Kate Sedley: The Lammas Feast

Richard had not yet arrived, but, as a sheriff’s officer, he could easily have been delayed. I stood on the corner of Ballance Street and waited, leaning on my cudgel. Houses crowded me in on either side, with their deeply recessed, dark doorways. I couldn’t move into the middle of the street because of the (at that time of day) overflowing, stinking drain. I was peering out over the Backs, looking for Richard, when some instinct, born of my general nervousness, warned me of danger. I half turned, sensing someone behind me — and so received the blow that was aimed at the crown of my head, and meant to kill me, on the right-hand side of my face.

Although a glancing blow, it nevertheless knocked me out.

Fortunately for me — or so I learned later — one of the passers-by on the quayside saw what happened and, in an unwonted display of public-spiritedness, rushed to my assistance, calling on others for help, and a little knot of Good Samaritans soon formed around me. One of these was Dick Hodge, on his way home to supper, so that I was immediately identified and my address supplied. A blanket was fetched from a nearby house, I was rolled on to it and four of the heftier men, taking a corner each, carried me home to Lewin’s Mead.

I remember Adela’s white face bending over me as I was lowered on to our mattress, but nothing after that until the local physician’s measured tones pierced my consciousness, assuring her that I had suffered no lasting damage and that a period of rest was all that was needed to restore me to my usual robust state of health. At the time, just before I drifted off once more into oblivion, I thought him a fool who didn’t know his business. But I awoke next morning feeling very much better.

Adela was lying beside me, propped on one elbow, watching me anxiously.

‘Hello, sweetheart,’ I said, aware that the right-hand side of my face was extremely sore and stiff. ‘What do I look like?’

She breathed a sigh of relief. ‘If you can worry about your appearance, you must be improving. You have a black eye and your cheekbone’s badly bruised, but I’ll make you a primrose leaf poultice later on. That should take some of the heat out of the swelling. Also, the doctor left some lettuce pellets for you to take to ease the aches and pains. Roger!’ She put her arms around me carefully, but couldn’t resist giving me a little squeeze. ‘Do you know who did this to you?’

I shook my head. ‘I missed seeing him by inches. But how did I get home? Who brought me?’

She told me briefly what had happened, but when I asked if my rescuer had caught a glimpse of my assailant, it was her turn to shake her head. ‘He was too far away. But after he’d seen you safely home, he alerted the sheriff’s office to the attack. Richard came to see me last night and I told him of the message you’d received. He was highly incensed at having his name taken in vain, but couldn’t hold out much hope of catching the culprit unless we could trace the messenger. He said he trusted you’d soon recover, and that he’d call in to find out how you were going on sometime today.’

‘I suppose I could go to see him,’ I suggested, forgetting to whisper and so rousing both Adam and Hercules together.

‘You are not leaving that bed until tomorrow,’ Adela informed me in a tone of voice I have mentioned before, and which defied any attempt at argument. ‘Even then, I’ll have to see how you are. Down, Hercules ! The master’s in no mood for your antics.’

She went to fetch Adam and put him to her breast.

Hercules was so astonished at her ferocity, while I was equally astounded at being referred to as ‘the master’, that we both stared silently at one another. Then Hercules removed himself from the mattress and slunk back to his own bed without so much as a whimper of annoyance, but I’ll swear he grinned at me and lifted his lip. That dog knew who ruled the roost in our house.

I submitted gracefully to Adela’s ministrations while she washed me, fed me a breakfast of oatmeal and dried herring and treated my bruises with the promised primrose leaf poultice. I also swallowed two of the doctor’s lettuce pellets without making too much of a fuss, but insisted both on shaving myself and on getting up to use the chamber pot, rather than suffer the indignity of trying to aim into it while in bed. Finally, I made no protest when my pillow was shaken and I was ordered to sleep while my wife took Adam off to the shops to buy the day’s supply of victuals. As soon as the door closed behind them, Hercules hurtled out of his own bed and into mine, curling up in the crook of my knees and falling asleep almost at once.

I very quickly followed suit as the lettuce pellets did their work, but my slumber was an uneasy jumble of strange dreams. When, eventually, I awoke, the dream that stayed with me, and was uppermost in my mind, was of walking along the river bank with Goody Godsmark, who kept chanting, ‘People lie, you know! People lie to protect the ones they love. People always lie!’

I rolled on to my back, taking care not to disturb the dog, and linked my hands behind my neck. My head was still hurting, but I ignored it. It was time to put my thoughts in order.

I looked back over the past ten days, starting at the beginning with the arrival of the stranger. And there, at once, I picked up one of the main threads that ran all through the subsequent pattern of events — the connection with Brittany. The stranger had disembarked from a Breton ship and, whether or not a Breton himself, he had come from the duchy and was most likely a Tudor agent. (It was, after all, a conclusion I had drawn on sheer probability alone, long before I knew of the suspicions of those in authority.) And then Brittany had cropped up again in my conversation with both John Overbecks, who had been at the sack of Fougères, and with Philip Lamprey. What was it Philip had said, referring to the siege? That was . . when? ’ 49 ? Twenty-nine years ago. John Overbecks wouldn’t have been much more than twenty-two or three, maybe not so much, a young man disgusted by the atrocities of war, who, according to his own account, had thought of deserting.

‘It’s all right, you’re not talking to one of those cowards who ran away and left his comrades in the lurch,’ he had said to me in the Green Lattis. But how did I know that that was the truth? ‘All people lie,’ Goody Godsmark had told me, her cry continuing to echo through my head. And, ‘He was soldiering in France for years’ — Adela’s voice came back to me — ‘before he came home and took up baking.’ But that, presumably, was only John’s account of what he’d been doing in the meantime. Suppose he hadn’t been soldiering? Suppose. .

Suppose what? I began to shake. A touch of fever, no doubt, but it was also excitement. I knew I was on the verge of some discovery. Any moment now, I should see the way clear before me. .

‘I hope you don’t mind me walking in like this,’ said Richard Manifold. ‘I knocked, but you obviously didn’t hear. The door was unbolted, so. .’ He let the sentence go and stood looking down at me, pursing his lips. ‘You’re a fool, Roger,’ he continued after a moment or two contemplating my bruised and battered face. ‘You should know that I don’t deal in vague messages of that sort. If I’d wanted to see you, I would have invited you to the Council Hall or come to visit you myself, as I’m doing now, when there’s something I need to ask you.’

‘Oh, I see! You haven’t come just to enquire after my health, then!’ I sounded petulant even to my own ears, and he quite naturally looked surprised.

‘Did you expect me to? I’ve more important things to do with my time than run around after numskulls who get themselves beaten up through their own stupidity.’