The Weaver's Inheritance (28 page)

‘Edward wouldn’t allow it,’ I predicted confidently. ‘If that happened, he’d reprieve Clarence. Anyway, he’s probably only imprisoned him to give him a fright.’

Timothy pursed his lips. ‘My master isn’t so certain. There are rumours flying about that Clarence employed the Oxford clerk, John Stacey, to cast the King’s horoscope, which prophesied His Highness’s early death.’

‘Is there any substance to these rumours?’

‘Not yet. But there are also whispers that the damning evidence was parcelled up by Stacey and entrusted to a kinsman to bring to a cousin here in Bristol. If that should prove to be the case, then Duke Richard is anxious to get his hands on it before any of the Woodvilles do, so that it can be disposed of.’

If I was shocked at the idea of the Duke of Gloucester destroying evidence that might be used to incriminate his brother, it was an emotion largely suppressed by the tumult of ideas suddenly spinning around in my head.

‘The cousin you mention must have been Imelda Bracegirdle,’ I said. ‘I’d forgotten it until now, but somebody once told me that her mother’s name was Stacey and that she came from Oxford.’ Now at last I knew what it was that had been nagging at me ever since I first heard the name of John Stacey. ‘But why would he want his papers lodged with a kinswoman? Why didn’t he simply burn them? Surely that would have been the safer, easier way?’

‘Maybe they were too valuable. Maybe they represented too many hours’ hard work.’ Timothy drained his cup and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. ‘There’s another rumour that says this cousin is, or was, herself a caster of horoscopes. Perhaps he wished to bequeath her his secrets.’

‘Wait a minute,’ I interrupted. ‘A man did come to this cottage a month or so ago, looking for Mistress Bracegirdle and carrying a bundle of some sort under his arm. I arrived here just as he was leaving, but according to Mistress Juett, he’d claimed to be a kinsman of Imelda. He seemed most put out to discover she was dead.’

Timothy sighed. ‘There you are, then. And if she hadn’t been dead, she’d probably have relieved him of the parcel and hidden it somewhere.’ He glanced disparagingly around the cottage. ‘But it’s difficult to see exactly where.’

‘No, it’s not!’ I cried excitedly, and rose from my stool to fetch the hooked iron bar from its resting place in a corner of the room. I then cleared the rushes from the necessary portion of the floor and raised the flagstone. ‘Come and look at this,’ I invited.

Timothy joined me, kneeling down and staring thoughtfully into the cavity. ‘Undoubtedly this is where Mistress Bracegirdle kept her own charts,’ he said. ‘You see how the bottom is lined with waxed cloth to keep them dry and stop the parchment from mildewing.’

‘Of course!’ I breathed. ‘We thought it must have contained a secret hoard of money that was stolen by her murderer, but why would she have gone to so much trouble just to store coins? The bare earth would have sufficed.’

Timothy sighed regretfully. ‘Well, there’s nothing here now.’ He lapsed into silence for a few moments, before adding, ‘I must return to Duke Richard at once and tell him that we’ll have to search elsewhere for John Stacey’s papers. Let’s pray to God that the Queen’s or Earl Rivers’s spies don’t locate them before we do!’

He had risen to his feet and was making ready to leave even as he spoke. For the sake of politeness, I urged him to stay a little longer and have some refreshment before setting out, but he refused. There could be no delay: he had to get back as soon as possible to London, where Duke Richard was on a brief visit from the north, to remonstrate with the King and comfort his mother, and decide what was now best to be done.

I did not argue, for I was as anxious to see him gone as he was to go. My mind was whirling. All those scraps of knowledge that had been in my possession for days, weeks, months, had begun to make sense, and I could not wait to start piecing them together.

*   *   *

Adela sat in the place that Timothy Plummer had so recently occupied and I sat opposite her, our hands almost, but not quite, touching in the middle of the table. Nicholas had been sent to play with his toys at the back of the room, but, childlike, was happier cradling an old leather water bottle in his arms and talking to it in his own baby language.

Having engaged Adela’s pledge of secrecy, I had told her not only what I had found out in London during my visit to Morwenna Peto, but also everything that had passed between Timothy and myself this afternoon, for I knew she was to be trusted, even if he did not. She was intrigued by the notion that Imelda Bracegirdle had been a caster of horoscopes, and readily agreed that the underfloor cavity could have been the hiding place for her charts and predictions.

