The leper's return ktm-6

by Michael Jecks

  Ralph sat at a stool, and gestured for her to follow suit. “But perhaps your presence is not so beneficial?”

  “What do you mean, sir?”

  “Well, you see, he can watch you every day here, and that must be unsettling for him. He was to marry you, as you say. If he loves you, how would he feel knowing you are here with all the other lepers?” He held up a hand to prevent interruption. “Your being here, near him, must always be a sore temptation.”

  At this she laughed. “Oh, Brother! You think he might rape me? My Edmund?”

  “You may find it hard to believe, but worse things have happened to young women in lazar houses. And even if he doesn’t, don’t you think it might be cruel to remind him of what he is missing?”

  “Like letting the bull see the heifers but keeping him fenced off?”

  “Well, er, yes. Something like that.”

  “I suppose it’s possible. But I think my Edmund would prefer to see me here and know I care for him still than wonder what I was doing outside. And if you’ve heard the talk, I don’t care what people say!”

  This last was said with a sudden passion, and Ralph nodded slowly. “The people of the town can be very cruel, but try to forgive them. They don’t understand-all they know is, they’re scared of the disease that we hold in here.”

  “Saying I’m no better than a whore!” she declared hotly. “They ought to know better.”

  “Well,” he sighed, “some misguided people believe that leprosy is an evil brought about by lust. They think it’s transmitted by intimate relations, and therefore lepers are especially libidinous.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No, Mary, and even if they were, that would be no reflection on you. I think my charges have more important things on their minds than fornication. They have their eyes firmly fixed on the life to come, or on how their poor, tortured bodies will be eaten up and destroyed by their disease. Anyway, I don’t believe that leprosy is sexually transmitted. It’s a gift from God, and the sufferers should be honored. I agree with St. Hugh of Lincoln, that the more deformed they are, the more they suffer here on earth, the more brightly their souls will shine in Heaven. They have been sent their diseases to teach us all how we shall be tormented with pain in Purgatory. Their Purgatory is here, now!”

  “Yes, Brother. But if it is a gift from God, then maybe He intends honoring me too.”

  “We should never presume to look for such things from God,” he said sententiously. “Whatever He decides for you, you must accept it.”

  “But it cannot be wrong for me to want to help look after His own selected people.”

  “No,” he said uncertainly. It was considered that women were capable of looking after others in certain circumstances, he knew. “Except I really do think you should be considering starting a new life without Quivil. He’s lost to you now.”

  “So he is, but that’s no reason why I shouldn’t help you, is it? Especially since by so doing I’ll be helping those whom God Himself has chosen to be a sign to us all.”

  “Well…I suppose so.”

  “Then I’d better get on with the sweeping.”

  Ralph watched her move down the little aisle, rhythmically swaying as she moved the broom. She was the picture of a rough, untutored peasant girl, with heavy body and coarse, grubby hands, and yet she was demonstrating more generosity of spirit and kindliness than many of his brother-priests. The thought made him sigh, but it also gave him a spark of satisfaction. He walked forward and bent at the altar, offering up a short prayer for her and her doomed lover, before leaving the chapel. He might as well go and see to laying out the body of the dead leper.

  After all, he reasoned, what harm could come from letting Mary work in the lazar house?

  “My God! Simon,” Baldwin gasped. “How could Jeanne have allied herself with that?”

  “It can’t have been her fault. She must have been stuck with the woman from an early age,” Simon said.

  They were standing at the entrance to the inn, watching the small cavalcade disappear down the street. Edgar was leading the way, Hugh keeping the rear with the packhorse, although from the way he kept throwing appealing glances back at his master, he would have preferred to remain. Baldwin couldn’t blame him.

  “She’s a bear, Simon, a ravening, insane beast! How could a frail thing like Jeanne stand to live with something like that?”

  As they made their way along the road toward Godfrey’s hall, Simon laughed. “She’s not so bad as she looks, Baldwin. She can even tell jokes.”

