Ellis, Rose, and Joliffe had already risen to their feet, Ellis and Joliffe bowing, Rose making a curtsy. Will waved an easy acknowledgment that excused Basset doing the same while he said, “You’re not practicing anything today?”
“Done this morning, I fear,” said Basset.
“Oh.” Will sighed his disappointment. “You’d have to stop anyway, I suppose. My mother sent me to ask if someone of you could come to sing or play music or something for her and the others while they’re sewing Mariena’s new gown.”
Joliffe gave him deep bow. “That will be me, and most assuredly I’ll come and with pleasure. Give me but leave to fetch my lute and then you may show me the way.”
Joliffe’s excess of manners brought back Will’s smile. “They’re where they were yesterday. You can find them well enough. I’m going to go find Piers and Gil.”
“Before anybody catches you to run more errands?” Basset asked, conspirator to escaping prisoner.
“Before anybody catches me for anything,” Will said.
“Would you like,” Basset offered, “to stay here and I’ll tell you all the stories my grandson is tired of hearing but I’m not tired of telling?”
Already started to turn away, Will missed the sharp looks Joliffe, Rose, and Ellis all gave Basset; and by the time Will turned back, asking, “Stories?,” their faces were as bland as Basset’s, and Joliffe was going to the cart for his lute.
“Stories,” Basset assured him. “Come sit here beside me. Take Joliffe’s cushion.”
Basset was well away into a tale of King Arthur as Joliffe left the cartshed, his lute hung around his shoulder and easier in mind than he would have been if Will was not there safe with Basset and the others instead of gone off alone in search of Piers and Gil. Unhappily, that ease of mind told him how deeply his suspicion was set that all was not as right as it might be here at the manor of Deneby.
Chapter 14
For those who were only minstrels, with no need to be aught else, their trade truly was to sing for their suppers. Players crossed a wider range of skills, it serving a company well to have as many skills as possible among its people, to meet whatever an occasion brought. Joliffe, going up the curve of the tower stairs toward Lady Benedicta’s chamber, was wondering what this occasion would bring.
If nothing else, it would give him another chance to see how things went among the womenfolk here and how better Mariena was or was not.
The door to the chamber stood open, but as Joliffe neared it, the silence from the chamber beyond was so complete that he wondered briefly if the women had left, had maybe gone up to take the air on the tower’s top or some such thing, and he would have to follow them. As he reached the doorway, though, he saw Lady Benedicta and Idonea Wyot were on the window bench, where the weakling sunlight fell most strongly, while Mariena sat on a chair nearby, to Joliffe’s eyes seeming none the worse for her night’s illness. They were all of them stitching at the rich blue cloth of Mariena’s new gown, and at his light knock they all looked toward him—Idonea Wyot with what seemed hopeful relief; Mariena eagerly, probably glad for any diversion; Lady Benedicta with the same cold nothing as yesterday. But she remembered his name, saying, “Joliffe, is it not? Come in. We’re in need of something to pass this sewing time for us less tediously. You sing, I take it?”
Joliffe made her a respectful bow. “You will be the judge of that, my lady.”
With the narrowest of smiles, she nodded agreement and gestured for him to sit on the chest at the bedfoot. That put him at an angle to them rather than fully facing, which did not matter since it was his singing they wanted, not his face, while by looking sidewise from his lowered eyes he could see them all well enough. Bent over his lute while bringing it into tune, he said, watching them, “We were all sorry to hear of my lady’s trouble in the night. I hope she’s well-recovered?”
Mariena opened her mouth to reply, but Lady Benedicta said first, coldly, “It was a passing indigestion, nothing more, with too much made of it.”
Mariena closed her mouth into a tight line and said nothing.
Stroking the lute’s strings, finding they were ready, Joliffe said mildly, “Something she ate then.”
Lady Benedicta gave him a sharp look, followed by an equally sharp glance at her daughter, who met her look darkly, not hiding her anger. At what?
Idonea Wyot merely huddled further over her sewing, shoulders curved forward and head down as if readying for a storm, while Joliffe went on easily, “Is there aught you’d care to hear first, my ladies?”
Again, Mariena made to answer. Again Lady Benedicta cut her off, saying, “I leave it to you.”