‘But who would have taken them?’ Adela asked. ‘Who would have known that they were there?’

‘Someone who had asked her to cast a horoscope. Someone who had either noticed that iron bar in the corner and worked out what it could be for, or who had seen her use it. And when she was dead, that someone opened up the hiding place and took the charts away.’

Adela frowned. ‘But to what purpose? Are you saying that they were the reason she was murdered? Not her money?’

‘I doubt if she had any money other than what she earned from spinning, and the little extra she made in secret by her horoscopes. But after Irwin Peto turned up, claiming to be Clement Weaver, she may have been sharp enough to put two and two together and realize how she could extort more money in return for keeping her mouth shut. If that is what happened, she signed her own death warrant.’

My companion’s frown deepened. ‘I don’t understand. How can Mistress Bracegirdle’s murder and Irwin Peto’s impersonation, as you now assure me it is, be linked?’

‘By the murderer,’ I answered simply. ‘Do you remember when we first looked at the iron bar, we discovered some threads attached to it?’

‘Two black threads and a red; yes, I remember. They were silk.’

‘And do you also remember, on an earlier occasion, a woman, outside her father’s house, calling and calling for her husband, who made no answer? And why didn’t he answer? Probably because he wasn’t there; probably because he had slipped out earlier, across the Frome Bridge, and was busy about his own murderous business.’

Adela passed her tongue between her lips. ‘You’re talking about William Burnett,’ she said, ‘unless I’m very much mistaken.’

‘I am.’

She gave an incredulous laugh. ‘But that’s nonsensical! If Mistress Burnett is disinherited, then he is too. If she gets no money, then neither does he. What would be the point of it?’

I didn’t reply directly. ‘A few days before Margaret received your letter from Hereford,’ I said, ‘I saw Alderman Weaver and Mistress Burnett coming out of his house together. Now, everybody says that Alison is like her mother, that she looks like the de Courcys more than the Weavers, but that day it struck me that she bore a stronger resemblance to her father than I had previously imagined. At the same time, I thought how sickly the Alderman appeared.’ I leaned a little closer, and suddenly my hands were holding hers. ‘Don’t you see, the similarity lay in the fact that they are both unwell; that both are suffering from some wasting disease? Alison Burnett was ill long before the quarrel over the will. That has aggravated it, accelerated it,
but it’s not the cause.
’

Adela followed my reasoning without any prompting, as I had known she would. ‘And you think that William Burnett, realizing this, had Imelda Bracegirdle cast his wife’s horoscope. And if that horoscope predicted Alison would die before her father…’ Her voice tailed off and she looked at me with startled speculation in her eyes.

‘Yes! Yes!’ I breathed, tightening my grip on her hands. ‘If Mistress Burnett were to die before the Alderman, then her husband would never get a penny of her father’s money. I’ve been told that Alfred Weaver has grown to dislike his son-in-law, so he would be extremely unlikely to make a new will that provided for William.’

‘But Master Burnett doesn’t need the Alderman’s money. He has a very substantial fortune of his own.’

‘So we are led to believe. But has he? Firstly,
did
he inherit as much from his father as everyone thought? I’ve been told that both old Alderman Burnett and his father before him were gamblers; and only three months after the Alderman’s death, William merged the business with that of his father-in-law. Why? Simply because it made good sense to do so, or because he realized that it was the only way to keep it going? And secondly, there’s the matter of his own gambling debts.’

‘Does he have any?’ Gently Adela freed her hands from mine and rose to fetch us both more ale.

I swivelled round to watch her as she crossed the room, and thought, not for the first time, how gracefully she moved.

‘According to Nick Brimble and Jack Nym, William Burnett is a frequent visitor to the upper room of the New Inn, which is apparently given over to games of hazard. Nick Brimble told me that William owed money to Jasper Fairbrother, and he and Jack reckoned it was a couple of Jasper’s bravos who attacked William that night outside Saint Werburgh’s Church, because he had delayed paying Fairbrother his money. But why had he delayed, knowing what might happen to him? I don’t think it was out of meanness or cussedness as Jack and Nick believe, but because he couldn’t afford to honour the debt.’

Adela handed me my cup of ale and sat down again, sipping her own. ‘But why, in that case, when he must have guessed who his assailants were, did he try to throw suspicion on Irwin Peto?’ She answered her own question. ‘To put Alison off the scent, I suppose.’

