A Play of Treachery

by Margaret Frazer

  Joliffe doubted it. He thought he saw, now he was looking more carefully, a drag mark through the blood that made him think it more likely she had been dead before she was moved, had been lying with one arm outflung, and when her murderer, standing here, had bent over, taken her body by the near shoulder, and rolled it sideways against the fountain’s curb, the outflung arm, that now lay slack across her body, had trailed through the drying blood.

  He wished he dared lift her hand, to see what the blood on it might tell. He also wished he could see the wound that had killed her, but between the failing light and her gown’s black cloth that hid the darkness of blood on it, he could not tell anything and was not going to touch more than he already had.

  He moved away to the gateway. Where were Foulke and Alain gone? For a few moments the only sound in the quiet was the fountain’s burbling to itself, until at last—although it had not been that long—a burst of people came out of the hôtel, their raised voices loud to each other. Joliffe closed the gate and put himself in front of it. If he knew people, most of those coming fastest wanted more to see a murdered body than to do what needed to be done. He meant to keep them out if he could, and indeed the jostle of the three men who first reached him objected to him being in their way and craned necks to see around him. But by good fortune Master Wydeville came next. With his authority as Lady Jacquetta’s chamberlain, he ordered the men aside, saying, “The household’s marshal has been sent for. This is his business, not yours.”

  He kept saying that as more people came. To the questions thrown at him, he sometimes added, “I don’t know. I haven’t gone in.” He did take a single long look over his shoulder, through the iron scrollwork of the gate, and asked Joliffe, “Foulke had it right? It’s murder?”

  “It’s murder.”

  Lady Jacquetta’s coming brought a sudden falling away of all the questions and demands. The clutter of people shifted to either side, making way for her, and for M’dame, Ydoine, Guillemete, and Alain. Master Wydeville stepped forward, blocking them from coming nearer the gate, saying with firm respect, “My lady, you need not be here. Best you wait inside, out of the cold, until your marshal and the coroner have been here.”

  Lady Jacquetta stopped but not as if she intended to be turned back, and asked, “Is it truly Lady Alizon? But she’s not dead, surely?”

  “She’s dead, my lady. It looks to be murder.”

  He had kept his voice low but there was no way to keep the words from Guillemete, who cried out with sharp pain and started forward. Even as Joliffe said urgently, “She should not see,” Master Wydeville reached out to stop her, while M’dame and Ydoine took hard hold on her arms from either side and Ydoine asked, “She was not . . . Was Lady Alizon . . . Was she . . . dishonored?”

  Dishonored more than having a dagger thrust into her heart? Joliffe thought sharply. But he knew what Ydoine meant, and at Master Wydeville’s glance silently bidding him answer, he said, “There is no sign that her . . . skirts . . . were touched. Or that there was any struggle.”

  “Thank the Virgin!” someone in the gathering said.

  Joliffe held back from snapping, “You mean, give thanks for a clean kill?”

  “I want to see her!” Guillemete cried. She was not in tears yet, but Joliffe thought wild breakdown was close.

  Lady Jacquetta questioned Master Wydeville with a look, and when he shook his head, she ordered, “Ydoine, take Guillemete inside. Alain, help her.”

  Alain took M’dame’s place and hold on Guillemete. She gave a single great sob and would have sunk to the ground without his and Ydoine’s hold, and together they more carried than guided her away, toward the hôtel.

  Not troubling to watch them go, Lady Jacquetta said steadily at Master Wydeville. “Now I am going to see her. She was of my household. This is my duty.”

  Master Wydeville looked past her to M’dame as if asking for her help. M’dame, stony-faced, gave none. Lady Jacquetta, pale but certain, started forward, and Master Wydeville moved aside. Joliffe unlatched the gate and stepped backward, opening it ahead of her. M’dame followed her in. Master Wydeville, after giving order to someone for lights to be brought, followed them both, and Joliffe—because no one said he should not—moved after them, to one side of the path to be quiet-footed on the grass, telling himself that if either of the women collapsed as Guillemete had, Master Wydeville would need immediate help.

