The Midsummer Rose

Four

I said swiftly, ‘I can escort Mistress Avenel home. You must be wanting to return to the brewery.’

Luke Prettywood smiled triumphantly. ‘I’m not returning to the brewery, chapman. I’m on my way to the market to buy grain, but I can’t do that until the market bell has been rung. It’s one of the city’s laws,’ he added in answer to my look of scepticism, ‘written down in Bristol’s Great Red Book. It’s so that one brewer shan’t have the advantage over another by buying up all the best grain just because he’s an early bird and his rival has overslept. All very commendable, but it’s a scramble once the bell has gone and the bidding starts.’

‘Well, then,’ I argued, ‘shouldn’t you be off at once in order to make sure of a place at the front of the crowd? Mistress Avenel will be perfectly safe in my company, I assure you.’

But Luke wasn’t prepared to forgo his mistress’s company except for a very good reason. He offered Marianne his arm, which she accepted with an alacrity that would have been positively insulting had I not known how things stood between them. I wondered if they were cuckolding Robin Avenel, or if matters had not yet gone that far.

I let them reach the steps leading up to the nave. Then I called after them. ‘Mistress Avenel! I wanted to speak to your sister-in-law. Is she at home this morning?’

The lady turned, her delicate eyebrows arched in surprise. ‘Do you know Mistress Alefounder, sir?’

I thought quickly. ‘I’m not sure. I think I might do. But I shan’t be certain unless I see her. Is she at home?’

Marianne frowned. ‘She may have gone out; she rises early … Her companion might be there, however. Are you acquainted with Mistress Hollyns?’

‘Not that I know of. On the other hand,’ I went on hastily, before Marianne lost interest, ‘I could be. Does Mistress Hollyns by any chance own a blue brocade gown?’

‘She may do,’ my informant conceded doubtfully. Her tone implied that, as mistress of the house, she had better things to do than notice the attire of her sister-in-law’s maid.

‘I think, then, that I must try to see either Mistress Alefounder or the other lady for myself,’ I concluded.

Marianne Avenel gave her companion an apologetic glance and sighed. ‘In that case, you’d better come home with me.’

Luke Prettywood made no comment, but I could well imagine his thoughts as we left Saint Giles and proceeded along Bell Lane, he and Marianne walking decorously side by side, with me only a pace or two behind. He must have wished me in Hades.

A few yards further on, we turned into Broad Street. The house that had belonged to Alderman Weaver, and which I had once known so well, was a little over halfway up on the left-hand side. And judging by the growing babel of noise, the market around the Tolzey was getting under way, leaving Luke Prettywood no choice but to abandon his companion and take himself off. In silence, the lady and I watched him walk rapidly up the street and disappear into the rabble of people heading for the market. Only then did she turn her attention back to me.

‘Wait there,’ she ordered, ‘while I find out who’s at home. Who do I say is calling? Roger the Chapman?’ There was the same slightly contemptuous note in her voice that I had noticed earlier, when she had been speaking of her sister-in-law’s maid.

I hesitated, suddenly a prey to misgivings. If Mistress Alefounder was not the woman I had met at Rownham Passage, what excuse could I offer for calling on her? As for Mistress Hollyns, unless, by some lucky chance, she was wearing a blue brocade gown, I shouldn’t even recognize her. As so often in the past, I had rushed into a situation without carefully considering all its ramifications.

‘Perhaps I’ll leave my visit until another time,’ I said, backing away and treading on the toes of several indignant passers-by. ‘Yes, that’s what I’ll do. Let me wish you good day, Mistress Avenel.’

She shrugged, plainly thinking me an idiot, and, having knocked for admittance, vanished inside the house. But instead of returning home, I crossed the street, nearly getting run down by one of the refuse carts clearing the central drain, and took refuge in the mouth of an alleyway almost directly opposite. Here, I propped myself against the wall of a house and waited.

