Blood of the South

by Alys Clare

  Once we were on the level ground of the water’s edge, he ran over to fetch the discarded stick. I took the opportunity to wind up my long skirts, twisting the gathered fabric into a loose knot and thrusting it under my belt. Turning back to me, the stick in his hand, I watched as he took in my altered appearance. ‘It’s wet down here,’ I said lamely.

  He stopped looking at my legs and grinned. ‘Very sensible,’ he remarked. Then once again he thrust out a hand in my direction. ‘Hold on to me, will you?’

  I went to stand behind him, dug in my heels and did as he said, taking his left hand in mine, with my other hand round his arm. His wrist felt like steel. With the stick in his right hand, he leaned forward, right out over the water, and began swirling it gently just under the surface.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I whispered. I had no idea why I was whispering.

  ‘Well, I’m not fishing,’ he muttered. Then, with a soft exclamation, he leaned out even further, and hastily I threw my weight backwards to counterbalance his. He crouched low, stretched out one more time, then said, ‘I’ve got it!’

  I held on tight as he straightened up, waiting till I was sure he’d got his balance before releasing him. He gave me a quick smile. ‘Thanks. Now, let’s see what we’ve found.’

  Carefully, he drew in the stick, just as if he was pulling in a fishing line. Its tip remained under the water, but I could see there was something snagged on it. When it was close enough for Jack to reach, he put his hand down into the water and took hold of it, dragging it to the surface and laying it on the bank.

  At first it looked like a nondescript rag. Then, as Jack untangled it and smoothed it out, I saw that it was a woman’s under-shift. It was made of a pale, soft, smooth fabric which I didn’t recognize; it wasn’t linen or wool. It was well-made but unadorned, and it wasn’t new. There was a darn on the front of the skirt, and the seams had been mended at least once.

  ‘Was it hers, do you think?’ Jack asked quietly.

  I rubbed the material between finger and thumb. ‘It’s likely, isn’t it? It’s a shift, so she’d have worn it next to her skin. As such, it would have been the last garment to be shed.’

  ‘And you’re thinking it would be too much of a coincidence to find it here if it didn’t belong to her,’ he finished.

  I nodded. I gathered the shift up, rolling it and wringing it to remove the water. I was finding it quite emotional to handle something the dead woman had worn.

  Jack seemed to pick up my mood. He stood up, rested his hand on my shoulder briefly, then said, ‘I’m going to see if I can find anything else. The water’s falling quite fast now –’ I’d been so preoccupied with my thoughts that I hadn’t noticed – ‘so I suggest we wait here for a while, to see if anything turns up, then continue downriver.’

  I nodded again. I was still clutching the shift, and now I held it up to my face, rubbing my cheek against the smooth, wet fabric. I didn’t understand it, but there was something about the dead woman that seemed to be reaching out to me; reaching right into my heart.

  I knew Jack was right, and we must continue with our task. But it was hard, when the greater part of me just wanted to run away home.

  EIGHT

  The slowly receding water revealed a mass of flattened vegetation caked with mud and assorted rubbish. Jack and I realized that it was only by an unlikely stroke of luck that we would come across anything else belonging to our dead woman. After standing silently for some moments staring out over the ruined landscape, Jack turned to me.

  ‘Did I not hear your aunt mention that you were good at finding things?’

  ‘It has happened, on rare occasions, that I’ve managed to locate lost items –’ a vision of an ancient crown1 flashed through my head; there and gone in a blink – ‘but, for it to work, it seems that I have to have a pretty good idea of what I’m looking for.’

  He nodded his understanding. ‘Perhaps you have to visualize the item?’

  ‘Er – well, sort of,’ I agreed. It wasn’t exactly that – I’d had no idea what that crown would look like – but it was hard to explain.

  He stared at me a while longer, and I saw interest in his eyes. He had a way of looking at you very directly, as if you held every bit of his attention. He would, I guessed, have loved to pursue the matter. I was surprised. If anyone had asked me, I’d have said that a Norman lawman, with quite an important position in a place like Cambridge, would have been down to earth, pragmatic and totally lacking imagination; a man, in short, to be utterly dismissive of anything he could not detect by sight, smell, hearing or touch.

