Roberta Gellis (30 page)

“This evening, if that is satisfactory,” she said, bringing her gaze down to meet his. “Letice will be free from after Vespers. You can stay the night if you like, and you know we will gladly feed you.”

“Excellent!” he almost caroled the word in his good humor. “And, oh wait. Here are the ribbons.” He walked around the inside counter and from a shelf below it took a wrapped package. “I had intended to bring them the next time I came, but when I saw you, I decided I deserved a little rejoicing at once.”

“Thank you again, Master FitzRevery,” Magdalene said, taking the packet and raising her veil.

“Until tonight,” he said softly, seeing her out the door.

Oddly enough, FitzRevery’s frank avowal of pleasure in his release made Magdalene less sure of his involvement in Bertrild’s death. She could not put her finger on how she felt a murderer in fact if not in deed should act, but it was not with bouncy good humor. Mainard’s gloom seemed
less innocent, but then Magdalene reminded herself that the gloom was not over Bertrild’s death but over concern for men he had known for years.

* * * *

She was just in time for dinner with her women, and opening the packet of ribbon kept them all occupied after the meal had been removed until the bell pealed to announce the first client. Sabina rose at once, and started toward her chamber.

“Go take a bath, Diot,” Magdalene said. “And stay there until I call for you. I will tell the Mayor—” (he was, in fact, no such thing but had a sufficiently pompous manner to fit him for the title) “—that you had been shopping
and come back dirty and sweaty and wished to be sweet and clean for him. I need to talk to him about his years in Norwich.”

Diot ran off with a grin. She bathed often anyway, as if she could not rid herself of the filth of her time in the stews, and would have spent even more time in the tub if she had not feared she would be reprimanded for taking advantage. An invitation to take another bath was only too welcome.

Magdalene went out to answer the bell. It was not the “Mayor” but Ella’s client. She, having seen him enter, came dancing out to greet him, bubbling with the beauty of the ribbons that Magdalene had brought and what she was going to embroider on them. Magdalene was prepared to intervene if he seemed bored, but that was not at all the case. In fact, he came to the table and looked through the different colors. Then, choosing one, he looked from it to Ella and smiled most oddly.

“Could you embroider that for me, my pet?” he asked.

“I could. I could. Magdalene draws the designs for me and—she went to get her basket and produced her current piece of work “—you can see I embroider well.”

“Indeed you do, little one.” He looked at Magdalene and grinned broadly. “I would like white dogs running though some kind of fruit trees or marrow vines, and the fruit or marrows must show. How much
would that cost?”

Magdalene’s heart sank. She had the feeling that the man was going to play a bad joke on his wife, giving her his whore’s work to wear, or perhaps wearing it himself, sewn onto a neckband. His relationship with his wife was no business of Magdalene’s, but if the woman liked the work and wanted more or suspected and tried to find out from where the piece came, it could make trouble for the Old Priory Guesthouse. Usually she sold her work and her women’s through
a mercer in the East Chepe who did not know who she was and, from her speech and demeanor, assumed she was a lady of good birth fallen on hard times and selling her work to live. Still, she could only smile and nod, and smile more broadly when the bell rang again and she hurried out to answer.

This time the bell did announce the “mayor.” Magdalene welcomed him and produced her apology. “Would you like to sit with me in the common room, or would you prefer to sit in the garden behind the house? It is very pleasant there now.”

He chose, as Magdalene had expected, the garden where he was less likely to see, or be seen by, anyone he knew. She fetched him a cup of wine and a small plate of cakes, and when she had put it down on the table, snapped her fingers.

“Aha, you are just the man I wanted to see, and I am delighted to be able to talk to you for a few moments. I could use your advice. Did you not tell me, oh, I cannot remember when but it must be a year since, that you were a master mercer in Norwich?”

“You have a long memory, Magdalene.” He did not sound pleased about it.

