Death and the Chapman Read Online Free PDF Page A

speaking, she rested her elbows on the table and propped her chin between her hands; little hands that gave small, fluttering movements like captive birds.
    ‘Would you care to hear the whole story,‘ she asked me, ‘about my brother’s disappearance?’
    ‘If you would care to tell it me,’ I answered gravely.
    ‘What do you think, Marjorie? Would Father mind?’
    Marjorie shrugged her plump shoulders. ‘He might, but he’s not here, is he? And won’t be for an hour or two yet. He’s gone to a Guild meeting, and afterwards to a service at the Temple Chapel.’ She added for my benefit: ‘It’s the Weavers’ chapel, dedicated to St Katherine, their patron saint.’
    Alison copied the housekeeper’s shrug. ‘In that case, what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.’
    I have never ceased to marvel, all my life, at the pragmatism of women: I think they are born without scruples. Nevertheless, I have been thankful for it on many occasions, as I was thankful for it then, because my curiosity had been aroused, and to leave with it unsatisfied would have been like denying a man dying of thirst a drink. And as though she read something of my thoughts, Marjorie Dyer asked: ‘Shall I pour us all some ale?’
    Her mistress nodded. ‘And open the door a little more. It’s close in here with the heat of the fire.’
    The housekeeper took my empty mazer and reached two more down from a shelf, filling all three from the cask of ale. Then she stood the door wide, letting in the fragrant scents of the garden. The afternoon had turned extremely warm and there was a faint shimmer of heat in the air. The light quivered as bright as a sheet of pressed metal, and the faint, far cry of a bird was, for a moment, the only sound on the still, spring air. Then the noises of the city seeped back, like a slowly rising tide.
    Alison Weaver sipped her ale and fingered the coral rosary around her wrist. ‘I don’t know where to begin,’ she said.
    ‘Begin with your journey to London. There’s nothing much to tell before that.’
    Marjorie, I thought, spoke with unnecessary sharpness, but looking at her, I could see that she was upset. Clement Weaver had probably been her favourite; less imperious, perhaps, than his acid-tongued sister. I had a mental picture of a sweet, soft-spoken boy, deeply affected by his mother’s death.
    Alison nodded, sipped more ale, then resumed her former position, elbows on the table, chin propped between her hands. ‘It was before Christmas, last year,’ she began, ‘around All Hallowstide ...’
    She had recently become betrothed to William Burnett, the son of another of Bristol’s Aldermen and a fellow member of the Weavers’ Guild. The Burnetts, I gathered, were even more well-to-do than the Weavers themselves, owning up to a hundred looms in the suburb of Redcliffe and claiming kinship with a nobleman who lived in the village of Burnett, some miles outside the city. It was an alliance, therefore, to gratify the one family more than the other, and Alderman Weaver was determined that no expense should be spared on arrangements for the wedding. In particular, his daughter’s bride-clothes should be the best that money could buy and Bristol merchants were deemed unworthy of providing the necessary materials. Alison was despatched to London, in the company of Clement, to stay with her uncle and aunt, the Alderman’s brother and his wife. John Weaver, also employed in the cloth trade, had elected many years previously, on the occasion of his marriage, to try his fortune in the capital and was now, it seemed, nearly as rich - although, gratifyingly, not quite as rich--as his elder brother. He and his wife lived in the ward of Farringdon Without, which, so Alison informed me, taking pity of my self-confessed ignorance of London and its byways, included Smithfield cattle-market, the Priory of St Bartholomew and the Temple and its gardens, which ran down to the River Fleet. It was, moreover, within easy