A Fall of Shadows Page 19

Joan dipped a brief curtsy. “Mistress, Humphrey accuses Mistress Ellyn of making this horrid creation and leaving it in the garden.”

  “What creation?”

  Humphrey tossed what he’d been waving at Ellyn onto the ground at Bess’s feet. “That.”

  Quail lunged for it, but Bess retrieved the item before the dog’s teeth closed around it. The item was a straw-stuffed figure in the shape of a person. A square of cloth had been wound about its body, the material of rust-red linen. And from the center of the figure protruded a single thorn.

  “’Tis the color of your dress, Mistress,” said Joan, her voice shaking.

  “Yes.” Bess pressed her hand to her stomach, her fingers curling over the madder-dyed linen of her gown. “So it is.”

  CHAPTER 17

  “You must not accuse Mistress Ellyn of leaving that poppet in the garden, Humphrey,” said Bess.

  They were closeted together in the front parlor Robert used for his office. Joan no doubt lingered outside the door, her ear pressed to its thick oak. Quail’s nose poked through the gap between the door’s bottom and the flag floor, betraying his presence.

  Humphrey stood with his thick shoulders back. He gripped his wool cap in his hands, the only sign of deference to Bess’s position as the mistress of the house in her brother’s absence. His thinning dark hair lay plastered onto his skull, and the pockmarks his cap normally concealed formed an array of dots across his forehead. If she were to encounter him in London, she’d believe him to be a cutpurse or a bullyboy. Instead, he was her brother’s trusted servant. The fellow who had nursed Robert back to life when his wife and her maid had fallen ill from fever and perished.

  Were Bess to fall ill, she had no confidence that Humphrey would offer her such care.

  “I accuse Ellyn Merrick because I saw her there,” he answered at last.

  “She is welcome to be in the garden,” said Bess. “And sitting among the fading flowers and ripening quince is what she should be doing to recover.”

  “She was not sitting. She was looking about. In your herbs.”

  “She is welcome to do that, as well.”

  “I say she pretended,” he said. “Because it was after her being in the garden that I spied it. Sitting in the bed of winter betony. ’Twas not there this morn when I planted out the cabbages. I’d have seen that … that thing.”

  He jabbed an elbow in the direction of the poppet, which lay on the table between Bess and Humphrey. She had removed its lone thorn—only one for her, as opposed to the other poppet, which had been stuck throughout with many—and tossed it onto the hall hearth.

  “Joan tells me she was with Mistress Ellyn shortly before she went into the garden, and that Mistress Ellyn did not have the poppet with her then,” said Bess.

  “Joan defends the woman, for she pities her. ‘Poor Mistress Ellyn. She has been treated right poorly,’ ” he mimicked. He screwed up his mouth as though he might spit, but thought better of it. “Joan blames a man for bringing Ellyn Merrick to harm, and needs must champion her to one and all. Joan does so because she hates men. ’Twas a man what gave her that nasty scar on her face. I know ’tis true. So she would pity any female with a sorrowful tale. I have no pity for Ellyn Merrick. She is not what she seems, Mistress. There. I have said it.”

  “And so you have, Humphrey Knody.” They were the most words he had ever spoken to her. It was unsurprising they would be words full of bile. “Joan may be sympathetic of Mistress Ellyn, but she would not lie to me to protect her.”

  “I do not say Joan lies, Mistress. I say she is wrong,” he answered. “The woman put that thing in the garden. And she made the other like it.”

  “Ellyn cannot have left that poppet in her family’s farmyard, Humphrey. She was in this very house all of yesterday, recovering.”

  Humphrey sniffled loudly and twisted his lips into a cynical grimace. “You were at the Poynards’, tending to that servant of theirs, that Simon. She slipped out, as she did the day before when she went to the river.”

  “You saw her leave?” she asked.

  He did not answer, which meant he could not prove his claim.

  “Mistress Ellyn would not wish to lay a curse upon me,” she said. “I have given her no cause. I have tended to her and allowed her to stay in this house, and she has been grateful.”

  “She killed her lover, who wanted another. She killed her servant, the one he wanted,” said Humphrey, providing a terse summary. He slanted a look at the poppet. “A curse can kill, Mistress. And now one has been cast upon you.”

