[Roger the Chapman 03] - The Hanged Man (5 page)

'And did it?'

Margaret shook her head. 'Not a whit. Robert carried on his reprehensible way just as before. But...' and here she paused significantly, 'he fell in love with her. What is more, Cicely fell in love with him.'

'And yet she held no sway over him?'

'None whatsoever. He continued drinking and gambling and idling away his days, and still she would look at no other man. It seemed that nothing he did gave her a disgust of him. I have no doubt that many people tried to persuade her to give him up, especially as there were so many other young men anxious for her favours. Everyone knows that Robin Avenel, whose father bought the Herepath soap-works, is mad for love of her, and has been for many a long day. She tried to influence Robert, of course, but her gentle persuasions fell on deaf ears and, much as he loved her - or said he loved her - he never even attempted to please her in that way.'

'How do you know all this?' I asked curiously.

Margaret shrugged. 'How does anyone get to know such things? Gossip gets around, in the market-place, in the shops. Dame Freda, Cicely's companion, told friends, who told other friends, who were overheard talking by their servants.' She smiled. 'If you're thinking I might have received the information from my father, you're wrong. The one person I could reasonably have expected to give me details of the Herepaths was the one person who took no interest in them. But then, my father was incurious about the day-to-day lives of his fellow human beings. His only interest was in the state of their souls.'

'He was a pious man?'

Margaret's lips thinned until they were almost invisible.

'Oh, yes,' she answered shortly.

Lillis looked up from the huddle of blankets. 'When my father and little brother were killed, Mother's faith was sorely tested.'

Margaret glanced uneasily across her shoulder, as though afraid someone might be listening. 'Hold your tongue, girl! Do you want me accused of heresy? Not,' she added, turning to me, 'that it isn't partly the truth.

Since Adam and Colin died, I have had difficulty in believing in a just and merciful God. I've confessed it to my parish priest and he assures me that faith will come back if I pray for it. When I point out that it is almost seventeen years since they died, he says either that I am not praying hard enough or that I am not sufficiently contrite for my backsliding. Either way, it is my fault and not God's, and of course he's right.'

'No he's not,' Lillis said fiercely, her strange cat's eyes glowing in the firelight. 'A God of love wouldn't allow such things to happen.'

'Hush, hush, you stupid child!' Margaret exclaimed in an agony of apprehension. 'Do you want to bring more trouble down upon our heads than we have already? You shouldn't say such things in front of Roger.' Lillis gave her small, secret smile. 'I trust him,' she replied calmly. The childish upper lip curled to reveal her little white, very even teeth. 'He has doubts sometimes, too.’

I stared at her in consternation. How in Heaven's name did she know that? No word on the subject had ever passed between us. Was she a witch? Had she supernatural powers that she could read the secret places of my heart? Or was it that she simply had an instinctive ability to draw the right conclusions from little things that people said or did? I could never make up my mind with Lillis.

I said hurriedly: 'You may trust me, at all events, to keep your confidence.' I avoided a further glance in Lillis's direction and continued, 'You were talking, Mistress Walker, about Robert Herepath and Cicely Ford.' She nodded, relieved to turn the conversation away from dangerous topics. 'I was, although there is little else to add on that score.' She took a deep breath and settled herself more comfortably on her stool, leaning forward to hold her hands to the slumbering fire. 'Now we come to the heart of the story, to the strange happenings which began on Lady Day of last year and only ended with the death of my father before Christmas. Although to say the tale is ended is wishful thinking on my part, for until the mystery is resolved there will never be an end, not for me and Lillis, nor for Edward Herepath and Cicely Ford. Lillis, there's small ale in the jug on the table. Pour Roger a cup while I get on with the story.' Lillis did as her mother bade her, then returned to her seat on the mattress and once again burrowed inside my blankets, like a small animal going to ground. Her eyes gleamed at me from inside the cave of rough wool she had fashioned around herself. I looked away quickly and concentrated on Mistress Walker.

