by Mike Ashley
“Not so’s you’d notice,” Master Gregory agreed.
“I don’t know about that,” one of the men said. “You both heard Harlow, that works for Fouk the tailor, you know, say he saw him coming out of a house over in Lad Lane a few evenings back and asked as he passed him, like you do to be friendly, ‘What brings you here?’ and Furseney said he was thinking of buying the place.”
The other man scoffed. “Harlow told us the house. It’s run down enough you’d be better burying your money in a box in the garden than buying it. Not that Furseney had the money to be buying it anyway. I’m betting it was a woman he was there for.”
“Now,” Master Gregory said, “you mind your talk of the dead. I know the house you mean and if he was there at all, it was for ink. The old woman what lives there makes ink.”
“Then why tell Harlow he was thinking to buy the place?”
“Because it was more mannerly than telling Harlow to mind his own business.”
Sire Pecock nudged Dick and stood up with a friendly nod at Master Gregory and the two men to show it was need not wish that took him away, and outside in the sunlight again, said, “That went more easily than I’d dare hope. Come along.”
Dick didn’t ask where but was not surprised when they shortly turned into Lad Lane. The street was one of London’s short and narrow ones, front doors crowded near to each other and the upper storeys of the houses overhanging to close out much of the light but the pavement between them cleanly swept and most of the houses well kept, making it easy to choose which of them Sire Pecock sought. Midway along and once as good as its neighbours, there was one with the paint faded on the plaster between the half-timbering, a shutter on an upper window held on by only one hinge and a latch, and the doorstep dirty with old mud though all the others on the street were this-morning scrubbed. Besides that, to add to its ill-seeming, not even the bright day had tempted anyone to open the shutter over the window beside the door more than the merest crack, as they approached, Sire Pecock said in a low voice, “Very likely the woman here will be as close-shut as her house but if we win inside, see all you can of everything while I hold her in talk.”
“See what? What am I supposed to see?”
“I don’t know,” Sire Pecock said and knocked at the door, far too lightly for anyone not close at hand to hear.
But the door was promptly jerked open a crack, a pair of eyes in a head tipped sideways peered out, and a woman’s age-thinned voice, sharp with rancour, demanded, “Yes, what do you want?”
As mildly as he had knocked, Sire Pecock said, “Good wife, I’m in need of ink.”
The eyes narrowed into a frown. “Why come to me?”
“You’ve made ink for Master Furseney, haven’t you?”
“He talks too much, does William Furseney,” the woman muttered, then said, “Best you come in, I suppose.”
She drew back and opened the door just grudgingly wide enough to let them into a low, narrow, bare-raftered room that Dick guessed was supposed to be both workplace and shop but was untidy, dim, and dirty, with small sign she did anything there at all. The woman, like her house and business, had seen better days, too. Age came in different ways to people. To her it had come with a humped back and small care for herself, grey hair straggled loose from a headkerchief that probably hadn’t been washed since her loose-hanging dress and food-spotted apron had been, and that wasn’t lately; but as Sire Pecock, once inside, crossed away from her towards the worktable under the shuttered window, she shuffled after him quickly enough, saying, “What manner of ink and how much are you in mind to have?”
Dick, left behind at the door and supposing this was his chance, slid sideways, trying to be as unnoticeable as possible, towards the room’s other doorway until he could see through to the room behind. Somewhat larger than her shop, it seemed to be where she did most of her living because besides a battered cooking pot on the hearth and table, there was a bed with tumbled blankets along one wall and a smell of much use and little cleanliness. The back door stood open to a long, narrow yard, with the remains of a once neatly kept garden, Dick guessed from what he could see of it, high-walled on all sides from its neighbours, and between the two rooms stairs barely wider than his own shoulders went up to the floor above, impossibly steep for a bent-backed old woman managed, which would be why she lived in her kitchen, he supposed.
More than that he didn’t dare and sidled back towards the front door, to let Sire Pecock know he had seen all he could. The priest seemed too busy to notice, bent over the table with a quill pen, writing on a scrap of paper and commenting on the ink to the old woman.
