I was no wiser as to what was troubling me than I had been the previous evening. No great revelation had burst upon me when I awoke. My bed companion from the fen country was still snoring loudly, so I had dressed, paid my shot for the night’s board, resisting the landlady’s pressing invitation to stay to breakfast, and made my way back to Cornhill. There, Jeanne Lamprey, as neat and bright-eyed as ever, having offered me hot water to wash and shave in, regaled me with a meal of bread and salt bacon, washed down with ale. Philip, for a small man, had eaten and drunk with exceptional heartiness, and had then sat picking his teeth while Jeanne bustled about, getting the booth ready for opening. I had offered a helping hand, hoping to shame him, but he had only grinned. He knew his wife better than I did.
‘No, no!’ she had said, almost angrily, waving me to one side. ‘You and Philip get on about your business and let me get on about mine. And, Roger, you’d best leave that leather jerkin behind. Both of you would do well to do as I suggested last night and borrow something from the stall.’
Now, as the oarsman rowed us across the river, skilfully riding the incoming tide, I thought to take notice of what Philip had on, and saw it to be an extremely old and disreputable camlet tunic, with tattered remnants of fur at neck and wrists. It might have been a garment of quality once, but I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to buy it in its present condition, and said as much.
Philip laughed. ‘It isn’t off the stall, you great lummox! Can you see my Jeanne selling anything as tattered and torn as this?’ He leaned towards me from his seat in the stern. ‘Don’t you recognize it?’ I shook my head, bewildered. ‘Look closer,’ he urged. He pointed to just below the collar; or rather to where the collar had once been, for it was now more than half ripped away. ‘At one time, there were two initials there, worked in gold thread, but nothing’s left of ’em now except the stitchmarks.’
Enlightenment dawned. ‘CW,’ I breathed. ‘That’s the tunic you bought all those years ago from Bertha Mendip, after she’d stripped it from a corpse she found in the river. It’s Clement Weaver’s tunic. Fancy you keeping it all this while!’ I wrinkled my nose. ‘Particularly as it still stinks of fish.’
Philip gave another of his raucous laughs. ‘That’s what my Jeanne says, but she knows better than to throw it away because it’s always brought me good luck. Mind you, we never knew for certain that it belonged to Clement Weaver. We only thought it might have done because of the initials.’
‘That’s true enough,’ I admitted grudgingly. ‘And Alison Weaver, as she was then, confirmed that her brother had possessed such a garment and thought he might have been wearing it on the day that he disappeared. But come to think of it,’ I added, ‘a camlet tunic, trimmed with grey squirrel’s fur, was mentioned to me not so long ago by none other than “Clement” himself. But he claims it was stolen from him by the thief who stripped and robbed him after he had swum ashore.’
The oarsman gently beached his craft on a narrow strip of sand and Philip and I disembarked. We climbed the flight of steps to the quayside above, but had barely reached the top before we were surrounded by half a dozen whores, immediately identifiable by their striped hoods. (Most of the Southwark stews are owned by the See of Winchester, whose yearly income is greatly enhanced by these women’s earnings.) They seemed in no way deterred by our impoverished appearance, but turned violently abusive when Philip and I declined their services. For a moment, I was afraid for our safety, but my companion grabbed me by the arm and we took to our heels through a warren of narrow, filthy alleyways fringed by dark and desolate dwellings, whose inhabitants turned to stare suspiciously after us as we ran. I was thankful on more than one occasion for my good stout cudgel and the gleaming steel of Philip’s unsheathed knife.
But finally, without mishap, we reached Angel Wharf, long since abandoned for all commercial purposes, and still looking much as it had done six years earlier. The same collection of hovels and near-derelict houses provided shelter of a sort for the tribe of beggars, thieves and vagabonds who lived and found sanctuary from the law there. As Philip and I got closer, shrill whistles gave warning of our approach, just as they had done on our first visit; and as we emerged on to the quayside, I noted again the little fleet of boats moored alongside the shallow flight of well-worn steps leading up from the river. The denizens of Angel Wharf took no chances: they made sure that they could escape by both land and water.
I could sense that Philip was far less at ease in such a community than he had once been, but he put on a good show of bravado, turning with a flourish to a little knot of onlookers who had gathered outside the door of one of the hovels. ‘Can someone tell me where I can find Bertha Mendip?’ he asked.
They all shuffled their feet and stared vacantly at him, as though he were speaking in Turkish instead of good plain English, and when he repeated his question, they looked even more bewildered.
‘God’s breeches, we’re old friends of hers,’ Philip said impatiently. ‘Bertha knows us.’
A young man, so wizened and stunted in growth that he might have been any age from twelve to twenty, stepped forward. ‘And what names shall we give these friends of hers?’ he demanded.
Before either of us could reply, a voice from inside the nearest hut called out, ‘It’s all right, Matt! I know ’em. One of ’em, at least, and I think I remember the other.’ Bertha Mendip emerged into the daylight, smaller and more emaciated than when we had last met, and with a skin like well-tanned leather. The elf locks that straggled, unkempt, about her shoulders had once been chestnut-brown, but were now almost completely grey. ‘You’re a pedlar,’ she said, addressing me. ‘Leastways, you were, although you look as if you’ve come down in the world since then.’
‘We’re in disguise, Ma,’ Philip grinned, circling her waist with his arm and planting a smacking kiss on her unsavoury cheek. ‘We were afraid that if we came smartly dressed, we might be set on by cutpurses and murderers, although I can’t for the life of me think what should have given us that idea! Not when we’re surrounded by so many honest faces.’
Bertha made a strange gargling noise in her throat which seemed to indicate amusement, for she punched him in the chest and protested, ‘Get away with you, do! So why are you and the pedlar looking for me?’
‘We’re trying to trace a Morwenna Peto,’ I said, ‘and hoped that you might be able to tell us where to find her.’
‘Morwenna Peto, eh?’ The shrewd eyes, whose bright blue had clouded with the passing years, regarded me straitly. ‘Now what would you be wanting with Morwenna?’ But when I would have made shift to explain, Bertha held up her hand imperiously. ‘If it’s going to be a long story, you’d best come indoors. We don’t want all these knuckleheads gawping at us. Matt!’ she yelled to the young man who had first spoken to us, and jerked her head towards the door of the hovel immediately behind her. ‘You remember my son, I expect,’ she added as the three of us followed her inside, and I hadn’t the heart to admit that I had failed to recognize him.
Bertha earned her living from ‘corpsing’; fishing dead bodies out of the Thames, stripping them of their clothes and other belongings (which she then dried and sold) and tipping the denuded cadavers back into the river. The inside of the hut reeked with the stench of decaying flesh and salt water, as garments from her latest catch dried on poles hanging above a smoky, slow-burning fire. The smell was so unpleasant that I was forced, from a fear of being sick, to refuse her offer of ale, saying that I wasn’t thirsty, but Philip accepted with alacrity. Little seemed to upset his stomach.
‘Right,’ she said, when she had discharged her duty as hostess and directed us to sit on a couple of very rickety stools, ‘what’s this about then?’
She listened carefully to all I had to say, sucking thoughtfully on the couple of good teeth still left to her, and, every now and then, spitting with remarkable accuracy into the fire, several feet away. When I had finished, she drank up the rest of her ale and said belligerently, ‘Well, I never said the owner of that tunic Philip bought of me belonged to this Clement Weaver. I don’t deal in names.’