He sounded as if he desired it about as much as a pain in his big toe. On the other hand, Joliffe was now bouncing indeed and nodding with eagerness, making as if he wanted to break in with more speech of his own. Distracted, Richard Eme stopped and said at Sendell, “He’s doing it all wrong. He’s playing a fool. Aren’t you going to stop him?”
“He’s playing someone stirred by the most marvelous thing that’s ever happened,” Sendell returned. “Maybe overplaying it somewhat.” He gave Joliffe a stern look. “But that can be fixed as we go on. No, you continue, and we’ll see how it plays.”
It played quite well for a first time through, Joliffe thought when they finished. Their fellow players’ heed had not wandered. Given the length of time the Prophets talked at each other, that was to the good. Only Richard Eme, as stiff in his final speech as he had been in his first, was—if his violently red face and short, angry breathing were anything by which to go—displeased. Sendell, as if he did not see those signs, said, “Now, Simeon, as he starts off, you’re coming on. You will exchange slight bows as you pass. You will go into the middle of the playing space and begin. No,” he added to Richard Eme who had put up a hand and had his mouth open. “We’ll save talk until the end. I want to get as far with this as may be this evening.”
With Sendell keeping them moving, they reached Mary and Joseph finding Christ talking to the Doctors in the Temple before the light was too far gone for reading their scripts and he had to call a stop. “It’s gone well. Even better than I hoped,” he told them.
Joliffe thought the same. There was probably nothing to be done about Richard Eme’s playing except match him to parts that matched his opinion of himself. He did those quite well enough, and his two fellow Doctors at the Temple gave promise of being able to balance his stiffness well. Burbage had grave authority without Richard Eme’s stiffness. Master Smale, who served as Simeon’s clerk earlier in the play, was like his name—small of stature with a light voice to match that worked well against the other two with their weightier voices.
The surprise for Joliffe in the evening was finding out that Ned was Ned Eme and Richard’s brother. With his comely face and a grace of manner and voice very unlike his brother’s, he was shaping well as the angel Gabriel, although there was a twinkling of mischief about him that suggested “angelic” was not his usual way of being. Hew as his fellow Angel was still awkward with his movements but aware of it and trying to better. That boded well for their days of work to come. Tom Maydeford as Mary was nowhere yet and would need help, but probably not so much as Dick Byfeld who looked likely to need most working with to be anywhere near good enough.
And then there was Eustace Powet. For all his disappointment at being Joseph, he was not stinting his effort, had already put more effort into his part than anyone else into theirs yet, and was well along the way he had tried for last night, finding the warmth and depth behind the laughter always aimed at Joseph.
“Now heed this, all of you,” Sendell was saying as they gathered themselves to leave. “The sooner you can play without your script in hand, the better we’ll be when the day comes. You can have tomorrow’s evening, most of you, to work at learning your words instead of being here, because I want to work only with the Angels, Mary, and Joseph then. Master Joliffe, too. I’d like you here to work with Tom Maydeford on being Mary. Right enough? Good. I’ll see all the rest of you the evening after that. With all your words learned.”
A few good-humoured groans answered that as nearly everyone made for the gate. Only Richard Eme did not. Instead he was closing on Sendell with protest in his every lineament.
Joliffe unashamedly escaped out the gate, leaving Sendell to his fate.
Because he and Sendell had agreed that finding a gown for the prophetess Ane was something Joliffe could do for himself, he readied himself to spend part of the next morning at it. He tried to persuade Rose to go with him, but she flatly refused, saying she had too much to do. Piers showed willing, but Joliffe tousled Piers’ curls in the way Piers hated and deftly dodged a kick at his ankles while saying, “My thanks, but no thanks. That much mocking I can do without,” and went on his way laughing at Piers’ general indignation.
Before the morning was done he had provided laughter in his turn to several fripperers, all of them taking his quest in good part once he had explained it, so that at the end he had what he thought would suit an aged woman visiting a temple: a plain-cut yellow gown with close-fitted sleeves and high collar to wear under a loose, sleeveless russet over-gown edged with a tired fur that the seller swore was not cat. Any dark, soft-soled shoe would suffice for the feet, and a wimple and veil would be small trouble to come by; some wife among the weavers would likely gladly loan her nearly-best if Sendell asked for the favor.
