Listening to Gil and Basset trade answers and questions the rest of the way back to the cartshed, Joliffe was the more sure the boy had a true instinct for their craft. There were some men who—no matter the time and training spent on them—never seemed to grasp there was more to playing than the pleasure of showing off themselves. Others could be taught, if only eventually, otherwise; and then there were some like Gil, who seemed to understand in their bones the need to take on the seeming of whom they were playing, rather than turning every person they played into himself. Gil still needed to build the necessary skills of voice and body, but he increasingly looked to be worth the training.
The cart-yard and -shed were deep in shadow save for the low red glow of their own fire to welcome them back. Rose had their beds laid out and ready and welcomed them back with a hug for Piers and questions how the playing had gone. While Basset told her, Joliffe and Ellis set the hamper near the cart, to be put away tomorrow, and Piers put the mask-box a-top it. Asking her father how he felt, Rose started to ready Piers for bed, stripping his player’s garb from him. The rest of them were likewise undressing, stripping to undergarments to go to bed, except for Joliffe who, after seeing his garb safely folded and laid on the hamper, pulled on his own hosen and doublet. Ellis at least knew why but none of the others asked him what he was doing. Only when he picked up the still-lighted lantern and started out of the shed did Ellis ask mockingly, “Where are you away to?”
Mockingly back at him, Joliffe said, “Just a walk.”
Ellis snorted and Piers laughed. Rose shushed them both, but Basset called cheerily, “
Walk
carefully!”
Joliffe waved one hand over his shoulder without looking back and kept going. The rain had softly started up again, but under the eave of the narrow way behind the stable he was dry enough and crossing the dung-yard hardly dampened him. The cow-shed was lined with cows now, their munching of hay and cud-chewing loud in the night-stillness. The lantern-light disturbed them. Hind-quarters shifted and heads lifted, throwing shadows far more giant than anything the players had managed in the hall. Joliffe made soft, cow-hushing noises at them, reassuring them he wasn’t come to attack them, and then climbed the ladder awkwardly one-handed with the lantern. Not that a lighted lantern was the best of things to have in a hayloft full of dry hay but—as he had rather expected—that problem was forethought: the hay was cleared away from the ladder’s end of the loft and there was a peg in one of the beams to hang the lantern.
No one was there. Joliffe hung the lantern, checked its candle, judged it would last to see him back to the cartshed, and took a long look around. Not that too long a look was needed. It was a hayloft, with bare roof-beams and bare wooden floorboards, where they weren’t covered by the piled hay, and that was all. What surprised him was that there was nothing else.
“The way Sia and Avice are said to go on, you’d think they’d have themselves a bed here,” Joliffe told the shadows. Besides that, he had always found hay made for prickly lying. But he’d also found that if the prick of the body’s desire was strong enough, the hay’s prick hardly mattered, and hay was better for lying on than bare boards or ground, that was certain. The hay was new enough, too, that it still smelled sweetly of summer and sun. There were worse places for lusting, and Joliffe sat himself down on the floor, his back against the wall, content to wait.
Unfortunately, his mind was not content. For preference, he would have kept himself happily occupied with thoughts of pleasures to come, but what came instead was thought of why he was here at Deneby at all. Sorting through what he had found out so far, there seemed little to go with Lord Lovell’s vague doubts and worry. John Harcourt had fallen ill and then been dead. That was common enough, with little to be made of it. It didn’t mean the same couldn’t happen to Amyas, but neither did it mean that it would. But what of Will? He’d had a fall on stairs lately, a thing that could happen to anyone, but today’s fall would have been far worse than it had been if it had come a few yards sooner. And lately he’d twice been ill. That was much misfortune for one boy in a short time.
Still, such things happened, just like John Harcourt’s sudden death.
But if they weren’t happenstance, who might have reason to want Will dead?
Amyas Breche for one. With Will dead, Mariena would be her father’s sole heir.
Or Amyas’ uncle could want it on his nephew’s behalf. A wealthy, landed nephew could be of use to a merchant.
