Exasperated, she slipped sideways to sit on the blanket; and after a few moments stood up. She was doing no one any good just sitting there. It was going to take a good deal of praying to free Barnaby’s soul from Purgatory, mere sympathy wasn’t going to do it. On the other hand, with a sentence as long as his probably was, putting off the prayers for a few hours would make small difference. Frevisse made the sign of the cross over his body. If prayers were failing her-or she was failing them-and all she could do was keep watch, that could be done as well near the players’ well-burning fire as here beside the near-gone embers that were all that was left of this one.
The players were all awake. Rose was sitting beside Piers, holding him up with an arm behind his shoulders while gently making him drink from the goblet Ellis had brought. The boy’s face was flushed a dry, harsh red, showing that his fever had not yet broken. His mother was holding him firmly against his own restlessness, insisting that he drink while the three men sat on the far side of the fire, pretending they were not watching while talking among themselves as Frevisse came near enough to hear.
“We’ll have to find the money somewhere.” Joliffe was saying. “Tisbe’s been shoeless on that near fore since we left Fen Harcourt. She’ll go lame if she has to go on that way.”
“If the nuns pay us for the play-” Ellis began.
Bassett rumbled, “No. What we do for them is in return for their courtesy to us, and to Piers.”
“I wonder why they’ve been so kind to us?” said Joliffe. He looked around toward the darkness where Frevisse was. “Who’s there?”
Frevisse had not tried to hide her coming, and she came forward now into the light. The men would have risen to their feet but she gestured them to stay seated and said with a smile that included them all, “I’ve been keeping cold watch over there and wonder if I might share your fire a while.”
“Surely, my lady,” Bassett said, holding out his hand to the only empty stool among them.
Frevisse hesitated, looking toward Rose. The woman nodded for her to be seated.
“Piers is quieter when I’m by,” she said.
Piers, laid down again on his pillow, rolled his head restlessly, his fevered eyes half-shut. They were all watching him, as if their gathered attention would be enough to help him.
After a while Ellis asked, “Is the medicine working?”
Rose waited, then said softly, “He’s going to sleep. The way the lady said he should.”
They went on waiting until it was quite clear that Piers was soundly asleep. Rose touched his forehead and said, “I think he may be a little cooler.” Ellis sighed, his shoulders relaxing. Joliffe unknotted his fingers as if surprised to find them wound around each other so tightly. Bassett straightened his shoulders and set his hands on his spread knees. But no one moved to go back to their pallets, and no one spoke.
It was not quite a comfortable silence. Frevisse felt their awareness of her, felt maybe she should go but did not know how to do it gracefully, and to end the silence nodded toward Piers and said, “He’s a likely looking boy, and clever, from what I’ve seen of him. How old is he?”
“Nine years, come Candlemas Eve,” Rose answered, not taking her eyes from her son’s face.
The silence came again. Frevisse was about to suggest that she leave to let them go back to their sleeping when Bassett said, “A pity about the villein. Too bad hurt to live, I take it?”
Frevisse answered, “A tear in his lungs, Dame Claire thinks. Nothing that could be helped and we only hoped he was going to be all right after all because we didn’t know of it. It’s going to be hard for his widow,” she added, to keep the conversation from fading out again. “With all the dues owed the lord now and her sons not full grown.”
Bassett nodded. “Holding the land, you’re held by the land.”
Joliffe, more serious than Frevisse had ever heard him, said, “‘And now I wax old, sick, sorry, and cold; as muck upon mold, I wither away.’”
Ellis poked moodily at the unburned end of a log with his foot, shoving it further into the flames. “That’s us as much as them, though they never see it that way.”
The mood was darkening. Against it, Frevisse said to Joliffe, “What you quoted, it’s from the Noah play, isn’t it? From Wakefield?”
The gleam returned to Joliffe’s eyes. He grinned and asked, “How can a cloistered nun be knowing of such worldly things as the Wakefield plays?”
“You can hardly call The Play of Noah a worldly thing,” Frevisse returned.
“I don’t recall the Church tells that Noah’s wife has to be hauled bodily into the Ark, and then clouts him alongside of his head when she’s there.”
“‘Welcome, wife, into this boat,’” Frevisse quoted. “And then she hits him. No, I don’t recall that from the Bible.”
“Ah!” Ellis pointed an accusing finger. “That’s from the Chester plays. You’ve mixed your sources, scholar!”
“Only after one of you did!” Frevisse returned. They all laughed, a friendly exchange that swept away any last constraints.
“A well-traveled lady,” Bassett said with interest. “Unless you’ve somehow come by copies of the plays?”
“No copy but mine own memory, I fear,” Frevisse answered.
“And how did you come by that, pray tell?” Joliffe asked.
“I wasn’t born a cloistered nun. There was a time when St. Christopher was of more use to me than St. Simon Stylites.” Frevisse had meant to say it blithely, to match Joliffe’s tone, and was a little disconcerted to hear a sad edge to her voice.
“So what brought you into the cloister after all?” Joliffe asked.
“There are less fleas here than in other places I could name.” A flippant answer because a serious one did not seem appropriate.
They laughed again, and Bassett said, “You must have stayed in some of the same inns we have.”
“There was one inn,” Ellis offered, “where the guests were crowded so many to a bed that the fleas had perforce to sleep on the floor.”
“And since that wasn’t comfortable for them, they stayed awake all night, biting us,” Joliffe added. He had pulled an apple from a bag beside his stool and cut a slice from it. He held the piece out to Frevisse. “But such talk can’t be seemly for a nun, however well traveled.”
“Perhaps the lady came to a nunnery to escape the roads,” suggested Bassett. “The English roads are a shame to a Christian country.”
“The worst road I ever traveled,” Frevisse said, suddenly remembering, “was in Yorkshire, I think. Or thereabouts. It had been raining…”
“It’s weather more than the inns giving sorrow to us who travel,” said Ellis.
But Frevisse was not to be turned from her reminiscence. “It was raining enough that the road was puddled from one side to the other in places, and ahead of us as we came riding along was a larger puddle than most. It had a large hump in the middle of it, like an island, and a man squatted down on the edge, looking all discouraged. Only when we reached him did we realize the hump in the puddle was his horse. They’d fallen into a hole so deep the horse could not stand but must swim to exhaustion, and the edges were so slippery it could not climb out, and there we found them, disconsolate rider and drowned horse.”
“Brickmakers,” Bassett said. “Digging their clay out of the high road.” Frevisse nodded. “Was your road maybe in Lincolnshire? That’s where it’s bad right now, with Lord Cromwell set to have his place all made of bricks.”
“And nobody able to make complaint because who around there is going to gainsay Lord Cromwell.” Ellis said.
“Nobody between there and the royal court,” Bassett said. “And probably nobody even there.”
“‘When even gold will rust, what then will iron do?’” Joliffe sighed. “Ah, for the good old days when law was law and men obeyed it.”