Chains of Folly (25 page)

“Hmmm.” Magdalene, as she often did, followed Ella’s innocent remark farther. “It is not impossible that Gehard somehow gained possession of Nelda’s key long enough to have a copy made. And there was Nelda’s own key. We had forgotten about that. I wonder what happened to it? But does that mean he never approached Linley about his lost seal? Possibly that Linley did not know he intended to search Nelda’s apartment?”

Bell shrugged. “I do not know, but it does seem to me that if Gehard thought Linley had got Nelda’s possessions and asked for them, Linley would have told Gehard that you, or the bishop, had them now. From what his fellow captains in Surrey’s service said, Linley was no great hero. Yet Gehard did not come here.”

“Thank God for that!” Magdalene exclaimed. “With a full house I do not need the kind of riot that one would make.”

To that Bell made no direct response, but he said, as if he hardly heard her, “So when he did not find the seal, he lost his temper and broke up the furniture.” He nodded. “I can imagine him doing that, but why then did he not leave?”

“There was that heavy thud Tayte mentioned.”

“Perhaps he tripped on something and fell,” Diot said, and then shook her head. “But being the man you implied he was, Bell, tripping and falling should have made him more furious so that he broke up more furniture. Only Magdalene said it was quiet after that. And whatever happened, it still does not explain why he did not leave.”

“Hit his head?” Bell suggested. “And we don’t know that he didn’t leave later. From what Magdalene says, Tayte and her man closed her door after the man arrived and—” Bell chuckled “—were busy.”

The laugh died in his throat and his expression froze. Magdalene’s hand tightened on the cup she held. Letice looked down at the piece of pasty in her hand. Diot looked away toward the window.

“I was very busy this morning,” Ella said, smiling. “Diot was kind enough to take me to the East Chepe. Baby Face had left me a purse…” She turned to Magdalene and said earnestly, “I tried to give it back to him, but he would have none of it and said it was for me. I told him you gave me money enough—”

“It was something he wished you to have, likely so you could buy something that you could say came from him since he is too timid to buy you a gift himself.”

Ella’s eyes opened wide. “That is just what Diot said,” she marveled. “And it sounded right, so I bought a really beautiful clasp to hold my hair, and when he comes I will show it to him and tell him what you said, Magdalene, and that I would always think of him when I put it in my hair.”

Magdalene opened her mouth to commend this idea, but the bell of St. Mary Overy pealed the hour of Vespers. In a little while, the men who planned to spend the night in the Old Priory Guesthouse would be arriving. Bell hastily swallowed the remains of the pottage in his bowl and took more of the cold sliced meat, which he slapped on a piece of bread. He swung over the bench and pulled his sword belt over his shoulder. With both hands free, he added a wedge of cheese to the bread and meat, caught up the cup of ale, and walked down the corridor toward the room in which he slept.

“Where is Bell going?” Ella asked.

“To his room,” Magdalene said patiently, but her voice trembled slightly. “You know some of our guests do not like it known that they come here. They would be uncomfortable and unhappy if they saw Bell or he saw them. That is why you must never speak to any of your friends when you meet them outside this house.”

“Oh, yes.” Ella smiled. “I never speak to any of my friends when I see them in the market. Today I saw Master Long Robe and I walked right by him, even though I will see him tonight. And now I remember about Bell.”

“I am glad you remember.”

“I saw that he took his sword with him. It is safe for us if he is in the house. I remember when that silly student came in the middle of the night and everyone screamed. Bell captured him with his sword. So if that man who fell and hit his head—was he running when he fell? My mother always told me not to run lest I fall.”

“That is very wise,” Magdalene said, smiling at Ella. The strain was gone from her voice. Sometimes Ella’s babble was priceless.

But for once Ella did not respond with delight to the words of praise. She frowned, then nodded. “He will not come here and break our furniture because Bell will be here.”

Magdalene could not help smiling. “Bell is very useful.”

