Murder Most Medieval

by Edited by Martin Greenburg

  “Father!” he exclaimed. “Thank heaven you came!”

  “I can find no reason for thanks,” the other said, grimly.

  “Untie me so that I may pursue the rogue who attacked me.”

  “The only rogue I see is the one who lies at my feet. Whoever delivered you to me like this deserves a rich reward for he has solved the murder of Walter Huckvale.”

  “I did that!” ranted his son, nodding at Catherine. “There’s the villain, standing beside you. That black-hearted witch put a spell on Walter Huckvale and struck him down with poison.”

  “Be quiet!” his father ordered. “We have caught the wretch who bought and administered the poison at your behest. He is under arrest and will hang for his crime. It shames me that my own son will hang beside him. What kind of birthday present is this for your mother? What kind of reward is it for your dear wife? You disgust me, Hugh. You and that heartless woman, Agnes Huckvale. She may have had no part in the murder, but she was ready to share a bed with you before her husband had even been consigned to his grave.” He turned away. “Take him out. He offends my sight!”

  Two men-at-arms hauled Hugh Costaine to his feet and hustled him out. Catherine ignored the vile taunts that were hurled at her by the departing prisoner. When Sir Richard looked at her, his face was ashen with despair. He tried to master his feelings.

  “We owe you a huge apology, Mistress Teale,” he said. “You were wrongly accused in order to throw suspicion away from the true villain. My son is the real sorcerer here. He knew that the only way to possess Agnes Huckvale was to remove her husband. You were unwittingly caught up in his evil design. There will be restitution for the way in which you have been cruelly abused.”

  “My liberty is restitution enough, Sir Richard.”

  “You have my heartfelt apology, and I will make sure that Bishop Nigel offers his words of regret as well. I will also insist on making some financial reparation. After all,” he added with a sad smile, “you did find a missing son for me. I had no idea that you would solve a heinous crime in the process. It is a sorry day for my family.”

  Catherine put a consoling hand on his arm. She had no quarrel with Sir Richard Costaine. He had behaved honorably toward her and had made no attempt to shift the blame away from his son when the latter’s villainy was exposed. The experience had aged him visibly.

  “One of my men will take you back home,” he offered.

  “Thank you, Sir Richard.”

  “You were right, Mistress Teale. You do have a gift.”

  ADAM WAS WAITING FOR her in the house. After a warm embrace, he conducted her to the wooden bench and sat beside her with his arm around her shoulders. Catherine gave him a detailed account of all that had happened since her arrest. He listened patiently.

  “It was that lie about the rats that betrayed him,” he noted. “When you told me that Hugh Costaine came in search of rat poison, I knew that it was a ruse. A man like that would never run his own errands. He wanted that poison for a darker purpose.”

  “I counted on you working that out, Adam.”

  “I worked out much more than that, my love. Costaine would only stoop to murder for one reason. Lust. It seeps out of the man. Well, look at the way he tried to molest you. No,” reflected Adam, “there had to be a woman involved and Walter Huckvale’s wife was the obvious person. Then there was the poison, of course. If you would not provide it, there was only one person who would.”

  “Thomas Legge.”

  “I loosened his tongue with a flagon of wine, and he told me all I wanted to know. His testimony pointed me in the direction of the Huckvale estate. Hugh Costaine was not a person to bide his time. He wanted his reward immediately. When I saw his horse outside that cottage, I guessed that he was inside with his prize. Agnes Huckvale. I waited until the young widow slipped out then crept in to overpower Costaine and tie him up. That was how you found him.”

  “Delivered up to justice,” she said. “Bishop Nigel would not believe me when I told him that I could sense things. For that is what I did. I sensed exactly what you would do to prove my innocence. You would go first to Thomas Legge to establish if and when he sold some poison. I knew that you would leave a sign for me and guessed where it would be.”

  “In a place very dear to both of us, my love.” “That clearing in the woods where you once asked for my hand.” She gave a smile. “I did not expect to find a black stallion there, I can tell you. But it satisfied Sir Richard that we were on the right trail.”

