Kate Sedley - The Weaver's inheritance

Timothy joined me, kneeling down and staring thoughtfully into the cavity. ‘Undoubtedly this is where Mistress Bracegirdle kept her own charts,’ he said. ‘You see how the bottom is lined with waxed cloth to keep them dry and stop the parchment from mildewing.’

‘Of course!’ I breathed. ‘We thought it must have contained a secret hoard of money that was stolen by her murderer, but why would she have gone to so much trouble just to store coins? The bare earth would have sufficed.’

Timothy sighed regretfully. ‘Well, there’s nothing here now.’ He lapsed into silence for a few moments, before adding, ‘I must return to Duke Richard at once and tell him that we’ll have to search elsewhere for John Stacey’s papers. Let’s pray to God that the Queen’s or Earl Rivers’s spies don’t locate them before we do!’

He had risen to his feet and was making ready to leave even as he spoke. For the sake of politeness, I urged him to stay a little longer and have some refreshment before setting out, but he refused. There could be no delay: he had to get back as soon as possible to London, where Duke Richard was on a brief visit from the north, to remonstrate with the King and comfort his mother, and decide what was now best to be done.

I did not argue, for I was as anxious to see him gone as he was to go. My mind was whirling. All those scraps of knowledge that had been in my possession for days, weeks, months, had begun to make sense, and I could not wait to start piecing them together.

* * *

Adela sat in the place that Timothy Plummer had so recently occupied and I sat opposite her, our hands almost, but not quite, touching in the middle of the table. Nicholas had been sent to play with his toys at the back of the room, but, childlike, was happier cradling an old leather water bottle in his arms and talking to it in his own baby language.

Having engaged Adela’s pledge of secrecy, I had told her not only what I had found out in London during my visit to Morwenna Peto, but also everything that had passed between Timothy and myself this afternoon, for I knew she was to be trusted, even if he did not. She was intrigued by the notion that Imelda Bracegirdle had been a caster of horoscopes, and readily agreed that the underfloor cavity could have been the hiding place for her charts and predictions.

‘But who would have taken them?’ Adela asked. ‘Who would have known that they were there?’

‘Someone who had asked her to cast a horoscope. Someone who had either noticed that iron bar in the corner and worked out what it could be for, or who had seen her use it. And when she was dead, that someone opened up the hiding place and took the charts away.’

Adela frowned. ‘But to what purpose? Are you saying that they were the reason she was murdered? Not her money?’

‘I doubt if she had any money other than what she earned from spinning, and the little extra she made in secret by her horoscopes. But after Irwin Peto turned up, claiming to be Clement Weaver, she may have been sharp enough to put two and two together and realize how she could extort more money in return for keeping her mouth shut. If that is what happened, she signed her own death warrant.’

My companion’s frown deepened. ‘I don’t understand. How can Mistress Bracegirdle’s murder and Irwin Peto’s impersonation, as you now assure me it is, be linked?’

‘By the murderer,’ I answered simply. ‘Do you remember when we first looked at the iron bar, we discovered some threads attached to it?’

‘Two black threads and a red; yes, I remember. They were silk.’

‘And do you also remember, on an earlier occasion, a woman, outside her father’s house, calling and calling for her husband, who made no answer? And why didn’t he answer? Probably because he wasn’t there; probably because he had slipped out earlier, across the Frome Bridge, and was busy about his own murderous business.’

Adela passed her tongue between her lips. ‘You’re talking about William Burnett,’ she said, ‘unless I’m very much mistaken.’

‘I am.’

She gave an incredulous laugh. ‘But that’s nonsensical! If Mistress Burnett is disinherited, then he is too. If she gets no money, then neither does he. What would be the point of it?’

I didn’t reply directly. ‘A few days before Margaret received your letter from Hereford,’ I said, ‘I saw Alderman Weaver and Mistress Burnett coming out of his house together. Now, everybody says that Alison is like her mother, that she looks like the de Courcys more than the Weavers, but that day it struck me that she bore a stronger resemblance to her father than I had previously imagined. At the same time, I thought how sickly the Alderman appeared.’ I leaned a little closer, and suddenly my hands were holding hers. ‘Don’t you see, the similarity lay in the fact that they are both unwell; that both are suffering from some wasting disease? Alison Burnett was ill long before the quarrel over the will. That has aggravated it, accelerated it, but it’s not the cause. ’

Adela followed my reasoning without any prompting, as I had known she would. ‘And you think that William Burnett, realizing this, had Imelda Bracegirdle cast his wife’s horoscope. And if that horoscope predicted Alison would die before her father…’ Her voice tailed off and she looked at me with startled speculation in her eyes.

‘Yes! Yes!’ I breathed, tightening my grip on her hands. ‘If Mistress Burnett were to die before the Alderman, then her husband would never get a penny of her father’s money. I’ve been told that Alfred Weaver has grown to dislike his son-in-law, so he would be extremely unlikely to make a new will that provided for William.’

‘But Master Burnett doesn’t need the Alderman’s money. He has a very substantial fortune of his own.’

‘So we are led to believe. But has he? Firstly, did he inherit as much from his father as everyone thought? I’ve been told that both old Alderman Burnett and his father before him were gamblers; and only three months after the Alderman’s death, William merged the business with that of his father-in-law. Why? Simply because it made good sense to do so, or because he realized that it was the only way to keep it going? And secondly, there’s the matter of his own gambling debts.’

‘Does he have any?’ Gently Adela freed her hands from mine and rose to fetch us both more ale.

I swivelled round to watch her as she crossed the room, and thought, not for the first time, how gracefully she moved.

‘According to Nick Brimble and Jack Nym, William Burnett is a frequent visitor to the upper room of the New Inn, which is apparently given over to games of hazard. Nick Brimble told me that William owed money to Jasper Fairbrother, and he and Jack reckoned it was a couple of Jasper’s bravos who attacked William that night outside Saint Werburgh’s Church, because he had delayed paying Fairbrother his money. But why had he delayed, knowing what might happen to him? I don’t think it was out of meanness or cussedness as Jack and Nick believe, but because he couldn’t afford to honour the debt.’

Adela handed me my cup of ale and sat down again, sipping her own. ‘But why, in that case, when he must have guessed who his assailants were, did he try to throw suspicion on Irwin Peto?’ She answered her own question. ‘To put Alison off the scent, I suppose.’

‘Partly for that reason, maybe, but also because he knew she was only too eager to believe everything bad about Irwin, and that, with a little encouragement, which he no doubt subsequently gave her, Alison would quarrel even more bitterly with her father on the subject. One of the things,’ I went on, ‘that has always bothered me about that quarrel is the apparently maladroit way in which William Burnett handled the affair, making the rift between the Alderman and his daughter even greater than it need have been by his arrogant and insulting behaviour.’