That duty done, the rest of the day he wandered around the town, spending time in various taverns and at cookshops, drinking not much and eating slightly but all the while listening and sometimes easing into talk with one person or another. So far as hearing any worries about any merchant presently late in returning to town or finding any likely way to ask about Sebastian’s missing Master Kydwa, the day was a waste, but he made a good start at learning his way around the town, and at afternoon’s end he felt free to tell himself he had done what he could for now and went cheerfully to the evening’s practice, Ane’s garb tidily bundled under his arm.
He was early and glad to find Sendell in a cheerfulness to match his own, greeting him with, “You escaped fast enough last night. It took me a goodly while to talk Richard Eme around to believing your foolery served to make him look noble and profound. If I can keep him believing that, we’ll be fine. Did you find a gown and all?”
Joliffe had just time to unfold and shake out the gown and over-gown, and have Sendell’s approval for them and agreement that, yes, asking for loan of a wimple and veil from someone’s wife would probably serve and he would see to it, before Ned Eme and young Hew came into the yard.
“My brother is not best pleased with you,” Ned said at Joliffe with light, mocking sternness.
“I grieve to hear it,” Joliffe said, not troubling to sound grieved at all.
Ned laughed. Tom Maydeford arrived, bringing an old gown got from his mother to practice in as Mary. Sendell sent him and Joliffe to the yard’s far end to work together while Sendell gave his own heed over to Ned and Hew.
Joliffe, not altogether unexpectedly, found Tom greatly uncomfortable with having to wear a woman’s gown. It did not help that his mother must be both wider and taller than her son; Tom had to use his belt to gather in the excess and hitch the skirts clear of his feet. While he did, Joliffe put on Ane’s over-gown, wearing it being the easiest way to begin showing how women moved differently from men. He was no longer surprised that something someone had seen every day of his life had gone totally unnoted in its detail. Made to look and think, Tom was likewise surprised to see how much he had to change not only in how he walked but in how he stood and sat and kneeled and rose to his feet if he were to seem a woman. The second time he tangled in his skirts and fell over when trying to rise from his knees, he lay on the cobbles, unhurt but unready to struggle free of his skirts as he asked somewhat piteously, “How do they
do
it, then? In skirts and
all
the time?”
“More gracefully than you just did,” Joliffe said and offered a hand to help him up.
On his feet again and shaking the skirt free of his legs, the youth complained, “I feel a right fool dressed like this.”
“Ah, but remember it shouldn’t be
you
dressed like this there on the pageant and saying Mary’s words. It should be
Mary
who’s there. If it’s you in the gown and saying her words, you
will
look a right fool, but if it’s Mary there, then everything will be right.”
“Well enough for you to say, but doing it is another matter,” Tom said.
“How to do it is what we’re here to learn. Look you, do you remember me being the Prophet yesterday?”
Tom laughed, which was answer enough.
“Remember me the day before that, when we sat and read the play, and how you’ve seen me here when I wasn’t being the Prophet yesterday.”
Tom drew down his brows in thought. “Yes.”
“And now you’ve seen me here, in this gown of mine, being”—Joliffe deliberately shifted his stance, that had been his own, into that of a young and noble woman—“someone else again. And yet it’s always me. That’s the trick of it: to give the seeming of being someone else well enough that the lookers-on believe you, if only for that while. Now if you wear Mary’s gown and move and sound like Mary, you will be fine. If you wear Mary’s gown but go on being you”—he went into the slouch of a young lout about town, which Tom was not but Joliffe wanted the point made plain—“you will indeed look a right fool. You see?”
Looking satisfactorily thoughtful, Tom nodded slowly that he did.
“Then let’s try walking, then kneeling, then falling over—er, I mean standing up—again. And just wait until you have to do it all while wearing a wimple and veil, too.”
“Oh, Lord have mercy,” Tom groaned, but gathered up his skirts to try again.
