A Play of Knaves

by Margaret Frazer

  Own folk or not, Minster Lovell’s priest had been stiff at first about having the playing scaffold set up in his churchyard. He had allowed it only because Lady Lovell ordered it, but as the week went on and each day they performed a different play not only for Lady Lovell and her children and household but for all the manor folk and—as word spread—to folk from neighboring manors and villages, and attendance at his Holy Week services and the offerings to his church grew, he had warmed wonderfully to the players. By the week’s end, when they had triumphantly performed the Resurrection on Easter Sunday afternoon, he was so mellowed toward them that he had hoped aloud they would do it all again, come next year.

  Joliffe’s own unsaid thought was that they had succeeded so well only because they had gone so headlong and desperate at the whole business that ill fortune had not been able to catch up to them. They had, as it were, outdistanced it, and he would not care to wager on their chances of doing it again.

  Nonetheless, after Lady Lovell’s harsh words about the duke of Burgundy, he had cobbled together a play with a fat, waddling “Duke” declaiming his allegiance to “Lady Honor” but being led, with much comic business, astray and to the Devil by “Mistress Greed.” The business was long on farce and short on piety, and the players had put it on in the great hall, with their speeches still raw and barely learned, the day after Easter. Everyone was ready to be done with solemnity by then, and the household had rocked with laughter, Lady Lovell so much enjoying it that she had had them do it again then and there, and afterward, there in the hall, given each of the men a silver coin in token of her pleasure.

  With all of that behind them, they had been tired but well-contented the next morning as they waited with Tisbe harnessed to the loaded cart in the manor’s outer yard for Basset to return from formally asking Lady Lovell’s leave for them to go; and when he did, he had patted his belt-hung leather purse and said, “There we are. Well-paid as well as well-fed by our good Lady Lovell’s bounty. Geeup, Tisbe. We’re away!”

  Piers had led them out of the yard playing a reed pipe held in one hand and rattling away with the other at the drum slung on his hip by a strap around his shoulders. They had passed through Minster Lovell village waving to folk who waved, smiling, back at them, and twice girls ran out into the road to give Gil quick kisses, so that it was in a general glow of good feeling they had left the village by the narrow bridge over the Windrush River and taken the steep climb of road up from the valley to the wide highway that could take them eastward toward Oxford or westward toward Cirencester, as they chose.

  Until then they had thought their choosing was to go west and curve northward into a round of villages and town familiar from other years and meant to bring them back to Minster Lovell toward Michaelmas at the end of harvest. But that morning at the roads’ meeting, Basset had signaled Joliffe to halt Tisbe and said to everyone, “Lady Lovell has asked a favor of us, that we go south from here instead of elsewhere. What do you say?”

  He had cheerfully made it sound a choice, but Joliffe’s own thought was that to choose other than what Lady Lovell asked of them would be stark foolishness.

  He was saved from his urge to say that by Ellis demanding, “Why?”

  Basset had surely known that question would come, and he answered promptly, “Because when Lady Lovell did her Lenten retreat at St. Mary’s Abbey in Winchester, the lady abbess was worried over something that may be shaping to the bad at one of the abbey’s manors in the White Horse Vale. The bailiff there has passed on word by way of the abbey’s steward for that part of the abbey’s lands that there are angers among her best folk there, but they won’t talk openly enough about whatever is the trouble for him to be certain what it is and put a stop it.”

  “So Lady Lovell thought we could do . . . what?” Ellis asked. “What’s her interest, anyway, in a worry delivered at third hand about people that have nothing to do with her?”

  “I gathered it’s a favor to the abbess,” Basset said, patient with Ellis’ impatience. “There’s worry the trouble will boil up and it will all turn to lawyers and other costly business. What she’s asked of us is that we go there, listen, look, hear what we can, and pass on to the bailiff anything we learn.”

  “Does this bailiff know we’re coming?” Joliffe asked. “Or are we going to surprise him with our helpful interest?”

