The Midsummer Rose

Eight

I would have made love to Adela that night — God knows I wanted to! — but she held me off, reminding me that tomorrow was Sunday and we should be at church. So, I had to content myself with holding her in my arms while I recounted my day’s adventures.

This was the first chance I’d had since returning from Rownham Passage to be alone with her. Now, at last, the house was quiet, humans and animal exhausted by their own high spirits, asleep in their respective beds; Hercules snoring away in the kitchen, Elizabeth next door, Nicholas and Adam in the small chamber just above ours, for it had been decided during my absence, that our youngest child should join his half-brother on the thick goose-feather mattress that occupied most of the floor of the attic. Adela was tired of getting up each night to attend to his wants, and considered that removed from my snoring, his nights would be less disturbed. What Nicholas made of the arrangement, I didn’t dare ask.

Adela was as alarmed by my intelligence as I had known she would be. She stared anxiously at me through the gloom.

‘If those were Timothy Plummer’s instructions, then promise me, Roger, that you’ll stop your incessant meddling. I won’t have you put anyone’s life at risk. Do you understand me?’

‘I don’t suppose for a minute-’ I began, but she interrupted me with a hand across my mouth.

‘I’ll leave you,’ she threatened, ‘if you endanger your own life or the children’s.’

I tried insinuating a hand inside her nightrail. ‘The Church doesn’t approve of disobedient women.’

She permitted me to cup her breast, but made it plain that tonight that was as far as I was going to get.

‘The Church doesn’t approve of husbands who jeopardize the lives of their families, either,’ she answered tartly.

She fell asleep quite quickly. I, on the other hand, lay awake for a long time, turning over the day’s events in my head. The house was quiet, the noise and bustle of the streets stilled at last, the silence broken only by the occasional ‘All’s well!’ of the Watch or the ululating cry of an owl. It was uncomfortably warm, and I envied Hercules the cool of the kitchen.

I knew I had to respect Adela’s wishes. I was responsible for lives besides my own: it was the penalty for marriage and fatherhood … Did I really mean penalty? But I was uneasily conscious that the sight of Rowena Honeyman had stirred old bachelor yearnings that I had long thought dead.

The word ‘dead’, however, brought me up short. The woman was a cold-blooded murderess. She would have helped her mistress drown me — had in fact aided and abetted Elizabeth Alefounder to that end. And under attack from Eamonn Malahide, she had retaliated with a dagger thrust that would not have disgraced a professional soldier. Once again, I recalled Gilbert Honeyman, a man of few, if any, moral scruples; yet somehow, the same description did not seem so apt when applied to his daughter. But what did I know of her? Nothing, except the manner in which Gilbert had spoken of her, and his concern for her welfare after his death.

The shadows of the room broke up and reformed as I drifted towards the edge of sleep. Rowena’s face and figure swam mistily before me. She was wearing the blue brocade gown and red shoes. She reached out a hand to grasp one of mine, but just as I was about to take it, I realized she was clutching a dagger, whose evil-looking blade was dripping blood …

I was suddenly wide awake, sitting bolt upright. I could swear that something had woken me … Some movement … Some noise … And there it was again! The creaking of a stair.

I slid out of bed, trying not to disturb my wife, and reached for my cudgel. I tiptoed as quietly as possible towards the door, and, easing it ajar, was at once aware of a blast of air which must have originated from an open door or window downstairs. I crept on to the landing and began, stealthily, to descend.

The flight led down to a narrow passageway outside the kitchen. I could hear Hercules’s snuffling and whining which, at any moment, would culminate in a series of ear-splitting barks. After that all hell would break loose as he protested against his incarceration, while an intruder invaded his home.

But I had no wish for my nocturnal visitor to be alerted and escape before I had time to see who he was. I knew the squeaky tread was near the bottom of the stairs, so I crept down as fast as I dared, but to no avail. By now, Hercules was making sufficient noise to waken the dead, and it was therefore only a matter of minutes before Adela called out to ask what was happening. Adam was screaming, and that intrepid duo, Elizabeth and Nicholas, were thundering down to join me. As I turned the bend in the staircase, I was just in time to see a cloaked and hooded figure disappear through the street door, and although I ran out, barefoot, he had already vanished. The Watch was nowhere to be seen. Are they ever, when you need them?

I returned indoors and, ignoring the questioning of my loved ones, knelt down to inspect the lock, peering into its mechanism.

Adela now appeared. ‘Roger, what’s going on?’

I straightened up. ‘We must get a bolt for this door. Someone has managed to pick the lock.’

‘How do you know?’ My wife gave a sudden scream as she sighted Adam, who was negotiating a perilous descent of the stairs entirely on his own, his yelling having attracted no attention. He was unused to such treatment.

