Chapter Ten

‘I’ve come to pay my respects, Mistress Juett,’ he said, remaining outside the door, as though unsure of his reception. ‘I heard that the tenancy of the cottage has been granted to you, and I want to say how pleased I am. Welcome home.’

Adela went forward, hands outstretched. ‘Richard Manifold! I’m happy to see you again after all these years.’

I had never see her so animated, not even when greeting my mother-in-law, and I felt a small stab of irritation. Surely her cousin deserved a warmer response than a mere friend, however close to one another Adela and the Sheriff’s Officer might have been in the past.

‘Come in,’ she invited, ‘and shut the door. The weather’s bitter.’

‘I can’t stop but a moment or two,’ Richard Manifold protested, but doing as he was bidden. ‘I’m on my way to Master Burnett’s house. It seems he was attacked last night.’

Adela nodded, pushing forward one of the chairs, which she dusted with a corner of her cloak, and seating herself on the other. ‘I know. It was Roger, here, and a man of Alderman Weaver’s who found him and helped carry him home.’

Richard Manifold turned his head to look properly at me for the first time since his arrival and gave me a nod of recognition. ‘You found him, eh? Did Master Burnett give any indication who he thought might be responsible for the assault? Did he mention a name?’

I hesitated a moment before answering. ‘There was some talk of this young man who claims to be Clement Weaver, but…’

The Sheriff’s Officer cut me short. ‘That accounts for it, then.’ In response to our raised eyebrows, he went on, ‘One of our Sergeants was called to Alderman Weaver’s house in Broad Street earlier this morning to deal with a disturbance between Mistress Burnett and two of her father’s servants, who had been ordered to remove her bodily from the premises. She was in a great sweat, my friend said, pouring out a torrent of abuse on the Alderman’s head, and calling him by names which no respectable matron should even know, let alone make use of.’

Adela gave a little snort of laughter. ‘And did they manage to remove her?’ she asked.

Richard Manifold shrugged. ‘As far as I can gather, Mistress Burnett was eventually persuaded to let one of her father’s men take her home, before she was charged with causing a public affray.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘A bad business, that. A very bad business. She’s been a good daughter to the Alderman, and for the old fool to take against her in such an unreasonable fashion is a great shame. But she’s just as pig-headed. She won’t consider for a minute that this man who says he’s her brother might be telling the truth.’ He waved a dismissive hand. ‘However, I didn’t come to discuss the affairs of my neighbours, but to welcome you back to Bristol, Mistress Juett. Though I must say,’ he added, ‘that that name sits uneasily on my tongue, for Adela Woodward you’ve always been to me, and always will be.’

‘That was a long time ago,’ she smiled. ‘I’m the Widow Juett now with a two-year-old son, and no doubt you’re a father yourself, Richard.’

‘I’ve never married,’ he answered simply, looking at her with a soulful expression which, for some unknown reason, deepened my irritation and made me long to knock both their heads together.

My companion, however, suddenly seemed to sense danger in the situation. ‘It was kind of you to call,’ she said hurriedly, ‘but as you can see, there is much work to be done here if I’m to make the cottage habitable by Nicholas’s bedtime.’ And suddenly recollecting her son, she looked around to see what mischief he was up to, only to discover him sitting on the floor at the back of the room, quietly playing among the rushes.

Richard Manifold, with a sigh and a thought to his own duties, took the hint and also his leave, but not before promising to return later in the day to see how she was faring. ‘For there’s still a deal to talk about,’ he added comfortably. ‘No doubt you’ll want to know what’s become of your old friends and neighbours.’

Adela could have said that her cousin had already told her all that she wished to know, but she didn’t, increasing my festering annoyance yet further. She was so calm, so self-contained, so self-possessed. It surely must be as obvious to her as it was to me that the Sheriff’s Officer was presuming on what I guessed to have been an unequal friendship in order to renew their acquaintance, and to ensure a comfortable billet for his bachelor evenings during the long winter months ahead. Why then did she not send the fool packing with a flea in his ear? Why encourage a man who, I arrogantly concluded, was not worthy of her notice?

Not, of course, that it mattered to me who Adela Juett chose as her intimates, but, I told myself, I was indignant on my mother-in-law’s behalf. Margaret had set great store by her cousin’s return, and I resented anyone who might deprive her of Adela’s wholehearted attention and company.

‘What do you wish me to do first?’ I asked when the door had finally closed behind Richard Manifold, repeating my question of half an hour earlier.

But once again the reply was delayed as Adela cried sharply, ‘Nicholas! What are you up to?’

