by L. C. Tyler
‘I had not realised that secretaries had grown so grand,’ I say. But I am aware that I am merely parroting his own jibe. There is a pause in the conversation as I try to think of something clever to say. The pause becomes quite a long one.
‘I met with Aminta and her father returning from your mother’s cottage,’ Pole says, admiring one of the pale-blue silk bows on his sleeve.
‘House,’ I say. ‘My mother’s house.’
Pole ignores this correction. ‘Sir Felix greeted me very cordially. As ever. And Aminta is charming of course. She has really blossomed of late.’
He speaks of the Cliffords with great familiarity. Perhaps during my absence at university they have grown closer. The Cliffords and the Poles are, after all, both cavalier families who lost much through their support of the Stuarts. And it is a small village. It is not unnatural that they should meet from time to time. And yet I cannot help feel that there is more to what Pole has just said than immediately meets the eye. Obviously, it does not follow that Aminta in any way reciprocates Pole’s feelings – I do not think Pole has blossomed in any way at all.
‘Aminta has no dowry,’ I say, though why I wish to tell Pole this is a mystery to me. But still I blunder on: ‘The Cliffords are penniless. The war ruined them.’
‘I think you’ll find everyone in the village knows that,’ says Pole. ‘That’s why they lost the manor. But thank you nonetheless. I am sure Aminta would appreciate your explaining this to me. Still, you must agree that she has many other virtues. She is rather pretty in fact. But . . .’ Pole pauses, also perhaps wondering why I have clumsily raised the issue of dowries for ladies in whom I have no interest. ‘But possibly there is already some understanding between the two of you?’ He puts the tips of his slender fingers to his delicate little mouth in mock concern.
‘Aminta and I? Not a bit of it,’ I say.
‘How wise you are to set your sights lower,’ says Pole, preening one of the feathers in his hat. ‘A farmer’s daughter perhaps, who could dispense with a lady’s maid and many of the other servants that you would not be able to afford. Somebody who would be happy to take you for your good looks and not regret too much your lack of any inheritance. Am I right in thinking that your mother has only two servants and pays neither?’
‘Good day to you, Mr Pole,’ I say.
‘Your ever-obedient servant, Mr Grey,’ says Pole with a very low bow.
I put my hand up to my hat and then quickly take it away again. As I close the door, I hear Pole give a prim little snigger – though whether for my benefit or his own, I could not rightly say.
As I go back along the path, I think, Thorns! Thorns are sharp and unpleasant. I’ll remember that for next time.
But now I have urgent business. Murder cannot be swept behind the door, as some clearly wish it should be. Especially the murder of one who was seeking me out. I must consult the only person in the village I can wholly trust.
For the avoidance of doubt, as we lawyers say, that’s Dickon Grice.
Late Afternoon
I am riding our only remaining horse over the hill to the Grices’ farm. If we were to canter, we would make the hard earth ring beneath her hooves – but we do not canter. For ten years nobody has given the horse any cause to believe that our family’s business could be urgent. She plods along, happy as far as I can tell. I do not clap my spurs to her side, impatient though I am. She is our only horse and may prove to be the last we ever own, unless I can earn the money for another. In the meantime I would do well to return her to the stable in much the same condition that she left it. I think she too knows this.
High above me, in some sort of crude allegory of summer, an invisible lark is singing. A sticky breeze blows off the fields, bringing me the scent of hay and sweet camomile. It will be a hot evening and a hot night to follow. I am beginning to realise that my resting place last night was not as comfortable as I imagined at the time – my body aches for a feather bed and linen sheets. But first I need to talk to Dickon.
‘Have you grown old, or is it just your mare?’ asks Dickon as I clatter across the stones in the courtyard. ‘I’ve been watching you descend that hill for near half an hour. I remember when you’d have taken it at a gallop and then jumped the hedge you picked your way round so daintily.’
‘Have you grown fat, or is it just that you’re wearing your little brother’s coat?’ I respond. ‘The buttons look about to burst off it.’
