Free A Play of Treachery by Margaret Frazer

guessed from their voices there was some grumbling as they spread along the dormer to the various beds. Perhaps they had had it better at the bishop’s palace? Or was that properly also called a hôtel here?
    What he did not catch quickly enough was how the men were choosing their beds. Cauvet, abandoning him, joined another man in claiming the two beds at the far end, near the brick wall of a chimney that would give out warmth rising from the fires in rooms below. Joliffe belatedly guessed the other men were sorting themselves according to their greater or lesser place in the household, and he found himself left to the bed nearest the door—and also nearest a screen in the corner there, behind which were the pottery pots of the dormer’s necessarium, to give the polite name.
    Resigned, and ignoring the sniggering glances of the nearer men, Joliffe set his sack on the floor and shoved it under the bed. Just so he was not the one who was supposed to empty those pots, too, he thought, and copied the other men in spreading a coarse linen sheet and then a thick woolen blanket of undyed wool over the straw-filled mattress. If he laid his cloak over the top of that, he thought he might sleep warm enough. If the weather got no colder, he silently added, looking up at the laths between the rafters and the roof slates held to them by wooden pegs, all there was between the attic chamber and the wind. He had slept with less between him and the weather often enough, and he silently laughed at himself because he had hoped for better while in a bishop’s household.
    With nothing else to do and unable to join in the general talk around him, he sat down on the bed to wait for whatever came next. Used as he was to doing almost all the time—even if the “doing” was simply walking along the road toward wherever the players were next going or, on board the ships coming here, taking in all there was to see and learning what he could—idleness felt strange, the more so because everyone else seemed to have some thought of what they should be doing next. Cauvet, for one, had already disappeared down the stairs, taking the chest he had brought from the ship. After him, the other men went, too, one by one or several together, none giving Joliffe heed, until as the last several of them went past him, he decided it was pointless to stay here alone and stood up and followed them. Master Fowler had said he was to make himself known to Master Wydeville and he would never do it by staying here among the rafters.
    The men he followed descended first to what Cauvet had said was the bishop’s bedchamber. Wide and long, it had windows at one end that must overlook the courtyard, and at the other end the bishop’s bed, raised above the floor on a low dais and enclosed by tall carved posts holding up a canopy of white and red striped cloth that matched the bed’s coverlet and the curtains drawn back to the bed’s four corners. The wall-hung tapestries around the room were woven with tall, vividly colored figures of undoubtedly allegorical men and women that Joliffe supposed he would have chance enough to look at, because besides bedchamber, the room was furnished—as was common—at the end opposite the bed for the gathering of men to attend on the bishop and, guessing from the low desk in one corner, for some secretary’s work.
    Joliffe could guess that because Bishop Louys’ journey to England had been half-secret—in other words, no secret at all but kept as low-viewed and little flaunted as possible—the bishop had traveled with very little of his household and none of the rich flourish a bishop’s travel usually entailed. Because so little of the bishop’s goods had been with him, there was not the fuss and flurry of much unpacking and readying the chamber there might have been. The shift of his goods from his hôtel to here having been already done, the chamber was complete, simply waiting for his presence. Only the tall-mantled