The Traitor's Tale (9 page)

The rain was a steady downpour likely to last an hour or more. Joliffe shifted his arms, folded them across his chest and settled himself to sleep. Having so narrowly avoided getting soaked, he saw no reason to go deliberately into the rain. People would be as ready to talk about murder in a few hours as now, and looking forward to roasted lamb and Mistress Cockerel's berry pie, he slept.

Not so deeply, though, that he did not awaken the moment there were voices in the tavern-room below him—a sudden quantity of voices that made him think his fellow guests were come in, and he rose from the bed. The rain had slacked to nearly nothing, and though the overcast made judging the time difficult, he thought supper must be near. He was hungry enough for it, anyway, and headed down the stairs, meeting a man coming up. They both turned sidewise, Joliffe s back to the wall, the other man's to the open side of the stairs, to clear way as they passed each other, Joliffe taking chance for a good look at him—a younger man, maybe no more than thirty; a long, smooth face with dark, sharp eyes; hair in the longer cut lately made fashionable by the king's abandoning the above-the-ears crop of his father's time.

Stranger-friendly, he said as they passed, "Wet out."

"It is that," Joliffe agreed. "I rode in just before it broke."

"Your good fortune." The other good-humouredly lifted the arm over which he was carrying a wet cloak. "I wasn't so favored."

Then they were past each other, with nothing to think about it, except that Joliffe did not like his clear certainty that the other man had taken a deep, close look at him in passing, as if to be very sure of knowing him if they met again.

The same kind of look that Joliffe had taken of him.

In the tavern-room four more men, as openly just come in from the rain, were gathered to a table around a pitcher and pottery cups, dice already rattling out on the boards between them. Nearly Joliffe joined them, to learn what he could about and from them; but if they were only lately come to Flint, they had nothing to do with Hampden's death, were not his problem. Besides, he was surely going to share the dorter with them and have chance enough then to learn as much as he likely needed. Best for now that he eat, then go out and about m Flint to learn what he could about Hampden—at best, why he had been in Flint and how he had died.

He failed to set about that so soon as he could have, because both the roast lamb and the berry pie were so savory and served in such fulsome shares it would have been a crime to cram them down. Willing to be law-abiding when he could, Joliffe took his time over the meal, and the men across the room did likewise, even leaving off their dicing while they ate. The man on the stairs did not come down again, but Jack took a laden tray up to him, and before Joliffe was done, the room had filled with assorted, ordinary townsfolk— several men alone, a young couple with a small child, an older man and woman together. None of them looked likely for the kind of talk Joliffe wanted, even if he had not already asked enough questions of Master Cockerel that it would be better if he were not heard asking more, so when he had regretfully finished eating and had had a final tall cup of the excellent ale, he strolled out of the Green Cockerel.

The rain had fully ended but the air was still thick with damp and late twilight was well-come, the first lanterns already being lighted beside doorways. The Rolling Man was easily found in a side street not a far walk away from the marketplace. It was more tavern than inn, with no yard that Joliffe saw but a tavern-room facing the street under the sign of a man rolling a wine cask. With the heavy damp and evening coming on, Joliffe had supposed he would find it busy and it was, but differently from the Green Cockerel to judge by the mixed roar of laughter and angry shouts inside the tavern-room, and the man who lurched out a side door to relieve himself against the wall. That done, he turned his back to the wall and sank down in apparent stupor. It was early hours to be so publicly drunk or even a tavern to be so loud. It looked to be just what Joliffe had hoped for, and putting on a swagger, he went inside.

Noise and smell hit him together. The first he was braced for. The second did not surprise him. The room was cluttered with battered, unscrubbed tables and benches already crowded with drinking men and some women, many of whom looked equally battered and unscrubbed and most of whom had plainly started their heavy drinking some hours ago. No one had troubled to sweep out the floor's old rushes with their stinking spills and thrown-down food. Fresh rushes had simply been thrown on top of foul and not very lately, either. Slut-run, such places were called, though from what Joliffe had seen of them they seemed as often—or more often—run by men as women. Only when even the owner could no longer stand the stink and squelch underfoot—or maybe when he began to fear patrons would sink and be lost in it before they paid—would the floor be cleared, to start again.

For his part, Joliffe had never understood either that degree of laziness or some people's seeming delight in filth for filth's sake, as if life were more real if it were dirty. But then neither had he ever understood people for whom cleanliness was all in all, as if a polished tabletop were enough to earn them a crown in Heaven.

And if a polished tabletop
were
the way to Heaven, he had no hope of salvation.

Having bought a tall leather jack of what proved to be poor ale, he sat himself on the end of a bench along a table where two men were slapping greasy playing cards down at each other and half a dozen other men were sitting somewhat watching them but mostly drinking and talking among themselves. Joliffe, as he had intended, was soon drawn into their talk. Asked where he came from and what brought him to Flint, he answered with ready ease that he was from Warwick way, heading to Caernarfon, to a cousin doing business there for the while, with papers for him to sign and word that his wife had safely birthed him another son.

"Not that he's going to be so pleased about that," Joliffe said with the ease of a man who thought himself well out of it.
"That's their fifth, and three girls besides."