Again Mariena’s mouth tightened over in-held words. Was she subdued by her night’s ordeal? Or was she for some reason become wary of her mother? She had certainly not been wary of her before. If she was now, why was she? John Harcourt had fallen ill and died here. Now Mariena had been ill. She hadn’t died, though. And why would her mother want her dead anyway, however much dislike there seemed to be between them? Why even want her ill, for that matter, given the trouble it had surely caused for most of the night? But then, come to it, why would Lady Benedicta have wanted John Harcourt dead?
He had yet to find
why
John Harcourt might have been murdered, let alone by whom. But he noted that “yet” in his thought, even as he started to sing a song he thought matched the women’s grey and lowering humour, that seeming the better way to go, rather than against them. His voice low and sad to match the words as he sang, “Alone walking, in thought ’plaining, sore sighing, death wishing both early and late . . .”
There were a good many verses, useful for those times when one was particularly ready to feel miserable, but watching the women, Joliffe judged by the sixth one that they were ready for a change and let the song fade away into a quietness of plucked strings before suddenly thrumming forward into the merry, “Of a rose, a lovely rose, of a rose I sing a song. Listen, hearken, both old and young, how the rose even now hath sprung . . .”
Words and music skipped quick as sunlight over rippling water, and the women were caught by surprise. Idonea Wyot raised her head, looking on the edge of laughter. Mariena dropped her sewing and clapped her hands with delight. Lady Benedicta, who had been paused at her sewing, looking away out the window, turned back to the room, almost smiling. But a moment later Mariena shoved her sewing to the floor and sprang to her feet and into a dance, arms out-stretched as she twirled to the wide middle of the room, her long skirts and dark hair flaring out around her. Her suddenness so immediately matched the music that Joliffe forgot he meant to seem seeing nothing and lifted his head, watching her and smiling as he sang.
But Lady Benedicta said, “Mariena.”
Only the word and not loudly, but it was an order that stopped Mariena where she was, arms and skirts falling straight, her hair swirled partly forward over one shoulder. Momentarily mother and daughter stared at one another, no liking in either of their looks. Then Mariena threw up her head and defiantly spun around one more time, back to the chair, where she flung herself down and glared at her mother, her arms folded and her hair partly over her face.
Coldly, Lady Benedicta said, “Put back your hair and take up your sewing.”
Mariena shoved back her hair from her face with both hands, then folded her arms again, defying the rest of her mother’s order. Lady Benedicta with gaze fixed on her said evenly, “Idonea, put down your sewing,” putting down her own on her lap with a finality that said she would not take it up again until she was obeyed. “If we have to sew on this gown of yours,” she said at Mariena, “you will sew, too. If you do not, no one does.”
The stare between mother and daughter held a long while this time with Idonea Wyot and Joliffe frozen in wary watching of them before Mariena gave way with a toss of her shoulders and grabbed her sewing from the floor. Without comment, Lady Benedicta took up her own and Idonea followed and Joliffe carefully began to set quiet, light notes into the taut silence, only gradually weaving his way back toward a song while thinking how much more alike to each other Lady Benedicta and Mariena were than he had heretofore thought. Lady Benedicta’s will was the stronger, but that only came from more years of practice at it, Joliffe suspected. Beyond that, both she and Mariena were passionate in their different ways—Mariena’s passion still raw and open while Lady Benedicta’s passion was . . . Joliffe watched his fingers on the lute’s strings rather than the women while he considered Lady Benedicta. Her passion must have run hot once upon a time, but if passion could be said to run cold, he suspected hers still ran, no longer with fire but with the force of ice.
Against the hotness of young life in Mariena, perhaps? Very possibly. Reason enough to want the girl married and away from here.
