Jack Chevestrier was silent for a while. I risked a quick look at him, and guessed from his expression that he was thinking hard. Finally, he turned to me. ‘I don’t suppose you’d like to come and work for the sheriff?’
He kept such a straight face that it took a moment for me to realize he was joking. And that he’d just paid me a pretty nice compliment.
The compliment had me confused. Looking down at my left boot, with which I was tracing semicircles in the grass, I said, rather more brusquely than I’d intended, ‘It was nothing – just listening and observation.’
‘That’s what I keep telling my men,’ he said with a sigh. ‘You’ve no idea the problems I have getting them to use their eyes and ears, never mind their brains.’ He fell silent again. Then, after a moment, said, ‘She arrived on one of the trading boats that ply the fenland rivers. I spoke to its master, who told me she’d come on board at Lynn.’ He glanced at me. ‘Although I don’t think either you or I believe her journey originated there.’
‘No, I’m sure it didn’t. Was she alone when she boarded? Other than the baby?’
‘She was.’
‘And did the boat’s master report anything out of the ordinary happening at Lynn? Rumour of sickness on board another ship, or a fight?’
‘You’re trying to account for the missing companions and servants.’ I nodded. ‘No, he didn’t. He-’ Abruptly he stopped, then, taking my arm, said, ‘Come and talk to him. His name’s Alun, and his boat’s called The Maid of the Marsh.’
I hurried along behind him. ‘But surely he’ll have left by now? It was -’ how long had it been? – ‘the day before yesterday that the veiled woman arrived.’
Jack Chevestrier turned briefly and gave me a swift grin. ‘He’s still here,’ he said firmly. ‘His boat’s bows needed repair, and he’s not sailing till tomorrow. Come on!’
FOUR
The Maid of the Marsh was a typical river craft: long and narrow, not very big, with a wide space on her foredeck for cargo. There was a mast amidships and spaces down each side for oars. One of her crew had clearly suffered a lapse of attention, allowing her to run into something hard, and at some speed. On the right hand side of her bow, there was quite a large area of new planking, in the seams of which a sailor was now splashing large amounts of a thick, tarry substance. Hearing our footsteps, he looked up and gave us a toothy grin.
‘Is your master aboard?’ Jack asked.
‘Aye, that’s him, back there.’ He inclined his head towards the stern.
‘May we come on board and speak to him?’
The man waved his brush in an expansive gesture. ‘Aye, help yourself.’
I followed Jack along the plank that provided the only access to the boat. It was several paces long, and it was just that: a plank, with no handrails or even a rope to hold on to. I had a vision of myself ending up in the water, but I managed to keep my feet. We crossed the deck and edged along to what appeared to be the master’s own particular space. Not that there was much to distinguish it from the rest of the ship, being cramped, and hemmed in with crates and sacks, neatly stowed.
The master sat on a narrow shelf, swinging his legs to and fro as he watched us approach his domain. Recognizing Jack, he greeted him cheerfully.
‘Repairs nearly done, I see,’ Jack said, having returned the greeting.
‘Aye, and I’m docking the cost from that stupid bastard’s wages,’ the master said. ‘That’ll teach him to eye up pretty girls when he should be keeping his mind on his work.’ He was staring at me. ‘Talking of pretty girls …’
‘This is Lassair, Alun.’
The master jumped down from his seat – he was a head shorter than me – and gave me a bow. ‘How d’ye do, Lassair,’ he said with a grin.
‘Very well,’ I responded, returning the smile. It was impossible to resist his good cheer.
‘That woman you picked up at Lynn,’ Jack said. ‘We have some more questions.’
The master gave him a knowing look. ‘Been stealing again, has she?’
‘Not as far as I know, and she insisted it wasn’t theft the first time,’ Jack replied.
The master gave a snort of laughter. ‘Oh, she did, did she? Well, it looked like it to me.’
‘She paid the baker both for the loaf and for his inconvenience,’ Jack said. ‘I decided to let that be an end to the matter.’
‘Well, you know your own business,’ the master said. ‘She was a slippery one. We were all glad to see the back of her.’
I sensed Jack’s suddenly heightened alertness. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘Arrogant, she was. Gave orders like a queen, and expected my crew to jump to it. Surly, too – when we tried to look after her, she acted like it was her due and never gave a smile or a thank you. Well, like I told you, she came on board at Lynn, wanting passage up to Cambridge. She wanted to get into the fens, but you can’t just drop a passenger out in the middle of nowhere, and I reckoned this was the best place, and the nearest port to the fens. I mean -’ his face creased in a frown – ‘if I’d have put her ashore out in the watery wilds, likely she’d have lost her way and drowned, and that little baby along with her. She paid it no mind,’ he added with sudden vehemence. ‘Didn’t seem to know how to look after it. Didn’t even seem to like it, come to that.’ His frown deepened. ‘The mate found someone who knew how to get a bit of milk inside it, otherwise it’d have yelled its head off all the way.’
‘It’s a he,’ I said. ‘He’s being tended by a wet-nurse, and he’s doing all right.’
The master turned to me. ‘I’m right glad to hear it.’
Encouraged, I said, ‘It’s obvious she’s a noblewoman, and must somehow have become separated from the companions and servants she was travelling with. She seems to be in a state of shock, and I was wondering if, back in Lynn, you heard any talk of some incident that might have resulted in her being all alone? A ship having met with an accident, or illness aboard?’
The master shook his head. I saw his left hand make the sign against evil, no doubt in reaction to my mention of shipwrecks and sickness. ‘No, I heard nothing.’
‘Did she say where she had come from?’ Jack asked.
‘No. She offered no information at all.’ The master thought for a moment, then grinned. ‘But I think I can tell you what ship she arrived in, because she’d underpaid the cost of her passage – see, told you she was a slippery one! – and one of the crew came after her to collect what she owed.’
‘What was the ship?’ Jack’s eyes were narrowed like a cat’s. ‘And where had she come from?’
‘She was The Good Shepherd,’ the master said, ‘out of Yarmouth.’ He nodded, as if confident that he had answered all our questions. ‘That’s where that veiled woman came from – Yarmouth.’
Jack Chevestrier didn’t say a word as we headed back over the Great Bridge into the heart of the town. I could understand his mood; it really had seemed that we’d been on the point of discovering something crucial about the veiled woman. Yarmouth, however, was no likelier a starting point for her voyage than Lynn.
I went over my earlier encounter with the lady. Something had occurred to me, pushed out of my mind by subsequent events, and now I returned to it.
There had been an aspect of her which recalled a matter I’d once discussed with my aunt Edild. It concerned a new mother in Aelf Fen who, for some inexplicable reason, had taken a dislike to her newborn daughter; a dislike so profound that she had, for a few terrible days, refused to feed, tend or in any way care for the child. The baby was not her first; there was just something about her that the mother couldn’t tolerate. Edild said it sometimes seemed to happen – fortunately not with any frequency – that, following a birth, a mother became inexplicably miserable; unable to feel any joy in the new life she had brought into the world. Often it occurred when a birth had been particularly long or hard, as if the baby was a constant reminder of the pain and the distress its arrival had caused.