The Unquiet Bones

by Mel Starr

  “No. The reeve is a good man. But do not even good men sometimes shelter malignant thoughts?”

  “They do,” I agreed. “Even our Lord Jesus was tempted, as the apostle tells us.”

  “May not evil thoughts become deeds if unchecked?” Lord Gilbert asked.

  “They may.”

  “Then you must seek out a murderer for me. We are agreed, I think, that one who frequents the castle has done this. I might choose that man, unwittingly, to seek out the murderer. I believe all my servants incapable of such a crime, yet I am certainly wrong.”

  “I will do as you ask,” I sighed. “I held the girl’s bones in my hands and felt sorrow, and anger, too. Who was this lass? And what did she do to merit such a death? Did she laugh, and love? Was she a wife and mother? I think not, for I believe she was too young, but would she have become such? I would know the answers to these questions, as you would, m’lord. But I will tell you straight, I fear my ignorance of such probing as will be required will undermine my endeavor. And perhaps a clumsy question may give warning to the killer.”

  “Perhaps. But I have observed you at your work this past month. It may be you underestimate your abilities. Where, then, will you begin?”

  I thought for a moment: “I think the first work must be to discover who the victim is…was.”

  “Sensible. How will you do this?”

  “I must think on it. She was not from Bampton, you are certain of that?”

  “Aye,” he nodded agreement, pulling again at his chin.

  “My guess is that she came from a village close by. She did not arrive here alone, I think, and if she came from some great distance, why?”

  “You will need a horse,” Lord Gilbert declared. “I will direct John to have the marshalsea keep a horse ready for you. Whenever you are free to visit another town in your search, call here for the beast. When will you begin?”

  “Today,” I shrugged. “No one has done anything foolish or dangerous recently, so my skills are not presently required.”

  “You could visit Aston, and Cote, today, and return before nightfall.”

  “I know Aston,” I remarked. “A reasonable place to begin.”

  “A horse will be ready within the hour. I shall notify Thomas de Bowlegh. We will bury the remains tomorrow.”

  “I would not,” I answered.

  “Oh?”

  “If God grants grace to my labor, and I find the girl’s family, they will want her close by. And perhaps further study will yield another clue to this mystery.”

  “Hmmm…yes. As you wish. And Hugh,” he said as I turned to go, “do keep me acquainted with the progress of your search.”

  “And if there is no progress, must I inform you of that, as well?”

  “You are wrong to disparage your competency.”

  “I esteem your opinion. I will return for the horse when I have dined and viewed the bones again.”

  Chapter 4

  I returned to Galen House and took a maslin loaf and a cold capon breast to the toft where I had, perhaps unwisely as I think back on it now, left my table and its bony burden. I worked my way about the table while I ate, seeking some new knowledge. None readily appeared. I washed down my meal with ale purchased from the baker’s wife, who brewed tolerably well.

  After several loops of the table I was no wiser. I set my cup on the cobbles and decided to make one more thorough inspection of the bones before I set off for Aston and Cote. I began with the skull. Had I started at the feet, I might have been home before dark.

  I will explain. The skull told me nothing but what I already knew. This was a young person, surely female, who had yet no wisdom teeth, although on close inspection, the rear of the jaw showed just the beginning of a tooth erupting. The long bones and the scarred rib yielded no further clues. At last I reached the feet, and the few small bones which were recovered. There I found what I sought. This girl had broken her foot. Which foot I could not know. One of the metatarses showed sure evidence of a fracture, now poorly healed. This was not much of a clue, but how many maids have broken a foot?

  My outlook improved with the discovery. I returned to the castle with more optimism than when I had left it two hours earlier. I exchanged greetings with Wilfred and set off across the yard to the marshalsea. I did not get there; not straight away.

  As I rounded the base of the southwest tower, I came face to face with Lady Joan Talbot. There was no one I would have preferred to meet face to face. This was not, however, a meeting for which I was prepared. I fear my wit did not impress the lady.

