The Dance of Death (5 page)

‘I don't want to steal anything,' I retorted angrily. ‘I told you, I'm the Lampreys' friend. I live in Bristol and recently I've been abroad – Scotland – so I haven't been able to see Master and Mistress Lamprey for some while. Where are they? What's become of them?'

The woman gnashed her gums together and subjected me to another hard stare, but then she seemed to accept my story. It was a comfort to know that at least I didn't look like a villain and could pass for an honest man.

‘She died in childbirth, her and the child – oh, back in August 't would be, round 'bout Lamastide. It were a boy, too, jus' what they both wanted.'

‘Jeanne dead?' I interrupted, horrified, unable for the moment to take it in. ‘
Dead?
' I repeated.

‘Milk fever,' the woman confirmed. ‘Jus' the way my eldest girl went when she had her third. Sudden like. One minute sittin' up talkin' as right as you please, the next out of her wits, poor soul. And dead within three days.'

‘Oh dear God,' I groaned. ‘And what of Philip? He thought the world of her.'

‘Aye, he took it hard. Didn't leave the cottage for weeks after she and the babe were buried. Didn't eat, didn't sleep – well, not much – didn't work. Didn't cry even, leastways not that I saw. Just lay in here, on that there bed, curled up, knees drawn up to his chin, not speaking. Us neighbours did our best t' rouse him, brought him food and drink – brought him some o' my best home-made beer and rabbit stew – but he refused t' touch either. Don' think he even knew it were there. Worn away to a thread he were in the end. Never had much meat on his bones t' begin with. Then, all of a sudden, 'bout three weeks ago, he up and vanished. No one knows where. Jus' disappeared. Took nothin' with him that anyone could see. Nothin' but what he stood up in. My own feelin',' my informant added, with a comfortable settling of her shoulders, ‘is that he's drowned himself. Couldn't live without her.'

Her words confirmed my own fears. I didn't want to listen to any more. I thanked the goodwife and stumbled blindly out of the cottage and back into the general hubbub of Cornhill, feeling like a man who has been mortally wounded. What made matters worse was that I had been, albeit briefly, in London in May, and had even toyed with the idea of going to see the Lampreys, but had persuaded myself that I couldn't spare the time. The truth was, of course, that I had been in a vile mood about my enforced journey into Scotland and been no fit company for anyone. Now, however, I blamed myself for not having overcome my ill humour. At least I would have seen my friends and known about the child.

The next thing I can remember with any clarity is standing beside the great conduit at the end of Cheapside and the beginning of the Poultry, staring around me, completely in a daze. My mind refused to function properly; all I could think of was that Jeanne and most probably Philip were dead. It felt as though a door had slammed shut, locking me away from a part of my life that I had taken for granted: two friends who were always there even if years elapsed between our meetings.

‘You all right, master?'

The voice, that of a carter who had stopped to water his horse at the conduit (forbidden by law, but what of that? To your average Englishman, rules are only made to be broken) brought me back to my senses.

‘Yes . . . yes. Thank you.'

‘Well, if you say so, though you don't look it.' He spoke with rough sympathy, adding acutely, ‘I'd say you've had a nasty shock. What you need, friend, is a drink. Oh, not that stuff,' he went on, as I cupped my hands and scooped up some water. ‘You want a cup of good ale inside your belly. Settle your guts.' With which sage advice he mounted the box of his cart, jerked on the horse's reins and rattled off towards West Cheap.

The man was right. I needed something to calm my nerves and shake myself back to normality. At the moment, nothing seemed real and I was aware of a general feeling of weakness, a sort of trembling in my bones that made me ashamed of myself. I was a big, strong man of thirty – along with Duke Richard I had passed that milestone three weeks back, on the second of this month of October – and here I was behaving like a sickly schoolboy. I took a deep breath, braced my shoulders and looked about me for the nearest alehouse.

