13 - The Midsummer Rose (13 page)

‘Too big for a woman. Oh, I know there
are
women with big feet. My own aren’t exactly dainty. But this is far too large.’

She frowned suddenly and bent to scrutinize the shoe more closely. I kissed the nape of her neck in a suggestive manner, but I could have saved myself the effort. I doubt if she even noticed. She turned her head abruptly, so that her nose nearly collided with mine.

‘I know who this shoe belongs to,’ she breathed excitedly. ‘I’ve seen him wearing them. It’s one of a pair belonging to Robin Avenel.’

‘Are you sure?’ I frowned. ‘His shoes are usually far more fashionable than this. You know what a dandy he is. He likes those ridiculously long pikes. You can’t even walk in them unless the toes are fastened round your knees with fancy gilt chains. The pike on this thing can’t be more than half an inch.’

‘Not all his shoes are the same,’ Adela argued. ‘It stands to reason that someone as wealthy as he is has a number of different pairs. But I recollect seeing him in these some months ago, when I met him one day in High Street. He was wearing them with particoloured hose in purple and green. Robin never has had any taste in clothes. Why are you doubtful?’

‘One of the women who attacked me was wearing red shoes.’

My wife shrugged. ‘That proves nothing. Lots of people have red shoes, women as well as men. Another reason I recall this pair is that they have gold embossing around the toes. Look!’

She held up the shoe for me to make a closer inspection, and, sure enough, beneath the accretion of dirt and staining, I could see the glint of gold pressed into the leather. I got out of bed and carried it over to the window, where I opened the shutters. As the morning sunshine flooded the bedchamber, I plainly saw the embossed gold Greek key pattern. There seemed no further room for doubt that it belonged to Robin Avenel.

But I had no time to consider the matter further, as the arrival of Adam and Nicholas from upstairs, followed almost immediately by Elizabeth, debarred Adela and me from any further private conversation. The two elder children, far from being upset by the events of the night, were only too anxious to discuss such an unlooked-for adventure, while Adam, still deeply reproachful about his banishment to the attic, tried to clamber back into his crib, which remained standing against one wall.

Although I had not opened the windows as well as the shutters, the noise of the city’s church bells, all tolling at once – but not in harmony – penetrated the room with deafening clarity. They were ringing for Prime, warning us that the day had begun. I put the shoe away in a small wall cupboard near the head of the bed before any of the children saw it and demanded to know to whom it belonged and where it had come from. Later, when Adela had shooed them back to their own rooms and gone downstairs, I took the ring out of my pouch and placed it inside the shoe. Then I locked the cupboard and removed the key, which I hid in my secret place, beneath a loose floorboard under the window.

That morning, it was the turn of Saint Giles to be graced by the presence of our parish priest and the nave of the church was crowded. Adela, the children and I arrived just as the five-minute bell ceased tolling and consequently had to stand right at the front, close to the altar. Throughout my life, I have frequently observed this phenomonen: the later you are, the more prominent your position. The truth is that the majority of people prefer to herd to the back of churches, of courts – of any place, in short, where being at the front means being under the eye of Authority.

There are, of course, glaring exceptions to this general rule; persons who consider themselves so important that they assume the rest of the world cannot wait to obtain a glimpse of them, and the Avenels were just such people. Gregory Alefounder, Marianne Avenel’s father and Elizabeth Alefounder’s uncle by marriage, was another. Gregory was a big man of florid complexion, who always carried the scent of the brewery with him in his clothes. It was not unpleasant; indeed, I knew some men who positively liked to stand beside him just to inhale the smell. The only feature he had in common with his dainty, kittenish daughter was a pair of fine grey eyes; other than that, there was no physical resemblance between them whatsoever. Marianne apparently favoured the distaff side.

That morning, Gregory stood beside his son-in-law’s father, Peter Avenel. The soap manufacturer was somewhat dwarfed in size by the brewer, but he was plainly unaware of any other inferiority. Like Robin, Peter was always dressed in the height of fashion, regardless of whether it suited him or not. Today, both father and son wore doublets that were almost indecently short, the elder in peacock blue, the younger in jade green, revealing codpieces decorated with dangling laces in one case and bows of ribbon in the other. I saw quite a few men in the congregation sniggering behind their hands, numerous ladies and goodies carefully averting their eyes, and was unsurprised to note the look of contempt on Luke Prettywood’s face as he surveyed Marianne’s husband and father-in-law.

