The Burgundian’s Tale

Twelve

I hurriedly dismounted and, leading the horse, approached the group. Apart from Martin Threadgold’s housekeeper, this turned out to consist of Lydia and Roland Jolliffe, the St Clairs, Paulina Graygoss and, somewhat surprisingly, Lionel Broderer. Of William Morgan and the younger members of both families there was no sign.

‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

No one seemed to find my sudden appearance remarkable. (I think they had come to regard me rather like the Devil in a morality play, always popping up when least wanted or expected.) Judith St Clair gave me a resigned look and said, in an even more resigned voice, ‘Master Threadgold is dead.’ She finally managed to hush the little housekeeper’s noisy sobbing with a curt word or two, which she palliated with an arm about the woman’s shoulders. ‘My dear Mistress Pettigrew, you have had a shock, but you must pull yourself together. Many people die in their sleep, you know. It’s not uncommon, and your master was not a young man.’

Which was true, as far as it went, but there is old and then there is old; and if Martin Threadgold had been much past his middle fifties, I would have owned myself greatly mistaken. And he had died in his sleep, apparently. Now that really did surprise me; and when I had paid, and paid handsomely, two passing and fairly honest-looking youths to return my horse to Reynold Makepeace’s stables, I followed Mistress Pettigrew and the rest of the party into Master Threadgold’s house. I was not invited, but no one seemed to object to my presence.

Godfrey and Judith St Clair took charge, as, I supposed, the representatives of the absent Alcina, the dead man’s next of kin.

‘Now, stop snivelling and let us see your master,’ Judith instructed the housekeeper, quietly but firmly. She was not, I guessed, a woman who had much time for the self-indulgence of grief. Whatever life threw at her, she absorbed the shock and just got on with living, expecting others to do the same and ignoring the fact that not everyone is capable of such stoical behaviour.

Paulina Graygoss gave her fellow servant an encouraging pat on the back.

‘Come now, Felice,’ she urged gently, ‘show us where Master Threadgold is.’

He was in the little room at the top of the ‘secret’ stair leading up from the inglenook of the empty fireplace, slumped in his armchair. A folio, bound in moth-eaten red velvet and with broken laces, had fallen from his hand to the bare flagstones, although, oddly enough, the reading-stand had been folded down on its rusty hinges to perform its other function as a table. A tattered brocade cushion was stuffed awkwardly behind his head.

It only took a swift glance to convince us that Martin Threadgold was indeed dead. The cold and pallid skin, the slack jaw, the thread of saliva glistening on his chin and, above all else, the stillness of the body twisted at an awkward angle, left no room for doubt; and at the sight of her master, Mistress Pettigrew renewed her lamentations.

‘Paulina, take her downstairs and give her some wine if you can find any,’ Judith St Clair recommended. There was an edge to her voice that suggested she might be more rattled by her neighbour’s and former brother-in-law’s death than she was prepared to admit. ‘Now,’ she continued when the two women had disappeared, ‘Godfrey, you and Lionel, if he will be so kind, had better carry poor Martin to his bedchamber and lay him on his bed. There’s nothing more we can do tonight. Tomorrow will be time enough for us – and, of course, Alcina – to make arrangements for his burial. I’ll wait up for her tonight until she returns from wherever it is she’s gone, and break the news. An unhappy occasion for her, but not, I fancy, one that she will find unduly distressing.’

‘Did anyone visit Master Threadgold this evening?’ I asked, butting my way into the conversation as I recalled the sight of William Morgan walking up the alleyway between the gardens.

They all turned to stare at me in faint surprise, as though I was something nasty that had just hopped out of the woodwork.

Again, it was Judith who answered. ‘You’d have to put that question to Mistress Pettigrew, Master Chapman. Neither Godfrey nor I keep account of our neighbours’ movements.’

And while I was prepared to accept that this was probably true of herself and her husband, I was extremely sceptical of the Jolliffes’ exaggerated nods of agreement – well, of Lydia’s, at any rate. I remembered her peering down from the side window of her house at me and Mistress Pettigrew.

But something else had attracted my attention: two small damp circles on the surface of the reading-stand table, as though a bottle and beaker had stood there at some time during the evening. But they weren’t there now. I wondered what had happened to them.