He had used this imagined cousin before, moving him about the countryside as need be, with the number of children increasing every time. Now one of the men here, more sorrowful over his ale than the rest, sighed into his almost-empty bowl and mourned, "Not one do I have. Not one to carry my name on after me."

His fellow on the right poked an elbow into his ribs. "You've not a wife either, Dai. Try getting yourself one of those before you start in about having no children."

Dai straightened. "A wife?" he said indignantly. "Do I look mad, man, that I'd be saddling and bridling myself with a wife?"

"Drink up," said someone across the table and poured more ale into Dai's bowl from the pitcher they were all sharing. Dai buried his face in that as solace for his griefs, and Joliffe said at large to the rest of them, "I hear I've missed a murder. Some fellow was killed in here lately, was he?"

In some times and some places there was need to take the long way round to find out things, but he'd guessed rightly that here a straight question would be enough.

"Didn't happen in here," one of the men said with good cheer. "It was in the street right outside."

"Started in here, though," someone else said.

"The fight started here. The dead fellow wasn't part of it then, though, was he?" a third offered.

"Wasn't part of it at all," Dai said, still brooding into his ale bowl. He seemed the sort given to brooding about all and everything. "The fellows didn't even know him. Hell's blowsy bottom, nobody here even knew
them,
let alone them knowing anybody."

Letting himself look as confused as he was by then, Joliffe asked, "It was all strangers? The dead man and the men who killed him?"

"Nay," the first man said. "We knew the dead man, well enough."

"He wasn't dead then, though," said Dai.

His fellows ignored him, one of them saying, "Didn't know him all that well. Had seen him hereabout now and again of late. Knew he was the duke of Suffolk's man ..." Two of the men spat aside into the rushes. "... and that he came sometimes to see Sir Thomas."

"Sir Thomas Stanley, that is?" Joliffe asked.

"Aye. Him," the man said, with no great liking.

Another man spat into the rushes, maybe simply because he needed to, but by a swift glance around the table, Joliffe saw several other men who looked as
if
they wanted to. "King's chamberlain here in North Wales, isn't Sir Thomas?" Joliffe asked, raising a hand for another pitcher of ale to be brought, the present one running low.

"That's him, and a quicker man to the bribe you'll not find this side of the border."

"Thank St. David he's a royal officer. If he were not, he'd be the kind of thief as would have every sheep off the hills and into his bag."

"Not that he might not anyway, the way he goes on," Dai said into his bowl.

"Wasn't for Sir Thomas that Hampden was this end of town that night, though," one of the men said, grinning.

Others chuckled or grunted appreciatively. Taking a guess, Joliffe said, "Some woman?"

"One of Sweet Mabli's, yes. Has her place in Trudge Alley. If you've a mind," the man beside him on the bench said with a wink and a nudge.

"Not tonight," Joliffe said with a regretting shake of his head. "I've done enough riding for the day."

That brought laughter and let him lead the talk on about Hampden. The way the men told it—and they had all been here the night it happened and given testimony at the crowner's inquest since then—there had been three men in here that night that no one had seen before. They had kept themselves to themselves, drinking, throwing some dice, not talking much among themselves but making no trouble.

"Sitting right there," Dai said, pointing at a table near the streetward door. "At that very table there."

Then suddenly two of them had sprung to their feet and started shouting and shoving at each other. The other one had joined in and without anyone had time to tell them to take it outside they had gone out the door, quarreling and shoving at each other.

"None of us saw them with any daggers drawn," the man next to Dai said now. "Those must have come out as soon as they were out the door."

"Hampden's bad fortune was he was out there, too," another put in. "On his way back to the castle from Sweet Mabli's. Just passing by."

"In time to take a dagger-thrust under the ribs." Dai shook a brooding head. "It goes to show. It does indeed."

No one asked him what it showed.

"More than one thrust," someone else said. "Three. One to the heart from the front. Another in the back. A third in the gut."

"Couldn't have done it better if they'd been trying," said Dai to his ale bowl.

"So what's happened to them?" Joliffe asked.

"Nothing. Killing the wrong man must have sobered them out of their own quarrel on the instant. By the time any of us were into the street to see if they'd come to fist-punching each other yet, Hampden was lying there . . ."

"Took us a moment to realize it was him and not one of them, but he was dead already anyway."

"... and they were run off into the dark. They had horses somewhere ..."

"... and sense enough to clear off while the clearing off was good. Never hide nor hair of them did we see again, no more than did Sir Thomas' men out hunting them next day."

"Left us the trouble and cost of the crowner and not a single good hanging in return," said one of the card-players.

He threw down a final pair of cards and added, "Damn them." Whether at the cards or the fled men was unclear.

The game was over, anyway. His fellows threw down their cards, too. One of them scooped the little pile of farthings toward him from the center of the table, asking of Joliffe while he did, "Want to play?"

That being as good a way out of talk about the murder as he was likely to get, Joliffe took it, meaning to keep at the game long enough for, hopefully, his questions about the murder to be lost in the general fog of drinking and good fellowship and no one likely to remember him particularly. For that to work, he had to be sure not to win too much, but given his usual luck at games of chance, that was no problem. By the time he drained a last draught of ale and stood up from the bench, saying he had to leave now if he was going to sleep in the bed he'd paid for, he had won some money and lost more, enough that the other players were sorry to see him go but were unlikely ever to think about him again.