She nodded. Of course she did. So much rested on the sheriff’s verdict, and it had implications for Ulf himself. In the unlikely event that he returned a murder verdict, it would fall on Ulf to organize a vigil around the village boundary in case the murderer—whoever he might have been—escaped, in which case the village would be heavily fined.
They watched him to the door, and when it closed behind him Gyltha turned to Allie.
“Right then, you . . . Bed!” she said firmly. “Seen your ma in that state more times ’an I care to remember . . . Sleep! That’s what you need, and plenty of it.”
When she was resolute like that, Allie knew better than to argue with her; besides, before she knew it, Jodi was gently coaxing her off her stool and steering her toward the staircase.
She woke up to a fading light and Hawise in silhouette at the window. Disoriented by sleep, she didn’t see her properly at first, but instead saw a living facsimile of the murdered girl. An instinct she had never felt before propelled her out of bed and across the room.
“Be careful,” she said, wrapping her arms around her. “Promise me you will be very careful.”
That evening Ulf’s tithing took up the vigil outside the church, while inside the women tended to the body of the girl and laid her to rest on a bier. When the priest had said an antiphon and a psalm over her and sprinkled her body with holy water, they left.
The next day a mass was held for her, and throughout the diocese, all parish priests—or, at least, those able to read the notices pinned to the church gates—appealed to their congregations to help identify her.
By the Sabbath, when she was still anonymous, Father Edward, in whose crypt she lay, was making his way down the altar steps, preparing to address his congregation, when a peculiar thing happened.
He suddenly felt imbued not with the disaffection usually accompanying this great mimetic rite—most of his congregation, after all, wouldn’t have known a word of Latin if it leapt out of the Bible and bit them in the arse—but something else entirely, something quite extraordinary, in fact: an overweening sense of elation that, at last, he was at the very center of a genuine mystery.
He looked out almost affectionately on his worshippers, who were still pouring into the nave in their droves, and noticed how quietly, how respectfully, they were coming in. Perhaps, for once, they had come not from curiosity or boredom but for genuine enlightenment and comfort. Perhaps, at long last, he was the light to which they were turning in these dark, uncertain times and the mysterious dead girl in the crypt wasn’t simply a puller of crowds but a symbol of something more meaningful.
The hair on the back of his neck rose with the thrill of this extraordinary revelation and he decided that he would reward them with a sermon in English for a change.
He looked down at the sea of upturned, expectant faces, smiled genially upon them, put his shoulders back and prepared to deliver the sermon to end all sermons . . .
After mass the congregation spilled out into the churchyard. Neighbor garrulously greeted neighbor until the cacophony of voices rose to such a pitch that even the rooks in the elm tops were drowned out.
Rosa leaned against a gravestone, wondering whether—if it wasn’t for the blacksmith—she would still want to go home.
The man had purloined poor Ulf ruthlessly from the moment they stepped out of church, something to do with his neighbor’s dilapidated cottage, which, he said, was bringing his corner of the village into disrepute. In fact, he insisted Ulf go with him that moment to put a stake in the cottage garth as a reminder to the slummocking fumble-fist that the authorities were onto him and that he should make the repairs immediately.
Or something; she was only half listening. The rest of the time she was looking idly around, wondering whether to stay put and risk the blacksmith’s boring her to death or try to slip off home unnoticed.
But it wasn’t just the blacksmith. The advent of the dead girl and her recent attack of the Nameless Dreads had done nothing to lift her spirits, which meant that she was in no mood for idle chat this morning and increasingly anxious to get back to the sanctuary of the cottage.
While the blacksmith droned on, she looked around, hoping to see Hawise. She had something she wanted to discuss with her, but all of a sudden, the girl was nowhere to be seen.
They had sat together in church as usual but because Father Edward’s sermon—which was a surprise, being in English for a change—went on rather, halfway through it Rosa was easily distracted by a falcon when it squawked loudly at the back.
