Kate Sedley: The Midsummer Rose

‘C–Captain Malahide?’ stammered the woman who had let me in. ‘But … but we thought …’

‘What did you think?’ The seaman was growing uneasy. I could hear it in his voice and could see it in the sudden shuffle of his feet on the dusty floor. At that point he must have noticed me for the first time. ‘Who’s this?’ he demanded suspiciously.

I decided the moment had come to put the cat among the pigeons. It didn’t take much brainpower to work out the situation, even when that brain felt as though it had been pounded to a pulp. I dragged myself up on to one elbow.

I heard someone curse, but whether a man or a woman I couldn’t be certain: I was too busy trying to steady my swimming senses. I must have moved too quickly, or was weaker than I had thought. Whatever the reason, the room was revolving dizzily about me. But my powers of speech were still strong.

Fighting down a rising tide of nausea, I said as loudly and distinctly as I could, ‘I’m just a poor pedlar who sought shelter here from the storm. Instead, I was knocked over the head with my own cudgel and my murder planned while these villains thought I was still unconscious.’

‘But why?’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ I demanded. ‘Use your common sense, man! They thought I was you!’

I was prepared for my seafarer to have some difficulty in working out the implications of this remark, but he didn’t. Something he knew that they knew — or maybe guessed that they had guessed — made him accept my accusation without a second’s hesitation. He gave a roar of anger and drew a wicked-looking knife from the sheath attached to his belt. He didn’t falter for even a second, but went straight for the second woman in the blue brocade dress who, I now realized, had stationed herself just inside the parlour door. His intention was clear, and I desperately struggled to my feet in order to prevent murder being done. But I was too late — except that it was not the murder I had expected. It was the seaman who fell, stabbed to the heart by the expertly wielded short-handled, long-bladed dagger produced in a flash from the folds of the woman’s blue skirt. Eamonn Malahide, if that were indeed his real name, dropped with nothing more than a grunt and was patently dead even before he hit the floor.

At the same time, I saw the first woman stoop and pick up my cudgel again. I divined her purpose without much effort and made a further frantic attempt to get to my feet. But it was hopeless. My knees buckled under me and I was violently sick just a moment before she dealt me another stunning blow to the back of my head, on almost exactly the same spot as before. For the second time that morning, I was knocked unconscious.

I moved uneasily in and out of a nightmare in which I was being pursued along a river bank by a whole posse of women, all of whom were brandishing knives and intent on murdering me.

The third time I recovered my senses, I was vaguely aware of being jolted across the rocky foreshore of the Avon, slung like an unwanted sack of flour between two people. My head and shoulders were being supported by someone I couldn’t see. But the blue brocade dress, which I could glimpse from the waist down, was immediately familiar to me as the gown of the unheard other woman who had the murderous ability to wield a knife as well as any man. The skirt had been hitched up indecently high to reveal the occasional sight of a thin, but well muscled leg in a yellow silk stocking with a garter of fine buckled leather.

The lower half of my body was in the tender care of my attacker. She was grumbling and occasionally cursing under her breath as her shoes slithered on the wet stretch of rock separating the ‘murder’ house from the river. Just before I passed out yet again, I wondered where the third person, the man, was. Then I remembered the bulk and girth of the dead seafarer. It would need some strength to shift his carcass.

This time my dreams took me back inside the house, where I found myself locked in the parlour with two enormous horses, maddened by the storm raging outside. Just as one reared up on its hind legs, its evil-looking hooves flailing above me, the window flew open and I was drenched in water.

But that, at least, was no dream. I surfaced just as the two women were rolling me into the Avon. And I saw the muddy waters close over my head as I lost consciousness for the final time. I remember thinking desperately of Adela. This was it, then. This was the end. I was drowning.

Iraised my eyelids just far enough to see the motes of dust dancing in the sunlight streaming through the open window. The heat lay as heavy as a fur across my knees. I was dry, warm and floating on a cloud somewhere between sleeping and waking. I suspected I must have died and gone straight to heaven …

But as my other senses began to revive, I realized that heaven could never smell like the Bristol streets on a hot summer’s day. (And if it did, I didn’t want to go there.) Nor would angels, playing their celestial harps, sound like street traders raucously vying with one another for customers. I therefore had to be at home in Small Street, in my own bedchamber, in my own bed.

Why I should find this idea so strange gradually became clear to me as unwelcome memories started to return, waving at me like discoloured rags from the corners of my mind. The house at Rownham Passage … The storm … The blow to my head … The sickness and nausea … The murder of the Irishman, whose name I could no longer remember … Above all, the two women, one in brown sarcenet, the other in blue brocade, who had tried to drown me in the river …

Something landed on my chest with all the force of a cartload of turnips hitting a brick wall. I yelled, afraid I was being attacked again. Then my face was licked by a wet, enthusiastic tongue, and breath that could knock a grown man senseless at a dozen paces assaulted the back of my nose, making me sneeze.

My dog, Hercules.

I was definitely at home and I wasn’t dreaming. But how I had survived my watery grave and how I had got here were questions that I was unable either to answer or to cope with just at present. I lifted an arm that felt like lead and stroked Hercules’s scruffy little head.

‘Hello, lad. All right! All right! I’m as pleased to see you as you are to see me. But just shift a bit, will you? You smell as though you’ve been eating fly-infested meat.’ (Which he probably had, from the drain in the middle of the street. Gnawing at putrefying carcasses was one of his less endearing habits, but also one of the greatest pleasures of his doggy existence.)

Hercules was not to be deterred, however, and at the sound of my voice grew even more excited, farting loudly to demonstrate his happiness at seeing me again.

The bedchamber door burst open and Adela came in, flour streaking her forehead, hands still partially caked with dough. She had obviously been in the middle of baking, and wiped them in a hurry. Her beautiful brown eyes, overflowing with anxiety, fixed themselves on me.

‘Roger?’ she asked in a whisper of painful intensity. ‘Was that you calling out? Are you properly awake at last?’

I grinned weakly at her. ‘You’re not looking at a ghost.’

She threw herself on her knees beside the bed, pushing an indignant Hercules to the floor and embracing me in an all-enveloping hug. Her tears trickled down my face, mingling with my own. I managed, after a great deal of effort, to get both arms around her. This time it was like moving two dead weights.

How long we might have remained so — I was quite content to stay that way forever — is a moot point, but, as usual, our private moment was rudely interrupted. The room was suddenly full of people — my former mother-in-law and three children to be precise. But, as always with my nearest and dearest, it felt as if the hordes of Genghis Khan had invaded.