He was surprised, though, that it had not been banked for the night before now. Was surprised, too, to find Basset sitting hunched almost over it, wrapped and hooded in his cloak. Everyone else seemed to be asleep, and when Joliffe had laid the lute into its case and into the cart, he went to sit on his heels beside Basset and ask, quiet-voiced, “All’s well?”
“Well and very well with us,” Basset said back. “With you?”
“Well enough.” But he said it too slowly, weighted with his thoughts.
“You’ve learned something,” Basset said.
“I’ve learned something,” Joliffe agreed. Several things, including how discouraging other people’s lust could be and to what depths of foolishness lust like Mariena’s could take someone. He had known something of foolishness’ faults before this, but none so deep as these. “Most importantly, Amyas
is
in danger.”
“From whom?” Basset asked.
“From Sir Edmund and Mariena both. But not until after he’s married her.”
“Not before?” Basset asked. “You think then that Harcourt’s death was only chance?”
“To my mind he was likely murdered, but I don’t have any proof he was, nor know why, and couldn’t swear to who did it.”
“Ah,” said Basset dryly. “That’s helpful, isn’t it? What of Will?”
“He’s probably safe for now.” But only if Sir Edmund was right in thinking Mariena was to blame for everything that had befallen the boy and she believed his threats. But if he was wrong? What if it was someone else than Mariena? Who? Lady Benedicta? Joliffe was certain against that—and equally certain she had used the bedtime draught to make Mariena ill as a warning after Will’s last “accident.”
But if not Lady Benedicta, then who?
“So you think Harcourt was indeed murdered,” Basset said. “But Will is safe for now, and Amyas in no danger until after he’s married. Is that the way of it?”
“Probably.” But only probably. The trouble was that he was more than half-way sure Lady Benedicta had poisoned John Harcourt to his death but did not know
why
and so there was no telling but what she might choose to kill Amyas, too, before his marriage, whatever her husband’s intention. But still the question was why would she want to prevent Mariena’s marriage. The more especially if she knew about the incest. But did she know? And even if she did, that did not answer much. The dislike between her and Mariena went back for years longer than the incest could have, and why, with finally the chance to be quit of Mariena, would she kill Harcourt? But if she had—or someone else had for a reason Joliffe equally did not see—then Amyas could be in danger the same way. Just as Will might still be if Sir Edmund was wrong about Mariena harming him and it was someone else entirely set on hurting, if not killing, him.
Basset sighed and held his hands out over the fire’s glow. “It’s something to tell Lord Lovell anyway. He’ll do something about the marriage, I suppose. What to do about the rest will be his choice, too, and better him than us.”
“Better never us at all,” Joliffe said. He was suddenly in a savage anger at everything. “I’ve had a vile, ugly evening.” Faced with lust he couldn’t return and wine he wasn’t offered. “I’m for sleep and to hell with it all.”
He left Basset banking the fire, undressed barely enough, and slid into his blankets still seething with frustration and anger. The pieces of whatever was happening here were taking shape but they didn’t yet fit together. It maybe should have been enough that Amyas and Will were probably safe for now and the rest could be left to Lord Lovell, just as Basset had said, but that did not stop his thoughts from circling. There was Mariena’s frightened waiting-maid. She plainly served Sir Edmund rather than Mariena. She had to know their secret and probably saw to it that Sir Edmund knew whatever she knew of Mariena. That meant Sir Edmund would hear what had passed between her and Joliffe, so thanks be given to every celibate saint that he had done no more than what he had. Unless Lesya told Sir Edmund about the questions he had asked. Would it matter if Sir Edmund knew he knew about the sleeping draught? Maybe not, if Sir Edmund didn’t know Joliffe understood it was meant for a way to keep Mariena’s lust in check, and surely Lesya would keep that part of their talk to herself. He hoped. Did Lady Benedicta know the draught was for that, or did she truly think it was simply to make Mariena sleep well? Did she know her daughter lusted beyond the ordinary for men? Did she know of Mariena’s and Sir Edmund’s sin? Did she agree with her husband on what he intended for Amyas Breche, or did she know nothing of it? Had Sir Edmund wanted John Harcourt’s death, or had that been Lady Benedicta’s doing alone? Supposing she had done it. Supposing anyone had done it. But if she had done it, did Mariena know it? Was Mariena’s sin with her father partly in revenge for that treachery? Or had their lusting started even before that? How wide and deep did treacheries go among these people?