“Aye,” she answered. “I can make up a batch of that for you in three days’ time, if you like.”
“That would do well. The price?”
She named a price somewhat more than Dick would have agreed to, but Sire Pecock accepted it without question. It was while he was taking the money from the pouch on his belt that he said, “You’ve heard about Master Furseney’s death, I suppose.”
The old woman, her eyes on his purse until then, jerked up her head, staring. “Master Furseney? Dead? How?” she demanded. “When?”
Not noticeably noticing her perturbation, Master Furseney clasped his purse closed. “This morning. Perhaps three hours ago.” He held out the coins to her. “He was stabbed in the back in a tavern brawl, they say.”
“A brawl?” The old woman’s voice scaled up, disbelief warring with alarm in her face. “No.”
“I fear I saw him dead myself.”
She had forgotten to take the coins. Sire Pecock moved his hand to remind her and she belatedly held her hand out for them, her mind openly elsewhere.
“You’ll add your prayers to ours for his soul?” Sire Pecock asked.
“Prayers? I hardly knew him.” She shuffled backwards from Sire Pecock. “I sold him ink, that’s all. Haven’t seen him for weeks. A month or more.” She turned towards the door. “I’ll pray for him though. I can do that, yes. Thank you for coming. You’ll have your ink in good time, sir. Good day.”
She wanted them gone and Sire Pecock obliged her, letting himself and Dick be seen out the door with more haste than manners, thanking her as he went and walking away along the street, saying nothing nor Dick either until they had turned the corner and were out of sight of the house. Dick would have said something then but Sire Pecock held up a hand to stop him and called out, “Geva, wait a moment, please you,” to a servant woman who had come out of another house as they left the old woman’s and gone down the street and around the corner ahead of them. Intent on what he wanted to say, Dick had hardly noticed her but as she turned around he knew her, Mistress Dyer’s servant who came with her mistress to St Michael Paternoster every Sunday and feast day.
She, in return, knew Sire Pecock and came back towards him, bobbing a curtsey as they met and smiling a greeting.
“You came out of a house in Lad Lane just now,” he said.
“My cousin’s.” Geva gestured to the laden basket she carried in the crook of her arm. “She does Mistress Dyer’s headkerchiefs and I was fetching them. A better starcher you won’t find in London.”
“Do you take time for talk with her? Because I’d know something about the woman who lives in that unhappy house further along the street.”
“Old Mistress Aunsell?” Geva said. “A disgrace to the street she is and has been for years. Even before her husband died she was going strange.”
“She lives alone, then?”
“All alone and keeps herself to herself into the bargain.”
“No family at all?”
“She’s from Oxford, years back, and my cousin has said she used to talk about going back to family there but she never has, worse luck for the street. Some of her kin has come looking for her, though. My cousin says some nephew has been in and out of there off and on the past month.”
“She had that from Mistress Aunsell?”
“Not likely. She talks to nobody if she can help it. No, my
cousin stopped him in the street one day and asked him and that’s what he said. That he was a nephew from Oxford trying to persuade her to go back with him. He hasn’t though.”
“Early days yet, perhaps,” Sire Pecock said and nodded her on her way, waiting until she was away before he turned to Dick and asked, “So? What can you tell me?”
“There’s only one plate and cup on the table in the kitchen and that’s where she mostly lives, I . . .” He decided not to guess. “. . . think. There’s a bed there.”
“For this nephew maybe?”
“It’s been there and slept in a long time. Longer than a month. Besides, I’d say the stairs are too steep for her, the way she can hardly walk. It’s most likely hers.”
“Did you note if the stairs looked to be used or not?”
“They were used but not clean,” Dick said, pleased with himself. “They looked like the dust had been on them fairly thick but someone had been going up and down them of late so they were clear in the middle but with still the dust still deep in the corners.”
