13 - The Midsummer Rose (9 page)

‘Oh?’ I endeavoured to look innocent.

The gatekeeper tapped his nose. ‘I know what I know. I’ve seen sweet little Marianne mooning after that Luke Prettywood. Never wanted to marry Robin in the first place. At least, that’s the word in the taverns. Arranged by the two old men.’

‘The day of the storm, last Wednesday week,’ I said, dragging the conversation back on course. ‘Can you recall if Mistress Alefounder and her maid left by this gate during the day?’

Edgar Capgrave replied without hesitation.

‘Oh, yes!’ he said. ‘Bess Alefounder was the first person through the gate that morning. Curfew had only just been lifted. It was barely light. She was wearing a light woollen cloak, grey in colour, as I recall, and riding that roan mare of hers. Looked down her nose at me, she did, just as if we hadn’t known one another since we were children. Mind you,’ he added viciously, ‘the Avenels were always like that. High and mighty, thinking themselves better than any one else.’

‘Was her maid with her?’ I asked.

The gatekeeper shook his head. ‘No. There was no one with her, not then. But now you put me in mind of it, she did have that Mistress Hollyns alongside her when she came back. That would have been … let me see … sometime around midday, I reckon. About an hour after her brother returned and about an hour and a half before they brought you home, half-drowned, in a farm cart.’ He laughed even louder than before at the recollection.

‘Master Avenel had been out as well?’ I queried.

‘Left by this very gate some two hours after his sister, also on horseback, if you want to know. But, as I told you, he was back after three hours or so.’ Traffic was building up again on both sides of the arch, waiting to be let through. ‘So, if there’s nothing else you want to ask, I’ll have my groat and be about my work.’

I took the money from my pouch. ‘One other thing,’ I said, continuing to hold it in my fist. ‘Did you happen to notice what colour of gown Mistress Alefounder was wearing?’

Edgar shook his head. ‘She still had her cloak on when she returned, because the rain hadn’t quite cleared away. But that maid of hers, I did happen to see what she was wearing. She had a cloak on, too, but it blew back in a gust of wind. Her gown was blue brocade.’

‘B
lue brocade?’ My voice shook a little. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure. I remember thinking it was a pretty fancy gown for a maid to be wearing.’ Edgar Capgrave eyed me curiously, then shrugged. ‘Don’t know where they’d been or what they’d been up to, but they both looked like drowned rats. Their skirts were soaking wet for ten or twelve inches above the hem. Leastways, Mistress Hollyns’s was. Didn’t get a proper look at the other’s. Reckon they’d been caught proper by that storm.’

Or been wading in the river, up to their knees, trying to drown some poor sod they’d previously bludgeoned unconscious!

‘Are you absolutely certain that Mistress Alefounder’s companion was Mistress Hollyns?’ I asked all the same.

By this time, there were growing protests from both sides of the archway, where two fresh lines of traders and honest citizens waited to pay their tolls.

‘Who else could it have been?’ the gatekeeper demanded irritably. ‘Bess could have met up with her somewhere and they rode home together. Mind you, Mistress Hollyns must have left by another gate. She didn’t pass through this one on her outward journey. I’d stake my life on it.’

I believed him. Edgar Capgrave’s powers of observation seemed phenomenal. I asked about the red shoes, but he answered that he hadn’t noticed, and that, in any case, they would probably have been too wet for him to say anything with certainty about their colour. I gave him the groat, remounted the cob and rode off across the Frome Bridge, leaving him to deal with his irate customers. I had no doubt at all that he could handle them.

Once across the bridge, I rode sedately along the quayside of Saint Augustine’s Back, past the abbey, to the confluence of the Frome and Avon. There, I turned towards Rownham Passage and the ferry, skirting the steeply rising ground to the north of the city, which culminated in the high plateau of Durdham Down and Lord Cobham’s manor of Clifton.

It was another beautiful day. The sky was blue; little clouds, fragile as blown glass, danced to the tune of a following breeze; sailors and dockers were mostly stripped to the waist, bronzed and fit and enjoying the summer sunshine. But my mind was elsewhere, trying to reconcile Rowena Hollyns with the role of a ruthless killer. Instinct and a knowledge of human nature denied the possibility. But then I remembered whose daughter she was and conviction wavered.

