The Brothers of Glastonbury

Chapter Eighteen

Cicely’s mouth fell open and she stared at me for several seconds in uncomprehending silence, then she gasped. ‘You know what’s happened to Peter?’

‘I think,’ I corrected her, ‘that I know why Abel Fairchild was deceived into thinking your cousin had vanished. What I don’t know is where Peter went after Abel ran away.’

‘You mean Peter wasn’t seized by Old Scratch?’

‘I’ve always thought that unlikely, haven’t you? People abducted by the Devil are always people no one has ever met. Such reports are always hearsay, recounted by the friend of a friend of their cousin’s brother-in-law’s mother’s niece.’ I added soberly, ‘But I’m not holding out any hope that Peter is still alive.’

Cicely giggled nervously, then shivered, her thoughts turning to Dame Joan. ‘We must tell my aunt at once what you’ve just told me.’ She turned, and would have made her way into the shop had I not caught her by the arm.

‘Not yet. I must test my theory first. Come outside with me to the stable.’

She looked puzzled, but did as I asked. The stable, as I have already described, stood between the Gildersleeves’ shop and the neighbouring house, and it was possible to walk freely all round it. It was still empty, Dorabella remaining for the present in Northload Street, cared for by Edgar Shapwick.

‘Well?’ Cicely was puzzled.

‘I want you to pretend,’ I said, ‘that the stable is the shepherd’s hut and that you are Abel Fairchild. I shall play the part of your cousin.’ As I spoke, I moved towards the building. ‘Abel was coming down from the upper slopes of Mendip with his flock when he spied Peter and waved to him. Almost immediately after that, because of the lie of the land, Peter disappeared from his view. So I want you to shut your eyes for the same length of time, and promise that you won’t cheat by peeping.’

‘All right,’ Cicely agreed reluctantly. ‘I give you my word. But what do I do then?’

‘You behave exactly as Abel Fairchild did.’

‘And how was that? I’ve forgotten.’

‘Then listen carefully.’ I was pleased to note that I had her attention. ‘First of all, you look in the “hut” to see if I’m there. When you’re satisfied that I’m not, walk right round the outside of the building, and then walk back again. Repeat this two or three times, remembering that Abel was growing ever more frightened and cautious with each second that passed, and in all probability walking slower and slower. Now, do you think you can do that? Can put yourself into Abel Fairchild’s shoes?’

‘Of course I can!’ was the lofty response. ‘I shall pretend I’m just a silly child who’s convinced himself that something dreadful has happened to Peter.’

‘Isn’t that what we all thought?’ I asked, and she had the grace to blush. ‘Very well,’ I continued, ‘let’s begin. Wave to me and then close your eyes. No looking, mind! You’ve promised!’

Cicely did as I bade her, and after a minute or two, I heard the stable door creak open as she went inside. There were rustling noises from within as she made a pretence of searching among the straw, then a second creak told me that she had come out again. She walked slowly, clockwise, around the stable, before turning and going withershins; but by the time she had repeated this manoeuvre several times more she had no need to simulate Abel’s increasing alarm. She was herself growing frightened.

‘Roger! Roger, where are you?’ When I did not answer, she ran out from behind the stable and stood facing the door. ‘Roger! Stop it! This has gone far enough!’ Her voice was trembling.

Deliberately, I waited a few more seconds before strolling into view.

‘Here I am, as you can see, alive and well.’

The violet eyes widened. ‘Where have you been?’

‘Only two or three steps either behind or in front of you all the while.’ I smiled at her confusion. ‘There’s really precious little mystery about it. We have to assume that your cousin was on Pennard land not on business, but for some purpose of his own, hoping against hope that he wouldn’t be seen by any member of the Pennard household. He may even have known, by some means or another, that Anthony and his sons had gone to Priddy that afternoon. But unluckily for him, he was spotted by Abel Fairchild. He returned the boy’s wave, but as soon as Abel was out of sight, in the hollow, Peter hid behind the hut, trusting that when the boy found him gone, he would simply proceed on his way. After all, why should he bother to search for your cousin when he had his sheep and their welfare to attend to?

‘But your cousin reckoned without Abel’s natural curiosity and his sense of duty. Abel wanted to discover what Peter was doing, roaming around so far from the farmhouse on his own, so he started to look for him. First he searched inside the hut, even peering round the door, in order to make certain that his quarry wasn’t hiding behind it, then he began walking around the outside. After a while, Abel must have begun to grow uneasy because he couldn’t understand how Peter could possibly have vanished in so short a time, and he was probably moving cautiously enough for your cousin to keep several steps either ahead of or behind him. As Abel turned one corner of the hut, Peter disappeared around the next, as I was doing just now.’