  The sun was now below the top of the garden’s wall, but there was still light enough to show all that needed to be seen without the women went too near the blood or body, and they did not but near enough that Lady Jacquetta made a small sound that brought M’dame and Master Wydeville immediately beside her. She did take hard hold on M’dame’s arm but did not sway or look away from Alizon.

  M’dame, after one swift look at the body, stood staring at the far garden wall, stiff as an iron rod. Lady Jacquetta, after a moment, said in a small voice, “They say the dead are asleep. She does not look asleep. She looks empty. We hear—we always hear—about the killing. There is so often—among the men—someone who does not come back, because they’re dead. We hear they’re dead. But we don’t see death. Not death like this. Death with blood and—suddenness.”

  “My lady,” M’dame said, not lowering her gaze from the wall. “You should come away now.”

  Lady Jacquetta looked at Master Wydeville. “Is there pursuit of who did this?” she demanded, and under her disciplined quiet, Joliffe thought he heard anger like his own at so wrong a death.

  “My lady, no one was here when she was found, so there’s no one to pursue,” Master Wydeville said, then asked, his tone measured, “Do you know why she was here? Was it to meet someone?”

  “I do not know why she was here. She did meet someone, though. That is plain. Someone who did this and left her.” Lady Jacquetta’s head snapped around. She stared toward where the hôtel was out of sight beyond the brick wall. “Left her and went back to there?” she said in a horrified half-whisper.

  “Or else through there.” Master Wydeville made a grim nod toward the far wall of the garden.

  Forgetting, in his surprise, to keep silent, Joliffe echoed, “Through there?”

  The garden’s far wall was of stone, rather than brick. Directly opposite the gateway there was a gap of perhaps two feet in the turf bench, with branches of rose bush trellised on the wall there like everywhere else. With the half-thought Joliffe had given it, he had vaguely supposed that in summer a large pot of something—a lily or maybe irises—was meant to be set there in the space, but now Master Wydeville went toward it, saying grimly, “Come and see.”

  Joliffe followed, heard the click of a latch as Master Wydeville touched the wall, and was startled by Master Wydeville swinging inward part of the wall and some of the trellis with its vine.

  “See,” Master Wydeville said. “Here the wall is wood, painted to seem stone unless someone looks closely.” Painted very skillfully and with the trellis and rose branches serving to further obscure it.

  Joliffe went closer and saw there was a drop of several feet beyond it—with no steps down—to a somewhat grass-grown pathway running along a wide, clear-flowing stream. On the stream’s other side were what looked to be the backs of other gardens, some walled, some not.

  Level-voiced, Master Wydeville said, “My lord of Bedford had the door made when the garden was. He said no sensible man put himself into a place from which there was only one way out.” He started to shut the door. “So you see . . .”

  Joliffe put out a hand to stop him, then pointed to the broad board that was the door’s frame and said, “There.”

  A few more moments of gathering twilight would have hidden it, but he and Master Wydeville bent together for a closer look.

  “What is it?” Lady Jacquetta demanded from where she still stood beyond Alizon’s body.

  Master Wydeville straightened. “I’d judge it to be blood, my lady.”

  “Alizon’s?” Lady Jacquetta asked.
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  “She never moved from where she was stabbed,” Master Wydeville answered.

  “And up here,” Joliffe murmured for only Master Wydeville to hear, slightly nodding toward a lesser smear higher up on the frame.

  Master Wydeville nodded that he saw it, too, finished shutting the door, and answered Joliffe’s questioning look toward the latch with, “Yes. It only opens from this side. Not from the other at all.”