She lifted her cup and drained the ale, but she did not finish the food she had taken. Ella looked at the pasty and then shook her head. Diot and Letice put the last bites they had been eating into their mouths. Then all the women began to clear the table. Dulcie came and wiped it clean. They had hardly settled on their stools near the empty hearth, when the bell at the gate pealed.

When all the women were behind closed doors with their clients, Magdalene continued to embroider for perhaps half a candlemark. She looked up when she heard a door open and dropped her gaze hastily to her work again. Bell came softly down the corridor and sat on Diot’s stool, across from Magdalene.

“Do you have the key to Nelda’s rooms with you?” she asked.

Bell shook his head. “It is in my strongbox in the bishop’s keeping. I thought of going to get it, but it is really too late to go to Nelda’s rooms. By the time I got there, it would be too dark to see anything.”

Magdalene laughed. “And I would have murdered you if you did not take me, but I cannot say I am sorry you do not have the key. You know I do not like to leave the house when my women are at work, even though the three men who are being entertained are hardly likely to cause any trouble.” She sighed as she remembered her day-long frustration because she could not get into Nelda’s rooms, and added, “You are a dreadful temptation.”

“Am I?” A fist clenched on Bell’s knee.

Magdalene laughed. “You know you are, you pretty peacock, but I am not talking about that. I have been burning up with curiosity ever since Tayte left. If you had had the key, I would have gone with you.”

He was silent for a while, first looking down at his own hands and loosening the fists. Then he said, as if the previous remarks about temptation had not been made, “As you suspected, I spent the day chasing down the poppy takers. They were all merchants of one kind or another and their seals were easily traced. Fortunately, they had been supplied recently, but they were appalled when I told them that Nelda was dead.”

“Did any seem to be hard pressed to pay for what they desired?”

“No. From what I saw they were all prosperous, but…” He frowned and then shook his head. “Perhaps it is old memories that make me distrust any man who loves the poppy. Still, as of today, I will take oath that none of those to whom I spoke threw her down the stairs.”

Magdalene shrugged. “Whores hear about most dangerous vices, but I never heard of this one. In any case, I cannot believe—even if one of them did kill Nelda—that any merchant in the city would carry a whore’s body to the bishop’s house. And who did that, I think, is the important thing to discover. More and more I am convinced her death was an accident. The attack on the bishop was not. I think we need not worry about the poppy takers anymore.”

Bell nodded. “Most, I think will shake off their desire, but two…”

“They need not do without, any of them. I sent Letice to her uncle yesterday morning and he says that Umar will sell to anyone who comes with sufficient silver.”

“Oh, good! Then I need not worry about them going to Linley and him sending them to you. I will return their rings tomorrow and tell them how to find The Saracen’s Head.”

For a moment Magdalene was surprised that he knew where the place was and then she remembered that he had taken Letice there one day when she had been threatened. He was a good man, kind, and truly fond of her women without the smallest desire for any of them. Most men, knowing them to be whores would think of trying them out, but Bell acted as if they were sisters. He had sisters, she recalled, and loved them and was loved in return. She had to strangle a laugh when she thought of those sisters’ horror had they known where Bell’s affection for them had led him.

But thinking of Bell’s attitude toward her women reminded her of how her mention of temptation had stirred him. Now she grinned at him. “I am almost sorry that we will not suffer any threat of invasion by desperate poppy-takers.”

He had been slumped forward a bit, elbows on his knees, idly watching her use her needle. He looked up, frowning. “That is not a matter for jest.”

She had been about to suggest that if she had needed protection from desperate men, she could hire him to protect her and her house…and pay with her body. But suddenly her mouth went dry. She suspected if she made the proposal and he refused, he would leave the house and not return. She needed a real threat, needed to be truly afraid herself, before she made that offer.

So instead she said, “You know the oddest things, Bell. Like the fact that bodies get stiff after death, and what kind of wounds what kind of knives make, and now that eating poppy can make a man desperate to eat more.”

