I nodded, but continued eating in silence. I was suffering from a feeling I had often had before; that something had been said or done that day of some significance, but which, at the time, had passed me by, unnoticed. In my mind, I went back over the events of the past ten hours, from my successful, early-morning transactions at the fair to my walk, with the children, to Margaret’s cottage; from my subsequent meeting with Cicely Ford to taking her home and our encounter with Marion Baldock and John Overbecks; from my visit to the bakery to my talk with Jenny Hodge. But none of these recollections yielded the hoped-for clue, and I remained as much in the dark as ever. My thoughts did linger over that sense of recognition I had experienced when witnessing the brawl in Horse Street, but nothing came of it and I reached the conclusion that I must, after all, have been mistaken.
I felt suddenly, desperately weary, and when, after our meal, Adela and I took our stools outside to enjoy the evening sunshine, I fell asleep almost at once, my back propped against the cottage wall. But it was an uneasy slumber, punctuated by moments of consciousness when I was aware of the growing rowdyism of the fair as the day’s frenzy reached its height; as the crowds drank themselves into fighting mood and from that into eventual stupor. My dreams were broken and senseless, a jumble of all the events of the past seven days since I had first noticed the stranger disembarking from the Breton ship. In the end, just as Cicely Ford seemed on the point of revealing something vitally important, Hercules renewed his love affair with my left leg, and Adam set up in competition with the raucous din coming from Saint James’s Barton. I awoke with a curse and a mouth as dry as tinder.
‘You’d better go to bed early,’ my wife advised. ‘You’re worn out. Go now. I’ll see to Adam and that wretched dog. You can sleep on Nicholas and Elizabeth’s mattress if you want, then I shan’t disturb you.’
But this was an offer I declined. ‘I’ve no objection to being disturbed by you,’ I informed her, grinning lasciviously. She chased me off to bed.
When I told Adela that I had no objection to being disturbed by her, I certainly didn’t mean being prodded violently in the back in the middle of the night.
‘Whassup? Whassa matter?’ I asked stupidly, roused abruptly from a deep, dreamless sleep and struggling to come to terms with my surroundings.
‘Roger! Wake up!’ my wife’s voice whispered in my ear. ‘Someone’s tapping on the door.’
If I had not been fully conscious before, Hercules’s infuriated charge across my recumbent body, breathing fire and brimstone, would surely have done the trick. I scrambled out of bed, reaching for my cudgel just as Adam, deciding that it must be morning and therefore time for his breakfast, contributed his own cries of protest to the dog’s barking, destroying any chance of lying low in the hope that our caller would despair of waking us. I unhooked my cloak from the peg on the wall, covered my nakedness and opened the door the merest crack, my stick at the ready in case of trouble.
‘Who’s there?’ I asked.
‘It’s Brother Nicodemus from Saint James’s,’ came the reply. And in the soft glow of light afforded by a three-quarter moon and the monk’s horn lantern, I had no difficulty in recognizing the Benedictine robes and tonsured head of one of the priory’s inmates.
‘What is it, Brother?’ I could barely suppress my annoyance. ‘What do you want at this time in the morning?’
The Watch-within-the-walls was just calling two o’clock, echoed almost immediately by the Watch-without-the-walls naming the same hour.
Brother Nicodemus coughed apologetically. ‘Could you come up to the priory, Master Chapman? We have one of the fairground stallholders there. He’s been beaten up in a fight and he’s also very drunk. The point is,’ the monk went on hurriedly as I shifted impatiently, ‘he claims to be a friend of a Roger Chapman of Bristol, although he doesn’t know where the man lives. Forgive me, but you’re the only Roger Chapman I could think of. The man’s name, or so he says, is-’
‘Philip Lamprey!’ I interrupted, suddenly realizing whose face it was that I had recognized in Horse Street the previous afternoon. ‘Of course! That’s who it was!’
Brother Nicodemus breathed a sigh of relief. ‘You do know him, then? That’s a blessing! Father Prior says, if you are the man, could you possibly come and take Master Lamprey away? He’s made his way into the church, you see, and positively refuses to budge until we find you. He’s being very obstreperous and noisy. Vigils is due to begin at any moment, but we can’t hold the service with Master Lamprey shouting and throwing up all over Lord Robert’s tomb. He’s fastened himself to one of the pillars and we can’t move him without resorting to violence, which we should be extremely loath to do.’
‘I’ll come,’ I said, ‘as soon as I’ve dressed. Go back and tell Father Prior I’m on my way. I shan’t be long.’
While I was pulling on my shirt and hose and lacing up my jerkin, I explained the situation to Adela. Practical as always, she said, ‘Bring Philip here. If he doesn’t mind being disturbed by the baby, he can have Nicholas and Elizabeth’s mattress for a night or two.’
I lit a lantern and picked up my cudgel again. ‘It doesn’t sound as if he’s in a fit state to object to anything,’ I retorted grimly. ‘It’s plain that Jeanne isn’t with him, or he wouldn’t be drinking and getting into fights. She must have stayed behind to look after their stall in London.’
It took only a few minutes for me to reach the priory, skirting the fairground, which was now reasonably quiet, with just one or two camp fires around the perimeter flaring in the darkness. The shouting and singing of a particularly bawdy song coming from inside the church was therefore all the more shocking.
Philip, although a sorry spectacle, was, nevertheless, instantly recognizable. He had indeed, as Brother Nicodemus had told me, fastened himself to the tomb of the priory’s founder, Robert of Gloucester. This, as befitted the bastard son of King Henry I, the half-brother of the Empress Matilda and the uncle of King Henry II, was a splendid monument, with a canopy of green jasper supported by six marble pillars. It was to one of these that the battered and disreputable figure of my friend was attached by a length of rope, so cunningly knotted that even he couldn’t remember how to undo it; and, in the end, after much fumbling on both our parts, and a good deal of swearing on his, I had to draw my knife and cut it through.
‘Roger, ol’ friend,’ Philip muttered, falling on my neck and clinging on for dear life as his legs gave out beneath him. ‘Goo’ t’see you again.’
‘Wish I could say the same,’ I answered shortly, as he was sick all down my tunic. ‘Come on! I’m taking you home to Adela.’
I had to carry him to Lewin’s Mead slung across my shoulder, thanking heaven that he was a slight man who weighed very little for his age and strength. He was out cold by the time I reached the cottage, and the next hour or so was spent in cleaning up both him and me and tucking his inert form between the sheets of the children’s bed. Brother Nicodemus, who had insisted on accompanying me — largely, I suspected, because it was far more interesting than the repetition of a service he knew like the back of his hand — proved himself adept at nursing Adam to sleep and soothing Hercules, who had at first taken violent exception to him, trying to bite his ankles or any other part of his anatomy that offered itself. But once the monk had shown himself a friend, the dog did nothing worse than chew his sandal straps and lick his dirty feet.