She laughed lightly. “Not really. I only remembered because a mercer, not a client of this house (that was not true, Josne was a client if not a frequent one, but Magdalene did not mind prevaricating in a good cause and the lie actually protected Josne after all)—approached me to sell me some particularly fine yarn from Norwich. I liked the yarn very well, and the dyes were rich, but I did not like the man. The name he gave was Jokel de Josne—”

The “Mayor’s” brow wrinkled. “Éoqule de Éosné? From Norwich? My advice is that you should not buy from him lest you have the sheriff at your door seeking for stolen goods. Has he had the impudence to go back to Norwich? I did not think there would be a man in the city who would do business with him.”

“You mean he is not from Norwich or has been away from there?”

“Gone from the town for years. He was never actually convicted of any crime, but that was because he fled before evidence could be found. Rumor and complaint followed him and grew until the sheriff was about to examine his premises for stolen goods. He disappeared only the night before the sheriff came. It was said that one of the sheriff’s men was in his pay.”

“Oh, when was that?”

“Hmmm. I left the city myself—except for visits—for I married very well in London in the spring of 1130. It was not long after that, perhaps the summer or autumn, that my father wrote to me that Éosné had cleaned out his warehouse and salesroom and disappeared—and taken with him all the goods he had ‘bought’ but not yet paid for and all those he had ‘sold’ and not yet delivered. It was quite a scandal, which is why I remember his name, also because it was French, and we of Norfolk are mostly named in the Danish mode. My father’s letters were full of it for weeks.”

“Ah, well.” Magdalene shrugged. “It was very fine yarn, and as you know, we do embroidery in this house, but the last thing I desire is to draw the sheriffs attention. I will not deal with the man. Thank you for telling me.”

“You are a wise woman to seek advice when you are not sure,” the “Mayor” said.

Magdalene smiled sweetly and did not call him a pompous fool. In fact, she sought his advice on several other small matters, until he had finished his wine and cakes. Then she said Diot had surely had time enough to scrub herself clean and went to fetch her woman, who came from the back door of the house looking fresh and very beautiful and holding out her hand with seeming pleasure.

Watching discreetly from the kitchen window, Magdalene nodded with satisfaction. Diot seemed even more reliable and eager to please now that she had been told she would not be put out even if Sabina was forced to return to whoring. Of course Diot knew that any infraction of the rules—stealing, deliberately offending a client, speaking about clients to anyone except her “sister” whores—would still result in her expulsion from the Old Priory Guesthouse; however, except for that, Magdalene had told her, her position was assured. She had sat, frozen faced, and then burst into tears, sobbing that it was as if she had died and had come awake in heaven. Magdalene had been somewhat startled. Whoring, even in so good an atmosphere as the Old Priory Guesthouse, was not her idea of heaven.

When Diot’s door had closed, Magdalene walked down the corridor toward the common room, pausing as a squeal came from behind Ella’s door. Then she heard the girl laughing and protesting that “that tickles,” and she sighed, recalling that Ella’s client not only had a warped sense of humor but was the lunatic who insisted on eating various foods—most of them sticky, like ripe fruit or puddings—off Ella’s body and out of various orifices. Ella enjoyed it, but it did make a mess of her and the bedclothes.

Letice’s client must also have come, Magdalene thought, because Sabina was sitting near the hearth, softly strumming her lute, playing a false note now and again as she worked over a new song. Magdalene gathered up the ribbons strewn over the table, stopping to consider one of clear blue and another of green. Both, she thought, laying them aside, would suit Bell’s fair coloring and embroidered would make a good name-day gift for him; the green could be embroidered with his coat of arms, the blue with a hunting scene. The idea of hunting brought to mind the white dogs the client wanted, and she sighed again.

Well, if it made trouble, she would cross the stream as best she could. No sense worrying now. She refolded the other ribbons into their packet and put them on one of the shelves on the back wall, coming by her stool to pick up her workbasket. Sabina, hearing her footsteps, looked up. Magdalene thought she was paler than she had been, and her lips did not curve gently into their usual almost-smile. Restraining her impulse to sigh again, for Sabina would hear that and want to know why, Magdalene took her sewing basket to the table.

From it she extracted a thin piece of charcoal with which she marked the smooth boards of the table with a long rectangle, the length and width of the ribbon Ella’s client had chosen. Within this, she sketched eight lean greyhound figures; around them, more carefully, she drew squat, fantastic trees with drooping branches, among which she marked out pear shapes. Her lips twisted. Pears were a favorite of the client when they were in season, probably because they crushed easily into a sweet, wet, mess.

