A Play of Isaac by Margaret Frazer Page B

Lewis said firmly, putting his hands behind his back. “I don’t want to.”
    “It’s time to go,” Simon repeated, still easily, his hand still out. “It’s time for dinner.”
    How odd did Simon find the necessity of seeing to Lewis as a child when Lewis was the older of them, Joliffe wondered? Or was he so used to it that he never thought about it as strange at all?
    “You’re hungry, aren’t you?” Simon said.
    “No,” Lewis answered.
    “Our guests are. They’re going to eat. It would be discourtesy not to come with them.”
    “I’ll put our spears away,” Piers said cheerfully, offering to take Lewis’s.
    Lewis looked about to refuse but Joliffe, taking on his “Devil” manner and voice, said, “Here now, young master demon, there’s time for sport and time for feast and as your lord I say ‘tis time to feast, that afterwards we may have strength enough for seizing souls. Hand over here . . .” He put out demanding hands toward both Piers and Lewis. “. . . and away with you both till time for sport again.”
    Among Piers’s few virtues was the ability to know a prompt when he heard it. With a flourish of his spear, he knelt and held it out to Joliffe. Lewis, grinning again, clumsily copied him, going heavily down on one knee and holding out his spear, too. With a solemn, approving nod, Joliffe took them both and ordered, “Away with you then, my devils, until we meet again to win this stinking soul to hell.” He pointed arrogantly at Ellis who rolled his eyes and turned away as Piers and Lewis, laughing now, scrambled back to their feet, Piers saying, “Race you?”
    But Matthew quickly put in, “No, best not. Master Simon wants to hear what you’ve been doing this while.”
    “How the play is going and all,” Simon said. He held out his hand again and this time Lewis took it and they went out together, Lewis talking happily, Matthew following a few paces behind.
    At Basset’s word, the players lingered, to let Lewis, Simon, and Matthew reach the hall well ahead of them before going themselves, leaving Ellis to his turn of keeping watch in the barn. By the time they took their places at the farthest end of one of the hall tables, below all the household folk, Lewis and the others were at the high table with Matthew standing against the wall behind Lewis, who—to judge by his gestures and bouncing on the bench through the meal—was telling Kathryn all about the morning, paying more heed to that than to his eating and sputtering much of his food in consequence. The girl seemed used to that. She took it in good part anyway, nodding to what he was saying and wiping his chin when need be, helped by Simon sometimes drawing Lewis’s attention his way, giving her chance at her own food. Joliffe, watching while trying to seem he was not, judged it was something well practiced between her and Simon.
    Seated between Piers and Basset, he had no chance to speak with anyone else but decided that, first chance that came his way, he would make talk with someone of the household—a pretty maidservant for choice; no reason not to mix one pleasure with another—to find out more about this care and coddling of Lewis. Even if Master Penteney hoped to go on running the Fairfield properties—and they must be considerable—after Lewis came of age, that was hardly reason for all this care of someone who anywhere else would at best have been kept unseen and never talked of. There had to be more than money in it somewhere and Joliffe wondered what it was.
    At the meal’s end, when Master Penteney said the grace and the household was beginning to draw back from the tables, making no great haste toward their afternoon’s work, Lewis ducked away from both Kathryn and Simon and around the high table’s end, avoiding even Matthew reaching out for him as he made eagerly toward the players at the hall’s far end. Basset, seeing all that, said, “Rose, Piers, you go on. Get Ellis’s food and go. Joliffe,