The Prodigal Son

Twenty

Hercules and I knew we were home as soon as I pushed open the door of the house in Small Street. The noise of Adam having a tantrum somewhere or other assailed our ears almost immediately, while the thunderous descent of the stairs heralded the arrival of my daughter and stepson, who had spotted our approach from an upper window. I did not delude myself, however, that they had missed me and were eagerly awaiting my return to ply me with hugs and kisses. Rather, their hands were at once searching my pockets and the scrip at my belt, at the same time demanding, ‘What have you brought us?’ To add insult to injury — or, in this case, injury to insult — I could hear Margaret Walker’s voice uplifted in admonition to my longsuffering wife.

‘You mustn’t give in to him, Adela. Just let him scream.’

I walked into the kitchen where Adam, tied securely to his little chair, showed every intention of doing just that without any encouragement from my former mother-in-law, and dropped my pack and cudgel on to the table with a thump and a clatter that surprised everyone into silence.

‘Roger!’ Adela exclaimed. ‘You’re home!’ She left her cheese-making and hurried to greet me, slipping her arms around my neck and kissing me soundly. I returned the embrace with interest, having lived a celibate life for the past ten days.

‘So you’re back, are you?’ Margaret said. ‘And that’s quite enough of that sort of behaviour, thank you.’

‘Nuff that!’ Adam screamed in support. ‘Thank you!’

I untied the strips of cloth that bound him, picked him up bodily and tossed him into the air. He gurgled with delight, only threatening to resume his ear-piercing shrieks when I stopped. But I pacified him with a little wooden whistle that I had purchased from a fellow pedlar whom I had met during the leisurely three days it had taken me to walk home from Wells. I had refused all offers of rides in carts and proceeded quietly on foot, feeling that after the past few days, Hercules and I had earned time to ourselves before facing up once again to the strains and stresses of domestic life.

Declining to attend Anthony’s funeral, I had quit Croxcombe Manor on the afternoon of the day we had discovered the truth (or as much of it as I presumed we should ever be able to piece together) about the murder, leaving behind me a situation fraught with tension, but one, I guessed, that would be quickly submerged by everyone’s need to return to a normal, day-to-day existence. If George Applegarth had killed Anthony Bellknapp, then the latter had killed his wife, so it was impossible for either dame or steward to accuse the other without drawing attention to the crimes of their own kith and kin. It was a deadlock that I suspected neither wanted to break, or would ever allude to again. Rumour, gradually turning to legend, would surround the circumstances of Anthony’s death and would add to the folklore of the surrounding countryside for all the generations still to come. John Jericho would continue to be blamed for a murder he didn’t commit, but he was dead and it couldn’t harm him. As far as I was concerned, all I had to do now was to take Dame Audrea’s letter to the Sheriff of Bristol and ensure that my half-brother was released from prison.

Adela, generous woman, was almost as pleased as I was myself to learn of John Wedmore’s innocence.

‘You must bring him back here, Roger,’ she insisted. ‘Elizabeth can sleep with Nicholas and Master Wedmore can use her room for as long as he wishes to remain.’

‘No news of Master Jay’s expedition, then?’ I enquired.

Both Adela and Margaret Walker shook their heads.

‘They’ve been gone six weeks and more now and not a word of them being sighted anywhere,’ the latter announced with a lugubrious shake of her head. ‘Madness! Folly! I always said so. The Isle of Brazil! Who has actually laid eyes on it? No one that I can discover. It’s just a sailor’s yarn, if you want my opinion, like men and women with fishtails instead of legs. All nonsense! Ah, well,’ she added, glancing around at our reunited family group, ‘I’d better be getting back to Redcliffe, then, Adela. You won’t want me hanging around, I daresay, now that your husband’s back.’ She wagged an admonitory finger at me. ‘Look after her! She’s worth her weight in gold.’

‘Gold!’ shouted Adam, unexpectedly adding his mite, and giving all our ears a momentary respite from his whistle-playing. ‘Bad man,’ he continued, jutting his lower lip in my direction and demonstrating that, although only two years old, he was perfectly capable of following the unspoken drift of adult conversation.

Margaret smiled grimly, picking up the stick she used nowadays to help her walking, and headed for the door.

‘Perhaps I wouldn’t go that far,’ she grudgingly admitted. She ruffled my son’s dark hair. ‘But that father of yours does need keeping in order.’