And there, almost opposite to where I was standing, was the entrance to Bucklersbury and the inn of St Brendan the Voyager. I had stayed there on at least two occasions and counted the landlord, Reynold Makepeace, as a friend of mine. I conjured up a picture of him, short, stocky, bright hazel eyes, sparse brown hair, his large paunch covered by a leather apron and always delighted to welcome old customers. A presence infinitely comforting and just what I needed. I plunged across the road, oblivious of swearing carters and the imprecations of mounted men-at-arms and self-important messengers, and into the narrow mouth of Bucklersbury, where the upper storeys of houses and shops on either side overhung the street, meeting almost in the middle.

The Voyager was situated just before the junction with Needlers Lane and appeared to be even busier than I recalled at this time of day. I squeezed myself on to a providentially empty stool at the common table and stared around, hoping for a glimpse of Reynold, but there was no sign of him. I decided that he was most probably in the parlour attending in person to the more select of his guests. He would arrive to restore order in the ale room in just a few minutes.

There was no doubt in my mind, as I tried to catch the eye of a passing pot boy, that the present set of customers were a far more raucous bunch than they used to be. There was a rough element among them that Reynold would never have tolerated in days gone by, and I wondered if times were hard that he put up with them now. A brawl had broken out in one corner of the ale room between a man with a broken nose and another with a patch over one eye, whose tunic bore witness to the fact that he was a careless eater, and who was being vociferously encouraged by his friends to ‘black the bugger's daylights'.

I waited confidently for Reynold to appear, breathing fire and brimstone, in order to have the troublemakers ejected. Nothing happened. In the meantime, I at last managed to order a cup of ale, which, when it came, tasted flat and stale. After only three sips, I pushed it away, disgusted.

I turned to the man on my right. ‘Where's Landlord Makepeace?' I asked, raising my voice to be heard above the increasing din.

‘Who?'

‘Reynold Makepeace, the owner of this place.'

Before he could reply, a slatternly looking, red-haired woman wearing a dirty apron and with her cap askew had entered the ale room and was screaming at the two antagonists to sit down and behave or they would be thrown out without more ado. To reinforce her words, a couple of very large gentlemen, also red-haired and obviously her sons, each with fists like hams, had followed her in and were indicating their readiness to carry out her wishes. The would-be combatants duly subsided and peace, of a sort, reigned again.

I felt a touch on my arm. The man on the other side of me, a quiet, pleasant-spoken fellow, said, ‘You were asking about Landlord Makepeace. It must be some while since you were last here, friend. You plainly haven't heard.'

‘Heard what?' I asked, my heart sinking into my boots.

‘Reynold was killed some year and a half ago. Stabbed to death, here in this very room.'

‘Stabbed? Here? In the Voyager?'

My companion nodded. ‘I don't know how long it is since you were last in these parts, but the area has been going from bad to worse for a long time. Far more thieves and beggars and pickpockets than there used to be, and foreign seamen making their way up from the wharves. You know how it is. Someone discovers a place by accident and the word spreads. Anyway, to cut a long story short, Reynold was trying to separate the contestants in just such a sort of brawl as was threatening a few moments ago, and unfortunately got in the way of a knife that was being brandished about. Died within hours.' He broke off, laying a concerned hand on my arm. ‘Are you feeling unwell, sir? You're looking a very funny colour. Here, drink some of your ale.'

‘No! No!' I pushed his hand away and staggered to my feet, holding him down on his stool when he would have risen with me. ‘There's nothing wrong. I mean, I'm not ill. It's just that this is the second piece of bad news – appalling news – that I've had within the past hour. Please don't come with me. I shall be all right once I get away from this place.'

Having made my way outside, all I could do, for several minutes at least, was to lean against the wall of the inn breathing heavily and trying to control the renewed shaking in my limbs. Above my head, the inn sign, St Brendan in his cockleshell boat, swung and creaked in the late afternoon breeze just as it had always done, giving the illusion that nothing had changed. But everything had changed and in so short a space of time. Jeanne Lamprey was dead and her baby stillborn, Philip was missing, and now Reynold Makepeace had gone, stabbed to death in his own ale room, where his word used to be law.

