‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You couldn’t keep your eyes off her, could you? Always fancied her arse. Did you ever get a chance to feel her up?’
‘No, Ben, I didn’t. I wouldn’t have if I’d been given the chance, either. Because it’s not right that a man should do that to a woman outside of marriage.’
‘Oh, it’s all right, Os. If you want a woman,’ Ben continued, eyes open wide in innocence, ‘why don’t you go to see Anna at Jordan’s ale-house? I could give you a recommendation there. She’s very good. The way she wriggles her backside is–’
‘Be silent, you dunghill worm. You can treat me with contempt if you like, but on this day, when your sister’s being taken to her grave, the least you can do is go there to witness it. Why do you stand here chewing at my ears when you should be with your mother?’
‘Oh, by Christ’s passion! Give me strength to cope with a big man’s big heart. What good will it do Mary for me to be there? I grieved enough for her the day she died. There are other folk in church who’ll say prayers for her. Who knows, maybe even I shall sometime soon.’
‘You loved her before. Why do you hate her so much now?’
‘I didn’t love her. I never loved her. It’s different for you, you wanted her body: that lovely scut and her breasts like two great bladders waiting to be squeezed. And she’d have liked it too. It’s a shame you missed your chance. Losing her to a cleric! God’s blood, I wouldn’t have thought he had the life in his bone to satisfy her.’
Osbert had kept his patience, but he could feel it draining. ‘I respected your sister, that’s all,’ he said quietly. ‘And you should revere her now all you have is a memory.’
‘Ah, yes, a memory. Sad, you don’t even have that, do you? But I forgot! You did see her, didn’t you? I was there. I saw you follow her down to the stream when she went to bathe last summer. I was intrigued to see why you were walking so quietly down that path.’
‘I wasn’t walking quietly!’ Osbert spat. ‘You make this up. You imagine the worst you could do yourself, then think others might copy you.’
Ben continued as though Osbert hadn’t spoken. ‘I went after you, and I tiptoed, just like you did. You turned into the wood, and when you came to the river, where she was lying naked in the water, I saw you. I saw you fiddling with your tarse…’
‘I didn’t, you liar!’
‘All over the sight of my naked sister. Naughty, naughty Os.’
Unable to control his anger, Osbert leaped to catch Ben, but the smaller man slipped aside. Osbert felt a tingling in his arm as his momentum carried him onwards. When he stopped, he turned to catch at Ben again, but then he saw Ben had come around behind him, and now he stood with a dagger held ready, his head low in a fighting stance, eyes wary, alert to any movement.
‘Try that again, and you’ll get worse, Os,’ he said, pointing at a long cut on Osbert’s arm that dripped blood. ‘And you shouldn’t fear, anyway. I won’t say anything. I know you adored my sister, you even went to watch her in the river naked, and I saw what effect that had on you, but I won’t tell anyone. Why should I? I never liked her anyway. Bitch. It’s better that she’s gone. Especially since she seems to have been playing the whore herself. Think about it. You’re better off without her!’
‘She told me, you know!’ Osbert spat. ‘I know all about you.’
‘What?’ Ben demanded, waving his knife nearer Osbert, sweeping it back and forth.
‘You accuse me of lust, but it was you who tried to take her,’ Osbert spat.
The knife darted forward and Osbert had to slip to one side to avoid it.
‘You’re lying! She swore she wouldn’t… I didn’t touch her!’
Osbert laughed mirthlessly. ‘She swore she wouldn’t talk? She did. I know what you tried, boy!’
‘I didn’t try anything.’
‘Perhaps it wasn’t the monk killed her, eh? Maybe he just found her and thought…’ Osbert’s mouth fell open at the thought. ‘Did you kill her?’
‘Me? Why should I do a thing like that, eh?’
‘To silence her! To stop her telling people how you tried to make her sleep with you!’
‘No, and you’re mad to think it.’
‘You haven’t liked her since then, have you?’
‘It was the priest killed her. You’re just mad with jealousy of him. That’s why you’re making up this tale. You’re mad!’
