“Everything that can be done has,” Adelia said. “They held a search, and a vigil of course . . . but so far . . . nothing . . .”
She glanced at Allie, saw how close to tears she was, and looked away again quickly.
“On the other hand,” she said, striving for a chink of brightness in the otherwise impenetrable gloom, “we’re hoping that she’s still alive, of course, and that—” She broke off, realizing how ridiculous she sounded.
Even if Hawise was still alive, unless they found her soon, which seemed increasingly unlikely, she wouldn’t stay that way much longer, and although she dared not say so, all this futile hoping was doing nothing but prolonging what deep down she suspected was an inevitable agony.
Rowley glanced at Allie, too, saw the misery etched in her face and felt his heart melt along with his lifelong resolve that he would never encourage them in their endeavors. He took a deep breath, galvanizing himself for what he was about to do.
“Very well,” he said. “What do we know so far?”
Allie’s face brightened. She wanted to leap up and fling her arms around his neck; despite their differences there were times when she thought her father was really quite wonderful.
“We’ve made some notes,” she said, seizing on his concession with undisguised delight and, at the same time, squeezing her mother’s knee conspiratorially under the table. “I’ll fetch them for you, shall I?”
Chapter 51
Hawise’s errant knight had been so busy lately—fording rivers, fighting tournaments, slaying dragons and the like, not to mention traveling the kingdom in search of, well, whatever he was searching for—that if it weren’t for the number of dead maidens he left in his wake, she might even have begun to admire him.
But six women were dead, and time was running out, and, crucially, so was her imagination.
In the original story, as far as she remembered it, there hadn’t been a single dragon, tournament or battle, but in hers the knight’s journey was now so protracted that he could have traveled to the ends of the earth and back in half the time. The strange thing was that, although she knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that her life depended on her ability to eke it out for as long as she could, she couldn’t bring herself to kill another girl, and yet . . . there was only one left, and he was impatient for her. She could feel that, too.
During the endless dark days and weeks of her captivity—what, five weeks? Six now? His visits had become so erratic that she had lost all sense of time or any method of marking it, other than the dreary cycle of hunger and fatigue, times when her stomach burned and tiredness torched her eyes and her mind played tricks on her, making the balm of sleep impossible—she sat, head hanging like an aged dog’s, waiting for the draft on her face when the door opened and he came to her again.
“And he came to a clearing in the old oak wood, where he saw a maiden so dazzlingly beautiful—hair the color of ripened corn, skin as pale as moonlight—that he had to shield his eyes just to look at her.”
“Number seven?”
Hawise nodded wearily, irritated by his interruption, realizing that, in a strange way, she was impatient for the end, too.
When he settled down again she continued.
“‘Fair maid,’ said the knight when he recovered his tongue, ‘go at once to your father’s house and fetch all the gold you can carry and two of his finest horses and bring them to me.’
“And because the maid was as true as she was fair, she did as he asked, returning a little while later riding a pale white steed, carrying an enormous sack of gold and leading a dapple gray.
“‘Ride on, ride on,’ said the errant knight, climbing astride the dapple gray. ‘Ride on to the deep blue sea, there six pretty maids I have killed and the seventh you will be.’”
“How many more are there then?” he interrupted again.
Under the cover of the darkness Hawise rolled her eyes.
“Wait and see,” she said brightly, hiding her irritation. “There’s a long way to go yet. You’ll have to be patient like the knight, won’t you?”
It was a lie, of course, but by the grace of God, she hoped to come up with something before the time came.
Chapter 52
“This is what we don’t understand, Rowley,” said Adelia.
It was very late but they were still poring over Allie’s notes in the hall, only this time remembering to keep their voices low so as not to disturb the servants snoring softly in its niches.
“This,” she repeated, pressing her finger onto the line in the vellum where the letters “DV” were written. “For some reason he carved this on the second girl’s wrist postmortem, only we don’t know why.”
“His initials?” Rowley suggested to a withering look from Adelia.
“Well it could be,” Allie added hastily. Since her father had always been so disapproving, not to mention squeamish, about their death investigations, and because she was grateful that, for once, and for the first time in his life, he was actually willing to help, she didn’t want Adelia discouraging him. Besides, his contribution might be invaluable; after all, once, on Crusade, he successfully tracked a murderer all the way across the Holy Land.
“The trouble though, Pa,” she continued, “is that we can’t think of anyone with those initials, and since we have to assume that whoever is doing this is local, we’ve rather ruled it out.”
Rowley shrugged, sat up straight on his stool and yawned. He didn’t say so, but actually, he would have been quite happy to be discouraged. He had never approved of what they did and had surprised even himself when he’d agreed to help. He was also terribly tired and finding it hard to think straight—Penda’s generous helping of wine at supper was a contributing factor—and longing for peace and quiet. In fact, just then, he was debating whether or not he would be able to sneak off to the guest chamber unnoticed, and was slyly easing his buttocks off the stool in order to do so, when a thought struck him.
“Deus vult!” he exclaimed, forgetting to lower his voice in his excitement and prompting Adelia to scowl and press a finger to her lips.
