The Huntsman's Tale (Oxford Medieval Mysteries Book 3)

by Ann Swinfen

  We set off companionably, our way lit by the full moon which was now well risen and turned the workaday farm lane into a tunnel of silver light and blue-black shadows, as fine and delicate as an altar cloth worked in silver thread upon velvet.

  The priest was never one to come at a subject roundabout.

  ‘You are ill content about all these affairs at the manor, Nicholas,’ he said, not making a question of it.

  ‘Aye,’ I said. I would not prevaricate with him. ‘Three deaths. Two outright murders. One self murder. Now, I believe Lawyer Baverstoke told no lie when he said he murdered the king’s man, Reginald Le Soten, a decent, honourable man, doing his duty. And I believe that what he said were his reasons were the truth. If it became public that Gilbert Mordon had made another will, disinheriting his wife, then all the more would suspicion fall on her for the first murder. Baverstoke had seen Le Soten talking to Sir Henry and me in the orchard, but he could not know – not then, at least – that Le Soten had already told us of the second will.’

  I paused. ‘I never thought so at the time, but now I realise that Le Soten wanted us to know about the fraudulent acquisition of the manor and the existence of that will because he was in some fear for his life. In the work he undertook for the king, he must often have been in danger. In a straightforward and honourable fight, he seemed to me a man who could hold his own, but he was treacherously taken from behind. A coward’s way.’

  In the shafts of moonlight through the trees, I saw a brief smile flit over Sire Raymond’s face. ‘You speak like a courtly knight. All murder is dishonourable, but I grant that confronting a man face to face is less so, for it gives the man a chance to fight for his life. But, all the same, I think it is not so much the injustice of Le Soten’s murder that most troubles you.’

  ‘The injustice of his murder, that does trouble me, but the murderer has made admission and paid the price with his own life. But you have the right of it. The other murder, the murder of a man both cruel and despicable, was not done by the hand of the man who confessed to it.’

  ‘You are sure of that?’

  ‘Beyond a doubt. Had Baverstoke come to trial for Le Soten’s murder, he would have been found guilty and been hanged for it. But the other–’ I shuddered. ‘Father, the man knowingly condemned himself to everlasting torment in the fires of Hell for a murder he did not commit, while the true murderer – the murderess – has ridden away, free from justice.’

  He laid his hand on my arm and brought me to a stop, for I had been striding more and more quickly in my agitation and distress.

  ‘Son,’ he said, ‘the woman has escaped worldly justice through the actions of a man who loved her. It is for God to judge the rights and wrongs on all sides. It is not for us. Have you considered? The woman is with child. You would not want an innocent child condemned to death. And even if the mother had been condemned, but spared until after she gave birth, as the law permits, what then of the child? The bastard of a murderer?’

  ‘I would not condemn the child,’ I said. ‘You know that I would not.’

  ‘You see, Nicholas, God may have some purpose in all this. It is not unknown for the child of sinful parents to rise to heights of holiness. Even saints have come into the world thus. We cannot know, but it may be that God put it into the man Baverstoke’s mind to take the blame because in His wisdom and intention, He has some purpose for the child.’

  I heaved a sigh, but his words left me feeling cleansed, though very weary.

  ‘You have the right of it, Father,’ I said. ‘And I find great comfort in that.’

  ‘Do not come any further,’ he said. ‘Away to your bed. You have a long journey tomorrow.’

  I nodded. ‘Give me your blessing before you go, Father,’ I said, and knelt before him on the mossy path.

  He laid his cool hand on my head, and spoke a blessing over me, just as he had done when I was a boy. When I rose, he kissed my forehead, then walked away down the lane without looking back. I turned toward the farm again, my mind calm and filled with the silver moonlight. But there were tears on my cheeks.

  The journey back to Oxford the next day was uneventful. The children slept in the cart most of the way, weary from the previous night’s celebrations, until, a few miles past Witney, Alysoun woke and demanded to be taken before me on Rufus’s back. Not to be outdone, Rafe complained that he too should return mounted, ‘Not in a cart with the women,’ he complained.

