Kate Sedley - The Midsummer Rose

I hurried across Bristol Bridge, dodging acquaintances and friends who wanted to stop and talk, and hiding under a shop’s awning until Jack Hodge had passed. He looked ill and drawn, and I guessed he was on his way to visit Burl in the bridewell.

I went straight to Margaret Walker’s cottage and knocked on the door.

‘Where does Luke Prettywood live?’ I asked when she answered my peremptory summons. Her two friends, Bess Simnel and Maria Watkins, peered over her shoulders. They were evidently paying her a morning visit.

‘And God be with you, too, Roger,’ she snapped, affronted by my lack of greeting.

She would doubtless have treated me to a lecture on manners had I not protested that I was on an urgent mission to prove Burl Hodge’s innocence.

Her eyes brightened. ‘You know who really killed Master Avenel?’

I nodded. ‘I believe so. But proving it might be another matter.’

Margaret’s lips set in a determined line, as did those of Goody Simnel and Goody Watkins. ‘Not if I can help it.’ She glanced at me suspiciously. ‘But why do you want to know where Luke Prettywood lives? What’s he got to do with it? You know very well he can’t be guilty. He’d assaulted Jack Gload and been taken into custody by the time the body was discovered.’

‘Just tell me where he lives,’ I pleaded. ‘I know it’s somewhere in Redcliffe, but not which street.’

Her sharp-featured face was suffused with doubt, but eventually she directed me to a cottage near the rope walk, where the former brewer’s assistant lived with his parents.

‘And don’t go upsetting Goody Prettywood,’ Maria Watkins admonished me. ‘She’s a friend of mine.’

I reflected grimly that in a close-knit community like Redcliffe, everyone was a friend of everyone else. That was the trouble with murder; it harmed more lives than just those of the killer and his victim.

As I approached the Prettywoods’ cottage, I could see the ropemakers in their stout leather aprons and caps, two at either end of the walk, their roughened, red hands twisting and re-twisting the lengths of hemp into the thick ropes necessary for binding bales of goods, before they were hoisted aboard ship for despatching overseas.

The summer heat showed no sign of abating, and the cottage’s single window was wide open to the air. As I passed, I could see Luke sitting at a table in the despondent manner of someone who no longer has employment to go to, playing idly at fivestones, one hand pitted against the other. He seemed to be alone, so, without knocking, I lifted the latch and went inside.

He glanced up as I entered, but the dead-eyed look with which he greeted me altered when he saw who it was, to be replaced by a wariness and a tensing of his body that told me he was suddenly afraid.

‘What do you want, chapman?’ he demanded, his voice cracking.

I said quietly, ‘I’ve come to tell you that I know it was you who murdered Robin Avenel.’

His hands closed tightly over the fivestones. I could see sweat glisten suddenly across his forehead. But he had recovered his composure sufficiently to try a little bluster.

‘That’s ridiculous and you know it.’ He managed a convincing laugh. ‘I’d been arrested by the time the Watch found the body. And before Edgar Capgrave closed the Frome Gate and went home.’

I walked over to the table, pulled another stool from underneath it, and sat down.

‘But Robin Avenel wasn’t murdered in Jewry Lane, was he? He was killed downstairs, in the furthest one of the old synagogue cellars. I showed you the bloodstain, and you tried to convince me that it was two hundred years old, remember?’ It was my turn to laugh.

‘So? I was teasing you. There’s nothing in that to make me a murderer.’

‘You and Marianne Avenel are lovers. You admitted it to me yourself. You meet secretly in Saint Giles’s crypt, and I’ve seen the pair of you down there with my own two eyes. It’s the sort of secret that everyone knows about, or at least suspects — except, of course, the poor, cuckolded husband.’

Luke reddened, but jutted his chin defiantly. ‘All right. I was a fool to confide in you, of all people, I can see that now. But it doesn’t mean I killed Master Avenel.’

‘It gives you a very strong motive.’

He shrugged and began tossing the stones again, his confidence returning. ‘I’ve told you, I was in custody when the murder took place.’

I let that go for the minute and regarded him straitly.

‘I did wonder,’ I said, ‘why you became involved in an apprentices’ riot. You’re no longer one of them. You don’t share their grievances. And why pick on Jack Gload, a Sheriff’s man? What stupidity! Unless, that is, you were anxious to be arrested.’

‘Why would I want that?’ he sneered.

‘Because you’d killed a man, a man you were cuckolding, as quite a lot of people knew. You were sharp enough to realize that if you drew attention to yourself in some other way — in a big enough way — no one would then think to connect you with Robin Avenel’s murder. You couldn’t have known, of course, that his body would later be moved, making this deception of yours unnecessary.’

He looked up sharply at that, about to ask a question, but thought better of it. He was a clever lad. He knew better than to admit curiosity.

‘Go on,’ he said. ‘This is quite amusing. My mother won’t be back for a while — she’s gone to the market — and my father’s working in the rope walk. You may have seen him as you passed. Tell me some more of this fairy tale of yours. It helps to pass the morning.’

‘Very well.’ I rested my elbows on the table and stared hard at him. He dropped the fivestones and stared back. ‘Here is what I think happened. You arranged to meet Mistress Avenel in your usual trysting place in Saint Giles’s crypt during the Midsummer Eve’s celebration. Everyone would be occupied; eating, drinking, playing games. It’s easy to get lost in a crowd. No one knows for certain where anyone else is. A simple excuse by Marianne that she wanted to use the privy and she could leave the trestle where she was sitting with her husband and Mistress Alefounder. I doubt if they even noticed her absence. They both had a lot on their minds.

‘You and she had arranged the meeting that same morning, during the herb-gathering in Redcliffe fields. I saw the pair of you, heads together, near Saint Mary’s Church. But things went wrong, didn’t they? In your eagerness, you arrived early: Marianne wasn’t there. Then you thought you heard her approaching. Only it wasn’t her, was it? It was Robin Avenel! You jumped to the conclusion that he must know all about you and Marianne, especially when he drew his knife and started shouting. He went for you, and in the ensuing struggle, you killed him, probably accidentally. Then you ran. The more you thought about it, the more you saw that you could be the chief suspect. People knew where you and Mistress Avenel met. Later, Marianne caught up with you. She’d found her husband’s body by that time and guessed what must have happened. What were you going to do? She must have been frantic. But when the apprentices’ riot broke out, you suddenly saw your chance to divert suspicion away from yourself.’

I paused, reflecting that, of course, I hadn’t been quite frank with him. Robin Avenel hadn’t gone down to Saint Giles’s crypt because he knew of Luke’s tryst with Marianne. He had gone down there to speak to Albany — maybe to inform him that he had failed yet again to arrange a sea passage for him to Brittany. But when he saw Luke, his first thought must have been that, somehow or another, his treason and the secret hiding place had both been discovered. He wouldn’t have stopped to reason things out or to reckon up the likelihood of such a discovery. He simply lost his nerve, drew his dagger and attacked Luke with the intention of killing him before he could reveal what he knew.