A Mortal Bane(98)

Two more arrived without overlapping or colliding with each other, and Buchuinte, the third, came at his regular time. He was still saddened by Baldassare’s death—he told them he had arranged the burial for Tuesday—but he was not so sad as to give up his appointment with Ella. An easy day.

Magdalene had settled to her embroidery again after hearing Ella’s squeal of pleasure, cut off by the closing of her door. She was enjoying her solitude and looking forward to the completion of a complex pattern and the delivery of a piece already ordered, when the bell at the gate rang. She gave a quick thought to the men being entertained behind closed doors. Sabina’s second client, an elderly widower whose children were established in their own homes and was more lonely than lustful, was staying the night, but Ella’s and Letice’s guests would be gone in time for this new man to be accommodated.

Sighing, Magdalene fixed her needle into her work and rose to answer. She would have preferred not to need to entertain anyone until one of the women was free, and William’s extra purse would have made it possible to indulge herself, but she had left the bell cord out. That was an invitation that could not be withdrawn without offense. She would let this man in, she told herself, and then pull in the bell cord. Fixing a pleasant smile on her face, Magdalene started toward the gate, only to stop dead a few steps along the path.

The man had let himself in, which always annoyed her, but the face she saw rendered her too speechless to protest.

“Delighted to see me, are you?” Richard de Beaumeis said, grinning broadly. “How did you like the client I sent you?” And when Magdalene still just stared at him, gaping, he laughed and went on. “Baldassare did mention my name, did he not? I told him he should.” He laughed again. “I would wager he was surprised at what he found here. I would have loved to be invisible and have seen his face.”

“I thought you were in Canterbury,” Magdalene got out, still too stunned to say anything sensible.

Beaumeis certainly sounded as if he thought Baldassare was alive. Could he have struck with the knife and then run away without realizing he might have killed the man? There was a kind of self-satisfied spitefulness under his final words that simply did not fit with having already taken the ultimate revenge.

“Canterbury?” Beaumeis repeated. “I brought the archbishop’s news on Friday. The cannons celebrated fittingly on Saturday, and I returned to my duty in St. Paul’s…. Why should I remain in Canterbury? It is a nothing place after London and Rome.”

[page]He started to step around her, and Magdalene was suddenly enraged. “Oh, no,” she said, catching his arm. “You are not welcome here. You do not know the ill you did us with your nasty little jest. Baldassare de Firenze is dead, and I have been accused of killing him.”

“Dead?” Beaumeis’s voice came out as a squawk and his face had gone parchment yellow. “No! No! He cannot be dead. I saw him…. No! He cannot be dead.”

He sounded genuinely shocked, but so he might be if he did not know his blow had struck home. Magdalene said, “He is dead. He was killed on the north porch of the church—

“No! I do not believe you! I cannot believe you! You are a lying whore.”

Beaumeis’s eyes bulged, looked ready to fall out of his head, and he swayed on his feet. Magdalene would have felt sorry for him if not for that last sentence.

“Then go look at his body yourself,” she said coldly. “It is laid out in the small chapel between the monks’ entrance and the church.”

He pushed past her roughly, running toward the back gate. Magdalene called after him, but he did not stop or even turn to look at her, and she shrugged and went into the house, walking quickly through it toward the back door. As she expected, it burst open a few moments later and Beaumeis stood in it, panting. Magdalene blocked his entrance; Dulcie waited in the kitchen doorway, the long-handled pan in her hand. But Beaumeis did not try to push his way in this time.