I turned back and slowly and carefully started to mount the stairs, keeping one hand on the moss-covered wall to my left, damp and slippery with oozing slime. Hercules bounded ahead of me, unfazed by the lack of a banister to prevent our falling. I proceeded with equal circumspection along a narrow upper landing, but there was no entering any of the three bedchambers, whose floors had been made of planks and beams and had therefore been destroyed in the fire. Between the blackened rafters, I could see the foliage shooting up from the ground below. There was an air of desolation about the place and it was beginning to make my flesh crawl. I edged my way back to the top of the stairs.
I descended them with even greater care than I had taken going up — Hercules, of course, demonstrated his superior fleetness of foot by leaping the last four treads in a single bound — but having reached the bottom in safety I decided to take a final look around. I have no idea what prompted me to make this decision; perhaps because I felt a little ashamed of the sense of unease that was gripping me. But for whatever reason, I inspected again all the rooms on the lower floor, this time going into each of them in turn.
It was actually Hercules, with his quivering nose and inquisitive eye, who came across the chest, alerting me to its existence by his excited barking. Made of solid iron and banded with copper, it was half-hidden behind a clump of purple loosestrife, not yet in flower, but whose erect stems and hairy leaves had already reached almost their full three feet in height as they pushed their way in profusion through the broken flagstones. And it was the fact that the surrounding flagstones were so fragmented, and that the chest itself lay on its side, that suggested to me the thing had fallen from the chamber above, crashing through the burning floorboards as the fire had taken hold.
Hushing Hercules and kneeling down beside it, I inspected the chest, with its patches of flaking rust, and saw that the lock had burst asunder, confirming my theory that it had indeed fallen from the chamber above. I tried to open it, but it seemed to have rusted fast shut, and all that my attempts got me were raw and blackened fingers. The dog did his best to help, but only succeeded in getting in the way, incurring my wrath. Finally, I did what I should have done in the first place: I fetched my cudgel, which, on entering, I had propped against the outside wall of the house, and gave the lid several hearty blows with its lead-weighted end. Hercules thought this great sport and began barking like a fiend. Between us, we must have made enough noise to have awakened the countryside for some miles around, and to this day I cannot understand why nobody came to see what was going on. But no one did, and eventually the lid of the coffer buckled sufficiently for me to be able to force it open.
I don’t really know what I had expected to find, but two undershifts, a pair of brown leather shoes and a gown of moth-eaten purple wool, embellished with fur around the neck, were a terrible disappointment. Further investigation revealed other female garments, and I came to the inevitable conclusion that the chest had been the property of either Isabella or Amorette Linkinhorne, locked up after either the one had disappeared or the other been found drowned, and probably never opened again.
I stood up slowly, brushing my knees and noticing that there were green stains, both on my jerkin and my hose. Adela would not be pleased. Hercules, as though he understood and sympathized, licked my hand and tentatively wagged his tail. He was looking none too dapper himself (well, he never does, but even less so than usual), his rough coat dirty and the fur seemingly standing on end.
I sighed.
‘You’re right,’ I told him. ‘We’re a scruffy pair and we shall no doubt be in serious trouble when we get home.’ He licked my hand again. ‘I know. Come on, lad, we’d better get on to the village and see if we can find Jack Nym.’
There was no sign of our quarry, but my enquiries elicited the fact that he had already delivered his consignment of soap and sea coal at the manor house and had left.
‘Not these many minutes since,’ the housekeeper informed me. ‘A little bit earlier and you’d have caught him.’
It served me right, I thought, for wasting my time investigating old ruins instead of keeping to the job in hand. I could at least have begged a ride home for Hercules and myself in Jack’s cart, for after the long and arduous climb up from the city we were both flagging somewhat, and the freedom of the open road began to appear a trifle overrated. However, it’s no good being a chapman and balking at a little additional exercise, so I took a resolute grasp on my cudgel and, encouraging Hercules in his pursuit of rabbits, set off back the way we had come.
It was a little way past the great tump that I saw a cart that I knew to be Jack’s pulled into the side of the track, and the man himself emerging from a clump of nearby bushes, adjusting his codpiece as he came. This unwonted coyness was explained by the presence of two young and decidedly pretty girls in the vicinity playing a decorous game of handball, watched with an indulgent eye by their nurse.
Jack saw me almost as soon as I saw him.
‘Roger! What you doing up here, lad?’ Then, lowering his voice, he added confidentially, ‘Call o’ nature.’
I grinned. ‘So I’d surmised. And the reason I’m here is because I’ve come looking for you. Your goody said you were delivering soap and sea coal to the manor, so I came to find you.’
He sent me a shrewd, sly grin. ‘You mean you wanted to get away for a while on your own.’ He waved aside my half-hearted protest. ‘D’you think I don’t know all the tricks and excuses? Anyway, why d’you want to see me? What’s so urgent that it couldn’t have waited until I got home, eh? Tell me that.’
At his invitation, I climbed on to the cart’s box seat, beside him, while Hercules leaped thankfully into the back and settled down. The two girls and their attendant waved happily to us before continuing with their game, and as we trundled downhill, I informed Jack of my need to get to Gloucester and my hope that he might be going in that direction some time soon.
‘Or Bath,’ I added. ‘That would be just as helpful.’
‘Well, make up your mind,’ he grunted. ‘Gloucester and Bath, they ain’t exactly close together. Opposite directions altogether, if it comes to that.’
‘Of course they are!’ I responded irritably. ‘I’m not a fool, Jack! It just so happens I need to visit both places. It’s to do with this business I’m engaged in for Mayor Foster.’
Jack nodded. ‘Now, I’ve been hearing something about that.’ Well, naturally he had. He lived in Redcliffe, not far from my former mother-in-law, and his wife was certainly on speaking terms with Bess Simnel and Maria Watkins. ‘It’s about this body they’ve dug up at the top of Steep Street. It’s that Issybelly what’s-’er-name, ain’t it? His Worship the Mayor wants you to find out who done it. Who killed ’er. Before ’e builds ’is almshouses up there. But why? That’s what I don’ understand.’
‘He also intends erecting a chapel for the inhabitants of the almshouses,’ I explained. ‘So Master Foster understandably wishes the ground to be re-consecrated before he builds anything to the glory of God. A sacred building must stand upon holy ground.’
Jack sniffed. ‘And ’ow will it help, knowing who killed her and sending the poor sod to the gallows after all these years?’
‘Justice will have been done.’
I was half-inclined to agree with my companion. Twenty years is a long time. People change. The guilty man was probably married. He might have a loving family, be a pillar of his community, looked up to, revered. Could any good be served by destroying the life of such a person? I had to remind myself sharply that this was murder we were talking about; the destruction of a fellow human being; the most heinous of all sins.