Girl In A Red Tunic (11 page)

Josse returned and was briefed by de Gifford. Having as he did such favourable memories of the sheriff and trusting that the man was not causing a fuss about nothing, Josse agreed that they should begin asking all the people currently making use of the Abbey’s various services if the name Teb – or, come to that, Walter – Bell meant anything to them. In particular, whether it brought fear into their eyes. Leofgar and Brother Saul offered to help, and Saul said he would enrol the assistance of some of the other lay brothers; there were, after all, an awful lot of people to ask  ...

But in the end they had got no further than interviewing the first dozen or so pilgrims down in the Vale before they were overtaken by events.

     Two nuns, Sister Anne and Sister Phillipa, were on their way back from the tiny hamlet of Fernthe, accompanied by Brother Erse, the Abbey’s carpenter, and a young lay brother called Peter. They had met with a slight accident when almost within sight of the Abbey; Peter had tripped on a tree root and sprained his ankle. Erse had been of the opinion that, with the support of his stout shoulder, the lad would be up to hopping back to the Abbey if they gave it a while for the pain to subside but, not wanting the nuns to take a chill while they waited around in the cold, he urged them to hasten on to Hawkenlye. It had seemed unlikely that they would meet with any mishap so close to the Abbey’s walls, especially as their baskets were empty and no longer a target for hungry thieves, but if they did, Erse told them ‘to holler as loud as you can and I’ll come running’.

     They did as he suggested, as confident as he that nothing unexpected would happen.

     But it did. They rounded a curve of the track that ran along beside the Great Forest and walked straight into a body hanging by a rope from the branch of an oak tree. Sister Phillipa had the presence of mind to try to lift the man and take the weight off his neck; a good idea but in fact quite pointless since he had been dead for some time. Poor Sister Anne’s terrified screams echoed not only back to Erse, who dumped Peter on the ground and, habit flying up round his thighs, raced to help; they also echoed faintly in the cloisters of Hawkenlye Abbey, where people looked up in alarm and wondered what on earth had happened now.

     It would not be very long before at least some of them found out.

Chapter 6

Josse and Brother Saul were first on the scene. They had been speaking to a young family who had just arrived at Hawkenlye and they had run the distance from the Abbey gates up to the forest fringe with the speed of anxiety; Sister Anne had a scream to equal the last trump. Leofgar, who had been in the stables trying to get some of the icy, caked mud off Horace and his own horse, raced after them. Everyone had been too busy to notice, but Leofgar looked if anything even more tense than when he and his little family had arrived.

     Josse hastened to relieve Sister Phillipa of the weight of the body and Saul climbed up the oak tree and tried to undo the knot that bound the rope to the high branch. Leofgar, who had put his arm around Sister Anne to comfort her and in the hope of stopping her piercing screams, looked up briefly and, catching Saul’s eye, took a sheathed knife out of his belt and threw it to Saul, who deftly caught it. He sawed through the rope about two hands’ breadths from the knot and instantly the full weight of the body descended into Josse’s arms.

     Josse put his fingers to the throat and his ear to the gaping mouth, from which a blackened tongue protruded. As his senses confirmed what he already knew, Josse shook his head.

     He sensed that someone had come to stand close beside him and Sister Phillipa’s low voice said, ‘Did I not succeed in saving him, Sir Josse?’

     He laid the dead man carefully on the ground and, taking off his own cloak, spread it over the horrible spectacle of the ruined face. ‘Had you happened upon him soon after the rope tightened, your resourceful and brave action might well have helped, Sister,’ he replied. ‘But he is already cold and his limbs begin to take on the stiffness that follows death, so we must assure ourselves that any action we tried to take to save him came far too late.’

     ‘Sister Anne and I did not set out by this path,’ Sister Phillipa murmured. ‘Had we done so, we might have been in time.’

     Josse looked at her and noticed how pale she was. Shock, he reminded himself, can manifest itself in other ways than in hysterical screaming. Straightening up, he took hold of Sister Phillipa’s hand, which was cold and clammy. Thinking quickly, he leaned close to her and whispered, ‘Sister, we must get Sister Anne back to the Abbey for she is beside herself and is in need of the infirmarer’s calming draught. Will you see her back, if Brother Saul and Leofgar go with you?’

     ‘But that means you would be left alone with the body, Sir Josse!’ she exclaimed. ‘I will stay with you, for two together will be better than one alone.’

     She was courageous, there was no denying it, and he admired courage; indeed, he would have welcomed her company. But he did not want her to stay out there in the cold with him for the length of time it might take Saul to arrange and dispatch a party with a hurdle to fetch the body. ‘I will be quite all right, Sister,’ he assured her gently. ‘I have stood vigil by the dead many times and they do not frighten me.’

     Her eyes met his. A very small smile touched her lips and she said, ‘And you would rather not have the additional worry of a woman who might pass out on you.’

     He grinned back. ‘I have no fear of that, Sister. But you have had a disturbing experience and I would be reassured if I knew that you too were on your way to being tended by helping hands.’

     She bowed briefly. ‘Very well, I will go.’

     Brother Saul and Sister Anne had already started off down the path and now, for the first time, Josse looked over at Leofgar, about to ask him to take Sister Phillipa’s arm and help her along after them. What he saw quite surprised him, for Leofgar was almost as white as Sister Phillipa and he was staring down at the body as if he could see straight through the thick cloth of Josse’s cloak and was still studying the blackened, distorted features of the dead face. Perhaps, Josse thought, it is the first time he has seen violent death. Perhaps, despite the fine example of bravery set by Sister Phillipa, he cannot control his reactions. Well, if so, the sooner he puts distance between himself and the corpse, the better.

     ‘Leofgar?’ he said.