  “Jokes? I daresay she could, but not the sort I’d want a soldier to hear! And did you see the warts on her chin? And her arms are more strongly muscled than my own, I swear.”

  “Baldwin, you can’t deny that she’s eminently capable of protecting her mistress, can you?”

  That, Baldwin agreed silently, was the whole point. With a fearsome guard like Emma he would find it very hard to get Jeanne on her own, if the display with Hugh was anything to go by. He had no objection to Jeanne being safe from footpads and felons, but that was very different to her being carefully fenced in from him by her maid. And he had no doubt that Emma would be a most resolute guardian. He had seen it in her eyes as she was introduced to him-cold, astute eyes that seemed to read him with terrifying ease. Little, brown eyes, they were, but without any of that gentle, bovine softness that Baldwin had always associated with the color. Emma’s were sharp and angry, like a small hog’s.

  The rest of her bore out the analogy. She was short, but with a massive frame that made her look almost perfectly round. Her chest was carried like some kind of armored buttress-or maybe like the curtain wall of a castle, Baldwin amended, recalling the awesome immensity of her bosom. An army, he felt, could batter itself to death against such a vast obstacle.

  Seeing his self-absorption, Simon laughed. “Forget her. You have a murder to solve. So tell me, whom are we to see now?”

  “The daughter of the man who was killed. Her name is Cecily, and she was discovered in the same room as her father’s corpse. She was knocked senseless.”

  They were soon at the house. Clearly most of the townspeople had accepted the fact that Tanner was not going to be bribed into allowing them to view the corpse or the place where Godfrey was killed, and had left to get on with their work. Tanner stood aside for them to go in, and Simon led the way, but not before Baldwin had caught a glimpse of the men standing well back, almost in the alleyway opposite. It made him frown for a moment, seeing the lepers there, but then he shrugged. Why should he assume that lepers, by mere virtue of their disease, should be uninterested in the fate of others? He knew that old men were always keen to hear of the demise of their peers, or of those younger than themselves. There was a greedy fascination with death among those who were likely to experience it for themselves in the near future, and lepers surely fell into that category.

  Yet when he glanced over his shoulder, he was surprised to see how keenly one of the rag-clothed figures was following his progress to the door. It was the new man, the one he had seen with Quivil earlier, and Baldwin made a mental note to ask the leper master about the stranger when he had a chance.

  The door was open, and just inside, seated on a stool from which he could see both front and back doors, was a watchman. He stood and nodded to Baldwin, and let the two pass into the hall itself.

  “Ugh! You could have warned me, Baldwin!”

  “Squeamish, Simon? I had thought you would have been cured of that after looking into so many murders.”

  “It’s one thing to become used to the sight of dead men, but quite another to suddenly get presented with a corpse, especially when the stench is so strong!”

  The knight had to agree with that. Someone had been in and fuelled the fire, and the room was close, the atmosphere heavy with the sweetness of death. As he moved toward the body, he grimaced. The crushed skull was already feeding the flies. Waving them away as best he could, he crouched down to repeat his inve
stigation of the night before.

  Godfrey had been an older man, certainly over fifty, and his hair was thin and gray. From the size of the damaged area, one conclusion seemed obvious. “He can’t have known anything about it.” Something caught Baldwin’s notice as he spoke. The man’s nose was scratched, and as Baldwin peered closer, he saw a series of short, but deep marks on the chin, and more on his left cheekbone. The wound on the back of the head itself was on the right side, a little above the point where it joined the neck. “Yes, we can be quite sure that as soon as this blow struck, he was dead,” he said musingly.

  “Fine-you enjoy yourself, and I’ll get some fresh air while you carry on.”

  Suiting his action to his words, Simon went to the nearest window, the one toward which the body was pointing. Soon he had thrown open the shutters, and could breathe in deep, satisfying lungfuls. There was something about Baldwin’s eagerness to examine the victims of violent death that had always repelled the bailiff. He took a little too much pleasure in his work. Today was no exception. Even now, Baldwin turned the body to and fro in his search for other wounds, opening the dead man’s shirt and checking the torso, feeling the chilly flesh for the onset of rigor mortis, before prying the lips apart to gaze in at the mouth.

