A Play of Lords

by Margaret Frazer

  “Except he’s needed against the Scots. No one is going to think the Percies can do it all in the North. More than that, he has that quarrel going with the Westmorland half of his family that he’s not likely to want to walk off from. So not him, more’s the pity.”

  “Nor the duke of Gloucester neither,” Mak said.

  Ned laughed, doubling over with the force of it, wiping at his eyes as he straightened as if they were streaming with laughter tears although they were not. “Gloucester!”

  “I said not him,” Mak growled. “Whatever he thinks, any fool can see it won’t be him. The Beaufort lot will never agree to him.”

  “Why not?” Joliffe asked. He had a fairly good thought as to why not, but he wanted to hear what Londoners had to say on it.

  “Why not?” Mak echoed. “Gloucester and our bishop of Winchester have been at each other over who should have the government while the king’s a baby ever since our late King Henry died, God keep his soul. Not ten years ago they . . . no, saints assoil me, it has been ten years, hasn’t it?”

  “To the month,” Ned said, then explained to Joliffe, “The bishop’s folk for him and Londoners for Gloucester came as near to open warfare here in London’s streets as you never want to see.”

  “I mind I threw a few cobbles myself,” Mak said with fond memory.

  “Who didn’t?” said Ned.

  “I remember hearing of all that,” Joliffe said. “Bedford had to leave France and come back to settle it between them, yes? That’s when Bishop Beaufort got his cardinal’s hat.”

  “His price for giving some ground to Gloucester, aye,” Mak said. “They’ve pretended peace between them ever since.”

  “Except now Bedford is dead,” Joliffe said.

  “Ah!” said Ned. “But Gloucester hates the duke of Burgundy as much as he’s ever hated Bishop Beaufort. With Burgundy’s treachery threatening Normandy, they won’t quarrel with each other for the while. Not while they’ve got Burgundy to hate.”

  “That won’t get Gloucester made governor of France, though,” Mak said.

  “Doubt he wants to be,” Ned returned. “Go that far away from king and the government here? He’ll never want that now. Even if he does, you’re right—he won’t get it. The council might make him captain of Calais to keep him busy, but that’s it.” He tapped another finger. “That leaves us the duke of York.”

  “Nay, nah, and never,” Mak scoffed. “Too young and too royal.”

  “But wealthy,” Ned said. “Has enough he can help pay for the war, the way Bedford did when the government fell short.”

  “Doesn’t change who he is,” said Mak.

  “So we’re back to our earl of Mortain,” Ned said triumphantly.

  “Ah, but there’s talk he and his uncle are out with each other because the good bishop is doing little or nothing to ransom Mortain’s brother out of French hands,” Mak said.

  Ned shook his head. “That won’t count enough against his Beaufort blood. The king’s council will have to choose someone, and I’m saying it will be him. He’s married to the earl of Warwick’s daughter and that isn’t going to hurt.” The earl of Warwick was a strong voice on the royal council and had had the raising of young King Henry these few past years.

  “Ah, well,” said Mak easily. “We’ll find out when we find out and not before, no matter how much we talk of it. Nor we’ll never know the whys or wherefores of it, since no one’s likely to tell us.”

  “True enough,” Ned agreed. They both brooded for a moment on that sad fact of life. Then Ned brightened, looked around to Ellis, and said, “Has Mak ever told you what his name’s short for?”

  Mak shot to his feet. “That’s it. Time we were going. Hope you put a twist in your privy part that doesn’t come out, Ned.”

  Chapter 6

  “Mackerel?” Ellis asked as they came out of the tavern’s warmth into the chill night. “Your name is Mackerel?”

  “It’s not. Can you see a priest christening anybody that? It’s properly Matthew,” Mak said. “But my family are fish-mongers, see, and somehow we all came down with side-names. I’ve a brother who went from Harry to Herring and my sister is—no, she said if ever I say hers again, she’ll know in her bones and come pluck me bald.”

  “Mackerel,” Ellis repeated.

  “Ellis,” Rose said quellingly.

  Ellis quelled but continued to grin.

  They came out into broad Cheapside. St. Paul’s spire rose black into the star-spread night sky above the pools of lantern-light along the street. Joliffe guessed the merchants who lived in Cheapside’s high houses must strive among themselves to have the best and largest lanterns lighted beside their fore doors. The light was mostly gone to waste, though: there were few people about; the evening was too chill for lingering, and everyone who was in sight seemed like the players and Mak—bound for somewhere else and being quick about it—and at Lord Lovell’s inn John Hyche greeted them at the barely open wicket set in one gate with, “Just in time. How was the Crow’s Toes?”

  “As always,” Mak said. “Ned was there.”

  “Ned,” Hyche said, pushing the gate closed. “He gets around, doesn’t he?”