‘But I turned and went in the opposite direction as well,’ Cicely objected. ‘You told me to. So why didn’t we meet? Why didn’t Peter and Abel Fairchild bump into one another?’

‘Because it’s possible to peep very quickly around each corner to see what the other person is doing. If your quarry moves with sufficient speed to begin with, he is behind the hunter, watching his back. But when the hunter shows signs of retracing his steps, the quarry does the same, quickening his pace until he is again following the person who is looking for him. Do you understand what I’m saying?’ Cicely nodded solemnly. ‘In my case, of course, there was no danger of our meeting because I knew in advance what you were going to do, that as soon as you had circled the stable once you would turn and go withershins, as I had instructed. Had your cousin and Abel come face to face, however, Peter could easily have claimed to be playing a joke on the lad. He would then have offered some excuse for his presence so far from the house, mounted Dorabella and ridden away, postponing whatever it was he had gone there to do until another day.’

Cicely’s eyes narrowed as she thought about what I had said. ‘You mean Peter didn’t disappear at all?’ she asked at last. ‘At least, not just then. And if anyone had been watching from a distance, he would merely have seen two people stalking each other round and round the hut?’

I nodded and she started to laugh, a little wildly. ‘But why didn’t one of us think of that before? It’s such a simple explanation.’

I grimaced. ‘When it’s been pointed out to you, yes. But the answer didn’t fully occur to me until half an hour ago, in the abbey, when one of the pilgrims swore she’d seen a mouse by King Arthur’s tomb. The Brother who was with her went all round the shrine but could find no sign of it, and swore that the woman had been mistaken. But my neighbour and I had seen the animal scuttling around just ahead of his pursuer, until he finally broke away and vanished behind a pillar.’ I made no mention of my half-dream, half-vision, but went on, ‘I think that at the back of my mind I must have worked out the answer already. I knew that something I’d said a night or so ago, at supper, should have alerted me to the truth, but I couldn’t remember exactly what that something was.’

‘So you mentioned before. And have you remembered it now?’

‘As far as I can recall, your aunt asked me if there was any other means of concealment near at hand, in the hollow. And I answered no, not apart from the hut, and that Master Peter was not inside it.’

‘So?’

‘So, I should have realized that if he was not inside, he had to be outside. And if there was no time for him to make good his escape without being seen by Abel, then he still had to be where the lad had first spotted him.’

‘Unless he had been snatched by the Devil.’

I smiled down at her. ‘I thought we’d agreed that that was most unlikely.’

She eyed me askance, uncertain whether or not I was speaking heresy. A denial of the Devil might logically mean a denial of God, although Cicely perhaps would not think of it quite like that.

I hastened to reassure her. ‘It’s just common sense,’ I said, adding, ‘Our Saviour had a lot of common sense.’

‘Did He?’ she queried doubtfully, and again regarded me uneasily, still not certain that it was permissible to speak of the Lord in such terms.

I smiled and held out my hand. ‘Let’s go to dinner,’ I said. ‘It must be well past ten o’clock, and Lydia will grumble if we’re late.’

At this moment Dame Joan came out of the shop with Rob Undershaft and a swarthy-looking man with a weather-beaten face who was clutching a letter in one hand and several coins in the other, obviously the carter bound for London. The Dame was still issuing a number of confused instructions, but the man cut short her meanderings.

‘I shan’t have any difficulty in discovering where the Duke of Clarence is lodging, Mistress, don’t you trouble your head about that. And if he and his household have already left the city, I’ll make certain someone gets your letter and knows that it’s to be passed on urgently to your brother, Sergeant Armstrong.’

He nodded perfunctorily at Cicely and me before wishing Dame Joan farewell and disappearing into the hurly-burly of the High Street.

My hostess twisted her hands together. ‘He didn’t want to take it, you know,’ she whispered. ‘He didn’t want anything to do with me, in case he might be jeopardizing his immortal soul. It wasn’t until Rob here — ’ she summoned up a watery smile for the apprentice — ‘reminded him that we had put plenty of work his way in the past that he agreed, but then only with the greatest reluctance.’ She wrung her hands again. ‘We are becoming outcasts in this town.’

Cicely linked one of her arms through her aunt’s. ‘Come and have dinner. Lyddie had it ready ages ago. Roger and I have something to tell you.’

* * *

‘You mean … you mean there isn’t anything strange about what happened to Peter?’

In spite of her immense relief, Dame Joan sounded almost as if she had been cheated, an emotion reflected on the faces of Lydia and the two apprentices. They were all finding it difficult to accept my explanation.

‘It’s the fault of that stupid boy,’ Lydia exclaimed wrathfully, ‘frightening us with his talk of the Devil!’

