Masques of Gold (7 page)

“I know nothing.” William's voice was low, but terribly violent.

He leaned over Lissa and grasped her wrist so hard that pain lanced up her arm. She shoved herself upright, taking him by surprise, and pushed him back toward the fire so she could wrench herself around and seize the poker. William let go of her, gasping as she raised the tool like a weapon.

“She-wolf! Monster!” he hissed. “Will you accuse me of what I am totally innocent just to satisfy your hatred?”

“Do not be a fool,” Lissa said, lowering the poker. “You hurt me, and I will not tolerate that from you, especially since I may be forced to leave this house and return to yours when Peter's sons are found. Sir Justin FitzAilwin and his men are seeking them in the city and beyond. As for you, I will accuse you of nothing and will do all in my power to keep any shadow of guilt from touching you. You know too much about it, but thank God I am certain you are not guilty of murdering Peter.”

William stared at her and then bobbed his head in a satisfied way. “Well, then, do you want me to see to Flael's will or seek out someone to argue your case for you?”

“What case?” Lissa asked. “I have none, since I do not intend to dispute Peter's will.”

“You are a fool,” William said. “Every merchant in the city will be lined up outside your door insisting that Flael owed him money and insisting on immediate payment.”

Lissa put a hand to her head, then dropped it and sighed with relief. “No, that will be all right. The money is gone, but Peter's records are in our bedchamber. I will be able to call in the debts owed to Peter to pay those he owed others.”

“
You
will call them in? Who will be willing to pay
you
!”

“There are some honest men in the world,” Lissa said with a wry smile.

“Fool,” William remarked, but without much passion. He was accustomed to his daughter's stupid honesty and her insistence on giving everyone the benefit of the doubt. “You tell me what is owed by whom, and I will have Hubert collect—”

“No!” Lissa exclaimed, her eyes going wide. Then she came closer to her father to speak softly. “I think it was he who murdered Peter. I—”

“Bite your tongue!”

Her father's whisper had the intensity of a scream, and Lissa stiffened with fear, not of any attack by him but of the sudden terror in his eyes. She moistened her lips and looked down. It sickened her to be part of her father's schemes and guilt, but he
was
innocent of murder and for him to be blamed would destroy her. Justin could never—The thought ended abruptly as her father said “Heloise—” in that same tense whisper. It recalled to her the terrible panic her father had shown when he heard of Peter's torture.

Now it occurred to Lissa that though her father treated Hubert de Bosco with caution, he did not really fear him. Then there must be someone behind Hubert, someone very powerful, most likely someone more powerful than the mayor and aldermen of the city, which meant the earls and barons…or the king. Lissa remembered that Peter had told her he did much business with the king and the great nobles. Perhaps Peter had been involved in the troubles that had nearly turned King John's court inside out.

Lissa knew more than she wanted to know about the accusations and counter-accusations in the plot to kill the king. She also did business with the great nobles, or rather with their wives and daughters, and the ladies who came to her for perfumes and salves and powders and potions loved to gossip. But too often ladies who had carried themselves high and proudly suddenly came no more. Then another, perhaps new to the court, would whisper in Lissa's ear that the lady had been banished or ruined when King John's favor shifted. Or sometimes the whisper was that their husbands had fallen foul of the king, and a man who had thought himself too powerful to be touched by John learned that the king's slyness could sometimes outmaneuver strength. If Peter's death was part of that madness, it could go unavenged as far as Lissa was concerned. She had no intention of becoming entangled in court politics.

“Heloise!”

William's now frantic plea woke Lissa to the fact that she had been silent too long, thinking. She raised her eyes, which had been fixed on the floor, and saw that her father's face was blanched and his hands were knotted into fists.

“I will point no finger in any direction,” she said, “but I will have nothing to do with that man nor any other connected to you.”

“Then do not blame me if your dowry is seized to pay your husband's debts,” William snarled, rage replacing fear as soon as she promised not to implicate Hubert. “And do not expect me to make good on it either.”

“If I need help, Sir Justin will help me,” Lissa said.

“Will he?”

William stared thoughtfully at his daughter. She was no beauty. He could never understand what it was about her that drew men. Before he needed to provide Flael with a hostage, he had refused more offers for her than he could count, which was one reason Flael thought William valued Heloise enough to make her a good hostage. Possibly she could seduce Sir Justin. If she could…For a moment William indulged himself with the idea of what he could accomplish if the man charged with uncovering crime dared not accuse him of anything. But he could not believe his daughter's attractions could be that powerful, and close association with a seeker of wrongdoers was dangerous.

“You would do better to stay clear of Sir Justin,” William urged. “That man will see through you. I warn you that if he noses out your suspicion of Hubert, we will all—Sir Justin too—be in grave danger.”

The inclusion of Justin in her father's threat startled Lissa. In view of her thoughts about the power that might be behind Hubert, she could not dismiss the threat as she usually did. In an odd way, though, what her father had said was a balm to her soul. It gave her an excellent reason to continue to conceal her suspicions from Justin. Then she had to suppress a qualm about how close she had come to telling Justin far more than it was safe for him to know. But she could not try to avoid him; that would surely make him think she had guilty knowledge.

Hiding uncertainty from her father was second nature to Lissa, and all she said was “I am not so presumptuous as to expect Sir Justin to make the time to attend to my problems himself, but I believe he will most likely be able to recommend to me someone who will collect Peter's debts without cheating either me or the debtor.”

“Then I need waste no more time with you.” William's voice grated with anger, and he turned to leave.

“I will accompany you down,” Lissa said sweetly, but to her surprise, for he had just warned her to avoid Sir Justin, her father only looked surprised.

