A Web of Silk

by FIONA BUCKLEY

  Sir Edward pursed his lips, and then spoke quietly to Frost and Stagg, presumably asking for their agreement. They shook their heads quite violently, which had the effect of making him look at them sharply. Then he turned to Johns and Taverner.

  ‘Your request is granted. Mistress Stannard may speak.’

  I did so, as I had tried to do the day before. Then, I had been interrupted and contradicted. This time I was heard out. I put everything as plainly and briefly as I could, so as not to waste time or confuse anyone. When I reached the stage of explaining why Frost and Stagg desired my downfall, they both clearly wanted to interrupt but Heron ordered them to keep silent, and when Saint and Pug placed ominous hands on their sword hilts the attempt to interrupt ceased abruptly.

  At the end, Heron said: ‘So you claim that you were told that the dowry chest had been stolen, and that you were asked to find and retrieve it quietly, ostensibly because Mistress Liversedge feared that her betrothed husband would be shocked by the scandal of having the chest stolen, even though she was the victim and not the perpetrator. He denies this …’

  ‘I most certainly do!’ said Taverner. ‘And I am so appalled at being used in this offensive manner that I have broken my betrothal off.’ Eleanor at once began to whimper and he rounded on her. ‘Oh, don’t begin that again, Eleanor, please! You will dissolve into a puddle soon!’

  Eleanor produced a handkerchief, blew her nose and wiped her eyes. She stood trembling, but refrained from any further demonstration of grief.

  ‘And Mistress Stannard, you claim,’ said Heron, ‘that the entire request was a trap, aimed at getting you caught in the act of committing a theft. Aimed, in fact, at your ruin. Because you also claim that Julius Stagg is actually Anthony Hunt, brother of Simeon Wilmot, who was hanged for his involvement in a plot which you foiled, and that Master Stagg – or Hunt – therefore seeks revenge.’

  ‘Yes, Sir Edward. And I – we, all of us – also suspect that Philip Sandley, who was recently found murdered not far from Hawkswood, was aware of the plot against me and was coming to warn us, but was prevented. We have reason to suspect that he was actually involved in Simeon Wilmot’s plot, and that Hunt and Frost thought they could involve him in this one. Perhaps they had some scheme that needed his co-operation and had to change their plans when he refused. He and his father, Roger Brockley, had by this time formed a bond.’

  ‘It hangs together very well,’ Heron conceded. ‘But where is the supporting evidence? Is there any at all to uphold this matter of Philip Sandley, which you have brought up so very unexpectedly? And is there any at all to support your version of how you came to be found removing the chest and the salt from Knoll House?’

  ‘I have something to say,’ said Christopher.

  ‘You, Master Spelton?’

  ‘I paid a call on Mistress Stannard shortly after she was visited by Master Stagg and his niece with their extraordinary request. When I entered the parlour where she was sitting, she was in the company of Gladys Morgan, whom you see here, and in fact it was Gladys who told me about their visit. She had been present throughout. She confirms Mistress Stannard’s account of that visit.’

  ‘Gladys Morgan? I know of her,’ said Heron. ‘A loyal family servant who owes Mistress Stannard much and, or so I understand, is also grateful to Roger Brockley. It is common knowledge in this district that in the past they protected her from charges of witchcraft, which I myself strongly suspect were justified. A loyal, aged and possibly dubious servant is not the kind of witness I find convincing. I cast no aspersions on your honesty, Master Spelton, but you are offering no more than hearsay and not from any reliable source.’

  Gladys lifted her stick and banged it three times on the floor, making us all look towards her. ‘Enough of calling me dubious, whatever that means. There’s rudeness, anyway. I know it. But I can tell you that that man Stagg hates Mistress Stannard, and there’s proof of that. Summat I can show you. Hates her so much, his very hands betray him.’

  ‘And I can speak to that,’ said Dr Joynings. ‘Gladys has shown me.’

  I stared at them in amazement. Brockley, Sybil and Dale were fairly gaping. None of us had the least idea what this was about.

  ‘It’ll mean a journey to Hawkswood,’ said Gladys, obviously enjoying herself. ‘But you can see for yourselves, indeed you can.’

