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

by David Crossman

  A boy, not more than six or seven — was bound to one of the posts comprising the loft ladder. If there was a man of the house he was nowhere to be seen. So far, it seemed, no blood had been shed, a status, Foss suspected, that would not remain quo for long.

  “Well, well,” said Foss, leaning on the doorpost, fiddling a diamond in his fingers, “I see the Scots are as chivalrous as the French. Shortage of sheep up north, is there?”

  Foss knew foragers, as a rule, were the lowest of the low in the military hierarchy, with an intellect reflective of their social standing. He had, accordingly, calculated that his appearance in the midst of their activities would cause consternation. He had under-estimated.

  The two bystanders were hard pressed to maintain control of the writhing, screaming girls in their charge. The third man had recently unsheathed the weapon with which he came into the world for an assault upon the lady of the house, who was, tooth and nail, spurning his advances.

  At Foss’s announcement, all activity ceased, with the exception of the tuft-headed man bent over the woman. He sprang back as if stung in his member, the instrument with which he had expected to manifest his intention suddenly limp as a punctured bladder. “It’s the devil!” he said, tucking himself into his tunic. He reached for his sword.

  “That’s Foss. The King’s fool!” said one of the others.

  Foss recognized the speaker as Welf the Potter’s son, a man, until his recent desertion, employed in the King’s stables, being mentally ill-equipped for anything more taxing that shoveling shite.

  “The King’s dead,” said the tuft-headed man with the sword, apparently the ringleader. His intended victim had wrenched herself from his grasp, but he scarcely noticed as his attention was now on the dwarf, and the diamond he was teasing with his fingers. He stepped toward the middle of the room, malice swarming in his eyes, but was immediately cudgeled from behind by an iron cooking pot which glanced off his skull, across this shoulder, and down several vertebrae. For a moment, he tottered, and seemed about to swoon but, apparently no stranger to blows about the head and shoulders, suddenly righted himself and turned on the woman in fury, grabbing her by the throat, and raising his sword.

  “Leave her!” said Foss, trying his best to sound much more in command than he felt. “Or the King will hear of it.”

  “How so, if his ears is full of dirt?” said the man, still holding the woman by the neck. She gurgled at him and attempted to spit, but his hold was too tight and she began to choke on her own saliva.

  “Well, I won’t argue the point. Makes no difference, really, does it? There’s no end of Kings,” said Foss calmly. “Like the deprived little pillicock you were recently brandishing about, they’re a curse, passed from father to son . . .”

  “He’s talking about young Henry!” said the third member of the trio, who had thus far remained silent. He threw the girl he’d been holding into the corner, where she struck her head and fell silent.

  “You shut your pie hole, Larky! Alexander’s going to make short work of him,” said the first.

  Foss held the diamond up to the light. “And there’s always the Queen to consider. Not a lady to whom I’d like to explain the abuse of her property—which these folks are, whether the King’s dead or not. But let’s not talk politics,” he said. “I’m tired of ‘em. Whether for the King or the Queen, I’m prepared to pay handsomely to secure the safety of what belongs to ‘em, so let’s open negotiations.”

  “Let me see that!” said tuft-head.

  “By all means, to show I’m a man of good faith,” Foss tossed the stone in tuft-head’s direction. As it fell among the crushed meadowsweet and marjoram on the floor, the man released the woman and dove for the gem.

  The woman gagged and sputtered, gulping air. She threw a desperate look at Foss who, almost imperceptibly, shook his head, in which she read his warning against further action. She stumbled toward her unconscious daughter in the shadows.

  “Man? You’re no man at all,” said tuft-head, plucking the gem from the straw. He held it up. “but a changeling swapped for a proper human at birth. And, now that I have your jewel,” he secreted the diamond among the folds of his costume, “I’ll consider negotiations successfully concluded once I’ve relieved your neck of its burden, and helped myself to the gems this little fief has to offer as well.” The gesture with which he punctuated his comment underscored his intentions.

