Letice touched her arm. She had put on the cap with a smile of delight when Magdalene first gave it to her and her attention had seemed to be all on lifting her hair to watch the metal chains gleam through it. Now she fixed Magdalene’s eyes with her own and acted out blows, choking, then clasped her hands tightly together.
“He could not have been so angry as to wish to do violence,” Magdalene protested. “Sabina would have heard that in his voice, surely.”
Poor Letice shook her head and showed her frustration, but she did not simply sit down and shrug with tears in her eyes as she so often did when she could not communicate. She tried again, even trying over and over to mouth a word with her dumbshow until, at last, Magdalene drew a sharp breath. Jealous, was the word.
“You think he was jealous?”
Letice breathed a great sigh and nodded.
“That could be,” Sabina said. “That could be what I heard, that kind of constraint over anger in his voice.”
“What can I do?” Magdalene cried. ‘The fool! How can a man be jealous of a whore? And I cannot refuse to let him in and talk to him. We must discover who killed Baldassare.” She sighed and shook her head, remembering her underlying desire to see him, which had sent her to the bishop’s house. “Oh, he is not the only fool! Why did I ask for him, leave a message for him? I hoped he would believe I only wanted him to discover whether Beaumeis was guilty, but doubtless he flattered himself the message was an excuse for us to meet.”
Sabina protested that it was not Magdalene’s fault, and Letice patted her and hugged her. Magdalene shook her head and sighed some more over her own folly, still unable to put aside all hope that she could come to some reasonable arrangement with Bell. After all, he had gotten over his first fury at learning that she still served William of Ypres, and it was the first time he had ever found her missing from the Old Priory Guesthouse. He would adjust to that, too, she told herself. He must accept the fact that she was free to work her trade if she wished.
Ella returned, proudly displaying her shift under a bedgown, and Dulcie brought in dinner. By the time they sat down to eat, Magdalene had put aside most of her anxiety, and she mentioned the new requests she had for embroidery. Ella and Letice were laughably proud of their skill, considering how little it earned in comparison to whoring, and they began to discuss new work they could do. The lively talk allowed Magdalene to plan what she would say to Bell when he did return and vow silently she would never again go to seek him out personally.
The first three clients arrived, took their pleasure, and left according to schedule; those three—a cordwainer, a dyer, and a woodworker—also had had guild meetings on Wednesday and had nothing to do with Baldassare. Of the second set of clients, BamBam came ahead of time because he intended to leave early; he was a wool factor who had to travel at dawn the following morning to collect sheared fleeces. He had been away on the same errand the preceding week, from Wednesday morning to Saturday, and his name could be crossed off Magdalene’s list.
The two others had come soon after. Sabina’s client was a horribly ugly but gentle man, scorned and derided for his looks by his wife. He had been introduced by a friend who valued him highly and hoped that Magdalene and her women could restore a spark of joy to his life. That hope had more than been fulfilled. He adored Sabina and had already asked Magdalene whether he could buy her and keep her for his own.
Letice’s “guest” Magdalene thought must, from his complexion and halting French, be a fellow countryman; he had been brought to Magdalene’s by a shipmaster and was apparently very rich. Although he had his own house on the north shore of the river in London, he always stayed the night. Something about Letice fascinated him, and he spent more time playing an odd, high-pitched little pipe and watching her dance than he did in her bed.
When they were all safely closed away and busy, Magdalene got a large, tight-woven white cloth and a thin piece of charcoal from her workbasket, pinned the cloth to the table, and began to sketch out a design for the altar cloth the mercer wanted. A lock-and-key border for the bottom of the cloth and a large cross in the center would bind together a pattern of interlocking square frames with rounded and barbed sides. Within the frames she would embroider pictures of various saints. It took some time to draw the squares with their convoluted sides, and she rubbed out more than once. When she came to the saints, all she could do was to sketch in some vague forms. The mercer would have to tell her which of the saints his customer wanted shown.