‘The Church doesn’t approve of husbands who jeopardize the lives of their families, either,’ she answered tartly.
She fell asleep quite quickly. I, on the other hand, lay awake for a long time, turning over the day’s events in my head. The house was quiet, the noise and bustle of the streets stilled at last, the silence broken only by the occasional ‘All’s well!’ of the Watch or the ululating cry of an owl. It was uncomfortably warm, and I envied Hercules the cool of the kitchen.
I knew I had to respect Adela’s wishes. I was responsible for lives besides my own: it was the penalty for marriage and fatherhood … Did I really mean penalty? But I was uneasily conscious that the sight of Rowena Honeyman had stirred old bachelor yearnings that I had long thought dead.
The word ‘dead’, however, brought me up short. The woman was a cold-blooded murderess. She would have helped her mistress drown me — had in fact aided and abetted Elizabeth Alefounder to that end. And under attack from Eamonn Malahide, she had retaliated with a dagger thrust that would not have disgraced a professional soldier. Once again, I recalled Gilbert Honeyman, a man of few, if any, moral scruples; yet somehow, the same description did not seem so apt when applied to his daughter. But what did I know of her? Nothing, except the manner in which Gilbert had spoken of her, and his concern for her welfare after his death.
The shadows of the room broke up and reformed as I drifted towards the edge of sleep. Rowena’s face and figure swam mistily before me. She was wearing the blue brocade gown and red shoes. She reached out a hand to grasp one of mine, but just as I was about to take it, I realized she was clutching a dagger, whose evil-looking blade was dripping blood …
I was suddenly wide awake, sitting bolt upright. I could swear that something had woken me … Some movement … Some noise … And there it was again! The creaking of a stair.
I slid out of bed, trying not to disturb my wife, and reached for my cudgel. I tiptoed as quietly as possible towards the door, and, easing it ajar, was at once aware of a blast of air which must have originated from an open door or window downstairs. I crept on to the landing and began, stealthily, to descend.
The flight led down to a narrow passageway outside the kitchen. I could hear Hercules’s snuffling and whining which, at any moment, would culminate in a series of ear-splitting barks. After that all hell would break loose as he protested against his incarceration, while an intruder invaded his home.
But I had no wish for my nocturnal visitor to be alerted and escape before I had time to see who he was. I knew the squeaky tread was near the bottom of the stairs, so I crept down as fast as I dared, but to no avail. By now, Hercules was making sufficient noise to waken the dead, and it was therefore only a matter of minutes before Adela called out to ask what was happening. Adam was screaming, and that intrepid duo, Elizabeth and Nicholas, were thundering down to join me. As I turned the bend in the staircase, I was just in time to see a cloaked and hooded figure disappear through the street door, and although I ran out, barefoot, he had already vanished. The Watch was nowhere to be seen. Are they ever, when you need them?
I returned indoors and, ignoring the questioning of my loved ones, knelt down to inspect the lock, peering into its mechanism.
Adela now appeared. ‘Roger, what’s going on?’
I straightened up. ‘We must get a bolt for this door. Someone has managed to pick the lock.’
‘How do you know?’ My wife gave a sudden scream as she sighted Adam, who was negotiating a perilous descent of the stairs entirely on his own, his yelling having attracted no attention. He was unused to such treatment.
‘Well, for a start,’ I answered acidly, ‘I locked this door before I went to bed and now it’s open. And it hasn’t been forced. So, someone managed to pick it. With what purpose, I’m unable to guess, but I suspect it wasn’t to kiss us all goodnight. And secondly, I’m an expert at picking locks, myself. Nicholas Fletcher, a fellow novice at Glastonbury, taught me how. This one would have been easy.’ The question is, who did it and why?’
‘That’s two questions,’ Adela retorted huffily, preparing to shepherd the children back upstairs and settle them down again. ‘And I must say that lock-picking is hardly an accomplishment I’d have expected you to acquire during your novitiate …’
She didn’t continue, but made her way upstairs for the second time that night, carrying Adam, with the other two children trailing in her wake. I was aware that her bad temper, like mine, stemmed from acute anxiety as to why our home had been broken into. It was well known that we had nothing valuable enough to steal …
I almost shouted aloud, but restrained myself in the nick of time. The ring that I had found in the ‘murder’ house and subsequently forgotten all about! How could I have been so absent-minded? I could have — and probably should have — given it to Timothy Plummer, to whom it might have meant something.
But my moment of euphoria was short-lived as common sense reasserted itself. There was no way anyone could know that I had the ring. No one had seen me find it, and there was a good chance that its owner had no idea where or when it had been mislaid. The ring couldn’t possibly be the reason for our intruder.
Hercules, who had been sniffing around the front door, whined suddenly and prodded something with his front paw.
‘What is it, lad?’ I stooped to examine his discovery, which he presented to me with all the air of an intelligent and highly trained bloodhound. He dropped it in my outstretched hand.
I was looking at a shoe made of very soft, scarlet leather.
I slept fitfully for the rest of the night; a sleep broken by dreams in which a blue brocade gown swept past me as I lay on the floor of the old Witherspoon house, revealing a glimpse of scarlet leather shoes.
Adela had been dead to the world when I finally crept back to bed, so I had not woken her with the news of Hercules’s find. But I showed it to her the following morning as we sat in bed, adjusting our minds and bodies to the rigours of the day ahead.
‘A shoe?’ She was incredulous. ‘How could anyone lose a shoe? Unless it was too big, of course. But surely no one would set out to rob a house in shoes that were too large. Loose shoes can cause all sorts of difficulties. And accidents.’
‘Precisely. But suppose a person removed the shoes in order to make less noise, placing them just inside the door-’
‘Which he’d left open-’
‘For a quick escape should he need it-’
‘Which he did, thanks to Hercules!’
I felt somewhat annoyed at being denied my share of the credit. ‘So, having been discovered, our thief turns and runs, grabbing his shoes, dashes outside only to find that, in his haste, he’s left one behind. Does that make sense?’
Adela leaned against my shoulder. ‘You’re quite clever,’ she conceded, ‘when you want to be.’
I let that go, although I felt like the prophet in his own country: I didn’t always get my due. I picked up the shoe from where it lay, like a drop of blood against the white counterpane, and handed it to my wife.
‘Could that belong to a woman?’ I asked.
‘Do you really suspect the intruder might have been a woman? I thought you said it was a man.’
I tried to conjure up a mental picture of the figure I had seen disappearing through the door. An all-enveloping cloak and hood viewed from the back — what could that tell me with any certainty? In different circumstances, I would have sworn it was a man. Something in the general bearing, in the economy and decisiveness of movement seemed more masculine than feminine. But I had seen red shoes on one of my attacker’s feet: Rowena Hollyns.
‘I can’t swear it was a man. So, what do you think? Could this shoe belong to a woman?’
‘Too big for a woman. Oh, I know there are women with big feet. My own aren’t exactly dainty. But this is far too large.’