by S. D. Sykes
‘I know the back paths. Don’t be concerned. Nobody will stop an old priest with a covered body in a cart. Especially if I suggest my load is suffering from the Pestilence.’
So, it was agreed. Clemence was changed into a clean gown and cloak, and laid on the back of a hay cart like a sack of barley. But she still would not take Brother Peter’s sleeping draught, claiming that she would rather be knocked about on a rutted road, than tricked into a delirium.
And she would not travel without Humbert. Equally the boy would not be left at Somershill without her. So I gave him my brother Richard’s sword to earn his keep on this journey and told him to guard Clemence with his life. Humbert might not have been violent, but he had the capacity to look so. The boy handled the weapon with some trepidation – who knows what torments he had received at the hands of this very same sword? But when I proposed that Clemence needed protecting from de Caburn, he gripped it as firmly as a crusader charging at an army of infidels. He was Clemence’s champion and would defend my sister’s favour to the end.
Peter would not let me help him load the cart, though he struggled to lift a very heavy casket onto the back.
‘More brandy?’ I asked him.
He smiled. ‘The abbess is as miserly as the bishop.’
‘How long are you planning to be away? You must have a supply in there to last weeks.’
‘I will return as soon as possible.’
‘You promise.’
He looked at me and smiled. ‘Don’t worry, Oswald.’ Then he whispered into my ear. ‘Come with me, quickly. There’s something I must show you. Before I leave.’
He led me to Father’s library and shut the heavy door behind us. Shards of light from the window picked out a thousand dancing specks of dust in the air. Peter led me to the back wall. ‘If you come under attack while I’m away, there is somewhere you can hide.’
‘In here?’
He nodded and lifted back the tapestry of the three-headed sea-serpent to reveal the alcove where he kept his brandy and solitary pewter cup.
‘I can’t hide in there,’ I said.
‘Don’t be so foolish, Oswald.’ He then pushed at a small carved angel in the back of the alcove and slowly a panel in the wall moved – rotating outwards in the manner of a door hinge. Its movement was entirely silent, and the heaviness of the wood did not make a single scratch upon the floor. I looked with wonder inside the cavity to see only darkness.
‘It’s an escape tunnel,’ said Peter.
‘Who built it?’
‘Your grandfather. When he redesigned the house.’
‘And how do you know about it?’
‘Your father revealed it to me. Years ago. When I was copying manuscripts for the abbey. He used this tunnel to store his most precious books.’ Peter coughed. ‘Any text that might seem seditious or profane.’ A damp and cold smell crept out from the opening.
‘Where are the books now?’
‘On the shelves in the library. This is no place to keep books, Oswald. They will only warp and rot. I removed them as soon as we returned to Somershill.’
Peter lit a candle and beckoned for me to follow him. ‘Come inside and I will show you how to escape at the other end. You cannot stay too long in here as the air is fetid.’
The thin light of the candle illuminated a set of stone steps and a narrow corridor that sloped gently downwards into the distance. The walls were the work of master masons. Each stone perfectly carved into place in the lancet arch of the tunnel.
‘Are there any other tunnels about the house?’ I asked, as we made our way into the darkness.
‘Just this one, to my knowledge,’ said Peter. ‘At least your father did not tell me of any others.’
‘I wish he had told me about this place.’
‘He didn’t have the opportunity, Oswald.’
‘Does Mother know of this?’
Peter laughed. ‘Of course not. Your father wanted this tunnel to remain a secret!’
‘And nobody else knows? Not Gilbert, nor any of the other servants?’
He shook his head. ‘Not a soul.’
As we climbed the steps at the other end of the tunnel, we were met by another wall. Peter counted down seven stones and then pushed. This door was much heavier and smaller than the one in the library, and was made of stone. Once again it pivoted outwards, and as we peeped through the tiny aperture, I saw that we were now on the outer face of the high crenellated wall that ran from the north-east tower to the north-west. No wonder this part of the wall had been left standing, when the other three sides had been demolished. In front of us stood the stinking remains of the moat.