  He slid the heavy wooden bar into place, and Mak asked, “Everybody in, then?”

  “Everybody who’s getting in unless they pound enough to wake me, and anybody who does that may get pounded by my good wife.”

  With good nights said, they all went their ways, Hyche back to his family, Mak away across the yard to wherever he slept, the players into their room, where Basset had left a short candle burning on the table. To judge by his breathing he was soundly asleep on his mattress, while Piers was a curled and sleeping heap on his own. By the small light the others silently readied for their own beds, and when Ellis blew the candle out and darkness came, Joliffe—despite all he had heard tonight that might be worth thinking about—fell as soon to sleep as anyone.

  In the morning, while they put back on the little clothing they had taken off for the night, Ellis told Basset about the Crow’s Toes and their evening there, with Joliffe and Gil adding bits now and then. At the end Basset asked Joliffe, “Anything you can use from all of that?”

  “Not in this play. Maybe later.”

  “What I didn’t follow was that about the duke of York,” Ellis said. “That he’s ‘too royal’ and all. How can he be too royal? Doesn’t it matter more that he’s wealthy?”

  Gil, sounding somewhat disbelieving that Ellis did not know, said, “He’s the king’s cousin. Richard, duke of York.”

  “So?” Ellis said. “Shouldn’t that make him more likely, instead of less, to take over in France?”

  The things Ellis got through life without knowing often surprised Joliffe, who could never decide if Ellis was better off for it or not. As it was, he left it to Basset to answer kindly, “The king’s great-grandfather and York’s great-great-grandfather—or something like that—were brothers, younger sons of King Edward III. That makes our present good King Henry and the duke of York cousins, God keep them both.”

  “They’re cousins, yes, I have that,” Ellis said. “So?”

  “So York’s forefather, that was brother to the king’s forefather, was an older son of King Edward III. Older brother of the king’s forefather, I mean.”

  “So?” Ellis repeated; but half a beat later his eyes widened as he sorted that out and he exclaimed, “Oh! Older brother. Then the problem is King Richard.”

  “It could be said that way, yes,” Joliffe agreed dryly, although it was less King Richard II—deposed and dead some thirty and more years ago—who was the problem, and more that his cousin, the duke of Lancaster, had said to Hell with the right line of succession, deposed King Richard, made himself King Henry IV, and kept a grimly determined hold on the crown through several uprisings and the death of a great many men, until he died in his bed and was succeeded on the throne by his son and now his grandson.

  It had helped, of course, that when Lancas
ter made his grab for the crown, those who were the right heirs by blood had been children with no chance of protest, and by the time those children had come of age, the time was past when protest would have got them anything except killed, and they had settled quietly for what they had, until now enough years were passed that all of them were dead, and their one living heir, Richard, duke of York—who had not even been born when it all began—looked to have accepted his Lancastrian cousin as King Henry VI as readily everyone else did.

  “So,” Basset said, “putting York forward to remind folk of things best not remembered won’t be the royal council’s first choice. Or their last, either, if they can help it. The less York is thought about, the better. That’s probably the way they see it.”

  “Except he’s the king’s cousin and one of the wealthiest lords of the realm,” Joliffe pointed out. “That makes not thinking about him difficult.”

  “They all just have to try the harder then,” said Basset as dryly as ever Joliffe could.

  “And hope the duke of York does the same,” Joliffe returned.

  What tickled his humour about it all was that the Lancastrians could have saved themselves much worry if they could have made the same claim that the French did: that crowns could not descend by a woman’s line. That would have cut off York’s claim at several points. But for something like a hundred years now English kings had been claiming—and fighting a war to prove it—that the crown of France was theirs by right of descent from a French princess, and so long as they held to that claim, they could not be rid of York’s. York did not even have to do anything to be a trouble to those around him. He only had to be for men to be uneasy at him. And let someone, anyone, decide to raise a cry for York’s “right” against King Henry, and York—even if he had no part in it—would be looking at a charge of treason so fast he’d have small chance of ducking the headsman’s ax.

  Joliffe did not envy him.

  Or at least not much.

  But a little, perhaps. He doubted the duke of York had to wash his morning face in a basin of cold water set beside his doorstep in the yard. And cold was definitely the word for this morning. Damp and shivering his way into his doublet, Joliffe could grant there were compensations to be had for the hazards that came with royal blood.

  Breaking their fast in Lord Lovell’s hall among the warm crowding of the household folk was good, though, and even better was finding Mak in their room afterwards, kneeling at the small hearth with a bucket of sea-coal beside him, starting a fire on a bed of kindling.

  “Bless you!” said Rose. “My fingers and I thank you.”

