A Play of Treachery (16 page)

He thought Lady Jacquetta was showing a spark of wary interest, but Master Fouet protested, “I have no such play!”

“I can write you one,” Joliffe said before he could stop himself. Gone too far for going back and with everyone looking hard at him, he outright lied, “I did one once for my lord of Winchester’s household. A small one. One year at Shrovetide.”

Master Fouet’s dignity kept him from outright pleading, but he was near to it as he said toward M’dame, “A thing suitable for the cardinal bishop of Winchester’s household at Shrovetide would surely be seemly here.”

“Surely!” Lady Jacquetta agreed, glaring at M’dame.

Giving no sign she noted her lady’s glare, M’dame eyed first Joliffe, then Master Fouet, then said at Joliffe, “I would need to read this play before I agree to it, Master Ripon.”

Seeing too late the very large flaw in what he had said, Joliffe said quickly, “I have no copy of it here. Not the one I wrote. But I can write it a-new, for you to approve. If it please you, my lady.”

Master Fouet said worriedly, “We’re not that far from Shrovetide.”

“The speeches are short. Easily learned,” Joliffe promised. “I’ll make as quick work of writing it as my duties allow.”

“Your other duties can wait. Begin at once,” Lady Jacquetta ordered.

Resisting any look toward M’dame—knowing Lady Jacquetta would resent it and equally certain that if M’dame had objection she would make it—Joliffe made a low, acknowledging bow.

Far too late, he was remembering the proverb that warned against digging a pit with your mouth and then falling into it.

As he straightened from the bow, Lady Jacquetta gave a sharp clap of her hands and said, “Even before reading the play, we can decide who of my ladies will play which Virtues.”

Master Fouet began, startled, “I had thought the play would be for the boys of the chapel to . . .”

“There are only six of them,” Lady Jacquetta said with gleaming mischief. “There are seven Sins and seven Virtues. Now, how would it be if all the Sins were played by my gentlemen and all the Virtues by my ladies? Yes. I like that thought. Yes.”

Master Fouet turned to Joliffe as if to an ally. Which they now were, Joliffe supposed. At least, they had
better
be allies, if they were to survive this. And in answer to the choirmaster’s silent plea, he said with a bow to Lady Jacquetta, “It might be best to wait until the play is written before we choose, my lady.” And added, to win Master Fouet and himself more respite, “Would my lady have me read to her again this evening? It being somewhat late to begin taxing my wits with writing tonight.”

Lady Jacquetta hesitated, then accepted that graciously, and while one of her ladies fetched
Reynard
, Master Fouet bowed himself out, so that it was only to the ladies Joliffe read, and at the end he escaped with an honest plea of tiredness as the ladies began to talk of which Virtue they would like to be. Although Guillemete said happily that she would rather be one of the Sins. To them all, trying not to let his retreat seem like the flight it actually was, Joliffe smiled and said, “We’ll have to see,” and got himself away.

But morning inevitably came, and while Joliffe lay listening to the scuffling, moaning, and griping from the other men along the dormer, putting off crawling from under his own blankets and cloak, he considered what he would do. He had once thrown together a play about Sins and Virtues. That much was true. But it had been a farce for mad-cap scholars rather than something fit to play in the bishop of Winchester’s household, and it would not serve for here.

So.

A play about the seven deadly Sins and the seven soul-saving Virtues sufficient to divert a bored young duchess while not offending M’dame, and simple enough to be practiced and performed in a very short time before Lent began. Joliffe encouraged himself with the thought that, to the good, once the thing was written, his part in it would be done, the rest of the problem all Master Fouet’s. With that comfort, he finally got himself out of his bed’s warmth and into the morning’s cold, to dress and hurry down to the hall, among the last of the household taking a share of the breakfast ale and bread.

Being too low in the household to be required to attend every morning’s Mass with Lady Jacquetta and her ladies, he chose not to today and went up to his desk, thoughts about Sins and Virtues twitching in his mind. He found word of his new duty was there ahead of him and that no one seemed to envy him for it. Henri said right out, “I’m glad it is not me.”

Jacques, clerk of the kitchen accounts, asked, “Is it to be in French or English?”

