‘So you mentioned before. And have you remembered it now?’
‘As far as I can recall, your aunt asked me if there was any other means of concealment near at hand, in the hollow. And I answered no, not apart from the hut, and that Master Peter was not inside it.’
‘So?’
‘So, I should have realized that if he was not inside, he had to be outside. And if there was no time for him to make good his escape without being seen by Abel, then he still had to be where the lad had first spotted him.’
‘Unless he had been snatched by the Devil.’
I smiled down at her. ‘I thought we’d agreed that that was most unlikely.’
She eyed me askance, uncertain whether or not I was speaking heresy. A denial of the Devil might logically mean a denial of God, although Cicely perhaps would not think of it quite like that.
I hastened to reassure her. ‘It’s just common sense,’ I said, adding, ‘Our Saviour had a lot of common sense.’
‘Did He?’ she queried doubtfully, and again regarded me uneasily, still not certain that it was permissible to speak of the Lord in such terms.
I smiled and held out my hand. ‘Let’s go to dinner,’ I said. ‘It must be well past ten o’clock, and Lydia will grumble if we’re late.’
At this moment Dame Joan came out of the shop with Rob Undershaft and a swarthy-looking man with a weather-beaten face who was clutching a letter in one hand and several coins in the other, obviously the carter bound for London. The Dame was still issuing a number of confused instructions, but the man cut short her meanderings.
‘I shan’t have any difficulty in discovering where the Duke of Clarence is lodging, Mistress, don’t you trouble your head about that. And if he and his household have already left the city, I’ll make certain someone gets your letter and knows that it’s to be passed on urgently to your brother, Sergeant Armstrong.’
He nodded perfunctorily at Cicely and me before wishing Dame Joan farewell and disappearing into the hurly-burly of the High Street.
My hostess twisted her hands together. ‘He didn’t want to take it, you know,’ she whispered. ‘He didn’t want anything to do with me, in case he might be jeopardizing his immortal soul. It wasn’t until Rob here — ’ she summoned up a watery smile for the apprentice — ‘reminded him that we had put plenty of work his way in the past that he agreed, but then only with the greatest reluctance.’ She wrung her hands again. ‘We are becoming outcasts in this town.’
Cicely linked one of her arms through her aunt’s. ‘Come and have dinner. Lyddie had it ready ages ago. Roger and I have something to tell you.’
* * *
‘You mean … you mean there isn’t anything strange about what happened to Peter?’
In spite of her immense relief, Dame Joan sounded almost as if she had been cheated, an emotion reflected on the faces of Lydia and the two apprentices. They were all finding it difficult to accept my explanation.
‘It’s the fault of that stupid boy,’ Lydia exclaimed wrathfully, ‘frightening us with his talk of the Devil!’
‘I don’t think that’s being fair to Abel Fairchild,’ I reproved her gently. ‘After all, Peter has disappeared. This solution resolves only a part of the mystery: how he escaped Abel’s vigilance before going off about his own concerns.’
‘Ay, that’s true enough,’ John Longbones said thickly through a mouthful of goat’s milk cheese. ‘What was Master doing over at Pennard’s, anyway? He said nothing to us about needing more skins, and by my reckoning we had plenty in store.’
Dame Joan nodded her agreement. ‘And if it was on business,’ she added, repeating what had been said before, ‘why didn’t he go to the house or the sheds?’
I caught Cicely’s eye across the table and almost imperceptibly shook my head. I was not yet sure myself that Peter’s foray on to the Pennards’ land necessarily had anything to do with his quest (although I found it hard to believe otherwise; I suppose I was tired of the incredulity with which my theory was constantly greeted), nor did I want Rob Undershaft and John Longbones spreading the story all over town. To my relief — and, I have to admit, somewhat to my surprise — Cicely remained silent.
Lydia said, ‘There’s Master Mark as well. He’s vanished too. You seem to have forgotten him.’
‘How can you suggest such a thing, Lyddie?’ Dame Joan reproached her. She began to cry again. ‘When my brother comes, he’ll know what to do.’
I felt my hostess was being over-sanguine. Furthermore, it could be many weeks before William Armstrong reached her, depending upon whether or not my lord of Clarence had moved on before the carter arrived in the capital. Moreover, Dame Joan was right: an uneasy atmosphere had permeated the town for several days now whenever she or her niece had appeared in public, and I was sure that the continued calm was only a result of the influence exerted by such friends as Edgar Shapwick. This fear proved to be well-founded when, shortly after dinner, a dead cat, with a halter tied about its neck, was found lying outside the front door. Lydia’s scream brought us all running to see what had caused it, and one look at the gruesome discovery was enough to send Dame Joan into strong hysterics.
‘I knew it! I knew it!’ was all she could utter coherently between sobs which racked her from head to foot.
The practical Lydia, although badly shaken, was more concerned for her employer than for herself, and insisted that Dame Joan drank an infusion of herbs in order to calm her overstretched nerves, followed by a draught of lettuce juice in order to make her sleep. Consequently it was more than an hour later, when the household was at last quiet and its mistress laid down upon her bed, that I was able to take myself off to the garden and sit on the bench beneath the medlar tree, where I could think undisturbed.
But I had barely managed to get even the most trivial of my thoughts in order when I looked up to see Cicely treading purposefully towards me across the grass. I sighed audibly as she sat down beside me.
She ignored this mark of disapproval. ‘You haven’t told me yet,’ she said, in the determined tone of voice I was beginning to dread, ‘what you and Master Honeyman were up to, visiting the whore-houses in Cock Lane earlier this morning.’
My hope that she had forgotten this unguarded remark was dashed. But there was no good reason why she should be kept in ignorance concerning Mark’s nocturnal activities, so I felt obliged to tell her what I had discovered.
She was, of course, as mystified as I was. ‘But if he didn’t go whoring, what did he do?’ she demanded.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know much, do you?’ she snapped.
We were growing extremely edgy with one another; the discovery of the dead cat had shaken us all more than we cared to admit.
‘No!’ I snapped back. ‘And I don’t know what significance this has, either.’ I opened my pouch and drew out the coil of brown homespun thread which Edgar Shapwick’s stable-boy had given me.
Cicely took it from me gingerly. ‘Where did it come from?’ she asked.
‘It was snarled up in Dorabella’s mane when she was found wandering yesterday morning. She also had bits of straw in her coat, as well as flecks of something sticky.’
Cicely had unwound the coarse woollen thread and was pulling it through her fingers in an effort to straighten it further. She frowned. ‘There’s something sticky on this as well.’ She examined the strip more closely. ‘Yes, look!’ she said. ‘There! In the middle. You can probably feel it better than you can see it.’
She was right. When she handed the thread back to me I was just able to make out, halfway along its length, a speck of some black foreign matter which undoubtedly felt glutinous to the touch. I raised it to my nose and sniffed, but it was too small an amount to have retained any smell.
‘Well?’ Cicely asked impatiently. ‘What do you think it is?’