Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [458]
“Would you yourself like to invest in this venture?”
“Yes. But . . .” Shockley grinned, “it could only be a modest sum . . .”
Forest looked at him carefully.
“A token from you would be enough. But if you would give your support, then I shall see to it that a part of the profits are yours.” He paused to see Shockley’s reaction.
Edward kept calm. His face gave away nothing.
“A twentieth,” Forest said softly.
A twentieth! It could be a huge amount. Shockley’s eyebrows rose; but still he made no comment. Forest was certainly making the offer for a reason. He waited to hear it.
“I ask in return one thing,” Forest went on.
Shockley nodded. “Ask it.”
“My son. Let him accompany you about your business in Salisbury. Let him converse with the merchants there.” He smiled. “He knows Oxford – perhaps too well. But of trade he knows nothing.”
Shockley had no objection to this at all. Forest went on.
“There is more.” He grimaced wryly. “Unlike his father, he cares for the poor. Let him know what should be done for them.” He bowed, as though this admission had cost him something. “Whatever our differences in the past, Edward Shockley, I value your counsel highly.”
Shockley looked across at where the elegant young man was standing, with some surprise. A Forest concerned with the poor?
However, he readily agreed to do as Forest asked.
Why was it though, as he left, that he felt so certain that this was not all that Forest wanted?
He was a pleasant young man; indeed, it sometimes seemed to Edward that the dark, good-looking Giles Forest had been designed chiefly to please. He expressed great interest in the poor and investigated the workhouse minutely. He smiled charmingly at the inmates and talked to them so that, by the time he left, there was not one of them who did not believe that if young Giles Forest were only able to do so, he would certainly improve their lot.
Shockley took him round the market and the fulling mill and introduced him to Moody and the weavers. And every one of those he met, even old Moody, believed he was their friend.
He stood at the street corner. It was exactly the place where he had stood before, on that day he had returned early from Downton.
Indeed, until that moment he had forgotten the previous incident entirely.
It was dusk.
But there could be no mistaking the fact that a figure had just slipped unobtrusively out of his house. Was it the similarity of the incident, or was it also the figure himself that had brought that earlier occasion back to his mind so sharply? He could not be sure, but this time he thought it was another man – perhaps it was the darkness, but it seemed a taller, thinner figure who had furtively come out: a figure, he could not help the thought, similar to Thomas Forest.
He hurried forward, but the mysterious figure slipped away, and although this time he followed quickly, his quarry somehow eluded him in the alleys near St Thomas’s Church.
He went back to the house, puzzled.
It was quiet inside. Perhaps his wife and her maidservant had gone out for some reason. Could the strange figure have been a thief?
Slowly he mounted the stairs.
Katherine had not heard him. She was standing in one corner of the big front chamber where there was a chest in which she kept her valuables. The chest was open. He saw her carefully count back a handful of gold coins into a small pouch – a pouch he recognised and in which he knew she normally kept the considerable sum of ten pounds. Even from where he stood, he could see the pouch was almost empty.
She closed the lid and turned the key in the lock. Then she stood, gazing meditatively through the shutters.
When he stepped into the room, she started violently.
“Who was here?”
“Here? Nobody?”
He frowned.
“I saw someone leave.”
“Not this house.”
He paused, trying to make sense of it. Had she been younger, he would have supposed such a stranger might have been a lover. Was it possible? Could it be Forest?
“Where are the servants?”
“They went to the cathedral.”
He remembered now that he had heard