A Deadly Penance tk-6

by Maureen Ash

  Richard continued his questioning. “We have only your word to support your claim that you were unaware of Mistress Adgate’s unfaithfulness. And I find it hard to believe that you did not notice her attraction to Tercel during the times he came to your business premises. You are a successful merchant and therefore not, I would think, a man who is easily gulled. How is it that your wife was able to do so?”

  “I fear I was too complaisant in my affection for her,” Adgate replied tightly. “I was married before, and happily, to my first wife and remained so until she died. While I have experience in commerce, I have little in dealing with women, other than those who come with their husbands to buy my wares. Had I paid Clarice more attention, perhaps she would not have sought comfort elsewhere. Although my wife’s actions were inexcusable, I must admit that I am perhaps partly to blame.”

  The words galled him, but he had to admit they contained a modicum of truth. He should have been more observant and noticed that his pretty young wife had an inclination for licentiousness. Then he could have made an effort to forestall her infidelity.

  “Your answers are glib, furrier, and do not entirely satisfy me,” Richard proclaimed. “Nonetheless, I will accept your protestation of innocence-for now. You may go, but hold yourself ready to be questioned further in this matter.”

  It was with great relief that Adgate turned and left the room.

  After the furrier had exited the solar, Nicolaa, Richard, Alinor and Bascot discussed what they had been told.

  “I think Mistress Adgate is now telling the truth,” the Templar said, “but I am not so sure about her husband. Still, his testimony that he did not leave the hall is borne out by the others who were in his company, so unless he is lying about being unaware of his wife’s adultery and did, in fact, hire an assassin-and I must admit I think that unlikely-we must look elsewhere for the murderer.”

  “But where?” Nicolaa responded. “Who else would have had reason to wish Tercel dead? He had only been in Lincoln a short time…”

  “But, even so, we must remember that he went quite often into the town,” Bascot reminded her, “and had time enough to make the acquaintance of any number of people within the city walls. It could be one of these that led to his death-suppose he took another lover besides Mistress Adgate and the other woman became jealous at sharing his attentions with the furrier’s wife, for example; or he struck up a friendship with a citizen in the town which became rancorous for some reason or another. There are many possibilities and the only way we can discover if any of them are worthwhile considering is to try and trace Tercel’s movements since he came to Lincoln-where he went and to whom he spoke.”

  “Not an easy task, de Marins,” Nicolaa said repressively.

  Bascot agreed, but added, “The chore may be made a little lighter, lady, if your own servants and that of Lady Petronille were asked if he mentioned, even if only in passing, any of the places he went in the town; whether he was in the habit of visiting a certain alehouse, or had a favourite pie shop, for instance. Any small detail they can recall may assist us.”

  Nicolaa rose from her seat with a sigh. “You are right, de Marins. Every possibility must be pursued if we are to prevent this murderer from escaping retribution. Richard and I will question all of the servants again and let you know when you return tomorrow if anything of import has been uncovered.”

  As the company all left the solar, Stephen Wharton, fifty miles to the southwest, had returned to his demesne and was preparing to travel to Lincoln. He did not look forward to the trip; it would take him the better part of two days and involve a stop overnight, probably at Grantham, but it was not the distance that was bothering him, it was what lay at the end of the journey. Richard de Humez had listened to his tale in near silence, the baron’s irritation gaining momentum long before the story was told. Wharton hoped Nicolaa de la Haye would be more understanding, for he truly had not intended any harm by concealing the flight of fancy in which Tercel had engaged. Now, as one of the grooms brought out his horse, saddled and ready for him to mount, he wondered if he had been too credulous in his deceit.

