A Play of Isaac Read Free

Richard?”
    Joliffe immediately judged she was his wife and that they all were a tidy little family group—two brothers, probably, and the wife of the elder, with somehow an idiot in tow. Another brother?
    Lewis was saying happily, “Plays and plays and plays.
    It’s almost Corpus Christi and there’ll be plays and plays and more plays.”
    Piers, never one to keep out of anything for long unless he were forcibly stopped, made a small leap onto the sturdy-lidded basket nearest Lewis, struck a pose, and said, “We know! We’re to play the third play. The one at St. Michael’s Northgate. Isaac and Abraham . . . .”
    “ Abraham and Isaac, ” Ellis corrected.
    “. . . and I’m Isaac,” Piers went on, uncorrected. He and Ellis often differed on their views of the world and, presently, particularly on the name of the play they had been hired to do for Oxford town’s Corpus Christi plays. To Piers’s mind, if he was playing Isaac then Isaac had to be the more important. “I even cry when my father is going to kill me,” he said proudly.
    “He kills you?” Lewis breathed, looking awed at Ellis.
    Ellis was too often mistaken for Pier’s father for Piers to care; he went on, heedless of it, “My father in the play. Abraham. No, he doesn’t kill me. The angel stops him, remember. That’ll be Joliffe.”
    “But aren’t you afraid he might kill you?” Lewis insisted, wide-eyed.
    “No,” Piers said with bold scorn and friendliness. “The sword we use wouldn’t cut hot butter. I’ll show you.” Quickly, the way he did almost everything, he slipped off the far side of the basket and had it open and Lewis was come to join him before anyone could gainsay them.
    The woman with her hand still on her husband’s arm said in embarrassed despair, “Oh, Lewy!” while her husband said to Ellis, “I’m sorry. He’s like that about things. Simon, can’t you . . . ?”
    The younger man was already going toward Lewis and Piers as if taking responsibility for Lewis were a long accustomed thing for him, while Rose came forward, saying with a smile, “It’s no matter, sir. He’s welcome to see. But, Piers, if you mess things about, you’ll spend the afternoon straightening them.”
    “I won’t,” Piers said in the voice of one forever much put upon by others.
    Lewis echoed, “We won’t,” sounding so much like him that over their heads Rose and Simon unexpectedly widely smiled at each other with much the same depth of affection.
    But beside her husband the woman was saying, “We really should have brought Matthew. He’s the only one who manages Lewy well, he really is. Richard, shouldn’t we be going home?”
    Simon looked to Richard who slightly nodded agreement to his wife’s insistence. Unhurriedly but firmly, Simon set to extricating Lewis and Piers from each other’s company and the depths of the basket with a casual hand on Lewis’s shoulder and, “We must needs go now, Lewis. You heard Geva and Richard. We have to go home. The players have things to do. We have to go.”
    Lewis surfaced from behind the propped up lid. “Do we, Simon? I don’t want to.”
    “We do,” Simon said gently, firmly.
    Great grief shimmered dark into Lewis’s odd-formed eyes, but even as he protested, “I don’t want to go,” he was moving to follow Simon, probably too used to doing what he was told to do to make real trouble over it. Then suddenly delight as utter as his grief had been bloomed across his face. He stopped where he was between the baskets and said, “They can come, too! They can come and do plays for me!”
    Geva cried with instant and complete dismay, “Oh, Lewy, no !”, while her husband said more moderately, “I don’t think so, Lewis.”
    Only Simon kept countenance, saying calmly, “Lewis, the players can’t come with us. They have things to do.”
    “They can do things with me. Where I am,” Lewis insisted.
    “We don’t have any place for them to stay,” Simon insisted back