The Weaver's inheritance

Chapter Seventeen

By offering him an extra penny above the price of our fare, we persuaded the boatman to row a little way downriver and put us ashore at Saint Botolph’s Wharf, instead of at Fish Wharf, which was adjacent to London Bridge. From there, we returned to Cornhill via Roper Lane, Hubbard Lane and Lime Street, glancing anxiously over our shoulders all the way. Fortunately, we seemed to have shaken off our pursuers, but we took a circuitous route, nonetheless, to the Old Clothes Market and the daub and wattle hut behind Philip’s stall.

I could see, while we ate the dinner prepared for us by Jeanne, that my companion’s enthusiasm of the morning was already on the wane. Philip’s taste for adventure had faltered at the first hint of possible danger, and who could blame him? He had his wife and business to consider; and in any case, he knew as well as I did that he could be of no further use to me. He had helped me find both Bertha Mendip and Morwenna Peto: my visits to the Weaver family I must pay alone. As for himself, he would lie low for a week or two, and trust that after such a lapse of time the details of his appearance would fade from Morwenna’s mind. (My height was against me, as always, when seeking anonymity, but, with luck, I should be gone from the capital within a very few days.)

‘What I can’t understand,’ Jeanne said, serving me with a second helping of dried, salted fish fried in oatmeal, ‘is why this Irwin Peto should hang on to any of his past life at all. Surely he might have expected Alderman Weaver to make enquiries of his own, and so discover the truth. He couldn’t have known, as you say, Roger, how unquestioning would be his acceptance.’

‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ I said, wiping my mouth on the back of my hand. ‘First of all, without Bertha Mendip’s assistance, and Matt Mendip to guide us, we might never have traced Morwenna Peto. And without your husband, I should never have discovered Bertha again. In that part of Southwark, they’re as close as oysters, and won’t betray the whereabouts of any of their kind to outsiders; so unless the Alderman’s envoys knew someone like Philip to begin with, it’s more than probable that they would never have found her.

‘Secondly, we have now established that Irwin Peto is indeed an impostor, and therefore there must be more than enough for him to remember, more than enough pitfalls strewn in his path, without having to make up a story about his life for the past six years, as well. And on those six years, he must be accurate; there must be no discrepancy between one account and another; no risk of being told “but last time you said so-and-so, although the time before that you said the other”. There is a good excuse, you see, for his lapses of memory concerning his early life as Clement Weaver, but none at all for forgetting what happened to him as Irwin Peto. So it’s much simpler for him to tell the truth whenever he can. The only thing he has to remember is to refer to Morwenna as his adoptive, and not his real, mother.’

Philip nodded his approval of this reasoning, agreeing that it was simpler and safer to tell the truth where possible; and even Jeanne, always harder to convince of anything than her husband, finally agreed that it might be so. ‘What will you do now?’ she asked me.

I swallowed my last morsel of fish and took a swig of ale. ‘I must visit the rest of Alderman Weaver’s family, and also the cousin of a certain Baldwin Lightfoot who lives near Saint Paul’s.’

‘You won’t be needing my company, then?’ Philip suggested anxiously, exchanging a somewhat shamefaced glance with his wife.

I shook my head and laughed. ‘You’ve been more than helpful, Philip, and I couldn’t have got this far without you. But henceforward what I have to do, I must do alone. I shall say my goodbyes after dinner, and you won’t be troubled with me any further. I shall return to Bristol as soon as possible.’

They both looked relieved, and neither enquired what I should do for a bed for the next few nights, although I could see that the question was on the tip of Jeanne’s tongue. Indeed, she had her mouth open to speak, when I saw Philip give an almost imperceptible shake of his head. What they did not know, they could not reveal, should anyone come knocking on the door for information.

* * *

I decided, upon reflection, to visit Baldwin Lightfoot’s cousin first, as Saint Paul’s was on my way to the Ward of Farringdon Without; but it was only as I approached the churchyard and the towering bulk of the church itself, topped by its great, gilt weathercock, that I realized I did not know the cousin’s name. Throughout my life, I have, from time to time, been guilty of this kind of oversight, and although I am always ready to curse myself for my stupidity, I am perfectly well aware that it will happen again and again. As my mother used to say, periodic inattention to detail is one of my many failings.

I recollected that Alison Burnett had referred to Baldwin’s cousin as a kinsman of his father; therefore there was a possibility that he, too, might be called Lightfoot. Consequently, I began knocking at every house in the vicinity of Saint Paul’s churchyard, starting in Paternoster Row, proceeding along Old Change and then turning west into Carter Lane, enquiring if one of the inhabitants was so named. And luck, or God, was with me, for at the third dwelling from the further end of Carter Lane, the young maid who answered the door said that if I’d wait, she’d see if the master was within. She disappeared, returning a few moments later to ask my name.

I told her, adding with a fine disregard for the truth, ‘I’m a friend of your master’s cousin, Baldwin Lightfoot.’

She eyed me askance. ‘That won’t be much of a recommendation,’ she sniffed. Nevertheless, she departed for a second time, eventually reappearing with a request for me to follow her upstairs.

The small, first-floor parlour into which I was shown was snug and well furnished, with a fire burning on the hearth, for the May day was chilly, plenty of fresh, sweet-smelling rushes on the floor, a corner cupboard on whose shelves were displayed items of pewter, silver and latten tin, tapestry cushions liberally piled up on the windowseat, and two beautifully carved armchairs. In one of these, his knees covered by a hand-embroidered, fur-lined rug, was an elderly man wearing an old-fashioned woollen gown trimmed with budge, while a linen hood, with lappets and strings that tied beneath his chin, protected his head from the many draughts whistling about the room.

Master Lightfoot looked me appraisingly up and down with a pair of beady grey eyes. ‘And who might you be? I don’t recognize your name. Have you come to pilfer from me, like that wretched cousin of mine?’

‘I, I’m sorry, sir,’ I stammered, taken aback. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I mean what I say,’ he snapped. ‘Baldwin came to stay with me last November, sponge off me would, I suppose, be nearer the mark — and after he’d gone I discovered that a silver-gilt cup was missing from that cupboard over there, and my housekeeper reported her best leather girdle had been taken from her room. There were some other odds and ends taken as well, a few trinkets that he purloined and has no doubt by now turned into cash, for Baldwin’s always hard up. He’s piddled away the money his father left him on women and strong drink, and has virtually nothing left. So if he’s sent you as his emissary to touch me for a loan, then he’s going to be disappointed. You may tell him from me that I know all about his thieving ways, and that he’s lucky I don’t set the law on his tail.’ The old man continued grumpily, ‘It’s not that I haven’t thought of doing so, believe me, but blood’s thicker than water when all’s said and done, and unluckily he’s the only family I have left nowadays.’ He raised his eyes to mine. ‘Well! Speak up! Why did he send you here?’

‘Er … Master Lightfoot didn’t send me,’ I faltered, trying desperately to find something to add, for I had really been told everything that I needed to know. I now felt almost certain that Baldwin’s denial of being in London six months earlier had more to do with his shame at having stolen from his cousin than from any need to deny a meeting with Irwin Peto. ‘He … er … He’s talked of you so often that I … er … Being in London, I thought I’d call on you and see how you did.’

The elder Lightfoot snorted. ‘Talked of me, has he? He might well do so if his conscience troubles him.’ He gave me another long, deeply suspicious stare. ‘You don’t look like a friend of Baldwin’s to me. In fact, you look more like a pedlar with that great pack on your back … What’s going on, eh? Get out of my house! Go on! Get out of my house, before I send the maid for the law. Susan! Susan! Where is the dratted girl? Never about when I want her!’

‘It’s all right,’ I assured him hastily. ‘I mean you no harm. I’m going. Now, this minute!’ And I left the room so fast that I collided with Susan, just outside the door.

‘Oops!’ she exclaimed, and giggled, looking up coyly into my face. ‘You’re in a hurry. Upset him, have you? Well, that’s nothing new. He’s an ill-conditioned old codger, but I suppose I’d better see what it is he wants.’

‘He wants me out of the house,’ I said. ‘He’ll be all right now that I’ve gone.’ She was nothing loath to be persuaded, not wishing to brave her employer’s bad temper, and preceded me downstairs again. At the bottom of the flight, I caught her arm. ‘Your master has a cousin who’s an acquaintance of mine…’

‘A friend, you said.’ The girl laughed. ‘I’m not surprised you weren’t received with favour. There were things went missing after Master Baldwin’s visit last November, and he — ’ she jerked her head upwards, indicating the room above — ‘hasn’t had a good word to say for him since.’

‘How long did Baldwin stay?’ I asked.

Susan shrugged. ‘Three days, maybe four; I can’t remember exactly. But it wasn’t for any length of time. His visits are always short, but this one was shorter than usual.’

‘And did he go out much?’

If the girl resented this interrogation, she gave no sign of it. ‘He hardly left the house. It was very bad weather, raining and sleeting the whole three or four days. But when I sympathized with him, Master Baldwin said it didn’t matter; he didn’t have any money to spend anyway.’ Susan gave a reminiscent chuckle. ‘He’s a one, that Baldwin! He never stopped trying to get me into bed with him all the time he was here.’ She gave me a demure glance from beneath long dark eyelashes.

