A Play of Heresy by Margaret Frazer Read Free Book Online

me more joyous.”
    They turned into a narrower street than Earl Street, well-paved between scrubbed doorsteps of shop-fronted houses, then soon turned again, down a short passage into a cobbled yard set about with benches beside a few trestle tables. One table, set across one of the doorways into the yard, had a servant man standing behind it, pouring something from a leather jack into a wooden cup held by a man across from him. Perhaps a dozen other people were scattered among the tables with cups and food. Basset, with no apparent need to look around, turned toward a table and two men in the yard’s nearest corner. Both men were sitting with hunched shoulders, their hands wrapped tightly around the cups on the table in front of them, seemingly brooding into their cups’ depths as if there were their last hope on earth before damnation took them. They both looked up as Basset and Joliffe came their way. One of the men was altogether unfamiliar. The other . . .
    Will Sendell had not aged well in the years since Joliffe had last seen him. Never a sturdily built man and already begun to lose his hair all those years ago, he was well toward bald now and as weathered away and roughened as an old gatepost beaten on by too many seasons of bad weather. He had always been someone full of thoughts and forward-driving ambitions, who would sit leaning forward beside the players’ fire in the nights, debating with Basset across the flames what the company should try next, where they should go. In the days before times turned to the bad, he had strode along roads with his head up and a readiness for whatever the next town or village or manor might offer.
    Here, now, he looked only aged and tired.
    And defeated? Was that defeat instead of only weariness in the slump of his head and shoulders?
    At any rate, there was nothing there of him as Joliffe had last seen him, setting off on the road away from the company with no backward look or wave, a man just coming into the fullness of his life and ready to face all. Presently he looked ready to face nothing, including the effort of raising that cup to his mouth.
    That Joliffe knew him immediately despite all that was as disconcerting as the rest. How much did a man have to change before someone who had known him would fail to know him again?
    Just as disconcertingly, Joliffe found he was asking the question about himself.
    “Will!” Basset said heartily. “Here he is. I said he’d finally show himself. Joliffe, sit you down. I’ll fetch ours.”
    Basset veered away toward the serving table. Joliffe, feeling abandoned, sat himself down on the nearer bench beside the man he did not know, across from Will Sendell who had raised his head at Basset’s greeting and now stared at Joliffe as if he were trying to care he were there. Joliffe had more than half thought he would be drunk, but he was not. His gaze was fuddled with misery maybe, but not with drink. Clear-voiced enough and even with a kind of welcome, he said, “Joliffe. After all this time. Who would have thought it?”
    Remembering what Basset had told him about Will Sendell’s past few years, Joliffe thought better of asking him how things were with him; instead said, “Who would have thought it indeed. How goes this play I hear you have in hand?”
    Sendell’s face twisted into wry bitterness. “It’s a bastard of a play. Endless talking and nothing else. Worse, I have to find a half-grown boy who can look like holy Christ and not gibber his lines. Much luck may I have at that .”
    “There’s Powet’s nephew,” the other man said. “You might as well try him. Powet says he’s likely to do if there’s none other.”
    “I may have to,” Sendell said, much as if admitting need to have a tooth pulled, but his gaze had stayed on Joliffe, and he now demanded, “Ever got around to telling anyone your whole name?”
    From the first, Basset had made a jest of Joliffe never telling his whole name and over the years gave