A Play of Knaves by Margaret Frazer

asked.
    The woman beamed on him. “Died three winters ago in a soft bed in his own room right there across the yard, with his family all beside him.”
    The players were all eating by then, with Basset slowed from more questions by mouthfuls of stew, but Nan was in no hurry to leave them, and stood watching them eat as if men enjoying their food was a pleasure to her, and Joliffe took the chance to say, “Master Ashewell doesn’t seem to go on well with the priest here. Father . . . ?”
    He stopped on a question, as if he could not remember the priest’s name.
    “Father Hewwwwgo,” Nan obliged, mockingly rude and not at Joliffe. “There’s not many around here get on well with that pull-faced priest. John Medcote maybe comes closest to it, but then, well, that’s him for you, isn’t it?”
    Joliffe did not know if that was John Medcote or not, but while he tried to find a way to ask more that way, Basset asked, “Who else was at table with Master Ashewell tonight? His wife, surely, but there was another couple, too.”
    “That’s the Gosyns. Walter and Geretruda. The Ashewells and they have all known each other since forever.”
    “Did Master Gosyn make his fortune in the French war, too?” Joliffe asked.
    “No. He kept to home and took up his father’s holding. Nor he’s not ‘Master’ Gosyn, just plain Walter Gosyn, though there’s those say he’s done well enough adding lands to what he had that he has money enough to buy himself and his wife and their girl all free if he wanted to. There’s some say, too, that the abbess will soon make him do it whether he wants it or not, because then he’d have to lease his land from her, and his rents would likely bring her more than his villein service does.” Nan smiled widely. “There’s been some going-round with my lady abbess’ bailiff and steward over that, I’ve heard.”
    The players all grinned back at her around mouthfuls of stew and bread or over the rims of cups; there was always a backhanded comfort for those holding no land at all to hear the troubles of those who did.
    In the yard in front of the hall a busyness of people leaving the hall had started while they talked, and Nan said now, “That will be the Gosyns leaving to be home while there’s still light. It’s but a mile but that Geretruda doesn’t walk so fast now she’s been ailing.” The sun, just touching the horizon, would go from sight fast now, but the afterlight would linger long in the clear sky. Nan, watching who was in the yard, chuckled. “The walk will do Gosyn, good, though. He’s fattening up a bit with his easy living, he is.”
    Joliffe had had no chance for a clear look at anyone in the hall and so took the one he had now as the Gosyns and Ashewells briefly stood in talk in the yard. As Nan had said, Gosyn was a stout-set man, but the woman leaning on his arm was thin as if she was indeed ailing. She was laughing, though, at something being said between Gosyn and Master Ashewell, and as they all began to stroll toward the bridge she looked as if she held to her husband more from affection than need. Nicholas and several other children of various heights were grouped around Master and Mistress Ashewell, while a girl much about Nicholas’ age went with the Gosyns as they left, all of them waving to the Ashewells as they crossed the bridge, and the Ashewells waving back.
    With that much friendliness between the families, and a son and daughter on either side of much the same age, Joliffe was willing to guess that Lionel Ashewell and Walter Gosyn were thinking of a marriage there.
    That surely couldn’t be where the trouble was rooted that had the abbess’ bailiff worried.
    Could it?
    Joliffe would have led Nan’s talk that way, but two serving men came from the hall’s kitchenward door, and Nan said, as she began to take the players’ empty bowls and cups and stack them on the tray, “Here comes the rest of what’s yours,” and Joliffe saw the men were