The Cross Legged Knight (14 page)

A short man with a shock of greasy hair stood beside him, hands clasped behind him, rocking slightly back and forth on his feet. ‘Good-day to you, Captain Archer.’

‘Good-day to you,’ Owen said, searching his memory for the man’s name.

‘Such a fine house. It would be a pity if Bishop William abandoned it.’

‘It would indeed.’

The man turned to Owen. ‘Corm’s the name. I live at the back of Edward Taylor’s messuage.’

Now Owen remembered him, once a regular at the York Tavern, now married to a woman who embarrassed him by fetching him home when he strayed, thus training him to stay put.

‘You must have said a prayer of thanks when the fire was contained,’ Owen said.

‘Aye. It was a night I’ll not soon forget. Nor will any of the women of this parish. Are they safe, Captain?’

Here again was the assumption that Cisotta’s death had not been accidental. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Because of the man I saw hurry away from the undercroft.’

Owen tried to hide his excitement. ‘Tell me about him.’

Corm stepped closer to Owen. ‘He rushed out from the undercroft door.’

‘Rushing from the fire?’

Corm shook his head. ‘Nay. I cannot be certain, of course, but I do not believe the fire had yet begun. I heard voices before he appeared, angry voices they sounded to me.’

‘You saw no fire behind him in the undercroft?’

‘There was light, but I did not think of fire then. Later, after I carted my sacks of grain back to the house, unloaded them and returned the cart to Taylor’s shed, that is when I raised the alarm about the fire.’

‘What did you see then?’

‘The door was ajar and smoke poured out, flames flickering behind.’

Owen backed up to the alleyway between the bishop’s house and Edward Taylor’s. ‘You went down this way?’

‘Nay, on the far side of Taylor’s house, by the shed.’

‘The shed to which Mistress Cisotta was taken?’

‘Aye, the very one.’

‘You heard voices raised in anger?’ Owen wondered about that, with all the noise of the city of an evening.

‘Aye. It was a quiet evening, until the fire. It was no accident, was it?’ Corm rocked back and forth.

‘Your tale makes me wonder. Have you told anyone else?’

‘My wife, that is all.’

‘I would ask you to keep it a secret for now, Corm.’

The man nodded solemnly.

‘Would you walk me through your movements that night?’

Four heavy sacks of grain the man had carried down the alley from the street and set them down at his door, one at a time, which was all he could manage. Long enough for a blaze to begin behind the departing man, but surely Corm would have noticed something amiss before all four bags had been stowed inside.

‘Were they men’s voices?’

‘I couldn’t say for sure, Captain, nor what they said.’

Upon turning on to Stonegate, Owen found the Fitzbaldric and Dale families gathered by the front gate of the goldsmith’s house, with two of Wykeham’s men standing off to one side. Except for the Dales’ two daughters, who were clipping late roses, arranging them in a nosegay, it was a grim gathering. The lovely Julia Dale, looking tired and dressed in more sombre garb than Owen ever recalled her wearing, was urging Adeline Fitzbaldric to accept an armload of wool cloth – fine wool, by the look of it. Adeline wore the same gown she had worn the previous evening, damp spots revealing attempts to clean it. Her eyes were narrowed in temper, though her tone in addressing Julia Dale was cordial. The servant May stood back a little, leaning against the garden wall. Her face was sallow, slack-skinned. Owen wondered why she did not wait on the garden bench nearby. But perhaps that was not considered appropriate behaviour for a Fitzbaldric maidservant.

‘Good-day to you,’ Owen said. ‘I hope you have
had no further trouble that has driven you from the house.’

Fitzbaldric, still suffering his ill-fitting clothes, would not meet Owen’s eye, so it was up to Adeline to explain. ‘His Grace has offered us shelter and we have accepted. We cannot continue to impose on the Dales. They have their family to think of.’

As I do
. Owen must speak with Thoresby about moving Poins. ‘His Grace is most generous,’ Owen said. He wondered whose idea it had been to take in the Fitzbaldrics. Thoresby seldom mixed with the citizens of the city.

‘It is better this way,’ said Adeline, tight-lipped.

