[Roger the Chapman 03] - The Hanged Man (4 page)

The meal had been eaten and cleared away. The shutters were fastened against the unfriendly night, and the three of us drew close to the fire, whose fierce blaze had been banked down with turfs cut from neighbouring fields and sold from door to door by the turfer, who had called that same morning. At the time I had reflected, somewhat sententiously, how much city-dwellers had done for them which country folk had to do for themselves. Mistress Walker had no stock-cupboard worth mentioning, not even for the winter months, but went daily to the market for whatever was needful in the way of food. Her other wants were supplied by pedlars coming to the door; and when I asked what happened when heavy snowfalls or floods kept suppliers from reaching the city, I was told that the castle or the abbey or any of the many wealthy houses would hand out dried fish or grain. No one starved, although many might go hungry, in bad weather.

Lillis had brought my mattress as near to the hearth as she dared, and was curled up on it, more like a cat than ever. Margaret Walker and I sat on the two stools, supporting our backs when necessary against the table edge, but for the most part leaning towards the glowing warmth of the fire. Outside, the day's noise and bustle had dwindled to an occasional shout, a dog's bark and the distant call of the Watch as it patrolled the icy streets. Now and then, a bitter draught penetrated the smoke-blackened hole in the roof, bringing with it a spatter of rain, but we merely huddled closer to the heat.

While Margaret Walker searched for words with which to begin her story, I had time to study her. Lillis resembled her mother more closely than I had realized, for Margaret, too, was small and thin with large brown eyes which dominated her face, and the wisps of hair which strayed from beneath her hood were as black as her daughter's.

But it was not just her added years which gave the impression of a greater maturity. There was a solidity and common sense about Margaret which I felt sure that Lillis would never achieve, and I could tell by the way the older woman kept a vigilant watch upon the younger that she also felt this way. There was something lacking in Lillis, a sense of responsibility, of morality, which made her seem almost fey.

'My father,' Margaret said abruptly, as though deciding that if she didn't speak now, she might change her mind altogether, 'died at the beginning of last month, some three or four weeks before Christmas. His name was William Woodward, and in his youth he was a weaver by trade.'

The story came out piecemeal, with interruptions from Lillis, questions from me, events omitted only to be recalled later and recounted out of place, or incidents recollected too soon, leading to involved explanations and recriminations from one at least of Margaret's listeners.

So I will tell the story here as I came to understand it when her narrative was finished and I had had time to put the facts in order in my mind.

William Woodward had been born, during the last years of the reign of King Henry IV, into the close-knit weavers' community of Redcliffe in Bristol. He had been apprenticed as a boy to Master Jocelyn Weaver, the head of one of the city's wealthiest families concerned in the cloth trade. William had lived for seven years in the Weaver household, as a good apprentice should, and, at the end of his time, had become a journeyman weaver. Unfortunately, when he had applied to join the Weavers' Guild, his masterpiece had been rejected as of inferior standard, and he had therefore been unable to set up in business on his own account, a state of affairs which he deeply resented. A grudging man, he had, I gathered, blamed his failure on everyone but himself and his own poor workmanship.

At the age of twenty-two or thereabouts - he was never quite sure of his exact age - he had married Jennifer Peto, a young Cornishwoman, who had travelled to Bristol with her parents a few years earlier. Of the couple's four children, only Margaret, the eldest and the only girl, survived infancy. Jennifer died when Margaret was in her middle twenties and Lillis some six years old. Margaret had dutifully taken her father to live with her and the child, for by then she herself was a widow.

In her nineteenth year, she had married, within the weaving community, Adam Walker; in her own words 'as good and kind a man as ever breathed.' Lillis had been born two years later and a son, Colin, a twelve-month after that. It needed no great skill to discern that this boy had been the apple of Margaret's eye, and I stole a sidelong glance at Lillis to see how she took such overt partiality. But her face was untroubled; and if she realized that her long-dead little brother still meant more to her mother than she did, she showed no sign of resentment.