They had worked a while longer, and Tom was catching on quickly when Sendell crossed the yard to them, leaving Ned and Hew on their own for a time, to ask Joliffe, “I’m wondering why Eustace Powet hasn’t come yet. Ned says he’ll go to see what’s kept him, but I’d rather keep Ned and Hew at work.” He looked at Tom. “You could work on your own or on your words while Joliffe’s gone, yes?” Tom shrugged that he could, and Sendell said, back to Joliffe again, “You know where Powet lives. I just need to know something hasn’t happened to him, and if it hasn’t, then for him to get himself here as fast as may be.”
“Done,” said Joliffe, already in the midst of pulling Ane’s gown over his head. “You have your script with you?” he asked Tom. The youth patted the belt pouch at his waist. “Then work your words and at sitting down and standing up
gracefully
while I’m gone.” He nodded at the nearby bench while taking up his hat he had set aside for the while. “I won’t be long.”
Nor should he have been. Nowhere was very far away from anywhere else in Coventry. He only had to go the short way to Mill Lane’s corner and turn right into the street he now knew was called Jordan Well despite there was no noticeable shift or turn between it and Earl Street and then, not far along it, turn left into Much Park Street where he and Sendell had met Powet yesterday. He had no trouble remembering which house he wanted, either, despite the shop was shuttered closed. Somewhat early for that, he thought, given there was still much daylight left and others were open, but after all Herry Byfeld surely had some life besides behind his counter and maybe was gone off about it.
First sign that all was not well nor going to be simple was that the door in from the street was standing open, and the passageway beyond crowded with a huddle-headed hush of people who looked as if they thought they should do something about something but did not know what. Neighbors, Joliffe thought. Three women and a man and two skirt-clinging small children. Beyond them, the door to the kitchen stood open, and from there came the loud weeping of several women.
Something was gone very wrong.
Before he had decided between retreat and pressing forward, one of the women looked back at him and said, “The shop is closed. There’s been a death, seems.”
A somewhat too familiar tightness taking hold on his chest and throat, Joliffe said, “It’s Eustace Powet I’m here to see. Is he . . .”
The man among them called over the head of the woman ahead of him, “Hai, Eustace, someone is here asking for you.” He laid a hand on the woman’s shoulder and added, “Come away. They don’t need us here. There’s naught to be done.”
She gave to the pull of his hand, beginning a retreat toward the outer door. The other women must have agreed with him, and Joliffe pressed back against one wall to let them pass, one of the women saying to another as they went, “A shame and all that it’s him. I knew his mother, God keep her soul.”
“Aye. They’re a family that’s had no good fortune at all these past years,” another woman said.
“She undid them, that’s right certain,” the man said grimly. “God’s judgment.”
“I’ll tell you whose judgment,” one of the women snapped as they went out the door, “and it wasn’t God’s. It . . .”
“Master Joliffe?” Powet said from the passageway’s other end.
“Master Powet,” Joliffe said low-voiced, going toward him, wary of the weeping but too curious to keep his distance. “I’m to find out why you didn’t come to practice.”
Powet’s face was taut and twisted with distress. “There’s been a death.” He looked over his shoulder at whoever else was in the kitchen behind him. “My niece—my great-niece—Anna—her . . . not her betrothed, they hadn’t said the words yet, but they meant to, when all was better—word’s come he’s been found dead. She’s been waiting all this past week for him to come home and now . . . Oh, god in heaven and all the saints’ mercy, old John will never survive this.”
Now in the doorway beside Powet, Joliffe saw past him into the kitchen that had been so easy with ordinary family matters yesterday. Today there was nothing easy or ordinary. Close to the far doorway Dick and another boy enough like him they had to be brothers were crouched shoulder to shoulder, looking caught between a wish to bolt and the fixed watching of what they hardly understood. The girl Cecily and Powet’s great-niece Mistress Deyster, were crumpled together on the bench beside the table, clinging to each other. The loud sobbing was theirs. Herry stood in helpless uncertainty which way to go midway between them and the old man still slumped in his chair beside the hearth, with now an older woman on one knee in front of him, leaning forward with her hands braced on the arms of the chair to either side of him, saying into his face, “Do you understand, John? Do you understand?”