[Roger the Chapman 06] - The Wicked Winter (20 page)

'Where are you going, Chapman?' he demanded. 'You're very busy, running here, there and everywhere.'
 

'These long limbs of mine need constant exercise.' I offered him the same explanation I had given Martha Grindcobb, but he was less easily convinced.

'I've warned you, don't go poking your nose into affairs which are none of your business. You'd do well to heed what I say.'

‘I’ll try to keep your words in mind,' I assured him, and for the second time that day, let myself out of the back door.

The snow had eased a little, but a wind was blowing and the driven flakes were now as fine as dust. The hill rose bleak and bare beneath a threatening sky filled with dark and racing clouds. It was growing colder, and under the eaves, where a noonday thaw had only just begun, drops of water were already turning to splinters of ice. A few yards to my right were the gallery steps, and on a sudden impulse I mounted them to knock gently on the door of the women's dormitory. A tearful voice bade me enter. I paused on the I threshold, letting my eyes grow accustomed to the gloom.

'Mistress Empryngham,' I asked hesitantly, 'may I come in?'

'Who - who's that?'

'Roger Chapman. We met yesterday.'

'What do you want?' She sounded suspicious.

I advanced a pace into the room. She was lying, propped up on her elbows, on one of a row of wooden cots ranged against the opposite wall. A large oaken chest at the far end of the chamber provided, I guessed, storage for the women's meagre possessions, and on a small table to my left, just inside the door, were a couple of candle-holders, some tallow candles and a tinder-box. Apart from these things the place was bare, without even a scattering of rushes on the floor.

Sir Hugh Cederwell, as I might have expected, was not a man who set great store by the comfort of his servants.

'Mistress Empryngham,' I said, 'forgive me, but I've just come to see how you do.'

'How do you expect me to do,' she answered tartly, 'with my husband dead? Thanks to you,' she added.

I was startled. Because I was completely convinced in my own mind that I had replaced the lid on the well, I had forgotten that I had not been exonerated by others. I went and stood at the bottom of her cot.

'No, no!' I protested. 'I am certain that I'm not to blame. I'm sure I didn't leave the well uncovered.'

'How else could the accident have happened? No other person has owned up to being in the courtyard.'
 

'No one but yourself, when you quit your bedchamber and came to find Martha Grindcobb in the kitchen.' I spoke with urgency. This had not occurred to me before. 'Mistress Empryngham, you must have passed close to the well after I had returned indoors. Think, I beg of you! Can you recall if the lid was on, or lying on the ground?'

She stared at me as though I were a fool. 'Good heavens, man! I was upset. It was snowing. Do you seriously think I would notice a thing like that?' She must have seen my disappointment and made a little gesture of reconciliation.

'Don't look so downcast. It wasn't your fault that Gerard walked in his sleep or that I left him to his own devices. No, the friar has shown me where the blame really lies.'
 

'Brother Simeon is sometimes too harsh in his judgements,' I consoled her, and was rewarded by a wintry smile. 'He expects too much of us ordinary mortals. Has that is to say, did Master Empryngham always sleep-walk?'
 

She nodded dully. 'Since early childhood. It was a well-known fact amongst members of his father's household. Once, at least so Gerard said, a door was accidentally left unlocked and he wandered out of the house and away across the pastures. One of the shepherds, who was up late tending a sick ewe, saw him and took him home. The servant who had left the door open was severely punished.' The story jogged my memory.

'I spoke to Father Godyer this morning. He told me of Lady Cederwell's... of her ordeal at the hands of one of her father's shepherds.'

Adela Empryngham curled her lip. 'Father Godyer is an old gossip who can't keep his mouth shut. Nevertheless, what he says is true.' She sighed gustily. 'Poor Jeanette, I think the experience turned her brain. She was always pious, but afterwards she was ten times worse than she had been before.' Adela lowered her voice. 'I believe it made her a little mad.'

'I understand that she refused to take the veil as she had intended because she thought it would bring disgrace on any Order that she entered.'