And waited. Half an hour or more passed and still no one had emerged from the Avenel dwelling. Either Marianne had kept her own counsel, or her story had provoked little or no curiosity among the inmates. No one had considered it worthwhile to find out if I might still be loitering in the vicinity.

After my lengthy wait, my legs were again beginning to feel as if they were stuffed with sawdust. The morning was getting steadily hotter as the sun rose in a sky of unrelenting blue. I removed my jerkin, but the heat burned through the linen of my shirt until I could feel it scorching my skin. My head swam and once or twice I had to swallow hard to prevent the bile from rising in my throat. Moreover, I was afraid I was becoming conspicuous. Several people who had noticed me on their way up Broad Street stared even harder on the return journey, obviously wondering why I was still skulking there. Those who recognized me shrugged and no doubt decided that I was living up to my reputation for nosiness. And, of course, there were others who were not even as charitable as that.

‘Snooping again, Roger?’ A familiar voice sounded in my ear.

‘Hello, Jack,’ I said, none too pleased at being accosted.

Jack Nym, the carter, gave me his broken, black-toothed grin. He was wearing his customary greasy, food-stained leather jerkin and wrinkled hose, and even in the height of summer his nose was running. He wiped it on one of the empty sacks he was holding. Adela and I had once spent an entire week in his company, on a journey to London, and a kinder, more considerate person it would be hard to find. (Moreover, he had never been one of those alienated by my stroke of good fortune.) But he wasn’t a man whom anyone with a sensitive nose would choose to get too close to, particularly on a warm summer’s day.

‘I hear you haven’t been well,’ he continued, sniffing prodigiously. ‘Fell in the Avon, I was told. Mind you, it happens to most of us sometime or another. Drop too much at the Rownham inn, was it?’ He gave me no chance either to offer an alternative explanation or to reflect how every detail of one’s private life became common gossip in this city, but went on, ‘I trust you’ll have recovered enough for the midsummer revels.’ Almost at once, his face fell. ‘How do you count the petals on a rose, chapman?’

I laughed. ‘You go out into the hedgerows and pick a dog rose, Jack. It’s no good trying to do it with one of those fussy, frilly things you buy from the street vendors. Even so,’ I sighed, my mood suddenly matching his in despondency, ‘with a wife as clever as mine, she knows I’ve already counted the petals and made certain there’s an odd number. So instead of starting off: ‘He loves me, he loves me not’, she reverses it and I end up accused of not loving her.’

‘That’s the trouble with women,’ the carter agreed morosely. ‘They’re that artful, you can never win. Silly custom, anyway! The Midsummer Rose, I mean.’

‘Indeed it is! However hard you try, it’s nigh on impossible to convince even a sensible woman that picking the petals off a rose doesn’t prove your affection for her.’

Jack nodded glumly, then raised his eyes to my face.

‘You feeling all right, lad? You’re looking mighty pale. What you need is a sit down and a draught of the Green Lattis’s best ale. Come on! I’ll pay. Here, lean on me.’

I refused his offer of assistance — he was too short to make a comfortable crutch — but accepted his invitation. I suddenly realized that I was indeed in urgent need of refreshment and rest, but I didn’t want to return home yet and face my wife’s triumphant. ‘I told you so!’ At the same time, the idea of the Green Lattis failed to appeal, it being one of the city’s most popular taverns, frequented by many of my friends and acquaintances. I couldn’t stand the thought of their jokes at my expense or their probing questions concerning my recent dousing in the river Avon.

‘Couldn’t we go somewhere else?’ I proposed, as we made our slow way up Broad Street, elbowing a path through the crowds.

‘Why?’ Jack Nym demanded reasonably. ‘The Lattis is nearest, and you don’t look to me like you want to go dragging all over town, especially in this heat. I’m bloody sure I don’t.’

‘There are a couple of alehouses in Marsh Street,’ I suggested.

‘You are joking, aren’t you?’ the carter asked grimly, grabbing my arm as my footsteps faltered momentarily. ‘Marsh Street is where the Irishers drink, and they don’t care for strangers.’

