Kate Sedley - The Midsummer Rose

Luke Prettywood made no comment, but I could well imagine his thoughts as we left Saint Giles and proceeded along Bell Lane, he and Marianne walking decorously side by side, with me only a pace or two behind. He must have wished me in Hades.

A few yards further on, we turned into Broad Street. The house that had belonged to Alderman Weaver, and which I had once known so well, was a little over halfway up on the left-hand side. And judging by the growing babel of noise, the market around the Tolzey was getting under way, leaving Luke Prettywood no choice but to abandon his companion and take himself off. In silence, the lady and I watched him walk rapidly up the street and disappear into the rabble of people heading for the market. Only then did she turn her attention back to me.

‘Wait there,’ she ordered, ‘while I find out who’s at home. Who do I say is calling? Roger the Chapman?’ There was the same slightly contemptuous note in her voice that I had noticed earlier, when she had been speaking of her sister-in-law’s maid.

I hesitated, suddenly a prey to misgivings. If Mistress Alefounder was not the woman I had met at Rownham Passage, what excuse could I offer for calling on her? As for Mistress Hollyns, unless, by some lucky chance, she was wearing a blue brocade gown, I shouldn’t even recognize her. As so often in the past, I had rushed into a situation without carefully considering all its ramifications.

‘Perhaps I’ll leave my visit until another time,’ I said, backing away and treading on the toes of several indignant passers-by. ‘Yes, that’s what I’ll do. Let me wish you good day, Mistress Avenel.’

She shrugged, plainly thinking me an idiot, and, having knocked for admittance, vanished inside the house. But instead of returning home, I crossed the street, nearly getting run down by one of the refuse carts clearing the central drain, and took refuge in the mouth of an alleyway almost directly opposite. Here, I propped myself against the wall of a house and waited.

And waited. Half an hour or more passed and still no one had emerged from the Avenel dwelling. Either Marianne had kept her own counsel, or her story had provoked little or no curiosity among the inmates. No one had considered it worthwhile to find out if I might still be loitering in the vicinity.

After my lengthy wait, my legs were again beginning to feel as if they were stuffed with sawdust. The morning was getting steadily hotter as the sun rose in a sky of unrelenting blue. I removed my jerkin, but the heat burned through the linen of my shirt until I could feel it scorching my skin. My head swam and once or twice I had to swallow hard to prevent the bile from rising in my throat. Moreover, I was afraid I was becoming conspicuous. Several people who had noticed me on their way up Broad Street stared even harder on the return journey, obviously wondering why I was still skulking there. Those who recognized me shrugged and no doubt decided that I was living up to my reputation for nosiness. And, of course, there were others who were not even as charitable as that.

‘Snooping again, Roger?’ A familiar voice sounded in my ear.

‘Hello, Jack,’ I said, none too pleased at being accosted.

Jack Nym, the carter, gave me his broken, black-toothed grin. He was wearing his customary greasy, food-stained leather jerkin and wrinkled hose, and even in the height of summer his nose was running. He wiped it on one of the empty sacks he was holding. Adela and I had once spent an entire week in his company, on a journey to London, and a kinder, more considerate person it would be hard to find. (Moreover, he had never been one of those alienated by my stroke of good fortune.) But he wasn’t a man whom anyone with a sensitive nose would choose to get too close to, particularly on a warm summer’s day.

‘I hear you haven’t been well,’ he continued, sniffing prodigiously. ‘Fell in the Avon, I was told. Mind you, it happens to most of us sometime or another. Drop too much at the Rownham inn, was it?’ He gave me no chance either to offer an alternative explanation or to reflect how every detail of one’s private life became common gossip in this city, but went on, ‘I trust you’ll have recovered enough for the midsummer revels.’ Almost at once, his face fell. ‘How do you count the petals on a rose, chapman?’

I laughed. ‘You go out into the hedgerows and pick a dog rose, Jack. It’s no good trying to do it with one of those fussy, frilly things you buy from the street vendors. Even so,’ I sighed, my mood suddenly matching his in despondency, ‘with a wife as clever as mine, she knows I’ve already counted the petals and made certain there’s an odd number. So instead of starting off: ‘He loves me, he loves me not’, she reverses it and I end up accused of not loving her.’

‘That’s the trouble with women,’ the carter agreed morosely. ‘They’re that artful, you can never win. Silly custom, anyway! The Midsummer Rose, I mean.’

‘Indeed it is! However hard you try, it’s nigh on impossible to convince even a sensible woman that picking the petals off a rose doesn’t prove your affection for her.’

Jack nodded glumly, then raised his eyes to my face.

‘You feeling all right, lad? You’re looking mighty pale. What you need is a sit down and a draught of the Green Lattis’s best ale. Come on! I’ll pay. Here, lean on me.’

I refused his offer of assistance — he was too short to make a comfortable crutch — but accepted his invitation. I suddenly realized that I was indeed in urgent need of refreshment and rest, but I didn’t want to return home yet and face my wife’s triumphant. ‘I told you so!’ At the same time, the idea of the Green Lattis failed to appeal, it being one of the city’s most popular taverns, frequented by many of my friends and acquaintances. I couldn’t stand the thought of their jokes at my expense or their probing questions concerning my recent dousing in the river Avon.

‘Couldn’t we go somewhere else?’ I proposed, as we made our slow way up Broad Street, elbowing a path through the crowds.

‘Why?’ Jack Nym demanded reasonably. ‘The Lattis is nearest, and you don’t look to me like you want to go dragging all over town, especially in this heat. I’m bloody sure I don’t.’

‘There are a couple of alehouses in Marsh Street,’ I suggested.

‘You are joking, aren’t you?’ the carter asked grimly, grabbing my arm as my footsteps faltered momentarily. ‘Marsh Street is where the Irishers drink, and they don’t care for strangers.’

I knew this. I had visited one of the alehouses there many years ago, when I had been trying to find out what had happened to Margaret Walker’s father. It was not an experience I had been eager to repeat, although I had received a polite, if frosty reception. But now I was in a truculent mood.

‘They’re the strangers. I live here.’

Jack Nym tightened his grip on my elbow.

‘Don’t be more of a fool than you can help, chapman! You know as well as I do what trade goes on in those alehouses.’

Of course I did. I hadn’t lived in Bristol for six years without learning some of the city’s darker secrets. Centuries after papal intervention to ban the trade, and centuries after royal decree had made it illegal, slaving between Bristol and Waterford, Bristol and Dublin still continued. Did you have an unmarried daughter who had brought disgrace on the family by getting herself pregnant? Did you have an aged parent who was an interfering, or incontinent, old nuisance? Did you have a son who was in trouble with the law and ripe to become gallows meat? Did someone owe you money and wouldn’t pay up? If you were a Bristolian, you knew exactly what to do in those circumstances. You did a deal with the Irish slavers. And the place to do that deal was in the Marsh Street alehouses. I decided perhaps it was better not to go there, after all.