  “Did you see the flagon?”

  “Of course. It was certain proof of your success.” “My real success was getting wed to you, Catherine.” “I have been thinking the same about you,” she admitted. “It has been a marriage of true minds. When I am being accosted by a foul-mouthed man like Hugh Costaine, you come to my aid at just the right time. When I am falsely accused, you spring to my defense. I love you so much,” she said, kissing him on the lips. “You always know when I need you and how best to help me. That is my real gift.” “What is?”

  “A husband called Adam Teale.” “Me?” he said with a grin. “Am I really a gift?” “Oh, yes. A gift from God.”

  The Queen’s Chastity

  Tony Geraghty

  “BY THE GRACE OF ALMIGHTY GOD, BE THIS SAD HISTORIE NOT INCONTINENTLY REVEALED ‘TIL YET TWO MILLENNIA HAVE PAST

  —requiescat in pace”

  Queen Eleanor’s tomb at Llanthony, with its cryptic inscription, had lone) been an object of speculation among scholars. Now that it was opened to reveal the remains not of one, but three human skeletons, seven centuries after her presumed death, medievalists revived a longstanding dispute. The matter was of little constitutional importance now. Yet there was no shortage of academic dinosaurs ready to make war about it on the Internet, from Honolulu to the London Library in Saint James’s. Both factions believed it was important to know the truth. To express the matter somewhat indelicately, did the Queen of England cuckold her husband, the future King Edward I, while he was crusading in the Holy Land from 1270 to 1272? Forensic science could only confirm that one skeleton was that of a woman in her early forties. The other two—almost identical, apart from differences of gender—were in their twenties and could have been twins. The skull of one of these people was missing. In its place was that of a bird of prey. The younger skeletons were, perhaps, her offspring (the DNA said as much), but to admit that would have been to concede that the queen was indeed unfaithful, a theory peddled vigorously by the Honolulu Faction and passionately opposed by the London Library Faction, united by their belief in Eleanor’s virtue. The London faction asserts that Eleanor of Castille was with Edward all the way to the Holy Land and back.

  It is late afternoon in autumn. The forest air blends the odors of rutting deer, horse dung, and wood smoke from the charcoal burner, piled up irreverently at the center of a circle of standing stones.

  “Did!”

  “Didn’t.”

  “Did!”

  Two children, a boy and a girl, their faces and bare feet blackened from a life built around the process of burning wood, face one another like quarrelsome cats.

  “How, then?” says the girl at last, a nervous finger curled into her long hair. “How did he come back from the dead like you say?”

  “It was a manacle,” the boy retorts, one tiny fist punching into the palm of the other hand, just as he had seen the priest at Christmas. “Sweet Jesu came back through a manacle after they nailed him to the tree.”

  “Well, I don’t believe you,” the girl says. She turns clockwise, pirouetting to show her nakedness beneath the worn dress. “I believe in Green Man. I believe in the Old Religion.” Sticking her tongue out for good measure, she adds, “And the Moon Goddess.”

  “Well, then,” the boy shouts at her, his eyes glowing through the smoke-dirt on his face, “you will go to Hell and be damned for ever-and-ever-Amen.”

  Watching from among the clustered, conspiratorial sessile oaks, a trio of wo
men turn to one another. Two smile indulgently, but the third, a peasant, casts her eyes down, murmuring, “They shame me, Ma’am… If you wish to—”

  “Not at all, Jenny Blackthorn.” The Queen’s smile does not conceal her pallor or the deadly shadows beneath her tired eyes. “Here,”—giving her a small bag of jingling coins—“take them to the market and buy shoes for them. Soon it will be Hallowe’en.” Her hand shakes, but not because of cold.

  Eleanor’s companion, the taller of the two, buxom and glowing in a red gown that hampers her on horseback, even riding sidesaddle, whispers, “Ma’am…We are far from home. Your escort will wonder…” She touches the Royal arm, a breach of protocol permitted only to a trusted lady of the bedchamber. Reluctantly, Eleanor allows herself to be led away, stifling what might be a cough or a sob, or both.

