City of Fiends

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Cock Inn

Baldwin eyed the boy without pleasure.

Algar was a short, scrawny wretch, with a thatch of tallow hair that appeared to be as full of filth as the straw in the stables it resembled. His grubby face was sly, and Baldwin felt the lad’s testimony was unlikely to be reliable.

Sir Richard gave the fellow a long stare, after which he drained his cup of ale, waving it at the innkeeper for a refill.

‘So, boy. I think you know why we’re here. You knew the girl who was murdered.’

‘What girl?’

‘Right. We’ll begin again, and this time you’ll be best served to keep a civil tongue in your head,’ Sir Richard rumbled with a genial wave of his hand. ‘Otherwise, I will have you taken outside and strapped until you holler for peace. Understand me?’

The boy’s expression darkened, but he nodded.

‘Now, we are here because we’ve been told to look into the girl’s death. You knew her, didn’t you? We’ll have the truth this time.’

‘I didn’t know her exactly. I liked her, that’s all.’

Baldwin was convinced that this at least was true. The idea that this brutish fellow could have tempted Alice was a trifle hard to swallow.

‘Did she like you?’ Sir Richard asked patiently.

‘Dunno. She was often walkin’ past here. I used to see her. She was pretty.’

‘Did she come into the inn often?’

‘Not at first. But recently she’d started coming in.’

‘With whom? She wouldn’t enter an inn on her own.’

‘I’ve seen her with her master, Paffard, and his sons – that apprentice of his, too.’

‘Paffard used to bring her here?’

‘After they’d been about the city. They’d come here for a mess of pottage and ales before returning home.’

Baldwin could imagine them. A cheery group, the father bringing them in to one of the low tables, exercising his patronage with pride, for he was one of the richest men in the city. There were not many who could compete with him when it came to demonstrations of largesse. They would walk in, Henry Paffard in the lead, then his sons, and last of all his apprentice and the maid, these last only to show that their master was so wealthy, he could bring his apprentices and servants with him.

It was curious, nonetheless. Baldwin had not seen many men taking maidservants with them when they went to mess at an inn.

‘What of the day she died?’ Sir Richard continued. ‘Did you see her then?’

‘Not here, no,’ the boy said shiftily.

‘Where, then?’

‘It was late afternoon. My master told me to go and fetch a horse from the house of a clerk in Combe Street, and I was leading it back to the stables when I saw her. She was walking out from her master’s house.’

‘From the alley, you mean?’ Baldwin asked.

‘No. She was coming out of the main door – as proud as a hen with a new chick, she was. Like she owned the place.’

Paffards’ House

Henry Paffard sat at his table for a long time after dark. John had already been in and banked the fire, so that it gleamed dully in the hearth, but John didn’t speak to him. He rarely did. John was a servant from Claricia’s childhood whom she had insisted on bringing with her, and Henry was happy that the fellow was trained and effective in his job, while not expensive. There were too many bottlers and stewards whom he had seen in his dealings about the city who cost their masters a small fortune.

John had set out a quart jug of wine before he retired, and Henry was more than halfway through it now. The wine didn’t help, though. His thoughts kept returning to those men with Peter – Sir Baldwin, Sir Richard and their tatty friend Puttock. It had left him empty and drained when they had finished questioning him. He could see the contempt in their eyes when he spoke of Alice. They seemed to think he had behaved badly.

They couldn’t understand. He wasn’t like them. Henry Paffard needed more women than others. He was strong, a tiger amongst the men of this city. Where he prowled, others ran or were eaten. He had stronger urges – appetites, passions – than others. He couldn’t be measured by the same standard as other, lesser men.

That was their problem, after all. They were looking on him like some sort of equal. They didn’t realise who they were talking to. He wasn’t some shopkeeper who could be browbeaten. He was Henry Paffard, member of the Freedom of the City, one of the richest men in the whole of Devon. In the country, perhaps.

Church of the Holy Trinity

The knock at his door brought Father Paul back from his reverie.

Since the service he had been thinking about that girl. Alice had been so pretty, it was a shock to think that she was dead, never to be seen again. And Paffard didn’t seem to want any demonstration of affection. His sole concern was that, instead of being about their duties, his family and workers were all there at the Cathedral. It was all, from the look on his face, a stupendous waste of time. And yet there were still those unshed tears in his eyes that appeared to belie his hard expression.

It was not only him. Claricia, he sensed, was just as miserable to be there. She had clearly not been fond of the girl – but if Alice was truly, as the rumours suggested, supplementing her income by offering her body – Claricia would scarcely have been glad. A maidservant who flaunted herself, when Claricia had two sons in the household, both impressionable boys, and a husband who must surely have an eye for such an attractive maid, would not have been a comfortable addition to her house. The bottler said nothing, but at least stood staring down into the grave with every indication of sorrow, and when he was called away, he threw a look at Henry Paffard that was so full of vitriol, Father Paul was surprised it did not burn Henry where he stood.

‘Yes?’ he called as the knock came again. Father Paul slowly rose to his feet, stiff and weary, his mind still set upon Alice’s death. The creaking of his joints was louder even than the crackle of his fire, and he grinned wryly to himself at the sound. There was no hiding the fact that he was an old man.