‘Well, for a start,’ I answered acidly, ‘I locked this door before I went to bed and now it’s open. And it hasn’t been forced. So, someone managed to pick it. With what purpose, I’m unable to guess, but I suspect it wasn’t to kiss us all goodnight. And secondly, I’m an expert at picking locks, myself. Nicholas Fletcher, a fellow novice at Glastonbury, taught me how. This one would have been easy.’ The question is, who did it and why?’

‘That’s two questions,’ Adela retorted huffily, preparing to shepherd the children back upstairs and settle them down again. ‘And I must say that lock-picking is hardly an accomplishment I’d have expected you to acquire during your novitiate …’

She didn’t continue, but made her way upstairs for the second time that night, carrying Adam, with the other two children trailing in her wake. I was aware that her bad temper, like mine, stemmed from acute anxiety as to why our home had been broken into. It was well known that we had nothing valuable enough to steal …

I almost shouted aloud, but restrained myself in the nick of time. The ring that I had found in the ‘murder’ house and subsequently forgotten all about! How could I have been so absent-minded? I could have — and probably should have — given it to Timothy Plummer, to whom it might have meant something.

But my moment of euphoria was short-lived as common sense reasserted itself. There was no way anyone could know that I had the ring. No one had seen me find it, and there was a good chance that its owner had no idea where or when it had been mislaid. The ring couldn’t possibly be the reason for our intruder.

Hercules, who had been sniffing around the front door, whined suddenly and prodded something with his front paw.

‘What is it, lad?’ I stooped to examine his discovery, which he presented to me with all the air of an intelligent and highly trained bloodhound. He dropped it in my outstretched hand.

I was looking at a shoe made of very soft, scarlet leather.

I slept fitfully for the rest of the night; a sleep broken by dreams in which a blue brocade gown swept past me as I lay on the floor of the old Witherspoon house, revealing a glimpse of scarlet leather shoes.

Adela had been dead to the world when I finally crept back to bed, so I had not woken her with the news of Hercules’s find. But I showed it to her the following morning as we sat in bed, adjusting our minds and bodies to the rigours of the day ahead.

‘A shoe?’ She was incredulous. ‘How could anyone lose a shoe? Unless it was too big, of course. But surely no one would set out to rob a house in shoes that were too large. Loose shoes can cause all sorts of difficulties. And accidents.’

‘Precisely. But suppose a person removed the shoes in order to make less noise, placing them just inside the door-’

‘Which he’d left open-’

‘For a quick escape should he need it-’

‘Which he did, thanks to Hercules!’

I felt somewhat annoyed at being denied my share of the credit. ‘So, having been discovered, our thief turns and runs, grabbing his shoes, dashes outside only to find that, in his haste, he’s left one behind. Does that make sense?’

Adela leaned against my shoulder. ‘You’re quite clever,’ she conceded, ‘when you want to be.’

I let that go, although I felt like the prophet in his own country: I didn’t always get my due. I picked up the shoe from where it lay, like a drop of blood against the white counterpane, and handed it to my wife.

‘Could that belong to a woman?’ I asked.

‘Do you really suspect the intruder might have been a woman? I thought you said it was a man.’

I tried to conjure up a mental picture of the figure I had seen disappearing through the door. An all-enveloping cloak and hood viewed from the back — what could that tell me with any certainty? In different circumstances, I would have sworn it was a man. Something in the general bearing, in the economy and decisiveness of movement seemed more masculine than feminine. But I had seen red shoes on one of my attacker’s feet: Rowena Hollyns.

‘I can’t swear it was a man. So, what do you think? Could this shoe belong to a woman?’

‘Too big for a woman. Oh, I know there are women with big feet. My own aren’t exactly dainty. But this is far too large.’

She frowned suddenly and bent to scrutinize the shoe more closely. I kissed the nape of her neck in a suggestive manner, but I could have saved myself the effort. I doubt if she even noticed. She turned her head abruptly, so that her nose nearly collided with mine.

‘I know who this shoe belongs to,’ she breathed excitedly. ‘I’ve seen him wearing them. It’s one of a pair belonging to Robin Avenel.’

‘Are you sure?’ I frowned. ‘His shoes are usually far more fashionable than this. You know what a dandy he is. He likes those ridiculously long pikes. You can’t even walk in them unless the toes are fastened round your knees with fancy gilt chains. The pike on this thing can’t be more than half an inch.’

‘Not all his shoes are the same,’ Adela argued. ‘It stands to reason that someone as wealthy as he is has a number of different pairs. But I recollect seeing him in these some months ago, when I met him one day in High Street. He was wearing them with particoloured hose in purple and green. Robin never has had any taste in clothes. Why are you doubtful?’

