by S. D. Sykes
‘I agree with Mistress Woodstock,’ I replied. ‘We mustn’t jump to conclusions about Ranulf Sawyer. Let me talk to him first. Let’s see if he can explain how he found Jocelin’s bracelet.’
Aldith eyed me for a moment, before she leant on the table and then clumsily lumbered to her feet. ‘Your decision,’ she said wearily. ‘Just make sure that you don’t disappear as well.’
* * *
Most of the women had filed out of the hall by now, but as Rose passed me, I grabbed the girl’s arm and pulled her to one side for a private conversation. Her sister Christina tried to hang back to listen, but Maud had the sense to take Christina’s arm and accompany her towards the front door.
Now there was just the two of us, Rose immediately launched into a stirring defence of Sawyer. ‘Ranulf didn’t do anything to Jocelin,’ she said. ‘He just found the bracelet on the path. He only gave it to me because he didn’t need it. We’re not courting or nothing like that.’
‘Did you tell Brother Merek about this bracelet?’ I said.
She dropped her eyes from mine. ‘No,’ she replied.
‘Are you sure about that?’ I asked. She shook her head vigorously in response. ‘It’s very important that I know the truth, Rose,’ I said. ‘Did you ever mention Sawyer’s name to Brother Merek?’
‘No, Brother Oswald,’ she said, looking up at me in earnest. ‘I’ve never said anything about Ranulf to anybody. You’ve seen what the people here are like. They won’t give him a chance.’
I paused to study Rose’s face, looking into those strange grey eyes that were fringed by the palest, sandy-coloured lashes. Her skin was so translucent that I could see the blue veins threading across her temples. ‘Where is Sawyer now?’ I said eventually.
‘Burning charcoal.’
‘Yes. But where is he burning charcoal?’
‘Follow the forest path from Stonebrook until you reach the crossroads to Tonbridge,’ she told me. ‘Then walk through the trees towards the north-west, for about four hundred yards. Ranulf’s pits are there, in a hollow.’ She dabbed the corner of her eye with a birdlike finger. ‘I won’t get Ranulf into trouble, will I?’
‘That depends,’ I said. ‘On what he has to say for himself.’
* * *
I walked Rose to the door and then returned to the hall to bid Maud farewell, only for her to insist that I eat something else before leaving. Now that the village women had departed, the hard cheese and best bread soon reappeared at the table.
‘I wonder if we can trust Rose’s story about this man,’ I said, sinking my teeth into a thick slice of deliciously salty cheese. ‘She had no intention of telling anybody about this bracelet, until she was forced to.’
Maud took a sip of ale from her cup. ‘The trouble is, these girls have nothing, Oswald. You must remember that. I imagine Rose was afraid that this prized gift would be taken away from her.’
‘And what about this Sawyer?’ I asked. ‘You say that you know him?’
‘Yes,’ replied Maud. ‘He’s harmless enough,’ she added. ‘At least that’s always been my impression.’ She paused. ‘And anyway. I doubt he’s involved in this mystery. Why would he abduct a woman and then give one of her belongings to another girl in the same village? It’s too incriminating… unless the man is a complete fool.’ She paused. ‘But I know Sawyer, and he’s not stupid. I think it’s just a coincidence that he found this bracelet in the forest.’
‘You’re probably right,’ I said, wiping the crumbs from my chin and rising to my feet. ‘Even so. I need to speak to him,’ I said.
She seemed surprised at this. ‘Are you going now?’
I nodded my head. ‘Yes. The gates of Kintham will be shut against plague soon, and then it might be months before I can leave again.’
‘Shall I come with you?’ she asked, also rising to her feet and now standing so close to me that I could almost feel her breath on my cheeks. For a moment, I wanted to lean forward to kiss her on those full and sweet lips. They were at exactly the right height, only inches away from my own mouth. The opportunity was there, and yet I didn’t have the courage to act. What if she rejected me?… What if she didn’t?
‘Thank you, Maud, but I should go alone,’ I said, trying to move away from her, but not quite succeeding.
