The Tintern Treasure (34 page)

I swore inwardly. As what I wanted to say to Henry Callowhill concerned my suspicions of the goldsmith, I was in something of a quandary. Wondering desperately what explanation I could offer, I invited them both inside – I could do no less – and ushered them into the parlour. I felt unjustly irritated with my wife for having interfered in my affairs. The fact that she had obviously thought she was being helpful in no way assuaged my annoyance.

I saw both men glance curiously around the parlour, but whether they were thinking it poor and ill-furnished compared with their own, or whether they were considering it as too well appointed for a mere pedlar, I was unable to decide. If the latter, then it would merely confirm their belief that I was in the pay of the king. But as to how I came by the house itself, they must know the circumstances. Everyone in Bristol knew them.

I begged the two men to sit down, waving them to the armchairs, one on either side of the hearth, and offered them refreshment.

‘I don't keep wine,' I said, refusing to make it sound like an apology, but then ruining the effect by assuring them that Adela's home-brewed pear and apple cider was, if not nectar of the gods, not far short of it.

‘By all means let's try it,' Gilbert Foliot said. ‘I'm sure, Master Chapman, it's every bit as good as you say.'

I detected a patronizing note, but ignored it and went off to the kitchen to find clean beakers and broach an unopened keg. When I returned to the parlour, I found Adam there. He must have wandered downstairs and entered, unaware that I was entertaining visitors.

‘Your younger son, Master Chapman?' the wine merchant queried and I nodded, deciding it was high time I accepted Nicholas as also my own. Henry Callowhill smiled. ‘A smart little fellow. Now, Roger, what is it you wish to speak to me about?'

The awkward moment had arrived. Whilst in the kitchen, I had been cudgelling my brains to think of a subject of sufficient moment to warrant my having sought him out. But my mind was still a blank. I handed each man his beaker of cider and desperately sought some distraction.

And, miraculously, found it.

In one of Adam's hands he was clutching the worn leather bag with the drawstring of faded and ragged blue silk that belonged to Elizabeth. Sternly, I held out my hand.

‘Give that to me, Adam! You know very well it's not yours. You've been in your sister's chamber again, stealing her things. I told you earlier this morning that you are not to do it. This time it means a whipping.' He looked defiant. ‘What's in the bag, anyway, that it holds such fascination for you?'

For a long moment I thought he was going to refuse and make me look a fool in front of our visitors. I could see him turning it over in his mind, whether or not it was worth a beating just for the sheer pleasure of defying me, or whether it was more dignified to capitulate gracefully. Thankfully, he decided on the latter course.

In answer to my question, he said, ‘Buttons.'

‘Buttons?'

‘Yes.'

‘What buttons?'

He looked faintly surprised. ‘The ones Bess took, o' course.'

‘Took?'

My son heaved a sigh, plainly exasperated by my lack of intelligence.

‘When you forgot,' he explained laboriously, ‘to bring us home any presents, you said we could take anything we liked from your pack. I took my knife. Forget what Nich'las took. Bess took the buttons.'

Vaguely, my memory stirred, then sharpened. Of course! I recollected now. Two weeks ago, on my return from Hereford, I had omitted to bring the children anything. (My mind had been too much occupied with other matters.) Moreover, I had forgotten Elizabeth's birthday. All three had all been upset and I had lost my temper, storming out of the kitchen and shouting at them to take what they pleased from my pack. Neither Adela nor I had seen what they had chosen, but Nicholas claimed to have taken some tags for his belt, Adam the ivory-handled knife – which he had been brandishing under our noses ever since – and my daughter the buttons . . .

But what buttons? The set of carved bone buttons I had bought in Gloucester, of course!

And yet she couldn't have done! Twice my pack had been emptied, once by myself all over the kitchen floor and the second time by Sir Lionel Despenser when he had invited me in to display my goods to his housekeeper. And on both occasions, if I shut my eyes and concentrated, I could clearly recall seeing the buttons amongst my other wares: six prettily carved buttons threaded together on a length of ribbon. The very set of buttons I had given to the farmer's wife the preceding Sunday in return for a dish of pig's trotters stewed in butter, an apple dumpling and a beaker of homemade cider . . .