  * * *

  Kit had just taken a bite of warm manchet bread when he heard Alice scurrying to answer a knock, followed by heavy footsteps outside the hall.

  He looked over at the doorway. “Timely, Gibb. If you want a meal.” He nodded toward the empty stool near the table. “Sit. I’ll have Alice bring you a mug of ale.”

  “I am not here to eat, Kit,” he said, ducking into the room.

  For once. “What then? Another fire?” he asked lightly, his stomach souring at the thought.

  “No, not a fire. There is a brawl at the Cross Keys. Between the players and some townsmen,” he answered. “I could not stop them.”

  Kit cursed. “Can we not have just a moment’s peace?”

  He stuffed the remainder of the bread in his mouth, and hurried from the house. From the step outside his front door, he could see that the brawl had spilled out into the square.

  Three men took turns swinging at one of the players, who parried their blows with astounding ease.

  “Part them, Gibb!” he called as he ran. “I shall deal with those inside.”

  A crowd clustered around the door. Men, women, children. A few apprentices, cheering on the fighters. One of the burgesses stood there as well. Apparently he felt no need to interfere and looked to be enjoying himself. Several onlookers placed bets on who might win.

  “Stand aside!” Kit shouted, shoving at them to give him a path.

  “Those players be nothing but trouble, Constable!” a fellow called out unhelpfully.

  “As we have been saying,” exclaimed the matron at his side, her wrinkled cheeks flushed from the excitement.

  Kit made his way into the tavern. Inside, there were five spectators for every man involved in the scuffle. Stools and tables had been overturned, ale spilled onto the rushes covering the floor, and broken pieces of furniture snarled men’s feet. Shouts, curses, and cheers rose in a deafening roar. The air stank of sweat.

  Master Johnes tugged at a pair of men wrestling on the floor. “Stop, you reckless idiots! Stop!”

  For his efforts, he was knocked to the ground. His wife, who hid behind the counter where drinks were served up, cried out. Marcye, covering her face with her apron, huddled next to her mother.

  “There, Constable.” The town barber, a comb stuck behind his ear, leaned through the tavern’s wide window. “That be the one who started the fight.”

  He pointed at a red-haired player in a bright-green doublet and trunk hose. It was Willim Dunning. Blood streamed from his nose. The man he pummeled, one of the local traders whose name escaped Kit, looked just as bad. One eye was swollen shut, and his mouth was split open.

  “You, there!” Kit shouted, reaching the nearest set exchanging blows. “Stop now, or I’ll see you all arrested!”

  A stout fellow, his back to Kit, swung wildly at his opponent. His fist collided with Kit’s shoulder. Kit grabbed the man’s arm and yanked him backward. “I order you all to stop!”

  A gunshot rang out. Silence instantly fell. The burgess, smoke still streaming from his snaphance pistol, grinned at Kit from where he stood inside the door.

  “My ceiling!” cried Master Johnes, who’d scrambled to his feet and now stared aghast at the plaster where the ball had broken a sizable hole.

  Someone howled with laughter. Two others decided the shock of the moment was over and resumed scuffling.

  “Stop! Immediately!” Kit shouted, bringing t
heir fight to an end. “All of you are to leave before I find room for you in the jail. Everyone leave, except for the players and you, Master Trader.”

  A few trooped off. The rest, reluctant to miss the diversion that was now to follow, shuffled their feet and sniffled back blood.

  Master Johnes, still bemoaning the damage to his ceiling, straightened stools and tables.

  “Mistress Marcye,” said Kit. “See the door barred behind these good fellows once they have departed.”

  Muttering, the remainder of the curious left, the burgess who’d blown a hole in the ceiling the last to go. Marcye scurried over and barred the door and the window shutters, closing them upon the faces of the curious who’d reassembled outside the opening.

  “Now, gentlemen,” said Kit, rolling his aching shoulder. The man who’d accidentally struck him owned a thick fist. “Tell me the cause of this fight.”

  The three players, Master Howlett not among them, stood in a line, gazing at their feet or sucking the cuts on their knuckles.