Ben chuckled low in his throat. It sounded almost like a snarl. Then he cautiously stepped backwards, and sidled out through the door.
Osbert’s anger had left him now, and in its place was an emptiness. He should have defended her. He should have fought Ben for that foul assertion. As if any man could think that beautiful Mary was in any way a whore. If he heard Ben insulting her memory again, he’d kill him. Yes, and take the consequences.
Osbert remembered what he had said and shivered. The thought that Ben might go about spreading that story to others was fearful. He couldn’t deny it was true. That time, when he’d first seen her nude, it had snared his heart. She was so perfect, so beautiful. Small, but large-hipped and large-breasted, perfect.
If people realised just how badly Os had desired her, they might think he could have killed her after raping her. Ben would enjoy telling tales, spreading rumours. There was no point in it; it couldn’t do anything to benefit Ben, or anyone else, but it would cause pain and shame. Ben was right about one thing: Os didn’t want others to hear that tale. They would think that he wasn’t enough of a man to take Mary. That was shameful. Nearly as shameful as their thinking that he had taken her against her will.
There could only be one purpose for Ben to spread the story, and that was to cause hurt. That was one thing at which the miller’s son excelled.
Ben was bitter, but at least he had punctured the thick ox’s self-satisfaction. How did he hear about that… Mary must have told him about it. No one else knew. Only him and her – yet Os knew. Mary must have said something, the cow!
There was nothing shameful about it. He was a young man, and she was a woman. He only wanted her to lie with him, so he could know what it was like. He did love her, after all, and all his friends had tupped girls in the vill. He had thought she would be willing, that she’d look on it as a great compliment. It wasn’t as if it was rare for a brother and sister. He’d have agreed if she had asked him.
If only she had agreed, he wouldn’t have hated her so much then. But she not only rejected him, she laughed at him. Made him feel stupid, small – nothing. She laughed at him, as though he had no manhood for her to consider, and that made him angry. He had caught her, made her hiss with pain as he pushed her to her knees, and then he hit her, to teach her to laugh at him. That was why he had grown to hate her, to loathe the sight of her. If he could, he would have killed her. Except there was always that little place in his heart which watched her with the jealous eye of a lover. A lover whose adoration could never be consummated. That was why he refused to honour her in death, even though part of him felt desolate that she was gone.
Flora was no better. He had never tried to sleep with her, but she was fearful of him – probably because Mary had warned her. If she had told Os, who else might she not have told? Shit! The bitch should have kept her mouth shut! There was no telling what trouble she could have brought to Ben.
Os had wanted her. He had watched her with his great bovine eyes whenever she passed nearby, almost drooling with delight. When she spoke to him kindly, he all but fell over at her feet like a puppy. Pathetic arse. He should have taken her. That’s what a real man would have done.
Suddenly Ben had a vision of another man, the sort who would have taken her without compunction: Esmon, Sir Ralph’s son.
‘Esmon,’ he muttered thoughtfully. ‘You were up there the day she was killed, weren’t you?’
He hadn’t been with Elias quite all the time out in the field. Elias had gone to empty his bladder twice, and once Ben had gone himself
, and that was the time when he had seen his sister alone there by the gate. Only a short time later, he had seen Esmon riding nearby as well. Everyone was off hunting down the wayward cleric, and yet if Ben was to mention that sighting, many in the vill would immediately think that the Lord of the Manor’s own son should be questioned.
Ben gave a shrug. He didn’t miss his sister – not really. She hadn’t cared about him, so he wasn’t going to waste his feelings on her. She was nothing to him. She had rejected him, while opening her legs for that damned priest. Fine. And the priest killed her.
It was interesting to think of Esmon being there, though…
Chapter Eight
As twilight came, Baldwin had reached the road that led north to Eggesford, but after a few moments’ thought, he took the road that led almost due east in preference. Ahead of him, a lowering hulk in the far distance, was the great mound of Cosdon, the first of the huge hills of Dartmoor. To continue further was pointless. He had tested his initial conviction that Mark was running straight to the Bishop and found it persuasive. There was no need to carry on west. The priest must already have passed by here.