‘True enough,’ he says, good-naturedly patting his stomach. ‘I need a new coat. You, on the other hand, are starting to acquire a thin and pinched appearance well suited to a rascally lawyer.’
‘I am not.’
‘You are. Another term at Cambridge and you would resemble a withered pippin stuck on a rake handle. We were once much the same build. In a fair fight you could throw me maybe one time in ten.’
‘Nine in ten,’ I say.
But perhaps Dickon is right. I have spent too long poring over dusty lawbooks. It might be better not to compare my own face too closely with his sunburnt cheeks and short blond hair.
Now I am descended from the saddle, Dickon’s hand thumps my shoulder – a little too heartily. He has in my absence become by several degrees more of a farmer, while I have left this flat countryside behind me. We have grown in opposite directions since I was last home. But I still have no better friend in the village or anywhere else.
I enquire after his parents, and, as if she might have overheard, Dickon’s mother appears in the doorway. Though Dickon’s father comes from a long line of farmers, his mother grew up in one of the nearby towns, the daughter of a merchant – of what type I am unsure, since it is not the sort of thing Dickon would think to tell me or, for that matter, I would think to ask. Like Nell Bowman, Dickon’s mother seems slightly exotic in this remote clay-country village. But whereas Nell continues to sparkle like a gem in a muddy puddle, Mistress Grice has reluctantly taken on the drab hues of rural Essex. She might, to look at her, be any Essex farmer’s wife with her weather-beaten face and powerful arms. She wears a greenish-brown dress, and her hair is concealed under a scarf that may once have been white. The dress is partly protected by an apron of coarse grey linen, much washed and mended. Out here there’s no point in wearing anything that might get spoiled by mud. There’s never any shortage of mud in Essex.
She wipes her hands carefully on the apron before speaking. ‘Your mother is well?’ she asks. She talks with the accent of another place and perhaps another time that she now only dimly remembers. But Essex is nibbling at the edges of her speech, and she is aware of this.
I tell her my mother is well enough and that she sends her best wishes. I am not sure whether she expects me to have news of my father. That few people in the village mention him to me suggests that most know he was not a casualty of the war. Nobody mentions Bess Clifford to me either, though I am sure many whisper behind my back. It’s a village after all. It’s what we do. Dickon’s mother asks after ‘the family’, meaning the gentrified Wests rather than the obscure Greys. That they once lived in the Big House raises them – and me – in her eyes, even though the Grices’ comfortable, rambling, timber-framed farm is much bigger than the New House. The Grices have farmed here or hereabouts for as long as the village has existed. Lords of the manor have come and gone, while they have quietly added to their holding a field or a strip at a time. And no field or strip, once in their grasp, is ever given up.
Dickon’s mother seems happy with the little I have to say and disappears back into her kitchen to resume the never-ending round of sweeping, dusting, polishing, washing, fire-tending, brewing, baking, roasting, boiling, skinning, salting, cheese-making, child-bearing and pickling that is her lot in life. I am hoping that she has not neglected the brewing.
We are both on our second tankard before I broach the main reason for my visit.
‘Dickon,’ I say, ‘what do you know about this dead man Ben and I found this morning?’
Dickon�
��s tankard pauses briefly on its next journey to his mouth. Nobody in his family usually says anything without considering it for a day or two. ‘Smith? Arrived the afternoon before you came back from Cambridge. I only spoke to him the one time. A small, dark man he was. Solidly built. Scar on his chin, I think. He was sitting in Ben Bowman’s front parlour with his ale in front of him and his pipe in his mouth, minding his own business. I did no more than wish him good day. Strange to think of him dying scarce half a mile away while we were all carousing in Ben’s parlour.’
‘Why was he staying at the inn anyway?’ I ask.
‘I heard he was on his way to Norwich or somewhere.’
‘And not in a hurry to get there?’
‘Seemingly.’
‘Did he arrive on horseback?’