I knew this. I had visited one of the alehouses there many years ago, when I had been trying to find out what had happened to Margaret Walker’s father. It was not an experience I had been eager to repeat, although I had received a polite, if frosty reception. But now I was in a truculent mood.

‘They’re the strangers. I live here.’

Jack Nym tightened his grip on my elbow.

‘Don’t be more of a fool than you can help, chapman! You know as well as I do what trade goes on in those alehouses.’

Of course I did. I hadn’t lived in Bristol for six years without learning some of the city’s darker secrets. Centuries after papal intervention to ban the trade, and centuries after royal decree had made it illegal, slaving between Bristol and Waterford, Bristol and Dublin still continued. Did you have an unmarried daughter who had brought disgrace on the family by getting herself pregnant? Did you have an aged parent who was an interfering, or incontinent, old nuisance? Did you have a son who was in trouble with the law and ripe to become gallows meat? Did someone owe you money and wouldn’t pay up? If you were a Bristolian, you knew exactly what to do in those circumstances. You did a deal with the Irish slavers. And the place to do that deal was in the Marsh Street alehouses. I decided perhaps it was better not to go there, after all.

Luckily, the Green Lattis was less than a quarter full, most folk preferring to postpone convivial drinking until after the ten o’clock dinner hour. A hasty glance confirmed that there were few people I even knew by sight, and a mere handful whom I knew well. Jack Nym sat me down in a quiet corner while he went in search of a pot-boy and ordered us both some ale. He had offered to buy me wine, tipping a shower of coins from his purse into one hand and jingling them in an affluent sort of way. But, much to his obvious relief, I had declined. Like me, being common and low-born, he preferred ale.

A group of men at the next table were having an animated discussion about an expedition they were preparing to launch the following year; a search for the fabled island of Brazil which, as everyone in those days knew, lay somewhere beyond the west coast of Ireland. The moving spirits of this enterprise seemed to be a Welshman and a native Bristolian who went by the name of John Jay. I thought I had heard him mentioned by Margaret and Adela. So, until Jack returned, I let my mind drift on a tide of strange and, to me, meaningless nautical phrases until I fell asleep, my head resting against the wall behind me.

‘Roger! Wake up, lad!’ I opened bleary eyes just in time to see Jack plonk a mazer of ale in front of me before sitting down on the stool beside mine. ‘Sorry I was so long, but I met an old friend and stopped for a chat. Never mind. You were well away in the land of Nod.’

‘Just a quick doze,’ I excused myself, unwilling to admit how tired I still felt after more than a week in bed. I swigged my ale gratefully. It was the best the Green Lattis had to offer and a brew I could rarely afford. ‘You’re very flush with money today,’ I accused him. ‘What’s happened? Someone died and left you a fortune?’

‘We work damned hard, me and my horse and cart,’ he answered, righteously indignant, as he had every right to be. Everyone in Bristol knew him for one of its most industrious citizens. Then he grinned. ‘Matter of fact, I managed to fit in an extra job last week, in between carrying a load of sea coal up to Gloucester and a cartload of soap, for the older Master Avenel, as far as Chipping Sodbury. It was when I got back from the first jaunt and went to the soapworks, to get instructions for the second, that I ran into Robin Avenel. He asked me if I could spare him some time to shift an old bed and some other unwanted bits and pieces round to Saint Giles’s crypt. I dunno if you know about the crypt, you not being born here …’

‘By coincidence,’ I interrupted, ‘I saw it, and learned its history, for the first time this morning. I understand the church was built on the foundations of the old city synagogue.’

‘That’s right. The Avenels have always had a close connection with the place. It was old Peter Avenel’s great-grandfather, or great-great-grandfather, or some such, who had a hand in helping to build the church on the ruins of the Jewish temple. Not literally, you understand, but he gave generously to the project. Consequently, the Avenels think they own it. Saint Giles, that is.’ Jack regarded me thoughtfully. ‘You really don’t look well, lad. Finish your ale and I’ll take you home.