But the sight of Robin Avenel had aroused all my former uneasiness. I had never liked him, and knew him to be vain and self-important, but I nevertheless found it hard to imagine him creeping into anyone’s house in the middle of the night, intent on some felonious purpose. I could well imagine him ordering or paying someone else to do so, however, feeling sure that his conceit would prevent him from undertaking so risky or so criminal an act himself. Robin might be dipping his toes in treasonable waters, but he would take all necessary care to cover his back.

And, although I had said nothing to Adela, nor had any intention of doing so, a cold certainty was beginning to grip me that last night’s intruder had been bent on murder. Mine. And with equal conviction, I knew he had to be the man whose voice I had heard, but whose face and involvement in this affair remained a mystery. He had come to finish what his two accomplices had tried, but failed to do.

How I had reached this conclusion, I was unsure, but certainty was growing. As for the shoe, I accepted Adela’s word that it belonged to Robin Avenel, but could only think that he had lent it and its fellow to the stranger for some reason. For, whatever was going on, Robin was in the thick of it – that, at least, seemed obvious.

Braving the indignant and reproachful stare of the priest, I glanced around to see who else was present, and was rewarded with the sight of Rowena standing quietly behind Elizabeth Alefounder. She wore a simple blue homespun gown – definitely not brocade, but blue, nevertheless – and her coifed head was bent devoutly in prayer. Her mistress was more flamboyantly dressed today, having abandoned the brown sarcenet for green velvet and an even more elaborate girdle: sapphire-blue leather studded for its entire length with what looked like tiny emeralds. It spoke of money; a lot of money. The sort of wealth that can sometimes engender boredom, when there is nothing left to want or to strive for. (The sort of boredom, needless to say, that Adela and I would never experience.) Was that the reason Elizabeth Alefounder had decided to embroil herself in politics? Or were the Avenels a family of convinced Lancastrian sympathies? I had never heard them named as such in a strongly Yorkist city such as Bristol, where it would surely have been noticed, but many supporters of the late King Henry had learned to dissemble their feelings and bide their time.

Though bide their time for what, I could never make out. Henry Tudor’s claim to the crown, as I think I’ve mentioned before, was tenuous indeed, descending as it did through the bastard line of John of Gaunt. And rumours lately coming into Bristol, disseminated by the many Breton sailors whose ships tied up along the Backs, suggested that the Tudor was of a sickly constitution, recently suffering from several bouts of a debilitating illness, the cause of which his physicians found hard to diagnose. A situation doubtless worrying to his adherents, however much it might have cheered the rest of us.

The Mass was over. The miracle of transubstantiation had taken place: the bread and wine of the Eucharist had been transformed into the Blood and Body of Christ within each member of the congregation. (The Lollards would have us believe that this is impossible, a heresy I half subscribe to myself, although I have always kept such ideas strictly private: I shall be dead when these records are read. If they ever are.) As we turned to make our slow way out of Saint Giles, Adela was waylaid by a neighbour’s wife, a pleasant enough soul who seemed not to begrudge us our good fortune, and I found myself standing to one side, ignored, waiting for the conversation to come to an end. Adam was held in his mother’s arms, while the other nosy pair were listening with rapt attention to what their elders were saying.

Glancing round, I saw that I was standing close to the steep flight of steps leading down to the crypt. On a sudden impulse, and as no one appeared to be even slightly interested in my movements, I descended to the vault below. The same smell of must and decay that I had noticed previously met my nostrils as my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom. Cautiously, I inched my way forward, past the coffined rows of Christian dead and on into the second chamber of what had once been the synagogue cellars. Here, everything was as I remembered it from Friday morning, with all the parish’s unwanted bits of furniture and other rejected items ranged along the walls. Suddenly, I recollected what Jack Nym had told me – that the preceding week he had brought a bed and some other bits and pieces here for Robin Avenel.