She went across to her son and fell on her knees beside him. I followed suit, and was interested to discover that the cottage floor, when swept clear of rushes – Nicholas having busily created a space all round him – revealed stone flags, and not the beaten earth that I would have expected. But this was not all. With his strong little fingers, and at the cost of a broken fingernail or two, the child was trying to prise free one of the flags which stood proud of its fellows.

‘Nick,’ his mother scolded, ‘just look at your hands! They’re filthy. And we’ve no water as yet to wash them.’ She glanced frowningly at me. ‘I shall have to get that slab hammered down. It could be dangerous. One of us could easily trip over it.’

‘Undoubtedly,’ I agreed. ‘That’s probably how Nicholas discovered it. I’ll secure it for you before the day’s out, but first let’s see if there’s anything underneath which might have caused it to rise.’

I was able to raise the flag, which was some nine or ten inches square, with surprising ease, disclosing a shallow cavity cut into the earth in which it was bedded; a cavity about three inches deep and slightly smaller in area than the stone, which normally fitted comfortably on top of it. I put in a hand and felt all round.

‘The bottom of the hole is lined with a thick waxed cloth,’ I said. ‘Feel for yourself.’

Obediently, Adela did so. ‘A hiding place, evidently and recently disturbed. What … What do you think it was for?’

I pursed my lips. ‘Your friend, Richard Manifold, told me it was common gossip that Mistress Bracegirdle had a hoard of gold secreted somewhere in this cottage. He thinks it’s what her murderer was looking for, and hazarded the opinion that she kept it in that chest under the window. But if she did have any such hoard, this would have been a much better hiding place for it.’

Adela raised thoughtful eyes to mine. ‘And the fact that it’s now empty would suggest that whoever killed her knew exactly where to look for the money. Not a chance thief, then, but one with a fell purpose in mind. Maybe even someone she knew and to whom she had entrusted her secret.’ She nodded solemnly. ‘You were right. Imelda probably did know her killer and let him into the cottage. And after the robbery, he was in too much of a hurry to put the stone back properly.’

I replaced the flag and it fitted snugly between its fellows, removing any necessity to hammer it down. But this very snugness presented a problem of its own: how was it normally lifted?

This part of the room, furthest from the window, was gloomy, and I asked Adela to see if the cottage boasted a tinder-box and some rushlights. She discovered the former on the shelf alongside the pots and pans, together with a lamp, and when this was lit, she carried it over and set it down beside me on the floor. In its pallid glow, I could just make out a deep notch chiselled into the flagstone.

I raised the lamp and looked around the room. ‘There must be a lever somewhere which is inserted into this groove and lifts the slab. Can you see anything anywhere of that description?’

‘There’s something over there, lying among the rushes,’ Adela said. ‘I noticed it earlier and wondered what it was for.’ She got to her feet and took several paces across the room, returning with a hooked iron bar, somewhat rusty and beginning to flake along the shaft. ‘Could this be it, do you think?’

‘Yes, indeed. Well done!’ I said approvingly. I took it from her and fitted the hooked end into the groove. The flagstone lifted with very little exertion on my part and was as easily lowered into place again.

‘Should we tell the Sheriff’s Officers of our find?’ Adela asked me.

‘I think we must, although I doubt if it will alter their opinion that the murderer was a passing thief. Officers of the law can be very thick-headed sometimes,’ I added nastily.

She knew at once that it was a sneer at Richard Manifold’s expense, and looked puzzled, as well she might. I had no clear idea myself what it was that I had against the man. I rose to my feet and was about to put the lever under the bed, out of the reach of Nicholas’s questing little fingers, when I became conscious of two or three fine silk threads caught on a patch of the rusting metal. I must have exclaimed, for Adela asked excitedly, ‘What is it? What have you found?’

For answer, I carried the iron bar over to the window, Adela following me, and opened the casement slightly to let in more light. It had begun to snow again, and a few flakes drifted through to settle on our shoulders.

‘Look here,’ I said, ‘at these strands of silk. They must have come from the clothing of whoever last used the bar.’ And, very gently, I detached them, laying them across my outstretched palm.

My companion put out a cautious hand, and they stirred in the current of air cased by her movement. ‘Two black and one red thread,’ Adela remarked thoughtfully, ‘and of a very fine silk. I don’t know much about Mistress Bracegirdle, but I should doubt she owned a gown as good as this.’

I wound the threads around my forefinger, and handed them to her. ‘Give these to your friend, Richard Manifold, when he returns tonight, and explain how you came by them. And now,’ I went on, without giving her time to reply, ‘for the third time of asking, what do you wish me to do first?’

