A Play of Knaves Read Online Free PDF

waiting behind the cart to give them their tabards, not needing to be told that, since they would be here for a time, her father would want to make as good a show leaving the village as coming in. Basset gave the bag of coins to her—she saw to their money as well as to so much else—before taking up his tabard while Joliffe, Ellis, Piers, and Gil were slipping their own over their heads, Ellis saying as he settled the weight of the cloth across his shoulders, “Do you have the feeling we just became a rope in a tug-of-war the priest and these men are having?”
    Joliffe shrugged, partly in answer, partly to shift his own tabard into place, and said, “Thus far anyway the tugging has been to our good.”
    “That’s probably what the rope says just before it breaks,” Ellis growled.
    “Ellis,” Basset said, “you’d find something to complain of if God himself dropped gold coins in your lap.”
    Ellis paused, seeming actually to consider that, then said seriously, “You’re right. I probably would.”
    Rose laughed at him and kissed him on his cheek.

Chapter 2
    The Ashewells returned riding bay rouncys, horses meant more for service than show, but these two were of good quality. Not wasting words but with a smile and a nod, Master Ashewell led the players not back the way they had come but onward, to turn right at the cross-lanes and along the churchyard’s end and out of the village, the downs now at their backs. Beyond the village’s crowd of houses the lane did not deepen between steep banks like the other one had, but made a long, straight slope to the level land, the broad village fields spread away to either side beyond the ditches that kept them drained, with hedges and stands of trees here and there and, it soon proved, Master Ashewell’s own manor not far from the village.
    The place was not walled. The hall and its house, barns, stable, and sheds sat close and clean around an open yard beyond the far end of a wooden bridge across a ditch widened to make a reed-filled moat around it all. With freshly white-plastered walls and roofs golden with new reed-thatch, the clustered buildings shone with settled prosperity and welcome among the young-greened fields and pastures around them. But at the bridge’s outer end Master Ashewell drew rein, said something to his son, lifted a hand to the players, and rode on across the bridge into the manor yard.
    Left to wait for the players to come up, Nicholas dismounted, and when they reached him said to Basset, a little shy but smiling, “It’s not much farther to where you’re welcome to tent. My father hopes you’ll pardon being left to me to show the way.”
    “We are as grateful to the son as to the father for all their courtesy and kindness,” said Basset with a bow.
    Nicholas acknowledged that with a slight bend of his head in return. “If you’ll come this way, then,” he said, turned, and leading his horse, fell into step beside Basset.
    While they went on along the road, he made solemn talk about the weather and how long the players had been on the way from Minster Lovell. Basset answered him just as gravely, and when they had turned from the wider way into a side lane between hedges high enough to hide the fields beyond them, took his turn to ask whether Father Hewgo was so cross-grained about everything or only about players.
    Forgetting to be grave, Nicholas exclaimed, “Him? He’s cross-grained about everything.” And added with scorn, “Besides, he’s like glove to hand with the Medcotes.”
    That had not seemed true just now, Joliffe thought, while Basset prodded mildly, “You’d think he’d take better care to keep well with your father, him being the abbey’s reeve here.”
    “You’d think so, yes,” Nicholas said with a boy’s readiness to talk to someone as ready to listen as Basset. “But when John Medcote got Brook’s manor, the right to a quarter of the village came with it, and the right to half the village court, too.