A Play of Treachery (23 page)

Joliffe made a wordless, angry noise in his throat, not liking to be in the middle of this—or anywhere near it, come to that—and set off after the pair. With the wind blowing from them to him, they did not hear him behind them on the path, but as he neared them, Remon’s voice was carried to him clearly, insisting with incautious force, “. . . a thing you must share with someone. You have to know I’m your heart-friend in this.”

“There is no ‘this’ to share,” Lady Jacquetta answered, somewhat sharply.

“My eyes tell me differently.”

“Your eyes need care then,” Lady Jacquetta said more sharply. “Remember, there are those who warn me against what they see about you.”

“My lady.” Remon’s voice was suddenly melting with warmth. “If I thought there was any hope . . .”

Joliffe, so near that he had to say something, threw himself forward into a headlong walk just short of a run and called out, “My lady! I must speak with you. Before it’s too late!”

Lady Jacquetta and Remon jerked around. Joliffe pulled up barely in time not to run into them, gasping for breath as if he had been running. He hurriedly bowed and burst out as he straightened, “It’s Master Fouet, my lady! He’s ruining the play. You must stop him. I pray you stop him!”

“Master Ripon,” Lady Jacquetta said coldly. “Control yourself. What are you saying?”

“Master Fouet. I didn’t know all he was doing! The words, my lady! With all he’s done, no one will heed my words. The dancing and . . . and . . . and flaming spears . . . and . . . and . . . everything!” Joliffe, out of invention, let John Ripon’s frustration break down from fumbled words to helpless hand-waving.

Lady Jacquetta snapped, “Master Ripon, it is somewhat late to be finding fault with what Master Fouet has done. It is
very
late. It is
too
late.”

“But I did not see until now,” Joliffe protested. He went down on one knee, the better to plead. If he had had a cap, he would have snatched it off and wrung it between his hands. He wrung his hands instead, protesting, “With all the music, all the dancing, no one is going to hear my words at all!”

“By Saint Denis,” Remon burst out. “Who cares about your words? My lady has the right of it. It’s too late to do anything. Let it go, you fool.”

Lady Jacquetta took a step forward, laid a hand on Joliffe’s shoulder, and said, suddenly mild, “Master Ripon,
I
care about your words. But indeed it is too late. You must let it go. I am sorry for it. Will it help if, while we watch it tomorrow, you sit beside me?”

Honestly moved by that kindness, Joliffe bowed his head and murmured, “To be so honored would wipe away all my griefs, not merely for the play.”

Lady Jacquetta took her hand away with a light laugh. “You are on your way to being more a courtier than a secretary, Master Ripon. Please, stand up.”

As he obeyed, Remon said to her, mildly chiding, “You’ve given him M’dame’s place. Will she mind?”

Her voice sharp with sudden malice, Lady Jacquetta replied, “No. Because it is
your
place I’ve given him.”

To judge by Remon’s abruptly widened eyes and immediate scowl, that was a thrust that went home. Lady Jacquetta, seeming not to see, went on, calm again, “It’s time we went in. Master Ripon, you should not have come out without a hat. You will take a chill.”

But she did not bid him return ahead of them to the house, instead let him follow as she and Remon went the straightest way back to the house, up the stairs, and into her bedchamber, where M’dame was sitting on the chest at the bedfoot, an embroidery frame standing in front of her and a threaded needle in her hand. But Joliffe would have wagered that until a few moments ago she had been at the window, watching. As it was, she stood up as they came in, said to Lady Jacquetta, “You endured the wind longer than I thought you would, my lady,” then with surprise, “Master Ripon?”

“He came to me with worry over his play,” Lady Jacquetta said easily. Her two little dogs woke and came running to her, the smaller one yipping its delight. She loosened her cloak and let it drop. Remon caught it as it fell, while she scooped up dogs, one on either arm, and went on to M’dame, “Sadly, I could give him no comfort except promise he might sit beside me when we watch his play tomorrow. Now I think I will rest a while.”

To that more-than-hint, she added a dismissing nod at Remon and Joliffe. They both bowed, Remon laid the cloak on the bed, and Joliffe stood aside from the door to the parlor for Remon to leave first. With neither look nor word at him, Remon did, and Joliffe took his time shutting the bedchamber’s door behind them both, giving the squire time to be well away, wanting no word with him if he could help it. Remon seemed to be of the same mind; he had stalked across and out of the parlor by the time Joliffe turned from the door.

