Old Saxon Blood
Page 19
She thought that despite what Matthew had said about the unlikelihood of Conroy confessing anything, it would be of some value to see what the Irishman was up to. She went downstairs and then out to the stable.
As she entered she saw Edward at his workbench and asked him if he'd seen Conroy.
The hostler paused in his work. He was in the midst of repairing a saddle and had a sharply pointed tool in his hand. He looked at her and said, “He's gone."
“Where?"
“Where he willed," Edward answered, returning his attention to the saddle. “He's cleared out. Go have a look for yourself."
She decided that under the circumstances the invitation was well worth accepting. Joan slipped around Edward and into the stable where Matthew had told her Conroy slept.
Despite the hostler's assurance that Conroy had cleared out, she expected to see the chaotic mess that had characterized Conroy's quarters in the castle. Instead, the little room was well ordered and clean. The straw pallet had been covered with a piece of new canvas. There was no sign of the Irishman’s gear.
She was turning to leave when she noticed a large dark stain on the planks. She knelt down to have a closer look. Whatever had spilled had been in ample supply, and someone had made a serious effort to clean it up, for there were abrasive marks all around the edge of the stain, as though the floor had been scrubbed hard with a thick-bristled brush.
“I noticed a stain on the floor. Something spilled," she commented to Edward as she was on her way out.
“The floor is filthy with stains," the hostler said without looking up. “Most of it blood. Animal blood. My father tells me the cabin was once used to slaughter chickens and pigs."
“Oh, was it?" Joan responded casually, as if the hostler's explanation was of no importance to her.
A slaughterhouse for chickens and pigs? she thought as she
walked back to the house. Who would believe that a stable room with a solid wood floor would be used to butcher beasts—a filthy work all the world did out-of-doors? And, moreover, who could believe, knowing the natural slovenliness of Michael Conroy, that he would spend a minute of his time cleaning quarters he had never sought and was on the edge of abandoning forever?
The only conclusion to be drawn was that Edward was lying. But if Conroy really had cleared out for good, why didn’t Edward simply tell the truth?
And then she wondered if perhaps he hadn’t—at least in part. Perhaps the stain was blood. But no animal’s.
She shuddered.
She reasoned that if Edward was lying, then it was his second lie, for she recalled Matthew’s account of the hidden child. She wondered if Conroy might be dead and if Edward had killed him and had then cleaned up after the murder. The silly story about the slaughterhouse might have been invented on the spur of the moment. Perhaps he thought no one would see the stain, or attach any significance to it. If so, Edward had woefully underestimated her housewife’s eye for details.
She went upstairs again to see how Matthew was doing. Finding him still asleep, she applied cold compresses to his forehead while she tried to decide what to do next. When Matthew awoke she told him what Edward had said.
“Gone! I can’t believe it. He wouldn’t go save he found what he was looking for, I’m convinced of it.”
She had to agree. She told him she thought Conroy might be dead. Murdered. Perhaps by Edward.
“But why would Edward kill the Irishman?” he asked. “I must get up.”
“No, you don’t. Keep to your bed. You’re not well, and while I think you are mending, if you do too much you’ll make it worse again. I’ll be back in a little while.”
“Where are you going?”
“Out to see Edward’s father—and perhaps Edward’s child.”
“No, wait until I’m well enough to accompany you.”
“We can’t wait. Things are happening too fast, Matthew.”
He protested futilely. In the next moment she was gone.
She recognized the cottage from Matthew’s description, which had been very exact. As she approached, she saw an old man seated in the doorway sunning himself. At his feet sprawled a large dog. Indoors, a woman’s voice was singing. The dog, catching her scent, stood and began to bark. The singing stopped. Joan advanced quickly, maneuvering around the man and the dog, who she could see was tied to a stake and was at the end of his tether and beyond reaching her. Joan’s foot was on the doorstep when the woman appeared, a startled expression on her face.
She was in her early twenties, Joan supposed. With fair skin and dark hair, full on her shoulders. She was holding her hand over her mouth in a gesture of surprise. Joan greeted the woman, identified herself, and stepped into the cottage, as though the younger woman’s astonishment at Joan’s sudden appearance had been a clear invitation to enter.
Not certain as to how long she could take advantage of her hostess’s confusion, Joan took in as much as there was to see. She noticed the interior was simply furnished, and, as Matthew had said, clean. She saw the baby at once. Joan judged it to be about a year of age, perhaps more. It was lying on its stomach on one of the two pallets, its round pale face protruding from a coarse-spun blanket. The child was asleep.
Joan turned from the child to look at its mother. The woman had come into the center of the room and wore an expression of confusion and dismay. Joan noticed, now that she could study the woman’s features, that they were delicate and winsome, the eyes wide-set and the mouth small and well-shaped.
The woman still seemed too astonished by Joan’s invasion of the cottage to speak. Taking advantage of her confusion, Joan turned to have a closer look at the child.
The child’s coloring favored the mother. There was a thick growth of ruddy hair on the smooth scalp and the child’s flesh was pale, almost translucent. But there was a deformity in the mouth that marred the little face. It was a harelip, a lamentable defect.
