"Does he think everyone is as pleased about this marriage as they seem to be?"

"I gather so. In truth, if I were asked, I'd say there was a general eagerness to have Mariena married and out of here."

"No sign that Mariena doesn't want this marriage?" Joliffe asked.

"By what Father Morice says, she's very willing to be married and away."

"And Lady Benedicta has no objection to it?" Though Joliffe would be very surprised if she did, given the irk between her and her daughter.

"I asked that directly of Father Morice, under seeming concern that we not rub folk the wrong way with over-playing the joys of marriage to someone who might not be so happy about it. *Is her mother, for one, quite resigned to losing her daughter?' I asked."

"And he said?"

"He said with somewhat staggering bluntness that Lady Benedicta just wants to have her married and gone. More than that, I had the feeling that so does Father Morice."

And yet Lady Benedicta had been unwilling for Harry Wyot to marry her, which would have got her out of here far sooner. Thinking on that, Joliffe said slowly, "From what I've seen, Lady Benedicta and Mariena don't get on, true, but I can't tell if that's merely for the present or something more."

"That's something long-set between them," Ba.s.set answered with firm certainty. "Given the chance, Father Morice does like to talk. I said something slight about mothers and daughters going through a difficult time, and he said from all he's heard, it's a time they've been going through since Mariena was small. She likes to have her own say about everythinga"final say, mind youa"and goes angry if she doesn't get it. That sets her at cross-purposes with Lady Benedicta, who's not minded to give over being mistress of the household to her."

"So it stands that the sooner Mariena is married and gone to a household of her own, the happier they'll both be," Joliffe said.

"Them and everyone else, I'd say," said Ba.s.set.

"You know," said Ellis, "it could be no more than all the dislike going on around him that's troubling Will. It would keep me ready to duck, that's sure."

"It could account, too," Ba.s.set said thoughtfully, "for Sir Edmund going after the Breche marriage instead of waiting for better, if the difference was made up by having a happy home in its stead."

"Were there other offers for her?" Joliffe asked quickly.

"What Father Morice said was that when the Breche offer for her came, Sir Edmund took it on the leap. Mind you, it's a rich marriage and no disparagement to the girl."

"Is Sir Edmund badly enough in debt to need a quick, rich marriage?"

"Or is maybe his daughter in need of a quick marriage, rich or otherwise, for another reason," Ellis said meaningfully. "She had a betrothed she expected to marry."

"She'd be showing by now if she'd done anything beyond bounds with Harcourt," Ba.s.set said. "Nor is she likely to have had chance with anyone since then."

Joliffe kept to himself what he knew about her that way, partly because he thought that Mariena probably valued her place in the marriage market too highly to give herself freely to anyone, however much she took delight in stirring a man to l.u.s.t. In truth, part of her delight in that might come from never satisfying a man once she had roused him.

Only with that thought did he face how much he had come to dislike her.

"Altogether," Ba.s.set said, "I'd say we've learned nothing except this is an unhappy family and may be the happier once Mariena is married and gone."

"Not if the trouble runs deeper," Joliffe said. "Not if matters have never been mended between Sir Edmund and his wife since she strayed. And don't tell me they've had two children since then and still share a bed," he added at Ellis, "because none of that means anything is mended at all."

Ellis, who had started to open his mouth, shut it again, looking darkly at Joliffe, who gave him no heed him and asked Ba.s.set, "Did you learn anything about Sir Edmund that we didn't know?"

Ba.s.set brooded on his answer before finally saying, "I'm trying to think whether Father Morice deliberately avoided talk of him, or if it only seems that way. I know I made openings he could have talked into, if he'd wanted."

"You did that," Ellis said. "You did everything but ask him openly to tell you what he knew about Sir Edmund."

Ba.s.set made a frowning, agreeing nod to that. "I did," he granted. "And he never took the chance. He talked enough about Lady Benedicta and Mariena, but not about Sir Edmund at all. I wonder why."

