A Play of Treachery (30 page)

Both men obeyed while she opened this other well-oiled gate, thrust her head and shoulders out, looked both ways with over-played care, went out, and—giggling—turned to beckon Joliffe and Kechyn to her. As they joined her, she put a finger to her lips and hissed, “Ssshhhhh!” very loudly, before hooking her arm through Kechyn’s and starting to pull him along the street in a tipsy-slipsy way.

Joliffe linked his arm through the man’s other arm and copied her, giggling, too. Kechyn did not immediately get into the spirit of the business, at first only staggering because Joliffe and Perrette pulled him into it, even protesting as Perrette turned at the first corner, “This is the wrong way.” He started to point. “The harbor is . . .”

Perrette swung herself against him, stopping his arm and heartily kissed him before hissing into his face, “Just do what I do and don’t talk if you can’t sound drunk.”

He lurched a fairly convincing step back from her, giving Joliffe reason to lean hard against him as if to steady him while whispering to Perrette, “No kissing. The masking won’t hold.” As it was, he was counting on the cold to hold it a while longer than otherwise.

Perrette giggled drunkenly at him and pulled them onward. It was late enough in the night that many of the lanterns hung by doorways had gone out, leaving the streets mostly to shadows and cold starlight. Likewise, it seemed that such of the watch as might have been in the streets were gone, too—Joliffe guessed out of the cold into somewhere warm. Only a few other revelers—probably too drunk to feel the cold—and several skulking lone figures happened into sight as Perrette led them unevenly through Rouen. Kechyn grasped now what she and Joliffe were trying for, joined in their faked argument at a corner of the marketplace on which way they should go from there, and by the time they reached one of the city gateways to the quay, was lurching and singing as well as either of them.

Because tides kept their own time, there was no curfew at the harbor’s gates. Lanterns and torches blazed everywhere, there being more than one ship readying to leave on the tide’s turn, and the guards made no trouble over a drunken man and his two whores swaying past. Perrette had cut the time fine: men were starting to loose the ropes holding the
Bonhomme
to the quay. At the gang-board, a sailor placed there to keep the unwanted from going aboard demanded to see Kechyn’s coins, to show he would be a paying passenger. “But not them,” he added with a nod at Perrette and Joliffe.

“No,” Perrette agreed with shrill merriment. “Not us.” She elbowed Joliffe rudely aside, pulled Kechyn around and to her by his cloak, and gave him a long, hard kiss and a grind of her hips. In his startlement, he let his strapped sack thump to the cobbles. The sailor laughed and said something rude. Giggling, Perrette staggered back from Kechyn and sideways into Joliffe so that they tangled “drunkenly” with each other, staggering away together as Kechyn snatched up his bag and went aboard. Giggling and holding each other up, they waved and watched, making certain none but crew followed Kechyn onto the ship before the gangplank was hauled in and the ship cast off.

They went on leaning on each other and waving farewell until Perrette said, “He’s away. If he isn’t safe now, that’s how the dice rolls and it’s beyond our helping it. We’re done here. Come.”

Still playing the somewhat drunken whores, they lurched back into Rouen, Joliffe letting Perrette choose their way as she threaded them through several back alleys and passageways. They lost their seeming-drunkenness along the way, well before they came into the street where they had started. Joliffe supposed they were bound for Master Roussel’s house again, or else Doncaster’s or Wydeville’s, but as they went careful-footed along the dark slit of the passageway toward the alley, Perrette paused, snicked a latch, opened a door Joliffe had not known was there, and let them into a small room that was—guessing by the barely glowing coals on a small hearth—someone’s kitchen. Those should have been covered for the night but were not, which was good or they would have had to make their way blindly to another door and into another small room.

There, with the kitchen door shut behind them, they were in full darkness, and Perrette took him by the hand. She led him across the room, said softly, “Stairs,” and set his hand on them. In the darkness he could only tell they were of wood and steep, but he could guess they were probably also narrow, with a wall on one side and nothing on the other.

“Don’t stumble on your skirts,” Perrette said, still softly, and started up them.