  “Uh, good day, m’lady.”

  “Good day, Master Hugh. Do you seek my brother?”

  “No. I’ve come for a horse.”

  “Do you ride for pleasure, Master Hugh?”

  “No, m’lady. I am on your brother’s business.”

  “Oh? What business is that?”

  “You know of the bones found yesterday?” She nodded. “Lord Gilbert will have me investigate this matter. I am off to visit villages in the shire hereabouts to see if a young woman has gone missing.”

  Lady Joan’s brow furrowed. “You are sure it was a woman found in the…waste pit?”

  “Aye. I have no doubt. And I know how she died.”

  Lady Joan caught her breath and stepped back. “Oh?"

  “A rib bears a deep gouge where the knife which killed her glanced from it on its way to her heart.”

  She blanched, then spoke softly. “Then I wish you good fortune in your search.”

  I thanked her for her good will, doffed my cap, and bowed in what I thought was a graceful sweep of arm and body. I think I overdid it. I heard her giggle softly as she glided on across the castle yard.

  I know I am not a handsome fellow. Women do not compete for my attention. But neither do small children run and hide when I appear. I am as tall as Lord Gilbert, although he has thirty pounds on me. He is a warrior. I would not say that I am scrawny; slender would be more apt. Well, some would say I am scrawny. I prefer to think of my form as wiry.

  My nose is a trifle large for the adjacent geography, but I have always thought that lends character to a face. To a masculine face, anyway. It seems to depart my brow properly, but then takes a right turn, as if my nostrils were trying to direct my attention to some event on the dexter side. It is inherited. My father viewed the world across a nose of similar size and bearing. My father was also bald. I know that my thick brown locks will soon vanish. I hope I may find a wife before that happens, although I am not sure I want a wife who thinks more of what is atop my head than what may be in it.

  Although I am the son of a landed knight – all right, not much land – I hold no manor. Our stations were too far apart for me to hold dreams of holding Lady Joan.

  I had seen her rarely in the month I’d lived in Bampton. I heard it spoken about the town that shortly after Sir Robert’s disappearance, she journeyed to Exeter, and there spent the summer with her cousin, Lady Alice Boteler. She returned at Michaelmas, at near the same time my employment in the town began. Village gossips soon had it that the visit to Exeter was a failure, its purpose being to introduce m’lady to available young gentlemen of the appropriate station.

  Numerous reasons were given for this miscarriage: Lady Joan was too opinionated, she was too demanding, she was shrewish, she thought too highly of herself. Whether any of this was true, I knew not. But no one ever spoke of her appearance as the cause of her failure to find a husband, if indeed she sought one.

  I watched her walk across the castle yard and was reminded again that a wife would be a good thing to have. Any man would think the same, whatever his rank, when he beheld Lady Joan, coming or going.

  Mooning over the unobtainable would not get me to Aston or Cote, although as it turned out, I might have remained in the castle yard, for all the good a horseback ride did me that day. Thomas must have recalled my riding skills, for he had the marshalsea prepare for me an elderly gelding of wide back and gentle demean
or.

  “Bruce, we calls ’im,” the stableman told me. “Lord Gilbert rode ’im at Poitiers, he did. Took a bolt in the haunch, but never so much as flinched. Lord Gilbert didn’t know as he’d been hurt ’til battle was over.”

  The stableman held the horse’s head and scratched his forelock while I mounted. Four hours later Bruce and I ambled through the gate with barely enough light to see that Wilfred had not yet swung it shut nor dropped the portcullis. Waiting for my return, he said, as I greeted him.

  No one, male or female, was missing from Aston or Cote. Not missing for unknown cause, anyway. There were so many missing from plague that the old woman who spoke to me in Cote suggested that the families who remained might petition their lord to remove to Newbridge or some other town less decimated by disease.

