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stride toward despising him—answered courteously back but with a look down his nose and the slightest hint in his voice that told he had heard the insolence but was willing to overlook it this time, “Master Penteney has given leave for our horse to graze in his pasture these few days our company is in his service. Master Glover, are you?”
    “Aye.” The man started across the yard toward him. “Company of what?”
    “Players.”
    Glover regarded him with mingled disbelief and disapproval. “Master Penteney has taken on a clot of players?”
    “For Master Fairfield’s pleasure,” Joliffe said, giving no ground.
    “Ah. Master Fairfield.” That seemed to answer everything for Glover. Some of the unwelcome went from his voice. “Well, we’ve grass enough.” He reached the middle of the yard when Joliffe did, enough into his way that Joliffe stopped. Master Glover walked around Tisbe with a judging eye. “She looks healthy enough.”
    “We’d have small use for a sick horse, would we?” Joliffe said easily, not looking to make a quarrel with him.
    Glover half-laughed. “You wouldn’t, no.” He slapped Tisbe lightly on the shoulder, said, “We might even manage some oats for you while you’re here, old girl.” He pointed toward one of the gates at the far end of the yard. “That’s where we keep the horses presently. Turn her in. She’ll do fine.”
    He went back toward the house and Joliffe led Tisbe on to the gate at which Glover had pointed. There were three gates, all opening into well-hedged pastures, with a marshy stream running along the bottom of them to make for easy watering of any livestock kept there to wait for market. Just now some young sheep were in one, a few cows in another, while half a score of horses were grazing the thick-grown grass in the middle one. With all of that and the barn and byre and pigs and storage shed and being so near to town, this was a place suited and fine for a victualler supplying colleges, halls, and a monastery in Oxford. Besides there, Joliffe could guess that Master Penteney’s business probably went across a wide swathe of country from the Welsh border to London, with links overseas to France and Flanders at the least. It was not that Master Penteney owned or needed much land of his own, since he wouldn’t trouble to grow much of his grain and hay or breed his own livestock. As a victualler, he would contract with others who did that, would buy from them and sell in better markets than they could hope to reach, making fine profits for himself from it all.
    Joliffe led Tisbe into the horse pasture and closed the gate behind him while he made his farewell, rubbing the deep hollow under her jaw while he told her, “Don’t eat yourself out of shape here, my girl. You’ll have to go back between the cart shafts one of these days, you know.”
    Tisbe did not deign to answer. With head stretched out and eyes half-closed, she would have let him go on rubbing under her chin forever; when he stopped, she rolled a reproachful eye at him, still holding her head out in hope of more. Laughing at her, he slid her halter off, gave her a scratch behind the ears, and said, “That’s enough, you spoiled madam. Go enjoy yourself.”
    Tisbe blew down her nose at him, swung her head to bump him in the chest for her own farewell, and ambled away, not toward the half dozen other horses in the pasture but in search of a patch of grass all her own. Usually she had only whatever grass was in the compass of her lead rope when they staked her out of a night beside a road or else a little plain hay if they were in a town, with—as Master Glover had certainly guessed—rarely a mouthful of oats from one month’s end to the next. Compared to the sturdy, smooth-flanked horses here, she was an unimpressive sight, under-tall and bony, but she had come cheap five years ago when their last horse, Hero, having lain down sometime in a night, had quietly failed to rise in the morning,