“He did?” Joliffe said, as surprised as the man had supposed he would be.
“He did. Of good Italian cut.” The man made a gesture at himself from throat to waist to show something that Joliffe did not understand. “The neck. The front. The way the sleeves were gathered and set. The wide pleating below the waist. Italian. Our lords’ll likely be wearing them that way before next year is out.”
“But this man already was,” Joliffe said.
“Well, he would be, wouldn’t he? Being Italian.”
“Was he?” Joliffe said, beginning to sound stupid in his own ears at least.
“Talked like one.”
“You know Italian?”
“Nay. He spoke English and not badly neither. But I get all sort of folk in here. Selling to me. Buying from me. I know the different sounds of them. He was Italian of some sort.”
“Were they both Italian?”
“The other was foreign, aye, but from no further off than Sussex, likely.”
Joliffe took another coin from his purse and laid it on the table. “Anything else about them?”
The man eyed the coin but did not take it, just shook his head and said regretfully, “No. That’s it.”
“My thanks,” Joliffe said and turned away, leaving the coin.
“My thanks to you,” the man replied, sounding truly grateful, the coin scraping a little on the wood as he picked it up.
As the proverb said, it was an ill wind that blew nobody good.
Chapter 21
Joliffe chose to take the longer way to Winchester House, on foot across London bridge rather than by boat across the Thames. It gave him time to think. And kept him off the river’s choppy waters.
Part of his thinking was to the purpose, but part of it was a frustrated brooding on having learned the final thing he needed to know only by chance rather than by asking the right question at the right moment. He tried telling himself it was hard to ask the right question when he did not know it was there to be asked, but he found small comfort in that. Part of him was certain he should have known, despite he could not answer his own demand of how he should have known.
He truly, truly hated not knowing things.
His token got him past the gate guards and to Master Fowler again. Looking as blank as he had before, Master Fowler said, “His grace has only lately returned from Westminster. I must see if he’s free to see you just now,” and ushered Joliffe from the chamber, locked the door behind them, told Joliffe to wait where he was, and went away up the stairs.
Abandoned and not feeling bound to obey the man too nearly, Joliffe waited, then went up the curve of the stair to the narrow window, laid the doublet out on the deep stone sill there, and used his time to go over it very carefully in the gray daylight to be sure of what he was already sure. When he heard someone coming down the stairs, he did not bother to go back to Master Fowler’s door but gathered up the doublet and waited where he was with it folded over his arm again. Master Fowler, coming into sight above him, showed disapproval by a downward pull of the corners of his mouth at finding him there but said only, “You’re to go up,” and went past him, down the stairs and presumably to his lair again, leaving Joliffe to go upward alone.
The door at the stairs’ top was standing open. Joliffe gave a light rap at it and waited the moment until bade to enter.
This time Bishop Beaufort was not seated at his desk but standing at the window, nor was he wearing his dark bishop’s garb but instead the flowing scarlet robes of a cardinal of the Church, with ermine furred around the throat and a large golden and bejeweled cross on his chest, hung from a thick golden chain laid over his shoulders. Even in the dull daylight, the richness of it sent Joliffe into a deep bow that was as much to the sudden magnificence as to the man himself—which was, Joliffe knew, much the purpose of such magnificence. But as he straightened, he met the bishop’s dry gaze and knew Bishop Beaufort was no more misled by his own outward show than a good player was by whatever seeming he might take on for a part.
“You look surprised,” Bishop Beaufort said.
Not used to being so easily read, Joliffe said, blunt rather than flattering. “I’ve heard there was such trouble made over you becoming a cardinal that you . . .” Discretion caught up to his tongue. “. . . um . . .”
“That I find it better not to display it in my fellow-churchmen’s faces?” Bishop Beaufort said, dry as his look. “Yes. That’s been the way of it. But since presently the Church in the person of a certain Cardinal Albergati has seen fit to side with the French and the duke of Burgundy against us, it has suddenly become most desirable to have a cardinal in England, too.” He left the window, moved to his desk where the low-crowned, broad-brimmed hat of a cardinal lay, its tasseled ties hanging over the edge. He moved it to one side, nodded at the doublet over Joliffe’s arm, and said, “You have something to show me?”
“To tell you, first,” Joliffe said.
He began with yesterday’s riot and his talk with the duke of Gloucester’s man. When he repeated what the man had said about his hirer being maybe of the bishop’s household, Bishop Beaufort’s gaze sharpened and darkened. Pretending not to see that, Joliffe went on to today, to the murder and following the two men and learning where they went.
