Angela laughed. “Serves him right! What did he die of, shame?”
“Food poisoning, actually,” said the Vicar, betraying nothing in his expression. “The woman ended up marrying the man who held her cookery gifts in such high esteem. A big noise hereabouts—a member of the lesser nobility.
“Oddly, he succumbed to the same complaint within the year.”
“You mean she poisoned them both?”
“I would be surprised if there weren’t some conjecture to that effect at the time, people being the way they are,” Simon replied. He may or may not have been smiling. “In any event, the woman ended up inheriting from both husbands.”
For a moment the Vicar seemed to be considering the stained glass rosette at the far end of the sanctuary. “Justice often takes curious shapes.”
Albert’s eyes were grazing among the nooks and crannies of the chapel while his brain twisted in knots attempting to ring significance from the vicar’s tale. “She didn’t kill them to get the inheritance,” he observed. “She did it because they had used her as . . . just a thing.”
Angela agreed. “Women and men kill for different reasons.”
The vicar, a student of history, felt it incumbent upon him to salt the statement with fact. “They also kill for the same reasons. Avarice and the lust for power, for example, are practiced with equal vigor by members of both sexes.”
As far as Albert was concerned, motives—which, it seemed, the Law held in high regard—were of little interest to the victims, who were no less dead.
Dead. Death. Dead people. Harvest Lossburgh. “How was Harvest Lossburgh killed?”
“I spoke to the curator at the British Museum about that,” said Angela as the party, in response to some unspoken impetus, herded toward the door and out into the sunlight. “He said he couldn’t vouch for the account of the story that had been passed down with the painting, which was that a burglar had broken into the house to steal the family silver or what-not. Got his signals crossed as to the house being empty, so it would seem, and ended up stumbling in upon Annabella and Lossburgh just as the paint was drying.
“In passing toward the window to make his escape, he stabbed Lossburgh through the neck—back to front,” she mimed the procedure on herself, “with a hat pin.”
“Hat pin?” said Albert. He remembered his aunt Emma, on special occasions, wearing a little hat which was held to her hair by a long, deadly-looking needle. The first time he witnessed the procedure, he thought she’d stuck the needle into her skull—one never knew with women—but his sister, after reminding him that he was an imbecile, which he did not dispute, explained that it merely pierced the tight curls of her hair and so secured the hat to her head. “Like a knitting needle?”
“Quite like,” said Angela.
“Back-to-front?”
“So the story goes.”
Seeming to change the subject abruptly, Albert turned to the Vicar. “Where is his grave? Lossburgh’s?”
“Just over here, beyond the oak.” The party followed in parade as, with practiced steps, Simon threaded his way through the irregular crop of headstones, monuments, and markers, careful not to tread on any graves. “There’s not much left to read, unfortunately. As I said on your earlier visit, the only reason we know it’s his is because its location is noted in the cemetery register.
The stone marking the final resting place of Harvest Lossburgh, painter of cows, horses, and himself as Robert Tiptoft, presented only a few weathered and unrelated letters for inspection, apologetically announcing to the world that;
‘Here lyeth Ye,’ then a large empty space signifying Lossburgh’s life, then what appeared to be a date with at least one six in it, then a Bible verse or line of poetry, the last words of which were, ‘and claim God’s peace.’
For a long time, Albert stared at the stone and the grave which, unlike the mounds constituting most graves, was concave, as if—at some time in the past—the coffin had been removed and the earth hastily shoveled back in. Albert had read someplace, probably during his perusal ofThe Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, that grave-robbing was once popular in England; that people took fresh bodies from graves and sold them to hospitals which weren’t coming up with enough dead people on their own, so students who were learning to be doctors could practice taking people apart to find out how they worked and, presumably, putting them back together.
The last part was an assumption.
Perhaps Harvest Lossburgh had been harvested, and his mortal remains had fertilized not only the minds of medical students but, in their final form, flowerbeds all across England.