     The young man slowly turned his head towards Josse, although his eyes remained fixed on the body. ‘Yes?’

     ‘Leofgar, please take Sister Phillipa back to the Abbey.’ This time Josse put a little asperity into his tone and to his relief Leofgar responded. As the young man stepped around the corpse and approached the nun, his features seemed to unfreeze and he gave her a comradely smile. ‘Come, Sister,’ he said, holding out his hand for hers, ‘Sir Josse is right, there’s no need for more than one to stay on guard here. Let’s help each other back to the sanctuary of the Abbey walls.’

     She took his hand and Josse watched as the two of them strode off down the path, quickly catching up and overtaking Brother Saul and Sister Anne; Leofgar called out something, perhaps an assurance that he would alert the community to what had happened, and then he and Sister Phillipa, still rather touchingly holding hands, broke into a trot and hastened away. Leofgar might well have reacted like a green young lad on seeing the body, Josse mused, and I can’t really blame him for it was not a pleasant sight. But he’s pulled himself together, no doubt of that, and I am sure he will not falter again.

     Josse put the matter out of his mind. There would be only a brief time before the hurdle bearers arrived to take the body away and he had work to do. First he inspected the ground beneath the branch from which the body had been suspended, but it was hard with the dry cold and, in any case, any informative footprints there might have been had been obscured by the lightly shod feet of the two nuns, by Saul’s sandals and by the boots of Leofgar and Josse. No help there, he decided. Then he went to look around the trunk of the tree. There were the prints of Saul’s feet; he had broken the thin ice on the edge of an all but dried out puddle and the marks of the hobnails on the thick soles of the lay brother’s sandals had made a sliding pattern in the mud.

     There was another footprint too.

     Josse hurried back to the dead man and studied his feet. He wore filthy boots of poor quality leather and the uppers had pulled away from the soles in one or two places. The backs of the boots were trodden down, as if the man had been in the habit of pushing his feet carelessly into them. Grimacing at the task, both because it took some force and because the man stank, Josse pulled the right boot off the dead foot. Then he carried it over to the base of the oak tree and compared it with the footprint there.

     Interesting.

     He laid the boot down beside the corpse – putting it back on the pale, naked and filthy foot would take time that he did not have and, besides, the infirmarer and her nurses would in any case soon be stripping the corpse in preparation for burial – and then he spat on his hands and shinned up the tree. He edged gingerly along the branch and, at the point where the knot was still tied to it, settled himself securely, winding his legs firmly together beneath the branch and, holding on with one hand, bending down to inspect the knot.

     He traced the way in which the rope had been tied. That was interesting, too. Then he spotted something else. Leaning down, he teased out the small but revealing thing that was caught up in a strand of the knotted rope and carefully tucked it inside his tunic. He pushed himself back along the branch – funny how it seemed to be even further from the ground now that he was up there – and as he slid back down the oak tree’s trunk, he heard the hurdle bearers coming along the track.

Later, he and the Abbess waited together in the infirmary, outside the recess where Sister Euphemia had ordered the lay brothers to put the corpse. She would strip the dead man, she had said, have a preliminary look at him and invite the Abbess and Josse to join her when she was ready. She had just sent Sister Beata to fetch them and, as they waited there, the curtains parted and the infirmarer stood back to let them approach the cot where the body lay.

     There was a strong smell of rosemary, combining refreshingly with some other flowery scent that Josse thought was geranium.

     ‘We’ve washed him,’ Sister Euphemia murmured. ‘He was lice-ridden and I didn’t want the little devils spreading.’

     ‘Quite so,’ said the Abbess. Josse, glancing at her, did not miss the swift expression of disgust that momentarily crossed her face. Then, like her, he turned his attention to the dead man.

     The flesh was white and sparse; he had been a lean man, not very tall. Josse stared at the skinny arms and looked for several moments at the hands and wrists. The limbs were stunted and the legs slightly bowed, an effect often seen, Josse reflected, in the bodies of the poor who had never had quite enough to eat. Sister Euphemia had discreetly placed a folded sheet across the man’s lower trunk so that his groin and genitals were concealed; Josse raised the corner of the sheet and had a quick look, which told him little other than that the man had had gingery body hair and had not been circumcised. Replacing the sheet, he turned to stare at the head and face. The head hair had also had a ginger tinge, although less pronounced, and the man had been in the process of going bald. With a nod to himself, as if privately noting that some earlier possibility had just turned out to be true, Josse looked at the bulging eyes – Sister Euphemia had managed to close them – and finally at the open mouth with its protruding tongue.

     Noticing the direction of his attention, the infirmarer said, ‘He had rotten teeth, Sir Josse. They’d have given him gyp, I shouldn’t wonder.’

     ‘Hm.’ Josse hardly heard; he was thinking. He put his hands either side of the head and, raising it from the cot, moved it gently around, from side to side, then backwards and forwards. Again he said, ‘Hm.’ Then he pulled out the small object he had found in the strands of the rope and put it on the cot beside the dead man’s head. Looking up at the infirmarer, he said, ‘A match, would you say?’

     With a soft exclamation she bent to look more closely. She sniffed at the dead man’s scalp and picked up the few strands of ginger-brown hair that Josse had laid beside the head and sniffed them too. She felt the head hair – still damp from her own recent ministrations – and then the stray strands, rubbing at them between her fingers. Then, replacing the loose hairs on the cot and carefully wiping her hands on a clean piece of soft white linen that smelt of lavender, she said, ‘Aye, I reckon so.’

     The Abbess, who had silently been watching, said quietly, ‘Where did you find the hair, Sir Josse?’

     ‘In the knot of the rope.’

     ‘The knot—’ She swallowed. ‘You mean the noose that was around his neck?’