[Roger the Chapman 06] - The Wicked Winter (5 page)

'Better leave Belle Amie to us,' Hamon said over his shoulder. 'The mare's Mistress Lynom's pride and joy, but to my mind she's a nasty nature. Feed the cob and Jessamine there.' He indicated a raw-boned grey. 'They're both quiet and gentle.'

'What about him?' Jasper demanded with a jerk of his head towards a big handsome black with white stockings and a white blaze on its forehead. 'Did we ought perhaps–?'

'Nab!' Hamon interrupted decisively. 'Why should we waste our winter fodder on a stranger? He'll have hay enough waiting for him in his own stable. Great overfed brute!'
 

'The mistress might expect it,' Jasper demurred. 'How long's he going to be here?'

Hamon gave a ribald chuckle. 'How do I know? As long as his master, and how long's that? In such circumstances, there's no saying.' And they both laughed immoderately, nudging one another in the ribs.

I made no inquiries as to their meaning, judging it wisest to remain ignorant, but half guessing at the truth. Had not Joanna Miller informed me that I might meet Sir Hugh Cederwell at Lynom Hall? 'Gossip has it that the widow is his mistress.' But if that were indeed the case, the less I knew about this illicit liaison the better. I hoped, the weather holding, to travel as far as Cederwell Manor.

When the horses had been fed, Jasper dropping a little hay into the black's manger while his companion wasn't looking, and I had again taken up my pack and cudgel, the two men led me around to the back of the house and into the kitchen. In contrast to the extreme cold outside, the heat in there was almost overpowering, emanating from a huge fire on the central hearth and a number of ovens set into the thick stone walls. A big woman in a gown of grey burrel and a linen coif and apron, wielding a large ladle as if it were her wand of office, as in a way I suppose it was, dominated the room and sent the kitchen-maids scurrying in all directions to carry out her orders.

'What are you two great oafs doing in my kitchen?' she demanded, when she saw Hamon and Jasper. 'Out, before you carry the muck from the yard and stables all over my swept and scrubbed floor!'

'Here's a chapman,' Hamon said sulkily, 'come hawking his wares. We thought the old lady might be glad of his company.'

I stepped forward with meekly lowered eyes for inspection by this she-dragon, who gave me a basilisk stare: But after a moment her expression softened somewhat and she nodded.

'Very well.' Her blue eyes narrowed. 'Are you hungry, my lad?' And when I assured her that I was, she instructed a tow-headed girl to give me one of the apple pasties which were cooling on a marble slab close to the half-open door.

'Best give him the large size with a frame like his.' The child shovelled a pasty on to a wooden platter and handed it to me with a self-conscious giggle. Hamon and Jasper immediately began to moan that good looks and a fine physique gave a man an unfair advantage over his fellows.

'Oh... give them a pasty apiece, Bet,' the cook instructed at last, pursing her lips in exasperation. 'But you eat them outside, the pair of you. You reek of horses !'

The two men seemed to take no offence at her tone but, grinning broadly, accepted their apple pasties from Bet's hands and vanished through the kitchen doorway. I was allowed to eat mine in peace, sitting beside the fire and warming my chilled bones by its leaping flames. When I had finished, not even a crumb of pastry remaining, Bet was told to conduct me to Dame Judith.

'The late master's mother,' the cook explained, basting a couple of fat chickens which were roasting on the spit, 'complains of being neglected since her son died, three years since. And it's true that there's not much love lost between her and the mistress. But,' she added judiciously, 'old people do tend to exaggerate their hardships in my experience.'
 

'Is Dame Judith upstairs or down?' asked Bet, and was told that the old lady was in the solar.

She led me out of the kitchen and into a narrow passageway where the draughts from open doors lifted the rushes on the flagstones; and the sudden chill, after the heat we had just left, made us both shiver. As I followed Bet, I could see into the various rooms on the opposite side of the corridor, the counting-house, justice room and parlour, all their windows facing frontwards to the track beyond the moat.

The reason I was able to see this was because the shutters in the parlour had been set wide in spite of the inclement weather, and Lynom Hall had no surrounding walls for protection. In this remote comer of the world they plainly did not fear attacks from their neighbours.