  Browne to Long-. Dear Long—What do you make of Queen Eleanor’s deathbed confession?

  —Browne, Honolulu.

  Long to Browne: Dear Browne—Just another smear, started by Giraldus Cambrensis, working off his old grudge against Edward. He never forgave the King for refusing to confirm his election as Bishop of Saint David’s. His way of hitting back was to tell the world that the King was a cuckold.

  —Long, London.

  “FATHER, FORGIVE ME, FOR I have sinned a mortal sin, a sin of impurity, and would be shriven now my hour is come.”

  The candle flickers. The rosary lies inert among the Queen’s dying fingers.

  “Be at peace, my child. Our Lord God is ever merciful. He died that we may live.”

  The voice of Bishop Gerald of Wales, lately returned from Ireland with young Prince John and preparing his great recruitment for the Crusade through the Welsh Marches, soothes Eleanor out of this life with a voice that is soft as the silk lining of her coffin. “But make your confession whilst there is yet time.”

  A little way off, a loose floorboard squeaks. Gerald raises a cautionary finger, silencing the intrusion. Two men—tall Prince John, his hooked nose scarred from jousting, and his inseparable companion and Clerk, Dark John, small and sinuous as a marmoset—strain to hear the words that follow.

  “Father this is hard… hard. My husband Edward, having taken the Cross, was at Acre. Word came that he had died of a green wound. But it was false, a calumny, the work of the Evil One. I was comforted one night in my grief. Even now I dare not speak his name for it were mortal sin even were I in truth the widow I had thought myself to be.”

  She coughs. The side of her mouth stains pink bubbles, then smooth crimson as if an invisible artist has her as his paint pallet.

  “So much blood there was. I was delivered a month before Edward disembarked at Southampton.”

  Her eyes roll back into her skull. Prince John, from the other side of the room, hisses: “The name! What is the Bastard’s name? Is he a Pretender?”

  Bishop Gerald’s finger again ordains silence, though he, also, is disturbed by the political implications of this revelation. A Pretender? Where? Supported by what? An army of peasants, perhaps? These are dangerous times and Wales is still untamed.

  The Queen’s eyes open, fixed on the candle as if she sees hellfire looming.

  “My son, my firstborn, was one of two. One son, one daughter, like puppies in a litter. John was later, the true son of his father.

  “What became of them, child?”

  “Jenny Blackthorn…”

  The last flicker of life flows away as the candle gutters. Gerald closes her staring eyes, makes the Sign of the Cross on her forehead, and kneels to pray for her departing soul.

  Browne, Honolulu, to Long, London: But Gerald wrote of twins, with the superstitious horror surrounding the phenomenon at that time. Why would he complicate a false story without cause?

  Long, London, to Browne, Honolulu: Further evidence, in itself, that the Queen—and by extension, Edward—was cursed. He even hints at incest and suggests that the boy carried the “Mark of Cain” on his face (a single, linked eyebrow). All nonsense, of course.

  THE MOURNING BELL TOLLS on a biting winter morning at Llanthony Priory, that huge, grey, graven emptiness that not even a host of gargoyles, nor even the gaping sheila-na-gig, can populate: a place that shudders under the perpetual storms that rage on the Black Mountain just above it. The choir sings its requiem for Eleanor. An angry Prince, his nose red with cold, his chain mail heavy with ice after the long ride from Gloucester, stamps stone flags either from frustration or cold, or both, ignoring the burial service.

  The service over, he summons Bishop Gerald.

  “Your Grace, lookie-here. Before our period of mourning is done, certes before our coronation, we will have the Bastard found.”

  Gerald notes with disquiet, but not surprise, that Prince John has already adopted the royal “We” instead of the humble, human “I.”

  “What is your advice?”

