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

ignorance was good cover for learning things if men thought he could not understand. Not that he heard or overheard anything among the bishop’s men that was anyone’s secret. Their talk was mostly of being home, but there was also half-angered wishing the English council would hurry with naming a governor for Normandy and get him and a new army to France immédiatement, and that told Joliffe that what Cauvet had said about the duke of York was not openly known yet.
    Then why had Cauvet seen fit to tell him about it? It could be Cauvet simply had a loose tongue—not a desirable thing in a bishop’s secretary. Or—had he been testing to see if Joliffe knew more than he might rightly be expected to know?
    If the latter was the way of it, Joliffe trusted his true ignorance had been convincing, while making note he should sharpen his skill at seeming ignorant, on the chance he would have more use for it should he ever, in time to come, indeed learn things he “should not.”
    After all, he had to suppose that was why he was being sent to the late duke of Bedford’s spymaster—to learn how to learn things others meant to keep hidden.

Chapter 4
    B esides the bishop’s men, Joliffe took what chances came to talk to the sailors, who were mostly English and as willing as most men to talk freely about what they knew best. By late the next day when they came in sight of the walls and harbor of Honfleur, having met neither storm nor enemies along the way, he knew more than he had about ships, including that they did not have front and rear; they had prow and stern, with amidships between. All the ropes—the rigging—had their particular names, too. He had not got so far as learning those or the differences among the guns set along the ship’s sides, but he knew starboard from larboard, which some of the sailors seemed to think was a grand accomplishment.
    He also knew for a certainty that Bishop Louys was well-thought of by all his people here. Given that they had been in England longer than any of them had wanted to be, that no one thought their purposes there had gone well, and that now they were making a winter crossing of a rough sea, the fact that their displeasure did not spread to include the bishop spoke very well of him, Joliffe thought. There was no one could dislike a man as much as those who lived nearest with him.
    On his own part, he had no other encounter with Bishop Louys, and after the household’s landing in Honfleur, he was treated as not much more than a piece of baggage, hurried off the ship along with the bishop’s traveling chests and loaded with them and most of the household men onto another ship, not so different from their English one but crewed by men familiar with the river they would be following to Rouen, Joliffe gathered.
    Then they all waited.
    From the talk around him as he sat on one of the traveling chests, Joliffe learned that Bishop Louys was gone to meet briefly with the captain of the Honfleur garrison and certain important citizens, to give them letters and greetings from King Henry and the royal council in England, and that in the usual way of things, the bishop would have celebrated Mass here in Honfleur, in thanksgiving for the safe crossing from England, but the river—the Seine, Joliffe heard it called—was as tidal as the Thames, and if the bishop left now, he would have the tide’s advantage to speed the beginning of his upriver journey. So the boatmen were ready, and when someone shouted the bishop was approaching, they began to loose ropes holding the ship to the quay.
    Besides his accompanying dozen household men, six men-at-arms and a dozen archers came with the bishop along the quay, and boarded, and while the bishop took a seat on his traveling chair under a tilt amidship, they shifted about to find places out of the way as the last ropes were cast loose, freeing the boat to the current. Not until some sort of cooked cold meat, bread, and cheese were being handed out