A Play of Treachery (28 page)

Fortunately, no order had yet been given to let no one leave. They did not stop him going out, and because rumor had had too little time to spread further, there was no questioning crowd gathered outside the gateway. Once beyond it and among people in the street there, Joliffe was no one. Unfortunately, he was also nowhere, so far as knowing where to go. He had made no study of apothecary shops or surgeons in Rouen. Even if had he, he did not know which way the wounded man—woman?—murderer?—had gone once out the garden’s door. Right or left along the path there, yes. But which?

Come to that, he did not even know where the path ran, but he found the nearer end of it by simply asking a pair of children sitting on a doorstep, probably waiting to be called in to their supper. They jumped up and happily took him along the street to where a short alley came out between two houses. He gave them each a small coin in thanks, to their complete delight, just as their mother called them angrily home.

Left looking into the alley’s shadows, Joliffe did not much like the thought of going into it, especially to no purpose, and crossed the street instead, to where someone’s apprentice was closing the shutter across a shopfront. He asked the youth if he had been there the past hour or two and got the answer, “Freezing my fingers and selling nothing, yes. Could have closed three hours ago, for all the profit there’s been.”

“Has anyone come out of that alleyway in that while? Someone who came along the stream path there?”

“That’s not much used this cold time of year,” the youth said scornfully. “There was no one I saw today, anyway, and I did not have much else to look at.”

Joliffe gave him two coins and went back to the alley and unwillingly into it. Going now with the last afterglow of sunset was better than in the full dark that was coming, but “better than” was not the same as “good.” And what if the wounded man—woman?—had been too hurt to go far, was lying somewhere there in the dark and not grateful to be found and still able to use his dagger?

Not that Joliffe much wanted to stumble on his corpse, either.

He came out the alley’s far end onto the open pathway without having encountered anyone or anything and was grateful to see how the path ran with the stream on one side and, on the other, a blank, tall, stone wall—part of Joyeux Repos—giving no hiding places where a hurt murderer might be lurking. He went quickly forward, keeping watch toward the stream for any floating body caught along its edge, on the chance that blood-loss might have made his quarry fall that way. At the same time he tried to watch for any signs, including more blood smeared anywhere on the wall, but the light was too far gone to give him real hope of seeing either that or any other subtle sign about his quarry.

Torch- and lantern-light and voices on the other side of the wall told when he passed the door in wall. Even on this side, where it was not hidden, it was all but invisible in the deepening dark. Joliffe went faster, glad when he came out the path’s other end and into another street where there was the welcome warm light of evening lanterns beside doorways. Better than that, not twenty yards away an apothecary shop’s sign of a mortar and pestle was hanging over the street, with a line of light around the front window’s closed shutter telling someone was there.

Accepting his luck, Joliffe went, knocked, and when someone said, “Come,” went in, giving a tipsy sway sideways as he crossed the threshold into a small, candle-lighted room. Shelves crowded with the usual apothecary clutter filled most of the walls, while behind a trestle-and-board table a stout middle-aged man stood grinding at something in a stone mortar. At Joliffe’s slight stumble, he looked up with inquiring eyebrows, and Joliffe asked, slurring the words and making his French worse than it was, “I look for my friend. He hurt himself. He went to be helped.”

Speaking slowly and somewhat loudly to help the foreigner understand him, the man asked, “Do you mean he was ill?”

“No. No.” Joliffe made a poking gesture, as if he were holding a dagger. “A fight. Hurt.”

“You do not want me,” the man said. He came from the table to take Joliffe by the arm and turn him toward the door. “You want Master Vengier. He is a surgeon. Around the corner from here.” He steered Joliffe out of his door. “He would be where your friend is gone. To Master Vengier.”

Joliffe let himself be aimed in presumably the right direction, thanked the man with a happily drunk man’s friendly ease, and swayed away along the street.

He had his doubts about the success of this quest Master Wydeville had set him on. How many barber-surgeons and apothecaries might there be in Rouen? How long would it take him to find them all? And the hurt man need not have gone to any of them but to a friend who might be willing to tend his wound and hide him. After all, the wound might be slight.

