Free A Play of Piety by Margaret Frazer

use their own. Others will call for you to help when the need comes on them, be it day or in the night. Don’t delay about it, or you’ll have to explain to Emme why there are extra sheets to wash. Today, the way their sleep was broken last night by Adam Morys’ trouble, the men may be troublesome in their turn. You’ll be patient with them, nonetheless, I know.”
    That was pleasantly said, but left Joliffe without doubt that what Sister Ursula meant was that he had best be patient with them. There was a crisp certainty to Sister Ursula that left no doubt why she was huswife here, with all the overseeing of the place’s daily needs put in her hands. Joliffe judged that if he did exactly as she told him in his duties, he would do well enough. At the same time, there was nothing unfriendly about her, and he gave way to his curiosity and asked, “Why is it safer for Master Soule to do Prime today?”
    Quite steadily but with something of the same laughter under the words as there had been in kitchen, Sister Ursula said, “Because Mistress Thorncoffyn will not be up this early.”
    That again was no sufficient answer but it was all she gave. They were in the hall now. There was enough gray dawnlight through the windows that Sister Ursula paused beside a low-standing table just inside the hall’s door to put out the fat candle burning there. Several smaller, unlighted candles in holders waited beside it. “For use in the night, when you have to go to someone,” she explained.
    She went to the nearest bed, said quietly, “Deke Credy, good morning,” and pushed back the curtain. “Wooden rings,” she said to Joliffe, nodding upward. “They make less of a noise than metal would.” As not really an after-thought, she added, “And are less costly.”
    “More to spend on m’comforts,” mumbled the toothless old man grinning up from the bed. “Um’ll have roast pork for my dinner today, Sister.”
    “You’ll have pains in your belly all the rest of the day and all tomorrow if you do,” Sister Ursula said back as if it were an old jibing between them. “This is Joliffe who’s taken Ivo’s place for the while.” And to Joliffe, “Deke is here nearest the altar because he’s more in need of blessing than most.”
    “Um that,” Deke agreed cheerily. “Bad man all my days.”
    “Leave the pot a moment,” Sister Ursula bade Joliffe who had bent to draw the cloth-covered pottery pot from under the bed. “You can meet the others while I set back their curtains to the day and gather up the cups from their night-time drink.”
    Joliffe willingly put off the first bed-pot in favor of following her as she made her way back and forth and down the ward, opening the curtains beside each bed with cheersome good-mornings and sharing some talk with each man that told Joliffe a little about them. Only Deke and three others were decrepit with years. Another man was in hale middle-age save for a broken leg that had him bedfast and grumbling, his summer-brown skin beginning to pale from being away from the sun too long.
    “Let a hay wain roll over him, did our Adam,” Sister Ursula told Joliffe, and added sternly to the bedfast man, “You’re lucky it wasn’t your head, drunk as you were, stumbling about like that.”
    “I wasn’t drunk and you know it!” he shot back. “Nor don’t think I don’t hear the wild times and drinking goes on in that kitchen among you women, neither.” But he grinned as he said it, and Sister Ursula returned a smile of her own.
    In another bed a hollow-chested young man much about Joliffe’s own age was lying quiet and pain-eyed, too taken up with the effort of his breathing to strain at talk. Sister Ursula spoke quietly to him, calling him Iankyn, and gentled him a little higher on his several pillows. As they left him, Joliffe asked softly, “Lung-sickness?”
    “Of a kind, yes. It’s asthma, and sometimes he’s quite well, but some times of the year are worse for him than