Fifteen

IT TOOK ME LONG to reach the town. I kept in cover as far as I could, not using the road much for fear of pursuit—the light was strong enough for a man to be seen moving against the snow. But in the event no pursuit came. Perhaps I was believed to be hiding in some corner of the castle; or perhaps they judged it useless to search in the dark, even with dogs. Whatever the reason I was thankful for it, for my own sake and that of the others, reasoning that while I was at large they were the less likely to come to harm.

I was wet from the waist down and chilled and exhausted when I came to the inn, hardly able to keep from staggering in my walk. The yard lay deserted. There was no sound anywhere, but one of the upstairs rooms showed a crack of light between the shutters. It was the room at the end of the gallery, the Justice’s. The inn door was open still. I mounted the stairs and went softly down the passage to the end room. Light came from under the door. I stood there for some moments, listening first to my own loud heart and then to a voice from within the room that droned and paused and resumed again. I gathered what courage I had and rapped with my knuckles against the panel.

I heard the voice break off. Then the door was opened and a man of middle years stood at the threshold, a thin man, sharp of feature, dressed in a black coat such as attorneys wear. His eyes ran over me, my shaven head, the wet and bedraggled skirts of my habit. “What do you seek?” he said, in no very friendly manner. A larger man stood beyond him, in the middle of the room.

“I would speak with the Justice,” I said.

“On what business?”

“It is about the murdered boy,” I said. “I am a priest … I am one of the players.”

“It is late,” he said. “The Lord Justice is occupied. Will it not keep until the morning?”

“Let him come in.”

It was not said loudly, but the voice was of one accustomed to command. The man at the door moved aside and I went into the room. There was a desk with scrolls upon it and a good fire burning in the grate. Tall candles burned in a triple-headed brass sconce and they had the clear flame that only comes from good tallow. This was far beyond the means of the inn to provide, as were also the red and gold damask hangings on the walls. Facing me was a man of corpulent body and good height, dressed in a black skullcap and a black velvet mantle held at the neck with a jeweled pin. “So,” he said, “a priest who is a player is not so infrequent, especially among priests who get advancement, eh, Thomas?”

“No, sir.”

“A player who is also a priest, I grant you, that is rarer. This is my secretary, and a very promising advocate. What is your name?”

I told him but I do not think he took note of it, not then. He looked at me more closely as I spoke and his face changed. “Set a chair for him,” he said. “Here by the fire. Give him a glass of that red wine we brought with us.”

And in truth I think he saved me from fainting in the sudden warmth and brightness of that room.

“Such wine you will not find in a place like this,” he said, watching me drink. “I saw the play from my window here. It was very well done—far beyond the common. Your master-player is a man greatly gifted.”

“Better for us had he been less so,” I said.

“Indeed?” He mused for some moments, looking toward the fire. His face was heavy and hung in folds, as if too much flesh had piled on the bone; but the brow was high and the mouth was firmly molded. The eyes, when he looked up at me, were considering and cold—also, as it seemed to me, in some way sad, as possessing knowledge not much prized. “What brings you here?” he said, and he signed to the secretary to replenish my glass.

At this I told him all that had happened, trying to keep things in the order of their occurring, which was not easy in my weary state, would not have been easy whatever my state, when so much had depended on accident and surmise.

I told him how Brendan’s death had brought me into the company and then brought the company to the town. I told him of our failure with the Play of Adam and our desperate need for money so as to continue on our way to Durham. I told him of Martin’s idea for making a play out of the murdering of Thomas Wells, which was something that belonged to the town.

“We did not doubt at first, when we began, that the girl was guilty,” I said. “There was no reason to think otherwise, she had been tried and condemned for it. But the more we discovered, the more difficult it was to go on believing this. And it was not only the things that we learned by inquiry.” I faltered now, coming to the part least likely to be believed. His eyes rested on me with the same expression, attentive and cold but not unkind. “We learned through the play,” I said. “We learned through the parts we were given. It is something not easy to explain. I am new to playing but it has seemed to me like dreaming. The player is himself and another. When he looks at the others in the play he knows he is part of their dreaming just as they are part of his. From this come thoughts and words that outside the play he would not readily admit to his mind.”

“I see, yes,” he said. “And as you played the murder …”

“It pointed always away from the girl, first to the Benedictine, because he had lied.”

I was beginning to tell him of these lies but he held up a hand. “I have read the deposition of the Benedictine,” he said.

It was the first sign he gave that he had occupied himself with the matter and my heart rose at it. “But then he was hanged,” I said. “They dressed him in a penitent’s shift and tied his hands and hanged him. And we thought it must be a punishment because he caused this one to be found. But only the powerful would punish in that way, those who hold their power from God or the King.”

