by Jason Vail
“How many of these rough folk were there?”
“Seemed like a dozen, at least. But it was dark and hard to tell.”
“What happened after they came to the grate?”
“Like I said, one remained there, keeping an eye on us. The rest went round the corner. I heard them talking now and then, low like, so I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then there was a crash and a thump. A little bit later, they all went away.”
“Which way?”
“They went downhill, toward the path to Dinham Bridge.”
“A crash and a thump, you said.”
“It was that fellow Ormyn.”
“A good guess on your part, I suppose. Then what did you do?”
“They said to stay a full hour. But we left right away.”
“But not before going to see what made the crash and thump.”
“Well, no.”
“No?”
“I’m a prudent man. I take no notice of thumps in the night that don’t concern me. We were making our way along when we heard a groan. Tad went up to see what it was. He’s like a dog, sometimes that boy, always poking about in things he ought to leave alone. He found that fellow lying there in the bushes. Now I wish he hadn’t.”
“Ormyn wasn’t dead?”
“Not right then. But he died soon after.”
“Did he say anything about what happened?”
“No, he wasn’t conscious, and hardly breathing, in fact, by the time we got to him, just doing those little hiccup-like things that people make when they’re dying. I had my finger under his nose to make sure when he stopped.”
“What happened to his purse and clothes?”
Thumper shuffled his feet, not eager to address this question. But at last he said with a sigh, “We got ‘em.”
“You stripped a dead man who wasn’t even cold.”
“I didn’t. I had the girls do it.”
“You have no shame.”
“People do say that about me. I take pride in it.”
“Do you still have his things?”
“Oh, yeah. Haven’t tried to sell any of it yet.”
“Waiting for the controversy to die down?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Sell them. I’ll be back for them. They belong to the widow now. And Ormyn’s sword — do you have that as well?”
“We didn’t find no sword. Funny thing, now that you remark upon it. He had a belt and scabbard on him, but the scabbard was empty.”
Chapter 8
The girl Cicely’s house lay a quarter mile down the Galdeford Road from Thumpers’, a small hut surrounded by budding oak and elm. A man and boy were sawing boards from a log, the boy on top of the scaffold and the man in the pit beneath. A pile of logs and fresh boards lay beside the pit, indicating that the profession of the householder was a sawyer.
The boy called “Dad! Visitor!” alerting the man in the pit as Stephen pushed through the gate in the wicker fence about the yard, and the man climbed out of the pit. Rather than looking abashed, they looked angry at having been discovered to be working on a Sunday.
“What can I do for your?” the man asked, adding a “sir” at the end after a long pause. “You don’t look like anyone from the parish. You in the market for some timber?”
“I’m looking for a girl. Name of Cicely.”
The sawyer sucked on his front teeth. “What makes you think we’ve a girl by that name here?”
“Will Thumper said she lived here.”
“Thumper?” The sawyer frowned. “That son-of-a-bitch big mouth. He told you where to find her?”
“Yes.”
“Anything for a fucking penny. What do you want with her? She’s done with that business.”
“I just want to ask her a few questions.”
“Questions?” This proposal seemed to dumbfound the sawyer. “What about?”
“The dead man.”
“What dead man?”
“The one found yesterday outside the castle.”
“What makes you think my girl knows anything about that?”
“Because she was there, with Thumper, when they found him.”
“I thought it was a bunch of boys who found him.”
“I’ve already been to Thumper’s. He told me all about it.”
“Then what do you need my girl for?”
“Do you believe everything you hear from Thumper?”
“No.”
“Neither do I.”
“Are you that coroner fellow? Attebrook?”
“That’s me.”
“Heard of you. Just a moment.” The sawyer retreated round back of the hut.
He returned a bit later with a young girl. Stephen was shocked to see that she had to be no more than twelve or thirteen.
“She’ll talk to you,” the sawyer said, “but only on condition that her name don’t come up in connection with this.”
“Fair enough. I’ve no interest in what business you two engage in after dark.”
The sawyer prodded Cicely forward. “Have your way, then.”
If Stephen expected a saucy girl, he was disappointed. This was a little mouse, with wiry brown hair showing from beneath her cap, gentle eyes, and receding chin. She kept her eyes on the ground, hands folded upon her stomach, the fingers tangled together. She looked embarrassed to be here, her father embarrassed as well, which he tried to cover up with an air of belligerence.
Stephen was uncertain how to start. He felt as though some delicacy was required, since whoring out your daughter had to be a touchy subject for most people. But he lacked subtlety, an aspect of character than had frustrated his former master, the crown justice Ademar de Valence. (“You’re too much of a lout even to make a living collecting shit in a wagon!” de Valence had once shouted at him after some now forgotten mistake.) His normal approach was a brash lunge forward, heedless of fine distinctions or people’s feelings. And as he struggled for a way to begin, his mouth took things in hand for itself: “Will Thumper said you’re one of the girls he takes up to the castle.”
Cicely nodded, eyes on the ground. A blush had begun to creep up her neck.
“You were there when Tad found the dead man.”
