Chains of Folly

by Roberta Gellis

  Chapter 4

  When Magdalene let Bell in through the gate of the Old Priory Guesthouse the next morning, she drew a sharp breath and said, “What happened? You are hurt.”

  Bell was stiff and sore but not wounded, so he shook his head. “Only bruised. We were attacked on our way to the archbishop’s house.”

  “The bishop?”

  Magdalene’s eyes were wide with concern. Henry of Winchester was as rapacious a landlord as any other who owned a whorehouse, but he had not raised her rent until she could no longer pay just because he knew her business was good. Moreover, Winchester valued her as a tenant and knew her as an individual. She could fare far worse under another.

  “Unharmed, but as you can imagine, greatly distressed.”

  “Yes, I…oh, why are we standing here? Come in.”

  She closed the gate behind him and watched as he made his way into the house. He was not favoring any limb nor was his walk crooked; just, he lacked his usual grace of movement. Diot looked up from the cheese and bread with which she was breaking her fast. She too, looked concerned.

  “You’ve been fighting,” she said.

  “The bishop was attacked on his way to the archbishop’s house,” Magdalene explained, and then to Bell, “Do you want more than bread and cheese? Sit, and I’ll get you some ale.”

  Instead of simply stepping over the bench. Bell pulled it out, walked around, and eased himself down, resting his sword beside him. “Bread and cheese is enough,” he said, and as he took a cup from Magdalene’s hand, “Thank you.”

  “Attacked the bishop?” Diot muttered. “Who would attack a bishop on the streets of Southwark? It isn’t as if he were traveling with valuables—or was he? Bringing tithes to the archbishop?”

  “No.” Bell drank, set the cup down, and looked rather blankly at a piece of cheese he had speared on his eating knife. “He was going to dine with Theobald to discuss the convocation he called to examine the king’s conduct with regard to the treatment of Salisbury and Lincoln.”

  “Calling a convocation will not endear him to Stephen,” Magdalene said and then suddenly covered her lips with her hand as she realized what the king’s displeasure could have implied about the attack. “Oh, no. I know they have quarreled but Stephen would not! Winchester is his brother.”

  “No,” Bell agreed. “Stephen would not agree to harm coming to Winchester, but unfortunately those we captured and questioned…straitly…all said that the bishop was not to be hurt. So Stephen could have been involved or could have known nothing about it. Sometimes his ‘advisors’ do not bother to mention to him what they plan, particularly if they believe they will not be found out.”

  Diot looked brightly from Bell to Magdalene, but it was Magdalene who said, “That is a mark of Waleran’s finger in the pie. There was no hint at all of who planned this?”

  Bell shrugged. “Perhaps. They were supposed to take the bishop prisoner and carry him off to some den opposite Paul’s Wharf, light two lanterns and set them side by side, then leave.” He grimaced. “I lit the lanterns—as if anyone could see them during the day—and spent all of yesterday afternoon and most of the night down there watching, but no one came.”

  Diot shook her head. “I must suppose that bringing the bishop opposite Paul’s Wharf and lighting signal lanterns means that a boat would come to move him across the river. And Paul’s Wharf is not far from Baynard’s Castle. And Baynard’s Castle is held by Waleran’s youngest brother, Hugh Beaufort.” Once more she shook her head. “Could the Beauforts be so stupid and obvious?”

  “I don’t know,” Bell said, voice rising and face twisted with frustration. “They might have thought it was better to be quick. If Winchester had ridden with only myself unarmed, and he had been seized quickly, me dead or too hurt to follow, he might have been hidden away and none even sure he had been taken. But what you say is also true. If anything went wrong, which it did, the hiding place would cry aloud that Waleran and his family were involved.”

  “Yes,” Diot said. “Why not find a hole to hide the bishop in on this side of the river? There are enough holes in Southwark and Lambeth.”

