by S. D. Sykes
‘I was acting to defend myself. He would have killed me, given the chance.’
‘I’m not so sure.’
She dropped my hand abruptly. ‘Don’t be foolish, Oswald. Peter had already killed three people, including my own husband. Of course he would have murdered me. He believed that I would reveal your secret.’
I folded my arms and turned away from her.
She leant forward. ‘I would just like to ask Peter some questions, that’s all.’
‘About what?’ I said, petulantly.
She looked into my face. Her expression was conciliatory. Even gentle. ‘I’d ask why there was no body in Thomas Starvecrow’s coffin. Only an effigy of the Christ child. Then I’d ask what happened to my true brother, the real Oswald de Lacy. Peter is the one who supposedly buried the boy. Doesn’t that interest you?’
I bristled. ‘Yes. It does. But—’
She looked away. ‘Your position’s not in danger, Oswald. Nobody is going to remove you as Lord Somershill. We’ve discussed this enough times. I just want to find out the truth. And Brother Peter is the only person who knows.’
‘But he’s dead.’
She went to answer, just as her baby began to cry in the next chamber. His calls began softly, but soon grew in volume. Clemence got to her feet and tramped wearily towards the door, turning to address me just before she left. ‘You would tell me if you heard any news of Peter, wouldn’t you Oswald?’
‘He’s dead, Clemence.’
Chapter Eleven
There are few things in life more trying to a nineteen-year-old boy than his own parents.They are an embarrassment, a hindrance, sometimes even a disgrace. The boy can scarcely believe that he was created by the union of these same two people. Indeed, the very idea that two such ancient and hopeless persons ever possessed the wherewithal to make love completely stupefies him. When he can bear to think on such matters (and this does not happen often, since the suggestion appals him,) he suspects they only performed the act once, which resulted in his own conception. He does not stretch his imagination to wonder how his siblings came into being, as this would lead into even darker realms of disgust – signifying that his parents might have continuously enjoyed each other’s company on a carnal level.
I grew up thinking just the same of my own parents, Lord and Lady Somershill. My father, Henry de Lacy, was a tyrant, a pinch- penny, and a bore. My mother was, and remains, a woman who continually affects silliness in order to achieve her own ends. Of course, only half of her eccentricity is genuine – but gauging which half is where the problem lies. But Lord and Lady Somershill were not my parents. Not my true flesh and blood.
I have already said in this account that my true mother was a young village girl, Adeline Starvecrow. A girl who had been employed as a wet nurse to the de Lacy family. I never knew her, so she remains a perfect angel in my mind. Her behaviour, her appearance, and her personality do not cause me a moment of mortification, because the poor woman is dead. And so we come to the identity of my true father. Was he a man who could be exhorted in the same way as my mother? Was he a saint, an exemplar, a man of good deeds and heroic action? No. He was not. For my true father, the man whose blood runs in my own, was a liar, a drunkard, and a murderer. He was also a priest.
Since our argument in the monastery, after the departure of Edmund, I had accused Peter of showing too much of an interest in my welfare. I had suggested that his motives were not altogether moral – even that he shared the same corrupt tastes as the abbot. But I had been both wrong and blind. I had not seen that the attention and watchfulness Peter afforded me was the love and care that a father gives to his only son.
Peter had finally confessed the truth to me last year, when I was eighteen – but with great reluctance, for this story was wretched and shameful. As a young man, Peter had fallen in love with the pretty and poor Adeline. Their love had been so intense that he had abandoned his vows of celibacy, and soon Adeline was expecting an inconvenient child. I suppose Peter could have disappeared at this point – plenty of errant fathers do. Instead, he arranged a speedy marriage for the girl to a villager, William Starvecrow, and left Adeline to explain away an early birth. When the true Oswald de Lacy died in Adeline’s care however, it was not her new husband that she turned to – it was Peter. In a panic Peter had taken the young de Lacy boy’s body away to be buried, swearing to me that he had laid this child to rest in the churchyard. In a grave marked Thomas Starvecrow.
