11 - The Lammas Feast by Kate Sedley Read Free Book Online Page B

the fresh demands of another day. I scrambled up from the mattress, searching for something to cover my nakedness before answering the imperious summons. Adela threw me my cloak, which hung on a nail by the window.
    ‘Wrap it well round you,’ she hissed. ‘Unless I’m much mistaken, that’s Mistress Coxley’s voice, and a glimpse of your manliness might prove too much for her.’
    Mistress Coxley was an elderly neighbour who lived with her equally elderly husband a few doors distant. I drew my cloak about me with a flourish and sent my wife a resentful look that only made her laugh.
    When, at last, I opened the door, I realized with a shock that the morning was well advanced. The sun was already mounting the sky, and the traffic in and out of the Frome Gate had swollen from a steady trickle to a flood. Adela and I had overslept, and it was well on the way to the ten-o’clock dinner hour: breakfast would have to be done without if we were to catch up on our day.
    Mistress Coxley gave a little shriek of surprise at seeing me and not Adela, and also at seeing me so unconventionally attired. Remembering my wife’s admonition, I held the cloak tightly together and gave the old lady my best, and what I thought was my most beguiling, smile.
    ‘Mistress Coxley! What can we do for you? I’m afraid we’ve woken rather late this morning, as you can see. A disturbed night with the children.’
    I could tell that my irresistible charm was making no impression on her. Her faded blue eyes remained round and startled. Her lined face, as grey and dusty as the hair that straggled from beneath her linen cap, retained its expression of shock.
    Fortunately, at that moment, Adela joined me, still braiding her thick, dark hair into the single plait that would be coiled up beneath her snow-white coif, but otherwise looking spick and span as became a wife and mother who ran a respectable household – in spite of the disreputable layabout who answered the door wearing only a little more than a good-natured expression.
    ‘Mistress Coxley, what is it?’ she asked in the quiet, reassuring tones that made people turn to her in times of trouble. ‘My dear soul, you’re trembling. What’s happened? Come in and sit down for a moment.’
    ‘No, no! I won’t stop. I must get home to Wilfred and tell him the news, if he hasn’t heard it already. I’d have gone straight there, but I know Master Chapman has an interest in such matters. It’s just been a terrible shock, that’s all. The baker’s been murdered.’
    ‘
What
?’ I cried, stepping forward in such a hurry that, if Adela had not had the foresight to move in front of me, Mistress Coxley might have had an even nastier shock than the one she had sustained already. ‘Master Overbecks? When? Why? How did it happen?’
    ‘No, no!
Not
Master Overbecks! Did I
say
Master Overbecks?’ The old lady was peevish, incensed by my lack of understanding. ‘I’d be a deal more upset than this if it had been John Overbecks who was dead. No! I’m talking about that rogue, Jasper Fairbrother. And if I weren’t a Christian, I’d say good riddance to bad rubbish. But as I am, I’ll say it’s no more than he deserved.’ On which pious note, she folded her bloodless lips together over her blackened teeth and nodded vigorously.
    ‘Jasper Fairbrother?’ I exclaimed, now thoroughly confused. ‘Are you sure?’
    ‘Of course I’m sure! Dang it! D’you think my wits have gone wool-gathering, young man?’ She appealed to Adela. ‘Does he think I’m senile that I can’t tell Jasper Fairbrother from John Overbecks? Besides, I was there, just passing by, when that Walter Godsmark came rushing out of the shop, screaming that his master had been murdered. Stabbed to death, he said, with one of his own knives.’
    I was just about to repeat Adela’s invitation to her to come into the cottage, when I recollected that I was in no fit sartorial state to question a sensitive old lady at close