A Play of Heresy by Margaret Frazer Page A

easiest way to begin showing how women moved differently from men. He was no longer surprised that something someone had seen every day of his life had gone totally unnoted in its detail. Made to look and think, Tom was likewise surprised to see how much he had to change not only in how he walked but in how he stood and sat and kneeled and rose to his feet if he were to seem a woman. The second time he tangled in his skirts and fell over when trying to rise from his knees, he lay on the cobbles, unhurt but unready to struggle free of his skirts as he asked somewhat piteously, “How do they do it, then? In skirts and all the time?”
    “More gracefully than you just did,” Joliffe said and offered a hand to help him up.
    On his feet again and shaking the skirt free of his legs, the youth complained, “I feel a right fool dressed like this.”
    “Ah, but remember it shouldn’t be you dressed like this there on the pageant and saying Mary’s words. It should be Mary who’s there. If it’s you in the gown and saying her words, you will look a right fool, but if it’s Mary there, then everything will be right.”
    “Well enough for you to say, but doing it is another matter,” Tom said.
    “How to do it is what we’re here to learn. Look you, do you remember me being the Prophet yesterday?”
    Tom laughed, which was answer enough.
    “Remember me the day before that, when we sat and read the play, and how you’ve seen me here when I wasn’t being the Prophet yesterday.”
    Tom drew down his brows in thought. “Yes.”
    “And now you’ve seen me here, in this gown of mine, being”—Joliffe deliberately shifted his stance, that had been his own, into that of a young and noble woman—“someone else again. And yet it’s always me. That’s the trick of it: to give the seeming of being someone else well enough that the lookers-on believe you, if only for that while. Now if you wear Mary’s gown and move and sound like Mary, you will be fine. If you wear Mary’s gown but go on being you”—he went into the slouch of a young lout about town, which Tom was not but Joliffe wanted the point made plain—“you will indeed look a right fool. You see?”
    Looking satisfactorily thoughtful, Tom nodded slowly that he did.
    “Then let’s try walking, then kneeling, then falling over—er, I mean standing up—again. And just wait until you have to do it all while wearing a wimple and veil, too.”
    “Oh, Lord have mercy,” Tom groaned, but gathered up his skirts to try again.
    They had worked a while longer, and Tom was catching on quickly when Sendell crossed the yard to them, leaving Ned and Hew on their own for a time, to ask Joliffe, “I’m wondering why Eustace Powet hasn’t come yet. Ned says he’ll go to see what’s kept him, but I’d rather keep Ned and Hew at work.” He looked at Tom. “You could work on your own or on your words while Joliffe’s gone, yes?” Tom shrugged that he could, and Sendell said, back to Joliffe again, “You know where Powet lives. I just need to know something hasn’t happened to him, and if it hasn’t, then for him to get himself here as fast as may be.”
    “Done,” said Joliffe, already in the midst of pulling Ane’s gown over his head. “You have your script with you?” he asked Tom. The youth patted the belt pouch at his waist. “Then work your words and at sitting down and standing up gracefully while I’m gone.” He nodded at the nearby bench while taking up his hat he had set aside for the while. “I won’t be long.”
    Nor should he have been. Nowhere was very far away from anywhere else in Coventry. He only had to go the short way to Mill Lane’s corner and turn right into the street he now knew was called Jordan Well despite there was no noticeable shift or turn between it and Earl Street and then, not far along it, turn left into Much Park Street where he and Sendell had met Powet yesterday. He had no trouble remembering which house he wanted,