Peter confessed his sins to God. He kept away from Adeline, and he paid his penance. But Peter could not keep away from me, his own son.
I shall never know with absolute certainty whether fortune or stealth placed me in the cradle of Oswald de Lacy, but that is where I grew. Peter had watched over me, always making excuses to visit Somershill in order to check upon my progress. It had even been his suggestion that I be sent to the monastery to be educated and prepared for holy orders. His reasoned appeal to Mother, that the de Lacy family should have a priest in their ranks, was a successful one – though Peter had been forced to promise my father that I would become an abbot. At seven years of age I left Somershill. At eighteen I returned. Peter accompanied me.
If Peter’s love for me did not begin as a corrupted emotion, it soon became so. Now that his own son was Lord Somershill, he was ambitious for me. His watchfulness turned to suspicion, his care to obsession. He saw danger and enemies at every turn, fearing somebody would reveal my true identity and snatch away my fortune and position. He even murdered three people in order to protect me – two young girls and Clemence’s husband Walter de Caburn. He committed these crimes to keep our secret hidden – a secret that I did not yet know.
I did not discover that Peter was my father until I had investigated the murders, and the trail had led me back to the old monk in the midst of my own family. Now that he was cornered, Peter had no choice but to confess the whole sordid story. That he was a murderer. That his motivation was a desire to protect me, his son. I didn’t want to believe it, of course – who chooses to discover such a thing? Though, in my heart, I knew it to be true.
I had not been the only person listening to this confession, however. My sister Clemence, a seasoned eavesdropper, had been hiding in the room and had heard the whole tale. When she revealed herself and threatened to tell our secret to the whole world, Peter held a knife to her throat and went to stab her. I begged for my sister’s life, but Peter refused to spare her. She would destroy me, he argued. She hated me. Why would I want to save this viper, when she would not extend the same favour to me, if the tables were turned? I tried to reason with the old fool, but when this failed, I managed to pull Clemence from his clutches. As Peter berated me for my foolishness, Clemence threw a great pan of boiling water over his face, burning the skin from his bones. He lay upon the floor, convulsing in pain. He panted and struggled for breath. It seemed his heart would stop.
We only left Peter for a few moments. I went to fetch some brandy to ease his journey into the next life. He was my father, after all. Despite his sins, I wanted to lessen his suffering. When I returned however, he was gone. He had completely disappeared.
We searched for Peter for days, but found nothing. In the end I was convinced he had taken himself to a quiet corner of the forest and died. His injuries were too severe, and his body was too old and abused to allow his survival.
But if he was dead, then where was his body?
The next morning I organised a wider search of the estate for the de Caburn sisters, feeling sure that Mary and Rebecca must be hiding somewhere in an abandoned cottage or a dry hay barn. They knew how to look after themselves, having been raised by their father without the education and attention he would have lavished on a son, but even so, it was time they came home. It was too cold to be outside for long.The sky was leaden, and the sporadic rain was threatening to thicken into icy rods of sleet. There was also another important and more practical reason for finding the girls as soon as possible.The rumour
that they had been taken by the butcher bird was now running through the village like a flooded stream, and though I had ordered such talk to stop, it was impossible to close the mouth of every gossip, or the ears of every gullible fool.
I split the men into groups and then sent them into the different sections of land that radiated in all directions from the house. I stopped short of calling this a hue and cry, knowing the effect such words would have upon the village. Instead I described our search as a hunt for two lost girls, and when I offered a five- penny reward to the person who could find the sisters, there was less grumbling from the men about having to leave their own fields for the day.
I would tell you that my authority over these men had grown in the months since my last tale, that they respected my dominion and obeyed me without argument or resentment. But I found they still gathered into surly groups at my approach and folded their arms with guarded hostility to my commands. In the weeks before the girls’ disappearance I had given up trying to win their respect and favour and now shouted my commands as noisily and arrogantly as any other nobleman in Kent. When my reeve Featherby tried to intervene with unsolicited advice, I would tell him to keep his peace, even if I found, upon reflection, that his suggestion was better than mine. I thought it was a weakness to change my mind. But I was wrong, for it turns out that intransigence is weakness. Holding blindly to your first utterance in the hope that it will appear more commanding is, in fact, one of the best ways to fail.
None of the various search parties appeared to need my assistance, so I chose instead to check once more about Somershill. There was always the possibility that the two girls were hidden under our very noses in some nook or cranny. I wandered the house, searching in the corners where I had hidden as a child, when my brothers were in the mood to taunt me with their sticks, or to incite one of their dogs to chase me about the courtyard. I looked in the cellar, behind the barrels in the buttery, and at the end of the stables where we used to keep the smallest ponies. The smell of my childhood filled my nostrils and induced a sudden melancholia that I struggled to shake off.
Wandering across the wet grass between the rear of the house and the curtain wall, I decided to look around the back of the north-west tower. Brambles grew in a tangle about the base of the walls and had only recently been cut away into a path so that food could be taken to and from my ward, John Barrow. The man was still in there, though we no longer heard his wailing – thanks to Agnes Salt’s sleeping draught.
Pulling aside some stray brambles that were determined to stick their barbs into the wool of my new hose, I made for the door – only to stop in my tracks as a crow landed above me on the narrow sill of an arrow slit. Its eye was bright and black. Its feathers were lustrous and shimmered in the weak winter sunlight. But any beauty possessed by this creature was short-lived, for when it began to call, it made a crabby, grating noise that filled the air with its ugliness. I shooed it away, but as its rasping call diminished into the distance, it left a more subtle sound in its wake. It was a whisper, not of one voice but of two.
I crept closer to the door of the tower, not wanting to disturb the originators of this low murmuring, for there is nothing more provoking to an investigator than a whispered conversation. I placed my ear at the crack in the door and then pressed it against this small sliver of space in the hope that some words would leak through. But ears are an unreliable friend. At times they will let you hear the most disagreeable of noises, or even some cruel words of criticism. At other times, when you need them most, their powers will desert you.
I poked a finger into my ear and twisted it in the hope that I might hear better, but unfortunately this did little to help. All I could tell for certain was that there were two people conversing. One had to be John Barrow, since he was imprisoned behind this door. The other voice I did not recognise.
I noticed the key had been removed, so either both of them were locked into the tower, or the owner of the second voice had turned the lock and now had the key in his possession. Realising that there was little to be gained from trying to eavesdrop any further on this conversation, I decided instead to push at the door. As I then entered the chamber and adjusted my eyes to the darkness, two faces looked up at me. It was John Barrow and the priest, Father Luke. Both were crouched in the corner of the room, and looked as guilty as two boys caught drinking the best port in the cellar.
Father Luke jumped to his feet. ‘Lord Somershill. We didn’t hear you approach.’ Now he bowed and then forced Barrow to stand and do the same. I noted that Barrow’s clothes were covered in pieces of food, suggesting that the man had been sick in recent hours. I will admit, at this point, to wanting to vomit myself, since nothing is as contagious as the stink of another person’s bile. Instead I held my hand to my nose.
Father Luke bowed again. ‘Perhaps you should leave this chamber, sire? Barrow has been sickened by some sort of sleeping tonic. The fumes could be noxious.’
The priest sounded like my mother and I was not about to be ordered about by somebody who was barely a year older than me. ‘What are you doing here, Father?’ I asked.
The fool bowed a third time, and I wondered if such excessive servility would accompany each of his responses. ‘I came to visit John Barrow, sire. The man is in need of spiritual guidance.’ It seemed to me that Barrow was more in need of a clean tunic.
‘What were you whispering about?’ I asked.
Father Luke’s face fell, and I would tell you that the colour drained from his features, but the priest was a pale and bloodless creature anyway. He mumbled some answer or other, but then our attention was drawn away from the chamber entirely, and I’m sorry to say that I did not press my nose any further into this nook.