Joliffe had not thought that far about it yet but answered immediately and from the heart, “If it’s to be played in French, someone will have to turn it from my English, that’s sure!”

The others laughed at him and returned to their work. Among the scratching of pens that was soon the only sound among them, Joliffe’s was the least as he played with thoughts. The matter seemed straight enough. After all, there was only so much that could be done with a psychomachia. The Sins—Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony, Lust—and the Virtues—which were various, according the purpose of whoever was making a list, but for this would be Humility, Kindness, Patience, Diligence, Liberality, Temperance, and Chastity—had to present themselves, quarrel against each other, and the Virtues be victorious at the end. That was all. What each Sin and Virtue had to say for themselves and to each other was fairly well set out in any number of treatises and other works. All Joliffe need do was write out short verses of no particular original thought for each, and leave it to Master Fouet to put dances or whatever else around them. No, not even verses, since surely the play would be turned to French. Short speeches, then, and anyway it would be the dancing that people most wanted to watch, rather than listening to badly delivered speeches by giggling girls and stiff young men, if this went like every household-done play Joliffe had ever seen in his younger days. Besides, he should not write it too well. Among the last things he needed was for people to fix in their minds that he had skill that way, because if they did, there might be no end to what was asked of him.

By late morning he had a number of random-seeming lines scribbled down on paper, but the whole shape of the thing was in his mind, and by late afternoon the Sins’ opening speeches were well toward being finished, and he doubted the Virtues would give him much more trouble. His one worry through supper was that he would be summoned to Lady Jacquetta that evening, and when George slapped him on the shoulder at the meal’s end and asked if he wanted to join some of the fellows at the Crescent Moon tonight—“I’ve heard they’ve opened a cask that’s not so bad.”—Joliffe agreed more readily than he might have otherwise.

Besides, it would give him a chance to play up both John Ripon’s insistence he must not drink too much and his worries about the war, and he started while he and George were crossing the yard toward the gateway by asking, “George, while we’re out—that fellow that’s said to teach sword-work—the one someone was talking of yesterday—could you show me where he lives? Maybe recommend me to him?”

“Saint Agatha’s breasts! I don’t know the man,” George protested. “I’ve only heard of him. You’re not truly set on this, are you? You’re in Rouen, not out in the bleeding countryside!”

“Strugge didn’t think here was all that safe,” Joliffe said with an edge of stubborn whine. “This Master Doncaster is good?”

“Experienced, anyway. Fought at Agincourt and all that.”

“Ha!” someone said, coming up behind them. “Like every other old soldier in Normandy, he was at Agincourt. Ha!”

George slapped a hand on the newcomer’s shoulder and said to Joliffe, “Estienne, clerk of the chamber to his grace the bishop, and a right good drinking companion. Coming to the Crescent with us?”

Estienne was a short, bustling man, perhaps a little older than George, dressed in a dark clerk-gown much like their own, and he said he would most willingly go to the Crescent with them, adding scornfully as they passed through the gateway, “If every Englishman who says he was at Agincourt had truly been there, your King Henry’s army would have been double the size of the French and his victory none so glorious after all.”

George laughed, and Joliffe kept to himself his thought that Master Doncaster had too much the straight feel of true steel to be other than he said he was.

The Crescent Moon proved to be a clean-kept place, the strewn straw on the floor none too old and the benches and tables well-scrubbed. The men whom George and Estienne led him to join looked to be, like George and Estienne themselves, middling clerks of the respectable sort or else journeymen in one craft or another. Joliffe gathered as they talked that none of them had wives waiting at home; gathered, too, that George and Estienne were seen as somewhat above the rest of them, given the households they served, and that same reflected worth came Joliffe’s way, too, and the more so because it was already generally known among these men that he had been in the bishop of Winchester’s service. That he was here because of disgracing himself there seemed not to count.

Joliffe reminded himself never to under-guess men’s ability at gossip, for all that women had the worse reputation for it.

Unfortunately, these men’s gossip this evening was mostly of Rouen folk and matters, until the stationer’s journeyman commented grumpily that the latest shipment of paper from Paris, needed by his master, was being held up by Armagnac raids along the Seine. That brought on general head-shaking and obviously familiar muttering about taxes being wasted on garrisons that didn’t do the work they were paid for, and Joliffe took the chance to bring up John Ripon’s worry over how dangerous things might be, even here in Rouen.