Joliffe bundled his skirts up and out of his way over one arm, used his other hand to feel his way, and more or less crawled up behind her. At their top, Perrette said, “Wait,” and he listened as, invisible, she padded away from him, until with a scrape of wood on wood she opened a shutter to the lesser darkness of the night outside, relieving the room’s utter blackness but doing nothing to relieve its damnable cold. Able to see at least shapes now, Joliffe guessed by a curtained bed against the further wall that it was a bedchamber.

Crossing to the bed, Perrette pushed aside the nearer curtain, swung her cloak from her shoulders, and spread it over whatever covers were already on the bed. “It’s too late—or too early—for you to go elsewhere. I’m inviting you into my bed,” she said, a touch of laughter in her voice. “But you might want to take off your gown first.”

With a soft laugh of agreement, Joliffe freed himself from his cloak and copied her in laying it over the bed before ridding himself of the headkerchief, coif, and gown, folding them and putting them on a stool he had knocked against on his way to the bed. He was aware of Perrette undressing, too, down to her white undergown, a pale shape in the room’s darkness. In the normal way of things, in a house and with a bed, it was usual to go to bed naked, but she went no further, instead moved toward the bed, saying with a weariness that matched his own, “Come sleep now.”

Some other time Joliffe would have regretted she did not sound like she was inviting him to more than simply sleep. Just now, though, everything was so far in so many ways from where he had started the day, from what he had thought the day would be, from what the day had become, and he was now so tired, that he seemed to be moving half-brained through a strange dream that seemed to make sense now but might not in the morning when he awoke. Body and mind, he was weary; fumbling out of his doublet and hosen with increasing clumsiness, he wanted nothing so much as what she had offered—sleep.

She was in the bed now, holding the covers open for him. Still in his shirt and braies, he joined her. The sheets were as chill and damp as he had expected they would be. Sheets were always chill and damp this time of year unless there were bed-stones to warm them. And a fire to warm the bed-stones. And, with luck, a servant to warm the bed-stones and put them into the bed. Lacking servant, fire, or bed-stones, Joliffe and Perrette made do with each other—would surely have made more than do, except just then weariness and the need for warmth were stronger than lust, and when they had warmed the bed and each other enough for the shivering to stop, they fell simply to sleep, wrapped tightly together in each other’s arms.

M
atters were otherwise in the morning. Joliffe awoke first and lay for a long moment with his eyes closed, gathering memory of where he was and why, before opening his eyes to the gray light of a cloudy dawn in a strange room. Perrette was no longer in his arms. His body and mind both regretted that, until he found she had only rolled over and a little away from him in her sleep. By her breathing, she still slept, and he shifted to curve himself along the curve of her back, carefully put an arm over her, and stroked lightly at the softness of one breast. Perrette made a small murmur of pleasure and wriggled her body backward, closer to his. Joliffe presumed then to kiss her uppermost shoulder, then gently moved her long hair aside from the back of her neck and shifted his kisses to there. By then she was at least half awake and softly laughing as she rolled over, keeping in the curve of his arm to press the length of her body against his and return his kisses.

What came next came naturally, and afterward they lay, again wrapped in each other’s arms, in utter ease. It was only after a while that Perrette stirred enough to stroke a hand along his jaw and murmur, “You’re fortunate to have a pale beard. Even this morning it hardly shows.”

“It saves on shaving,” Joliffe murmured in return. His own hand began to move along the lovely curve of her hip and thigh.

She shifted slightly to show she liked that and said, teasingly, “You played the woman well last night.”

“I’ve been . . .” Despite himself, Joliffe’s hand and answer paused before he finished, “When I was a player traveling with a company and all, we all had to play every part, sooner or later.”

Perrette, now running the tip of her forefinger in invisible patterns on his chest, murmured, “You also play the man very well.”

