“You’ve been a soldier,” Joliffe guessed. With the Thames behind them and London around them, the man’s manner had changed from easy to crisp and watchful.
“Have been, yes. Got out just after the French witch made all that trouble. Didn’t like the look of things. Would like it even less now, with Bedford gone.”
Joliffe had supposed the man was simply to be his guide in a place Bishop Beaufort knew was still unfamiliar to him. Now he supposed differently. In the boat it had been the boatmen at their work. Now it was him, and his work was plainly more guard than guide. Joliffe, being a man skilled in his own craft, knew enough to value others’ skill in theirs, whether it was rowing on the Thames or knowing how to use a sword, and since he suspected Bishop Beaufort hired only the best when they could be had, he judged he was satisfactorily safe with George.
Of course with that thought came the flattering one that Bishop Beaufort now wanted him among his men.
A flattering thought and one not free of fear, and Joliffe doubted that when he had time to think on it, he was going to feel any easier about it than he presently did. Meanwhile he wished he could ask if George had known the bishop’s man killed last night, but that was something he doubted he should know as someone’s country-bred servant, so he asked instead, “Is it the duke of Gloucester’s men might attack us?”
George gave a short chuckle. “Nay. No one is likely to attack us. I’m just always over-wary, I’m told.”
“I keep hearing there’s always trouble between his grace of Winchester and Gloucester,” Joliffe tried. “But Gloucester is as near kin to him as Bedford was, and you say he was friends with Bedford. What is it that’s so amiss between him and the duke of Gloucester?”
“Who knows? Goes back before my time. You ever known a man you just couldn’t abide and who couldn’t abide you? That’s what it’s like between them, seems to me. Supposing one of them ever said ‘Good morning’ to the other, the other would take it amiss. That’s how it is between them, seems.”
And there was no likelihood of a cure after all these years of disliking each other, Joliffe supposed. It was hard on England, though, to have the two men who were nearest in blood and power to the king at perpetual quarrel with one another.
Surely hard on the young king, too, Joliffe thought.
The street, which had been mostly steep as they came up from the Thames, leveled, and in a few strides more they came out into Cheapside, close to the tall, tiered, fretted Eleanor Cross, graceful memorial of a king’s grief for his dead queen. They were all long-dead now—the king, the queen, and the royal grief—but the Cross’ beauty remained. Further away St. Paul’s spire showed as a black spearpoint against the lesser black of the clouded sky and, “There you are,” said George, looking all around. A few men were to be seen, as ears-deep in cloaks as Joliffe was in his and all looking in haste to be somewhere other than out in the growing cold. “You’ll be all right from here, you think?”
“Can’t get lost from here,” Joliffe said with outward easy confidence.
He had a coin ready. As George took it with thanks, a strong bell began a steady stroke, crisp in the quiet night.
“There’s curfew,” George said. “Best you trot.”
Already moving away, Joliffe asked, “What of you? You have farther to go, back to the river.”
“I’ll be well.” George shoved his cloak out from his left shoulder to show the embroidered badge fixed there. By the light of the nearest lantern hung by someone’s door Joliffe could see it well enough: a broad-brimmed cardinal’s hat with its tasseled cords. “This will see me back to the boat if I meet any watch.”
“But not if you meet any of Gloucester’s men.”
George grinned and patted his sword. “No. Then I’ll just have some good sport to warm the night. God keep you, fellow.”
“And you,” Joliffe returned.
Chapter 17
All his long-strided way along Cheapside to Lord Lovell’s gate, Joliffe kept watch around himself for anyone who might come nearer him than need be, but of the few people there were to see, everyone looked only interested in getting wherever they were going. Since that was likewise his main wish, he all but ran his last fifty yards or so, reaching the gate just as the curfew bell struck its last stroke, and found he did not need to knock. The gates were closed, but the wicket was open, and John Hyche there in talk with another late-comer. As Joliffe neared, they laughed at something together, the other man went on, and Hyche said cheerily to Joliffe, “You’re the last, so far as I know, and just made it, too. Come you in, come you in. I trust her bed was warm enough to be worth the cold run home.”
“Warm enough that I was a fool to leave it,” Joliffe said, matching his cheerfulness. Better that Hyche think he had been with a whore than make any other sort of guess about it.
Fortunately, the night’s damp cold did not encourage standing in talk. They said their good nights quickly and went their separate ways.
The players’ door was shut but not barred. Supposing everyone else might well be to bed, Joliffe eased it open, found he had guessed right, eased himself in, closed and barred the door, and by the low light of the last glowing coals in the fireplace got himself to his bed that someone had thoughtfully laid near the door to lessen the likelihood of him stumbling over anyone. That meant he was also nearer the draught under the door, and he spread his cloak over his blanket for better warmth and took off only his shoes and doublet before sliding under the covers. One way and another it had been a long day, and the bed’s chill was not enough to keep him awake. He had a fleeting regretful thought of the warm bed Hyche thought he had left but was soundly asleep well before his body had warmed this one.