  “That’s all right then,” Mak said, looking pleased with her pleasure. He looked to Basset. “I’m to ask if there’s anything else you’re in need of. T’ward the play and all.”

  That the play was getting them this courtesy from Lord Lovell was to the good, but it also made an uneasiness in Joliffe’s mind that he was unready yet to look at too closely, while Basset answered, “Space to rehearse would not come amiss. We’re somewhat cramped for it here, and we distract Master Southwell at his work into the bargain.”

  Getting out his writing-box, Joliffe kept his grin inward. He did like being raised to “Master Southwell.”

  “I’ll ask about that for you,” Mak said and went out, leaving the coal he had not yet put on the fire, enough to see them through the day and maybe into the evening if they were careful of it.

  Piers went off with the water bucket to fetch the day’s water. Rose settled to her sewing again and Joliffe to his writing, Gil to his copying on one side of the table and Ellis to beginning work on the mask on the other side. Basset paced back and forth along one side of the room, the first pages of script in one hand, gesturing with the other one and muttering to himself, as much out of everyone’s way as he could be.

  Piers reappeared long enough to set the bucket just inside the door, said something about finding Ivo if he could, and quickly disappeared again. He probably succeeded because he did not come immediately back again, and the day went on peaceably enough. When Gil had caught his copying up to Joliffe, and Joliffe would not give him any more just now—“Not until I’ve read this last over,” Joliffe told him—Basset claimed him, to begin rehearsing their part together at the play’s beginning.

  Mak returned with word that Lady Lovell said they might use one of the chambers above the parlor if it would serve, and Basset and Gil went off to work there. Ellis, having started the day with muttering that the mask would not be all it could be since he’d not have time to make a mold to shape the buckram over, was now whistling softly behind his teeth as he snipped and glued, apparently pleased at doing whatever he had decided was possible.

  Joliffe, too, was pleased with what he was doing himself. The play would not be as good as it could have been with time to take more care over the words, but it would serve Bishop Beaufort’s purpose. People would laugh at Burgundy and hiss the Dauphin, see one as a fool and the other as the villain, and hopefully shift their anger off the fool and onto the villain, never mind that to Joliffe’s mind Burgundy was by far a greater villain than the Dauphin Charles. The Dauphin had never wavered from trying to claim back what he saw as his country and his throne, but Burgundy had sworn unfailing vengeance against him and eternal alliance with the English, and now for his own gain and because the English had not given him every single thing his pride demanded of them, he was not only foresworn in his alliance but allied with the man who had murdered his father, and however easy it was to make such a man a buffoon, it would have been more satisfying to show him as the small-souled villain he was.

  But that was not what the bishop of Winchester wanted, and Joliffe had to admit there was going to be more satisfaction in having the bishop’s gold than there would be in putting a skewer of words through the duke of Burgundy. Especially because Burgundy would never feel the skewer, while the players would very happily feel the coins.

  So he wrote onward. Mid-day and mealtime came, with Piers’ inevitable return. Rose gave over her sewing to go out with him to find a cookshop, Piers assuring her he knew just the one. Ellis shifted his work from the table, and Basset and Gil came back. Basset took up Joliffe’s morning work to read while Gil answered Ellis’ questions about where they had rehearsed. It seemed the room had served well. On Lady Lovell’s orders they had even been given a pot of weak ale.

  “What of this afternoon?” Ellis asked of Basset. “We have our license. Are we going to use it, go out to play somewhere?”

  Still reading, Basset said, “We rest. To be best ready for playing for Lord Lovell tonight.”

  “Come to it, we can do the thing in our sleep if need be,” Ellis said.

  “Is there somewhere to change your garb?” Joliffe asked, because The Steward and the Devil had more parts in it than they had players, and Basset at least needed somewhere to change garb when he changed from one character to another.

  “We’re given a small room off the dais end of the hall,” Basset answered. “The usher says he’ll see the way is kept clear for us going in and out.”

  “Have you heard anything of who’s to be here?” Ellis asked.

  “Not yet. We’ll have it from Mak, surely,” said Basset. He handed the pages back to Joliffe and sat down on the joint stool. “It’s going well, Joliffe. I can do much with what you’re giving me. Gil, you can spend the afternoon copying it out for us to get on with it tomorrow.”

  “So much for rest,” Gil muttered in a pretense of protest that his grin denied.

  “And I’ll warrant ‘rest’ didn’t include me not writing,” Joliffe said.

  “Or Rose not sewing,” Ellis said. “Or me not finishing this benighted mask. So whose rest are we talking of here?”

  “Mine,” said Basset. Hands on spread knees, he beamed on them all. “You’ve no mind how wearying it is to keep the lot of you from slumping into sluggardly lumps. I must recover my strength, that I may continue to drive you ever onward.”