A Play of Treachery (15 page)

“You’ll be teaching me those, too?”

The man gave a grin that showed his dog-teeth. “No. Weapons are what I do. Master Wydeville prefers his spies be subtle enough to need no use of dagger or sword, but there’s always the chance, and if it comes, best they be good at it. That’s what I’m for. I’m Master Doncaster, by the way. So. We’ll begin.”

They began not with daggers, as Joliffe expected, but—stripped to their shirts and hosen—with wrestling.

“Your body is as much a part of the fight as whatever weapon you have in hand,” Master Doncaster said. “You need awareness of it.”

The man who had taught wrestling to Joliffe years ago had said much the same. Since then, Joliffe had not much used the skills he had learned; he was thrown more than once before a particularly jarring fall seemed to shake them all back into his head, and at his next grappling with Master Doncaster, he hooked a leg around one of Master Doncaster’s and with a twist and a shift of his balance he had forgotten until then, he had the man down. After that, they traded one fall apiece, and Master Doncaster said he was satisfied that sometime, somewhere, Joliffe had had some manner of good training at it.

He did not ask when or where, and Joliffe did not offer to say.

They went to wooden practice daggers, balanced and weighted to the feel of true ones. As with the wrestling, his training with weapons was long past, but with his once-skill probably reawakened by the wrestling, Joliffe did “not so badly as you might,” according to Master Doncaster at the end of trying him for a lengthy while. Joliffe nonetheless knew by the ache on his thigh when he had downward-blocked a thrust away from his ribs but not far enough aside to miss his leg that he would be bruised there when he looked.

When they were dressed again, Master Doncaster asked to see Joliffe’s own dagger, looked at it carefully, tried its balance, and said, “A fine one. Sheffield steel, I think. Somewhat misused but still sound. In need of right sharpening, though.” He showed how a fine blade should be wooed by a whetstone, as he put it, then polished the blade with a soft cloth and handed the dagger back to Joliffe, warning, “It will cut the wind now, as they say. So be careful of it. Best, too, you put it away for now and get a different dagger the first chance you have. Some hearty pig-sticker with a fool’s hilt, to go with your talk of being worried over the war. That will make plain past questioning your need to be sent to me for lessons.”

Joliffe nodded that he understood, keeping to himself his resolve to oblige Master Wydeville’s desire that his spies be subtle enough to avoid the need to use dagger or sword—devoutly adding his own hope that no one would ever have desire to use dagger against him, either. Or—saints forbid—a sword.

A while later, he left Master Doncaster’s with a bowlful of the good stew inside him, followed the alley back to the street, and strolled along it, meaning to see if he could tell which were Master Doncaster’s and Master Wydeville’s houses but finding it no challenge because of the sign painted with crossed swords hung above what had to be Master Doncaster’s door. Ah, well.

Then, on the chance someone might ask where he had been for so much of the day, he set to briskly walking as much of Rouen as seemed reasonable to allow for his absence if he had been merely strolling all this while. For good measure, he spent time in a tavern near the quay, to be able to name somewhere particular he had been. But he returned to Joyeux Repos to find clusters of angrily talking men crowding the great hall, and seeing his fellow-clerk George was in one of the near clusters, Joliffe edged up to him to ask, “What’s amiss? What’s happened?”

“Where’ve you been, to miss the uproar? Taking a nap?” George returned. “It’s Burgundy, damn him. All the bishop’s going to England in hope of making a peace was a farce and a waste. Damned Burgundy never meant anything but war from the first.”

One of the other men protested, “That’s not altogether the way of it. He maybe meant it when he asked Luxembourg to ask his brother to go. It was the letters from England that threw it all to nothing.”

“Ha!” George threw back. “Burgundy was playing for time, nothing else. He’d have found one excuse or another whenever he was ready.”

“King Henry didn’t have to give him such a fine one on a platter,” another man grumbled.

“What excuse?” Joliffe asked.

“There’s that,” George granted, agreeing with the man, not answering Joliffe. “The royal council had no business sending off those letters.”