No matter the hour he had gone to sleep, he did not get to keep to his bed long in the morning. There was too much stepping over him by the others going out and in, with accompanying cold bursts of air from the opening door, so that he finally gave up the lost cause, rolled out, and started the day only a little behind everyone else.
Ellis, stiff with his night’s sleep and from yesterday’s effort, was ill-humoured and—for a wonder, considering it was Ellis—trying to keep it to himself. The others were simply themselves, except maybe too much themselves, as if Joliffe’s absence and late return were nothing to remark on. It was the care they all made not to remark on it that made him say, as soon as he had washed his face and gathered his morning wits a little, “Bishop Beaufort is pleased with what he’s heard about our play. He wanted us to know.”
“Why not summon Basset to him then?” asked Ellis.
A fair question and just the one that Joliffe did not want to answer. He cast through his mind in search of what to say that would be no answer, decided that was too much trouble, and settled for some of the truth with, “Because he also wanted to know what I thought about what I’d seen at the places we’ve played it.”
The others all looked at him in a silence that went on a little too long. They were waiting for more, and he was not ready to give it and was grateful when finally Rose said, “Oh,” and they all stopped looking at him and went back to what they had been doing.
He was even more grateful when, after they had broken the night’s fast, Basset gave him a small nod, and they went out together, not merely into the inn’s yard but through the gateway and at an easy walk along the street, not to anywhere particular except away from the others to talk more freely. Around them Londoners were thronged and loud about their morning business; there was no one seemed to note the two of them in particular or want to overhear what they might say, but neither of them said anything at first, Joliffe waiting for Basset to begin, Basset maybe waiting for him to start. Joliffe would have, if he had known what to say, but he was not clear in his own mind what he wanted to tell and what he did not, was still sorting his way through his own thoughts when finally Basset asked, “Was that all his grace wanted? A report on your thoughts and nothing else?”
“A report,” Joliffe said
slowly. “Yes.”
“And?” Basset prodded.
Joliffe felt his mouth twist as if working to hold back the words before he unwillingly admitted, “And to ask me to become a spy for him.”
Basset’s stride did not falter, but after a long moment, even-voiced, he swore. “By all the souls burning in Hell.” And a while after that, “What did you answer?”
“I told him I didn’t want to leave our company.”
“Then he said?”
“He said he did not want me to.”
Heedless of where they were, Basset completely stopped. A woman with a basket on one arm and a small child on the other nearly blundered into him from behind. Swinging aside to avoid him, she nearly bumped into an apprenticed-aproned youth hurrying the other way. While they sorted each other out with a mixture of irk and apology, Basset grabbed hard hold on Joliffe’s arm and took him away, on along the street and then into the first side way they came to. It was an alley barely there between the buildings, but in fifty strides or so it opened out along a churchyard bounded by a low stone wall, and Basset stopped, let go of Joliffe, leaned back against the wall, crossed his arms on his chest, and demanded, “He said what?”
Joliffe found he wanted to shuffle and lower his eyes like a guilty schoolboy but made himself meet Basset’s gaze and repeated, “When I said I didn’t want to leave the company, he said he didn’t want me to.”
Basset’s eyes narrowed. “Because being a player would give you reason to be places where otherwise a stranger would be suspect.”
“Yes.”
“What of the rest of the company? Are they to know this or not?”
“He didn’t say even you should know it. It never went that far.”
“Because you refused him?”
“Because . . . I’m to think on it.”
Basset uncrossed his arms and swung them down to slap his hands flat against the stones behind him, hard enough it had to have stung. “Think on it?” He shoved himself from the wall as if to start away but then fell back against it, crossed his arms again, and went on angrily, “What are you supposed to think about it? Eh?”
Joliffe made a vague two-handed gesture of helplessness. He could not remember when he had last seen Basset this angry.
“Because my guess is,” said Basset, “that our good fortune stops right where our—your—use to the bishop does.”
“I don’t think he’s that way base, to punish us all for my refusal,” Joliffe protested.
“Nor do I,” Basset answered grimly. “But it’s the light of his favor that’s got us all we’ve had since we came to London. What do you think happens if he takes that away?”
“Lord Lovell—”
“Will have us out of London so fast we’ll barely have time to toss the hampers onto a cart. Supposing he lets us have a cart and doesn’t make us foot it. Haven’t you supposed yet the only reason he brought us here was to turn you over to”—He said it scornfully—“our cardinal bishop of Winchester?”