  “Lady Lovell is going to send word of us to him by way of the abbess.”

  “It’s daft,” muttered Ellis. “What are we likely to learn in a night spent in a place we don’t know at all?”

  “We should be able to draw it out to three nights likely,” Basset said. “There’s a village and several manors all in the same parish. Enough to keep us there longer than a night, anyway.”

  “Where is it we’re going?” Joliffe asked, since choice didn’t seem part of it. “White Horse Vale is a long place.” Named for an ancient figure of a galloping horse carved into a white chalk hillside above the vale, the valley ran broad and for miles between the Cotswold Hills to the north and the Berkshire Downs to the south.

  “A village called Ashewell. We do know the place a little, if we remember it,” Basset said. “We were there, what, six years ago it would be now. At one of the Scourings.”

  The Scourings were when the local folk turned out every few years to clear the encroaching green turf from the Horse, to keep the chalk shining white, and although that in itself was no great draw, there was always a large fair held with it, with all manner of sports and other pastimes among and around the earthen banks of an ancient fortress on the hilltop above the Horse. Joliffe no longer remembered why the players had gone so far out of their usual ways to be there that year, but he remembered other things about it well enough and asked, “It’s not a Scouring time now, is it?”

  “It’s not,” Basset agreed. “There’ll be just us, with everyone there surely ready to be diverted now Lent is finally done, same as any other way we might go instead. With all said and done, there are as many places to play to the southward as on the way we usually go. I doubt we’ll lose by obliging Lady Lovell in this.”

  Or not lose so much as they might if they disobliged her, Joliffe had thought.

  Ellis, usually able to find something to grumble at, had simply shrugged and said, “Makes no odds to me. We’ll be walking whichever way we go, so let’s get on with it.”

  They had, taking the highway toward Cirencester only to the first crossroads and there turning southward, the newly risen sun throwing their morning shadows long to their right across the wayside grass and the world bright with spring all around them.

  That had been three days ago. The weather had held fair, the travel easy along roads gently twisting through the Vale’s mostly level miles, the villages where they stopped to play open-handed, and they were all in good humour now as they neared Ashewell. The flat fields here must have once been marsh; the road ran level between constant, reedy ditches sometimes fringed by pollarded alder and willow trees, but ahead were the smooth-flanked high downs, a great heave of land against the sky.

  The White Horse was there but they were coming toward it at a slant, not able to see it from the road they were on. Their goal was marked by Ashewell church’s gray-stoned square tower, seen long before they neared it. The village was built on the first lift of land at the foot of the downs, and when the road began to climb toward it, narrowing into a steep-sided lane so deep between hedge-topped banks that the church and even the downs were lost to sight, the players stopped to put on the bright red and yellow tabards with the Lovell badge of a hound that proclaimed them Lord Lovell’s players. Then Joliffe set Tisbe to the climb, and the players matched their pace to her plod as she took the slope until the road gave a tight bend and suddenly they were at the beginning of the village’s narrow main street, with houses close-clamped along both sides and ahead the church’s tower again with its promise of a churchyard where they could set up to play if the street never widened enough to let them. Always suppo
sing the priest was not one of those who held stiffly against allowing plays.

  But come what may, it was lookers-on that were most needed or else there was no use to the players being there at all, and Tisbe, knowing the players’ business as well as they did, paused, without need of Joliffe to tell her, for Rose to take her place at her head while the rest of them, even Gil, who was not much limping now, arrayed themselves into procession ahead of the cart with Piers in the lead, having fetched the small drum and his reed pipes from their hamper in the back of the cart. With the drum hung from his shoulder by its belt, he began to beat on it with one hand while playing the pipes with the other, and Tisbe, again not needing an order, started forward behind them as they all strode onward as if sure of their welcome and happier to be at Ashewell than anywhere else on earth. As Basset had told Joliffe in Joliffe’s early days in the company, “If you come skulking in like a dog that expects to be kicked, kicked is what you’ll likely be. Show a lordly assurance of being welcomed and folk will believe you’re worth welcoming.”