The sketch had to be corrected several times before she was satisfied, but when she felt she had a graceful, flowing design, she went to the back shelf and brought out a bottle of pale ink. Having pinned the ribbon to the table just below her sketch, she sharpened the quill that had lain beside the bottle and began to copy the picture onto the ribbon. She left the ribbon pinned to the table to dry and fetched Dulcie from the kitchen to scrub the table clean.

“You went to see Mainard,” Sabina said softly, when Magdalene had seated herself on her own stool and begun
to work on an elegant gown facing that the East Chepe mercer had ordered.

“However did you know?” Magdalene asked.

“I smelled the shop on you when you came in.” Sabina smiled faintly. “I am very fond of the odor of leather.” She paused, and then went on, even more softly. “I hope you did not….”

“I told him you missed him. He needed to know that, my love. When you are with him, he does not doubt you, but when he is alone, he thinks of how ugly he is and that you must hate to lie with him and crave other, whole men.”

“No!” Sabina cried. “I know his face is not like other men’s, but his body…oh, that is perfect, beautiful and strong, so strong. He is like a great wall or a great tree, able to shelter those who need him.” She was silent for a while, her fingers picking minor chords from the lute. “I suppose he is inquiring about another wife….”

“He said nothing to me about that, but I do not think he will seek a wife so soon. The woman, terrible as she was, is not dead a week, and the manner of her death, being what it was, might raise suspicions. No, I do not think Master Mainard is thinking about a second marriage.”

Two tears oozed out from under Sabina’s sealed lids. “That means I will have to wait longer. I do not think he would make proposals to a woman while he had his whore living above his shop.” She bit her lip. “I wish he would find someone and be done. If he does not want me, I…I need to know.”

“He will always want you,” Magdalene said. “It is only you with whom he can be at ease, but if he wants sons of his blood to inherit his business…. I am sorry, my love, very sorry, but a whore’s child….”

“I know that.” Sabina’s voice trembled. “I would not dare to bear children anyway. What if they were born like me, without eyes?”

Magdalene sighed. It seemed to her that she was doing a lot of sighing this day. “He said he would come soon. When he does, you must convince him—although how, I have no idea—that you do find him beautiful and desirable. He is afraid, because he promised you that he would look aside if you took other men, and now he finds he cannot endure that.”

“But I haven’t! You know I haven’t. I want only my Mainard. I
love
his funny face.”

“Tell him, my love. Tell him over and over. Somehow you must make him believe you—no easy task when everyone, even those who love him, look away.”

Sabina bit her lips, but her face looked more intent now than sad and after a while she began to sing again. Magdalene embroidered steadily, not thinking about how Sabina could convince Mainard she found him beautiful but wondering how a whore could convince any man she would be faithful. She thought of the terrible instruments of torture, the iron chastity belts some men who went on crusade had inflicted on their wives…and still were not convinced of their purity.

Magdalene chuckled softly. They had doubted with good reason. Any woman who did not find a way to remove such a shackle was mad. One could not even relieve one’s bladder and bowels without smearing the belt and oneself with filth. In an attempt to be sure the spaces provided for such relief did not permit other usage, they were far too small. Her husband had shown her such a device, one his grandmother had worn, and spoken of the peace of mind a woman’s patience could bring her man.

Even if he had not expected her to welcome the idea, he had been shocked at her response. Perhaps he had thought she would weep and plead with him not to force her to wear such a thing, promising to be faithful. Perhaps he had even thought she might accept it. Certainly he had not expected her to laugh and say she imagined there were locksmiths enough to make a duplicate key, perhaps many duplicate keys to assuage the insult of having her honor questioned. Brogan had hit her, but he had not mentioned chastity belts again.

As she opened her embroidery frame to move the work up some inches, Magdalene frowned. Why in the world was she thinking about chastity belts and a man dead many years? She felt a slight warmth in her cheeks as she rethreaded her needle with cherry-red silk and took the tiny double stitch that would fix the thread. Bell. Thinking about Mainard had brought Bell to her mind. And Bell’s jealousy had made her remember Brogan.