11 - The Lammas Feast (29 page)

‘Well,
we
know that, of course,’ Margaret agreed hastily. ‘I’m only trying to warn you what others might hint at, that’s all.
I
don’t believe it, of course.’

‘What don’t you believe, Margaret?’ I asked bluntly. ‘That Cicely Ford and I were lovers?’ Adela tried to hush me, glancing across at the children, but they were absorbed in their game. ‘Are you seriously suggesting that anyone could really think such a preposterous thing?’

‘They might. That’s all I’m saying. Be warned.’

I realized with a sinking heart that she could be right. Envy makes people unreasonable. I was beginning to wish that Cicely had willed the Small Street house elsewhere. So, obviously, was Adela.

‘Perhaps the Church court won’t grant probate,’ she said, almost hopefully. ‘There may be some kinsman of Mistress Ford or the Herepaths that we know nothing about, who might successfully contest the will.’

Margaret snorted angrily. ‘You mean you’d rather be a laughing stock than lose a few friends who aren’t worth keeping anyway? Incidentally, what’s happening to all the money Edward Herepath left her? It was a tidy fortune, by all accounts.’

‘I haven’t asked, nor do I intend to,’ I answered shortly. ‘I expect Mistress Ford has left most, if not all, of it to the Magdalen nuns. Master Hulin did not see fit to confide in me, nor did I expect him to. But if we ever do move into the Small Street house, at least we have money enough to furnish it. I have the two gold pieces the Duke of Gloucester sent me for the service I rendered him in London last winter.’

Margaret had barely time to frame an indignant protest that this was the first she had been told about any such money, before she was interrupted by the appearance, one on either side of my stool, of Nicholas and Elizabeth. They had obviously been paying more attention to our conversation than I had thought. Their faces were creased into worried frowns, and a small pair of hands pressed urgently into each of my thighs.

‘Won’t we have a new house?’ Elizabeth demanded. Although still something over three months short of her fourth birthday, she was showing every sign of being as sharp as her mother had been, and as her grandmother still was. Little escaped Nicholas, either: in intelligence, he was Adela’s son. He fixed me now with his brilliant, dark eyes.

I put an arm around each child.

‘We hope so. But we might not,’ I answered gently. ‘It will rest with the decision of the Church court in the end.’

‘Why? Does it matter?’ Adela asked them.

Neither replied immediately, but I saw two pairs of eyes flicker towards the sleeping Adam. Elizabeth, who was closer, surreptitiously kicked his little cart.

‘In the new house, we wouldn’t have to sleep in the same room as him, would we?’ she enquired.

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘Probably not.’

‘What’s wrong with sleeping in the same room as your baby brother?’ Margaret Walker wanted to know. ‘People like us, my girl, should be thankful to have a roof over our heads, let alone separate rooms. I’ve never heard such nonsense.’

‘He screams,’ Elizabeth muttered rebelliously, and aimed another half-hearted kick in Adam’s direction, while her stepbrother nodded vigorously in agreement.

‘We could put him out with the rubbish,’ Nicholas suggested, earning himself a stinging slap from his mother and the promise of a whipping if she ever heard him express such sentiments again.

Later, as we walked home together through the jostling crowds of late afternoon, pulling Adam and a reluctant Hercules behind us, my wife remarked sombrely, ‘You were right, after all, sweetheart. Bess and Nicholas do dislike Adam. What can we do about it?’ She was plainly upset.

‘Just give them both time to get used to him,’ I answered. ‘We have to be honest and admit that he does scream a very great deal. I must say that, on occasions, I find the noise he makes more than I can bear myself. Have patience. There’s nothing else to be done that I can see.’

Adela sighed and took my arm with her free hand. ‘I suppose we can also pray that we get the house; that probate
will
be granted.’ She gave my arm a squeeze. ‘Would it be wrong of us to walk down Small Street, instead of Broad Street, and take a look?’

‘At the house, you mean?’ She nodded. ‘Why not? We’re as free to look at it as anyone else, provided we don’t try to go inside. And as we haven’t a key, we’re unable to do so, anyway. There are tenants living there at present.’

It was strange, standing on the opposite side of the street, and looking again at Edward Herepath’s old home, where so much grief and pain had ruined so many lives during that first winter I had spent in Bristol. It was four and a half years ago now, and the story had begun long before my arrival . . .