'Someone in this house is fond of fresh air,' I remarked to Bet as she preceded me up a twisting staircase.

'Oh, that's the old mistress,' she said with another giggle. 'She don't seem to feel the cold, not even when it's bitter. Leastways, she says she don't, but it's my belief she's just nosy. She likes to sit by the window and look out to see what's going on. Makes the young mistress fair mad, I can tell you. I'd best close them shutters when I come down again, before she discovers they've been opened. Dame Judith was ill the parlour earlier,' she added by way of explanation.

At the top of the stairs, I was conducted into the solar, as dank and chilly on this bleak winter's day as the rest of the house. But it was a comfortable room with many indications of wealth from the candelabra of latten tin, supporting a number of pure wax candles, to the tapestries which decorated the wails and the cushions strewn across the window seat.

Two of the windows were glazed - a greater rarity then than nowadays, when you, my children, take so many of these modern luxuries for granted - and a third had panes of horn.

A fourth window of stretched and oiled linen had been set wide to the elements. Bet at once hurried across and closed it.

'You d' know what the mistress says about openin' windows this weather, Dame Judith,' she scolded. 'You'll catch yer death, you will surely.'

The upright old woman, seated in a chair near the fire, sniffed scornfully.

'And what if I do, pray'? That's what she hopes will happen. The lying jade just pretends to be concerned about me, but nothing would suit her better than to be rid of me. Where is she, eh? Not a soul's been next nor nigh me since I was brought up here earlier this morning. What's she up to? Why hasn't she been to see me?'

'The mistress is busy,' Bet answered, colouring. 'Look, here's a chapman come selling his wares. I've brought 'im to visit you.'

Dame Judith peered at me with short-sighted, laded blue eyes, but for the moment evinced no further interest.

'Don't change the subject,' she ordered Bet sternly. 'You tell my daughter-in-law to come and see me.' She added to the network of wrinkles already lining her face by screwing it up in disgust. 'I know what she's at, the harlot! She may think she's pulling the wool over my eyes, but you can tell her that she ain't. I wasn't born last September! That Sir Hugh Cederwell's here again. It's no use your denying it, girl! I saw him ride in this morning not long after breakfast, while I was still downstairs in the parlour.' She gave a sudden grin, grinding her toothless gums together. 'I see a lot of things that people don't reckon on me seeing.'
 

'That's 'cause you sits with the shutters wide open,' Bet reprimanded the old lady. She beckoned me forward. 'Here's the chapman, like I told you. You talk to 'im fer a bit and look at what 'e's got to sell you.'

Bet whisked herself out of the solar before Dame Judith could protest or hinder her further. I was left alone with this indomitable old lady whose fragility made me feel even gawkier and more overgrown than usual. In her grey gown and slippers, untidy locks of white hair pushing out from beneath her hood, she was like a wisp of smoke waiting to be blown away by the first puff of wind. She eyed me sharply.

'They think I don't know what goes on in this house,' she snorted. 'But I do. Oh yes, I do indeed. That Sir Hugh Cederwell! Lovely young wife by all accounts, but he prefers a maturer woman with more experience between the sheets.' l felt the blood steal up under my skin. Dame Judith saw it and laughed. 'Embarrass you, do I? Why does a little plain speaking make you uncomfortable? I'm sure a good-looking lad such as you is no virgin, and you must have exchanged plenty of ribaldry in the alehouses and taverns. But you don't care to hear it on a woman's lips, is that it? Ah well! I shouldn't chide you. It's good to know that you hold womankind in such esteem. So!' She clapped her dry, fleshless hands together. 'Show me your wares. I promise I'll buy something, even if I don't really want it. It'll be payment for your time and company, which are the two things I chiefly need.'

She was seated in a high, carved armchair and instructed me to draw up a flat-topped oaken coffer which stood against one wall. It would serve, she said, as a table on which to display my goods. But when I had spread them out, she showed no immediate inclination to look them over, but folded her hands in her lap, leant back in her chair and began to reminisce about her youth; a youth spent, as a young and beautiful woman, at King Henry's court before what she called 'all the troubles and upheavals'.

