Kate Sedley - The Lammas Feast

I knew Robin Avenel well by sight and had once, four years earlier, had some dealings with him. He had fancied himself in love with a young woman whom I fancied myself. Not that I ever stood a chance with someone so far above me socially as Cicely Ford; but I had resented the fact that this cherubic-faced little dandy, with his prancing gait and the roving eye, had dared even to aspire to Cicely’s affection.

There was the usual congestion in Broad Street, with the customary procession of carts and pedestrians going in and out by Saint John’s Arch and the Frome Gate, and I almost missed the sight of Robin Avenel opening his door to usher out a guest. I also very nearly missed seeing the guest’s face because a smallholder, returning home with the remains of the vegetables he had failed to sell at market, stopped alongside me, blocking my view. The line of traffic passing through the Frome Gate had come to a halt as it so often did at that time of day. Then the smallholder suddenly dropped the reins on his horse’s neck and jumped down from his seat to answer a call of nature in the drain in the middle of the road. I could now see plainly that the visitor taking his leave of Robin Avenel was the same man who had previously visited Jasper Fairbrother; the man who had disembarked that morning from the Breton ship in Saint Nicholas Backs.

As soon as I pushed open the cottage door and heard a strange voice, I knew we had a visitor. Happily, it didn’t speak with the self-assertive tones of Richard Manifold, but in soft, feminine cadences that still had the power to make me shiver with pleasure.

Cicely Ford! Now here was a true coincidence. I had been thinking of her as I walked along Broad Street and through the Frome Gate, only to find her seated at my table, drinking a cup of Adela’s elderberry wine, her left arm cradling Adam. He, needless to say, was behaving perfectly, peaceful and quiet, even though awake. All his life, he has known how to please women and earn their adoration. Many’s the time I’ve wished that I could learn the trick.

Cicely Ford was a lay sister at the Magdalen Nunnery, which stood on the rising ground a little way north-west of Saint James’s Priory and opposite the church of Saint Michael-on-the-Mount-Without. The nunnery had been founded three centuries earlier by the wife of Sir Robert Fitzhardinge as a house of retreat and a seminary for young women, and dedicated to Saint Mary Magdalen. When Cicely Ford had entered the community four years before, following the deaths of her betrothed and his elder brother, it had been her intention to join the order. But in the end, for reasons I had never discovered, she had abandoned this idea and stayed on as a lay sister, helping to instruct the merchants’ daughters who attended the seminary, or waiting on any rich woman who felt she would benefit from a few days’ peace and quiet in retreat, away from the company of her nearest and dearest.

It was a very small cell of the Augustinian Order, and until Marion Baldock had joined their number, as Sister Jerome, the previous year, there had been no more than three nuns in residence for quite some time, leading an unexciting and blameless existence; a far cry from the preceding century, when stories of their daring and courage in taking food to the beleaguered villagers of Bedminster during the Black Death had made the community famous throughout the city and beyond.

As I entered the cottage, Cicely turned her head and smiled at me. Her corn-coloured hair was strained back beneath a grey veil, but the severity of the style in no way detracted from the beauty of her almost perfect oval face, which, with its soft, creamy skin, was as flower-like as ever. Her blue eyes lit with pleasure at seeing me.

She murmured, ‘Roger!’ and held out one small hand which I gallantly kissed. I avoided Adela’s cynical gaze; a look that told me she understood exactly what was going on. She knew that I liked to keep these little shrines to my past goddesses brightly lit in the secret recesses of my mind, even though I was fully aware that, given the chance, I could never have lived with any one of them. Adela was the only woman I had ever met capable of the sort of love that demanded no ties or promises, but let me be myself and allowed me the freedom to wander the open road whenever the fancy took me. She was totally altruistic, the only possible wife and helpmeet for someone as selfish as I was. In return, she had all my heart — but I did like to pretend sometimes that I was still a lad-about-town, an attitude she regarded with her customary indulgence.

‘Mistress Ford has come to invite us to be her guests, the day after tomorrow, at Vespers,’ Adela said.

‘It’s the twenty-second of July, the feast day of Saint Mary Magdalen,’ Cicely explained. ‘The lay sisters can each invite two visitors for the evening service. And just now, as I was passing your door, I suddenly thought of you, Roger. And Mistress Chapman, of course!’ She gently withdrew her hand, which I had retained for far too long, with a faint frown of disapproval and a small, apologetic smile at Adela.

‘We shall be delighted to be your guests, shan’t we, Roger?’ my wife demanded peremptorily.

‘We shall, indeed,’ I concurred. ‘But what about the children? What about feeding Adam?’

They were cries becoming more familiar to me with each passing day. But I could always rely on Adela to be one step ahead of me.

‘I shall feed Adam before I go. As for the other two, I shall naturally ask Margaret to come and look after them. I’m sure she’ll agree. She can stay here the night, in our bed, with Elizabeth and me. You can share Nicholas’s mattress.’

I grimaced. My stepson was a lively sleeper and I could foresee precious little rest for either of us that night. Adela, without a single look or word of reproach, had got her own back. That would teach me to hang on to other women’s hands beyond the call of duty.

‘And now, dearest,’ my wife added, ‘I think you should make yourself respectable. Put on your tunic and walk Mistress Ford home.’

Cicely protested, but Adela was adamant. ‘The paths and alleyways around here aren’t safe, even in broad daylight. And I know whereabouts you live.’

So did I. Although Cicely was a wealthy young woman, having inherited her guardian’s fortune as well as her father’s, when she decided against becoming a nun, she had rented a tiny cottage, a little higher up Saint Michael’s Hill than the nunnery, facing the public gallows. It was not a spot many people would have chosen, but I could guess her reasons for selecting it, and not simply because it was close to the nunnery. It was on those gallows that the man she had loved, Robert Herepath, had died, deserted by everyone, including herself, protesting his innocence to the last; innocence that had been amply demonstrated a few months later, when the man he was supposed to have murdered, Margaret Walker’s father, had returned to Bristol, alive and well. Having subsequently married Margaret’s daughter, Lillis Walker, and solved the mystery of William Woodward’s disappearance, I had, like my mother-in-law, always felt some sort of responsibility for Cicely Ford.

Adela knew this and had therefore forestalled me with the suggestion that I would, sooner or later, have made myself. And it gave me an excuse to be absent when Richard Manifold called.

Quarter of an hour later, Cicely and I left the cottage, and only just in time as far as I was concerned. Glancing behind me as we turned into the alley alongside the house, I saw the sergeant emerging from the shadows of the Frome Gate, so, taking my companion’s arm, I hurried her forward. The open ground around Saint James’s Priory was already half-covered with booths and stalls in various stages of construction, ready for the opening of the fair in five days’ time.