“I’ve had an odds and ends kind of life,” he said, now smiling more easily. “So my head is full of odds and ends things. You knew that when I fled the monastery where my parents had sent me to be educated to enter the Church, I took a place on a merchant ship. I thought that would make it much harder for them to catch me and send me back. I could not thole the thought of a life of quiet prayer, not at fifteen when I had seen the flash of steel in a man’s hand and the joy of fighting in his eyes. Still the brothers, at least two of them, the prior and the infirmarian, were men with bright and lively minds. They taught me not only to read and to write but to look around me and truly see.”

As he spoke, his lips stayed curved in a faint smile, his body was relaxed, and his eyes were fixed into the distance of memory. He spoke about the sweet and the bitter of those days in the past, of the hardship of life aboard ship and the danger from pirates and from storm and also of his intense joy in being free and his passionate interest in the strange places where the ship made port.

He had been fortunate. The captain of that ship was a good man and he had favored Bell not only for his strong arm and skill with a sword, but for his education, his manners, and his ability to learn new things. He had taught Bell out of the experience of a lifetime of strange and harrowing situations, and when experience had honed Bell’s fighting skills to their peak he had made Bell the leader of the marines—where, as the youngest of them, he had to learn even more and faster about human nature to hold his place.

Magdalene listened eagerly. She knew some of what Bell was telling her from a comment here and there and brief snatches of pillow talk. But she had not heard a connected history, and she was very glad she had not tried to lure him back into her bed. It was too soon, she thought. He needed to remember those wild early years, remember the compromises he had made and that one could live with compromise.

One and then another of the women slipped out of her room, glanced back into the common room and waved gaily on her way to the kitchen to fetch a midnight bite to eat and drink. When the last had trotted back into her bedchamber, Bell suddenly yawned and stretched.

“Whatever started me on the story of my life?” he asked grinning at Magdalene and shaking his head.

Magdalene laughed. “I did. I wanted to know how you picked up all the things you know. You are quite a remarkable man, Bell.”

He uttered an uneasy laugh. “No. I have many faults—” he hesitated and then added harshly, “And many weaknesses.”

“I did not say you were a saint,” Magdalene retorted. “I said you were remarkable. I would not like you much if you were a saint, but I am very fond of you just as you are.”

Bell shifted uneasily on the stool. “You are fond of too many people,” he said.

“No.” Magdalene shook her head. “One cannot be fond of too many people. Did your mother love only one of her children? Was not her heart large enough to hold you all?”

He stood up abruptly. “But of men there is only my father.”

Magdalene caught her needle in the fabric of her work and looked up. “Your mother is a fortunate woman. Do not think I do not envy her—but the past cannot be undone. Life must be lived as a compromise between past and future. You have made compromises in the past.”

Before he could speak or turn away, she put her embroidery frame aside, stood up, and said in an entirely different tone of voice, “Do not you dare go to Nelda’s place without me in the morning. Send Dulcie in to wake me if I am not waiting for you when you come back with the key.”

Bell lay on his belly for some time thinking of what had passed between Magdalene and himself. To his surprise he was not particularly sexually aroused. Whenever he thought of Magdalene, he felt desire but now it was not an urgent need, just a longing for being with her, for talking as they had talked but lying cozily in bed, for the warmth of her soft body beside him.

Partly the lack of urgency was because he knew that he would only have had to hold out his hand to her and she would have taken him. It was very clear to him that she had thought again about the cold rejection of their first meeting. In a way that made him uneasy. He wondered if she would welcome him and then thrust him away as he had abandoned her.

Yet she was not abandoned, whether he left her or not. She had a haven and a protector. Bell could feel his teeth set. She had said she loved the man, yet William of Ypres drew her into danger for his own purposes without a second thought. And she knew it. And she did not care. What had she said? That when one was so deeply in debt to another, if you did not hate that other with every fiber of your being, then you loved him.

Thinking of sharing her was a burning in Bell’s gut and a sour taste in his mouth. He shifted uneasily in the cot. But at least she had never lied to him, never pretended to be other than she was, never pretended there was no other man.

Would he have preferred the lie, he wondered? Honesty forced him to admit he would, but then when he learned the truth… Suddenly he snorted gently. If Magdalene had wanted to lie to him, he would never have learned the truth.