Coda: The Third Albert Mystery (The Albert Mysteries Book 3)

by David Crossman

  “Do you know someone named John?” he asked.

  Deirdre Ponsenby–Blythe–Hamilton was making an effort at pretending not to be looking at herself in the mirror. She tucked some rebellious hairs into the bright blue band around her head. “John? You mean here are the house?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. No Johns in the family. Mostly Henrys, Richards, and Georges,” she turned toward Albert and, in the mirror, he saw the hairs that had been wrestled into place pop out from under the blue band. “The only John with any connection to Oxburgh, as far as I know, is John Blanke.”

  “Is he still here?”

  “What’s left of him is in the churchyard. He died in 1511, assuming the date on the tombstone is correct. Why do you ask?”

  “Somebody’s been asking for him.”

  “Well,” said the housekeeper, “should they ask again, the church is next door but one down the lane at the left turning. Direct them there.”

  “I will,” said Albert.

  Deirdre Ponsenby–Blythe–Hamilton, who never thought to ask to what individual or group Albert might be referring, given that he hadn’t left the property since his arrival— made a little laugh through her nose. “If they ask for his wife, though. Well, that’s a different story.”

  “His wife?”

  “A Spanish woman.” Animated to be talking about Oxburgh history, she sat down in the chair opposite Albert by the fireplace. “The story, as far as anyone knows, is that John Blanke was one Catherine of Aragon’s household musicians when she came to England to marry poor Prince Arthur. Played this sort of trumpet arrangement they had in those days, I believe.”

  “Prince Arthur?”

  “No, no. John Blanke. He was the first black African to appear on these shores, at least as far as history knows. Anyway, he brought his wife, the Spanish woman I mentioned. I say wife to be polite. She may have been his mistress, or inamorata, or what-have-you. Legend has it her soul wanders these halls.” Deirdre Ponsenby–Blythe–Hamilton leaned across the little table that separated them. “Every respectable English country home has its ghost, of course. She’s ours.”

  Albert was just about to say he’d met her, when the housekeeper continued. “Nonsense, of course, but it goes a long way toward adding interest to an otherwise fairly colorless history for a place as old as this. Tourists love to hear it.”

  “You’ve never seen her, then?” Albert ventured.

  “Me? I should think not,” said Deirdre Ponsenby–Blythe–Hamilton, standing in emphasis and dusting her immediate vicinity with a flourish. “I am not the sort of person who goes around seeing ghosts.”

  Which meant that Albert was. This could be Helpful Information. “Did something happen to her here?”

  “There are stories. Between you and me, well, what happened is that when the ghost was first reported—centuries ago now—they started calling her the Spanish Lady, I have no idea why. . .”

  Albert interrupted, which he had seldom done before. “Maybe she looks. . . looked. . . Spanish.”

  “Well, I suppose whatever blob or fog it was might have appeared so to a fevered imagination. In any case, someone turned up this story of John Blanke and his wife amongst the family archives and, being Spanish, she became the ghost by association.”

  “Ergo. . .” said Albert.

  “Ergo,” said Deirdre Ponsenby–Blythe–Hamilton.

  “Does she have a name?”

  “Curious you should ask that. The short answer is no, not on evidence that an historian would credit. There is mention, among tenant lists in those same family records, of a woman of the name Esperanza, but it’s not in direct association to John Blanke’s wife or the ghost.

  “Its the only Spanish-sounding name in the records, though, so. . .”

  “Esperanza” Albert repeated, fixing the name in his brain. “You never know.”

  Deirdre Ponsenby–Blythe–Hamilton, assuming, correctly, that this was a rhetorical observation, renewed her assault on her environment.

