Kate Sedley - The Weaver's inheritance

‘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.