Free A Play of Knaves by Margaret Frazer Page A

in the good brown gown and white wimple and veil of a tradesman’s respectable wife, and the players, following Basset’s lead, stepped aside, all of them bending their heads to her in respectful, wordless greeting. Slowed by the child dragging at her hand while staring at the strange-garbed men, she bent her own head in return while briefly but not boldly looking at them, too. Only as her gaze passed across Joliffe, coming behind the others, did her eyes widen and her steps falter.
    Joliffe’s steps more than faltered.
    With memory sweeping through him of a warm September night and the scent of wild thyme on a hillside, he stopped where he was and said, before he could think to do otherwise, “Mary?”
    She stopped, too, smiling so warmly that her memory of that night must be as sweet as his own. “Joliffe. You remember.”
    Both gallant and truthful, he said, “A memory as sweet as that one will keep me company to my dying day.”
    But the next moment his mind caught up to the fact there was a boy-child staring up at him from her side, and sweet memory was overlaid by a desperate attempt to judge how old the boy was.
    His thoughts’ rush must have shown on his face because Mary laughed her lovely laugh—he had remembered her laugh was lovely—and said, “This is James.” She paused, her look teasing Joliffe, before she added, “He’ll be four years old come St. Bartholomew’s. I’ve been happily wed to a good man these five years.”
    And it had been six years since the players had last been this way, Joliffe remembered and tried not to let his relief show, but she laughed at him again and this time he laughed with her. Moonlight and her lovely laughter and her generous loving. That’s what he remembered of Mary.
    Basset, Ellis, and Piers had kept walking and there was no one else near. Quickly, while there was chance, Joliffe asked, “All’s well with you?”
    “Very well. And with you?”
    He made a small, flourished gesture. “As you see,” he said lightly. “Much the same.”
    But it was into his eyes she went on looking and said gently, still smiling, “I see.”
    And then there was nothing else to say between them that mattered or would make different what was.
    He said, “We’re Lord Lovell’s players now.”
    And she said, “You’ll pass our shop farther along the street here. A cordwainer’s on the left.” Her child tugged at her hand, impatient to be going, and she gave way to him with one last smile at Joliffe, and went her way.
    And Joliffe went his and did not look back and doubted she did either.
    No promises had ever been asked, made, or expected between them the little while they had had together. There had been need on both sides, then pleasure, then parting. What they had given between them had been given unburdened by afterward-demands for more on either side, so that what had been between them had stayed whole, a moment complete and enough in itself.
    At least that was how it had been for him, and now he thought it had been that way for her, too.
    He lengthened his stride, overtaking Basset, Ellis, and Piers just as they passed a prosperous-looking cordwainer’s shop where various well-made shoes and gloves and purses were laid out on the shopboard for display. Joliffe looked but caught no glimpse of its owner, and that was probably just as well, he thought as he kept on going.
    Tired from the morning’s work, the players did little but walk on their way back to camp. Piers sometimes plucked a daisy from the wayside to chew the sharp-tasting stems, but for the rest of them walking was enough, until almost back to Grescumb Field, when Piers ran ahead to tell his mother and Gil the others were coming; and, with him away, Ellis said suddenly and aggrieved, “Rose still loves me or she’d not care so much what I do,” sounding as if it were something he had been thinking on and had to say out.
    “She still loves you so much,” Joliffe said back, “that she’ll likely