Back on the bed, she lay still until the throbbing in her head subsided. She supposed the Medicus would now be hobbling around the city streets in search of two girls who were safely back at home. Nobody else seemed to have thought about that.
24
The pain that had nailed her head to the pillow was gone. Tilla opened her eyes, gazed at the cracks in the ceiling of the Medicus’ room and wondered if he was back yet.
There were no voices outside. No footsteps in the corridor. She managed to time her ascent of the stairs so that nobody saw her slip into her stuffy little bedroom clad in one of the Medicus’ old Army tunics. Inside, she changed into her own clothes. On the landing she bumped into the slave who had slept in her bed the previous night.
‘Have you seen the mistress and the master’s sisters?’
‘In the bath-house, miss.’ The girl leaned forward to mouth across a pile of folded linen, ‘It is safe to come out.’
It was, but now that she had the temporary freedom of the house, Tilla could not think of a single place within it where she would feel at ease. She went across to the window. Nothing was moving in the regimented garden, which was still baking in the late afternoon sun. Beyond the wall, a tall grey horse was tethered in the shade of the stable building. There was some sort of compress on its foreleg. Feeling they were fellow sufferers, she went downstairs to talk to it.
When she got there, the stable lad was busy replacing the compress. His morose expression defied the jolly tangle of curls around his temples.
She said, ‘This is a fine horse.’
‘He is, miss. Pity he’s not ours.’
She took the animal’s head to distract it from investigating the stable lad’s curls. ‘What is the matter with him?’
‘He’s not looking too happy on the nearside foreleg.’ Glancing up, he saw she was interested. ‘It’s an old injury. I’d have rested him for a day or two more, myself. You don’t want to mess about with a good animal like this.’
‘Your master has taken the mule-cart?’
The lad nodded. ‘That’s all there is now, miss. We don’t have horses here no more.’
She supposed they had been sold.
The lad tucked in the ends of the bandaging and added, ‘I wouldn’t have been cleaning the harness if I’d known he needed it.’
‘You had the harness in pieces when the master wanted the cart?’
‘I made him late.’
She said, ‘So did I. But he was very late anyway. Was he cross?’
Instead of replying the lad straightened up and slapped the horse on the shoulder. ‘Good boy.’
‘When the master is feeling better,’ she said, ‘he will thank you for taking such good care of this horse.’
The ‘Yes, miss’ was not enthusiastic.
‘He is always in a bad temper when his foot hurts. He is not usually rude to people who do not deserve it.’
The lad paused to consider this for a moment, then said, ‘Fair enough, miss.’
‘The master has many things on his mind today.’
‘Could you ask him what he wants done with the horse, miss? I don’t want to be in more trouble. Only nobody asked about it, and I didn’t like to interfere.’
Tilla must have looked baffled, because he explained without prompting that the guest who had died — ‘You heard about that, miss?’
‘Yes.’
‘It was the horse he come over on. I was going to give it a rest and take it back in a day or two.’
Tilla felt sorry for the lad, who was obviously desperate to get his hands on a high-class animal again.
‘But if the master thinks it ought to go back now, I could walk it over. I don’t want to get him in no more trouble.’
‘You think he really is in trouble?’
The stable lad reached up and pulled a section of mane straight. ‘I wouldn’t know, miss.’
‘Did you see the man who died yourself?’
The lad explained that he had heard the dog barking and realized nobody was around. He had opened the gate himself to let in the visitor and his horse and gone to fetch someone — Mistress Cassiana was the only one he could find — from the house.
‘I’ll say the man was ill when he got here if that’s what the master wants me to say, miss,’ he offered, ‘but it’s not true. Like I told the master, the horse was lame, but I didn’t notice nothing wrong with the man on top.’
25
‘Want, want, want!’ exclaimed the cook, waving a vegetable knife towards the kitchen ceiling. ‘Always somebody wanting something. You don’t need a cook, you need a magician.’
‘That’s the nature of cooking, I believe,’ said Ruso. He had arrived back from town hot and tired and banished the protesting Marcia and Flora to their room. He was not in the mood for another argument.
‘First mistress wants a grand dinner,’ exclaimed the cook. ‘With what, I’d like to know? I can’t show my face in town till the bills are paid. Then after I’ve gone to all the trouble she decides everyone’s too upset to eat it, and she just wants a tray in her room.’ The knife sliced down through the air and stabbed into the tabletop, narrowly missing the startled kitchen-boy. ‘How can I work if nobody makes their minds up? The fire’s gone out …’ In case Ruso could not see this for himself, the point of the knife was now jabbed towards the dead coals under the grill. ‘And we’ve washed up. If you’ve changed your minds again, it’s no good. It’s too late.’
‘All I’m after is something simple and quick to eat,’ said Ruso, leaning back against the doorpost and folding his arms, ‘and some information about what happened to our visitor this afternoon.’
‘I see. Blame the staff, eh?’
‘Information,’ repeated Ruso. ‘And put the knife down first.’
‘I don’t know a thing about it.’ The knife flashed towards the kitchen-boy, who was cowering in the corner. ‘He doesn’t know a thing either. It’s no good asking him.’
‘The knife?’ Ruso reminded him, wondering if the man was genuinely deranged or just an out-of-work actor.
The cook looked at the knife as if it had just appeared in his hand, turned it over to inspect it, then wiped it on his apron and put it back down on the table beside the sharpening-stone. ‘We don’t know anything. We were getting ready for a dinner. We didn’t have time to hang around gawping. Try asking the cleaning girls.’
‘When the visitor arrived this afternoon, someone gave him a drink.’
‘That one with all the children — Mistress Cassiana. Not us.’
Ruso frowned. ‘She must have got the crockery from here. Where is it now?’
The cook gestured to the kitchen-boy, who stepped forward and pulled a stool out from beneath the table. He clambered on to it and reached up to a shelf that housed a set of slender glasses and a matching jug wisely stored out of harm’s way. He retrieved the jug and one glass.
‘You’ve washed them?’ asked Ruso.
‘Straight away,’ said the cook. ‘The man dropped dead. I’m not letting somebody else drink out of that glass without washing it first. If they dropped dead too it’d be my fault, wouldn’t it?’
Ruso turned to the kitchen-boy. ‘I suppose you washed the jug as well?’
His pessimism was justified. Apparently keeping the crockery clean was all part of maintaining standards in the modern kitchen.
Ruso examined the glass and the jug. He sniffed them. He ran his forefinger along the smooth inner surfaces, peered at the finger and then gave it a tentative lick.
‘Clean?’ demanded the cook, as if he were daring Ruso to say otherwise.
‘Pristine,’ agreed Ruso, unhappily. His household’s cavalier attitude towards evidence was not going to look good. ‘What was in it?’
Apparently the visitor had wanted nothing but water. The boy had been despatched to the well to fetch a cool supply, but he had not seen the visitor. Mistress Cassiana had taken it to the hall herself.