Somehow sensing his mother’s alarm, the child awoke and stared up at Joan and began to wail.
The baby’s distress brought the mother hurrying to the bed. She snatched the child up in her arms, putting the blanket over the lower part of the child’s face to hide the deformity.
Joan decided to be direct. "Who are you? And who, pray, is this child?”
"The child is mine,” the woman said in a heavy Irish accent. "Hes my son. My name is Brigid.”
"You are Edwards wife, then?” Joan said.
Brigid paused before answering; then she said, "No, not his wife.”
"But that is his child,” Joan said.
In the comforting embrace of its mother, the child had ceased crying and was watching Joan out of large blue eyes. But before Brigid could respond to Joan’s question about the child’s paternity, Joan’s attention was drawn to the yard, where the dog had resumed barking. This time, however, the quality of the bark had changed from fierce aggression to excited welcome. Joan heard a familiar voice. "Stand, Dagger. Peace, cur!”
The next moment Edward appeared, stern-visaged and breathing hard, as if he had run in pursuit of her.
"What’s your business here, Mistress Stock?” he inquired coldly.
She was tempted to answer in kind—to say that she had every right to be where she was and to demand what right the woman and child had to be under a roof that was property of Thorncombe without the owner’s permission. But then, remembering that a soft answer turned away wrath, she said, "I came to visit your father. And this young woman. And her child.”
This response seemed to take Edward by surprise. He appeared less angry now and came deeper into the room to stand next to Brigid.
"You came to visit my father?” he asked suspiciously.
"You told me he was old. And infirm. I thought it within the scope of my duties—if not an obligation of a Christian.”
"My father needs nothing that I cannot provide,” Edward said defensively. He looked down at the baby in Brigid’s arms as though to see if it was all right and then back
at Joan. His face was full of resolve. "This woman and I are betrothed. If our union has not yet been blessed by the Church, yet it has been blessed by this child, who is truly ours.”
"It’s a fine, healthy child,” Joan agreed, not sure how to respond to this speech and its note of defiance. "But I don’t
understand, Edward, why you have been so secretive—about Brigid, I mean, and your son. Certainly there is no cause of shame here. You did say you were betrothed.”
Joan decided that she would not reproach him with the lie he had told Matthew. But she was still not unconvinced that the hostlers handsome countenance was not a murderer’s, for there was still the matter of the bloodstain on the stable floor.
“Well/’ Edward said, “some might not approve of our living as husband and wife before our union has been blessed. I’m of no mind to have my son called a bastard.”
Joan thought that was a good enough reason. If the pair weren’t married by law, then it followed that the child was a bastard by the same law, despite the dubious “bed-rights” often claimed by betrothed couples and sanctioned by their families. Yet the word “bastard” had a sting to it, and she could see another reason for Edwards secrecy. Since it was common thinking that bastards wore the outward sign of their illegitimacy on their bodies, it was sure that the child’s harelip would be construed as a curse and stigma.
“Bastard is a hard name, a cruel name,” she said. “I’m sure your little son is as innocent as any other child. As for your unmarried but housed condition, I will be no hypocrite and say that I completely approve. Yet I will be no judge of you.”
Edward’s hard manner seemed to soften at these words. “Thank you, Mistress Stock. We didn’t know how you and your husband might think. The old steward and his wife cast Brigid off when she was great with child. We keep to ourselves here, as you can see. Dagger isn’t used to company.”
“I could see that well enough,” Joan said good-naturedly. “Yet a dog that does not bark is hardly worth what it takes to feed him.” Brigid smiled and put her baby back down on the bed. Edward said, “We’d be obliged if you didn’t say anything about the baby at the castle.”
“As you please,” she answered. “It’s your business—yours and Brigid’s. The matter is closed as far as I and my husband are concerned.”
Then Joan said it was time she must be going. She explained that her husband was taken ill. Both Brigid and Edward expressed their sympathy. They said they hoped he would be himself again soon. They waved to her as she left.
The old man was still in the yard. Unmoved since her arrival, he now lifted up pale, watery eyes in her direction as she passed, and the dog, having accepted her status as an invited guest, was too busy scratching its fleas to take note of her departure.
She was disappointed that the mystery of the crying child was so easily explained—and more disappointed that the explanation cast no greater light on what the child might have to do with the castle murders.
Matthew had been awake since his wife left, thinking he really should get up, imagining that while he languished recuperating, events of great moment were taking place of which he was woefully ignorant. And so get up he did, although not without a few protests from his ailing body, despite Joan’s remedies and compresses. Still in ill sorts, he knew he had paid the price for his foolhardiness. He could see that now—and Joan had seen it too and therefore had spared him the scolding his foolhardiness warranted.
He felt not only physically weak, but morally chastened.
But what lay heaviest upon his mind and heart was a sense of failure. In London the Queen and Sir Robert would be waiting his return. But when he did, what could he report—a second mysterious murder and perhaps a third to add to the first he had been charged with solving?