On impulse, I bent and kissed her lips, which were soft and pliant, and I felt the tip of her tongue brush mine. I backed away hastily. Apart from the fact that I had no time for dalliance, I found that I had no inclination for it, either. I assumed that it was because of my attachment to Rowena Honeyman, but the face that suddenly swam into my mind was not fair-skinned and blue-eyed, framed by corn-coloured hair, but of a sallow complexion with a pair of steady brown eyes and tendrils of dark hair escaping from beneath a widow’s cap. The mind, I thought irritably, could play strange tricks at times.

Susan, pardonably angered by my recoil, opened the street door and indicated that I should leave. ‘And don’t bother coming back,’ she called as she slammed it shut behind me.

I had no intention of returning, but neither did I immediately hurry away. At the end of the street was a stone water trough, and as no horses were drinking from it at that particular moment, I lowered my pack to the ground and sat on its rim to think. Was I now convinced of Baldwin Lightfoot’s innocence in this matter of Irwin Peto? All in all, allowing for the fact that there could be no total certainty until the true culprit was exposed, I thought I was. He had stolen from his cousin and, being at heart an honest man and deeply ashamed of his action, was trying to persuade himself that he had never been in London last November. Indeed, he had by now probably convinced himself of the fact. Added to this was his assurance, backed up by that of Alison Burnett, that he had not seen Clement often enough in the years immediately preceding the latter’s disappearance to recognize a double if he saw one. I felt reasonably confident, therefore, that I could rule out Baldwin Lightfoot as the instigator of this plot.

That left the Alderman’s brother, John, and the various members of his family; his wife, Alice, his two sons, George and Edmund, and their wives, Bridget and Lucy. As I have already mentioned, I had met Dame Alice and George and Bridget Weaver six years earlier during my search for the real Clement, and I thought it almost impossible that the first of these three was capable of hatching such an elaborate piece of mischief on her own. She had seemed to me a compliant woman, submissive in all things to her husband’s will and without a thought in her head that he had not put there. But that she would go along with anything of his devising, and think it right to do so, I could well believe. As for the others, I should have to suspend judgement until I saw them.

I remembered that although John Weaver lived in Farringdon Without, his looms and weaving sheds were in the Portsoken Ward, on the other side of the city. The three men, therefore, would probably be from home, thus giving me an opportunity to talk to their wives alone. I rose from my seat on the edge of the water trough and passed through the Lud Gate to make my way along Fleet Street, where the stink of the tanners’ yard assaulted my nostrils and made me sneeze. As I approached the bridge over the River Fleet, I had to wait for a party of horsemen coming from the opposite direction, all wearing the badge of the Duke of Clarence and every one of them heavily armed. A carter, who had drawn up beside me, watched them pass with an impassive face, but once they had gone by he turned to me and grimaced.

‘Trouble brewing,’ he remarked succinctly, and spat before moving on.

I nodded in agreement at his departing back and swung into Shoe Lane, heading north across the Holborn highway into Golden Lane on its further side. Here, there was a cluster of some ten or twelve dwellings, those at present on my right having gardens at the rear which ran down to the Fleet; and if memory served me correctly, John Weaver’s house was one of these, somewhere in the middle of the row. It was pointed out to me by a passer-by, who also, without being asked, informed me that George and Edmund Weaver lived on the opposite side of the street, adding gratuitously that the two wives were in and out of their mother-in-law’s house all day long. ‘You may well ask me when do they cook and clean?’ the woman finished indignantly. ‘And my answer to that is, I doubt very much if they do.’

In view of these neighbourly strictures, I was not surprised when, in reply to my knock at John Weaver’s door, it was opened by a most attractive girl with deep blue eyes and fair curls that were loosely confined by a ribbon at the nape of her neck. Her gown, which was the same colour as her striking eyes, was of the best quality wool, trimmed with matching silk braid, an expensive garment for Golden Lane. This, I guessed, must be Lucy, Edmund Weaver’s wife, and described to me by Alison as, ‘as big a spendthrift as Bridget is a miser … Lucy gets rid of Edmund’s money as fast as he can make it … so pretty that she can wind him round her little finger.’ Well, there was no doubt that she was very pretty; equally as pretty as Rowena Honeyman.

I waited for my heart to give its customary lurch of misery at this conjuration of my true love’s name, but nothing happened. In a perfectly calm and steady voice, I heard myself asking if I might come in and speak to Dame Alice. ‘It’s on behalf of her niece, Mistress Burnett.’

Lucy hesitated, eyeing me with caution, but she evidently liked what she saw, for she suddenly smiled and motioned me inside. The interior of the house was much as I remembered it. A long passage led to the back door and the garden, a narrow, twisting staircase rising halfway along its length and giving access to the upper storey, while doors on either side of it opened into various rooms. A faint, but all-pervasive smell of the cattle market at Smithfield hung in the air, borne on the wind and seeping through the building’s numerous cracks and crannies.