  Again, I began to understand that there was more to Jack Chevestrier than met the eye.

  His quiet scrutiny was making me uncomfortable. Carefully I stowed the shift in my satchel, then said, ‘I’ll have a go, though. Just give me a moment.’

  He knew exactly what to do. He turned his back and walked away along the bank, catching up with the horses. They were taking advantage of the halt to graze, and I could hear the soft sound of their big teeth ripping through the grass.

  I stood quite still, closing my eyes. Normally, when I’m searching for a specific item, I hold out my hands palms down and focus on it, and, with any luck, when I’m near it I feel a sort of tingling in my hands. I think that I must be open to strange forces at such times, because once – it was when I found the crown – I’d been assailed by the most terrifying feeling that invisible lines of power were attacking me, and I’d seen a vision from the past that still haunts me.

  I hoped very much that wasn’t about to happen again.

  I stretched out my hands. I waited. Nothing happened. I turned in a slow circle. Again, my palms gave no response. Now I was back where I had started, facing out over the swollen river.

  It happened so suddenly that there was no time to feel afraid. I saw a huge wall of water, sweeping up the river towards where I stood. It went past me, and I should have been right inside it, helpless as it swept me away; but this was not reality, it was vision, something intangible that originated within my mind, and although I saw myself within a deadly swirl of furious water, in fact I stood, perfectly safe, on firm ground.

  I saw a body, its long pale limbs turned over and over in the wild current. A garment still clung to it but, as I watched, it detached, sinking down into the water. Suddenly I was face to face with her, and I could see the devastated eyes, the half-eaten breasts. Nausea rose up, and I heard myself groan as sweat broke out on my forehead. I made myself go on looking, and, as I’d known I would, I saw the poor body thrown against the underside of the bridge. It – she – was battered to and fro by the force of the flow, and then, as the ferocity of the current slowly eased, finally the body came to rest.

  The vision faded. I was about to open my eyes when, totally unexpectedly, something else happened: out of nowhere, I was hit with a sense of fear so overpoweringly strong that I gasped. Somebody was watching me from a place of concealment, but in my trance state – if that was what it was – I saw eyes, glittering with malice, narrowed with intent. I felt a surge of malevolence which seemed to roar towards me and break against me like a wave. There was a flash of silver, a whistle as if something was flying through the air, and then I was on the ground, flat on my face, winded from the force with which I’d thrown myself down.

  As soon as I could breathe again, I sat up, then got to my feet. Jack was standing a respectful distance away, but with the anxiety easily readable in his expression. Suddenly I wanted to laugh: did he imagine that every attempt at dowsing ended with me flinging myself on the ground?

  I didn’t really appreciate it until later, but his first question was actually rather revealing. He must have been desperate with impatience to find out if I’d discovered anything relevant to the woman’s death, but what he said was, ‘Are you all right?’

  I started to say yes, but then, as I made to move towards him, I stumbled. He was by my side in an instant, strong hands supporting me. Feeling stupid, hastily
I straightened up. ‘I’m fine!’ I said with an embarrassed laugh. ‘And I didn’t sense anything other than the shift, which you’ve already found. Oh, except that she was dead some time before she got here.’ My voice didn’t sound quite normal. ‘I saw her poor body, with the eyes so badly damaged and those wounds to her breasts, and she was in that state when the surge drove her here.’

  He gave a soft exclamation of sympathy and put his arms round me. He felt as tough as he looked; it was a bit like being hugged by a barrel. When he spoke, the tenderness in his tone came as an odd contrast to his physical toughness. ‘She is at peace now,’ he said. ‘The fear and the pain are all over, and she lies quiet, warmly wrapped in your aunt’s clean cloth.’

