by Mike Ashley
“Not that they were interested,” the second woman humphed, and they both gave dire looks toward the sheriff’s man and the undercrowner in talk beside the gateway.
“Couldn’t be bothered,” the old man put in. “Too much else in hand these days.”
“Did any of you see Master Furseney among the men fighting?” Sire Pecock asked again, this time of the women and servingman. None of them had. “Or any daggers out?”
“No, sir,” the servingman said, “but it was all happening fast, like. They were all clotted together. You couldn’t see anything clear except they were fighting.”
“Richard.” Sire Pecock turned to Dick, who had kept close and been listening hard. “Go to everyone still standing around and ask if they saw Master Furseney before the fight or in the fight and who among the men had a dagger out.”
“Sir,” Dick said with a bow and went willingly to the task.
He returned from it puzzled, rejoining Sire Pecock just as he finished talk in the tavern doorway with Master Drury and turned away, beckoning with his head for Dick to follow him away along the street. Master Furseney’s body had been carried away, the officers were gone and most of the onlookers wandered on their way. Except for a servant sluicing a bucket of water over the blood on the pavement to wash it away, nothing out of the usual might have happened here.
“So, Richard?” Sire Pecock asked. “What did you learn?”
“That almost nobody, at least those still here, saw Master Furseney at all.” That was no puzzle; Master Furseney had been a man easily overlooked. “Only one woman says she saw him coming along the street with a man not much before the fight. She didn’t know the other man.”
“Did she see them go into the tavern yard?”
“She says she didn’t. There were a lot of folk coming and going along the street, the way they do this time of day and more than usual because of the muster. Master Furseney and the man with him passed her, that’s all she knew, and then she heard the fighting and turned back to see what was happening. Otherwise all anybody else I talked with knew is that there was a fight and Master Furseney was killed. What did Master Drury say?”
“That the men were strangers to him – some of the Duke of Gloucester’s men out of Kent, he thinks, from the way they talked. They were at the inn only a little while, had been quarrelsome with each other when they came and all he meant was to let them have a few drinks and send them on their way.” Sire Pecock began to walk back the way they had come along the street, Dick at his side. “He was indoors when the fight started and didn’t see Master Furseney with them, but he says none of his servants saw him either. Or doesn’t admit to it anyway. One must always leave room in one’s considerations for lying.” At the jog in the street where Watling turned into Budge Row, Sire Pecock stopped and faced Dick. “What do you make of what we’ve heard so far, young Richard?”
Used to the priest’s way of suddenly demanding that he think, Dick answered, with barely hesitation, “Nobody saw Master Furseney with the men or in the fight. Or they’re not saying they did, anyway. But we don’t know of any reason why any of them would lie about it so probably we can take it as truth.” Sire Pecock nodded approval of that, and Dick went on, encouraged, “So, if the woman was right about seeing him in the street, he doesn’t seem to have had chance to meet them before the fight started. He was just there and was watching in the crowd and somehow was stabbed.”
“Somehow?”
“Well, the men staggered into the crowd while they were fighting. One of them had his dagger out and, instead of stabbing one of the others, he stabbed Master Furseney. By accident, it would have been.”
“Hm,” Sire Pecock said, committing to nothing. “Clumsy of whoever did it, wasn’t it?”
Dick had been thinking the same and readily nodded agreement.
Sire Pecock began to walk again. “Tell me about Master Furseney. You said he was a scrivener. What else do you know of him?”
Because Dick’s father’s trade was the making of books and Dick was good at listening to what was said around him, he knew something of Master Furseney and told it to Sire Pecock, little though it was. Master Furseney had his own shop but not much work of his own. What he mostly did was take the overflow of copying work from more important scriveners. “They’d hire him, see, to . . .” said Dick.
“It is not a matter of sight, young Richard. You’re telling me this. I’m hearing, not seeing it. Please be precise.”
