“Here, yes, and stay here, too, rather than with your fellows, because you’ll be needed in the night sometimes. So a bed and your food and drink come with the work. And a penny a day.”
“I’ll only be here so long as we have to be,” Joliffe said. “I’m away when the rest of them go.”
“Better to have you a while than not at all,” Sister Ursula answered with firm practicality. “Maybe Ivo will have shifted himself back here by the time you all leave. Or the harvest will be done and there’ll be someone else to hire.”
Harvesting would pay better in coin, Joliffe thought, but hurt more in body. Better, what with one consideration and another, to work around here than sweating at the harvest—with the added benefit that Ellis would be irked he was not breaking his back with the rest of them.
“Done, then,” he said. “I’m yours for the while.”
“Good. Rose will show you where to bed and all. Tomorrow you can start. You’ve no horse we need see to, do you?”
“No horse.”
“Good.” She nodded at the bread and cheese he held. “Eat up. Rose, everything’s in hand here?”
“All’s well,” Rose said.
“Bless you. Time I was away to Mistress Thorncoffyn then.”
And she was gone out of the kitchen and away. Gazing at the doorway through which she had vanished, Joliffe asked somewhat wonderingly, “Is she always so brisk?”
“Always,” Rose assured him. “Always brisk, always definite, always generous-hearted. Mind you”—Rose raised the spoon to emphasize her warning—“she doesn’t suffer fools gladly.”
Joliffe sat down on a stool beside the table. “Fortunate then that I’m not a fool.”
“Um,” said Rose, not committing herself to that one way or the other but smiling at him before she turned back to the pot over the fire.
Joliffe chewed through a mouthful of bread and cheese, then asked very quietly, “How is it with Basset? How is it truly?”
Rose swung the pot to the edge of the fire and hung the spoon on a waiting hook before she faced him, to answer gravely, “He’s far better than he was. When it was at the worst, he could barely bear to move. The pains in his hips and knees and even the bones of his feet were terrible, but if he didn’t move, his joints stiffened, and then he could hardly move even when he had to, and that was worse. So he had to move but was in barely bearable pain when he did. It was beyond anything I could do to ease or better it. We were fortunate to come on this place when we did. They’ve helped him as I never could.”
“How long, at a guess, until he’s fit to leave?”
Rose took too long to answer that. If she had not been strong of will and mind and brave-hearted into the bargain, she would not have lasted in the life the players led, but still she took too long to say anything, and Joliffe stood up, leaving the bread and cheese, and went around the table to her, just in time to put his arms around her as her tears spilled over. She leaned her forehead against his shoulder, letting herself be held, but only for a moment before she drew a trembling breath and straightened away from him, swept tears from her cheeks with firm fingers and said, “I’m sorry.”
“Rose,” Joliffe said gently. “Just how bad is it? Worse than he told me, yes?”
“We don’t know.” Her voice was steady, the tears gone. “That’s the trouble. No one can say how far better he’s going to be. How he is now—this may be the best he’ll ever be.”
And that was not good enough for him to go on as a player. If he could hardly walk, that was the end of playing for him and the end of the company.
“I’ve given you nothing to drink,” Rose said suddenly and made a bustle of fetching a cup of what proved to be good new ale, setting it on the table beside him, and going to put the kettle over the fire again, asking as she went, “It went well? Your business?”
“It did,” Joliffe said.
“You’re not needed . . . somewhere else sometime soon?”
“Not that anyone’s said. That smells good. They eat well here?”
Understanding he had told her all he was going to tell just then, she answered, “They do,” and went on to talk of where the players had been after he left them and where they had been going when Basset’s necessity had stopped them here. “It being harvest time and workers always needed, they’re as grateful for us just now as we are for them. Father told you what the others and even Tisbe are doing?”
“He did. What happened to this Ivo whose place I’m taking?”
“Oh, it seems he tired of being paid his penny a day here when fieldwork would earn him more. So he took himself off to elsewhere. Sister Ursula says he’ll likely be back sometime. He does this almost every year.” And in despite of the statutes there were forbidding workers wandering in search of better pay when they could get work where they were, he could be sure of finding work somewhere at better pay than a penny a day, because at harvest time no one ever had enough workers. Rose looked at Joliffe. “How did you come from wherever you were without being set to work somewhere?”