“We servants of the Crown would say it is the self same thing, eh, Thomas?”

“Yes, sir.”

He had smiled a little, saying this, and again I saw some quality of sadness in his face, something that I did not think had always been there, that had come with the years of good living and the authority of his office. “So then,” he said, “the Monk took the body of Thomas Wells, after someone else had killed him, and laid it there on the road. Then that someone else, or another, killed the Monk. Did you not ask yourselves why he chose that particular time to bring back the boy’s body? Why did he wait so long? It was a dangerous time, was it not? It must have been getting light. In fact the man Flint found the boy not much after.”

“Perhaps he was not killed until then.”

He shook his head. “The boy was taken in the afternoon, as it grew dark. The one he was taken to would have been waiting, no doubt impatiently. It is not likely that Thomas Wells was strangled as an afterthought. Dawn is a common time for killing oneself, but not others. Unless it be by Royal Warrant, eh, Thomas? Give him some more wine, half a glass only—he will need to keep his wits about him yet.”

“Then there was the haste of it,” I said. “And the steward came and paid the priest and saw the boy buried. It began to seem—”

I stopped short with a sudden fear, looking at the fleshy, keen-eyed face before me. The wine was loosening my tongue, but there was danger in such frankness. Had I escaped from one trap only to fall into another? “We meant no harm, it was only to make a play,” I said. “We were led to it, step by step.”

“There is nothing to fear,” he said. “I give you my word on it. I will require nothing from you, save only this account.”

I could only hope that this was true. I had gone too far now to retract or fall silent. “Then Martin was stricken with love for the girl,” I said. “It was beyond all reason, he saw her only once.”

I told him then of our arrest and of how we had been kept for a night and a day, then taken before the Lord and made to do the play, but in a private chamber and before the Lord and steward only, and how Martin had betrayed us.

“You will be the first players to have set foot in Sir Richard’s private apartments,” he said. “He is fond of music, they say, but not of shows and plays. He is a man of austere life.” The Justice spoke with pity almost, as if it concerned some aberration of the spirit.

“Well,” I said, “the chamber was austere enough, there was nothing in it but a chair. There was nothing to remark anywhere but the smell of plague as we went by.”

I had said this as an afterthought but he raised his head at it and fixed his eyes on my face. “Plague? Are you sure?”

“I am sure, yes. It is not a smell like any other. Once you have known it, you will know it always again. It came from a room that we passed on the way.”

“Perhaps the one within was gone already to his Judge?”

“I do not think so.” I sought to remember, not as myself thinking the matter important, but because of his very evident interest in it. There was the short passage, the suddenly opened door, the veiled and hooded sister with the white cloths draping the sleeves of her habit, the smell of death-in-life that followed us. “It was only the impression of a moment, as we went by,” I said. “I think the one in the room was still being cared for in some fashion.”

He was silent for a long moment. Then he nodded slightly and it seemed indifferently and looked away. “Yes, I see,” he said. “Picture it, Thomas. This player come from nowhere, puts on the mask of Superbia, and gives him back look for look in his own chamber, Sir Richard de Guise, one of the strongest barons north of the Humber, with lands that go east from here as far as Whitby, who dispenses his own justice, not the King’s, and has his own army and his own court and his own prison.”

“The man must be mad,” the secretary said.

“Madness you call it?” His eyes returned to me. “I had thought love would make a man want to preserve his life, not throw it away.”

“He is a man who goes to extremes. Besides, he had lost hope that the girl could be saved. He did not know …” Here I was obliged to make a pause and master myself, as gratitude threatened me with tears. “None of us knew,” I said, “that you had come to administer the King’s justice and set this foul wrong right.”

And now his eyes were full upon me, narrowed in a scrutiny that seemed half-amused, half-incredulous. “The King’s justice,” he said. “Do you know what it is, the King’s justice? Do you think I would leave his business in York and come these weary miles in this weather, to this wretched inn where I am served food not fit for the swill tub, for the sake of a dead serf and a dumb goatgirl?”

“I did not think there could be other reason for your coming. I thought—”

“You thought I was one of your company, one of the players, somewhat belated, come to put on the mask of Justitia in your True Play of Thomas Wells. There was the Monk and the Lord and the Weaver and the Knight. And now the Justice, who sets all things right in the end. But I am in a different play. What did you say was your name?”

“Nicholas Barber.”

“How old are you, Nicholas?”

“This is my twenty-third winter, sir,” I said.