All that was a circle Joliffe went around more than once but all the answers stayed uncertain and the questions did not change and he fell asleep still circling.
He awoke to heavily falling rain and pity for Mariena and was not happy about either one. He was tired of rain, he was tired of mud, and he didn’t want to think about Mariena or anyone else at Deneby now or ever again. Lying tightly rolled into his blankets, refusing to open his eyes, trying to deny morning was come, he burrowed deeper into his bedding. Even at the least guess, there looked to be so many wrongs—either done or intended—here that he doubted anyone could any longer sort out one as separate from another. And if some of the wrongs went back to whatever had gone amiss between Sir Edmund and Lady Benedicta years ago, there was likelihood no one even remembered for certain the how or why they had begun.
One thing was discomfortably clear, though. Whatever wrongs Mariena had done, was doing, meant to do, she was as much betrayed as she was a betrayer. From every side she was wronged beyond measure—by her father, by her mother, by even the waiting-maid who should have been her own. If ever there had been goodness in her, no one had ever done anything to help it grow. He disliked her too much to want to pity her, but he did, without pity in the least lessening his wariness and dislike. Pity did not change the fact of her lust or her greed or that her own father thought she had tried for her brother’s life. She had certainly shown no scruple in thinking of Amyas dead. No, Joliffe did not choose to be such a fool as to think she was not dangerous to anyone she turned on.
An unkind toe prodded at his back and Ellis said, “We’re not bringing your breakfast to you. Rise and gloom with the rest of us or go hungry.”
Joliffe rose, looked out at the rain, and said, “I think I’d rather be hungry than wet.”
In a heroic voice Basset declaimed, “Be brave, my heart, and face the worst the world can give!”
“Just now the worst is having to look at Ellis,” Joliffe growled.
Intent on being away to breakfast, even Ellis ignored that, and Joliffe did go with them, silently hunched into his cloak. Gil and the rest of them were still riding high and happy from last night’s play. Joliffe, unable to give up his thoughts and unwilling to spoil their pleasure, let himself be drawn into talk of what changes he could make to the plays they had been doing and what plays they could do again, now they were one more man to the good. Gil had more training ahead of him but no one doubted now he would be one of them, and the talk gave Joliffe reason, when they returned to the cartshed, to go away to his corner with his writing and the script box as if he meant to see what could be done. And that gave Basset reason in a while, when he had set Ellis to teaching Gil more about using his voice—“The deep growls strengthen your throat cords, the high cries keep them loose, and everything in between gets you from one to the other,” Basset told him cheerfully—to join Joliffe, bringing a cushion and sitting down on it with a stiffness that made Joliffe ask, “How go the joints?”
“Better.” Basset gave a soft grunt of discomfort as he settled. “By fits and starts,” he amended. Forgoing the grumble to which he was probably entitled, he started to talk plays. He had some thoughts that were the same as Joliffe’s and some that Joliffe had not had, and warming to the talk, Joliffe let go his worries for the while. Only when Basset asked, “So how does
Dux Moraud
come on?” did everything drain flat again, so quickly Joliffe was unable to hide it.
Basset, reading his sudden silence and his face, said, “As bad as that?”
Joliffe tried, “Not . . . the play so much,” but had nowhere to go from there except where he did not want to go. When he had begun to work over that play, with its incestuous and murderous father and daughter, it had been a story, just a story, to be pulled about into whatever shape met the players’ needs, his only great problem with it his quest to give it some grace and sense beyond the readily seen ugly pleasure of the tale. Face to face with such ugliness in truth, there was no pleasure in it at all. All the answers he had considered giving to the play for his own satisfaction were no answers at all when faced with the harshness of lives lived in just such ugliness.
Slowly, watching his fingers twirl his pen and keeping his voice too low to be heard beyond the cart, he gave way and told Basset what he had seen in the woods yesterday, had learned last night, and now suspected. Basset listened, with occasional looks to be sure no one else was near enough to hear, and at the end gave a low, long, almost silent whistle before saying, “You’re for it, my boy, if anyone knows you know all that.”