  ‘She is right,’ said Joynings. ‘She has shown me. It is something in the church. She has shown Master Spelton, too.’ Christopher nodded vigorously and Daniel Johns said: ‘Master Spelton has told me about it. I believe him.’ Eleanor’s wet eyes were wide with incomprehension, and Stagg and Frost clearly just as flummoxed.

  ‘Got the Hawkswood coach outside,’ said Gladys, looking smug. ‘Been a fair old game, it has, people riding hither and yon all yesterday. Me getting Master Taverner to put me on his crupper so we could call on the vicar and I could be showing them what I want to show you all now, and then Master Taverner going off in the coach yesterday to fetch Master Johns so we could all travel here together this morning, and the vicar here galloping off on his fat old skewbald to fetch Master Spelton and show him what’s to be seen. Well, who’s coming along to see for theirselves?’

  TWENTY

  The Face of a Damned Soul

  ‘There is no need for us all to go,’ Sir Edward said, testily. ‘We are not going a’maying. The party will consist of myself, the accused – Mistress Stannard and her manservant Brockley – Julius Stagg and Giles Frost, the woman Gladys Morgan, of course, Dr Joynings and Master Taverner. That is all.’

  ‘I am coming as well,’ said Johns. ‘I got here in the Hawkswood coach and if there’s no room for me this time, then I’m sure the Knoll House stables can provide me with transport. A plain farm cart will do. And Eleanor comes with me.’

  ‘So do I,’ declared Christopher. ‘I am a witness to what Mistress Stannard told me before she came here. In fact, I advised her not to get involved. My wife was once her ward and I also have the status of a Queen’s Messenger. I came here on horseback and intend to go back to Hawkswood the same way, with or without an invitation. Anyway, Master Johns will need me to push his chair.’

  So, in the end, it was a sizeable party that set out for Hawkswood that morning, though there was no need for any farm carts. Johns travelled in the coach, which turned out to be driven by my groom Eddie. Gladys and Eleanor also journeyed in the coach and, on Heron’s orders, so did Brockley and I. With five of us squeezed in along with Daniel’s chair we were very much wedged together and far from comfortable. The chair bumped my shins all the way. Heron and his men rode around the coach, encircling it and forming a guard. ‘We’re virtually under arrest,’ Brockley said to me as the party set off.

  ‘I know,’ I said grimly.

  Dale and Sybil, who had both been left behind, knew it too. Our last sight of them had been two forlorn women with white faces standing outside the house to watch the coach depart. I glimpsed the twins trying to join them and caught sight of Mrs Hamble and Dr Lambert trying to draw them back. The twins must be frightened, too, I thought. Their father had not been officially accused of anything, but I had myself brought him under suspicion.

  The rest of the party were all mounted and rode behind. We formed quite a cavalcade as we covered the nine miles to Hawkswood. We did not go to Hawkswood House, but straight to the village and the church, where the riders dismounted and tethered their horses.

  Brockley and I got out of the coach, and Eddie, descending from the driving seat, chivalrously helped Eleanor out. Brockley and I hadn’t felt inclined to do so. Christopher then lent Eddie a hand in getting the wheeled chair out, guiding Daniel Johns down into it, and fetching a rug out of the coach to place across his knees. When everyone was finally assembled, Heron took the lead as we filed through the gate, then along the short path to the church and into the cool interior of St Mary’s.

  ‘Well,’ said Heron, swinging round to look at his clustered audience. ‘Here we are. What is it that
we have been brought here to see?’

  Gladys hobbled forward and used her stick to point to the last window on the south side. ‘That’s it. You look close at that one. That’s the Last Judgement, that is, and there’re the demons taking the damned to hell. You take a good hard look at those. Can’t see it from down here; those windows are too high. You’ll want ladders.’

  ‘I left a ladder in readiness,’ said Joynings. ‘There it is, propped in the corner beyond the font. Master Heron, perhaps your men could …’

  Pug and Saint were already doing it. They brought the ladder out of its corner and set it carefully beneath the window Gladys had pointed to. ‘I’ve been up there,’ said Joynings. ‘I’ve seen what Gladys Morgan means and …’

  ‘And how did Gladys get up there?’ enquired Heron. ‘She can’t climb ladders!’