“I wonder,” Sire Pecock said, considering some distant point along the street, “why a man who could afford to come from Oxford to persuade an aunt to go back with him, wouldn’t be able to afford somewhere better to stay than there? But it seems safe to say Master Furseney and this nephew aren’t the same and that it wasn’t for women Master Furseney went there. Very possibly it was for ink. Hers is surprisingly good.”
“Maybe he went to meet the nephew?” Dick suggested. “Maybe we should find out the nephew and ask him.”
“Almost undoubtedly, not a desirable thing to do,” Sire Pecock said firmly and walked onwards again. “We’ve one thing more to learn and then I think we’re finished.”
“Finished?” Dick echoed in surprise.
“Finished,” Sire Pecock repeated but added nothing more and Dick refused to ask anything, merely kept up with him as they, first, retraced their way until almost back to Master Furseney’s house, then swung into another street and along it to the next street’s corner, where Sire Pecock paused, looked along it, said, “Yes. That would serve,” and turned away.
“What would serve?” Dick demanded, staring over his shoulder as they left. “What did you see?”
“No more than you did. You saw there’s an inn along there?”
“The Blue Stag? Yes.”
“Can you judge what lies at the far end of its yard?”
Dick reckoned quickly. “Maybe the yard behind Master Furseney’s house?”
“Even so.”
“I don’t see . . .”
“All this morning you have been seeing and hearing. Now you must think, young Richard.”
Dick shook his head. He wasn’t sure he didn’t prefer going to his dinner to thinking just now.
“A suggestion,” Sire Pecock said. “Consider Oxford.”
“Oxford?” Dick repeated blankly. He gathered his thoughts. “The old woman’s nephew is from Oxford.”
“So we’re told, and since the woman has long been said to be from there, very likely he truly is. Now, what else is there about Oxford?”
At last Dick began to be excited. “The Lollard rebels. That’s where the Duke of Gloucester is going. To Oxford against the Lollard rebels.” He caught at Sire Pecock’s arm, stopping him. “Master Furseney’s death is about that? About the uprising?”
“I cannot say it certainly,” Sire Pecock answered, “but, yes, I think so. We have enough at least to interest the sheriff a little more in Master Furseney’s death, I believe.”
“We do?”
“There now.” Sire Pecock began walking again. “You’ve gathered your facts, young Richard, right along with me. Now let Reason tell you the sum and meaning of them. I’ve tried to teach you to reason through. Now do so, please.”
Dick tried but trotting at the priest’s side and dodging Londoners willing to move aside for a priest but not for a boy made it hard to keep hold all at once on everything there had been today and sort it toward whatever Sire Pecock saw in it. There was Master Furseney, dead in an unlikely way. And his wife and her friends and their unfriendliness. An ink-maker. A man from Oxford. Where the Lollard rebels were. But not all the Lollards. There were Lollards in London, not in open revolt but . . .
“The pamphlets,” Dick gasped. “The paper Master Furseney bought. The inkmaker. They’ve been copying out the pamphlets that’ve been showing up everywhere!”
“They and some few others, I would reason,” Sire Pecock said. “Yes, that’s the core of it, I think. Do you perceive the whole of it?”
Going backwards through what they had learned, Dick said eagerly, “The nephew from Oxford is with the rebels and they’re hoping for help from Lollards in London. He came and made use of his aunt . . .”
“Willing use, I would say,” Sire Pecock put in. “Though if she’s wise she’ll claim she was ignorant of his purposes.”
“. . . to find a Lollard who could help him – that being Master Furseney . . .”
“Likewise willing.”
“. . . who probably knew her because she makes ink. Because he was a scrivener, he could get paper in quantity without rousing suspicion, and if he was a Lollard . . .”
“. . . as we think he was.”
“. . . he’d know other Lollards willing to do all the copying out of the pamphlets in the quantity needed. Where did they do it?” Dick wondered, then answered for himself, “At his house because everything would be there.”