‘Take care then, Oswald,’ she said, touching my cheek. ‘Sawyer isn’t a bad man. But he’s gruff and uneducated. He might not take kindly to your questions.’
‘Should I be afraid of him, then?’
‘No, no,’ she smiled. ‘He just looks a little frightening. That’s all.’ With this, she leant her face towards mine, before her sweet, warm lips touched my own – and for a moment I felt overwhelmed. The joy of kissing this beautiful, unattainable woman. The kiss was all I had ever imagined it might feel like, and yet even more thrilling. For a moment, I was overcome with a feeling that I could only just control, as I felt the urge to grab her breasts and press myself into her.
I forced myself to step back, giddy at the strength and power of this desire – aware that the evidence of my lust was now trying to poke its way through my habit. After a moment of silent awkwardness as I tried to rearrange my robe and tighten my belt, Maud took me by the hand and led me to the front door. ‘Do you know where to go?’ she asked me.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Rose described the place where Sawyer lives.’
She opened the door. ‘Take care, Oswald,’ she said, standing aside so that I could leave.
‘I’ll come back to tell you what I find,’ I promised.
‘Thank you,’ she said, blowing me a kiss. Within a moment the door had closed and suddenly I was out on the street again. Alone with the sensation of that kiss still stinging at my lips.
* * *
It was even quieter in the village now. Eerily so. The women from Maud’s meeting had been reabsorbed into their homes and were nowhere to be seen. All I could hear was the mewl of a distant infant, or the calls of some men pulling eels from a fish trap by the water mill. If they noticed my passing, then they didn’t raise their heads to watch me.
I was being watched by somebody, however. As I turned the corner, I found that John Roach was blocking my path ahead, mounted on a fine white palfrey.
‘Where are you going?’ he asked me rudely.
I bowed my head – still basking in my amorous glow and not feeling in the mood to argue with the man. ‘I’m returning to Kintham,’ I said brightly. ‘Good afternoon to you.’
Roach waved at the path on the other side of the green. ‘The monastery is that way,’ he said.
I bowed again. Brother Peter had always taught me the power of politeness to unnerve an opponent. ‘Thank you, Master Roach,’ I said with the broadest of smiles. ‘But I’m going to take this route instead. I find it more pleasing.’
He laughed at this. ‘Do you indeed?’
‘Good day to you,’ I said, and just to annoy him further, I added, ‘And may God bless you.’
I walked on, hearing him kick at the flanks of his horse as he rode behind me until we reached the edge of the village. But Roach didn’t follow me as I entered the forest. Instead, he stopped his horse at the boundary, where the trees met the fields. And then he watched me leave – his eyes boring into my back, until I was finally out of sight.
Chapter Sixteen
The air was cooler once I entered the forest. Dappled light fell on the path from the gaps in the branches of the trees overhead – a knitted tangle of oak, sweet chestnut and maple. The scent of elderflower wafted headily through the air, now overpowering the perfume of the wild garlic and the last of the bluebells. For a while, I felt happier than I had done in weeks, before the feeling evaporated. After my encounter with Maud, I wondered how I could ever become a monk? How I could ever spend my whole life in celibacy?
I imagined myself in love with Maud already, and it was certainly a strong and overpowering emotion – though perhaps not the romantic perfection that I had read about in the poetry
of the troubadours? In all honesty, this feeling was not so different from the desires that invaded my dreams most nights, and were vaguely present each time I saw one of the village girls in the monastery. The Abbot might have chosen the plainest girls to venture inside our four walls, on the basis that he was reducing temptation, but their plainness was not the point. His own tastes did not extend to an interest in the female sex, so he didn’t realise that the mere presence of a woman, whether she were handsome or not, was enough to provoke lustful thoughts. Particularly in the novices.
My feelings of despondency were thankfully short-lived and soon I began to fantasise instead about leaving the monastery, choosing to forget, momentarily, how impossible this would be to achieve. I had been sent to Kintham Abbey by my family, with the intention that I would rise through the ranks to one day become the Abbot myself. I was the third living de Lacy son. A quiet, diffident boy who didn’t particularly care for hunting, farming or fighting, so what other use was I to them? Better for all concerned, if I were shelved away in the monastery, like a dusty book. Reached for on those odd occasions when my ecclesiastical skills were required, such as family births, marriages and deaths.
