A Play of Piety by Margaret Frazer

to know all about you.” Having taken the cloth bag of oatmeal from the box and opened the drawstring, she took out a handful of meal and let it flow into the bubbling water with one hand, spoon-stirring with her other hand while going on, “Besides Master Soule and Father Richard and Master Hewstere, there’s who you’ve already met. Sister Margaret knows as much of medicines as Master Hewstere does, I think, though it won’t do to say so. She and Sister Letice together know as much about herbs and what purposes they best serve as anyone is likely to. Then there’s Sister Ursula.”
    “Who hired me.”
    “And will be watching to see you earn your keep, never doubt it,” Rose assured him. “You’ve still to meet Sister Petronilla. She mostly sees to the children.”
    “The children?”
    “The children. Mistress Thorncoffyn’s father made this hospital for the care of aged and ill men, with ‘four discreet men of the town’ and the master to govern it, but with the provision that his heir of the next generation and the three generations after that have right of say and stay.”
    “The right not only to stay here when they choose, but a right to a say in the hospital’s governing, you mean.”
    “Just so,” Rose agreed.
    “And when the four generations of heirs have passed?”
    “Then all reverts to the next heir who will be free to continue the hospital or take all back into his own hands.”
    “And the children?” Because a hospital was not the usual place for children. Ill children were cared for at home. Unwanted, orphaned children, if they were fortunate, went most often into the care of a nunnery or monastery.
    “The older at least is Mistress Thorncoffyn’s doing,” Rose said. She was now slicing the onions, leaves and all, into the pot.
    “It’s Mistress Thorncoffyn’s child?” Joliffe said incredulously.
    Rose scorned that with, “No. I’ve never made out whether he’s the son of someone among the gentry she knows or of one of her servants she decided to favor, only that he’s the child of someone she knows who couldn’t or wouldn’t keep him. He’s twisted of body and was thought to maybe be slight in his wits, which he isn’t, as it’s turned out. By rights, there’s no provision in the hospital’s statutes for children to be here, but Mistress Thorncoffyn wanted it and she—” Rose paused, seemingly searching for a word.
    “Forced?” Joliffe suggested.
    “Persuaded,” Rose said quellingly. “She persuaded the others with say in the place to accept the boy. So I’ve gathered from the talk. Maybe it’s thought he’ll take over from Jack at the gate when the time comes. Anyway, since he was already here, that made it easier to let in the other boy when that was the only way to have Sister Petronilla here. She’s a widow, you see, and he’s her son and not at all right in the head, poor little thing. Sister Margaret and Sister Ursula are widows, too, come to that.”
    Widows were preferred for work in hospitals and alms-houses, and the older they were the better, to put them beyond the temptations of the flesh. The trouble with that, Joliffe had always thought, was that someone old enough to be beyond the temptations of the flesh was likely to be too feeble for the necessary work. Certainly, the women he had seen here were not in the blushings of youth—save for Amice in the laundry perhaps—but equally certainly they were far from old and assuredly far from feeble.
    “Then there are Emme and Amice in the laundry, but they’re not sisters here, only hired like me, with Emme having her gown and apron as part of her wages. That’s all of us. Not that anyone except Emme and Amice have any one set of tasks all and only her own. We all set our hands to whatever needs doing. The cooking. Tending to the men. The garden. Anything.”
    There it was again, that including herself in this place as if she belonged. This time Joliffe might have taken her up about it, but she