Kate Sedley - The Weaver's inheritance

Enlightenment dawned. ‘CW,’ I breathed. ‘That’s the tunic you bought all those years ago from Bertha Mendip, after she’d stripped it from a corpse she found in the river. It’s Clement Weaver’s tunic. Fancy you keeping it all this while!’ I wrinkled my nose. ‘Particularly as it still stinks of fish.’

Philip gave another of his raucous laughs. ‘That’s what my Jeanne says, but she knows better than to throw it away because it’s always brought me good luck. Mind you, we never knew for certain that it belonged to Clement Weaver. We only thought it might have done because of the initials.’

‘That’s true enough,’ I admitted grudgingly. ‘And Alison Weaver, as she was then, confirmed that her brother had possessed such a garment and thought he might have been wearing it on the day that he disappeared. But come to think of it,’ I added, ‘a camlet tunic, trimmed with grey squirrel’s fur, was mentioned to me not so long ago by none other than “Clement” himself. But he claims it was stolen from him by the thief who stripped and robbed him after he had swum ashore.’

The oarsman gently beached his craft on a narrow strip of sand and Philip and I disembarked. We climbed the flight of steps to the quayside above, but had barely reached the top before we were surrounded by half a dozen whores, immediately identifiable by their striped hoods. (Most of the Southwark stews are owned by the See of Winchester, whose yearly income is greatly enhanced by these women’s earnings.) They seemed in no way deterred by our impoverished appearance, but turned violently abusive when Philip and I declined their services. For a moment, I was afraid for our safety, but my companion grabbed me by the arm and we took to our heels through a warren of narrow, filthy alleyways fringed by dark and desolate dwellings, whose inhabitants turned to stare suspiciously after us as we ran. I was thankful on more than one occasion for my good stout cudgel and the gleaming steel of Philip’s unsheathed knife.

But finally, without mishap, we reached Angel Wharf, long since abandoned for all commercial purposes, and still looking much as it had done six years earlier. The same collection of hovels and near-derelict houses provided shelter of a sort for the tribe of beggars, thieves and vagabonds who lived and found sanctuary from the law there. As Philip and I got closer, shrill whistles gave warning of our approach, just as they had done on our first visit; and as we emerged on to the quayside, I noted again the little fleet of boats moored alongside the shallow flight of well-worn steps leading up from the river. The denizens of Angel Wharf took no chances: they made sure that they could escape by both land and water.

I could sense that Philip was far less at ease in such a community than he had once been, but he put on a good show of bravado, turning with a flourish to a little knot of onlookers who had gathered outside the door of one of the hovels. ‘Can someone tell me where I can find Bertha Mendip?’ he asked.

They all shuffled their feet and stared vacantly at him, as though he were speaking in Turkish instead of good plain English, and when he repeated his question, they looked even more bewildered.

‘God’s breeches, we’re old friends of hers,’ Philip said impatiently. ‘Bertha knows us.’

A young man, so wizened and stunted in growth that he might have been any age from twelve to twenty, stepped forward. ‘And what names shall we give these friends of hers?’ he demanded.

Before either of us could reply, a voice from inside the nearest hut called out, ‘It’s all right, Matt! I know ’em. One of ’em, at least, and I think I remember the other.’ Bertha Mendip emerged into the daylight, smaller and more emaciated than when we had last met, and with a skin like well-tanned leather. The elf locks that straggled, unkempt, about her shoulders had once been chestnut-brown, but were now almost completely grey. ‘You’re a pedlar,’ she said, addressing me. ‘Leastways, you were, although you look as if you’ve come down in the world since then.’

‘We’re in disguise, Ma,’ Philip grinned, circling her waist with his arm and planting a smacking kiss on her unsavoury cheek. ‘We were afraid that if we came smartly dressed, we might be set on by cutpurses and murderers, although I can’t for the life of me think what should have given us that idea! Not when we’re surrounded by so many honest faces.’

Bertha made a strange gargling noise in her throat which seemed to indicate amusement, for she punched him in the chest and protested, ‘Get away with you, do! So why are you and the pedlar looking for me?’

‘We’re trying to trace a Morwenna Peto,’ I said, ‘and hoped that you might be able to tell us where to find her.’

‘Morwenna Peto, eh?’ The shrewd eyes, whose bright blue had clouded with the passing years, regarded me straitly. ‘Now what would you be wanting with Morwenna?’ But when I would have made shift to explain, Bertha held up her hand imperiously. ‘If it’s going to be a long story, you’d best come indoors. We don’t want all these knuckleheads gawping at us. Matt!’ she yelled to the young man who had first spoken to us, and jerked her head towards the door of the hovel immediately behind her. ‘You remember my son, I expect,’ she added as the three of us followed her inside, and I hadn’t the heart to admit that I had failed to recognize him.

Bertha earned her living from ‘corpsing’; fishing dead bodies out of the Thames, stripping them of their clothes and other belongings (which she then dried and sold) and tipping the denuded cadavers back into the river. The inside of the hut reeked with the stench of decaying flesh and salt water, as garments from her latest catch dried on poles hanging above a smoky, slow-burning fire. The smell was so unpleasant that I was forced, from a fear of being sick, to refuse her offer of ale, saying that I wasn’t thirsty, but Philip accepted with alacrity. Little seemed to upset his stomach.

‘Right,’ she said, when she had discharged her duty as hostess and directed us to sit on a couple of very rickety stools, ‘what’s this about then?’

She listened carefully to all I had to say, sucking thoughtfully on the couple of good teeth still left to her, and, every now and then, spitting with remarkable accuracy into the fire, several feet away. When I had finished, she drank up the rest of her ale and said belligerently, ‘Well, I never said the owner of that tunic Philip bought of me belonged to this Clement Weaver. I don’t deal in names.’

‘No, of course not,’ I agreed hastily. ‘But do you recollect anything about the body you took it from?’

‘After all this while?’ she asked scathingly. ‘I expect he was too nibbled away by the fishes to be recognizable, anyway.’

I swallowed the bile that rose in my throat and shook my head. ‘No, at the time you said he hadn’t been in the water long enough for the fish to get at him.’ I turned towards Philip, catching at his sleeve. ‘This sorry-looking garment is the actual one, still preserved. Look at it carefully. It might bring back a memory or two.’

Bertha rose from her seat and peered closely at the tunic, fingering the cloth and examining it around the neck and down the seams, her face growing ever more lined as she furrowed her brow in concentration. ‘I don’t know how you expect me to remember anything,’ she whined at last, ‘considering the amount of garments I deal with in a twelvemonth. And this happened six years ago, you say?’ She shook her head. ‘No, I can tell you no more than what I’ve told you already.’

‘You said, back then, that the man you took it from was young and had been stripped of all his valuables. He’d been caught in a fisherman’s net, and he was one of three corpses you’d recovered from around the same spot in the river. Is it possible,’ I went on, ‘that this particular man was not dead, but only drugged, both when you dragged him out of the river and when you tipped him back in?’