"Discretion," Ellis said. "He's the man's priest after all."

"He's priest to everyone here," Ba.s.set pointed out.

"Fear?" asked Joliffe, keeping to the question.

"Of what?" Ba.s.set asked.

"Of the same thing Will is afraid of?" suggested Joliffe.

"Which is?" Ba.s.set returned.

They all fell silent, no answer among them, until Ba.s.set folded his hands across his belly, leaned back against the cart wheel, and said, "I'm going to nap on it a while," and shut his eyes. Ellis stood up and went out. Joliffe sat a few moments more, then went to get his writing from the cart and sat down in his corner to work a while more at the problem of Dux Moraud's repentence of his terrible sins. As the play went now, when confronted with the dire consequence of his greatest sin, the duke was supposed to cry out, "Jesu have mercy on my corrupted soul," fall p.r.o.ne before the altar, and lie there while an avenging angel spoke at length unto him, until finally the duke was allowed to say how badly he felt about the whole business and promise to do better hereafter.

Given the line of corpses his sin left through the course of the play, that finish struck Joliffe as altogether too easy, both for the duke and for the player playing him. Ellis wouldn't thank him for making the part more difficult, but then Ellis never thanked him for anything, so that made no difference, Joliffe thought with a wide smile to himself. He briefly tickled himself under his chin with the feathered end of his quill, considering, then began to write.

Ellis returned. Rose and Ba.s.set both awoke, and while Ba.s.set moved arounda"loosening his sorry joints, he saida"Piers, Gil, and Tisbe returned, bringing firewood. Ellis complained that not much of it was dry. Piers said he was welcome to go hunt for dry wood in the wet woods himself if he thought he could do better. Rose said it was time for someone to fetch their supper from the kitchen, and since Ellis and Piers seemed to have so much strength to spare, why didn't they? They left, still wording happily at each other, and Joliffe put away his writing, ready to turn his mind to this evening's work and give over thinking about both Dux Moraud and everything there mighta"or might nota"be wrong here at Deneby.

In the hall, with all the work of settling the marriage agreement done and the first banns read, everyone seemed in a festive humour, ready for the fall-about sport of The Husband Becomes the Wife. While the players waited in the screens pa.s.sage, Ba.s.set had time to judge the level of general merriment and said, "I think we should do it *with them' tonight."

Joliffe, Ellis, and Piers all made muted groan together. It was one thing to do the play as it was, but "with them" meant they drew the audience into it as well, and while that made much more sport for the audience, it made much more work for them.

Giving their groans no heed, Ba.s.set went on, "Piers, you and Will can be twins. I think we should best leave Mariena and Lady Benedicta out of it?" He looked at Joliffe, who nodded ready agreement with that. "But Sir Edmund may join in if Will does, and that would be good. Maybe Amyas or Harry Wyot for the table . . ."

He went on quickly laying out his plan, and then it was time to begin, far too late, Joliffe thought, to smother Ba.s.set, hide his body in the hamper of properties, and escape into the night. Instead, perforce, they sallied forth and set to being merry. For this play, he and Ellis switched their usual parts, with Joliffe the husband and Ellis the wife, looking unlikely in a deliberately ill-fitted gown and over-large ap.r.o.n that overwhelmed Joliffe when given over to him along with the housekeeping.

It quickly became clear that Ba.s.set had read the hall a-right. Whether from plain high spirits or a plenitude of wine, everyone Ba.s.set gathered from behind the tables into the playing area came readily and with laughter. Will came eagerly to be Piers' "twin," their business being to lie on their backs and at the most awkward moments pretend to be wailing babies. Amyas became a table, down on all fours in the square laid out for the unhappy couple's cottage, his laughter a constant threat to the plate and bowl set on his back. Harry Wyot was willingly the hearth, sitting cross-legged and waving his arms over his head to be rising smoke, although when the Husband laid sticks across his lap and set a kettle there, he laughed so hard along with everyone else that he nearly fell over.