  In normal circumstances, I’d have treated that remark with a derisive snort. I deal with death pretty frequently, and I know full well that corpses have no feelings, and can’t possibly be aware of being snug in their winding sheets. But these were far from being normal circumstances. For some reason – I had no idea what it was – I had formed a bond with the dead woman. Her awful death had touched me, and her fate affected me deeply. To hear Jack speak those consoling words was like balm to my sore heart.

  He went on holding me. He was very close, and his clear green eyes looked straight into mine.

  ‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’

  ‘Yes,’ I whispered. Could I tell him? What had I seen, after all? I’d sensed danger, imminent and strong, but I was almost sure it was simply an overactive imagination. We were standing where a woman had just died, and I’d already had a jittery sense of eyes on me on the way here. ‘I’m sure it’s nothing,’ I added.

  ‘Tell me anyway,’ Jack said.

  I drew a breath. ‘I thought I saw – or sensed – that someone was watching us. He meant us harm, and I heard the sound of a weapon as it whistled towards me.’

  ‘Is that the sort of thing you often pick up when you’re dowsing?’ he asked.

  I smiled. ‘No, not really, although there was a time when I felt as scared as I did just now.’

  ‘And did the danger—’ But he must have felt how violently I was shuddering, and, tactfully, stopped asking penetrating questions.

  After a few moments, I said in a small voice, ‘What if she was murdered, Jack? What if whoever did it is still here, watching to see what we discover?’

  He was quiet for quite a while, and I guessed he was thinking. ‘Your aunt seemed to be fairly sure that our victim drowned,’ he said eventually, ‘but it need not necessarily have been an accidental drowning.’

  ‘You mean, somebody could have held her under till she died?’ I said in a whisper.

  ‘They could,’ Jack agreed, ‘but that’s not to say they did.’

  It took me some time to pull myself together. I needed to show him I was all right, and that he could let me go without fearing I’d instantly collapse on him. Gently I disengaged myself, gave him a grin and said, ‘We can go on now.’

  Then I bent down to pick up my satchel and, with as much determination as I could muster, strode over to the horses.

  We rode on through the day, stopping wherever we saw a village, a hamlet, a collection of houses and even a gaggle of people, to ask if a tall, fair young woman had gone missing in the floods. The going was hard, and at times we had to make long detours to get round inundated ground. My knowledge of the area helped, and once I even tried my hand at finding the safe path across a stretch of marsh, as I’d done at Ely. Jack was impressed at my success, and I felt compelled to admit that I’d been all but sure the hidden path was there, since it was one I use at least twice a year going to and from a place where marsh mallows grow.

  It seems to be a factor in our dealings with others, this compulsion to be straight and honest with those who are straight and honest with us.

  Nobody we spoke to was looking for a young, fair, blue-eyed woman. They were searching for plenty of other things: missing livestock, doors, bits of fencing, household items; and some, indeed, were frantically hunting for people. Heartbreakingly, one wild-eyed man was trying to find his six-year-old son.

  We helped where we could. Jack used his muscle to assist a group of men heave a cart out of the ditch into which the water had flung it. We both joined an old woman trying single-handedly to round up a flock of geese, and, while she and I shut them up temporarily inside her own tiny hovel of a house, Jack repaired their pen. He was, I noticed, well used to dealing with geese. I used quite a lot of the supplies in my satchel patching up various wounds and dispensing remedies for the many aches, pains, sniffles and coughs caused by people having spent far too long out of doors up to their knees or waists in cold water and soaked to the skin.

  We found the little boy. Out in the open ground beyond the village with the geese we heard frantic sobbing, and found the child sitting in the lower branches of a hazel tree. It took quite a long time to coax him down, encourage him to get on my horse and take him back to his father, but the man’s inarticulate joy at being reunited with his son was more than adequate reward.

  I don’t think either Jack or I had noticed how late it was until darkness began to fall. We were miles away from Aelf Fen, and we’d had no luck at all in trying to find where our dead woman had come from. Turning to me with a rueful expression, Jack said, ‘It looks as though we’ll have to find somewhere to spend the night, and then continue with the search in the morning.’ I nodded. ‘I’m sorry,’ he added, ‘I hadn’t expected to be away so long. Do you mind?’