  Simon looked away. It was too morbid for his taste. When a body was dead, that was an end to it as far as he was concerned. Simon’s interest lay in people’s motives for killing, and that meant questioning all those concerned; Baldwin’s conviction was that any body could tell how it died, and that might give clues as to who the attacker was. It was a view which Simon had seen demonstrated often enough for him not to dispute the fact, but he was enormously grateful that Baldwin was always keen to take on that part of the investigation himself, and didn’t require Simon’s help. In fact, Simon knew full well that his friend was glad to be left to study any clues alone.

  The window was quite low. This place was not designed for defense like so many others. Standing here, Simon could see the stableyard to his left. In front was the edge of the kitchen’s wall, which stretched on to the right, out as far as the wall between Godfrey’s and Coffyn’s.

  If someone was to try to rob the place, they wouldn’t try to escape through any of the windows at the front of the place. Only a fool would run away through a busy street, surely-but then many felons were fools, he reminded himself. Intelligent men rarely turned to crime. But if that was the case, and if plates had been stolen, then the best escape route was through the back, and perhaps over one of the walls.

  The idea caught his imagination. From what Baldwin had said, Godfrey had shouted at someone trying to defile his daughter. That implied the drawlatch was at the window. Why else should Godfrey have tried to cross over to this window? Yet if the thief was inside, and Godfrey thought he was trying to rape or harm his daughter, did that mean the man had taken the plate with the woman’s agreement? Or had he struck her down and then removed it-in which case, what on earth had Godfrey meant when, according to Coffyn, he had shouted: “So you’d defile my daughter too, would you?”

  “Baldwin,” he said, “tell me again where the three bodies were.”

  “Hmm? Godfrey was here, as you can see. Arm held up, as though he was instantly killed by the blow to his head. I think that is quite likely-the blood flowed freely, as you’d expect, and although there was a light spray under his arm, the main flow of the blood followed the line of his arm. This other arm is interesting, though. Very!”

  “Come on, tell me where the bodies were.”

  “You see, the knuckles of his hand have been barked, as if he managed to thump one of the men before he was killed.”

  “That is not a surprise.”

  “No, but at least we know that one assailant might have been wounded. It might help. Oh, very well, Simon, don’t fret! The servant was there, nearer the door, as if he was going to his master or Cecily.”

  “The girl?”

  “She was here,” said the knight, getting to his feet with a groan and cracking of bones. “Here, Tanner said, between the body and the window. Why?”

  “I wonder what she was wearing.”

  “Simon, what are you talking about?” Baldwin demanded.

  In answer, the bailiff pointed. At the side of the window, where the shutter met the wall, was a splinter of wood, and on the splinter was a torn piece of blue material.

  “So? Anyone could have snagged their tunic on that,” Baldwin said dismissively.

  “True enough,” Simon agreed, pulling it gently. “But it looks very fresh. The cloth hasn’t been here for a long time-if it had, it would have faded. This window faces south, it catches the sun all day, but this stuff has kept its bright color.”

  Baldwin held his head to one side, gazing at his friend. He took the scrap from him and turned it over in his hand. “It does look new,” he admitted. “I wonder if it is Cecily’s or the thief’s.”

  “Let’s ask her.” 9

  T he guard fetched a maid, a pretty young girl with dark flowing hair named Alison, who was, they were told, Mistress Cecily’s servant. She took them back through the hall and into a warm parlor. Here they were told to wait, and she slipped out through a door. A few minutes later Cecily was with them.

