Cicely Ford! Now here was a true coincidence. I had been thinking of her as I walked along Broad Street and through the Frome Gate, only to find her seated at my table, drinking a cup of Adela’s elderberry wine, her left arm cradling Adam. He, needless to say, was behaving perfectly, peaceful and quiet, even though awake. All his life, he has known how to please women and earn their adoration. Many’s the time I’ve wished that I could learn the trick.
Cicely Ford was a lay sister at the Magdalen Nunnery, which stood on the rising ground a little way north-west of Saint James’s Priory and opposite the church of Saint Michael-on-the-Mount-Without. The nunnery had been founded three centuries earlier by the wife of Sir Robert Fitzhardinge as a house of retreat and a seminary for young women, and dedicated to Saint Mary Magdalen. When Cicely Ford had entered the community four years before, following the deaths of her betrothed and his elder brother, it had been her intention to join the order. But in the end, for reasons I had never discovered, she had abandoned this idea and stayed on as a lay sister, helping to instruct the merchants’ daughters who attended the seminary, or waiting on any rich woman who felt she would benefit from a few days’ peace and quiet in retreat, away from the company of her nearest and dearest.
It was a very small cell of the Augustinian Order, and until Marion Baldock had joined their number, as Sister Jerome, the previous year, there had been no more than three nuns in residence for quite some time, leading an unexciting and blameless existence; a far cry from the preceding century, when stories of their daring and courage in taking food to the beleaguered villagers of Bedminster during the Black Death had made the community famous throughout the city and beyond.
As I entered the cottage, Cicely turned her head and smiled at me. Her corn-coloured hair was strained back beneath a grey veil, but the severity of the style in no way detracted from the beauty of her almost perfect oval face, which, with its soft, creamy skin, was as flower-like as ever. Her blue eyes lit with pleasure at seeing me.
She murmured, ‘Roger!’ and held out one small hand which I gallantly kissed. I avoided Adela’s cynical gaze; a look that told me she understood exactly what was going on. She knew that I liked to keep these little shrines to my past goddesses brightly lit in the secret recesses of my mind, even though I was fully aware that, given the chance, I could never have lived with any one of them. Adela was the only woman I had ever met capable of the sort of love that demanded no ties or promises, but let me be myself and allowed me the freedom to wander the open road whenever the fancy took me. She was totally altruistic, the only possible wife and helpmeet for someone as selfish as I was. In return, she had all my heart — but I did like to pretend sometimes that I was still a lad-about-town, an attitude she regarded with her customary indulgence.
‘Mistress Ford has come to invite us to be her guests, the day after tomorrow, at Vespers,’ Adela said.
‘It’s the twenty-second of July, the feast day of Saint Mary Magdalen,’ Cicely explained. ‘The lay sisters can each invite two visitors for the evening service. And just now, as I was passing your door, I suddenly thought of you, Roger. And Mistress Chapman, of course!’ She gently withdrew her hand, which I had retained for far too long, with a faint frown of disapproval and a small, apologetic smile at Adela.
‘We shall be delighted to be your guests, shan’t we, Roger?’ my wife demanded peremptorily.
‘We shall, indeed,’ I concurred. ‘But what about the children? What about feeding Adam?’
They were cries becoming more familiar to me with each passing day. But I could always rely on Adela to be one step ahead of me.
‘I shall feed Adam before I go. As for the other two, I shall naturally ask Margaret to come and look after them. I’m sure she’ll agree. She can stay here the night, in our bed, with Elizabeth and me. You can share Nicholas’s mattress.’
I grimaced. My stepson was a lively sleeper and I could foresee precious little rest for either of us that night. Adela, without a single look or word of reproach, had got her own back. That would teach me to hang on to other women’s hands beyond the call of duty.
‘And now, dearest,’ my wife added, ‘I think you should make yourself respectable. Put on your tunic and walk Mistress Ford home.’
Cicely protested, but Adela was adamant. ‘The paths and alleyways around here aren’t safe, even in broad daylight. And I know whereabouts you live.’
So did I. Although Cicely was a wealthy young woman, having inherited her guardian’s fortune as well as her father’s, when she decided against becoming a nun, she had rented a tiny cottage, a little higher up Saint Michael’s Hill than the nunnery, facing the public gallows. It was not a spot many people would have chosen, but I could guess her reasons for selecting it, and not simply because it was close to the nunnery. It was on those gallows that the man she had loved, Robert Herepath, had died, deserted by everyone, including herself, protesting his innocence to the last; innocence that had been amply demonstrated a few months later, when the man he was supposed to have murdered, Margaret Walker’s father, had returned to Bristol, alive and well. Having subsequently married Margaret’s daughter, Lillis Walker, and solved the mystery of William Woodward’s disappearance, I had, like my mother-in-law, always felt some sort of responsibility for Cicely Ford.
Adela knew this and had therefore forestalled me with the suggestion that I would, sooner or later, have made myself. And it gave me an excuse to be absent when Richard Manifold called.
Quarter of an hour later, Cicely and I left the cottage, and only just in time as far as I was concerned. Glancing behind me as we turned into the alley alongside the house, I saw the sergeant emerging from the shadows of the Frome Gate, so, taking my companion’s arm, I hurried her forward. The open ground around Saint James’s Priory was already half-covered with booths and stalls in various stages of construction, ready for the opening of the fair in five days’ time.
Cicely must have read my thoughts. ‘By this hour next Saturday afternoon,’ she said, ‘this place will be crowded with people buying, selling, dancing, cramming the side-shows-’
‘Drinking, thieving, throwing up,’ I interrupted, and incurred her displeasure.
‘That’s a very jaundiced view, if I may say so, Roger. Don’t you like people to enjoy themselves?’
‘Of course! Just so long as they don’t pick my pockets or try to steal my children away. We live in perilous times, Mistress Ford.’
She laughed. ‘We always have. I used to listen to my father talking when I was a child. There never were such perilous days as he lived through.’ I grinned in acknowledgement of her argument, and she smiled up at me. ‘I’m so glad you’re happy, Roger. I can tell that you and Adela were made for one another. I was sad when you married Lillis Walker. I never thought her the right wife for you. But Adela’s different. You are happy, aren’t you?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Only I heard the note of hesitation in my voice.
Her beautiful eyes filled with tears. ‘Then mind you don’t have anything to reproach yourself with. If only I’d believed in Robert! I could have comforted his final hours, let him know that one person, at least, had faith in him.’
I tried to console her. ‘It might only have made things worse. His death would have seemed even more pointless and unjust.’
We had climbed halfway up Saint Michael’s Hill to where the gallows stood. Some poor lost soul was hanging there in chains, part of his face already pecked away by the crows.
‘Why do you choose to live here?’ I demanded violently, chasing off two of these scavengers as I spoke. But I knew the answer before she made it.
‘It’s close to the nunnery. And I feel closer to Robert. Sometimes, I feel he’s there in the cottage with me. Do you think that foolish?’