  Jordain laughed, holding up the reins of the cart horse and pointing out that Rafe was not the only man in the cart.

  ‘But you are driving,’ Rafe said. ‘I should not mind if I could drive.’

  ‘Not yet a while,’ Jordain said, ‘for if the horse should take fright, you could not hold him.’

  The cart horse had shown never a sign of nerves since he had been with us, but Jordain made a sound point.

  Guy rode up close to the cart. ‘Pass the lad up to me, Mistress Makepeace,’ he said. ‘I will take him on my horse.’

  Once Rafe was settled proudly before the student’s saddle, I saw that Stephen was looking up at him wistfully, but he said nothing. I turned and caught Philip’s eye. He could not acknowledge Stephen openly in Oxford, but we were a mixed party. If Rafe could ride with Guy, might not Stephen ride with Philip?

  It was a more difficult manoeuvre to lift Stephen on to the withers of Philip’s horse, but it was managed at last, and so we rode the last miles down the Woodstock Road and St Giles, into Oxford by the North Gate, with the three children like conquering paladins, high above the heads of the shoppers in Northgate Street.

  Already with the passing of summer the hours of daylight were growing shorter, so that it was nearing dusk by the time we reached my shop on the High. When we had unloaded the cart, Giles would return it to the Mitre. Margaret offered to make a meal for all, but Beatrice shook her head.

  ‘Best if we take Stephen home to his own bed,’ she said quietly. ‘He is growing tired, though he would rather bite his tongue than admit it. Philip can ride on ahead with him and light a fire, while I follow on foot. We have some of the food left which your cousin gave us.’

  Indeed, we had fared well for food on our journey, Susanna having loaded us down with remnants from the previous evening’s feast.

  ‘You and the boys, at least, will eat with us,’ Margaret said firmly to Jordain, having little faith in what the cook at Hart Hall might be able to provide. So our slightly diminished party ate a scratch meal in a kitchen which felt forlorn and chilly until I had the fire alight and Margaret had placed candles along the table to cheer us.

  When Jordain and the two students had gone back to their hall, I walked Rufus up the street to the Mitre and paid over the remaining fee for his hire to a sleepy groom. I rubbed his head fondly, sorry to part with him. He had been my mount of choice for some time now, but I had never been so long in his company. He had served me well, whether on the long journey to Leighton and back, or galloping through Wychwood on that misbegotten hunt.

  When I returned home, Margaret had already put the children to bed, and we soon followed. Even Rowan was almost too tired to climb the stairs and slip into the children’s room, while I pretended not the notice.

  A new dawn, and a return to normal life. As far as I could tell, Walter had not opened the shop while I had been gone, for everything was as I had left it, no books sold, no papers or inks moved. Roger had left a pot of green, such as he used for grass, poorly stoppered, so that it had dried up. I was annoyed, for it was unnecessary waste, though fortunately it is not a costly colour and there was not much left in the bottom of the pot.

  Margaret bustled about, deploring the quantity of dust which had accumulated in our absence, shooing us out of her way, except for Rafe who was inexplicably doleful and followed her about. Alysoun could not make up her mind between spending her time with Jonathan, who might have found new friends while she was gone, and the hens, which had been fed by Mary Coomber, but would have had none of Alysou
n’s accustomed chatter to brighten their days.

  I turned my attention to the shop, where dust had also fallen. It finds its way in from the street, however tightly the shutters are closed. It had been good to visit the farm and the village again, but this was where I now felt most at home. I ran my hands lovingly over my neat piles of parchment, and lifted a fat copy of Tully’s Orations and sniffed its aroma appreciatively – leather, parchment, ink, and that indescribable perfume which, even with my eyes closed, I can identify as Book.

  In the next day or two, I would make enquiries about procuring a pair of spectacles for Walter, despite his protests. Only after I had tidied, and borrowed a cloth from Margaret to dust the desks and shelves, did I allow myself to remove from my strongbox what I had been promising myself. I sat down behind my desk, and laid the parcel before me, untying the tape which held the pages together.

  Emma Thorgold’s unfinished book of hours lay before me.