Godfrey St Clair and Lionel Broderer were attempting to lift the body, but the former was struggling somewhat. Dead men weigh more heavily than you think, as the term ‘dead weight’ implies. I stepped forward and gently elbowed him out of the way, seizing Master Threadgold under the armpits and signalling to Lionel to take hold of his legs.

Judith St Clair gestured to us to wait, disappearing and returning after a minute or two accompanied by the housekeeper.

‘Show these gentlemen to your master’s bedchamber, Felice,’ she instructed. ‘Then you and Paulina can lay out the corpse.’

This procedure not only entailed the lighting of candles and wall torches, as it was by now growing dark, but also a good deal of swearing on my part as I backed down that narrow stair to the great hall, through the door leading into the bowels of the house and then up another flight of steps to a chamber at the front of the building, overlooking the Strand. This was as Spartan as everywhere else seemed to be, with nothing but a bed and a chest and a chamber-pot not yet emptied from the previous night.

The rich aroma appeared to offend Lionel Broderer’s sensitive nose, for he grimaced, dropped his end of our burden and hastily departed. From beneath the bed, Mistress Pettigrew retrieved a stump of a candle in a candle holder, lit it from the one she held in her hand and placed it on a narrow ledge that ran around the bed head, to the imminent danger of bed curtains as thin as cobwebs. She started crying again and muttering about her ‘poor, dear master’, so I let her get on with it, bending forward to take a closer look at the dead man’s face. Now that I had time to examine it more carefully, I noticed suffused patches of discolouration under the eyes and along the jawline. There were others, too, all suggesting to me that Martin Threadgold might have been suffocated. I remembered the cushion, pushed so awkwardly behind his head.

I repeated my earlier question to the housekeeper, who had not been present when I asked it before, but who was, of course, the one person who might know the answer.

‘Did anyone visit Master Threadgold this evening?’

She shook her head in denial, but immediately added, ‘Only Mistress Alcina.’

‘When?’ I demanded. ‘When was this? And what did she want?’

Mistress Pettigrew looked surprised by the urgency of my tone, and I can’t say that I blamed her. ‘It was early, just after supper. She came to bring the master a flask of wine. Mistress St Clair had sent it.’

It was my turn to look surprised. ‘Did Mistress St Clair often send your master gifts?’

‘Occasionally. And why shouldn’t she? She was once married to his brother.’

‘Mmmm … Did Mistress Alcina speak to her uncle?’

‘I told her where he was and she asked me to fetch a beaker. Then she took it and the flask up to him. At least, I suppose she did. I don’t know for sure. I went back to the kitchen.’

‘You didn’t see her again?’

Felice Pettigrew shook her head. ‘She isn’t one as is over-friendly with servants.’

‘Then what happened to the flask and beaker?’ I asked. ‘They’re not in the room where you found your master. At least, I didn’t see them.’

She looked at me, puzzled. ‘I don’t know. Maybe he got rid of them.’

‘Where? Did he bring them down to the kitchen?’

She shook her head slowly. ‘Not as I remember. But I did fall asleep for a while. I often do of an evening.’

‘But surely you’d have noticed them when you woke up? On the kitchen table or somewhere.’

She shrugged, plainly beginning to lose interest. Her eyes had again filled with tears: the death of her employer outweighed any curiosity she might feel in what had become of a flask and beaker – a flask, moreover, that didn’t even belong to the household. Why should she care?

‘Did you see anything of William Morgan during this evening?’ I persisted.

‘No.’

That was brief and to the point. ‘You’re certain?’

She didn’t even answer this time, but just nodded.

‘Could he have entered the house without your knowledge? While you were asleep, for example?’

‘Yes … Yes, I suppose so. The doors aren’t bolted until after dark.’ Her feelings were now threatening to overcome her, the tears spilling down her cheeks and her thin chest starting to heave. ‘Why are you asking me all these questions? What does it matter? What does anything matter now that the master’s gone?’

It occurred to me that I might be treading on delicate ground, that her sentiments towards her late employer might be more than they should have been. In which case, I was sorry, but I had to know.

‘What doors are those? The street door? The door into the garden?’

‘Both of them.’

‘You’re saying that people can come and go at will? And if you were asleep, you wouldn’t have any idea they’d been and gone?’

