A Play of Piety Read Free Page A

stopped at the first stall and said, “Is this someone you know?” to someone inside it.
    Joliffe joined him, and there, stretched out on a wood-framed bed, was Basset. Enough propped up on two pillows that he need not raise his head to see who was come, he exclaimed, “Joliffe!” sat further up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. “How come you here?”
    “On my own two feet, as always,” Joliffe said.
    The gatekeeper said, satisfied, “He knows you then. I’ll leave you to it,” and shuffled away as an old man’s voice demanded from the next stall, “Who’s there? Thomas Player, who’s come?”
    “One of my company. You hush and let me have his news. I’ll tell it to you later.”
    “Have him push aside the curtain and speak up.”
    “Not until I know what he has to tell is fit for your chaste ears.”
    That brought a rasping, long-drawn chuckling from the curtain’s other side but no more questions as Basset grasped Joliffe by the wrist and pulled him down to sit on the bed’s edge with him. The booth was perhaps six feet across and mostly taken up with the narrow wooden bedstead standing with its head against the whitewashed wall, its foot toward the aisle between the booths. There was room enough—but only barely—on either side of the bed for a thin person to stand, and other than the bed and its bedclothes, there was nothing but a small, square wooden table beside the bed’s head, set with a pottery pitcher, a wooden cup, and a partly unrolled scroll on which Joliffe recognized his own handwriting. A narrow window high up the wall—one of a row along the hall’s length and matched by others on the hall’s other side—let in afternoon sunlight strongly enough for Joliffe to see how cleanly kept everything was. Floor and bedding and Basset all had a scrubbed look to them, with no sign of illness on Basset at all, so that Joliffe said with mock indignation hiding his relief, “Why do you look so well? You’re supposed to be ill.”
    Some of the delight went from Basset’s face and what remained was forced. He lifted his bare legs. He was wearing under-braies and a loose, thigh-long shirt, sufficient clothing in the warm day. He nodded toward his bare legs and feet and said, “Those are still the worst. About Saint Mary Magdalene day the arthritics flared all through me like they’ve never done before. I couldn’t walk.”
    He said it evenly, nearly no feeling in his voice, and the very blankness told Joliffe something of how bad it must have been. Quietly he asked, “How is it now?”
    Basset circled his feet from the ankles and grimaced. “Those are still solid pain when I try to walk on them, but the hips are better, the knees bearable, the back no worse than it’s usually been.”
    “So you’re bettering.”
    “I’m bettering,” Basset agreed. “When I first came in here, you’d not have seen me sit up the way I did just now. So, yes, I’m bettering.” There was maybe a false note under his assurance, but he gave no time for Joliffe to be certain of it, going on, “Their physician here is good.” He lowered his voice more. “And their medica is maybe even better, but it would be a point of wisdom not to say so where Master Hewstere might hear.” Keeping his voice low, he added, “Now, how did it go with you? Where’ve you been all this while?”
    Since Basset wanted to change their talk’s course, Joliffe obliged, equally low-voiced, with, “These past few months I’ve been in Northamptonshire.” Where he had been before then was best unsaid. “Being taught like an over-sized schoolboy.” He tried to make it sound a lightsome pastime. “All in all, they were satisfied with me, I think.”
    Leaving “they” vague, he looked for something he could tell beyond that. That he was more skilled at riding than he had been would be safe enough to say, but he would rather pass over how far more skilled at dagger- and swordwork he had become. Nor should he say