Adam endorsed this by a blast on his whistle that speeded Margaret’s departure, set Hercules barking furiously and hurriedly drove the rest of us from the kitchen. But, all in all, it was good to be home.

I’d missed it.

I took Dame Audrea’s letter to Richard Manifold and gave him the honour of approaching such authority as he thought fit. It was a kindness on my part: he loved nothing better than to appear important and to bring himself to the attention of his superiors. And unlike his two henchmen, Jack Gload and Pete Littleman, he was efficient in whatever he undertook. My half-brother had been released from the bridewell by suppertime.

He looked paler and thinner than when I had seen him last and demonstrated a surprising lack of resentment for his unjust incarceration — to begin with, at least. He was too relieved for the present that his ordeal was over. Elation vied with despondency over the news that there was still no news concerning John Jay’s ship. (The prevailing view in the city was that it had been lost with all hands.)

Adela welcomed her new-found brother-in-law with a shy kiss and, it being Friday, one of her fish stews for supper, her warmth and kindliness making up for the children’s complete indifference. When I apologized for them, John merely laughed and said his younger brother, Colin, had always been the same with strangers. But mention of his brother plunged him once more into gloom and we finished supper in almost total silence on his part. This became so oppressive that, when the meal was over, Adela suggested that I take John to the Green Lattis, where a beaker or two — or even three — of their best ale might improve his mood.

Nothing loath, I walked my half-brother up Small Street in the sunshine of a warm August evening and found a favourite corner seat in the as yet deserted aleroom, secluded from the prying eyes of the dozens of after-supper drinkers who would soon be joining us.

John downed his first beaker very nearly in one gulp and, as Adela had foreseen, this considerably raised his spirits.

‘You see,’ he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, ‘I was right to trust you to clear my name.’ He hesitated, then asked, ‘Would you be willing to tell me all about it? How you managed it. What happened exactly?’

There was no reason, I felt, why he shouldn’t be told the whole story. He had a right to know the fate of the young man whom he obviously resembled.

‘Very well,’ I agreed and fetched us another beaker of ale apiece. At the same time, I tried to persuade myself that I really wasn’t interested in proving to my young half-brother just how clever I’d been. (And, indeed, when I came to think about things in detail, I wasn’t so sure that I had been particularly clever in this instance.)

‘Right,’ I murmured, settling back on the bench beside him. ‘It’s complicated, so listen carefully.’

When I at last finished speaking, there was a long silence between us. The aleroom had filled up, and all around us, the chattering of Bristol voices, with their familiar, hard-edged, west country burr and Saxon diphthongs, was deafening. Still without speaking, John Wedmore signalled to a passing potboy to bring us another drink. And to my astonishment, we got it almost at once. (Potboys in the Green Lattis are often mysteriously afflicted with deafness and blindness when things get busy.)

‘So,’ my half-brother muttered at last, ‘the truth’s finally out. Anthony Bellknapp is exposed as the murderer he was and has been justly punished by George Applegarth.’ He emitted a little snort of mirthless laughter.

I regarded him curiously. ‘You sound as if you knew them,’ I said. ‘My powers of storytelling must be better than I thought.’

‘Oh, it’s not that,’ John answered, without, I’m sure, meaning to be rude. ‘The truth is, I did know them. Well, I knew the steward and his wife. But as for Anthony Bellknapp’ — he spat vigorously into the rushes — ‘I only had the misfortune of meeting him once.’

I digested this, sipping my ale, but quite unconscious of the fact as a suspicion slowly formed at the back of my mind.

‘What do you mean? What are you saying? That … that …?’

My half-brother nodded. ‘Yes. I do mean what you think. Dame Audrea didn’t make a mistake when she identified me as her page. I was John Jericho.’

It was now his turn to assume the mantle of storyteller while I listened, pushing aside my ale before my brain became too fuddled to understand what he was saying. I moved round to the other side of the table so that I could sit opposite him, occupying a stool just vacated by another customer.

‘Go on,’ I said.

‘It was about two years after my mother had married Matthew O’Neill, and we’d gone to live in Ireland with him, that she told me who my real father had been; not Ralph Wedmore as I’d always thought, but your father, Roger Stonecarver. They’d been secret lovers and she said that whatever happened he’d promised to look after her. Perhaps he meant it. Masons and stone carvers have always been better paid than other trades, but in the end, whether he was sincere or not went for nothing. She was less than a month pregnant when he was killed. So she married my fa- She married her cousin, Ralph, who’d always been fond of her, and he brought me up as his own, although, looking back, I can see that he never really regarded me as his son. Especially not after Colin arrived, three years later.

