All the same, her accusations and my own failure continued to haunt me throughout a largely silent meal. The roast coney and vegetables might have been sawdust for all the notice I took of their taste, in spite of the fact that I ate two helpings (although, to be fair to myself, I shared the second one with Hercules). Finally, as I pushed my plate aside and took a swig of ale, I put one of my hands over Theresa’s, where it lay, fidgeting restlessly with a knife, on the table. The brown blotched skin of advancing age was dry and rough to the touch.
‘I must start for home in the morning, Mistress. Dame Maud is in the right of it. But there’s still the rest of today. I’ll take one last look along Upper Brockhurst ridge, particularly at the well. I’ve no good reason to offer you for doing so, except a deep-rooted and completely unjustified feeling that it could hold the key to Eris’s disappearance.’
Eighteen
‘Why do you want to visit the ridge again?’ Maud snapped. ‘A waste of time and effort, if you ask my opinion, Master Chapman. We all know there’s nothing up there. Ned himself searched the whole area, including the well, the morning after Eris’s disappearance. So wherever she is, it isn’t in the ruins of Upper Brockhurst Hall, a fact to which half the village can testify.’
Theresa nodded. ‘I wasn’t here, myself, but it’s what everyone will tell you. And that well’s been empty for years. It really ought to be filled in,’ she added, her thoughts momentarily diverted. ‘It’s a danger to all the children of the village. Not so much at this time of year, I grant you, but in the summer months when the more adventurous of them go up on the ridge to play. Oh, I know the canopy’s been removed and it has a lid,’ she went on hastily, forestalling her daughter-in-law’s objection, ‘but children are perfectly capable of opening it, even if it takes two or three of them to do it. The village elders are fortunate that there have been no further accidents since Ned Rawbone was a lad. That rusty ladder’s most unsafe. It was partially eaten away the last time I saw it, and that’s some while ago now.’
‘It still is,’ I agreed. ‘I can vouch for that. I’ve climbed down it. It’s just that …’ I shrugged unhappily, finding it impossible to explain the conviction that gripped me every time I visited the Upper Brockhurst woods that Eris was somehow close at hand.
Maud said again, ‘It’s a waste of your time. You might as well spend the rest of the day here, with us, by the fire. Conserve your strength. You’ll need to be up and about first thing tomorrow morning if you’re to make the most of the daylight hours. They’re still short this time of year. Go early enough and you might fall in with a cart travelling in the direction of Bristol.’
‘Oh, let him visit the ridge if he wants to,’ Theresa grunted. ‘A great lad like him doesn’t need to worry about saving his strength. It stands to reason he doesn’t want to be sitting around here all day, chatting to a couple of women, and one of them old enough to be his mother. He won’t find anything up there on the ridge – at least, he hasn’t so far – but if it keeps him happy, where’s the harm in it?’
Maud opened her mouth as if she would argue the point; then, seeming to change her mind, shut it again.
I glanced at Hercules’s recumbent form. Having finished his dinner, he had retired once more to his place by the hearth and was now stretched full length, fast asleep.
‘I’ll leave the dog with you, if I may,’ I said. ‘His little legs will find themselves overtaxed, I’m afraid, in the next week or so. I’ll let him rest while he can.’
‘He’s no trouble.’ Maud pushed the ale jug towards me, inviting me to pour myself another drink, which I did, not needing a second bidding. The simple action nudged my memory and I turned to the older woman with a smile.
‘You overcame your scruples during this morning’s Mass, Dame Theresa. You drank from the Roman chalice, after all.’
She pursed her lips in disapproval, partly, I suspected, at her own lack of backbone.
‘There are times, chapman,’ she said, ‘when you know that taking a stand will achieve you nothing. You might just as well grin and bear whatever it is. And as, according to you, Sir Anselm has consecrated the cups to the greater glory of God, I’ve decided that this is one of those occasions. That must be my excuse for not speaking out.’
‘But you have the added consolation,’ I comforted her, ‘of knowing that many generations of men, women and children have drunk from those cups without, apparently, having incurred the wrath of the Almighty. Ever since, if I’m right in my supposition, the priest known as Light-fingered Lightfoot chanced upon them in Upper Brockhurst Hall after the great plague.’
‘This is only guesswork on your part, Master Chapman,’ was Maud’s acid comment.
Theresa frowned her down. ‘He’s admitted that. So, tell us again what you think happened,’ she encouraged me. ‘How did the Roman bowls come into the Church’s possession?’
I was nothing loath to give my theory another airing.
‘I believe,’ I said, ‘that the wellers who were working for Humphrey and Tobias Martin found the two chalices whilst digging the well, but did the bowls belong to the finders or to the men on whose land they’d been discovered? The silver was valuable, worth a great deal of money. If the wellers had had any sense, they would have kept quiet concerning their find, but perhaps they were unable to. One or both of the brothers might have been present when the bowls were dug up.’
‘Go on,’ Theresa urged as I paused for another swig of ale. ‘I realize that you’ve already told us all this once, but I wasn’t attending properly the first time.’
‘There’s nothing much more to tell,’ I shrugged. ‘I think it probable that the wellers walked off with the bowls. When the brothers discovered what they’d done, they went after them and killed them. They carried their treasure back to Upper Brockhurst Hall, assuming that the murders would be put down to the work of outlaws or footpads. Sometime, doubtless, they would have intended taking their booty to either Gloucester or Bristol, or even, maybe, to London, in order to sell it. But they died in the outbreak of plague that wiped out the whole village a few days later.’
‘You don’t know any of this for certain,’ Maud reiterated scathingly as she whisked the ale jug out of my reach and began once again to clear the table. I had often seen Adela move in just such a fashion, like a sleepwalker, as she performed a task that she did several times a day, barely conscious of her actions, her mind elsewhere. I would have given much to know what, or of whom, Maud was thinking just then, with that glazed, faraway look in her eyes.
Her thoughts, whatever they were, were interrupted by a knock on the cottage door. She called out, ‘Come in! It’s not bolted,’ and, to prove her point, stepped forward to unlatch it.
Rob Pomphrey stood on the threshold, rubbing first one foot and then the other against the back of the opposite leg, in a vain attempt to rid his shoes of their coating of mud. His nose, red and running from the cold, sniffed appreciatively at the smell of roast rabbit that lingered tantalizingly on the air.
Maud laughed. ‘Come and sit down, Rob. Have some dinner. If you don’t mind the burnt scrapings from around the dish, I can probably top a trencher for you.’
I have rarely seen a man move faster. He was seated at the table before Maud had finished reaching into the bread crock to find a hunk of stale loaf. From this, she hacked a thick slice which she placed in front of him; then, with knife and spoon, she scraped the earthenware pot clean of its remaining meat and vegetables.
Rob set to with a will, producing his own knife and hacking the trencher in half. He then proceeded to stuff his mouth so full that it was impossible for him to speak for several minutes. He could only nod or shake his head in response to the two women’s enquiries about his family.
Eventually, however, when he had washed down his impromptu meal with what was left of the ale in the bottom of the jug, he solemnly announced, ‘Been talking to Billy Tyrrell.’