The Tavern in the Morning (3 page)

‘What?’ Josse was amazed. ‘They’re saying something served in Goody Anne’s inn poisoned him?’

‘Aye,’ Thomas said, obviously pleased to have provoked a reaction at last. ‘Threatening her with the full force of the law, they are, for feeding a man vittles that killed him.’

There were at least two things wrong with that, Josse thought. For one, his experience of Goody Anne’s fare was that it was good, honest nourishment, cooked fresh each day, and that she richly deserved her reputation as a generous and skilled innkeeper. The second objection – and this was the clincher – was that, if a bad dish had indeed been served, then it was most unlikely that there would be only the one casualty.

‘Poor Anne,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘What a misfortune! The worst thing to happen to a woman in her profession.’

From her corner, and to Josse’s total surprise, Ella suddenly spoke. ‘Can’t you do nothing for her, sir?’ she asked, face flushing at her own temerity, hands clasping at each other in anxiety. ‘I’m a cook, too, sir, though I wouldn’t dare to compare myself with this Goody Anne. But, sir, if someone said that food
I
had prepared had done for some poor soul, then I don’t know what I’d do.’ Her eyebrows descended over the mismatched eyes in a ferocious frown as she tried to imagine the unimaginable. ‘Reckon I’d want to be dead, an’ all.’

It was the first time Josse could recall Ella ever having ventured a remark of her own accord. Certainly, it was the first time he’d heard her say more than a few words: ‘Mornin’, sir’ and ‘Aye, a cold day it is’ were normally her limit. ‘Ella?’ he said gently. ‘You feel strongly for poor Anne?’

But her courage had run out. She had returned to her hunched position in her corner, and would not meet his eye. She grunted and managed, ‘Aye.’

The tinker was standing up, draining the last of his wine with a slurp. ‘I’ll be on my way,’ he said. ‘There’s an hour or two of daylight left, I’ll make my next stop afore dark if I leave now.’ He nodded to Ella, bowed to Josse, and headed out through the kitchen door.

Josse followed him out to the stables. Will could be heard, whistling between his teeth to Horace as, with steady, soothing strokes, he rubbed the horse down.

‘Cheerio, Will,’ Thomas called, bending to pick up the handles of his cart. ‘Be seeing you.’

Will’s head appeared over the half door of the stall. ‘Cheerio, then, Thomas.’ He caught sight of Josse. ‘Oh! Nearly done here, sir, then I’ll see about helping you with your kit.’

Josse watched the tinker set off across the yard, one wheel of the handcart accompanying the regular beat of his steps with a small squeak. ‘I didn’t come to hurry you along, Will,’ he said, turning back to the manservant.

‘No, sir?’ Will looked at him expectantly.

‘No.’ Josse sighed. It wasn’t a very happy prospect, especially when he’d been so looking forward to a few days’ peace and quiet in the warmth and comfort of home. But, there you were, a friend was a friend, and one in need couldn’t be ignored. Especially when, as seemed to be happening, they were being punished for something they hadn’t done.

‘I came to say, Will,’ Josse went on, ‘that I’d be grateful if you’d feed old Horace up a bit tonight.’

‘Sir?’

‘I’ll be needing him again tomorrow, I’m afraid. It looks like I’ll be going to Tonbridge.’

Chapter Two

Next day the weather had changed. Improved, almost, for, although it was actually colder, the rain had stopped and the wind had lessened. Josse set out around mid-morning under a clear blue sky, and, wrapped up in a cloak which Ella had renovated for him by lining the hood with a precious piece of fur, he felt quite cheerful.

As he and Horace trotted along, he looked round him at the winter-dead landscape. You would think, he thought, that everyone had gone, deserted their hovels and hamlets, been driven away by some dread calamity. There’s nobody about, no sign of any life, human or animal.

It made him feel quite lonely. To reassure himself, he imagined the inside of a cottage such as Will and Ella lived in. Small and dark, yes, but dry, if the inhabitants took the trouble to attend regularly to their roof. Warm – the one thing everyone made sure of was to keep the fire alive, no matter how small the room, how tiny the hearth. Reasonably clean, too, provided a woman was a good manager. Sharing your home with your animals tended admittedly to make cleanliness a problem, but there were ways. Apparently.

It was, Josse realised, something about which he really hadn’t a clue.