Cicely shook her head.
“I know you were.”
After a false start, Cicely said in a whisper, “I wasn’t there. I came along after.”
“Right. You were in the tunnel.”
Cicely nodded.
“But you saw him.”
Cicely nodded.
“Was the man still alive?”
Cicely nodded.
“Did Thumper do anything to hasten the fellow’s death?”
Cicely coughed. “No. He died right after I got there. Just gave up the ghost. You’re not thinking we had anything to do with it?”
“Just being sure. And then you stripped him.”
“Will made us do it. I didn’t want to.” Cicely shuddered and wiped her hands on her skirts.
“There were some men who came to the grille of the tunnel, did you see them?”
Cicely nodded.
“About what time?”
“Middle of the night sometime, I don’t know.”
“What did they look like?”
“I don’t know. It was dark.”
“You had a candle.”
“The candle was by the ladder, with Will.”
“The ladder . . . ah, you mean the ladder leading up from the tunnel to the cellar of the tower.”
“Right,” Cicely said. “It was dark outside. I just heard them moving around and talking. Gave me a bit of a fright. I thought they’d try to get in. The grille’s not locked back up till we leave.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know. Two, three maybe.”
“Besides the men at the grill,” Stephen said, “did anything else unusual happen that night?”
&
nbsp; “There was the dead man. But that was in the wee hours, really.”
“Besides that, anything else that seemed unusual?”
“Well, there was the man who went out.”
“A man went out? When?”
“I don’t know. Sometime after those fellows made a racket at the grille. I can’t remember.” She added, “What was really unusual about it is that he paid Will at the ladder, then just slipped out without taking part, you know, in any of us girls.”
“Did you get a look at him?”
“At who?”
“The man who went out.”
“No. I had a customer on me then. I heard him talking to Will, and then he walked by, tripped on me leg, he did. I keep my eyes closed usually, you know, when I’m engaged. It’s easier that way. It don’t do much for the smell, though.”
“So you heard him?”
“Clear as a bell, even over all the grunting that was going on. That’s one rusty grate.”
Ludlow Castle had two chapels, the round one in the inner bailey which was dedicated to Saint Mary Magdelene for the elite and a small timber one that looked like a hut more than a place of worship in the outer bailey for the servants. This little timber chapel stood against the north wall, its neighbors a barn, a pig-sty, a vegetable garden, and for the moment a vast tent covering piles of hay for the horses of the army’s knights and mounted sergeants in the temporary paddock nearby. This did not leave much space for the crowd which had come to pay its respects to Ormyn Yarker and his family. The crowd was so large and so densely packed that several mourners were propelled through the fence defending the vegetable garden, but fortunately, the wives who tended the garden had anticipated this sort of trespass, and they were on watch, encouraging those clumsy folk to retreat with the help of staves and firm warnings.
As a consequence, it took Stephen more than half an hour to find Gilbert in order to share what little he had learned in Lower Galdeford, and he only happened to make the connection on his second circuit by the barrels of ale set up by the chapel’s door when he spotted Gilbert’s head above the crowd: he was standing on a box which teetered so that he seemed likely to fall into the pigs’ run. All it would have taken was a slight nudge and over he would go. A pair of boys were eyeing Gilbert for just such a pitching when Stephen arrived at his side and sent the boys away with a glare.
“Ah, there you are!” Gilbert said, although with the noise of a thousand conversations at once, Stephen could only guess that’s what he said from the movement of Gilbert’s lips.
“What?” Stephen said as he grasped Gilbert by the sleeve to save him from falling among the pigs, which were lined up by the fence because people in the crowd threw them morsels of food. They enjoyed seeing the pigs scramble for the morsels. Pigs are not stupid, and they put on quite a show, which encouraged the throwing of yet more morsels.
“I said, there you are!” Gilbert said after he had hopped down.
“What?”
Gilbert pulled Stephen’s head close to his so he could shout in Stephen’s ear. “I said, where have you been?”
“I’ve been to see Will Thumper!” Stephen rubbed his ear and shouted back.
“What for, in God’s name?”
“What?”
And so the conversation went, Stephen sharing what little he had found out and Gilbert asking clarifying questions. Stephen was glad for them although they often challenged his own views, but he was mindful of his impulse to leap to conclusions; “Evidence is hard!” his old master Ademar de Valence used to say. “Speculation is easy!”; advice he had not heeded until he had come under Gilbert’s wing. The whole was punctuated by a lot of “what’s?” — not a satisfactory way to make a report on an important subject, even if there wasn’t much to it to begin with.
During the course of this discussion, they worked their way to the edge of the crowd, where the noise wasn’t quite so bad.
Gilbert put fingers in both ears and rubbed vigorously. “I didn’t even know there was a tunnel.”
“I think it’s been there since the castle was built, a secret way out, I suppose. I can’t see it being much use as a sally port.”
“I should like to see it some time.”
“Few are allowed in.”
“Yet you managed, apparently.”
