Lamentation

‘No. He’s keeping safely out of the way at Canterbury, I’d guess.’ I shook my head. ‘I wonder he has survived so long. By the by, there was a young lawyer at the burning, with some gentlemen, who kept staring at me. Small and thin, brown hair and a little beard. I wondered who he might be.’

‘Probably someone who will be your opponent in a case next term, sizing up the opposition.’

‘Maybe.’ I fingered the coins on the desk.

‘Don’t keep thinking everyone’s after you,’ Barak said quietly.

‘Ay, ’tis a fault. But is it any wonder, after these last few years?’ I sighed. ‘By the way, I met Brother Coleswyn at the burning, he was made to go and represent Gray’s Inn. He’s a decent fellow.’

‘Unlike his client then, or yours. Serve that long lad Nicholas right to have to sit in with that old Slanning beldame this afternoon.’

I smiled. ‘Yes, that was my thought, too. Well, go and see if he’s found the conveyance yet.’

Barak rose. ‘I’ll kick his arse if he hasn’t, gentleman or no. .’

He left me fingering the coins. I looked at the note. I could not help but think, What is Bealknap up to now?

Mistress Isabel Slanning arrived punctually at three. Nicholas, now in a more sober doublet of light black wool, sat beside me with a quill and paper. He had, fortunately for him, found the missing conveyance whilst I had been talking to Barak.

Skelly showed Mistress Slanning in, a little apprehensively. She was a tall, thin widow in her fifties, though with her lined face, thin pursed mouth and habitual frown she looked older. I had seen her brother, Edward Cotterstoke, at hearings in court last term, and it had amazed me how much he resembled her in form and face, apart from a little grey beard. Mistress Slanning wore a violet dress of fine wool with a fashionable turned-up collar enclosing her thin neck, and a box hood lined with little pearls. She was a wealthy woman; her late husband had been a successful haberdasher, and like many rich merchants’ widows she adopted an air of authority that would have been thought unbefitting in a woman of lower rank. She greeted me coldly, ignoring Nicholas.

She was, as ever, straight to the point. ‘Well, Master Shardlake, what news? I expect that wretch Edward is trying to delay the case again?’ Her large brown eyes were accusing.

‘No, madam, the matter is listed for King’s Bench in September.’ I bade her sit, wondering again why she and her brother hated each other so. They were themselves the children of a merchant, a prosperous corn chandler. He had died quite young and their mother had remarried, their stepfather taking over the business, although he himself died suddenly a year later, upon which old Mrs Deborah Cotterstoke had sold the chandlery and lived out the rest of her long life on the considerable proceeds. She had never remarried, and had died the previous year, aged eighty, after a paralytic seizure. A priest had made her Will for her on her deathbed. Most of it was straightforward: her money was split equally between her two children; the large house she lived in near Chandler’s Hall was to be sold and the proceeds, again, divided equally. Edward, like Isabel, was moderately wealthy — he was a senior clerk at the Guildhall — and for both of them, their mother’s estate would make them richer. The problem had arisen when the Will came to specify the disposition of the house’s contents. All the furniture was to go to Edward. However, all wall hangings, tapestries and paintings, ‘of all description within the house, of whatever nature and wheresoever they may be and however fixed’, were left to Isabel. It was an unusual wording, but I had taken a deposition from the priest who made the Will, and the two servants of the old lady who witnessed it, and they had been definite that Mrs Cotterstoke, who though near death was still of sound mind, had insisted on those exact words.