A Play of Piety Read Free

looked out at him, and said in practiced greeting, “Welcome to this place. God have you in his keeping.” And then more sharply, “You look hale enough. What do you want here? There’s honest work to be had in the fields, if that’s what you’re after. If it isn’t, best you be on your way.”
    Not an old man, Joliffe revised, having a longer look at him. Middle-aged at the most, his stoop not from age but because of a badly humped back that was probably part of whatever infirmity had likewise shriveled and stiffened his right arm into a crook at his side and given him the limp Joliffe had heard on the stairs. There would be no fieldwork for him, surely, nor much in the way of any craft he could do. He might have been made gatekeeper here out of plain charity, but the sharpness of both his judgment and his demand at Joliffe said he was good at his work, and Joliffe said as plainly back, “I was told a friend was here in hospital.”
    “His name would be?” the gatekeeper demanded, unyielding.
    “Ah.” Joliffe paused, awkward with lack of that. “We’re a company of players. I was apart for a while, and all I’ve heard is one of us is here, without the man who told me being able to say who.”
    Instantly friendlier, the gatekeeper said with a smile, “That will be Thomas the Player you mean,” and stepped back, drawing the gate wider open to let Joliffe into the yard beyond it. The yard was a wide space, dusty in the August heat, with various timber-and-plaster buildings around it. By the glance Joliffe gave them, those at one end of the yard looked to be a stable and storerooms. At the yard’s other end was a long, open-sided, empty shed, while facing the gateway was the gable end of a high-roofed great hall and the long side of a two-floored building with narrow windows above and below. A wide doorway up a single step led into a foreporch, with presently the door at its far end standing open to the warm day.
    To Joliffe it looked much like any number of manor yards into which he had come over the years, except that no one was there save himself and the bent-backed gatekeeper. Such unnatural quiet could only be because everyone was out to the harvest, Joliffe supposed as the gatekeeper began to shuffle toward the porch across the yard, saying, “I’ll just see you to him, to be sure he’s the man you want.”
    And to see me right back out if he’s not, Joliffe thought.
    He would have been holding back a smile at the man’s busy assurance if his worry had not been keeping any smile at bay as he picked up his sack and followed. He could have hoped the gatekeeper’s light mention of Basset meant there was nothing greatly ill with him, but the thought was forestalled by knowing that Basset would not have been here except he was too ill for Rose to care for him.
    The door led not into any room but a passage that went straight through the narrow building, with another door standing open at its other end, giving glimpse of a roofed walk, but there were two doors on the right as well, and another on the left, and it was through the latter that Joliffe was led into what, from the outside, had seemed no more than a usual great hall. Inwardly, too, it partly matched that look, being broad and long, with a heavily beamed roof open to the high rafters, but where a usual hall would have been open from one end to the other for space to set up the trestle tables at mealtimes and for the gathering of the household for one thing and another at other times, this place was broken by posts and curtains into—he counted quickly as the gatekeeper led him into a middle aisle that ran the length of the hall to its far end—eight stalls, he supposed he could call them, four to each side, lined along the walls, their end to the aisle open but separated from one another by rough-woven, dark red-brown curtains hung on wooden rods just above head-height.
    He had no time to note more just then as, ahead of him, the gatekeeper