A Head for Poisoning (40 page)

He refolded the parchments and turned his attention to the pouch. Inside were more letters. Geoffrey looked closer. They were not so much letters as notes—short, concise missives that aimed to provide information rather than entertain. He held one close to the candle and read.

“Midnight on the fifth day of June 1100. Expect five.”

Nonplussed, he read another.

“Midnight on the twenty-fifth night of July 1100. Everything is almost in readiness. Only details regarding horses left to manage.”

And another.

“The first day of August at Brockenhurst. The evil is about to end.”

He gazed at it blankly. Had Enide gone to Brockenhurst on the first of August for this meeting? he wondered. It would have been shortly before her death.

He scratched his head and pondered. These documents were not written in Norbert's spiky scrawl, but they were not in Enide's writing either. This was a confident roundhand that made use of an archaic form of the letter
T
. Were these messages written for Godric, who was not adverse to dabbling in subterfuge and secrecy from time to time? Or were they for one of the others—Stephen perhaps, who of the three brothers was easily the most cunning and devious? Or was Enide involved in something else? Geoffrey thought about the claim that she was being poisoned, before someone had come along early one morning and whipped her head from her shoulders. Had she died for these fragments of parchment and their sketchy, indecipherable scraps of information?

He leapt to his feet in alarm as he became aware that Father Adrian was standing over him.

“I have finished my prayers, Sir Geoffrey,” said the priest, regarding Geoffrey curiously. “I called out to you, but you did not answer me.”

“Sorry,” said Geoffrey, stuffing the parchments back into the pouch. “I was reading some letters of Enide's.”

“Enide?” asked Father Adrian, startled. “I do not think so!”

“What do you mean?” asked Geoffrey, wondering how the priest imagined
he
would know whether Enide had kept letters hidden away in a secret place, and resentful of his presumption.

“Enide never wrote letters,” said Adrian. “She could not.”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Geoffrey, bewildered. “She could read.”

“She could read,” agreed Adrian. “But she could not write. She had an accident—probably not long after you went to Normandy—and it left her right hand virtually paralysed. She could manage simple tasks with it, but never something like writing.”

G
eoffrey did not believe Father Adrian's claim that Enide had lost the use of her writing hand for an instant. He pushed past the priest to go back into Godric's bedchamber, annoyed that he had allowed himself to be caught reading what might be vital clues to the mystery. Adrian followed him.

“Many things must have changed since you left all those years ago,” said the priest. “I suppose Enide's accident happened so long ago, and her family grew so used to her injury, that they came not to notice it any more. The same would have been true of me, but I tried to persuade her to learn to write with her other hand. It became something of a contest of wills.” He smiled, perhaps more fondly than was appropriate for a priest reminiscing about one of his parishioners.

“You must be mistaken,” said Geoffrey. “She wrote to me often after I left. And she mentioned no accident.”

“She was proud,” said Adrian, shrugging. “She did not like anyone to know that the accident had deprived her of the ability to perform certain functions—she could no longer sew, for example. And she certainly could not write.”

“But I had letters from her several times a year,” insisted Geoffrey. “You must be thinking of someone else.”

“Do I seem like some doddering old fool who cannot tell the difference between women?” demanded Adrian, finally nettled into sharpness. “If you had letters from her, then she paid for someone else to write them—because, I assure you, she could not. Ask any of your family. Ask Francis the physician.”

“What happened to her, then?” asked Geoffrey, still far from convinced.

Adrian shook his head. “The accident occurred many years before I came here. She told me that she had been picking plums in the churchyard and had fallen. She landed awkwardly, breaking the bones in her arm, so that her hand muscles no longer worked. She usually had it wrapped in a scarf or tucked inside her gown, but she showed it to me once, and it was withered into a claw, like this.”

He hooked his fingers and splayed them out to show Geoffrey what he meant. He saw the knight's consternation, and patted him on the shoulder.

“It happened many years ago, and she said it gave her no pain. She probably did not mention it to you because she was sensitive about it, and she was fond of you. She would not have wanted you to consider of her maimed.”

“I would never have thought such a thing,” said Geoffrey, stung. “I thought we were friends.”

“Then perhaps she did not tell you at the time because she did not want to worry you, or because she thought it would heal. And then, by the time she came to accept that her arm would be crippled permanently, it was too late. And why should she confide in you, anyway? You were absent for twenty years.”

“But we often talked of my coming back in our letters,” protested Geoffrey. “Especially early on, when we were still young.”

“But you never came, did you?” said Adrian. He softened. “Look, I am sorry to have upset you. It is the second time I have spoken out of turn about her, it seems. I took you unawares about the nature of her death, too.”

“I do not seem to know much about her life either,” said Geoffrey, not without rancour. “Is there anything else about her that I should know? Was her face green? Did she play with the fairies at night? She was a woman, I take it, and not a man in disguise?”

“Sir Geoffrey!” admonished Adrian, shocked. “Not so bitter!” He smiled suddenly, almost wistfully. “Her face was pale and delicate, like a blossom. She did not dance with the fairies, although she danced with an elegance and energy I have never seen equalled. And I can assure you that she was most certainly a woman!”

“You seem very sure of that,” said Geoffrey, his eyebrows raised.

“Just because I have sworn a vow of celibacy does not mean that I can no longer tell the difference between a man and a woman,” said Adrian, his smile fading.

“She wrote to me …” Geoffrey hesitated. “Her letters mentioned that she had a lover. At first, I thought it was Caerdig, who later asked to marry her. But now I think it was you.”