‘One of the women who attacked me was wearing red shoes.’

My wife shrugged. ‘That proves nothing. Lots of people have red shoes, women as well as men. Another reason I recall this pair is that they have gold embossing around the toes. Look!’

She held up the shoe for me to make a closer inspection, and, sure enough, beneath the accretion of dirt and staining, I could see the glint of gold pressed into the leather. I got out of bed and carried it over to the window, where I opened the shutters. As the morning sunshine flooded the bedchamber, I plainly saw the embossed gold Greek key pattern. There seemed no further room for doubt that it belonged to Robin Avenel.

But I had no time to consider the matter further, as the arrival of Adam and Nicholas from upstairs, followed almost immediately by Elizabeth, debarred Adela and me from any further private conversation. The two elder children, far from being upset by the events of the night, were only too anxious to discuss such an unlooked-for adventure, while Adam, still deeply reproachful about his banishment to the attic, tried to clamber back into his crib, which remained standing against one wall.

Although I had not opened the windows as well as the shutters, the noise of the city’s church bells, all tolling at once — but not in harmony — penetrated the room with deafening clarity. They were ringing for Prime, warning us that the day had begun. I put the shoe away in a small wall cupboard near the head of the bed before any of the children saw it and demanded to know to whom it belonged and where it had come from. Later, when Adela had shooed them back to their own rooms and gone downstairs, I took the ring out of my pouch and placed it inside the shoe. Then I locked the cupboard and removed the key, which I hid in my secret place, beneath a loose floorboard under the window.

That morning, it was the turn of Saint Giles to be graced by the presence of our parish priest and the nave of the church was crowded. Adela, the children and I arrived just as the five-minute bell ceased tolling and consequently had to stand right at the front, close to the altar. Throughout my life, I have frequently observed this phenomonen: the later you are, the more prominent your position. The truth is that the majority of people prefer to herd to the back of churches, of courts — of any place, in short, where being at the front means being under the eye of Authority.

There are, of course, glaring exceptions to this general rule; persons who consider themselves so important that they assume the rest of the world cannot wait to obtain a glimpse of them, and the Avenels were just such people. Gregory Alefounder, Marianne Avenel’s father and Elizabeth Alefounder’s uncle by marriage, was another. Gregory was a big man of florid complexion, who always carried the scent of the brewery with him in his clothes. It was not unpleasant; indeed, I knew some men who positively liked to stand beside him just to inhale the smell. The only feature he had in common with his dainty, kittenish daughter was a pair of fine grey eyes; other than that, there was no physical resemblance between them whatsoever. Marianne apparently favoured the distaff side.

That morning, Gregory stood beside his son-in-law’s father, Peter Avenel. The soap manufacturer was somewhat dwarfed in size by the brewer, but he was plainly unaware of any other inferiority. Like Robin, Peter was always dressed in the height of fashion, regardless of whether it suited him or not. Today, both father and son wore doublets that were almost indecently short, the elder in peacock blue, the younger in jade green, revealing codpieces decorated with dangling laces in one case and bows of ribbon in the other. I saw quite a few men in the congregation sniggering behind their hands, numerous ladies and goodies carefully averting their eyes, and was unsurprised to note the look of contempt on Luke Prettywood’s face as he surveyed Marianne’s husband and father-in-law.

But the sight of Robin Avenel had aroused all my former uneasiness. I had never liked him, and knew him to be vain and self-important, but I nevertheless found it hard to imagine him creeping into anyone’s house in the middle of the night, intent on some felonious purpose. I could well imagine him ordering or paying someone else to do so, however, feeling sure that his conceit would prevent him from undertaking so risky or so criminal an act himself. Robin might be dipping his toes in treasonable waters, but he would take all necessary care to cover his back.

And, although I had said nothing to Adela, nor had any intention of doing so, a cold certainty was beginning to grip me that last night’s intruder had been bent on murder. Mine. And with equal conviction, I knew he had to be the man whose voice I had heard, but whose face and involvement in this affair remained a mystery. He had come to finish what his two accomplices had tried, but failed to do.

How I had reached this conclusion, I was unsure, but certainty was growing. As for the shoe, I accepted Adela’s word that it belonged to Robin Avenel, but could only think that he had lent it and its fellow to the stranger for some reason. For, whatever was going on, Robin was in the thick of it — that, at least, seemed obvious.