  Bell opened his mouth, but before he could speak Magdalene said thoughtfully, “Could this be the work of someone who wanted to blacken the Beauforts and frighten the bishop? Someone like Geoffrey de Mandeville, who would wish to support the king’s seizure of Salisbury’s castles but would also like to slip into Waleran’s place close to the king?”

  “I don’t know,” Bell’s voice, although still kept low, carried the feeling of a howl. “I don’t know whether whoever planned the attack had someone down there watching and saw me and my men and thus did not send the boat. I don’t know whether it was because we were later getting there than the attackers would have been. And the whole thing may have been only a ploy, an attempt to frighten Winchester. In that case no one would ever have come and the bishop would have been allowed to escape. It is possible someone those men knew nothing about—” Bell’s mouth grew very hard “—and believe me they told everything they knew, would have come later, not necessarily from Paul’s Wharf, and killed him.”

  Magdalene raised her brows. “They told everything…but not who sent them?”

  “We had some bad luck there. I assure you that every man I questioned would have been only too glad to tell me. But the leader of the group, who had likely made the bargain, was killed.” Bell finished the ale in his cup and slammed it down on the table. “It seems that I killed him myself.”

  “You couldn’t have known,” Diot said, patting his shoulder and refilling the cup with ale.

  For a moment Bell was very still, then he said, “No. I couldn’t have known.” He sighed. “But I learned the men were not from Southwark, which is why they knew no holes here for hiding. They were from east of London. Two saw their leader with a very big man, well wrapped in a cloak. One saw him twice, once about a week ago and again yesterday morning.”

  Magdalene’s brow furrowed and she bit her lip. “To give orders for the attack?” She shrugged. “I don’t suppose the bishop’s plan for dining with the archbishop was a secret.” But before Bell could reply, she said, “I cannot see how these things can be connected.”

  “What things?” Bell mumbled around another mouthful of bread and cheese.

  “Leaving Nelda’s body in the bishop’s bedchamber and setting a troop to capture him. It seems to me that although both were intended to damage Winchester, they are the product of entirely different ways of thinking.”

  “Hmmm. I had not connected them at all.” Bell broke off a small piece of bread and chewed it slowly. “But they are both attempts on Winchester and likely both because of this convocation he has called. Still you are right. They…ah…feel different.”

  “But Nelda is dead,” Diot said sadly.

  “Yes, so perhaps the two attacks are not so different after all.” Magdalene looked around the table. “If you are finished, perhaps we had better go and see whether we can discover anything from where and how Nelda lived.”

  * * * *

  Both Bell and Magdalene were slightly surprised when they realized how close Nelda’s rooms were to the Old Priory Guesthouse. However, neither was particularly surprised when the hard-faced woman guarding the heaps of ragged remnants of garments that were piled outside of the old clothes shop turned her back on them. They were too well-dressed to try to steal her wares and it was to her advantage not to know anything about what went on above her shop.

  The flight of stairs was sound enough. Bell paused to examine the stair treads carefully. A few had broken off, leaving sharp edges. Bell thought it likely that falling down the stairs had bruised Nelda’s back. The older bruises—he squinted in thought as he climbed the rest of the stairs—one broad one on her upper arm where whoever had beaten her held her tight and the others on her face and upper body were not directly connected with her death.

  He found Diot and Magdalene searching through their pockets, and bo
th turned to him as he came onto the landing.

  “The door is locked,” Magdalene said. “Do you have a piece of wire in your purse or a long, thin nail?”

  He did not have a nail, but he did have a very thin file that he used for removing and smoothing nicks in his sword. Wordlessly, he proffered the file to Magdalene, who just handed it to Diot. Bell sighed as she bent and probed into the lock with the file. He was not really surprised that Diot could pick a lock, and had a quick caustic thought about whether she had learned the skill to open the chastity belt her husband had no doubt tried to make her wear.

  “Crude thing,” Diot muttered after a few moments, then turned the handle and opened the door.

  They all paused just inside and looked around. “Whatever happened didn’t happen in here,” Magdalene said.