Nevertheless, I still felt uncomfortable with the idea, although I now felt sure that she was the woman in the blue brocade gown, and so, by natural corollary, that Elizabeth Alefounder must be the woman in the brown sarcenet. As for the motive behind the whole murderous episode, now that I knew Robin Avenel might have been involved, I was certain it must have something to do with that perennial thorn in the English Government’s side, the Lancastrian faction’s last and very forlorn hope: the exiled Henry Tudor.

As Adela had reminded me, it was less than a year since Master Avenel had come under suspicion of being a Lancastrian supporter, but nothing had been proved against him. And unless I could prove some connection between him and the old ‘murder’ house at Rownham Passage, there would be no evidence of wrongdoing this time, either.

My mind reverted to Rowena Hollyns, and from her it was but a short step to thinking about Adela. It would have been an exaggeration to say that there was something amiss between us, but I couldn’t deny that there had been a certain constraint this past year, since Adam’s birth. Three months ago, Adela had ceased feeding him at the breast, and from then on had been anxious to avoid conceiving another child. Ironically, for the first time in our lives, we had a bedchamber almost to ourselves, and all the privacy any married couple with three small children could reasonably hope for.

I understood, but still resented, Adela’s lukewarm acceptance of my bedtime advances. She was much more God-fearing than I was, and therefore far more inclined to abide by the Church’s regulations. For me, as, I suspect, for many other people, there are some rules which are simply made to be broken. For instance, according to the Church, married couples should refrain from carnal pleasure on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays, for forty days before both Easter and Christmas, and for three days before going to Mass. I worked this out once, and it totals at least five months of enforced abstinence every year. Enough to make any red-blooded male resort to the nearest whorehouse!

Of course, wise women can always offer remedies against conception, but, frankly, most of their ideas make my hair stand on end. One we consulted advised Adela to eat bees (presumably dead ones, although we didn’t bother to enquire). Another recommended that the wife drink a pint of raw onion juice just before the act itself (on the assumption, I suppose, that no man could possibly perform at his sparkling best whilst being asphyxiated by his wife’s breath). A third tried to convince us that a foolproof method was for the woman to eat a whole cabbage as soon as she got out of bed. (Adela hates cabbage.) So there we were, left with using less traumatic, but more frustrating ways of assuring we had no more children just at present, and with a relationship every bit as loving, but not nearly as carefree as it was of yore …

I realized that my musings had brought me to Rownham Passage. I was abreast of the ‘murder’ house on its rocky promontory, overlooking the slimy grey mud that forms the Avon’s banks on both sides of the river. In the distance, I could see the ferryman plying his trade, but for the moment he was rowing towards the opposite shore. I dismounted, looped the cob’s reins around the lower branch of a stunted, wind-blasted tree and crossed the patch of coarse, dry grass to the ‘murder’ house.

I had half expected the door to be locked, but it wasn’t. As I cautiously pushed it open, I was met once again by the same strong smell of must and damp that I recalled from my first, ill-fated visit. I stood on the threshold, straining my ears for any sound that might indicate occupation, but apart from the inevitable scurrying of mice, all was silent.

I advanced a pace or two along the narrow passageway and entered the parlour. Nothing. Nobody. Yet something was different. The room was much gloomier, and the shapes of its meagre furniture loomed oddly menacing in the darkness. The shutters, previously open, were now closed, blocking out what little light had been afforded by the grimy parchment panes. Someone had been here.

I returned to the passageway. Dust lay in drifts across the floor, but there were no footprints apart from my own. There were, however, other marks which I recognized as strokes made by a broom. Someone had thought it worthwhile to erase as far as possible all traces of occupation. A sensible precaution, I thought, smiling grimly.

