Masques of Gold (36 page)

Adela blinked. “But surely bedding him is less dreadful than the punishment for being a runaway slave.”

“I would think so myself,” Lissa said, and then shuddered suddenly. “Perhaps not. My father might have peculiar tastes.”

“Poor creature,” Adela sighed, “but still, if a runaway slave were to be discovered in an alderman's house—”

“Oh heavens,” Lissa exclaimed, interrupting her, “I have told this all backward. Oliva does not need a place to hide from slave takers—oh, Adela, how could you believe I would ask so dangerous a favor? She is not being sought and I do not believe she ever will be. She only needs a place to live quietly until I can discover whether my father intends to go away again. If he does not, I will arrange to go to Peter's house in Canterbury in October to check the harvests and the accounts—for all I know about it, a cow could do it, but anything runs better when someone is responsible, and they know me. I will take Oliva with me and leave her there.”

“But Lissa, why do you say she will not be sought? Even if your father has not missed her yet, he soon will.”

Lissa laughed. “Oh, he missed her. She will not be sought because I told my father I threw her out in February. It is barely possible he will lay a complaint, but I do not think he will bother. He must know how impossible it would be to find her after so long. In any case, she would not be punished, nor would anyone keeping her, because I will testify that I drove her away against her will.” Her lips twisted. “If my father lays any complaint, it will be against me for depriving him of his property, and I am sure he will not do that, for fear my uncles would kill him.”

“Well in that case, of course the woman will be welcome here.” Adela sighed in relief. “You were perfectly right not to tell Goscelin, and as for Sir Justin—”

“There is another part of the problem,” Lissa interrupted hastily. “I need to take back to the house with me a woman who is strong but both old and ugly. If she could cook, at least plain things, so much the better, and for the rest, the maid's work is simple enough. We do no spinning or weaving, so all that is left is the polishing, caring for the bedclothes, and fetching and carrying.”

Adela had been studying Lissa's face while she spoke, and now she said, “Your father beat you. The bruise is faint, but I see it now. And you are thinner, Lissa, much too thin.”

“As for the bruise, I gave him back better than he gave me,” Lissa said with a smile, but her eyes were thoughtful and she added, “But his manner is very strange. For all his threats, he has never actually hit me before. He used to pinch me in private places or pull my hair or twist my ears so that there would be no bruises to show. He was always too much afraid my grandfather or uncles would hear I was bruised, even if I did not complain, but this time I even told him Gamel was due any day, and he did not seem to care.”

“Then you must have Ebba,” Adela said. “She has courage enough to brain your father with a pot if matters look dangerous to her, but she will not lose her head either. And she can cook, so perhaps you will regain some flesh.”

“Oliva can cook, too,” Lissa said merrily. “It was Edward Chigwell following me about that was taking away my appetite. Every time he opened his mouth and I thought about needing to listen to him for the rest of my life, I could feel my gorge rising. Really, you will find Oliva a good, obedient maid. She mends well also.”

“Very well, you can bring her here. Meanwhile I will explain the situation to Ebba.”

Adela watched Lissa go out and heard her run down the stairs, calling out to Goscelin that she had forgotten a parcel of fish and would be back in a few minutes. She even took the time to run down Friday Street and buy a fish from the first vendor, then back to the hut in Flael's garden. Oliva hung back in terror when Lissa prepared to lead her out of the hut, and Lissa had to stop and tell her again that it was safe, that no one was looking for her.

Despite what she had said to Adela, Lissa was not as confident of that as she sounded; however, when she got to her house after delivering Oliva safely—Ebba following her loaded with the fish and all the purchases she had made in the market—she learned it was perfectly true, at least for that morning. And it remained true, for her father seemed to have lost interest in Oliva.

William was still abed when Lissa entered the house, but he rose soon afterward. He was in so pleasant a mood that she was frightened to death, but everything came back to normal by dinner time. He attacked her when he came home, not physically this time but with words, as he had in the past, only he was nearly hysterical, not simply nasty. This disturbed Lissa also, but to her it was far more important to get him out of her chamber, so she did not stay to hear out what crimes she had committed, but snatched up some food and her work on the furnishings for his bed and locked herself in her chamber.