Colin Walker was barely two years old when he accompanied his mother, one hot summer afternoon, to the weaving sheds to take his father a draught of cider.

Adam had been allowed to the door to see and speak to his wife, and while his parents were talking, Colin strayed into the middle of the road, attracted by the debris sluggishly floating along the open drain. And it had been at that precise moment that a horse, harnessed to a cart loaded with bales of cloth, had been frightened by some passing urchins and bolted. The driver was drunk, having spent the previous hour in one of the local inns.

Adam Walker, who was facing the road, saw the danger to his son before his wife did, and hurled himself into the path of the oncoming horse and cart in a vain attempt to throw the boy clear. Both were killed, the child almost instantly, the father after lingering in agony for several hours. Margaret was left inconsolable and grief-stricken, mourning a husband whose memory was so potent that she could never bring herself to marry again. Alfred Weaver, who had by then inherited the business from his lather, Jocelyn, and to whom the horse and cart belonged, had allowed Margaret and Lillis to remain in the cottage, which had been their home ever since.

And it was here, in this room where I now sat, that William Woodward, newly widowed, had joined his daughter and granddaughter in the summer of 1460; or, at least, I judged it to be so from Margaret's insistence that it was the year the Duke of York, father of King Edward, God bless him, returned from Ireland to lay claim to the throne, and was later killed at the battle at Wakefield. William was still a journeyman weaver, still disgruntled and less than grateful - or such was my guess - for the filial duty and attention heaped upon him.

He remained with Margaret and Lillis for well on nine years, and was already fast approaching the age when his daughter expected that she would have to support him as he grew too old to handle the heavy shuttles and looms, when William seemed to gain a new lease of life. He left weaving and the protection of Margaret's care, and went to live in a cottage in Bell Lane, near St John's Gate, the property of Edward Herepath, for whom he now worked.

For this same Edward Herepath was the city's biggest landlord and had offered William Woodward employment as a rent and debt collector, when his former bailiff had left him to be married.

When she spoke of the circumstance, Margaret Walker's voice still registered the same sense of astonishment she had felt at the time.

'For you must know,' she said to me, 'that Father was not a young man. Big and well-built, I grant you - Lillis and I get our small bones from my mother - but grey-haired and not much short of his sixtieth year; an age when most men would be quietly and decently contemplating death. To change his trade like that at such an advanced time of life was something very few people could understand. And even less understandable was Edward Herepath's decision to employ him, for they were two men with little in common who had, as far as I knew, never exchanged words prior to this transaction.'
 

'Tell me about Edward Herepath,' I suggested.

Margaret added a few sticks to the fire before positioning a fresh turf to contain the blaze. 'I was going to,' she answered, 'for Edward Herepath and his brother Robert are at the very heart of this story. Indeed, without them, there would not be one.'

Edward Herepath, she informed me, was some thirty-five or -six years old, the eider of the two sons of Giles Herepath, wealthy soap manufacturer and respected burgess of the city, and his wife, Adela. When Edward was eighteen, his mother had died giving birth to her second child, Robert. A grieving Giles had followed his wife to the grave only two years later, leaving everything, including the upbringing of the infant Robert, to his elder son.

Edward, who apparently had no interest in the manufacture of soap, had disposed of the business to a friend of his father, one Peter Avenel, and with the money thus obtained, bought up a number of properties in and around Bristol, which returned him a handsome profit in rents.

As far as the baby brother - with whom he had been saddled at so young an age - was concerned, everyone agreed that his devotion was exemplary. Nothing that could make up for the lack of a mother and father had been denied Robert; his every wish had been his brother's command. Even when Edward married, no children of his own had come along to challenge Robert's supremacy in the household.

'With the result,' snorted Margaret, 'that you may well guess at. Robert grew from a wilful, spoilt child into an even wilder and unbiddable youth, a constant source of worry to his brother and, above all, a gambler, forever in debt.'