Leaving Kintham was not an option, so I turned my mind towards the ways in which I might cope with my future life. Plenty of monks, particularly those of noble birth, were able to keep a mistress and live a semblance of life as a normal man. Some even fathered children – or so I had heard. This might have been an option, but I dismissed this idea immediately. I knew, even at the age of eighteen, that it would be difficult for me to live in such duplicity. I was not yet so jaded and disillusioned with the world, that I accepted such dishonesty as an unfortunate but acceptable fact of life. I only knew that I wanted to change my future. The trouble was, I had no idea how.
I must have been daydreaming like this, dawdling a little on the path, when the spell was broken by the sound of a horse braying somewhere behind me. I turned quickly, and for the briefest of moments, I saw the blur of a white horse and its rider quickly disappear into the trees. My first fear was bandits, because this was exactly the right sort of territory for such attacks – lonely and shaded – before I realised that my follower was John Roach. He had trailed me into the forest after watching me leave Stonebrook.
I quickened my pace until the path turned a corner, where I scrambled into the trees and waited to see if Roach would attempt to catch up with me. I must have stayed there for nearly half an hour, but nobody came past me on the path. I could only assume that Roach had given up the chase, after realising that he’d been seen. In any case, I couldn’t waste any more time hiding in these trees. The longer I stayed away from Kintham, the more likely it was that Peter would discover my absence.
And so, I cautiously picked my way back through the undergrowth and rejoined the track, following Rose’s directions and heading for Sawyer’s pits. I passed the crossroads, where one road led towards Tonbridge, then worked my way along the path that Rose had described, before reaching Sawyer’s charcoal pits in the hollow of a small woodland clearing. The smell of the place hit me immediately – the smouldering, earthy stink of four charcoal piles, each of them covered in earth and moss, and each of them releasing their thin, blue tendrils of smoke into the air. Near to these piles was a hut – a ramshackle building, which strangely clung about the trunk of a tree like the ball of a wasp’s nest.
A hooded man was seated on a wooden stump nearby, poking a stick around in a small fire beneath a blackened cauldron. It could only be Sawyer. Despite Maud’s assertions that this man was harmless, I suddenly began to wonder if I had put myself in danger by coming here alone. Charcoal burners did not enjoy a reputation for civility – especially the ones like Sawyer with a licence to burn charcoal for the whole year. They might earn a good living by selling their charcoal to the furnaces near Tonbridge – where the iron rods were forged for the smiths and nailers of London – but these men were often treated as pariahs. It was a hard way of life that produced a hard sort of man.
I took a deep breath and emerged from the trees. ‘Ranulf Sawyer?’ I asked, as I approached him.
Sawyer rose to his feet slowly, eyeing me from beneath the hood of his cloak. He was an exceptionally tall man, with broad shoulders and large hands, and I felt intimidated immediately. Not only was his height extraordinary – so was his appearance. The soot from his work was not only embedded into the skin of his face and hands, it had also collected in the lines about his mouth and eyes in a dusty sediment. His blue eyes looked out from this blackened mask like two bright ellipses of light. The effect was almost demonic. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Who’s asking?’
‘My name is Brother Oswald,’ I said, trying to steady my voice. ‘I’ve come from Kintham Abbey.’
He folded his arms, wrapping one large hand under the elbow of the other arm. ‘My licence was granted by the Abbot,’ he said. ‘I’m allowed to be here.’
‘It’s nothing to do with your licence,’ I said quickly. ‘It’s another matter.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘I wanted to ask you some questions about a bracelet. The one that you recently gave to Rose Brunham.’
He stared at me for a moment. ‘What about it?’ he asked brusquely.
‘It belonged to a girl who’s disappeared from Stonebrook,’ I replied. ‘Her name was Jocelin Baker.’ I hesitated. ‘I’d like to know why you had it?’
