A Play of Dux Moraud by Margaret Frazer Read Free Book Online

“Where’ve you been?” and “Come in out of the chill,” with various folk shifting on benches to make place for him. He stood smiling and nodding to one and all, familiar and friendly, while he looked over the company and then, with smiling words and slaps on the shoulders of folk as he passed, made his way to where Basset and Ellis sat with a few other men.
    Basset and Ellis both rose to their feet and made him respectful bows, to which he returned a slight bow of his head and said in a clear, easy voice, knowing perfectly well he was listened to by everyone, “You’re the players, yes? May I join you?”
    Basset bowed again and Ellis and the men shoved sideways, clearing a place beside Basset. Both priest and Basset sat, the alehouse talk rose up again and closed over whatever their talk might be, and Joliffe and Rose raised eyebrows to each other. The Church had never quite settled how it felt about players. Their craft could be used the same way that paintings on church walls were used: to tell godly stories and show the error of sinful ways, but against that was set the lingering suspicion—and sometimes outright certainty—that the ways of wandering, lordless, land-less men were likely to be as sinful as anything their plays might claim to be against.
    So it was much each churchman’s choice how well or ill he regarded players and happily this Father Morice seemed among the happier-minded sort. Joliffe couldn’t watch how things went between him and Basset for long, though, because a village fellow was inching somewhat too close along the bench to Rose on her other side, with an interested look and his hands beginning to stray her way. A fight being among the last things the players wanted, Joliffe gave the man no apparent heed but draped an arm over Rose’s shoulders with seemingly absent-minded affection. Understanding what he was at, she leaned against him in return and held up her bowl of ale for him to drink from it. The village fellow eased away and turned his heed to the woman on his other side, whose lowering stare at Rose turned to smiles at him.
    Instead, it was Ellis’ hard stare across the alehouse Joliffe met, but Rose saw it, too, and twitched her head slightly sideways, meaning Ellis to understand there was reason for Joliffe’s arm around her. Ellis flicked a glance at the now disinterested village fellow, slightly nodded back at Rose, and returned to his deep talk with the woman who had lately crowded onto the bench between him and the next man, all their hips against each other but her eyes for Ellis.
    Under her breath, disgustedly, Rose said, “Men.”
    “Hai,” Joliffe protested.
    “You, too,” Rose said and shifted, without making show of it, from under his arm as she turned to the woman formerly glowering at her and struck up talk across the man between them.
    The last Joliffe heard was Rose asking if anyone in the village might be willing to do laundry for pay. “Just keeping these men mended takes all my time,” she said—unfairly, Joliffe thought; but the other woman nodded with full understanding and started a friendly answer, while the man between them began to look uncomfortable. Leaving Rose to it, Joliffe rejoined the talk of the other men around him.
    Basset made to leave not long thereafter when Father Morice did, the two of them talking together all the way to the door and out, Father Morice giving wordless, good-humoured waves and nods to all the farewells called out to him. Joliffe, Rose, and Ellis broke off their own various talk and followed them, finding them still talking outside in the spread of yellow light from the lantern hung beside the alehouse door. Beyond the light’s reach, the over-clouded darkness was like a black wall, save for another lantern hanging beside a door across and farther along the street. As the players joined Basset, Father Morice was pointing that way and saying, “There’s my door. Might I offer you a light to see you on your