I went upstairs. Here, there was just one room, a little larger than the parlour below. Even so, it was cramped and, remembering the family who had once lived here – daughter, mother and tyrranical father – I found it hardly surprising that their story had ended in tragedy. The only piece of furniture was the bed and it took up most of the space. Made of oak and with carvings of angels decorating the headboard, it was, however, devoid of bedding except for a mattress, its covering of grubby, once-white linen torn in several places and goose feathers protruding in handfuls. I walked around it and peered underneath, but there was nothing to be found, not even a chamber pot.

I brushed the dust from the knees of my breeches and was conscious of a sharp pain in the back of my head. I was also feeling a little dizzy, another indication that I was not yet as fit as I pretended to be. I sat down on the bed. The room spun once or twice, then steadied. I felt a little better.

The house was beginning to get on my nerves. The knowledge of what had happened there fifty years earlier, and also ten days ago, was making me jumpy. All the same, I would make a further search of the downstairs before I left.

It was at that moment that my right hand encountered a small, hard lump in the mattress. Through the ticking, and embedded in goose feathers, it wasn’t easy to say exactly what it was, but it felt suspiciously like a ring. The pain in my head and my uneasiness both forgotten, I slewed round to examine the mattress more closely and saw that the location of the lump was about the length of a man’s forearm from a large rent in the covering. Hanging on to my prize with my right hand, I cautiously inserted my left arm into the tear until my fingers met with solid metal. A few seconds later, I was staring at a heavy gold signet ring lying in the palm of my hand.

I brushed the fleas aside and inspected my trophy. It was a man’s ring, there was no doubt about that – it would have fitted easily on any of my fingers. There was no jewel, just a richly chased band and a roundel deeply engraved with the insignia of its owner, whoever that might be. I held it up to the light, but the carving was too elaborate to decipher. I could see that there were two capital letter As entwined, but another concave motif behind them was less distinct.

I debated what to do with my find. If there was an owner of the ‘murder’ house, and there must be somewhere, did it belong to him, by right of having been discovered on his property? On the other hand, it might belong to the unseen man whose voice I had heard, in which case, should I hand it over to Richard Manifold? A third alternative was that it had been the possession of the original owner of the house, but somehow I didn’t think so. The mattress was certainly torn and filthy, but I doubted very much if it were fifty years old.

And someone had used it recently. There was a definite hollow in the middle of the mattress where a body had lain not too long since. And the man, whoever he was, must have been up here: he wasn’t in the parlour when I was first admitted – unless he had come in through the front door while I was unconscious …

My head was starting to ache again, and I was no nearer a solution as to what to do with the ring than I had been ten minutes ago. For the time being, then, I would do nothing. I would let the course of events and my instincts guide me. Whether the ring had been deliberately hidden in the mattress or accidentally lost was another question altogether. But for the moment, it was not a problem I was prepared to cope with. I dropped the ring into my pouch and went downstairs again.

I opened the shutters, letting in a shaft of sunlight that slabbed the floor with gold, and when I scuffed aside some of the dust near the door, a large dark stain was visible. Blood, I had no doubt, belonging to the Irish sea captain. A sudden vivid picture flashed into my mind of the man falling, the dagger thrust through his heart after his attack on the woman in blue brocade. Rowena? But why would she have been carrying a knife? And it must have been a beautiful stroke, clean, swift, unerring. If only the scope of my vision had been greater instead of confined to a mere few feet above the floor!

I was certain that the man whose voice I’d heard in the background had not been Robin Avenel. Firstly, according to Edgar Capgrave, Master Avenel had returned to Bristol too early for him to have been present during the attack on myself and Eamonn Malahide. Secondly, I remembered thinking that the man’s accent was slightly foreign, or, if foreign was too strong a word, then strange – not the broad, diphthong-vowelled speech of the west country. That was the way in which the woman in brown sarcenet had spoken, but try as I might, I could not recall the voice of the woman in blue brocade. She must have remained silent throughout the entire episode.

I prowled around the parlour once more, but found nothing else. I closed the shutters again before emerging into the sunshine with a feeling of relief. Then I remembered the outhouse where the horses had been stabled, but on inspection this, too, was empty except for a large besom, propped against one wall. I searched for signs of dung or wisps of hay, but there were none. I was up against a thoroughly disciplined, orderly mind, not easily panicked by unforeseen circumstances.