Blood Runs Thicker

by Sarah Hawkswood

  ‘You did not touch the body?’

  ‘No, why should I have?’

  ‘You did not perhaps add to his wounds?’

  ‘What possible use was that?’ Parler snorted. ‘The work was done for me. My only sorrow was I suppose he died swiftly. There was a knife wound that would surely have killed him in moments, though I still hope he felt the other I saw first.’

  ‘You saw but one other?’

  ‘Yes, but I was not counting or looking. I was just plain rejoicing.’ Parler gave sharp crack of laughter. ‘It did me good to see it, and I thank God I was in that place and at that time.’

  ‘Was his horse there also?’

  ‘No. It was just him, and the sound of the skylarks rejoicing with me. Even the birds were happy he was dead.’

  ‘And did you find his hat and cloak?’

  ‘That hat! No, I did not, though I was not seeking it. Worn that hat he has since but a few weeks after his first wife died. That badge was hers, I heard, some brooch for a cloak. I would not have called the bastard sentimental, not in the slightest.’ He shook his head, but the smile, which had not faded, lengthened the more. ‘I suppose it was him wearing it at Lincoln gave me the idea of suggesting he killed her. Must have hurt the more, eh?’

  ‘You really did hate him, didn’t you.’ It was not a question.

  ‘Oh yes. Never liked him, even when there was his sister as link between us. Lincoln was just when it all came to a head. Well, the boil is lanced for good now, though I have to put up with that blustering pale imitation that is his son in his place. I never suggested he was not lawful, however good the jest, because there is no doubting his siring, though he takes in character as much after his mother.’ Parler sighed. ‘Now, since you have it all, get out of my hall.’

  ‘Not yet, Parler. You lied to us before. How do we know you are not lying to us again? Nothing you say can be proved. Your explanation sounds sensible, but could as easily cover the deed, so why should be believe you?’

  ‘Bu …’ Walkelin opened his mouth, and shut it again, even before Catchpoll growled at him.

  ‘Why would I lie?’ bemoaned Parler.

  ‘To keep your neck from a rope would be a good reason. You left Worcester intent if not upon killing Osbern de Lench then at least harming him as much as you did the woman.’

  ‘Yes, but I did not actually kill him. I never saw him until he was already dead. You have to believe me.’

  ‘No, we don’t,’ Bradecote responded, instantly.

  Catchpoll very nearly sighed with pleasure. This was just how serjeanting worked.

  ‘Even if we do, eventually, and only by finding a killer who confesses to it, you are still facing the ire of William de Beauchamp.’ Bradecote, though he felt that it was unlikely Parler had slain Osbern de Lench, did not want the man to feel he was free of either blame or shrieval disapprobation. ‘You knew a man had been killed, not by accident, but by intent, and did not seek to make it known.’ The undersheriff was dubious as to whether concealing the killing was against anything in the laws, but it felt wrong. ‘Thus whoever did it had more chance to escape punishment. I will ask the lord de Beauchamp if you can be amerced for that. If lords do not see the laws kept and wrongdoers taken, what can be expected of the ordinary man?’

  Catchpoll hid a smile at that, for from what he had seen of lords they would get away with whatever lawbreaking they could and claim it as some right of their rank.

  ‘Also,’ continued Bradecote, ‘if ever a hand is laid upon the widow in Worcester I will come first knocking upon your door, and will need very good proofs it was not you, or if any man of your description is ever declared where a woman has suffered injury, there or … here. Your name and reputation will be remembered, by me, by the lord Sheriff and by Serjeant Catchpoll here. We have long memories.’ The undersheriff turned to the lady Parler, who did not look, he thought, entirely shocked or surprised by her husband or his attitudes. He wondered, yet again, why she had been so desperate to see him return safely, why she had been prepared to lie for him today. He stepped towards her and saw her press herself a little more against the oak. He made her a small obeisance.

  ‘I have disturbed your hall, lady, and am sorry for that. Few men have such loyal wives or are as undeserving of them.’ He could not help but voice the question, ‘Why would you—?’

  ‘Some women are strong. I am not. There has to be a man, and they seem little different, one from another.’ It was barely even a whisper and sounded resigned, tired. It occurred to Hugh Bradecote that in some ways she was little better off than the Widow Brook in Worcester.

