A Play of Heresy by Margaret Frazer Page B

either, despite the shop was shuttered closed. Somewhat early for that, he thought, given there was still much daylight left and others were open, but after all Herry Byfeld surely had some life besides behind his counter and maybe was gone off about it.
    First sign that all was not well nor going to be simple was that the door in from the street was standing open, and the passageway beyond crowded with a huddle-headed hush of people who looked as if they thought they should do something about something but did not know what. Neighbors, Joliffe thought. Three women and a man and two skirt-clinging small children. Beyond them, the door to the kitchen stood open, and from there came the loud weeping of several women.
    Something was gone very wrong.
    Before he had decided between retreat and pressing forward, one of the women looked back at him and said, “The shop is closed. There’s been a death, seems.”
    A somewhat too familiar tightness taking hold on his chest and throat, Joliffe said, “It’s Eustace Powet I’m here to see. Is he . . .”
    The man among them called over the head of the woman ahead of him, “Hai, Eustace, someone is here asking for you.” He laid a hand on the woman’s shoulder and added, “Come away. They don’t need us here. There’s naught to be done.”
    She gave to the pull of his hand, beginning a retreat toward the outer door. The other women must have agreed with him, and Joliffe pressed back against one wall to let them pass, one of the women saying to another as they went, “A shame and all that it’s him. I knew his mother, God keep her soul.”
    “Aye. They’re a family that’s had no good fortune at all these past years,” another woman said.
    “She undid them, that’s right certain,” the man said grimly. “God’s judgment.”
    “I’ll tell you whose judgment,” one of the women snapped as they went out the door, “and it wasn’t God’s. It . . .”
    “Master Joliffe?” Powet said from the passageway’s other end.
    “Master Powet,” Joliffe said low-voiced, going toward him, wary of the weeping but too curious to keep his distance. “I’m to find out why you didn’t come to practice.”
    Powet’s face was taut and twisted with distress. “There’s been a death.” He looked over his shoulder at whoever else was in the kitchen behind him. “My niece—my great-niece—Anna—her . . . not her betrothed, they hadn’t said the words yet, but they meant to, when all was better—word’s come he’s been found dead. She’s been waiting all this past week for him to come home and now . . . Oh, god in heaven and all the saints’ mercy, old John will never survive this.”
    Now in the doorway beside Powet, Joliffe saw past him into the kitchen that had been so easy with ordinary family matters yesterday. Today there was nothing easy or ordinary. Close to the far doorway Dick and another boy enough like him they had to be brothers were crouched shoulder to shoulder, looking caught between a wish to bolt and the fixed watching of what they hardly understood. The girl Cecily and Powet’s great-niece Mistress Deyster, were crumpled together on the bench beside the table, clinging to each other. The loud sobbing was theirs. Herry stood in helpless uncertainty which way to go midway between them and the old man still slumped in his chair beside the hearth, with now an older woman on one knee in front of him, leaning forward with her hands braced on the arms of the chair to either side of him, saying into his face, “Do you understand, John? Do you understand?”
    “For the sake of pity, let him be, Mother!” Herry exclaimed like a man pushed to his limit. “Better he never understands. Leave him what peace he has left!”
    The woman who must be Powet’s niece Mistress Byfeld stood sharply up and turned on her son. “And when he starts to wonder where Robyn is, starts asking when he’s coming home? What then? Then we tell him Robyn is never coming