A Play of Treachery (20 page)

Shortly, clearly, Joliffe told of the blue-capped man, ending with, “But then, you were hoping I’d see him, weren’t you?”

“Why do you think that?” Master Wydeville asked blandly.

“That cap was too bright a blue for someone who wanted to go unnoted,” Joliffe said. Carefully watching both men, he added, “Spotting the fellow in the tan cap took me longer.”

Master Doncaster laughed. Master Wydeville went so far as to smile and said, “You have a suspicious mind and some cleverness, Master Ripon. That’s to the good. A suspicious, clever man is likely to live longer in this game. Martin, I leave him to you. Good day.”

Joliffe was still taking in that “live longer” as he bowed to Master Wydeville’s departure, then watched, surprised, as Master Wydeville went up the stairs instead of down. As his footfalls crossed the floor above, Joliffe looked his question at Master Doncaster who answered, “There’s a door between the houses up there. People who come in at one of his doors can go out one of mine if need be. Or the other way around. Or lets us meet without anyone to know of it.”

Joliffe nodded toward the lately empty house on the other side. “What of that way?”

“That way will have to be blocked now there are children there. It’s not to the best to have them there, but Master Roussel needed somewhere for his family quickly, to set him free to return to Paris as soon as might be.”

“Does Master Roussel know about”—Joliffe made a vague gesture—“all of this?” Meaning not simply the houses.

“He knows. But talk is not what you’re here for,” Master Doncaster answered. “Come.”

This time they wrestled only a little, by way of warming up. Then Master Doncaster had him put on a padded surcoat. That served to blunt the blows that too often got past Joliffe’s guard. Toward the lesson’s end, fewer blows were getting through to him, but he guessed that he should not begin to think himself skilled until Master Doncaster felt the need of padding, too.

At the lesson’s end, still warm from the effort but dressed again and come down to the parlor, he was surprised to have Master Doncaster not dismiss him but set him at the table near the streetward window, give him a rolled parchment, and say, “By rights, this should be someone’s business to show you, but Master Wydeville thinks you may do well enough on your own. You’re to learn it.”

That was all he offered in explanation. He went away downstairs, and Joliffe unrolled the parchment, weighed it open across the table with the little, bright-painted lead bars kept to hand for just such work, and found the parchment patterned with what might have been called a spider web of black lines, if one accepted the spider was drunk when it made them. Along the lines, small, red-inked drawings of walls and towers with names beside them marked towns, and with a little study, Joliffe determined this was a map showing at least some of Normandy and France. He found Paris and Rouen because of the numerous roads spidering from—or to—them, and he was able to trace the Seine from Paris to the sea, and then the roads that went outward from Rouen, taking in the names of the towns along them. He doubted the map showed the distances between them anything like rightly, and while some vaguely sketched lumpy hills here and there probably meant uneven land, for the most part the map only showed the general way to all the places on it and what rivers might have to be crossed.

After a time Master Doncaster came back from wherever he had gone and asked, “Questions?”

Joliffe put his finger on a town near the coast. “Caen. I’ve heard the name but know nothing else. Do I read the map rightly? There’s a castle there and it’s a port?”

“You have it. There are also two great abbeys, founded by the Conqueror himself and his wife four hundred years ago. My lord of Bedford worked to start a university there, to be a rival to the arrogant scholars in Paris who think it’s their right to weigh in on every trouble that comes up and that their word should be the last in any contest. What will come of Bedford’s hope now, I don’t know.” He shrugged and tapped a finger on another town. “Could you get from here to there if you had to?”

“Honfleur?” Remembering what he had heard about Armagnac raiders through that part of Normandy, he said, “Not without a good-sized armed guard around me.”

“Huh.” Master Doncaster’s grunt was appreciative. “Good enough for now, then. Time you left.”

Setting aside the weights to let the scroll roll up on itself, Joliffe took the chance to ask, “One thing. How is it with the woman who was here and hurt?”

“She’s gone on about her business,” Master Doncaster said, easily but as if that was all he meant to say, and Joliffe warily left it at that.