He walked to his door and set his hand on the latch – but then he felt a sudden inexplicable wariness. ‘Hello?’ he called.

The door instantly burst open, the timbers catching his forehead. He felt the door ride over his toes, pulling the nails from the quick, and would have screamed in agony, but for the man in the doorway.

Father Paul looked up, and saw a tall man with a hessian sack over his face, clad in dark clothing, an old grey cloak hanging tight at his shoulders, who shoved him inside, slamming him against the wall, face to the hard lime-washed plaster.

When he spoke, it was in a rough whisper that terrified Father Paul. ‘Shut up, little priest! Shut up or I’ll shut you up forever!’

‘What do you want?’

‘There are stories about you, Father. Stories that you use the bitches from the stews, that you fornicate with abandon, with two or three at a time. Stories I can back up, with witnesses. Remember that, priest.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, man! I don’t keep women!’

‘What of Sunday? Two whores in here, in the House of God, and you bulling them both, here, in His holy place. You are obscene!’

‘My son, you don’t understand! I gave them food, and they left. I didn’t-’

‘You will forget what you saw.’

Father Paul looked up at him. ‘Forget what? I don’t know what you mean.’

The masked face pressed closer. ‘All you saw the night the girl died. You forget all you saw in the street. Don’t breathe a word of the people you saw there!’

‘For your soul’s sake, sit down, tell me what troubles you,’ Father Paul said, bewildered. ‘Perhaps I can help: let me pray with you.’

The man leaned forward and hissed viciously in his ear, ‘You have no idea what this is about. This is nothing to do with you, little man. You worry about others who need your help. Because,’ he added, punching to punctuate each word, ‘I . . . need . . . none of it.’

He let Father Paul drop to the floor, then kicked him in the belly, making the elderly cleric curl up like a hedgehog, moaning and sobbing with the pain, coughing as the dust clogged his lungs once more. He closed his eyes, then opened them again when he was kicked a second time, only to see a black stain at the corner of the cloak, and a small tear.

‘You forget what and who you saw, or I’ll tell all about you and the whores, and I will see the church burned down – with you inside it, little priest! Think on that!’

Father Paul rolled over, away from the man, but he kicked again, this time in the priest’s kidneys, and then he was gone, and Father Paul sobbed as he tried to raise himself to sit, and stayed there, his back against the wall, whimpering, unable to stand as his foot throbbed and his back pulsed. The wind gusted through his open doorway, bringing leaves and shreds and tatters of rubbish with it. It made his room look as desolate as he felt, he thought, and gradually sensed himself topple sideways; somehow he didn’t hit the floor, but fell into a deep, deep pit of pain.

Paffards’ House

Joan was asleep when she heard the noise. It took some little while to become aware of what was happening, and then she suddenly snapped wide awake in an instant.

The door was open, and she saw her master standing there in the doorway.

He had been drinking. She could smell his breath even from here, and she knew immediately what he wanted with her.

‘No, please, no,’ she muttered, shaking her head and pulling her blankets to her chin, but it was impossible to stop him.

He walked in, kicked the door shut, and pulled the bedclothes from her bed, standing and staring at her nudity with a cold rapacity that made her blood turn to water even as she struggled to cover her nakedness.

‘You know what I want, wench. It’s why you’re still here in the house. If you wish, I can throw you from the place right now. Out on the street. You want that?’

She knew he could. He was rich. He was her master.

But all through it, and later, she could not stop her tears.

In his chamber downstairs, John heard his master rise and walk unsteadily up the steep stairs to his solar. Overhead the floorboards creaked as he made his way along the passageway, and then John heard the complaint of the rusty hinges as a door was opened at the back of the house. The master’s bedroom was at the front of the house, and John knew that the mistress slept in that, while her children had the two chambers at either side. But the master had not gone to his own chamber. He had walked to the back of the house, where the maidservants’ room lay.

Silently, the bottler rose from his bedroll and stood in the doorway. He could hear the sounds from upstairs, the weeping and pleading as Henry forced himself on the girl, and finally the man’s footsteps from Joan’s room to the front of the house. Then the door to the master’s bedroom was closed, and John returned to his buttery.

In a flagon he had a pint of burned wine that he had bought from St Nicholas’s Priory. He poured a measure into a cup, sealed the flagon and took the cup up the stairs.

She was sitting up, a blanket wrapped about her shoulders, eyes wide and terrified as a rabbit’s. John sat on her bed, as far from her as possible, and held out the drink. She made no move towards it, but stared at him as though fearing that he too would attack her in his turn.

‘Drink, maid,’ he said with gruff kindness. ‘It’s good for a hurt heart.’

She did as he bid, and pulled a face at the flavour.

‘I know what he did,’ John said. ‘You have to be brave, maid. He will come to you as often as he likes. You can’t stop him. You can’t do anything. Only stay or leave. But if you go, you will lose all.’

‘Why?’ she asked in a tiny voice. ‘He has his wife, why do this to me?’

But John couldn’t answer her. He waited until she had finished the cup, and then he pulled the blankets back over her, and patted her head before leaving.

Later, lying back with his head on his hands, staring up at the ceiling, he could hear her sobbing late into the night, and he wished he could understand. Joan had never given any signs that she wanted the master’s attention, he was sure of that.

She was only a poor, terrified little maid.