When she was halfway down the stairs, Lissa saw the guard sitting near the shop door, and her amusement changed to disappointment. She should have known that her father had not seen Sir Justin when he did not argue with her about coming down. Telling herself not to be a fool, that Sir Justin had more important things to do than wait for her to finish her nap, she forced herself to say, “Farewell, father, and thank you,” as she saw him out. It would be a mistake, she thought, to allow the guard to see anything he might consider unusual in her behavior. The man could not know of the long-standing antagonism between her father and herself, and any coldness she exhibited might be connected to Peter's death.

Turning from the closed door, Lissa started toward the workroom. She did not want to see Peter's body, but she could not control a single sidelong glance in that direction. He was not there! She turned to stare at the empty space before the counter where the corpse had lain.

“M-my husband,” she stammered. “Wh-where—”

The guard stood up. “The brothers took the body away, mistress,” he said. “Sir Justin and the priest thought it would be better for the brothers of Saint Bartholomew to make the body ready for burial. Father Denis would've told you, but Sir Justin left orders that you not be wakened. Father Denis wasn't angry. He said he'd come back later to talk to you.”

Tears of relief and gratitude stung Lissa's eyes, and she had to swallow hard before she could thank the guard for the information. With a light step she passed through the shop into the workroom, but there she stopped short. Only two men were in the room, one gathering the scraps of a meal to give to his pigs or to the beggars, and the other setting aside the plank they had used as a table. After the kindness he had shown in relieving her of the dreaded duty of laying out Peter's corpse, Lissa had expected to find Justin either eating with his men or waiting to dine with her. Now, although she knew she had no right to be offended, she felt hurt and angry. Still, it was not the fault of the men who, she supposed, were waiting in the hope that Peter's sons would return, and she managed to ask pleasantly if their dinner had been satisfactory.

“Yes, mistress, thank you,” the older man, who had been gathering the scraps, said with a smile. “I am Halsig, captain of the guard, and this is Dunstan. If there is anything we can do for you, just say, mistress.”

“Thank you. You are very kind,” Lissa replied. “If you would tell Binge to send Witta up with something for me to eat, I would be grateful.”

He nodded and went out the back door, and Lissa went upstairs again. She felt lonely and lost, both emotions intensified by her idleness. Before marriage Lissa had done or overseen much of the compounding of the remedies and cosmetics her father's shop dispensed and had often served the female clients as well as keeping the accounts and accompanying her father to examine the herbs and spices they purchased. After her marriage she had been equally occupied because her husband's country estate was new to her and she wished to learn all she could about managing such a place. Even when they had returned to London, she had been busy. Now she stood looking around the room forlornly, noticing that the table where they had eaten had been cleared and that the plate and goblet Justin had used were both clean and in their proper places. There was nothing for her to do…

“Oh, Lord,” she whispered, “what a fool I am.”

There was more than enough to do. She had forgotten all about her conversation with her father in her disappointment over Justin's departure. There were the records to examine. Lissa walked quickly into the bedchamber and knelt by the chest that contained the records of Peter's business. Lifting the heavy lid, she examined the contents—tally sticks and rolls of parchment. The tally sticks no doubt were the financial records, each marked with a symbol that stood for the client and cut and notched to show the amounts owed and repaid, then split, Peter keeping one half and the client keeping the other so each had an identical record.

Lissa had little doubt that she would be able to translate the cuts and notches into pennies, shillings, and pounds or marks after a little study, but there was no way for her to determine to whom each symbol at the top of the stick referred. However, there were a large number of sticks, some bundled together. It was possible that Peter had kept a separate written record of the symbols rather than trust to his memory. Lissa scooped the parchment rolls out of the chest and discovered that there were not as many as she had first thought, because there were more tally sticks underneath. She took what she could hold and carried them into the solar where she dropped them into the basket that held her embroidery thread. Setting that on a stool to one side of Peter's chair, she went to make up the fire and then set to work.

Most of the rolls were about the same size, a few were larger. She chose one of the largest, untied the thin cord that held it into a roll, and began to examine it. At the top was an extraordinarily detailed drawing of a plate and several views around the body of a goblet. Below was a written description of the items, an agreement that the client, a Lord John, would furnish the gold, and the price to be paid for the labor.

The designs were lovely. Lissa was swept with a deep feeling of regret that the man who could create such beauty should have been so cruelly killed. She wondered, too, whether the client had appreciated what he was getting, and looked down to see if she might recognize the seal. For a moment she went rigid. Every important merchant in London knew that seal. It was the king's privy seal, the small one used for private business, which was kept in his own wardrobe rather than at the exchequer.

Lissa stared for a moment and then shivered slightly. There was no indication on the parchment as to whether Peter had been paid for his work. Had death been the coin in which his demand for payment was satisfied? No, that was silly. The king was not in London, and Peter had not had time to ride to Windsor. It did not matter anyway, Lissa thought. She had just decided that this was one debt she would be happy to ignore when Witta pranced in the open door with a tray.

The boy seemed to have recovered completely from the shock he had had and was brighter and more cheerful than at any time since he had begun serving her. Lissa was sure it was because he had not been blamed for any of the horrible events and, in addition, was free of the ill treatment of Peter's sons. She did not have the heart to reprimand him for showing he was happy despite his master's death, and simply told him to put the food down on the table.

There was no harm in Witta's being happy, but Lissa did not feel the same about idleness. She bade him wait when he was about to skip out of the room, then told him to go get his slate, for she had begun to teach him to read and cipher. He ran off with an eager smile and was soon clattering up the stairs again. The eagerness to learn was one of the things that made Lissa determined to keep the boy. He was no angel. Set him an ordinary task of sweeping or cleaning and he was as dilatory and desirous to escape as any other child his age, but show him the difference between the look and scent of varieties of herbs or the lines of a new letter, and you had Witta's full attention.