Suddenly, I forced myself away from the wall and started half running, half lurching through the crowded streets – the Walbrook, Dowgate Hill, Elbow Lane and so into Thames Street – instinct guiding my feet back to Baynard's Castle. I was like a man possessed, seeing no one, hearing nothing, until, without in the least knowing how I got there, I found myself sitting on the edge of the narrow bed in the tiny, cupboard-sized room that had been allotted to me for the duration of my stay in the castle. At this point, it occurred to me, quite irrelevantly, that I should have been suspicious from the moment I was given a private chamber and not put to sleep in the common dormitory, along with the scullions and spit-turners and other general dogsbodies who kept the life of the household running smoothly. Such favouritism should have been a warning that something more was required of me. For the present, however, I could concentrate only on the loss of three friends.

Perhaps it was too much to claim Reynold Makepeace as a friend, but as an acquaintance I had valued him highly and until today had regarded the Voyager as a home from home and a safe haven from the perils of the London streets when staying in the capital. Now that refuge was gone, along with Philip and Jeanne Lamprey, whose cottage door had always been open to me and where I was welcomed as a brother.

Someone was rapping on my own door with an urgency that suggested whoever it was had been knocking for some time. I got up and opened it to find Eloise Gray standing on the threshold.

‘It's suppertime,' she said. ‘The trumpet sounded ages ago. I thought to find you in the servants' hall before me. Is anything wrong? It's not like you to neglect your belly. You're not sick, are you?'

I shook my head. ‘I'm not hungry.' When she looked her astonishment, I blurted out the sorry story, feeling foolish, but at the same time needing comfort.

I should have known better than to expect it, I suppose, from a woman who had played a man's role for so long and whose companions I had, in some part, helped to destroy.

‘Dear me!' she said brightly when I had finished. ‘Well, you can't count this Philip Lamprey as a death, nor the child, so you'll be bound to hear of a third one within a day or two. Are you coming down to supper? You surely don't mean to starve yourself on account of a couple of people who, on your own admission, you haven't seen for years. Besides, I seem to remember you have an audience with His Grace of Gloucester this evening. You need to fortify yourself for that. You don't want to risk an empty belly rumbling as you make your obeisance, now do you?'

There was something in what she said, and her brisk, unsympathetic attitude had the effect of making me pull myself together, aware that I was perhaps indulging my grief to an unwarranted degree – or that it would seem so to other people. I was not mourning family, only two acquaintances whose existence had made very little difference to my life. I braced my shoulders and managed a smile.

‘You're right,' I admitted. ‘I'll come right away if –' I forced myself to say it – ‘you'll give me the pleasure of escorting you down to the hall.'

She put her hand on my arm. ‘I don't think we need hurry,' she laughed. ‘It's probably more of that disgusting brown pottage that we were fed at dinner. I suspect Duchess Cicely of being a thought parsimonious. These religious women very often are. They have little time for the pleasures of the flesh.' We had arrived at a narrow, twisting staircase and had to descend in single file. Eloise paused two steps down and, turning her head, glanced up at me, a malicious smile lifting her pretty lips. ‘Although I understand it wasn't always so. Rumour has it that Her Grace of York was far from despising earthly pleasures in her youth.'

‘What exactly do you mean by that?' I spoke more sharply than I intended and added in a milder tone, ‘I've never heard any ill of her.'

Eloise continued her descent, talking over her shoulder as she did so. ‘I daresay you might not. But my lord duke –' she meant Albany, of course – ‘let slip odd things now and again. Being of kin, he was probably privy to family secrets.' We had by now reached the bottom of the staircase and were traversing a passage, where daylight had already given way to torchlight as a fading October sun gave up the unequal struggle to filter through infrequent arrow slits. My companion chuckled. ‘Didn't Her Grace once offer to prove King Edward a bastard?'

‘Oh, that!' I shrugged. ‘I recall hearing something of the sort. But if I remember rightly, it was a long time ago, when the king first revealed his secret marriage to the queen. The duchess was apparently so incensed, so furiously angry, that it's generally reckoned she would have said anything in order to overset it. The marriage, that is. And so far as I know, no such proof was ever forthcoming.'