But by early the following morning, after another night’s undisturbed sleep, I was wide awake long before cockcrow. By the time Elizabeth and Nicholas stormed into our bedchamber and heaved themselves astride my chest, I was ready for them. I had shoved a pillow between myself and the counterpane to prevent myself becoming the most flat-chested man in Bristol.

‘What is he today?’ my stepson asked.

‘A log!’ Elizabeth shouted. ‘Wake up, Father! You’re a log and we’re floating on you down the river Frome!’

Her penetrating tones woke Adela, who groaned and rolled on to her back, throwing out an arm and hitting me in the face as she did so. My two young limbs of Satan laughed so much they fell off the bed, so I wriggled into a sitting position before they could climb back up again. Inevitably, we were joined by Hercules, who tore upstairs, uttering short, ecstatic barks, while Adam stood up in his crib and roared to be lifted out.

‘He’s had me dancing attendance four times in the night,’ Adela announced ominously, struggling up from our goose-feather mattress in order to comply with her younger son’s wishes.

I didn’t know. I hadn’t heard. I’d slept (and no doubt snored) throughout everything, and that could mean trouble. So, being so much stronger and better in every way than I had been the day before, I hastily made plans to remove myself as far as possible from Adela’s neighbourhood once breakfast was over. And if that meant riding to Rownham Passage rather than hanging around Broad Street for a glimpse of Elizabeth Alefounder or Mistress Hollyns, so be it, I decided.

It occurred to me, while eating a second bacon collop, washed down with a third beaker of ale, that a resolution made the previous evening to have nothing more to do with this case — if, indeed, a case it was — had been completely overlooked in my urgent need to get out of the house. Not that Adela often reproached me for my shortcomings, and she knew how much I had been in need of that afternoon and night’s healing sleep. But, as so often happened, she was overtired and overworked and, consequently, short-tempered.

While she washed the breakfast dishes, the children and dog went out to play in the small back yard. This was not large, and most of the space was taken up by our very own pump and lean-to privy — both undreamed-of luxuries in either of our lives until now. Add to these things an apple tree and a little flower bed where Adela had started growing herbs and simples, and the envy of many of our former friends was understandable. This was the town house of a gentleman — which I most definitely was not.

Once the contents of Cicely Ford’s will had become common knowledge, there had, inevitably, been speculation concerning the exact nature of my friendship with this young woman, several notches above me on the social scale. Margaret Walker had warned us that there would be gossip, and she had been right. All I could do was assure Adela that there had never been anything more between myself and that lovely, sad, young creature except gratitude on her part — for proving, too late, that the man she had loved was innocent of murder — and a carefully suppressed affection on mine. Adela had accepted this with her usual generosity of spirit, even though she was fully aware of my susceptibility where fair hair, blue eyes and soft, peach-bloom complexions were concerned. The fact that she herself was the exact opposite, with dark, almost black hair and liquid, deep-brown eyes seemed to convince her that my love for her was real and abiding. And that was indeed the truth. Nevertheless she also knew that I was a man, with a man’s appetites and a roving eye, and was easy prey to flattery and admiration.

I began to inspect the contents of my pack, which had not been replenished since my illness. But there must have been something in my attitude, in my indifferent glance as I turned the remaining items over, that made my wife say sharply, ‘If you’re fully recovered, I hope you intend getting on the road again as soon as possible. We need the money, Roger.’

I turned and made a grab for her, managing to get an arm about her waist and trying to steal a kiss.

‘You are in a bad mood! I know! I know! You’ve had a rotten night while I was snoring my head off. So let me put a smile back on your face. While the children are outside, let’s go upstairs for a while.’

She pushed me away, almost violently. ‘I can’t be doing with all that just now, Roger!’ She sounded exasperated. ‘Men never have any sense of time, how short a day is or how much a woman has to do. Cleaning, cooking, going to market, preserving, mending, teaching the children their lessons.’