The water in the streams and ponds was frozen hard now, and, on the banks, remnants of dry grass and bracken were coated in glistening white frost. Pretty – Josse noticed a skein of geese flying in formation up ahead, alive and active in contrast to the dead hare he’d just seen beside the track, already half-eaten by anonymous predators – but such severe weather sorted the survivors from the weak, no doubt about it.

Hunching deeper into his cloak, he kicked Horace into a canter and turned his head down the long sloping road that led off the flank of the higher ground and into the valley where Tonbridge lay.

*   *   *

Goody Anne was in tears.

‘Oh, sir, I’m that glad to see you, I can’t put it into words!’ she sobbed, clutching Josse’s hand and wringing it between her own. She was a strong woman, and quite soon he had to disentangle himself.

‘What a business, Mistress Anne,’ he said, patting her plump shoulder.

‘They’re saying I gave him a bad plate of supper!’ she said, the indignation clearly still fresh. ‘Me that’s been feeding folks all my life! It’s an
insult,’
she went on, with quiet dignity.

‘I agree,’ Josse said. ‘If it’s any comfort, dear Anne, I don’t believe for one moment that you are to blame.’

She gazed at him, eyes filled with sudden hope. ‘Don’t you?’

‘No. If by some terrible mischance there
had
been a dish that had gone bad, where are all the other victims?’

Her lips moved in silence as she worked it out; it must be the shock, he thought charitably, she was normally a quick-witted woman. ‘You mean, lots of people would have eaten the same meal, and they’d all have fallen ill?’

‘Aye.’

‘And they haven’t.’ She gave a visible shudder. ‘Thank the good Lord, they haven’t!’

‘Amen,’ Josse said. ‘So, Mistress Anne, we have to look at other possibilities.’

She was looking at him keenly. ‘Such as?’

‘Well, perhaps the man was sick when he arrived here, and merely died in your guest chamber of something that had already written his death warrant. Perhaps he was very, very drunk. Perhaps…’ He paused. Unable to think of anything else, he finished lamely, ‘Something like that.’

Anne gave him a grateful smile. ‘You’ve a good heart, sir knight, that you have.’ Drying her eyes, she said, ‘You’ll be wanting to talk to a few folks, ask a few questions, I shouldn’t wonder.’

Will I? Josse thought. He couldn’t for the moment think what he might ask. Then, recovering, he said, ‘I’d like to see the room where he died. And talk to the maid who found him.’ His mind seemed to have recovered. ‘And I’d better know who he was and where he came from, so that I can pay a visit to his family, whoever they are.’

‘If they’re sick too, it’ll put me in the clear,’ Anne said, accurately but with little regard, Josse thought, for the dead man’s kin. Shock again, he decided. In her right mind, Goody Anne wouldn’t wish a ghastly death on somebody purely to prove that her food wasn’t poisonous.

‘We’ll start with the guest chamber,’ Goody Anne announced. And led the way along the passage.

*   *   *

The guest chamber had, Josse was relieved to find, been cleaned. The thin rugs on the floor still showed patches of damp from their recent washing, and the cot, stripped of bedding, was covered in a haze of condensation. The leather flap over the window had been fastened back, and the cold, fresh air circulating in the room was fighting gamely with the pervasive stench of vomit. Unfortunately, it wasn’t yet winning.

‘We found him half on and half off the bed,’ Goody Anne said, holding her nose. ‘As if he’d lain down, then, feeling the sick rise up, leaned out over the floor to puke up.’ She muttered something else, something about folks that hadn’t the decency to find a bowl to be sick in and save other folk from the mopping up.

‘Had he been drinking hard?’ Josse asked.

Anne gave him a look. ‘They’d
all
been drinking hard. Always do, market day. It’s my best day.’

‘Do you think a surfeit of alcohol killed him?’

She considered. ‘I’ve heard tell of such things,’ she admitted. ‘Young feller I knew when I was – er, when I was younger, it happened to him. He got drunk, then fell heavily asleep on his back, and choked on his own vomit.’ She shook her head. ‘But that can’t be what happened to this poor soul.’

‘It can’t?’

She sighed. ‘No. Like I said, he was leaning out over the edge of the bed. The vomit ran out of his mouth, not back down his windpipe.’

The talk was becoming rather too graphic, for Josse. Especially standing in a room that reeked all too strongly of its last occupant’s demise.

‘I’ll talk to the girl who found him,’ he announced, striding for the door. ‘Come on, Mistress Anne.’

