13 - The Midsummer Rose (2 page)

‘We didn’t think you’d be here just yet,’ the woman said. She sounded edgy, nervous, as though the arrival of whoever it was she had mistaken me for was unwelcome. ‘We thought you would have sought shelter during this storm.’

I was vaguely aware of movements overhead. Someone was upstairs. This accounted for the ‘we’ she had referred to.

I pushed my dripping hair out of my eyes, propped my cudgel against the wall, dropped my pack beside it and tried in vain to brush the rain from the front of my sodden jerkin.

‘Look, I don’t know who you think I am,’ I began, but the woman ignored me.

As she brushed past to stare out of the window, I was aware of a pleasant-featured, strongly marked face and a well built figure, taller than average for a woman. Suddenly she uttered a sharp cry and beckoned me to join her.

‘Come and look at this!’ she whispered urgently. ‘Hurry!’

Bewildered, I followed her to the window and peered through the dirty parchment which showed me nothing beyond the fact that it was coated with the grime of many years.

‘What is it?’ I demanded irritably. ‘There’s nothing there. And if there were, you couldn’t see it through all this muck.’

The woman had left my side and was now behind me – again, something I realized later. Much later.

‘There’s something you must understand.’ I tried again. ‘I’m not—’

I can’t even remember feeling the blow with which she felled me.

I had no idea how long I had been unconscious, but guessed it could not have been for any length of time; perhaps no more than a minute or two. I experienced no confusion of thought as I came to my senses, nor any difficulty in recalling what had happened or where I was.

I was lying where I had fallen, the dust on the floor tickling the back of my nose and throat and making me want to sneeze. I controlled the impulse, realizing that my best hope of eventually overpowering my assailant rested in the element of surprise. She probably thought she was stronger than she really was, and would pride herself on laying me out for some considerable time. But she would soon learn her mistake.

Meanwhile, I had a throbbing headache to contend with and, worse than that, the even greater pain of wounded vanity, for I had been struck down with my very own cudgel! Cautiously opening one eye, it was the first thing I saw, lying a couple of feet or so away. I cursed myself for every kind of a fool. It was all very well arguing that I could not possibly have foreseen what was coming; that I had no reason to suspect that danger lurked. But I had guessed from the start that I had been mistaken for someone else. That, if no other reason, should have put me on my guard. Furthermore, the unfurnished appearance of the house, coupled with the smell of damp and decay, should have alerted my senses to the fact that something was amiss. Instead, I had been preoccupied with my own discomfort. It served me right.

The storm seemed to have passed, in the abrupt way that such summer squalls so often do. The rain had ceased drumming against the window and a ray of sunshine was once more struggling to illumine the filthy panes. I could hear seagulls noisily foraging for food along the mudflats of the Avon.

Someone else had come into the room. Another woman. Presumably the person who had earlier been moving about upstairs. Opening my eyes the merest slit, I was just in time to see the hem of a blue brocade gown sweep past me and, beneath, the flash of red leather shoes. This was not my attacker, who was wearing a gown of much plainer, darker material, although I had had little opportunity to register it in any detail. But it had definitely not gleamed with the richness of brocade, of that I was certain. Who, then, was this?

Then a man’s voice spoke from somewhere behind me. Whoever he was, he must have entered the house while I was unconscious.

‘What are we going to do with him? Toss him in the river?’

It dawned on me with sickening clarity that I was in a far more serious situation than I had previously imagined. It was not just one woman I had to deal with. It was not even two. It was three people, one of whom was male and might be armed.

The thought had barely entered my aching head when he spoke again, confirming my worst fears.

‘I’ll use my knife. Finish him off.’

There was something foreign about his speech, some peculiarity that I could not quite place. French? Breton? Cornish? I didn’t think so, but what the accent was, I was unable to say. In any case, there was no time for such considerations. I was in imminent danger of being murdered.

The first woman moved back into my line of vision and I hastily closed my eyes, but not before I had glimpsed several inches of brown sarcenet skirt and the end of a black leather girdle tipped with a silver tag studded with turquoises. Whoever she was, she was a woman of substance. Possibly also a woman of sense and education. I trusted that she was about to speak up in my defence.