  Although not always true, it held more often than not, and as they went merrily along the street, doors opened and people looked out. As they reached the church, they found that where their lane crossed another beside the church there was enough widening of the streets along the churchyard for them to set up to play without troubling whoever was priest here, and Basset said, “We look to be in ever-better luck.”

  Even more to their luck, they could not set up just now because today must be the village’s market day: half a dozen tables and a few canvas-sheltered booths crowded the street’s widening, with among them a gathering of men and women and children who greeted the players with shouts and waves. Adding the villagers drawn from the houses by the drum and pipes gave a goodly crowd to whom Basset proclaimed that the company would, “by your good grace, perform a play, if there be none to say us nay!”

  If there were any nays, they were lost among the many shouted “Ayes!” and Basset bowed as if in submission to their will and stepped aside with a wordless sweep of his arm to bring Ellis forward. What they had been playing most places since leaving Minster Lovell was Joliffe’s rude play about the duke of Burgundy, it being quick and with no need to set up a particular playing space, and while Basset had proclaimed to the crowd, Joliffe, Ellis, and Gil had been behind the cart slipping out of their tabards and into the needed garb. Helped by Rose and Piers into wigs and loose gowns over their usual clothing, Gil became “Lady Honor” and Joliffe “Mistress Greed,” while a red cloak, a pair of horns, and a swagger sufficed to turn Ellis into “the Devil,” ready to come forward to take Basset’s place and hold the crowd with a speech about the joys of seizing souls, giving Basset time to go behind the cart and put on a “rich” chain of office—oversized and gaudy, made of brass-dipped tin and false jewels—and the company’s brass crown to become the Duke and ready at the end of the Devil’s speech to come forward hand in hand with Lady Honor.

  It was just as well the farce was brief, because as they finished to loud laughter and cheers at the Devil and Mistress Greed dragging the yelling, kicking Duke away to Hell behind the cart, leaving smiling Lady Honor curtsying to the crowd and Piers skipping out with bag in hand to collect whatever coins people might be pleased to give, a man came shoving through the crowd along the churchyard wall, demanding as he came, “What are you doing here? What’s this pollution?”

  Behind the cart Ellis and Joliffe let Basset go, knowing the sound of trouble when they heard it. Hurriedly stripping off the Duke’s chain and crown, Basset handed them to Rose while Ellis took off the Devil’s horns and cloak and tossed them into the cart, freeing him to go with Basset back around the cart to face the trouble.

  Joliffe took longer to be rid of wig and gown but followed bare moments later, to find Basset and Ellis facing a stout, balding man in a priest’s long black surcoat loudly railing at Basset for his blasphemous work. Basset seemed to have yet to get a word in edgewise, but having long experience at such trouble, he was standing with hands clasped and head respectfully cocked to one side, waiting for the priest to run down before attempting any answer. Behind the priest, none of the villagers were leaving, as willing to enjoy this new show as the last. Piers, intent on the most important part of everything, was still weaving among them, gathering coins, while Gil in Lady Honor’s wig and gown still stood where he had been, giving the priest someone to point at while ranting, “There is only one of the blasphemies! A hitherto innocent boy lured and corrupted into playing at being a woman! Making mock of the Lord’s creation! You!” He all but spat at Basset. “A man of your years, making sport . . .”

  While the priest went on, Joliffe said in Gil’s ear, “Go on and change. He can yell at me for a while.”

  Gil gasped out a breath he probably had not known he was holding and willingly retreated. Behind the priest, two men were now pushing to the front through the crowd. Tall and fair-haired, they were well-dressed in almost-matching, short, dark houppelandes split for riding, with tall, soft-leathered boots that told they had horses somewhere nearby. It was easy to tell they were not plain villagers even before the older of them said, “Father Hewgo. What’s toward here?”

  “Medcote,” the priest said without need to look around. “These men, these servants of the Devil, these . . .”

