As if to underline his point, the wind gusted suddenly. There was a creak, a slam and a click, and the charnel house was plunged into darkness. The dog whimpered, Delilah made a noise that sounded very much like disgust, and Geoffrey sighed in weary resignation.
‘Oh dear,’ said Juhel. ‘Now what?’
For several moments, Geoffrey could not even see the door, so complete was the darkness, but then he detected a faint rectangle of light. He made his way towards it. It did not take long, however, to realize that the latch was beyond him. He began to grope around for something to use as a battering ram, irritated that Juhel was more interested in crooning to his bird and did nothing to help.
Eventually, he grasped something that was the right shape for battering, but when he tugged at it, he discovered it was a leg. He released it hastily, but the next thing his tentative hands encountered was a face, cold and rigid. Abandoning the search, he returned to the door, swearing under his breath when increasingly violent tugs and thumps failed to make an impact.
‘You will not succeed with brute force,’ said Juhel. ‘Let me try.’
There was a series of scrapes and taps, then the latch clinked and the door swung open. Geoffrey regarded him warily, but Juhel was more interested in removing Delilah than in explaining how he had done it. He waved away Geoffrey’s thanks and started back to his hut, muttering sweet nothings to his feathered companion.
When man and bird had gone, the dog darted to Geoffrey’s side, winding around his legs and leaping up to rest its forepaws on his chest so it might be petted. It was not normally affectionate, and Geoffrey saw its experience had seriously discomfited it.
‘You have had a miserable time,’ he said sympathetically, rubbing its head. ‘Trapped by a chicken! You always were a cowardly hound, but I never thought to see you sink this low.’
‘Sir Geoffrey,’ came an uneasy voice that made him jump in alarm. It was Galfridus, with Aelfwig and Ralph behind him. They carried a box and had come for one of the dead. ‘Did I hear you chatting to the corpses? Aelfwig told me you were recovered.’
‘I have heard tales of men who talk to cadavers,’ said Ralph darkly. ‘Sometimes they encourage them to walk around. Is that what you have been doing, Sir Geoffrey? It would explain why there are suddenly so many Saxons in La Batailge.’
‘None of them are corpses,’ said Galfridus wryly. ‘Corpses do not eat, and these are devouring our stores at a rate of knots. I cannot imagine why the gatekeepers allow so many in.’
‘I was talking to my dog,’ said Geoffrey. He frowned, thinking they were not the first to comment on the number of Saxons. Were they men rallying to Magnus and Harold? He did not have time to ponder, however, because Galfridus was regarding him with a shocked expression.
‘Dogs are not permitted in here! They have a tendency to. . to ravage, if you understand me.’
Geoffrey hoped the conclusions he had drawn from the animal’s poor condition were correct and watched with considerable anxiety as Aelfwig pulled away the blankets that covered the bodies. There were three of them: Edith and two men. Neither of the men was familiar: one was old and looked as though he had long been ill — Geoffrey assumed it was his rival for the abbey’s last coffin — and the other was a hefty, thick-set man. He tried to disguise his relief that all three appeared to be unchewed.
‘I owe you an apology,’ he said to Galfridus. ‘I was not myself when I first arrived and regret any offence I may have given.’
Some of the rigid wariness faded from Galfridus’s face. ‘Your apology is accepted, although I suspect it was honesty, not illness, that made you refer to my amethyst horse as the work of a baboon. And to say that you had seen better art in brothels.’
‘I came to see if I recognize the man who was killed,’ said Geoffrey, to disguise his mortification. He wondered what else he had said.
‘He died clutching a dagger,’ said Galfridus. ‘But Sir Roger says he is not one of the pirates.’
Geoffrey went to inspect the body more closely, wincing when he saw Bale’s savage slash to its throat. It was a man in his late thirties with a strong, determined face. Its clothes were too tight for its muscular frame, and Geoffrey assumed that either someone had exchanged them after the man had died or he had borrowed them, perhaps as a disguise. When he inspected the fellow’s hair, he saw it had been dyed: in places it was black, in others yellow. He turned over one of the hands, which was soft-palmed with traces of ink on the thumb. The face was entirely unfamiliar, and Geoffrey could not imagine why this man should have been looming over his sickbed with a weapon. However, there were certain conclusions he could draw.