*   *   *

When I finally set out for my mother-in-law’s house in Redcliffe, darkness was already closing in and it was almost the hour for curfew. I was bone-weary, for this was by no means the first time that day that I had traversed the Frome Bridge. I had crossed and recrossed it on various trips to and from the market; for as well as fetching water and chopping firewood, spreading fresh rushes and helping to make up the bed, there had been food and other necessities to buy. And it seemed to me that each time I returned, Adela had thought of something else she needed, but which she had previously forgotten to mention.

In the end, she had been forced to borrow some money from me, for her meagre funds were running dangerously low. While we ate our dinner – some eel pies that I had bought from a pie-maker’s stall near the Tolzey – she had told me a little more about herself and her marriage to Owen Juett. I gathered that it had not been a happy union, and suspected that she had regretted it almost as soon as she had arrived in Hereford. Owen had been a poor man, a cooper’s assistant, who had never acquired the necessary skills to set up on his own account, and whose untimely death had left her with nothing. Such money as she had, had been earned by her own efforts at the inn where Jack Nym had met her.

‘You mustn’t pity me or feel sorry for me,’ she had added. ‘I knew my husband’s circumstances before I married him, and was headstrong and foolish enough to despise the advice of friends and kinsfolk. Also, to make matters worse, Owen and I were inclined to blame one another for our childlessness. Then when, after five years, we finally had our longed-for son, Owen only lived just another twelvemonth. He died during an outbreak of the plague last spring.’

In spite of my earlier determination not to become involved in Adela’s affairs, I had found my sympathy and interest beginning to be engaged to an alarming degree. I had therefore been extremely relieved when the reappearance of Richard Manifold put a period to my stay. I had taken my leave with an alacrity that had been almost offensive, and had turned a deaf ear to Adela’s invitation to visit her the following day, if I could spare the time. I had left her to her admirer’s company and thankfully made my way home.

Margaret was awaiting my arrival with impatience, and wanted to know every detail of the day; while Elizabeth, robbed of her playfellow, climbed on to my knees and vied for my attention with an incomprehensible spate of childish babble. I answered their demands as best I could, hoping that my replies to my daughter would make more sense than her questions – if that was what they were – did to me. As for my mother-in-law, I was able to satisfy her curiosity, although the information that I had left Adela in the company of Richard Manifold greatly displeased her. And when I added that it was his second visit of the day, she folded her lips and did not speak again for several minutes.

However, my revelation, which I had saved until last, about the secret hiding place under the floor, jolted her out of her sulks and rekindled her interest.

‘What do you think Imelda used it for?’ she asked, dipping salted herring in oatmeal and beginning to fry it in a pan over the fire.

‘The obvious answer, in view of what happened to her,’ I said, ‘is money. But another question is: Did Mistress Bracegirdle make, or have made, the hiding place, or did she inherit it along with the cottage? Did a previous Priory tenant dig it out of the floor beneath the flagstones? And if so, did Imelda Bracegirdle even know that it was there?’

‘But you said the flagstone had recently been lifted,’ my mother-in-law objected, pausing in the act of turning the herrings.

‘Yes. But while it’s possible that the person who killed her might have known of the hiding place, she might not have done,’ I suggested.

Margaret immediately, and quite rightly, scouted this idea. ‘Nonsense! John Bracegirdle rented that cottage from the Priory for many, many years, long before he married Imelda Fleming. Indeed,’ she added, warming to her theme, ‘it’s more than likely that he was the one who had this safe place made. Or, rather, dug it out himself, for it’s doubtful he’d have trusted anyone else to do it and keep the secret. He had the reputation of being a miser. Whether it was deserved or not, I’ve no idea; but for whatever reason the hiding place was created, there can surely be no argument that Imelda would have known of its existence. Therefore, if she did indeed inherit money from her husband, that’s where she would have put it for safekeeping. Not,’ she went on, placing the herrings in a dish which she then handed to me, ‘that there was ever any sign of Imelda being a wealthy woman. If she had money, she must have been as great a miser as John.’

‘And there seems to be no proof for that rumour,’ I said, setting Elizabeth on the floor and beginning to eat my belated supper.

‘True. It’s all conjecture.’ My mother-in-law removed the empty pan from the heat and laid it to cool on the hearthstone. ‘Nevertheless, Imelda Bracegirdle has been murdered and this hiding place, according to you, has been disturbed. I should say that there’s only one conclusion to be drawn from those two facts.’

‘Not necessarily,’ I objected, but more for argument’s sake than from conviction. Imelda Bracegirdle must have known what the iron bar with the hooked end was for, or she would never have kept it all those years. And more than ever, I felt certain that my theory that she had known her murderer was the correct one. I could not believe that a chance thief would have known where to search for her gold; and I wondered what Richard Manifold had made of this additional information that Adela must, by now, have laid before him. And that thought, in its turn, reminded me of what he had told us concerning Alison Burnett.