With Joliffe confined to the "cottage" as the husband making a desperate mess of everything he tried to do, Ba.s.set and Ellis kept busy pulling one person and another from behind the tables to play "neighbors" come to call, including Father Morice (with Ba.s.set at his back to urge him on), who walked into the cottage, pretended horror at what he saw, signed a cross in the air, cried, "G.o.d's mercy on you all," and retreated; but that was enough to bring on roars of laughter from one end of the hall to the other.

It was all something the players had done uncounted times before here and all went as it usually did. Some people fell into the game eagerly, over-playing their part to everyone's delight, including their own. Some, not sure at all what they should do, gamely tried, able to rise to nothing more than stiff dignity until released back to their places. But they all tried. Only Sir Edmund did not rise to the moment when Will forsook being a baby to jump up and run to help Ba.s.set bring him into the game. Pulled by his son, Sir Edmund came, and when Will had flung himself down beside Piers on the blanket that was their "cradle" and begun to wail and kick again, Sir Edmund let Ba.s.set guide him through the cottage doorway and even said, as Ba.s.set had directed but very stiffly, "Ho, good neighbor, aren't we going fishing today?"

Joliffe, pretending a particularly frantic moment of trying to quiet the wailing "babies" by dandling over them a bright cloth ball on the end of a stick, turned with a despairing, "Here. Quiet these brats if you can," thrusting the bauble toward him. Always before, whoever was there had taken the sticka"out of surprise if nothing elsea"and dandled it over the babies, who immediately fell to quiet cooing. Sir Edmund did nothing. Neither took the stick, nor moved. Only stood there, rigid, blank-faced, staring at Joliffe. For a perilous moment the whole headlong forward rush of the play was in danger of stumbling. But Ellis, probably reading Sir Edmund's back, entered sooner than "she" might have, coming into the cottage declaring loudly, "What is this wailing, these cries of grief? What have you done to my darlings dear? Have you been deeply into the ale, that even the children you can't calm?" With bustle and busyness, "she" hurried Sir Edmund out of the cottage, for Ba.s.set to return to the high table while "she" s.n.a.t.c.hed the bauble from Joliffe and quieted the children and set the play on to its roaring finish and a loud beating of goblets and spoons on tabletops by all the lookers-on, even Sir Edmund as if nothing awry had happened.

Despite they were tired to their bones, the players made their way back to the cartshed satisfied with the evening. After a little talk and a little ale around the fire and general agreement that they could put everything away in the morning, they made for their beds. It being Joliffe's turn to bank the fire once their blankets were warmed, he was the last to lie down. By then Gil was slackly asleep with his mouth a little open, Ba.s.set was gently snoring, and Ellis was tucking a blanket higher around Piers' neck with a tenderness that told Piers was soundly asleep already, too. All his angelic look was on him, his lashes soft on his rounded cheeks, a small smile curving his lips, everything belying what he was when awake. Ellis, turning, finding Joliffe's look on Piers, scowled, maybe angry at being caught in such open tenderness, but Joliffe said quietly, to disturb no one else, "He's better off than Will is, our Piers."

Ellis cast a scornful glance around them. "I don't see it." But then added grudgingly, "Aye, he's not frightened, for one thing. And he's loved and wanted." His look sharpened on Joliffe. "Though I'd break my own neck before telling him as much."

Joliffe held up his hands in silent a.s.surance that he'd keep Ellis' secret. But Ellis was looking past him, eyes a little widening, and Joliffe looked over his own shoulder to see Rose was pulling Ellis' mattress from its place beside the fire to beside her own bedding.

Turning back to Ellis, he asked, low-voiced, "No token on the cowshed for you tonight?"

"Shut up," Ellis muttered, equally low, starting past him toward Rose.

"Poor Avice," Joliffe murmured. "Thwarted of her prey."

"Poor the other one," Ellis muttered back. "She got you."

