The Voyager was situated just before the junction with Needlers Lane and appeared to be even busier than I recalled at this time of day. I squeezed myself on to a providentially empty stool at the common table and stared around, hoping for a glimpse of Reynold, but there was no sign of him. I decided that he was most probably in the parlour attending in person to the more select of his guests. He would arrive to restore order in the ale room in just a few minutes.
There was no doubt in my mind, as I tried to catch the eye of a passing pot boy, that the present set of customers were a far more raucous bunch than they used to be. There was a rough element among them that Reynold would never have tolerated in days gone by, and I wondered if times were hard that he put up with them now. A brawl had broken out in one corner of the ale room between a man with a broken nose and another with a patch over one eye, whose tunic bore witness to the fact that he was a careless eater, and who was being vociferously encouraged by his friends to ‘black the bugger’s daylights’.
I waited confidently for Reynold to appear, breathing fire and brimstone, in order to have the troublemakers ejected. Nothing happened. In the meantime, I at last managed to order a cup of ale, which, when it came, tasted flat and stale. After only three sips, I pushed it away, disgusted.
I turned to the man on my right. ‘Where’s Landlord Makepeace?’ I asked, raising my voice to be heard above the increasing din.
‘Who?’
‘Reynold Makepeace, the owner of this place.’
Before he could reply, a slatternly looking, red-haired woman wearing a dirty apron and with her cap askew had entered the ale room and was screaming at the two antagonists to sit down and behave or they would be thrown out without more ado. To reinforce her words, a couple of very large gentlemen, also red-haired and obviously her sons, each with fists like hams, had followed her in and were indicating their readiness to carry out her wishes. The would-be combatants duly subsided and peace, of a sort, reigned again.
I felt a touch on my arm. The man on the other side of me, a quiet, pleasant-spoken fellow, said, ‘You were asking about Landlord Makepeace. It must be some while since you were last here, friend. You plainly haven’t heard.’
‘Heard what?’ I asked, my heart sinking into my boots.
‘Reynold was killed some year and a half ago. Stabbed to death, here in this very room.’
‘Stabbed? Here? In the Voyager?’
My companion nodded. ‘I don’t know how long it is since you were last in these parts, but the area has been going from bad to worse for a long time. Far more thieves and beggars and pickpockets than there used to be, and foreign seamen making their way up from the wharves. You know how it is. Someone discovers a place by accident and the word spreads. Anyway, to cut a long story short, Reynold was trying to separate the contestants in just such a sort of brawl as was threatening a few moments ago, and unfortunately got in the way of a knife that was being brandished about. Died within hours.’ He broke off, laying a concerned hand on my arm. ‘Are you feeling unwell, sir? You’re looking a very funny colour. Here, drink some of your ale.’
‘No! No!’ I pushed his hand away and staggered to my feet, holding him down on his stool when he would have risen with me. ‘There’s nothing wrong. I mean, I’m not ill. It’s just that this is the second piece of bad news — appalling news — that I’ve had within the past hour. Please don’t come with me. I shall be all right once I get away from this place.’
Having made my way outside, all I could do, for several minutes at least, was to lean against the wall of the inn breathing heavily and trying to control the renewed shaking in my limbs. Above my head, the inn sign, St Brendan in his cockleshell boat, swung and creaked in the late afternoon breeze just as it had always done, giving the illusion that nothing had changed. But everything had changed and in so short a space of time. Jeanne Lamprey was dead and her baby stillborn, Philip was missing, and now Reynold Makepeace had gone, stabbed to death in his own ale room, where his word used to be law.
Suddenly, I forced myself away from the wall and started half running, half lurching through the crowded streets — the Walbrook, Dowgate Hill, Elbow Lane and so into Thames Street — instinct guiding my feet back to Baynard’s Castle. I was like a man possessed, seeing no one, hearing nothing, until, without in the least knowing how I got there, I found myself sitting on the edge of the narrow bed in the tiny, cupboard-sized room that had been allotted to me for the duration of my stay in the castle. At this point, it occurred to me, quite irrelevantly, that I should have been suspicious from the moment I was given a private chamber and not put to sleep in the common dormitory, along with the scullions and spit-turners and other general dogsbodies who kept the life of the household running smoothly. Such favouritism should have been a warning that something more was required of me. For the present, however, I could concentrate only on the loss of three friends.
Perhaps it was too much to claim Reynold Makepeace as a friend, but as an acquaintance I had valued him highly and until today had regarded the Voyager as a home from home and a safe haven from the perils of the London streets when staying in the capital. Now that refuge was gone, along with Philip and Jeanne Lamprey, whose cottage door had always been open to me and where I was welcomed as a brother.
Someone was rapping on my own door with an urgency that suggested whoever it was had been knocking for some time. I got up and opened it to find Eloise Gray standing on the threshold.
‘It’s suppertime,’ she said. ‘The trumpet sounded ages ago. I thought to find you in the servants’ hall before me. Is anything wrong? It’s not like you to neglect your belly. You’re not sick, are you?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m not hungry.’ When she looked her astonishment, I blurted out the sorry story, feeling foolish, but at the same time needing comfort.
I should have known better than to expect it, I suppose, from a woman who had played a man’s role for so long and whose companions I had, in some part, helped to destroy.
‘Dear me!’ she said brightly when I had finished. ‘Well, you can’t count this Philip Lamprey as a death, nor the child, so you’ll be bound to hear of a third one within a day or two. Are you coming down to supper? You surely don’t mean to starve yourself on account of a couple of people who, on your own admission, you haven’t seen for years. Besides, I seem to remember you have an audience with His Grace of Gloucester this evening. You need to fortify yourself for that. You don’t want to risk an empty belly rumbling as you make your obeisance, now do you?’
There was something in what she said, and her brisk, unsympathetic attitude had the effect of making me pull myself together, aware that I was perhaps indulging my grief to an unwarranted degree — or that it would seem so to other people. I was not mourning family, only two acquaintances whose existence had made very little difference to my life. I braced my shoulders and managed a smile.
‘You’re right,’ I admitted. ‘I’ll come right away if — ’ I forced myself to say it — ‘you’ll give me the pleasure of escorting you down to the hall.’
She put her hand on my arm. ‘I don’t think we need hurry,’ she laughed. ‘It’s probably more of that disgusting brown pottage that we were fed at dinner. I suspect Duchess Cicely of being a thought parsimonious. These religious women very often are. They have little time for the pleasures of the flesh.’ We had arrived at a narrow, twisting staircase and had to descend in single file. Eloise paused two steps down and, turning her head, glanced up at me, a malicious smile lifting her pretty lips. ‘Although I understand it wasn’t always so. Rumour has it that Her Grace of York was far from despising earthly pleasures in her youth.’