  Chapter 18

  Lady Jacquetta left the garden, M’dame going with her. Beyond the gathered gawkers outside the gate, someone was coming with the lights Master Wydeville had ordered. Surely a priest was on the way, too, and probably the household’s marshal, but in the few moments he and Master Wydeville were alone, Joliffe took the chance to point out the handprint on the fountain’s edge and the possible footprint. Master Wydeville said nothing about the first and had to bend low and lean a little to one side and another to see the footprint, then matched Joliffe’s own thought with, “Someone stood there to turn the body over, well after she was dead and the blood had ceased to spread.”

  A servant with a lighted torch came into the garden, followed by one of the household priests and two more servants carrying lighted lanterns. Master Wydeville ordered the torchbearer to stop barely inside the gateway and hold the torch high, to throw as much light as might be over the darkening garden. He gave short answers to the priest’s short questions, left the man kneeling to pray near the body, took one of the lanterns from a staring servant, and ordered at Joliffe, “Take the other,” before sending both servants to stand outside the gate to keep anyone unneeded from coming in.

  “Now,” he told Joliffe, “we look carefully all over this garden, to find out anything we can. Come the morning, there’ll be search by daylight, but we have to try tonight, too. You understand? Anything, whether you think it matters or not. Start at the gateway and work that half of the garden, back toward the door, while I work this half.”

  Freed by Lady Jacquetta’s and M’dame’s going, household folk outside the gate were jostling for better view. No one presumed to ask anything of Master Wydeville, but a few questions were shot at Joliffe, who ignored them, keeping his mind tightly to his search, but when he and Master Wydeville met at the door in the wall, their faces told each other neither had found anything. Joliffe took the chance, though, to say, wanting to hear what Master Wydeville would answer, “It must have been that she let her murderer in.”

  “He did not need to come through the door to be here,” Master Wydeville returned. “Alizon surely came through the garden. So could he.”

  “But he knew the door is here, to let himself out,” Joliffe said. As the blood marks showed he must have. Master Wydeville nodded, beyond doubt thinking the same as Joliffe was—that the murderer must almost surely be someone of the household, to have spent time in this most private garden and so know of the door and how to open it.

  “Whichever way he came,” Master Wydeville said, “Alizon was expecting him.”

  “Or her,” said Joliffe.

  Master Wydeville was silent a moment before granting, “Or her. Although if the kill was made with a sword, we’ll have to grant it was done by a man. We’ll know more when the body has been properly seen. But, yes, otherwise there’s nothing to say a woman could not have done it.”

  Joliffe’s unsaid, unwanted thought was of Perrette. But what reason would Alizon have to meet with Perrette, secretly or otherwise? Or Perrette have reason to kill her? But if there was a reason Alizon had to die, and if it had been Perrette here, how much part in it might Master Wydeville have? Was all this searching and questioning here only a pretense on his part? Smothering a definite terror at that thought, Joliffe shied aside from those questions by saying with forced steadiness, “About the blood on the doorway here. The lower smear looks much as if someone leaned there, bleeding.”

  “It does,” Master Wydeville agreed. “It’s fair guess, too, that the lesser smear, higher up, was probably from the same hand that left the print on the fountain’s rim. Those two could well be Lady Alizon’s blood. This one, though”—he nodded at the lower smear—“gives more the seeming that the man were wounded himself.”

  That matched Joliffe’s own thought, and he asked the question that went with it. “Wounded by whom?” Because Alizon was unlikely to have had any weapon with her; demoiselles did not go armed about the household.

  But everything about her death was unlikely, so the unlikely had to be considered possible.

  But Master Wydeville seemed to share his own doubt, saying, “I don’t see how she could have wounded him, unless she fought him and did it with his own dagger, unlikely though that is against a man. Let us see.”

  They went back to the body. The priest had been joined by a second priest. Master Wydeville stepped between the two kneeling men—the gravel must be uncomfortable under their knees, Joliffe thought—and lifted first one of Alizon’s hands, then the other. Having looked at them in his lantern’s light and laid them gently down, he stepped back and several paces away before saying quietly what Joliffe had seen, too. “There are no cuts on her hands as if she had tried to fend off the dagger. My judgment would be she was struck without warning and fell and died, taken completely by surprise. But if so, then how did her murderer come to leave his blood on the door post?”

