‘What would he gain from hurting Janelle?’ said Deblunville, pulling away angrily. ‘And anyway, I believe him when he says he was attacked by Padfoot.’
‘What?’ Bardolf was almost screaming in disbelief. ‘Padfoot is a story invented by Tuddenham to allow his spies to come and go at will.’
‘But Tuddenham does not believe in Padfoot,’ protested Bartholomew. ‘He told us it was superstitious nonsense.’
Deblunville ignored him, but snatched the torch to thrust it so close that the physician winced, certain that he would have caught fire had his clothes not been so wet. ‘Look at his cloak, Bardolf. It is covered in white hairs!’
Bartholomew sat on the edge of the bed in Janelle’s chamber, and replaced the covers carefully. She smiled up at him, her face so lovely in the candlelight that it made him feel suddenly lonely. He wondered what Matilde was doing back in Cambridge, and whether he, like Michael, was destined to spend the rest of his life without the joy of a female companion.
‘Are you really sure?’ she asked yet again.
Bartholomew nodded. ‘I am certain. There was no child in the flux of blood, and everything suggests to me that you are still carrying it. The potions I have given you will help, but you must rest for the next few days – weeks, even – and no more betony and pennyroyal, no matter what Stoate tells you.’
‘You have been kind to me, despite the fact that we have been less than hospitable to you twice now.’ She looked at the flames in the health, her tiny fingers fiddling restlessly with the bed-covers. ‘In return, there is something I know that you might be interested to hear.’
‘About the murder of Unwin?’ he asked hopefully.
She shook her head. ‘I am sorry, but no one seems to know anything about that. Usually, if a crime is committed, someone knows the culprit, and it does not take long for the truth to come out. But whoever killed Unwin has been very clever in hiding his tracks. I think you should not look to the common villagers for your killer; you should look higher.’
‘That has been suggested before,’ said Bartholomew, thinking about what Norys had told him. And then there was Eltisley’s claim to have seen Grosnold with Unwin in the churchyard shortly before the friar’s death, plus her father’s belief that Unwin might have been killed because of the strife among the lords of the manor and their priests, ‘Is that what you wanted to tell me?’
‘No, something else. About my husband’s clothes – the ones that you saw on the hanged man at Bond’s Corner.’ She paused again, and looked at the fire, its lights flickering in her eyes.
‘You know who took them?’ asked Bartholomew, gently prompting.
‘Yes.’ She looked up at him, and there was some of the grim determination in her face that he had seen when they first met. ‘But you must not reveal that I told you this, or use the information against my father.’
‘Your father?’ said Bartholomew, puzzled. ‘How is he involved?’
‘I gave him those clothes,’ said Janelle reluctantly. She shrugged at him. ‘I am the thief. I stole from the man who was going to be my husband.’
‘I see,’ said Bartholomew, not seeing at all.
‘Roland never wore those clothes; they sat in a chest all year round, gathering dust and slowly being eaten by moths. They were too big for him, and he did not like them. My father is not as wealthy as he would have you believe – his manor is small, and any spare money he has is spent on winter fodder for the cattle and extra grain for the village, not on clothes. He would be furious if I told you this, but he is so poor he does not even pay taxes.’
That meant he was poor indeed, for there were few who escaped the greedy hands of the King and his tax collectors. Before an exemption was granted, all accounts were inspected rigorously by men who were neither generous nor sympathetic to hardship. Janelle continued.
‘So, a week or so ago, I took the clothes and the dagger, and I left them for him in a bundle near the Clopton – Grundisburgh parish boundary. Roland would not have been keen for me to give them to my father had I asked, but he would not have demanded them back once they had gone. I wanted my father to wear them at our wedding, you see, so that he would not look shabby and old.’
‘And did your father ever receive these clothes?’ asked Bartholomew.
She shook her head. ‘I had instructed one of his men to meet me there, but he was late. I did not want to waste the whole day waiting for a servant, so I left the bundle under a tree and went about my own business. By the time the servant arrived, the clothes had gone.’
‘So, someone else found them?’
She nodded. ‘It could not have been a villager from Clopton, because the finder would have announced his luck, and then someone would have told him that the bundle was intended for my father. It must have been someone from Grundisburgh.’
‘So, someone from Grundisburgh found a bundle containing some clothes and a dagger, donned them and ended up hanged,’ said Bartholomew, trying to make sense of it.
She nodded again. ‘So you see, whoever hanged the man you found probably did not believe he was hanging Roland, as you seem to think. The man you found must have been hanged because he found the bundle and was dishonest enough to keep it.’
‘But that makes no sense, either,’ said Bartholomew. ‘The man to judge that sort of crime would be Tuddenham, and he seemed to know nothing about anyone being hanged for theft.’
‘Perhaps he did not want to cast a pall of gloom over the Pentecost Fair, and so kept it quiet,’ she said with a shrug. ‘You should not believe everything he tells you.’
‘I will bear it in mind,’ he said with a smile. He was not surprised that she had kept the business of the stolen clothes to herself; the most obvious people who would avenge an act of finders-keepers would be either her father – an impecunious man who needed his daughter to steal him new clothes for her wedding – or her husband, perhaps startled to meet a man parading around in the finery he thought was safely packed away in a chest at home. Bartholomew frowned. Or was the real killer Tuddenham, the man whom Deblunville and Bardolf thought had been spreading tales of the mysterious white dog? ‘Padfoot’ was, after all, the word uttered by the dying man.
He left Janelle in the care of her maidservant. Deblunville was waiting for him in the lower chamber, huddled near the fire, while Bardolf paced back and forth angrily. Cynric was folded into a corner with an untouched cup of ale at his side, staring morosely into the rushes.
‘Thank you,’ said Deblunville, standing to greet him. ‘This child means a great deal to her. She was afraid she might be too old to have children.’
‘You should find her a midwife in Ipswich,’ said Bartholomew. ‘Or better still, try to persuade Mother Goodman to come. She seems a competent woman.’
‘She is,’ said Deblunville. ‘But she is also loyal to Tuddenham. She will never attend Janelle.’
‘What are you going to do with him?’ demanded Bardolf of his son-in-law. ‘All this talk of midwives and infants is becoming tedious.’
Deblunville turned on him angrily. ‘I will talk about midwives and infants from dawn until dusk in my own home if it so suits me.’
He offered Bartholomew a stool near the fire. The physician sat gratefully, weary from his efforts to save Janelle‘s child, which had lasted through most of the night. Despite his tiredness, he felt more cheerful than he had done since they had arrived at Grundisburgh. He might have lost two battles with death – the hanged man and Unwin – but he was fairly sure he had won the third, and that Janelle would bear a healthy child if she followed his advice.