  “I suppose you may, if you wish,” said Foss. “Assuming your friends don’t object. By the way, I happen to have another bauble here somewhere.” He groped exaggeratedly in the little leather pouch that hung from the cord about his waist. “Ah! Here it is!” The gem glistened as it arced through the air toward Welf, with the expected result: the former stable hand fell upon the treasure as it rolled to a stop against a rush mat. The girl he’d been holding ran to her mother and sister, who, slightly bloodied, was reviving with sobs in the shadows.

  Tuft-head took a sudden step toward his companion who, in a flash, drew his sword and, clambering to his feet, slashed meaningfully at the air. “You want to try me on, Welfy? You got yours. I got mine. I’m all for callin’ it a good night’s work and lettin’ the little fella have his deal.”

  The third member of the trio, Larky, took exception. “Oi!” he said, which gave him time to conduct a brief calculation by which, from any angle, he came up short. “Not so fast. What aboutme?”

  At once, as if by unspoken accord, his companions took up threatening positions on either side of him, their swords drawn.

  “Oh, gentlemen!” Foss intervened. “Please, no! I cannot countenance unnecessary bloodshed! With an eye toward these negotiations, I put another stone in the crotch of one of the yew trees at the southern edge of yonder field. I’m not sure which, it being dark, but I’m sure. . .”

  He hadn’t time to finish before he was plowed down by the trio as, palpitating with treasure-lust, they flew out the door.

  “Woman, release your son there.” Foss, no stranger to gathering himself from the floor, brushed himself off. “Are you alright?”

  The woman untied her son, who promptly began to seethe and fume in his impotence. “Shush now,” said the woman. She looked at Foss. “They’ll be back.”

  “Not more than two of them, if so,” said Foss. He spied a tankard of something on the table and pulled himself up onto the bench for a better look. “Beer?”

  “Milk.”

  If he was disappointed, it was only for a moment. “May I?”

  “Of course. Of course. Anything we have. You . . . you’ve saved our lives!”

  “That is so,” said Foss with pleasure. He look a long pull at the milk, which gushed through him like balm. He wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “That is so. And it was a pleasure.”

  “You don’t think they’ll be back?”

  “As I said,” his eyes fell upon a half-eaten loaf of bread and asked permission of her.

  “Of course. Help yourself.”

  He ate hungrily as, one by one, the family gathered around the table with the exception of the boy who, with a pitchfork, took up a defensive position, fully prepared to puncture any intruder. “No. I doubt they’ll be back tonight. Not at full strength at any rate, as I said. I rather expect there’ll be bloodshed when they finally give up the search for the third jewel.”

  “You don’t think they’ll find it?”

  “That would be a miracle,” said Foss, his voice echoing in the tankard, “as it doesn’t exist.” He looked up and smiled. “We shall let nature take its course, shall we? The nature of those three, in particular. I’m thinking you’ll have none of them to contend with—that the strongest and loudest of them will end up slitting the throats of the other two and making off with the booty while he may. That’s the way it is with such as those. I know them well.”

  Having eaten his fill, to a chorus of thanks—and assured by the passage of time that none of the foragers would be returning—Foss stood in the door, ac
ross which he had stretched a tripwire, just in case he had underestimated his adversary, and prepared to make his farewell.

  “The King,” said the woman, piercing the eye of a dried eel she had taken from the wall with a skewer, and stringing it over his shoulder, “he’s really dead?”

  “To paraphrase our Savior, ma’am,kings you have with you always. Taken in aggregate, they’re a resilient crop; rest assured another will be divinely appointed shortly. Whether to bless or punish us, God knows.”

  Foss turned to leave. “Mr. Foss,” said the woman, dropping to her knees before him, from which perspective she looked down on him by six inches. He turned. She held out her hands and, somewhat unsurely, he laid his own upon her upturned palms. “What that fellow said; he was wrong.”

  Foss cocked his head, trying to distill meaning from her words.

  “That you are no man,” she reminded. “He was wrong. You are ten times any of those men.” She turned to her son. “But for your dear, dead father,this is the man I pray you to be,” she said, shaking the stunted fingers she held in her own.

