Leaving Powet and Tom to struggle onward without him for a few minutes, Sendell went aside to speak with her, apparently only about the garb because Joliffe, watching, did not see her demeanor change at all. When Sendell started back to the wagon, Joliffe went over, cleared a space beside her by carefully moving a folded robe, and sat down. She gave a sideways shift of her eyes toward him without faltering in her stitching and said, a little questioning, “Master Joliffe?”
“I wanted to tell you, since Master Powet likely won’t have first chance, that the crowner and bailiff have determined Ned Eme’s death was not by his own hand. He did not kill himself.”
“I know,” she said softly. “A neighbor was spreading word along the street. We heard not long after Master Powet came away. But he knows now?”
“He learned it here.”
She nodded, accepting that, and kept sewing. Given her silence, Joliffe saw no way to ease toward anything more, so he simply asked outright, “Three days ago, when Mistress Deyster quarreled with Ned in the kitchen, did you hear anything at all of what it was about?”
Cecily did not pause in her sewing and her voice was as steady as her stitches. “It had to do with my brother, I think. I heard his name. Nothing else.”
“Nothing else at all? You were right there in the kitchen with them.”
“When Master Eme set again to persuading her to marry him, it seemed a good time to take my father out. She told you I did that. We went out. What they said to each other while I was gone I don’t know.”
“What did you hear when you came back?”
“That’s when I heard my brother’s name.”
“From whom? From Mistress Deyster or Master Eme?”
“I couldn’t tell.”
She had not ceased her sewing but her stitches had become quicker and now were uneven. At a guess, she was lying, but about what—about hearing only that, or about what she had heard, or simply about who had said her brother’s name? All of that? None of that, but something else as yet unasked that she feared might be? What?
And why?
Richard Eme joined them. “Master Sendell says we’re to try on our Prophets’ garb if it’s ready.”
Cecily settled her needle firmly into the blue cloth, set it carefully aside, and rose to take up one of the folded piles. She handed it to him and another to Joliffe. They took off their doublets but needed to strip no further: the Prophets’ robes were loose, full, and reached from neck to heels, easily hiding shirts and hosen.
“I think they’re finished,” Cecily said softly as the men shook out the folds around their ankles and stretched their arms to try the sleeve lengths. “If I’ve done the hems rightly.”
She had, but Richard Eme, looking down at his robe’s hem, began in the tone of someone about to assert his superiority by making complaint, “I think this could be . . .”
“Not possibly bettered,” said Joliffe cheerfully. “Look how we match.” He stood beside the other man. “No, look down without bending. See? When we stand together, the hems are the same length. That will look very good.” Before Richard Eme could think to point out they stood together on the stage hardly any time at all, what with being up and down the stairs and rarely ever side by side, Joliffe surged on, “Mistress Kydwa, you’ve done very well by us indeed.”
Faint color touched her cheeks. She murmured thanks. Leaving Richard Eme no chance to spoil it, Joliffe took him by the arm and turned him back toward the wagon, saying, “We must needs show Master Sendell.”
Sendell was pleased. Richard Eme accepted that as if the approval were merely his own due, then said with a nod toward the wagon where Powet and their new Gabriel were settling their parts, “As I was saying, Master Sendell, if you want me to take him aside and tell him how my brother was playing Gabriel . . .”
As much to save Sendell as for his own purpose, Joliffe took Eme by the arm again, this time saying, “Since you’ve brought up your brother, there’s something I want to ask,” and walked him away from the wagon and aside from anyone else in the yard, adding as they went, “As one of the crowner’s jurymen, you understand.”
Richard Eme’s face had fallen immediately into lineaments of grief at mention of his brother. Now his voice had a sorrowful tremble tinged with anger as he said, “Anything. Anything that can help to find who did this to him
and
tried to shame our family.”
That gave Joliffe a thread to try and he said, “Is there someone who would want to do that—make such trouble for your family, even if it meant killing your brother?”