‘He was not a labourer, but a man who could write. I am not certain, but I saw a burly fellow rather like this on the beach with the villagers. His yellow hair suggests Saxon-’
‘Oh, Lord,’ said Galfridus, coming to inspect the dead man’s face himself. ‘It is Gyrth! I had no idea! Move him into the light, Ralph, so I can see better. Yes, it is him. But why is he wearing a peasant’s clothes, and where is his habit?’
Geoffrey looked from Galfridus to Ralph to Aelfwig, trying to work out what was happening. ‘Are you saying that one of your monks tried to stab me? But Aelfwig said he did not recognize him.’
‘I do not,’ objected Aelfwig. ‘I have never seen him before — I am sure of it!’
‘He was a novice,’ explained Ralph. ‘Or he wanted to be.’
Geoffrey was sceptical. ‘He is older than me. How could he be a novice?’
Galfridus shrugged. ‘Men come when God calls them, and there is no statutory age to serve Him. However, it helps if you bring a little something to smooth the way, and Gyrth offered the abbey a handsome bracelet — solid gold and studded with rubies.’
‘Magnus and Harold mentioned a Gyrth,’ said Geoffrey. ‘He was Earl of East Anglia.’
‘Actually he was not,’ said Ralph. ‘His father held the title, but this Gyrth never did, although he never stopped railing at the injustice of his disinheritance. He was quite tedious about it.’
‘Then he came to us six months ago,’ elaborated Galfridus, ‘and professed to have had a dream in which God ordered him to take the cowl.’
‘I was unsure whether his calling was genuine,’ finished Ralph, ‘so I recommended that he be sent to the chapel at Lullitune, to see how serious he was.’
‘Why did no one recognize him when he was killed?’ asked Geoffrey.
‘Because no one here had ever met him, except Galfridus and me,’ explained Ralph. ‘We sent him off to Lullitune the day he arrived, and although we heard that a man had been killed in the hospital, it did not occur to either of us to come and inspect the corpse.’
Geoffrey was bemused. ‘So why was he here wearing someone else’s clothes and with black dye on his hair?’
Galfridus shrugged again. ‘He is one of those Saxons for whom the fire of battle still burns. Perhaps he took against you because you are Norman. Do you think he murdered poor Edith, too?’
Geoffrey was surprised Galfridus should think he could supply solutions. ‘I do not know. I was ill at the time.’
‘Sir Roger says you have a way with murders,’ said Ralph. ‘And we would greatly appreciate any help. In return, we shall charge you nothing for the medicines Aelfwig provided, and, as Sir Roger told us you lost all your money in the shipwreck, this is a good offer. Just look at Edith’s body and see whether you can throw any light on her cruel death.’
Geoffrey wished Roger had kept his mouth shut. But the three monks were looking hopefully at him, and he felt a certain need to make amends for his uncharacteristically caustic criticism of Galfridus’s sculptures.
‘She was strangled,’ he said, walking to Edith’s body and noting that the red ribbon was still embedded in her neck. Someone had washed her face and dressed her hair, but the cord remained in place. He looked up questioningly, wondering why no one had removed it.
‘I did not like to poke her about too much,’ explain
ed Aelfwig, embarrassed. ‘She is a woman, you see, and I took a vow to stay away from those.’
‘Surely you have female patients from time to time?’ asked Geoffrey.
‘Well, yes, but I am not tempted by those,’ replied Aelfwig enigmatically. Geoffrey decided he did not want to know more and applied himself to his task.
Whoever had throttled Edith had done so with considerable force. Broken fingernails showed she had struggled frantically to prise the ribbon loose, and there were corresponding scratches on her throat that she had put there herself. There were no other marks that he could see, and he had no intention of looking under her clothes when he was surrounded by monks. He stepped back with an apologetic shrug. Roger accused Lucian, Philippa accused Juhel, and the monks were suspicious of Gyrth, but there was nothing on Edith’s body to incriminate any of them.