Now, beds were as valuable a commodity in my young days as they are today, in my dotage. I was intrigued, therefore, to discover what sort of bed it could be that even a rich man could discard with impunity, especially with a household as large as Master Avenel’s. But although I looked long and hard amongst the rickety chairs, bales of rags, stools with two legs that were meant to have three, handle-less pots and pans and all the rest of those things that ‘might come in useful one day’ and so were hoarded rather than actually thrown away (to the greater profit of Saint Giles), I could find no bed of any shape or size, broken or dismantled.

To begin with, I thought I must have missed it in the gloom, but a second search, after my eyes had adjusted to the crypt’s dim light, convinced me that there was nothing there that resembled a headboard or a mattress or the empty wooden frame of a bed. So I walked forward, under the second archway and into the third chamber of the synagogue cellar, where I had seen Luke Prettywood and Marianne Avenel embracing the day before yesterday. But even though it was darker than ever in there, I could see that it was empty. The dust, rising in little clouds wherever I put my feet, made me sneeze violently.

I had turned to look behind me, back the way I had come, when a sudden noise made me spin round sharply. But the chamber was deserted except for myself. I was alone. There was nothing or no one there. After a few seconds, during which I stood stock still, almost afraid to move, I regained my courage and prowled around the room’s perimeter, trailing one hand along the rough stone walls that oozed with damp and slime. I tried to recall the nature of the noise I’d heard, the quality and density of the sound, but, as always in such cases, it grew more difficult to recapture the more I thought about it. In the end, the best I could say was that it had had a kind of hollow resonance – a thump and yet not a thump.

Something – a door, perhaps – closing? I remembered the story of the Jews’ secret chamber, and the local belief that had persisted for so many years after their expulsion that it had contained their abandoned hoard of gold and silver. Prompted into fresh action, I started rapping the walls, but all I got for my pains were bruised and bleeding knuckles, which, I felt, served me right for being such a credulous fool.

The silence now was all-encompassing. I could no longer hear even the distant murmur of voices from the church above. There was no living being down there except myself, only the sad ghosts of a long-gone past to keep me company and play tricks with my imagination, mocking me with phantom noises made by the dead.

I turned on my heel and strode the length of the crypt, ascending thankfully into the sunbeamed quiet of the nave.

F
or the next ten days I schooled myself to follow my own advice; to keep my nose clean and not to meddle in matters that were not my concern.

But they
were
my concern. I had been assaulted, nearly murdered, and the two women responsible were living quietly in the next street, going about their business, the model of two well-respected citizens. Still, as I say, I taught myself to ignore their existence; and on those occasions when it was impossible to do so, I touched my forelock with all the humility that was expected of a humble pedlar whose material good fortune had in no way enhanced his social status. (And he had better not forget it!)

All the same, it lifted my spirits to note the inconspicuous, but assiduous attention being paid to the Avenel household by Richard Manifold. It was heart-warming to remember the number of times in the past few days that I had met him either sauntering up or meandering down Broad Street, apparently looking at nothing in particular, but in actual fact keeping a close watch on the comings and goings in Alderman Weaver’s old house. And once, I ran into – literally – a heavily disguised Timothy Plummer on the corner of Broad Street and Corn Street. Well, he thought he was heavily disguised. I recognized him instantly. I apologized for stepping on his foot; he glared and called me a name I prefer to forget, but I remained faithful to my promise and pretended we were strangers. But I had no doubt as to his purpose in being there: he was observing the Avenel house on the opposite side of the street.

Fortunately for my peace of mind, I had other things to think about. We were approaching Midsummer Eve and Midsummer’s Day, with all their attendant jollifications.

On June 22nd, the day before Midsummer Eve, the rose sellers were out in force on the streets of Bristol, peddling their overblown wares. But, as I had told Jack Nym, the Midsummer Rose needs to be a flower of simple proportions. The outcome of ‘He loves me, He loves me not’ should never be left to chance. In the past it had not worried Adela when I brought her a dog rose from the hedgerow. Last year, it was true, she had mischievously started off with ‘He loves me not’, thus altering the desired resolution, but she had done so laughingly, teasingly, and had been prepared to demonstrate her affection afterwards. This year, however, I was not so sure of her reaction to any overture on my part. We seemed to be drifting further apart with each passing day, while our nights, when we weren’t sleeping, were spent in a constant passage at arms, with me attacking, she defending. In the past, I would have taken my troubles to Burl Hodge and received sound advice in return, but Burl’s jealousy had come between us. We were no longer friends.