Peter pulled me back. ‘Let’s hurry back now, Oswald. There’s no time to waste.’ He showed me how to open and close both the doors from the inside of the tunnel and then we made our way back to the cart, where Clemence and Mother awaited us.
But Mother refused to see the party off – proclaiming she had never seen a de Lacy leave Somershill in a more degraded state, and was ashamed our servants should witness such a thing. It was lucky then that we had no more house servants than Gilbert, Ada and Piers the stable lad.
Before she left I held Clemence’s hand and kissed her scratched cheek. ‘I’m sorry this happened, Sister.’
‘I know, Oswald.’ Her voice was weak, but the next moment she squeezed my hand with surprising vigour. ‘But he will pay.’
Under Brother Peter’s instructions, we shut up the house as if preparing for a siege. He also persuaded me to write another of his letters – this one to the earl. I was to express my dismay at de Caburn’s behaviour towards Clemence and then to plead for men to aid my defence. I was to say nothing about the Starvecrow murders.
I was unconvinced, but Peter felt we must try to invoke old family alliances. The earl was known to be both mercurial and chivalrous. If I pleaded my case poetically, he might be moved to take my side. And if that didn’t work, my agreement to commuting the military service to a money payment might also swing the argument in my favour. So, against my better judgement I sat down and composed the most emotional and florid of appeals, then despatched Piers to the earl’s castle near Rochester.
Those of us left at Somershill took turns to watch from the north-west tower. For three days we feared the approach of de Caburn, but he didn’t come. Instead I looked out morosely upon my fields of wheat and barley, which ripened in the unexpected sun, with nobody to harvest their crop.
At my second watch I saw Gilbert moving the dairy cattle and their calves about in the fields with a long stick. The sunlight gave him a vaporous quality, as if he were an illusion. I wished he would keep the herd nearer the house, but he refused, saying they needed the sweeter meadows of the pastures nearer to the forest and hence nearer to de Caburn’s land. The next day he was gone for so long, we wondered if he had been captured by my enemy. But Gilbert returned at dusk, driving the cattle grumpily into the dairy barn and calling for Ada to help him milk the beasts.
Mirabel joined me on the third evening to watch an orange sun setting in a pale sky. Small bats flitted amongst us, and the squeal of a dog otter drifted up from the river. I looked at my companion. The warm light cast shadows across her beautiful face and lit up the velvet down of her skin.
‘Do you think we will starve this winter, sire?’ she asked.
‘Of course not,’ I lied. ‘The villagers will return soon. The harvest will be a good one.’
I wanted to take her hand and hold her. But she had been distant since that afternoon in the forest, reluctant to say much at all. Mother had plans to train her as a lady’s maid, but I was adamant Mirabel would receive care and attention rather than Mother’s instruction. For even then I had formed ideas regarding Mirabel. Plans that would take both courage and luck.
On the dawn of the fourth day, Gilbert was driving the cattle out through the main gate when I called for him to bring them back. I had been watching the woodland, our most vulnerable point. My eyesight is keen,
but I will admit that my imagination can sometimes be keener. Seeing something move in between the distant trees I first dismissed it as the wind, since the early morning was gusty and cold. But this was not air moving about between the oaks and ash. It was people.
I shouted again to Gilbert.‘Quickly, drive the cattle back!’
The man suffered from wilful deafness and held his hand to his ear. ‘What’s that, sire?’
‘We’re under attack, Gilbert. Bring the cattle back!’ He seemed to hear me this time and began to round them up with a shrug, as if being under attack were a tedious nuisance. By the time I had run out of the tower to join him, the cattle had dispersed in all directions.
Gilbert looked into the distance. ‘I can’t see nothing, sire.’
‘Over there!’ We turned to look at the woodland, where some people were now emerging. They were moving slowly and to my mind stealthily. ‘It must be de Caburn and his men,’ I said.
Gilbert snorted. ‘I don’t think so, sire. They don’t look so dangerous to me.’ We looked again, and now they were closer we saw a trickle of people with their backs bent and faces to the ground. They were a string of peasants in dirty brown and grey tunics, followed by a gaggle of children.
I recognised them immediately.