  When he was five years old, standing over his mother whose sightless eyes, still warm with the liquid of life, stared up at him, Foss hadn’t cried. Nor had he once cried through the countless taunts, abuses, kicks, and calumnies heaped upon him by all and sundry in over fifty years of existence. But he suspected the surgings tugging at his innards, shoveling a strange, burning brew into his tear ducts were about rectify the imbalance.

  He turned quickly away. “I have friends waiting,” he said and, without a backward glance, stepped into the night.

  Not until he had put fifty paces between himself and the cottage did the dam burst. He collapsed to his knees and watered the earth with the treasury of tears he’d acquired over five decades.

  “Master Foss!”

  The voice, that of a girl, came from the direction of the cottage and cauterized the sobbing to silence. Foss dabbed at his eyes and pushed himself to his feet. Turning, he saw silhouetted against the trembling light of the doorway, one of the daughters of the cottage, running toward him. His immediate expectation was that he’d forgotten something, and that she was coming to return it.

  But, aside from the jewels with which he’d intended to part, he’d brought nothing with him.

  “Where you goin’?” said the girl, slowing as she drew closer.

  “On the King’s business,” said Foss, a bit warily. Largesse, in his experience, was often met with requests for more. “What can I do for you, miss?”

  “You saved our lives, you did. What more could we ask?”

  “You have a point,” Foss replied cagily. “What more, indeed?”

  “Ma wonders if you might need help.”

  “Is there something in my acquittal of your salvation from those three fozdiks that makes her think me unable to take care of myself? Perhaps my size . . .”

  “Oh, no! No such a thing. She jus’ wonders if, well, I know the country good as anyone, that might be useful to your . . . whatever it is you’re doing.” She was beside him now, towering over him and, as if it was a natural thing to do, tying the strings of his collar snugly about his neck. “It’s cold.”

  Foss looked from the girl, a sturdy individual rather abundant in womanly promise and not unattractive, from what he could see in the foggy dispersion of light, in a rustic, cow-eyed respect. His eyes drifted beyond her to the cottage, from which he half expected the mother to emerge at any moment, and tell her to ‘get away from that little freak and back into the house this moment!’

  Reading his thoughts, the girl said, “No one’s comin’. She’s the one sent me, did Ma. Says I’m to keep of you long as you please, right up to Judgement Day. Willy wanted to come, but he’s too young, and the only man she’s got since Pa died which, for all he’s only six, is Will, and all she’s got but my sister.

  “So she sent me.”

  Foss suspected that the mother, with nothing to lose, had taken the off-chance of an opportunity to diminish by one the number of mouths she had to feed, and if, at the same time, she could assuage her guilt by making it seem an act of gratitude, so much the better. Feeding that mouth, should he accept the gift of the girl’s companionship, would fall to him.

  To say nothing of her defense.

  And presumably the girl’s clothing wouldn’t grow with her.

  Weighed against these inconveniences were certain obvious benefits, which—together with the novelty of a sentient fellow-traveler—ultimately, argued in favor of the arrangement.

  “Are we going to find your friends?”

  “My friends?” said Foss, his thoughts recalled from their sojourn in unexpected regions. “Oh, yes. Pike and . . . yes. They’re over the hedges there to the north.”

  They made a circuit to the rear of the house and struck off across the field. “How are you called, lass?” said Foss.

  “Mirth.”

  “Mirth?”

  “Means happy,” said the girl. “Pa’s name for me, it was, on account of I come out Ma’ssoeaÞ laughin’.”

  Foss ventured a tentative query. “And, you’ve been happy since?”

  “You know what makes me happy?” she said, in lieu of a direct answer. “I like when things ain’t the same, day-after-day.”

  Foss considered this. “Gird yourself for bliss,” he said, holding aside some low-reaching brambles and gesturing her through the hedge. “Your new family awaits.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “I feel like a goose that’s been sitting on a golden egg for nearly nine years, and not known it!” James Simon was as animated as his Easter sermon as he rifled through a little stack of papers on his lectern. “So much history! Right here, in this little chapel! Truly amazing!”