'But handsome,' sighed Lillis, a predatory light gleaming in her cat-like eyes. 'One of the best-looking young men in the city.'

'Oh, I don't deny that,' agreed her mother. 'And to give him his due, I don't believe he was aware of, or even cared about, his looks or the effect they had on women.

Leastways, not until Cicely Ford came on the scene.'
 

'Cicely Ford?' I queried, storing away yet another name in my memory and wondering where the story was leading me.

'A truly beautiful girl,' Margaret said with decision. 'Beautiful by nature as well as in person.' Lillis gave a little sniff, but did not contradict her mother's description.

Margaret went on. 'Her father, John Ford, was one of the wealthiest burgesses of this city. He was an exporter of soap, wine, cloth; anything you care to name. He owned nine ships and employed above eight hundred souls. His merchant's mark, they say, was known the length and breadth of Europe. And one of his ships, the Cicely, was part of an expedition that sailed westwards to find the great Western Isles men talk about, the islands of Brazil.

But storms turned the ships back some way off the Irish coast.'

She sat a moment, staring into the heart of the fire, lost in contemplation of those lands far out in the Atlantic Ocean; those fabled shores which sailors used to swear they had glimpsed, or knew of some other ship's crew which had almost made landfall on them. (Nowadays, of course, we know that they are there, those strange, far-off lands peopled by red-skinned men. The Italian, Christopher Columbus, and Bristol's own Venetian adventurers, Giovanni Cabot and his son Sebastian, have set foot in them.)

The resin of a twig caught flame and sent up a shower of sparks. Margaret Walker jumped and laughed. 'I was day-dreaming,' she said. 'I've forgotten where I was. What point in the story had I reached?'

'You were singing the praises of Mistress Ford,' her daughter answered drily. 'The perfect, the ever-lovely Cicely.'

'And so she is!' Margaret declared roundly. 'One of the kindest, sweetest, prettiest, most devout ladies to grace this earth.' I had - then - reservations that anyone could be so perfect, but I held my tongue and allowed my hostess to continue uninterrupted.

It seemed that Master John Ford had died of a sudden apoplexy four years previously, leaving Cicely, his only child, orphaned, Dame Ford having departed this life some time earlier. John Ford had been a close friend in his youth of Giles Herepath, and had always deeply admired Edward, the elder son. And in spite of what might have been seen as Edward's mishandling of his brother, Robert, Master Ford had nonetheless left Cicely to Edward's care for the remaining years of her minority, trusting, no doubt, in his ability to handle her vast fortune with the same skill with which he managed his own business affairs.

'And Master Edward's wife was a sober, decorous woman,' Margaret told me, 'a great benefactress of the Church and altogether a fitting preceptress for such a girl as Cicely Ford.'

'And constantly ailing,' Lillis put in; her high-pitched tones, sharp as a needle, stabbing the momentary silence.

Her mother glanced reprovingly at her. 'Are you suggesting, Miss, that she was shamming?' Margaret turned to me. 'Many people thought that during her lifetime, but they had to eat their words. The poor lady died in her thirtieth year, less than nine months after Cicely went to live in the Herepath house in Small Street.'

Chapter Four

A flurry of hailstones rattled the shutters and fell through the hole in the roof to hiss among the burning twigs and sea coal, sending a thin column of smoke towards the ceiling. Margaret placed another turf on the fire, while Lillis sat upright on the mattress, pulling one of the blankets about her shoulders. The room had grown chilly and I was glad of my leather jerkin, lined with scarlet, which had been given me in exchange for goods by a widow who had fallen on lean times. It had belonged to her husband, and the warm, cochineal-dyed wool helped preserve my bodily warmth as it had once done his.

'So,' I said, 'Edward Herepath found himself again saddled with the responsibility of a minor, this time a young girl and not of his blood. What did he do about it?' 'He hired a good, sensible woman of the town to be
C
icely's companion, and probably hoped that the girl's influence would have an improving effect upon his brother.'