11 - The Lammas Feast (5 page)

As I passed the shop, a door opened and Walter Godsmark came out, crossing the street with his long-legged stride. He entered the shadows of Saint Mary le Port Street and I guessed that he was hurrying home, for I knew that he lived with his widowed mother near Saint Peter’s Church, in the lee of the castle.

If Walter had a saving grace it was his care for this elderly parent, who, so I was told, had been almost past the age of childbearing when her only son was born. Her husband had died shortly afterwards, and, with the help of a daughter, some twelve or so years older than Walter, had managed to rear him from a sickly infant to the strapping great lout he was today. Now it was his turn to look after her, his sister having long ago departed from the town. What Goody Godsmark thought of her son’s association with Jasper Fairbrother no one knew, for she would never be drawn on the subject; but he was the apple of her eye, and I doubt that she would have blamed him had he been in league with Old Nick himself.

I slowed down a little as I reached the top of High Street, then skirted the High Cross before entering Broad Street, almost directly opposite. Here stood a house I knew well, the former home of the late Alderman Weaver; a house which, since the Alderman’s death just over a year ago, had stood shuttered and empty while his brother and heir decided what to do with it. But now, at last, it had a new occupant. One of Bristol’s richest citizens, Peter Avenel, who made his money from making soap, had bought it for his son, Robin, recently married to the daughter of another wealthy local merchant. (Bristol is a very rich city, and approves of its sons and daughters marrying one another. That way, Bristol money remains in Bristol pockets and doesn’t find its way into those of strangers.)

I knew Robin Avenel well by sight and had once, four years earlier, had some dealings with him. He had fancied himself in love with a young woman whom I fancied myself. Not that I ever stood a chance with someone so far above me socially as Cicely Ford; but I had resented the fact that this cherubic-faced little dandy, with his prancing gait and the roving eye, had dared even to aspire to Cicely’s affection.

There was the usual congestion in Broad Street, with the customary procession of carts and pedestrians going in and out by Saint John’s Arch and the Frome Gate, and I almost missed the sight of Robin Avenel opening his door to usher out a guest. I also very nearly missed seeing the guest’s face because a smallholder, returning home with the remains of the vegetables he had failed to sell at market, stopped alongside me, blocking my view. The line of traffic passing through the Frome Gate had come to a halt as it so often did at that time of day. Then the smallholder suddenly dropped the reins on his horse’s neck and jumped down from his seat to answer a call of nature in the drain in the middle of the road. I could now see plainly that the visitor taking his leave of Robin Avenel was the same man who had previously visited Jasper Fairbrother; the man who had disembarked that morning from the Breton ship in Saint Nicholas Backs.

As soon as I pushed open the cottage door and heard a strange voice, I knew we had a visitor. Happily, it didn’t speak with the self-assertive tones of Richard Manifold, but in soft, feminine cadences that still had the power to make me shiver with pleasure.

Cicely Ford! Now here was a true coincidence. I had been thinking of her as I walked along Broad Street and through the Frome Gate, only to find her seated at my table, drinking a cup of Adela’s elderberry wine, her left arm cradling Adam. He, needless to say, was behaving perfectly, peaceful and quiet, even though awake. All his life, he has known how to please women and earn their adoration. Many’s the time I’ve wished that I could learn the trick.

Cicely Ford was a lay sister at the Magdalen Nunnery, which stood on the rising ground a little way north-west of Saint James’s Priory and opposite the church of Saint Michael-on-the-Mount-Without. The nunnery had been founded three centuries earlier by the wife of Sir Robert Fitzhardinge as a house of retreat and a seminary for young women, and dedicated to Saint Mary Magdalen. When Cicely Ford had entered the community four years before, following the deaths of her betrothed and his elder brother, it had been her intention to join the order. But in the end, for reasons I had never discovered, she had abandoned this idea and stayed on as a lay sister, helping to instruct the merchants’ daughters who attended the seminary, or waiting on any rich woman who felt she would benefit from a few days’ peace and quiet in retreat, away from the company of her nearest and dearest.