‘You want to go on, Sir Baldwin?’
The speaker was Godwen, one of Crediton’s two Constables. He was a small-boned and sharp-featured man with black hair and bright blue eyes in a narrow but attractive face. Women loved him, although many were jealous of his high cheekbones and slender nose. His eyes in particular were startling. They were the colour of cornflowers on a summer’s day, and when he turned them full onto a target, especially with his attention concentrated so that he scarcely blinked, Baldwin thought that they would be quite as hypnotic as a cat’s. Together with his gentle manner, soulful expression and tenor voice, let alone his quick and assured movements, he must have his choice of women in the town, especially with the expensive clothes he always sported.
‘I’m happy to carry on if you want, Sir Baldwin.’
This bass rumble came from the second Constable, Thomas, a larger, slower man, with a heavy, square head and a jaw that could have broken moorstone. His eyes were narrow slits that glittered darkly as he spoke, especially when he caught sight of Godwen. There was a perpetual antipathy between the two. Even in clothing they could not have been more different: Thomas wore cast-offs from his father that were so well darned that there was little of the original colour or thread of the original.
Baldwin sighed to himself. ‘We shall turn back now. All the other men have had time to search out the smaller bartons. If we head back along the road down here,’ he pointed, ‘to Coleford, we should begin to meet up with some of them. Then we can make our way back to Crediton if there is no news.’
‘Very good, Sir Baldwin,’ Godwen said, ducking his head obsequiously, but then throwing an amused glance at Thomas.
It was that which irritated Baldwin. Godwen and Thomas had always been on edge in each other’s company. Once he had heard it was because of some slight or insult that went back several generations. He knew that their fathers hadn’t exchanged a word intentionally in twenty-odd years, and these two now continued the feud. In another country, he reflected as he kicked his mount onwards, they would have come to blows, or more likely, one would already be dead. In most of the lands which Baldwin had visited, enmity was not allowed to rest, and insults weren’t permitted to go without punishment. Luckily English peasants were a little better behaved.
‘We shall return this way. With luck, we should be back at Crediton before dark,’ he added. He had asked the groom to see that a messenger was sent to his home to warn Jeanne that he would be staying overnight in Crediton. ‘I hope that fool Jack has not fallen asleep again and forgotten.’
Godwen gave him a smile. ‘You trusted him with something?’
‘I needed a message taken home to my wife.’
‘Jack is a cretin – he’s always forgetting things,’ Godwen said dispassionately.
‘He’s a good man!’ Thomas asserted harshly. ‘Even the best may grow drowsy with all the work he does.’
Baldwin glanced at him. ‘What do you mean? He is a groom, is he not? What is so tiring about looking after a few horses?’
‘He’s a groom during the day, yes, but he still keeps his three cows, and has to look to them as well, and after all that is done, he helps in Paul’s inn. Poor bastard, it’s no wonder he gets tired.’
‘I did not know he had so many jobs,’ Baldwin mused. ‘Why does he do all that?’
‘Needs must. He has a family to support.’
‘True,’ Baldwin said.
‘And he’s been fleeced by his landlord. His rents have been put up. Every time he’s close to having enough to keep his wife and children in food and ale, his landlord takes more.’
‘He’s just lazy,’ Godwen said, languidly dismissive. ‘His family always was.’
Baldwin made a guess. ‘He is related to you, is he not, Thomas?’
‘Brother-in-law to my sister,’ the man grunted with a sidelong look at Godwen.
They rode in silence for a good mile or so, through one small barton and out the other side towards Coleford. There they met the first of Baldwin’s posse, two men whom he had sent to question the master of the seyney-house at the riverside. This was a resting place for monks who had become exhausted from their onerous duties. Baldwin sometimes wondered how tiring rising in the middle of the night and kneeling throughout long services actually was, but all monasteries had these small retreats so that brother monks could have their blood let, and then recover with less stress, better food and more sleep. No doubt if he had taken on the robes of a monk and was still serving an abbey or priory, he would occasionally feel the need of good food and more sleep, he admitted to himself.