  The chamber was not disordered and yet not neat enough to have been rearranged to hide disorder. Bell nodded agreement and Diot remarked that it looked much as it did when she had shared it with Nelda.

  “She had a small strongbox, which she hid in a different place every day or two,” Diot said. “It never had much in it. The most it held was five pence, but she never seemed to be short of money. I always thought she brought her money to a goldsmith to hold for her.”

  Bell grunted and began to examine the walls, but they were all solid. Diot pulled away the front board of what looked like a box bed—only it was not—built out from one wall. There was nothing in the space exposed. They went back to searching, and Magdalene eventually found the strong box at the back of the small hearth behind a false wall of thin bricks. It was locked, but Bell’s file and Diot’s skill soon had it open.

  Hardly worth the effort, Diot thought. It held only two pence and two farthings…and then she swallowed bitter laughter. Now two pence and two farthings were nothing to her, but before she came to the Old Priory Guesthouse, she would have killed for it. Two pence and two farthings would have saved her—she swallowed sickly at the memory of the things she had been forced to do.

  Nelda’s strong box told them nothing about why she was killed, why she was carrying a letter to Winchester from Robert of Gloucester. They continued to search carefully, upending the stools and the small table, and the bench near the wall opposite the bed, testing for hollow legs, stripping the blanket from the thin pallet that served as a mattress and examining it very carefully for hidden parchment or the shape of coins or jewelry. They found nothing, not a slip of parchment and certainly no indication that Nelda could read or write.

  Then they moved into the bedchamber. This bed, which seemed to be fixed to the wall, took longer to examine. It had several pillows and the mattress was thicker, stuffed with wool and horsehair. The examination, however, produced nothing except a few six-legged pests. Again the walls kept no secrets, nor did the chest that held Nelda’s clothing.

  While Bell pried at the base of the chest to see if it had a false bottom, Magdalene sat down on the stool near the empty brazier and stared around.

  “Finished?” Bell asked, adding, “There’s nothing hidden in the chest.”

  “No, we can’t be finished,” Magdalene replied absently, her eyes roaming restlessly around the room. “It has to be somewhere and more likely in here than in the other chamber.”

  “What has to be somewhere?” Diot asked.

  “Nelda’s real cache. That strong box was to convince a thief that he had found her treasure and could stop looking. But the rooms are too good, the clothing too good. I think it likely that she was a thief too, and needed someplace safe for her takings. She must have money somewhere.”

  “A goldsmith, as Diot suggested?” Bell said.

  “No. Diot thinks of goldsmiths, I think of goldsmiths, you think of goldsmiths, but Nelda would not put her money in a goldsmith’s care. She would not trust anyone with her life savings, with what was all she had to keep her in her later years. She would think he would steal from her and what recourse would she have—a whore’s word against that of a rich and honored goldsmith.”

  “It isn’t in the walls,” Bell said.

  “Or in the bed,” Diot added.

  “In the bed, no. But it must be near the bed. She would want it close, where if there was fire or some other disaster in the night she could get it quickly.”

  “The bed is fastened to the walls,” Bell remarked dryly.

  “No, no it isn’t. Not the way you think,” Diot said, voice high with excitement. “Once I was in here talking to her…she had just got out of bed and I leaned against the footboard, and it moved. The whole bed moved. She was dressing. She didn’t notice—or maybe she did and that was why she got rid of me. It…it must slide forward…”

  But pulling and pushing had no effect, until Magdalene got on the bed and kneeling up slid her hand along the headboard. Her fingers caught on a metal bulge—a latch. When that was unhooked, the bed did slide forward, exposing a small ring. Pulled, this drew out a square of plaster on a thin board and behind that was a hollow in the wall in which lay a flat, well-smithed metal box.

  That lock was much harder to open, but patience was eventually rewarded, exposing several pounds worth of silver pennies. Diot watched Magdalene, but the whoremistress was clearly not interested in the coins. She lifted them out, handing them to Bell who stood beside her, until what was hidden beneath the coins was exposed.