Albert would like to fertilize flowers some day. Being reduced to elements tiny enough to be sucked up into the stamen and pistils or whatever they were and provide the nourishment the plant needed to stretch toward the sun and follow it across the sky, which is what flowers do.
That was a musical thought. A roundelay.
“Where did he get a hat pin?”
“Who?” said Angela. “The burglar?”
“Maybe it’s part of the tools of the trade,” Simon conjectured. “Lock-pick, or what-have-you.”
Albert knew how to pick locks, and it didn’t require foot-long hatpins. “And if he was running to get out of the room, why would be take the time to stop and stab Harvest Lossburgh?”
“Getting rid of a witness?” Angela ventured.
Jeremy Ash could see where Albert was going. “Then why leave Annabella?”
“And,” said Albert, “why go behind Lossburgh to stab him in the back of the neck? How would he even do that?”
“More holes than Swiss cheese,” Jeremy pronounced.
A truth came to Albert, as surely as if it had been absorbed through the soil on which he stood and of which Harvest Lossburgh was now so integral a part. “There was no burglar.”
“Well, according to the coroner’s inquest . . .” said Simon, and was prepared to say more.
“Lies,” said Albert.
“Told by Annabella to protect her secret,” Jeremy added.
Brigit, by long custom no more interested in the conversations of those for whom she labored than the furniture upon which they sat, had been roped into the present conversation by talk of murder and, now, secrets. “What secret?”
“The one in the painting of the man in the Blue Pajamas.”
Angela and the Vicar spoke at the same time. One said, “Lossburgh?” and the other said, “Tiptoft?”
“It doesn’t matter who it was,” said Albert. “What matters is what they’re looking at.”
“But, you’ve stood where he imagined himself to be standing, right here in the chapel, and looked where he seemed to be looking. There’s nothing there.”
Albert looked up and smiled. He realized that, when Lossburgh was painting himself, he must have been looking in a mirror. He hadn’t, in reality, been looking right, he’d been looking left!
He would test the hypothesis later, if he could think of a way to get into the chapel alone. “I’d like some cider,” he said, and strode toward the church gate, and he wondered what kind of flower he’d like to be part of.
The Headless Owl, Langar Manor, 1367
“I had hopes for these holdings,” said Gerard de Rode, sifting sand across the document he’d just signed.
“Oh, come now,” said Tiptoft, anxious for the ink to dry. “The manor’s been in your family for generations, and you’ve done nothing more with it than plant a few tenants. As for improvements, well, all I’ve gained in the bargain is a lot that needs doing. And please, don’t play the hang-dog, it doesn’t become you. I’ve seen you, at this very table, ruin families whose fortunes hail back to the Romans, and not shed a tear for their loss.”
De Rode, whose life was spent gaming and who had gained and lost many fortunes — lately lost more than gained—laughed an ironic note. “The misfortune of others doesn’t disturb my equanimity nearly as much as does my own.”
Tiptoft took the deed, s
hook the sand from it, and blew on the ink. “I suggest you take a break from the tables for a while. Think of your little ones. Your poor good lady who is left with, what, only a half-dozen estates to manage?
“Whereas this little parcel,” he waved the foolscap carelessly, “will hardly be missed.”
De Rode took a draught that emptied his tankard and pushed himself up from the table. “Unlike you, Tiptoft—who I’m sure have cheated me somehow—I possess a conscience.”
“A defect your upcoming season in Parliament will doubtless correct.”
“Be that as it may, for the time being, such conscience as I have is troubled to think at what cost and sacrifice my great grandfather, poor old Ralph, came into possession of this ‘little parcel’, as you style it, and how lightly I have lost it.”
“The table is still here, de Rode. Look!” Tiptoft tapped one of the brown pips stacked on his side of the backgammon board.
“Get thee behind me, Tibetot,” said de Rode, strapping on his sword. “I’m swearing off games of chance.”