Joliffe did not disabuse him with the truth. Why hand rocks to someone who enjoyed stoning you? Instead, listening to Ellis and Rose settling together behind him, he finished settling the fire and slid into his own bed, glad that at least sleepa"if nothing elsea"was in his reach. But as he burrowed against his thin pillow, he found himself considering what Ellis had said about Piers being loved and wanted. Wasn't Will both loved and wanted? As heir, as the son who would carry on his father's name and blood, he had to be; and yet, once asked, the question sat uneasily among Joliffe's other thoughts.

Why?

Joliffe wrapped his blanket more tightly to him and thought about it. What had he seen or heard that made him uneasy over it? Put to it, he could name nothing. If only as his only son, his heir, at least Sir Edmund must value Will. Or did Sir Edmund know something more about his wife's unfaithfulness than others did? Had there beena"or did he suspect there had beena"a later lover than the one so readily talked of? Did he doubt the boy was truly his?

But Sir Edmund gave no sign of resenting Will, seemed neither to neglect nor abuse him. Nor was it his father that Will feared. Ba.s.set had said Will was relieved this afternoon when told it was his father who wanted him. In truth, everything Joliffe had seen between them had looked like affection.

Looked like affection.

Seemed neither to neglect nor abuse him.

More awake than he had hoped to be by now, Joliffe held his choice of words up in his mind and studied them.

Why "seemed"? Why "looked"? Whata"of the little he had seen between Sir Edmund and Willa"gave him this feeling of something not right? He could think of nothing he'd seen or heard to make him doubt Sir Edmund's affection for Will. So far as Joliffe had seen or heard, Sir Edmund said and did what he should both for and with Will.

Sir Edmund said and did.

Sir Edmund seemed and looked.

Sir Edmund said and did and seemed and looked but . . . There was a hollowness behind it.

Rain had begun to fall again, a quiet pattering on the cartshed's thatch and yard, perfect to accompany him into sleep, but Joliffe held awake, caught by his thoughts, wondering from where that one had come.

Then he knew.

He had told Gil that a player needed to have layers in his mind while at his playinga"that whatever pa.s.sions were being outwardly played, an inner layer of the mind had to keep watch and control over all. In good time Gil would learn, too, that, beyond that, a player had to regard not only the pa.s.sions of the person he played but the pa.s.sions of all the others on stage, the better to play off them while they played off him, weaving the play into a tight-bound whole. Without that, a play was dead even while the players spoke and moved through their parts.

When Joliffe had first joined Ba.s.set's company there had been a player in ita"Serle; that had been his namea"who played faultlessly in every outward seeming, yet gave nothing to anyone else on the stage with him. To play on stage with Serle had been much like playing to a wooden post. He said the words and made the gestures that went with whatever was supposedly taking place between him and anyone else, but nothing did take place between them. No matter what part he played or with whom he played it, all he gave was a flat front. He had given the needed words and gestures but with never a sense he felt any of it, and whatever another player tried to give him to bring the business alive between them had died somewhere in the air between them.

He had left Ba.s.set's company for a larger one a few months after Joliffe joined, seen away with Ba.s.set's good wishes. But afterwards Ba.s.set had said, "He'll do better there than here. They won't ask so much of him and that's what they'll geta"not much of him." And had added in answer to Joliffe's questioning look, "You meet them sometimes, his sort. There are women like him, too. You can give them your heart's core and it means no more to them than a rotted apple. They're useless in life because they care for nothing but themselves and they're useless on stage for the same reason." Then Ba.s.set had pointed a sudden, fierce finger at Joliffe. "And if I ever catch you at anything so feeble as unfeeling playing, I'll stick-wallop you the next three miles we travel."

Sir Edmund reminded Joliffe of long-unthought-of Serle. Why?