  The trader pulled a nose cloth from beneath his tunic and held it to his bleeding mouth. “That one,” he said, wincing as his lips bled afresh with the speaking. “He is a cheat.”

  “I am not,” said Willim Dunning. “The robe is of good brocade.”

  The other two players sidled away, putting distance between themselves and their accused friend.

  “What do you say to Master Trader’s statement that you have cheated him, Master Dunning?”

  “I am no cheat.”

  “You are,” shot back the trader. “You promised finest brocade and a trimming of fox fur upon the robe. But it is not fox fur, and the robe is ruined. Stained, it is! I’ll not be able to sell it now!” He stepped up to Dunning, his nose but inches from the player’s. “I paid you a goodly fifteen shilling for naught! Further, it has a tear my wife cannot mend!”

  A stain and a tear?

  “You sold the robe, Willim?” said one of his fellows, just as tall as Dunning but with a soft, cultured voice. “No wonder that I could not find it. And I blamed the Poynards’ servants for the theft when it was you! ’Fore God, Howlett will have your head!”

  “He no longer wants the thing. Were you not aware? He calls the robe accursed,” Dunning answered him with a sweep of one long-fingered hand, a gesture fit for the stage. Except this was not the stage, but a blood-spattered, ale-soaked tavern, its owner moaning over a shattered stool and a hole in the ceiling. “He had tossed it aside to be disposed of.”

  “Accursed?” asked the trader, his lower lip splitting wide again, blood dripping from it. “You sold me clothing that is not only ruined but accursed?” He stuck out his palm. “I would have my fifteen shillings back. At once.”

  Dunning jutted his chin. “You shall receive your money in full, sirrah.”

  “I shall receive that money, or you”—the trader jabbed Dunning’s chest with his forefinger—“you shall be hung from the gibbet as a lesson to one and all!”

  Dunning blanched, his pallor revealing the freckles that dotted the bridge of his nose.

  “What is the stain, Master Trader?” asked Kit. Blood? And would the tear match the scrap of black material Kit had found snagged in brambles near the old fort hill?

  The trader shrugged. “I know not. All I know is that the robe will not fetch the price I paid for it, with such a mark.”

  “Do you have it now at your shop?” asked Kit.

  He nodded, mopping his lip with his nose cloth.

  “I would have you show me the robe.” He looked at the players. “And you are to go with my assistant to the stocks. Save for Master Dunning. I will meet with you at my house.”

  “What have we done?” the one who hadn’t yet spoken wailed.

  “Caused a brawl,” said Kit. “Master Johnes, I shall speak with you later about the fine you are to pay for this fight today.”

  “But my ceiling!” He gawped helplessly at the hole.

  “The town shall pay for its repair,” said Kit, uncertain the burgesses would agree to do so, even though one of them had caused the damage. He turned to the trader. “Come, Master Trader. Show me this robe.”

  * * *

  “You saw no one toss a witch’s poppet over the garden fence?” Bess asked the servant of the family whose property adjoined Robert’s.

  A fine drizzle had begun to fall, and she and the girl huddled together on the strip of land behind the houses’ garden walls. The servant had been given charge of the family’s youngest, an infant but a few months old. She jiggled the tiny red-faced boy, swathed in tight linen swaddling bands except for his arms, who made ready to release a wail.

  “A witch’s poppet?” she asked, her eyes wide. “No one, Widow Ellyott. Not a soul. When think you someone did toss it into your garden?”

  “Today, mayhap this afternoon.” No earlier than then, thought Bess, as Humphrey had been at work in the garden that morning.

  “I was out in the courtyard. Some of this day,” said the servant. She hunched over the baby in her arms, protecting it from the dangerous rain. The infant reached for the strings of the girl’s coif and tugged. “Scrubbing linens clean afore the clouds came and the rain began. I made no note of any person in particular. I did hear your manservant moving about in your yard.” She screwed up her face as she sought to recall. “Lads walked by, chattering, though they ought be at their classes or their work. I cannot remember others.”

  “Not any of those players who are in town?” asked Joan, who stood in the muck and weeds that lay behind the brick wall of their garden.