‘Anyway’ — John paused to swallow a draught of ale — ‘the news of my true paternity came as a shock to me. I also learned that I had an older half-brother, Roger. I was then about sixteen, a time of life when who you are seems very important. I immediately decided to leave Ireland and return to Wells to try and find you. My mother pleaded with me not to go, Colin cried and begged me to stay, and even my stepfather — who rarely interfered in matters concerning us two boys — told me that he thought I was being over-hasty. He advised me to sleep on it, to consider my mother’s feelings, but I wouldn’t listen. I was too upset. I needed to get away.

‘So I took ship at Waterford and arrived in Bristol that summer that the little Duke of York was born — I remember, because all the church bells were ringing in celebration — and from there I walked to Wells. But, of course, by then your mother was dead and I was told you were a novice at Glastonbury. But when I enquired for you at the abbey, one of the monks informed me that you’d never taken your vows and had left two years previously. No one could tell me where you were.’

‘That year I was in Cornwall,’ I said, thinking back to the affair at Trenowth and my subsequent, very reluctantly undertaken trip to Brittany. ‘So what happened next? To you, I mean.’

John Wedmore shrugged. ‘By that time I’d spent all my money. The monks at Glastonbury fed me and gave me a groat out of the poor fund to tide me on my way and I decided to go in search of my mother’s family, the Actons. I made a few enquiries — there were two of them living between Wells and Wedmore — but before I got to visit them, I fell in with Dame Audrea.’

I laughed. ‘How did you manage that? I wouldn’t have thought her the sort of woman one just “fell in” with.’

My half-brother grinned, acknowledging the point. ‘True, but miracles do happen. I just wandered into the kitchen at Croxcombe one day when she was there, and she took a fondness for me. Don’t ask me why. I don’t think even she knew the reason. She decided there and then to make me her page. Master Bellknapp tried to dissuade her, but she wouldn’t be moved. In fact, the more he told her that she was being foolish, the more obstinate she became.’

I nodded. ‘I can imagine that. A woman well set up in her own conceit was how she appeared to me. Not one to admit she was in the wrong.’

‘No.’ John’s face grew sombre. ‘And, indeed, in this instance she was proved right. I was a good and loyal servant to her until that night … That night when her own son came back to rob her.’

‘Tell me your version of events,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard George Applegarth’s.’

He swallowed the dregs of his ale and placed both elbows on the table. ‘I don’t suppose my version differs much from his. As you already know, Dame Audrea, Master Bellknapp, young Simon and most of the household officers had gone on a visit to Kewstoke Hall, the home of the daughter, Lady Chauntermerle and her husband. I’d stayed behind because I was suffering from toothache, and so had George Applegarth. He had broken his arm. The evening before the robbery, he was drinking fairly steadily in order to ease the pain, and at one point, I saw Jenny slip something into his ale, but attached no significance to it. Why should I? Like a good wife, she was giving him a potion to help him sleep. I nearly asked her for some myself. A pity I didn’t. She’d probably still be alive today.

‘I retired early. I had a truckle-bed in a passageway near the mistress’s room. Usually I slept like the dead, but that night my toothache woke me up after an hour or two. I got up and went down to the hall, intending to get myself some clove paste from the medicine chest, but as I reached the bottom of the stairs, I saw Jenny and there was a man with her. He had a sack with him, and the door to the cupboard where the silver was kept was standing open. Even though my wits were befuddled with pain, I could see what was going on. Just before they became aware of my presence, I’d heard her call him Anthony, so I guessed he was the elder son people talked about. The one who’d been turned out of the house two years before.’

‘Then they both saw you,’ I said. ‘And Anthony went for you with his knife.’

‘Yes. I heard Jenny scream as the blade went into my chest, and just before I lost consciousness, I saw him turn on her, stabbing her just as he’d done me. My last thought was that both of us were dead.’

‘But you weren’t. So, how did you survive?’

‘I couldn’t have been wounded in a very vital spot. I lost a lot of blood, but I eventually recovered consciousness. I was as weak as a fledgling bird, but I wasn’t dead, although I’d obviously been left as such. I was somewhere deep in Croxcombe woods, covered with leaves and branches, where, I suppose, I was meant to rot away until my flesh had been eaten off my bones by ants and animals. Until, if anyone found me, I was unrecognizable. I managed to get to my feet, although I could barely stand. I vaguely remember staggering about, sometimes falling over, but always picking myself up again. Then I was violently sick, but by that time, I was passing out once more. I can recall tripping over a tree root, but after that nothing … until I came to my senses in Hamo Gough’s hut.’

