Caught Red-Handed

by Denise Domning

  For the first time since entering the church, Aldo's gaze flickered in the direction of the boy's corpse. The smith flinched. "That's just what I thought I saw," he said, blustering again.

  "I want to look for myself," Tom said. Setting down his sack and basket, he went to where Dickie sat. Watt followed.

  "What does it matter?" Aldo called after them. "If I'm wrong, it's only because I was barely awake when Father Godin and I found him." This time there was no mistaking the panic in the man's voice.

  That had Faucon rising to the balls of his feet, grateful that he'd chosen to leave his boots on after disarming. Tom crouched before Dickie. With Watt leaning forward to look over his shoulder, and both Gervis and Bertie peering at the boy from where they stood, Tom pushed aside the boy's hair, exposing Dickie's bloodied face.

  "Ha!" Heyward crowed in satisfaction. "Just as I said. No terror in his expression."

  Aldo took a backward step. Faucon leaned a little forward. Even as he readied himself to give chase if required, he was certain the reeve wouldn't run. Aldo would have to be a fool to think he could escape. If nothing else, the smith wasn't a fool.

  "What does it matter?" Mancetter's smith almost pleaded, shaking his head like a man stunned. As he took another backward step, his gaze again flickered toward his Crowner. "Have it your way, Heyward. I was wrong. It wasn't terror that I saw," he said, his hands lifting to show he yielded.

  "Aldo, we all know what a terrible liar you are," Gervis told the man, speaking gently as he watched his reeve in surprise. "Why do you try to lie to us now?"

  "I— I," Aldo stammered and took another backward step.

  Even in the meaty, oily light of the torches, Faucon could see the color drain from the reeve's face. The big man took one more backward step. His heel hit the dais edge. Crying out, he dropped to sit on the altar platform. The rope slid from his shoulder. The sacking beneath his arm dropped to the tile floor.

  Aldo raised his head to look up at his neighbors. "I no longer have the right to pronounce the name of the murderer to the jury," he cried, his voice breaking. He pointed at Faucon. "Instead, it's now the duty of that knight."

  "What has that to do with anything?" Watt asked in frowning confusion.

  "Aye, why should that eat at you? We all know it will be Raymond's name he speaks," Heyward agreed.

  "Whose name do you think I will pronounce, Aldo? Yours, perchance?" Faucon asked at the same time.

  Aldo looked up at him. "What does it matter how I answer you, sir? Even if I could convince you that my dead brother killed his son, you'll never speak Raymond's name. How can you? You are the king's servant! A dead man without a coin to his name isn't going to satisfy you or your royal master. Our king demands his fines. He requires a life to pay for a life."

  As Aldo's charge assailed both Faucon's honor and his pride, he stiffened. "Do you dare claim that I intend to falsely accuse you?" he demanded.

  "God help me, but that's not what I mean," Aldo cried, sounding truly bereft. "This must be the work of my brother. Raymond has finally found the perfect way to punish me for taking what he believed belonged to him. He killed his son in my smithy three days after I caught Dickie in the act of housebreaking. The men from the far end of our hundred don't know me. If they hear that much and you don't speak my name, they'll believe I paid you not to say it. How can they think anything else? They don't know how Raymond torments us! I'm ruined no matter who says what." As he fell silent, Aldo buried his face in his hands.

  Faucon's insulted pride deflated with the smith's words. This was the legacy of Sir Alain's corruption. But discarding Aldo as a suspect in Dickie's murder left Faucon feeling almost as disappointed as Edmund over the lack of special marks on the boy's corpse. Sighing over that, he settled back into the business of the Crowner.

  "Answer me now and speak the truth," he commanded the reeve. "Did you kill the boy?"

  "Of course he didn't," Heyward said, speaking for Aldo. "I see now that I hadn't thought it through completely, sir. Aldo is right. It wasn't just Waddard and Juliana that Raymond meant to destroy, but his brother as well. He must have known you were coming," the oldster assured his Crowner.

