I decided it was time to be gone. I should get no more out of Maud, and I had no wish to be confronted by her irate father. And I had gleaned something for my trouble.
So I said my farewells and hastened down the lane towards Saint James’s chapel. As I rounded the corner into the main thoroughfare a big, burly man with a belligerent expression on his unattractive face passed me, going in the opposite direction. Impossible, I felt, that he should be anyone but John Jarrold, and I was glad that our paths had crossed so briefly.
The heat of the day was giving way to a soft warmth, which made for pleasant walking. At the side of the track, willow herb and ragwort stood sentinel, rose-purple and dusty gold, their petals beginning to furl against the coming dusk. I thought again of the paper Father Boniface had given to Peter Gildersleeve, and which Peter had told Maud was ‘valuable beyond price if he had interpreted it aright’. What had he discovered about it between receiving it from the priest and the time that he had vanished? And did it really have anything to do with his disappearance?
I passed the turning to Lambcook Street and re-entered the lower part of the town. The children were being rounded up now and shepherded indoors, goodnights were called, gossip was abandoned until tomorrow. I turned into the Gildersleeves’ house and was met by Dame Joan, coming along the passageway from the garden.
I raised my eyebrows in silent enquiry, and she, just as silently, shook her head.
Mark had not yet come home.
Chapter Nine
Nor had he returned by nightfall, when the rest of us (with the exception of Dame Joan) went soberly to bed: the two apprentices to their pallets in the workroom, Lydia to her kitchen corner, Cicely to her chamber and I to Mark’s.
‘Won’t you come too, Aunt?’ Cicely pleaded. ‘You can do no good by depriving yourself of rest. If my cousin arrives home during the night or early morning he’ll knock loudly enough to rouse one of us. You’ll achieve nothing except to give yourself that sort of headache which comes from dozing and waking in a chair.’
But Dame Joan was adamant. ‘I must know the moment he returns,’ she said. ‘Roger, lad, fetch me down an armchair from the solar, if you’d be so kind, and place it in the shop. I’ll leave the door into the passageway open, then I’m certain to hear him. Lydia, child, run and fetch me a spare blanket from the cedarwood chest. It’ll be sufficient covering on a warm night like this.’
The maid (whose attempt to say something was angrily hushed) and I did as we were bidden. Cicely tucked the rough grey blanket around her aunt’s legs.
Dame Joan thanked her and patted her cheek. ‘You’re a good girl,’ she told her.
Cicely and I each took a candle and mounted the stairs, saying a muted goodnight to one another before entering our respective rooms. The door to Dame Joan’s chamber stood wide open, showing a glimpse of a four-poster bed, with its tapestried canopy and snowy white cover. I thought of the hard armchair and the draught from the passageway, and hoped, like Cicely, that my hostess would not have cause to regret her decision tomorrow morning, when she would almost surely suffer from fatigue and aching bones.
I lit the wicks of the two horn-paned lanterns and snuffed out my candle before sitting down to pull off my boots. My day had been long and hard. I had been to the Pennards’ and back again, a total distance of some eleven miles, walked to and from Beckery Island in all the glare of the afternoon’s heat, and, finally, paid a visit to the Jarrolds’ cottage in Bove Town. I should have been dog-tired. Indeed, I was — and a few moments earlier my one ambition had been to climb between the sheets, sink into the goose-feather mattress and lose myself in sleep; my racing thoughts, however, prevented me from doing so. I sat there on the blue damask coverlet, one boot off, the other still grasped in my hand, staring before me at the open window but hearing and seeing nothing. Where had Mark gone? He had ridden to Beckery, that much I could be sure of, but I had no idea what had happened next. Absentmindedly I finished removing my second boot, then, elbows propped on knees, chin resting on my hands, I considered such information as I possessed.
Mark had told both Dame Joan and his cousin that he was going to see Father Boniface, but had offered them no explanation — and he had lied to the apprentices about the reason for his visit. The truth was, however, that he had hoped the priest could interpret the contents of the paper left behind by the Irishman, Gerald Clonmel, and had been disappointed. So what had he done then?
The question of exactly when Mark had discovered this mysterious document returned to tease me. He had patently not known of it last night, when he had asked me to go through his brother’s books and folios this morning. It must therefore have been sometime today, before dinner — for I had set off for the Pennards’ immediately afterwards, and he had departed for Beckery before I returned — and consequently prior to ten o’clock, when the meal had been served. We had been much together during those early hours — washing, dressing, breakfasting, shaving — but naturally I had not had him in view every second. There were many moments when our eyes had been averted from one another, and a full ten minutes when I had been in the privy next to the stable.
It was most probable, I decided, that he had chanced upon it then, and somewhere in this room. His brother had originally stored the paper with his other books in the workshop, but as Peter had come to appreciate its value, or what he thought was its value, he had grown more secretive, keeping the chest locked and flying into a rage when Mark had questioned this unaccustomed action. And, eventually, he had removed it from the chest (which he had not bothered to relock) and hidden it elsewhere.
One of my legs was growing numb from the weight of my elbow pressing against my knee, so I straightened my back and looked around me. If Mark had indeed discovered the paper in this room it might still be here, probably in the same place in which he had found it. For unless he had lied again, this time to Father Boniface — and I could see no good reason why he should have done — he had not taken it with him to Beckery. My gaze ranged over the clothes-chest and the oak cupboard in the corner, but I dismissed them out of hand: they were neither of them places in which to hide something that needed to be kept secret; Dame Joan and the maids would have had constant access to them both. Instead my glance rested upon the remarkable bed-head, with its posts of carved acanthus leaves, and, in between, its score or so of tiny drawers and cupboards.
Suddenly I recalled the scene in the workshop, when Mark had produced the key to the book-chest. I remembered his words: ‘It was in one of the drawers of the bed-head. It occurred to me last night that that was where it might be.’ And he had found the paper at the same time. He must have done! There was no other explanation.
I knelt up on the bed and, with hands that shook a little, opened every drawer and cupboard in turn, peering excitedly into each one, certain that in the next I should find what I was seeking. But there was nothing. Disbelieving, I started over again, but this second search was just as fruitless. Almost weeping with disappointment I then looked in the clothes chest — even rifling through the pockets of the garments it contained — and the corner cupboard, but without success. I stripped the bed of sheets, blankets and mattress, all in vain, and had to remake it before I could sleep.
By this time, however, I was so tired that I could barely stand, and so I reluctantly abandoned any further search until the morning. I thought that in spite of my weariness I shouldn’t know a moment’s rest all night, but I was asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow.