A Play of Isaac by Margaret Frazer

leaving the apron on Rose’s cushion, did he take the pouch—pleased with the weight of it in his hand—and step up into the cart, make his way around and over the hampers they’d not bothered to unload, and finally crouched among them just behind the driver’s seat. The seat was made of seemingly a single thick slab of wood, but he felt along the slab’s bottom until he found the slit there, big enough for him to put two fingernails in. Pushing carefully, he was able to slide aside the panel set so cunningly in grooves that anyone who did not know about it would need to have the seat out and upside down in full daylight to know it was there.
    Rose had said when showing the hiding place to Joliffe, “He’s good with wood, is that man I married. That I’ll say for him. I had him make this so I’d have a secret place for things. I’ve not ever even told Basset. It’s so no one can come at our money except me, and now you.”
    “Why me?” Joliffe had asked, more in protest than pleasure.
    “What if I drop dead? Better someone knows where our money is than only me.”
    “Why not trust Basset?”
    “Because if it comes to buying a play or some other thing he thinks might help our playing, he’ll spend all we have without half thinking whether he’s paying too much or whether we really need it or that there might be dire need of money to hand somewhere down the road. You know that.”
    Joliffe also knew better than to ask why not Ellis. The one thing he doubted Rose would ever do again was trust a man she deeply loved; her judgment had been too deeply betrayed by Piers’s father. Instead he had said, “So don’t trust Basset. But why trust me?”
    Rose had smiled a grim little smile at him and said, “Because you’re just idiot enough to be honorable.”
    He had not much liked hearing that, not liked having her know him so well, because, yes, he was just idiot enough not to betray a trust if he could help it. Aside from that, he loved the game they had between them—of her sometimes giving him their money to be hidden or, other times, having him be the one to secretly bring it out and slip it to her, so that neither Basset nor Ellis had yet figured out how she managed to keep their money hidden from them.
    With most of the money safely put into the leather pouch waiting in the hiding hole, and the panel carefully closed, Joliffe crawled back out of the cart, put the other pouch back among the folds of Rose’s apron, and settled down on a cushion with his back against one of the hampers, his legs stretched out in front him with ankles crossed, ready to have the evening go as simply as the day had. Given the tangles into which life could twist itself, a simple day like today, full of straight-forward work and no problems, was as near to wealthy as he ever expected to come, and he was watching sparrows flitting among the rafters and not thinking about anything much at all when, true to expectation, Rose came back with a goodly portion of supper for him. He did not rise, just smiled up at her and thanked her as she set the tray down beside him. A padlock and its key were lying beside the thick, broad slice of meat pie and the berry tart in a bowl of cream, and as Rose straightened to stand over him, hands on hips, she said, “We can lock up now, with no need to keep watch, so what about this going out to the tavern? Basset says you have one of your black humours on you and will want to stay here. Do you?”
    “My humour is more the shining blue of a summer day’s clear sky,” Joliffe said.
    “There is no blue humour,” Rose pointed out. “You can have black, yellow, red or . . . What would phlegm be? Gray? White? You cannot have blue.”
    The four humours ruled the health and passions of human bodies: the black bile of the melancholic; the yellow bile of the choleric; the hot red blood of the sanguine; the cold, pale phlegm of the phlegmatic. If the humours were in good balance, all was well. If out of