As the door closed behind him, Anthony laughed. ‘If George thinks I’m afraid of either Simon or my lady mother, he’s getting senile in his old age. Now, come along, Chapman.’ He offered me his arm. ‘I’ll show you to my chamber. The housekeeper should have had it prepared by this time. Then it’ll be supper. I don’t know about you, but after all this excitement, I’m ravenous.’
Supper was a difficult meal from the moment that Dame Audrea arrived in the hall to find her elder son already installed in her customary place in the centre of the dais; and herself relegated to the seat on his left hand. Simon would have attempted to oust his brother by force had he not been restrained by his mother’s frowns and hissed admonitions to behave.
The tensions and undercurrents among family members and retainers were aggravated by the presence of strangers; two monks returning to Glastonbury, a merchant on his way back to Bath, a royal messenger travelling on the King’s business which had taken him first into Wales and who was now heading south to Plymouth, and a band of mummers touring the surrounding countryside. All had begged asylum for the night and, according to the rules of hospitality, none had been refused. With the exception of the mummers, who, as mere entertainers, were relegated to one of the lower trestles, the guests sat at the high table, where the strain of making normal conversation soon began to show on the faces of the dame and her younger son. The King’s messenger and the Bath merchant were naturally unaware of anything unusual, but the two monks, obviously acquainted with the Croxcombe household, were plainly agog with curiosity.
At Anthony’s instruction, I had been seated among the household officers, one or two of whom made plain their resentment of me out of loyalty to their mistress. Chief of these was a red-haired man of roughly my own age, addressed either as Edward or Master Micheldever, and whom I knew from Josiah Litton to be the receiver. And, again drawing on my recollections of what the landlord had told me, I also knew that the young girl beside him must be his recently acquired bride. She was, indeed, extremely pretty with a peach-like skin, eyes of a deep cerulean blue, a rosebud mouth and, when she smiled, a row of tiny, pearly teeth. Altogether too good to be true; and I decided within the first ten minutes of meeting her that, if I were her husband, I wouldn’t trust her out of my sight. For all her apparently modest demeanour and lowered lids, I noticed the way her gaze strayed constantly towards the high table, her moist lips parting invitingly every time she encountered Anthony Bellknapp’s approving stare. There was going to be trouble there, as Josiah Litton had foreseen.
The man with the thinning grey hair, faded blue eyes and stammering speech sitting opposite me, could only be the chaplain, Henry Rokewood. He, too, kept looking towards the dais with a kind of dreadful fascination, his colourless lips trembling with panic and his stutter growing noticeably worse each time that Anthony glanced in his direction.
To Sir Henry’s left sat a burly fair-haired man, almost as broad as he was tall, bull-necked and generally giving the impression of someone you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley on a moonless night. He might easily have been somebody’s bravo, but he wasn’t, and the others addressed him respectfully as Master Chamberlain. I racked my brains to remember what the landlord had told me concerning him, and eventually recollected that he had a sister whose bastard son was thought to be the progeny of Anthony Bellknapp, although the girl had never been persuaded to name him as the father. The chamberlain was called Jonathan Slye.
That left, among the senior members of the household, Reginald Kilsby, bailiff, a tall, well-built man with an air of self-consequence that was almost tangible. He was handsome and knew it, with plentiful dark hair just beginning to grey at the temples, and a pair of fine hazel eyes which he opened to their widest extent whenever he condescended to make free with the pearls of wisdom he was convinced fell from his lips. The proprietorial way in which he smiled at Dame Audrea, and the looks of venom that he darted at her elder son, gave credence to the landlord’s assertion that the bailiff entertained hopes of marrying his mistress. I recalled the rumour that he was already her lover and wondered if it were true.
It was a strange meal, with an air of unreality about it, stemming from the fact that there was one burning topic uppermost in everybody’s mind, but no one felt able to discuss it in so public a location. Even when George Applegarth, his duties done, joined us, squeezing in alongside me on the bench, the talk was of a desultory nature. Someone ascertained that I came from Bristol and asked about John Jay’s missing carvel, but the interest was perfunctory. It was not local enough to concern them in this part of the world. What might be big news in Bristol and Waterford (and other Irish towns) was of little concern in rural Somerset. Young Mistress Micheldever, whose name, she informed me, was Rose — she had by this time discovered that I was worth her attention — asked me if I knew anything of Queen Elizabeth’s latest pregnancy, but when I said no, she lapsed once more into a bored silence. I could have told her that I had seen the Queen and other members of the royal family only two or three months earlier, in London, but that would only have involved me in explanations that I would rather avoid. It might have aroused suspicions of my real reason for being at Croxcombe, and I wished to remain a chapman who had twisted his ankle and was waiting for it to mend.
The business of eating and drinking was at last at an end. If the guests had thought it odd that they were offered no entertainment after the meal, they were too polite to comment. They bowed over their hostess’s hand, thanked their host and followed the steward as he conducted them to the guest chamber or (in the case of the mummers) to the kitchen. Not sure what to do, and feeling at a loss, I wandered outside to breathe the fresh air of the August evening. It was still hot, and the hazy sunshine lay across lawns and formal flower-beds, byre and fields and distant pasture like the bloom on an overripe plum. Somewhere a bird was singing and there was the bittersweet tang of new-mown grass. I wandered over to the edge of the manor’s encircling moat and watched the swans swimming regally up and down, their proud necks arched in two feathered question marks, reminding me that I had a problem to solve.
I found a rough wooden bench, nothing more than a plank linking two stumps of trees, but in a spot shaded by a willow and where the bank was starred with buttercups and daisies and the small, creamy-white flowers of meadowsweet scented the air like honey. A lady’s nook, I guessed, but one equally acceptable to a weary traveller whose ankle was aching uncomfortably and who needed peace and seclusion to gather his wandering thoughts together.
Someone sat down on the bench beside me.
‘I thought I saw you come out here, Chapman,’ Rose Micheldever announced with all the satisfaction of having run me to earth; and although there was plenty of room on the bench, she wriggled along its length until our shoulders were touching.
Mindful of her jealous husband, I shifted my buttocks another two or three inches to the left. Then I turned my head and observed her as closely as I dared without giving her the wrong idea. She was gazing out over the moat, apparently absorbed, as I had been, in the movements of the swans; but it didn’t take me long to to realize that her interest in ornithology was negligible. The flutter of her eyelashes told me that she was presenting her profile for my consideration — and, of course, delectation.
It was a profile well worth regarding, I had to admit. She was just as pretty side-faced as full on, with the small, straight nose above the delicate mouth showing to even greater advantage. As a beauty, she would be a catch for any man, but I thought I had detected a note of patronage, a slight air of condescension, in the receiver’s dealings with his wife, and I wondered who she was and where she came from.