‘They’ve come back,’ Gilbert shouted. ‘That’s the villagers, sire.’ And indeed it was.
We ran across the field to meet them as if they were long-lost family. I even forgot to look angry – though once we caught up with their guilty faces it was clear they were expecting some level of censure from me, so I quickly dropped my look of joy and exchanged it for a frown.
‘I understand you’ve been at Versey Castle,’ I said. They looked from one to the other and then to the ground.
William the ploughman spoke first. ‘We were on a pilgrimage, sire.’
‘We wanted to be saved from them dog heads,’ said Hilda, the ruddy-faced woman who sometimes worked as our dairymaid. ‘Father John said we had to pray at the shrine of the Virgin.’
‘That doesn’t take a week.’
Again silence. It was the ploughman who braved an answer, though he muttered his words, half hoping I wouldn’t hear him properly. ‘Lord Versey asked us to take in his harvest.’
‘There’s a harvest at Somershill,’ I said. ‘Can’t you see it? Rotting in the fields.’
‘But he offered better wages, sire,’ said a boy. ‘Uncle got a farthing more per day.’ The boy was quickly kicked by a man I presumed to be his uncle and told to be quiet.
‘So why have you returned? If you were made such a good offer by Lord Versey?’ More silence. A couple of women crossed themselves. The boy kissed his crucifix.
‘Answer Lord Somershill,’ said Gilbert, looking at them in turn. ‘Come on. Satan cut your tongues, has he?’
The ploughman coughed. ‘Lord Versey is dead, sire. Killed by the dog heads.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I asked. A general uproar broke out, and it became impossible to make sense of what anybody was saying.
I dragged the boy forward. He, at least, seemed able to speak the truth. ‘De Caburn is dead. Are you sure?’
The boy shivered. ‘I saw his body myself, sire. Hanging over the Virgin’s shrine at Versey. We all went to look at it.’ The others nodded and expanded on the story with garbled details and calls to the Almighty.
I told them to be quiet. ‘What did his body look like?’ I asked the boy.
‘He was naked, sire. His throat was all mangled by the dog heads.’ The boy’s eyes were wide. ‘But it wasn’t just his throat. They’d chewed away at his face and his hands as well. And he smelt strange.’
‘Dead bodies always smell strange.’
‘No, sire. He smelt sort of . . . cooked.’ Once again cries to the Almighty rang out.
‘Cooked?’
The boy’s uncle intervened. ‘Tom has a bit of an imagination, my lord. I think it was just the scent of evil myself.’
Sensing this strand of conversation would inevitably lead into the direction of dog heads, I quickly grabbed the boy again. ‘When was the body found?’
‘Yesterday morning, sire. Elfric saw him first. He was going to the shrine to pray.’
I looked at Elfric, a youth whose eyes pointed in different directions, so it was a wonder he could see anything at all. ‘And when was the last time Lord Versey was seen alive?’
‘Don’t know, sire,’ said the boy. ‘Lord Versey was always in his castle.’
‘I saw him riding out alone the afternoon before,’ said young Ralph. ‘He was headed out on the road to Burrsfield.’
‘Do you know where he was going?’ I asked. They all shrugged. It was a foolish question anyway. De Caburn was hardly likely to share his diary of engagements with a group of villagers.
‘And where’s Father John?’ I asked, suddenly remembering Cornwall. The boy was about to reply, but the ploughman interrupted him. ‘He didn’t want us to return to Somershill, sire. Thought we should stay and finish the harvest at Versey.’
‘And why didn’t you?’
The ploughman shifted on his feet, seeming more uncomfortable than ever. I looked about at the other faces, but nobody would answer my question.
‘Why didn’t you stay at Versey?’ I said again. The ploughman muttered something inaudible. ‘Speak up, please,’ I told him.
‘We weren’t sure who’d pay us. Now Lord Versey is dead.’
‘And not just that, sire,’ said Hilda. ‘Versey is cursed.’
‘Last week Somershill was cursed, if you remember!’ I said.
‘Oh no. It’s much worse there,’ said Hilda. ‘Oh yes. First the girl went missing and then Lord Versey was murdered.’