*   *   *

The serving maid who had discovered the corpse was a small, thin, pale-faced girl of about fourteen or fifteen. She had light brown hair tied in a knot on the nape of her neck, pale bulging eyes with light-coloured lashes, spots on her chin and lumpy hands reddened from constant contact with cold water. She had a permanent sniff, a habit of wiping the dewdrop off the end of her nose with the back of her hand, and she answered to the name of Tilly.

For some reason, Josse detected instantly, she was very disturbed by his gentle questions.

‘I can’t tell you
nothing!
’ she kept crying. ‘I went in and there he was, and that’s all there is to it!’

‘You knew who he was?’ Josse asked.

‘Eh? How d’you mean?’ She looked cagey.

Josse tried another tack. ‘Were you serving in the tap room the previous evening?’

Tilly hesitated. ‘Might have been.’ Josse waited. Eventually, as if even Tilly’s limited intelligence realised there wasn’t much future in evading the truth on a point that could instantly be decided by others’ testimony, she said, ‘Yes.’

‘And you served the dead man?’

‘No,’ she said instantly. Then: ‘Yes, maybe. It’s hard to tell, when we were so busy.’

‘I’m sure,’ Josse said soothingly. ‘What I’m asking is, when you saw the dead man in the morning, did you recognise him as one of the previous evening’s customers?’

She looked at him as if he were daft. ‘Course I did! He’d stopped the night, hadn’t he?’

This was getting nowhere. Realising that he still didn’t know the dead man’s identity, Josse thanked Tilly for her help – she wouldn’t have noticed the mild irony – and sent her back to the kitchen.

He spoke to half a dozen men who had been in the tavern the night the man died before anyone could tell him the dead man’s name.

It was Peter Ely. He had been in his mid-thirties, it was guessed, and he farmed a few meagre acres in the Vale of Tonbridge, some five or six miles out of town. He was in the habit of coming to the market, where he would sell whatever produce he’d brought with him before repairing to the tavern for a drink and a bite before setting off for home.

Nobody knew whether he had family. Nobody, it become clear, knew very much about him at all.

If he was already ill, Josse mused, taking a break from questioning the clientele of the tap room and strolling around the yard, then that’s an easy answer, and I almost hope it’s the right one. Because if he wasn’t, and if, as I strongly believe, we can rule out a dish of bad food, then somebody must have killed him. Slipped poison into his food while he wasn’t looking, and murdered him.

And if that’s what happened, I’m left with the question, who? Who on earth, and for what purpose, could have wished to kill a poor, humble peasant who doesn’t seem to have had anything remarkable or memorable about him whatsoever?

He shook his head, stumped.

A thought occurred to him, prompted by a sudden rumble from his hungry stomach.

Food. The dish of food.

Was there any chance…?

Hurrying back inside the tavern, he raced to find Tilly.

*   *   *

‘It’s a-cause of all the pother,’ she said, indicating with a hopeless gesture the piles of food-encrusted trenchers, platters and dishes stacked in a lean-to abutting the kitchen. ‘There’s always a lot, see, after market day, and, what with getting the body out, and the clearing-up, and all the comings and goings and what-not…’ The words ended on a weary sigh, as if she didn’t have the heart to finish.

Three days after market day, and washing-up not yet done. No, Josse thought, he could quite see that wouldn’t accord with Goody Anne’s orders under normal circumstances.

‘Never mind, Tilly,’ he said encouragingly. ‘I’m quite sure nobody’s going to be cross with you.’ She turned mournful eyes on him, as if she didn’t share his confidence. ‘Anyway, as it happens, it may prove to be very helpful that the platters are still soiled.’ He ran his eyes over the mess, wondering where to begin. ‘Er, Tilly, could you try to think back and tell me what the dead man ate for his supper?’

She didn’t answer. Turning, he noticed her expression. Pale eyes wide, face even whiter and glossed with a fine sheen of sweat, she looked terrified.

‘Tilly?’ he repeated, trying to sound gentle. ‘What’s the matter?’

She shook her head, and emitted a strangled sound. He waited. Then, whispering the word as if admitting to some dread crime, she said, ‘Pie. He had chicken and vegetable pie.’

Wondering as he did so why she should make such a scene about a question which surely could not have been unexpected, Josse attacked the stack waiting for Tilly’s attention. He didn’t bother to look at any of the rough wooden trenchers from which the tavern’s customers ate their meals; there was absolutely no way he could have told which one had been used by Peter Ely. What he wanted to inspect was the considerable number of larger serving platters, on which, presumably, each dish had been cooked, and from which individual portions would have been cut.