“Shhh!” she hissed, about to silence him completely, when curiosity got the better of her. “‘Deus’ what did you say, Rowley?”
“Deus vult,” he repeated. “‘DV.’ The initials or letters or whatever they are.”
“Meaning what? . . . At least, I know what they mean, but what’s the significance?”
“That, my clever old darling,” he said, stifling another yawn, “I do not know. That’s your business. It just popped into my head. All I know is that it’s the old Crusader’s cry, meaning ‘God wills it,’ which may—or may not—imply that the man you’re looking for took the cross . . . You never know, could narrow things down a bit.”
Allie and Adelia exchanged glances before Adelia suddenly leapt to her feet and ran around the table to fling her arms around his neck.
“You’re not the fool you look, either,” she said, giving him a robust and noisy kiss. “You might even be onto something.”
But Rowley shook his head. “Oh no, not me,” he said, wagging his finger at her. “You. I’ve done my bit and now I’m going to bed.”
His respite, however, was short-lived. Adelia was still chuntering about the initials when she came up to bed a little later on.
“Do you really think the man we’re looking for might be a Crusader?” she asked, sitting down heavily on the bed beside him—just in case slamming the door and thinking aloud hadn’t been enough to wake him.
Rowley opened his eyes reluctantly. “How would I know?” he said. “We don’t even know if that’s what it means. It might be something else entirely. It was just a thought, and frankly, one I’m beginning to regret.”
But Adelia ignored him. “And yet it makes sense,” she continued. “Whoever it is that’s going around slaughtering these girls will have some peculiar justification for why he’s doing it—however corrupt or perverse it might seem to us—they always do . .
.” She paused in thought for a moment. “But if you’re right about the initials, then perhaps he kills them because he believes ‘God wills it’ somehow, which would be reason enough for a woman-hater.” She broke off again as another thought occurred to her: “I think I ought to talk to Penda.”
“Not now surely?” said Rowley plaintively.
“No, darling,” Adelia replied, smiling to herself as she closed the curtains around the bed. “That can wait until the morning.”
That morning the gradual appearance of a weak sun cleared away the mist in time for Rowley and the ever-faithful Walt to set off on a tour of the diocese, to see for themselves the devastation the interdict had wrought.
Rowley hadn’t been looking forward to it, not just because he expected to find a community cast into darkness, but because he had never been comfortable in the Fens and he never would.
Interdict or no interdict, as far as he was concerned this stretch of the east wasn’t a place one could trust. Even the ground was treacherous; one moment’s inattention, one false step, and a person could end up in a bog deep enough to suck him into the bowels of hell. Quite what Allie and Adelia found so enchanting here, he would never understand, although he had a sneaking suspicion that it had something to do with the natural anarchy of the place, which, he presumed, amused them.
They were riding warily down a narrow wooded track so beset by thorns that a starving greyhound would have been lucky not to have its flanks ripped off, when the incongruously sweet song of a thrush lifted his spirits. He stood up in his stirrups to look for it, an unexpected bright spot in an otherwise dismal morning, but it was hidden from view, lost somewhere in an impenetrable thicket of trees and bushes where—never mind songbirds—any number of robbers and outlaws might be lying in wait. He sat down again with a nostalgic pang for the gentle countryside of his own diocese in Hertfordshire, where the ground always did what you expected and the prevailing rule that no tree should encroach on a highway by more than a single bow shot was invariably respected.
The rest of the morning was unrelentingly drear as they rode through innumerable villages already scarred by the interdict, where church bells no longer rang to summon the faithful and church doors were barricaded against their worshippers with vicious-looking sheaves of brambles, and where in graveyards makeshift coffins were hung in trees or left to rot on walls.
In the last churchyard they came to, they saw a tiny shrouded bundle tucked into the nexus of a yew tree branch. A newborn baby, judging by the size, unbaptized and unburied but not, apparently, unmourned; beneath it a young woman was keeping vigil in the bitter cold.
Rowley had seen enough and, with a heavy heart, turned his horse around and set off back to Elsford.
The first thing Adelia did when she woke up to find Rowley had left was to go in search of Penda.
She found her eventually in the buttery, where she was arguing bitterly with an elderly man about a pheasant, which, judging by the way it was dangling limply from her fist, was either dead or pretending to be.
“Your sack!” Penda shouted, shoving a grubby-looking rag into the old man’s chest. “My pheasant. Now bugger off and don’t let me catch you at it again.”
When the old man wandered off clutching the sack and muttering truculently under his breath, Adelia gave Penda a moment or two to calm down and then announced her presence.
“I thought you hanged poachers around here,” she said.
“I do usually,” Penda said, lifting the bird onto a hook beside a row of others. “But not that one. Best napper I’ve ever ’ad. Wait ’til you see my tablecloths. Wouldn’t want to lose ’im.” She wiped her hands down the front of her kirtle and turned to Adelia. “What can I do for you, then, mistress?”
Adelia told her about the discussion the night before. “So I was wondering if you could think of anyone around here who went on Crusade.”
Penda frowned as she thought about it. “Well,” she said after a moment, “it’s hard to remember ’em all. There was a great mort of ’em went from here after the call from the old bishop.”
