A Play of Heresy Read Free Page A

to unsettle himself nor take a sudden turn to killing. No.” Sebastian’s gaze was brooding on the green and quiet countryside. “There’s a murdered body out there somewhere, waiting to be found.”
    “Or two bodies.”
    “Or two bodies, aye.”
    “Plain robbery, you think?” Joliffe said. “And the bodies hidden better than robbers usually bother to do?”
    “It would be simplest to think so,” Sebastian said, plainly not thinking that at all. “But it will be Lollards. I feel it in my bone here.” He jabbed a thumb against his doublet at the breast bone underneath. “Lollards sure as anything.”
    Since with Sebastian it always came to Lollards, Joliffe let that go, saying instead as he gathered up his reins, “I hear horses. I’d best ride on.” Since they would do best not to be seen together.
    “Right enough.” Sebastian stood up, stretching, readying to walk again. “I’ll leave Coventry to you for now since you’ll be there anyway. Learn what you can about Master Robert Kydwa and what he might have found out that got him killed. He was going to bring me more word about the damned Coventry Lollards. He knew some. Now he’s likely dead, and it will be them that did it. Take heed on that. I’ll seek you out later to hear what you learned.” He was walking away as he said that. It was over his shoulder he added, “Stay alive.”
    The road to Coventry was straight ahead. Sebastian had taken the right-hand road, his tread the weary one of a solitary traveler knowing he would get eventually where he was going. Joliffe’s glare at his back was wasted and the coming horses sounded only the last bend of the road away, so he nudged his heels into his own horse’s flanks, setting it moving again as a fresh shower of rain spattered down.

Chapter 2
     
    H e was shortly overtaken by a trotting line of pack-horses, their rope-bound bundles strapped firmly to backs and sides. Their rider at lead did not give him so much as a look, but Joliffe and the rear man shared friendly nods as they passed. The tittupping of hoofs faded, the rain gave up, and for a time Joliffe was alone on the road again, except companioned now by regret at how much of ease was gone from his day. He had been looking forward to being simply a player in Coventry. Now he was supposed to find out what he could about this Master Kydwa. And Lollards.
    He did not know why it was always Lollards with Sebastian. The man worried at them like a dog at a bone it hated. Maybe a special charge from Bishop Beaufort had set him on, but Joliffe suspected it was the other way around—that they were Sebastian’s own-chosen foe and Bishop Beaufort simply made use of an itch Sebastian already had. However it was, Sebastian was hell-bent on his quest to find out Lollards and their complots, and that hell-bent sat uneasily with Joliffe. True enough, a goodly number of the wilder ones among them had made trouble hereabouts—seven years ago, was it now?—with an armed uprising. For a few weeks things had been chancy, and afterward there had been some hangings, but so far as Joliffe had ever seen, most Lollards were not out to make open trouble. Yes, they were known to gripe against the Church and the government, but who did not? They claimed they wanted to understand what they were told to believe, which was fair enough on the face of it, but what was their chance of it, given that scholars had been quarreling over how and what to believe for centuries?
    From what Joliffe had heard, the core of Lollard gatherings seemed to be someone among them reading aloud from the Bible done out of Latin into English. Then they would sit around telling each other what they thought it meant, sure they could do better at it than priests and scholars. Priests and scholars of course felt otherwise, but still the whole thing might have been no great matter if only there were not some Lollards who thought—convinced as they were of how right they were; after all, their name