consider the possibility of doing the play three evenings from now at the earl of Mortain’s. Tell him so.”

  Joliffe swallowed down all the many things he wanted to say in answer to that and gave the only acceptable answer there was, his voice far more even than the jump and twist of his thoughts. “Yes, my lord. I’ll tell him.”

  “Meantime and despite it’s asking much of you, I need you to perform here tomorrow evening between the removes of dinner.”

  “Of course, my lord.” Again, the only acceptable answer. “How many removes will there be?”

  “Only two. Only one play will need to be done. I would like to see The Steward and the Devil again.”

  “As you will, my lord,” Joliffe said with a slight bow.

  “I had best let you get back to work then,” Lord Lovell said and dismissed him with the same gesture that had sent the chamberlain and servant away.

  Joliffe bowed more deeply and gladly left.

  “Three evenings from now?” Basset said when he and the others returned and he heard Joliffe’s news. “Saint Genesius help us. How far along with it are you?”

  “I have the shape of it planned, and the first speeches are simply those we already have between the Duke and Lady Honor, only somewhat changed. The rest of it will come easily enough.” Joliffe hoped.

  “It’s ‘fast enough’ we need,” Basset said.

  “Fast enough, too,” Joliffe said. “It’s not as if the thing has to be beautiful. It just has to be insulting.”

  “And the saints know you can do insulting without much thinking about it,” Ellis said from across the room.

  Joliffe let that pass, saying to Basset, “All going well, I may have it done late tomorrow afternoon, or maybe the morning after. If Gil copies out the first parts this evening, you could start learning and rehearsing those in the morning anyway. But we’ll need more paper.”

  “I asked Maud about that,” Rose said, adding, in answer to her father’s questioning look, “The gatekeeper’s wife. She says there are stationers in Paternoster Row, not far from here.”

  “I know where they are!” Piers said eagerly. “Ivo and I were along there . . .” He trailed off at the sharp looks suddenly turned on him. “After I fetched back the water,” he said feebly, pointing to the filled bucket in the corner of the room.