Before he had died the former bishop of Ely had famously asked every man in the county to take the cross. The call had been widely and enthusiastically received by a variety of men: those looking for lands or fortune, those hoping for excitement and adventure and those simply looking to escape nagging wives, not to mention a host of criminals who, given the choice between taking the cross and having their crimes forgotten, or going to prison, left for the Holy Land without a backward glance.
“Well,” Penda said at last, “Lord Peverell went, and so did Sir William. But we can rule them out . . . Oh, I know Allie don’t much care for Sir William but ’e’s not a murderer, at least I don’t think so. And then, from Elsford there was Sir Stephen, but ’e don’t ’ave the appetite for wickedness . . . or the energy, come to that.”
She broke off as she thought some more and then added brightly: “Oh, I nearly forgot, there was Peter, too . . . my falconer,” she explained when she saw Adelia looking at her blankly. “Landed up at Elsford on ’is way back . . . Poor sod didn’t make the fortune he’d been hopin’ for but didn’t fancy goin’ into the church, either, so ’e come to me instead.” She broke off, disconcerted by Adelia’s expression.
“And you think—” Adelia began.
“No.” Penda cut her off sharply. “I know what you’re thinking. But ’e’s a good lad, that one, and a bloody good falconer. You wanted to know who went and ’e was one of ’em, that’s all.”
She turned her back and started fussing with one of the dead pheasants, which Adelia took as her cue to leave, thanking her for her time and wondering how unhappy it would make her if she knew that the information she had provided had just catapulted her esteemed falconer to the top of the list of suspects.
“Peter!” Allie looked shocked when Adelia told her her latest theory. “Well!” she added on a heavy breath. “I knew he was irritating but I didn’t think he was a murderer. What does Penda think?”
“Oh, she wouldn’t have it,” Adelia said. She was staring out of the guest chamber window, the only room where privacy and a view over the mews were guaranteed. “So, we’ll have to be a little bit circumspect. And, of course, at this stage, it’s only a suspicion.”
“An interesting one though,” said Allie.
Over the next few days they took turns at the window, careful not to arouse the suspicion of the others, who, they felt, were anxious enough already without worrying about a killer in their midst.
Apart from the window vigil they came up with ruses to take them to the mews whenever possible, but on every occasion found Peter behaving quite normally and unmurderously, greeting them cheerfully whenever he saw them.
“I might be wrong, you know,” Adelia admitted one day when she had stood at the window watching him do nothing more sinister than train a falcon to the lure. “It has been known to happen. I even suspected your father was a murderer once.”
Allie sighed. “I know. I’ve heard that story a hundred times,” she said wearily.
Allie was becoming despondent as it dawned on her increasingly that they were latching on to the idea of Peter as a suspect out of sheer desperation and in the absence of anything or anyone more plausible to go on. And yet, if Peter wasn’t the murderer—and it looked increasingly likely that he wasn’t—they were no closer to finding the real culprit than they had been when Adelia arrived.
Chapter 53
Hawise rarely opened her eyes these days, or nights, or whatever they were; there seemed no point. The insuperable darkness was as shocking now as it had been at first, and the thin barrier of flesh she could close against it was the last vestige of her control; otherwise she was as helpless as a mole in a trap, an irony that, in the long, dismal hours, she had had time to consider.
Her only comfort was that it was going to end soon, all of it, her life included; she could feel it, particularly today, in the deep dull ache in her belly, the sign
that she was about to start another bleed.
It would be her third since her captivity, and each time it inflamed him, as if she had willfully conjured the blood to make herself dirty and untouchable. He wouldn’t tolerate another; besides, she was coming to the end of her story.
But when the door opened and she heard his footsteps, something in the lightness of their tread told her that, for now at least, the trepidation was unwarranted. He was in a good mood.
“Make room,” he said brightly, nestling beside her on the palliasse, rubbing his hands together. “We’re getting to the best bit, aren’t we?”
“We are indeed,” she said, surprising herself because she meant it. In a sense, of course, they were—or she was—and as long as the end wasn’t too protracted or painful, she almost welcomed it.
“Now, do you remember where they were?” she asked. “The knight and the maiden?”
“The sea,” he replied.
“Good,” she said, pulling her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them, ready to begin. “That’s right. They’d reached the sea.
“In the rosy twilight they rode their horses over the golden sand to the water’s edge, and when they dismounted, the maiden turned to the knight.
“‘I have always wanted to swim in the sea,’ she said, gazing at it wistfully. ‘All my life, but I never have. If this is to be my last day, my last wish, as I believe it is, will you grant it to me?’
“After some considerable thought the knight agreed that he would, but only on the condition that she take off her silken robes, lest the salt water spoil their incomparable beauty.
“But the maiden gave a gasp of horror, clapping her hand over her pretty mouth. She had never been naked in front of a man before.
“‘If I must take off all my clothes,’ she replied when she had recovered from the shock of the suggestion, ‘you must promise to turn your back and not to look at me. After all, it’s unseemly for a man to gaze upon a woman when she is naked unless they are married . . .’”
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