I realized suddenly that this was what all my dreams had been trying to tell me. And Adam's remarks about belly buttons – they too had been jolts to my memory, but I had been too dull, too stupid, to see their significance.

I held out my hand.

‘Give me that bag at once, Adam,' I said sternly.

He hesitated, but recognizing the note of authority in my voice, the tone which meant I was deadly serious and not to be trifled with, surrendered his prize. For a moment I stood weighing the bag in my right hand, then, loosening the drawstring, upended its contents into my left.

There was a flash of white light, a rainbow of colour, and I stood staring at what I was holding like a man in a dream.

I heard the sharp intake of breath from both Henry Callowhill and the goldsmith. Then the latter murmured in an awestruck whisper, ‘Dear Mother of God, the Capet diamonds!'

There were eight of them, the largest and most perfect stones I had ever seen, and each one had been set in a cup of gold, exquisitely shaped like flower petals, with a tiny, pierced shaft so that they could sewn on to a garment and used as buttons.

I looked at the goldsmith. ‘What . . . What did you say they are?'

He took one from my hand and stood twisting it reverently between his fingers.

‘The Capet diamonds,' he breathed. ‘They belonged to Philip IV of France.' He laughed shortly. ‘Probably looted from the Templars. When Isabella Capet married Edward II, the goldsmiths of Paris turned them into buttons which she brought with her to England to adorn her coronation robes. Alas, they suffered the same fate as most of her other jewels. Edward seized them and gave them to his Gascon favourite, Piers Gaveston.

‘After Gaveston was murdered by the barons, the diamonds disappeared. No one knew what had happened to them. Gaveston was related in some degree or other to the great banking family of the Calhaus, and it has been generally assumed that the buttons were deposited with them and never reclaimed.' Gilbert Foliot paused, turning the gem this way and that, watching the light flash and sparkle before going on, ‘But it would seem that this assumption was wrong. Edward must have taken back the diamonds after all. And when he and Hugh le Despenser fled into Wales, escaping from Mortimer and Isabella's invading army, he took them with him, leaving them eventually with the abbot of Tintern for safe-keeping and until he should need them. Of course, he never did, and there they remained in the secret hiding place in the abbot's old lodgings, no one suspecting their existence.'

‘Not,' I said, ‘until Walter Gurney went to work for Sir Lionel when, in view of their families' shared history, he told him about the tradition amongst the Gurneys of Edward having tried to bribe his gaolers to let him escape.'

‘How did you know about that?' the goldsmith asked sharply.

‘I didn't. It was something I worked out for myself. Sir Lionel told you. You remembered the secret hiding place and began to wonder if it had contained more than the original documents discovered fourteen years ago. Peter Noakes overheard the conversation between you, and . . . Well, the rest we know.' I dropped the buttons back in the bag, taking the final one from Gilbert Foliot's hand and putting it in with the others. ‘And now,' I continued, ‘we'd better take these to the Lord High Sheriff without delay. They're far too precious to remain in my keeping.'

The two men glanced at one another, then Henry Callowhill smiled.

‘Oh, I don't think so,' he said. ‘We'll take the diamonds, Master Chapman. They'll make a valuable contribution to Henry Tudor's war chest.'

I
laughed. I thought he was joking. Then I saw that he wasn't. He was perfectly serious and there was a hard look in his eyes that I had never seen before. The genial wine merchant had vanished. This was a man with a purpose.

There was another change, also. The two men seemed to have switched roles. Gilbert Foliot was suddenly the subordinate, looking to his friend for instructions, and I realized that their previous relationship had been a blind for the true state of affairs. I remembered, too, Lawyer Heathersett's warning that the goldsmith was not ‘the only man you need to look at in this town'. And there had been young Martin Callowhill's description of his father – a man of ambition and pride in his ancestry – that had not tallied with the man I thought I knew.

The meeting in Wales had not been accidental, either. I now felt sure of that. No doubt as soon as Sir Lionel had passed on Walter Gurney's information to his friend, Gilbert Foliot had, in his turn, relayed it to Henry Callowhill. The two men had gone there together to test the soundness or otherwise of the knight's theory . . .

