Plague Land (2 page)

‘A girl has been savaged in the forest,’ John of Cornwall told me, without so much as a formal greeting.

I hardly knew what to say to this announcement and must have let my mouth hang open a little too long.

A man with the skin of a cankered apple then bowed. ‘The girl’s dead, my lord. Gored by a wild animal.’ When I continued to remain silent, the man looked about uneasily at his companions.

I found my tongue quickly, as they clearly thought me foolish. ‘Was it a wolf attack?’ I asked.

The man shook his head. ‘No wolves left in Kent, sire.’

‘But perhaps they’ve returned? Nobody has hunted the creatures since the outbreak of the Plague. As far as I know.’

John of Cornwall pushed the man aside. ‘My lord. It is another creature responsible for taking the girl’s wretched life.’ His entourage groaned before falling silent and looking to me again for a response.

‘What sort of creature?’

Cornwall dropped his voice to a staged whisper. ‘The Cynocephalus.’

‘The what?’

‘The dog-headed beast, my lord.’

So this was his notion. I nearly laughed out loud, even though it was hardly a fitting reaction given the news of the girl’s death. ‘That sounds unlikely,’ I said.

Cornwall’s lips pursed and his eyebrows rallied to a frown. ‘There’s no question. It’s the work of the Devil.’

How tempting to tell him that I found the Devil to be as improbable as God, but I had the sense to suppress the urge. Instead I asked the girl’s name and was told she was called Alison Starvecrow. It was not a name I recognised.

‘Where’s her body now?’ I asked.

‘We left her in the forest,’ said a boy with boots too big for his feet.

‘Why?’

‘We thought you’d want to see her, sire.’

I shook my head. ‘Me? No. You should inform the constable. Surely?’

‘But the Constable’s dead, sire.’ The men looked at each other again, only just disguising their scorn.

‘What about the Coroner?’ I then immediately held up my hand. ‘Yes. He’s dead too. I knew that.’

Cornwall cleared his throat and fanned his robe. ‘I have assumed the role of Chief Tithing-Man, my lord.’

‘But you’re a priest.’

He puffed out his chest. ‘Indeed. But we must each suffer new burdens since the ravages of the Plague.’ The man had tried to disguise his Cornish accent by adopting French pronunciation, but the colour of his true voice seeped through his speech like dye in a washtub. I found myself listening to the cadence of his words, rather than to the meaning of them. Sensing my mind was wandering, he coughed. ‘In the absence of a constable,’ he told me, ‘we believe that you, as Lord of the Somershill estate, should take responsibility for the investigation.’

I hesitated. Was this the case? Was this really my responsibility? But if not me, then who else would take on this unwelcome duty? ‘Yes. I . . . suppose that’s—’

But suddenly there was a hot and breathy voice at my ear. ‘Did I hear somebody say the Devil has murdered a girl?’ It was my mother, peeking around my shoulder like a curious child at the door.

‘It was not Satan himself, my lady,’ replied Cornwall, pleased to find an attentive audience at last. ‘It was his emissary. The Cynocephalus.’

My mother gasped. ‘The dog heads? Here?’

Cornwall nodded gravely. ‘They’ve been here for two years,’ he said. ‘Did you not know, my lady? They carried the Great Mortality to us from the Orient.’

The mention of the Plague was enough to provoke an even more fervent reaction from Mother. She clasped her hands to her cheekbones, fell against the doorpost and made a great show of fainting at Cornwall’s feet.

With Mother providing the finale to this performance, the others in Cornwall’s company were prompted to act out their own parts. The canker-faced man crossed himself feverishly. A tenant I recognised as our pig-herd, Hugh Gower, fell to his knees and prayed with an ardour I had never witnessed him display in church. And a youth with buck teeth muttered garbled words in concocted Latin, whilst pressing a piece of blackened wood to his lips. No doubt it was a fragment of the True Cross.

I had seen enough. When Gilbert returned from emptying the barrels into the moat, I sent for my boots and demanded to be taken to the girl’s body.

Our shadows fell westward as we crossed the common pastures towards the forest. The dew was steaming and a host of finches chattered in the hedges. My home, Somershill Manor, rose behind us like a long knoll – the curtain wall of the old fortress now missing from the front of the house, revealing the great hall my grandfather had built. I looked back to see its large windows glinting in the morning sun, wearing their extravagant glass like a set of jewels.

Cornwall made it plain that he would lead the party to the girl’s body, although it soon became obvious he didn’t know the way. I couldn’t entirely blame him, I suppose. The estate had been neglected for nearly two years – already the paths were overgrown with brambles, and the fields were full of foxgloves and ragwort. We came across sad, forsaken places, where only months ago we had driven off the wild dogs and ravens as they scavenged the bodies of the dead. I watched my step through the long grass, for fear of treading upon something that the dogs had missed.

When we reached the forest I tried to push to the front, since my father would have led our group, but Cornwall deliberately outpaced me at every attempt, or blocked my progress with the swing of his cloak. The forest was dense and dark, and resisted our attempts to penetrate, even though we walked along identifiable paths and trails. Beard lichen hung from low branches like cobwebs and tried to cling to my face or stick to my hair as I passed. Brambles scratched at my arms and hooked their barbs into the wool of my hose. Strange shapes seemed to dart in and out of the trees, but only ever at the periphery of my vision, so that when I turned to catch them, they had disappeared.

It was dark and lonely in this place – once the domain of hunting parties with their dogs and hawks – and suddenly I felt the urge to run home and find refuge in the open fields and sunlight of my meadows. But that was hardly how a lord should behave. Even one as young and inexperienced as I. So I continued to follow Cornwall around and around the same glade of willows until he finally accused me of being unreasonable in expecting him to lead the way. After all, he argued, he hadn’t been the one to discover the girl’s body.

