A Mortal Bane(45)

“I know when you said he was dead. I need to be sure. And speaking of Sabina and what you told me about her experience, why are we walking all around the priory? Did you not say that there was a gate between the back of the church and your back garden?”

“Yes, but the sacristan locked it.”

“When did you discover that?”

[page]“Yesterday afternoon when Dulcie—” Magdalene choked slightly as she almost told him they had discovered the locked gate when Dulcie had gone to hide the pouch “—went to clean in the church,” she finished, pretending to cough to clear her throat. “She goes most days.”

“So she went around the other way, as we have done?”

His voice was cool and he was smiling slightly.

Magdalene swallowed, grateful that he could not see her appalled expression behind her veil. But he knew, she thought. Even without seeing her face, he knew she was hiding something. And then she realized that Sir Bellamy was not first going to her house and then back to the priory so that Knud and the infirmarian could finish their meal, but so that she, whom he could not have kept by him when he questioned them, should not have the opportunity to go home and speak to her women in private before he did.

She glanced at him above the masking veil. Was he seeking signs of their guilt so she would have to yield her body to him? Behind the veil, her lips thinned. She would not do it—not because she cared about one futtering more or less, but because if he were that kind, he could use her yielding as another proof of her guilt.

II he asked, she thought, she would go to the bishop again—or tell William of Ypres. And then she wondered whether she was making too much of a single look and a quite justifiable desire for confirmation of her statements. Before complaint, she would do her best not to increase his suspicion, and she would explain, most carefully, why it would have been lunacy for her or any of the others to have killed Baldassare.

She swallowed again as she saw he was staring at her and then realized she had not answered him. “No,” she said, “Dulcie did not go to the church at all that day, nor today, either. She was furious and said she will not clean again until our gate is opened.”

“Was she angry on her own account or out of loyalty to you?”

“I think out of loyalty,” Magdalene said, but this time she spoke easily, smiling a little, guessing he would hear the smile in her voice. “And yes, all the women would lie for me if I asked. They are very grateful for an easy employment in comfortable circumstances, which none could expect if I had not taken them into my household. However, I hope you will understand that we have no purpose for lying. None of us harmed Baldassare and none had any cause to do so. Indeed, his death—any client’s death so near our establishment—does us the greatest harm.”

Bell shrugged. “On the surface, that is true.”

“And beneath the surface also. I did not know that Messer Baldassare was a papal messenger, but” —she sighed— “I guessed. His clothes, so rich and yet so sober, the way he spoke his French, which was like a client who came from Italy although he now lives in London, the pouch he carried—”

“You saw the pouch?”

“Yes, Sir Bellamy. Not clearly, he pushed it back under his cloak, and it is never my business to pry into what a client wishes to keep private. But I saw he had a pouch.”

“What happened to it?”

“I suppose he took it with him when he went out. He left nothing behind. Well, after the sacristan came and accused us of murder and I had been so stupid as to deny the man had been here, you can lay odds that we searched most carefully for anything that might tie us to him. There was nothing.”