“Pride,” Joliffe said promptly.
Ellis gave a bark of laughter. “That makes you a great sinner, then. You’ve enough pride for—”
“My pride is honest and proportionate pride,” Joliffe said with dignity. “There’s no sin in pride at filling my humble place in the world as best I’m able. In using well what talents God has given me. In—”
“Sir Edmund?” Ellis said quellingly.
“Sir Edmund,” Joliffe said, unable to keep a hard edge from his words, “is a hollow-hearted coward who has never seen beyond what he wants, what he feels. Other people’s grief or pain or hope or happiness don’t matter to him. Only his grief, his pain, his hope and happiness count for anything. If he comes to repentance now, it’s not because his heart has truly changed but because he’s frightened to his hollow core that he’ll otherwise be made to suffer for what he helped to happen.” Joliffe heard the anger building in his own voice and shifted back to deliberate lightness. “If I do him wrong, may I be forgiven. But there I have my Moraud. A petty man sniveling his way into repentance. I think—”
“You think too much,” said Ellis.
Author’s Note
Lord and Lady Lovell are historical. His effigy can be seen on his tomb in Minster Lovell church in Oxfordshire, close by the ruins of Minster Lovell manor house. The site is a lovely one to visit, with its remains of golden Cotswold stone buildings beside the Windrush River under Wychwood Forest.
The Denebys and all about them are imaginary, but the story of incestuous father and daughter is an old one, to be found in many sources and forms through the centuries, including the contemporary Confessio Amantis by John Gower and the actual play of Dux Moraud.
Unfortunately, the play presently exists only in fragmentary form, written in the 1400s on a damaged and reused parchment of the early 1300s. We have the Duke’s speeches, no one else’s. This brief remains of the play can be found in Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, edited by Norman Davis for the Early English Text Society, Oxford University Press, 1970, or in perhaps more generally accessible form (if somewhat less accurately and under the title Duke Moraud) in Joseph Quincy Adams’s Chief Pre-Shakespearean Dramas.
A Play of Dux Moraud Page 26