'It began on the day of Our Lady's Annunciation, last March,' she said. 'The day my father collected all the outstanding rents and debts owed to Edward Herepath for the quarter.'

On that particular Quarter Day, Edward Herepath had arranged to visit Gloucester to look over a horse he intended to buy from the acquaintance of a friend.

Because of the length of joumey involved, he decided to remain in the city for two nights, travelling to Gloucester on the Thursday, inspecting his prospective purchase on the Friday and, taking his leisure, returning to Bristol on Saturday. As a consequence of this, he had asked William Woodward to keep the money safe in his own cottage in Bell Lane, rather than delivering it to Small Street.

'For although he may have trusted his servants,' Margaret Walker said, 'he didn't trust his brother not to get his hands on the money somehow or other. Or part of it, at least. For everyone knew that Robert was heavily in debt to one or two of his cronies at the White Hart in Broad Street, where they played dicing games nearly every evening.'

Margaret, however, had known nothing of this arrangement when, on the Saturday morning, she had set out to visit her father in Bell Lane. She had not seen him on the Friday, but there were often occasions when she had no knowledge of his movements for several days together.

'We had little in common,' she told me in a low voice, 'and were never eager to seek out one another's company after he left the shelter of this roof. But I did my duty as a daughter and visited him regularly to make sure that he was eating properly and had his necessary share of comfort.'

But on the morning of Saturday 27 March, she had been totally unprepared for what she would find.

'I knocked at the street door, but got no reply, so I tried the latch. It was nearing mid-morning by then, and my father, if he were at home, would have been up and about, so I was not uneasy at being able to walk straight in.

There was no sign of Father, however, and the first thing I noticed was that the door of a small wall cupboard, which he normally kept locked and in which he kept his few items of any value, was swinging open: its lock had been forced. But the silver-handled knife which his mother left him, and which had been passed down from generation to generation in his family, and an enameled belt buckle and Cornish loving spoon which were my mother's, were still there. For a moment I assumed he had lost the key to the cupboard and forced the lock himself.' But Margaret soon had cause to change her opinion.

When she began to look around her, she was horrified to notice what looked like dried bloodstains among the rushes on the floor and on her father's bedding. The bed, moreover, had been left unmade, an unusual omission on William Woodward's part, for he was, so Margaret assured me, meticulous in his domestic habits and hated slovenliness in all its forms. A search of the cottage, including a visit to the outside privy, convinced his daughter that something was seriously wrong, and inquiries of his neighbours elicited the information that no one remembered seeing him since late on Thursday afternoon, when he had been noticed by one of them coming out of the butcher's shop near All Hallow's Church, where he had obviously bought some meat to cook for his supper. A whole day and two nights had passed without any knowledge of William's whereabouts.

'To cut a long story short,' Margaret continued, 'I called in the Watch, who informed the sheriff. Two of his officers began at once to investigate the affair, but there was no light shed on the matter until Master Herepath returned from Gloucester that same afternoon.'

Edward had wasted no time, but immediately gone in search of William Woodward and his money. It was then that the meaning of the forced cupboard door had become apparent, and questions were asked as to who, apart from Edward himself, had known that William was holding the rents. In the end, with great reluctance, the elder Herepath admitted that he had inadvertently let the information slip to his brother.

Margaret stirred, moving her face back from tile fire, as though it had suddenly become too warm for her, yet at the same time wrapping her arms about her body as if she were cold.

'The two leather bags which had contained the money, and what was left of the coin itself after he had paid his most pressing debts, were found in Robert Herepath's room in Small Street,' she said quietly. 'Robert freely admitted to taking the money, relying, I suppose, on his brother's goodwill not to bring charges against him, but denied all knowledge of my father. His story was that he had gone to Bell Lane after curfew, intending to knock up my father and spin him a tale of Edward changing his mind at the last minute, and asking him instead to collect and hold the money at Small Street until Edward's return.

However, on Robert's arrival at the cottage, he had been unable to get any reply to his knocking, but had discovered, as I had done, that the door was unbolted; so he had lifted the latch and crept in.'