  The Road to Langar Chapel, Nottinghamshire, May 8th, 1285

  The burden of being in sole possession of not one, but two great treasures forms a heavy mantle about the shoulders of the bearer. The weight of such a mantle is trebled when the wearer is a dwarf, and trebled again when that dwarf, able to take no one into his confidence for fear of treachery, is riding a donkey laden with that treasure across nearly two-score miles of relatively flat country that he knows to be swarming with mercenaries, turncoats, spies, cutthroats, ruffians, soldiers with fluid allegiance and, not unlikely, the unsettled shade of a certain recently departed monarch.

  Foss would have found nothing in the foregoing statement with which to disagree. In fact, were he to express his personal sentiments between huffs and grunts as he clambered, tripped, and tumbled ass-over-scuttle down yet another of many dry-laid stone walls that seem to have been constructed for the sole purpose of impeding his progress, his description would have been vivid in the extreme, salted with terms borrowed heavily from the lexicon of his Anglo-Saxon forebears.

  These terms were not unfamiliar to his traveling companions; the donkey—at whom they were mostly directed—and Pike, the raven, who rode, alternately, between Foss’s head and the donkey’s rump.

  Nor were the dwarf’s invectives confined to colloquialisms. Having escorted the former king, John’s brother RichardCouer de Leon, on two crusades to the Holy Land, he had acquired a considerable vocabulary of colorful terms that mingled much more easily on his tongue than the cultures from which they sprang did in geographical proximity. Arabic, he had found, was especially fecund with expressions of opprobrium reserved exclusively for donkeys.

  He had just unburdened his tongue of the choicest of these and was pausing to catch his breath. The donkey, not fluent in arabic, champed noisily on a little nest of nettles and Pike, his eyes locked on Foss, cocked his head this way and that as if expecting the dwarf to do something interesting.

  Instead, Foss sat, planting his walking stick in the ground and gripping it with both hands, and studied the horizon.

  Well off to the northwest, a handful of furlongs or more, a long cloud of smoke rose from the forest to a certain height then spread horizontally as if smudged by a finger of God.

  “Look yonder, Pike,” said Foss, poking the air with a stubby finger. “Alexander’s army.”

  Pike followed with his eyes, as if he understood.

  “He knows by now that John’s dead.”

  Pike dipped and nodded and anyone who saw him would be hard-pressed to argue that he wasn’t doing so in response to the comment.

  “Aye,” said Foss thoughtfully.

  The king was dead; the only situation more precarious than when the king was alive. Especially for a diminutive individual whose allegiance to that king was a fact established beyond doubt. Should such a person fall into the hands of that king’s avowed enemies, it would not go well.

  Others in his situation might affect a disguise; cut or even color their hair, trim their beard, cut off their nose, or assume an alias. ‘Name’s Smith,’ sayeth Jones. “No idea who this Jones is you’re on about. Never heard of him, her, or it.’

  “There’s no disguise for Foss,” said Foss to the raven Pike. “No name so beguiling to conceal from the viewer this misshapen bag of bones.”

  Only two options remained: faithfully follow through with his master’s dying demands and damn the consequences—or throw himself on the dubious mercy of Alexander. Not that the Scottish King would have any interest in him, as such; but the knowledge Foss and Foss alone carried about the disposition of John’s treasure was hard currency that, if meted out in small, suggestive portions, might buy him at least a few days in which to compound a plan of more permanent benefit.

  “The question is,” said Foss, turning over yet another stone in his mental garden, “what of Alexander now that John is dead?” Would the barons maintain their felicity toward a northern usurper; or toward Prince Louie of
France, for that matter? Or would one of them attempt to set himself up as king?

  “And what,” Foss continued, addressing Pike with the most likely scenario, “if they all turn on one another? Leaving yours truly between a number of rocks and a veritable marketplace of. . .other rocks.”

  These were the thoughts Foss entertained as he attempted to incubate both respite and perspective from the cold stone upon which he sat, but the only crop forthcoming was more questions. What if de Rodehad managed the impossible task of making it to Castle Combe and snatching young Henry from the talons of the Barons?

  “That would make the boy rightful king.” The donkey looked up, his large eyes swimming in a heavy liquid of doubt. “Yes, yes. Inasmuch as any of ‘em are rightful,” said Foss. “Goes without saying.”