 

 

He was working at his desk the next day when a servant summoned him to Lady Jacquetta. He welcomed the escape, not so much from the work itself but from the low-voiced worrying among George, Jacques, and Bernard over what would come of the dealing between Bishop Louys and Lady Jacquetta over her household. Given how many people had overheard what had been said between them yesterday and how word spread through any household, there was no wonder at talk about it being everywhere by now, but because no amount of talk and scrabbling worry by those with no power in the household was going to affect what those above them decided, Joliffe had soon tired of listening to them and left his work willingly.

The servant who came for him did not say why he was wanted, and Joliffe chose not to ask, so he walked unprepared into the duchess’ parlor and chaos. But a bright and happy chaos, with Lady Jacquetta’s women scattered, laughing and talking, among a dozen or more bolts of cloth set around the room on stools and tabletop, with many of the bolts partly unrolled, their rich cloth falling and flowing in vivid heaps of bright colors. Joliffe thought of the delight Rose would have taken in having such cloth to sew, rather than the rough-and-cheap with which the players mostly made do. Certainly, the women here were taking delight in the wealth of it. Several had swathes caught up to themselves, held against their black gowns, or draped over shoulders, or held out to see at arm’s length. Lady Jacquetta’s little dogs were nowhere to be seen, a mercy for the cloth-merchant, who was likely the man standing with his gaze twitching uneasily around the room, not far from where Lady Jacquetta stood beside the table, stroking a shining blue satin and looking thoughtful, while across the table from her Master Fouet stood looking much like a man barely holding back from wringing his hands.

While Joliffe was still bowing to her, Lady Jacquetta said at him, “It was Master Fouet who requested you come. We are not agreed about your play. Since it is yours, he said you would be best able to say. I agreed you might be.”

Joliffe took special note of that “might be.” As with her household, Lady Jacquetta was giving no ground until she had to.

Master Fouet, a man embattled, said, “You see, Master Ripon, I came here to try out her ladies’ voices, to choose who would do well for which Virtues. But I found this. The Virtues are to be gowned in shining white, to show . . .”

“Then I don’t want to be a Virtue,” Blanche declared.

“No,” said Marie. “I want to be Envy and wear this green!”

An outcry of counterclaims and laughter from the others answered that, while Master Fouet said desperately, “No, no. The Sins are to be played by men. For ladies to take on any seeming except of virtue . . .”

Indignant, laughing outcries and exclaims interrupted him, Lady Jacquetta’s the most firm with, “It will be Mardi Gras.
Carnaval
! Everyone takes on seeming then and it means no more than sport.”

Master Fouet looked ready to continue his protest, but from a corner where she was sitting much like a watching black crow, M’dame said, dry-voiced, “Given that the Church teaches insistently that women are the fount of all sin, to have the Sins played by women does not seem unreasonable, Master Fouet.”

That was the last opinion Joliffe would have expected to hear from M’dame, and it surely brought Master Fouet to startled silence, staring at her. She turned her look on Joliffe. “So. Can the speeches you gave to the Sins be done as well by women as by men?”

Lady Jacquetta took that up eagerly. “Yes! Could the Sins be played by women and the Virtues by men?”

Warily, Joliffe granted, “There’s nothing in the play that says they could not.”

Glad exclaims among the women and a few hands clapped met that answer, before he added (lest Saint Genesius, patron of players, strike him down), “
But
it is also every player’s duty to obey what the master of the play tells them to do. The play is in Master Fouet’s hands. It is for him to determine how it is to be done.”

That was true as well as fair, although Master Fouet probably little appreciated having the problem handed back to him. But it
was
his to determine, and showing only a little desperation, the choirmaster looked around at all the young, eager gazes fixed on him and finally at Lady Jacquetta to whom he bowed and said, “If my lady gives her permission that her ladies be Sins rather than Virtues, I can but gladly obey.”

Joliffe thought that “gladly” was a deft touch. While seeming to give complete surrender, it meant that if Master Fouet hereafter suggested something counter to Lady Jacquetta’s wish about anything, she should see him doing it only as someone careful in his work and duty, not as a resentful foe. Certainly Lady Jacquetta’s smile and accepting nod were his reward now as she said, “I do give my permission, Master Fouet.”