“When I was a squire here, we stole the key. There isn’t much to see. A shaft so narrow the likes of you would probably get stuck in it descends from the cellar of the tower to the tunnel, which runs about thirty yards or so before it emerges on the hillside.”
“And Thumper’s been using it as a trysting place, to whore out the village girls?”
“Seems so.”
“You can’t imaging he’s doing this without Turling’s approval!”
“I reckon Turling gets a piece of it. I would if I were him.”
“Which means there was probably quite a bit of coming and going to the north tower throughout the night. Yet no one saw anything untoward at the chapel. Nor even told us about it!”
“Yes,” said Stephen, who had not thought of this, as his mind had been more on the problem of Ormyn’s death than on the disappearance of the relic; although he acted as if he the thing had already occurred to him. “But all that coming and going could have concealed the movement of the thief. People might have thought that he was just another reveler.”
“That is a possibility. All this is not helpful.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Well, come on,” Gilbert said, taking Stephen’s arm. “You should pay your respects to the family before you are trampled to death. They are just over there.”
Just over there meant a mere forty or fifty yards, but it was a space packed with mourners who were reluctant to give way, so that another quarter hour elapsed before Stephen finally came face to face with the bereaved. Confronting the survivors was never a duty he relished, and he had done a lot of that lately. He would have avoided this if he could, but Gilbert had left him no option.
Ormyn’s widow should have been by the cart carrying the coffin. But she was not in evidence. Only Ormyn’s children were where they should be, a boy of twelve who was apprenticed to a weaver in town, and two girls, one eight and the other six. They stood by the cart, their faces sad, tear tracks on their cheeks. Stephen did the best he could, which amounted to “Sorry for your loss” and “He was a good man” and then bursting out of its own accord the cringe-worthy “Hope you’re doing all right,” which elicited brief smiles and nods. It was an awkward moment, but soon over.
That task behind him, Stephen breathed a little easier. He acquired a cup of ale, and had a deep drink to calm his mind, which took more time than he liked after his words with the children.
Gilbert wanted to lead Stephen in search of the widow, but he had had enough of comforting the bereaved for one day, and he begged off with “I’ve had enough. I’m going.”
“What?” Gilbert shouted back.
When Stephen did not repeat himself, Gilbert followed along, although leaving the wake meant sacrificing free food and drink.
Stephen’s luck, however, brought him to a goose pen at the edge of the crowd, where he was startled to find Bridget Yarker. She was with a group of girls as young as herself, most of them unmarried. They were amusing themselves by throwing tidbits of bread to geese in the pen. Perhaps this was a more genteel thing for girls to do than amuse the pigs. There were a few lads with the girls, and one older man, Simon Jameson, another member of the castle guard. Bridget cast a crust into the pen. She turned to laugh with the others at the resulting scramble. Simon grasped her arm in a possessive way. Bridget disengaged herself and her lips moved so that Stephen made out, “Not here, not now.” Simon looked put out. But Bridget brought him out of his pout by saying something in his ear. They smiled at some secret, their heads together for a moment before they drew back.
“Something is not right about that,” Gilbert said to Stephen. “Did you see it?”
“I s
aw something, I’m not sure what,” Stephen said, relieved that Gilbert was so distracted by this perception that he did not insist that Stephen console the widow as well. It would have been a shame to interrupt her fun with trite mutterings about loss and such.
“Most new widows of my acquaintance are not so happy. It is usually a disaster to lose a husband, but she seems rather relieved.”
Stephen reflected that Gilbert was right about this. He had met quite a few newly minted widows in his time, and he could not recall one who had been so unconcerned by a husband’s death, even when the marriage had not been a success. “Some cuckolding going on before poor Ormyn’s fall, perhaps?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. I wonder what Simon Jameson was up to Thursday night.”
“Hmmm, it wouldn’t be the first time a jealous lover disposed of a rival. At the behest of the wife, perhaps?”
“I shall be disappointed if that is true,” Gilbert sighed. “She is such a pretty thing, so young, so fresh. I hate to think she’s capable of murder. But we must keep in mind the example of Margaret de Thottenham to remind us. A pretty package can just as easily conceal a hard heart as an ugly one.”
“Let’s leave Margaret out of this.”
“You must admit that the sight of you leaping through a window when she tried to have you killed was very funny.”
“That was just a spat. We’ve patched up our differences, or don’t you remember?”
“I wouldn’t put it past her to do something like that again, if the need arose.”
The best way to find out what Jameson was doing Thursday night was to ask the man. But that would require prying him loose from Bridget, since if they were in fact in league over Ormyn’s death, it was best to question them apart from each other. Now did not seem to be the time, but then another way occurred to Stephen. He spotted another man from the garrison, and asked, “Have you seen Turling?”
The soldier snorted. “You can’t be serious, sir. He’d not come out for this. He don’t give a damn what happens to us. When his service is up, he’ll be gone without a look backward.” Turling was one of the lesser gentry, whose family was only a rung or two above Stephen’s. He was not the permanent guard commander, instead fulfilling his knight service, whereas the guards themselves were hired soldiers whose complement did not change.