He sat back in his chair and looked at me for a moment or two, then shook his head. “I have no sons, only daughters,” he said. “But if I had one such as you I would be concerned lest simplicity bring him to folly and thence to grief. You are at the stage of folly already, are you not? You are outside your diocese without license, you have joined a company of players.”

“Yes,” I said, “it is true.”

“What led you to do so?” He was looking closely at me still, but with an air now of simple curiosity which was somehow more disturbing to me than that former derisive incredulity. “You had a certain position,” he said. “You are lettered. You could have hoped for advancement.”

“I am, or was, one of the sub-deacons at the Cathedral of Lincoln,” I said. “I was set to transcribe Pilato’s Homer for a benefactor, a work extremely tedious and verbose. It was the month of May, the birds were singing outside my window and the hawthorn was breaking into flower.”

“So simple as that?” He glanced aside. “No more than an impulse.” His eyes moved over the rich hangings on the walls, the bright blaze of the fire, the silent and attentive secretary. “Thomas has never done a thing like that, have you, Thomas?”

“No, sir.”

“Thomas will sit on the King’s Bench someday.” He looked at me again. “I have never done a thing like that either. I have studied and worked for one part only. If such impulse had come to me I would have taken it for sickness.”

He fell silent and for some moments there was no sound in the room but the whisper of the fire. Then he stirred, as if waking. “Thomas and I have some private business to conclude,” he said. “I will ask you to wait elsewhere for a brief while. Then we will go on a short journey together. But first I will tell you something about the King’s justice, though I do not hope to lessen your simplicity thereby. For a dozen years or more, since I first came close in counsel to the King, we have had trouble with this stiff-necked de Guise. He keeps men under arms in numbers more than needful and they are unruly and oppressive and threaten the peace of the realm, and the dues that are the King’s prerogative go to paying their wages. He combines with others to maintain the right of the lords, as peers of the realm, to pronounce judgment on their fellows, thus denying the King’s right of impeachment. He takes the law into his hands. Only Royal Commissioners have the power to try cases of felony in the shires, and all fines and expropriations should go to the Royal Exchequer, yet this Lord arrogates such powers of trial to his Sheriff’s court and all the moneys go into his coffers.”

He paused, with a compression of the lips. “You see?” he said. “No way but force with such a man. And this is not a time for force, with the loyalties of the people uncertain and a Commons always ready to cry tyranny. But I kept him in my view, there was one in his following who reported to me. Then, a year ago, we began to hear stories of disappearing children, those you know of and others, vagabond children about the town, parentless children who came to beg at the castle gates. Always boys. And now this case of Thomas Wells, the one who was found, and finally a path that led to the house of de Guise.”

He paused, smiling, and stretched out white hands to the fire as if cherishing still the wondrous warmth of that opportunity and the gems of his fingers flashed in the firelight. “I have looked very carefully at this case,” he said. “And I know the truth of it now.”

“And now you will bring him to justice and serve the King’s cause at the same time.”

He shook his head and smiled again. “I see well that you have been put to copy the wrong books,” he said. “Do you think he would meekly consent to be tried? Justice is less easily applied to the strong than to the defenseless. It is the fame of his house that concerns him most. We are fortunate in the nature of the crime.”

“Fortunate? Thomas Wells would not say so, if he had a voice.”

The smile faded and his eyes narrowed in the heavy face as he looked at me and I understood what it might mean to be an obstacle in the path of such a man as this. “What we cannot change we do not waste time over unless we can make use of it,” he said. “It is time you learned that, Nicholas Barber. The manner of the boy’s death is something we can make use of. There are mortal sins and mortal sins. Some might add luster to a pride like his. But not, I think, the sin of sodomy. No, I will talk to him and he will listen, and he will go on listening as long as he lives.” He paused for a moment and his expression softened a little. “One thing only was puzzling me and you have shed full light on that. I am grateful to you.”

“How did I do so?”

“Later you will know it. You will wait for us now some little while. Then we will take a ride together, and I promise you enlightenment at the end.”

“To the castle?”

He rose to his feet and stood looking down at me from his greater height. “Not to the castle,” he said.

I was moving toward the door when he spoke again. “You will come to no harm. Wait for me below, do not run away. After this journey it will lie in my power to deliver the girl from prison into your keeping.”

“And the others, what of them?”

“Yes,” he said, “them too. Have no fear, it will not be too late. Yesterday when you were taken, I sent some lines to Sir Richard, enough to give him pause. That is what I can do for your friends. For you I can put in a word with the Bishop of Lincoln if you desire to return.”

