[Roger the Chapman 03] - The Hanged Man Read Online Free PDF

still meant more to her mother than she did, she showed no sign of resentment.
    Colin Walker was barely two years old when he accompanied his mother, one hot summer afternoon, to the weaving sheds to take his father a draught of cider.
    Adam had been allowed to the door to see and speak to his wife, and while his parents were talking, Colin strayed into the middle of the road, attracted by the debris sluggishly floating along the open drain. And it had been at that precise moment that a horse, harnessed to a cart loaded with bales of cloth, had been frightened by some passing urchins and bolted. The driver was drunk, having spent the previous hour in one of the local inns.
    Adam Walker, who was facing the road, saw the danger to his son before his wife did, and hurled himself into the path of the oncoming horse and cart in a vain attempt to throw the boy clear. Both were killed, the child almost instantly, the father after lingering in agony for several hours. Margaret was left inconsolable and grief-stricken, mourning a husband whose memory was so potent that she could never bring herself to marry again. Alfred Weaver, who had by then inherited the business from his lather, Jocelyn, and to whom the horse and cart belonged, had allowed Margaret and Lillis to remain in the cottage, which had been their home ever since.
    And it was here, in this room where I now sat, that William Woodward, newly widowed, had joined his daughter and granddaughter in the summer of 1460; or, at least, I judged it to be so from Margaret's insistence that it was the year the Duke of York, father of King Edward, God bless him, returned from Ireland to lay claim to the throne, and was later killed at the battle at Wakefield. William was still a journeyman weaver, still disgruntled and less than grateful - or such was my guess - for the filial duty and attention heaped upon him.
    He remained with Margaret and Lillis for well on nine years, and was already fast approaching the age when his daughter expected that she would have to support him as he grew too old to handle the heavy shuttles and looms, when William seemed to gain a new lease of life. He left weaving and the protection of Margaret's care, and went to live in a cottage in Bell Lane, near St John's Gate, the property of Edward Herepath, for whom he now worked.
    For this same Edward Herepath was the city's biggest landlord and had offered William Woodward employment as a rent and debt collector, when his former bailiff had left him to be married.

    When she spoke of the circumstance, Margaret Walker's voice still registered the same sense of astonishment she had felt at the time.
    'For you must know,' she said to me, 'that Father was not a young man. Big and well-built, I grant you - Lillis and I get our small bones from my mother - but grey-haired and not much short of his sixtieth year; an age when most men would be quietly and decently contemplating death. To change his trade like that at such an advanced time of life was something very few people could understand. And even less understandable was Edward Herepath's decision to employ him, for they were two men with little in common who had, as far as I knew, never exchanged words prior to this transaction.'  
    'Tell me about Edward Herepath,' I suggested.
    Margaret added a few sticks to the fire before positioning a fresh turf to contain the blaze. 'I was going to,' she answered, 'for Edward Herepath and his brother Robert are at the very heart of this story. Indeed, without them, there would not be one.'
    Edward Herepath, she informed me, was some thirty-five or -six years old, the eider of the two sons of Giles Herepath, wealthy soap manufacturer and respected burgess of the city, and his wife, Adela. When Edward was eighteen, his mother had died giving birth to her second child, Robert. A grieving Giles had followed his wife to the grave only two years later, leaving everything, including the upbringing of the infant Robert, to his elder