Robert Herepath, sensing that the cottage was empty, and presuming that William Woodward had slipped out for a while about some business of his own, had hurriedly drawn the dagger from his belt and prised open the door of the wall cupboard, guessing, from prior experience of the Bell Lane house, that it would be the most likely place for the money to be stored. He was not disappointed and, having extracted it, made off round the comer to Small Street as fast as he could, latching the street door behind him. The theft had been carried out in darkness and he had therefore been unable to take note of his surroundings. Of the fact that violence appeared to have been done there, he disclaimed all knowledge. Such had been Robert Herepath's story and he never wavered from it, Margaret said, even at the end.

And that end had come three months later, on a June day of high summer, at the end of a hangman's rope.

'Robert Herepath was hanged for your father's murder?' I asked, sitting bolt upright and frowning. 'But... But surely you have told me more than once that Master Woodward died just before Christmas, here, in this cottage.'

Margaret nodded slowly, her eyes fixed on the heart of the fire. 'That is so. For you see, two months after the hanging, on the Day of the Assumption of Our Lady, Father walked back into Bristol, alive, although far from well.'

Robert had been under suspicion for the murder of William Woodward almost from the moment he admitted to stealing his brother's rents. Dried blood had been discovered on the outside of one of the leather pouches and smeared over the left breast of his jerkin, where, presumably, he had cradled the bags in his left arm. Several days later, William's bloodstained hat had been fished out of the River Frome by two young boys, angling for the family supper. The presumption was that his body had been pitched into the water just beyond St John's Archway, on the townward side of the Frome Gate.

Margaret Walker raised a hand to her forehead and held it there for several seconds, her eyes closed, as though trying to block out the events which followed. But at last, she lowered her hand again and went on: 'A strange kind of madness seemed to grip the town. Robert Herepath had made too many enemies in his time, for he was arrogant as well as spendthrift, and now suddenly everyone saw a chance for revenge; all those he had deliberately insulted or simply offended by his thoughtlessness, all those he owed money to and had never repaid, and all those young men who wanted Cicely Ford for themselves and saw a possibility of getting her if once Robert was out of the way. I don't say that people set out to tell lies, but they began to convince themselves that they had heard and seen things which we now know they couldn't have done.

At Robert's trial, there were witnesses who swore to hearing cries and moans coming from Father's cottage the night he disappeared; one of them declared he had looked from his window in the small hours of the morning and was convinced that he had seen a shadowy figure fumbling at the wicket gate next to St John's Archway which gives on to the Frome Quay. Even Cicely Ford turned against Robert and refused to see him while he was in prison or even before he was hanged.' Margaret shuddered. 'I tell you, it was as though some evil possessed us all, willing Robert Herepath's destruction. There was no body, yet the jury found him guilty. No one heeded his protestations of innocence.'

She was growing agitated and I leaned across and gently squeezed her arm. 'You are speaking with the knowledge of hindsight,' I said. 'At the time, the evidence must have pointed strongly to his having murdered your father. If your father's body had been pitched into the Frome, as the evidence suggested, then it could have been borne down-river into the Avon and thence out to sea on the tide. And Robert had admitted to taking the money; the rest followed naturally. In addition, there were witnesses who persuaded themselves they had seen and heard things which you now know they could not have done.

But the jury did not know that at the time.' There was a pause before I asked, 'After your father came back, what happened?'

Margaret bit her lip. 'I was sitting here, spinning. It was the Day of the Assumption of Our Lady and a beautiful, warm August afternoon. I was alone because Lillis had gone to fetch more wool from the dyer's, and I recall that I was humming a tune. I was beginning to get over what I believed to be Father's death and the subsequent horror of Robert Herepath's trial and execution. Life was getting back to normal again. The door was open as it was so hot, and I remember the noise of some children playing in the street; half a dozen boys trying to kick a blown swine's bladder between two posts.' She drew a deep breath. 'I was watching my wheel, teasing out a snag of wool from the spindle, when a shadow fell across the threshold.'