Joliffe patted the leather purse hanging from his belt. “A signed, sealed permission from Lord Lovell giving me leave, as his man, to go as I must, without let or hindrance.”
“Very useful,” Rose said, with plain memory of times before they were Lord Lovell’s players when such a thing would have greatly eased their lives. She swung the pot altogether away from the fire. “There. That’s done, I think. Now let me show you where you’ll sleep and warn you of a few things.”
Chapter 3
W
here he would sleep proved to be a small room off the short passageway between the kitchen and the roofed walk—and small was the only word for it, with just distance enough to fully open the door between the doorway and the narrow bed along the far wall and no space for anything else except a little wooden chest against the wall beside the bedfoot, with a wall-pole above it for hanging clothing. Joliffe slid his bag from his shoulder yet again, this time to the wooden floor beside the little chest, and said, “I hope Ivo wasn’t a large man.” He nodded toward the wall beyond the bed and asked, “What’s there?”
“The stairway to the storeroom that’s above here,” Rose said from outside the doorway, there being hardly space for them both at once in the room. “Beyond the stairs is the scullery. You’ll be seeing enough of that soon.”
“Will I?” he asked, suddenly wary. “Washing dishes was part of this Ivo’s duties?”
“Everything was part of his duties,” Rose said with a serenity suspiciously underlain with laughter. She looked at the bare mattress on the roped bedstead. “I’ll bring you sheets, a blanket, and a pillow.” She stepped backward from the doorway, inviting him to come out, adding, “We stripped and scrubbed the room and aired the mattress after he went. That only leaves doing the same to you.”
“Pardon?” he said, following her back toward the kitchen.
“Cleanliness of body and soul. Those are the lights that lead us here.” She sounded as if she were quoting—and maybe a little mocking—someone.
“I note that cleanliness of body comes first,” Joliffe said dryly. “I suppose because it’s easier to be sure a body is clean than a soul.”
“Only too true,” Rose agreed, crossing the kitchen toward a far doorway. “So, as with anyone newly come here, we’ll begin with your body.”
Still following her but his voice rising more strongly, Joliffe repeated, “Pardon?”
“And hope for the best with your soul,” Rose said as she went out the door.
Joliffe followed her into a small, stone-paved yard enclosed on either side by low, long buildings and at the far side by a waist-high wall of willow-woven hurdles and a broad gateway to what looked a larger yard with varied buildings that Joliffe supposed were the place’s byre, haystore, and granary as well as a poultry yard somewhere, to guess by the many multi-colored chickens scattered and scratching about the dusty yard.
Here in the smaller yard Rose pointed at the buildings on the left and said, “The bakehouse and woodstore.” Then to the right and, “The brewhouse and laundry. That’s where you’re bound for.”
“The brewhouse?” Joliffe said with pretended hope.
“The laundry,” Rose said with the same ruthlessness she used toward Piers when he was going to be given no choice about something. “It’s also the bathhouse, it being the rule that no one is admitted here without they be thoroughly bathed—soaped and scrubbed from hair to toenails. Patients and all,” she added as they reached the doorway, then saying as she went in, “Emme, I’ve someone needs a bath.”
Plainly, the place had been built with the thought of how it would be used. The roof was held up on stout wooden posts, but on two sides the walls stopped a foot short of the eaves, the better to let out the smoke and some of the heat from the two fires burning in the long, low-walled hearth in the middle of the room. Two cauldrons sat on short-legged gridirons above the coals, the steam of hot water rising from their depths, while just inside the door was a well with a long-roped bucket sitting beside it to keep those cauldrons filled. The round, high-sided wooden tub standing in a far corner was the bath, Joliffe guessed, and the tall woman coming toward him and Rose from beyond the cauldrons had to be Emme, the laundress. Lean as a coursing hound, she was gowned in the same gray gown and white apron as Sister Margaret and Sister Ursula, but her sleeves were pushed above her elbows, the gown was unlaced at her neck, and her hair was bound in a headcloth wrapped to leave her neck clear, to be as cool as might be in the place’s heavy, wet heat. She was red of face and red of arms, and Joliffe noted that those arms were as sinewed as any fieldworker’s. But the face was friendly, her eyes merry as she looked the length of him while saying to Rose, “He looks somewhat too healthy to be one of ours.”