It was a very small cell of the Augustinian Order, and until Marion Baldock had joined their number, as Sister Jerome, the previous year, there had been no more than three nuns in residence for quite some time, leading an unexciting and blameless existence; a far cry from the preceding century, when stories of their daring and courage in taking food to the beleaguered villagers of Bedminster during the Black Death had made the community famous throughout the city and beyond.

As I entered the cottage, Cicely turned her head and smiled at me. Her corn-coloured hair was strained back beneath a grey veil, but the severity of the style in no way detracted from the beauty of her almost perfect oval face, which, with its soft, creamy skin, was as flower-like as ever. Her blue eyes lit with pleasure at seeing me.

She murmured, ‘Roger!’ and held out one small hand which I gallantly kissed. I avoided Adela’s cynical gaze; a look that told me she understood exactly what was going on. She knew that I liked to keep these little shrines to my past goddesses brightly lit in the secret recesses of my mind, even though I was fully aware that, given the chance, I could never have lived with any one of them. Adela was the only woman I had ever met capable of the sort of love that demanded no ties or promises, but let me be myself and allowed me the freedom to wander the open road whenever the fancy took me. She was totally altruistic, the only possible wife and helpmeet for someone as selfish as I was. In return, she had all my heart – but I did like to pretend sometimes that I was still a lad-about-town, an attitude she regarded with her customary indulgence.

‘Mistress Ford has come to invite us to be her guests, the day after tomorrow, at Vespers,’ Adela said.

‘It’s the twenty-second of July, the feast day of Saint Mary Magdalen,’ Cicely explained. ‘The lay sisters can each invite two visitors for the evening service. And just now, as I was passing your door, I suddenly thought of you, Roger. And Mistress Chapman, of course!’ She gently withdrew her hand, which I had retained for far too long, with a faint frown of disapproval and a small, apologetic smile at Adela.

‘We shall be delighted to be your guests, shan’t we, Roger?’ my wife demanded peremptorily.

‘We shall, indeed,’ I concurred. ‘But what about the children? What about feeding Adam?’

They were cries becoming more familiar to me with each passing day. But I could always rely on Adela to be one step ahead of me.

‘I shall feed Adam before I go. As for the other two, I shall naturally ask Margaret to come and look after them. I’m sure she’ll agree. She can stay here the night, in our bed, with Elizabeth and me. You can share Nicholas’s mattress.’

I grimaced. My stepson was a lively sleeper and I could foresee precious little rest for either of us that night. Adela, without a single look or word of reproach, had got her own back. That would teach me to hang on to other women’s hands beyond the call of duty.

‘And now, dearest,’ my wife added, ‘I think you should make yourself respectable. Put on your tunic and walk Mistress Ford home.’

Cicely protested, but Adela was adamant. ‘The paths and alleyways around here aren’t safe, even in broad daylight. And I know whereabouts you live.’

So did I. Although Cicely was a wealthy young woman, having inherited her guardian’s fortune as well as her father’s, when she decided against becoming a nun, she had rented a tiny cottage, a little higher up Saint Michael’s Hill than the nunnery, facing the public gallows. It was not a spot many people would have chosen, but I could guess her reasons for selecting it, and not simply because it was close to the nunnery. It was on those gallows that the man she had loved, Robert Herepath, had died, deserted by everyone, including herself, protesting his innocence to the last; innocence that had been amply demonstrated a few months later, when the man he was supposed to have murdered, Margaret Walker’s father, had returned to Bristol, alive and well. Having subsequently married Margaret’s daughter, Lillis Walker, and solved the mystery of William Woodward’s disappearance, I had, like my mother-in-law, always felt some sort of responsibility for Cicely Ford.

Adela knew this and had therefore forestalled me with the suggestion that I would, sooner or later, have made myself. And it gave me an excuse to be absent when Richard Manifold called.

Quarter of an hour later, Cicely and I left the cottage, and only just in time as far as I was concerned. Glancing behind me as we turned into the alley alongside the house, I saw the sergeant emerging from the shadows of the Frome Gate, so, taking my companion’s arm, I hurried her forward. The open ground around Saint James’s Priory was already half-covered with booths and stalls in various stages of construction, ready for the opening of the fair in five days’ time.

