hearth and thinking fondly about her pendant. As soon as the boy had gone, Martin Yeo looked across at the others. John Tallis lowered his lantern jaw in an open-mouthed grin while Stephen Judd gave a knowing wink. They were happy accomplices.
'Are you sure it will work?' asked Tallis.
'Of course,' said Yeo. 'The beauty of it is that no finger will be pointed at us. We will all be sitting here together when it happens.'
'All but me,' added Judd.
'Oh, you were right here all the time,' insisted Yeo.
'Yes, Stephen,' corroborated Tallis. 'We both saw you.'
'We'll swear to it!'
'I've always wanted to be in two places at once.'
'Then so you will be,' promised Yeo.
They fell silent as they heard the tread of Richard's light feet upon the stairs, then they smirked as he creaked his way up to perdition. It was only a question of time now.
Oblivious to their plan, Richard Honeydew went up to his attic room by the light of the moonbeams that peeped in through the windows. Every other night, his first job had been to bolt the door behind him to keep outrage at bay. Lulled into a mood of trust by the others, he did not do so now. He felt safe.
The chill of the night air made him shiver and he got undressed quickly before jumping into bed. Through the narrow window above his head, the moon was drawing intricate patterns on the opposite wall. Richard was able to watch them for only a few minutes before he dozed off to sleep but his slumber was soon disturbed. There was a rustling sound in the thatch and his eyes opened in fear. It would not be the first rat he had heard up in the attic.
He sat up quickly and was just in the nick of time. Something came crashing down on his pillow in a cloud of loam, cobwebs and filth. Richard coughed as the dust got into his throat then he turned around to see what had happened.
The dormer window was set in the steeply pitched roof and small, solid beams formed a rectangle around the frame to keep the thatch away. Richard had often noticed how loose the lower beam was. All four of them had just come falling down with a vengeance. He sat there transfixed by it all.
'What is it, lad! What happened?'
Margery Firethorn was galloping up the stairs to the attic in her nightgown. Her voice preceded her with ease.
'Are you there, Dick? What's amiss?'
Seconds later, she came bursting into the room with a candle in her hand. It illumined a scene of debris. She let out a shriek of horror then clutched Richard to her for safety.
'Lord save us! You might have been killed!'
Martin Yeo, John Tallis and Stephen Yeo now came charging up to the attic to see what had caused the thunderous bang.
'What is it! '
'Has something fallen?'
'Are you all right, Dick?'
The three of them raced into the room and came to a halt. When they saw the extent of the damage, they were all astonished. They looked quickly at Richard to see if he had been hurt.
'Is this your doing?' accused Margery.
'No, mistress!' replied Yeo.
'That beam has always been loose,' added Tallis.
'We will sort this out later,' she warned. 'Meanwhile, I must find this poor creature another place to lay his head. Come, Dick. It is all over now.'
She led the young apprentice out with grave concern.
As soon as the two of them had gone, Martin Yeo bent down to untie the cord that was bound around the lower beam. Fed through a gap in the floorboards, the cord had come down to their own room so that they could create the accident with a sudden jerk, out they had only expected to dislodge the lower beam. A blow on the head from that would have been sufficiently disabling to put Richard out of the play. They had planned nothing more serious.
Stephen Judd examined the dormer with care. Those other beams were quite secure earlier on,' he said. Someone must have loosened them. They would never have come down otherwise.'
'Who would do such a thing?' wondered Tallis.
'I don't know,' said Yeo uneasily. 'But if Dick had been underneath it when it all came down, he might never have appeared in a play again.'
The three apprentices were completely unnerved.
They stood amid the rubble and tried to puzzle it out. A small accident which they engineered had been turned into something far more dangerous by an unknown hand.
Evidently, someone knew of their plan.
*
Susan Fowler went to London as a frightened young wife in search of a husband and returned to St Albans as a desolate widow with her life in ruins. The passage of time did not seem to make her loss any easier to bear. It was like a huge bruise which had not yet fully come out and which yielded new areas of ache and blemish each day.
Her mother provided a wealth of sympathy, her elder sister sat with her for hours and kind neighbours were always attentive to her plight, but none of it managed to assuage her pain. Not even the parish priest could bring her comfort. Susan kept being reminded of the day that he had married her to Will Fowler.
Grief inevitably followed her to the bedroom and worked most potently by night. It was a continuous ordeal.
'Good morning, father.'
'Heavens, girl! Are you up at this hour?'
'I could not sleep.'
'Go back to your bed, Susan. You need the rest.'
'There is no rest for me, father.'
'Think of the baby, girl.'
She had risen early after another night of torture and come downstairs in the little cottage that she shared with her parents and her sister. Her father was a wheelwright and had to be up early himself. A wagon had overturned in a banked field the previous day and one of its wheels was shattered beyond repair. The wheelwright had promised to make it his first task of the day because the wagon was needed urgently for harvesting.
After a hurried breakfast of bread and milk, he made another vain attempt to send his daughter back to bed. Susan shook her head and adjusted her position in the old wooden chair. The baby was more of a presence now and she often felt it move.
Her father crossed the undulating paving stones to the door and pulled back the thick, iron bolt. He glanced back at Susan and offered her a look of encouragement that went unseen. He could delay no longer. The wagon was waiting for him outside his workshop.
When he opened the door, however, something barred his way and he all but tripped over it.
'What's this!' he exclaimed.
Susan looked up with only the mildest curiosity.
'Bless my soul!'
He regarded the object with a countryman's suspicion. It might be a gift from the devil or the work of some benign force. It was some time before he overcame his superstitions enough to pick the object up and bring it into the cottage. He set it down on the table in front of his daughter.
It was a crib. Small, plain and carved out of solid oak, it rocked gently to and fro on its curved base. Susan Fowler stared at it blankly for a few moments then a tiny smile came.
'It's a present for the baby,' she said.