My mother-in-law, however, was already in possession of the facts, having been paid a visit by Goody Watkins.

‘I should have got around to telling you eventually,’ she said, ‘when I remembered it.’

She sat down suddenly on a stool, and I thought how uncommonly pale she looked. Margaret, it was true, never had many roses in her cheeks during the winter months, but today her complexion was the colour of chalk.

‘Are you feeling ill?’ I asked her.

‘A little light in the head, that’s all,’ she answered. ‘If you’ll draw me a cup of ale from the barrel, I’ll do well enough.’ And when I had fetched it for her and she had sipped a little of it, she did indeed seem better. ‘Now,’ she went on, setting down her cup, ‘what were we talking about?’

I returned to my herrings. ‘You were saying that you already knew about the scene between Mistress Burnett and her father this morning.’

‘Ah, yes! Goody Watkins paid me a visit sometime after dinner.’ Margaret smiled faintly. ‘Presumably, by then, all her army of spies had reported back to her.’ Encouraged by my snort of laughter, she continued, ‘Someone had met Ned Stoner by the High Cross and been told that Mistress Burnett had come ranting and raving to the Alderman’s door almost before it was light, accusing her self-styled brother of attacking her husband last night by Saint Werburgh’s Church. Ned Stoner claimed she was well-nigh hysterical, and that having gained entrance to her father’s house, and the two gentlemen not being out of bed, she went rushing upstairs and set about the younger man like an avenging fury, tearing out tufts of his hair and scratching his face until it bled. The Alderman tried to intervene, but got the same treatment for his pains, and had to send one of the maids to fetch Rob Short and Ned to remove her from the house. He also sent for one of the Sheriff’s Officers to enforce the law and threaten her with causing an affray. According to Ned, she went in the end, in floods of tears and shaking all over, as though she had an ague.’

I finished my herrings and pushed my plate to one side, before starting on the oatcakes and cheese that my mother-in-law put in front of me. I recalled Richard Manifold’s words. ‘A bad business,’ I said. ‘A very bad business.’

Margaret sighed and rose wearily from her stool to put Elizabeth to bed. ‘It is that,’ she agreed. ‘Alderman Weaver looked very ill to me when I called on him this afternoon, to beg a place for Adela among his spinners. That girl of his will be the death of him if she’s not very careful.’

‘They’ll be the death of each other,’ I said. Evidently Mistress Burnett disbelieved her husband’s denial that Irwin Peto was the one who had attacked him. What a fool the man was ever to put the notion into her head. Unwisely, I spoke my thought aloud.

‘By your account, it was you who first mentioned the impostor – if indeed he is that. You told Master Burnett that you and Ned Stoner had seen him in the Lattice,’ my mother-in-law chided me.

I should have remembered that Margaret had a good memory, particularly for those details one would prefer her to forget. I changed the subject. ‘You haven’t yet said what Alderman Weaver’s response was to your request about Adela. Was he agreeable?’

‘He was graciousness itself, and asked me to tell her to present herself at the baling sheds to collect her wool as soon as she liked, and he would see that word was passed along to the overseer by this evening. We must buy a spinning wheel for her, Roger, as we promised. Tomorrow morning, you must go to the carpenter’s in Temple Street and get her the best one that he has in his shop. And I’ll go to Lewin’s Mead and give her the news. Elizabeth can go with me. She’ll like to see Nicholas again.’

She was as good as her word, and set out immediately after breakfast the following morning, although she looked so unwell that I begged her not to go. There had been yet another severe frost during the night, and now it was snowing once more.

‘Stay here in the warm with Elizabeth. I’ll visit Adela as soon as I’ve been to Temple Street,’ I added.

But my offer was spurned. ‘The fresh air will do me good,’ was her only answer.

I could do no more and completed my errand at the carpenter’s before returning home to collect my pack. I had no intention of going far beyond the city walls in such weather, but I needed to make some money, and people reluctant or unable to go out in the snow welcomed goods brought to their doorsteps. It was well past dinner-time when pangs of hunger sent me back over the bridge to Redcliffe, my mouth already watering in anticipation of one of Margaret’s winter stews.

But when I pushed open the cottage door, there was no savoury smell to greet me. Instead, I found my mother-in-law slumped down beside the bed, unconscious, while my daughter sat beside her, sobbing with fright and clutching her grandmother’s arm.

‘Granny ill,’ Elizabeth informed me, raising her tear-blotched face.