  Master Wydeville was less asking for Joliffe’s answer than considering aloud, but Joliffe said, “Then there had to have been a third person here. Someone else who was attacked but not killed. Someone who escaped.”

  “Or else the murderer wounded himself. Which I doubt. Or he was the one wounded by some third person here.” Master Wydeville turned his head toward raised voices outside the gate and spoke more quickly. “That will be the marshal, perhaps the coroner and all. We’re done here, you and I. But listen to me. First, say nothing about the blood on the doorpost. Second, someone as hurt as whoever bled there will need some manner of help with a hurt like that. I want you to ask questions among apothecaries and surgeons hereabout, to see if any of them have helped a hurt man tonight. Make up whatever story you need to, to cover why you’re asking. Then go to Master Doncaster with what you’ve learned. Or haven’t learned. Go now.”

  “Now?”

  “Now. Take yourself away at your first chance.”

  “They’ll want to ask me questions, as one of the first-finders.”

  “I’ll answer for what was found. They’ll be satisfied. You’ve been overset by seeing this murder and are likely going to slip away to get drunk as possible.” Starting toward the three men now coming into the garden, Master Wydeville added in a raised voice and impatiently, “Get hold on yourself, Ripon. Be a man, not a mimsy rag.”

  Joliffe promptly slumped into John Ripon and began a whining mutter about his stomach.

  Master Wydeville snapped at him, voice still raised, “If you’re going to be ill, don’t do it in here!” and the three men moved well aside as Joliffe, his free hand pressed over his mouth, scuttled past them with a hasty bow and out the gate, thrusting his lantern into someone’s hands among the on-lookers. With shoulders hunched and hand still over his mouth, he shook his head against the questions thrown at him and made heaving sounds that got people out of his way as he stumbled toward the hôtel, nor did anyone follow him through the darkening garden, saving him the trouble of feigning worse sickness by way of a finger in his throat.

  At the hôtel he went in and up by the private stairway but only to the grand chambers. He cut through them and along the long gallery, having the good fortune to meet no one either there or as he went up to the dormer. There he shed his clerk’s gown, put on his cloak and hat again, and went down the stairs into the stableyard corner of the foreyard. From there he had only the outer gateway’s guards to satisfy. They proved curious, having caught the word murder from whoever was gone in search of the coroner but knowing no more. Joliffe told them he only knew it was some woman in the garden and he was heading out for a drink because who k
new when supper would be tonight.

  Fortunately, no order had yet been given to let no one leave. They did not stop him going out, and because rumor had had too little time to spread further, there was no questioning crowd gathered outside the gateway. Once beyond it and among people in the street there, Joliffe was no one. Unfortunately, he was also nowhere, so far as knowing where to go. He had made no study of apothecary shops or surgeons in Rouen. Even if had he, he did not know which way the wounded man—woman?—murderer?—had gone once out the garden’s door. Right or left along the path there, yes. But which?

  Come to that, he did not even know where the path ran, but he found the nearer end of it by simply asking a pair of children sitting on a doorstep, probably waiting to be called in to their supper. They jumped up and happily took him along the street to where a short alley came out between two houses. He gave them each a small coin in thanks, to their complete delight, just as their mother called them angrily home.

  Left looking into the alley’s shadows, Joliffe did not much like the thought of going into it, especially to no purpose, and crossed the street instead, to where someone’s apprentice was closing the shutter across a shopfront. He asked the youth if he had been there the past hour or two and got the answer, “Freezing my fingers and selling nothing, yes. Could have closed three hours ago, for all the profit there’s been.”

  “Has anyone come out of that alleyway in that while? Someone who came along the stream path there?”

  “That’s not much used this cold time of year,” the youth said scornfully. “There was no one I saw today, anyway, and I did not have much else to look at.”