“It wasn’t the council,” the second man countered. “It was King Henry signed them.”

“Don’t be such a simple-head,” a third man snapped. “It’s been King Henry’s name on the council’s orders since he was nine months old. This wasn’t his doing any more than anything has been since then.”

“Lay you odds that it was,” George said. “King Henry’s of age to take things into his own hands, and aren’t these letters more surely a youth’s throwing of a gauntlet at Burgundy’s face than something the old sober-sides of the royal council would do?”

“What letters?” Joliffe persisted.

“Letters to the Zealand towns,” George said. “Letters out of England urging them to rise in revolt against their rotten duke, saying England would back them if they did.”

The second man laughed. “They’re saying Burgundy fair foamed at the mouth when he heard about it.”

“Would he would choke on his own bile,” the first man said.

“It’s wiped out any good might have come from our lord’s time in England, that’s sure,” said the third man gloomily. “Burgundy will settle for nothing but war now.”

To Joliffe, George said somewhat grimly, “Report is that he’s swearing vengeance and destruction on everything English.”

“That’s all he’s wanted from the beginning, I tell you,” one of the other men said, which brought the talk back to where it had been when Joliffe joined it. As it started through the same round again, he drifted off, to hear what else was being said around the hall but, finding it all fairly much the same, the only variation being, “Would to God the royal council would choose a new governor and get him here,” which told him word was not yet open about the duke of York.

When he had heard, several times over, everything there was to hear, he went away, up to the dormer. The wrestling, dagger-work, and walking had somewhat tired him. So had the swirl of anger and talk. Wrapped in his cloak for more warmth, he lay down on his bed. At this hour, the dormer was blessedly quiet, giving him chance to think for a while. Not that he much liked his thoughts. These Zealand letters looked to have set the bad blood between England and Burgundy even further to the bad, and that could not be good for Normandy or what England held in France. Not that anybody had seemed to deeply expect anything else in the long—or maybe even short—run of things, but the Zealand letters had exploded Burgundy’s false front of wanting peace, meaning whatever was going to happen was going to happen all the more soon.

To the good, Joliffe thought, it all gave him open reason for proclaiming his “fears” to the world and getting that pig-sticker dagger. Beyond that . . .

He longed for home.

The thought came from seemingly nowhere and surprised him. He had, by his own deliberate choice, left what had been his home a good many years ago. To find himself missing it now made him look hard at the feeling, distrusting it. Was it only wariness about where he was now, not truly a missing of “home,” that he was feeling? But a closer look showed it was not a place in particular he was missing. What he missed was the familiarity of belonging. In truth, if belonging was “home,” then the other players had been his “home” this while past, and it was them he was missing. Basset, Rose, Ellis, Gil. Even Piers. No matter the changes that daily came with being traveling players, these last few years there had always been them, a familiar core to his life. Now there was no familiar core. There was only change and strangeness. There was only himself.

He stared at the wood grain of the blank wall beside him. Was he lonely? Was that it? Why should he be? After all, no matter where or with whom he ever was, he had always been alone with himself. At the core of everything there
was
only himself. Once he had come to understand that, having only himself for company had never been a particular trouble to him.

Was this maybe more a matter of
where
he was alone—that he was more completely a stranger here than anywhere he had ever been?

Players, of necessity always on the move, were used to being constantly strangers, with anyone on the look-out to make trouble willing to turn on them if no one else was to hand. It was simply something players faced, along with days of walking roads and occasionally going hungry—familiar troubles. Here in Normandy, in Rouen, the troubles were unfamiliar ones, and he had the very bad certainty that he barely understood many of them, and the worse certainty that he had not even begun to guess at what some of them might be. More than that, here he was not simply a stranger—to some people he was an outright enemy simply because he was English.

And today he had begun to learn how to kill men.

That was part of his deep unease, too. He had never doubted he could kill if he had to, if it came to living rather than dying for himself or a friend. But to learn to kill as a skill . . . To learn it very deliberately . . .

He did not like the thought of learning how to kill. Of course he liked the thought of
being
killed even less. But the two went together, didn’t they? He was going to learn how to kill because someday someone might want to kill
him
, and then he would . . . know how to kill instead of being killed.