Braving the indignant and reproachful stare of the priest, I glanced around to see who else was present, and was rewarded with the sight of Rowena standing quietly behind Elizabeth Alefounder. She wore a simple blue homespun gown — definitely not brocade, but blue, nevertheless — and her coifed head was bent devoutly in prayer. Her mistress was more flamboyantly dressed today, having abandoned the brown sarcenet for green velvet and an even more elaborate girdle: sapphire-blue leather studded for its entire length with what looked like tiny emeralds. It spoke of money; a lot of money. The sort of wealth that can sometimes engender boredom, when there is nothing left to want or to strive for. (The sort of boredom, needless to say, that Adela and I would never experience.) Was that the reason Elizabeth Alefounder had decided to embroil herself in politics? Or were the Avenels a family of convinced Lancastrian sympathies? I had never heard them named as such in a strongly Yorkist city such as Bristol, where it would surely have been noticed, but many supporters of the late King Henry had learned to dissemble their feelings and bide their time.

Though bide their time for what, I could never make out. Henry Tudor’s claim to the crown, as I think I’ve mentioned before, was tenuous indeed, descending as it did through the bastard line of John of Gaunt. And rumours lately coming into Bristol, disseminated by the many Breton sailors whose ships tied up along the Backs, suggested that the Tudor was of a sickly constitution, recently suffering from several bouts of a debilitating illness, the cause of which his physicians found hard to diagnose. A situation doubtless worrying to his adherents, however much it might have cheered the rest of us.

The Mass was over. The miracle of transubstantiation had taken place: the bread and wine of the Eucharist had been transformed into the Blood and Body of Christ within each member of the congregation. (The Lollards would have us believe that this is impossible, a heresy I half subscribe to myself, although I have always kept such ideas strictly private: I shall be dead when these records are read. If they ever are.) As we turned to make our slow way out of Saint Giles, Adela was waylaid by a neighbour’s wife, a pleasant enough soul who seemed not to begrudge us our good fortune, and I found myself standing to one side, ignored, waiting for the conversation to come to an end. Adam was held in his mother’s arms, while the other nosy pair were listening with rapt attention to what their elders were saying.

Glancing round, I saw that I was standing close to the steep flight of steps leading down to the crypt. On a sudden impulse, and as no one appeared to be even slightly interested in my movements, I descended to the vault below. The same smell of must and decay that I had noticed previously met my nostrils as my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom. Cautiously, I inched my way forward, past the coffined rows of Christian dead and on into the second chamber of what had once been the synagogue cellars. Here, everything was as I remembered it from Friday morning, with all the parish’s unwanted bits of furniture and other rejected items ranged along the walls. Suddenly, I recollected what Jack Nym had told me — that the preceding week he had brought a bed and some other bits and pieces here for Robin Avenel.

Now, beds were as valuable a commodity in my young days as they are today, in my dotage. I was intrigued, therefore, to discover what sort of bed it could be that even a rich man could discard with impunity, especially with a household as large as Master Avenel’s. But although I looked long and hard amongst the rickety chairs, bales of rags, stools with two legs that were meant to have three, handle-less pots and pans and all the rest of those things that ‘might come in useful one day’ and so were hoarded rather than actually thrown away (to the greater profit of Saint Giles), I could find no bed of any shape or size, broken or dismantled.

To begin with, I thought I must have missed it in the gloom, but a second search, after my eyes had adjusted to the crypt’s dim light, convinced me that there was nothing there that resembled a headboard or a mattress or the empty wooden frame of a bed. So I walked forward, under the second archway and into the third chamber of the synagogue cellar, where I had seen Luke Prettywood and Marianne Avenel embracing the day before yesterday. But even though it was darker than ever in there, I could see that it was empty. The dust, rising in little clouds wherever I put my feet, made me sneeze violently.

I had turned to look behind me, back the way I had come, when a sudden noise made me spin round sharply. But the chamber was deserted except for myself. I was alone. There was nothing or no one there. After a few seconds, during which I stood stock still, almost afraid to move, I regained my courage and prowled around the room’s perimeter, trailing one hand along the rough stone walls that oozed with damp and slime. I tried to recall the nature of the noise I’d heard, the quality and density of the sound, but, as always in such cases, it grew more difficult to recapture the more I thought about it. In the end, the best I could say was that it had had a kind of hollow resonance — a thump and yet not a thump.

Something — a door, perhaps — closing? I remembered the story of the Jews’ secret chamber, and the local belief that had persisted for so many years after their expulsion that it had contained their abandoned hoard of gold and silver. Prompted into fresh action, I started rapping the walls, but all I got for my pains were bruised and bleeding knuckles, which, I felt, served me right for being such a credulous fool.

The silence now was all-encompassing. I could no longer hear even the distant murmur of voices from the church above. There was no living being down there except myself, only the sad ghosts of a long-gone past to keep me company and play tricks with my imagination, mocking me with phantom noises made by the dead.

I turned on my heel and strode the length of the crypt, ascending thankfully into the sunbeamed quiet of the nave.