A Play of Isaac Read Online Free PDF Page B

he was but older and more strongly built and with nothing lacking in his wits, to judge by the sharp look-over he gave the players while Lewis greeted Piers with, “I’ll show you where! Come on!” and started away at a shambling run.
    Piers looked to Basset, who nodded he could go. He did, and the older man, left behind, gave a hard look at him light-footing after Lewis but, seeming satisfied of something, said to Basset, “This way, then.”
    At Joliffe’s urging, Tisbe started the cart forward again, following Ellis and Rose who were following Basset who was saying as they went, “Thank you, Master . . . ?”
    “Matthew,” the man said. He sounded as if he were still of several minds how much he approved of them being here. “No ‘master’ to it.”
    “You see to Master Fairfield,” Basset ventured.
    “I’m his keeper is the way most folk put it, like he was an animal. Which he isn’t. He’s just simple.”
    “And good-hearted and clear-spirited,” Basset said, “which is more than can be said for a great many men who ought to have keepers and don’t.”
    The man give Basset a shrewd sideways look. “You’re in the right of it there. Master Fairfield doesn’t need ‘keeping. ’ He just needs watching out for, like you would with a child. I’m the one who does it most of the time and that means, from what Master Penteney has said, that we’ll be seeing something of each other these few days.”
    “Indeed,” Basset agreed. “So by your leave, I’ll depend on you to keep us straight with him. Tell us if we start to lead him some way he shouldn’t go.”
    “Aye,” Matthew said. “There’s none know him better than me. You listen to what I say and it’ll go well enough.”
    “Would he be able to be in one of our plays, do you think. A small part but . . . ?”
    Joliffe grinned to himself. Basset would have the man as much on their side as Lewis was before they finished crossing the yard.
    As the cart rattled off the cobbles of the fore-end of the yard onto hard-packed bare ground that went the rest of the way to the rear gate, Piers and Lewis disappeared through the double-wide doorway of the barn at the yard’s far end. Joliffe, with the practiced glance of someone who often needed to know quickly as much as he could about where he was, took in the barn’s size, over-large for some place in town, even if on the town’s edge. The well-built stables and long cattle byre facing the house were more than might be expected, too, as well as, on the house side of the yard, the several low, strongly built sheds with hasped and locked heavy doors in a line from the house’s end to the barn where Piers and Lewis had disappeared. To make it all more strange, the whole yard was oddly empty, with no men in sight nor any animals besides a few chickens scratching in the dust. There was not even a muck heap beside the stable.
    Ahead of him, Ellis must have noted that, too, because he asked something and Matthew said over his shoulder to him, “Aye, nothing much going on just now. It’s because Master Penteney is a victualler, see. Supplies their beef and mutton and pork and all to a goodly number of the colleges and halls and St. Frideswide’s monastery right here in Oxford, as well as I don’t know what all he sells to London merchants. Whatever the butchers need for the holiday they already have, so he’s cleared the place out for there to be room for Lord and Lady Lovell’s people and horses as they’ll be bringing with them. Then, God willing, we’ll be coming on to more haying. That’ll take up a big part of the great barn where you’re to stay, but there’s room in plenty for you folks for now. Along harvest-time he’ll be buying grain, and right through into winter we’re full up and busy with cattle and sheep and all, as well as whatever he buys in from overseas in the way of spices and the better wines and suchlike. That’s what’s in there.” Matthew nodded at the locked