  "Answer the knight, Aldo. Did you kill the lad?" Gervis asked over the old man as Tom and Watt returned to stand with him and Bertie. Gervis's gaze shifted to Faucon as he continued. "Not that we could blame you if you'd murdered that boy, Aldo, considering all the rancor and disrespect he's shown you these past months."

  Aldo lifted his head from his hands. His expression was bleak. "Here in this church and before God, I swear that I did not kill Dickie," he vowed, his gaze moving from man to man as he spoke.

  Bertie nodded. "That's enough for me. I'm convinced Aldo did no murder. What say the rest of you?" He looked at his neighbors.

  The other men nodded their agreement. "Aldo's word has always been good enough for us," Watt said, speaking for all. "We in Mancetter will all stand with you, Aldo, and proclaim your innocence to the jury, and after that to the king's justiciars."

  Heyward looked at Faucon. "Raymond and no one else did this," he insisted yet one more time.

  Setting his jug and blankets on the dais, Bertie picked up the rope and sacking that Aldo had dropped. "Now that we've settled the matter of Aldo's innocence, I say we bind and blind the boy. Then we can get onto the rest of our night and someone can open a jug. It'll be mine first, Watt," he told the man.

  "Mine is better than yours, Bertie, and you know it," Watt retorted with a laugh.

  "You'll have to let us be the judges of that," Heyward said, grinning as he joined the other four men moving toward Dickie's rigid corpse.

  Faucon waited, expecting Aldo to rise and join them. Instead, the reeve remained seated on the dais edge. He looked as deflated as Faucon felt. Faucon went to sit with the man.

  Aldo kept his gaze on the floor in front of him as he said, "You don't believe that Raymond killed his son. I can see it in your face."

  "I cannot say what I believe as of yet," Faucon replied. "But consider this, Reeve. What if I discover that your dead brother didn't do this deed? Will you be like Heyward and continue to insist, even though it means the one who truly killed the boy lives undiscovered among those you seek to protect?"

  Aldo straightened at that. He frowned at his Crowner. "Sir, if it were anyone other than Raymond, I'd know," he again insisted. "This much is true— although no one had any patience left for Dickie, no one here wanted him dead. Not even me."

  Then he added, "Well, truth be told, as Watt said earlier, I thought about his death, especially after he broke my wall."

  "What of Bett?" Faucon asked. "Dickie ruined her daughter. Could she have crept from her home last night and killed the boy?"

  "Nay," Aldo replied far too quickly.

  That had Faucon cocking his head as he eyed the man. "How can you be so certain?"

  The reeve watched him for a moment. "It's no one's business but ours," he said, his voice lowered. "I'm certain Bett didn't kill Dickie because she spent the night with me last night, staying until just before dawn. It's a miracle that Father Godin hadn't seen her on his way to come tap on my door."

  Faucon blinked in surprise, then was surprised by his surprise. Where else save from her reeve would the woman have found permission to behave so boldly? "So you have more than a few indecent souls here in Mancetter, after all," he told the reeve. "What say you? Were you willing to walk back alone in the dark after escorting her home?" he offered in a gentle taunt.

  The corners of Aldo's mouth lifted. "I knew the moment those words were out that I was a fool to say them to you. It was almost dawn and she chose to walk home without me." He sighed. "Fool I am, and a doomed one at that. Not only will both my brother and his son likely haunt me for the rest of my days, but after what happened at yon door tonight, I think I've lost Bett as well. I doubt she'll ever forgive me for sending her away from the church."

  Faucon swallowed his laugh. "As if you had any choice in
the matter. She was beating you bloody with her words."

  "She did that for certain," Aldo agreed with another sigh. "So much of what has happened is my fault."

  This time, when the smith looked at the knight next to him, Faucon at last saw the man in whom these villagers had entrusted with their lives and fortunes. Any man with courage enough to shoulder the responsibility for his errors was a man with enough courage to risk his life for another if called to do it.

  "I knew two years ago that Dickie would never find his proper place here with us," Aldo told him. "There are too many who can never forget my brother and what he did. They despise Dickie for no other reason than his blood. Although I knew the right path to take, I couldn't bring myself to force it on the boy or on Juliana, not after what—" The reeve fell silent and again turned his gaze to the floor.