‘I suppose that might be the safest way to get rid of him.’

So much for the gentleness and mercy of the opposite sex! I should have known better; women can be far more ruthless than men. I tensed my muscles ready to sell my life as dearly as possible. I would not go under without a fight …

‘The door was unlatched, so I just walked in,’ announced yet another male voice. This one had an Irish lilt to it, the soft brogue of southern Ireland, around Waterford. I had heard it often during my years of living in Bristol.

There was an astounded silence. I can recognize total amazement even when my head is pounding fit to burst.

‘Who … Who are you?’ my assailant quavered as soon as she managed to find her tongue.

‘Who do you think I am? I’m Eamonn Malahide of course. Who else are you expecting?’

Once more, I let my eyes flicker open. I could safely wager that no one would be looking at me.

Where there had been brown sarcenet and the hint of a shapely leg beneath, was now a huge pair of feet encased in worn but substantial leather boots with thick, hobnailed soles – excellent, I surmised, for kicking people to the ground and, afterwards, trampling them underfoot. Above the boots, a stout pair of legs were shrouded in thick frieze breeches such as seafaring men wear. I dared raise my eyelids no further for fear of revealing that I was awake, but the two hands dangling loosely by the man’s side were as big as shovels, and one had a ship pricked out in woad on the back of it, with the word Clontarf underneath.

‘C–Captain Malahide?’ stammered the woman who had let me in. ‘But … but we thought …’

‘What did you think?’ The seaman was growing uneasy. I could hear it in his voice and could see it in the sudden shuffle of his feet on the dusty floor. At that point he must have noticed me for the first time. ‘Who’s this?’ he demanded suspiciously.

I decided the moment had come to put the cat among the pigeons. It didn’t take much brainpower to work out the situation, even when that brain felt as though it had been pounded to a pulp. I dragged myself up on to one elbow.

I heard someone curse, but whether a man or a woman I couldn’t be certain: I was too busy trying to steady my swimming senses. I must have moved too quickly, or was weaker than I had thought. Whatever the reason, the room was revolving dizzily about me. But my powers of speech were still strong.

Fighting down a rising tide of nausea, I said as loudly and distinctly as I could, ‘I’m just a poor pedlar who sought shelter here from the storm. Instead, I was knocked over the head with my own cudgel and my murder planned while these villains thought I was still unconscious.’

‘But why?’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ I demanded. ‘Use your common sense, man! They thought I was you!’

I was prepared for my seafarer to have some difficulty in working out the implications of this remark, but he didn’t. Something he knew that they knew – or maybe guessed that they had guessed – made him accept my accusation without a second’s hesitation. He gave a roar of anger and drew a wicked-looking knife from the sheath attached to his belt. He didn’t falter for even a second, but went straight for the second woman in the blue brocade dress who, I now realized, had stationed herself just inside the parlour door. His intention was clear, and I desperately struggled to my feet in order to prevent murder being done. But I was too late – except that it was not the murder I had expected. It was the seaman who fell, stabbed to the heart by the expertly wielded short-handled, long-bladed dagger produced in a flash from the folds of the woman’s blue skirt. Eamonn Malahide, if that were indeed his real name, dropped with nothing more than a grunt and was patently dead even before he hit the floor.

At the same time, I saw the first woman stoop and pick up my cudgel again. I divined her purpose without much effort and made a further frantic attempt to get to my feet. But it was hopeless. My knees buckled under me and I was violently sick just a moment before she dealt me another stunning blow to the back of my head, on almost exactly the same spot as before. For the second time that morning, I was knocked unconscious.

I moved uneasily in and out of a nightmare in which I was being pursued along a river bank by a whole posse of women, all of whom were brandishing knives and intent on murdering me.

