A Play of Isaac by Margaret Frazer Read Free Book Online

fading from sleep to death with the players standing mourning around him.
    They had had to pull the cart to the next town themselves and spend half a day looking for a horse they could afford, and even then Tisbe had taken most of the coins in Basset’s purse. They had lived on vegetable pottage and bread for a week afterwards, unable to buy any meat, but in the long go of things Tisbe had proved to be worth more than they had paid. She was not much to look at but she was what they needed—a plain horse that no one would ever envy or likely have urge to steal, but hardy enough to hold up to the work they asked of her. Besides that, she was sweet-humoured, and Joliffe was glad she’d have this while of rest along with the rest of them.
    Leaving the pasturage, he turned back for Oxford with no particular thought of what he meant to do but in no hurry to rejoin the others. Since the few silver farthings in his pouch totaled somewhat less than threepence and he misliked spending himself flat out of coin unless there was black need of it, he did not have much choice of what he would do, but walking, sitting, and looking cost nothing, and he turned off the lane at the first stile he came to, going over it to a fieldpath headed vaguely eastward through the countryside. He made no haste: sat for a while on another stile between one field and the next to watch the world do nothing in particular around him, ambled on eventually, and when the path brought him to a stream’s bank, sat there among a scrub of alders for another while, pitching idle stones into the water. The path finally brought him, as he had supposed it would, to a narrow bridge over the River Cherwell and into another lane that he followed southward, back toward town, still in no haste. Among summer’s beauties was how long the days lasted. The sun had over an hour to go to setting when he reached the Iffley Road and joined the flow of townspeople and students turned back from their Sunday strolls or visiting, done with their day’s idleness and heading to the surety of supper and somewhere familiar for the night. Having no thoughts of home to draw him and fairly certain he had time before supper, he stopped on the bridge outside the town’s East Gate, to lean on the railing and watch the water flow away under him in satin darkness and rippled light. It was something, in other days, he had done often here, and he was paying no heed to the talk of passing people behind him—students as always louder than everyone else—until a man asked, “Joliffe?”
    Too surprised to be wary, Joliffe straightened and turned around from the railing.
    Drawn aside from the people-flow, the man was standing uncertainly a few feet away. Soberly dressed in a scholar’s dark, long gown, with a simple, brimless scholar’s cap over his smooth, short-cut hair, he was much about Joliffe’s own age and clearly of two minds as to whether he should have spoken or not. For a moment Joliffe was equally puzzled, until something in the slight, questioning turn of the man’s head jarred memory loose and Joliffe asked uncertainly back at him, “John Thamys?” Growing certainty surprised him into pleasure and he repeated, certain now, “John Thamys!”
    “Yes!” Certain, too, Thamys shifted the leather case he was carrying—Joliffe would have bet his less-than-threepence that it held books—into the crook of his left arm and thrust out his right hand to clasp the hand Joliffe put out to him. “I thought it was you but couldn’t believe it,” Thamys said. “It was the way you were leaning there on the railing, looking as if you were seeing anything except what was in front of you. It made me think of you. I haven’t thought of you . . .”
    “In years,” Joliffe said, smiling.
    “Six months,” Thamys said. “At Christmastide. I thought of you then, when someone put double cinnamon in Master Bryton’s spiced wine and Master Bryton choked and coughed wine clear across the high