‘You knew him?’

‘Oh, yes. Not well, but by sight and to exchange the odd word with. He’d dressed my wound with cobwebs and bits of mouldy bread and bound my chest with a strip of linen, and as soon as I was sensible, he fed me slops of boiled oats and water … I actually thanked him for looking after me and asked if he’d let them know at the manor that I was safe.’ My half-brother laughed derisively. ‘Of course, it was then he told me that I was a hunted criminal — that half the countryside was out searching for me — on a charge of robbery and murder.’

‘You told him the truth?’

‘Naturally, but I might as well have held my breath. He didn’t believe me. He was sure, like everyone else, that I was the thief and murderer of Jenny Applegarth, and nothing I could say would convince him otherwise.’

‘How did he think you got stabbed yourself?’

‘I asked him that, and he said he supposed it was during a scuffle with Jenny. But I don’t think he ever reasoned it out properly. He had only one object, and that was to persuade me to tell him where I’d buried the stolen goods. He said he’d keep me captive until I did, so in the end, I told him that when I recovered and was sufficiently strong to leave the hut, I’d take him to the place and we’d share them between us. I said I couldn’t describe the spot exactly, but I’d know it again when I saw it.’

‘Hoping to escape in the meantime?’ I suggested.

John nodded. ‘But I knew I’d have to get my strength back first, before I could do anything. Also, I needed a place to lie low until the immediate hue and cry died down. I was a marked man. Only Jenny Applegarth knew the truth, and she was dead. Somehow, I had to get to Bristol and find a ship to take me back to Ireland. For several weeks, I pretended to be weaker than I really was, putting off the day when I’d have to overpower Hamo. When he left the hut, he tied me to the bed and locked the door behind him. If anyone approached the hut, he knew I wouldn’t call out for fear of being found and taken.’

‘So?’ I prompted as he stared sadly into his empty beaker. I hailed a potboy and ordered more ale.

‘So,’ my half-brother continued, perking up, ‘the inevitable happened. Hamo forgot to lock the door, and that on a day when he’d failed to tie me very securely. He must have been in a hurry for some reason. I managed to free myself and went. And I had absolutely no compunction in really turning thief and filling my pockets from his store of money. I was penniless and I had to get back to Ireland somehow.’

‘Weren’t you afraid Hamo would tell the authorities when he discovered your escape?’

John took a swig of ale from his freshly filled beaker and shook his head.

‘No. He’d have been forced to admit that he’d been sheltering me from the law, and would himself have fallen foul of it. All the same, I travelled by night and lay low by day until I reached Bristol, where I easily found a ship sailing to Waterford. And nothing,’ he added violently, ‘would have tempted me back to this part of the world had it not been for Colin’s being a part of this fated expedition of Master Jay’s. There’s no news of the ship, I suppose?’

Gloomily, I had to admit that no sighting had as yet been reported. ‘But you must stay with us,’ I went on, ‘until something definite is heard, or … or until …’

‘Or until it’s plain that the ship and all her crew are lost,’ he finished for me. ‘It might be months. Are you sure your wife will want me?’

But when we returned to Small Street, Adela was at pains to assure her new-found brother-in-law that he would be more than welcome to remain with us if he had the strength to endure the curious attentions of three small children and the vagaries of an undisciplined dog. John grinned and said he thought he might manage it. So for the next couple of weeks, to keep himself busy and his mind from dwelling too often on the possible fate of his brother, he accompanied me on my expeditions in and around the city, learning the art of peddling and eventually getting so good at it that he thought he might try earning a living by the same means when he returned to Ireland. And it was one afternoon, as we were returning home for supper through Redcliffe, and as we approached Bristol Bridge, that we saw an elderly, grey-haired man pacing around, muttering busily to himself and making copious notes in a notebook.

‘What’s he doing?’ John asked, breaking the miserable silence that had engulfed us ever since the Redcliffe gatekeeper had assured us that no news had been received during our absence of Master Jay and his crew.

I drew in my breath sharply. ‘I believe I might know who he is,’ I said.

As we approached the gentleman, I doffed my hat. ‘Master Botoner?’ I enquired.