  ‘There’s silly talk,’ said Gladys in her rude way. ‘I was here when the window was brought inside the church and I saw it then, close to. After the mistress had gone, I stopped on. Wanted to see the window go into its place, I did. Only I were in that little chapel, looking at the flowers in there and Master Stagg didn’t know I were still there. But I was, and I was at that there chapel door, about to come out, when, just as the men were putting ladders ready to help them get the new window into place, Master Stagg strolls up to it, says: “Ah yes, one final touch!” – and with that, quick as lightning, he knocks out one pane, just one, puts another in its place, gets it fixed, and then tells everyone to wait, it’s got to settle. “We’ll break for a meal,” he says. “It’s all ready at the inn. Got to wait a bit now before we move the window.”’

  ‘That’s true enough,’ Stagg interrupted. ‘It had all been a rush, getting ready to deliver the window and I forgot to see to a pane that I thought should be replaced. The colours weren’t right in the one already there, didn’t perfectly match colours in other panes they ought to have matched. I’d got the new one ready myself, working late for two nights. And then, would you believe it …’

  ‘No,’ muttered Brockley.

  ‘… I was so tired that I overslept, and in all the to-do of getting the window wrapped and on to its cart I almost forgot the new pane! I remembered at the last moment, and I like a job to be perfect. So I picked up the new one and brought it with me. I didn’t want to mention any of this to the customer, though! I knew Dr Joynings would want to see the window before it went into place, so I waited for him to come. Then Mistress Stannard came too. Well, good. I let them both see all they wanted to see and when they’d gone, I saw to replacing the unsatisfactory pane. What’s all this fuss about?’

  ‘I waited till they’d all gone,’ said Gladys, unimpressed. ‘But afore I left, I took a look. And that new pane, it worried me. Couldn’t think what were amiss with it, I couldn’t, but summat was. Even dreamt about it at night. And then, night afore last, it were, as I woke up, I realized! Plain as the sun in the sky! Them goats have people’s faces, but there was one face that was different in that new pane and all of a sudden I knew why. But I didn’t know what to do about it, not till Master Taverner got here with his wild talk about Mistress Stannard there being arrested, and that’s when I saw. That man Stagg, I thought, he’s at the bottom of this, and I got Master Taverner to take me to Vicar Joynings here and I told him what I’d seen and he got out his ladder and took a look and, well, everyone as can ought to take a look, too!’

  Heron was, as I have said, a fair man. He might not approve of me but he was not going to refuse to look at evidence on that account. Without another word, he gripped the sides of the ladder and began to climb. Pug and Saint took hold of it to keep it steady.

  ‘It’s bottom left,’ Gladys called after him.

  ‘I’m there,’ Heron shouted down to her as his head topped the lower edge of the window. ‘What am I supposed to look at?’

  ‘The damned!’ shouted Gladys. ‘Look at their faces!’

  ‘They’re goats!’ Heron shouted.

  ‘They got humans’ faces. And one of ’em’s a face you ought to know! You look!’

  There was a silence, while Heron peered. Then, slowly, he backed down the ladder. His expression was grave. He looked at me, for once with no sign of dislike, but with something more akin to sympathy. ‘Mistress Stannard, can you climb that ladder?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said. In fact, I was determined to climb it. If anyone had a right to know what had so obviously shaken Heron, I had.

  I did not find it easy, even though I was physically quite strong, having always ridden regularly and been often busy about the house and garden. I had climbed ladders in the past but not for a long time now, and in the intervening years I had grown older. I knew that Heron’s men were holding the ladder, but still it quivered under me and made me nervous.

  But I had to know. My breath was coming short when I reached the window, but I had managed it. I turned a little and looked where Gladys had said, at the bottom left-hand corner, where the demons were dragging the damned to their eternal torment.

