The Burgundian's tale

This time I was saved from answering by the opening of the door, and by Roland Jolliffe entering the room in his slow, shambling way, but with a martial light in his kindly blue eyes.

‘Why are you keeping my wife so long, Master Chapman?’ he demanded belligerently. ‘I won’t have her worried by all your questions. She’s not strong.’ (I’d have bet money on Lydia outlasting everyone around her.) ‘Come, my love.’ He offered her his arm, which she rose and took with the greatest reluctance. ‘I’ll bid you a very good morning, pedlar. I don’t look to see you bothering my wife again.’

Nineteen

I had intended to go next door, to the St Clairs’ house, as soon as I quit the Jolliffes’; but instead I returned the way I had come and struggled through the crowds, which had now become clogged with sightseers waiting to cheer the Duchess, to Needlers Lane, where I went straight to visit Martha Broderer, relying on the fact that Lionel would be across the street, at the workshop. I looked for Bertram as I went, but he had either not yet finished a protracted breakfast or we missed one another in the throng.

Martha Broderer was still at home and still at table. A dirty bowl and beaker opposite her place suggested that my hopes had been realized and that Lionel had at least left the room, if not the house.

‘If you’re looking for Lal, he’s already gone,’ his mother confirmed. ‘But stay and have a cup of ale with me, chapman, before you seek him out.’

‘It’s you I want to see, not your son,’ I said, pulling up a stool and accepting her offer of ale. When she raised her eyebrows, I went on, ‘I’ve just come from talking to Lydia Jolliffe.’ I added significantly, ‘About Brandon.’

Martha, filling a clean beaker from a jug of small beer, shot me a suddenly apprehensive glance from beneath frowning brows. ‘What about Brandon?’

I took the beaker and swallowed several mouthfuls before replying. But at last, I said, ‘Mistress Jolliffe has admitted to me that Edmund Broderer was Brandon’s father. And Brandon looks extraordinarily like Lionel. My guess is that your son, too, was fathered by Edmund.’

Martha looked at me, her lips compressed, her hands gripped together in front of her, on the table. I was afraid she was about to order me from the house, but, finally, she heaved a great sigh, almost of relief.

‘Edmund and I were once very much in love. He was nineteen, I was fifteen — old enough to know better, perhaps, but not old enough to be wise. At least, I wasn’t. I was already betrothed to Edmund’s cousin, you see. And when I discovered I was pregnant with Edmund’s child, I was too frightened to admit the truth — frightened of the shame and the recriminations. In spite of Edmund’s pleas, I went ahead and married my husband and passed Lionel off as his.

‘Edmund found it hard to forgive me, and who can blame him? But he stayed single for the next eleven years. I don’t mean there weren’t women; there were — a number of them. He was a very virile man. And I must admit that I have often wondered about Brandon Jolliffe’s paternity. The boy bears little resemblance to either of his parents, and the likeness to Lal that you’ve mentioned is really quite marked … Then, quite suddenly, at the age of thirty, Edmund met and married Judith Fennyman, a seamstress in Margaret of York’s household. It must have been the same year as the battles of Mortimer’s Cross and St Alban’s. The same year that King Henry was deposed and the present king crowned. Margaret of York was suddenly of great importance, a member of the reigning dynasty. Edmund told me later that he was never in love with Judith: his mother had died and he didn’t care for the idea of living alone, and Judith had a certain attraction for him, being as she was in the employ of the new princess. Besides, he wanted a child whom he could acknowledge openly as his own.’

‘He was disappointed, then,’ I put in as Martha paused to draw breath.

She nodded. ‘Yes. Judith proved to be barren. But more than that, the year after Edmund and Judith’s marriage, her brother-in-law, James Quantrell, was killed when he was thrown from his horse, and Veronica and Fulk, who was just a baby, went to live at the house in the Strand. Edmund and his sister-in-law didn’t get on. The two women were as thick as thieves, and Edmund felt himself to be an outsider in his own home.

‘This went on for six years and, more and more, he began to turn to me for comfort — I was a widow by this time — and, gradually, all our old love was rekindled. He gave me a gold ring as token of his love, and I gave him a gold-and-agate thumb ring, which he told me he would wear until he died. He promised to tell Judith that he was leaving her for me. He could obtain a divorce, he said, on the grounds of her inability to have children …’