‘Gyrth was strong,’ said Ralph. ‘He had a restrained tension that might have exploded.’
But Geoffrey was sceptical. ‘That means Gyrth strangled a woman with ribbon and then tried to stab a man. Two different modes of execution.’
‘What is the significance of that?’ asked Galfridus.
‘Most killers confine themselves to one,’ began Geoffrey, then stopped abruptly because he did not want the monks to think him overly familiar with such matters. Besides, it was too much of a coincidence that Edith should have been killed in exactly the same way as her husband.
He started to back away, loath to spend more time in the charnel house than necessary, but his dog, which had declined to stray far from his side, tripped him up. He could have saved himself by grabbing Gyrth’s bier, but it was unstable, and instinct told him that dragging a corpse to the ground would not be well received by the monastics. So he twisted to one side and landed on his knees. This placed him at eye level with Edith’s left hand, which he had not inspected.
Caught under one of her nails, and held there by dried blood, was a tiny thread of red. For a moment, he thought it was a fibre from the ribbon around her neck, but it was darker and made from cloth rather than cord. He was almost certain the fragment had come from her killer and that she had clawed it away during her death throes. He pointed it out to the three monks.
‘This means Gyrth is innocent,’ said Aelfwig. ‘There is nothing red on his corpse.’
‘He could have changed,’ suggested Ralph. ‘Although it makes no sense to remove clothes after one killing if you intend to indulge in another.’
‘I fear it means Edith’s murderer is still at large,’ said Galfridus, crossing himself. ‘God help us!’
Geoffrey left the monks to their ruminations. With his dog trailing at his heels, he wandered towards the battlefield, craving time alone to think. A pair of wading birds in the bogs near the fishponds released eerie cries that reminded him of Roger’s marsh fays. As he walked, he saw part of a sword blade jutting from the grass. He crouched to inspect it and realized the ground held many such relics from the battle, rusty and ancient and gradually being claimed by the earth.
He reached the top of a ridge and sat on a tree stump, considering what he had learned. Gyrth had offered himself as an abbey monk, but when Galfridus sent him to a distant chapel instead, he had returned in disguise. Geoffrey was fairly sure Gyrth was the burly figure he had seen after the shipwreck — with the man in the green hat. However, since he had done nothing to warrant an attack from strangers, he could only suppose that it was a case of mistaken identity.
The ink on his fingers showed Gyrth was literate, not someone who worked the land. Had he agreed to rally to Magnus and Harold, perhaps after promises to see him reinstated as Earl of East Anglia? Was that why he had tried to pass himself off as a man with a mission to serve God? To infiltrate La Batailge with a view to furthering whatever Magnus and Harold had in mind? If so, then it seemed the plot had been set in motion months ago.
Who had been Gyrth’s target? Magnus or Harold, because he thought they were failing to act quickly enough? Or was he acting under Magnus’s orders to dispatch Harold as a rival? Magnus had made no effort to disguise his satisfaction that Ulf would no longer be an issue.
And what about Edith? Were her killer and Vitalis’s the same? Geoffrey believed so, because of the ribbon. But who could it be? At one point, he had suspected the women, but their circumstances showed it was not in their interests to have killed the old man. Philippa said she had held him in her arms and had believed him dead. He had probably fainted, and the killer had moved in to finish him off when the women had fled from the drenching squall. Geoffrey was sure Philippa had not killed Vitalis — and neither had Edith, assuming the killer was one and the same.
Roger believed Lucian to be guilty, and Geoffrey admitted the monk’s behaviour was odd. There was also the pectoral cross Lucian said had been stolen, which the sailors had claimed was base metal. Or had they? Geoffrey could not decide whether that had been a genuine discussion or an imagined one. He frowned impatiently. It was hard enough to make sense of the situation, without being unsure which conversations had actually taken place.
And what about Juhel, whose friend was a spy for Belleme? Would he strangle a woman? He would according to Philippa, who also saw him as Paisnel’s murderer. Geoffrey tried to recall whether Lucian or Juhel had ever worn a garment of scarlet, but nothing sprang to mind. Of course, Edith had owned a red cloak herself, so perhaps the strand came from her own clothes, not the killer’s. Philippa had claimed the cloak, but that had been after Edith was dead, and Geoffrey doubted she would have been permitted to don it while her wealthier friend was still alive.