  ‘I wish you well for the babe to be born. Perhaps, with so many sons, you will be blessed with another daughter for company.’ He smiled, but she gave no echo of it.

  ‘Why would I wish that? Daughters are not valued.’ He had the idea that she was assuredly not valued now, but nor had she been before she was wed to Parler. There was nothing else to say, but he vowed to make it quite clear to his Christina that a daughter would be a blessing if a daughter it was, and that she would be as loved as Gilbert, or any other son. He bowed again, and turned to Catchpoll and Walkelin with a small nod. Walkelin opened the door and they passed out into the sunlight, their eyes narrowing in its glare. None of them said a word until they had ridden from the village.

  ‘I said he was a nasty bastard,’ commented Walkelin. ‘Why did you not say we would bring him before the justices for what he did to the Widow Brook, my lord?’

  ‘No right o’yours to know,’ chastised the serjeant.

  ‘Tell him, Catchpoll.’ Bradecote felt suddenly tired of Parler and beaten and defeated women.

  ‘Well then, young Walkelin. If we was to take him up before the justices, two things would happen.’

  ‘Yes, Serjeant?’

  ‘Yes. The first is that the Widow Brook would deny anything ever happened, and the second is that the justices would say they were very sorry to that nasty bastard and make our lives a misery, through the lord Sheriff, for upsetting him.’

  ‘I knows that, sort of.’ He did, but he wanted to believe someone more senior might be able to change things. ‘But I saw her face, Serjeant.’

  ‘And what has that to say to anything?’

  ‘It’s not … fair.’

  ‘Fair? Life’s not fair. If it was, the godly and innocent would live long and happy lives and those like him would die young and badly. You may have noticed that it is not the way things happen. So we makes the most of what we can. The lord Bradecote did the best we could for Widow Brook, aye, and for the lady also. They threaten, men like that one, but we out-threatens ’em. He won’t get within a mile of Worcester for months and will for sure never get within speaking distance of the widow.’

  ‘You know, Serjeant. I am glad I am not a woman,’ remarked Walkelin, thoughtfully.

  ‘So are we. You would never run fast enough in skirts.’ Catchpoll grinned, but Bradecote merely gave a small smile.

  ‘It seems very unlikely that Raoul Parler stuck a knife in the lord Osbern, not least because he did not meet him, and since a man had been seen on the hilltop, he had obviously already been and gone. So the answer lies in what I thought back in Lench, before we set out here, and that is that we have the thing back to front.’

  ‘My lord?’ Walkelin look puzzled, but Catchpoll groaned.

  ‘Should’ve thought of that.’ The serjeant swore.

  Walkelin looked from one to the other.

  ‘But does it fit for Parler, my lord?’ asked Catchpoll.

  ‘Not sure it does. We need to work this through very, very carefully, and if truth be known, my head is too full of today. We have had Parler, the box and the badge, the man Edgar and the death of Winflaed the Healer, and now all this. I am sure it is important, and it will get us to the end, but … I do not want to make any mistake, and it would be too easy.’

  ‘Ah.’ Walkelin had come, he thought, to the right conclusion. ‘I suppose it works, but does
it not make it more strange that the Healer was killed?’

  ‘Yes, a little, which is why we sleep upon it, and why we will keep a very good eye upon Baldwin de Lench, just in case we are right.’

  Any hopes Hugh Bradecote had of an early night and time to rest his brain rather than just his body were dashed upon their arrival back in Lench. He swore under his breath even as he urged his horse into a canter, hearing the many raised voices. For one desperate moment he wondered if there was a hanging, but the villagers were before the hall, in a circle.