The Queen would hardly be pleased. She would forget his great service at Bartholomew Fair, perhaps even demand the return of the silk purse and its contents on the grounds that it had been earnest money for greater service promised and yet unperformed. Matthew knew the Queen to be a canny businesswoman. Yes, would she not have the purse back?
And there was Sir Robert, who had praised Matthew so generously. Matthews failure would be Cecils too. And with that thought, Matthew slid even further into a slough of despondency.
He went over to the casement and looked out. How long had Joan been gone? To the cottage of Edward s father. That had been her destination. He wondered what she would find. Perhaps the concealed child. And the reason for the concealment?
He turned at the sound of her voice.
‘The child is one of the maids’,” she said without prologue. “She lives with Edward. They’re betrothed.”
“Not Una?” Matthew asked, imagining for the moment the triangular complexities of Una, Wylkin, and Edward.
“The girls name is Brigid. She was once a servant here but was sent away when found with child. By the Fludds, or so says Edward.”
“Cast the maid off because she was undone by another servant!” Matthew exclaimed, disapprovingly, climbing back into bed and folding his hands beneath his head. “Why, if that were made a rule, half the houses in England would be untenanted by servants. Besides, they are betrothed. Some say that gives bed-rights. Whence comes this moral severity on the old couple’s part? Neither strikes me as a Puritan.”
Joan took off her cap and cloak and sat down on the bed beside Matthew. She asked him how he did and he said he felt better, much better.
“Liar. Stay in bed,” she said.
She addressed his question.
“With people as bad-tempered as the Fludds, there’s no great mystery. I imagine Brigid got on the wrong side of Moll. The girl is quite beautiful really. Her features are unusually fine for a country girls.”
“Jealousy, then?”
“Envy, spite, the cankered nature of the awful old woman,” Joan said. “When Brigid’s folly began to betray itself in the swelling of her belly, they asked her to leave, and Edward took her in. Took her to his father’s cottage, where she looks after her child and his father. He didn’t want you to know she was there because he was afraid you’d send her packing, just as the Fludds did. But they trust us now to keep their secret.”
“And so we shall,” Matthew said.
Joan told her husband too about the child’s deformity, the little red fissure dividing the upper lip and marring the otherwise flawless countenance.
“Our grave divines and moralists would make much of that,” Matthew said, shaking his head sadly, for he loved children and felt a natural sympathy with other parents who were protective of their little ones.
“There remains one cause of suspicion about Edward,” Joan reminded him. “The bloodstained floor.”
"Well," Matthew said. ‘'However that is explained, I’ll believe Conroy dead when I see his body for myself. But if he is dead we may never know what he was looking for on the island, or why he killed his master to get it, if Conroys our man/’
“Perhaps it was in the chest,” Joan suggested. “The empty chest I found.”
“Perhaps,” he agreed.
For a moment each thought his or her own thoughts. Then Matthew said, “Conroy may have misunderstood Sir John’s intention—about the island, I mean. Maybe he thought that because Sir John was in his boat he was setting out for there. But maybe the island wasn’t in the man’s thought at all.”
“What do you mean, husband, not in his thought?”
“I mean, maybe he wanted to row out to the center of the lake and give whatever it was he had with him a toss into the water and let it sink to the bottom.”
“Something that he may have carried with him in the chest I found?”
“It is possible,” said Matthew.
Joan considered this, for her husband’s new speculation had its appeal. It made sense of the chest, their only hard evidence. But what would the baronet have been so eager to throw away on the night of his homecoming? The larger, more compelling question remained unanswered.
“Could the lake be drained?” she asked, thinking suddenly that what man had made could be unmade.
“Mistress Frances would hardly approve,” he said. “All of what we’ve said is guesswork. How could we justify it to her? Could we say: Madam, your honorable uncle concealed some unknown thing beneath the lake waters—something for which we suppose the good man might have been murdered, although we have not a jot of proof of the same. We humbly request your permission to—”
She conceded the point, indicating with a bob of her head and a wry smile that he need not proceed further with his fanciful conversation. They could not ask that of Thorncombe’s new mistress. The implication that some disgraceful revelation would follow upon the discovery of whatever had been cast away and since hunted for so covertly by Conroy was too grossly palpable. They had been commissioned to find a murder, not expose a family scandal.
"No, the Challoners are a proud race/’ Matthew said. "Only if Mistress Frances’ curiosity is greater than her sense of family honor would she consent to such an undertaking.”
"Or her passion for truth, should curiosity fail,” Joan said. But both Joan and Matthew knew that neither truth nor curiosity nor the two in consort would prevail over family honor. They seemed to have arrived at another impasse.
That night Jack Wylkin made three trips from Stafford Hall to the dam, bearing on each trip two twenty-pound kegs of black powder hoisted on his shoulders like a peddlers pack. He had secured the powder at no little expense and trouble from an unscrupulous captain who would sell anything for money; but it was good-quality powder, purloined from Her Majesty's own navy vessels and guaranteed by these virtues to blow the dam to hell.
He made the difficult journey on foot, for there was no horse trail, only the rtreambed with its puny trickle, sharp rocks, dead branches, and pits—all navigated with great difficulty because of a teasing moon that would appear and then disappear behind swollen clouds.