The Prodigal Son (35 page)

‘I should say here, perhaps, that all this is so much guesswork on my part, but guesswork I believe to be as near the truth as we are ever likely to get. He took Master Chapman's cudgel from the room they shared. Indeed, I saw him come out of the chamber with it, and it made me suspicious, so I determined to keep an eye on him. I knew he had killed twice, and felt certain he would have no compunction in killing for a third time. I also had a fancy that, just as he used John Jericho as the scapegoat for him the first time, so he might be planning to lay the blame for Thomas Bignell's death on the chapman. I didn't doubt that he was growing nervous of our friend here, especially after you' – he glanced at me, faintly mocking – ‘had boasted so openly of your past successes.'

I groaned and had the grace to blush.

‘Fool!' I muttered to myself.

‘Continue!' Dame Audrea commanded harshly.

The steward shrugged. ‘There's little more to tell, Madam. After everyone else had retired for the night, I hung around outside the hall, waiting to see what would happen. I heard Master Anthony and the butcher talking, then Master Anthony came out, prowling around, looking to see that the coast was clear. I feel sure he intended to club Master Bignell over the head and push him into the moat.'

‘Precisely as you did to him,' I interrupted.

George Applegarth nodded. ‘It was the opportunity I'd been waiting for, for six long years. He was walking along the edge of the moat, looking for a sheltered spot in which to do the deed, and was totally unsuspecting of my presence. Almost before he had time to understand what was happening, I wrested the cudgel from his hand, swung it with all my might and knocked him into the water. Then I held him under until he drowned.'

H
ercules and I knew we were home as soon as I pushed open the door of the house in Small Street. The noise of Adam having a tantrum somewhere or other assailed our ears almost immediately, while the thunderous descent of the stairs heralded the arrival of my daughter and stepson, who had spotted our approach from an upper window. I did not delude myself, however, that they had missed me and were eagerly awaiting my return to ply me with hugs and kisses. Rather, their hands were at once searching my pockets and the scrip at my belt, at the same time demanding, ‘What have you brought us?' To add insult to injury – or, in this case, injury to insult – I could hear Margaret Walker's voice uplifted in admonition to my longsuffering wife.

‘You mustn't give in to him, Adela. Just let him scream.'

I walked into the kitchen where Adam, tied securely to his little chair, showed every intention of doing just that without any encouragement from my former mother-in-law, and dropped my pack and cudgel on to the table with a thump and a clatter that surprised everyone into silence.

‘Roger!' Adela exclaimed. ‘You're home!' She left her cheese-making and hurried to greet me, slipping her arms around my neck and kissing me soundly. I returned the embrace with interest, having lived a celibate life for the past ten days.

‘So you're back, are you?' Margaret said. ‘And that's quite enough of that sort of behaviour, thank you.'

‘Nuff that!' Adam screamed in support. ‘Thank you!'

I untied the strips of cloth that bound him, picked him up bodily and tossed him into the air. He gurgled with delight, only threatening to resume his ear-piercing shrieks when I stopped. But I pacified him with a little wooden whistle that I had purchased from a fellow pedlar whom I had met during the leisurely three days it had taken me to walk home from Wells. I had refused all offers of rides in carts and proceeded quietly on foot, feeling that after the past few days, Hercules and I had earned time to ourselves before facing up once again to the strains and stresses of domestic life.

Declining to attend Anthony's funeral, I had quit Croxcombe Manor on the afternoon of the day we had discovered the truth (or as much of it as I presumed we should ever be able to piece together) about the murder, leaving behind me a situation fraught with tension, but one, I guessed, that would be quickly submerged by everyone's need to return to a normal, day-to-day existence. If George Applegarth had killed Anthony Bellknapp, then the latter had killed his wife, so it was impossible for either dame or steward to accuse the other without drawing attention to the crimes of their own kith and kin. It was a deadlock that I suspected neither wanted to break, or would ever allude to again. Rumour, gradually turning to legend, would surround the circumstances of Anthony's death and would add to the folklore of the surrounding countryside for all the generations still to come. John Jericho would continue to be blamed for a murder he didn't commit, but he was dead and it couldn't harm him. As far as I was concerned, all I had to do now was to take Dame Audrea's letter to the Sheriff of Bristol and ensure that my half-brother was released from prison.