  ‘Holy Mary, has the man found someone else upon whose body he can vent his ire?’ complained the undersheriff, and then he saw what was happening. ‘Halt there!’ he cried, in so loud and peremptory a voice that obedience would be instinctive. The lady de Lench, her wrists bound, her head bare and her hair in disorder, was tied to the ring in the wall where her late husband’s mare had been tied upon its return. The gown had been stripped from her back and hung in tatters to her waist. She was screaming, pulling in vain against the binding rope like a soul possessed. Yet the villagers were not looking at her. Every eye was upon the lord Baldwin de Lench, with a knife in his hand, the short blade catching glints of evening sunlight. Before him, also bound and already half insensible, Fulk the Steward was stretched back over an upturned handcart, the pale skin of his belly exposed, and his braies torn down to his knees. It did not need any question to know what Baldwin intended to do. Bradecote scrambled from the saddle and drew his sword, as Baldwin, deciding that he was not going to stop after all, reached to Fulk’s soft flesh.

  ‘Touch him, de Lench, and your blood will flow more freely than his.’ There was no bluster, just a grim promise.

  ‘I have the right. You know I have the right. This filth betrayed my sire with that whore,’ the knife flashed as he pointed it at the now-sobbing woman, ‘in his own hall. What he would have done, I will do.’

  ‘No, you will not.’ Bradecote was firm. ‘Walkelin, get the poor bastard way from here.’

  Walkelin came forward silently, his eye upon the knife, cautious but determined. He tried to lift the steward, but the man was both in no position to gain purchase with his feet and help himself, nor with wits enough to try. It was the little priest who stepped out to take the other arm and help lift him upright, though the man’s legs buckled, and he had, perforce, to be dragged away.

  ‘This is my manor, and I decide—!’ shouted Baldwin de Lench.

  ‘No,’ Bradecote interrupted him immediately. ‘You do not decide. Your decisions are made in haste and heat, and are the acts of anger.’

  ‘She admitted it. So did he, eventually.’ The lord of Lench was livid with anger.

  ‘Faced with your wrath and a knife, I doubt not they would admit anything.’ Whatever he knew as truth, agreeing with de Lench was not going to help, and Bradecote felt no desire to shame the woman further. He caught sight of the girl Hild’s oldmother, grim-faced, at the doorway of Gytha’s cott. ‘Oldmother, see to the lady. Take her within.’

  The woman nodded and went to untie the bound lady and lead her, stumbling, into the hall.

  ‘I will not have her in there!’ Baldwin still had no other voice than a yell.

  ‘It is not your decision. Put down the knife, de Lench, and for the sake of Heaven, muster what wit you possess.’ He did not actually think that Baldwin would obey, but that was not important, since Catchpoll, at his most invisible, had quietly moved so that he was behind the ranting lord. Baldwin just stood there, and the undersheriff gave the very smallest of nods. In a moment the serjeant, with a nimbleness that defied his complaints about his creaking knees, had borne down the arm with the knife and twisted it so hard and far up Baldwin de Lench’s back that he was forced onto tiptoe.

  ‘There now,’ said Catchpoll, soothingly, ‘that’s better, isn’t it?’

  Baldwin stared, panting, at Bradecote.

  ‘As I said, not your decision.’ The undersheriff was unsmiling. ‘Now we could have done this the easy way, but you chose the hard. So be it. Serjeant, bring him to the church.’

  Bradecote ignored the villagers and strode towards the church, with no doubt whatsoever that Catchpoll would bring de Lench with him. The undersheriff was thinking. For all his bluster and violence there was some truth in what the lord of the manor had said. He had the right to take action, but not this. He might thrash the steward and send him, lordless, from the village, an exile that would mean no other local lord would employ him, and he had no craft for town work. He might also cast out the lady. As he saw it, Bradecote could not prevent either for more than a few days, though the thrashing seemed to have already taken place. Until the killer of Osbern de Lench was taken, he would hold sway, but that might, and he hoped it was so, be only until the morrow.

  He turned and stood before the chancel arch, his arms folded. Catchpoll, perhaps thinking that a penitential attitude was suitable for the church after such wrath, pushed Baldwin de Lench to his knees.

  ‘Is this how Osbern de Lench ran his manors? Are you truly following his precepts, or just unable to control your temper, de Lench?’ Bradecote was in no mood to be gentle with the man. ‘You are their lord; you are meant to think more than they do. Act with decisiveness, yes, but with intelligence, not just rampage about like a goaded bull. If it is your decision that the lady de Lench leaves the manor, you have the right, and if you also choose to dismiss your steward, you have that right also, but what makes you so sure, other than confessions obtained at knife point, that what you claim is true?’