  I stared in amazement. I had seen and approved the design in Master Stagg’s workshop and I had seen the window close to when it was delivered, but I had not seen this. On the contrary, I had been pleased to see that the design was restrained. The entrance to hell was a black cavern mouth, but nothing worse, and the damned were shown as goats with sad human faces. Although they were being escorted by two black horned demons with pitchforks, only one of them was actually prodding a goat.

  The change was in the goat that was being prodded. It had a new face, and it was the face of a woman bound for hell. Her mouth was distorted, a taut, gaping rectangle of pain and fear. She was surely screaming. Tears flowed from her distended eyes. The second demon was in the next pane but for his clawed hands and they now clutched her throat.

  That face of terror and anguish was my face. The hair was dark, the eyes, very cleverly done, were a mingling of brown with bits of glittering green: hazel eyes, my eyes, deeper in colour than the hazel eyes of the twins. I recognized the way they were set, the shape of the dark eyebrows above them; I recognized too the cream and tawny of the goat’s coat, the exact shade of my favourite cream-and-tawny colours which I had been wearing, as it happened, every time I met Stagg. And I recognized the topaz pendant round the goat’s neck.

  Stagg was good at portraiture, I thought. The human face of that goat was certainly mine, depicted as only someone could who hated me with every fibre of his being, body and soul.

  He had been careful to make sure that if I or Joynings inspected the window before it was put in place, as indeed we did, we would only see the original pane. He had made the change at the very last moment, after we had come and gone. He knew that once the window was in place, it would be hard to see that agonized face.

  The window was high and the faces of the goats were small. The details of their expressions wouldn’t be obvious. Wouldn’t, indeed, be obvious at all except to people who knew my face well and perhaps not very plain even to them.

  A stained-glass picture of a goat with a human face, and the features of a living person were so very different. Glass and paint for the one, flesh and blood for the other; the one static in a church window, the other walking and talking. Even Gladys, who knew my face well, had not recognized it at first.

  It would be Stagg’s nasty little joke, though he would have to keep it to himself. His emotions had been so strong that he hadn’t been able to keep them out of his work. He hadn’t been able to resist the temptation to record me, for all time, as damned. I might never realize – indeed, I was not intended to realize – that it was there, but he, Stagg, would know, and rejoice in secret.

  I shuddered. It was a frightening thing to find oneself the target of a hatred as intense as that.

  I backed down the ladder, not minding it now for I was far too shocked by what I had seen to care. I stepped off and turned at once to Heron.

  ‘If you please, Sir Edward, I would wish everyone to see that window who can clim
b up to it.’

  I glanced at Stagg. His face had gone leaden, bloodless.

  ‘Perhaps Master Stagg himself should look,’ said Sir Edward. ‘We will see what he thinks of it now.’

  Stagg made an effort. He licked his lips and said he didn’t understand.

  ‘Go up!’

  We watched him climb. I looked at the long, sensitive fingers gripping the sides of the ladder. Simeon Wilmot’s fingers. Why had I been so slow to recognize them? Even the lines of Stagg’s back looked familiar now. They too were the same as Wilmot’s.

  He reached the top of the ladder and then called down: ‘But what am I to look at?’

  ‘The damned, as well you know, look you!’ screeched Gladys.

  More temperately, Heron called: ‘Left-hand corner.’

  Stagg looked. Then he came down the ladder. His face was now as pale as a white linen sheet. He did not speak. Christopher said: ‘I have seen it already.’ But he went up all the same to view it for a second time, and came down with such anger in his brown eyes that I felt alarmed, even though the anger was not directed at me.

  Taverner, who had also seen the window already, declined to take a second look. ‘I was horrified enough the first time. It’s despicable.’

  Dr Joynings too had seen the window, but Heron signed to Brockley and he in turn tackled the climb. He descended with his lips pressed together and a disquieting glitter in his blue-grey eyes. It boded ill for someone.

  ‘I can’t get up there,’ said Daniel Johns. ‘But the window has been described to me and you all look thoroughly appalled by it. It is evidently most objectionable. Well, Master Stagg has had time now to consider his position. Has he not, Sir Edward?’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Stagg said again. ‘I didn’t mean … I never intended … I suppose Mistress Stannard’s face was in my mind. She has a most pleasing countenance …’