‘It’s scandalous, that’s what it is!’ she exclaimed in a soft, gentle voice that nevertheless managed to convey condemnation and outrage in equal measure. ‘Beric has to be on Valletort Manor somewhere, and yet the Sheriff’s officers declare they are unable to find him. What arrant nonsense! They’re letting him and his sister make fools of them.’
‘You don’t believe, then,’ I asked, ‘this theory that the boy’s eaten of Saint John’s fern?’
Mistress Trenowth shivered. ‘Perhaps he has done,’ she admitted at last, hastily crossing herself to ward off evil. ‘But it wouldn’t make him invisible all the time. Nor would Beric want to be permanently invisible, now would he? Would you? Would anyone? Besides,’ her natural common sense prodded into her adding, ‘I know they say that St John’s fern has the power to make people disappear, but in all my life, I’ve never met anyone who actually knew of a case of someone becoming invisible. I’m not saying, mind you, that it can’t happen, or hasn’t happened. There are strange and wonderful goings-on in this world that no one can explain, not even the Church.’
‘But you feel,’ I prompted, after a pause during which Mistress Trenowth seemed to have become lost in reverie, ‘that the reports of invisibility due to eating the fern are always second-hand?’
She nodded. ‘Or even third- or fourth-hand. Wouldn’t you agree?’
‘Yes, indeed.’ I leant forward, my hands on my knees. ‘But surely, having committed this terrible crime, Beric Gifford would have taken the earliest opportunity to escape. Once the initial search for him had proved fruitless, and he had managed to evade the Sheriff’s officers for a day, maybe even a week or two, and once the scent had gone cold and enthusiasm for the hunt had begun to wane, then he must have slipped away under cover of darkness. He’d be a fool not to. Every day he spends in the vicinity of his home, he’s in mortal danger of being seen, arrested and hanged. He must be miles and miles distant by now.’
Mistress Trenowth gave a decided shake of her head. ‘Oh no! There’s no way Beric would have left the manor while she’s still there. And she is still there. I know, because I’ve another sister who lives in Modbury, and she told me so.’
I frowned. ‘Who are you talking about? Are you referring to Master Gifford’s sister?’
‘No, no! Although he and Berenice are close, and always have been. No, I was meaning Katherine Glover. She’s the reason Beric and Master Capstick had that terrible falling-out the day before he killed his uncle.’
I drew a deep breath. ‘I’m afraid, Mistress Trenowth, that if I’m to understand this story, you’ll have to give me all the details of your master and his family, their past history and the events leading up to the murder. It would save me asking a lot of questions, which can only be a trial to both of us. Would you be agreeable?’
She thought for a moment, then graciously inclined her head. ‘There isn’t, in any case, a great deal to tell,’ she said, ‘but such as there is, you’re welcome to know. Particularly,’ she added, her eyes filling with tears, ‘if it can help you bring Beric Gifford to justice.’
* * *
Oliver Capstick, Mistress Trenowth told me, had been the younger of two sons of a Plymouth vintner, owner of a flourishing business, importing wine from both Bordeaux and La Rochelle; wine that had subsequently been transshipped to Calais and the North Sea ports, as well as being supplied to London and the eastern counties. Those had been dangerous, but heady days, when dozens of vessels had sailed in convoy in order to beat off attacks from the Breton pirates, and when England had been the French vineyard owners’ most valued customer. All that had changed now, of course, but then there had been great fortunes to be made in the wine trade, and Jonathan Capstick had become a very wealthy man.
The elder son, Henry, had followed in his father’s footsteps, but the younger, Oliver, had elected to go into hake fishing, and had bought himself three boats with money left to him by his mother.
‘As a foreigner to these parts,’ Mistress Trenowth condescended to inform me, ‘I must tell you that hake is in very plentiful supply in these waters.’ And she nodded towards the open window through which could be seen the sparkle of sunlight on the golden-blue haze of the sea. ‘Master Capstick once told me that the greater part of every catch is sent to Gascony, where it seems they have a partiality for hake when it’s dried and salted. Mind you, it’s very popular in this country, too. In fact, there’s nothing I like better, myself, than a nice bit of hake on a Friday.’
‘In short,’ I said, ‘hake fishing is a very profitable business.’
‘It certainly made Master Capstick wealthy,’ she conceded before resuming her story.
The Capstick brothers had, in due course, married, but between them, had managed to produce only one offspring, Henry’s daughter, Veronica. Both couples had been fond of children, and so she had become the darling not only of her parents, but also of her uncle and aunt. And it had been the greatest desire of Oliver’s heart, far greater than that of his brother’s, that Veronica should marry well.
‘Judging by what Master Capstick let drop,’ Mistress Trenowth confided, settling down for a comfortable gossip, ‘and from what I’ve been able to gather from other people who knew them, Henry Capstick wished his daughter to marry for money and didn’t much care about pedigree. But Oliver had different ideas and wanted his niece to be a lady; so when Cornelius Gifford came courting Veronica, he was all for the match and wouldn’t hear a word against it.’ The Giffords, it appeared, were related by blood to the Champernownes, who had been lords of Modbury and its environs since the beginning of the previous century. ‘But the trouble was,’ my companion continued, ‘that this particular branch of the Gifford family were poor relations and as far as Henry Capstick was concerned, Cornelius’s noble connections didn’t make up for his lack of fortune.’
But Oliver had put pressure on his niece to agree to Cornelius’s proposal of marriage by promising to double whatever her father gave her by way of a dowry if she did so. Otherwise, not a penny piece would she ever get from him, then or in the future. The combined bribe and threat had proved too difficult to withstand, and as her mother was also urging her to marry Cornelius, Veronica had duly accept his offer. ‘But of course,’ Mistress Trenowth added with a shrug, ‘you don’t need me to tell you the outcome.’
‘Cornelius frittered away all his wife’s dowry,’ I hazarded, ‘and was left just as penniless as before.’
She pursed her lips and nodded. ‘The bulk of it he lost gambling and the rest went on impractical, grandiose schemes for enlarging Valletort Manor.’
In the end, there had been nothing left, but by that time Veronica had died giving birth to Beric, three years to the day after marrying Cornelius. The elder child, Berenice, had been borne within the first twelve months.
‘What happened next?’ I asked.
According to Mistress Trenowth, neither Henry nor Oliver Capstick had been prepared to throw good money after bad, and Oliver had blamed himself bitterly for having insisted on the marriage in the first place. But there were other factors, also, why the brothers declined to assist Cornelius. First, when Berenice was three and Beric one, their Aunt Capstick had died, leaving her husband to mourn her passing by becoming almost a recluse. Secondly, the wine trade was not what it had been, and Henry Capstick’s business had begun to fail. Consequently, when he died in the autumn of 1468, within three months of the death of his own wife, his fortune had been considerably eroded. The amount of money, therefore, left to Beric and Berenice had been substantially less than their father had been led to expect. Nevertheless, by the time that Cornelius himself had died, in the spring of 1475, of a surfeit of drink and hard living, he had managed to whittle away his children’s inheritance still further, and Valletort Manor was once more slipping into a state of decay.