He turned his mind to the ribbon that had killed Vitalis and Edith. He pulled out the piece Bale had taken from the old man’s body and turned it over in his hands. Juhel was right to say there was a lot of it around. Edith had owned some, donated by Paisnel, and so had Juhel. Had ribbon been used to kill her because her murderer knew it had dispatched her husband and he was trying to create confusion?
But the deaths of Vitalis and Edith were irrelevant to the brewing Saxon rebellion. Geoffrey wondered how far Breme had travelled. He hoped his message would be taken seriously, because he was becoming increasingly convinced that the danger to Henry was real. He decided he would leave La Batailge the following morning and deliver his own account.
His mind turned to the battle that had raged over the ground in front of him some thirty-seven years before, changing England for ever. The ridge on which he sat was a superb vantage point, and the geography of the area explained why two fairly evenly matched forces had taken the best part of a day to decide the victor.
He was not alone for long. Several monks were strolling on the field, either singly or in groups, and one laboured up the ridge towards him.
‘You are Godric Mappestone’s son,’ said the monk. ‘I am Brother Wardard and I understand you want to speak to me.’
Geoffrey stood and bowed, but now the man was in front of him he did not know how to put his questions. He gestured that Wardard should sit on the tree stump and stared across the battlefield, wondering what it had been like when the monk had been a warrior waiting to advance. Wardard fumbled in his pouch and drew out a piece of dried meat, which he flung to the dog.
As the monk watched the animal eat, Geoffrey studied him. He must have been nearing his eighth decade but was still impressive. He was tall, strong and erect, although lines of pain etched around his mouth indicated his health was not all it might have been. He had obviously been a fine specimen in his prime, and confidence, nobilesse and dignity were still present. His eyes were alight with intelligence, and there was something about him that suggested he was still more soldier than monastic. Geoffrey understood why the monks of La Batailge had wanted him as their abbot.
‘You wanted to ask about your father,’ said Wardard eventually. ‘Sir Roger told me that Vitalis discussed Godric’s conduct during the battle. He should not have done.’
‘Vitalis was losing his wits,’ said Geoffrey, then realized he shoul
d moderate his tone. Wardard and Vitalis had been friends.
‘Illness had turned him self-absorbed and greedy, and the Vitalis you met was not the one who stood here and fought for the Conqueror. Do not think badly of him.’
Geoffrey inclined his head, although he would make up his own mind about Vitalis once he had heard the truth from Wardard.
‘It is wicked to denigrate a beloved father to a son,’ Wardard went on. ‘Dangerous, too — it is not unknown for sons to withdraw masses for their forbears’ souls when they learn certain things. I would not like such a fate to befall Godric’s beleaguered soul.’
‘Did you know him well?’
‘Did you?’ countered Wardard.
It was not an easy question to answer. Geoffrey had been sent away for knightly training at the age of twelve and had not met Godric again for twenty years. His memories were of an aggressive, brutal tyrant, who had ruled his household with a brooding temper and ready fists. They had never shared confidences, and even when he was dying, Godric had lied and schemed.
‘Not really,’ he replied eventually.
‘King Harold stood where you are now,’ said Wardard, after another silence. ‘He had come up in the night and chose to fight from this rise. His men stood close-packed, with their shields forming a solid wall. Duke William’s troops were down there, just out of range of the Saxon archers, and there was a bog between them. And then the Normans advanced.’
‘Up there, first,’ said Geoffrey, waving his hand towards the west, as he recalled Godric’s descriptions. ‘That was where the Bretons were stationed, and my father was with them. The main troops and Duke William were straight ahead.’
‘It was the Breton advance that almost saw the battle lost in its first hour,’ said Wardard. ‘They became mired in the bogs, then were forced to ride up this hill directly into the path of the Saxon archers. Their horses were unprotected, and most who reached the Saxon line were on foot, their mounts shot from under them. The Saxon counter-attack was savage, and it turned into a rout.’
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