Because when he had tried to thrust the fool's bauble into Sir Edmund's hand tonight, he had been looking straight into Sir Edmund's eyes at that moment, and out of all the responses Sir Edmund could have had, there had been nothing. The players had played that game enough to know the responses there could be: laughter, eagerness, confusion, uncertainty, even offense. None of them had shown on Sir Edmund's face. Looking into Sir Edmund's eyes had been like looking into emptiness.

At the time there had been no time to think about it. Joliffe had simply swung away from him, intent on not letting the play falter. Only now, thinking back on it, did he see how like to long-forgotten Serle Sir Edmund had been in that moment. That emptiness had been there. For Serle nothing had mattered beyond himself. Was it that way with Sir Edmund? Or maybe was it not so much that nothing mattered as that everything beyond himself was no more than a puppet-show, that everyone around him were no more than puppets for his usea"some puppets of more use, others of less; good puppets doing easily what he wanted from them, bad puppets needing to be forced.

Or killed?

In that moment of trying to bring him into the game, Joliffe had been a "bad puppet," had been outside the part Sir Edmund allowed to him. If he had persevered, would Sir Edmund have simply, coldly crushed the sport and Joliffe with it, as he would have a fly that would not leave off troubling him? Because in his stare there had been no more regard for Joliffe than that. And for all that he had smiled when he talked with Lady Benedicta in her chamber, his eyes had been as blank on her as they had been on Joliffe. That had been what made Joliffe uneasy without he could name why. What Sir Edmund had been doing outwardly had been linked to nothing inward. There had been a hollow ring behind every seemingly true note he had struck.

How many years now had Lady Benedicta lived with that blank gaze turned on her above a smile she must have long since come to hate?

And Will and Mariena? Sir Edmund feigned "father" as well as he did "husband" and "lord of Deneby." Knowing nothing better, was it enough for thema"that seeming? Or was their father's coldness corroding something in them? Were Mariena's willfulness and furious humours her shield against him? And did Will take the other way, being ready to his father's wishes in hope of keeping safely inside the circle of his father's approval, not understanding how false-based that approval was?

And John Harcourt. Had he in some way strayed too far from whatever puppet-place Sir Edmund had for him, somehow given too great offense and been killed because of it? Had he gone beyond Sir Edmund's tolerance, and Sir Edmund killed him to be done with him?

Joliffe lay for a long while in the dark, listening to the rain rustle in the thatch, trying to fit that possibility into the rest of what he knew and suspected, but there were too many questions to make a comfortable fit of it yet. It was like all the rest of lifea"too many questions and nearly no answers.

Only eventually, and not happily, did he find his way into sleep.

Chapter 16.

At its beginning, the next day went much the way of the day before. Through the morning, while the rain made uneven effort to keep falling, the players briefly worked through The Baker's Cake for that night; then Ba.s.set took up teaching Gil again, still helping him find how to lighten his voice into a girl's.

"Not *seeming' of a girl's voice," Ba.s.set told him. "If you try to *seem' like a girl, the falseness will make farce, whether you want farce or no. Joliffe, show him. Do Con-stance, I think. First, as if you meant it."

From his corner beyond the cart, Joliffe paused trying to prod Dux Moraud into likelihood and said, "Alas, what wonder is it that I weep, that shall be sent into strange lands, far from friends that tenderly till now did keep," in the n.o.ble, saddened voice of the ill-fated queen.

"Now *seem' to be her," Ba.s.set directed.

Joliffe promptly said the same but this time with a shrill lift to his voice.

"You hear the difference?" Ba.s.set asked. "The first was a woman's voice. The second was a man working to sound like a woman. Now try again."

By mid-day when the players crossed the yard to dinner, the rain was given way to an uncertain mix of broken sun and clouds. Through the meal Joliffe watched Sir Edmund at the high table as best he could without seeming to, hoping either to put aside his last night's thoughts or fully convince himself, by strong light of day, that he had seen what he'd seen. He failed of either, just as he had fairly failed with Dux Moraud this morning, and was glad to agree to take Tisbe out to graze this afternoon, leaving Gil to Ba.s.set and Piers to his mother, who was readying to sew new hosen for him and wanted the use of his legs for measuring before she cut the cloth.

