‘Your life could be in danger, if my theory was correct,’ Baldwin acknowledged.
‘So why in God’s good name should I help you? I would have to be mad to do anything of the sort, wouldn’t I?’ Ralph exclaimed.
Baldwin nodded with a grin, but gradually the lightness left his face and he met Ralph’s look with a correspondingly serious gaze. ‘I think you’d do it because you like the women in that terrible place. You care enough to go there and help them when they need it, and yes, you get to pick one of the women afterwards, but that’s for comfort, isn’t it? In truth, you would like to help them. And you could help them in a valuable, material way, if by catching this murderer you protected them from his depredations.’
Ralph laughed aloud. The youth returned as he leaned back in his seat, guffawing.
‘Ah, ah! Sir Baldwin, you should be a jester! Protected them? What do you think would be the first thing that would happen to those girls if you were right? They would lose their master, and that would mean that they’d also lose the roof over their heads. Their individual panders would appear and whip them away to work in worse conditions all over the city, and I’d never get to see them to help them again. Nor would anyone else. If you arrested the man who killed Anne, you’d take the one man who had a vested interest in looking after them all.’
‘That is mad!’ Baldwin waited until the sulky youth had left the room. ‘Look, the man killed her man and ruined her. What he did to her was savage. I’ve seen torture in my time, but that was foul. He intended to leave her as an advert of what could happen to a woman who crossed him. Now I have heard that Jordan le Bolle has had something to do with prostitution. All I want is to learn whether he owns that brothel or not.’
‘Him? Hmm. But the corollary is, if you’re right, that he would kill any man who attempted to beat or hurt one of his women. He feels he owns them, they are his investment. He wants them to behave in the way he expects, and he wants them to remain here. He’ll look after them like his own children, provided they do what he wants.’
‘And then throw them away like garbage,’ Baldwin summed up for him. ‘Ralph, a man who can do that to a girl must not be allowed to keep the brothel. He has done it to this one … what if he did the same to another? What if he did the same to Betsy? Yes, to her, Ralph.’
He stood. Ralph was sitting pensively now, a small frown wrinkling his brow.
‘Think on it, Ralph, and then go and speak to Betsy. Find out who it is who owns her and the other girls there. And then tell Sir Peregrine. I would not have another girl die.’
‘What of you? Should I not tell you?’
‘Ach!’ Baldwin pulled a face and felt his shoulder. ‘I think that I have done enough already. My shoulder, as you keep telling me, needs rest. I shall ride home today and leave all these affairs in the hands of those who actually have responsibility for them. It’s no longer my business.’
Jordan was home at a little before lunch, and as he walked inside he saw his wife sitting waiting for him. She stood as soon as he came in through the door, and went to help him with his cotte.
‘Get me an ale,’ he rasped. ‘My throat is parched. Christ’s cods, the way those arses talk you’d think there was a tax on silence.’
She obediently hurried out to the buttery. Usually their bottler should have been there to serve him, but Jordan had sent the man away to replenish their stocks, and he had taken the cart down to Topsham a little after Jordan and she had broken their fasts. He wouldn’t be back for a long time.
Jordan watched her go sombrely. The matter of Daniel’s death was all over the city, and several men had been glancing at him askance as though they were wondering. It didn’t matter, though. He’d been at the South Gate brothel with two merchants. They were both of them unmarried, so neither would worry too much about their presence there becoming known, and Jordan didn’t care who learned he’d been lying with a whore. That was his protection. He couldn’t have been present when Daniel was murdered. He hadn’t been.
Still, some men were asking who else would wish to see him dead, and he was unhappy with the sidelong looks and suspicious stares. The city’s receiver this morning had refused to sit near him and hadn’t shaken hands with him. Nor had the clerk. If those two took it into their heads that he might have paid someone else to kill Daniel, it could go hard for him. God, he was thirsty! ‘Where are you, bitch?’
Mazeline shivered at his voice. The barrel was almost empty, and she had to lift the end to pour a little more from the bottom. It meant that there was more sediment in the jug than usual, but she could do little about that. Taking it back into the room, she set the drink down with his favourite goblet in front of him on his table, and asked if he’d like some cold meat or a pie.
‘Meat, woman. Bring it out quickly, I’m hungry. Where’s Jane?’
‘Playing at the Bakeres’ house.’
She saw him nod approvingly. Jane didn’t like the Bakeres’ little boy — she said he was loud, rough, and bullying — but Mazeline knew that her husband approved of the Bakeres because Master Billy Bakere was a rising force within the Freedom of the city. In that exclusive club it was as well to keep an ear to the ground, and Jordan had heard that Billy might soon be the city’s official receiver, in charge of all the city’s money. That would make him a worthwhile friend, so Jane had been told to play with his son at every opportunity.
The meat was ready with some bread sliced on a trencher, and she brought them through to the table. He watched her as she approached the table and set the food down, and then, as she took a pace back, he swept up his goblet and hurled it at her.
‘This tastes of shit! Are you trying to poison me?’
The heavy pewter rim struck her above the eye, cutting the flesh on the point of the bone, and dashing the ale all over her. There had been a good two-thirds of a pint, and it exploded from the goblet, drenching her hair and upper body.
She stood for a moment, and the urge to burst into tears was so overwhelming, she felt certain she must succumb, but the expression on his face stopped her. She recognized that look. He was waiting for her to react.
When they had first been married, each time he had lost his temper she had been sure that it was a brief aberration, not a proof of his true character. She knew now that she had been fooling herself. This man was not a kindly lover such as young maids dreamed of and hoped to marry. Mazeline had been unfortunate in her choice of husband.
She had realized that the first time she had provided him with a meal that was late. She had explained that it was not her fault, that the cook had bought some flesh that was already too old and that it was unfit for him, so she had gone to buy some fresh meat from the fleshfold.
He had listened, very calm and collected, and then he had explained coolly that he was providing money for her to feed him, and if she was unable to provide even that service, she had no use. And then he had gripped her wrists and held her while he took a rope and studied it carefully, weighing it in his hand. The hemp was heavy, almost an inch thick, and he beat her so violently that she had been sick on the floor in front of him. Although the rope had not cut her skin as badly as, later, the plaited leather switch would, the weight of the rope bruised her dreadfully, and she had been incapable of lying on her back. Later that night, her protests were ignored, though. A wife had two duties, he explained, to provide food and then to bed her man. She had failed in one, but she wouldn’t fail in the second. While she wept and groaned in pain, he thrust and moaned lustfully above her, and probably from that moment she had truly begun to hate him.
It was a strange feeling to give birth to this man’s offspring. At first the idea of a child was repulsive, as repellent as taking him between her thighs and permitting him to enter her, but then, when the child arrived, she realized that this little babe was part of her too, and as soon as Jane first opened her eyes and looked up at Mazeline she knew that she loved her. They would love each other, despite all that the world could throw at them; against her husband, Jane’s father, they would unite for each other’s support.