Somewhere outside the tower my name was being shouted repeatedly. The voice was shrill and insistent, and at first I assumed it belonged to a woman. When I ran outside, I found that it was our new servant Geoffrey, trying to summon me. He bounded across the grass like a deerhound. ‘You must come quickly to the great hall, sire.’
‘What’s the matter?’
He hesitated. ‘Master Featherby says I’m not to tell you.’
I crossed my arms. ‘Geoffrey?’
The boy winced. ‘It’s the missing sisters, sire. Something’s been found.’
I quickly returned to the tower, telling the priest to lock the door and then to join me immediately in the house.
The great hall at Somershill is my least favourite part of the house. Perhaps this antipathy to grand dimensions and high ceilings is distilled from my true essence, as the child of a peasant. I prefer the warmth and intimacy of the upper chambers, where I am not on show to every member of the household – for the great hall is a stage where I must perform as a lord.
As I strode into the hall that morning, I was confronted by a small group of men who were gathered in a circle, staring intently at something on the floor. Their backs were to me, but my reeve Featherby was immediately recognisable by his height and the tight curls upon his head. It was with great trepidation that I pushed my way through the crowd to look upon the object of their inspection.
They parted to allow me to look down at the floor, where two pairs of shoes lay in the reeds. Both made of green satin. One pair a little larger than the other. Both unmistakeably belonging to Mary and Rebecca de Caburn.
‘Where did you find these?’ I asked the man standing next to me.
He went to answer, but Featherby shoved him away. ‘They were hidden inside the tithe barn, sire.’
‘The priest’s tithe barn?’
Featherby frowned. ‘There are no other tithe barns in Somershill.’ Now he crossed his arms and seemed poised to revert to his habit of leaning over me, so I stepped back hastily, standing upon another man’s foot.
‘Where’s Father Luke?’ I asked, looking around to see the priest hanging back behind the group, his sickly face now blotched with patches of colour.
‘Yes, sire?’ He was trying to behave as if
he hadn’t heard the conversation.
‘Mary and Becky’s shoes have been found on your property. Do you know anything about this?’
He shook his head vigorously. ‘No, sire. I am as surprised as you.’
‘You didn’t see the girls before they disappeared?’
‘No, no. I’ve been at church most of the last few days, preparing for Holy Week. I’ve hardly been at my house at all.’ He bowed again, with such deepness that he nearly fell over. ‘I really don’t know why such items might be lying around in my barn.’
Picking up one of the delicate shoes, I found it to be undamaged but muddy. Looking for Featherby’s face again amongst the host of men who now bore down upon me, I asked, ‘You say these shoes were hidden?’ Featherby nodded. ‘Were they tucked away behind something, or just abandoned?’
‘The shoes were behind some sacks of flour, sire.’ At the mention of flour, some of the men began to grumble beneath their breath, repeating their perennial complaint that one tenth of their harvest might sit in a tithe barn, whilst their own children went
‘So the shoes were found easily?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know what you mean, sire,’ said Featherby.
The man was beginning to irritate me. ‘I imagine an attacker might have made an effort to conceal these items?’
‘So you think the girls were attacked, sire?’
I went to answer this, but could hardly make my voice heard above the chattering that suddenly erupted.
A man known locally as Roger the Toad pushed his droopy face forward and bowed to me. ‘Have the sisters been murdered, sire? Like poor little Catherine Tulley?’
Once again I tried to answer, but the clamour amongst the men was now deafening, and they had stopped paying any attention to my words. It was not long before the name of John Barrow was mentioned, and his accursed butcher bird.
‘John Barrow has nothing to do with this,’ I said. ‘He’s been locked in the north-west tower for nearly two weeks.’ I spoke as loudly as possible, though nobody listened – their ears blocked by their own stupidity. I made my way quickly to the dais at one end of the hall, so that I might stand above them and fully gain their small-minded attention.