  Thirteen

  At Riseholme, all of the children, even the reluctant Willi, marvelled at the comforts they were experiencing. The refurbished old barn was snug and secure, with lime-washed walls and a dirt floor that was clean and hard packed. A fire blazed in the middle of the large space, the smoke escaping through a hole in the newly thatched roof, and over the embers hung a huge cauldron filled to the brim with an appetising broth thickened with barley and root vegetables. Each child had a pallet stuffed with clean straw and, best of all, a blanket to cover them at night. Twice a day they were each given a cup of milk-a rarity that some of the children had never tasted before-and three small loaves of coarse bread to share. In their short and desperate lives, they had never before been so well fed or warm and each of them revelled in their good fortune. Even the youngest, little Annie, had stopped grizzling and her older sister, Emma, was beginning to blossom at being relieved of the little girl’s demands. The other girl, Joan, although still maintaining her near silent demeanour, now accompanied her monosyllabic responses with a tremulous smile.

  After they had first arrived, the bailiff, a stern-faced man who, despite his intimidating demeanour, spoke to them kindly, had shown them around the property and told them where they were allowed to roam and where they were not. All of the buildings-a small and sturdy stone-walled manor house, a newly built barn used for storing grain and root vegetables, a large byre with a dozen milch cows, an enclosure with a few pigs and a shed where cheese was made-were out of bounds for the present, he explained. Once they had become used to their surroundings, the boys would be expected to muck out the cowshed and pigsty and the girls to tend a vegetable plot at the rear of the main building. He also told them that, when the summer came, they would help to gather apples and plums from the fruit trees in a large orchard that abutted the inner compound and assist with gathering the harvest from the fields of wheat and barley to the south. But until then, he said, and while they put some “meat on their sparse bones,” they would be expected to keep the barn in which they were living clean and tidy; their pallets were to be rolled up neatly every morning and the boys were to fetch fuel from the woodshed and tend the fire while the girls were to empty their slop bucket once a day and sweep the floor.

  As the bailiff, a man named Stoddard, looked at the thin little faces of the youngsters, his heart swelled with pity. Lady Nicolaa had promised all of the Riseholme servants a bonus each Michaelmas for the extra work the children would cause but, even if that had not been so, Stoddard would have welcomed the chance to help these poor unfortunates and he knew the rest of the servants felt the same.

  Now, on their third day at Riseholme, as the children rolled up their pallets and were looking forward to breaking their fast, Mark motioned to Willi to come a little aside and said, “It’s a good place here, inn’t it?”

  Willi was forced to nod his head in agreement, and Mark, who felt he owed it to his new friend to dissuade him from a foolish course of action, said, “You knows as how you’d be a right silly beggar to leave and go back to Lincoln, don’t you? We’s got everything we needs here. Why go back there and be hungry and freezin’ cold again?”

  Willi set his mouth in a stubborn line. “ ’Cos I’se got to go and find my da, that’s why. How will he know where I am? Only orphans is allowed to come to this place and I ain’t one, so he’ll never think to look for me here, will he?”

  “But what if that murderer sees you?” Mark asked. “’Spe-cially if your da ain’t come back yet and you got no one to protect you. You could be killed stone dead like that man up on the ramparts.”

  “I’ll have to take my chances,” Willi replied stoutly, but despite his brave words, the young boy was fearful. The person he had seen near the tower had looked straight at him as their glances met and was sure to know him if their paths chanced to cross again. Mark was right; it wou
ld be more sensible to stay at Riseholme, but Willi was desperate to find his father who, if he had chanced to earn a few pence, might spend it in an alehouse if Willi was not there to dissuade him. His father had not always been a tosspot. They had lived in a village not far from Lincoln until last spring when Willi’s mother had died of a fever. Up until then, his father had worked hard at his trade of thatching and they had a little cot to live in, provided by the high-ranking cleric who held the land in return for the fee of his father’s labour for two days a week. But when Willi’s mother died, his father had taken to drinking all his hard-earned pennies away in the village alehouse and had not turned up for work. When the cleric had threatened eviction if the terms of the fee were not met, Willi’s father decided he would go to look for work in Lincoln, and so they had come to the town. But thatched roofs were not, due to the town’s bylaw, in common use within the town and prospective employers had not been plentiful. On the few occasions that his father had been fortunate enough to earn a few pennies repairing thatch on small buildings such as barns or outhouses in the suburbs, the coins had been squandered in an alehouse before Willi could persuade his father to spend them on food and shelter. Finally, they had been reduced to begging in the street or lining up with other indigents for alms from the church. It had been then that his father had declared he would go back into the countryside to find work and told his son to wait in Lincoln for his return. Willi knew he had to be in the town when his father came back for him; if he was not, they might never see one another again. He would rather take the chance of being murdered than losing his da forever.