"Though I'm sorry for Tisbe," Piers called as Joliffe led her away. "Spending the afternoon with you."

"Not so sorry as she is when she has to spend it with you," Joliffe said back at him.

"It's me I'm most sorry for," Ellis growled. "I have to put up with the other of you, no matter who goes."

Joliffe laughed and kept going, not bothering to sling more words. He had his writing box in a bag over his shoulder, was looking forward to time on his own, hoping to work a little further through the problem of the evil Moraud.

Sir Edmund, Mariena, and a servant were just riding over the drawbridge as he neared the gateway. Sir Edmund had kept his word thena"that she could go with him to the second reading of the banns. That no one else was with them was no great surprise; today's reading would be the same as yesterday's. The surprise lay not in no one else going but in Sir Edmund's courtesy to Father Morice in going again. It gave Joliffe pause in his thoughts against the man. But only pause. Of all the virtues, courtesy might be the easiest to feign, needing only outward show of it at no great cost.

That Mariena would bother herself to go was not a surprise at all, since it gave her excuse to be away from her mothera"probably to Lady Benedicta's relief as much as her own, Joliffe thought, watching them ride away toward the village while he crossed the drawbridge with Tisbe. Beyond the drawbridge he went left by a trackway that curved first along the moat, then away along the headland between two ploughed fields. A stretch of woodland lay beyond them and the track turned again, to run along the outer edge of the field, between it and a narrow band of rough pasture before the trees began. It was pasture that had been well-grazed, though, and he led Tisbe onward, supposing he would find somewhere better before he reached the village's common land.

Following the curve of the woods around the fields, he was maybe midway between manor house and village and well away from both when the woods opened away from him into a large bay of open ground and long gra.s.ses. Sometime there had been a cutting back of the woods here, almost enough to begin another field, though not lately if judged by the well-grown scrub closing in around its edges. Likely it had been an intake of land begun when there were more people at Deneby and need for more land, meaning probably eighty or so years ago, before the Great Pestilence made such a killing of people that afterwards there was more than land enough for those folk who were left. Joliffe could just remember, at the edge of childhood memory, his grandfather remembering that pestilence from the very farthest edge of his own very-long-past childhood. Only he and his mother had survived out of their family. She had married again and had more children. Joliffe's grandfather had grown up and generously done what he could to repeople England by way of three wives and ten children; and most of them had generously done what they could by having children of their own. However much he had sometimes wished it otherwise, Joliffe had never been a poor, lone orphan left to make his own hard way in the world. He had had to make especial effort to go so far astray from all his family as he had.

He had also strayed far enough just now for his present purpose. Since the forest had not closed on the clearing again, the land must be used for grazing sometimes, even if not lately. Tisbe would not make difference enough to offend anyone, and there was an up-thrust rock against which he could lean if the ground was not too wet, or else sit on to stay dry. If the rain held off, the place would suit well; and when he had hobbled Tisbe and turned her loose, he matted down the gra.s.s beside the rock, judged it sufficient between him and the ground for a while at least, and made himself comfortable, his writing box on his knees. He left the box closed, though; closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the rock, thinkinga"just as he had feared he woulda"not about Dux Moraud and his sins but back to last night's wondering.

Was everything that had happened here at Deneby of latea"from John Harcourt's death to Will's accidents to Mariena's illnessa"no more than life's usual unshaped chances? Or was there a link between all those different things that made them part of some same thing? A thing still going dangerously on?

Dangerous to whom?

There was a good question. The last bridegroom had died and Lord Lovell was uneasy enough about that on Amyas Breche's behalf for the players to be here, but thus far there was no sign of any threat against Amyas. Will and Mariena were the two who had suffered of late. Were those maybe someone's revenge for John Harcourt's death?