When she turned around to look at it, she saw Peter make a clumsy and belated attempt to hood it, and when he caught her eye, they had exchanged amused glances. She had turned back to Father Edward, thinking about what a refreshingly pleasant young man Peter was and, more important, whether Hawise thought so, and how the day was fast approaching when they would have to start thinking about a match for her . . .
In the meantime, Father Edward, who had the bit between his teeth this morning, droned on and on with his sermon, and before long Rosa got distracted again, this time by a shaft of glorious sunlight shining through one of the belfry windows onto Hawise’s hair, giving her voluptuous curls such an astonishing gleam that it made her gasp in admiration. Sometimes she quite forgot how beautiful that hair was, how beautiful, in fact, her daughter was . . .
She turned around again, only this time casting a maternally critical eye over the other girls in the congregation, whom she found wanting in comparison. Ulf would tell her it was a mother’s bias, but it was nothing of the sort; she was very fond of those girls, had known most of them all their lives, but it was obvious to anyone with half an eye—even their own mothers—that not one was a patch on her Hawise.
In fact, now she came to think about it, they all looked much of a muchness these days; it was almost impossible to tell them apart . . . And then it dawned on her why that was, and her head whipped around a third time.
Of course! That was why! They all had their hair covered.
She turned back to Hawise, her hubris of a moment ago banished now that she realized as things stood, with a killer of young women on the loose, it probably wasn’t such a blessing to stand out from the crowd.
Her heart was pounding with such renewed anxiety that she could barely sit still and decided that, at the earliest opportunity, she would have a word with Hawise and insist that she follow the example of the others and wear a wimple in future.
But, when the time came, Hawise was nowhere to be seen.
She was about to interrupt Ulf and the blacksmith, make her excuses and go home, when she saw Ediva on the other side of the graveyard, beneath the old yew tree, playing with the children, laughing as they tugged on her skirts, spinning her around. The unexpectedly joyful sight changed her mind about going home and she set off toward them instead, dexterously weaving her way through the crowd, nodding politely to anyone she recognized and gathering snippets of conversation as she went—mostly about the weather, people wondering whether the cold snap would last until Christmas and whether or not it would snow. But there was also a great deal of conjecture about the dead girl, as people wondered who she was, where she had come from and how she had turned up dead in their river.
Just as she was trying to squeeze unnoticed past a particular group of women who were holding forth in the middle of the path through the gravestones, one noticed her.
“Rosa!”
She froze.
It was Magge, the thatcher’s wife, a garrulous woman who had a voice like a corncrake.
“Oh, Rosa, just the person! We was just talking about that poor girl,” Magge said, lowering her voice with such exaggerated reverence that the end of her sentence was more mouthed than spoken.
“Oh . . . Yes . . . the poor girl . . . ,” Rosa said, straining to look past her to make sure Ediva and the children were still there, hoping that, if she looked distracted enough, Magge might let her go.
But Magge had other ideas. In
fact, she had been looking out for her all morning. She assumed that Rosa, as wife of the village reeve, would be privy to information they were not and was determined to winkle it out of her . . .
“You see, Rosa,” Magge continued, lips pursed, arms folded across her ample chest, “we was wondering what Ulf thought about it.”
Rosa’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not sure there’s much for him to think,” she replied.
“Well.” Magge was undeterred. “Thing is, and not to put too fine a point on it, what we’re wonderin’ is: does ’e think she drowned or was she murdered? You see, we can’t help thinkin’ about Martha and all them rumors when they found ’er body, and nobody ever knew for sure what happened to ’er, did they?”
“Shh!” Rosa shocked even herself when her hand suddenly shot out and clamped itself over Magge’s mouth. “Don’t talk about Martha!” she hissed. “I shouldn’t ’ave to remind you, as it was my nephew what found the body and ’ad nightmares ever since, poor little mite . . . Martha drowned! That girl, too, if you want the truth! And tha’s all there is to say on the matter!”