  Slowly I turned the pages over, studying each in turn. When I had first seen them, I had thought all the drawings were but outlines. Later, I discovered that she had painted in the colours on some. About a third were complete, the scribing finished, the illuminations drawn, coloured, and gilded. Then a few pages where some of the colours were laid on, but which still awaited completion. The final pages were lettered, but the drawings merely outlined. Even in their simplest form these drawings had immense vigour and life to them. When brightly coloured inks and gold foil are used in abundance, even clumsy drawings can appeal to the eye, but they are flat and disproportionate. When the first swift outlines leap from the page, like these, filled with life, then you know they are the work of a true artist. Ah, if she were not a woman, what a scrivener and illuminator she would be!

  Yet I could not wish her any less a woman.

  ‘Margaret,’ I said, putting my head around the kitchen door, but not daring to enter, for she was on hands and knees, scrubbing the floor.

  ‘Aye?’ She did not bother to look up.

  ‘I am off to Bookbinder’s Island. Do not wait dinner for me. I am not sure how long I shall be.’

  She answered with a nod, and I withdrew.

  There were two blank sheets amongst Emma’s pages. These I placed in the stiffened satchel I use for carrying the pages of books and set off at a brisk pace toward Carfax, then down Great Bailey to the bridge over one of the branches of the Thames which leads to Bookbinder’s Bridge.

  ‘Can you match this parchment?’ I asked David Hewlyn without preamble, catching him as he tightened the cords holding a stretched skin to its frame.

  He glanced down, without stopping what he was doing.

  ‘Aye. Let me finish this.’

  When he had tightened the skin to his satisfaction, I followed him into the room where he did the final finishing of the skins and kept stacks of the different sizes and grades of parchment on shelves. He fingered the sheet I gave him, then went unerringly to a pile on one of the lower shelves.

  ‘How much do you want?’

  It was not a large pile. ‘I will take all that you have,’ I said.

  He raised his eyebrows, but he was not a man to turn down a sale.

  I hurried back with my purchase and set the fresh parchment down beside Emma’s pages. The original parchment had come from Hewlyn, I knew. It was fortunate that he still had some of the same stock.

  ‘Do you want any dinner?’ Margaret had come through into the shop. ‘Why was it so urgent to replenish your supplies of parchment? Surely you have plenty?’

  ‘I needed to be sure I could obtain a match,’ I said, hardly listening. ‘Dinner? Nay, I may take a bite later.’

  She glanced down at the pages spread out on the desk.

  ‘Mistress Farringdon has been here,’ she said. ‘You know that she works at the cheese making with Mary Coomber, over the way. She saw that we were back, and put her head in the door at midday. She says you loaned Juliana a book before we went away. She wants to return it, and borrow another. I said she might bring it round.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said, distracted, counting sheets to be sure there would be enough. ‘Any time.’

  Margaret went back into the house and I sat down at my desk. There would be enough sheets to complete the book of hours, with some to spare. I would need to replace the green ink Roger had spoiled and I did not keep more than a small amount of gold foil. I would need to buy more. Otherwise, I thought I had almost all the colours, even the costly lapis blue.

  I had lowered the shutter which served as a counter below the window on to the street, although I did not expect any business today. Tomorrow I would send word to Walter and Roger that it was time they returned to work. There were a few weeks yet until the beginning of the Michaelmas Term, but some Fellows came up early, and the new young students would come looking for lodgings in one of the halls, or in those town lodging houses, likely Tackley’s Inn, where I had first stayed as a boy. So when a shadow passed the window I did not look up from the list I was making of the few inks I would need.

  There was a click of the latch as the shop door opened, and a girl’s light footfall on the threshold.

  ‘Juliana,’ I said, ‘you wanted to return the book I loaned you? I must think what you would care to read next.’

  She did not answer.

  I looked up.

  There, framed in the doorway, with the southern slant of the sun turning her into a silhouette, she was standing quite still, her face in shadow.

  ‘Emma!’

  I leapt to my feet, nearly overturning my inkwell and dropping my quill so that it smeared my list but mercifully missed the pages of the book.