I knew that her protest was justified, but I felt hurt and angry at her rejection.

‘If that’s how you feel, then I’ll be off.’ I shouldered my pack and grabbed my cudgel from the kitchen corner.

‘Sweetheart! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to be so abrupt,’ Adela began, but she was still flushed and angry.

‘I know,’ I said lightly. ‘You’re busy. I understand.’ And so I did, but I allowed my tone to imply the opposite. ‘Well, I’ll be off. Don’t expect me back much before curfew.’

‘Roger! Wait!’

I pretended I hadn’t heard, and let myself out of the kitchen into the flagstoned passageway beyond. I hadn’t even bothered to summon Hercules, but had left him, along with the children, to be an additional burden on Adela.

By the time I began to feel ashamed of myself, I had walked as far as the Tolzey, where I managed to purchase a number of small goods — laces, needles, ribbons and suchlike — at very reasonable prices, and which I would be able to sell in the surrounding villages and hamlets for a slightly increased sum. Then I walked down to the Backs and the ships moored along the quayside of the river Avon to see if I could pick up any merchandise of a more exotic nature. Some of the masters were not as scrupulous as they should have been, and had no compunction in stealing and selling various items from the owners’ cargoes.

With my pack now three-quarters full, I decided to set out for Rownham Passage without further delay. I needed to find out for myself what had happened eleven days earlier, when I had been left for drowned by that murderous pair of women. This need was made all the more urgent by the discovery, since I awoke this morning, that my own belief in my story was beginning to falter. Ironically, with renewed health and strength had come increasing doubts about what I actually remembered. Had the ‘murder’ house and all that had happened there really been part of a delirium caused by my immersion in the river? Yesterday, I would have sworn not. Today, I was less certain.

But first, conscience dictated that I go home to make my peace with Adela; apprise her of my plans. I could also relieve her of Hercules’s unwanted presence. In addition, I could leave my pack, admitting that I had no intention of doing any work that day, and trusting that my recent purchases would be sufficient to convince her of my good intentions for the day after next, Monday.

Consequently, I once more directed my feet up High Street, giving the time of day to those of my acquaintances who chose to acknowledge me, and ignoring those who did not. But at the top, close to the High Cross, I ran into someone I would have given much to ignore, but who, unfortunately, was only too happy to welcome me with outstretched hand and a supercilious grin.

Richard Manifold.

‘I’m glad to see you up and about again, Roger,’ was his greeting. ‘You gave Adela and Mistress Walker a rare fright, falling into the Avon like that. You were delirious for days, they told me.’

I released his hand after the merest shake.

‘I was not delirious,’ I said, vexed. ‘I simply explained what had happened. Adela and Margaret chose not to believe me, that’s all.’

‘That’s not quite true,’ he objected, his grin broadening to insulting proportions. ‘In fact, Adela was so worried that your story might be genuine, she sent me to Rownham Passage to make enquiries.’

‘So she informed me,’ I answered shortly, taking exception to his choice of words. The idea that my wife would send him anywhere, rather than make a polite request, argued a degree of intimacy between them that I knew, in my heart of hearts, did not exist, but which raised my hackles nonetheless. ‘Of course, you didn’t discover anything.’ It was my turn to sneer.

‘There was nothing to find out.’ He smiled in his maddeningly superior fashion. ‘Well, I won’t keep you.’ He nodded at my pack. ‘I see you’re anxious to be off about your work. I fancy that house must be something of a millstone around your neck, eh? Anyway, I have important business to attend to.’

I wondered unkindly how many pockets had been picked, how many purses snatched and how many little old ladies beaten up while he had been standing chatting to me. But I remembered Adela wanted us to be friends, so I said nothing, merely hitched my pack higher on my shoulder and prepared to depart. But just at that moment, Burl Hodge’s son, Jack, came running up High Street and, seeing Richard, stopped in full flight, catching him by the arm.

‘Sergeant! You’d better come. They’ve just fished a body out of the Avon.’