Joliffe opened his mouth to deny it, but Basset would have known it for the lie it was, and he closed his mouth with the lie unsaid. Not that it mattered. Basset had not waited for answer, was already saying, “So. When does he expect your answer?”
“Basset—”
“I doubt he’s a man who likes to wait.”
“Basset, I’m sorry!”
And he was. Desperately sorry to have brought this onto friends, a thing he would never deliberately have done.
And at the same time he knew that all while he had been holding back from Bishop Beaufort’s offer last night, finding reasons to refuse it, a side corner of his mind had been shoving forward, clamoring for him to take it, take it, take it.
Nor was that corner of his mind any quieter this morning.
Still, Basset went slack against the wall, anger going out of him as he said, suddenly sounding weary, “I know the blame isn’t truly yours. You’re sharp at seeing what others miss, yes, but it’s not your fault you’ve come under Bishop Beaufort’s eye.” He stood away from the wall like a man settling himself under a burden. “That’s Lord Lovell’s deliberate doing. Who would have thought he was leagued with Bishop Beaufort this way? Wool and sheep, yes. There’s money in that. But this.”
“It’s all one,” Joliffe said. “To have money, you need some manner of power. The more power, the more money, I suppose.”
“Do you think that’s all it is with them?”
Joliffe paused over his answer, then said, “No. I’d guess that with Lord Lovell it’s mostly the money. But with Bishop Beaufort, no. With him I think it’s the money and the power both.” Although maybe the power more than the money. And if that was true, the question changed then to: What did he mean to do with that power?
Basset started probably a different question. “What—” but broke off, he and Joliffe both turning their heads sharply toward Mak sidling toward them out of the alley, a smile fixed to his face that he surely meant to be humbly friendly. He must have followed them, rather than chanced on them, but could not have been close enough to hear them and that would be why he wanted to be nearer now—to find out whatever dregs he could of what they had been saying. And almost as one, Basset and Joliffe snapped, “Go away!” at him, angrily enough that Mak froze where he was, startled, before turning away and going back the way he had come.
Basset and Joliffe watched him disappear out the far end of the alley, then looked at one another. They had been nearly done with their not-quite-quarrel before Mak came. There seemed small use in starting it up again, and Basset shrugged, ending it for now, and said, “However it is with his grace of Winchester and Lord Lovell, I don’t see our refusal would be a useful choice, all in all. Do you think we’ll be expected to become Bishop Beaufort’s players?” But he answered that himself with, “No. Better we go on seeming merely Lord Lovell’s. What I don’t know is what we’ll tell the others. Nothing until we have to, I suppose. Or not until we see what the next thing is that happens.” He clapped a hand on Joliffe’s shoulder and tried for a lighter tone. “Don’t look so cast down. It’s not as if you meant it to happen. Nor there’s no saying it will be for the bad. It’s only been good for us so far.”
Basset’s acceptance somehow made Joliffe feel nearly as bad as their almost-quarrel had done, as if Basset’s acceptance somehow added weight to his guilt in wanting this. But all he said was, “Ellis. That attack in the street. That wasn’t to the good.”
Basset took him by the arm and turned them both to go in Mak’s wake, saying, “We’ve been attacked before, when it surely had nothing to do with bishops or anything else. Let it go. We’ll take care not to let it happen again. Now we’d best get back before Rose starts to fret that we’ve lost ourselves in London. We’re to play this afternoon for a gathering of ladies, Lady Lovell’s guests. She’s asked for Robin and Marian, so that’s what we’ll be doing.”
And they did, and had Lady Lovell’s thanks and the gift of a large pitcher of red wine afterwards. With that and Rose’s assurance that Ellis’ wound was healing well—“Despite of him,” she said tartly while putting a new poultice on it that evening—the day ended as merrily as it deserved to. Too merrily to spoil it for himself, Joliffe thought, so that he waited until the next morning to seek out Mak, cornering him by the kitchen to tell him, “Pass word along to his grace that I say, ‘Yes.’ Can you do that?”
Mak nodded hurriedly that he could.
“Good,” said Joliffe and walked off. He might want to learn more from Mak later, but for right now using him to pass that message on was enough, because under his acceptance of the bishop’s offer Joliffe found he was still angry at being shoved unwitting toward it. He did not like to be either unwitting or shoved.
In the wider world, the Commons had finally chosen their Speaker, and word was that Parliament would begin in earnest today. When Basset went to inquire of Lord Lovell’s household steward whether the players would be wanted today, he was told they would
not be, and Basset was just telling that to the rest of them when John Hyche brought a plain-dressed servant to the door, explaining, “Come from Master Hatherley,” with such respect that although the name meant nothing to any of them, they gathered they were to be impressed and arranged their faces so as Basset said, “What may we do for you, good sir?”
A Play of Lords Page 24