  “What have you found?” Angela wanted to know.

  Brigit was pushing Jeremy Ash up and down the aisle in his wheelchair, and together they were reading aloud the various memorial markers, the murmur of their voices a kind of indistinct, unpredictable music Albert had come to appreciate. Conversational jazz. He watched the faxes flip through the vicar’s hands, until he found the one he was looking for.

  “Here it is! Here it is.”

  The process of printing the fax on the flimsy paper had caused it to roll up at either end like a scroll of Holy Writ. Smoothing the document out, he held it in place. “Gloria found these records in the Land Office Archives and sent me these copies. Look here.” He pointed at a little cluster of words.

  “ ‘In fulfillment of an obligation of honor, I, John de Rode, son of Gerard de Rode, son of Ralph, son of Gerard the first, my grandsire into whose possession the Manor of Langar was entailed by William, King of England, do grant in freehold the same together with appurtenances thereunto, unencumbered, to Robert de Tibetot of Nottingham and Nettlesham, and his assigns hereafter evermore.’ “

  “Tibetot?” said Albert. “Tiptoft . . .?”

  “One and the same,” said Simon.

  Albert digested this. “Then, that’s the connection between him and Annabella Howe.”

  “That’s how they both came to own Langar Manor!” said the Vicar. He picked up the facsimile and rattled it enthusiastically.

  Brigit had pushed Jeremy Ash into the aural orbit of the conversation. As the Vicar spoke, the boy took the fax from his hand and gave it a cursory once-over. “He gave it to him?”

  “Pardon?”

  “This Jerry guy. He just gave the land. . .”

  “The manor,” Simon clarified.

  “Manor, right. He just gave it to Bob?”

  “So it would seem.”

  This struck Jeremy Ash as a strange economy. “Why?”

  The Vicar consulted the page. “Is it important?”

  “I dunno,” said Jeremy. “But it’s interesting, don’t you think? I mean, the manor . . . that’s this whole area, right?”

  “About 2400 hectares,” said Simon.

  Jeremy was not illumined. “How much is that in American?�
��

  “A hectare is roughly two and a half acres. So,” the vicar did a quick mental calculation, “let’s say 6000 acres.”

  The figure carried sufficient weight to bend the eyebrows of Jeremy Ash. He looked from Simon, to Albert, to Angela, to Brigit and, lastly, back to the Vicar. “Six thousand acres,” he said for emphasis, his tone tinctured with skepticism. “And he just handed it over to Tiptoft. Churches, farms, houses, pubs, mills, everything?”

  “Well, put that way, it does seem an extraordinary exchange,” said the Vicar.

  “Which is what it wasn’t,” said Jeremy. “It wasn’t an exchange at all. This doesn’t say,” he tapped the fax, “that Jerry got anything in return.”

  “But he must have,” said Angela. “Jeremy’s right. There had to be a reason Gerald de Rode let go of the land.”

  “Such arrangements weren’t uncommon under certain circumstances,” said Simon. “As a dowry, for instance.”

  Angela scrutinized the paper. “There’s no mention of a dowry here.”

  “. . . or payment of a debt . . .”

  “Like a gambling debt?” Jeremy asked.

  “Well, I hadn’t been thinking along those lines,” said the Vicar. “But it would account for there being no mention of the reason for the transfer.

  “Some time ago, I came upon an account in the church archives of a man who, to satisfy a gambling debt—which, in documents like these, is often referred to euphemistically as ‘payment made in fulfillment of a debt of honor’—had paid in the currency of his wife’s culinary expertise. The arrangement, which was attested by the acting vicar, was that, each evening for a given number of months, the woman would prepare supper for the winner.”

  “I’m sure she was thrilled,” Angela scoffed. “Imagine using your wife to pay a gambling debt!”

  “Well, the specifics of thedenouement are sketchy at best, but are founded upon the fact that the husband died within a month or two of the deal being struck.”