The King's Bed by Campbell Barnes Margaret

Author:Campbell Barnes, Margaret [Campbell Barnes, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-07-25T22:00:00+00:00

14

The murder of the landlady of the Blue Boar was the biggest local excitement since Bosworth. Coupled with the discovery of the source of her recently acquired wealth, it left all Leicester both horrified and amazed. Crowds hung about in the streets outside, staring up at the best bedroom window with macabre curiosity. Sheriff and doctors passed importantly through the front door to examine the corpse. It was difficult to believe that anyone as vital and exuberant as Rose Marsh was dead. Alive, she had provided a wealth of gossip. Now, at her death, the talk of the whole town centred on who had done this dastardly thing.

Thanks to the quick wits of the Welsh girl, there was nothing save Tansy’s word to pin the crime on to the guilty pair. Soon after she had poured out her improbable story they were found, apparently sleeping peacefully, in their respective beds, one at the Blue Boar and one at the Golden Crown. Save for a few scattered coins the secret drawer was empty, but although Gladys’s room and even the cellars of the Golden Crown were searched by the Mayor’s orders no sack of gold was found, and their air of amazed innocence seemed strong defence against an accuser who could produce no proof.

Although the Mayor looked into her honest eyes with pity, it began to seem certain that Tansy herself would be brought to trial.

The crime was discussed at every street corner and over every meal.

“The Grumbold girl was cunning enough for anything” the men said. “But she had broken with Malpas. He had turned her out. Is it likely that they would have plotted this theft together?”

“More likely the Marsh girl picked on two people she had good cause to be jealous of,” suggested some of the women.

Everyone who knew Tansy personally liked and respected her, and her father had been a popular citizen. But justice must be done, insisted the Mayor, who out of common humanity, had taken her from the scene of the crime into his own house.

After it had been established by the doctors that Rose Marsh had been suffocated with her own shift, and she had been given decent burial in the same grave as her late husband and his first, less spectacular, wife, a Court of Inquiry was held.

The questioning went on for days.

All Dilly could tell the Sheriff and the jury was that she had been wakened by her mistress crying out “like as if she was bein’ murdered”, and she had tried to wake cook who slept like a log. She herself had run down the attic stairs. The door of the best bedroom was a crack open and there was a light in the room, but she had been too scared to look in. So she had run on down the lower flight of the stairs, unbolted the front door and gone out into the street, yelling all the way for help.

Jod tried to make an alibi for Tansy by saying

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