By the shift of her hips against him, she gave him to understand she was willing for him to play the man again right now. He was ready in every way and more than willing, and afterward, replete and content, they lay for a long time silent together. Beyond the window, both the day and Rouen were fully awake, and he was so late to his secretary-duties—beyond any good excuse he could make—that he saw no point in hurrying to be out of bed. Perrette seemed to feel the same about wherever she might be supposed to be.

Only necessity finally drove them from the comforts of bed and each other, Perrette saying, “The kitchen will be warmer,” as they gathered up their clothing in shivering haste.

In the kitchen, a pottery jar set at the rear of the hearth was full of water still somewhat warm from the fire that had died on the hearth in the night. While Joliffe hurriedly washed and dressed, Perrette readied kindling and slivers of wood on the hearth, took a coal kept alive from yesterday in a small, sealed firepot, and encouraged little flames to dancing life. Then, while she washed and dressed in her turn, Joliffe tended the fire into a sufficient little blaze that they were able to break their fast with toasted bread and honey stiff from its pot.

While they ate, Joliffe had time to note not only how small the room was—narrow and short and low—and how clean—the stone-flagged floor swept; no cobwebs among the ceiling beams—but how bare of comforts. Except for the honey, there were only necessities: the fire and its fuel, a toasting fork, a long-handled spoon, and a short-legged pot hanging beside the hearth, a basin and pail of water with which to wash, a three-legged stool, a wooden box with a lid where the bread and the knife to cut it were kept, along with the honeypot and its spoon, and a lidded jug from which Perrette poured ale into a single wooden cup to share with Joliffe. Joliffe presumed there was at least a bowl in the box, too, but he did not see it. There was not even a table.

Upstairs, he had noted little beyond the comfort of the bed and of Perrette, either last night in the dark or this morning when—once he had slipped from the shelter of the bedcurtains—he had only been in haste to be downstairs; but thinking back, it seemed that room had been as bare as this one was of anything not starkly necessary. If this was Perrette’s house, he did not have to wonder if she lived alone: she seemed hardly to live here herself.

Last night and this morning did not give him any right to question her about herself, but while he crouched on his heels to toast another piece of bread, he said easily, “You know something of my past. That I’ve been a player. But I know nothing of yours.”

Perrette, seated on the stool close by, had begun combing her fingers through her hair, readying it to plait and fasten up. Her silence seemed to be all the answer she was going to give him until she said quietly, “I had family once and a home. Then the war happened. Now I have neither. I have my cousin. I have my work. There is no more.”

No more that she was going to tell him, anyway. And certainly no more that he had better ask, her silence told him.

There was something that he
had
to ask, though, and uneasily he did, because it was something he should have thought of sooner. “Um. If . . . a child . . . if there’s . . .”

“There’ll be none,” Perrette said, still quietly. “I thank you for asking, though.” She stopped combing her hair to take the toasted bread he now offered her. It was the last of the bread and she tore it in half and shared with him.

In the easiness that implied between them, Joliffe tried another question. “The fellow we helped on his way to England last night. What word is he taking to England that’s so desperate?”

“I don’t know, and you should not ask.”

“You don’t wonder?”

“I wonder. But it’s better not to know.”

There seemed nothing else to say. Joliffe ate his share of bread slowly. Perrette ate hers more quickly, plaited her hair, stood up as he finished eating, and said, “Best we go our ways now. We are surely late to our duties.”

They surely were, but putting off necessity for the moment, he held out his arms to her. She came to him readily, and they stood together, their arms around each other, the slender length of her body pressed along his, her cheek on his shoulder and his on her head nestled against his neck. For that moment, she was more real than anything else in the world. Was more warm and alive and . . .

Memory of Alizon—deliberately kept at bay for this while—came cold through his mind: Alizon lying dead and empty in the garden, with nothing of warmth or life left to her, with everything gone from her . . .

Joliffe did not know if it was because his body responded to the thought in some way Perrette felt, but from somewhere among her own thoughts, Perrette, with her face still pressed against his shoulder, asked in the same quiet way she had told of herself, “The demoiselle who was killed yesterday, she was the one who was ‘Wisdom’ in the Shrovetide play? Fair-haired and lovely?”