Joliffe took the chance to leave the borrowed cloak draped over a chair before leaving the room in turn, almost wishing the questions he had gathered in the past half of an hour were as easily left behind him. Oddest among them was an almost-certainty that Lady Jacquetta had been pleased at his interruption. Pleased—or relieved? But if she had not wanted to be with Remon, why had she been? Or had her displeasure come after she and Remon were alone together? From something the squire had done or said? If her displeasure went deep enough, M’dame would be relieved to know it.

He encountered Lady Jacquetta’s demoiselles in the gallery, returning from their practice. He stood aside with a bow to let them pass, grateful they were too busily talking happily among themselves to spare him a word. He was about to start down the stairs to the great hall when he had to stand aside again, this time for Alizon and Sir Richard, coming well behind the others and in head-close talk, Alizon saying as they passed him, “. . . if we were hand in hand, to show better we . . .”

Something about the play, Joliffe thought as he went down the stairs, intent on finding wine in the great hall.

 

 

He went out that evening with George and the others, and this time did not lose them in the joyous streets, so that the next day he and his head were glad to lie a-bed as long as might be, it being the last of Shrovetide and full holiday. Once he was up, though, he had full share of Shrove-cakes and all else, and then it was evening and time for the play. In other years there would surely have been an array of guests—lords and officials whom the duke of Bedford wished to honor or whose company he enjoyed—but this was a mourning household, its pleasures subdued and the company lessened even more by Bishop Louys having gone with many of his men to dine with the archbishop of Rouen, afterward to join his fellow-churchmen for the evening’s ceremonies at the cathedral.

Lady Jacquetta had dined in the hall, though, and lingered on the dais afterward while the trestle tables were cleared away. To the eye, it was a glooming gathering there—all that black mourning garb—but judging by the busy garble of talk and bursts of laughter among those waiting for the play, humours were high. Bright-burning torches were being brought in and set in the high holders along the walls, blotting out the last faint glow of sunset beyond the hall’s tall windows. Lady Jacquetta’s ladies had disappeared at the meal’s end, along with their counterparts in the play, leaving her unaccustomedly alone as she settled again into her tall-backed chair that had been brought forward to the dais’ edge. Two lesser chairs were set on either side of it, for those privileged to sit beside her. Other people allowed the dais would stand, while most of the household would draw back against the walls, to leave the center of the hall clear for the players.

Until yesterday, the best Joliffe had expected was to stand on the dais. Now, though, as the household’s musicians began to gather at either side of their gallery above the screens passage at the hall’s far end, Lady Jacquetta settled into her chair and gestured graciously for M’dame to sit on her right and Joliffe on her left. He was aware of stirrings and whispers as he bowed and obeyed; managed not to see Remon Durevis despite knowing he was near, but glimpsed Master Woodville raising questioning eyebrows at him from beyond M’dame.

Unable to answer, Joliffe settled for sitting stiffly, to seem as if John Ripon were both aware of the honor done him and uncomfortably uncertain what to do with it. Which fairly well matched what Joliffe himself felt about it.

Master Fouet entered the hall through the screen’s wide doorway below the minstrels’ gallery. He carried a staff tall as himself, and several paces into the hall stopped and rapped the staff’s end sharply against the stone floor. All through the hall, talk and laughter rippled to silence, save for some shuffling of feet and a few brief coughs. Master Fouet made a bow toward Lady Jacquetta and declared, his voice clear and carrying, “My great lady, my lords and ladies, gentlemen and gentlewomen all, we come tonight—”

Joliffe had not troubled to write this opening, supposing Master Fouet knew best the greeting for such a company, and surely the choirmaster did it gracefully, asking briefly for everyone’s good will for the play, then drawing aside and rapping his staff on the floor again, sign for the musicians to break into lightsome music and the Sins to sweep into the hall, three pairs of lovely demoiselles in bright gowns, each carrying a gold-shining wand, their long hair loose, their heads crowned with narrow bands of gold. Tall Ydoine as Pride came alone and last, with a somewhat larger wand and crown and little bells hung from her sleeves. The other Sins stood aside to let her pass between them, curtsying to her as she did, to show Pride’s preeminence among Sins.