Adela, generous woman, was almost as pleased as I was myself to learn of John Wedmore's innocence.

‘You must bring him back here, Roger,' she insisted. ‘Elizabeth can sleep with Nicholas and Master Wedmore can use her room for as long as he wishes to remain.'

‘No news of Master Jay's expedition, then?' I enquired.

Both Adela and Margaret Walker shook their heads.

‘They've been gone six weeks and more now and not a word of them being sighted anywhere,' the latter announced with a lugubrious shake of her head. ‘Madness! Folly! I always said so. The Isle of Brazil! Who has actually laid eyes on it? No one that I can discover. It's just a sailor's yarn, if you want my opinion, like men and women with fishtails instead of legs. All nonsense! Ah, well,' she added, glancing around at our reunited family group, ‘I'd better be getting back to Redcliffe, then, Adela. You won't want me hanging around, I daresay, now that your husband's back.' She wagged an admonitory finger at me. ‘Look after her! She's worth her weight in gold.'

‘Gold!' shouted Adam, unexpectedly adding his mite, and giving all our ears a momentary respite from his whistle-playing. ‘Bad man,' he continued, jutting his lower lip in my direction and demonstrating that, although only two years old, he was perfectly capable of following the unspoken drift of adult conversation.

Margaret smiled grimly, picking up the stick she used nowadays to help her walking, and headed for the door.

‘Perhaps I wouldn't go that far,' she grudgingly admitted. She ruffled my son's dark hair. ‘But that father of yours does need keeping in order.'

Adam endorsed this by a blast on his whistle that speeded Margaret's departure, set Hercules barking furiously and hurriedly drove the rest of us from the kitchen. But, all in all, it was good to be home.

I'd missed it.

I took Dame Audrea's letter to Richard Manifold and gave him the honour of approaching such authority as he thought fit. It was a kindness on my part: he loved nothing better than to appear important and to bring himself to the attention of his superiors. And unlike his two henchmen, Jack Gload and Pete Littleman, he was efficient in whatever he undertook. My half-brother had been released from the bridewell by suppertime.

He looked paler and thinner than when I had seen him last and demonstrated a surprising lack of resentment for his unjust incarceration – to begin with, at least. He was too relieved for the present that his ordeal was over. Elation vied with despondency over the news that there was still no news concerning John Jay's ship. (The prevailing view in the city was that it had been lost with all hands.)

Adela welcomed her new-found brother-in-law with a shy kiss and, it being Friday, one of her fish stews for supper, her warmth and kindliness making up for the children's complete indifference. When I apologized for them, John merely laughed and said his younger brother, Colin, had always been the same with strangers. But mention of his brother plunged him once more into gloom and we finished supper in almost total silence on his part. This became so oppressive that, when the meal was over, Adela suggested that I take John to the Green Lattis, where a beaker or two – or even three – of their best ale might improve his mood.

Nothing loath, I walked my half-brother up Small Street in the sunshine of a warm August evening and found a favourite corner seat in the as yet deserted aleroom, secluded from the prying eyes of the dozens of after-supper drinkers who would soon be joining us.

John downed his first beaker very nearly in one gulp and, as Adela had foreseen, this considerably raised his spirits.

‘You see,' he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, ‘I was right to trust you to clear my name.' He hesitated, then asked, ‘Would you be willing to tell me all about it? How you managed it. What happened exactly?'

There was no reason, I felt, why he shouldn't be told the whole story. He had a right to know the fate of the young man whom he obviously resembled.

‘Very well,' I agreed and fetched us another beaker of ale apiece. At the same time, I tried to persuade myself that I really wasn't interested in proving to my young half-brother just how clever I'd been. (And, indeed, when I came to think about things in detail, I wasn't so sure that I had been particularly clever in this instance.)

‘Right,' I murmured, settling back on the bench beside him. ‘It's complicated, so listen carefully.'

When I at last finished speaking, there was a long silence between us. The aleroom had filled up, and all around us, the chattering of Bristol voices, with their familiar, hard-edged, west country burr and Saxon diphthongs, was deafening. Still without speaking, John Wedmore signalled to a passing potboy to bring us another drink. And to my astonishment, we got it almost at once. (Potboys in the Green Lattis are often mysteriously afflicted with deafness and blindness when things get busy.)

‘So,' my half-brother muttered at last, ‘the truth's finally out. Anthony Bellknapp is exposed as the murderer he was and has been justly punished by George Applegarth.' He emitted a little snort of mirthless laughter.

I regarded him curiously. ‘You sound as if you knew them,' I said. ‘My powers of storytelling must be better than I thought.'

‘Oh, it's not that,' John answered, without, I'm sure, meaning to be rude. ‘The truth is, I
did
know them. Well, I knew the steward and his wife. But as for Anthony Bellknapp' – he spat vigorously into the rushes – ‘I only had the misfortune of meeting him once.'

I digested this, sipping my ale, but quite unconscious of the fact as a suspicion slowly formed at the back of my mind.

‘What do you mean? What are you saying? That … that …?'

My half-brother nodded. ‘Yes. I do mean what you think. Dame Audrea didn't make a mistake when she identified me as her page. I was John Jericho.'

It was now his turn to assume the mantle of storyteller while I listened, pushing aside my ale before my brain became too fuddled to understand what he was saying. I moved round to the other side of the table so that I could sit opposite him, occupying a stool just vacated by another customer.

‘Go on,' I said.

‘It was about two years after my mother had married Matthew O'Neill, and we'd gone to live in Ireland with him, that she told me who my real father had been; not Ralph Wedmore as I'd always thought, but your father, Roger Stonecarver. They'd been secret lovers and she said that whatever happened he'd promised to look after her. Perhaps he meant it. Masons and stone carvers have always been better paid than other trades, but in the end, whether he was sincere or not went for nothing. She was less than a month pregnant when he was killed. So she married my fa— She married her cousin, Ralph, who'd always been fond of her, and he brought me up as his own, although, looking back, I can see that he never really regarded me as his son. Especially not after Colin arrived, three years later.

‘Anyway' – John paused to swallow a draught of ale – ‘the news of my true paternity came as a shock to me. I also learned that I had an older half-brother, Roger. I was then about sixteen, a time of life when who you are seems very important. I immediately decided to leave Ireland and return to Wells to try and find you. My mother pleaded with me not to go, Colin cried and begged me to stay, and even my stepfather – who rarely interfered in matters concerning us two boys – told me that he thought I was being over-hasty. He advised me to sleep on it, to consider my mother's feelings, but I wouldn't listen. I was too upset. I needed to get away.

‘So I took ship at Waterford and arrived in Bristol that summer that the little Duke of York was born – I remember, because all the church bells were ringing in celebration – and from there I walked to Wells. But, of course, by then your mother was dead and I was told you were a novice at Glastonbury. But when I enquired for you at the abbey, one of the monks informed me that you'd never taken your vows and had left two years previously. No one could tell me where you were.'

‘That year I was in Cornwall,' I said, thinking back to the affair at Trenowth and my subsequent, very reluctantly undertaken trip to Brittany. ‘So what happened next? To you, I mean.'

John Wedmore shrugged. ‘By that time I'd spent all my money. The monks at Glastonbury fed me and gave me a groat out of the poor fund to tide me on my way and I decided to go in search of my mother's family, the Actons. I made a few enquiries – there were two of them living between Wells and Wedmore – but before I got to visit them, I fell in with Dame Audrea.'

I laughed. ‘How did you manage that? I wouldn't have thought her the sort of woman one just “fell in” with.'

My half-brother grinned, acknowledging the point. ‘True, but miracles do happen. I just wandered into the kitchen at Croxcombe one day when she was there, and she took a fondness for me. Don't ask me why. I don't think even she knew the reason. She decided there and then to make me her page. Master Bellknapp tried to dissuade her, but she wouldn't be moved. In fact, the more he told her that she was being foolish, the more obstinate she became.'