Kate Sedley - Wheel of Fate

As though he could read my thoughts, he suddenly leant towards me, his usually benevolent expression contorted into a vicious mask. ‘If you know as much as you seem to do,’ he said, ‘then you have to know what happened to my sister and myself as children. The Godsloves sold us into slavery in Ireland because we had become a burden to them. And also for money. Money! ’ he repeated. ‘Money so that their precious brother could become a fine London lawyer. Do you wonder, when we finally discovered the truth, that we wanted our revenge?’

‘Why did you wait so long?’ I asked, intrigued in spite of myself and the disgust I felt for this murderous pair.

It was Arbella who answered. ‘Because we didn’t know for certain.’ Her lip curled disdainfully. ‘It might surprise you to hear that although, as we grew older, the suspicion of their complicity occasionally crossed our minds, we couldn’t bring ourselves to believe it. You see, our mother was a distant cousin of the Godsloves, so we were in some, admittedly remote, degree kin to them. Of course, Clemency and Charity and Sybilla didn’t deign to regard us as such. To those three, we were merely the housekeeper’s children.’

‘So how did you find out that your suspicions were correct?’ I queried. ‘Something must have brought you to England.’

‘What brought us to England,’ Henry said, ‘was the death of my brother-in-law, Seamus Rokeswood, and a natural curiosity to discover what had become of the Godsloves in the intervening years. Seamus, you see, was the master who had bought us from the slavers and brought us up. He was a widower, years older than Lucy, but he took a fancy to her and when she was old enough, he married her. He had always treated us with great consideration — most Irish are good to their servants — but for the latter part of his life he was an invalid and she wouldn’t leave him. But when he died, we were at last free to do as we pleased. Seamus had left Lucy a little money, enough for our immediate needs and we were able to take ship to Bristol, from where we made our way to London. Our enquiries around the Inns of Court soon located a Lawyer Godslove — Oswald Godslove — and after that, there was no difficulty in finding out where he lived.’

‘And it so happened,’ Arbella put in, ‘that fortune favoured us. The Arbour had just lost its housekeeper, and Clemency was looking for another. I offered my services and was immediately accepted.’ She gave a little crow of laughter. ‘And as if that weren’t sufficient good luck for two people, the parish priest of St Botolph’s had recently disappeared. My brother simply took his place.’

‘Are you really a priest?’ I asked, looking across the table at Henry.

He grinned. ‘Let’s say I’m a sort of hedge-priest. I was known around Waterford for my hell-fire sermons.’

‘But did no ecclesiastical authority ever question your right to be in charge at St Botolph’s?’

That made him laugh out loud. ‘“Ecclesiastical authorities”!’ he mocked. ‘Don’t you realize that parish priests are the scum of the earth, the poorest of the poor? No one cares if they live or die or just run away, as my predecessor did. The stipend — if it ever gets paid, that is — is often less than six pounds a year. Most of the poor devils can’t write their own names. As long as a parish has a priest, and the parishioners aren’t complaining of the lack of one, the authorities are more than happy to ask no questions. I doubt if anyone outside the parish boundaries was even aware that a change had taken place.’

There was silence for a moment or two while I digested this information. Then I shrugged.

‘Very well,’ I said at last. ‘So the wheel of fortune spun your way. What next? Did none of the Godsloves recognize you?’

Arbella sneered. ‘Why should they? Nearly twenty-five years had passed. We shouldn’t have recognized them if we hadn’t known who they were. For quarter of a century, they hadn’t given us a thought. And Celia and Martin would have been too young to remember us with any clarity.’

‘And Reynold and Julian Makepeace wouldn’t have known you at all,’ I said viciously. ‘They’d never set eyes on you or had anything to do with you.’

Both brother and sister looked genuinely bewildered.

‘No, of course they hadn’t,’ Henry agreed.

‘Then why did you have Reynold murdered?’ I demanded furiously.

Henry blinked, staring at me as though I had gone a little mad. Then, slowly, a look of comprehension dawned and he started to grin.

‘You think we had Reynold Makepeace killed! Do the Godsloves believe that, too? Dear oh dear! No, no!’ He shook his head. ‘Reynold’s death had nothing to do with us. It was just what it seemed — a fatal stabbing during an ale-room brawl.’

For a moment, I was unable to take it in. ‘You’re saying you didn’t pay to have Landlord Makepeace murdered?’

It was Arbella’s turn to laugh, ‘No, of course we didn’t. Why should we? He was nothing to us and no blood relation to the others. Besides, at that time Henry and I were still unsure if Clemency and Charity and Sybilla really had been involved in our capture by the slavers.’

‘But sure enough to try to poison Clemency,’ I accused her.

Once again there was silence while the siblings looked at one another.

‘Oh dear, oh dear!’ Henry repeated, smiling broadly. ‘What misapprehensions you’ve all been labouring under. We didn’t try to poison Clemency. Her illness was a fever of the brain as everyone so rightly thought at the time. But — ’ and he leaned towards me, the smile replaced by a grim tightening of the lips — ‘it was during that illness that she believed she was going to die and confessed her sins to me as her parish priest. All her sins.’ He bared his teeth in a wolfish grin. ‘Including, of course, the greatest of them — how she and her two sisters had rid themselves of the two children of their erstwhile housekeeper who had become an embarrassment to them, and made some much needed money out of the necessity, as well.’

My brain was reeling, not least because I realized that God had tricked me into this investigation by planting in my mind the belief that my old friend, the landlord of St Brendan the Voyager, had been one of the victims of this series of killings.

‘You didn’t arrange the stabbing of Reynold Makepeace?’ I repeated stupidly, staring from one to the other of the two smiling faces.

‘No,’ Henry Maynard said.

‘No,’ echoed Arbella.

‘And until Clemency fell ill and made her confession, you had no proof that your suspicions regarding her and her sisters were correct?’

They both shook their heads. ‘But once we knew the truth,’ Arbella went on, ‘we set about getting our revenge. We didn’t care how long it took. Indeed, it was all the sweeter for being protracted. At first, they naturally had no suspicion that they were all under sentence of death, not even when Charity died from mushroom poisoning. That was my idea and such a simple thing to arrange. But after Martin Godslove was set upon and killed by street robbers, they began to be afraid and suspect that someone was trying to get rid of them all.’

‘I thought they seemed unusually quick on the uptake,’ Henry interrupted, ‘but now I see why. Quite erroneously, they had added their stepbrother’s death and Clemency’s illness to the list of mishaps that had befallen them.’

He spoke pleasantly, conversationally, as though he were discussing the weather. It brought me out in a sweat.

‘You paid those men to rob and murder Martin Godslove,’ I accused him, ‘with the money you’d stolen from the tailor, Peter Coleman, and what you’d raised from selling the pyx you, yourself, had taken from the church. Where did you find these cutthroats?’