Just as George had done, everyone jibed at him for his worry, with George adding to the jesting by saying, “He’s so worried that he wants to learn how to fight. Does anyone know where that Englishman lives that teaches swordwork?”

That brought a rude jest from someone about knowing where some “swordwork” could be done that needed no teaching, and Estienne asked didn’t he want a Frenchman to teach him since it was the French he was afraid of.

Joliffe protested, “It’s just that everyone says it’s going to come to fighting, but what do I know about fighting? Nothing! I just want to know more than I do about what to do with a dagger, that’s all.”

That brought an array of rude suggestions, and the stationer’s journeyman called him “an old woman.” Playing John Ripon, Joliffe got a little sullen, and that brought more laughter at him, until finally the cutler’s man took pity on him and recommended not only Master Doncaster but another man, and several of the others gave him jumbled directions to both.

“But you’re not going there now,” George said. “So drink up.”

Joliffe muttered he had had about as much to drink as he should, but Estienne beside him poured more wine into his bowl from the pitcher being passed around and said, “This wine is too watered to do anyone’s head any harm.”

That was not true. If anything, the wine was surprisingly good, but Joliffe pretended to take Estienne at his word, drinking deep and then asking, as if somewhat drunkenly suspicious, “This isn’t Burgundian wine, is it?”

“It’s Gascon,” the stationer’s man assured him.

“Good old Gascon,” Joliffe said. “We used to get tun-fulls of Gascon every year. Comes into Southampton with the autumn wine fleet. For my lord of Winchester’s household.” He blinked owlishly around him at the other men. “We don’t want Burgundian anything, do we? Not their wine. Not their duke. Not anything.”

The others agreed to that with general head-noddings and varied mutters and oaths at Burgundy. As Joliffe had hoped, their talk turned to the war. He was surprised at how little any of the men seemed worried by Burgundy’s new rage over the letters to the Zealand towns or had any doubt that Rouen was safe enough.

“The Armagnacs already threw their best at us these past two months, and Talbot and Scales put them back where they belong,” one of the men said. “They’ll do the same for Burgundy if it comes to it.”

“We’ll have to take the treacherous bastard down sooner or later anyway,” one of the men said. “Might as well be sooner.”

They all drank to that, but afterward the talk slid away to how old Bremetot had proposed marriage to a widow and been accepted. “Although I’ve heard he proposed something else first,” the mercer’s clerk said. “But she threatened him with a fry-pan for it, and he changed to marriage to save his pate.”

“More than his pate will need saving if he marries her,” George said. “Did you hear . . .”

The talk went on to some quarrel between merchants in Rouen’s court and then to taxes, none of it any interest to Joliffe. What did interest him was how, under cover of the talk around them, his bowl was kept full by Estienne beside him while the clerk asked him questions about what was said in England about matters in France and Normandy. Most especially what was said in the bishop of Winchester’s household. And then more questions about the bishop himself. Since Joliffe had never been part of Winchester’s household, there was little he could accurately tell Estienne. He made do with oddments he had heard in the players’ travels, telling them as if learned in the household itself and embroidering where possibility suggested itself to him, mostly because Estienne’s interest was somewhat too-intense and gave Joliffe questions of his own that increased as the clerk’s questions began to go deeper, trying for more particular information about Bishop Beaufort himself. How did matters presently stand between him and his nephew the duke of Gloucester? Who among the English lords did he seem most to favor? Was he much around the king? Who
was
much around the king?

John Ripon, not too sharp-witted to begin with and increasingly fuddled with wine, was unlikely to wonder much about Estienne’s insistent interest, but Joliffe was
not
fuddled with wine and he
did
wonder. As he ran out of answers he wanted to give, he retreated into Ripon’s ignorance, grumbling he did not know anything about any of that, all he had been was a clerk at one of his grace’s god-forsaken palaces in god-forsaken Hampshire, and if he had been given some place worthy of him, he wouldn’t have been driven to drink and he wouldn’t be here. He kept up his weak man’s whine that his life was all someone else’s fault and none of his own doing, slumping lower on the bench, his nose closer to his wine bowl while he did, until Estienne lost interest in him.