  And who would be regent until the boy attained majority? The queen? Possible, but not a result the Church would likely sanction. De Rode or one of the other loyal barons? “William Marshal,” he pronounced. But what if two or more of the barons contended that coveted position? “More war.”

  The donkey shifted under the weight of the crown jewels. Foss shifted under the weight of indecision. All roads held both promise and peril. Which to choose?

  Whichever way the Fates badmintoned fortune, only one thing was apt to secure Foss’s continued existence in the near-term; his knowledge of the whereabouts of the crown jewels. Getting them to safety, therefore, was of paramount importance, which meant to Langar Abbey and the hidey-hole John had prepared for them there; the elegant little treasury-cum-tomb where, even now, worms were merrily ingesting the mortal remains of the three gifted masons—cathedral builders all—who had devised its enigmatic mechanisms to their Lord’s exacting, if unfathomable specifications and now waited, unwittingly to accompany its contents into eternity.

  Foss declared this intention aloud to see how Pike responded. The raven was looking attentively at the columns of smoke rising like prison bars from the forest to the northwest with an unappreciative eye. “I agree,” said Foss. “To Langar.” He grunted himself upright, kicking the circulation back into his legs. “Assuming we can stay alive that long.”

  Pike flapped his wings and squawked, and in the squawk Foss read a warning in response to the residue of treasonous thoughts that whispered at the fringes of his conscience. “Torture. Yes, there’s always that.”

  He doubled his pace toward Langar.

  Albert had never ridden a public bus through the English countryside. He enjoyed the ride. He enjoyed watching the people who got on and off the bus and didn’t give him a second glance; gossiping old women laden with bags, solitary old men who peaked over the tops of their newspapers at squadrons of uniformed schoolboys unruly as their shirttails, unemployed teenagers of indeterminate sex—members of the same tribe to which the young person at the music store belonged and whose clothing was accessorized by dog collars and sharp objects of the type his mother used to tell him to stay away from, mothers with children, and small dogs. Lots of small dogs.

  Jeremy Ash, overcome by a chivalrous urge not to deprive Brigit Blake of the pleasure of his company, had relinquished oversight of Albert to Angela for the afternoon.

  She talked much less than Jeremy Ash, Albert observed, which drew his attention to her. This, too, made the journey unexpectedly pleasant. For the first time in their acquaintance, he saw her as Other. Not Other as the rest of humanity was Other - meaning that which was not he - that mass that responded to different, mysterious, and unfathomable motivations and rhythms which found no resonance in his being, but Other as Melissa Bjork had been Other.

  He was completely confused by the feelings his observations engendered, but more inclined to entertain them than shut them out.

  Taken geometrically, Angela went in and out at appealing angles.

  So did Esperanza, if that’s what her name was.

  Maybe all women did, and he was just beginning to notice. He decided he would make an effort to notice more.

  “What?” said Angela, who had suddenly awaken from the reverie that had thus far kept her looking wistfully out the window most of the time. She was looking him, and had caught him looking at her.

  “I was looking at you,” said Albert, mindful that confession was good for the soul.

  “Yes. I was watching you.”

  “You were watching me looking at you?”

  “Yes. I felt your eyes on me.”

  Albert understood this. It had happened to him before when he’d been quietly eating his soup in a restaurant and, feeling as if someone was looking at him, looked up to find that that was just what was happening. “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “And?”

  “Did you enjoy the view?”

  This was one of those instances Albert felt it was important to know what someone was talking about before he responded. “You mean do I enjoy looking at you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “You never looked at me like that before?”

  “Like what?”

  “You were looking at my breasts.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why now?”

  “I never noticed before.”

  Angela laughed. “Well, I don’t know how I should take that! They’ve been there all along.”

  Albert looked at her eyes for a moment. The sensation they produced was much different than that provoked by contemplation of her chest. For one thing, they looked back, and they seemed to be talking to him in a language he didn’t understand.