The third time I recovered my senses, I was vaguely aware of being jolted across the rocky foreshore of the Avon, slung like an unwanted sack of flour between two people. My head and shoulders were being supported by someone I couldn’t see. But the blue brocade dress, which I could glimpse from the waist down, was immediately familiar to me as the gown of the unheard other woman who had the murderous ability to wield a knife as well as any man. The skirt had been hitched up indecently high to reveal the occasional sight of a thin, but well muscled leg in a yellow silk stocking with a garter of fine buckled leather.

The lower half of my body was in the tender care of my attacker. She was grumbling and occasionally cursing under her breath as her shoes slithered on the wet stretch of rock separating the ‘murder’ house from the river. Just before I passed out yet again, I wondered where the third person, the man, was. Then I remembered the bulk and girth of the dead seafarer. It would need some strength to shift his carcass.

This time my dreams took me back inside the house, where I found myself locked in the parlour with two enormous horses, maddened by the storm raging outside. Just as one reared up on its hind legs, its evil-looking hooves flailing above me, the window flew open and I was drenched in water.

But that, at least, was no dream. I surfaced just as the two women were rolling me into the Avon. And I saw the muddy waters close over my head as I lost consciousness for the final time. I remember thinking desperately of Adela. This was it, then. This was the end. I was drowning.

I
raised my eyelids just far enough to see the motes of dust dancing in the sunlight streaming through the open window. The heat lay as heavy as a fur across my knees. I was dry, warm and floating on a cloud somewhere between sleeping and waking. I suspected I must have died and gone straight to heaven …

But as my other senses began to revive, I realized that heaven could never smell like the Bristol streets on a hot summer’s day. (And if it did, I didn’t want to go there.) Nor would angels, playing their celestial harps, sound like street traders raucously vying with one another for customers. I therefore had to be at home in Small Street, in my own bedchamber, in my own bed.

Why I should find this idea so strange gradually became clear to me as unwelcome memories started to return, waving at me like discoloured rags from the corners of my mind. The house at Rownham Passage … The storm … The blow to my head … The sickness and nausea … The murder of the Irishman, whose name I could no longer remember … Above all, the two women, one in brown sarcenet, the other in blue brocade, who had tried to drown me in the river …

Something landed on my chest with all the force of a cartload of turnips hitting a brick wall. I yelled, afraid I was being attacked again. Then my face was licked by a wet, enthusiastic tongue, and breath that could knock a grown man senseless at a dozen paces assaulted the back of my nose, making me sneeze.

My dog, Hercules.

I was definitely at home and I wasn’t dreaming. But how I had survived my watery grave and how I had got here were questions that I was unable either to answer or to cope with just at present. I lifted an arm that felt like lead and stroked Hercules’s scruffy little head.

‘Hello, lad. All right! All right! I’m as pleased to see you as you are to see me. But just shift a bit, will you? You smell as though you’ve been eating fly-infested meat.’ (Which he probably had, from the drain in the middle of the street. Gnawing at putrefying carcasses was one of his less endearing habits, but also one of the greatest pleasures of his doggy existence.)

Hercules was not to be deterred, however, and at the sound of my voice grew even more excited, farting loudly to demonstrate his happiness at seeing me again.

The bedchamber door burst open and Adela came in, flour streaking her forehead, hands still partially caked with dough. She had obviously been in the middle of baking, and wiped them in a hurry. Her beautiful brown eyes, overflowing with anxiety, fixed themselves on me.

‘Roger?’ she asked in a whisper of painful intensity. ‘Was that you calling out? Are you properly awake at last?’

I grinned weakly at her. ‘You’re not looking at a ghost.’

She threw herself on her knees beside the bed, pushing an indignant Hercules to the floor and embracing me in an all-enveloping hug. Her tears trickled down my face, mingling with my own. I managed, after a great deal of effort, to get both arms around her. This time it was like moving two dead weights.

How long we might have remained so – I was quite content to stay that way forever – is a moot point, but, as usual, our private moment was rudely interrupted. The room was suddenly full of people – my former mother-in-law and three children to be precise. But, as always with my nearest and dearest, it felt as if the hordes of Genghis Khan had invaded.