  I recollected myself. ‘Or should I say, “my lady”?’

  She stepped forward, so that the light falling through the window lit up her face.

  ‘What nonsense you talk, Nicholas.’

  ‘As Sir Anthony’s heir–’

  ‘I am who I am. I have not changed. Have you forgotten how we rode one horse, and I in my boy’s attire?’

  ‘How could I forget?’

  And how could I forget her, clasped in my arms as we rode from her stepfather’s pursuing hounds.

  ‘So not Lady Emma?’

  ‘Not Lady Emma.’

  She came toward me, but her eyes were not on me, but on her illuminated pages spread out on my desk.

  ‘You have been looking at my book of hours?’

  ‘I have. And I have been to see David Hewlyn today, to buy the rest of that batch of parchment, before he sold it to someone else. Now it can be finished.’

  She came closer, so that only the desk and the beautiful pages lay between us. She reached out and laid her palms protectively on the sheets.

  ‘You will not let Roger complete it!’ It was a cry of outrage, an order, not a question.

  ‘Should I not?’

  ‘I would tear them into tiny pieces myself, rather than let them fall into other hands.’ Her voice was fierce.

  Her hands still rested lightly on the pages, but she did not pick them up.

  ‘It is not easy to tear this fine quality of parchment into tiny pieces,’ I said solemnly, ‘but I suppose I could help you. Or I have a pair of scissors here.’

  I reached into the drawer where I kept some of the tools of my trade. It was a fearsome pair of scissors, used for cutting leather when I mended a damaged binding.

  She stared at the scissors in horror, then lifted her eyes to my face and began to laugh.

  ‘Nicholas Elyot, you are quite wicked.’

  ‘Will you think me wicked when I tell you of my plan?’

  ‘What plan?’ she said cautiously.

  ‘What would you say to finishing the book? It was, after all, ordered by Lady Amilia. I should be sorry to disappoint one of my wealthiest customers.’

  ‘Complete it? Myself? But as a woman I cannot work for you as a scrivener.’

  I patted the front of my shirt, where her letter rustled faintly.

  ‘I thought that was
what you were suggesting in your letter.’

  ‘But–’

  I reached out and lifted her hands from the desk, holding them in both of mine. When we had first met, I had seen the ink stains on her fingers which matched those on mine. Both were faded now after some weeks of disuse, but ink marks the hands so deeply it never quite disappears. Her hands were cool in mine, but though they were slender, they were strong, and the evidence lay before us that they were skilled. I lifted her hands, one after the other to my lips. They were trembling.

  ‘No one else need know that you are working for me as my scrivener.’

  ‘Do you mean it? It is not a jest? Like the scissors?’

  ‘I promise you, Emma, it is not a jest.’

  ‘For this book only? Or will there be others?’

  ‘I see no reason why there should not be others. Will you accept?’

  She began to glow, as if a candle had been lit behind her eyes. She looked from her illuminated pages to me.

  ‘I accept,’ she said.

  I sighed, and smiled at her. But was the glow for me?

  Or for her art?

  Historical Note

  Until fairly modern times, agricultural work was very labour intensive, and never more so than at harvest time. In the medieval period, although all farms of any size would have had permanent agricultural servants, and the manors would have had a body of villeins owing so many days’ work a week on the manor’s demesne, as a form of rent for their holdings, at harvest time day labourers would need to be hired.

  This group of labourers was made up of the poorest cottagers, and villeins who were anxious to augment their income. At one end of the social scale, even free men and women might take on the work when times were hard; at the other, homeless vagrants might earn a few honest coins.

  Employment of these day labourers was an established part of the rural economy until the violent disruption of society by the widespread deaths caused by the virulent plague now known as the Black Death, but at the time generally referred to as the Great Pestilence. Suddenly landowners found themselves without the workers to plough, plant, and harvest. Landless labourers and villeins tied by customary service to their lords’ lands discovered that the work of their hands had a monetary value. They began to demand higher pay. Owners of estates, desperate for workers, found they must offer it.