He got abruptly up, dropped his cloak across the bedfoot, and headed for the stairs. Warmth, light, company, talk, and soon supper—those were what he wanted just now. Not thinking.

B
ecause neither Bishop Louys nor Lady Jacquetta came to supper in the hall that evening, there was no ceremony to the meal. The servants served, people ate, and it was done. Through it, the talk was still about Burgundy and what was likely to come next, and minding Master Doncaster’s bidding, Joliffe showed himself very ill-eased and unhappy, even muttering that Strugge knew what he was doing, taking himself back to England.

“Strugge is an old woman!” George declared. “We’re in Rouen, for God’s sake. There’s no place safer!”

Other of the men chorused that, but at the meal’s end, when George and some half-dozen other of them were for going out to a nearby tavern, Joliffe said he should see if he was wanted by Lady Jacquetta. He was jeered at good-humouredly for being afraid of the dark, with a squire claiming, “He’s afraid the French are already in the streets,” then saying with mock surprise, “But wait. They are! This is Rouen. It’s full of French!”

That sally of wit and accompanying laughter carried George and the others out the foredoor on a swirl of ice-touched wind. Content not to be going out into the cold dark with them, Joliffe went upward, expecting there would be more talk of the news from Burgundy among Lady Jacquetta’s people, but that her rooms would be warm, brightly lighted, and less loud than any tavern.

What he did not expect, as he came into the outer chamber, were raised voices from the bedchamber beyond, and the demoiselle Guillemete and two others of the ladies whose names he did not yet know clustered tightly just inside the bedchamber doorway, either for protection or in readiness to retreat from Lady Jacquetta, who was out of sight but declaring furiously, “Because I’m weary of it! Weary and
sick
of it!”

Or maybe their wariness was of M’dame, answering with equally raised voice, “Your weariness does not matter in this! You are barely four months into your mourning. You . . .”

“Four months! Yes!” Lady Jacquetta cried. “And eight more before I am to wear anything but black or do anything but sit like a dull old woman.”

“A year of full mourning is what you owe his grace the duke your husband. At the very least. For your own honor as well as his, you owe him that!”

By now Joliffe was close behind the demoiselles, able to see over their shoulders into the bedchamber. Rather than last evening’s gathering, there were only Lady Jacquetta’s women there, a lone older man, M’dame, and Lady Jacquetta standing with her arms folded fiercely across herself, saying angrily, “But to have no sport at all! All Christmastide was tedious with doing nothing. A few card games. A little dull music. Nothing more. No dancing. No sport. Nothing! Now you say Shrovetide must be the same. Then it will be Lent, and Lent is always tedious, and this year it will be worse. I will have
something
at Shrovetide!” She turned sharply toward the man. “Master Fouet, say something! What can we do? I want more than card games and prayers at Shrovetide. What can you offer?”

Master Fouet had Joliffe’s instant sympathy. He vaguely knew the man was choirmaster of the chapel, which meant that, among other things, he had charge of training and overseeing the boys who sang in the household chapel. Now it seemed he was also expected to be the household’s revel-master, and caught between Lady Jacquetta’s demand at him and M’dame’s gimlet gaze warning him off any rash offers, he looked back and forth between them, his mouth opening and closing with no words coming. Joliffe, out of pity and with pure folly, edged past Guillemete, saying as he went, “What of a play, Master Fouet? A psychomachia? Sins in battle against Virtues?”

He did not know from where that thought sprang—or why he then let it spring out of his mouth—but as M’dame turned her narrowed gaze upon him, he hurriedly added, “Nothing riotous. No outright fighting. A debate and a formal dance.” He was making this up as he went and gained himself a moment by his low bow to Lady Jacquetta, who did not look taken with any of that, until he straightened from the bow and added, “You could of course be no part of the play itself, my lady”—that was to forestall M’dame—“but some of your ladies might dance, and there would be their lessons to, um, watch, and their dresses to make,” he ended somewhat lamely.