“It was something she ate,” Will said cheerfully. “Or ate too much of, Mother says. Amyas wore himself out with pacing back and forth along the gallery outside Mariena’s chamber until he was told she was better. Then he went to bed. Harry was there, too, but he didn’t pace; he just leaned on the railing, looking glum and keeping him company. Amyas told him to go back to bed. He said no point, what with his wife gone to help with Mariena—”
“How are you this morning?” Rose interrupted.
“Me?” Will sounded surprised at the question, as if yesterday’s fall had never happened. “I’m well. I didn’t eat whatever she did.” He turned his heed to Basset, Ellis, and Joliffe. “I almost fell on the floor laughing at you all last night! May I watch you practice today? Are you going to practice today? What are you doing tonight? I want to laugh like that some more.”
“Tonight will be something more in keeping with the marriage banns being first read,” Basset said. “Something”—he tipped a wink toward Will’s open disappointment—“only almost as much to be laughed at. And, yes, we’ll practice today, but as for watching us, won’t you be at lessons again, now Father Morice is no longer needed to clerk the marriage talks?”
“He’s going to be busy fair-copying the agreement out several times over. He has the best hand on the manor, my father says,” Will said. “With that and going to the village to say the banns, he’ll be too busy for me most of the day.” Will’s face fell. “You don’t want me to watch you, do you?”
That leap to expected disappointment seemed to come from nowhere, and Basset laid a hand on his shoulder, saying, smiling, “After we’ve broken our fast, you may watch us rehearse all morning if you want.”
Will stared at him, so openly uncertain whether Basset meant that or not that Joliffe wondered who lied to him so often he expected it. Basset must have seen Will’s uncertainty, too, because he said, “I mean it. You can watch for as long as you want, or until someone comes to fetch you.” Because, as he had otherwise said, there was never a bad time to encourage a love of plays in those who had—or, in Will’s case, would someday have—the money to pay for the playing. “It may not much benefit us here and now,” he had told Joliffe in his early days with the company, “but it may serve other player-folk when they come this way, and hopefully they’re doing likewise for us wherever they are.”
“But,” Basset said now to Will, raising a warning finger, “you must keep our secrets and not give away aforetime what you see us do here.”
“I won’t,” Will promised readily, happily. “I’m good at keeping secrets.”
“Such as?” Joliffe asked.
Will opened his mouth to answer, then broke into laughter. “I’m not going to tell you!”
They laughed with him, except for Ellis, who settled for shoving Joliffe hard on the arm, rocking him to the side. Joliffe, for more laughter, turned that into a wild-armed tottering before he windmilled himself back onto the balance he had never lost. That made Piers, Gil, and Will laugh more as they all started away to breakfast, walking slowly because of Basset’s stiffness.
Joliffe let himself wonder what they would do if this arthritic flare didn’t ease before it was time to move on again. Basset would have to ride in the cart and that would slow Tisbe and that would slow all of them, lengthening the times between when they could play. Still, that was not so desperate a matter as it might have been, not with Lord Lovell’s gold coin for comfort against lean times.
The trouble with once having that comfort was that the thought of losing it was the harder to face. They had been cast adrift as lordless players before this, when they lost their last patron’s favor. It wasn’t something Joliffe wanted to happen again, but what if he failed in the task Lord Lovell had set him and Basset? It was a vague enough task at best—determine if something had or hadn’t been wrong about a death, and whether there was or wasn’t something to be worried over about the present marriage plans. Maybe Lord Lovell would be satisfied with a vague answer at the end of it all?
Probably. He did not seem an unfair man.
But neither did he seem a man who would take less than he paid for. If their vague answer at the end included another death, how less than satisfied was he likely to be?
In a poor attempt to lighten his own dissatisfied thoughts as he trailed behind the other players across the wide yard toward the hall, Joliffe decided that would probably depend on who was dead.
Of course, if Harcourt’s death
had
been murder, why was the pattern changed? Last time the bridegroom-to-be had died. This time it was Mariena who had fallen so ill that the priest was called. And yet, despite of that, she had been so certain she would not die that she had refused his help.