I put the leather bag into the pouch at my belt and backed away until I could feel the far parlour wall behind me. They were two to one and there was bound to be a fight. Not only did I have what they wanted, but I now knew them for Henry Tudor's men, traitors to King Richard, whose agent and spy they thought I was. If it came to taking my word against theirs, they must feel certain that I should be believed.

Neither man, however, made an immediate move to wrest my pouch from me. Instead, Gilbert Foliot turned to his friend. ‘There's no Breton ship at present in harbour, nor will be for a week or two. The winter weather's closing in and sailings will be less.'

Henry Callowhill shrugged. ‘We must follow Bray to Cornwall. He's making for Rame Head where he told me a ship will lie offshore, somewhere between there and Penlee Point, as soon as it arrives from Brittany. We must go now. Today. As soon as you return home, send a message to Sir Lionel informing him of our intentions and tell him to join us as soon as he can.'

‘Today?' the goldsmith queried, horrified.

‘As things have turned out, we've no choice.' His friend sounded impatient. ‘You must see that! If we'd found the jewels ourselves, it would have been a different matter. As it is . . .' He let the sentence hang.

‘But if, when we get to Cornwall, we find that Reynold has already sailed?'

Reynold Bray! Of course! I had in the past heard Timothy speak of this most loyal and capable of Henry Tudor's agents.

The wine merchant shrugged again. ‘We must wait until we can find a ship willing to carry us to Less Britain.' I was interested, in spite of myself, to note that he used the old, archaic name for Brittany.

‘And our families?'

‘My dear Gilbert!' The impatience was fast turning to anger. ‘What do our families matter? What indeed do we matter in comparison with the Cause?' He spoke the last word with all the reverence of one referring to a holy crusade.

‘But what about him?' The goldsmith nodded towards me. ‘First of all we have to take the diamonds from him, and then . . . And then . . . Well, we can't leave him alive, can we?' He looked a little sick. ‘But if we kill him, everyone will know who did it. We were seen talking to Mistress Chapman at the High Cross. We must have been seen walking down the street. And it wouldn't be Bristol if someone hadn't observed us being let into the house. The hue and cry will be raised before we're fairly clear of the city and the
posse comitatus
will be after us in the blink of an eye.' A hysterical note sounded in his voice. ‘We're trapped!'

‘Trapped?' Henry Callowhill smiled. ‘I don't think so!' And, before I could make the slightest guess as to his intentions, he spun round and caught Adam such a stunning blow to the side of his head that the child dropped unconscious to the floor. Then he stooped and picked him up, slinging him across his left shoulder like a sack of flour.

I had completely forgotten my son – he had been so quiet, standing at one side of the room watching, I supposed, the unfolding of events and trying to work out what exactly was going on. He would not have been frightened by the two men; he knew them too well by sight.

I started forward, but Gilbert Foliot was too quick for me. He had drawn his dagger and was barring my path. The wine merchant, too, had his dagger in his hand, but was pointing it not at me, but at Adam's back.

‘I shan't hesitate to use it, Roger,' he said quietly. And I believed him. He was a desperate man. He went on, ‘Give the bag containing the diamonds to Master Foliot, then move back again and I'll tell you what's going to happen.'

I did as I was told. I had no choice. My son's life was at stake.

‘Go on,' I said harshly.

Henry Callowhill had put away his dagger – although the goldsmith still had his drawn and was standing at the ready – and with his free right hand pulled the left-hand side of his cloak across the child's inert form.

‘Master Foliot and I will now leave you, Roger,' he said. ‘If you tell anyone in authority – your friend Sergeant Manifold, for instance – what has happened, you will never see your son again.'

‘What are you going to do with him?' I asked, suddenly finding it difficult to breathe properly.

The wine merchant smiled. I was beginning to hate that smile.

‘I shall put him somewhere safe,' he said. ‘Somewhere where he can't easily be discovered.' I made an inarticulate sound and the smile deepened. ‘Don't try looking for him because you won't find him. Now, if Master Foliot and I – and, I trust, Sir Lionel – reach Cornwall in safety and find a ship waiting for us, just before we embark, I'll send someone back to Bristol with a message for you to tell you where your son is.'