Dickon looks at me quizzically. ‘What difference does that make?’
‘London to Norwich is a long way on foot. If the horse was still in the stables, Ben would be torn between complaining that nobody was paying for its oats and selling the beast quietly to the next traveller. He’s certainly not complained about the cost of oats.’
We both take a long, contemplative swig of ale. It’s good stuff. Powerful.
‘Smith apparently had a ring with the Stuart coat of arms,’ I say.
‘You’ve heard that? Yes, Ben mentioned it to me too. He’s got sharp eyes. Risky to carry an item like that around with you. Even riskier to show it to half the village, as he must have done.’
I note the source of his information. I think Ben knows his pickled herrings, for all the Colonel doubts it.
‘Smith clearly thought he was amongst friends then,’ I say.
‘His mistake,’ says Dickon. ‘There are few Royalist sympathisers round here. Except Ma maybe. Says things were better before the war.’
‘Christmas?’ I ask sympathetically.
‘Maypoles,’ says Dickon. ‘It’s as well we men don’t waste our time on such frivolity. Somebody has to get the work done.’
I nod, and we both turn our attentions to our tankards for a bit.
‘Dickon,’ I say, ‘I think I may have spoken to the killer. There was a stranger who arrived on a lame horse a little after midnight. He asked for the inn. Maybe you saw him there.’
I hope Dickon will say he remembers the rider well, for I am beginning to doubt my own memory on the subject. My heart sinks a little as Dickon shakes his head. ‘There were no strangers at the inn last night. If I’d seen anyone suspicious, don’t you think I’d have already reported it to the Colonel?’
‘What time did you leave the inn?’
‘I stayed drinking with Ben almost until cockcrow. Then I went off to milk the cows with a clear head and a steady hand. And Pa wanted me to slaughter a pig of ours – steady hand for that work too.’
‘I saw him,’ I say. ‘He couldn’t have ridden on to Saffron Walden – not on that horse. How does a man and a horse vanish into thin air between the crossroads and the inn? And why does nobody believe I saw him?’
Dickon pats me on the shoulder. ‘Because, John, everyone has heard how drunk you were,’ he says. ‘Why don’t you ask Ma? She believes in Robin Goodfellow and fairies and sprites and all sorts.’
Even a couple of years back, a condescending remark of that sort would have been the cue for me to throw a punch at Dickon and for the pair of us to tussle for a couple of minutes until one of us was thrown down or we got bored and decided to do something else. But we are older now, and one of us is almost a lawyer.
‘I wasn’t drunk,’ I say. ‘Well, not very. And I can’t have bought much ale, because when I checked my purse I had spent very little.’
‘Others may have paid,’ says Dickon. ‘It was your first night back after all.’
‘Did you buy me any ale?’ I ask.
Dickon looks at me to see what I might be prepared to believe. He puts me down for four tankards. ‘You’ll repay me soon, I don’t doubt,’ he adds.
My raised eyebrow causes this estimate to be reduced to one tankard, with repayment deferred indefinitely.
‘Anyway,’ I say, ‘I’ve been thinking.’
Dickon does not find this reassuring, but I am allowed to continue.
‘The fact that none of you saw him doesn’t mean that he didn’t go to the inn,’ I say.
‘How do you make that out?’
‘Let’s start with Smith. I don’t think he ever left the inn alive.’
‘And you have some reason for thinking that?’
‘There was something odd about the way he was dressed – no hat. What man goes out without a hat?’
‘Go on,’ says Dickon, but he’s not convinced. Dickon must know somebody who once went out bareheaded. ‘So, you say Smith was killed at the inn. How does the horseman make himself invisible and get past all of us?’
‘Because, quite simply, he doesn’t go to the front parlour, where the rest of you are. What if he creeps in through the back door and up the stairs to Mr Smith’s chamber, where he cuts his throat? Then he drags the body out of the inn and over to the dung hill, where he leaves him.’