The darkness of Bishop Beaufort’s silence had deepened, and when he broke it, it was to say coldly, “So you think I may be playing some sort of double game. That for some twisted reason I’m behind all of this at the same time I’ve asked you to find out about it all.”
“If I thought that,” Joliffe said from the heart, “I’d not be here talking to you. I’d be heading away from London as fast and far as I could go, hoping you’d never think of me again.”
That brought an upward quirk of the bishop’s eyebrows and almost a smile as he said, “So. Well then.” He looked at the doublet Joliffe still held. “There must be more.”
While telling of his return to the shop, Joliffe went to the window and laid the doublet out on the sill there much as he had when alone on the stairway. Bishop Beaufort joined him, and Joliffe showed where the shopkeeper had been cleaning the blood away, hip-low on one side.
“I thought you said it had been a clean kill,” Bishop Beaufort said. “A stab into the chest. How did blood get there?”
“The kill was clean, but I would judge that in his hurry to be somewhere away once it was done, the man was careless at resheathing his dagger.” Joliffe mimed fumbling a dagger toward the belt-hung sheath of his own. “It must have irked him, to have to get rid of the doublet after the trouble of getting it, but he couldn’t risk having it on him any longer than need be.”
“The trouble of getting it?”
Joliffe shifted the doublet, putting the left shoulder instead of the hem into the best light. There, a little darker against the somewhat faded red of the rest of the doublet, was the shape of a lord’s badge that had once been there. A shape that was difficult to imagine was anything but that of a cardinal’s hat.
“However the murderer came by it, it was acquired very lately,” Joliffe said. “And maybe somewhat hastily. See.” He pointed along an edge of the shadow-shape. “There are still thread-ends from where the stitching was cut so the badge could be taken off.”
Handling one sleeve, Bishop Beaufort said, “Nor is the doublet so old that it’s a cast-off from my household. So very probably the man who wore it is of my household, and he’s going to have to explain at some point what had happened to his livery doublet.”
“No,” Joliffe said. “The man who wore this today is probably Italian. According to the shopkeeper, he wore a fine Italian doublet under this one.”
“Italian?” Bishop Beaufort said sharply.
“Italian. Do you have any Italians in your household?”
“A man doesn’t have to be Italian to wear an Italian doublet.”
“True,” Joliffe granted. “Nor does a man have to wear an Italian doublet to commit murder. But this man did and so had to g
o to some trouble to keep it hidden, not only for the murder but afterwards, when he could far more easily have simply not have worn it at all. My guess is that for him to be seen here not in his usual doublet would be noted at a time when he wanted no note at all taken of him.”
“So that your next guess,” Bishop Beaufort said, “is that by the time he walked into Winchester House, he was no longer wearing the doublet he bought in London. Just as he would have been no longer wearing this one.”
“Yes.”
They both looked down at the doublet lying on the windowsill for a silent moment before Bishop Beaufort said quietly, “I wonder who of my household is missing his livery. That isn’t something that will go unnoted for long.”
“What of your man killed in London a few days ago? Did he have a livery doublet?”
“Not on him when he was killed,” Bishop Beaufort said dryly, then added in serious answer, “But, yes, whenever he served here in the household, he would have had such a doublet, kept in whatever chamber he shared with other men here. I’ll have it asked after.”
“There’s chance that . . .” Joliffe stopped, doubtful he should say what next was in his mind, but once begun, there was no going back under Bishop Beaufort’s gaze, and he said, “There’s chance, I suppose, that Gloucester’s player was right that the man who hired him was of your household.”
“The man who was with your Italian today.”
“Not him, no. I mean, he may be the one. But what if your man who was killed a few days ago . . . what if he was the one who approached Gloucester’s man? It would be a good play by the Italian. If Gloucester’s man was caught at his business and accused one of your men . . .”
“It could set things going between Gloucester and me again. I see the possibility. And then they killed my man for some reason, whether to be spared paying him or to be sure he did not talk or because he was going to betray them or they feared he was or any number of other reasons that hardly matter now. Most particularly to him.” He was quiet a moment, looking out the window, then said, “And the man who was with today’s murderer. Were you able to determine anything about him?”
“The shopkeeper said he was English. From Sussex maybe.”
Bishop Beaufort rapped his knuckles on the windowsill and turned back to the room. “Well, if we find your Italian, we’ll learn about the other, and if this doublet doesn’t fit him, then we’ll know it’s someone else’s, and I’ll have questions asked about what’s become of the dead man’s.” He crossed to the door by which Joliffe had entered, opened it, and called with no great force into the stairwell, “Master Fowler,” left the door open, and turned back to Joliffe. “Much of the household will be gathering to supper in the hall by now. Master Fowler will take you to the minstrels’ loft, to overlook everyone there. If you see today’s man or men, either or both of them, point out him or them but say nothing beyond that. Just return here. After that it will be my business.”