  As the two boys parted company to attend to their chores, neither of them noticed that Joan, maintaining her usual silence, had crept up close to them and listened to their conversation.

  It was almost midday when Stephen Wharton arrived at Lincoln castle. His horse and that of the groom who had accompanied him were flecked with foam from the hard riding they had been put to that morning. After stopping overnight in the guesthouse of an abbey a few miles north of Grantham, Wharton had decided they would start out before first light and the pair had spurred the horses hard for the remaining twenty-odd miles. Wharton was anxious to get his unpleasant errand done with.

  After instructing his groom to tend to their mounts, he walked wearily up the steps of the keep’s forebuilding and, upon entering the hall, asked the servant in attendance at the door to inform Lady Petronille that he wished to speak to her urgently.

  A little over an hour later, while Richard and Bascot were ensconced in Gerard Camville’s chamber discussing the paucity of information that had been obtained from re-interviewing all of the servants, there was a knock at the door and the Haye steward, Eudo, entered.

  “Lady Nicolaa has sent me, Sir Richard,” he said, “with a request that you and Sir Bascot attend to her in the solar. She told me to tell you that the matter is most urgent.”

  Fourteen

  When Richard and the templar entered the solar they found Nicolaa, Petronille and Alinor seated at the far end of the room in the company of a man who was a stranger to both of them. He appeared to be of middle age and, by the sword he wore at his belt, was of knight’s status. On his face was an expression of apprehension. A little behind Nicolaa’s chair, Gianni sat unobtrusively on a stool, his wax tablet and stylus in his hand, glancing apprehensively at the company around him. The strained look on the countenances of the two sisters bore evidence of tension and Alinor’s delicately arched brows were drawn down in a glower. In her hand, Nicolaa held an unrolled sheet of parchment.

  “This is Stephen Wharton, a friend of my brother-by-marriage,” Nicolaa said, introducing the man to her son and the Templar as they approached. “He is also the person, Richard, who recommended that your uncle Dickon give Aubrey Tercel a post in his retinue.”

  She paused for a moment as the men all nodded at one another. Then, her voice taking on the determined note that Bascot knew so well, continued, “Wharton has come to tell us a very strange tale about the background of the murdered man. While there is no proof of anything he will relate, the important aspect is that Tercel believed it to be true and, in so doing, may have given someone reason to wish him dead.”

  After Richard and Bascot had got over their surprise at Nicolaa’s words, they looked towards Wharton expectantly. The knight took a nervous swallow of wine before he began to recount his tale for a second time. Although neither Nicolaa nor Petronille had evinced any censure of him for keeping Tercel’s fanciful conclusions a secret, Alinor had been furious and still was. She, like her father, saw the repression as a breach of trust and had accused Wharton of placing her mother and herself in possible danger. As the visitor looked at the two men facing him, he felt very nervous of their reaction to his story; would they, like Alinor, find his actions irresponsible?

