Susan, pardonably angered by my recoil, opened the street door and indicated that I should leave. ‘And don’t bother coming back,’ she called as she slammed it shut behind me.
I had no intention of returning, but neither did I immediately hurry away. At the end of the street was a stone water trough, and as no horses were drinking from it at that particular moment, I lowered my pack to the ground and sat on its rim to think. Was I now convinced of Baldwin Lightfoot’s innocence in this matter of Irwin Peto? All in all, allowing for the fact that there could be no total certainty until the true culprit was exposed, I thought I was. He had stolen from his cousin and, being at heart an honest man and deeply ashamed of his action, was trying to persuade himself that he had never been in London last November. Indeed, he had by now probably convinced himself of the fact. Added to this was his assurance, backed up by that of Alison Burnett, that he had not seen Clement often enough in the years immediately preceding the latter’s disappearance to recognize a double if he saw one. I felt reasonably confident, therefore, that I could rule out Baldwin Lightfoot as the instigator of this plot.
That left the Alderman’s brother, John, and the various members of his family; his wife, Alice, his two sons, George and Edmund, and their wives, Bridget and Lucy. As I have already mentioned, I had met Dame Alice and George and Bridget Weaver six years earlier during my search for the real Clement, and I thought it almost impossible that the first of these three was capable of hatching such an elaborate piece of mischief on her own. She had seemed to me a compliant woman, submissive in all things to her husband’s will and without a thought in her head that he had not put there. But that she would go along with anything of his devising, and think it right to do so, I could well believe. As for the others, I should have to suspend judgement until I saw them.
I remembered that although John Weaver lived in Farringdon Without, his looms and weaving sheds were in the Portsoken Ward, on the other side of the city. The three men, therefore, would probably be from home, thus giving me an opportunity to talk to their wives alone. I rose from my seat on the edge of the water trough and passed through the Lud Gate to make my way along Fleet Street, where the stink of the tanners’ yard assaulted my nostrils and made me sneeze. As I approached the bridge over the River Fleet, I had to wait for a party of horsemen coming from the opposite direction, all wearing the badge of the Duke of Clarence and every one of them heavily armed. A carter, who had drawn up beside me, watched them pass with an impassive face, but once they had gone by he turned to me and grimaced.
‘Trouble brewing,’ he remarked succinctly, and spat before moving on.
I nodded in agreement at his departing back and swung into Shoe Lane, heading north across the Holborn highway into Golden Lane on its further side. Here, there was a cluster of some ten or twelve dwellings, those at present on my right having gardens at the rear which ran down to the Fleet; and if memory served me correctly, John Weaver’s house was one of these, somewhere in the middle of the row. It was pointed out to me by a passer-by, who also, without being asked, informed me that George and Edmund Weaver lived on the opposite side of the street, adding gratuitously that the two wives were in and out of their mother-in-law’s house all day long. ‘You may well ask me when do they cook and clean?’ the woman finished indignantly. ‘And my answer to that is, I doubt very much if they do.’
In view of these neighbourly strictures, I was not surprised when, in reply to my knock at John Weaver’s door, it was opened by a most attractive girl with deep blue eyes and fair curls that were loosely confined by a ribbon at the nape of her neck. Her gown, which was the same colour as her striking eyes, was of the best quality wool, trimmed with matching silk braid, an expensive garment for Golden Lane. This, I guessed, must be Lucy, Edmund Weaver’s wife, and described to me by Alison as, ‘as big a spendthrift as Bridget is a miser … Lucy gets rid of Edmund’s money as fast as he can make it … so pretty that she can wind him round her little finger.’ Well, there was no doubt that she was very pretty; equally as pretty as Rowena Honeyman.
I waited for my heart to give its customary lurch of misery at this conjuration of my true love’s name, but nothing happened. In a perfectly calm and steady voice, I heard myself asking if I might come in and speak to Dame Alice. ‘It’s on behalf of her niece, Mistress Burnett.’
Lucy hesitated, eyeing me with caution, but she evidently liked what she saw, for she suddenly smiled and motioned me inside. The interior of the house was much as I remembered it. A long passage led to the back door and the garden, a narrow, twisting staircase rising halfway along its length and giving access to the upper storey, while doors on either side of it opened into various rooms. A faint, but all-pervasive smell of the cattle market at Smithfield hung in the air, borne on the wind and seeping through the building’s numerous cracks and crannies.
Lucy Weaver ushered me into a small overcrowded room at the front of the house where Dame Alice and her other daughter-in-law, Bridget, sat yawning over their embroidery. They glanced up hopefully as Lucy announced, ‘Here’s a visitor.’
‘I know you,’ said Bridget. ‘You’ve been here before.’
* * *
‘Well!’ exclaimed Dame Alice some time later, when my story was finally told. ‘Here’s a to-do! Clement alive, after all these years! And poor Alison cut out of her father’s will! Not that she’ll starve, mind. That husband of hers is as rich as Croesus.’
‘That’s not the point,’ Bridget reminded her mother-in-law sharply. ‘Uncle Alfred’s money rightly belongs to her, but because he’s a fool, she’s being cheated of it by some impostor.’
I glanced across at her and asked, ‘You feel certain then, Mistress, that this man is an impostor?’ For the one piece of information I had kept to myself was the knowledge that Irwin Peto was indeed a fraud.
She seemed disconcerted by the question. ‘Well … That is … I suppose him to be. I thought you said he was.’ I shook my head and she shrugged. ‘It’s far too convenient, him turning up now, when Uncle Alfred is so ill.’
‘You know that the Alderman is sick? I understood that you had not seen him in some while.’
‘John and I visited him in Bristol last summer,’ Dame Alice cut in. ‘It was easy to see that he was in poor health then, and we told George and Edmund when we returned that their uncle couldn’t be long for this world. The only wonder is that he’s lasted until now.’
‘But you’ve known nothing of what’s been happening since Christmas? Mistress Burnett hasn’t written to you? Or the Alderman? But now I come to think of it, I recall Dame Pernelle saying that she had sent you a message by a London-bound carter.’
‘Well, it never reached us,’ Lucy declared. ‘And Alison hasn’t written, as far as I know.’ She turned with raised eyebrows to her mother- and sister-in-law, seeking confirmation, and they both shook their heads.
‘What is your opinion, Master Chapman?’ Dame Alice wanted to know. ‘Do you think this man could possibly be my nephew?’
‘No,’ I answered. ‘I don’t. His story is plausible enough, except in one respect. The day Clement disappeared, he was wearing a camlet tunic edged with squirrel’s fur, but Irwin Peto described a black frieze tunic trimmed with budge.’
But my bait wasn’t taken. Not by so much as the flutter of an eyelid did any one of the three women betray that she knew my story to be a lie, or hint that it could not be so because Irwin Peto had been given the correct information. Indeed, my falsehood appeared to have no effect at all, and they continued chattering and speculating and exclaiming over the news I had brought with every indication that it was a completely fresh revelation to which they still could not come to terms.