Candace Robb - The Cross Legged Knight

‘What else do you know of the Fitzbaldrics?’ Lucie asked. ‘I had not met them until last night.’

‘Misfortune follows them,’ said Emma. ‘They lost their son and daughter to the pestilence. Mistress Fitzbaldric was bedridden for months with her grief.’

‘They do say that Lady Percy was so after her son drowned,’ said Lady Pagnell. ‘But you have seen how well she has refined the art of fainting to avoid unpleasantness.’

Emma nodded. ‘Yet her gown is never soiled or torn.’

Lucie’s thoughts had turned elsewhere.

‘Do you know Lady Percy, Lucie?’ asked Lady Pagnell.

As Lucie nodded, Emma asked what she had been thinking. ‘You looked so sad.’

‘I thought of Cisotta, how I admired her neatness. She worked so hard but always looked as if a servant had just dressed her.’

Emma and Lady Pagnell crossed themselves.

As Owen arrived at the tawyer’s shop the drizzle gave way to a timid sun, glistening off the rooftops of Girdlergate. Eudo’s apprentice, a young man of perhaps twenty years, his curly hair kept from his face with a tight-fitting leather cap, was already at work at the counter that opened on to the street, softening a piece of leather by drawing it back and forth over a blunt blade set in a block of wood. A small child’s plaintive cries came from the house beyond, answered by a man’s angry voice.

‘You are up and hard at work betimes,’ said Owen. Though it was not so early now — mid-morning by the shadows in the street. It was difficult to judge time with so little sleep.

‘I’d as lief work as lie abed listening to little Will screaming and my master in a foul mood. He went out searching for Mistress Cisotta. She was away the night, without leaving word that she would be so long. He came back alone and in such state — I called for a neighbour to come and help Anna quiet the boy.’

‘The child is ill?’

The apprentice jumped at the sound of something heavy hitting a wall in the living quarters. A woman’s voice now drowned out the boy’s cries.

‘Aye, a stomach complaint. It smelled foul in there last night at supper.’

Owen wondered how the lad could smell anything after spending his days working the hides, trampling them in tubs of alum, egg yolks, oil and flour. But the child’s illness might explain Eudo’s absence from the crowd last night at the fire. ‘Your master attended the child all evening?’

‘Nay, he drank and cursed the boy, shouted at Anna for being slow.’ The apprentice rose abruptly as another visitor entered the shop — George Hempe, one of the city bailiffs, wearing his official livery.

Looking from Hempe to Owen, the apprentice said, ‘This is no accident, both of you here. What is amiss?’ He strained his neck to see the street behind Hempe, perhaps fearful of a guild searcher. Owen had noticed scrips, shoes and a belt that looked new, all items a guild tawyer was forbidden to sell.

‘I am not here as a guild searcher,’ Hempe said, responding to the apprentice though fixing his gaze on Owen.

‘We must speak with your master,’ Owen said to the apprentice. ‘Would you tell him we are here? I would not walk in on his family without warning.’

The young man glanced behind him, his heading sinking down between his shoulders. ‘He will want to know the matter of your visit.’

‘I doubt he will ask,’ said Owen.

‘It is the mistress?’

‘Aye, it is.’ The apprentice would know soon enough.

‘Mother in heaven.’ The young man crossed himself. ‘I feared that when he came back with such a face on him. Was it the fire?’

Owen nodded.

‘Now go, tell your master we wait without,’ Hempe said. His deep voice and hawklike appearance lent the slender man an authority that humbled the apprentice.

Shrinking, the young man made his way to the door, opened it and closed it quietly behind him.

Hempe picked up a shoe, turned it over. ‘Pity the guilds go after Eudo as they do — this is good workmanship, better than many a cordwainer in this city.’ He leaned back, nodded to Owen. ‘What exactly are you about, Captain, taking in the servant, bringing word to the family, which I assume you mean to do here? You are the archbishop’s man. The fire occurred outside the minster liberty. This is the city’s concern.’

That was true. In following Thoresby’s orders Owen was encroaching in the city bailiffs’ territory. ‘Mistress Cisotta died at the house of the Bishop of Winchester,’ Owen reminded him.

‘It does not matter. She lived and died in the city.’

‘It matters to Archbishop Thoresby and to Bishop Wykeham.’

‘They have no say in this.’

‘I suspect His Grace has already sent word to the sheriff, the mayor and the council with Bishop Wykeham’s request for this to be kept a Church affair.’

‘A Church affair? Not by any stretch of …’ Hempe stopped as the door opened and the apprentice slipped back in.

He shook his head at the two of them. ‘The air is foul in there. But my master bids you enter. He says he is eager to speak with you.’

Owen followed the bailiff into a long, squat hall with a meagre and very smoky fire in the centre, a few oil lamps sputtering.

‘Smells like all houses with young children,’ Hempe said beneath his breath.

Eudo stood near the fire, holding a squirming, whining young boy out in front of him while Goodwife Claire, a neighbour, spread ointment on the lad’s bare bottom. Eudo’s eight-year-old daughter, Anna, left her place by the largest piece of furniture in the room, a dresser full of jars and bottles of Cisotta’s potions, and crossed over to Owen and Hempe. She was small for her age, with little flesh on her tiny bones. But she comported herself with a mature solemnity, greeting the two men with courtesy and offering them ale.

Owen declined. Eudo might be quietly assisting his neighbour at present, but Owen had heard him earlier and knew he and Hempe were about to deal with a man at the end of his tether. Hempe was apparently of like mind.

The woman had taken the boy and carried him to a box bed in the far corner. He was quieter now, his cries softened to an occasional whimper. Eudo strode towards the guests, wiping his hands on his alum-stained leather leggings. He was dressed to work in the shop — Owen guessed he had never undressed last night. A squat man with a much creased and jowly face, ever scowling, Eudo was as homely as his wife had been beautiful, and at least two score years older than she had been.

‘I want some answers, men. Are you here to give them?’ Eudo pulled up a stool and straddled it, gesturing to them to find themselves something to sit on.

Anna approached, reaching out as if willing a bench to move towards them. Owen met her halfway and suggested she go to sit with her brothers while he and the bailiff talked to her father.

‘When will they bring Ma’s body home, Captain?’ Anna asked.

So they knew. Owen crouched down and took her little hand in his. It was rough for the hand of so young a child. ‘You cannot have your mother’s body here, not with your brother so ill. She is being taken to St Sampson’s. Father John will have parish women prepare her. But you will have your say in that, to be certain.’

She wiped her nose on her sleeve, but her tears were coming steadily.

‘Anna!’ Eudo shouted. ‘Do as the captain said. Go and sit with your brothers, make sure they mind Goodwife Claire.’

Owen watched as the girl began to disobey, opening her mouth to ask yet another question. He was glad of Eudo’s interference — he would find it difficult to lie to such a solemn child, and he was certain she wished to ask how her mother had looked, whether she had suffered.

‘Go,’ he whispered. ‘The little ones need you.’ Owen’s knees ached as he rose, and his head pounded from the lack of fresh air and the reek of the child’s sickness as well as the odours of Eudo’s business. He noted that Eudo grew angry under Hempe’s questioning. The bailiff’s presence was most unfortunate.