“He’s taking Ivo’s place for the while,” Rose said.
“Nor a moment too soon,” Emme said, then turned her head to add. “Amice, hear that? We’ve someone for the firewood again.”
On the farther side of one of the cauldrons a woman stood up from where she had been kneeling, probably feeding firewood into the fire there. She was younger than Emme and not yet worn to such leanness, with a pretty plumpness to her and a curl of dark hair escaping the forehead edge of her headcloth that was wrapped, like Emme’s, to leave her neck clear. And a very pretty neck it was, too, Joliffe thought, smiling back to the smile she was giving him before it crossed his mind that her pleasure might be not so much at him for himself as for his ability to carry firewood.
That did not change her prettiness, however. Since they were all servants together, no bow was needed among them, and he simply nodded to her, still smiling, before Emme caught his heed back to her by saying, “Let’s have him clean, then. Amice, start filling the tub. You—”
She paused, waiting for his name, and he gave the one he had already given Sister Ursula.
“Joliffe, then,” she went on. “Strip off and get into the tub. Do you have fleas or suchlike, that we need to deal with your clothing, too?”
“No fleas or anything,” he said.
“Clean shirt and hosen and braies?”
“In my bag. In my room.”
“I’ll fetch them,” Rose said and left him to Emme’s firm ordering, beginning with telling him in no uncertain terms, when he was rid of doublet, hosen, and shirt and down to only his short braies, that he need not stop there. “We’ve seen too many men’s bodies to take much interest in them beyond whether they’re clean or not. Those off, too, and into the tub with you.”
Which would have been well enough, if Amice had not added, a little laughing, “Still, his is a better body than most we see.”
“It is that,” Emme had agreed, openly approving.
In his life Joliffe had not had much chance or use for shyness over nakedness, his own or other people’s, and the women’s laughter made it easy to finish stripping while Emme went on, “Most men we bathe are on their way to a sick bed, see you. Dirt in a hurt makes the hurt harder to heal, and even if it’s not an outright hurt they have but sickness, there’s the thought there’s evil little creatures that carry sickness, too small to see, and the less of them a sick man takes to his bed with him, the better his chances of living to leave that bed. That’s what we’re told, anyway, and whoever cast the rules for St. Giles put into them that everyone, whether they’re here to be tended or to work, has to start out clean. So into the tub with you.”
There was nothing new to Joliffe in any of that. He knew the scholarly thoughts on the possible existence of some sort of life so small as to be invisible and yet a cause of diseases. Knew, too, that—scholarly thoughts or no—any good hospital lent heavily toward cleanliness and that after his warm days on dusty roads he was more than willing to a bath now it was offered to him. Only the suddenness of it all was disconcerting him. Hardly an hour ago he had been trudging along a road, hot and dusty and alone. Now he had not only found Basset and Rose but had work, a promise of meals, a room to himself, and was about to sink into pleasantly warm water and be clean.
“Besides,” Amice added, quite cheerfully as he put himself into the tub, “there’s the stink that goes with sickness. That’s always good to wash away, too. Not that you smell bad, just of honest sweat.”
As good-humoured at it as they were, Joliffe settled himself into the bathing tub, hip-deep into warm water, his knees drawn up so he would fit, and while Amice went to scoop another bucketful from one of the cauldrons, Emme set a bowl of soap in his reach and said, “Wash everything. Your hair, too.”
He washed. His shirt and hosen and braies went into a pile of laundry after Emme had a look at them sufficient to be sure he had been right about no fleas or lice. Rose came back with his clean shirt and braies, told him he would find her in the kitchen when he had done here, and went away again. He finished his scrubbing, helped Amice tip the tub so the dirtied, soap-scummed water flowed into an open stone gutter and away under the wall, then stood in the tub while Emme and Amice poured clean, warm water from the rinse-tub over him. Having dumped the tub again, he dressed, thanked both women, found Rose in the kitchen, and was told he should keep himself out of the way if he did not want to be put to work before his time.