Julia Dale had shifted her gaze to her daughters. Tension was thick in the air. The girls had completed their nosegay and now watched Owen, bobbing their heads and blushing when they found him looking at them. Whatever had transpired among the adults, the daughters thought all this exciting. They would regret the abrupt departure of their guests.

Owen would like to talk to Robert and Julia about the Fitzbaldrics, but it must wait. Perhaps he might find them alone and expansive on the morrow. For now, as the Fitzbaldrics and their maid had salvaged nothing from the bishop’s ruined house and had two of Wykeham’s men to carry what little they had, Owen did not consider it his duty to escort them to the palace.

He made his farewells and departed, feeling all eyes on his back as he headed for the minster gate. Once in the close, he slowed his steps and considered whether he had the time to say a few prayers in the minster. He did not want to become so caught up in the investigation that he forgot the tragedy of last night – that a woman had perished and a man had been horribly injured. More than Owen’s efforts to learn what had
happened to them, they needed his prayers. Inside, in the chill dimness that echoed with the whispered prayers of his fellow supplicants, Owen knelt and prayed for Cisotta and her family, and for Poins. Before continuing to the palace he added a prayer for Lucie.

When Lady Pagnell and Emma fell to arguing once more about Matthew’s behaviour, Lucie judged that it was time she took her leave. Emma escorted her out to the street, promising to pay her for the sleep powder when next she escaped from the house. She did not wish to draw her mother’s attention to it by fetching her purse.

‘Is Matthew not an unpleasant man, just as I said?’

‘It is difficult to judge on so little evidence,’ Lucie said, her mind elsewhere. ‘Do you and your mother ever agree?’

Emma drew her hem away from a dog that had wandered into the courtyard, shooed it out to the street. ‘Did our arguments disturb you?’

‘No, it is not that. Only – you are so fortunate to have her here.’

‘You mean I should honour my mother while she walks among us. I know. Father hated our bickering.’ Blinking, Emma dropped her head, crossed herself.

‘I did not mean to chide you.’ Lucie understood how close to the surface her friend’s emotions were in this time of mourning, how fragile her composure. She had noticed the solemnity of all the household. ‘The boys were so quiet today,’ she said.

‘Do you think so?’ Emma glanced back at the house with a sympathetic expression. ‘They miss Father, too. He doted on them.’ She embraced Lucie, stepped back to study her. ‘You must have a care. Let Magda and Phillippa fuss over the servant while he is in your
house. I shall pray that Owen finds another good Samaritan. You do not need the extra burden so soon after the loss of your baby.’

Emma was one of the few people who openly spoke of Lucie’s miscarriage, and did not dismiss it as God’s will as the older women tended to do.

Lucie pressed her friend’s hand in thanks. ‘Once Owen sets his mind to something, it is soon accomplished,’ she said. ‘I must hurry now – I promised Jasper sweet vinegar and barley sugar from the market.’

Only after she was out of sight of the Ferriby house did Lucie slow, worried about a deep, dull pain in her belly. She tried to distract herself from it by going over the conversations at Emma’s house, searching for what she had gleaned. In doing so she walked past Thursday Market and down Coney Street, remembering the vinegar and barley sugar only when she crossed into St Helen’s Square and passed a customer carrying a jar of physick. She was about to turn back, but thought better of it. She would send Jasper. He could do with an outing.

As Owen entered the palace garden, Brother Michaelo rose from a bench and joined him, his neat habit somehow shedding the leaves and dried blossoms that tried to cling to it. ‘I thought perhaps you would escort the Fitzbaldrics,’ said the monk.

‘With two of Wykeham’s men at hand they did not need me.’

‘Ah yes. The bishop has spread his men all about the city today. Four were dispatched to bring the Riverwoman and her patient here. The crone came – can you believe it?’

That Magda and Poins were already at the palace was an unwelcome piece of news. The suffering man should
have been left in peace for a day or two. And Lucie would take it ill, Owen was sure of it, thinking he had urged such speed. ‘I did not expect them to be moved so soon. Who was in such haste?’

