‘Mistress!’ I said, blocking her path and hoping against hope that her eyes would light up when she saw me.
Instead, she looked puzzled as she tried to remember who I was. ‘Your face is familiar,’ she smiled. ‘Have we met?’ But as recollection crowded in on her, the smile faded and she shrank back into the crook of the young man’s arm. ‘My aunt’s not in,’ she said coldly, and turned her head towards the reluctantly dispersing knots of people, some of whom still found it difficult to resume their normal tasks. ‘I don’t think she’ll wish to buy anything today, but if you want to ask her, she’s over there talking to the woman in the blue dress and the linen apron and hood.’
I recognized the description of Dame Janet and, with a sidelong glance, verified that the woman in question was indeed Baldwin Lightfoot’s housekeeper. In that brief moment, however, Rowena and her escort slipped past me and started off down the street towards the open countryside. I half-raised my hand to detain her, to grab at her sleeve, her skirt, any part of her within my reach, but thought better of it and slowly allowed my arm to drop back again to my side. What was the point in trying to claim her attention when she so plainly wanted as little to do with me as possible? In her eyes, I was still the man who had been partially responsible for her father’s death. I had been living in a fool’s paradise all these months, imagining that she would have forgiven me by now; exonerated me from any blame. How self-deluding I had been!
I stared after her as long as she was in sight, then heaved my pack on to my back and turned in the opposite direction. I felt winded, as though I had been dealt a heavy blow to my stomach, and I walked blindly, looking neither to left nor right. I had treasured up the memory of Rowena Honeyman for so many long months, that there was nothing now to take its place. It seemed as if a huge, gaping hole had been torn in my heart and that my life’s blood was slowly seeping away. It was not a sensation that I had ever experienced before and I had no idea how to cope with it. I had never been in love, although once, just over three years ago, I had come close to it — and had married someone else instead! But anything I had ever felt for Cicely Ford was as nothing to the emotions which Rowena had stirred within my breast; and my present dejection was not improved by the knowledge that I had been both arrogant and presumptuous in believing that during our short acquaintance I must necessarily have favourably impressed her. I realized with shame that I was so used to the admiration and friendship of women that I was in danger of taking them for granted and not valuing them as I should. If I was wise, this experience would be a salutary lesson to me.
In this humbled mood, and lost in my own unhappy thoughts, I was not at first aware of someone shouting after me. But suddenly a hand seized my arm, and a breathless voice said, ‘Chapman! Why are you hurrying off without letting me take a look at your goods? I’m in want of needles and thread and also a wooden spoon, if you have one.’
It was Dame Janet, flushed and indignant, and I stammered a half-hearted apology. ‘I–I’m sorry, but I did tell you that I wasn’t selling today. My visit was simply to deliver his cousin’s letter to your master, which I’ve done.’
She snorted angrily. ‘Well, if your business with Master Baldwin’s finished, what’s to stop you doing a little business on your own account? I never knew a pedlar yet who wasn’t anxious to sell the nose off his face if the opportunity should offer.’
I had never felt less like hawking my wares, but Dame Janet was an elderly woman in need of commodities which she might otherwise have to go a mile or so to buy. I therefore urged her to the side of the road, on to the same grassy knoll which I had earlier shared with Timothy Plummer, and spread out the contents of my pack in the shade of the oak. As luck would have it, I was carrying several wooden spoons, from which she was able to take her pick, as well as some good bone needles and a quantity of the best linen thread. She haggled over the cost of every item and patently enjoyed the little concessions she obtained on each, but in truth, I was in no mood for bargaining and was content to let things go for whatever she was willing to pay.
‘You charge near enough London prices,’ she grumbled as she stowed her purchases in the capacious pouch hanging from her belt.
I was no more in the mood for arguing than I was for chaffering, but something about the accusation stung me on the raw. ‘I can assure you that I don’t,’ I snapped, adding ungraciously, ‘and what would you know about London prices?’
‘Hoity-toity!’ Dame Janet, by the look on her face, was about to score yet another triumph. ‘I know what Master Lightfoot pays for the things he brings back from his London visits, for he tells me. “I’m a fool, Janet,” he says to me. “You see this leather girdle that I’ve brought you? I could have bought it in Frome for a fraction of the cost I gave for it, but I know you’ll like to boast that it’s London made.” And he had a silver-gilt cup and some other trinkets that he told me the price of. Extortionate, all of them. But that’s London for you!’
In spite of my private misery, my attention was arrested, and as I fastened the buckles on my pack, I asked casually, ‘Master Lightfoot often journeys to the capital then, does he? I wouldn’t have thought he had the means for so much gallivanting about.’
‘Well, you’d be wrong,’ she retorted, raising her chin and squaring her jaw. ‘He was there only last November. That was when he bought me the girdle from a booth in Cheapside. Oh, I admit he doesn’t go often nowadays, but when the fit comes on him, he’s off to visit his cousin who lives near Saint Paul’s.’
‘And he was there sometime last November, you say? You’re sure of that, Mistress?’
Dame Janet was suddenly uneasy, the first inkling that she might have said more than she should have done beginning to trouble her mind. But she had been too positive to retract her statement: she could only affirm what she had already said.
‘Yes, I’m sure. What’s it to you? Why do you want to know?’
‘No reason at all,’ I lied, and changed the subject. ‘The woman to whom you were talking just now — I forget her name — has a niece, Rowena. Is — er — is the young lady betrothed to that youth I saw her with a few moments ago?’ I tried to sound as casual as I could.
‘You know Mistress Coggins?’ Dame Janet enquired, surprised. Then, without waiting for an answer or an explanation, she carried on, ‘Yes, Rowena’s been promised to Ralph Hollyns these two months or more. Didn’t take him two shakes of a lamb’s tail, once he’d clapped eyes on her, to know what he wanted. The only surprise is that she feels the same way about him. With looks like hers, she could have had the pick of any man for twenty miles around. Mind you — ’ the housekeeper was warming to her theme and growing confidential, her earlier suspicions of me forgotten — ‘there’s something a bit mysterious about her. She doesn’t say much concerning her life before she came to live here with her aunt last year. Talks occasionally about her mother, but clams up when her father’s name is mentioned.’ The eyes grew bright with sudden hope. ‘If you’re acquainted with her, maybe you can tell me something of her past. There’s a lot of people hereabouts who’d like to know.’
But I shouldered my pack, said an abrupt goodbye and strode off along the road, heading back the way I had come. Rowena Honeyman was promised to a young man with a freckled face called Ralph Hollyns, and had been for the past two months while I was living with my hopeless dreams. Well, it served me right! I was growing too vain and was in need of a set-down. I hoped I should be able to learn from it.
* * *
I did not return to Bristol until the end of the following week, partly because I had felt it necessary to make some money by selling my wares, and partly because I needed to be by myself for a while, before returning to my mother-in-law and daughter. As I must have mentioned before, without seeming to pry, Margaret had an uncanny knack of searching out the truth if I appeared in any way unhappy or distressed, and I had no wish to discuss Rowena Honeyman with her. I therefore took my pack into the remoter communities of north Somerset, and, in my idle hours, tried to concentrate on what I was going to report to Alison Burnett.