I heaved myself away from the chapel wall and found that I was shivering. A man could think too much and never get any satisfactory answers. In the end, I could only be guided by instinct and hope that it was sound; that it was God’s way of working through me. Action was what I needed now. Epiphany had come: the Christ Child had been shown to the Magi. It was the Twelfth Day and Christmas was over.
‘You’re sure about this?’ Adela asked anxiously. ‘Going as far as Hampshire at this time of the year?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but I’ll take my pack. It won’t be a wasted journey. People are glad to see pedlars at this time of year when the Christmas festivities are behind them and spring is still a long way off. They’re so happy to see a fresh face, they’ll part with their money all the more easily.’
Adela sighed. ‘We could do with all you can earn,’ she admitted. ‘This Christmas has emptied our purse. Everything seems to have cost so much more than last year. All the same, you would be able to sell as much if you worked the hamlets and villages hereabouts. If the weather should turn bad, you might find yourself trapped in Hampshire for months.’
She still looked pale and unhappy. I knew why she wanted me to stay; the thought of Dick Hodge’s brutal death still lay like a bruise on her spirit, as indeed it did on mine. She needed comforting, but she knew why I had to go: I had explained my reasons to her. She had been shocked and, at first, disbelieving, having looked on the mummers as friends, but I had finally convinced her by my arguments that I must at least go after them and satisfy myself that I was right.
‘And what will you do if you are?’ she asked.
I admitted that I didn’t know and said it depended. ‘On what?’ she might have asked, but she knew as well as I did that I had no answer. I made her promise to say nothing of the matter to anyone until my return, when I would know more; when I could decide what had to be done.
We celebrated the Feast of the Epiphany that evening at St Giles and said goodbye to Christmas for another year. And in the morning I set out for Hampshire, warmly wrapped up in my new blue cloak against the January weather, and with my pack on my back and my cudgel in my hand.
TWENTY
It was a fortnight later when I finally discovered the community of Sweetwater, with its moated manor house, tucked away in the countryside between Winchester and Southampton.
The journey had taken me longer than I had expected; though perhaps no longer than I had any right to expect, it now being past the middle of January. The weather had indeed worsened the further the month progressed, with heavy snow showers and driving winds forcing me to seek shelter in friendly monasteries and other religious houses for as much as up to two days at a time. Added to this, of course, I had been peddling my goods around the villages and hamlets through which I had passed, and often been detained by their inhabitants, who were starved of news from the outside world once passing traffic had grown scarce on the frozen roads. Wayfarers were few and far between in the depth of winter, and I was a welcome presence in nearly every dwelling at which I stopped, whether manor, smallholding, cottage or hovel. With Christmas over for another year, and with the days not yet sufficiently longer so as to be noticeable, the inevitable pall of depression was clouding the minds of country folk; and so my advent was hailed with relief and the chance to hear of other people’s doings or to discuss such news as had reached them in the summer months rarely passed up.
Of these latter events, most of my customers wanted to know of the happenings in London during June and July, of the new king and, most of all, if the rumours that he had had the deposed young king and his brother murdered in the Tower were true. These rumours now seemed rife throughout the country — the West Country, at least: I couldn’t answer for other parts — and I did my best to reassure anyone to whom I spoke that the stories were false. The trouble was that I had no proof to offer as to the young princes’ actual fate and found myself resenting the fact. It was high time, I felt, that the king made the whereabouts of his nephews known.
The worst part of the journey was crossing the great plain near Salisbury. I passed the brooding Giants’ Dance, the Stone Henge as our Saxon forebears had named it, raised who knew how many hundreds of years before they had set foot in this island. I had encountered a particularly violent, but fortunately brief, snowstorm that afternoon and, for a while, had been forced to shelter among the stones themselves. I can recall even now, after all this lapse of years, how uneasy they made me feel, as if some magic possessed them. I remember how relieved I was when the snow abated and I was finally able to press on.
It was two days later, with a fragile sun riding high in the noonday sky that, thanks to a passing woodsman who knew the surrounding countryside like the back of his own hand, I arrived at Sweetwater Manor. This, as I have already said, was a moated house and the main gate was approached across a wooden bridge, wide enough and strong enough to admit a substantial cart. There was a bell on a rope hanging beside the gate, which I pulled as hard as I could. The sound of its clapper jangled away into the distance and then the silence came creeping back, more profound than before.
The place might have been deserted: there was no sound or sign of any life anywhere. I could see the byres, the pigsties, the sheep pens, but animals were keeping themselves close and not venturing forth in such freezing weather. The outhouses also appeared devoid of life, and I was just beginning to wonder if the whole compound was indeed untenanted when a spiral of smoke went up through a hole in one of the outhouse roofs, followed within a few seconds by the emergence of a young housemaid from a side door of the main building. She skidded across the frozen courtyard in her wooden pattens and disappeared inside the hen coop, presumably to collect the morning’s eggs.
I clanged the bell again, louder and more imperatively than before. And again.
At this third summons, the main door of the manor opened and the steward stepped out, a cloak held firmly around him and using his staff of office as a prop to help him walk across the slippery ground. He opened the gate, obviously in a furious temper.
‘Where’s that fool of a porter?’ he demanded.
Not being able to say, I simply shrugged and stepped inside.
‘Pedlars round to the kitchen entrance,’ the man snapped, having now taken a good look at me.
‘I wish to see Master Tuffnel,’ I said. ‘Master Cyprian Tuffnel.’
For a moment, he was palpably taken aback by my knowledge of his master’s name, but he quickly recovered and pointed with his staff to the right-hand side of the building.