I would have thanked him but he waved a hand in dismissal and the secretary came forward to show me from the room. I went down the stairs again and out into the yard. Moving quietly and keeping near the wall I made my way to the barn and tried the door: it was chained on the inside. I rattled the door against the chain, not too loudly. There came the sound of a dog from inside, something between a bark and a whine. Then I heard Margaret’s voice, thick with sleep, asking who was there.

“It is me, Nicholas,” I said, speaking close to the door.

After some moments I heard the key turn and the door was opened wide enough to let me in. Margaret had lit a candle and she held it in her hand. The light was cast upward over her broad cheekbones and the tangles of her hair. “Well, you are back,” she said. “I was going to wait until the morning.”

I did not understand what she intended by this but before I could make any reply she gave me the candle to hold and turned and burrowed briefly in the straw. When she stood again she was holding the box in which we kept our takings. “Another night in this piss-hole I will not stay,” she said. “There are sixteen shillings and fourpence in this box. That is what is left of our takings. I have had to pay two nights’ lodging here. That stinkard would have taken it in kind but I cannot abide him. Hold up the candle, Nicholas, and I will count it out. Half I keep for myself, who do not belong to this company and never did, nor any other.”

She began to count the coins out into my palm. No word of sympathy for my weary state or inquiry about the others.

“Margaret, we did not abandon you,” I said. “We had no choice but to go.”

“It is not that,” she said. “Wait, or I will lose my count.”

The money was all in pennies and my hand could not hold so much. “You can put it in this,” she said, and she found for me the black murder purse, which I had seen last when Martin held it up before the people at full stretch of his arms, as if it were the Host. “I kept it ready,” Margaret said.

When it was all counted out she sighed and nodded and turned to put her box again in its place under the straw. “I take half in payment,” she said. “Other payment I had none. I knew I would be given no share in the playing, but I did things that were needed and no one else could do them and I thought I would have my place in the company, but no place was given to me, except only what served you. I did not want to think it before, but when the soldiers came and took you and did not even bother to take me I was made to think of it and I knew I counted for nothing.”

“With them, no.”

“With you either,” she said very simply, as if there could be no argument.

It seemed to me strange and illogical, and belonging to the unreasonable nature of women, that Margaret should so resent being spared the danger of death and moreover should blame us for it, who had been placed in that danger. “The others are held still, they are in the castle,” I said. “They are in danger of their lives.”

“I do not want to hear of it,” she said. “They are the players, the play is theirs.”

“Where will you go?”

“I will go to Flint. He came at noon today to ask for me. The twice we were together pleased him. He wants to take me into his house. He will take the dog too. He says it is young enough still to be trained for sheep. The innkeeper says he will look to the horse, he is hoping that no one comes back to claim it.”

I did not think that the dog would come up to Flint’s expectations and I was not altogether sure that Margaret would, but I naturally kept silent on this score. “Well,” I said, “I wish you good fortune with all my heart.”

At this she smiled a little but without much softening and after a moment she came and kissed me. “Go back to your Bishop, you were best,” she said.

“Well, that is doubtful,” I said. “As for this question of being admitted to the company and having a part to play, you can take comfort from the story of the Devil and Player, do you know the one?”

She shook her head and yawned, in a manner not encouraging. Nevertheless, I persisted, because I thought there might be consolation in it for her.

“It took place before there were players, if we can imagine such a time. The Devil was casting about the world and he came upon a man of very virtuous life and sought to tempt him. He tried all manner of blandishment, the lusts of the flesh, the treasures of the world, fame and dominion. All of these the man steadfastly rejected. The Devil was at his wit’s end and could think of nothing more but to offer to make him a player. The man saw no harm in this and agreed and so he lost the bout and his soul was forfeit because a player borrows bits and pieces from the souls of others and in this pastime his own soul loosens and slips away from him and it is an easy matter for the Devil to scoop it up. And this has been the case with players ever since.”

Margaret’s response to this story confirmed me in my view that women have no head for abstract thought.

“If Stephen escapes hanging,” she said, “tell him Flint is big and strong and has both his thumbs and plenty of gristle in them.”

I promised to do this and she lay down again to sleep. I sat on the straw with my back to the wall and tried to think of what the Justice had told me. The Lord must already have had the message, perhaps it was somewhere about him while he sat watching our play. Martin had mocked him in the mask of Superbia and sought to bring him into the Play of Thomas Wells. But that note, which I had not read and never would, had forced on him a part in another play, that in which the Justice was a player and the King also, a larger play in which the suffering of the innocent was of no importance except as a counter to bargain with. And as my eyes grew heavy with sleep I wondered if there were not some larger play still, in which Kings and Emperors and Popes, though thinking they are in the center of the space, are really only in the margin …