He eased his way into a gentle song, trying now for no more than soothing over all the raw edges in the room, including Idonea Wyot’s, out of place here and ill at ease as she surely was, with seemingly no one trying to make her feel otherwise. All stayed quiet among the women, and in a while he moved on to more lightly playful songs, trying to raise smiles if nothing else; and when finally the song of the lady wakened by the crowing cock that nightly perched in her chamber brought even Lady Benedicta to laugh softly and shake her head, he dared try a love-song. After all, he was not supposed to know there was anything here but joy for the coming marriage, so a song of love was reasonable; but he sang the one he chose—“When the nightingale sings, the woods wax green”—in such a melting, over-lovestruck voice that by the time he reached, “I have so loved all this year that I may love no more,” first Idonea Wyot’s shoulders and then Lady Benedicta’s twitched with silent laughter that broke out aloud as he finished in the most mournful of voices, “I shall moan my song for my love it is for, until my heart doth fall on floor.” Which was not the end to it he had learned but the one he used when it suited him.
Putting their sewing on their laps, the two women clapped, still laughing. Mariena did, too, but not with such open pleasure; and when the women took up their sewing again, she demanded at him, “Now sing one as if you meant it.”
“Mariena,” her mother said in the tone of someone reminding a small child of its manners.
Tight-voiced, her words at Joliffe but her glare for her mother, Mariena said, “I pray you, sing one from the heart.”
Since Lady Benedicta said nothing against that, Joliffe began, “Nights when I turn and wake—by which I am waxed pale—Lady, all for thy sake is longing come on me,” obeying Mariena, singing as if such love-longing came from deep inside himself. It didn’t. All he had was the wish he might some time truly feel such love-longing for someone—and better yet, that that beloved someone would feel the same and equally for him. Since it had yet to happen, he made use of his skill as a player to show feelings he did not have, off-setting that, to his mind, his singing and his skill on the lute were no more than ordinary.
He pleased Mariena well enough, anyway. At the end, she sighed like someone satisfied and said, “There. That was good. Another one, please?”
If that wooing voice, as honey-smooth as her fair skin, was the one she used to her suitors, there was small wonder John Harcourt had come back well before their wedding to be with her, or that Amyas Breche had been doting on her the times Joliffe had seen them together. He found himself smiling warmly without meaning to as he answered, “If you will, my lady.”
But before he could begin, there was sound of someone on the stairs and Sir Edmund entered. Joliffe stood up and bowed to him. Mariena and Mistress Wyot rose and curtsied. In strict courtesy, Lady Benedicta might have done the same, but she stayed seated. With an easy gesture for Mariena and Idonea to sit again, Sir Edmund crossed to his wife and kissed her cheek.
She accepted it, nothing more; made no sign of welcome or willingness, nor did she give greeting of her own, merely looked at him, her gaze flat and shallow, as he stepped back from her. Seeming to expect nothing more than that, he turned and said easily to Idonea, “They’re keeping you busy. A guest shouldn’t be put to so much to work.”
“It’s my pleasure, sir,” she answered, which was only politeness; but she added, “I enjoy sewing, and this is lovely cloth.”
“From Flanders,” Sir Edmund said. He lifted a thick fold of cloth from Mariena’s lap. Guessing from the quantity of cloth there, she was sewing a seam in the gown’s skirt, the least demanding but most tedious part of the task because it went on, unchanging, for so many stitches. “A gift from Master Breche on his nephew’s behalf.” He smiled on Idonea. “But you knew that.” He laid the cloth down again, absently patted Mariena’s shoulder, and said, still to Idonea, “I hope you’ll be my daughter’s friend when she’s gone to live in Cirencester.”
“I will, sir. Gladly.”
He turned his smile to Mariena. “It will be all new to her and she’ll be missed. It will help to know she’s not gone completely among strangers.” He laid a hand on Mariena’s shoulder again. “Won’t it, sweetling?”
Mariena looked up at him, meeting his smile. “It will,” she agreed. “Though I’ll miss you.” Said with the faintest weight on “you” and a bitter sidewise glance at her mother, who made no more response to her daughter’s jibe than she had to her husband’s kiss, simply watching all with that same flat gaze.
Sir Edmund made a small laugh, satisfied by his daughter’s answer, it seemed, and said, “We’re going riding, the Breches and Harry and I. And Will, if we can find him. I only came to be sure you still did well, Mariena. Amyas will be pleased to know.”
“I’m more than well enough,” Mariena said eagerly. “Let me come with you.” She made as if to rise, ready to go on the instant.
Before Sir Edmund could answer, her mother said, cold as ice over dark waters, “Not if you want this gown done for your wedding.”