  ‘I found them together.’

  ‘You mean they were …?’ Bradecote could not imagine they would have been that foolish.

  ‘He was holding her hand.’

  ‘And that was it?’

  ‘No, she was crying, but smiling at him, as if she was happy.’

  ‘Which is proof of infidelity?’ Bradecote privately agreed it gave a strong hint, but no more. ‘Had it not occurred to you that the lady, already facing leaving her home, seeing her son go to the Benedictines and having just lost her husband, has been distressed? Your steward, whose manhood you are so keen to remove, is man enough to feel as many men do when a woman looks defenceless and alone. I have no doubt he sought to encourage her not to be dismal and offered some comfort.’

  ‘It was not his place.’

  ‘No, but she would get it neither from you nor the son of her own body.’ It was then that Bradecote wondered about Hamo. ‘Where is he, Hamo?’

  ‘In the hall. He was praying as I brought her out.’

  ‘Just praying? He was not injured?’

  Undersheriff and serjeant exchanged glances. If ever final proof were needed that Hamo de Lench was not like ordinary folk it was the idea that he would stand by and see his mother mistreated before his very eyes.

  ‘No. He came from the solar and asked what was happening, calm as you like, and I told him what his precious mother had been doing with that bastard steward, and he looked at her and said that adultery broke a commandment and he would pray for her soul. So he did, then and there.’

  ‘Even when you shamed her?’

  ‘She had shamed herself long since. I just wanted everyone to see her for the whore she is. My father would not keep a wife like that, and I will not suffer her to remain.’

  ‘She can leave when all is settled, not before, and if you set foot in that hall—’

  ‘It is mine.’

  ‘It is the lord Sheriff’s, from whom you hold, and I stand in his place. You do not enter it until I say so.’ Bradecote looked Baldwin de Lench in the eye. ‘And you do not place as much as a finger on the steward. When this is concluded, and only then, you may dismiss him, just as you may send your sire’s widow from Lench, but you harm neither. Understood?’

  ‘Where would you have me sleep? In the stable?’

  ‘In the priest’s house.’ Bradecote could not much care by this point. He kept his gaze on de Lench but his words were for Catchpoll. ‘Serjeant, Walkelin
will sleep where the steward sleeps, and you and I will guard the hall.’

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  ‘And take the lord Baldwin to the priest.’

  ‘Yes, my lord.’ It was not often Catchpoll was so obedient.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Bradecote waited until the serjeant had removed Baldwin de Lench, and then turned towards the altar and went upon his knees, silent in his prayers. After a few minutes he crossed himself and rose, and then went to seek out the lady of the manor.

  The hall was both peaceful and yet showed signs of disruption. A stool was thrown over, a cup broken, and there, as Baldwin had said, was Hamo de Lench, down on his knees, hands together in the formality of prayer, intoning Latin as though he were already a monk professed. From the solar beyond came a sharp cry, an exclamation of pain that escaped through the gap where the oaken door was ajar, but the cadence of the prayer was not disrupted by as much as one breath. It felt unreal to Bradecote, who was suddenly very tired. It was as Catchpoll had said; everything tumbled upon them, one thing after another, and it seemed days since Osbern de Lench had been interred. The praying youth was a distraction he did not want.

  ‘Messire, go to the church if you wish to pray.’ Hamo looked up but frowned as if questioning this.

  ‘I could, but God hears prayers wherever they are said.’

  ‘Assuredly, but yours will be interrupted when my men enter. Go to the church, and when you have finished your prayers, you may return.’ Bradecote paused one moment and then asked the question to which, although he had had enough of the day, he could not rest without knowing the answer. ‘Why did you not defend your lady mother when Baldwin … mishandled her?’

  ‘She had sinned. It was a harsh penance, but chastisement is for the wicked, and adultery is a great wickedness, a breaking of God’s commandment. If she suffers now, then perhaps it will not go so hard upon her with Him in the time to come.’

  ‘It is also a commandment to honour your father and your mother.’

  ‘Indeed, and I do. That is why I pray for her now. I think she will be forgiven, for it is not all her blame.’