  I planned to visit other villages to the east of Bampton the next day, but this was not to be. Shortly after I rose from my bed, before I completed my morning wash – I know many consider this an unnecessary affectation – there came a pounding at the door of Galen House.

  I opened it and peered into the gloom. Before me stood three men, two of them carrying a litter upon which a fourth was lying. Motionless.

  The door-thumper removed his hat and explained their mission. The man on the litter was his father. They were foresters in Lord Gilbert’s lands to the northwest of Bampton. At dusk the evening before, they had felled a last oak for the day. The man on the litter had not seen it coming his way as it dropped until it was too late. A large limb had caught him across the head as he ran, leaving him unconscious, and leaving a dent in his skull as well as a laceration. He had regained consciousness briefly, complained of headache and nausea, then, after they got him to his wife and hut, he’d passed out again. And this time remained comatose. I motioned for them to bring him in. Fortunately I had thought to repackage the bones and move my dispensary table to its rightful place. The sight of a surgeon’s table strewn with bones might put off even the most needy client.

  “Put the litter on the table there.”

  I lit two more candles – one was already burning – and inspected the wound. It was depressed to the depth of my finger and yet oozing blood.

  “Can you do aught for ’im?” the son asked, his cap still grasped tightly before him.

  “Perhaps. You would have done well to have brought him to me last night.”

  “’E woke up for a span. ’Is wife wanted us to bring ’im in, but ’e said ‘No.’ Worried ’bout t’expense, y’see. So when he went down again we thought ’twas but for a minute, like. But he hasn’t wakened yet, an’ seems to me he ain’t breathin’ right.”

  He wasn’t. I told the son and the other bearers I would do what I could, but I was not optimistic. For what I must do I wanted no spectators. I sent my patient’s three companions to wait in the street. The injured man remained comatose, which was good. He would feel no pain, nor thrash about.

  I heated water and shaved the indented part of the skull, and a circle around it, then bathed the wound with the last of my wine. I used the scalp laceration for the cross-stroke, and made two vertical incisions at either end. This created two flaps of scalp which I could fold back to reveal the fracture.

  I caught my breath when I saw the extent of the damage. The fracture was a finger’s length in diameter, and included four large bone fragments and many small splinters. I employed a probe to lift the largest piece, and in the gathering light from my eastern window I peered beneath it.

  I was cheered to see that the damage was not so severe as the broken skull would have it appear. I saw no great rupture of dura mater encompassing the brain. There was much coagulated blood under the break, but that could be teased out, with time and care.

  So I took my time and was careful. Three hours later I had cleaned the smallest bone splinters from the wound, positioned the larger pieces in a convex curve to match the undamaged portion of skull, and sewed up the “H” flap of scalp. My back ached and sweat ran into my eyes, but a sense of accomplishment overwhelmed my discomfort. The man might not survive, but he had not died on my table. At least, not yet. And I had given him a chance to live.

  I packed ground moneywort over the wound, wrapped the woodcutter’s head in several layers of linen strips, then called to his son and friends. They had remained standing, motionless, since the moment I sent them out, and it was now past the sixth hour. I had seen them through the window several times while I worked.

  “Take him home carefully. It will be his life should he receive another blow on the head. He must not rise from his bed for a week. After seven days he may rise but to eat and care for himself. No labor! In a fortnight he must return to have the wound inspected and have the windings changed.”

  “He will live, then?” asked the brother.

  “He may. I cannot pledge. The fracture was severe.”

  “When can he return to work?”

  “Perhaps a month. Certainly it will not be safe to do so sooner.”

  “What is your fee?”

  A wage for men like these might be two pence per day. I asked for four pence, brain surgery being somewhat more skilled employment than woodcutting and, from the stiffness of my back, nearly as arduous.

  “I’ve but t’uppence. He’ll bring two more in a fortnight. If God wills an’ he lives.”

  Fair enough, I thought. Success should be worth more than failure.

