A Play of Dux Moraud

by Margaret Frazer

  All that was a circle Joliffe went around more than once but all the answers stayed uncertain and the questions did not change and he fell asleep still circling.

  He awoke to heavily falling rain and pity for Mariena and was not happy about either one. He was tired of rain, he was tired of mud, and he didn’t want to think about Mariena or anyone else at Deneby now or ever again. Lying tightly rolled into his blankets, refusing to open his eyes, trying to deny morning was come, he burrowed deeper into his bedding. Even at the least guess, there looked to be so many wrongs—either done or intended—here that he doubted anyone could any longer sort out one as separate from another. And if some of the wrongs went back to whatever had gone amiss between Sir Edmund and Lady Benedicta years ago, there was likelihood no one even remembered for certain the how or why they had begun.

  One thing was discomfortably clear, though. Whatever wrongs Mariena had done, was doing, meant to do, she was as much betrayed as she was a betrayer. From every side she was wronged beyond measure—by her father, by her mother, by even the waiting-maid who should have been her own. If ever there had been goodness in her, no one had ever done anything to help it grow. He disliked her too much to want to pity her, but he did, without pity in the least lessening his wariness and dislike. Pity did not change the fact of her lust or her greed or that her own father thought she had tried for her brother’s life. She had certainly shown no scruple in thinking of Amyas dead. No, Joliffe did not choose to be such a fool as to think she was not dangerous to anyone she turned on.

  An unkind toe prodded at his back and Ellis said, “We’re not bringing your breakfast to you. Rise and gloom with the rest of us or go hungry.”

  Joliffe rose, looked out at the rain, and said, “I think I’d rather be hungry than wet.”

  In a heroic voice Basset declaimed, “Be brave, my heart, and face the worst the world can give!”

  “Just now the worst is having to look at Ellis,” Joliffe growled.

  Intent on being away to breakfast, even Ellis ignored that, and Joliffe did go with them, silently hunched into his cloak. Gil and the rest of them were still riding high and happy from last night’s play. Joliffe, unable to give up his thoughts and unwilling to spoil their pleasure, let himself be drawn into talk of what changes he could make to the plays they had been doing and what plays they could do again, now they were one more man to the good. Gil had more training ahead of him but no one doubted now he would be one of them, and the talk gave Joliffe reason, when they returned to the cartshed, to go away to his corner with his writing and the script box as if he meant to see what could be done. And that gave Basset reason in a while, when he had set Ellis to teaching Gil more about using his voice—“The deep growls strengthen your throat cords, the high cries keep them loose, and everything in between gets you from one to the other,” Basset told him cheerfully—to join Joliffe, bringing a cushion and sitting down on it with a stiffness that made Joliffe ask, “How go the joints?”

  “Better.” Basset gave a soft grunt of discomfort as he settled. “By fits and starts,” he amended. Forgoing the grumble to which he was probably entitled, he started to talk plays. He had some thoughts that were the same as Joliffe’s and some that Joliffe had not had, and warming to the talk, Joliffe let go his worries for the while. Only when Basset asked, “So how does Dux Moraud come on?” did everything drain flat again, so quickly Joliffe was unable to hide it.

  Basset, reading his sudden silence and his face, said, “As bad as that?”

  Joliffe tried, “Not . . . the play so much,” but had nowhere to go from there except where he did not want to go. When he had begun to work over that play, with its incestuous and murderous father and daughter, it had been a story, just a story, to be pulled about into whatever shape met the players’ needs, his only great problem with it his quest to give it some grace and sense beyond the readily seen ugly pleasure of the tale. Face to face with such ugliness in truth, there was no pleasure in it at all. All the answers he had considered giving to the play for his own satisfaction were no answers at all when faced with the harshness of lives lived in just such ugliness.

  Slowly, watching his fingers twirl his pen and keeping his voice too low to be heard beyond the cart, he gave way and told Basset what he had seen in the woods yesterday, had learned last night, and now suspected. Basset listened, with occasional looks to be sure no one else was near enough to hear, and at the end gave a low, long, almost silent whistle before saying, “You’re for it, my boy, if anyone knows you know all that.”

  “Thank you,” Joliffe said with heavy mockery. “I needed to hear that. It adds to my mind’s peace.”

  “Pleased to be of comfort to you.” But for all his words’ lightness, Basset was frowning with thoughts probably no more pleasant than Joliffe’s. “At least we can tell Lord Lovell something of what he wanted to know concerning this purposed marriage. How much he’ll thank us for the rest, I don’t know. Once it’s done, though, it’s no more our matter. He’s the one who’ll have to sort it out, thank all the saints.”

  Joliffe nodded silent agreement with that, but Basset was too skilled at reading what the body betrayed of unsaid thoughts to accept that for all his answer and asked, “Is there something more?”

  Joliffe started to answer, stopped, tried again, and finally said, irked at himself, “I have this clutter of questions all churned together in my mind and they won’t stop churning. I’ve found out too much and not enough. There are too many pieces that could go together too many ways and I can’t stop shifting them around. There has to be some way it all makes sense and it doesn’t yet.”