I should have rebuked him for such perversity, but instead I put Gower in charge and said nothing more. At least we now made some progress, walking new paths until we reached a ridge of yew trees where, at last, I recognised our location – on the main drover’s road to Burrsfield.

Not long after, we stopped by a standard oak that was said to be near the dead girl’s body. I took some ale from my leather bottle, as much to improve my mood as to quench my thirst, and then Gower led us to a thicket of nettles in a small hollow where the girl still lay, face down in a carpet of leaf mould. It was a dark and dismal place, even by the standards of this forest. The watery sun failed to reach its banks, where pale cow parsley looked ready to set seed.

I bent down to look a little closer at the girl’s body, lifting back her coarse woollen hood while the others in the party backed away behind some holly. They pulled faces and shielded their eyes, evidently repulsed by the sight of death, even though they had spent the last two years engulfed by its stink. Personally I was more disgusted by the pieces of food I had seen in Cornwall’s beard that same morning. But then I was accustomed to dead bodies. As a novice in the infirmary I had regularly dressed them for the grave.

Even so, the dead of the abbey hospital had never come to their end through this door. They had been killed instead by old age, bad luck, or contagion. Not by another living person.

I put aside my gloom to examine the girl with clear eyes, and immediately noted the clean wound to her neck. There was no blood beneath her body, nor anywhere else in the hollow. Nor was there the acute stench you might expect to attend a corpse, which suggested the body had been buried almost immediately after death. Her limbs were flaccid, cold, and tinged with blue, which led me to believe that she had been dead for at least three days.

The skin was not yet slipping from her bones. Her mouth, eyes, and the open wound to her neck were already infested with the tiny eggs of the blowfly, but we were not yet gazing upon a sea of writhing maggots.

Taking her delicate skull in my hand, I twisted it slightly to look at her face, but the girl was unknown to me – or so was my first impression. Then I couldn’t be so sure, for there was something about her blonde hair and pale face that now appeared familiar to me. I looked again and tried to catch the thought, but the recollection slipped away.

Replacing her hood I asked Gower, ‘How did you find her body in such a hidden spot?’

‘It wasn’t me that did it,’ he said, backing further into the holly.

‘I wasn’t suggesting you did.’

‘It was my pigs, sire. I brought them here to find carrot roots, but they sniffed her out. I had to beat them off her, you know. A sow’ll have anything.’

His story was credible. If he had killed the girl himself, he could easily have left the body here and she might never have been found. And given the bite marks on a slender arm, it was obvious the poor girl had only just avoided the last indignity of being eaten by pigs.

Looking about the hollow for her original burial place, I soon found a depression in the earth beneath a wilting dog rose. This had to be the spot, confirmed by a thin skein of wool that had snagged on a thorn just above the hole. The wool matched the cloth of the girl’s cloak and proved that her body had once been in this part of the clearing. But I could tell nothing more, other than that this grave must have been hastily excavated, since it had been shallow enough to allow a herd of pigs to unearth her corpse.

As I stepped about the area in search of more signs that might help to solve this mystery, the men edged cautiously over to the girl’s body. When they thought I wasn’t listening, the tallest pointed to her neck and whispered to his companions. ‘See how she’s been bitten. It must be the work of a dog head. Just as Father John says.’ The others bobbed their heads like a row of chickens, clucking their approval of this fantastical story.

Wanting to put a quick end to this nonsense, I beckoned for them to draw near while I pulled back the girl’s hood to reveal the cut to her neck. ‘Look at this wound,’ I said. ‘Dog’s teeth couldn’t make such a perfect incision into soft flesh. It must have been a knife.’

They peered in and the clucks changed a little in tone, but before I could say another word, Cornwall caught me roughly by the arm. ‘Don’t ask the men to gaze upon the work of the Devil, my lord,’ he said. ‘They will become tainted.’

I laughed and pulled away from him. ‘I don’t think so.’

However, any amusement at this statement was mine alone. Cornwall rose over me and tilted his head forward to fix me a stare, his arms folded. Once again I should have rebuked him for such insolence, but he had unnerved me. The clearing was airless and grim and I wanted to be away from the place as soon as possible. So I didn’t argue any further and instead asked Cornwall to remind me of the girl’s name.

‘Alison Starvecrow,’ he told me. ‘Daughter of your tenants William and Adeline Starvecrow. Both deceased in the Plague.’

‘Does she have any living family?’ I asked quickly, since I didn’t recall the Starvecrow family, nor their purpose on my estate.

I sensed Cornwall relished my discomfort, since a contemptuous smile crept across his lips. ‘The dead girl has one sister. Matilda,’ he told me.

‘Has this girl been informed?’ Cornwall nodded. ‘Then we should take her body back to the village and bury her properly. After that we can raise the hue and cry.’

Cornwall shook his head at this suggestion. ‘No, my lord. There is no need to pursue the offender. It’s better we pray for deliverance.’

For the third time that day I felt the urge to laugh out loud – as what had praying achieved in the last two years? The Great Plague had killed without discrimination. Saints and sinners. Those who pleaded with God like gibbering fanatics, and those who couldn’t be bothered to put two hands together.

But impulsiveness should be guarded against. My tutor at the monastery, Brother Peter, had taught me this much. And what harm would praying do? It is an undemanding pastime. Physically that is. If my tenants and villeins wanted to pray for forgiveness, at least they were not wasting their scant energies on a hunt about the countryside.