General merriment among the women answered that, and across the room Guillemete, who had been standing with a long swathe of rose-pink draped over her shoulder, did a happy twirl, moving from in front of the woman who had been kneeling behind her.

Perrette.

Or was she?

For a moment Joliffe was unsure, the difference was so great between the woman at Master Doncaster’s, strong even in her pain, and this mouse in a dull gown and apron, a simple headkerchief over her hair, and her lips pursed around several pins as she put out a protesting hand in per-forced silent protest after Guillemete.

“Guillemete,” Lady Jacquetta said. “Stay still for Perrette. How can she work if you dance about?”

Laughing, Guillemete twirled back into Perrette’s reach, and a thin, aged woman Joliffe had not noted before among the welter of cloth and other women said, “Thank you, your grace.”

At a guess, she was the sempster who would oversee the coming gown-making, Joliffe supposed. Then Perrette was . . . ?

Master Fouet made a small gesture toward the doorway and said, “My lady, I will want a different speech to try your women’s voices on. If your grace will pardon me, I will go for it.”

“Of course,” Lady Jacquetta said graciously. “Pray, go.”

“And might Master Ripon come with me?”

Lady Jacquetta waved them both away with a smiling nod and was turning to the cloth merchant, saying, “Now, Master Labbat . . .” as Joliffe followed the choirmaster out of the room.

He was half-glad to be out of there, half-wary of Master Fouet, and indeed once in the gallery and well away from being overheard, the choirmaster turned on him, pointing a shaking finger back toward the parlor while exclaiming, “That’s what I found when I came there. They were already planning all those colors for
Virtues
!”

“Why shouldn’t a Virtue be colorful?” Joliffe asked, honestly curious. “Virtues have a hard time enough holding out against all the delights of Sins without being dull to look at, too.”

“But they aren’t going to be colorful now! Now the women are going to be Sins!”

“But that means you can have the Virtues all in white after all, just as you want,” Joliffe pointed out. “Or—” He stopped himself. He did not mean to become part of this. It was not his business to become part of this. But the words kept coming. “Or they could be all in white and
gold
, carrying golden spears. And if there were some way to have the points of the spears flaming . . .”

Master Fouet went from harassed to suddenly excited. “Yes! Flaming spears. That would be something. Yes.” His hand clamped down on Joliffe’s arm. “Have you any thought about Lord Justice and Lady Wisdom? Here’s what seemed possible to me—”

Joliffe had the sudden and terrible sense that he had yet again opened his mouth one time too many.

He finally escaped from Master Fouet’s eagerness by claiming need to return to his rightful duties, and the rest of his day went well enough. Except for the tedium of it, his work was not burdensome; he had time to think of other things while he did it, and the woman Perrette was among his thoughts, although he did not know what to think of her, the difference was so great between his first seeing of her and today’s. But then look at the difference between what
he
seemed, sitting here at this desk, and who he was. Except he was both, because he was not
seeming
to do a secretary’s duties; he was doing them. So he was the Joliffe who walked England’s roads as a player, and the Joliffe who was learning a spy’s skills here in Rouen,
and
the Joliffe who was sitting at this desk, quietly at work over letters and accounts. As with music, someone who was a single note would be a dull thing. But—as with music—the mingled notes should make a pleasing whole. Else they were a pointless jangling.

It was all very well to be curious about the woman Perrette and the seeming jangle between the two ways he had seen her, but he was not yet sure even about his own notes—whether or not their present jangling would someday make a whole.

With that uncertainty in mind, he gave the day’s end over to thoroughly being John Ripon, refusing George’s and Estienne’s efforts to persuade him out to a tavern with all of John Ripon’s regret and hesitance, and instead spending the evening playing games of draughts with Cauvet and several others in the great hall. He made a point of complaining about how sore he was from his time with Master Doncaster yesterday (although he was not so sore as he claimed to be) and showed off John Ripon’s new dagger. That drew laughter and jibing about having a “pig-sticker” of a dagger, and his feeble protest that, “Well, better to have it than not,” brought more laughter at him.