Read 11 - The Lammas Feast for Free Online Page B

Adela’s cynical gaze; a look that told me she understood exactly what was going on. She knew that I liked to keep these little shrines to my past goddesses brightly lit in the secret recesses of my mind, even though I was fully aware that, given the chance, I could never have lived with any one of them. Adela was the only woman I had ever met capable of the sort of love that demanded no ties or promises, but let me be myself and allowed me the freedom to wander the open road whenever the fancy took me. She was totally altruistic, the only possible wife and helpmeet for someone as selfish as I was. In return, she had all my heart – but I did like to pretend sometimes that I was still a lad-about-town, an attitude she regarded with her customary indulgence.
    ‘Mistress Ford has come to invite us to be her guests, the day after tomorrow, at Vespers,’ Adela said.
    ‘It’s the twenty-second of July, the feast day of Saint Mary Magdalen,’ Cicely explained. ‘The lay sisters can each invite two visitors for the evening service. And just now, as I was passing your door, I suddenly thought of you, Roger. And Mistress Chapman, of course!’ She gently withdrew her hand, which I had retained for far too long, with a faint frown of disapproval and a small, apologetic smile at Adela.
    ‘We shall be delighted to be your guests, shan’t we, Roger?’ my wife demanded peremptorily.
    ‘We shall, indeed,’ I concurred. ‘But what about the children? What about feeding Adam?’
    They were cries becoming more familiar to me with each passing day. But I could always rely on Adela to be one step ahead of me.
    ‘I shall feed Adam before I go. As for the other two, I shall naturally ask Margaret to come and look after them. I’m sure she’ll agree. She can stay here the night, in our bed, with Elizabeth and me. You can share Nicholas’s mattress.’
    I grimaced. My stepson was a lively sleeper and I could foresee precious little rest for either of us that night. Adela, without a single look or word of reproach, had got her own back. That would teach me to hang on to other women’s hands beyond the call of duty.
    ‘And now, dearest,’ my wife added, ‘I think you should make yourself respectable. Put on your tunic and walk Mistress Ford home.’
    Cicely protested, but Adela was adamant. ‘The paths and alleyways around here aren’t safe, even in broad daylight. And I know whereabouts you live.’
    So did I. Although Cicely was a wealthy young woman, having inherited her guardian’s fortune as well as her father’s, when she decided against becoming a nun, she had rented a tiny cottage, a little higher up Saint Michael’s Hill than the nunnery, facing the public gallows. It was not a spot many people would have chosen, but I could guess her reasons for selecting it, and not simply because it was close to the nunnery. It was on those gallows that the man she had loved, Robert Herepath, had died, deserted by everyone, including herself, protesting his innocence to the last; innocence that had been amply demonstrated a few months later, when the man he was supposed to have murdered, Margaret Walker’s father, had returned to Bristol, alive and well. Having subsequently married Margaret’s daughter, Lillis Walker, and solved the mystery of William Woodward’s disappearance, I had, like my mother-in-law, always felt some sort of responsibility for Cicely Ford.
    Adela knew this and had therefore forestalled me with the suggestion that I would, sooner or later, have made myself. And it gave me an excuse to be absent when Richard Manifold called.
    Quarter of an hour later, Cicely and I left the cottage, and only just in time as far as I was concerned. Glancing behind me as we turned into the alley alongside the house, I saw the sergeant emerging from the shadows of the Frome Gate, so, taking my companion’s arm, I hurried her forward. The open ground around Saint James’s Priory was already half-covered with booths and stalls