“We’re nobody!” He thought better of that; changed it to, “My father is high among the drapers, has been on the guild council, will likely be on the city’s council one of these years soon. There’s nothing in any of that. He’s made no enemies. He doesn’t have the push to make enemies. We live quietly.”
“What of Ned? I know he traveled for your father.”
“Because I’m needed more here at the heart of things.”
“Certainly. So it was your brother who went to Bristol and saw to the family holdings outside of Coventry, yes?”
Joliffe had carefully linked the first, which was something he could be assumed to know from Ned’s talk of it after Robyn Kydwa’s body was found, to the second, which was unlikely for him to know. As he had hoped, Eme accepted him knowing both and readily answered. “Yes. Ned was ever happier than when out and about.
Doing
something, as he liked to say. As if sitting at the center of everything, seeing that all goes as it should, isn’t
doing
something.” The words were bitter, the grievance seemingly a long one between the brothers. But probably remembering he was after all speaking of someone now dead, Eme shifted back to his grieving voice. “He was good at that side of things. He’s going to be missed that way.”
But any other way? Joliffe wondered. Still, a vast difference between brothers did not mean a lack of affection, and he said evenly, “It did give him more chance to get into some manner of trouble without his family knowing of it.”
“It might, but I don’t see that he did. There’s no sign of it. The books and money all tally as they should, both with each other and with reports from our factor in Bristol and the steward at the manor.”
So, for all the talk of confidence placed in him, a close watch had been kept on the younger son. Not close enough, if he had indeed killed Kydwa and his servant, but close enough, it seemed, that any large pattern of trouble would have been found out. But, “What of here in Coventry?” Joliffe persisted. “Was he ever in trouble with gambling or drinking or anything else that could have made him an enemy?”
Eme had begun shaking his head while Joliffe was speaking, was still shaking it as he answered, “Nothing like that. He wasn’t given to gambling or drinking or anything like that.”
“What of the Byfelds? Was there particular close friendship there?”
“No. Nothing particular. Less than with some other families. The most we ever had to do with them was when all of us were small and played together. A whole band of children, I mean, not simply us and Herry and her. Then it was grammar school for the boys and dame school for the girls, and our ways parted. We were too grown.”
“By ‘her’ you mean Mistress Deyster.”
Eme’s face stiffened with some in-held feeling, then twisted with the pain of giving way as he exclaimed with raw regret, “I mocked him. About her. Saint Michael, judge of souls, forgive me. I meant nothing by it. I swear I meant nothing. When we thought he’d hung himself, I thought—” He broke off, unable to say what he had thought. He pressed a hand over his mouth to stop its trembling and mumbled past it, “I thought I’d goaded him to killing himself.”
That was the most open, honest feeling Joliffe had ever seen from him. To see there was honest grief somewhere in the man bettered Joliffe’s thoughts toward him but did not stop him saying, “It’s known Herry Byfeld wanted to marry your sister.”
Eme’s hand and open grief both dropped away. Stiffly, he declared, “That would never have been allowed.”
“Why not? It would seem a very reasonable marriage between two prospering families.”
“It wouldn’t have been.” Firm-voiced until then, Eme went to a mutter. “It was two years ago and nothing to do with Ned’s death.”
“Yet your family would have countenanced him marrying Anna Deyster?”
“Not happily, no. But Ned was less to be bid the right way than Goditha is.”
Joliffe was forestalled from asking more by Hew coming to say Cecily wanted their Prophets’ robes and the Doctors were to try their gowns.
The play and its attendant matters took up the rest of the time in the yard, giving Joliffe no other chance for questions. It was just as well that garb and growing used to the wagon took up most of the time, because his lines as Prophet and Ane were not to the fore of his mind though he tried, not very successfully, to take refuge in the work, away from all his questions and the few answers he had. None of the latter told him enough, not even somewhere else to look than just at the Emes and Byfelds. There had to have been more to Ned’s life than only a narrow living between the two families and working on the play. If so, Sebastian might be finding it out. Or it might be that for these few weeks that mattered, those
had
been the bounds of Ned’s life. If that were so and the reason for his death came from somewhere outside those bounds, answers would be harder to find. As yet there was not even hint of such a thread. Would Sebastian have to find it out in Bristol? Was that where the murderer had come from? Was Ned’s death for something he had done—or not done—in Bristol?