‘I don’t think that’s being fair to Abel Fairchild,’ I reproved her gently. ‘After all, Peter has disappeared. This solution resolves only a part of the mystery: how he escaped Abel’s vigilance before going off about his own concerns.’

‘Ay, that’s true enough,’ John Longbones said thickly through a mouthful of goat’s milk cheese. ‘What was Master doing over at Pennard’s, anyway? He said nothing to us about needing more skins, and by my reckoning we had plenty in store.’

Dame Joan nodded her agreement. ‘And if it was on business,’ she added, repeating what had been said before, ‘why didn’t he go to the house or the sheds?’

I caught Cicely’s eye across the table and almost imperceptibly shook my head. I was not yet sure myself that Peter’s foray on to the Pennards’ land necessarily had anything to do with his quest (although I found it hard to believe otherwise; I suppose I was tired of the incredulity with which my theory was constantly greeted), nor did I want Rob Undershaft and John Longbones spreading the story all over town. To my relief — and, I have to admit, somewhat to my surprise — Cicely remained silent.

Lydia said, ‘There’s Master Mark as well. He’s vanished too. You seem to have forgotten him.’

‘How can you suggest such a thing, Lyddie?’ Dame Joan reproached her. She began to cry again. ‘When my brother comes, he’ll know what to do.’

I felt my hostess was being over-sanguine. Furthermore, it could be many weeks before William Armstrong reached her, depending upon whether or not my lord of Clarence had moved on before the carter arrived in the capital. Moreover, Dame Joan was right: an uneasy atmosphere had permeated the town for several days now whenever she or her niece had appeared in public, and I was sure that the continued calm was only a result of the influence exerted by such friends as Edgar Shapwick. This fear proved to be well-founded when, shortly after dinner, a dead cat, with a halter tied about its neck, was found lying outside the front door. Lydia’s scream brought us all running to see what had caused it, and one look at the gruesome discovery was enough to send Dame Joan into strong hysterics.

‘I knew it! I knew it!’ was all she could utter coherently between sobs which racked her from head to foot.

The practical Lydia, although badly shaken, was more concerned for her employer than for herself, and insisted that Dame Joan drank an infusion of herbs in order to calm her overstretched nerves, followed by a draught of lettuce juice in order to make her sleep. Consequently it was more than an hour later, when the household was at last quiet and its mistress laid down upon her bed, that I was able to take myself off to the garden and sit on the bench beneath the medlar tree, where I could think undisturbed.

But I had barely managed to get even the most trivial of my thoughts in order when I looked up to see Cicely treading purposefully towards me across the grass. I sighed audibly as she sat down beside me.

She ignored this mark of disapproval. ‘You haven’t told me yet,’ she said, in the determined tone of voice I was beginning to dread, ‘what you and Master Honeyman were up to, visiting the whore-houses in Cock Lane earlier this morning.’

My hope that she had forgotten this unguarded remark was dashed. But there was no good reason why she should be kept in ignorance concerning Mark’s nocturnal activities, so I felt obliged to tell her what I had discovered.

She was, of course, as mystified as I was. ‘But if he didn’t go whoring, what did he do?’ she demanded.

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know much, do you?’ she snapped.

We were growing extremely edgy with one another; the discovery of the dead cat had shaken us all more than we cared to admit.

‘No!’ I snapped back. ‘And I don’t know what significance this has, either.’ I opened my pouch and drew out the coil of brown homespun thread which Edgar Shapwick’s stable-boy had given me.

Cicely took it from me gingerly. ‘Where did it come from?’ she asked.

‘It was snarled up in Dorabella’s mane when she was found wandering yesterday morning. She also had bits of straw in her coat, as well as flecks of something sticky.’

Cicely had unwound the coarse woollen thread and was pulling it through her fingers in an effort to straighten it further. She frowned. ‘There’s something sticky on this as well.’ She examined the strip more closely. ‘Yes, look!’ she said. ‘There! In the middle. You can probably feel it better than you can see it.’

She was right. When she handed the thread back to me I was just able to make out, halfway along its length, a speck of some black foreign matter which undoubtedly felt glutinous to the touch. I raised it to my nose and sniffed, but it was too small an amount to have retained any smell.

‘Well?’ Cicely asked impatiently. ‘What do you think it is?’

When I shook my head, she jumped up from her seat, holding out an imperious hand for me to accompany her. ‘We’ll ask the others,’ she said, ‘and see if they have any ideas.’

I followed her meekly, first to the kitchen, where Lydia was boiling some bones in a pot over the fire, the preliminary step to making a nourishing broth for her mistress’s supper.