‘What’s it got to do with you?’ He asked.
I felt my nerve deserting me. ‘I’m trying to find out what happened to Jocelin,’ I managed to say. ‘She hasn’t been seen since she last left Stonebrook. She was wearing the bracelet when she left.’
Sawyer stared at me from beneath his hood, before taking his seat again. It seemed he didn’t want to answer my questions. Instead, he took a long wooden spoon and started to stir the stew inside the pot. Some onions and rabbit bones were floating about in a grey broth. ‘You a friend of Brother Merek’s, then?’ he said finally.
‘Why do you ask that?’
‘Because he was here as well,’ he said. ‘Just the same as you. Asking just the same questions.’
I took a deep breath. Rose had lied to me. She must have told Merek about Sawyer after all – otherwise why had Merek come here? ‘When did you see him?’ I asked, now fearing that I had walked into exactly the same trap.
Sawyer continued to stir the stew, poking around at the bones distractedly. ‘About six weeks ago, I suppose.’
‘Six weeks?’ I repeated, swallowing the tension in my throat.
Sawyer lifted back his hood a little and grinned at me. The white of his teeth glowing against his filthy skin. ‘You want to see them as well, then?’ he said. ‘Is that it?’
‘See what?’ I asked.
‘The bodies,’ he said.
‘Whose bodies?’
‘The women, of course. The dead ones.’
‘How do you know where they are?’ I whispered, as I realised that Sawyer’s cloak was not so different to a monk’s habit. Is that why Agnes had been so afraid of my appearance? Was Sawyer the man she had mistaken me for?
‘I see things in the forest,’ he said ominously. ‘When I’m looking for firewood. Secret things. Things that nobody wants to know about.’
My heart pounded in my ears. Though I wanted to run, my legs were heavy and my feet wouldn’t move. ‘Did you take Brother Merek to see these bodies?’ I managed to say.
He was about to answer when he appeared to be distracted by something over my shoulder. Believing that he had seen somebody behind me, I turned instinctively, only for Sawyer to use this opportunity to dart away, soon disappearing between the trees.
I had fallen for the simplest of tricks, and I should have turned and retreated immediately, except that I did the opposite. I cannot explain why exactly, but suddenly I obeyed the oldest of urges – to chase escaping prey. I set off in pursuit of Sawyer, desperate to catch up with the man and discover why he was fleeing. Why he had offered to take me
to see the bodies of the women. But I had only run a short way between the trees, when I felt a thudding blow against the back of my head. The pain was sudden and overwhelming – before the world faded into a hazy, warped miasma that ended in darkness.
I don’t know how long I lay amongst the leaves, but when I regained consciousness, the pain in my head was searing. It took me a few moments to remember who I was and why I was there – but when I realised that Sawyer was nowhere to be seen, I stumbled to my feet and headed into the depths of the forest, walking as fast as my strength would carry me. I finally came to a stop beneath some willow trees, when I was overcome with nausea and exhaustion. I was sick repeatedly before I forced myself to stagger just a little further. I had to get away from this place and find somewhere to hide. I had to get away from Sawyer. The man had tried to kill me.
Chapter Seventeen
Somershill, November 1370
Mother asked me to finish there, which surprised me at first, seeing as we had just reached the part of any story that she usually liked best – the point at which mystery meets violence. But, instead, she suddenly asked me to quit the room and call for her maid, warning me not to return until dusk at the earliest. In truth, I was more than happy to comply, since she’d been complaining earlier about her digestion, and I suspected this sudden instruction was somehow related to this problem.
I left in search of her maid, finding the girl flirting with my new valet in the great hall. This man was turning out to be the latest disappointment, in a long string of disappointments, as it had been so hard to find a replacement for my previous valet Sandro. Filomena wasn’t the only person to miss the Venetian. This latest appointment was an older man, who was married with three children, and should have known better than to be chasing a young girl about the Great Hall like an aroused billy goat. My words were sharp to her, and even sharper to him. He wasn’t suiting my requirements at all, and this new indiscretion prompted my resolve to replace him at the earliest opportunity.