His voice kept carefully empty, Joliffe said, “Except it wasn’t that easy. You had to keep him from grabbing hold of something to save himself even then.”
Anna Deyster lurched forward into a rapid walk. Keeping pace with her, Joliffe insisted, “Didn’t you?”
“I had to. I had to.” Her hands, that had been folded tightly together at her waist, were now fists pressed between her breasts. She began to beat them against herself, lightly at first, then with increasing force. “He made Robyn suffer. I made him suffer in his turn. It took him longer to die than I thought it would, but he finally did. He couldn’t even pray for pardon with the rope choking him. He died unshriven and damned. Damned forever!”
That she had given Ned no chance of salvation plainly mattered greatly to her. Did it matter at all to her that her own salvation was in doubt if she could not come to remorse, confession, and penance for what she had done?
Her walking had brought them to the orchard’s edge, to where a gate stood open into the rear yard of what Joliffe guessed was her own home by the way she came to a sudden stop and stood staring the length of the yard toward the house at its far end. Then she abruptly turned aside and sat down on a bench there beside the gate. “I can’t go in there again,” she said.
Joliffe stayed on his feet in front of her. “Are you ready to go to the bailiffs, then?” As if it were something she had choice in. She might, of course, go back on all she had said, deny she had ever said it, but he did not think so. It had all been weighing on her so heavily that the slight added weight of his questions had been too much. Words and truth had broken out of her. He did not think she would mend enough to take up lying again.
But she went on sitting there, not ready yet for what must come next, and what Joliffe had supposed would happen happened: someone came looking for her down the length of the yard from the house, carrying a horn-sided lantern. To the good, it was Powet. When he was near enough for the lantern light to show him Joliffe standing just outside the gate, he said with open surprise, “Master Joliffe? Have you seen—” He reached the gate then, saw his niece on the bench, and changed that to, “Ah, there you are. Your mother is fretting. You said you’d not stay out like this again after the other night. You could have brought Master Joliffe into the house.”
There was half a question behind that last and in his look at Joliffe. Well might he question finding her out so late and alone with a man, but Joliffe had his own question and asked, “When was she out so late before?”
One hand out to urge his unresponding niece to her feet, Powet said, “Um? When? When was it, Anna? Four nights ago, wasn’t it? Herry and Dick have a wager laid you’d do it again, no matter what you said. I think Herry has won. Now . . .”
“Uncle Eustace.” Anna Deyster lifted her aged and ravaged face to the lantern light. “I killed Ned.”
Powet’s hand fell back to his side. He stared at her, then looked sharply aside at Joliffe who nodded agreement to her words. Powet looked desperately back to her and said, begging her to unsay it, “Anna, no.”
She stood up from the bench. Her back was straight. Her voice was firm. “Yes. Now I have to go to the bailiffs and tell them so.” In an echo of her uncle’s gesture, she put out a hand to him and asked in a voice gone momentarily small, “Please, will you come with me?”
Chapter 24
W
ord of Anna Deyster’s confession and arrest burned through Coventry the next day with something like the speed of fire through dry stubble. More than once it overtook the slower-spreading word that Ned Eme’s death had not been by his own hand, making momentary confusion for those unable to re-sort the pieces quickly enough. Joliffe heard more than he wanted to of the gabble-talk as he paced the streets, waiting for Sebastian to find him. He supposed Sebastian would, rather than wait for when they had settled to next meet, and surely enough as Joliffe walked through the marketplace in early afternoon, Sebastian’s hand came down on his shoulder.
They made play of having chance-met, so that if anyone heeded them it should look like two acquaintances briefly meeting, making an exchange of greetings, and soon parting. What actually passed between them was Sebastian saying, falsely smiling, “Out Bishop Gate. First street to the left. Second alehouse along it,” and Joliffe answering with as false a wide smile, “I’ll go long way round, shall I?” so that he and Sebastian would not go along Cross Cheaping and out the Bishop Gate at too much the same time. Sebastian gave an agreeing, smiling nod to that and they slapped hands and parted company.
