A Play of Piety by Margaret Frazer

Author:Margaret Frazer [Frazer, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery & Detective, General, Historical, Fiction
ISBN: 9781101445549
Google: QNJE9gCTCIkC
Amazon: B005GNK5QK
Publisher: Berkley Trade
Published: 2010-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

The evening busyness of Vespers and supper went not much differently from usual despite everyone’s sharp awareness of Aylton sometimes softly moaning behind the curtains drawn to hide his bed. Joliffe, bringing his supper, found him lying on his side with legs drawn up and head tucked down, curled in on his undoubted pain in side and head and shoulder. He had been undressed down to his shirt. The poultices and the bandages holding them to his ribs and shoulder were lumps under the shirt’s fine linen, while another bandage wrapped his head, holding a third poultice there. Joliffe had no chance to see his eyes as Sister Margaret had bid. Aylton opened them only so far as needed to see who was there and why, then shut them again and slightly moved one hand in a gesture that refused the food.

Joliffe set the bowl and bread on the little table beside the bed, carefully quiet, as if even the clunk of wooden bowl on wooden table might jar the man to more pain, and said, “One of the sisters or I will come later to see about feeding it to you.”

Aylton made a sound that meant nothing and did not stir. The easy-mannered, pleasant-worded steward was vanished, utterly gone from this undressed, bandaged, disheveled man in pain. Pain at its worst tended to cancel all else in a man, and Aylton was assuredly in pain that was mostly of the body at present, but Joliffe suspected there had to be a strong current of fear-pain in his mind, too, over what Mistress Thorncoffyn would purpose against him next. However well Aylton healed or did not heal, Joliffe doubted she would be satisfied with a beating as sufficient punishment for attempting to cheat her. More than likely, she would set the law on him.

Had she thought yet that he could set the law on her, too, because of the beating? Not that it would matter much to her. At the most, that would probably come to her having to pay a fine that she could readily afford, while Aylton almost surely could not afford whatever more her wrath might bring down on him. On the whole, he had more reasons than his aching body to lie there and groan.

Handing Basset his supper, Joliffe slid a look to the curtain hiding Aylton, questioning. Basset answered with a silent nod, agreeing they would not trouble the man with their voices, but no one among the other men in the hall had any care to spare Aylton their talk. Any of them who had not directly suffered himself from a corrupt steward in their time knew stories enough of others who had and were gladly telling them to each other. Joliffe, returning to the kitchen, was thankful the players had not played The Steward and the Devil today, because in it he would have been the Devil who took the Steward to Hell at the end, and the jesting at him now about when he would take Aylton away would have surely become tedious both for him and Aylton.

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