But she could offer no solution. ‘Take that nasty bit of stuff away,’ she ordered crossly, ‘before you drop it in the water.’

We then repaired to the workshop, where the two apprentices were scraping skins in a desultory manner, more to keep themselves occupied than from a belief that the work was of any importance. They were glad of a diversion, and both scrutinized the thread curiously as they listened to my story.

‘Found in Dorabella’s mane, eh?’ said Rob thoughtfully. ‘I’d say it’s a piece of homespun, unravelled from somebody’s clothing.’

‘Well, of course it is!’ Cicely raised her eyes to the ceiling in a mute appeal for patience. ‘But what’s that sticky blob in the middle of it?’

Rob shrugged his shoulders. ‘How should I know? I can barely see it.’

‘Wait a minute.’ John Longbones took the thread from his friend, carrying it over to the window and holding it up to the light. This was poor, the heaviness of the day still not having lifted, even though the hour was approaching noon. Then he rubbed the yarn between fingers and thumb, testing the consistency of that little black speck. After a moment or two, he said, ‘I think it’s tar.’

‘Tar?’ Cicely repeated vaguely, while Rob and I looked equally mystified. We were many miles from the sea and the nearest port.

John nodded. ‘Stockholm tar.’

‘But that’s used in the building and repairing of ships.’ I had lived in Bristol long enough by now to have some knowledge of seafaring matters.

‘It’s also used on sheep,’ John Longbones insisted. ‘One of my mother’s brothers keeps a flock near Wedmore. He always carries a little box of it around with him to treat fly-blow and maggots and cuts and grazes.’

‘I thought they used broom water for that sort of thing,’ I argued, childhood memories of watching local shepherds beginning to stir.

John gave me a look which showed plainly that he regarded me, however mistakenly, as a townsman who knew nothing of country ways. ‘Only the poorest herdsmen use broom water nowadays,’ he informed me pityingly. ‘It’s not nearly so effective. Haven’t you heard the saying, “It’s a pity to lose a good sheep for a ha’p’orth of Stockholm tar”?’

I had to admit that I hadn’t, but I was far too excited to worry about John Longbones’s poor opinion of me. Peter Gildersleeve had been on Pennard land when he disappeared, and the Pennards owned sheep. Now it seemed that Mark too might recently have been on Pennard land, and he had also vanished. Yet why would he have chosen to visit Anthony and his sons when he knew that I had done the selfsame thing that very morning? Why did he not return home from Beckery to hear first what I had to say? But if he had indeed gone, what could have befallen him? For what possible reason would the Pennards wish to harm either him or his brother?

I turned to see Cicely’s eyes blazing with an excitement equal to my own, which she was unsuccessfully trying to conceal in front of Rob and John. Fortunately, neither apprentice was very perceptive and, with a casual remark about us still being none the wiser regarding her cousins’ fate, she was able to drag me outside once more without arousing their suspicions.

‘Well?’ she breathed as soon as we were out of earshot. ‘What do you think? Has this mystery something to do with the Pennards?’

We sat down again on the bench surrounding the medlar tree while, for the hundredth time, I tried to put my thoughts in order. ‘Anthony Pennard and his sons certainly wear brown homespun,’ I conceded. ‘And a man might well wipe his hands clean on his tunic or hose after rubbing tar on a sheep. A thread pulled loose from a rent in the cloth or from an unravelling hem could carry with it a speck of that tar. But we mustn’t forget that there are other shepherds and other flocks in this region from whom your cousins may have bought fleeces.’

My companion was rightly scornful of this argument. ‘Peter was visiting the Pennards when last seen. And if Mark wanted to find out more about his disappearance, he wouldn’t have gone riding off to see anyone else, now would he?’

‘No,’ I agreed, suitably chastened.

‘Then it’s obvious that the Pennards’ land is where we must begin the search for them both.’

‘Not “we”,’ I corrected sternly. ‘I must certainly confront the family again in the light of what we now know — or think we know — but you will stay here with Dame Joan. It’s where you’re most needed, and you would only be a handicap to me if there should prove to be danger. I don’t know why the Pennards should wish any harm to your cousins, and can think of no good reason, but I can’t, and won’t, take the risk of letting you go with me. You understand that?’

‘Yes,’ she answered submissively, which surprised me a little, until I realized that she had not previously considered the possibility of danger.

‘Good,’ I said, and then went on, ‘At least now I think I know why Peter was there, what he was looking for, and how he evaded Abel Fairchild’s curiosity. But I still have no idea where he went after Abel returned to the house to raise the alarm. Why was he in that particular spot? It’s so bare and desolate.’

Cicely nodded, and then repeated something she had said to me once before. ‘I suppose that’s why it’s called the Sticks.’