  “You’re asking a lot of life, if you want it to make sense.”

  Most of the time, Joliffe was of the same opinion, but he shook his head against it now like against a fly’s buzz and said nothing, frowning at the pen he was still twirling.

  Basset watched him a moment, then said, “Well, if you can’t let it go, go at it as if you were trying to make a story of all these pieces you have. Shift them around and fill the gaps until they make the sense you want.”

  Joliffe nodded without looking up, still twirling the pen. Basset waited a few moments, heaved a sigh of business done, patted Joliffe on the knee, and labored up from the cushion. When he reached the other side of the cart, he said to someone, “Leave him be for now. He’s thinking.”

  To which Ellis said, “Ah. Let’s hope he doesn’t hurt himself too badly, then.”

  Chapter 20

  Joliffe kept to himself most of that day. Save for mid-day dinner and afterwards a quick through-run of that evening’s play, he stayed beyond the cart, chill but needing his thoughts more than he needed the fire and the others’ talk. Piers and even Gil moaned at having to take Tisbe out to her grazing when the rain eased off to hardly more than a misting, and Joliffe gathered from their half-heard talk when they returned that the last reading of the banns must have gone without trouble. Not that that much mattered. Given what he had to tell Lord Lovell, the marriage was unlikely to happen. What held him was what he was untangling by way of little scribbled thoughts on paper and lines drawn from one to another—lines often scratched out and replaced by others going other ways.

  Finally he sat for a long while without adding anything or scratching anything away. If the few guesses he had added in were right, it was all there. Nor were the guesses wild. They were come out of what he knew for certainty, and because they made everything else come together, he was afraid he now had the right of it all. Nonetheless, he straightened, finding his back hurt with being bent too long, drew in a breath to the very bottom of his lungs, and let it out with a deep relief. It helped to know. Or to think he knew.

  Putting his work away, he made to rejoin the others, shuffling from behind the cart, his legs as stiff as his back, and was surprised to find Will was there, sitting beside the fire with Basset, Rose, and Ellis. Everyone had been keeping so quiet—and must have signaled Will to the same before he was across the
cart-yard—that he had not known the boy was come. Basset had apparently been telling him a story, their heads close together. Rose was mending a shirt. Ellis was carving something from a thick stick. But they all alike looked up at Joliffe questioningly, and he smiled in what he meant to be an easy way and said, “All’s settled. No more trouble.”

  Ellis muttered, “That will be the day,” and went back to his carving.

  Rose watched Joliffe join them, her worry showing. He smiled better, just for her, and said, “Truly. All’s well.”

  He didn’t know if she believed him, but she smiled in return and went back to her sewing. Standing between Ellis and Basset, Joliffe held out his hands to the fire that was blazing more merrily than was its wont. “This is a goodly fire. Did someone bring us wood?”

  He cocked an eye down at Will, who beamed with pleasure. “My lady mother said I should. I’m best out of the way just now, she said. She said I could stay, too, if no one minded. There’s more guests come and everybody’s busy with readying for tomorrow when the rest of the guests will come. The day after that is the wedding and then next day there’s to be more feasting before everyone starts home and Mariena goes away. Now Basset is telling me a story about Sir Lancelot.”

  “Then I shall let Basset get on with it,” Joliffe said, “and sit myself down to enjoy your lady mother’s gift. Add my thanks to everyone else’s, if you please.”

  With Will there, Joliffe was safe from whatever unwanted questions he might have had from Ellis about what he had been doing and any talk with Basset; and as Will was leaving, Piers and Gil and Tisbe returned. Joliffe took Tisbe to tie her up again and wipe her dry, while the boys were sent to fetch the players’ supper, and when they had eaten, it was time to ready for that evening’s play. Or, rather, two plays—The Baker’s Cake and St. Nicholas and the Thief—in place of Robin and Marian. Both were ones they had done so often that they could all have done them in their sleep, but in the hall that evening they whole-heartedly put themselves into their playing, to do honor to Lord Lovell in front of the increased guests and because they owed Sir Edmund fair return for their good meals and good shelter. Their playing won laughter where they wanted it and silence where there should have been and at the end a hearty hand-pounding as they made their bows. Tired, satisfied talk saw them all to bed, and Joliffe would have been grateful for how quickly sleep took him except that he was so quickly asleep.

  If he dreamed, he did not know it and was kept from his thoughts the next morning by practice both for that night’s play, Griselda the Patient, and the two farces they would do tomorrow at the wedding banquet. Supposing the wedding happened, Joliffe thought once, then pushed the thought down and covered it over with the work of teaching Gil how to take a blow from a padded bat as if he were being hit “with a hunk of oak wielded by a giant,” Basset said. “In a farce, if it isn’t over-played, it won’t set them laughing.”

  Twice through the morning a hurrying in the yard told when more guests arrived, but the hour for dinner came without a meal to go with it because Lord Lovell had sent word that he and Lady Lovell and their people would be there soon after mid-day and all was being held back for them.