The little thud as the bar dropped into its slot left William feeling as if he might burst. “I will sss—” He choked on the word and then put his hand over his mouth in shock. He had almost said, “I will sell it anyway,” and exposed his whole plan. For a moment the idea that Lissa had ruined her own chances of saving herself by running off into her room calmed him, but nothing could change the basic fact that without Lissa his business was worth almost nothing.

He had decided, after throwing himself into bed the previous night, that there was nothing he wanted or needed so much as to leave his daughter without a house, without furnishings, without a business, without anything at all. He planned to sell to the richest pepperer he knew. John, called le Spicer, could give him the gold in hand that very day as soon as he made out all the deeds and transfers. He would sleep the next night in Lissa's chamber also, but he would set fire to or otherwise destroy all her clothing, all the records of the business, and if he possibly could, her receipt book. Then he would get on his horse and ride north. Somewhere along the road, William Bowles would disappear and Amias FitzStephen would be reborn.

William had known he could not get the best price for his business by selling so quickly, but it was far more important to him just then to know that Lissa would be homeless, penniless, a beggar in the street. The shock was all the greater, then, when Master John said, “I suppose you are taking your daughter with you or she is marrying? I heard that she was about to come to terms with Edward Chigwell.” He shrugged. “Without her…I am not sure I wish to make an offer at all. Without her the business is worthless. If she stays in London, every customer will go to her, wherever she is. If she leaves, your shop is no better than the next. The house is a fine one, though. I will offer for that.”

In vain did William protest how profitable his business was, how widely known were the medicines that came from his shop, and his special arrangements with the Hanse. Master John looked at him coldly, contemptuously, and replied that if he could only sell Mistress Lissa, who was well known to be the source of all the profit and cures, and who moreover had daughter's share in two Hanse ships, he would pay five hundred pounds for her and another two hundred for the shop and business. The contempt struck William like a blow across the face, for it told him that John le Spicer not only knew his daughter had carried the business on her shoulders for years but also that she was beyond his governance.

There was little William could do except ask Master John not to prejudice others against him, and this the pepperer agreed to with faintly curled lips. All the way home William was too stunned to think or react. His hate and disappointment only boiled over when he laid eyes on Lissa, but the spate of loathing that had poured out of his mouth and the shock he felt when he almost gave the game away brought him to something approaching rationality. He did not want to remember most of his interview with John le Spicer, but the idea of selling Heloise was not at all unpleasant and opened a pathway to thought.

The first result was a new rush of fury. A man might sell a daughter. Such transactions were not well thought of, but they were certainly legal. Unfortunately, however, Heloise was now a widow, free and independent, and too many people knew it for him to try to lie about her condition. That conclusion made William physically sick so that he threw the dinner on the floor and ran out of the house. It was only after he had walked himself into exhaustion that it occurred to him that there were other ways of binding people to a kind of slavery. If he could somehow induce Heloise to sign a contract for her services, she would be more firmly bound because she was acting as a free and independent widow.

He burst into hysterical laughter and had to lean on the side of a building until he recovered. Heloise would as soon stick her hands in a fire as sign anything he presented to her. If she had only committed some crime…Could he say he had proof that she had poisoned a client and he would show it to all if she did not sign? William saw an alehouse and sank down on the bench outside because his knees were shaking. She would laugh at him, and so would everyone else. But poison was an idea that recurred to him. He could poison her. It would not be easy, but it was possible.

Only that would do him little good. William signed for a cup of ale and drank it when it was brought to him. If Heloise were dead, her skill and knowledge would be subtracted from the value of the business, and it seemed that everyone knew that it was she, not he, who had the ties to the Hanse. And if she were dead, what Gamel and Gerbod would do to him was not to be thought of; they would never believe her death was natural, even if no one else suspected him. But Gamel and Gerbod would never find him. William shuddered and shouted for wine because he was suddenly cold as ice despite the warmth of a pleasant August afternoon.