A half hour later they were facing each other along a bench in a dark, slovenly den of an alehouse that looked to sell secondhand clothing as well, and Sebastian was not smiling at all as he said in a low-voiced growl and with a glower, “That’s it, then? That’s all she told you about it? She killed the fellow because he stupidly told her he’d killed Kydwa to have her? That she doesn’t believe what he said about Kydwa being a spy because
she
says there’s nothing to find out about Lollards here?”
“That’s the sum of it.”
“There has to be more. What a fool of a grieving woman thinks is true or not is worth nothing,” Sebastian grumbled.
“If there is, it will have to be for someone else to find.” Joliffe stood up, spreading his hands to show that was all he had. “I’m done for this while.”
Staying seated, looking up at him, Sebastian said, “Not if I give the word otherwise.”
“It won’t matter what word you give. I’m a player. Much of my value to our lord lies in my being a player. A good one. From now until after Corpus Christi all I am is a player. What you and any Lollards get up to in that while is your business and theirs, not mine. Not”—he added as he started to leave—“that we’ve found sign of any Lollards getting up to anything here. So I’m not going to worry overmuch about it.”
To Joliffe’s surprise, Sebastian lifted his cup in gesture of farewell and said with his rat-toothed grin, “The Lollards for me. Playing for you. Fair enough for now.”
Joliffe grinned back and went out.
The next few days were not that simple, of course. The talk and scandal of it all likely added to the pleasures of the hundreds of out-folk flowing into Coventry for the week, and Joliffe could not help hearing far more than he wanted to hear, more especially since it followed him straight to the last practices for his own play.
His worry the first day was over what they would do if Powet decided he was too distracted to go on with Joseph. Will Sendell could probably take up the part, but what if, instead of Powet being unable to go on, Richard Eme declared he could not work with the uncle of his brother’s murderer? At this late in the practices there was only so much patching could be done before the play suffered in the playing.
So he was relieved that first afternoon’s end when everyone came, gathering to the yard at the expected hour. By the look of them, they all were as unsure as he was how things would go from there. Powet was gray-faced and haggard with strain and grief. Dick was little better, half-hiding, huddle-shouldered, behind his uncle as if unsure he wanted to see or be seen. Richard Eme for once had nothing to say, simply stood looking as if he had been blindsided out of all reckoning of how the world should be. No one else seemed to know what to say to them or to each other and sat or stood around in awkward silence. But they were all there, and Sendell stood in front of them, the roll of the script in his hands like a marshal’s staff of office, and said, “We know what’s happened and it’s terrible all around. There’s nothing good to be said”—here he looked at Powet, who had drawn Dick to his side with a steadying hand on his shoulder, and then at Richard Eme—“beyond how sorry we all are.”
Murmurs from everyone else and a general nodding of heads agreed with that. Powet and Richard Eme nodded back in thanks and acceptance. Dick looked as if he wanted to bolt, but with his uncle’s hand on his shoulder, he managed his own awkward nod.
“That said,” Sendell went on, “we still have a play to do. It’s a fine play. We’ve made it that. Better than any of us thought we could when we started.” As he surely meant it to, that won a shaky laugh among them all, and he said more strongly, “I doubt any of us want to fail it now. So, into your garb and up on the wagon and everyone to their beginning places. We’ll run it as if we mean it. Prophets, let’s set it going, and mind you keep the pace fast to the forward.”
Joliffe, knowing from experience how possible it was to lose oneself in the necessity of a play no matter what was happening—or waiting to happen—in life beyond it, threw himself full strength at his Prophet, willing Richard Eme to match him because the drive they brought to the beginning might lift and carry everyone else forward in their turn. It worked. Or something did. From the Prophets onward, the play flowed like a thing with a life of its own, carrying them all with it. Their new Gabriel fitted in like he had been there all along. Joseph was sincere and comical in deft proportions. Mary remembered to move like a girl and held the bundle that was supposed to be the infant Christ as if it were a real child, not a wad of cloth. Even Dick, by the time he had to come from the stage house as Christ, had moved beyond his immediate misery into feigning the mix of wisdom and merriment that Sendell had been working him toward.
The only moment that nearly undid them all was Simeon’s Nunc Dimittis that he sang so much from the heart that it seemed to be for all the passing away there was in the world. Joliffe saw the tears rising in more eyes than his own among those on the stage and took up his next lines as the prophetess Ane more quickly than he might have, to move everyone onward from where their thoughts should not go just now. His own included.