But could either of them have had anything to do with John Harcourt’s death? From what he’d heard, Joliffe didn’t think they’d even known of Mariena then. They might have, though, by way of Harry Wyot, and found some way to bribe someone here to poison Harcourt . . . The likelihood of that seemed thin. They couldn’t have been certain Sir Edmund would turn to Amyas for Mariena’s next betrothed, and there were surely other valuable marriages to be had for far less trouble. Nor did Amyas seem so besotted with Mariena that he’d kill for the chance to have her. And while it would be to Amyas’ profit to have Will dead and Mariena sole heir of Deneby, why start trying to have him dead before being certain of Mariena?
There was still Harry Wyot to consider. He’d gain nothing by Will’s death, any more than he was going to gain by Mariena’s marriage, and Joliffe couldn’t make it likely that he’d do it for Amyas’ gain, however good friends they were. Revenge against Sir Edmund was possible, of course. There must have been quarrel between them when Harry Wyot refused Mariena. Had it been bad enough—or was his present marriage bad enough—that he wanted revenge on Sir Edmund, even if it meant bettering Mariena, whom he must not like or he would have married her?
But Will’s fall today had been by way of a loosened girth. If it wasn’t the stableman’s fault, then someone had pulled the buckle loose while riding and hoped for Will’s fall on the rocks. But today Harry Wyot and his wife had been riding together. If he had loosened that girth, she had to know of it and their marriage would have to be a sound one if he trusted her with a secret about him like that, and that took away revenge for a bad marriage as reason to harm Will. Damn.
Who else was there to consider? Mariena for one, Joliffe supposed. Head tilted back against the post, he frowned up at the underside of the thatch-covered roof. She would gain by her brother’s death, most assuredly, and have better chances at hurting him than Amyas or Harry Wyot did. But murder? Lust was one thing, murder was another. He might as well consider Lady Benedicta while he was at it. And why not? Her affection for Will seemed thin. Even though she was presently out of humour with her daughter, she might prefer Mariena’s betterment to that of a son favored by a husband for whom she didn’t care, if the servant-talk was right—and servant-talk was usually right about things like that. Forced into one childing after another by a husband wanting more sons, she might be seeking now to hurt that husband in one of the few ways left to her—by taking his one son away from him.
But surely she could find better ways than falls on stairs and loosened saddle-girths, and other times than now, with so many people around. Mariena would benefit whenever Will died. Later would do as well as now.
It was Harry Wyot who couldn’t count on having other chances at the boy.
Except Joliffe didn’t see that he had a reason to want Will dead.
Come to that, Joliffe couldn’t see any sufficient reason for anyone to take the risk to have Will dead. Being caught at murder and risking danger of damning one’s soul to Hell were large chances to take for
any
reason, whether for revenge or gain, and he couldn’t see there was that much to gain here. Not set against the risk involved.
So there was no reason anyone would want John Harcourt dead and no one was trying to kill Will and he was wasting his time trying to find answers to pointless questions, he thought disgustedly. If he was going to go making twists and turns, why not take up the possibility that a whole array of people, unbeknownst to each other, wanted Will dead for a whole array of different reasons, and one after another were trying for him. That worked as well as anything else he had come up with. No. The simplest way to see things was that John Harcourt had died of a sickness and that Will was having a run of bad fortune. There. No more problems. Everything settled and taken care of. No more need to think about the matter anymore at all. Or of anything else except of Sia now softly calling up the ladder, asking if he were there. About her, he was very ready and more than willing to think.
Chapter 10
Knowing what was expected of him as well as what he expected, Joliffe stood up and went to meet her as she came up the ladder. With her skirts to hold, the climbing was not easy, and he took her arm to help her the last way, steadying her as she stepped from the ladder. Her smile rewarded him for that as she slid a folded blanket off her shoulder, where she had been carrying it, saying as she handed it to him, “I brought this to make us the more comfortable.”
“Wise as well as lovely,” Joliffe said, bending to take a quick kiss from her ready lips. She stretched toward him, plainly willing for others, but those would come. He was never in favor of hurrying these things if it could be helped, and he turned his back on her, leaving her wanting more as much as he did while he made show of shaking out the blanket and throwing it across the low-mounded hay nearest to them. As he bent to pull it more even, Sia came close behind him, stroked her hands down his sides to his hips, and then pulled him against her. As he straightened up, she pushed her breasts against his back and slid her hands around him and upward, under his doublet’s lower edge.