Adela laughed. 'She was a simpleton! As if any convent would have refused a postulant with the sort of dowry her father could have given her! But everyone who told her so was scorned for their evil minds. Jeanette believed that anyone who consecrated a life to God's service was purer than the driven snow, whereas I know and you know, Chapman, that all the religious houses of this land are avaricious and vice-ridden.'

I resisted the temptation to cavil at this sweeping statement, afraid I might antagonise Mistress Empryngham and prevent any further confidences.

'Your sister-in-law,' I ventured, 'or so it seems to me, was greatly disturbed by the - er - by the sins of the flesh.'
 

'Obsessed,' was the succinct rejoinder. 'But hardly surprising I suppose, after what she had suffered. Not that I think her entirely blameless.' There was a pause. I waited expectantly as Adela Empryngham continued, 'Raymond Shepherd was a well enough looking man and I daresay that Jeanette, maybe in all innocence, had led him on. He probably mistook her friendliness for encouragement. She wouldn't have been the first well-born girl to fancy copulating with one of her father's churls. But whatever the truth of the matter, he didn't deserve the fate that befell him.'

'It would have been a worse one if he'd been caught,' I pointed out. 'He would have ended his life on the end of a rope, most likely without benefit of trial.'

Adela shrugged. 'Perhaps you're right. Gerard would certainly have strung him up from the nearest tree if he'd had half a chance. But having your head split open by robbers, your body despoiled and flung in a ditch, is that much better?'
 

I was unable to answer that question, and could only pray that neither alternative would be my fate. I remarked instead, 'Your husband and Lady Cederwell were very attached to one another.'

The face in front of me was suddenly transformed into a vicious mask of loathing.

'There was something unnatural about it,' Mistress Empryngham said, and I realised for the first time how much she had hated her sister-in-law. Enough to contrive her death? Perhaps. But would she also have wanted to be rid of her husband? That, however, could have been a genuine mishap.

On the other hand, Adela could have removed the lid from the well as she passed through the courtyard and left the result to chance. Who could say?

'I must be going,' I said, feeling that I should make my departure before she gave vent to her spleen and uttered words chat she might later regret.

She made no effort to detain me, but I felt her eyes on me as I moved towards the door. As I was about to step outside, she called, 'Chapman!' I turned and she raised herself higher on her elbows. 'I loved my husband, you know.' Tears trickled slowly down her cheeks.

I nodded mutely, raised a hand in farewell and went.

The footprints of the morning had now almost disappeared beneath a second fall of snow, although it seemed to me that there was a third set of tracks mingling with mine and Fulk Disney's. Once beyond the gate, I suddenly felt vulnerable and exposed in that desolate landscape, where the silence was unbroken by even the call of a bird. There was no other sign of life; the pigs which normally feed off the seaweed and fish refuse of saltings and marshland had been driven into their sties by the local swineherd in order to keep them safe from the cold. Here and there a few blades of marram grass had forced their way into daylight and air, but most tufts remained hidden by the snowy blanket.

As I approached the tower I glanced to my left, and was able to discern that other path, mentioned by Sir Hugh when talking to Mistress Lynom that morning, which led through the scrubland to join the main track. I hesitated, wondering whether to explore its length or no, but the extreme cold, now nipping at my toes and fingers, decided me against it for the moment. I pushed open the door and went inside.

Everything there was much as I remembered it from the day before. A little more light filtered through the four slits in the circular wall, but revealed nothing new. The lantern and tinder-box still stood on the table in the centre of the room, where I had conscientiously replaced them the previous evening, after Simeon and I had returned from the house with Jude and Nicholas Capsgrave, who had carried the stretcher. In order to make doubly sure, however, that there was no change of any sort, I prowled around for several minutes, but all was just the same. I mounted the narrow, well-worn stairs to the second storey, keeping one hand pressed against the outer wall for support.