She could feel herself turning crimson as her blood seethed with a combination of anger and contrition. It was wrong to get so angry and she shouldn’t have put her hand over Magge’s mouth like that, but she was so desperate not to be part of all the fear and rumormongering that had descended on the parish like a funeral pall ever since Longchamp’s investiture that, now that he was gone, she was damned if she was going to crawl back under it, even if they weren’t.
“Well! We don’t care what you say, Rosa.” The other women were joining in, their circle closing in around her.
The truth was that the others had never really liked her and, since her marriage to Ulf, had thought that she considered herself above them. Therefore her reluctance to contribute to the gossip that morning was all the excuse they needed to turn on her.
“I say she was murdered, and I’ll tell you another thing.” Buoyed by the support of the others, Magge had recovered from the hand-over-the-mouth incident and was wagging her finger threateningly in Rosa’s face. “I reckon if that Father Edward goes and looks at ’er now, ’e’ll find that she’s bleeding.”
A murmur of intrigue rippled around the group, making them huddle even closer together.
“What d’you think, then?” another asked with a furtive glance at the church. “Was he in there then? The murderer? In the church? Do you think so?”
“Oh! He was there all right, bor,” said yet another. “Wouldn’t doubt that for a moment.”
Captivated by the latest intrigue, they ignored Rosa’s howl of derision and barely noticed when she wandered off.
“Ridiculous!” she muttered to herself as she stomped off toward the yew tree. “Ridiculous!”
It was true that sometimes, even in her own mind, the boundaries of religion and superstition were a little blurred, but she had sense enough to know—married to Ulf, how could she not?—that a corpse did not spontaneously bleed in the presence of its murderer. Even so, she couldn’t help running through the faces of the men she had seen in church that morning, wondering who it might be.
Early the next morning the sheriff came to Elsford. His cavalcade clattered down the main street and, with a shrill blast of horns and unnecessary pomp, came to an abrupt halt at the church gate.
Father Edward—dragged from his bed only moments before by the alewife, who had heard the horses while she was emptying her chamber pots—arrived only just in time to greet him.
Stifling a yawn, he helped him from his horse and led him to the body.
The air in the crypt, already smelling of damp, became even more malodorous when Father Edward lit the fat-dipped tapers and it mingled with the stench of stale cooking.
The sheriff grimaced when it reached his delicate nostrils and vowed that, however poor the light was—and it was—he wouldn’t request any more in case it made things worse. When he had made his displeasure at the olfactory conditions clear to the young priest—wafting a pudgy, jewel-encrusted hand in front of his nose—he felt better. Anxious to get on and out as quickly as possible, he hastened over to the bier.
“Dead for how long, did you say?” he asked Father Edward as he pulled back the pall.
“Erm. I didn’t?” said Father Edward hesitantly, trying to remember what Ulf had told him.
“Hmm . . . Ah well. No matter,” the sheriff said, whipping back the last of the sheet and exposing the body. “Poor girl!” he murmured, looking down on her. So young! So sad! . . . So . . . Goodness, the light really was awfully poor! He blinked and leaned in closer . . . So terribly . . . Eughhh . . . Mottled around the edges!
He recoiled involuntarily, crossing himself and hoping Father Edward hadn’t noticed this moment of frailty, but it couldn’t be helped; that skin of hers was definitely on the turn, and he prayed, for all their sakes, that she could be buried soon.
“Name? Occupation?” he barked.
“Unknown,” Father Edward replied, stifling another yawn.
“Drowning!” the sheriff pronounced, and hastily whipped the sheet back over the body.
“Drowning!” Allie screeched when Ulf told her the verdict. “How could he possibly say it was drowning? Is he blind? . . . But . . . but . . . what about the contusions on her neck? What about the fracture, for goodness’ sake? How could he possibly have missed that?”
Watching her pace up and down, spitting vitriol about the sheriff, Ulf was reminded of Adelia, who behaved very similarly when her blood was up.