Her boldness was enough to raise any man’s . . . lust, and Joliffe’s very certainly rose. He turned, took her in his arms, and gave the long kiss they both wanted. When they had to pause for breath, Sia began to unfasten his doublet. While she did, he explored her body with his hands, until she had finished and he drew back a little from her, gazing into her flushed face, ready for her lips again but holding back while he shrugged out of his doublet. Then, with it off and tossed aside, he took his turn, beginning to unlace the long opening down the front of her gown to come at her breasts. Sia’s hands in return slid under his shirt and up, warm over his bare flesh.
With her gown undone enough for him to come at the drawstring of her undergown, he loosened that and pulled her gown open and her undergown down, baring one of her breasts. Cupping it with his hand, he bent to kiss it. Sia moaned with pleasure, her head bending back, opening her throat to more kisses. Her legs giving way, she began to sink down. He caught her and lowered her onto the blanket and himself on top of her. But one part of his mind was still detached from what they were doing and he slid aside, onto his side beside her. She made a wordless sound of protest and rolled onto her side, too, holding on to him. He did not resist. His own hands were too busy pulling up her skirts. But he asked, forcing the question past his lust, hard though the words came, “Have you done aught against childing?” Because whatever his other desires, he had no desire to leave bastard children behind him.
Sia gasped, somewhere between her passion and unexpected laughter, and pulled back from him, not away but only enough to look into his face. “There’s none ever asked me that before.”
“And doesn’t the unexpected add to pleasure,” Joliffe said. He had no fear of losing what they were doing, enjoyed prolonging their sport. Finding her bare thigh under her skirts, he stroked his hand along it. Sia sighed, her eyes closing, her hips moving with the pleasure of his touch. “You haven’t answered,” he whispered.
She whispered back, “There’s no fear. We all know what to do. Ummm. That’s good. Don’t stop.”
He stopped. “You do what?”
Sia twisted in protest and opened her eyes. “What?”
“What do you do?”
On the edge of laughter, she said, “We’ve pennyroyal and rue and one thing and another, not to fear.” She stretched, wiggled a little to settle herself deeper into the hay, and—not by chance, Joliffe was sure—let her gown fall more away from her breasts, which she lifted toward him with an arching of her back while she added, “The trouble is keeping enough for us, what with my lady wanting so much for herself.”
Even as he leaned forward to take the invitation of her breasts, Joliffe wished she had not said that. He kissed where she wanted him to, but his mind was going somewhere else, and regretting his curiosity even as he gave way to it, he began to work his way up her throat with more kisses, asking between them, “Does . . . Sir Edmund . . . know . . . she . . . wants . . . no more . . . children?”
Sia bent her head back to take his kisses as she breathed, “Who knows what Sir Edmund knows.”
“He doesn’t take his pleasures elsewhere?” Joliffe whispered back, making it plain with his hand under her skirts where he meant to take his own pleasure.
Sia writhed, and answered on a gasp, “He doesn’t.” She found her hand’s way into Joliffe’s short braies. It was his turn to gasp as she whispered, “More’s the pity for Lady Benedicta.”
Holding to a last shred of curiosity, Joliffe forced out, “There’s no love lost between them, then?”
“None . . .” Sia’s hand was making use of all it was discovering and Joliffe groaned. “. . . that I’ve ever noted.” Without warning, she pulled her hand out of his braies, instead slid it up under his shirt again, making a small torture of pausing his pleasure even as she moved against him, urging him onward to her own. He caught her hand and tried to force it back where he wanted it to be. She brought his hand, instead, to where she wanted it, saying into his ear, her breath cool over his heated flesh, “I won’t get with child if you have me. I promise. With all the men whose longings I’ve eased and no child yet . . .” Satisfied as Joliffe began to pull her skirts altogether up, out of his way, she began to work at loosening the drawstring of his braies, finishing, “. . . I do know what to do.”