  “By your leave, sire,” Basset inserted with firm respect. “We’re the Lord Lovell’s men, not the Devil’s.”

  That stopped the priest, at least briefly. It was one thing to confront the Devil’s servants, another to cross a lord whose power in the world might not be as great as the Devil’s but was more immediate. And in that pause Medcote said at Basset with cold authority, “Have you proof of that?”

  From the back of the crowd someone said, “That’s my question to ask, not yours, Medcote.”

  Heads turned and the crowd shifted, making way for a dark-haired man somewhat less tall and more plainly dressed than Medcote in surcoat and low riding boots but fully as assured as he came into the open, followed by a boy of maybe fifteen or sixteen years who was enough like him surely to be his son or some other near relation.

  “Then why haven’t you asked it?” Medcote demanded at the man.

  “Because I saw them come up the street wearing Lord Lovell’s colors and badge on their tabards.” His tone added, And aren’t you a fool not to know that?

  Medcote faced the newcomer, hooked his thumbs into his broad leather belt, and said with insulting challenge, “Well, I didn’t.”

  “That doesn’t change that it’s my business, not yours, whether or not they play here in the village,” the newcomer said, with an edge to the words that made them almost an affront.

  The priest, his voice still ripe with indignation, declared, “It’s my business more than anyone’s, here in my own parish.”

  That was answered by a few scattered jeers from well back in the crowd. The priest ignored them, pointing again at Basset and insisting, “His kind make mock of the Lord’s grace with their mincing and prancing and profaning. If you saw them arrive, then you saw that, Master Ashewell.”

  “I saw them making mock of the kind of men who betray honor and serve greed,” the newcomer answered. “You were not here and did not see what they did at all and so are without grounds to judge.”

  Father Hewgo opened, closed, and opened his mouth soundlessly, looking for something to say but apparently offended past words. It was the man called Medcote who challenged, “Anyone can stitch a badge, Ashewell.”

  “True,” Master Ashewell granted. “Therefore I shall ask, with something like due courtesy—” he turned to Basset “—have you something more to prove whose men you are?”

  Basset bowed to him, saying with equal courtesy, “We do, sir,” and held a hand out to the side, not needing to look around to know Rose was already there, ready to put into his hand the folded parchment that was their signed and sealed license from Lord Lovell, assuring the world they were in his service and under his
protection. Taking it, Basset went forward and handed it to Master Ashewell, who unfolded and read it, then said solemnly, “I find no fault with this,” and solemnly handed it back. The hint of laughter behind his solemnity was just enough to offend without being enough to be challenged as he added to Father Hewgo and Medcote, raising his voice enough to be heard by everyone, “On Lord Lovell’s behalf I am more than ready to welcome these players here. Am even glad to do so.” And to Basset again, “Master Player, welcome to Ashewell parish, both in Lord Lovell’s name and in honor of your skill.”

  If he noted Father Hewgo was gone rooster-red—choking on his own choleric gall, Joliffe hoped—Master Ashewell gave no more sign of it than Basset did, bowing to Master Ashewell again and answering in kind, “Good sir, your ready welcome does both yourself and my Lord Lovell honor. My thanks and that of all my company.”

  Copying his thanks, Joliffe and Ellis bowed and Rose curtsied.

  Master Ashewell bent his head in gracious return, but Father Hewgo started, “I still protest that . . .”

  “Protest to your heart’s content,” Master Ashewell said sharply. “Just not to me. Maybe Medcote likes to hear you gabble. I don’t.”

  The priest turned toward Medcote in clear expectation of his support, but Medcote said, as if having duly considered it, “Since they indeed have Lord Lovell’s approval and Master Ashewell’s, I think objection can hardly be made.”

  Father Hewgo’s rooster-red deepened toward a dangerous purple and again—probably most unusually—words failed him. Master Ashewell, with smooth pleasure at probably that as well as other things, said, “With that agreed on, Master Basset, may I offer you and your company a place to stay, with hope you’ll perform for my family tonight at supper?”