Kate Sedley - The Three Kings of Cologne

I promised humbly to keep the pest under control and ordered Hercules to sit at my feet and keep quiet. To my surprise, he obeyed instantly, which made me suspect that the geese had frightened him a great deal more than he had scared them. The old man turned out to be the dame’s brother, not her husband as I had presumed, and they introduced themselves as Judith and Alfred Humble. An enquiry by the latter as to what I was doing in Westbury and why I was knocking on doors produced the whole story; a tale of murder which not only thrilled them to the marrow of their ancient bones, but also led to Judith Humble banging excitedly on the cottage table with her fist, crying in her piercingly shrill tones, ‘I can remember that girl! Never knew her name, but she was always around here at one time, meeting some man or another. You recollect her, Alfred. You must do! She’d hang around here, talking to you over the fence. You weren’t a bad-looking man in them days, before your hair went white and your teeth fell out.’

‘Ar,’ her brother agreed, when he’d thought the matter over. ‘It were a long time gone, though. Must be. I ain’t had all me teeth for ten year or more. But I do recall her now you bring her to mind. Young, she were. Lovely. Sit on that horse of hers, she would, and chat to me like I were a proper gentleman, not just a cottager. I often wondered what had become of her. Stopped coming all of a sudden like, and I never set eyes on her again. And now you tell me she’s dead. Murdered.’ His faded eyes slowly filled with tears.

His sister sniffed disparagingly. ‘Well, I can’t say I’m that surprised. All those different men she used to meet! I clearly remember thinking to myself, “You’re asking for trouble, my lady! Just begging for it, with your fine clothes and your airs and graces. You’ll come to a bad end, my girl!” And you see, I was right!’

‘When you say “all those different men”,’ I asked, ‘how many exactly were there?’

‘Three,’ was the prompt reply. ‘I remember as though it were yesterday. But she never met them all together, that goes without saying. They each had their appointed days, and I doubt if any one of them knew the other two existed. But she was bound to make a botch of it one day. One day, one of ’em was bound to find out he was being made a fool of, and then, I thought, you’re for it, my young mistress.’

‘Can you recall at all what the three men looked like?’ I leaned forward eagerly on my stool.

Judith Humble frowned. After a minute or two’s deep cogitation, she finally answered, ‘If memory don’t play me false, one — the one I recollect best — was tall and fair and very handsome. Too good for her, although it was obvious she didn’t think so. She thought herself better than him; but then, I could tell, she thought herself better than anybody. Mind you, to be fair, the other two weren’t nothing remarkable. I can’t really remember either of them.’

‘I’ve been informed that one might have had red hair.’

The dame sipped her ale and wiped her mouth on her apron. ‘You could be right, at that,’ she agreed.

‘And Mistress Linkinhorne always met them here? In Westbury?’

‘I can’t say that for certain, but this did seem to be her trysting place. What do you tell me her name was?’

‘Isabella Linkinhorne.’

Judith Humble nodded her head. ‘That explains it, then. For years there was the letters I and L and R and M carved into the trunk of one of the trees hereabouts, enclosed in a heart. Could have shown it to you, but the tree came down in a storm three or four years ago.’

I too drank some of my ale while I pondered on this newly acquired information.

‘So, one of the men had the initials R.M.,’ I mused.

The dame nodded. ‘It would seem so.’

Alfred Humble suddenly spoke up. He had been so quiet for the last few minutes that I had almost forgotten his existence, especially as he had left the table and gone to sit by the fire, lost, I suspected, in memories of a young and beautiful girl who had carelessly made a friend of him; memories half-forgotten, but now recalled to mind.

‘One of them three men she met lived in Bath. She told me so,’ he said.

I turned my head sharply to look at him. ‘Which one? Do you know?’

The old man shrugged. ‘She never said and I didn’t ask. Weren’t my business.’ He added softly, more to himself than to me or his sister, ‘The last time I ever recollect seeing her was on a blustery March morning, when it weren’t fit for a dog to be out. Wrapped up in that blue cloak of hers, she were. She waved at me and smiled.’

‘Did you see anyone with her?’ I asked. ‘Or was she alone?’

The old man furrowed his brow. ‘Can’t rightly recollect,’ he said after a moment. ‘It’s a long time ago.’

‘Try to remember,’ I urged him. ‘It could be very important.’

Judith Humble sniffed. ‘Well, I can tell you that,’ she announced surprisingly. ‘I saw her that morning, too, when I looked out the door to yell at you — ’ she nodded at her brother — ‘to come inside and not catch your death of cold, standing there gawking, like some mazed youngling instead of a grown man in possession of his senses. And the wind and rain blowing that hard across the downs it was enough to give you an inflammation of the lungs.’ She turned to me. ‘Alfred’s always had a weak chest, ever since he were a child. Many’s the time my poor mother-’

I stemmed these reminiscences without compunction.

‘And was there anyone with Mistress Linkinhorne?’

‘Mistress Link-? Oh, yes! Her! I’d forgotten what you said her name was. Of course there was someone with her. A man. There always was.’

‘Not always,’ Alfred Humble protested. ‘Sometimes she was on her own.’

‘Not often,’ his sister snorted. ‘She played those three fools one against the other …’

Once again, I interrupted. ‘Did you get a glimpse of his face? Do you know which of the three men it was?’

Judith Humble thought a minute, but then shook her head. ‘He had his hood pulled well forward over his face against the weather.’

I sighed. This information agreed with that given me by Jonathan Linkinhorne. I asked, ‘Did anyone, to your knowledge, come here making enquiries about Isabella in the next few days?’

The old lady nodded briskly. ‘They did that. Which is why the sighting stuck in my mind, I suppose. It were a couple o’ young men, as I recall. Said they worked for her father, though no names were mentioned.’

‘Did they say why they were enquiring?’

‘Said their young lady hadn’t been home all night. Ho, ho! I thought to myself. There’s a surprise!’ The sarcasm was heavy. ‘I’d have wagered my last groat that that girl was going to cause trouble one fine day. Gone off with the man I saw, was my reckoning. And now you’ve brought it all back to mind, I guess that was the last time I ever clapped eyes on her. Not that I’d have sworn to it until this minute, but, yes, that was the last time. And now you tell us that the poor creature didn’t run away at all: she was murdered.’

‘Probably by the man she was with that day,’ I answered sombrely. ‘A thousand pities you didn’t see his face.’

‘Well, I didn’t,’ she replied with some asperity, as though she suspected I didn’t quite believe her. ‘It wasn’t a day for lingering at the door, and I was more concerned with getting Alfred to come indoors than in discovering which gudgeon she had persuaded to keep a tryst with her in such bad weather.’

‘I believe you,’ I said placatingly. ‘And I can only thank you for all you’ve told me. You have a remarkable memory, Mistress.’