  “Nay, not them, for I’d have marked them most certain,” the girl said. The infant she carried let out a feeble whimper. She tucked her finger into the child’s mouth to suck, quieting it.

  “What about an old woman who covers her lower face with a piece of linen?” asked Bess.

  “I saw no such woman, Mistress, but I did have this one to keep my attention upon.”

  Bess looked over at Joan. “’Twas not Mistress Ellyn,” said Joan.

  Bess’s gaze shifted from Joan’s face to the upper floor of Robert’s house, visible over the top of the garden wall. A woman’s face showed in one of the chamber windows. Ellyn watched what they did.

  “My thanks. Hurry into your mistress’s house with the babe,” said Bess to the servant girl, sending her back through the opening in her neighbor’s fence.

  Bess scanned the area behind the garden wall, though the daylight was fading and the rain clouds hung heavy in the sky. As she’d observed when she searched the afternoon Ellyn fled, the ground was well trampled by the feet of all those who chose to make it a path. ’Twas a narrow stretch of land, unusual in that no one in particular laid claim to it. In the summer, the townsfolk’s children often played with their whirl-jacks and their hobbyhorses behind Robert’s property and the houses alongside. Someone who’d passed by had lost a brass pin from their clothing. Not far from the pin, a worn fragment of leather lacing was tangled in a patch of taller grass.

  Joan came over to her. “What hope you to find, Mistress?”

  “A clue I’ll not discover, Joan.”

  “Mayhap one of the boys that girl heard did toss the poppet over the wall.”

  Bess stopped her futile search. “In jest out of cruelty?” Up at the house, Ellyn had withdrawn from the window. “We can be certain of one fact. ’Twas not Mother Fletcher who left the poppet for me.”

  “Can we be certain, Mistress? We know not to where she has gone.”

  Sighing, Bess lifted her face to the mist of rain; her skin prickled where the droplets landed. “I wish I could once again be a child in Oxford, Joan. Where I felt safe and protected. Where murders and danger did not consume me. Before I understood the evil in this world.”

  Before her father had died. Before Laurence had taken her beloved husband from her. Before her hope of sanctuary here in Wiltshire had become a false hope, as unreal a thing as the draperies hung about a players’ stage to offer the pr
etense of other times and places. Before. Before.

  Alas, she could not return to the safety of her youth, though.

  And evil pressed all around.

  * * *

  “They are safely secured in the stocks, Kit. Full of complaints, the two of them,” said Gibb, slipping into Kit’s hall. “The other one, Willim Dunning, waits below. I have paid the butcher’s boy to keep watch over him for us.”

  The lad was strong from hefting slabs of meat. Dunning would not escape his guard.

  “My thanks, Gibb.” He glanced at the purpling bruise beneath his cousin’s right eye. “You need to duck next time, coz.”

  Gibb smirked. “So should you.” He nodded at Kit’s shoulder, which Kit rubbed to ease the stiffness that ached.

  “A minor blow.”

  “If you insist,” said Gibb. “But what have you learned from the robe?”

  Kit had spread it atop the narrow table set near the hall window. The lantern he’d lit revealed the raised pattern woven into the black brocade.

  “I warrant the stains are blood.” They were not easy to see on the material. Held up to the light in the proper manner, though, dark streaks showed across the front of the robe as though it had been spattered. “Also, do you see this rip?” Kit pointed out the tear along the hem. “It is a curious thing.”

  Kit retrieved the scrap of black material from where he’d stored it alongside a bloodied knife and broken reed pen. Setting the scrap adjacent to the tear, he moved it into place where the edges of one matched that of the other.

  “I found this torn bit in brambles near the old fort hill,” he said.

  Gibb whistled between his teeth. “We now have the robe worn by the fellow who killed Reade. And all this while that I searched for it, it’s been amongst the goods in a trader’s shop.”

  Kit drew his fingers down the length of the fur—rabbit, not fox—trimming the edge of the robe. Long enough to reach the ground and of deepest black, it would be a fitting disguise against the dark of night. The fur beneath his fingertips was luxuriously soft, except for where dried blood caked it.

  “Bring Dunning up here,” said Kit. “And have the butcher’s boy wait.”