Keeping his sigh to himself, Dick said, “They’d hire him to do work when they’d taken on more than their own people could manage fast enough. He was good at it, must have been, because my father used him sometimes. He just didn’t have ambition to be more. Some men don’t, my father says. He got by and that was enough for him, like.”
“Like enough or exactly enough?” Sire Pecock asked crisply.
“Exactly enough,” Dick muttered, but he knew he wasn’t being bullied, he was being educated, and repeated clearly, “Exactly enough,” before he could be told to do so.
“Very good,” Sire Pecock approved, giving Dick nerve to ask, “Where are we going?”
“To Master Furseney’s window, to see how likely she thinks it is for her husband to be dead this way. But first we stop here.” And on the word Sire Pecock did, outside Master Hansard’s scrivening shop with its sign hung out above the street of a silver quill pen crossed slantwise with a bright red parchment roll. “Do you know if Master Hansard,” who came to St Michael’s and was therefore known to Sire Pecock, “ever hired Master Furseney?”
“Probably. Master Furseney’s place is just along and around the next corner.”
“Very good.” He didn’t tell Dick to wait outside so Dick followed him inside the shop. More broadly fronted to the street than most, with its shutters taken down there was an abundance of south light across the half-dozen desks lined there. The men at work at them did not look up nor the scratching of pens on paper falter as Sire Pecock made his way towards the back, met by Master Hansard coming forward to exchange greetings and head-shaking and regrets over Master Furseney’s death, word of it having already spread so far. It gave Sire Pecock chance to ask what he had known and thought about the dead scrivener, and Master Hansard told him readily enough and somewhat at length but it coming down to him having nothing bad to say of Master Furseney except he had been sadly lacking in ambition. “He brought in good work and on time. Very neat-handed and never tried to cheat me on anything. I’m going to miss his usefulness. Though likely his wife will carry on. She’s as good at the work as he was and I’ll hire her as readily.” Master Hansard pursed his lips, considering something. “Maybe I shouldn’t fault him for poor ambition either. He bought half a ream of paper off me maybe two weeks back. Poorest stuff I had on hand but, still, that was something he’d not done before. He was maybe starting to build his business after all. Pity then he was brought so short. Damn foreigners.” Meaning anyone not of London.
Leaving him to his head-shaking, Sire Pecock went on to Master Furseney’s, Dick knowing the way. St Mildred Close was short, dead-ended between other streets, and Master Furseney’s shopfront was narrow, shouldered in on either side by larger places. Its sign over the street was merely of a quill pen, somewhat faded, and inside the place was equally modest, with a single, ink-marred desk, a shelf above it with inkpots and other tools of his trade, a long-legged chest for keeping of things along one wall, and nothing else. Like most London houses, there was this room at the front, a room at the back, and stairs to rooms above; and here there were voices in the room at the back and Sire Pecock went that way, paused to lift the chest’s lid and look inside, then cleared his throat to warn he was there before going into the kitchen.
Dick followed, braced to face Mistress Furseney’s grief and maybe Master Furseney’s body again, but it wasn’t there and the widow was merely sitting on a joint stool beside a well scoured table, tear-marred but the first shock of her grief seemingly past, leaving her limp a
nd weary. Another woman setting a kettle of water on the small hearth fire and a third was piling some linen towels on a corner of the table. They paused at their tasks and Mistress Furseney raised her head to look at him as Sire Pecock entered. It was the usual moment for some bustle to be made to welcome a priest, from what Dick had always seen in his own home and other places. Instead there was a pause, with stares from the women and no word of greeting before Sire Pecock as if not noticing anything, which Dick very much doubted was the case, went to Mistress Furseney and began to say what could be said about loss and grief. That there were only the two women with her was strange. This was the time for neighbours to flock in. But strange, too, was that the woman tending the kettle was on the only other joint stool and by rights should have given it to Sire Pecock but she didn’t; and the other woman, who in the usual way of things should have offered him something to eat or drink, simply went on unfolding and then refolding the cloths while Mistress Furseney merely sat staring into her lap, making no response except, when Sire Pecock paused, she said, still to her lap and dull as the toll of a mourning bell, “He’s gone. That’s all. He’s gone.”