“So I suspect,” Sire Pecock said, “and thereby lies the usefulness of the inn behind his house, because I doubt that the coming and going of some several people over and over to an unsuccessful scrivener could happen without comment from the neighbours and they needed another way in. People come and go as a matter of course at an inn, to drink and eat if not actually to stay, and these people we are supposing might hope, if careful at it, to go unnoticed. It will be for the sheriff to determine whether there is indeed a way from the inn into the Furseneys’ yard and, if there is, how much the innkeeper knows. Now, what of Master Furseney’s death itself?”
They were nearly to the sheriff’s door but, as understanding struck him, Dick stopped still in the street, at peril of being run over by a pair of schoolboys racing home to their dinner. “The old woman’s nephew. Master Furseney was seen coming along the street with another man. Then there was the brawl and he was stabbed in the back, but it wasn’t the men fighting who did it. They weren’t seen to have their daggers out at all. It was the man with him who did it. In the crowding and excitement, no one saw it. But it was the nephew, wasn’t it? I’ll bet anything the nephew did it.”
“Betting is a perilous pastime, the cost all too often outweighing the gain,” Sire Pecock said, “but, yes, I think it was the nephew killed him. Now, why?”
Dick was fairly hopping with excitement. “Because Master Furseney knew both the nephew and the people who did the copying, and if the people who did the copying never knew the nephew, then with Master Furseney dead, there was no link between the nephew and the Lollard pamphlets. Even the old aunt needn’t have known for certain what her nephew was up to, only that he needed a scrivener.” He sobered suddenly. “What about Mistress Furseney? If she knows about this nephew, he’ll want to kill her, too.”
“Very possibly she knows next to nothing about him. He may never have come to the Furseneys’ and so she may know of him but not how he looks or even his name. To keep everything as secret as possible would be cunning and there is assuredly cunning in all of this. But even if she does know, she’s safe enough for now, while the women are with her, and before long, if the sheriff does his work well, he’ll have the nephew and she’ll be safe.”
“Except she’s a Lollard,” Dick said, not happy at seeing her other peril.
“We only suspect that. We don’t know it. For myself, I would judge that presently our good Bishop of London has trouble enough without I raise more trouble over suspicions of heresy just now.”
“But the pamphlets . . .”
“If she has sense, she’ll deny knowing what her husband was doing. She’ll say that if he was doing Lollard business it must have been only for the money.”
“But she’s a heretic,” Dick insisted.
Sire Pecock moved on towards the sheriff’s door, saying serenely as he went, “And how much easier it will be for me to reason with her about that if she isn’t in prison for it. Haven’t you heard me say how better it is to reason a person out of their errors than kill them?”
“You’d have the murderer caught, though.”
“Murder,” Sire Pecock said grimly, “is not an error. It is sin.” And with a firm hand knocked hard at the sheriff’s door.
A Moon for Columbus
Edward D. Hoch
Edward D. Hoch (b. 1930) is almost certainly the most prolific living writer of short stories, and rapidly becoming one of the most prolific short story writers ever. That’s a remarkable claim these days when most of the specialist fiction magazines have long folded. This is short story number 836, and was his last completed story of the millennium (which ended 31 December 2000, of course), and he reckons he’ll be adding to that total at about twenty stories a year.
I just happened to mention to Ed that it would be intriguing to see a mystery on board Columbus’s historical voyage of discovery, and no sooner had I said it, than Ed obliged.
On Tuesday, the ninth day of October in the year 1492, the three-ship fleet under the command of Captain General Christopher Columbus had been at sea for just over a month, having sailed from the Canary Islands on 8 September. There was talk of mutiny among the crew, mainly Castilians, who were tired and fearful of being lost at sea. On that day the Pinzon brothers, captains of the Pinta and the Niña, had been rowed across the waters in a moderate wind and come aboard the flagship Santa Maria. They argued that the search for land be abandoned and that they sail for home on the southerly breeze before it shifted dangerously. Also in the meeting with Columbus was the ship’s master, its owner Juan de la Cosa. He was second in command, looking after the safety of the Santa Maria.