Robert and Edward Herepath, Lillis, all dead who were living then. And now Cicely . . .

Grief is a strange emotion. You can keep it at bay, forget it almost, for hours at a time, only for it to strike when you least expect it. Cicely was dead! It was as though I was hearing the words for the very first time. They echoed round and round in my head and I could feel myself beginning to shake, racked by the effort of trying to control a desire to burst out crying. I was also filled with self-disgust. That sweet, gentle creature had been wantonly murdered and all I could think about was whether or not I might profit by her death, whether or not a Church court would eventually grant me the right to inherit her house, when what I ought to be doing was trying to find her murderer.

‘Come home,’ whispered Adela, pressing my arm again, conscious of my distress.

I nodded, unable to speak. She was right. It was time to go home; time to apply my mind seriously to the whole sorry sequence of events that had culminated in Cicely’s death.

T
hat night, Adela and I comforted one another. I was grateful for her generosity, because I knew in my heart of hearts that she had not fully recovered from Adam’s birth. But when I would have said something, she hushed me, kissing me into silence and holding me so tightly that I guessed she was still shaken by the events of the morning and the realization that I could, even as we made love, have been in prison, facing a charge of murder. A charge, moreover, that, but for Philip Lamprey, might have been difficult to disprove.

For once, Adam slept the night through, a circumstance so unusual that both Adela and I became restless. I woke at least four times, twice to use the chamber pot, and on each occasion was conscious that Adela was either awake or tossing from side to side in her sleep. Towards morning, I found myself fully conscious, sitting up in bed and muttering, ‘Fougères is in Brittany.’

‘What? What’s that, sweetheart?’ Adela asked sleepily. ‘What are you saying?’

‘Nothing.’ I snuggled down beside her again. ‘Nothing of consequence.’

Faintly, in the distance, I could hear a cock crowing and, not long after, the rumble of the day’s first load – of meat? vegetables? ironmongery? – being driven towards the Frome Gate. The fifth day of Saint James’s Fair was also getting under way. From the open ground around the priory came echoes of shouts mingled with laughter and the inevitable arguments that punctuated most such gatherings. Soon it would be time to get up – there were slight stirrings and rustlings from Adam’s cradle – but I might be able to snatch a few extra moments of slumber.

They refused to come, however, as my tired brain puzzled over the odd thought that had roused me. Why was I so sure that Fougères was in Brittany? Because Philip Lamprey had told me so, of course, and although there were many subjects on which I would never trust his judgement, his knowledge of the
hows
and particularly the
wheres
of the late wars was greater than most men’s. But why had it come as a revelation to me that Fougères was in Brittany? Again the answer came pat. Because I had previously believed it to be in Normandy.

My thoughts went back to my conversation with John Overbecks in the Green Lattis on the Tuesday morning of the preceding week. We had been talking about the loss of our French possessions overseas, with particular reference to the Conqueror’s duchy. My ignorance of geography being what it was, I had lumped together all the places he had mentioned and imagined that most of them were in Normandy.

But what did it matter that Fougères was in Brittany? Why had my unconscious mind considered the fact of sufficient importance to force me wide awake? There was no reason that I could fathom except that Brittany had run like a thread throughout all the terrible events of the past ten days, from the first moment, when I had seen the stranger step ashore from the Breton ship. Spying, subversion, Jasper Fairbrother’s unlikely involvement as a Tudor agent, Timothy Plummer, counter-spies sent down from London – why did I feel that all these strands in this tale of four murders were irrelevant? That they were like so many false trails strewn across my path to divert me from the truth?

Something moved in the darkest recesses of my mind. Something, some knowledge, buried deep, but slowly rising to the surface, was bringing revelation in its wake. I had only to lie still, to hold on, to wait patiently and all would be revealed . . .

The stirrings and whimperings in the cradle were getting louder. I struggled in vain to ignore them, to will Adam back to sleep. But it was useless, as I had known it would be. A pair of crumpled fists appeared above the sides of his crib, accompanied by an almighty roar that declared it to be my son’s breakfast time, and woe betide anybody who came between him and his food. Adela, still half blind with sleep, was already climbing out of bed, staggering across the room to pick up our vociferous offspring and pacify him before we and our neighbours were rendered permanently hard of hearing.