But if Ned had been meeting someone from Bristol, the smiths’ pageant house would have to have been Ned’s choice. Joliffe could come up with various reasons both for and against Ned choosing the pageant wagon yard for that, and the hanging remained troublesome. Had it been a thing of the moment, with the rope and Judas tree simply to hand in a burst of anger? But nearly every man wore a dagger most of the time. A burst of anger was more likely to lead to a drawn dagger and a quick stabbing than to the more difficult business of hanging. No. There was something deliberate and intended in the choice of hanging, and that the Judas tree was used strongly suggested the choice had been someone’s of Coventry rather than anyone’s from Bristol. There might be something that ran between Ned’s death here and Bristol, but one end of that something was surely deeply rooted here in Coventry. What Sebastian might be finding out, Joliffe was not even going to guess at.
What most frustrated him presently was that tomorrow was Sunday. There would be no practice and therefore no chance of questioning anyone as easily as he had done this evening. He thought that taking Dick and Cecily and Richard Eme almost unawares had helped in having answers from them he might not otherwise have had. Like chance would probably not come again, since after Sunday there were only three days to go through until Corpus Christi. For those days, practice would be intense with polishing the play to its highest and best, with no time for “idle” talk around the edges.
Awareness of that may have been why Joliffe was less than subtle at practice’s end, when finally, in the blue gloaming of deep twilight, Sendell said they were done for now. Simeon and the two Angels were already gone, released earlier when their part of the play had been run. Joliffe could have gone then, too, but had hung about to watch. Now Tom dropped from being Mary and left, whistling, while the Doctors in the Temple were taking off their robes. They had worn them though their part of the play tonight because, being cut very full, the robes’ hanging sleeves were in constant danger of tangling with each other as the Doctors moved around on the wagon’s limited space, and Burbage, Eme, and Master Smale had wanted more time to grow used to them. Because of that, Cecily was still there, too, unable to sew in the faded light but waiting to take the Doctors’ robes away for finishing.
Richard Eme was fastest out of his, stripping it off and tossing it onto the bench near Cecily, taking up his doublet in the same motion and putting it on as he headed for the gate and away. Burbage and Master Smale took off theirs with somewhat greater care, aware some of the stitching was only loose basting. While Cecily helped them, Joliffe went to see to Eme’s, shaking it out carefully, folding it, setting it down beside the other carefully piled garb. Powet was already stacking an armload on Dick to help in carrying home, telling him, “You wait and go with us.”
Burbage, hooking his doublet closed and his back to everyone else, said quietly as Joliffe came to him, “Did you learn anything new?”
“Ah.” Joliffe could not quite keep his mingled amusement and guilt out of his voice. “You noted what I was doing.”
“You saved me doing it. Did you learn anything of use?”
“Nothing. No one knows any reason why someone would want to kill Ned.”
“We’ll have to see what gossip my wife turns up,” Burbage said. “I told her to ask freely. She said all she’d probably need do is listen.”
“That will probably prove of more use than anything. Here, I’ll put your robe with the rest. You’ll be wanting to hie home.”
Burbage handed over the robe with thanks and went, a prosperous man with home and family mattering more in his life than murder. Joliffe, taking their robes to Cecily, was all too sharply aware how wide was the gap between Burbage’s life and his. Their shared effort in the play and their easy talk together was a bridge between them but a frail one. Joliffe felt a momentary sadness for that, then let it go as he handed Cecily the gown and asked her, after she had thanked him, “Have you remembered anything else you might have heard said between Ned Eme and Mistress Deyster?”