‘Why would anyone want to come in here?’ she asked in genuine bewilderment. ‘There’s nothing to steal. Everyone knows my master was a poor man.’

Glancing around me, I was inclined to agree with her. The house was a testament to poverty. On the other hand, there were more reasons than one for illegal entry. Looking again on that dead face with its patches of congested blood, the word ‘murder’ sprang forcibly to mind. And what of the missing bottle and beaker? Where were they? More importantly, why were they missing?

‘Mistress Pettigrew,’ I said earnestly, ‘do you know the reason for Master Threadgold’s wanting to speak to me this evening?’

She shook her head, as I had been afraid she would. ‘He never told me anything.’ She added resentfully, ‘He was always a secretive sort of man.’

‘But can you remember exactly what your master said when he asked you to run after me this afternoon?’

‘He just said there was something he thought you ought to know and to tell you to come back after supper.’

‘But why wouldn’t he see me then?’

‘I explained that.’ The housekeeper was growing testy. ‘He always sleeps in the afternoon. He’s–’ Her voice broke. ‘He was a creature of habit. And he didn’t like those habits interfered with.’

I sighed. In cases of murder, people who think they know something never seem to grasp the importance of sharing that knowledge as soon as possible with someone else. I had said to Bertram that delays were dangerous and I had been proved only too tragically right. Martin Threadgold’s afternoon sleep had become all too permanent.

There was nothing more to be got out of Mistress Pettigrew, and the arrival of Paulina Graygoss, equipped with cloths and bandages and a ewer of water, put any further enquiries, however futile, out of the question. I left the two women to lay out the body and found my way downstairs.

The dilemma I faced was whether or not to mention my suspicion that Master Threadgold had been murdered to Judith and Godfrey St Clair. Or, indeed, to anyone. I had no proof except that of my own eyes. The discolouration of the dead man’s face was not pronounced; he hadn’t struggled; he had died easily. And there was only my word that I had seen William Morgan during my ride to Westminster. Moreover, if this death and that of Fulk Quantrell were connected, as I felt sure in my own mind they must be, then to voice doubts about Martin Threadgold’s death might well impede the first enquiry. And that would suit neither of my royal patrons. I therefore decided to ignore my duty as a good citizen and hold my tongue – for the time being, at any rate. I salved my conscience by telling myself that the resolution of Fulk’s death would probably solve this crime, also.

When I eventually found my way back to the great hall, I discovered that only Lionel Broderer had waited for me.

‘The others have all gone home,’ he said. ‘I thought we might walk back together. And as curfew’s sounded, the gates will be shut and you’ll need someone to show you how to get into the city.’

We crossed the Fleet Bridge in silence. It was a clear night, the sky dusted with stars, promise of a fine day tomorrow. The distant trees had turned to a rusty black, the last shreds of daylight netted in their boughs. We turned northwards at the Bailey until we reached a sizeable hole in the city wall close to the Greyfriars’ house, leading to the Shambles. From there, five minutes’ brisk walk brought us into West Cheap and a straight run home to Bucklersbury and Needlers Lane.

‘Have you discovered who murdered Fulk yet?’ Lionel asked suddenly as we passed along Goldsmiths’ Row.

‘You’re as impatient as everybody else,’ I complained sourly. ‘I’ve only been in London two and a half days.’

As I spoke, I glanced at one of the shops to my left, scene of an earlier triumph, just over two years earlier. I wondered if I would be so lucky this time. (I admitted to myself that I had made very little progress.) A lighted window showed at the top of the house. Master Babcary or one of his family was still about.

‘What were you doing at Mistress St Clair’s?’ I asked Lionel, falling back on the maxim: ‘When driven into a corner, attack.’

He looked mildly astonished. ‘I was taking her the day’s takings, of course. What did you think I was doing? As a matter of fact, I was just leaving when Mistress Pettigrew came banging on the door, shouting and crying. She wouldn’t come in, so in the end we went out to her, Paulina and Judith and Godfrey and me. We barely had time to discover what the trouble was before the Jolliffes joined us. That woman, Lydia Jolliffe, doesn’t miss anything that’s going on.’

‘Had you been at Mistress St Clair’s long?’

