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

pleased he was there, and he rubbed her on the hard bone between her eyes, letting her know he was pleased, too.
    At the cart, Ellis, Gil, and Piers dropped down onto the waiting cushions. Joliffe, leading Tisbe to the cart to get out her hobbles so he could let her free to graze the long orchard grass, caught Rose’s worried look around at all of them, to judge how tired they were and make sure they were none of them hurt or in need of anything but food and sleep. The food they got immediately, Rose ladling pottage into wooden bowls and handing them around while Joliffe saw to Tisbe, wiping her down with a dry cloth, brushing her some—meaning to do more later—and putting tansy ointment around her eyes to keep the flies away, then giving her a portion of oats from the bag they kept for her. By the time he finished and joined the others, Ellis, Gil, and Piers were to their second bowlfuls, with large pieces of bread to go with it, but the first headlong thrust of hunger was gone, and as Joliffe sat down and took the bowl Rose held out to him, Ellis said, “No fatted calf for you, I fear.”
    “We could make do with your fat head,” Piers suggested around a mouthful of bread.
    “Isn’t it pity,” Joliffe said to Rose, “how his mouth has grown bigger along with the rest of him?” He fixed a glare of feigned threat on Piers and added, “We might have to cut you down by a few inches all around. That would save your mother the trouble of making you new clothes.”
    “Ha!” said Piers widely around the half-chewed bread.
    That earned him, “Don’t talk with a full mouth,” from Rose, sitting now to her own meal between him and Ellis. “Nor half-full neither,” she added, seeing him shift some to his cheek and swallow the rest.
    Grinning, Piers leaned sideways to bump his shoulder against her arm friendliwise and, for a wonder, kept his mouth shut while Gil said to Joliffe, “You’re not in hope you can hide here in the orchard, are you? The reeve is keen. He’ll find you out and invoke the statute. You’ll be at the barley with us by noon tomorrow.”
    “He’s already been caught,” Rose said. “Sister Ursula saw him first. She’s hired him to replace that Ivo for the while.”
    “I’m even to have a room there, and a bed, and my meals,” Joliffe said grandly.
    “You and your life of ease,” Ellis grumbled. “We spend the year walking our feet flat on the road, then get stuck here working the fields, while you take your ease at some bishop’s palace, hardly stirring a sweat, I’ll warrant.”
    “When it’s my wits that are wanted rather than your brawn, what can I do?” Joliffe protested sweetly.
    Ellis suggested, unsweetly, what he could do.
    Joliffe kept to himself that he had not spent the past months in anything like a life of ease, and especially the past weeks at a plain manor in an out-of-the-way corner of nowhere in particular where the lessoning had been unceasing, including—all too often—alarums in the night when he was supposed to be awake on the instant and knowing what to do. He likewise kept to himself the paling scar across his upper left arm from a dagger wound five months ago and the yellowing remains of a bruise under his left ribs where, a week ago, he had failed to block the thrust from the padded end of a wooden practice dagger. The fight-master had stepped back from him, saying, “See the angle I had the dagger? Up into the heart is where it would have gone. If this had been steel and me in earnest, you’d be dead by now,” then had set to making him block that manner of thrust over and over again, and afterward shown him how to give a thrust unlikely to be blocked.
    Gil asked, “Have you seen Basset yet?”
    “Seen him and had a goodly talk with him,” Joliffe answered. “He’s pleased with how much better he is but can’t say when he’ll be ready to be away.”
    “Not until harvest is well and truly done, would be my guess,” said Ellis. “The reeve