“Thank you,” Joliffe said with heavy mockery. “I needed to hear that. It adds to my mind’s peace.”
“Pleased to be of comfort to you.” But for all his words’ lightness, Basset was frowning with thoughts probably no more pleasant than Joliffe’s. “At least we can tell Lord Lovell something of what he wanted to know concerning this purposed marriage. How much he’ll thank us for the rest, I don’t know. Once it’s done, though, it’s no more our matter. He’s the one who’ll have to sort it out, thank all the saints.”
Joliffe nodded silent agreement with that, but Basset was too skilled at reading what the body betrayed of unsaid thoughts to accept that for all his answer and asked, “Is there something more?”
Joliffe started to answer, stopped, tried again, and finally said, irked at himself, “I have this clutter of questions all churned together in my mind and they won’t stop churning. I’ve found out too much and not enough. There are too many pieces that could go together too many ways and I can’t stop shifting them around. There has to be some way it all makes sense and it doesn’t yet.”
“You’re asking a lot of life, if you want it to make sense.”
Most of the time, Joliffe was of the same opinion, but he shook his head against it now like against a fly’s buzz and said nothing, frowning at the pen he was still twirling.
Basset watched him a moment, then said, “Well, if you can’t let it go, go at it as if you were trying to make a story of all these pieces you have. Shift them around and fill the gaps until they make the sense you want.”
Joliffe nodded without looking up, still twirling the pen. Basset waited a few moments, heaved a sigh of business done, patted Joliffe on the knee, and labored up from the cushion. When he reached the other side of the cart, he said to someone, “Leave him be for now. He’s thinking.”
To which Ellis said, “Ah. Let’s hope he doesn’t hurt himself too badly, then.”
Chapter 20
Joliffe kept to himself most of that day. Save for mid-day dinner and afterwards a quick through-run of that evening’s play, he stayed beyond the cart, chill but needing his thoughts more than he needed the fire and the others’ talk. Piers and even Gil moaned at having to take Tisbe out to her grazing when the rain eased off to hardly more than a misting, and Joliffe gathered from their half-heard talk when they returned that the last reading of the banns must have gone without trouble. Not that that much mattered. Given what he had to tell Lord Lovell, the marriage was unlikely to happen. What held him was what he was untangling by way of little scribbled thoughts on paper and lines drawn from one to another—lines often scratched out and replaced by others going other ways.
Finally he sat for a long while without adding anything or scratching anything away. If the few guesses he had added in were right, it was all there. Nor were the guesses wild. They were come out of what he knew for certainty, and because they made everything else come together, he was afraid he now had the right of it all. Nonetheless, he straightened, finding his back hurt with being bent too long, drew in a breath to the very bottom of his lungs, and let it out with a deep relief. It helped to know. Or to think he knew.
Putting his work away, he made to rejoin the others, shuffling from behind the cart, his legs as stiff as his back, and was surprised to find Will was there, sitting beside the fire with Basset, Rose, and Ellis. Everyone had been keeping so quiet—and must have signaled Will to the same before he was across the cart-yard—that he had not known the boy was come. Basset had apparently been telling him a story, their heads close together. Rose was mending a shirt. Ellis was carving something from a thick stick. But they all alike looked up at Joliffe questioningly, and he smiled in what he meant to be an easy way and said, “All’s settled. No more trouble.”
Ellis muttered, “That will be the day,” and went back to his carving.
Rose watched Joliffe join them, her worry showing. He smiled better, just for her, and said, “Truly. All’s well.”
He didn’t know if she believed him, but she smiled in return and went back to her sewing. Standing between Ellis and Basset, Joliffe held out his hands to the fire that was blazing more merrily than was its wont. “This is a goodly fire. Did someone bring us wood?”
He cocked an eye down at Will, who beamed with pleasure. “My lady mother said I should. I’m best out of the way just now, she said. She said I could stay, too, if no one minded. There’s more guests come and everybody’s busy with readying for tomorrow when the rest of the guests will come. The day after that is the wedding and then next day there’s to be more feasting before everyone starts home and Mariena goes away. Now Basset is telling me a story about Sir Lancelot.”