A Play of Dux Moraud by Margaret Frazer

pretending to be a girl a lot faster than you’d get over being gelded,” Ellis pointed out darkly, though he was no fonder of playing a woman than Piers was.
    Still distracting Gil from his embarrassment, Joliffe went on, “Besides, you’ll be surprised how women take to a man despite of it. Or,” he added thoughtfully, “maybe because of it. They maybe want to find out how much a man he is after seeing him in skirts.”
    “And St. Genesius knows you’re more than willing to show them,” said Ellis.
    “Children,” Basset said in his schoolmaster-in-classroom voice. “Behave. May we begin?”
    Despite his unwillingness at the start, Gil did well at his lessoning. By the end of it, he might not have had a girlish swing to his hips yet but he could drop a creditable curtsy. He did tread on his skirt’s hem much, but he fell over only once, and when they had finished, Basset allowed it was a promising beginning.
    “Better than Joliffe,” Ellis said, sitting aside to watch. “Didn’t he turn an ankle, almost break it, while he was learning?”
    “No,” Joliffe protested strongly.
    “I remember mending his hems a great many times,” Rose offered. “He kept tearing them out with his big feet.”
    “Everyone picks on me,” Joliffe complained.
    “It’s because it’s such fun,” Ellis returned.
    Lessons finished, Piers and Gil were sent off to fetch water and some hay for Tisbe. Rose took the afternoon’s pause to lie down for a rest, and Ellis set to scraping out a firepit in the packed earth floor. Joliffe, before taking a rest himself, went to check Tisbe, tied to the cartshed’s end wall and taking life easy. While he was feeling down her legs and seeing that her hooves were clean, Basset joined him, which was reasonable—Tisbe’s well-being was their well-being—but Joliffe supposed that Basset had more than Tisbe on his mind, and straightening from her last hoof, said to him, too quietly for anyone else to hear, “You hauled a good bucketful of information out of Will. We know more than we did.”
    “Not that any of it seems any particular use,” Basset answered, stroking the mare’s neck. “But then we couldn’t expect that anything even the boy knows would be all that secret. And maybe we’ll be fortunate and there won’t be any secrets to find out here after all.”
    “We can only hope,” said Joliffe.

Chapter 6
    That evening, the play, done in the great hall by torchlight after supper when the household was at ease and ready to be diverted, went well. Gil joined in the deviling with Piers without stumble or fault. “Almost as if you knew what you were doing,” Ellis said, slapping him on the back as they made their way back to the cartshed by lantern-light through a soft rain.
    “Now if we can just teach him to talk, he may make a player,” Joliffe said.
    Gil, too happy to mistake their jibing for anything but the friendliness it was, kept saying, “I did it, didn’t I? I did it.”
    “You did indeed do it,” Basset assured him.
    “Wait until you’ve done it fifty times and see how you feel about it,” Ellis muttered.
    “Don’t listen to him,” Basset said. “Every set of lookers-on and every place we play is different and that makes it a different play every time.”
    “Not different enough,” said Ellis. Rose poked him none too gently in his arm to shut him up.
    At the cartshed they changed out of their playing garb, and while Rose put it all away, Basset started a small fire in the firepit and the others laid out the bedding around it. Joliffe saw Ellis whisper in Rose’s ear, but she shook her head to whatever he said or asked and turned her back on him, her eyes downcast. Suddenly deeply glum, Ellis kicked his bedding before lying down.
    Gil was already into his own bedding and looked to be gone into instant, exhausted sleep as soon as he was under his blanket. The rest of them took hardly longer at it, with Joliffe maybe the last to go into sleep. He was