  "Where did you intend for that path to take Dickie?" Faucon prodded.

  "Well away from his mother and Mancetter," Aldo replied. "Dickie needed to leave, both for his sake and ours."

  Faucon's brows rose at that. He glanced at the sleeping woman. She had held her son close for too long. Now, if Edmund was proved right and Dickie did walk because he'd interacted with his dead father, then he'd remain eternally beyond her reach. "Where would you have sent him?"

  Aldo gave a quick lift of his shoulders. "I know men who yet serve our old lord. I was a slinger for him until I took this," he touched the scar that cut down the side of his face. "After that, he found me more useful to him in a smithy. I remained in his employ until I received word that my father ailed, and returned home.

  "Dickie is– was excellent with a sling, never missing what he aimed at. But when I mentioned to Juliana that Dickie would make a good soldier, she refused to hear me. I told her it was unfair to keep him trapped here where he was a constant reminder of the dead man who tormented us.

  "But I waited too long before making my suggestion," the reeve continued. "Had I offered this option to Dickie the previous year, he might have spoken up for himself and defied his mother. But by the time I found the courage to broach the subject with Juliana, Dickie wanted only one thing— to defy me. He refused my offer for the sole reason that I made the suggestion.

  "That left me no choice but to try one more time to find him a place among us, since he had failed at Waddard's wheel. When I assigned him to drive birds from our newly-sown fields, he lay on his back and stared at the sky. When I set him to watching our sheep, he let them break into our barley field, claiming he'd fallen asleep. I put a hoe in his hand. In the time it took Watt's boy to finish two rows, Dickie had barely finished one, and done as poor a job as possible. No matter where I put him, he made himself useless to us, to me."

  Aldo freed a frustrated breath. "That would have been tolerable had Dickie been a lackwit. He wasn't. Instead, it pleased him that I knew he was using failure to taunt me. He remained undeterred in his defiance no matter what sort of punishment his misbehavior earned, including me taking the rod to his back. Each punishment only made him more determined to resist me. Raymond had been the same when he was Dickie's age. Perhaps this, rather than affection, was why my father ceased trying to control him," Aldo finished quietly, then fell silent.

  Leaving the reeve to his own thoughts, Faucon watched the other village men wind their rope around Dickie's rigid body. As they worked, they discussed the virtues of knots and which one might best serve this purpose.

  "Did Heyward tell you that Waddard forced me to take Dickie to my forge?" Aldo asked a moment later.

  "I did hear that," Faucon replied, unwilling to name Godin as the one who brought him that tale.

  "Here again, I failed that boy," the reeve confessed. "Waddard was right when he went to our neighbors and recruited them to confront me. And the others—" The lift of his hand indicated the men at the back of the church. "—were right to stand with Waddard and demand that I comply with his request."

  Aldo shook his head, then looked at Faucon. Pain filled his blue eyes. "My God, you cannot know what a hell it was, having that boy beside me, day in and day out. He was his father's son in so many ways, even his voice. After a few weeks, and although I could see that he might well have a talent for the work, I could bear his presence no longer. My prejudice ended Dickie's apprenticeship.

  "And just as Raymond always did when thwarted in his desires, Dickie went mad in rage. He threw my tools, overturned buckets and benches. He screamed at me, saying I had no right to deny him his inheritance. When he refused to calm, I carried him out of the smithy. Let me say that was no easy feat. He left me as bruised as I left him. That night Dickie returned and tore great holes into my front wall."

  "Shame on me," Aldo said softly. "I pretended outrage over what Dickie had done, when I knew it was as much my fault as his."

  "Not Raymond's?" Faucon asked. When the reeve sent him a confused look, he clarified. "Dickie's father didn't bewitch his son into destroying your home?"

  "Oh, that," the reeve said, sounding embarrassed. "Another thing I shouldn't have said, not even in my panic. That tale was the one time I knew for certain that Dickie lied. It was Tibby who gave it away. She stood with him as he spewed his falsehood, then swore she'd heard Raymond's voice as he called for Dickie. Then she went too far and said she'd watched Dickie fall under Raymond's spell. She told the others that he'd walked like a dreamer toward my home.

