Free A Play of Isaac by Margaret Frazer Page A

floor and set out the two stools that would serve, for now, as God’s throne and the sacrificial altar.
    Joliffe, with his fair, smooth face, was inevitably the Angel but on their way to Oxford there had been, yet again, debate between Basset and Ellis over which of them should be Abraham and which should be God this time. Both parts were better suited to Basset, with Abraham supposedly being somewhat over one hundred years old and God being . . . well, God. Either way they played it, they were both going to be bearded heavily enough to obscure their actual years and Ellis had tried, “If I’m God, all I have to do is sit. I won’t have to remember to move old.”
    “Meaning I don’t have to remember because I am old, you young whelp?” Basset had growled in mock anger.
    “Meaning Abraham is the better part and you should have it,” Ellis had growled back.
    “What you mean,” Joliffe had put in, “is that you want the fewest lines and the chance to sit watching us do all the work. Let me play God. Then I can do the sitting.”
    They had both snapped at him for that and he had gone off laughing to help Piers fetch water from a stream to the camp and come back to find that, as usual, Basset would play God, with Ellis to be—as usual—the patriarch Abraham.
    Now Basset took his place upstage on the stool that was presently God’s throne and Ellis knelt as if in prayer down-stage, nearer the audience, while Joliffe as the Angel stood at God’s right hand. They had begun running their lines with each other last week on their way to Oxford, and despite Basset’s jibing at them, all of them had their words firmly in their heads. It was the business that went with the words they needed to make smooth again, not having done the play since sometime in Lent, and Basset was set on making this as perfect a performance as lay in human power. “We’re few enough,” he said, “but, by God, we’re better than most and as good as the best.” And if they weren’t, he plainly meant they would be before he was through with them.
    He set right off to it with, “Now, Joliffe, face me more than Ellis, remember, as if you’ve been listening to me, until he starts his prayer. When he starts to pray, turn your head over your shoulder to look at him so it seems we’re both pausing to hear him. Ellis, raise your head more. Remember the damn beard is going to be over most of your face. Talk to heaven but be sure they can see your eyes. Now, when I start to speak, Ellis, you go on mouthing silently as if still praying and, Joliffe, you look back at me, and if you can put less grin and more adoration into it, it will help. Ellis, begin.”
    Ellis obeyed, his voice rich on the words, giving them weight and worth. “Father of Heaven, omnipotent, who neither beginning nor ending has, with all my heart to you I pray . . .”
    He prayed at length, giving thanks in particular for his dear and long-desired son Isaac. Then God spoke to his Angel, and the Angel spoke to Abraham, and only then was Piers needed as Isaac. With the time Basset took over every bit of business among them, Rose was long since done with measuring Lewis, but she knew as well as anyone what trouble idle boys might make—or, more accurately, what idle Piers might lead Lewis into—and Joliffe, waiting while Basset showed Abraham exactly how he was to rise and pretend to be dusting off his knees and turn with great surprise when the Angel spoke to him, watched her setting Lewis and Piers down together with a few handfuls of hay between them, telling Piers, “You show him how to braid this to make his tail so it will be ready when I need it.”
    “Devils don’t have hay tails,” Lewis protested.
    “You’ll see,” Rose said with a smile and made to ruffle his hair as she would have done Piers’s but remembered in time he wasn’t a child. For all that he was childish, he was man-grown and properly to be called “Master Fairfield” and was certainly no one