  I was weary from the morning’s labor, and had no heart for another unfruitful journey through the autumn countryside. I had used much white archangel and moneywort to staunch the bleeding of the woodman’s scalp, and knew a meadow north of town where I might replenish my supply.

  The afternoon I spent gathering plants; white archangel, lady’s mantle, clover, moneywort, and betony. All these I did not find in the same field, but since the plague much land lay fallow. Brief journeys from meadow to meadow supplied all my needs. I hung my gathered medicines from beams in the dispensary to dry.

  I sat and contemplated this room as the day died. Tomorrow I would resume my search. Tonight I would enjoy the quiet reward of a day lived well, work well done, and the pleasure of searching God’s forest and field for the tools he has provided whereby we may be healed of our afflictions. I concluded the day with maslin, a haunch of cold mutton, and a pint of the baker’s wife’s ale. Life was good.

  The Angelus Bell awakened me early next day. It does so every day. Before the sun was over St Andrew’s Chapel I bid Wilfred good morning and found Bruce snoring contentedly in the marshalsea.

  I rode northeast this day, to Yelford and Hardwick, then all the way to Witney. Plague had reduced the first two villages so I spent little time there. No one had gone missing.

  Witney was grown large as Bampton, and plague had reduced it but little. Witney required more time. My task was to learn what I could, as thoroughly as I could, as quickly as I could. I decided on two strategies; seek an innkeeper, and approach an old woman or two. If such as these knew of no person mysteriously absent from the town, it was likely all its inhabitants could be accounted for. Two hours later an innkeeper and three grandmothers could recollect no missing citizen.

  I returned to Bampton through fields brown with autumn, forests golden, as frost worked its designs. A pity, I thought, to be on such a morbid mission when beauty surrounded me. But this also reminded me of death. Leaves and stems were dying, as would I, some day. Would my death bring some brief glory to the world, as did the dying foliage?

  Some deaths bring no radiance. To die young, or of some festering disease, this is an infamous way to meet God. Even the slaughter of battle may bring with it an aureole of dignity. I had chosen to spend my life battling against ignoble death – against wasting disease and injury. But now I found myself in a struggle against the calamity of murder, the death of the young. I felt unequal to the assignment. My feelings would nearly prove accurate.

  I did not seek for a missing girl next day; ’twas Sunday. At the third hour, bells from the tower
of the Church of St Beornwald called the faithful to matins and the mass. They called the unfaithful as well. I suppose the congregation included some of each.

  Lord Gilbert did not attend. He and his family worshipped in a private chapel in the castle, but most others in the town could be expected to be present. Before plague struck, the nave was barely large enough to contain the parish. Now there was room enough and to spare.

  Father Thomas led the two other vicars in procession around the church, blessing altars and congregation, and sprinkling holy water on both. A clerk led the prayer of confession and read the scripture for the day from St Paul’s epistle to the Galatians: “And let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all, especially to those who are of the household of faith.”

  “Do not grow weary in doing good.” I thought this a word from God, for I was already grown weary of wandering the countryside searching for a girl who might be missing from some place of which I had never heard a hundred miles away.

  My mind was so occupied that I neglected the prayers for the living and the dead. Father Thomas sang the mass well, and as I had some little training to do the same, my thoughts returned to the service in time to venerate the host and kiss the pax board. We shared the holy loaf, and as always after mass, I departed the church determined to live better, and in particular, to discover a name for a missing girl. I should attend mass twice each day. Although, come to think of it, there are lords who do for whom the practice seems without benefit.

  I am always ravenous when mass is done. Although some break their fast before the sacrament, I hold with those who do not. After the midday meal of a Sunday, it is Lord Gilbert’s custom to invite tenants and yeomen to bring bows to the castle forecourt for practice at the butts. He provides a cask of ale to ensure good attendance, and a prize for the most competent marksman. As the award, usually two pence, is not granted until the last competition, those who rewarded themselves already with Lord Gilbert’s ale seldom stagger home with any coin.