  Taking a deep breath, Wharton began his recounting. “When Aubrey was just a few weeks old, my younger brother, Lionel, brought him to my manor house. Although Lionel never confirmed it, I believed the boy to be my brother’s illegitimate son. He asked me to keep privy the fact that he had given the babe into my care, so together we concocted a tale that the child was the posthumous offspring of my falconer, Bran Tercel, who had taken a chill and died of a congestion in the lungs a couple of months before. We said that my falconer had told me on his deathbed that he had a paramour in Stamford town who was enceinte with his child and begged me to care for the babe after it was born. To explain the absence of the mother, we said that she had died giving birth and her family had given their consent for the boy to be placed in our care. It was a flimsy tale, but it was accepted, and no one questioned it during the years that Aubrey grew to manhood.”

  Wharton took another swallow of wine and, knowing the next part would be the hardest to relate, continued. “About the time that I recommended Aubrey be taken into Dickon’s service, my brother had a fatal accident. While out on a hunt, Lionel’s horse stumbled and fell, and in the tangle that ensued, landed on my brother with the full force of its weight, crushing his vital organs. He lived for only a couple of hours and died in extreme pain.”

  The knight looked up at the company; his eyes had darkened as he had spoken of his brother’s death. “Since Lionel had never wed, it fell to me to go through the few possessions he kept at the dower property he inherited from our mother. Among them, I found a small package containing a letter that was addressed to me”-he gestured towards the parchment Nicolaa was holding-“and which I have brought with me. It was written some years before, about the time that Lionel left England to follow King Richard on crusade to the Holy Land. I think my brother penned it in case he should not return and, when he came safely back, forgot that it had been written, and left it lying in the chest where I found it. In the letter, among instructions for disposal of his property, there was mention of Aubrey. It said that although Lionel knew I had assumed the boy to be his bastard, this was not the case. It went on to say that Aubrey had been given into his care by someone ‘to whom he owed a debt of loyalty’ and that the reason he had allowed me to be misled as to the boy’s parentage was to prevent the child’s true heritage from becoming known. There was a ring enclosed with the papers that Lionel said would provide a small inheritance for Aubrey and was to be given to him if, and when, I deemed him worthy of receiving it.”

  “Was it a gold ring with an engraving on the inner side of a crescent moon encircling a star?” Richard asked.

  “Yes, that’s the one. After I read the letter, and had given much soul-searching thought to the matter, I showed the letter to Aubrey and gave him the ring. My main reason for doing so was that he should know his father had not been, as he had been led to believe, of common stock, but had most likely been a friend of my brother’s and therefore a man of knight’s rank.”

  “Did your brother name the father?” Bascot asked.

  “No. He said in the letter that it was of no consequence; the lie had been told to protect Aubrey’s mother. She had be
en a maid of Winchester, Lionel wrote, and a woman of good repute, who was the daughter of a merchant and promised in marriage to a burgess of Lincoln. Since her future husband could not be expected to accept her as a bride if he discovered she had borne a child sired by another man, it was decided to keep the matter secret and my brother was asked to take her to a convent where she could be immured until the birthing. After that event, he said, it had been requested of him that he find a good home for the babe, so the woman could go to her betrothal as though she were a virgo intacta. As far as I can tell, all went as planned. Lionel brought the child to me and the mother married the merchant. Since I had believed the boy to be my own kin, even though of bastard stock, I contrived to have him educated and cared for as best I could. It was a shock to learn, so many years later, that my reason for doing so was fallacious.”

  “Did your brother never ask after the child’s progress?” Nicolaa asked.

  “Lionel was seldom in England during the years after he left Aubrey with me. Lionheart gave him a small fief in Aquitaine and it was there that he spent most of his time, and where he died, the manner of it told to me in a missive sent by the priest who was his confessor. I sometimes received a letter from Lionel to let me know how he fared, but that is all. But his news dealt mostly with his own activities or, after Lionheart died, with the political situation across the Narrow Sea, and made no mention of the boy. I must admit, to my shame, that I gave little thought to Aubrey myself until I found the letter I have brought you. His tutor was one I had hired to school some of the children of my upper servants and I left him to the cleric’s care, and that of my steward. On the rare occasions I spoke to him, he seemed a personable lad, and intelligent.”