  He looked out the window. “How far is it to the church?”

  “Langar Chapel?” Angela glanced from her watch to a chart over the window. “Three more stops. Maybe fifteen minutes?”

  They lapsed into quiet contemplation. It was Angela’s turn to study Albert, whose turn it was to let his eyes drift over the blur of countryside. She was sorting through her feelings about his visual exploration of her. What had he been thinking when his eyes lingered unabashedly on her breasts like that? Had she awaken in him that insatiable carnal appetite that creative people claimed their birthright?

  The notion awoke a physical response which she tried, immediately, to suppress with her awareness that this was not a normal man, that she was not equipped to get inside his brain and imagine what he might have been thinking—oblivious to her inner turmoil as he looked out the window—or how he might interpret whatever response she might make.

  She decided the best response, for the time being, was none at all.

  “You know what I like?” Albert said unexpectedly after a long silence.

  She expected his forthcoming comment would have something to do with his observation of her. “What?”

  “Anonymity.”

  She hadn’t expected that.

  Without warning he looked at her with such force that she had to catch her breath. She, too, was seeing for the first time something that had been there all along. Something for which she had no name. Had he not looked away, she might have drowned.

  “Are you a religious person, would you say?”

  As with most old English churches, the dead were a prominent feature of the decor at Langar Chapel. For several minutes, Albert and Angela had been strolling in the direction of the church through the field of lop-sided little menhirs marking the graves of the forgotten. Time had muted the bold declaration of the names they bore to vague whispers, most of them unintelligible.

  They brought Albert to a standstill in front of the grave ofMiriam, beloved of Esau, departed this life in ye Year of Our Lord 16. . . something or other. His hands were cold and he thrust them a little deeper into the pockets of his overcoat.

  “Religious,” he said, as if saying the word aloud would provoke a reply. It didn’t. “What does that mean?”

  “Well, I guess it means what do you think about God?”

  The question bent Albert’s brows. What did he think about God? Whatdid he think about God?

  “I mean, do you belie
ve in Him?”

  “Of course,” said Albert, without hesitation. Very early on, somewhere, he had heard God referred to as the Creator. God, then, was where the music came from. It certainly didn’t come from Albert. No one was more aware than he that he was just fingers.

  Angela, who had never heard Albert make even the most oblique reference to the Deity, hadn’t anticipated such an unequivocal response. “I’m not sure I do.”

  This struck Albert as odd. He cocked an interrogatory eyebrow at her.

  “I have trouble believing in a God that could allow all the pain and misery there is in the world. Like this,” she said, indicating a little tombstone with her foot, ‘William, their fourth child, who died January 4th, 1839. Aged 6 months’. Imagine the sadness of his parents, whoever they were.”

  Albert read the rest of the head stone aloud. “‘In faith of him who calleth little children to come unto him. Thomas Butler, Rector of this parish, and Fanny his wife, sorrowing, but not with bitterness, nor without hope; have placed this stone in memory.’ Those were his parents, Thomas and Fanny.”

  “See what I mean? What’s the point?”

  Albert’s eyes drifted toward the grave of Miriam, beloved of Esau. “So you punish Him?”

  “Punish who?” said Angela, looking up.

  “God,” said Albert, meeting her gaze over the heads of the dead, who listened with interest. “You punish Him by not believing in Him.”

  “Punish God? No, I . . . mean all the wars, and sickness, and . . . ”

  “If you can disbelieve Him out of existence, you won’t have to face Him. . . about Heather.”

  Angela, staring at the little stone ofElizabeth, precious daughter of someone, was surprised by a torrent of tears, and Albert left her to cry.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Labels were a nice thing about England. They were everywhere, and among those in Langar Chapel dedicated to the dead were a couple indicating the exact parts of the building that had been in existence in the early 13th Century, which wasn’t much, just the tower, part of an obscure arch, and a slice of wall.