  “This is not a matter for spiritual counsel, Sire. Perhaps”—he nods in his shrewd, political fashion toward Black John—“perhaps your loyal Clerk would know where to find Jenny Blackthorn if she yet live? Black John knew the Forest of Dean well as a boy, before the seminarians sent him to study in France to remove him from that sinister place of Devil worship where all who enter do so at risk to their immortal souls.” Crossing himself, he continues: “In Gloucester it is rumored that one of that name succored twins: a boy and a girl, and that the same Jenny Blackthorn, the wife of a charcoal burner, was once visited by a fine gentlewoman who gave her money.”

  Browne, Honolulu, to Long, London: And what are we to make of “Black John,” the Prince’s confidant?

  Long, London, to Browne, Honolulu: The Prince’s creature, no more. European history is replete with witch-finders.

  THE TUMBLED HAMLETS CLING to the edge of the Forest, as if afraid to venture far from it or enter the dark, unmarked green ways known only to the furtive people of the interior, the aboriginal Celts. Doors shudder beneath blows of mailed fists. Dogs bark and babies scream and puke as the gnomic Black John and his posse storm like Norman centaurs into the huddled settlements. The villeins are arranged along one stone wall—or hawthorn hedge if no stone stands—the women at another. They face the wall to be kicked, pushed, or lashed if they complain.

  “Where is Jenny Blackthorn?”

  “Dead, sire, these ten years an‘ more.”

  “What of her brats?”

  “The boy was taken by the Bishop’s people to be priested, just before Jenny died of the red mushroom.”

  “And the girl?”

  The villagers are silent, as if waiting. The posse turns, sensing something, as if stalked by a wood nymph. A slight, graceful woman dressed in faded green, her black hair wantonly about her shoulders, approaches them on bare feet. Her eyes are grey and the dark eyebrows meet above them. About her neck she wears a torque of gold. There are other marvels. On her left, gloved wrist rests a fine goshawk, its talons held in leathern jesses, the eyes masked by a hood.

  “I am Cerridwen, daughter of Jenny Blackthorn.”

  The voice is surprisingly low. It carves patterns of sound that could make a man—and some women—drunk with the melody, most particularly the name, in which each syllable is spoken separately, like a drumbeat: “Cer-rid-wen.”

  “What would you want of me?”

  Now the eyes are grey-green, changing, chameleonlike, with the shifting patterns of illusory light in an enchanted land. And they flash toward Black John with dangerous recognition. “Twere not love potions, I ween. Not twixt us.”

  Her laughter saws at the sinews of the centaurs about her. Black John, fear his companion, taps the arm of his giant escort. “Take her.”

  As they close on her, she slips off the hawk’s hood and lofts the bird into the air. It circles over the posse, shrieking, and she responds: “Fly! Fly, my beauty!” With a last unearthly call, the sound of the very soul ascending, it soars, still circling, leather jesses still dangling from its legs, into invisibility. Later, they said this was no ordinary
bird of prey, nor even a falcon of the hunting sort, trained by man, but one of her familiars. Certainly, she had a way with animals.

  Browne, Honolulu, to Long, London: The real mystery here is the identity of this woman and what it was that made her so important. She was no possible threat to Prince John or his spurious claim to the throne.

  Long, London, to Browne: Bread and circuses perhaps? As you say, there was no Pretender only the fear of one. But once the hunt was up and running, there had to be a quarry, even if it was some poor superstitious hag hauled out of her bed of cabbages to be hanged for the fun of it.

  THE INQUIRY BEGINS. No lack of witnesses this Beltane eve to attest that dark things have happened the year past in the gloomy Forest of Dean: babies stillborn and beasts aborting,- agues and boils and the falling sickness afflicting the innocent; curdled milk and chimneys blocked by jackdaws. The procession of hard-luck stories through the echoing hall of Hereford Castle, beside the salmonful Wye, is a jolly romp, with mead and bread for all,- a fair, my dear, with the hope of more entertainment to come and the start of better things after. Would they use the ducking stool? Or even swim the witch? Not yet, for no witness was found who had seen Cerridwen at her exercise… Not yet. Besides, she is here present, and who would denounce her to her face, she who has cured so many with her magic? What might befall if we did?