At that Sire Pecock sat down on his heels in front of her, took hold of her hands and asked with a gentleness Dick had never heard from him before now, “With him gone, good wife, how will it be with you? Are you able to make your living without him?”
So practical a question found its way through Mistress Furseney’s haze of grief. “My living?” She lifted her red-rimmed eyes to him. “Yes, I’m able.”
“How?” Sire Pecock pressed.
She shifted restlessly. “How? The work is still there. We did it together. I’ll do it alone . . .” – her voice broke a little – “. . . now.”
“Have you work presently on hand, to see you through a while?”
“What? No. But something always comes.”
“You’ve money in hand though, to see you through?”
Mistress Furseney straightened a little, her wits stirred awake by his questioning and, laying a hand over the bag-purse hung from her gown’s belt, said with an unexpected edge to her voice, “I’ve money enough for now. Enough to bury him, which is what you’re here for, you priests being what you are and never willing to do aught for anyone without payment in hand to you.”
“Madge,” the woman at the other end of the table said, chiding. Or warning her, Dick suddenly thought, seeing the looks that instantly passed among all three women before Mistress Furseney slumped down to silence again.
But Sire Pecock, who always seemed to see everything, stood up and said as if he had neither heard nor seen anything untoward, “Well, if there’s nothing I can do for you now and here, I’ll leave you.”
To that Mistress Furseney made no answer. It was the woman at the table’s other end who said, somewhat stiffly, “Thank you for coming.”
“Of course,” Sire Pecock said, sketched a sign of the cross in the air towards them and turned to go, then turned back to ask quietly, “Did your husband often keep company with men used to quarrelling and daggers?”
“What?” Mistress Furseney raised her head to frown at him. “No. Of course he didn’t. We lived quiet. He never kept company with any such. He never kept tavern-company at all.” Her voice strengthened with certainty and indignation. “Ever.”
“It was just base mischance he was there and it happened,” the woman beside the kettle said. “That’s all it was.”
“Why was he out this morning?” Sire Pecock asked, still to Mistress Furseney and still quietly.
“To . . .” Mistress Furseney began sharply but stopped, stared at Sire Pecock, then lowered her head again to say dully, “. . . meet someone, he didn’t say who, about some work. I think. I don’t know.”
“Do you want I should start Masses for Master Furseney as soon as may be?” Sire Pecock persisted, to Dick’s intense discomfort, who only wanted to be out of there.
Mistress Furseney jerked up her head. “Masses,” she said bitterly. “Priest-gobbling. Priest . . .”
“Madge,” the same woman said urgently.
Mistress Furseney stopped short, dropped her eyes, and although her breast heaved with swallowed feelings, managed to say, “Thank you for coming, Father,” not as if she meant it.
“Of course,” Sire Pecock answered mildly, as if hearing nothing amiss. Nor did he seem to hear as he left – although Dick following him did – one of the women mutter behind them, “Can’t even wait for a man’s body to chill before they come looking for their pence for Masses . . .” and from another one, hurriedly, “Hush.”
But outside, standing in the street while Dick shut the door, Sire Pecock asked with a deep-drawn frown between his eyes, “Now what did you make of that, young Richard?”
Dick had been trying to make nothing of it and answered reluctantly, “I’ve never seen anyone dare that much rudeness to a priest.”
Sire Pecock accepted that with a considering nod and, “To what would you ascribe that rudeness? What would you judge is its cause?”
“Grief,” Dick tried, but Sire Pecock raised his brows and Dick gave up, admitting, “They didn’t want you there. Since I doubt you’ve done anything yourself to offend them, and guessing . . .” Sire Pecock raised his brows again and Dick changed to, “. . . Judging by what they said that it’s priests they dislike, not you in particular, they may well be heretics.”
