Kate Sedley: The Midsummer Rose

Icould see the house where the murders had been committed from where I was waiting, on the opposite side of the river Avon. It was visible because it was two-storeyed and stood some distance from the other cottages that formed the hamlet of Rownham Passage, on a muddy spur of rock that was washed by the river at full tide.

Surprisingly for one who was not a native of Bristol, I knew its history. It had been one of the stories told to me by my long-dead first wife, Lillis Walker, and for some reason it had stuck in my memory.

Fifty years and more ago, two women — a mother and daughter who had lived there — had hacked to death the tyrannical husband and father of the household, throwing his mutilated body into the river. Unfortunately for them, the corpse had been trapped by those underwater rocks that make the Avon such a treacherous river to navigate, and instead of being carried out into the Severn estuary on the receding tide, it had floated on the next incoming tide right into the heart of the city. In due course the two women had been arrested, tried, found guilty and suffered the horrible fate of being burned alive …

‘You waitin’ for this bleedin’ ferry or not, then?’ enquired an irate voice that made me jump.

The ferryman had returned from the opposite shore and beached his skiff on the narrow mudflat skirting the towering escarpment behind us — an escarpment that reduced human life to dwarfish proportions. Similarly, on the other side of the river, Ghyston Cliff made the huddle of cottages at its foot look like a handful of toys tossed down by a careless giant.

‘You goin’ to stand ’ere all bleedin’ day?’ demanded the ferryman, growing ever more frustrated by my lack of response. ‘There’s a storm brewin’.’ He nodded towards a bank of dark clouds, marring the perfection of a warm, early-June morning.

‘Sorry,’ I apologized, heaving my pack and cudgel into the skiff and seating myself in the stern. ‘How much?’

‘Penny.’ The ferryman took the oars, looking me up and down in a disparaging sort of way. ‘Although for a chap as big and heavy as you, it ought to be more. You’re a weight, you are.’

‘Blame my wife. She feeds me too well.’

The man grunted as he pulled away from the Somerset shore and the Lordship of Ashton-Leigh.

‘Leg-shackled, are you? You look married. Any children?’

‘Three,’ I admitted with a sigh. ‘A daughter from my first marriage. She’ll be five in November. And a stepson a few weeks older. Then there’s Adam.’ I tried to sound cheerful. ‘He’ll celebrate his first birthday at the end of this month. He’s my child by my second wife.’

The ferryman looked sympathetic — or as sympathetic as his gnarled and weather-beaten features permitted.

‘One, eh? That’s a terrible age for any child to be. I should know! I’ve fathered six of the varmints. Girls ain’t so bad, but boys!’ He cast up his eyes to heaven, where they remained riveted. ‘Them dang clouds, they’m blowing inland fast. There’s going to be a real storm very soon.’ He indicated my pack with a jerk of his head. ‘You a pedlar?’

I nodded. ‘I’ve been as far as Woodspring Priory and back. Now I’m heading home to Bristol. I intended to walk the landward way round to the Redcliffe Gate, but when I found myself close to the river, I thought I might as well take the ferry. So, here I am.’ I gazed up at the cliffs rearing above us. ‘Pity someone couldn’t build a bridge up there,’ I remarked idly. ‘It would save travellers from Leigh to Clifton a great deal of time and effort.’

The ferryman snorted. ‘Are you mad or what? No one could build a bridge at that height.’

He was right, of course, but I was reluctant to relinquish my dream so easily. ‘It might happen one day,’ I argued. ‘Centuries hence perhaps, when you and I are long dead.’

He showed me the whites of his eyes. ‘You ain’t one of them heretics, are you? Lollards, or whatever they call ’em?’

‘I’m a good son of the Holy Church,’ I protested.

But wasn’t I being a little disingenuous? Weren’t many of my secret beliefs and theories more in tune with the followers of John Wycliffe than with orthodox teachings? But I knew it was as well to keep a still tongue in my head on that score. Nowadays I was not only a family man, but also had the additional responsibility of being a householder, thanks to the almost unbelievable generosity of a sweet, dead friend who the previous year had left me her house in Small Street. Me! Roger the Chapman, who had never lived in anything better or bigger than a rented, one-roomed cottage in his life, and had never expected to do so until the day he died!

My good fortune had at first caused a lot of resentment in Bristol, particularly among my erstwhile friends, very few of whom had seemed happy for my wife Adela and me. Even Margaret Walker, my quondam mother-in-law and Adela’s cousin, had been restrained in her congratulations, predicting that this result of my former (totally innocent) association with Mistress Cicely Ford would set the gossips’ tongues wagging. But, ten months on, my wife and I had largely overcome all the unpleasantness by simply ignoring it and remaining our normal polite, imperturbable selves. Well, Adela had. And although I might have been forced to black Burl Hodge’s eye in an effort to knock some sense into him, and to encourage my dog, Hercules, to bite the backside of a neighbour who openly objected to riff-raff such as my family and myself moving into Small Street, on the whole I had managed to behave with the propriety that became a man of property. And today, I could anticipate returning to a home that boasted not merely a hall, parlour, kitchen and three bedchambers, but also a buttery. Not that we needed such a room — only a modest amount of wine was drunk in our household, ale and small beer being cheaper — but the children found it useful for playing in, using the bottle racks as places to keep their toys.

The skiff scraped and bumped ashore at Rownham Passage and the ferryman berthed his oars, jumping out first in order to help me unload my belongings. I followed and paid him his fare.

‘What did you mean,’ I asked suspiciously, ‘when you said I “looked married”?’

The man shrugged, paying more attention to the weather and the rapidly darkening sky than to me.

‘Dunno,’ he answered vaguely. ‘But you can always tell …’Ere! I’m taking cover. Don’t want to be caught mid-river in this lot.’ A few drops of rain spattered the Avon’s mudbanks as he spoke. ‘An’ if you’ve got any sense, chapman, you’ll find shelter, too. This is going to be a nasty little squall.’

‘Pooh! A shower doesn’t bother me,’ I boasted. ‘I’m used to being abroad in all kinds of weather.’

The ferryman laughed and, with a rough word of explanation to his waiting fare — a fat woman dressed in grey homespun and carrying a large basket of eggs — hurried towards the alehouse perched just above the high-water mark and surrounded by the cluster of houses that was Rownham Passage. I, on the other hand, went in the opposite direction, along the narrow riverside track that skirted the base of Saint Brendan’s Hill.

Suddenly the heavens opened and a violent gust of wind almost knocked me off my feet. The reeds fringing the river were lashed by spray and flurries of rain hit the path in front of me. In a few moments, everything seemed to have disintegrated into one deafening, wind-torn shriek.

I cursed my stupidity in not listening to the ferryman and for allowing my bravado to get the better of my common sense. But I had no time to dwell on the matter. I needed to take cover, and it was with relief that I saw, through the curtain of rain, a hovel of some sort, standing close to the track.