“The man’s a pillard!” Allie spat, stamping her foot in frustration. “Stupid, blind bastard! I bet he hardly looked at her!”
Ulf had been equally frustrated when Father Edward gave him the news, but he wasn’t surprised; it was what he had expected, after all, and, when it came down to it, another verdict was unlikely to make any difference.
Allie stopped pacing for a moment.
“What are we going to do?” she asked.
“Not much we can do.” He shrugged. “But there is some good news,” he added. “She’s been identified at least. Turns out she’s the tanner’s daughter from March; been missing for weeks apparently. Her parents came to fetch her today.”
“That’s something, I suppose,” Allie replied vaguely.
She was standing with her back to him at the window, apparently deep in thought, when the implication of what he had just told her struck her and she spun around.
“But, Ulf. That’s it! This girl had also been missing for some time but when I examined her, it was obvious she’d only been dead, what, a day . . . two at the most. I told you, remember? Well, that was the same with Martha! And if, as I think we have to assume, Martha was murdered, too, then it looks increasingly likely that both girls were killed by the same person!”
Chapter 30
When he left the solar Ulf went to look for Hawise. When he couldn’t find her in any of her usual haunts he began to worry and was relieved when he eventually found her in the courtyard sitting between Peter and Bertha, the heavily pregnant laundress, on the fishpond wall.
As he started toward them, a dairy maid in hot pursuit of a goose she was trying to herd into a pen ready for tomorrow’s pot darted across his path. The squawk it occasioned when she had to resort to flinging the hem of her skirt over its head to stop it was loud enough to interrupt Hawise midsentence.
She looked up.
“There you are,” Ulf said irritably.
“Sorry, Pa. But I had to come out here to help Bertha. Her belly’s too big to carry much nowadays, see.”
Ulf glanced at Bertha’s incapacitating belly and then at Peter, who, for reasons he didn’t understand but found irritating nonetheless, started blushing as he scrambled to his feet.
“Did you get that bird o’ yours back the other day?” Ulf asked.
“Thank you, I did,” Peter replied, the blush deepening. “Lucky I did, too. She wouldn’t ’ave lasted much longer if Mistress Allie hadn’t
spotted her when she did.”
The day before the girl’s body had been found, during one of her archery lessons Allie had spotted a falcon with its jesses snagged on a tree branch. Worried that unless it was rescued it would die of starvation, she rushed back to the mews to tell Peter. When she couldn’t find him, she alerted Ulf to it instead.
“Aye, well,” Ulf said grudgingly. “Glad it turned out all right, in that case, but don’t let it happen again. Mistress Allie was very upset by it.”
He turned to Hawise, holding out his hand to help her up.
“Come on. Let’s be off. It’s getting late.”
On the way home he told her about the sheriff.
“Best not mention it to your mother though,” he warned. “Not with her nerves the way they are at the moment. She knows, o’ course, but she won’t want to dwell on it.”
It was dusk when they reached the outskirts of the village, quiet at last, the most peaceful time of the day, Ulf had always thought, all the animals safely put away for the night, all the villagers settled around their hearths, the only sound for miles around the occasional hoot of an owl and the faint, low drone of conversation drifting out of the rush-lit cottages.
They walked in companionable silence until they got to the church, which, unusually, still had candles burning in the windows.
Ulf stopped at the gate.
“Mind if I look in for a moment? I’ve been meaning to have a word with the pastor and by the looks of things he’s still there . . .”
He wanted to remind Father Edward, who could be very forgetful at times, to lock the font before he retired for the evening. Someone had been stealing holy water from it, for the purposes of witchcraft, it was presumed.
He left Hawise on the porch and went inside, surprised to find it unusually brightly lit and that the usual godly scent of damp stone and incense was corrupted, this evening, by heavy notes of beeswax from all the candles burning in the wall sconces. Nor, as he expected, was Father Edward alone; rather he was standing on the chancel steps, his back to Ulf, deep in conversation with another young man, who was also in clerical robes.
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