A Play of Piety by Margaret Frazer Read Free Book Online Page B

been able to spare from daily needs. Of late there were a comfortable number of them there, but sometimes they had been very scant indeed and sometimes the only thing between the players and dire need. The secret place had been made by Rose’s husband. After he had deserted her and their son and the company, never to be heard from or of since in the years afterward, only Rose had known where the secret place was, with her father’s willing agreement because she, being the most careful of any of the company, was least likely to be foolish with the money. Only eventually had she shared the secret with Joliffe, that if anything untoward happened, someone besides herself would know. That he knew of it remained secret between them.
    Now he asked, “Should you tell someone besides me?”
    “No,” she said. She swung away to find something in the kitchen box. “You’ve come back. There’s no need to tell anyone else.” She turned back to the pot and added, not looking at him, “Is there?”
    “No,” he said in his turn.
    “You’re staying in the company?”
    “Yes.”
    “Until he wants you elsewhere.”
    “He doesn’t want me elsewhere.” Neither of them saying the powerful bishop’s name.
    “Where does he want us?”
    “I don’t know. Wherever we want to be for now, I suppose.”
    Rose sighed. “Well, here is where we have to be for now, want or not.”
    The weight of that worry came down immediately on both of them, and Joliffe, to go a more cheerful way, forced though it might be, said, “And here is none so bad. Basset is bettering. You seem content. Ellis, Gil, and Piers are earning money. Tomorrow I’ll be. We’ve done worse.”
    “We have done.” Rose matched his cheerfulness without he could tell how forced her own was. “Why don’t you fetch the cushions now?”
    He did and sat himself down on one. The well-westered sun was striking long, golden light through the orchard, pooling deep green shadows among the trees. Supper was cooking. Tonight and probably tomorrow were taken care of. All in all, he had no complaints about the world at just that moment and after a comfortable stretch of silence he said easily, “So. Tell me about this place, these people.”
    “Um.” Rose hesitated. “Ah.”
    It seemed a more difficult question than Joliffe had intended. “Good? Bad? Mixed lot?” he prompted.
    “Good,” Rose said immediately. “On the whole, good.”
    “Mixed lot, then.”
    Rose laughed at him. “Mixed lot. But none of them so bad. Or so I’d have said before Mistress Thorncoffyn came. She’s unsettled everything.”
    “A cat come into a dovecote,” Joliffe suggested.
    “If you grant the cat doesn’t want to make a kill, only keep everyone’s feathers ruffled. And that the cat brought dogs with it. Master Soule has all but disappeared from sight since she came.” Her tone suggested “fortunate man.”
    “Master Soule?”
    “Master of the hospital. And please don’t make any jests about his name,” she added, although she had not been looking at Joliffe and could not have seen he had opened his mouth to do just that. As he closed his mouth, she went on, “He and Father Richard are our priests, with Father Richard priest at St. George’s across the road, too. Then there’s Master Hewstere. He’s our physician. He sees to the men’s bodily care, while Master Soule and Father Richard see to their spiritual.”
    “I’d begun to wonder if I was the only man here besides the patients.” Although he had not truly wondered that, because every hospital had its priest or priests, they being necessary to the patients’ longer well-being than anything a physician could do for them.
    “You saw Jack at the gate,” Rose reminded him.
    “I’d forgotten. Yes.”
    Rose spooned one of the peas from the boiling water, tried it for how cooked it was, and was turning to the kitchen box again as she went on, “Best you ready yourself for Mistress Thorncoffyn, though. She’ll want