Kate Sedley - The Weaver's inheritance

‘We’ll go to Southwark tomorrow morning,’ he said. ‘Meanwhile, drink up and let’s hear the rest of your news.’

So I recounted the episode I had witnessed at Keyford the preceding month, also the one at Westminster that selfsame morning, and the conversation immediately turned to the likelihood of renewed civil strife, this time not between Yorkist and Lancastrian, but the possibility of internecine war between two royal brothers.

‘Timothy Plummer predicted it,’ I said gloomily, ‘when I saw him at Tewkesbury last January, after the funeral of Duchess Isabel and the news of Charles of Burgundy’s death at Nancy. He said Clarence would propose himself for Mary’s husband, and blame the Woodvilles if he were thwarted, and that’s exactly what has happened. Either he or the Queen will eventually be destroyed in the process, but in the meantime, other innocents on both sides are being sacrificed.’

‘That’s all very well, but how d’you know they’re innocents?’ argued Philip, who liked to take the opposing view, often for no better reason than sheer cussedness. ‘Take this clerk, this Stacey, who accused Blake and Burdet! I was chatting to a man in Leadenhall Market only yesterday morning. He was from Oxford, and he said Stacey’s well-known among the undergraduates as a caster of horoscopes. His whole family’s been involved in the business at one time or another.’

‘Maybe, but that doesn’t make Blake and Burdet equally guilty,’ I insisted, started to get heated.

‘No smoke without fire,’ Philip countered belligerently, slapping his empty cup down hard on the table.

‘Nonsense!’ I snapped. ‘I’ve seen plenty of smoking fires where there was never so much as a wisp of flame.’

‘You’ll tell lies just to win your point,’ my host retorted, and was about to thump me, not altogether playfully, on the shoulder, when his wife leaned over and grasped his wrist.

‘Stop it, the pair of you! Why can men never talk seriously without losing their tempers? In any case,’ Jeanne added, ‘it will soon be time for bed. Roger, you know you’re welcome to share our quarters if you don’t mind sleeping on the floor.’

‘I’ve slept in far worse places,’ I assured her heartily, while Philip, a little shamefaced, poured us both more ale, ‘but tonight I’ll walk as far as the Ald Gate and the Saracen’s Head. I’ve stayed there before, two years since.’

Philip at once demurred, urging me to remain, but Jeanne was too sensible to contest my decision. She knew as well as I did that the hut was not big enough to be shared by a husband and wife, not yet out of love with one another, and a comparative stranger.

‘You’ll be comfortable at the Saracen’s Head,’ she agreed. ‘But you must promise to return here for breakfast.’

I gave her my word and, leaving my pack in a corner of their room, but armed with my cudgel and also Philip’s knife, which he insisted that I borrow, I set out eastward through the evening dusk for the inn which stood just inside the city gate, on the southern side of the wall.

It was an inn greatly favoured by travellers and merchants from East Anglia, being the first hostelry they happened across after entering the city, and consequently was always busy. That evening was no different from any other, and I was forced to share a room with a tailor from the Fens, who had come to London in search of a runaway daughter. I was compelled to listen to his unhappy chronicle of filial disobedience well into the night, and, when he did at last fall asleep through sheer exhaustion, to his snoring. However resolutely I closed my eyes or stuffed my fingers in my ears, I could not sleep, nor could I block out the noise. In the end, I stopped trying to do either, linking my hands behind my head and staring into the smoke-scented darkness.

As my body began to relax, and as I was at last able to ignore the snorts and snuffles coming from the opposite side of the bed, my vacant mind was suddenly preoccupied with another worry; one that I was familiar with and had experienced many times before. It was the feeling that something had been said by someone that should have had significance for me, if only I had had the wit to realize it at the time. I cudgelled my brain, trying to recollect my conversation with the butcher and the woman outside Westminster Hall. Was it something one of them had said? Or the Duke of Clarence? Or Doctor John Goddard? Or was it some words uttered by Jeanne or Philip Lamprey? But the more I thought, the more my head ached and the less I was able to recall.

At last, as I teetered on the brink of sleep, I was seized by the conviction that it was somehow something that all of them had said; that there was a thread linking the various conversations which was eluding me. And my final thought, as I tumbled into the pit of unconsciousness, was that this thread, if it could only be traced, would lead me straight to the heart of the mystery surrounding the impostor who claimed to be Clement Weaver. And even as this thought came to me and was lost again in the mists of sleep, Adela’s face swam in front of my eyes. She was smiling and beckoning me forward, into her cottage …

I sat bolt upright in bed, wide awake, the tailor still snoring on the other side of the bolster which separated us. I had almost had the answer. It was there, somewhere, hovering in the darkness all around me. I had had it, but now it was gone, slipping away into the night like a puff of smoke when the candle flame is doused. I lay down again. Perhaps it would come back to me in the morning. Meanwhile, there was nothing else to do but give my companion a nudge and try once more to sleep.

Philip and I were rowed across to the Southwark side of the river early the following morning.

I was no wiser as to what was troubling me than I had been the previous evening. No great revelation had burst upon me when I awoke. My bed companion from the fen country was still snoring loudly, so I had dressed, paid my shot for the night’s board, resisting the landlady’s pressing invitation to stay to breakfast, and made my way back to Cornhill. There, Jeanne Lamprey, as neat and bright-eyed as ever, having offered me hot water to wash and shave in, regaled me with a meal of bread and salt bacon, washed down with ale. Philip, for a small man, had eaten and drunk with exceptional heartiness, and had then sat picking his teeth while Jeanne bustled about, getting the booth ready for opening. I had offered a helping hand, hoping to shame him, but he had only grinned. He knew his wife better than I did.

‘No, no!’ she had said, almost angrily, waving me to one side. ‘You and Philip get on about your business and let me get on about mine. And, Roger, you’d best leave that leather jerkin behind. Both of you would do well to do as I suggested last night and borrow something from the stall.’

Now, as the oarsman rowed us across the river, skilfully riding the incoming tide, I thought to take notice of what Philip had on, and saw it to be an extremely old and disreputable camlet tunic, with tattered remnants of fur at neck and wrists. It might have been a garment of quality once, but I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to buy it in its present condition, and said as much.

Philip laughed. ‘It isn’t off the stall, you great lummox! Can you see my Jeanne selling anything as tattered and torn as this?’ He leaned towards me from his seat in the stern. ‘Don’t you recognize it?’ I shook my head, bewildered. ‘Look closer,’ he urged. He pointed to just below the collar; or rather to where the collar had once been, for it was now more than half ripped away. ‘At one time, there were two initials there, worked in gold thread, but nothing’s left of ’em now except the stitchmarks.’