‘Not very. Judith is always civil, but she’s never encouraged me to stay and talk. She doesn’t treat either my mother or myself as members of the family. I’ve always had the impression that while she tolerates me – might even be quite fond of me in her own peculiar way – she doesn’t like my mother.’

‘Do you know why not?’

He shrugged. ‘Who can ever tell why one woman doesn’t like another? They’re odd creatures. Irrational. The flux makes them that way.’

I said nothing. I thought of Adela and didn’t dare.

Lionel accompanied me to the door of the Voyager, where he said goodnight, issued a pressing invitation for me to visit him and his mother at any time, then crossed the street and was immediately swallowed up in the darkness of Needlers Lane.

I didn’t sleep well, a fact I attributed to a number of reasons.

To begin with, my conscience continued to trouble me that I hadn’t voiced my suspicions concerning the death of Martin Threadgold; but I consoled myself with my previous reasoning that if the same person were responsible for both killings, I had no wish to alert him – or her – to the idea of further danger. A sense of having got away with murder under my very nose might make my killer overconfident, thinking me a fool, and therefore more likely to make a mistake.

Secondly, I was missing Adela and the children. But that, I recognized sadly, was the perverseness of my nature. I resented the claims of wife and family when I was with them, but thought of them longingly as soon as we were apart. My mother had always complained that I was like my father in ways, although not in looks, but he had died when I was too young to remember him, so I had no means of knowing if she was right.

But there was another reason for my disturbed night. The carousers in the Voyager’s ale room had finally retired to their homes or beds at the inn, and the place had gradually sunk into silence. I must at last have fallen asleep some time after hearing the watch cry midnight. How long I slept before waking again, I had no idea, but I suddenly found myself sitting bolt upright in bed, convinced that someone was outside my window. I had closed the shutters against the night air, but there were chinks of light where the the wood had warped and weathered. Moreover, the shutters failed to meet properly in the middle, and as I looked, I could have sworn that a shadow passed momentarily across this gap at the same time as a board creaked, as if under someone’s weight.

I think I have already mentioned that my room opened on to a gallery running around three sides of the Voyager’s inner courtyard – a gallery that was easily accessible from the ground by a flight of steps. But entry into the courtyard could only be gained from inside the ale room, and the street door was locked and bolted by Reynold Makepeace as soon as the last customers had left. As far as I knew, none of the guests sleeping at the inn had any interest in me except as a fellow visitor to London. All the same, I slid silently out of bed and crossed the chamber on tiptoe, noiselessly slid back the bolt of the gallery door and eased it open.

There was no one there. Foolishly, still half asleep, I stepped outside. Immediately, the door was pushed violently shut, almost knocking me off my feet in the process, and the top half of my body was muffled in a musty-smelling cloak. By the time I had recovered from my initial shock, I found myself pinned against the gallery wall, being pummelled unmercifully by a pair of sizeable fists. On this occasion, my assailant worked in silence except for intermittent grunts of satisfaction; but after my first futile attempt to free my arms, I let my body go slack, then brought up my right knee with a well-aimed blow to the man’s groin. He yelped with pain. I delivered a second kick and then a third with every ounce of strength at my command. This time he let me go, wrenched open the door to my room and pushed me through it with such violence that I landed sprawled on my back, my head cracking against the bedpost. Then he fled – or perhaps in the circumstances I should say hobbled – along the gallery and down the steps.

With some difficulty, I disentangled myself from the voluminous folds of the cloak and staggered to my feet, tenderly feeling those various parts of my anatomy which felt as if they had been trampled on by a herd of stampeding cows. When I eventually recovered sufficiently to go outside again and look over the gallery paling, it was to see a shadowy figure nimbly scaling the wall on the courtyard’s fourth side and finally disappearing over the top. There was little doubt in my mind that my attacker was yet again William Morgan.

I half-expected that the disturbance would have roused the occupants of the rooms on either side of mine; but Reynold Makepeace’s ale seemed to have acted as an effective soporific, for no one stirred. I returned to my chamber and lay down on the bed, letting my bruised body sink into the goose-feather mattress, which enveloped it with healing warmth.