There was nothing here either which immediately suggested any further visit since my own and Simeon's yesterday. Yet on closer inspection, I fancied that the folios which lay on the table had been slightly disturbed. I tried to recollect exactly how they had been placed, and it seemed to me that they had not been so widely scattered. I inspected them more closely. There were four, two bound in yellow silk with golden tassels, another covered with violet silk and fastened by a silver-gilt clasp, while the fourth one had a red velvet binding ornamented with two rows of small copper studs. But the material of each was frayed and badly rubbed, the metal tarnished, the tassels unravelling. Inside, the parchment had yellowed and occasionally cracked, but the careful scripts were still as clear as the day they were penned and the illustrations glowed like jewels.

The titles were unsurprising for someone of Lady Cederwell's tastes; the Scale of Perfection, the Cloud of Unknowing, La Forteresse de Foi, the Imitatio Christi. I wondered how she had come by them, but it was obvious that she had gloried in their possession and read them often.

I turned the pages slowly, as I instinctively felt Fulk Disney must have done, searching for anything concealed between the leaves, but what I was looking for I had no idea. My eyes fell on some words in the Scale of Perfection. 'It needeth not to run to Rome or Jerusalem to seek Christ, but to turn thine thoughts into thine own soul where He is hid...' They were true when they were written, they are true today, and they will be true tomorrow and ever after.

I discovered nothing of any moment, and once the folios had been gone through there was no other place of concealment. Nevertheless I peered under the stool, the table, the bench, but saw only a dusty floor. I even examined the window slits, but nothing was hidden in any of them. It was no more than I had expected. I proceeded up the spiralling staircase to the chapel.

Here, at first sight, all was as orderly as in the lower two chambers, but I recognised almost at once that things were not as they should be. The great crucifix above the prie-dieu hung a little askew, the kneeling-desk itself had been shifted so that it now stood at a slight angle to the wall, and the silver candlesticks had been moved nearer to the centre of the altar, whose embroidered cloth had been hurriedly replaced inside out. I stared around me wondering if Fulk Disney had been successful in his quest or, as was equally possible, had satisfied himself that there was nothing there to find.

I began my own search, then stopped, feeling foolish.

What was I looking for? More importantly, what would Fulk have been looking for? And had he found it, whatever it was? The answer to the second question was probably no. I recalled how sour-faced he had been, how out of humour, when I encountered him at the back of the house this morning.

But that did not enlighten me as to his object. It could be nothing bulky or he would hardly have removed an altar cloth, peered behind the crucifix and, as I felt sure he had done, hunted through the pages of books. Something easily concealed then, and flat... A piece of paper, what else? But what could it contain? Why, a list of charges which Jeanette Cederwell had prepared against her husband and his mistress, ready to hand to Brother Simeon when he at last arrived; and quite possibly accusations, also, about her stepson and Fulk Disney. I drew a deep breath, feeling certain that I had stumbled on the truth. Yet did it exist at all, this written indictment, outside the fevered imaginings of Maurice and Fulk? Did they know something which I did not? Had Lady Cederwell forewarned her stepson and husband of what she intended to do?

Another question arose. If Maurice or his father knew for a fact of the paper's existence, why were they so anxious to get hold of it now that Jeanette was dead? Answer, because the inclemency of the weather had detained the friar within t he confines of the manor; and if one of the servants found the letter by chance before he left and handed it to him, there was little doubt that Simeon would use it to do them harm.

Sir Hugh probably had nothing to fear unless he were suspected of killing his wife, but Fulk and Maurice would stand accused on a far more serious charge, and one which carried a stringent penalty.

I began my hunt. I felt convinced that if there were such a paper, it must be hidden somewhere in the chapel. There was nowhere on the ground floor where it might be concealed, and I had looked in every possible place in the room immediately below. So offering up a short prayer to God for His forgiveness, I stripped the altar and examined the table beneath the cloth. But it was innocent of any drawer, a plain oaken board set on four stout legs, as Fulk Disney must already have discovered. It would have been a waste of time to search for a secret compartment as there was so obviously nowhere where it could be. I replaced the altar cloth, right side out, and the candlesticks before turning my attention to the prie-dieu.