  "I knew better," Aldo told the knight next to him. "I'd caught Dickie with his fist through my wall. He was in no way befuddled when I put my hand on the back of his neck. So I asked Tibby how she'd come to witness Dickie's enchantment when it happened well after the time she should have been abed."

  Again, the corner of the reeve's mouth lifted. "That's when it was Bett's turn to go mad. She— we hadn't realized that on the nights Bett visited me, her daughter fled their home, leaving her younger brother alone, to meet Dickie in the dark."

  "Well, that explains how the girl managed to meet Dickie without being missed," Faucon said. "How did Dickie manage the same thing when he comes from a household that includes two adults and five little lasses?"

  "That I cannot say, sir," Aldo replied. "But as you note, he managed it more than once. I know for a fact that had Juliana ever noticed him missing, she would have raced up and down the track, crying for all of us to come help her find her darling boy."

  Faucon freed a disappointed breath at that. "Tell me this, then. Father Godin said he saw blood on your anvil, but didn't notice anything else about or around the boy's body when the two of you discovered him. Did you find the weapon or tool that was used to end Dickie's life?"

  "Raymond used—" Aldo stopped himself. "The one who did this used my smallest hammer. All my smaller tools hang on the short wall that frames the opening to the smithy," he added in explanation. "I found it on the floor not far from the anvil. It made sense that Raymond might have taken it from the wall as he entered. But I was certain he'd left it out in the open to taunt me."

  "What of garments or shoes?" Faucon asked.

  "No clothing," the smith said, then came upright with a start as he sent a startled glance at his nephew's corpse. "But all he wore was his shirt and chausses," he said in surprise.

  "Aye, not even shoes on his feet. That's hardly seems likely, considering the boy walked from his house to yours on a cold night," Faucon said. "Perhaps you can tell me this. From what I can see, your nephew either sat or stood still as someone, whether alive or dead, hit him in the temple more than once until he was dead or mortally wounded. From what you've said of him, I cannot believe he would have allowed this without trying to protect himself in some way."

  "True enough!" the reeve retorted. "If Dickie felt at all challenged, he struck first, whether with words or his fists. That's how certain he was that everyone in this village meant to attack him. I can testify that he was more than able to defend himself using either."

  "Then how is it that he's dead now?" Faucon murmured, frowning in thought.

  Aldo sho
t him a surprised look. "You know as well as I, sir. He's dead because it was his time."

  The reeve's pragmatic statement caught Faucon by surprise, not because what Aldo said wasn't true. It was. Their heavenly Father knew every man's time. It was he who had changed. Somehow, he'd begun to think of the murdered as having been cheated of their lives.

  Yet considering this, Faucon shifted to look at Dickie's corpse. At the wall, either Bertie or Gervis, Faucon couldn't tell which one, was pulling the sacking over the dead boy's head and shoulders so his corpse would be unable to see to escape.

  And just like that, two more of Faucon's pieces— the bit of fiber he'd found at the boy's temple and the crisscross pattern imprinted on his skin— found their places. Father Godin had said the moaning figure that walked the track did so hooded and cloaked.

  Dickie hadn't seen his attacker because he'd been wearing a hood that limited his field of vision.

  "What are you doing to my son!" Juliana shrieked from directly behind them. "Take that sack off him!"

  Aldo wrenched around so swiftly his shoulder hit Faucon, knocking him to the side. As Faucon scrambled to his feet, the five men at the back wall turned. Juliana was on all fours at the corner of the altar. Her knees caught in the folds of her skirt, she scrabbled and slid as she tried to rise.

  Standing, Aldo leaned down to put a hand on her shoulder. "Stop, Juliana," he told her gently. "We're doing what you know we must."

  She shoved free of her reeve's hand and fell back to seated. "Take it off!" she screeched. "Take it off him!"

  "Not until dawn and we're certain," Aldo told her, again reaching for her. "Let me help you up. I'll take you home."

  She slapped his hand away. Her face was hollow and her gaze oddly unfocused, enough so that Faucon wondered if she was fully awake. Again, Aldo reached for her.