The Burgundian's tale

Another spoonful of stew was shovelled out of sight and swallowed before he answered. ‘Not my place, is it now, to form o-pin-i-ons’ — he gave ironic weight to every syllable — ‘about my betters?’

I turned to the housekeeper. ‘Did you have an opinion, Mistress Graygoss?’

She was busy stacking dirty dishes into piles and did not look up from her task. ‘Fulk was a nice enough young fellow,’ she replied in a colourless tone.

‘Oooh! He was lovely,’ the smaller of the two girls protested. ‘Ever so kind. Talked to me a lot, he did.’

‘What about?’

‘Oh … Just things. My family, where I lived.’ She giggled and blushed. ‘Once he kissed me.’

‘Take no notice of Nell,’ Mistress Graygoss advised me calmly. ‘She’s a daydreamer.’

‘I am not!’ Nell expostulated wrathfully. ‘Master Fulk did kiss me. Ask Betsy if you don’t believe me. She saw him do it.’

The bigger girl nodded. ‘He did kiss her, it’s true, but it was only a peck on the cheek.’

‘And did he talk to you, as well?’ I asked her.

‘No. He could never be bothered with me.’

This surprised me. Of the two, she had by far the more attractive face and figure — something I should have expected to weigh heavily with any man. But then I recalled that Jocelyn St Clair had accused Fulk of really preferring men to women, which might explain the matter. I turned once again to William Morgan, who had finished his meal and was picking shreds of meat from between his teeth.

‘What did you think of Master Quantrell?’ I pressed him.

He spat into the rushes covering the kitchen floor. ‘I’ve told you, haven’t I? He was the mistress’s nephew. If she was fond of him, that was good enough for me.’ He tossed back some ale, got up and went out.

Paulina Graygoss said, ‘You musn’t mind him. William is devoted to Mistress St Clair. His father was servant to Edmund Broderer, her first husband, and his mother died, I fancy, when William was born. Owen Morgan seems to have been a harsh father and by all accounts beat him a lot. When Judith married Edmund, she put a stop to all that — said she wouldn’t have an unhappy child under her roof and made herself responsible for the boy. William’s never forgotten it.’

A thought occurred to me. ‘Of course, William must have known Fulk as a child. Didn’t Mistress Quantrell live with her sister and Edmund Broderer for some years after her husband was killed?’

Paulina Graygoss nodded, sitting down again in her chair at the head of the kitchen table. Betsy and Nell, who were waiting to wash the dishes, subsided gratefully on to their stools, glad of a further respite from their chores.

‘Now that you put me in mind of it,’ the housekeeper said, ‘yes, he must have done. Funny, he’s never mentioned it. There again, William doesn’t say much about anything. He’s a deep one. Welsh people are usually very voluble, but not him.’

‘Have you been Mistress St Clair’s housekeeper for long?’ I asked. Bertram was ogling Betsy. I let him get on with it.

‘Ten years. I came to her just after she married her second husband, Master Threadgold. Alcina would have been about eight at the time. A rather sad little soul I thought her. But not surprising, I suppose. Her mother had died when she was one and she’d been brought up in that house next door with just her father and that brother of his for company. But with Mistress St Clair to pet her and make a fuss of her, she soon blossomed.’

‘Mistress St Clair seems very fond of children. A pity she’s never had any of her own.’

‘A great pity,’ the housekeeper sighed. ‘But that’s so often the way of things, isn’t it? God has his reasons, I suppose, and it’s not for us to question them. All the same, one can’t help wondering … Of course, she had Fulk for six years, but as I’m sure you know by now, her sister went to Burgundy in the Lady Margaret’s train, taking Fulk with her.’

Mistress Graygoss was growing loquacious and I was careful to keep refilling her cup from the jug of ale still standing on the table. ‘Wasn’t that also the year her first husband died?’

‘Yes, I believe it was. He was drowned, poor soul, in the river. Mind you, he was a bit of a drunkard by all accounts. Spent a lot of his time in various city ale houses. Lost his way coming home one night and fell in the Thames. Not an uncommon history.’

‘He left Mistress St Clair a very wealthy widow,’ I remarked in what I hoped was a noncommittal tone; but the housekeeper eyed me sharply.

‘That’s as may be, but you needn’t read anything into that. She was very fond of him, I fancy. I think, too, she must have missed him dreadfully after he died and her sister went to Burgundy, or she wouldn’t have married Justin Threadgold.’

‘You didn’t like Master Threadgold?’