Kate Sedley - The Tintern Treasure

As she spoke, recollections of my recent dreams gave me an unpleasant jolt, but try as I would I could still make no sense of them. I stared at the buttons. I fingered them. That they held some significance for me, I was certain, but what that significance was continued to elude me. .

Joseph Sibley lived in Redcliffe, so unloaded me along with my pack and cudgel close to St Thomas’s Church. I thanked him, paid him and then set out with a feeling of relief in the direction of Bristol Bridge. My way took me close to Margaret Walker’s cottage, but I had no intention of breaking my journey to pay her a visit. Home beckoned. I just wanted to get there as soon as possible.

Fate, however, decreed otherwise. As I started to cross the bridge, I realized that my former mother-in-law was just ahead of me and no doubt bound for Small Street. I had no option but to overtake her with as cordial a greeting as I could manage.

The pleasantry was not returned. ‘Oh, it’s you, is it?’ she said grimly. ‘And not before time. It seems to me you’re never around when you’re most needed.’

‘Why?’ I asked uneasily. ‘What’s happened?’

‘You mean apart from your house being broken into?’

‘Broken into again?’ I was aghast. ‘When. . When did this happen?’

‘The day before yesterday, in the morning while Adela was at market with the children. She’d foolishly taken that dog of yours along with her because she had a notion in her head that someone had been trying to poison him.’

‘Poison Hercules?’ I stopped dead in the middle of a crowded High Sreet, staring at Margaret Walker in horror. At the same time, I recalled a conversation with Sir Lionel Despenser in which he had expressed surprise — and, now I came to think of it, concern — that I owned a dog. I remembered telling him how Hercules had been acquired. ‘Is. . Is he all right?’

‘Quite unharmed, thanks to Adela, who kept him indoors after he’d been sick on two occasions. Although considering what that animal scavenges from the drains, why she thought — ’ Here Margaret broke off and seized my arm, urging me forward. ‘For the sweet Lord’s sake shift yourself, Roger! You’re getting in everyone’s way standing there like a great booby with your mouth half-open! Besides, you’ve a bigger worry than that awaiting you.’

‘Was anything stolen from the house?’ I asked as we began to move, her last words not sinking in for the moment.

‘Adela says not, but of course it hasn’t stopped Dick Manifold from being round there every five minutes. If you’ll take my advice my lad, you want to keep your eye on him.’

‘I do, believe me. . What did you mean, a bigger worry?’

My quondam mother-in-law snorted. ‘That child’s turned up again. He’s bigger now, about ten or eleven months I should say, and he’s not with the woman who brought him here first, before you came home in April.’

‘What child?’ I demanded. But I knew perfectly well what child. I was simply playing for time.

We had by now reached the High Cross and I came to a halt in its shadow. Margaret Walker stood still perforce and turned to face me. ‘The child that woman claimed was yours. Only now it seems the story’s changed. It appears that after all the boy is not yours, only has some sort of claim on you.’ She gave another snort. ‘I’ve never heard such nonsense. I told Adela that if this present woman shows up again to send her away with a flea in her ear. I don’t know what your connection is with that creature in Gloucester, and I don’t want to know, but it’s obvious she’s trying to force this child on you by one means or another. She’s afraid to come here herself for fear of coming face-to-face with you, so she’s persuaded her friend to do the deed for her.’

If that were only the case, I thought with a sinking heart, how much simpler things would be. It was apparent to me that Juliette Gerrish had died and that Jane Spicer, according to her promise, had brought Luke to Bristol in an effort to persuade me to take my half-nephew into my family and raise him as my own. I groaned inwardly. I could foresee storm clouds ahead.

We walked down Small Street, in silence on my part but with Margaret giving me a great deal of advice to which I paid not the slightest attention. Indeed, most of it I didn’t even listen to, one half of my mind being preoccupied with the break-in and what it meant, and the other with my responsibility to my half-brother’s child and how I was going to persuade Adela that we had no choice but to shelter the poor little mite.

I had been half afraid, after Margaret’s warning, of finding myself confronted by Richard Manifold, but my fears proved groundless. In fact, I had rarely known the house so calm and peaceful and we walked through the hall into the kitchen where all three children were seated round the table calmly doing their lessons. Adela glanced up as we entered with a finger to her lips and indicating the old cradle on the floor beside her and which she was gently rocking with her foot.

‘Hush,’ she said to Margaret, ‘he’s sleeping.’ Then she saw me and was immediately on her feet to give me a kiss of greeting.

‘Roger! You’re home!’

Immediately all was pandemonium. Elizabeth, Nicholas and Adam left their horn books with shouts of, ‘What have you brought us?’ Hercules nipped my ankles as a punishment for going away and leaving him behind, while Luke, just as I remembered him, all copper curls and huge brown eyes, sat up and beamed at all and sundry.

Adela stooped, picked Luke up and tucked him under one arm. ‘He’s so active,’ she explained. ‘You have to watch him every minute.

Margaret Walker and I stared at her.

‘Where’s. . Where’s Jane Spicer?’ I asked.

My wife smiled. ‘Gone home to Gloucester.’ The smile vanished. ‘Mistress Gerrish died two weeks ago.’

‘Adela!’ Margaret exclaimed, outraged. ‘You’ve not agreed. . You’ve not been so foolish as to keep that child, have you?’

Her cousin looked surprised. ‘What else can I do? And once I’d seen him. . He’s such a sweet-natured child.’

She turned her head to smile at Luke who grinned in return, revealing two teeth. He patted her cheek.

I sank down on the nearest stool, my head in a whirl. I had been prepared for squalls, but unbelievably all seemed set for fine weather. All the same. .

‘Sweetheart,’ I said weakly, ‘are you sure about this? Another woman’s child! And another boy! What. . What do the children think about it?’ I glanced nervously at the three of them as they rummaged eagerly through my pouch and pockets, extracting the small gifts I had had the forethought to buy them in Wells. I recalled a time when Adam was young and the other two had tried to give him away.

Adela shrugged. ‘They don’t seem to mind. If anything, Adam is rather pleased, I think, to have a member of the family younger than himself. It means he’s no longer the baby. .’

‘I’m a man now,’ my son interrupted. ‘I have a knife.’

‘. . while Bess and Nick,’ my wife resumed, ‘as you well know, have always been wrapped up in one another.’

‘You’re a fool, my girl!’ Margaret Walker declared loudly, making me jump. I had forgotten she was there. ‘Another mouth to feed! Another child to cook and clean and sew for! And not even yours or Roger’s!’ She prodded me hard on the shoulder. ‘You’d better go and see King Richard — if king he really is — and tell him you need to be paid more.’

I slammed my fist down on the table. ‘I tell you, mother-in-law — ’ she still liked me to call her that — ‘I don’t work for the king! And what do you mean, if he really is that?’

‘You’ve no cause to take that aggressive tone with me, Roger. There are plenty of people, I can tell you, who think he has no right to the title, who believe that his claim was a trumped-up one concocted with the help of Robert Stillington. And what has happened to those poor boys, the little king and his brother? Tell me that! Rumour has it — ’