No, there had been blood enough to think it was more than slight. Still, was it so bad the man would be desperate enough to go for help to the nearest surgeon when report of a murder in the neighborhood was sure to be spreading almost on his heels?

That would depend on how bad was the wound and how desperate the man. And he might not know he had left blood behind him that betrayed he was hurt. He might believe that with the hidden door shut behind him and no immediate outcry of pursuit, he was clear away, with no worry about going to the first help there was.

Or he might make for his home and send for a surgeon to come to him.

Or misjudging his hurt and not sending for help, he might quietly bleed to death somewhere.

Which would be thoughtless and unhelpful of him.

Joliffe let go his seeming drunkenness as he turned the corner from the apothecary’s shop; when he knocked at the door under the barber-surgeon’s sign he was only a man in worried search for his friend. The woman who soon opened the door to him was short and pleasingly plump, aproned like a busy housewife and, judging by her fine linen head-cloth and the good wool of her gray gown, no servant. She assessed him with a look, standing there on her doorstep in her lantern-light, and said before he had quite opened his mouth, “You’re looking for the stabbed man? Good. You can take him back to the garrison. We don’t want him.”

Joliffe felt his mouth dropping open, stopped it, closed it, swallowed what he had been going to say, gathered his wits, and said, sounding stupid even to himself, “He’s here?”

“He’s here. Come.” The woman turned and started back along the brick-floored passageway. “Shut the door,” she added, plainly not thinking he would have the sense to do even that without he was told.

Joliffe meekly followed her inside and shut the door. The house was much like Master Doncaster’s, with a kitchen at the far end of the passageway, where warmth and light and supper-smells met Joliffe as he came in, while in the room’s middle at a wide wooden table a man was standing bent over and doing something to the bare back of a man seated on the bench there with his face hidden against his crossed arms resting on the tabletop.

The standing man was short and plump like his wife—surely she was his wife; they had that immediate look of a couple—and he said to her as he looked around and saw Joliffe, “You were not to let anyone in!”

Going past the table toward the hearth, she returned, “He is not the watch or angry. He wanted his friend, that’s all.”

“You were to say no one was here!”

The woman sniffed. “He passed you money to say that. He did not pass me money.” She stirred at something bubbling in a pot hanging over the fire. “If there’s someone to take him away, we don’t want to keep him, do we?”

The seated man lifted his head, turned it enough to see Joliffe, and let it sink onto his arms again with a groan.

“Master Durevis,” Joliffe said.

Who should not be in Rouen at all, having ridden out with the other household men two weeks ago.

But it was Durevis nonetheless; and he whispered, as if gathering words was almost beyond his strength, “Did you do this?”

“No,” Joliffe answered with startled certainty.

Durevis regarded him through pain-taut eyes. “Can you forget you found me?”

“I was sent to find you.”

That seemed to startle Durevis in his turn. “How?” But pain cut off his curiosity. He shut his eyes again and muttered, “Stay then.”

The plump man grunted and returned to his work. Joliffe circled for better view and saw he was stitching closed a long, ragged slit low down on the right side of Durevis’ back. A bowl with a cloth and bloodied water in it sat nearby on the table, beside an open box of various pottery jars. Beside those, another cloth lay with an array of metal implements Joliffe chose not to see too closely. There was also a cup with a little red wine left in it, probably mixed with something to lessen pain, or Durevis would be flinching more than he was to the push and pull of needle and thread through his flesh. As it was, his eyes were squeezed tightly shut, and because there seemed small use in trying to question him now, Joliffe settled onto a joint stool to wait.

The woman swung the pot away from the fire, filled a wooden bowl, sat down with it and a spoon and a large piece of bread at the far end of the table from where her husband worked, and ate her supper while he finished with Durevis. He eventually snipped off the last stitch, set aside the needle and scissors, opened a jar from the box, and with his fingers smeared ointment from it over the length of the wound and its stitches, then set to putting a pad over the wound and a bandage around Durevis to hold the pad in place. He finished as his wife finished her supper, and she said, “See him to the bed. Then come eat your supper.” She looked at Joliffe. “You help.”

