Kate Sedley: The Lammas Feast

He stopped and swung back to face me. He had a pockmarked face beneath a thatch of spiky fair hair and cold, grey eyes that at first sight appeared almost colourless. I had not been mistaken in either his girth or his height, and, close to, he appeared even larger than he had done at a distance. He must have stood well over six feet in his good leather boots, because he topped me by a couple of inches. His mate, brown-haired and brown-eyed, was perhaps half an inch taller again. Except for me, they towered above everyone around them.

‘What do you want?’ the pockmarked one demanded, but looked a little wary when he realized that I was not the average dwarf he had been expecting.

I told him. ‘You tried to knock me over back there.’

The grey eyes raked me up and down. ‘So?’ he asked insolently. ‘You must have been blocking my path.’

He was not local. His speech did not have the West Country burr — the hard ‘r’s and ugly diphthonged vowels that we in this part of the world inherited from our Saxon forebears — but he was not from up country, either. The way he spoke reminded me of my friend, Philip Lamprey, and his wife, Jean. A Londoner then, which explained the man’s cocksureness, and also that of his companion. Although neither was by any means a dandy, their clothes were good, a narrow trimming of budge decorating the hems of their tunics. (As always in this country, the latest clothing law, issued by the King only twelve months before, was being steadfastly ignored. If they could afford to, the English continued to wear whatever took their fancy.)

‘I was not blocking your path,’ I retorted, beginning to lose my temper. ‘Furthermore, I live in this city, and I take great exception to strangers pushing me aside in my own streets.’

‘Oh, you do, do you?’ snarled my opponent, his narrowed eyes showing an angry glint. One great hand shot out and gripped my throat. ‘Well, let me tell you, Chapman. .’

‘Having problems, Roger?’ asked a voice behind me, and a moment later Burl Hodge, a tenter who lived and worked in Redcliffe, appeared at my side. He was accompanied by Jack, the elder of his sons, both their round, freckled faces puckered belligerently and two admirable pairs of fists bunched ready for a fight.

The taller of the men tapped his friend on the shoulder.

‘Let it go, Robin,’ he urged. (The name Robin had surely never been more mistakenly bestowed on anyone than on this great oaf.) ‘We’re not here to cause trouble.’ He turned to me and smiled ingratiatingly, although I could tell that the effort was cracking his face. ‘We’re sorry if we jostled you, Chapman. It was an accident. No offence was intended.’

There was nothing I could do but accept his apology. To do otherwise would have been churlish, even though I could see that the first man was hoping I would still give him an excuse for a brawl. But I stepped back, holding my hands palm upwards in a gesture of peace, and wished them both God speed.

Burl and I stood watching as the two men disappeared between the houses on the bridge.

‘Not here to cause trouble, eh?’ Burl murmured. ‘Then what are they here for, I wonder. I don’t like strangers who are bigger than me. And I particularly don’t like strangers who are bigger than you, Roger. That really worries me.’

‘It’s the start of Saint James’s fair in a few days’ time,’ said Jack, who was an apprentice weaver with Master Thomas Adelard. ‘Maybe they’re here in connection with that. Securing the necessary licence for a stall.’

His father cuffed him playfully around the ear. ‘I can’t see that pair doing a nice line in bric-a-brac,’ he laughed. ‘Murder and mayhem, perhaps. Pretty gewgaws for ladies, no.’

‘That’s silly,’ Jack objected. ‘They could be selling anything. .’

‘I saw Dick this morning,’ I interrupted in order to prevent what I could see was going to be a pointless argument. ‘He seems to have settled in well at the bakery.’

Burl nodded. ‘John Overbecks is a good man and a kind master. She ’s a bit queer, but Dick says if you don’t say too much to her and leave her alone, she won’t bother you. Says Master Overbecks adores her.’ He shrugged. ‘Well, each one to his own taste! I’d rather have a bright, cheerful woman like my Jenny any day. And now I must get back to work. The cloth dries so fast this weather, and if it’s too dry, it won’t stretch between the tenter hooks. Time you were off, too, young Jack.’ He clapped me on the back as a sign of farewell, and strode off in the direction of the tenting field.

‘I’m on an errand for Master Adelard,’ Jack said, ‘so I’ll come with you as far as the bakery and say hello to Dick.’ He brightened. ‘We might overtake those two bravos.’

‘I wouldn’t try renewing acquaintance with that couple,’ I advised him. Some lads have no nose for danger.

We crossed the bridge and walked together up High Street until my companion said goodbye and joined the crowd of people milling round John Overbecks’s counter, calling out a greeting to his brother, who was serving. On the spur of the moment, I decided to walk along Saint Mary le Port Street and work my way round to the castle.

I had actually passed the church when I stopped and then retraced my last few steps. Something moved inside the porch as two substantial shadows retreated even further into the blackness. After a moment’s hesitation, I shrugged and went on my way, whistling tunelessly — as I have said in previous chronicles, I have absolutely no ear for music — as though I had seen nothing, and was mistaken in thinking that I ever had. But as I reached the far end of the alleyway, I looked back over my shoulder. A head was craning round the side of the church porch, its owner staring in the direction of John Overbecks’s bakery.

Immediately, I thought of Master Overbecks’s story about his wife and sister-in-law; how they had fled from their home on Exmoor, and Marion’s fear that they might be pursued. But after due consideration, I dismissed it from my mind.

Coincidences do happen. Of course they do, or there wouldn’t be a word for them. But I simply could not believe that, after a lapse of five years, two men would turn up looking for the Baldock sisters on the very day that I heard the story for the first time. That, surely, was stretching the limits of credulity too far.

Nevertheless, my pair of ruffians did appear to be watching the bakery, but for what reason I was unable to guess. I had just made up my mind to return as far as Saint Mary’s Church and have a word with them, when someone clapped me on the shoulder. Turning, I found myself face to face with Richard Manifold.

Apart from being a former admirer of my wife’s — in the days before she married her first husband and went to live in Hereford — Richard Manifold was also a sheriff’s officer, now promoted to sergeant. During the early days of our acquaintance, after Adela was widowed and returned to Bristol, I had thoroughly disliked him; but I later accepted that this had been because, without realizing it, I was falling in love with Adela myself. Unconsciously I had known that he was a rival for her favours, desperately trying to rekindle her former spark of affection for him. That she had bestowed her love on me — when I had eventually come to my senses and stopped lusting after the blonde beauty of whom I had thought myself enamoured — was totally undeserved, a fact of which Richard Manifold and I were both well aware, and which I suspected he still resented. Nowadays, however, there was a kind of armed truce between us. If he visited the cottage in Lewin’s Mead and I was there, I gritted my teeth and smiled politely while he and Adela recalled their childhood and early youth in Bristol. (I was born and grew up in Wells and therefore had no share in these reminiscences.) In return, he was equally polite to me and treated me, superficially at least, as a friend.