Tibetot, folding the document and putting it in a leather pouch that hung from the back of his chair, laughed heartily. “Then you might as well take that unsullied sword of yours and fall upon it now, de Rode. I know you; gambling and breath are one and the same! A little demon of avarice huddles over your heart—such as it is—warming his hoary fingers by its fire. He’ll demand everything of you in the end, you know; wealth, station, honor, possessions, even your wife and children aren’t safe from impalement on the horns of his alter!” He patted the pouch as he stood and slung it over his shoulder.
“I have not cheated you, Gerard. You’ve plundered yourself. If I’ve benefitted from your sins, it isyou who have nurtured them to this inevitable maturity.” He slapped a coin loudly on the table, covering it with his hand. “Heads or tails?”
De Rode, his eyes drifting in drink, raised them. “Heads.”
Tibetot lifted his hand and peaked under it. Smiling broadly, he revealed the coin. “Tails. Pay the man.” He swept the coin into his pocket and, leaving de Rode to pay the bill, stepped from the tavern into the sunlight spreading thick as newly churned butter across the muffin of his new domain.
He breathed deeply and beguiled his mind with pleasant thoughts that, he hoped, would assuage the anxiety enflamed by the recent wager. He commended himself for having concealed that anxiety from de Rode. Had he read it, he would have known Tibetot was laying his little all on the table: his family home, what remained of the estate that generated the meager income keeping starvation at bay for him, his wife, and children. Had he lost the game, he would have been homeless, and penniless, with no remedy for his poverty but to entail himself as a tenant on his former lands or, worse yet, on those of his father-in-law.
But he had won. And, contrary to de Rode’s suspicions, he hadn’t cheated.
This time.
Even on the battlefield, he had never known the kind of exhilaration that seized him and shook him as he walked to the stables. Had it not been for the likelihood that the dignity of his position might be offended, should any of his new tenants witness the act, he would have jumped in the air and kicked his heels, perhaps broken into song — more likely a leg.
He mounted his horse and kneed it toward home where, within the hour, the walls would echo with the music of her joy when he told Margaret she was now the lady of Langar Manor.
No doubt she would scold him for having risked their slim fortune to chance—but she would settle quickly into the reality of her new role.
Langar Chapel, Langar Manor, 1370
“Ah, there you are Alan!” Pause. “I beg your pardon,Rector Amant.” Then came the musical little laugh that invariably accompanied the greeting, as if it had been newly minted. Amant and Margaret Tibetot, nee Deincourt, had been playmates nearly from the cradle, and he had loved her nearly as long.
But it was a love unspoken, one he wouldn’t acknowledge aloud even to himself, much less to her. Nevertheless, his poor heart leapt at the sound of her voice, teasing him as she had ever since he first announced his intention to take the cloth; not long after she had announced her intention to become Lady Robert Tibetot. To her, one of life’s curious little coincidences.
He got to his feet and brushed the loam from his knees. “Your Ladyship! To what do I owe the pleasure of a visit from my patroness?” He bowed facetiously, which obeisance she acknowledged with equal facetiousness.
“Gardening, are we?”
The rector looked at the patch of earth he’d been bothering, then at his dirty hands. “Define ‘gardening’. If you mean troubling the earth with this trowel to no avail, then, yes. We’re gardening.” He looked up and smiled. “At least one of us is.” He kicked a clod of topsoil. “Recalling Our Lord’s dealings with a certain fig tree, I’ve a mind to lay a curse upon the plague of roots bedeviling the soil hereabouts.
“If they and stones were a cash crop, I’d be a wealthy man!”
“Wealth,” said Lady Tibetot, sinking to her knees beside the newly-turned earth. “A little of that would not go amiss.”
Rector Amant knew things were not good for the Tibetots, and that they suffered from a complaint not uncommon to the lesser nobility: being land-rich and cash poor; they had insufficient income to maintain the great hall, much less the church, the household staff, the houses of their tenants, the numerous barns and outbuildings, sluices and dams scattered about the countryside: by which the family’s meager fortune was slowly being consumed.