Had that been merely from the blind refusal of mortality too many people had, or did it mean something else?
And were Will’s accidents only accidents, or were
they
something more than they seemed, too?
Had an attempt at murder been made against Will yesterday and another against Mariena last night?
John Harcourt’s death had disappointed Sir Edmund’s plans of a profitable alliance. Mariena’s death would make an end of any other plans forever and at all. And Will’s death would disappoint Sir Edmund’s hope of a male heir. But if someone was that set against Sir Edmund, why not just straight-forwardly kill
him
instead? Because there was more satisfaction in destroying him piecemeal? Or because someone was simply against the whole family?
The first person who came to mind that way was Harry Wyot.
What if he indeed had a deep-running resentment against Sir Edmund for his disparaging marriage to this Idonea Coket? It could be he liked his wife and still resented Sir Edmund. Sia might be able to tell him if that were likely, Joliffe hoped, and on his own he’d assuredly be taking more careful look at them together when he had the chance.
Chance didn’t come in the hall this morning, though, either to watch the Wyots or to talk to Sia. Neither she nor Avice were to be seen and there was no sign of their betters, but from the general talk and tired faces, Joliffe easily gathered everyone’s night must have been long and as fully unpleasant as Will’s telling had made it seem.
When Basset reasonably asked after the family’s health, the clerk Duffeld told him, “They’re all having their breakfasts in their chambers this morning. With all the toing and froing last night there was hardly sleep for anyone until nearly dawn.” Including him, by the look of him.
“You’re likely glad, then, that Father Morice is to copy out the marriage agreement, rather than you,” Joliffe said. Ellis looked at him sharply, instantly knowing what he was about.
Duffeld, probably bored with watching other people eat, huffed agreement with that. “I am, and he’s welcome to it. With all the ‘and ifs’ and ‘shoulds’ he and Sir Edmund and Master Breche argued into it, the thing goes on forever.”
“Worse than the one for the Harcourt marriage?” Joliffe asked. Ellis turned his back to him.
“That one,” Duffeld said with open dislike and disgust. “That one I thought would never be finished. This one is nothing to that. With the Harcourt one, every point was looked at from fifty ways and then looked at again. And then for him to die before ever . . .” The clerk broke off, shaking of his head.
“I’ve heard good of him,” Joliffe lied. “That he was well-liked and all.”
“Have you?” Duffeld seemed surprised by that but discretion held sway; he only said, “Yes, well, my lady Mariena favored him, assuredly. She was nigh ill with grief and anger after his death.”
“Anger?” Joliffe prodded lightly.
“That he could be dead. Grief takes some people that way, you know.”
Joliffe had to grant that it did. “Who was his heir?” he asked, making it sound like no more than shallow curiosity.
“A cousin of some sort. No one we ever saw.”
The other players had moved away, but there were still folk around the table, keeping the clerk in watch on them. Seeing no reason not to make use of the chance to ask him everything possible, Joliffe asked, “Sir Edmund could have pursued a marriage for Mariena with the cousin, couldn’t he? Or is the man married?”
“I’d not heard he was married, no, but Sir Edmund never seemed to think of another marriage that way. A month on, Amyas Breche began to be talked of.”
“That was Master Wyot’s doing, wasn’t it?” Joliffe said, deliberately wrong.
“Master Wyot’s?” The clerk seemed to find that both improbable and laughable. “I doubt that very much. No, assuredly not. He’d never . . .” Duffeld stopped short, abruptly disapproving, maybe of himself, and said repressively, “Master Wyot is here only as Amyas Breche’s friend. He has nothing to do with the marriage.”
Unrepressed, Joliffe asked cheerfully, as if simply making talk and not much interested in the question or any answer, “He was supposed to marry Mariena himself, wasn’t he?”
“There was brief talk of it.” The clerk was beyond repressive to curt. “It was decided otherwise.”
“Hard on Master Wyot,” Joliffe said with a sad shake of his head.
“He didn’t mind,” the clerk said coldly and walked away.