He noticed that Thomas glared at the place. ‘What is the matter, Thomas? You look as though you feel that place is the haunt of demons!’
Thomas said nothing, merely pulled his horse’s head around and trotted away.
‘It’s the Brothers, Sir Baldwin,’ Godwen said with a chuckle at his side. ‘He never liked them, not since they started making Jack’s life harder. You see, the landlord who keeps Jack on his toes, he’s a Brother too.’
‘What is his name?’
‘He’s a tight-arse, so it’s appropriate, really. He’s called Roger Scut.’
He wanted to stay. Huward’s little angel had meant so much to him, he really wanted to remain there by her body all through the long night’s vigil, but he had others to think of. His wife would remain here in the church, as would little Flora and some of the other women from the vill, but he was finding the atmosphere stifling. The smell of the incense was getting into his throat and irritating his eyes. He could have coped with it, but there was nothing to be done here, while he had something he desperately needed to do, ideally alone.
If he could have, he would have gone after that priest. He would have torn the devil limb from limb, pulled out his entrails and scattered them, ripped open his breast and fed his beating heart to the crows! That puppy would have suffered so much, he’d have begged for death. Perhaps he would still have an opportunity to kill him, too. If he was caught, there was a good chance that he’d be returned to the place where he committed his crimes. A double murder, mother and child! Hideous.
The priest at Gidleigh hadn’t wanted to let them in at first. He’d said that he couldn’t deal with the bodies of people from the next parish, especially women who died in childbirth. And the baby itself was not baptised, so it couldn’t be allowed in the church. Huward had squared up to the skinny little streak of piss, and the other men of the vill were with him, muttering and cursing the priest so volubly that he retreated nervously, fingering his rosary. It was lucky Piers was there. Before Huward could set his daughter’s body down, Piers appeared at his side, speaking soothingly, but quickly. He pointed out that the priest was standing in the way of a young girl’s soul if he refused to bury her. In the end the priest agreed, but more because of the grim-faced men who watched him
while Huward shoved him from his path and carried his daughter to the communal hearse, than because of the force of Piers’s arguments.
‘She lies here until she is buried by you, here in your graveyard, Priest,’ Huward said calmly. He was proud of that. He wasn’t angry, didn’t shout or scream, just stated what would happen. His daughter had made her last journey. And his grandchild.
He walked from the place and took a deep breath. Although he wanted to sob, he couldn’t. Maybe later. For now, it was hard to believe that his daughter had in truth been ripped from him. She was gone, for ever. He would only see her again on the day that all the dead were called to God. Perhaps even the priest who had killed her would be there… No. God couldn’t allow that. He wouldn’t make Mary have to see her murderer in Heaven, even if he swore his repentance.
Huward walked slowly from the church. There hung about him, ever so faint in the still air, the subtle odour of her. That buttery, sweet smell that he recognised so well. He had noticed it when she was suckling, and it had never left her. Not even now, in death. He sniffed at the shoulder of his jacket, then knelt, falling forward on one hand, the other covering his eyes while racking sobs convulsed his whole body, and yet still the tears wouldn’t fall. It was as though her death had removed some part of him, so that while he could feel his despair, he couldn’t fully appreciate the grief that she deserved. His angel, his little darling, was gone.
He remembered her life in a strange sequence. It was like a series of flashes, pulses of life bursting into his memory: the babe suckling; older, smiling and laughing as she gulped down meat already chewed and softened by her mother; a toddler who had taken a tumble, her knees all bloody, bravely trying to stop her sobbing; a child with her first illness, spewing and wailing with the pain and indignity of throwing up; a young woman proud of the new ribbon in her hair; a girl holding up her first blackened attempt at baking bread with the smile on her face that said she knew her father, if no one else in the world, would love it. She knew that if she were to hand him a crisp of charcoal, he would declare it delicious and swallow it, if it meant she would be pleased.
The Mad Monk of Gidleigh Page 11