The way in which Robert Tibetot had come to own Langar Manor was one of the region’s more poorly-kept secrets and, being familiar with the local economy, Amant couldn’t help but entertain the suspicion that de Rode had come out of the wager with the dry end of the stick. Not only had he divested himself of unprofitable property—and the costly care of its tenants, which the law required—but had done so in a way that made him seem to have satisfied a debt of honor.
Tibetot’s initial elation at his good fortune was very shortly tempered by economic realities which, over time, had become so severe that he was compelled, as he had been earlier in his career, to enlist as a soldier in the King’s adventures in France, where he now fought and toiled.
Though she never said as much, Amant knew Margaret was beside herself with worry, not only at the peril her husband, whom she truly loved, was daily in, but concerns about what she and her daughters could do to maintain the estate if he never returned.
“Silver and gold have I none,” said Amant, to whom these thoughts occurred in rapid succession. “But whatever comfort the church can provide, I offer gladly.”
She stood, brushed his shoulder affectionately with the tips of her fingers, and looked at the chapel. “I can only hope the Church Universal is in better shape than this church in particular. That leak in the chancel has gotten worse.”
“Perhaps we should have built it in a drier climate.” The rector laughed. “Lead’s expensive.”
“Well, we must do what we can,” said Lady Tibetot. “Speaking of which, the plaster in the Foss wall is coming loose again.”
“Yes. I’m no better plasterer than I am gardener, I’m afraid.”
“I’ll do it.”
“You!”
She looked at him and smiled in that way that made his knees weak. “Don’t look so surprised. I was curious of the art and so was sitting and watching Tiny Oldmanson as he repaired the bread oven last summer. As we talked of this-and-that, he suddenly asked if I would care to ‘throw plaster’, as he called it. Well, you know how I am. . .”
Few knew better than Rector Amant. He had never seen Margaret turn aside from an opportunity to learn; had once, to his amazement, discovered her, all but naked from the waist-up, with her arm up to the shoulder in a cow’s rear-end, helping the her father’s husbandman, who held the tail out of her face lest it ‘knock her to Sunday’, deliver a breeched calf.
Together, as children, he and she had climbed trees to harvest app
les, jousted with poles, lain on their backs on the roof of Delincourt Hall and studied the stars until early morning. And when her brother’s tutor arrived to take his education in charge, she had demanded to be allowed to attend his lessons. demanded of her father, no less, who was not a man of whom demands were to be lightly made. And so, in time, she became more adept at gentlemanly learning than the female arts.
Not that she couldn’t become feminine if it suited her. Breathtakingly so. That tactic, more than anything, was a sign that she wanted something, or was up to something and, early on, he had learned to be wary of it.
“Between us,” Margaret continued, “we plastered not only the bread oven, but the fireplace as well! And made a good job of it, if I say so.” She mimed spreading plaster on the air. “It’s the consistency of the mixture that’s important—Oldmanson swears by compound of cow urine, horsehair and Somerset gypsum, and would settle for nothing less.” She leaned toward him, so close he could smell the rose water she had, that morning, applied to her neck. “How he collected the cow urine, I never asked nor care to know. Much different than milking, I warrant!” she speculated nevertheless.
“Then there’s technique of application, of course.”
And so—as for some minutes she regaled him with the finer points of plaster application in conditions dry and damp, indoor and out, and the relative benefits of milk, beer, eggs, and urine as admixtures to the compound—she deepened the hold of her enchantment over Rector Amant. Her complete unawareness of her effect on him doubled the depth of its roots which, like those in the earth with which he had been contending for several hours, seemed invigorated rather than discouraged by his attempts to pull them out.
He smiled as the metaphor occurred to him.
Lady Tibetot interrupted herself. “What are you smiling at? You still don’t think I can do it, do you?”
“Margaret,” he said, refraining with all rapidly crumbling force of will at his disposal from taking her gently by the arms, even in the most brotherly way, “I entertain no doubt whatsoever as to your ability to do whatever you set your mind to. When it comes to plastering, I am sure a little application would make you the greatest partgeter in Britain.”
Coda: The Third Albert Mystery (The Albert Mysteries Book 3) Page 22