  Not really being used to people asking if I mind things, I was taken aback. Then – for he was clearly waiting for me to answer – I said, ‘No, I don’t. In any case, I’m here because Lord Gilbert sent me with you to try to help you, so whether I mind or not isn’t really important.

  I thought he said, It is to me, but I was probably wrong.

  We found a lonely, run-down and desolate little monastery, although monastery implies something far grander than the meagre set of ramshackle buildings and the half-dozen monks in residence. Jack’s status as a man of the law guaranteed their cooperation, such as it was, although I’d like to think that they would have honoured their Christian duty to take us in, whoever we were. The guest accommodation was a draughty barn full of old, musty hay, but at least it was dry. The food was indescribably bad, but, happily, we had plenty of Lady Emma’s supplies left. As we wrapped ourselves in our blankets and settled in the hay for the night, I was extremely glad to be safe under cover, and, hopefully, in a place where those haunting, threatening dark eyes could not spy on me.

  We set out again at first light. It quickly became clear that the day would follow yesterday’s pattern. Again, we found plenty of folk needing our assistance, but nobody missing our dead woman.

  By noon, we were only a few miles south of Lynn. We stopped at the top of a gentle rise whose summit was crowned with pine trees, and as we ate the last of Lady Emma’s food, Jack broke the silence – I guessed he’d been thinking hard – and said, ‘I have a proposition to put to you.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ The shiver of excited anticipation took me by surprise.

  He finished his mouthful, swallowed and said, ‘We could be in Lynn this afternoon. Since it’s the first settlement of any size we’ve come to, and since it must have suffered the full force of the tidal surge, it’s quite possible that we may at last trace the kin of our dead woman.’

  ‘True.’ I knew, even before he drew breath to go on, that there was more.

  ‘We will, of course, do our utmost to do so, since it is why we’re here. But there is something else we could look into.’

  ‘The Maid of the Marsh came from here,’ I said. He met my eyes, and he was smiling. ‘She left from Lynn to sail down to Cambridge,’ I went on. ‘This was where Lady Rosaria went aboard.’

  ‘Indeed it was,’ he agreed. ‘Sheriff Picot told me, you’ll recall, to help her, and I suppose finding out how she came to be separated from her companions could be described as simply following
orders.’

  ‘Also,’ I said, ‘Lord Gilbert would be delighted if we find out something that enables him to locate her kinsfolk, so, in a way, we’d be following his orders, too.’ In a burst of confidence, I added, ‘I don’t like Lady Rosaria. I know she’s making an attempt to look after her child, and I do realize she’s probably suffered some bad experience that’s still affecting her, but—’ I didn’t really know how to put it into words. ‘There’s just something about her,’ I finished lamely.

  Jack was busy packing away the remains of our food. I heard him repeat softly, ‘Just something about her.’

  There wasn’t really any more to say.

  The industrious inhabitants of the small settlement of Lynn had set about clearing up with great energy, and already the place was getting back to normal. A great muddy, sandy, salty swathe had cut through on either side of the river, and there was a very distinctive high-water mark all along the seaward-facing side of the town. Everywhere there was bustle and noise, and the endless sound of dozens of brooms energetically sweeping out water, mud and assorted debris.

  The prospect of being among a crowd of busy people was more attractive than I liked to admit. Although I’d been trying to tell myself it was all in my imagination, still the sense that unfriendly eyes were on me – on us – persisted. Several times that day, the certainty of somebody behind me, careful to stay out of sight, had become so strong that I’d whipped round, trying to catch him, or, I suppose, her, before they had a chance to slip back into hiding.

  I approached Lynn with a relieved smile. But, just as we entered the first of its little streets, it suddenly occurred to me that if this was where the drowned woman came from and if, indeed, she had been murdered, then the killer might easily be a local too. Just biding his time for the right moment to get rid of the inquisitive pair who’d come to investigate her death …