Lucy Weaver ushered me into a small overcrowded room at the front of the house where Dame Alice and her other daughter-in-law, Bridget, sat yawning over their embroidery. They glanced up hopefully as Lucy announced, ‘Here’s a visitor.’

‘I know you,’ said Bridget. ‘You’ve been here before.’

* * *

‘Well!’ exclaimed Dame Alice some time later, when my story was finally told. ‘Here’s a to-do! Clement alive, after all these years! And poor Alison cut out of her father’s will! Not that she’ll starve, mind. That husband of hers is as rich as Croesus.’

‘That’s not the point,’ Bridget reminded her mother-in-law sharply. ‘Uncle Alfred’s money rightly belongs to her, but because he’s a fool, she’s being cheated of it by some impostor.’

I glanced across at her and asked, ‘You feel certain then, Mistress, that this man is an impostor?’ For the one piece of information I had kept to myself was the knowledge that Irwin Peto was indeed a fraud.

She seemed disconcerted by the question. ‘Well … That is … I suppose him to be. I thought you said he was.’ I shook my head and she shrugged. ‘It’s far too convenient, him turning up now, when Uncle Alfred is so ill.’

‘You know that the Alderman is sick? I understood that you had not seen him in some while.’

‘John and I visited him in Bristol last summer,’ Dame Alice cut in. ‘It was easy to see that he was in poor health then, and we told George and Edmund when we returned that their uncle couldn’t be long for this world. The only wonder is that he’s lasted until now.’

‘But you’ve known nothing of what’s been happening since Christmas? Mistress Burnett hasn’t written to you? Or the Alderman? But now I come to think of it, I recall Dame Pernelle saying that she had sent you a message by a London-bound carter.’

‘Well, it never reached us,’ Lucy declared. ‘And Alison hasn’t written, as far as I know.’ She turned with raised eyebrows to her mother- and sister-in-law, seeking confirmation, and they both shook their heads.

‘What is your opinion, Master Chapman?’ Dame Alice wanted to know. ‘Do you think this man could possibly be my nephew?’

‘No,’ I answered. ‘I don’t. His story is plausible enough, except in one respect. The day Clement disappeared, he was wearing a camlet tunic edged with squirrel’s fur, but Irwin Peto described a black frieze tunic trimmed with budge.’

But my bait wasn’t taken. Not by so much as the flutter of an eyelid did any one of the three women betray that she knew my story to be a lie, or hint that it could not be so because Irwin Peto had been given the correct information. Indeed, my falsehood appeared to have no effect at all, and they continued chattering and speculating and exclaiming over the news I had brought with every indication that it was a completely fresh revelation to which they still could not come to terms.

I made a move to take my leave, but they detained me, begging me to remain until their husbands came home so that I should be on hand to supply the details that their memories lacked.

‘You had best stay to supper,’ Dame Alice decreed. ‘John and my sons will surely wish to question you, and it would be as well if you remained to hand. We can make the stew go round if we scrape the pot.’

It was neither the most flattering nor the warmest invitation that I had ever received; moreover, the smell emanating from the kitchen at the back of the house was not one to make my mouth water. But it would save me a long walk to the Portsoken Ward, and ensure that I could observe all three men together instead of having to chase them from one weaving shed to another, while at least half their attention was elsewhere. So I thanked Dame Alice and said that I should be pleased to stay.

While the two younger women bustled about fetching plates and knives from a corner cupboard and bread and ale from the pantry, and while Dame Alice disappeared into the kitchen to attend to her broth, I sat quietly with my thoughts. The house was not large, and boasted only one maidservant, but I suspected that this was due far more to parsimony than to poverty. Both Alison Burnett and Dame Pernelle had insisted that John Weaver was comfortably off, even if he were not as wealthy as his brother. If, therefore, he deliberately chose to live in this modest fashion, why should he want more money? Why should he covet half the Alderman’s fortune? Not to spend it, that was certain, but then, misers did not want to spend their money, only to know that it was there, in a hole in the wall or under the floorboards.

And yet I could not bring myself to believe that even if one or all of the Weaver men had hatched this plot their womenfolk were party to it. Total innocence is very hard to simulate, and amongst three people I should have expected at least one unguarded look or word that would have indicated their complicity. But Dame Alice and her daughters-in-law had acquitted themselves without faltering. I must wait patiently, therefore, for their husbands in the hope that either John Weaver or one of his sons might supply me with a clue …

And if they didn’t? If I was convinced of their innocence as well as that of their wives, what then? I knew, at least, that Irwin Peto was an impostor, but not who else stood to gain from this fraud. And without that second, shadowy figure being unmasked, there was little chance of convincing the Alderman that he had been grossly and cruelly cheated.