by Maureen Ash
“You still haven’t found out who the two strangers are,” Gerard interjected, irritation in his tone. “That’s what I want to know. And if they have relatives who will come claiming compensation for their deaths.”
“If Father Anselm is still unable to tell us what he knows by morning, then I will question the drapers and weavers in the town,” Bascot replied. “The material is a fine cloth, too rich for a prostitute to wear, unless she was the leman of a patron of substantial means. If it can be determined where it was made, it might provide an answer to her identity.”
“There are weavers and cloth mercers aplenty in Lincoln now, and will be for the next week,” Nicolaa said. She picked up the scrap of material and held it in her hand. “It looks like the red Greyne that is made here in Lincoln, but…” She rubbed it gently between thumb and forefinger. “It seems a little too fine, too loosely woven.” She sighed and replaced it on the table. “I have no doubt Rolf the Draper could tell you, although I fear his mood is somewhat truculent at the moment.” She added this last with a smile. “He and his fellow townsmen were not best pleased with their reception tonight, or the rain that most probably drenched them as they left in hasty retreat for their homes.”
“Bloody merchants,” Gerard said, stopping his pacing to refill his goblet with wine from a leather bottle on the table. “Whatever ails them they bleat and cry like lost lambs, pleading poverty while they count their silver in secret.”
Bascot made no remark; neither did the sheriff’s wife. Camville resumed his pacing. Bascot could not ever recall him being still, except when he was eating. It was said the old king, Henry, father to both Richard and John, had been the same, forever moving. Gerard Camville had been familiare to King Henry, one of a coterie of young knights that the old king had kept about him and to whom he had shown much favour. Perhaps that was the key to the sheriff’s fractiousness, the losing of a lord who had been a just and fair monarch, as well as a friend. King Richard, against whom Camville had rebelled while the king was in the Holy Land on crusade, had fought with his father and, the rumour-mongers said, had caused King Henry’s death through heart-break at his son’s treachery. Even John, the present king, had failed his father in the end, siding with his older brother and King Louis of France to bring about Henry’s downfall. Now Camville was in the position of having to trust his wife’s friendship with one of Henry’s traitorous sons in order to retain the royal favour that he had once held so firmly from the father. It was not surprising that he was often in an ill temper.
“I will also ask about the brooch, lady,” Bascot said, attempting to divert the sheriff from his train of thought. “It is not valuable, but it may be remembered, if only because it is so small and the design unusual for a brooch, rather than a ring.”
Nicolaa picked up the tiny piece of jewellery and held it against her clothes. “Too small to be of any use except for the flimsiest of gowns,” she said, “almost as though it were to be worn under the outer clothing, hidden from view and unremarked except for the knowledge of the wearer. It looks familiar to me, but… it is probably only because it is a common design.” She laid it back on the table.
“Are you sure the alewife has no part in this coil?” Camville asked suddenly. “If these people were given a sleeping potion first, then it could be that she did it. She would have a knowledge of the properties of herbs by reason of her trade, those both beneficial or poisonous.”
“I think she is innocent of any complicity in the deaths,” Bascot replied. “She has not the wits for such scheming and is of too hysterical a nature for her husband to have trusted her with any secrets. And I took the herbs I found in the alehouse to the castle cook. They are harmless. Mistress Agnes is nothing more than she appears to be-a competent brewer of ale.”
“It might prove worthwhile to question the harlots in Butwerk,” Nicolaa said. “They will know if one of their number is missing.”
“I will do that,” Bascot assured her, “but I have some doubts that the girl was a bawd. Rather, I think, she was made to look like one.”
“What makes you think that?” Nicolaa asked.
“Her outer clothing was too big for her and was of cheap stuff, not like the undergarments from which I think that scrap was torn. Once I have all of the clothing from the nunnery, I will be sure of that assumption but, if I am right, it was put on her, along with the face paint, to give the impression that she was from the stewes in the lower part of town.”
“And you say she was with child?” Nicolaa asked.
“So Sister Bridget told me.”
“Another life for which damned compensation can be claimed,” Camville said angrily.
A flicker of irritation crossed Nicolaa’s face, so subtle that if Bascot had not been looking straight at her with his one good eye, he would have missed it.
“You have done well, de Marins,” she said, rising from her seat. “Learn what you can about the cloth and the brooch. It may be the merchants of the town will be too busy to attend closely to your questions. You have permission to use my authority if you have need of it.
“We best return to our guests, husband,” she said to Camville. “Tomorrow will be a busy day, even if this rain continues to fall.”
As they prepared to depart Bascot thanked her and said, “I intend to visit the family of the dead Jew, as well.”
Camville snorted. “At least I will not have to pay compensation for that death. Any property he owns will come to the crown, and I can claim a fee for collection. The shame is that all of the dead are not Jews. Then there would be no cause for concern, only profit.”
This time Nicolaa did not veil her annoyance. “The king is careful of the Jewish community, as you well know, Gerard. He would rather have them alive and lending him money than being killed and losing silver they could bring to him in the future.”
Camville made no reply and Bascot remembered that there had been some talk that it had been the sheriff who had instigated the raid on the Jewry of Stamford some years before. Now Gerard let his wife’s words slide off him, and turned to the Templar.
“Bring me the murderer, de Marins, and I promise you I will hang him high enough that his feet will kick the heavens. If you can prove these people earned their death through their own fault rather than any lack of mine, I will be doubly grateful. You will not lack for a reward.”
With that the sheriff left the room, his girth filling the door frame for a moment before he pushed through. Bascot followed Nicolaa out of the chamber and, once they were down the winding stairs of the tower, opened the door for her to pass through into the hall. As she returned to her place on the dais, he felt a sudden desire for a candi and, taking one from the scrip at his belt, put it in his mouth and savoured it as his eye searched the crowd for Gianni.
Nicolaa resumed her seat with a feeling of resignation. The hall was packed to its farthest walls tonight. With easy capacity for perhaps a hundred souls, now there were nearer two hundred crammed into its large space-visiting nobility and their servants, prominent merchants from outside Lincoln who needed to be shown a welcome from the castellan of the castle, a troupe of travelling musicians and acrobats, and the additional men Gerard had hired to swell the ranks of his guard. All sat in their various places, the nobility and knights above the salt, merchants a little lower, with the visiting nobles’ servants and men-at-arms crowded against the rear wall. The storm-laden air was close in the press, with smoke from the myriad wall torches and candles making it into a murky eye-watering haze. Dogs barked, servants rushed and hurried with wine ewers and plates of sweetmeats and, in the midst of all this chattering humanity the musicians strolled, adding to the din with the screech of viol or rebec. The tumblers thrust their bodies through the aisles between the tables, turning somersaults and tossing brightly coloured balls as they whirled, the red and blue hues of their tunics and the spinning orbs making a kaleidoscopic pattern that hurt the eyes if one stared too long.
Nicolaa sighed and
signalled for a page to refill her goblet. This was a feast that had been expected of her and Gerard, she owed it as a contribution to the success of the fair, but she would be glad when it was over. Once, long ago, when she had been but a girl and her father had still been alive, she had revelled in such gaiety, laughed at the antics of the acrobats, sang with the musicians, eaten marchpane until her stomach rebelled. Now, she thought, she was growing old, for she longed only for it all to be over and to escape for a week or two to her small manor house at Brattleby, relishing a stay in its quiet confines while Lincoln castle was cleansed of the collected rubbish of the year and prepared for the onset of winter.
The guest at her elbow made a remark and she turned to speak to him. Hugh Bardolf was, like herself, a vassal of King John and holder of much land in the area, some of it from her own fiefdom, most of it directly from the crown. He was a tall rangily built man with sharp clean features and a shock of light brown hair now liberally sprinkled with grey. About her own age, he had once been suggested, before her marriage to Gerard, as a candidate for her husband. She liked him, but was glad that in the end an alliance between the Hayes and Bardolfs had not been forthcoming. They were too much alike, she and Hugh, with a similar need for order and control. They would have battled constantly over the smallest decisions. Gerard she had never loved, or even liked very much, but he left her to run the Haye demesne as she wished, purely because he was too lazy to do so himself, preferring his hawks and hounds to the trivial details involved in the management of their lands.
And, she suspected, Hugh would have been more of a demanding partner in the marriage bed. He had five sons, as well as two daughters, and his wife was expecting another, the last baby she would have, Nicolaa surmised, before she became too old for childbearing. Hugh’s need to control his surroundings would extend to ensuring his own blood would benefit from his industry, while Gerard, once their only child, Richard, had been born and was seen to thrive, had never again come to her bedchamber. She had never been sorry that this was so, although she would have liked more children. She supposed that it might be different to bed a man for whom you felt some affection but, for all that she and Gerard managed to maintain some degree of amiability on the rare occasions it was necessary to be in one another’s company, it had been very apparent that neither of them had enjoyed the brief liaison that producing an heir had required. She did not think Gerard was a lusty man, for she had never heard of any leman or female servant that had attracted his attention, and thought rather that he expended all his energies on his enjoyment of the hunt and his duties as sheriff. Even though her husband had not liked King Richard, she reflected, they had been very much alike, both preferring the challenge of bloody conflict to the embrace of a woman.
“You haven’t answered me, Nicolaa,” Hugh complained softly, but without offence, beside her.
“I’m sorry, Hugh. My mind, I am afraid, is on other matters. Please forgive me and repeat your question for, truly, I did not hear it.”
High gave her a mildly admonishing smile and leaned closer. “I am, as usual, asking if you have come to any decision about my Matilda and your Richard. It would be a good alliance, Nicolaa. One that should have been made between you and I, and was not. Now we should remedy it by uniting our lands through our children.”
Nicolaa smiled in return and gave her usual reply. “As I told you, Hugh, Gerard wishes to give it more thought. And we would need to consult with the king. He may not relish such a union, especially now while he is trying to bring his vassals on the continent under control. I am sure he would not happily consider two such vast fiefdoms as ours being joined together. He has not a liking for his barons to have too much power in their own hands.”
“He knows you would never betray him, Nicolaa. He has often spoken, not only to me but to others, of your father’s loyalty, and your own.” Hugh was being his most genial and persuasive but Nicolaa had known him too long for such tactics to work.
“He has no reason to doubt mine, Hugh, but every reason to doubt Gerard’s. And Richard is Gerard’s son. John is not a king to overlook past histories, or future possibilities. He has switched sides himself too often to be unaware of the propensities of others for doing the same. The question of marriage between my son and your daughter will have to wait. Neither Gerard or I will be offended if you should look elsewhere for a match for Matilda.”
Hugh sat back, rebuffed, his smile disappearing. Nicolaa motioned for a server to refill his goblet. Her mind was too full of tiredness, the thought of the energy that would be required for tomorrow’s festivities at the opening of the fair, and of the strange murders in the alehouse as well as Father Anselm’s dire state, to be overly concerned about Bardolf’s hurt feelings. There was not a lack of marriageable heiresses for her son, as Hugh well knew.
Her glance strayed down the table to where the eldest of Hugh’s two daughters, Matilda, sat with her mother and younger sister. She was not an unpleasant girl to look at, moderately round with the promise of a pleasingly plump frame when she reached maturity, medium brown hair and a demure manner. However, Nicolaa suspected that her modesty was often a pose put on for the benefit of her elders. There had been a day, when Matilda had thought herself unobserved and was with people her own age, that Nicolaa had overheard her conversation with the others. Matilda’s speech had been quick and racy, bordering on the lewd. From that moment Nicolaa had dismissed her as a possible wife for Richard, not because of her bawdiness, but because she hid her inclination for it so well. When she was finally presented with a grandchild, Nicolaa wanted it to be from her son’s loins, not those of some carefully concealed lover.
Matilda’s younger sister, Alaine, on the other hand, was far more to Nicolaa’s taste, for she had an open merry face, with a ready laugh and quick wit. However, she was only eleven, some five years younger than her sister, and it was possible she would change as she grew older. The onset of womanhood was a difficult time for any girl and could often bring about radical changes in temperament. Her own sister, Ermingard, had become an entirely different person after the advent of her menses.
Nicolaa looked down the table to where Ermingard now sat, flanked by her husband, William de Rollos, on one side, and their dour-faced son, Ivo, on the other. De Rollos was a stolid Norman knight and had ostensibly brought his family from Normandy to attend the fair and to visit Ermingard’s family, but in reality he was looking for support from Nicolaa and Gerard in regard to his claim over some disputed land in Normandy. Ermingard sat as though imprisoned between her husband and her son, her red gold hair dimmed with grey, as was Nicolaa’s own, and her small heart-shaped face prematurely showing lines of age.
The placement between her two menfolk was not without reason on William’s part, for his wife could, without warning, be subject to wild changes of mood, one moment unspeaking and the next spilling with laughter at some jest apparent to no one but herself. She had been subject to these startling lapses from lucidity ever since the day she had come running to Nicolaa in a state of fright, her clothing dishevelled, holding a bloodstained rag in her hand and screaming in fright at the gush of bright redness that had suddenly appeared between her legs. No explanations from Nicolaa or from the next eldest of the Haye daughters, Petronille, could alleviate Ermingard’s distress and she stayed in a state of shock for days until her cycle had ended, only to get into a similar condition a month later when it happened all over again. Never since the day their mother died had Nicolaa felt her loss so heavily.
Her gaze strayed over to her other sister, Petronille, a plump motherly figure who had inherited the dark hair and eyes of their mother. She was sitting at the far end of the long table on the dais, between an elderly priest and another vassal of King John’s, Philip de Kyme. De Kyme was a grizzled and truculent baron about the same age as Gerard. He had rheumy dark eyes, a sallow expression and could be extremely argumentative when he had taken too much wine. Seating Petronille beside him had been a diplomatic decision
on Nicolaa’s part. Her middle sister had a very calm nature, capable of listening to another’s speech without showing impatience or the need to thrust her own conversation forward. She was at ease with her table companions even though the old cleric was mumbling almost constantly as he ate meat from the trencher in front of him, and Philip de Kyme, as usual, was complaining about his son-by-marriage and lamenting the lack of an heir from his own seed. Petronille, deftly passing more food to the priest and murmuring an assent to his disjointed phrases, still managed to be able to listen to de Kyme and give the correct response in the right place.
Nicolaa hoped Petronille would be able to stay for longer than the few days she had said was all she could afford to be absent from her husband and household in Stamford. Petronille was a balm that Nicolaa sorely needed at the moment, especially with difficult guests like Philip de Kyme, who was, at that moment, casting angry glances about him.
The object of his disgruntlement, his stepson Conal, stood laughing and drinking a cup of wine a short distance away in the company of her own son, Richard. The pair had finished eating and had strolled over to watch a trio of tumblers who were cleverly balancing on each other’s shoulders and dropping down and back in almost constant motion, all within the confines of a tiny patch of floor. One of the tumblers was female, her legs encased, for modesty’s sake, in thin woollen stockings under her skirt. But for all the covering, her shapeliness could be seen as she flew up and down between the hands of her two partners and Nicolaa saw that Richard’s eyes were fixed in an avid stare on her antics while Conal, son of de Kyme’s wife from her first marriage, watched Richard, amusement on his face.