Master Fowler came in then. Bishop Beaufort told him what was wanted. Master Fowler silently bowed and turned back to the door by which he had come. Joliffe bowed more deeply and followed him out. Still in silence, they went down the stairs, past Master Fowler’s door to another one, through it, and then through several chambers where clerks were working at desks. Some looked up but with no great curiosity. Beyond them Joliffe and his guide came to a room that was near the kitchen, to judge by the good smell of cooking food, and crowded with servants being told their supper duties by some brisk household official. Master Fowler and Joliffe skirted behind their backs without causing any stir and with a little more threading through rooms came finally to the stairs to the minstrels’ loft.
It was too soon for anyone to have come there to their evening duty; there was no one to wonder why Master Fowler and Joliffe were there. With the high-roofed hall spread open before and below them but surely mindful that at the fore-edge of the gallery they would be in as plain view to those below as they were to him, Master Fowler led Joliffe to the more shadowed side of the gallery and gestured for him to go forward alone. Joliffe did, keeping near the wall and in the shadow, moving slowly so as to draw no eyes his way, and stopped before he quite reached the railing, able to see enough of the hall for a first long look. If he did not see his men, he would go closer, increasing the risk of being seen himself, but this would do for now.
And it was enough.
He saw the shorter of the two men first, standing not far below the dais, in talk with two other men and still wearing the plain-colored doublet he had had on in London but with a long, sleeveless surcoat over it and a silver chain around his neck that made clear he was not a plain servant in the household.
Since the man looked as if he would stay in sight a while longer, Joliffe did not immediately point him out to Master Fowler, would have gone on looking for the other man but did not need to because a flash of bright-colored movement at the side of the hall caught his eye, and there he was. The Italian. In talk with another man and in a yellow doublet of some rich cloth, with a wide-pleated skirt. Just as the shopkeeper had said.
The man to whom the Italian was talking was garbed much the same, so likely he was another Italian and was just then laughing heartily at whatever the other man had said. Joliffe wondered if the murderer man had been found by now or if his body was still lying sprawled there while his murderer stood laughing here, looking forward to a fine supper while his victim began to rot.
With the same hot anger that had been cramping inside him ever since he had found the body, Joliffe made a small gesture for Master Fowler to come forward, and when he had, pointed out both of the men to him.
Master Fowler made a small nod of acknowledgement, said, “I can name them,” and led Joliffe out of the gallery.
They went back the way they had come. The clerks were no longer at their desks but milling about, done with their day’s work, readying for their suppers and showing no more interest in Joliffe and Master Fowler than they had before.
Going up the stairs and nearly to Bishop Beaufort’s door, they heard him speaking as if to someone, and Master Fowler stopped so that perforce Joliffe did, too, waiting while someone answered whatever the bishop had said, followed by the closing of the room’s other door. Only then did Master Fowler go forward, one hand held up in silent bidding to Joliffe to stay where he was. Not until he had knocked lightly and gone in and known for certain Bishop Beaufort was again alone did he turn and say, “Come now.”
As Joliffe went into the room, Bishop Beaufort was asking, “He saw them?”
“He did, my lord.”
Bishop Beaufort flicked a glance at Joliffe, then raised a hand for Master Fowler to come to him and leaned toward him for Master Fowler to say something low near his ear. When the man finished and stepped back, Bishop Beaufort held silent in thought for a moment, then said, “There’s no likelihood they’ll run, since they don’t know they’ve been found out. We’ll let them be for now, rather than stir the household needlessly. I’ll have them brought to me later tonight. Set men simply to keep distant watch on them in the meanwhile.”
Master Fowler bowed in acceptance of the order, paused with a look at Joliffe as if waiting to be told to see him out, but Bishop Beaufort said, “I need to talk a little more with him. Thank you.”
Taking that for a bidding to leave, Master Fowler bowed again and left, closing the door as he went, leaving Bishop Beaufort and Joliffe looking at one another; and with again that discomfiting ability to see more than Joliffe meant to be showing, Bishop Beaufort said, “You’ve done well, but you don’t look pleased with yourself. Why not?”
Indeed, why not?
Joliffe had already been asking himself the same, and his answer was as much for himself as the bishop as he said slowly, “Despite all the while I’ve spent trying to think through what’s been happening, despite all my trying to understand the who and why of it, I’ve succeeded—if I truly have—only because I happened, just happened, twice to see a man and
follow him.”
A Play of Lords Page 29