He grimaced over the word, it being a vile thing to say of anyone, but Sire Pecock gave a brisk, single nod, one of his stronger signs of high approval and said, “Well reasoned. Things being as they are in this present time, with the rebellion in Oxfordshire and all causing more than a few people – most of them not heretics at all, merely slack of spirit – to show themselves in church again for the sake of protecting themselves against any charge of Lollardy, Mistress Furseney and her friends are rude to a priest who’s done them no harm as well as refusing Masses for the soul of a well-mourned husband. Neither such rudeness nor such refusal are sensible things at any time, let alone now. Put that together with other things, such as her husband purchasing a large quantity paper of late, more than could be used up in the while since then even if they had both worked unstopping these two weeks since he is said to have purchased it, which I think we can safely say they have not, sleep and food being unrefusable human needs . . .” As all too usual when caught up in his thoughts, Sire Pecock was running sentences together at too great a speed. “. . . And yet there is no paper in the shop – you did note that as we passed through? – let alone any work in hand according to Mistress Furseney herself, who nonetheless says she has no present worry over money and is likewise certain about what company her husband doesn’t keep but says she doesn’t know whom he was with this morning, and we are – to use an ever-popular hunting term – on the scent, young Richard, on the scent.”
“Of what?” Dick asked, his voice rising with the frustration of having completely lost hold of where Sire Pecock had started.
“Of lies, my boy.” Sire Pecock set off along the street at a walk fast enough to keep up with his thoughts, Dick trotting at his side, “Of wrongs and lies. They’re laid out in front of us the way a fox’s trail lies plain to a hound’s nose. It’s for us, being men, not hounds, to follow not our noses but our wits. Our wits, young Richard. You scented, so to speak, the start of the trail yourself back at the beginning of it, at the tavern, when you said you couldn’t see how Master Furseney could have been part of the fight.”
“Well, yes. It doesn’t seem so. What else I don’t see, though, is how he was stabbed by accident, like?”
“Like by accident. Exactly.” Sire Pecock turned in abruptly under the tavern sign of the Goose and Moon, around the corner from St Mildred’s Close and a few doors along. “You have it.”
Not clear at all what he had, Dick followed him inside. Even so early in the day there were men and a few women with seemingly nothing better to do than share the benches and drink ale or whatever cheap wine was to
be had. Their talk dropped away at Sire Pecock’s coming in but he raised a cheery hand at them and turned aside to an empty bench near the window, sitting down and nodding at Dick to do the same. Dick would have questioned him then but Master Gregory, the Goose and Moon’s keeper, was coming their way with pottery cups, a pitcher of ale, and a smile. Even in the short while he’d been at St Michael Paternoster, Sire Pecock had not sat snug in the College’s comforts with his dignity and his learning but had been out and about, talking to folk because, as Dick had once heard him say to Sire Thomas, “How am I to know what they need if I don’t know them?”
Sire Thomas had answered to that, “You just have to pray for them, man, not know them,” but plainly he knew Master Gregory who poured the two cups of ale for which Sire Pecock asked and then, at Sire Pecock’s invitation, poured one for himself and joined them, saying, “You’ve been to see Mistress Furseney, have you? Old Bess saw you going in.”
“A sad business,” Sire Pecock said moderately. “She’s far gone in grief, it seems.”
“Aye. They were a close pair. Never any shouting heard from their place. Good folk.”
“Not many women with her just now.”
Master Gregory shifted his wide bottom on the bench. “No. No, they weren’t an outgoing pair. Liked well enough but not with many friends, if you see.”
“Ah, yes.” Sire Pecock nodded. “Sufficient unto each other. That will make it harder for her now.”
“My wife is baking a crispcake to take to her later. To help her through these few days she won’t feel like cooking. A good many of the women are doing that.”
“Aye, my wife is doing that, too,” another man said, he and another drifting to the table, ale cups in hand.
Sire Pecock smiled on them and laid coins on the table, saying while Master Gregory poured for everyone, “The Furseneys were good folk, then, but not prospering, I take it?”