Hercules, too, was suddenly up and about, landing, as usual, with a thump on my chest and starting to lick my face. Fending him off and cursing silently, I lay back against the pillows, trying desperately to recapture that moment when I had felt so close to a solution. But it had vanished like the wraith it was, and I was left frustrated and bad-tempered, yet more determined than ever to discover the truth and bring the culprit, or culprits, for these murders to justice.

Adela and I were halfway through breakfast, when a knock at the door was followed almost immediately by the appearance of Richard Manifold.

Adela frowned her disapproval and muttered something under her breath about encroaching ways. (Or not under her breath, but just loud enough for our visitor to get the gist of her words.) The sergeant flushed painfully and murmured his apologies. I very nearly felt sorry for him: it was obvious to me, at least, that he had come to make his peace, particularly with Adela, whose good opinion he valued rather more highly than mine. He also, as I have said before, valued a friendly hearth and a comforting meal at the end of a day’s work, when the hard drinking and forced conviviality of the city taverns began to pall. And with the added knowledge that our circumstances this coming autumn and winter were likely to provide him with an even more comfortable billet than heretofore, he was anxious to make friends with us again.

At my invitation, he joined us at table and I poured him a cup of ale from the jug, ignoring my wife’s reproachful look.

‘Roger,’ he said awkwardly, ‘I trust there’s no hard feelings for what happened yesterday. I had no choice but to arrest you, once John Overbecks had revealed the contents of Mistress Ford’s new will, and once those contents had been verified by Attorney Hulin. Fortunately,’ he added even more stiffly, ‘you were able to exonerate yourself.’

I could guess, by the semi-official manner in which he spoke, that he felt acutely ill-at-ease. Adela’s unforgiving silence offered him no relief, and I realized with some amusement that I was the one who would have to ease his embarrassment.

I clapped him on the shoulder. ‘You could have done nothing else,’ I agreed, and smiled gently at Adela to deflect her indignation. ‘Besides,’ I added with a touch of irony, ‘I knew there could have been no personal animosity in your actions. You’re too good a sheriff’s officer to let feelings of your own cloud your professional judgement.’

He slipped me a resentful glance, then grinned reluctantly, raising an imaginary sword in the manner of a fencer acknowledging a hit. He knew when he was beaten and held out his hand.

‘Friends?’

‘Friends,’ I agreed, each of us conveniently ignoring the fact that friendship was something we had never felt for one another.

He accepted a second cup of ale and said, ‘I’ve come to pick your brains.’ He grimaced. ‘As you can imagine, the murder yesterday of Mistress Ford has brought demands for an immediate solution from my lord sheriff, the mayor and every city elder of note. Never mind that, up until now, urgency has not been a feature of this string of deaths. Jasper Fairbrother? Too many suspects, and anyway, who cares that Bristol has been rid of a notorious troublemaker? The stranger? A suspected Tudor spy, and, in a city almost unanimous in its support for the House of York, again who cares? Walter Godsmark? One less bully for the populace to worry about, and, in any case, an undoubted accident. But Cicely Ford, not merely respected, but almost universally beloved, well, that’s a different story. Our only suspect is in the clear’ – another sidelong glance, accompanied by the glimmer of a smile – ‘which leaves me with a head as empty as Adela’s pitcher is likely to be if we go on drinking at our present rate.’

‘And you want to know if I have any ideas on the subject?’

He nodded and refused my offer of a third cup of ale.

‘It occurred to me that you might have some thoughts on the subject. You’ve always been a nosy beggar, and you’ve earned a reputation for being able to solve these sorts of problems.’

Adela, who had so far said nothing, got abruptly to her feet and began to clear the dishes from the table.

‘Perhaps you’d care to continue this discussion elsewhere,’ she suggested coldly. ‘I have work to do, and then I must go to market. I shall need some money, Roger.’

I gave her a hug and a kiss. ‘Sweetheart, I know you think I ought to be working, but four deaths in ten days requires some consideration. If they’re connected, as I’m more than inclined to believe they are, our murderer is getting much too confident. And who knows who may be next if he, or she, considers them a threat?’