‘Partly for that reason, maybe, but also because he knew she was only too eager to believe everything bad about Irwin, and that, with a little encouragement, which he no doubt subsequently gave her, Alison would quarrel even more bitterly with her father on the subject. One of the things,’ I went on, ‘that has always bothered me about that quarrel is the apparently maladroit way in which William Burnett handled the affair, making the rift between the Alderman and his daughter even greater than it need have been by his arrogant and insulting behaviour.’

‘With the result,’ Adela said slowly, ‘that Alison was cut out of the will altogether.’ She tidied away a stray lock of hair that had escaped from beneath her linen hood. ‘Now, let me see if I have this aright. You’re accusing William Burnett of being the instigator of this plot, the man who stumbled across Irwin Peto, recognized his likeness to Clement Weaver and persuaded him to impersonate his dead brother-in-law. But when could this have happened?’

‘Listen! When Timothy Plummer and I were talking, that evening in Tewkesbury, he mentioned, quite by chance, that a deputation of Bristol weavers had been in London last October, demanding a higher price for their cloth. William may well have been one of them, and that could have been when Irwin Peto crossed his path. He was immediately struck by the likeness to Clement, and saw a way by which he could try to secure at least a portion of the Alderman’s fortune for himself after Alison’s death. No doubt, he and Irwin Peto arranged to split the inheritance in half. The state of Alfred Weaver’s health had probably convinced William that they wouldn’t have long to wait.’

Adela regarded me with consternation. ‘Roger, are you sure you’re not letting your imagination run away with you? I can see that William Burnett would know enough of his wife’s past, and enough details of Clement’s disappearance, to make him a good instructor; but how could he possibly rely on the word of a man such as Irwin Peto? What’s to prevent Peto hanging on to all the inheritance once it’s his?’

‘I have no doubt at all that William Burnett has foreseen that situation, and holds some sort of written, legally witnessed document, allowing him to claim half of any monies that come to Irwin. And with such a paper in William’s possession, Irwin would be a fool to withhold his share, unless he’s willing to risk getting his neck stretched.’

Adela rubbed her nose. ‘But why would William murder Imelda Bracegirdle?’

‘For the reason I’ve already given you. When Clement turned up just after Christmas, and the city was buzzing with the news, she was astute enough to suspect some underhand dealing on William’s part, and threaten him with exposure. He panicked, because she held the only proof that might connect him to such a plot, Alison’s horoscope, predicting her death before her father’s. So he killed Mistress Bracegirdle and removed the evidence. What he did with it, heaven alone knows. Burnt it, most like.’

Adela said nothing for a minute or two, turning over what I had said in her mind. At last she asked, ‘The black and red silk threads, where do you think they came from?’

‘The day William Burnett visited Margaret’s cottage with his wife, he was wearing a black and red silk girdle. He could have been wearing it the night of the murder.’

Adela still appeared dubious. ‘If all you say is founded in fact and isn’t a product of your imagination, and presuming that William Burnett believes the horoscope cast by Mistress Bracegirdle to be true, then why did he seek to widen the breach between Alison and her father? If she dies first, the Alderman will leave everything to Clement anyway.’

I shrugged. ‘I can’t say for certain, but probably to make it plain to Alison that he was taking her part against her father, and to make absolutely sure that all the money goes to his partner in crime when the Alderman is dead.’

‘But supposing Imelda Bracegirdle’s prophecy is wrong and Mistress Burnett
doesn’t
die before her father, then Master Burnett will have robbed himself of half of Alfred Weaver’s fortune.’ Adela finished her ale, propped her elbows on the table, cupped her chin in her hands and regarded me challengingly.

I returned her look resentfully. I was growing irritated by her constant questioning of my theory. To me, it all seemed as clear as day. ‘You have to try to think like he does,’ I protested. ‘You have to think with his thoughts, not your own. He must know enough of his wife’s state of health to believe implicitly in Mistress Bracegirdle’s forecast. Most likely, all he sought from her was confirmation of his own worst fears. At that time, he couldn’t see what to do about it; indeed, he may well have reconciled himself to the idea that there was nothing
to
be done. It was only when he chanced across Irwin Peto and recognized his likeness to Clement Weaver that he saw a possible remedy for the situation.’