'From time to time he was completely mad, poor man, like his grandsire, the French king that his father beat at Agincourt. And when he wasn't mad, he was on his knees praying, or exhorting all us women to cover our breasts.

Low-cut gowns, he said, were the work of the devil. And Queen Margaret wearing the most daring of any of us! When he first saw his son, Prince Edward, him who was killed a few years back at Tewkesbury, he said the boy must be the child of the Holy Ghost.' Dame Judith cackled with amusement. 'The child of the Earl of Wiltshire or of Somerset more like! At least, that's what the rest of us thought. We '

The door of the solar opened and the old lady broke off her narrative at once, snapping her jaws together like a pair of tongs cracking nuts. An authoritative voice demanded, 'Mother, what are you up to? Who is this man? And what is he doing in the solar?'

Chapter Four

Dame Judith drew herself up to her full height - not an easy thing to do whilst sitting down, but the old lady managed to give that impression - and said coldly, 'Bet brought this chapman to see me. She thought I might wish to purchase some of his goods.'

'Bet has no right to think,' was the terse response as the mistress of the house advanced further into the room.

The Widow Lynom was indeed, as the miller's wife had said, a fine woman with a high, broad forehead, slate-blue eyes, a long and impressively straight nose and a full, voluptuous mouth. In spite of this there was a hardness about the features which, to my mind at least, prevented her from being truly handsome. She wore a red woollen gown trimmed with squirrel fur at neck and wrists, and caught around her waist by a green leather belt studded with jewels. Her slender fingers were heavily beringed, but of the red hair, which might or might not be dyed with alkanet, there was no sign, all being concealed beneath a hood of fine, crisp lawn. Her skin was carefully whitened, her lips stained with a salve made from the distillation of strawberry juice - I was by now growing wise in the wiles and deceptions of women - and she carried herself well, as befitted someone born to command. Yet nothing could disguise the fact that she would never see forty again. Nevertheless, I could guess her attraction for any man tied to a sober and pious wife, however young. There was a raffish gleam in the blue eyes which suggested that she would not be niggardly with her sexual favours.

'Oh, I'm fully aware that you'd deny me anything that gives me pleasure,' Dame Judith snapped, her bony cheeks growing pink with outrage. 'Fortunately I have a few friends left in the household.' She turned to me. 'You needn't think I was treated like this when my son was alive. Then I was accorded all the respect that is my due.'

The widow sighed and tapped one leather-shod foot in exasperation.

'Don't be mendacious, Mother! You know very well that no one denies you anything you wish. We wouldn't be so foolish, knowing the tantrums we'd be subjected to if you were thwarted.'

'Tantrums is it?' Dame Judith was fairly spitting with annoyance. 'I'd have you know, Chapman, that I'm one of the most reasonable, sweet-tempered women living, but what I have to endure would try the patience of a saint!' The widow raised her eyes ceiling-wards and appeared to be praying for strength, but her mother-in-law ignored her. 'For one thing, why am I forced to remove up here every morning instead of being allowed to stay downstairs in the parlour, where I can at least look out of the window and watch who's passing on the road? Not,' she grumbled, 'that there's much traffic at this time of year. The only people I saw today were a holy man and a carter with a load of tree trunks bound for the sawmill. Oh yes, and the blacksmith, accompanied by a young girl muffled to the eyes and who looked to me as if she were keeping a tryst of some sort with him.' The old woman's sharp nose quivered. 'I must get Bet to discover if he's courting. But who could it be from hereabouts?' She tittered. 'Aren't I a nosy old woman?'

'You're brought up here to the solar, Mother,' the Widow Lynom interrupted forcefully, 'for that very reason; to stop you sitting with the parlour shutters wide open and catching your death of cold. In the summer you may stop there as long as you wish, and well you know it, so don't pretend that I ill treat you.' For the first time since entering the room she turned to look at me properly, and her forbidding gaze softened slightly. 'Well, Chapman, as you're here, you can show us both what you have to sell. We don't often get pedlars around in the depth of winter. You must be a hardy young fellow to be on the road in January.'