While I waited for sleep to reclaim me, I thought about William Morgan and wondered why I was the target of his virulent dislike. There was, of course, an obvious answer, but somehow I was unable to connect the Welshman with Fulk Quantrell’s murder. There seemed, on the face of it, to be no satisfactory link between them. Irrelevantly, it occurred to me to wonder why William spoke with such a strong Welsh lilt when, from what I now knew of him, he had never lived in Wales. From the age of eight he had been a part of Judith’s household, and before that, he and his father had been members of Edmund Broderer’s. He must have copied his parents’ speech – and what perhaps more natural in a child? – but it also suggested to me a certain fierce loyalty to a country he had never seen. Perhaps, I thought drowsily, it was this same tenacious loyalty that lay at the core of his nature; loyalty to people, places and things …

When I opened my eyes again, daylight was piercing the chinks and cracks in the shutters. Somewhere a cock was crowing and I could hear the sleepy voices of the kitchen maids and ostlers as they crossed the courtyard to begin the day’s work. Then the landlord’s sharper tones chivvied them to get on with things. I turned over on my side, intending to go back to sleep for half an hour, but instead I suddenly threw back the bedclothes and swung my legs to the floor. I was a little unsteady on my feet and aching all over, but forced myself to get dressed before going down to the pump in the courtyard to wash and shave. Then I repaired to the ale room for breakfast.

‘Something put the wind up your tail this morning?’ Reynold asked as he served me with a beaker of his best home-brewed. ‘Couldn’t sleep?’

I toyed with the idea of telling him about my nocturnal intruder, but decided against it. If William Morgan wanted to pay me another visit the same way, I had no wish to discourage him. But next time he would find me and my cudgel ready and waiting. I certainly didn’t want Reynold putting an all-night guard on the wall, or baiting the courtyard with a man-trap.

‘I just need to get on with my enquiries,’ I explained, ‘if I’m to solve this mystery before the Dowager Duchess returns to Burgundy. If young Serifaber arrives after I’ve gone, would you be good enough to tell him he’ll find me at the St Clairs’ house in the Strand?’

One or two other early risers were drifting into the ale room by now and seating themselves at the long table in the centre. A dark-eyed man with a faintly foreign accent, whom I recognized as having one of the bedchambers next to mine, sat down beside me and enquired if I had heard anything untoward during the night; but upon my assuring him that I had slept like a log, he seemed more or less satisfied. ‘Just thought I heard a noise, but obviously I must have been mistaken.’

‘Do you always rise at this hour?’ I asked in order to divert his attention.

Reynold returned with a plate of bacon collops in mustard sauce and a dish of hot oatcakes, both of which I attacked with gusto. I never allow bodily discomfort to stand between me and a good meal.

The man smiled. ‘You have to be an early riser if you’re in the employ of the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy.’

I nearly dropped my knife in surprise. ‘You’re employed by the Duchess Margaret?’

‘I’m one of her grooms and she likes to go out riding before breakfast in good weather.’ He glanced at me and smiled again. ‘Did you think all her retinue was housed at Baynard’s Castle? There wouldn’t be room. There are over a thousand of us, and even so, My Lady thinks she’s travelling light.’ He swallowed his ale and helped himself to an oatcake and some bacon, but he ate quickly like a man in a hurry. ‘I must get to the castle stables.’

‘You speak excellent English,’ I complimented him, and he laughed.

‘I was born here, but after twelve years abroad, people say I sound like a foreigner.’

‘Only a very little,’ I assured him. ‘Tell me, did you know a young man called Fulk Quantrell?’

‘The Duchess’s favourite? Oh, yes! Him and his mother. He returned to England just after Dame Quantrell died, after Christmas. Someone told me he’d since been killed.’

‘He was murdered two weeks ago.’

My new friend shrugged, cramming the last of his bacon collop into his mouth and starting to get to his feet. ‘That doesn’t surprise me. Good riddance, I say.’

‘You didn’t like him. Why not?’

‘No. As to why not, I just didn’t, that’s all. Like mother, like son. And now I have to go. The mare My Lady has chosen to ride this morning is in my charge. If she isn’t saddled and ready when she’s wanted, I shall be turned off and left to starve. The Duchess is a good enough mistress so long as her wishes are obeyed to the letter.’

‘And if not?’

‘Do you need to ask that? She’s a Plantagenet!’ With which succint remark, the groom wiped his mouth on his sleeve and fairly ran out of the ale room.