He frowned. ‘I prefer to be called William Worcester,’ he corrected me. ‘But how do you know who I am, Master?’

‘Oh, your fame precedes you, sir,’ I said. ‘An acquaintance met you in Cambridge. You were able to give him some information regarding his family in Wells, learned from your sister, Mistress Jay.’

‘I remember,’ he answered shortly. ‘The Bellknapps.’ Fortunately, he seemed disinclined to pursue the subject further, merely waving his notebook in my face and asking, ‘Do you know that this bridge is seventy-two yards long and five yards wide? That the Chapel of the Blessed Mary, in the middle, is twenty-five yards long and seven yards wide? That the Back to the west of it, where the River Frome flows, is two hundred and twenty steps, or three times sixty, plus forty?’

‘Amazing,’ I said inadequately, not knowing quite what else to say. ‘Are you … are you measuring the whole city, sir?’

He nodded briskly. ‘That is my intention. You may like to see my calculations.’

I took the proffered book, but the closely written pages were written in a sort of dog-Latin that was almost impossible to read. I handed it back with a smile that suggested I’d understood every word.

‘Mistress Jay must be worried about her brother-in-law. My kinsman, here, also has a brother on the voyage.’

Master Worcester nodded at John. ‘Then you have my sympathy, young man. The Isle of Brazil, indeed!’ He didn’t say, ‘What nonsense!’ but he plainly thought it. ‘Yes, it’s a worrying time, Chapman, particularly as she has been recently widowed. I am here to sort out her affairs, but I shall stay now until there is some news. I shall keep myself occupied, as you see, writing the topography of Bristol and its environs in this year of Our Lord, 1480. Well, well! I must get on. There’s much to do. Much to do.’

We were dismissed, but as we made to move on, I turned back and said, ‘Let me recommend to you, Master Worcester, a talk with the ferryman at Rownham Passage. A veritable mine of information, sir.’

‘Thank ’ee! Thank ’ee!’ he exclaimed. ‘I shall take your advice, young man. God bless you!’

Another week went by and September was already half done. It was still warm and one golden day succeeded another, the haze of late summer hanging over the thickly wooded hills and clouding the valleys in a shimmering veil. Only the faint yellowing of the leaves and a sudden sharp bite in the air, night and morning, hinted that autumn was not too far away. And then, three days before the feast of Saint Matthew, we were just sitting down to dinner when the clanging of the common bell arrested us with our spoons halfway to our mouths. Adam immediately bellowed in competition, furious that anything should be allowed to make more noise than he did. Nicholas and Elizabeth screamed briefly in sympathy, then defied my strict instructions to remain where they were and, struggling down from their stools, beat me to the street door by a hairsbreadth. Adela and my half-brother followed so hot on my heels that they nearly managed to trip me up.

Small Street, like every other, was crowded with people, most interrupted in the middle of their meal, some still holding spoons and even bowls, all making as fast as possible for the High Cross at the junction of High Street, Wine Street, Broad Street and Corn Street. We pushed and jostled our way as close as we could to the crier, who, when the common bell at last stopped its insistent tolling, informed us that news had just come from Ireland that John Jay’s ship and all his crew were safe and sound in Waterford. They had limped into port there early the previous morning and word had been carried urgently to Bristol on the next ship leaving harbour. The Isle of Brazil still remained, alas, an unrealized dream, but no lives had been lost and the ship was unharmed. Thanksgiving would be offered for God’s great goodness at every church throughout the city, whose bells were already beginning to ring out in celebration, as no doubt they also were across the water, in Ireland.

The following day, I said goodbye to John Wedmore as he boarded the same ship that had brought the happy news to Bristol and was now returning home.

‘Don’t forget me,’ he said, gripping my hands. ‘Apart from the fact that I owe you more than I can ever repay, we are brothers. We share the same blood. If ever you should come to Waterford, ask for Matthew O’Neill. Everyone knows him in those parts. You’ll be treated like a hero. If not, my mother will want to know why.’

We embraced and I watched him walk up the gangplank. At the top he turned and waved, grinning in the same way that I could just about remember my father grinning when I was a child. He was going home to his family, and I had a sneaking feeling that I would miss him more than he would miss me. The brother I had never known I had, and of whose existence I had only recently been made aware, was going out of my life before I had hardly got to know him.

I sighed and turned away from the quay. But then my pace quickened. I had my own family, waiting eagerly for my return. Well, Adela was, and that was all that really mattered.