While Margaret Walker searched for words with which to begin her story, I had time to study her. Lillis resembled her mother more closely than I had realized, for Margaret, too, was small and thin with large brown eyes which dominated her face, and the wisps of hair which strayed from beneath her hood were as black as her daughter's.
But it was not just her added years which gave the impression of a greater maturity. There was a solidity and common sense about Margaret which I felt sure that Lillis would never achieve, and I could tell by the way the older woman kept a vigilant watch upon the younger that she also felt this way. There was something lacking in Lillis, a sense of responsibility, of morality, which made her seem almost fey.
'My father,' Margaret said abruptly, as though deciding that if she didn't speak now, she might change her mind altogether, 'died at the beginning of last month, some three or four weeks before Christmas. His name was William Woodward, and in his youth he was a weaver by trade.'
The story came out piecemeal, with interruptions from Lillis, questions from me, events omitted only to be recalled later and recounted out of place, or incidents recollected too soon, leading to involved explanations and recriminations from one at least of Margaret's listeners.
So I will tell the story here as I came to understand it when her narrative was finished and I had had time to put the facts in order in my mind.
William Woodward had been born, during the last years of the reign of King Henry IV, into the close-knit weavers' community of Redcliffe in Bristol. He had been apprenticed as a boy to Master Jocelyn Weaver, the head of one of the city's wealthiest families concerned in the cloth trade. William had lived for seven years in the Weaver household, as a good apprentice should, and, at the end of his time, had become a journeyman weaver. Unfortunately, when he had applied to join the Weavers' Guild, his masterpiece had been rejected as of inferior standard, and he had therefore been unable to set up in business on his own account, a state of affairs which he deeply resented. A grudging man, he had, I gathered, blamed his failure on everyone but himself and his own poor workmanship.
At the age of twenty-two or thereabouts — he was never quite sure of his exact age — he had married Jennifer Peto, a young Cornishwoman, who had travelled to Bristol with her parents a few years earlier. Of the couple's four children, only Margaret, the eldest and the only girl, survived infancy. Jennifer died when Margaret was in her middle twenties and Lillis some six years old. Margaret had dutifully taken her father to live with her and the child, for by then she herself was a widow.
In her nineteenth year, she had married, within the weaving community, Adam Walker; in her own words 'as good and kind a man as ever breathed.' Lillis had been born two years later and a son, Colin, a twelve-month after that. It needed no great skill to discern that this boy had been the apple of Margaret's eye, and I stole a sidelong glance at Lillis to see how she took such overt partiality. But her face was untroubled; and if she realized that her long-dead little brother still meant more to her mother than she did, she showed no sign of resentment.
Colin Walker was barely two years old when he accompanied his mother, one hot summer afternoon, to the weaving sheds to take his father a draught of cider.
Adam had been allowed to the door to see and speak to his wife, and while his parents were talking, Colin strayed into the middle of the road, attracted by the debris sluggishly floating along the open drain. And it had been at that precise moment that a horse, harnessed to a cart loaded with bales of cloth, had been frightened by some passing urchins and bolted. The driver was drunk, having spent the previous hour in one of the local inns.
Adam Walker, who was facing the road, saw the danger to his son before his wife did, and hurled himself into the path of the oncoming horse and cart in a vain attempt to throw the boy clear. Both were killed, the child almost instantly, the father after lingering in agony for several hours. Margaret was left inconsolable and grief-stricken, mourning a husband whose memory was so potent that she could never bring herself to marry again. Alfred Weaver, who had by then inherited the business from his lather, Jocelyn, and to whom the horse and cart belonged, had allowed Margaret and Lillis to remain in the cottage, which had been their home ever since.
And it was here, in this room where I now sat, that William Woodward, newly widowed, had joined his daughter and granddaughter in the summer of 1460; or, at least, I judged it to be so from Margaret's insistence that it was the year the Duke of York, father of King Edward, God bless him, returned from Ireland to lay claim to the throne, and was later killed at the battle at Wakefield. William was still a journeyman weaver, still disgruntled and less than grateful — or such was my guess — for the filial duty and attention heaped upon him.
He remained with Margaret and Lillis for well on nine years, and was already fast approaching the age when his daughter expected that she would have to support him as he grew too old to handle the heavy shuttles and looms, when William seemed to gain a new lease of life. He left weaving and the protection of Margaret's care, and went to live in a cottage in Bell Lane, near St John's Gate, the property of Edward Herepath, for whom he now worked.
For this same Edward Herepath was the city's biggest landlord and had offered William Woodward employment as a rent and debt collector, when his former bailiff had left him to be married.
When she spoke of the circumstance, Margaret Walker's voice still registered the same sense of astonishment she had felt at the time.
'For you must know,' she said to me, 'that Father was not a young man. Big and well-built, I grant you — Lillis and I get our small bones from my mother — but grey-haired and not much short of his sixtieth year; an age when most men would be quietly and decently contemplating death. To change his trade like that at such an advanced time of life was something very few people could understand. And even less understandable was Edward Herepath's decision to employ him, for they were two men with little in common who had, as far as I knew, never exchanged words prior to this transaction.'
'Tell me about Edward Herepath,' I suggested.
Margaret added a few sticks to the fire before positioning a fresh turf to contain the blaze. 'I was going to,' she answered, 'for Edward Herepath and his brother Robert are at the very heart of this story. Indeed, without them, there would not be one.'
Edward Herepath, she informed me, was some thirty-five or — six years old, the eider of the two sons of Giles Herepath, wealthy soap manufacturer and respected burgess of the city, and his wife, Adela. When Edward was eighteen, his mother had died giving birth to her second child, Robert. A grieving Giles had followed his wife to the grave only two years later, leaving everything, including the upbringing of the infant Robert, to his elder son.
Edward, who apparently had no interest in the manufacture of soap, had disposed of the business to a friend of his father, one Peter Avenel, and with the money thus obtained, bought up a number of properties in and around Bristol, which returned him a handsome profit in rents.
As far as the baby brother — with whom he had been saddled at so young an age — was concerned, everyone agreed that his devotion was exemplary. Nothing that could make up for the lack of a mother and father had been denied Robert; his every wish had been his brother's command. Even when Edward married, no children of his own had come along to challenge Robert's supremacy in the household.
'With the result,' snorted Margaret, 'that you may well guess at. Robert grew from a wilful, spoilt child into an even wilder and unbiddable youth, a constant source of worry to his brother and, above all, a gambler, forever in debt.'