When the heat of the wine spread through him, he suddenly realized that there was no need to get Heloise to sign anything. Any woman, properly gowned, could appear before a justice and swear that a particular signature was hers. Who would suspect that the woman was not Heloise if she was with her own father? The signed contract need not be presented until the money was handed over. Nor was there any need for Heloise to be present at that ceremony. William himself could be gone…He imagined himself saying he wished to deposit the buying price with his goldsmith and would meet his dupe at his house, going a street or two away, mounting his horse, which would be waiting with what little baggage he would need for his journey, and riding off to Bristol, leaving the buyer to deal with Heloise himself. William had no idea who would win that struggle, but he almost wept to think he must miss seeing it.

He brought himself out of this pleasant dream with some effort, and sipped more slowly at the wine left in the cup. Dream or not, parts could be translated into the real world. William stared into the distance, now looking with care at each part of this new plan, and saw there were two essential points. The first was that Heloise must not be married or contracted to marry; the second was that the buyer be unable or unwilling to ask Heloise about the arrangements. William nodded with satisfaction. That meant the purchaser must be from outside London or thoroughly unscrupulous—but that could wait, as could the details of the contract to which he would forge Heloise's signature. His first step must be to get Chigwell publicly to withdraw his offer of marriage. William smiled for the first time since his meeting with Master John. Bitch in heat that she was, Heloise had wanted young Edward two years ago. He licked his lips over the satisfaction of frustrating that desire twice.

William's easy success in driving Chigwell to repudiate the offer he had made to Lissa had two sources he did not recognize. The first was Edward's growing distaste for her, which he had communicated to his father. The elder Chigwell had at first dismissed his son's doubts, saying a woman could be tamed after marriage in ways that could not be used by a suitor, but he was not as sure as he sounded. The most important factor, though, was that the whole merchant community was waiting with grave anxiety to learn what repercussions there would be in trade from the French victory at Bouvines.

Master Chigwell's fears were greater and his anxiety deeper than that of many others because his trade had been founded on the spices and delicacies that could be obtained more reliably from southern France rather than on those from the East. If King Philip gathered more troops in Paris, where a week-long celebration had followed the victory, ordered his son to join him—for Louis's troops had seen no action—and pursued the English, he might drive John out of France entirely. Even if Philip did not succeed in that, he might defeat King John again and impose punitive trade regulations. All English merchants, and many French ones also, would be hurt, but Chigwell, whose sources were almost exclusively French, might be ruined. His temper was very short.

Part of Master Chigwell's purpose in desiring to secure Lissa was that her sources of supply would balance his. Unfortunately he forgot this and other far more important considerations when, at a meeting of the pepperers guild, William accused him of fraud. Master Chigwell, he complained, had intended to marry his daughter and steal his house and his business, which did not belong to her. Chigwell denied this, of course, but William made matters look blacker and blacker. He pointed out that he had refused Chigwell's offer two years earlier, that his own business had improved and Chigwell's had not over those two years, and that Chigwell had deliberately waited to address his offer to Heloise until her father was away for a protracted time on important business.

Chigwell could have pointed out that the last accusation was utter nonsense; William had left London only five days after his daughter was widowed and Chigwell had not offered his son for a full five months after that. However, Master Chigwell had already lost his temper because the first two accusations had too much truth in them. He raved over William's “sale” of a brilliant apothecary to a goldsmith for God knew what unsavory purpose, and then gathered his wits enough to point out that Mistress Lissa was a free woman with the right to marry whomever she pleased. William admitted freely that this was true, but asked if it was fair that Chigwell had crept behind his back and sent his son to flatter and court his daughter. A father had a right and a duty, William protested, to advise and protect his daughter, even if she was a widow. It was dishonest to work on her feelings so that she would accept an ungenerous marriage contract.