Plague Land (4 page)

‘Don’t you care about the Starvecrow girl?’ he asked me.

‘Of course I do.’

‘Then find her murderer.’

‘But—’

He held his hand up to silence the end of my sentence. ‘Just go, Oswald.’

‘You don’t—’

‘Get out of my sight.’

Reaching the door, I heard the hasty footsteps of satin slippers across the rushes of the hall. Just as I had suspected. Clemence had been listening.

It is unsettling to disappoint a person you love. And I did love Peter. He had been my tutor and protector since I was seven years old, and had made abbey life at least tolerable for me. Keeping a promise to Mother, Peter had ensured there was always food in my bowl – even when kitchen supplies were low and the novices were the last to receive supper. I was not expected to join the lay brothers in the fields – even when I had broken the abbey rules. And when the abbot prowled at night, it was not my bed he disturbed.

Without Peter’s care and guardianship it’s difficult to say how I would have fared at the abbey, for I had not been prepared for monastery life. As the fourth surviving child in my family I was often little more than a lap dog to be indulged and fussed over by Mother. How she loved to comb my blond curls and sit me upon her knee. And how my sister Clemence would scowl as she watched jealously from the other side of the table, wincing as Mother sang to me and fed me spoons of honey.

But Clemence was not my only sibling to despise me. Once, when Mother was confined to bed with one of her headaches, my brothers William and Richard burnt the ends of my hair with candle wax, and then dunked my head into a bowl of brown walnut dye. Mother was incensed when she saw me, but since Father was rather amused by my likeness to a Saracen, she did nothing to censure their behaviour. Soon after this incident I left for the abbey, and at each subsequent visit, Mother would feel my hair and sigh in disappointment at its growing coarseness and darkening tone.

I soon learnt that Mother’s love was as fickle as the blondness of my hair, whereas Peter remained steadfast in his care. And although he could not provide the honey that I had demanded with tantrums and a pair of stamping feet when first taken to the abbey, he was able to show a more enduring affection, which turned me from a spoilt child into a quiet and thoughtful boy.

So I could not let Brother Peter’s low opinion of me persist, but how does a boy begin an investigation into murder?

My first idea was to question Mother about Alison Starvecrow’s visit. But Mother denied any knowledge of the event – even though Peter had told me it had happened but four days previously. When I pressed Mother on the subject, she dredged up a vague recollection of a girl with the same name who had called to speak with her. She claimed to have sent the girl away since Brother Peter’s reading of the scriptures had given her a headache, and she did not therefore care to receive visitors.

My next step was to question our servant Gilbert, since he must have opened the door to Alison, and it was possible she had mentioned the purpose of her visit. I found Gilbert in the kitchen where he was hanging a skinned rabbit from an iron hook. The kitchen cat purred at his feet, never taking her eyes from the pink and slippery carcass that was suspended above her. A stew bubbled in the copper pot over the fire, and some rye bread cooked in the embers.

I asked Gilbert to recall Alison’s visit, but found him to be his usual impenetrable self. Not only was he cross at being interrupted whilst cooking supper, he also remained irritated that Alison Starvecrow had knocked at the main door to the house, when she should have called at the back porch like any other villager. The fact that the girl had been subsequently murdered gave no rise to a softening of his heart.

Since returning from the abbey, I had come to notice that servants were often more haughty than the family they served.

Gilbert could at least recall one important fact. Alison Starvecrow had initially requested to speak with me – but since I was away at Burrsfield, she had reluctantly asked for an audience with Mother. When Mother had refused to see the girl, Gilbert had sent Alison back to the village, with a warning not to return. It seems, however, that the girl took little notice, since half an hour later Gilbert chased her away from the porch by the chapel.

Alison was then seen to head off across the meadow in the opposite direction from the village. I suggested she might have been hoping to meet me on the drover’s road, but Gilbert just shrugged his heavy shoulders. He assumed she had come to beg for money or a favour, like any other churl from the village.

So my initial investigations, such as they were, led nowhere. And by nightfall I had convinced myself that a lord is often called upon by his villeins and tenants – so Alison’s visit to the house and subsequent murder were nothing more than coincidence. There were some enquiries I could make about the village, but they were unlikely to prove fruitful. In fact, the whole investigation was probably pointless, regardless of Brother Peter’s sentiment. I did not see my role here as part of any divine plan. Somershill had only come to me by chance.

I sought some diversion in Father’s copy of Roger Bacon’s
Opus Minus
, but was unable to concentrate on Bacon’s words of supposed heresy, because my obstinate mind returned continually to the murder. I tried to distract myself by thinking about geometry or the position of the stars in the night sky. But nothing worked. Not even the memory of the girl I had once seen washing in the river. My mind was stuck in a circle of thought that soon led to a sweating panic and then, most unfortunately, to the urge to open my bowels.

Retreating to our small garderobe, I hoped for some peace, but found no calm in this supposed place of privacy. Clemence kept walking past the door and complaining loudly of the smell. And Mother, fearing I needed to rid my body of corrupt matter, prepared a purgative of linseed oil and vinegar, which she slipped under the wooden door and insisted I drink in one gulp. I accepted the foul-smelling concoction to appease her and then poured it straight down the hole in the wooden seat, so that it dripped down a chute on the exterior wall of the house with the rest of the ordure, before piling up in a stinking barrel. If only my grandfather had invested in a latrine when the house was re-built. We had such a facility at the monastery, where our waste and its foul vapours were flushed away with running water.

