Read Online A Play of Heresy by Margaret Frazer - Free Book Online

of the angels, or will you be Christ?”
    “One of the angels,” the boy said disgustedly. “I want to be Christ, but I sing too well, so I have to be an angel, Master Sendell says, and my da says I have to do what Master Sendell said.”
    “Your da being?”
    “One of the masters of the Weavers Guild.”
    “So you’re an apprentice weaver, I suppose.”
    “I am that. Would rather be a player, though. If I could do something besides play angels.”
    “Angels are hard,” Joliffe said in sympathy, knowing that was not what the boy had meant.
    “That they’re not,” the boy protested. They had reached the stairfoot; he turned to face Joliffe. “All angels do is stand there, say something, and sing. Or just sing—I just sing. Then they go away. None of that’s hard.”
    “It is if you sing like I do,” Joliffe said cheerfully. “But it’s the looking like an angel I’ve always found hardest.”
    “That’s not hard,” the boy returned scornfully. “You’re put in a white robe, and they put wings on you, and you’re an angel.”
    Joliffe slumped his shoulders, shifted to stand hipshot, and cocked his head to one side. “There. Imagine me with a white robe and wings. Would I look like an angel now?”
    The boy laughed. “Not standing like that you don’t. Angels don’t stand that way.”
    “What way do they stand?”
    With hardly a thought, the boy twitched his own shoulders back, straightened his spine, centered his body on itself, and raised his chin. Then he looked startled at the difference. He raised his hands uncertainly, as if they suddenly did not belong to him. “These,” he said. “Where do I put these?” He answered himself by pressing them together prayerfully. “Like this?”
    “I don’t know,” Joliffe answered. “Try different ways and see what feels best.”
    Sendell called, “Hew, time to be over here.”
    A cold sickness slid down Joliffe’s spine and into his belly. There had been another Hew who wanted to be a player, and the memories there were not good. This Hew, though, left off being an angel to obey Sendell’s call and headed toward the benches now set in a U-shape and sat upon by a variety of men and another boy. Joliffe, following Hew, saw him make to sit beside the other boy, but a strong-featured older man said, “Hew,” and pointed to a space beside himself. Hew grudgingly sat himself there while Sendell, taking the rolled script Joliffe offered him, said to everyone, just as he had to Master Powet, “This is Master Joliffe. He’s usually a player in the company that’s seeing to the Nativity—” A few good-humoured hisses answered that. “But they’ve no place for him as things are now, so he’ll be with us instead.”
    “Who’s he to be?” a tall, fair youth demanded. As it happened, Joliffe had sat down facing him, fully open to his suspicious stare.
    “Ane in the Temple,” Sendell said.
    The youth eased.
    Sendell added, “And one of the prophets.”
    The youth, who must be Richard Eme, the other Prophet, stiffened.
    Giving no sign he saw that, Sendell went on, “Master Burbage will stay as Primus Doctor but has given over his part as a Prophet.”
    The youth eased again, openly mollified by that, until Sendell continued, “But Master Joliffe will now be First Prophet and you, Richard, will instead be Second.”
    Richard began an immediate bristling but got only so far as opening his mouth before Sendell smoothly cut off whatever protest was coming by saying, “I need you for that final speech, Richard. The one where the Prophet is alone on the pageant, speaking to the audience all by himself. That’s why the change.”
    On the instant the youth’s protest turned to preening. “I understand perfectly,” he said. “I accept.” He smirked at Joliffe.
    Joliffe smiled blandly back, easily able to judge what Sendell was up against with him. For one thing, no sensible player ever told his playmaster that he “accepted” the