  Simon placed her at some twenty-five years old, perhaps a little more, but she had the natural grace and the elegance of a much older woman. She entered softly, seeming to float over the ground. The bailiff couldn’t help comparing her with the gorgon accompanying Jeanne de Liddinstone. Emma and Cecily were of about the same height, but that was where the similarity ended. Cecily had large, luminous eyes of a peculiarly intense shade of blue, and a fine, pale complexion that looked almost transparent. Her features were oval and regular, and there was a pleasing regularity in the high cheekbones, small mouth, and delicately arched eyebrows.

  But that wasn’t what Baldwin noticed about her. It was her sadness that struck him. Her high brow should have been unmarked in a woman born to wealth, but the lines were etched harshly across her forehead like parallel scars, her cheeks were sunken, her lips swollen and bloody from being punched, her eyes red-rimmed from sleeplessness and weeping. Her whole demeanor was that of a beaten cur, worn down by constant ill-use, and the livid pink and mauve bruise that marked her chin and cheek only served to emphasize her distracted misery.

  “Please, take a seat,” the knight said quietly. “We shall be as quick as we may be.”

  She went to a seat near the fire, all the way her head hanging, the picture of grief. But just for a moment, after she had settled herself and arranged her tunic to her satisfaction, she met his gaze, and he could swear that he recognized a cynical, measuring look in her eye. It was only fleeting, and was immediately replaced by every appearance of sober misery, as he would have expected from a dutiful daughter when her father has been killed, but the impact of that swift glimpse into her mind wouldn’t leave him. Although he wanted to believe her, he couldn’t forget it.

  “You are here to ask me what happened last night?” she asked softly, mumbling slightly as she tried to move her mouth as little as possible.

  “Yes, if it will not upset you too much. I am the-”

  “I know you. You’re the Keeper.”

  “Yes, and this is a friend of mine, who is helping me to try to find your father’s killer. Simon Puttock, bailiff to the Warden of the Stannaries at Lydford. Can you remember what happened to you last night?”

  “As if it was burned on my soul!” she declared, and gave a sudden shiver.

  That, at least, Baldwin thought, looked genuine. “Please tell us all you can.”

  “I was up in my room when it became dark, and walked downstairs. When I came to the hall, I noticed that a tapestry over one of the windows was loose. So I drew it back over the window, and was about to leave the room to look for my father or one of the servants, when I heard a noise behind me. I turned, and was hit.” She touched the tender bruise at her mouth.

  “You fell unconscio
us immediately?”

  “Yes.”

  “And so far as you could see, your father wasn’t there then?”

  “No. Father had the habit of going and walking the boundaries of the garden each evening, and I think he must still have been out when I was attacked.”

  “What next do you remember?”

  “Nothing. When I came to, I was in my chamber, and my maid was with me.”

  “This man who hit you,” Simon asked, “what did he look like?”

  She shot him a glance. “I don’t know. It was dark, and I think he had his face covered with a strip of cloth or something.”

  “Was he taller than you? Than your father? Fat or thin? Muscled or weak?”

  “I feel he might have been taller than me, but really, anything more than that I couldn’t say.”

  Baldwin leaned forward. “We have heard that your father gave a loud cry. That must have been as he was struck. You heard nothing?”

  She closed her eyes for a moment. “If I had heard him, I would have said.”

  Baldwin bit back a sharp retort, reminding himself that the girl had suffered an attack herself. Taking a deep breath, he said, “Please try to concentrate. I know it must be very difficult, but if we are to find your father’s killer we shall need something, even the most trivial-seeming detail…”

  “You think I don’t know my father’s dead?” she burst out. “Good God in Heaven, if I could tell you who it was, I would!”

  “Then, lady, think hard. Did you see what he was wearing?”

  “It was all dark clothing, I think he had a rich scarlet tunic, and a heavy cloak.”

  “What color was the cloak?” Baldwin pressed.

  “It was dark-one color looks like another!”

  Baldwin sat back and threw a harassed glance at his friend. Simon shook his head. It was plain enough that they would get nowhere with Mistress Cecily, not unless she recalled some more hard facts they could deal with. Baldwin nodded to himself, then leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees.