by Jason Vail
“Let’s go, boys.” Melmerby swaggered by Stephen to the door, Greg and Michael at his heels.
Dogface paused and brushed the younger daughter’s cheek. She tried to draw away, but the wall behind her prevented it. “She’s such a pretty piece. You sure we can’t take her with us?”
“No,” Stephen said. “You can’t.”
Dogface went out.
The wife had stopped her bawling, but she did not look grateful. She rose to her feet, her face filled with hate. The woman’s expression catapulted Stephen back in time to a house in Spain. His friend Rodrigo’s men had found the harem of the petty chieftain whom they had just killed and whose land they had raided, and wanted to rape the women. Rodrigo’s standing order was that no rapes should occur, and Stephen had enforced that order with the same vigor with which he carried out all his duties. The women had regarded him with the same hate as the Welsh woman. Except for one, a black-haired beauty with a hooked nose. She had looked relieved. She stood up and crossed from of the tangle of women crouching by a window. “I’m glad you killed him,” she said to Stephen as she stood before him.
“What’s your name?” he asked, so stunned by her beauty that he could barely speak.
“Taresa is the name he gave me,” she replied.
“You belonged to him?”
“I did.”
He took her wrist. “You belong to me now.”
“If you can keep me,” she said. But she had come without compulsion and had remained with him until she died. The ache left by her death was as fresh as if she had gone yesterday. Their son, Christopher, looked like her except for the nose.
Stephen said to the wool merchant, “Get away and stay away until we are gone. Understand?”
The merchant nodded.
Stephen went down to the hall, his coif back, arming cap in his belt, since there was no imminent danger of attack by the townspeople. It was quiet here. He wondered where the older daughter had gone. He hoped she had the sense to hide.
He heard scraping on the floor behind and turned, expecting to see the older daughter slipping from one bolt hole to another.
It was the soldier Michael. His right arm was upraised, a dagger in his fist.
Stephen barely had time to throw out his left arm and intercept the blow, which struck his mailed shoulder rather than his face, the intended target. Stephen pivoted and threw Michael with a hip toss. Michael’s momentum carried him over so that he was unable to keep his feet and they struck the ground, Stephen on top. Michael used the remaining momentum to roll Stephen over, and straddled him.
Michael struck with the dagger but missed as Stephen ducked his head to the side. Michael put a hand on Stephen’s neck to prevent such a thing from happening again and struck once more. Stephen caught the dagger arm with crossed arms and gripped the blade with one hand to strip the dagger from Michael’s grasp, but Michael prevented this by clasping Stephen’s wrist.
They struggled together, strength against strength, until it occurred to Michael to put his chest against the pommel and use his weight to drive the point home.
There was a flicker of movement at the corner of Stephen’s eye which neither he nor Michael paid attention to. But they were not alone in the hall. Someone struck a great blow that landed on Michael’s helmeted head with a solid clunk. Michael rolled off. Stephen climbed to his feet and drew his dagger.
Michael shook his head, then ran from the house.
Stephen turned to see who had saved him.
It was the elder daughter. She still held the log she had used against Michael.
Stephen stepped away in case she decided to use the log again.
“Diolch,” he said: Thanks, one of the few Welsh words he knew. She did not reply.
He left her with her log, and stumped out of the house, thinking of what he would do to Michael when he caught him.
Chapter 14
When Gilbert turned the corner of Linney Lane and Corve Street, he noted that there were knots of people hurrying north toward the bridge over the River Corve. He paused to consider this, since it was an odd thing for people to do during the middle of the day when they should be working.
He was about to dismiss this oddity from his thoughts when a woman in one of the knots spotted him. She pointed at him and said something, accompanied by a cackle, to one of her companions. Gilbert heard the cackle, though not the commentary, but whatever it was, it provoked smiles on all the faces, which until that moment had held a mixture of expressions ranging from grimness to excited interest.
Gilbert was not a man with a great deal of pride, but like anyone, he did not relish being made fun of, and he had the sensation that the woman had made him the butt of some jape. “Do you see something amusing?” he called to the woman who had spoken.
“What?” she cried back.
“I said, what do you find so amusing?”
“Yer heading in the wrong direction!”
“What are you talking about?”
“You should be going that way!” the woman pointed north toward the bridge.
“Whatever for?”
“Some boys’ve found a dead man under the bridge!”
Gilbert sighed, abandoning all thought of continuing his investigations today. “Oh, dear,” he muttered, as he turned to follow the knots.
There was already quite a crowd on and about the bridge when Gilbert arrived, even though they were out in the country now, away from any of the houses straggling down Corve Street and along Saint Mary’s Lane — far enough in the country that Gilbert wondered how so many had gathered so fast.
As Gilbert came up, the crowd surged around him. One of the men said, “Where’s Sir Stephen?”
“He’s left town on an errand,” Gilbert said. “He won’t be coming. Send someone for Sir Geoffrey. You’ll find him at the castle.”
There was some debate over who should be given this task, since nobody wanted to leave. But eventually a father dispatched one of his sons, who ran off with obvious reluctance.
“Where is he?” Gilbert asked.
“Over here,” someone said, and people tugged Gilbert’s sleeve, leading him across the bridge to the Smithfield parish side.
“There.” One of the men pointed down toward the stream from the foot of the bridge.
Gilbert could just see a pair of legs in the sluggish brown water. The remainder of the body was out of sight among tall grass beneath the bridge.
“Who found him?” Gilbert asked.
“These boys,” a man said, indicating a trio of boys about five or six.
Gilbert knelt before the boys. He recognized one of them as living in Lower Galdeford, which was some distance away. “Does your mother know you’re here?”
“No,” the boy said. “But she don’t care.”
“I hope you’re right, for your sake. Now, tell me, how did you find the body?”
“We was shagging rocks,” the boy said. “I thought it was just bit of rubbish and we used him for a target until Milward saw it for what it was.”
Milward, the boy next to the speaker, nodded vigorously, as this gave him the credit for the discovery.
“Just a bit of rubbish, eh?” Gilbert mused. “When did this happen?”
“An hour, maybe?” Milward said.
“And you touched nothing?” Gilbert asked.
“Well, we went close, just to be sure,” the first boy said. “Then we sent off for Walt’s dad.” He indicated a smaller boy beyond Milward. “They live close.”
“I see,” Gilbert said, standing up. He said to the people around him, “Well, then, let’s get him out of there and have a look at him.”
Several of the men clambered down the bank, and hauled the dead man to the edge of the road. They lay him face down. There was something familiar about him. Gilbert could not put his finger on who it was, although in such a small town it would not be unusual for him to know the victim.
Then one of the men turned the body over.
The boy sent to fetch Sir Geoffrey Randall returned without him, and it was a full two hours before the coroner made his appearance on the road from town. By then, people had drifted back to their homes and places of work, since the identity of the victim was now known, so only Gilbert and the jurymen remained, and even the jury wasn’t complete, because two of the Smithfield parish men had not turned up. Wace’s wife, meanwhile, had come, alerted by neighbors. She had collapsed at the sight of her husband, and the neighbors had carried her home as well, leaving behind the handcart they had brought to take the body back.
A valet accompanying Sir Geoffrey dismounted and stood a folding camp stool near Wace’s body. Then he helped Randall slide off his horse. The valet handed a cane to Randall, who hobbled the few steps separating his horse from the stool.
“Your gout bothering you again, sir?” Gilbert asked as Randall settled onto the stool.
“Yes, damn it,” Randall snapped. Outbreaks of gout frayed his temper, and this was a bad time to have an attack of the gout, with the army about to march. “Who’s this?”
“His name is, or was, Wace Bursecot. He was a journeyman to Leofwine Wattepas.”
“The goldsmith?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What’s he doing here?”
“That’s a good question. His wife said he didn’t come home last night nor turn up for work this morning, so we think he may have been killed sometime yesterday.”
“Humph. Strangled, that much is clear.”
“Yes, sir,” Gilbert said, for there was a strip of cloth around Wace’s neck. It dug so deeply into the flesh that bruising was visible about the cloth. He had seen death like this before, so he had no doubt about this one even without a more thorough examination.
“Anybody see anything?”
“Not as far as we know.”
Randall noticed that all the jury wasn’t yet present. “Where’s Estwyke and Foster?”
“We don’t know,” Gilbert said.
Randall struggled to his feet. “Well, you know what to do. Get a vote and write it up. I’m going back to the castle. Can’t do anything useful here now.” He hobbled toward his horse. The valet helped him mount.
“You thinking about doing something with this?” Randall asked Gilbert.
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Waste of time, chasing after murderers when there’s real work to be done. How is Stephen doing with that business of the Prince’s, by the way?”
“Hot on the trail, sir.”
“Is he? Good. Keep me informed. Whatever happens, have him come to me first so I can take word to the Prince.”
“Of course, sir.”
“That’s a good lad,” Randall said. He turned his horse, and he and the valet plodded back toward town.
“It’s suppertime,” one of the jurymen said. “What are we going to do?”
It was not strictly legal to determine the cause of death without a full jury. But then, it wasn’t strictly legal for the coroner to abandon his clerk and the jury to perform their tasks without him. Randall had wanted to be sheriff, but had lost out on that lucrative position, and he had never shown much interest in his job as coroner. He should have established himself in Hereford, the county seat, and personally presided over all the inquests into suspicious deaths in the county. But claiming that his gout made that a hardship, he had instead hired several deputies to perform his duties. None had ever stayed long. Stephen Attebrook was the most capable of the lot, and Gilbert had no expectation that he would last either, given the miserly stipend Randall paid and the sad nature of the work. And that did not take into account Stephen’s natural ambition, which would reassert itself once he managed to work himself out of the pit of despair into which the terrible events of Spain had driven him.
“Gilbert?” asked the juryman concerned about supper.
“Sorry, my mind wandered,” Gilbert said. “You’re right. It’s late. We might as well get this over with. Death by foul play, is it?”
There was a quick round of assent.
“That’s it, then,” Gilbert said. He should have asked them to put a price on the rag used to kill Wace, but the amount would have been so small that it didn’t seem worth the effort. “Can someone help me get him into the cart?”
There were no volunteers and Gilbert had to call two of them by name to assist. The body was flaccid and cold, and the skin felt slimy. The three of them lifted the body over the rail and tossed it into the cart, where it landed with a thud. Gilbert was about to ask for help pulling the cart to Wace’s house, but the two jurymen, foreseeing this request, said quick good-byes and retreated at a trot across the bridge, leaving Gilbert alone with the cart and body. The setting sun threw golden light on the bridge, the cart, and the fields about him, but it did nothing to warm his heart.
Gilbert stood between the handrails, looking at poor Wace and contemplating the ordeal ahead. He noticed Wace’s hands were wrinkled, like a washerwoman’s from long emersion. That was consistent with the notion that someone had strangled him on the bank and then let him fall into the stream. Gilbert wondered if he could have been killed upstream rather than at the bridge, but when he bent over to examine Wace’s head, it was clear that there was no evidence of emersion above the shoulders. Gilbert almost turned around and picked up the handrails when he remembered other corpses he and Stephen had examined and been mistaken about because of their haste to reach what had seemed an obvious conclusion.
“I suppose I must,” Gilbert sighed. He climbed into the cart and pulled off Wace’s coat, shirt, and stockings until Wace lay naked. At least there was no one here but Gilbert and the angels to look at him in this degrading state. Gilbert bent over the body, searching for signs of other injuries than the one on the neck, like a hidden stab wound or a knock on the head. He found nothing of the kind. But there were bruises on both upper arms.
“So,” he said, draping a blanket someone had left folded in a corner of the cart over the body, as if he had reached a decisive conclusion, although he had not.
Gilbert hopped down, took up the handrails, and headed back toward town.
He was a hundred yards up the road when he realized that he did not feel the slap of the tin canteen against his hip. He remembered that he had set the canteen on the grass when he had first examined Wace. He wanted to kick himself for forgetting to pick it up again. He left the handcart in the middle of the road and jogged back to the bridge, but when he got there, the canteen was not where he’d left it, nor anywhere about the bridge.
“Oh, dear God!” Gilbert cried. “I’ve lost it! What will I tell Stephen — or worse, Harry!”
He trudged up the road, the weight of his failure and what that would mean in terms of humiliation and recrimination tugging more heavily upon him than the cart.
Chapter 15
Herbert Jameson waited until the middle of the week, after the army had departed. He should have waited longer, he should in fact have done nothing — that was the prudent thing. But Herbert was not long on prudence any more than his brother. And the thought of how much he might make for the item became too strong to resist.
He had enough animal caution to realize that it was not wise to be seen carrying the item about, nor was it wise to be seen going to his destination, so he waited until dusk to retrieve the item from its hiding place in the thatch of his roof, and then nightfall before he set out.
As his house and his objective both lay outside town, where no curfew officially inhibited nighttime traffic and no bailiffs patrolled, he had little to fear from the law, but Herbert nonetheless was skittish, starting at every sound, as he made his way to Galdeford crossing and down the street through Lower Galdeford. Presently the houses ended and the Augustine priory loomed on the right, and at last, there on the other side of its fence, was Thumper’s rambling house, looking like a lumpy hillock in the darkness.
It was early enough
yet that people were still up, firelight visible through cracks in the shutters. Herbert knocked on the door. A boy answered, inquired who he was, and disappeared back into the house. A few minutes elapsed, then the door opened again, and Will Thumper stepped back to admit him.
“What can I do for you, Jameson?” Thumper asked. “It’s a bit late to be about, isn’t it?” Not that Thumper was unused to nocturnal visitors. Owing to the nature of his business, that sort of thing happened quite often.
“I’ve something to sell,” Herbert said. He held out the item.
Thumper unwrapped the cloth surrounding it. He looked closely at the item. “How much you want for it?”
“Five pounds.”
“I don’t know. I won’t be able to get that much when I sell it. I might go a pound.”
“Damn it, that’s robbery.”
“That’s rich, coming from you about this. Look, I could get in real trouble if anyone connected me with this thing. I’ll have to think about it. Can you come back tomorrow?”
Herbert did not want to come back tomorrow. He wanted this business concluded tonight. But he could see that Thumper would need time to make up his mind. He felt he could depend on Thumper’s greed to bring him around, so they would have a deal eventually. “Tomorrow, then.”
“Watch yourself on the way back,” Thumper said. “The night is full of evil men. We don’t want that to be lost.”
It was a cold morning and Harry was bundled up against the chill when Broad Gate opened. A couple carts hauling firewood had just passed, and with the street empty, Harry pulled his hood back over his ears so that he saw only the ground in front of him while he worked on another carving of Rosamond. So he did not see who Gip, the gate ward, spoke so sharply to when he said, “Hey, even you got to pay!”
Then Harry heard the reply — “I just need a word with Harry” — and knew who it was.
“What do you need a word with Harry for?” Gip asked.