I finished my herrings and pushed my plate to one side, before starting on the oatcakes and cheese that my mother-in-law put in front of me. I recalled Richard Manifold’s words. ‘A bad business,’ I said. ‘A very bad business.’
Margaret sighed and rose wearily from her stool to put Elizabeth to bed. ‘It is that,’ she agreed. ‘Alderman Weaver looked very ill to me when I called on him this afternoon, to beg a place for Adela among his spinners. That girl of his will be the death of him if she’s not very careful.’
‘They’ll be the death of each other,’ I said. Evidently Mistress Burnett disbelieved her husband’s denial that Irwin Peto was the one who had attacked him. What a fool the man was ever to put the notion into her head. Unwisely, I spoke my thought aloud.
‘By your account, it was you who first mentioned the impostor — if indeed he is that. You told Master Burnett that you and Ned Stoner had seen him in the Lattice,’ my mother-in-law chided me.
I should have remembered that Margaret had a good memory, particularly for those details one would prefer her to forget. I changed the subject. ‘You haven’t yet said what Alderman Weaver’s response was to your request about Adela. Was he agreeable?’
‘He was graciousness itself, and asked me to tell her to present herself at the baling sheds to collect her wool as soon as she liked, and he would see that word was passed along to the overseer by this evening. We must buy a spinning wheel for her, Roger, as we promised. Tomorrow morning, you must go to the carpenter’s in Temple Street and get her the best one that he has in his shop. And I’ll go to Lewin’s Mead and give her the news. Elizabeth can go with me. She’ll like to see Nicholas again.’
She was as good as her word, and set out immediately after breakfast the following morning, although she looked so unwell that I begged her not to go. There had been yet another severe frost during the night, and now it was snowing once more.
‘Stay here in the warm with Elizabeth. I’ll visit Adela as soon as I’ve been to Temple Street,’ I added.
But my offer was spurned. ‘The fresh air will do me good,’ was her only answer.
I could do no more and completed my errand at the carpenter’s before returning home to collect my pack. I had no intention of going far beyond the city walls in such weather, but I needed to make some money, and people reluctant or unable to go out in the snow welcomed goods brought to their doorsteps. It was well past dinner-time when pangs of hunger sent me back over the bridge to Redcliffe, my mouth already watering in anticipation of one of Margaret’s winter stews.
But when I pushed open the cottage door, there was no savoury smell to greet me. Instead, I found my mother-in-law slumped down beside the bed, unconscious, while my daughter sat beside her, sobbing with fright and clutching her grandmother’s arm.
‘Granny ill,’ Elizabeth informed me, raising her tear-blotched face.
Chapter Eleven
By the evening, my mother-in-law was in a high fever which lasted several days and which, at one point, I thought would be the death of her. As it was, it left her debilitated and bedridden for weeks afterwards, and she did not fully recover her health and strength until the beginning of April.
Adela came daily to the cottage and nothing was too much trouble, either for her or for our neighbours. Mistress Burnett, on hearing of our difficulties, sent and paid for the services of the physician from Bell Lane, who dosed Margaret with lozenges of dried lettuce juice, in order to reduce the fever, and a distillation of rosemary and rue which, he assured me, had a purging effect upon the body. All in all, I was the recipient of more kindness that I would have thought possible, and probably of far more than I deserved. Even so, a great deal of extra work fell upon my shoulders.
I had previously had no notion of how demanding, and what hard work, a child of two years old could be. My mother-in-law had seen to all Elizabeth’s needs, and when my daughter woke in the night, which seemed an all too frequent occurrence, had roused herself to dance attendance. Now it was my turn, and I was no longer assured of unbroken sleep. In addition, during the early stages of Margaret’s illness, she was in need of constant nursing, and there were no willing helpers during the small hours on whom I could call. I often started the day as tired as I finished it.
As I said, Adela came every morning to see how the patient did and to perform those more intimate female tasks which delicacy forbade me attempting. Nevertheless, she could not stay longer than an hour or two, for she now had a living to earn for herself and Nicholas, and was unable to neglect her spinning. This also applied to those other neighbours who dropped in and out during the short winter afternoons; but one or other of these good women would arrange to sit with my two womenfolk, so that I was able to get out of the house and peddle my wares from door to door.
I could not go far, however, even had I wished to. The weather was equally as bad, if not worse than, the preceding winter, with hard night frosts freezing the closely packed snow, and then more snow falling during the day. The dirty white mounds at the roadside grew steadily higher, wells froze over (including the great Pithay well near Christchurch with Saint Ewen), and, worst of all, the great cistern of the Carmelite Friars, filled by a stream which flowed downhill from the heights above the city and which was now reduced to the merest trickle, began to dry up. Water from this cistern was piped across the Frome Bridge and fed the conduit by Saint John’s Arch, so it meant that yet another burden was added to the hardships of the season with the necessity of melting lumps of frozen snow before anyone could wash or drink. Even the rubbish set solid in the open sewers, but at least it did not stink so much as usual.
In these circumstances, my life was reduced to getting through each day as best I could, with no spare time to pursue my promise to assist in the mystery of Clement Weaver.
‘When my mother-in-law is well again and the better weather comes and I can travel abroad once more,’ I assured Mistress Burnett, meeting her by the High Cross one bleak morning in late February, ‘then you may be certain that I shall resume my enquiries.’
Her nostrils were pinched, her lips blue with cold and she was shivering uncontrollably in spite of her fur-lined cloak, but she paused politely to hear me out. ‘I understand,’ she said, adding that she had no expectations from me as matters stood at present. Greatly daring, I asked her how her father was faring in these icy conditions, only to be fixed with a basilisk stare. ‘I neither know nor care,’ was the embittered answer.
‘And Master Burnett,’ I continued hastily, ‘has he quite recovered from the attack?’
‘He is perfectly himself again, thank you, Chapman,’ she said and walked on down High Street. After a few paces, however, she stopped and glanced over her shoulder. ‘But I shall expect to see you, and hear of your plans, when it grows warmer and Mistress Walker has regained her strength.’