She stared at me for a second or two, then threw back her head and laughed. ‘You thought that was Miles, did you?’ Her great age hadn’t dimmed her wits. ‘Oh dear, oh dear! You have been wandering all around the churchyard and getting nowhere fast, haven’t you? Even the dead must be laughing. No, my lad, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’ve no idea at all. As I told you at the time, Christmas is the time for young idiots to put on masks just for the sheer pleasure of frightening people.’
I thanked her politely and then, without waiting for James, turned and left the house. He caught me up a minute or so later to find me, oblivious of the cold, leaning against the wall beside the street door, staring into space. I was not even aware of him until he shook my arm.
‘Master Chapman! Are you all right?’ His voice eventually penetrated my dark and swirling thoughts.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not all right. I’m sick to my very guts.’ I turned on him savagely. ‘Do you realize that I’ve wasted two weeks blindly’ — and how appropriate that word was — ‘following a trail which has led me nowhere. All around the churchyard, as Dame Drusilla phrased it. Small wonder she thought even the dead were laughing.’
‘There’s no need to blame yourself. It always seemed possible it might be Deakin.’
‘Possible!’ I repeated angrily. ‘But there’s the rub. I turned “possible” into “probable” and then into almost a certainty. I’ve been the stupidest fool in Christendom. I! I, who should know better!’
And what were you doing, God, I thought bitterly to myself, that you didn’t nudge my elbow to bring me to my senses? He’d let me make an idiot of myself, but perhaps, I reflected uneasily, he’d been right to do so. I’d been getting too set up in my own conceit and, because of that conceit, young Dick Hodge was dead. I couldn’t remember at any time during the past twelve days asking for God’s guidance. I suddenly felt I had been humbled and, what was more, that I deserved it.
‘What do we do now?’ James asked miserably.
I opened my mouth to say that I didn’t know, that we now had no choice but to leave it to the sheriff and his men, but found myself saying something quite different.
‘We must go to see your father,’ I said. ‘You must persuade him to tell us who it was who came to see him, wearing the dog mask.’
NINETEEN
Dog mask! As soon as I uttered the words it was as though a great mist which had been clogging my brain for days had been suddenly lifted.
Alyson Carpenter had told me that my attacker at the Clifton house had been wearing a dog mask and Adam had described to me a play about the Sultan of Morocco and his dog which the mummers had performed. I remembered, too, the jumble of masks they had in their possession, including several depicting birds — one of which they claimed had been stolen and then returned, a statement I had never thought to query; at least, not until now.
‘They’ll all be at dinner,’ James said, ‘and I should be with them. We won’t get Father alone till after the meal. And, indeed,’ he added, ‘you must be wanting your own dinner, Master Chapman. Come back later and we’ll confront him together.’
He was right. I realized that I was very hungry, but was loth to go home. Adela would probably have returned from seeing Jenny and Burl by now and I wondered what sort of state she would be in; whether or not she would even have prepared a meal. Then I recollected that Margaret was there and would have taken charge.
All the same, I postponed my arrival at Small Street by going round by the castle and asking to speak to whoever it was who had found Dick Hodge’s body. I had no authority to do this, and was faintly surprised when one of the castle reeves came through from the inner ward, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, an indication that he had left his dinner in order to see me. I couldn’t help reflecting that there were times when my reputation as being in the king’s employ had its uses, however misleading it might be.
‘Master Chapman.’ The man nodded curtly to me, but his tone was civil enough. All the same, it was not his duty to attend upon the whims of a pedlar and I could tell he was resentful of his fear of offending me. ‘How can I help you? There’s nothing further I can say about finding poor Dick’s body than what I have already told Sergeant Manifold and the sheriff, information which I’m very certain the whole town must know by now.’
‘I’m really more interested in the mummers,’ I said. ‘I was informed they’d left.’
‘At first light.’ The reeve shrugged. ‘In fact, the carts were loaded and they were waiting to get away before the gates were open. One of them fetched the horses from the Bell Lane stables last night in order that there should be no delay from that quarter this morning. They should be well on the road by now. They were extremely anxious to get back to Hampshire and their winter lodgings before the weather worsened, which it very often does after Christmas. And the younger woman is, of course, in a delicate condition. So I’m afraid if you were wishful to speak to them, you’re unlucky. It would take a fast horse to catch up with them now.’ A slight smile touched his lips: he obviously knew the stories about me and horses.
‘Their winter quarters, I think Mistress Tabitha told me, are at Sweetwater Manor, between Winchester and Southampton, belonging to a Master Tuffnel.’
The reeve nodded. ‘Yes, that’s right. A Master Cyprian Tuffnel.’
‘Cyprian?’
My tone was so sharp that he looked at me curiously. ‘Yes, so one of them told me. Not a common name, I grant you, but a saint’s name for all that.’
‘It’s Master Marvell’s name, chosen presumably by his father, Sir George.’
The reeve fingered his chin. ‘So it is,’ he said. ‘Do you think it has some particular significance?’
I didn’t reply to his question because I wasn’t sure of the answer — not yet, at any rate. But I did feel a growing conviction that God had come back to me and was once more directing my footsteps.
I thanked the man for his help and left him staring after me, a puzzled frown creasing his brow. He was probably trying to work out what help he had given me. In spite of the bitter cold and my gnawing hunger, I went and sat on a wall close to the Mint. (I could hear them hammering away inside, fashioning the new coins needed for King Richard’s reign.) With a concentrated effort of memory, I recalled Tabitha saying that her father had been warrener to Master Tuffnel’s father, and that she and he had grown up together. Which meant that Cyprian Tuffnel was a man of roughly her age and of an age with Sir George Marvell and Alderman Trefusis. Had he, too, been a soldier in the French wars? Had the other two known him? Had they been companions? Could that possibly be why Sir George had given his son the name of Cyprian, in memory of an army friendship?
I took a deep breath. I was rushing ahead too fast again, letting my theories outstrip the facts, jumping to conclusions. It was my besetting sin, but this time I could not rid myself of the feeling that I was justified. A recollection of Tabitha saying that Master Tuffnel had been good to her and Ned Chorley when they most needed it rose to the surface of my mind. Also that Cyprian Tuffnel had been some years older than herself — which would make him even closer to George Marvell’s age …
A sudden blast of icy wind blowing up from both of Bristol’s rivers made me shiver violently and get hurriedly to my feet, grabbing my cloak around me. It was time to go home and find out what was happening there. But as I walked through the icy streets and the church bells still ringing out for the later Epiphany Day services, I had a sudden vision of the terrible injuries inflicted on Ned Chorley and Alfred Littlewood by the French, and then of those perpetrated on George Marvell; the lopped off fingers and the gouged-out eyes. The word that kept going around and around in my head was ‘retribution’.