  “Which should put the cook into a foul humour,” Rose said. “Trying to keep the dinner from spoiling and holding up work on everything for tonight and tomorrow’s feasting, too.”

  “At least Lord Lovell looks to have dry riding today,” said Ellis, unpleased himself at the delayed meal. “That should help his humour anyway.”

  Yet more rain had pattered to an end sometime toward today’s dawn, and although the clouds still held, the day was dry above if not underfoot, with puddles among the cobbles of the yard and the cart-yard’s packed mud slick with wet. The hint of a mid-day sun showing through the clouds made no difference to that, and when a trumpet sang out distantly, telling that someone of importance was nigh, Rose warned, “Don’t any of you dare slip and fall,” as she straightened the Lovell tabard over Gil’s shoulders.

  They meant to be in the yard with the rest of the household to greet Lord Lovell when he rode in. For that they were putting on their tabards, but Basset had decreed that Gil should have Piers’ because, “It will please my lord to see Gil has become fully one of us.”

  Piers, not happy, tried, “It’ll be too small for him. It won’t fit him.”

  “It’s a tabard,” Rose said calmly. “It doesn’t fit, it hangs.”

  “It’ll be too short,” Piers warned.

  “Lady Lovell considered you would be growing rather than shrinking,” his mother returned. “There’s a hem in it I can let down in a trice if need be.”

  “And it won’t look a tent on Gil, the way it does on you,” jibed Ellis.

  Because Ellis, tall and broad-shouldered, wore a tabard with easy grace, Piers was still looking for a quick come-again at him when Basset said, “What you’ll have is your cap with its feather and you shall stand at the end of our line and flourish it to my lord and lady.”

  Ever-pleased for a chance to show off himself and his feather, Piers ceased troubling, fetched his hat from where he safe-kept it in the cart in this wet weather, and followed the rest of them out to the yard happily enough. Because they were wearing Lord Lovell’s livery, no one contested their right to line up not far aside from where Sir Edmund, Lady Benedicta, their family, and guests were hurriedly gathering outside the main door to the hall, just in time as the Lovells rode in with their attendants behind them and probably several baggage-laden horses bringing up the rear somewhere. Lord and Lady Lovell themselves were in brown traveling cloaks whose lower edges, as well as their horses’ legs, showed how muddy their travel had been, but they were both smiling as they drew rein in front of Sir Edmund. He and everyone else bowed or curtseyed, and Lord Lovell answered with a raised hand and smile to everyone and, “Well met, Sir Edmund,” to his host.

  “My lord,” Sir Edmund returned, coming forward to hold his bridle while he dismounted.

  One of the men guests went to help Lady Lovell likewise, with Lady Benedicta coming forward to greet her. As lord and lady, host and hostess all moved toward the hall’s doorway, there were more bows and curtsies among all the lookers-on, but Piers gave a particularly great flourish of his cap that brought Lord Lovell to look straight at the players. He took in Gil standing with them in a tabard and as he passed by nodded to Basset in acknowledgment, so that afterward, going back to the cartshed to put the tabards away before going at last to dinner, Ellis said in the triumph they all were feeling, “That nod! Everyone saw it. He noted us and everyone saw it!” Rose, smiling, tucked her arm through his, and Piers risked his cap by a high toss into the air, and Basset clapped a grinning Gil on the back.

  Joliffe, trailing behind them all, had on a matching smile and said enough right things to be a part of their pleasure, but inwardly he was darkly waiting for when Lord Lovell would want to know what he had learned. He didn’t doubt that would come before the day was out, but he had to wait some several hours and the day was drawing into late afternoon, with rain threatening again, when a Lovell servant brought word that Lord Lovell wished to see Master Basset and the player Joliffe.

  “We’re at his service,” Basset said as easily as if being summoned to a lord were an every-day and always-pleasant happening for him.

  Rose hurriedly straightened their collars and smoothed their hair, smiling, but Joliffe saw the worry in her eyes as she brushed something imaginary from his doublet front and he was sorry for it. She had worries enough in her life without he gave her more. He could argue, he supposed, that this one was not his fault; but despite he could argue anything almost any time, including whether good was bad upon occasion, he just now did not feel like arguing anything and smiled at her with what he meant to be assurance.

  He only wished he felt as assured as he tried to seem. What he had to tell Lord Lovell was truly not his fault, but messengers had taken blows for ill-received messages before this. And what if Lord Lovell simply refu
sed to believe him?

  Lord Lovell’s man led Basset and Joliffe not to the great hall or the tower or even the galleryed wing of rooms but past there to a gate in a wooden wall across the space between the wing’s far end and the sheds and workshops along the manor wall beyond it. Until then, Joliffe had vaguely thought the gate led probably to a woodyard or some such serviceable place and was surprised when he followed Basset into a small garden of four squared flower beds divided and surrounded by narrow, graveled paths. It must have been meant for a lady’s pleasure garden, but the place had a drowned, brown air of being little cared for that Joliffe thought came only a little from the weather and not much from autumn. It was a place unloved, here but not truly wanted or cared for by anyone.