  “Ah,” she said with satisfaction, then turned to look at Bell, who had gasped.

  He was staring at the most remarkable item, a large crucifix. Magdalene also stared at it, not ever having seen Christ on the cross depicted in jewelry. Bell put the pennies aside and picked up the crucifix, frowning at it.

  “I cannot imagine how this came here,” he said.

  “You know to whom it belongs?”

  “Yes, but I…I do not believe the man who owned this would violate his vow of chastity with…with…”

  “A whore?” Magdalene asked, smiling bitterly.

  “A whore like that.” Bell’s voice was harsh.

  “Look at this,” Diot interrupted. “Magdalene, did you not say something about Mandeville being involved in the attack on Winchester?” She fished about in the box and came up with an enameled house badge on a ribbon.

  “That is certainly Mandeville’s badge,” Bell said, taking it from her hand and examining it closely. Then he looked around the chamber, grimaced, and added, “But can you see Geoffrey de Mandeville in these rooms?”

  “Not Geoffrey himself,” Magdalene replied, “but one of his captains? Could it be possible that Nelda had an arrangement, as I have with William, that for a set payment each moon he can send his men to my women? And these rooms are none so bad. We are used to the Old Priory Guesthouse, but I had been in business for some time in Oxford before I came to London so I came with money to spend on the Guesthouse. And since I came by a patron’s order, I had help. Does it not seem to you that these rooms are more than what an ordinary whore could afford?”

  “Well, Nelda had a patron…that I know. He was away when I first came to stay with her, and when she bade me go she said it was because her patron was returning to London.”

  “Yes, you said she did not want him to meet you.”

  As Magdalene spoke she had been turning over the trinkets in the box. She had put aside several valuable rings, which may have had lettering or simply a decorative border on them, and now she lifted out a handsome seal and uttered a low whistle.

  “Is this what I think it is, Bell?” she asked, holding out the seal to show the device carved into it.

  He took it and hissed gently between his teeth. “Beaufort…Waleran’s house…marked with a bend sinister. A bastard of the house? One that Waleran’s father old Robert did not want to acknowledge openly but did not want to ignore and abandon? Interesting. I have no idea to whom this belonged and however did he lose so precious a thing? It and a few words would identify him to the Beauforts—”

  “Unless he is already known to them and thus less careful of his tri
nket. What odds will you wager that if Nelda serviced Mandeville or his men, Waleran would want to know what she could find out? And they are all lodged in those houses around the Tower from time to time. The men would talk to each other. Doubtless Nelda would be mentioned and knowledge of her drift back to the masters.”

  “No odds,” Bell said. He shook his head and handed the seal back to Magdalene. “Pack it all up,” he ordered. “We have been here long enough. I will go back to the Guesthouse with you and take the money to the bishop. He will set his clerks to searching out whether Nelda had heirs. If she did, he will see that the money goes to them; if she did not, he will use it for charity. Keep the other things safe for me. The badge or the seal or some other trinket may be the answer to why she was killed.”

  “But not to why she was placed in the bishop’s bedchamber or where she got that letter.” Diot sighed. “I did not like her, but I cannot feel she deserved to be murdered.”

  Bell shrugged, his mouth a thin line. “People are murdered every day just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He shook his head. “I want to look at the stairs and at the landing more carefully. Put the box back in the wall. I doubt any but Nelda knew of it, but perhaps her patron was involved in the thefts and did know.”

  * * * *

  Outside the apartment, Bell looked carefully at the wall near the edge of the landing. It was rough plaster over lathe and not far from the door, about the level of his waist, there were several threads caught in the plaster. They looked the same color as Nelda’s gown. Perhaps her elbow had slammed into the wall while she was being choked. He pulled the threads free and put them in his purse.

  Also he noticed there were scuff marks right at the edge of the landing, roughly below where the threads had been. Bell got down on his knees to look more closely. No one ordinarily walked that close to the edge.