“Please!” exclaimed Adrian, turning away. “Think about what you say! I am a priest!”

“So?” asked Geoffrey. “Tell me the truth, Adrian!”

The priest refused to meet his eyes, and Geoffrey understood exactly why Enide had not mentioned the name of her lover in her letters. She could hardly tell her brother that she had fallen in love with the parish priest, who had sworn a vow of chastity.

“You loved her dearly, I see,” Geoffrey said softly, watching the priest's inner struggle. “But someone killed her, Adrian! Tell me what you know and together, perhaps, we might catch her murderer.”

“No!” said Adrian with sudden force. “That is
not
what she would have wanted—I have already told you that. You will only put yourself in danger if you persist with this, and it will do no good anyway, given the amount of time that has passed. One of the last things she said to me was that I should let her die peacefully and unavenged.”

“So, she told you where she was to be buried, and she instructed you that no one was to avenge her death?” said Geoffrey, his stomach churning at the notion that his sister had so despaired of her hopeless situation that she had made ghoulish arrangements for her funeral and mourning. “She knew she was going to die, and you did nothing to save her?”

Tears glittered in Adrian's eyes, but he did not seem angered by Geoffrey's accusation. “She knew she was in some danger,” he said in a low voice. “The morning of her death, as I have told you, she was anxious and restless, but she would not tell me why. If only she had confided in me, I might have been able to keep her safe.”

“Probably not,” said Geoffrey, using a more gentle tone as the priest turned away to hide his grief. “If she were anxious enough to be talking about her death to you, then she was probably in a greater danger than you would have been able to protect her from.”

“Do you think so?” asked Adrian uncertainly, still with his back to Geoffrey. “But what was it? What could she have done or said that had landed her in such dire peril?”

“I hoped you might be able to tell me,” said Geoffrey, thinking about the letters tucked down the inside of his shirt. “Did she meet anyone unusual, or leave the castle for any period of time?”

“She visited Monmouth last June,” said Adrian. He wiped his eyes on his wide sleeve, and faced Geoffrey. “She said she wanted to purchase new rugs for Godric's chamber, but when she returned, she had forgotten to buy them.”

“So, she went for some other reason, then,” said Geoffrey. “Did she know anyone in Monmouth?”

“Possibly she did,” said Adrian. “She was an intelligent woman, and people sought her out for advice. She may have met someone—at the Rosse market, for example—who lived in Monmouth. She told me that King Henry was at Monmouth when she visited—although he was not King then, of course. His brother Rufus was.”

“Do you think she went to meet King Henry?” asked Geoffrey, startled.

“I would not imagine so,” said Adrian, with a short, nervous laugh. “She had never met him before, and women do not simply arrive at the court and introduce themselves.”

Unless they had something specific to tell, thought Geoffrey, wondering anew about the pieces of parchment in his surcoat. But he was allowing his imagination to run away with him. How could Enide have anything to say that would interest a prince? And how could she possibly have come by such information anyway, tucked away in Goodrich Castle all her life?

He looked at Adrian, who had slumped on the chest at the bottom of the bed, his hands dangling between his knees. Adrian had been kind to him when he was trying to overcome the unpleasant after-effects of his poisoning and, although Geoffrey knew better than to put too much faith in first impressions, the priest seemed to have been genuinely fond of Enide. Geoffrey decided to take a risk and show Adrian the scraps of parchment. The knight had little to lose, since his own investigations were taking him nowhere, but he might gain considerably if Adrian could throw some light on what the mysterious messages might mean. And if Adrian turned out to be not quite the simple priest that he claimed, then Geoffrey had only a few more days in Goodrich in which to be cautious. He, unlike Enide, was unlikely to allow himself to be caught unawares and have his head chopped off.

“Have you seen these before?” he asked, taking the scraps from his shirt and handing them to Adrian.

The priest rifled through them without much interest. “No. Why? Did they belong to Godric?”

“I do not know,” said Geoffrey. “But I think Enide may have hidden them away for safe-keeping.”

Adrian took the candle from Geoffrey, and inspected them again. “Times and dates,” he mused. “Wait!” Geoffrey sat next to him, and looked at the parchment that had caught the priest's attention. “This one! ‘Midnight on the fifth day of June 1100. Expect five.' That was the night before Enide left for Monmouth.”

“How can you be sure?” asked Geoffrey. “It was a long time ago.”

“Because the sixth of June was the Feast of Corpus Christi. It is one of the most important religious festivals in our Christian calendar,” he added when Geoffrey looked a little blank. “Did the knights on God's holy Crusade not mark such an important occasion?”

“We may have done,” said Geoffrey vaguely. Despite the acclaimed sanctity of their mission, religious celebrations were a long way from the minds of most Crusaders. There were monks and other holy men in the company, but they tended to keep their distance from the rabble of knights and soldiers who formed the bulk of their number. Meanwhile, Geoffrey's attention had been taken more by battles and fighting the more dangerous enemies of the desert—hunger, thirst, and disease—than with observing religious festivals.

“But what does the Feast of Corpus Christi have to do with Enide?” he asked.

“On the morning that our celebrations were to begin, Enide announced that she was leaving for Monmouth immediately.”

“Just like that?” asked Geoffrey.

“Just like that,” said Adrian. “It takes a good deal of work to organise these festivities, and it would have been pleasant to have had Enide's help and support. It is one of the most important days of the year for me, and I was hurt that she considered buying rugs for Godric more urgent.”