Cicely must have read my thoughts. ‘By this hour next Saturday afternoon,’ she said, ‘this place will be crowded with people buying, selling, dancing, cramming the side-shows––’

‘Drinking, thieving, throwing up,’ I interrupted, and incurred her displeasure.

‘That’s a very jaundiced view, if I may say so, Roger. Don’t you like people to enjoy themselves?’

‘Of course! Just so long as they don’t pick my pockets or try to steal my children away. We live in perilous times, Mistress Ford.’

She laughed. ‘We always have. I used to listen to my father talking when I was a child. There never were such perilous days as he lived through.’ I grinned in acknowledgement of her argument, and she smiled up at me. ‘I’m so glad you’re happy, Roger. I can tell that you and Adela were made for one another. I was sad when you married Lillis Walker. I never thought her the right wife for you. But Adela’s different. You
are
happy, aren’t you?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Only I heard the note of hesitation in my voice.

Her beautiful eyes filled with tears. ‘Then mind you don’t have anything to reproach yourself with. If only I’d believed in Robert! I could have comforted his final hours, let him know that one person, at least, had faith in him.’

I tried to console her. ‘It might only have made things worse. His death would have seemed even more pointless and unjust.’

We had climbed halfway up Saint Michael’s Hill to where the gallows stood. Some poor lost soul was hanging there in chains, part of his face already pecked away by the crows.

‘Why do you choose to live here?’ I demanded violently, chasing off two of these scavengers as I spoke. But I knew the answer before she made it.

‘It’s close to the nunnery. And I feel closer to Robert. Sometimes, I feel he’s there in the cottage with me. Do you think that foolish?’

‘I think it unwise to encourage such morbid fancies.’

A man had just passed Saint Michael’s Church and the boundary stone that marked the city’s limit, and was climbing steadily uphill towards us; a man dressed in hose and tunic of brown burel, carrying a cloak made of the same material, together with his pack; a man I had seen three times before that day, the last time in Broad Street well over an hour ago. What, I wondered, had he been doing in the meantime that it had taken him so long to get this far?

I must have exclaimed involuntarily, because Cicely asked, ‘Do you know him, Roger?’

I shook my head. ‘No. But he’s been haunting me ever since this morning. This is the fourth occasion that I’ve seen him today.’

Cicely stared curiously at the man.

The stranger, however, did not return our interest. He strode purposefully past us without a glance, although he did falter for an instant at the sight of the felon dangling from the gibbet. It appeared to startle him and I glimpsed the whites of his eyes as he shied away from the corpse. It crossed my mind that it might hold some special significance for him; but then, I suppose that might be said about all of us when there are so many crimes that carry the penalty of death.

He recovered quickly, walking on towards the high ground above Bristol, known as Durdham Down, and the road to Gloucester.

‘He looks as though he knows where he’s going,’ Cicely commented, watching the stranger dwindle to a speck in the distance. She turned back to me. ‘Thank you for bringing me home, Roger.’ She stood on tiptoe and kissed my cheek. But I wasn’t fooled for a minute into thinking it anything other than a chaste, sisterly peck. Her heart belonged to a dead man and would do so until the day she died. ‘You and Adela won’t forget to come to Vespers on Wednesday evening?’

‘We shan’t forget,’ I promised. Then I saw her safely inside her cottage, with its grisly outlook, took the liberty of kissing
her
cheek – another chaste peck – and set off home, more than ready for my delayed supper.

The first thing I smelled when I entered the house was the delicious aroma of mutton stew, flavoured with cinnamon and saffron. The first thing – or, rather, person – I saw was Richard Manifold, sitting in
my
chair, eating from
my
bowl with
my
spoon. Adela was a worthy opponent: she could always teach me a salutary lesson. But, also, she knew when she had taken matters far enough.

She came forward, smiling a welcome, and kissed me full on the lips. There was nothing chaste or sisterly about this kiss, and I noticed our guest’s squirm of embarrassment. That put me in a better mood, and I sat down opposite him, while Adela brought me a brimming plate of mutton stew and a slice of barley bread.

‘Well?’ I demanded. ‘What did you discover about those two ruffians, Richard? Why were they watching Baker Overbecks’s shop?’

The sergeant’s manner became distinctly cagey.