At the end everyone came back onto the stage. Joliffe, looking around at them, saw they were all as lifted up and worn out as he was, and he started to clap, both for himself and them. Sendell, beaming at them from the yard below the wagon’s edge, joined in, and then everyone in a burst of relief and triumph was clapping for each other.
“We can only hope,” said Sendell when they had done, “that the next two practices go badly.”
Those among them who knew the old adage that a bad last practice meant a good performance when it counted explained it to those who looked either puzzled or alarmed at Sendell’s words. That made for more laughter before Sendell held up a hand and finished, “Word is we’re to play at five sites this year. If you haven’t heard, those will be in Gosford Street, then along to the meeting of Greyfriars and Earl Street, onward to the corner of Smithford and West Orchard, around to where West Orchard meets Cross Cheaping, and lastly at St. Michael’s churchyard. The weavers have promised us plenty of apprentices and journeymen to pull the wagon, so all we have to do is be there. And play our hearts out, of course.”
They cheered him for that, and he dismissed them for the night. Only to Joliffe, lingering behind everyone else, did he show how tired he was, sagging down on a bench to sit staring at the pageant wagon across the yard. In the evening shadows the bold colors of its red and blue painted sides and the green and yellow curtains of the stage house were muted, the emptiness of the stage profound after all that had been there so short a time before. Joliffe sat down beside him, guessing he needed to talk. Not taking his eyes from the stage, Sendell said, “It’s going to work. I truly think it’s going to work.”
“If they could do this well tonight,” Joliffe said, “they’ll be fine come the day.”
Sendell gave him a wry, sideways look. “Yes. Tonight. You couldn’t have waited until after Corpus Christi to make all this trouble, could you?”
The question was mostly in jest, but Joliffe answered it straight because it was something he had already thought on. “If she had had more time for what she had done to wear a familiar groove into her thoughts, into her feelings, I might not have been able to jar her so easily—if ever—into open guilt.”
“No,” Sendell agreed. “I don’t suppose you could have.” He slapped his hands down on his thighs and said in lighter humour. “Still, we have a play and that’s what counts. I’m going to bed. I’m so tired I can hardly walk straight. You?”
“I’ll sit here a while, while it’s quiet. It’s been a long few days and I could do with doing nothing for a time.”
Sendell nodded to that and strolled away to the stairs. Joliffe stayed where he was, but the “nothing” that he hoped for did not come. Instead, his mind turned yet again to what he supposed he would never be able to answer: Had Anna Deyster confessed—first to him and then as freely to Master Fylongley, and after him to the other bailiff—because she could no longer stand the pain she was in? Or did she do it from a need for penance for her deed mixed with a confused hope that the law would make an end of her, ending her struggle through a life that seemed to have betrayed her at every turn?
Those questions had come as he listened to her readily confessing again and again to bailiffs and sheriff, but there was no way that he could ask her for answer. Supposing she even knew herself.
The curfew bell began to ring and he left the yard, closing the gate carefully behind him, heading back through the streets to his bed, tired enough now to sleep no matter what his thoughts.
Against what he had supposed, through the next two days he had some answer of what Anna Deyster’s fate was likely to be. Along with all the other talk about the murders, word spread that Mistress Byfeld was swearing she would buy a pardon for her daughter no matter what the cost. Pardons were not always possible, but whereas a wife killing her husband was treason and execution for that hard to avoid, murdering a murderer was another matter altogether, and there was not much doubt left of Ned’s guilt after someone—it was supposed a villager not wanting to chance being pulled onto a jury—sent a boy to the crowner with a message of where Kydwa’s servant’s body could be found under a stream bank. That ended all possibility the man had killed his master and run away. It likewise must have stripped from Ned’s family what hope they might have held that after all he had not done what Anna Deyster claimed. It also meant that Anna Deyster had as many people on her side as blaming her, and although she would perforce be found guilty of Ned’s murder since she continued to insist on it, the odds were strong that Mistress Byfeld would succeed in a petition and payment for a pardon from the crown.