The bed that stood against the wall on the kitchen’s far side was only a narrow straw-filled mattress laid on boards kept off the floor by a low frame, plainly there for such as could go no further after the surgeon had seen to them. Joliffe, helping the surgeon ease Durevis, groaning, to it, looked no more closely than he had to at the stains on the mattress but saw enough to judge they were old, of varied ages, and well-scrubbed more than once. Anyway, the mattress and the pillow there were clean enough now, and assuredly Durevis did not care, gasping as much with relief as pain as he settled onto his unhurt side.

Across the kitchen, the woman had refilled the bowl from the pot and said at her husband as she brought it back to the table with more bread, “You eat now. I’ll see to things.”

Joliffe stood aside, wondering when he would have chance at questioning Durevis, as the surgeon obeyed his wife and she came to the bed, pulled a blanket off the wall-pole above it, and covered Durevis from toes to chin before giving Joliffe a hard look and saying, “He has to rest now.”

“I have to talk to him.” Joliffe looked at Durevis, wondering if it was the drug or feigning that had his eyes so tightly closed. “While I can. He needs to tell who did this to him.”

The woman lifted one of Durevis’ eyelids and peered at his eye. Durevis made a mixed sound of protest and groan. The woman let go his eyelid, straightened from the bed. “You might get a few moments sense out of him,” she said and went back to the table to busy herself with tidying away her husband’s work while he ate.

Joliffe sat down on his heels beside the bed. In his weeks at Joyeux Repos, few words had ever passed between him and Remon Durevis. Their places in the world were too wide apart for much to ever be said. That made it all the stranger to lean close to him now and say, quiet-voiced but insistent, “Master Durevis. You have to hear me. You have to answer me.”

The squire opened his eyes, closed them again. More insistently, Joliffe said, “Durevis, you
have
to answer me. Lady Alizon is dead.”

Durevis said thickly, the words blurred, “I know. I found her.”

“You didn’t kill her?”

“Dead. She was . . . dead. Then . . .” Durevis seemed to be dragging the words from somewhere beyond the drug he had been given against the pain. “. . . he stabbed me. From behind.”

Joliffe leaned closer, trying to hold him to his senses at least a while longer. “He stabbed you. Who?”

“Did . . . not . . . see.” Whatever the surgeon had given him was gaining on him.

“It was a man, though,” Joliffe insisted.

“He ran . . . not in . . . skirts. Out the . . . gate. Behind me.”

“But you had come into the garden through the hidden door.”

“Um.”

That seemed agreement. Joliffe pressed, “Who let you in?”

Durevis slurred, “Alizon.”

Joliffe almost pointed out that she was already dead. Then his wits caught up, and he said, spacing the words to give time for each to reach Durevis’ fading mind, “She had the door unlatched for you. You were there to meet her. But you found her dead.”

“Um,” Durevis granted, so faintly that Joliffe thought to have no more from him.

But from a last drift of awareness Durevis whispered, “Lay . . . ja . . . she . . . secrets.”

The last word came clearly enough, but it was the last word. Durevis’ breath hissed from it into a long sigh, and he was altogether gone into whatever sleeping place the drug had taken him.

“H
e said ‘secrets,’ ” Master Wydeville said. “More than one of them. You’re sure of that?”

Joliffe was tired, had already answered that several times, and said, “Not to stake my soul on it, no. But sure enough otherwise.”

He was, for the first time, in Master Wydeville’s own house. When Durevis was fully asleep from the drug and likely to stay that way for several hours, according to the surgeon, he had gone to Master Doncaster’s as ordered. The weapon-master must have already had some word from Master Wydeville, because he took what Joliffe told him calmly, then led him upstairs and by way of a stoop-low door behind the wall-hanging into this small, windowless room with its squat, square, empty table, a three-legged stool, and a closed door in the opposite wall.