‘Which girl went missing?’
‘My sister, sire,’ said the boy. ‘Mirabel Turner.’
‘No. She is—’
But then somebody caught my eye. The tall, red-haired youth who had followed Mirabel in church with jealous eyes. At mention of her name, his face hung and his eyes studied the ground, and suddenly I felt angry. It was not for him to grieve over Mirabel. She belonged to me.
I should have told the whole village that Mirabel was still alive. Instead I asked her brother to accompany me back to the house, telling the rest of them to meet me later in the fields.
For once, there was no discussion.
Chapter Seventeen
The colour returned to Mirabel’s face as she grasped her small brother and spun him about. It was such a joyful embrace that it provoked Mother to break up their reunion rudely, and demand the girl take their noisiness elsewhere. When they left the room, I realised Mirabel had been in the process of emptying Mother’s piss pot.
‘She’s not your maid,’ I said. ‘I keep telling you that.’
Mother shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Well. She’s certainly not my houseguest, Oswald. She must earn her keep if she wants to stay here.’
‘I want her to recuperate.’
Mother pulled a comb through her long, wiry hair and laughed. ‘Recuperate? That girl is as greedy as a horse. If she stays much longer, she’ll eat the whole winter store.’
‘Don’t speak about Mirabel that way. She’ll stay here as long as I say so.’
Mother pulled a face and returned to combing her hair. Her tresses were still black and sleek about the back of her head, but the hair on the top of her head was white and bushy. Suddenly she reminded me of a badger.
‘De Caburn has been found dead,’ I told her.
She dropped the comb. ‘Really?’
‘He was murdered.’
She puckered her mouth into an oval pout and gasped. ‘Goodness me. What a piece of luck.’
‘Mother!’
‘But that makes Clemence a widow. And a rich one at that.’ She flapped her hands in excitement. ‘She won’t want to dawdle about in that convent now. We should send Piers to tell her the good news.’
‘De Caburn was murdered,’ I repeated, ‘I would hardly call i
t good news.’
Mother raised an eyebrow. ‘Really, Oswald?’
‘Yes, Mother. He was draped over a shrine to the Virgin Mary.’
Now she smirked. ‘So you’re not in the slightest bit pleased de Caburn is dead?’ I didn’t reply. ‘Even though we’ve barricaded ourselves against the man for the last three days. A man who stole our village and attacked your sister.’
‘Very well,’ I conceded. ‘I won’t mourn his death.’
She returned to combing her hair. ‘How this tale has turned? De Caburn a victim of the Cynocephalus.’
I raised my eyes to the ceiling.
She ignored me. ‘Perhaps these dog heads are not the agents of Satan, as Cornwall says. Perhaps they fight on the side of the angels? Picking out the evil and depraved among us.’
‘Alison and Matilda were hardly depraved and evil.’
‘Meretrices. Lupae.’ This excursion into Latin took me by surprise. ‘They were she-wolves, Oswald. Whores.’
‘Says who?’
‘I know about such matters.’ She picked at the teeth of her comb. ‘Evil must be punished. Sin must be castigated.’
‘What evil? What sin? They were just young girls.’
She waved my question away. ‘It must be God’s will to punish them. The dog heads are doing His work.’I shook my head at this stupidity, which caused her to snort. ‘Who is committing these murders then, Oswald? Tell me that.’ I hesitated. ‘See. You don’t have an answer.’
‘But—’
‘Or when you do, it’s wrong. First it was that Bath woman. Then you told me it was Father John and de Caburn. But how does your theory stand now? With de Caburn murdered himself?’
I sighed and sat down beside her. ‘I’m not sure, Mother. But I shall ride out to Versey later and arrest Cornwall. He’s involved in this somehow.’
She smiled and stroked my arm. ‘Don’t disturb yourself, Oswald. There won’t be any more killings. I’m certain of it.’
‘I wish we could be sure.’
‘No, no. We can be absolutely certain. I’ve been studying the signs.’ She lifted her piss pot and twirled around the contents like a pan of soup. ‘There’s no blood in my water. See.’