Keeping unconcern all over his face, Joliffe took a long drink from the cup he held, sorting what he had learned. Besides making clear his disapproval of the whole subject, Duffeld had confirmed that it had been Master Wyot who did not want the marriage. About the proposed Harcourt marriage he had talked freely enough, though, and what he had had to say there had been as interesting, in its way, as his not wanting to talk about Harry Wyot at all.
Ellis butted him with an elbow in his back. “We’re going. Time to work.”
In truth, the play they meant to do tonight—
The Husband Becomes the Wife
—was one they did often and at most they needed no more than an easy run through it to be sure their speeches were crisp in their heads. With Will there, though, looking vastly eager, Basset made something more of the business than he might have, telling Joliffe to wear the rough rehearsing-skirt and making show, while they walked through it, of telling Gil what to note while he watched.
The story was simply the old one of the husband who complained his wife’s life was too easy compared to his and all the misfortunes that came of him taking her place for a day. As the husband, Ellis got to swagger at first, and then fall about in hapless disasters. Joliffe as the wife got to shrill at him and flounce about, while Piers was the ill-mannered, whining child and Basset the husband’s mother-in-law, with a fine time had all around, especially by the lookers-on.
At the end of their run-through, Basset said, “That was well. I think we need not go it again.”
Ellis muttered for only Joliffe to hear that they need not have gone it this time so far as he could see: they could all do the old thing in their sleep.
Basset sat down with stiff care on the piled cushions against the cart’s wheel. Rose had been brewing one of her herbal drinks to ease his pain and he took it from her with thanks, then asked, “Gil, what do you think?”
“Skirts,” said Gil. “I need to learn more with skirts.”
“Well noted,” Basset said with approval. “Skirts and swords and how to walk across a stage . . .”
“Everybody knows how to walk,” Will protested scornfully.
“Ah,” said Basset. “That’s what you think. Everyone but Will, come stand here by me. You, too, Rose. Now you, Will, go out to where we were playing and walk back and forth for us.”
Will obeyed. Or tried to. It took him only a few steps to know he was being awkward, too conscious of all their eyes on him and nowhere else. He couldn’t make his walk go easily; it wanted to be either strut or stiff shuffle, and he couldn’t stop looking sideways at all of them watching him, until he suddenly bent over in laughter and shouted, “I can’t!”
They laughed, too, and Basset said, “Now you do it, Gil.”
Will came to sit cross-legged beside Piers while Gil went in front of them and tried to walk. He was somewhat better but still too openly aware of being watched, his stride too stiff.
“Now Joliffe,” Basset bade.
Taking Gil’s place, Joliffe asked, “What sort of walk?”
“Just a man’s stride,” Basset said.
“What sort of man?”
“A knight.”
Joliffe put hand to imaginary sword hilt and strode out as if expecting a fight.
“A clerk,” Basset said.
Joliffe was immediately carrying a bundle of books in his arms and walking the small way of someone who spent much of his time at a desk.
“A young girl.”
Joliffe’s steps turned light and his hips had a sway not there before.
“An old woman.”
Joliffe’s shoulders curved forward and he shuffled, helping himself along with a stick that was not there.
“Me,” Basset said.
Joliffe straightened and asked, “With or without the arthritic hobble?”
Piers and Will laughed. Basset told Joliffe he was a rude boy and could have done. Ellis muttered, “He’s not done; he’s half-baked,” and got up to do something else. So did Rose, but Gil sat looking deeply thoughtful and that was to the good, Joliffe thought. Like Will, too many people saw play-acting as only a matter of learning the words and walking around with people to look at you. To Joliffe and Basset and anyone else in earnest about the work, playing was a craft whose skills had to be learned like the skills of any craft; and as with every craft, some folk were better at it than others were. Ellis was good within his limits. Joliffe was better, able to play far more sorts of parts, though no one in the company—including himself—ever said as much aloud. Basset, as befitted a company-master, was good at many parts and best at seeing a play as a whole and setting them all to what they had to do. What Gil would be able to do remained to be seen but that he sat there now, thinking, promised well.
A manservant whom Joliffe recognized from the hall came around the corner of the carpentry shed, and Will stood immediately up, saying, “I’m wanted.”