After that, they made their speeches while weaving through a simple dance. Then the six young men as the Virtues entered, again two by two, likewise crowned but with bigger golden bands, and carrying tall spears. They were wearing their own bright doublets of the household’s non-mourning days, with sleeveless tabards of white samite over them, cut very full and gathered at the shoulders to fall in wide folds to almost the floor. Only Humility, as Pride’s opposite, was robed entirely in white.

Joliffe could not help thinking that keeping all those yards of white cloth clean must have been a challenge right up to the moment the players entered the hall.

The Virtues danced and made their speeches more solemnly than the Sins had. With everything turned into French, Joliffe could not be sure how much was as he had written it, but what he understood sounded close enough, and while Basset might have done more with all of it, what weaknesses there were in the devising were well-countered by the splendor of gowns, crowns, spears, and wands sheened and shining in the torchlight. And all the dancing was gracefully done. If nothing else, these high-born young were able to move with a confidence and grace through the dances’ careful patterns, and somehow Master Fouet had convinced them of the need to say their words clearly and loud enough. Surprisingly, Guillemete as Wrath was best among the Sins, playing her part with better seeming than anyone else. Alain as her opposite was somewhat too stiff, but in the almost-ritual of the play it hardly mattered. The Sins confronted the Virtues, and they “battled” in graceful dance, striking wands and spears—that after all did not flame, Joliffe was relieved to see—together in careful “fight,” until abruptly two trumpeters stood up at either end of the gallery, swung up long, straight trumpets, and played a flourish that brought the Sins and Virtues all to a frozen halt, staring up at them.

From the shadowed rear of the gallery a man and woman came forward into light so suddenly much brighter that Joliffe guessed somewhere up there lanterns had just been unshielded toward them. They were robed all in cloth-of-gold that shone as if with inward captured fire, wore tall, jewel-flashing crowns, and held between them—the woman’s hand above the man’s—a single, heavy, ornate scepter. The trumpets ceased, and with surely every gaze in the hall fixed on them, the man declared in boldly ringing voice, “I am Lord Justice, come to end this fray.”

Lighter-voiced but as bold and clear, the woman declared, “And I am Lady Wisdom, come to bring peace beyond this day.”

They were only Sir Richard and Alizon, but in the wonder that sometimes came when the playing went true, for the on-lookers they had in that moment the true seeming of Lord Justice and Lady Wisdom speaking from high heaven, and while Joliffe silently acknowledged Master Fouet’s skill at spectacle, Lord Justice spoke at the Sins, condemning them. With heads bowed in humiliation they sank to the floor, bright skirts spreading around them. The Virtues, straight as the spears, their white robes shining in the torchlight, stood over them, triumphant.

And some slight movement from Lady Jacquetta made Joliffe slide his eyes sideways without shifting his head. She had leaned a little forward and her gaze was fixed, rapt, on the gallery. On—Joliffe tried to match her gaze—on Sir Richard. Not on “Lord Justice.” No. No one had ever looked at Justice, or even justice, in the way she was looking at Sir Richard, and beyond denying he was exceedingly fine to look on there in the torchlight, in the shining splendor of his crown and golden robes.

Who, Joliffe wondered, had been foolish enough to allow such a man into the household of a young widow?

Lord Justice ended his condemnation. Lady Wisdom gently and firmly bade the Sins take the Virtues for their guides and teachers, not their foes. Pride and Humility acknowledged peace with one another and on behalf of all their followers. The Virtues helped the Sins to rise and joined hands with them in a dance of accord out of the hall, while Lord Justice and Lady Wisdom drew back into shadows and vanished, ending the play.

B
y all the praise afterward, there was no doubt the play had been a success. For Joliffe, appreciation came foremost from Lady Jacquetta by way of words and a small but well-weighted embroidered purse pressed into his hand before she turned to Master Fouet, come to kneel in front of her. While she thanked him with another coin-weighted purse, Joliffe slipped into the shifting of household folk out of the way of servants setting up tables down the hall’s middle. On a usual Shrovetide evening there would have been drinking, dancing, and loud games now. This year would of course be quieter and without dancing, and when Lady Jacquetta retired to her chambers in a while, people would be away to better merriment elsewhere; but presently the drink and food-heaped platters being set out along the tables would give merriment enough.