Dickon does not consider my proposition for long. ‘Not a chance,’ he says. ‘We’d have heard if there was a fight in one of the chambers above our heads. And your horseman would have had to drag the body down the stairs, thump, thump, thump, thump . . .’
‘Yes, I understand what you are saying,’ I say.
‘Still got five stairs to go,’ says Dickon. ‘Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump.’
‘This isn’t a joke, Dickon,’ I say.
‘Then he has to get the body out of the back door and round to the front of the inn and all the way along the road. He would have been seen.’
‘What about the route across the meadow?’ I ask.
‘Carrying the body on his own?’
‘Ben could have helped him,’ I say. ‘There’s something weighty on Ben’s conscience. He’s been lying to me ever since we found the body.’
‘Ben’s got no stomach for a murder. In any case, he was serving us all evening. We’d have noticed if he’d been off dragging a dead body across the meadows and wading the stream. Unless you think he sprouted wings and flew. And where’s the rider’s lame horse while all this is going on?’
Dickon’s arguments are sound, though I would have appreciated a little less use of heavy irony. If he’s so clever, perhaps he has a theory of his own.
‘Well, if Smith was a Royalist spy, then don’t you think that he might have been killed by one of Mr Thurloe’s agents?’ says Dickon. ‘In which case, it would be best not to enquire too closely into who or where or why, or even what happened to his hat.’
‘You mean the rider was a government agent?’
Dickon nods meaningfully. ‘Why not? These are dangerous times, John. A wise man sometimes looks the other way. Maybe you should too. It’s none of your business.’
I wish this were true.
‘Look, Dickon, I haven’t told anyone else, but Smith was apparently asking after me. Harry Hardy overheard him talking to Ben. And Ben’s not said a word about it – to me or anyone else, I think.’
‘Then Harry probably misheard.’
‘No, I think Smith somehow knew me, and the rider somehow knew me. I’m right in the middle of this, and I don’t understand why.’
‘Or Harry’s getting deaf and you’re plain wrong about everything else. Maybe the horse wasn’t that lame after all, and your man just rode on innocently through the village and knows no more about the murder than we do.’
‘Well, somebody killed Smith.’
‘That’s undeniable.’
‘And Smith was staying at the inn,’ I say. ‘I should at least like to get a look at his room.’
‘There’ll be nothing there.’
‘How do you know?’
Dickon sighs the sigh of a defeated man. ‘I suppose I’ll have to watch your back as usual.’
I try to remember when Dickon has ever successfully watched
my back for me. Not in the days when we used to steal apples from the Cliffords’ orchard certainly. Still, as I may have observed before, there’s a first time for everything.
Early Evening
‘You gave my good wishes to Dickon’s mother?’ says my mother as she darns some shapeless woollen object that may be one of my stockings.
‘Yes,’ I say. I did that.
‘And the jar of preserved cherries? You didn’t forget to take them?’
‘Of course not,’ I say. ‘I remembered to take them.’ I must now remove the jar from my saddlebag, where it has rested warmly for most of the afternoon and evening, and see if I can smuggle it over to Mistress Grice before she and my mother next meet and discuss fruit. I’ll get Dickon to do it. That shouldn’t be too difficult.
‘Do you not think that Aminta has grown into a charming young woman?’
No, I don’t; but we have at least moved away from the potentially hazardous subject of jam. ‘She is quite pretty,’ I say. ‘But frivolous.’ I don’t add that she hits me, but it does seem a relevant consideration.
‘Roger Pole will steal her from under your nose unless you take care. I don’t know how you let things get into such a state.’
The last remark appears to relate to the shapeless woollen object in her hands. At least, I think it does.
‘Legally,’ I say, ‘it could be accounted theft only if Aminta were my property. Which she is not. If Roger Pole steals her, I shall summon the parish Constable and raise the hue and cry. But he will not have stolen her from me. Why should Pole want to marry her anyway? I would have thought that a rich heiress would be more in his line.’