‘Our masters. They thought it best to have them here. May God watch over us.’ Michaelo crossed himself as he spoke the last words.

So be it. Owen had wanted Poins gone and so he was. Now he must make the best of it.

Michaelo flicked the hem of his robe away from a cat lying near the path. ‘That wanton prevented me from hearing what Guy and someone in the Pagnell livery were arguing about the other day.’

‘The cat did?’

‘I’d caught her moving her kittens to the porch behind His Grace’s quarters. They made such a fuss as I was carrying them back to the stables that they broke up the argument. Pity. It seemed quite heated.’

Owen smiled at the image of the fastidious monk carrying a litter of squealing kittens.

‘Ah. Here come the rest of His Grace’s guests,’ said Michaelo.

Following the monk’s gaze, Owen sighted the Fitzbaldrics and their maid approaching from the minster, flanked by Wykeham’s guards. Adeline carried the nosegay from the Dales’ garden, holding it at an awkward distance from her body, as if uncertain of its safety. Fitzbaldric still looked pathetic in his borrowed clothes. One of the guards carried a sack over his shoulder. The maid, pale and coughing, dragged behind all of them, carrying the cloth Julia Dale had urged on the Fitzbaldrics.

‘Before I meet with them,’ Owen said, ‘I want to see Magda and Poins.’

‘They are in the kitchen,’ Michaelo said. ‘A corner
has been enclosed with screens. It should be warm, and the sound of the cook and her servants might cheer the invalid.’ He pressed his fingers to his temples. ‘How he must suffer. I do not know how he lies so quietly. Do you think he will survive?’

‘I pray that he does, at least long enough to tell us what happened last night.’

Michaelo studied Owen. ‘Do you think he murdered the charm weaver?’

‘I have no way of knowing that yet. I wish I did.’ Owen bowed to him. ‘I shall leave you to your guests.’

The morning’s clouds had burned away. The midday sun felt warm on Owen’s head and shoulders. Once he rounded the corner of the palace and slipped from observation, he paused, lifting his face to the radiance. If only it could burn away the scent of death on him. For several moments he stood there. When at last he opened his eyes the garden seemed bathed in a white light and as he moved into the shade of a linden he felt the sweat on his face cooling. There would not be many more days like this until spring, months away.

By the time Lucie returned to the shop there was a lull in customers, and a good thing it was, for only a few spoonfuls of the cough syrup remained. While Jasper was out at the market, Lucie assembled the other ingredients. The hocks seeds and flowers, the gum Arabic and dragagantum were all within easy reach on the bottom shelves in the shop and the storeroom, but the quince seeds, seldom used in physicks made while a customer waited, or asked for specifically, were stored on a high shelf.

Lucie hesitated – she had been fetching quince seeds when she fell. As if the memory were not enough, the cramp in her belly worsened. She rested on a stool,
passed a few moments talking to a customer who bustled in – needing a toothache remedy, thank goodness. When the customer was gone, Lucie resolved that she would not spend the rest of her life fearing to climb to a high shelf. She was doing to herself what she had accused Owen of doing – assuming that once she’d had a fall, it would happen again and again.

Positioning the small ladder, she gathered her skirts and climbed, with more caution than usual and with her breath held all the way. The jar was large and smooth, and she would need both hands to lift it from the shelf. She must let go her skirts and her grasp on the shelves in order to pull out the jar. Taking a deep breath, she reached for it. Her hands were clammy, slippery on the glazed pottery, but she clutched it tightly to her side, freeing the hand that must keep her skirts from underfoot, and backed down the ladder.

Weak with relief and bent over with the cramp, she almost wept. But Jasper appeared just outside the shop door, greeting a neighbour. Catching her breath, Lucie set the jar on the counter and calmed herself by measuring out the seeds.

The kitchen sat between the two palace halls, Thoresby’s and the more public great hall. Behind it, screened from the archbishop’s chapel and the minster by a juniper hedge, a large oven rose out of a patch of packed earth, squat and blackened from years of baking for archbishops of York. That is where Owen found Maeve, the archbishop’s cook, bent over a tray of fresh bread.