With a sore stomach and a tender arse, I went to bed early – but found my night was no more peaceful and free of Alison. In my dreams I kept the girl in a caged enclosure, but then forgot to feed her. When at last I remembered my duty, I forced myself to look inside the cage, where her shrivelled body was curled in a corner like that of a starved animal. I wanted to look upon her face. It was as compelling as the urge had been to spy upon the plague sores of the abbot. But as I crept towards her lifeless body, she opened a pale eyelid to reveal a grey and sunken eye.

I woke with a start, taking a few moments to shake off the terror before Brother Peter’s snoring reassured me of reality. We slept together in the only bed in the men’s chamber, and once I was awake there was little chance of returning to sleep, since Peter snorted and wheezed like a sow at the trough.

I looked into his familiar face as he slept and felt both guilty and ashamed. I had disappointed him. But he was wrong. In one respect, at least. I might be a coward, I might even be indolent, but I did care about Alison Starvecrow.

And I would find her murderer.

Chapter Three

I woke the next morning with the intention of raising the hue and cry. I would round up the men of the village and search out Alison’s attacker. We would be pursuing an offender with the head of a human.

I mounted my horse and rode into the village. It was now a short ride from the manor, but not so long ago the villagers had lived in a huddle around the house, before my grandfather had replaced the old Norman castle with our new residence – a house grand enough for the king himself to visit. He had removed their homes from the sight of the family, not wanting to look out of his new windows upon the untidy gardens and ragged children of his tenants and villeins. Now their ramshackle cottages clung about the parish church instead, and were only visible from the manor if you climbed the remaining north-west tower, and stood upon your toes.

The village had become a gloomy place in the last two years. Deserted cottages lined my path – their roofs stripped of timbers, while brambles and nettles pushed in at the doors like unwelcome guests. Anything of value had been looted, and soon these dwellings promised to be nothing more than skeletons of wood.

I will admit it was not only the lost lives that came to mind as I looked upon these shells. Half the village had died, but the dead pay no rent. And new tenants were impossible to find, not even with the more attractive terms and lower entry fines I had been forced to offer. And, if this were not bad enough, my surviving tenants were suddenly demanding higher wages to work on my demesne fields, with even the lowest villein and cottar now asking to be paid for their services – when their labour was bound to the tenure of their land and had never been waged before.

As Father often said, a poor harvest pushes up the price of grain.

Of course we had a local ordinance law to prevent wage increases, which I had heard would soon be reinforced with a parliamentary statute. But I doubted this new law would be any more successful. What was to stop a desperate lord from offering higher wages than his neighbour to keep his fields in crop and his cattle fed? The cottars and villeins might have to stay where they were told – but the tenants were free men and could go where they pleased.

And then I began to wonder if I should have written to Mother after all and declined this position? As cowardly as that might seem. For the monastery might have offered me more than this. With the nobility of my birth and the death of so many other brothers, I could have risen quickly to become abbot. Instead I was given Somershill – a gift that had smelt as sweet as the bloom of a rose, but which, on closer inspection, was barbed with thorns.

On reaching the centre of the village, I went to call on my reeve Featherby, but found his cottage to be as deserted as the rest of the street. Tying my horse to a post, I noticed a small boy creep out from a cottage and then begin bashing at a cartwheel with such dogged concentration, it was hard to determine whether he was trying to mend the wheel or simply destroy it.

I called to the boy, but he didn’t look up. So I approached and took him by the arm, causing him to jump. When I asked where everybody was, he just stared back at me with cautious eyes and a face full of pitted scars. At my third repeat of the question, he finally pointed towards the parish church and then returned to his work.

Nearing the graveyard I could hear Cornwall’s words, seeping through the stone walls like a poisonous vapour.

‘Repent of your sins and the Cynocephalus will be gone. Beg for the mercy of the sweet Virgin Mary and the host of Heavenly saints. Pray to the bones of St Augustine and to the holy water of Bethlehem.’ His voice was forceful and impassioned, calling upon every holy relic that had ever crossed the borders of our parish, and plenty of those that hadn’t – rounding off each supplication with the threat of damnation or the promise of eternal life. His strange and contrived accent made the whole entreaty sound faintly comical, though I could hear that nobody was laughing.

I waited for him to end, with the intention of entering the church to speak with the village. But Cornwall’s lungs were as strong as the bellows of a furnace, and worked without rest. When would he finish?

Peeping through the door for an opportunity to interrupt, I noticed immediately that there were no women or children in the church at all. Only men – whose large and bulky backs confronted me like an army of hostile faces. The only person to spy my presence was the wooden Virgin at the rood screen. Her arms outstretched and empty – as she looked about imploringly for the small Christ child that somebody had stolen from her many years ago.

My resolve now began to weaken at the idea of addressing this many men and wilting down onto the stone of the step, I hoped the ghost of my father were not watching me from behind a tombstone. He wouldn’t have hidden in the porch like a leper. He would have marched into St Giles and demanded every man get to their feet and do his bidding. It wasn’t a Sunday, so what impertinence was this to be wasting time in a mass? I wished I could have summoned the strength to follow his example, but at every new approach to the church door my legs refused to cooperate and soon I found myself unable even to look inside.

I am not an unreserved coward however. I didn’t yet possess the courage to interrupt Cornwall, but there were other matters to attend to while the sermon droned on. Given that the women were not in mass, I decided to use the time to visit Alison’s sister, Matilda.