The Hunter’s Tale (29 page)

Which brought her back to the question at the heart of everything here. Who had killed Sir Ralph?

Miles was telling Lucy that however rich a husband she married, she would undoubtedly use up all his money within a year. Lucy was telling him he was mean and Philippa was saying that they simply needed to marry Lucy to someone so rich she couldn’t possibly use up all his money in a mere year.

No one more than barely noticed when Frevisse stood up and, with a murmur that she would walk awhile, left the arbor.

The garden was drowsy in the afternoon’s warmth and sunshine. Hands quietly clasped in front of her, Frevisse moved along the paths. The beds enclosed in their low wattle fencing were full as could be with the end-of-summer flourish of flowers and herbs. Blue scabious and borage, feverfew with its flood of yellow and white flowers, tall and golden St. John’s Wort, towering scarlet hollyhocks, thick-growing low thyme and marjorem, others that Frevisse did not know by name. Pleasures for the eye, ease for the mind, healing for the body. But her thoughts came with her and the garden’s loveliness did not keep her from turning them over and over with the care she would have given to coals she feared were hot enough to burn.

Everyone said Sir Ralph must have been murdered by someone now long gone and never likely to be found out.

They all said it… but how many of them believed it?

Some of them might. Others might doubt but were willing, Frevisse thought, to ignore their doubt. What she feared was that someone here knew for certain it was a lie. Because if the murderer was not long gone away, he was still here.

And there had to be those among the doubters who feared it, too.

Feared… but refused to face it: would rather live with the murderer still among them than find out who he was.

Whoever had killed Sir Ralph that savagely, beating his head in even after it had to be clear he was dead, had to have hated him. Unhappily, that hardly limited who might have done it. To guess from all she had heard, there were surely villagers in plenty who hated him; and certainly no one in his family loved him. And all of his family had been in the woods that day when he was killed, except for Ursula.

And Tom, Frevisse amended. He had quarreled with his father and gone back to the manor before the dog ran off.

But had he gone back to the manor? He wouldn’t have purposefully lain in wait for Sir Ralph since they were hare-hunting that day and Sir Ralph unlikely to be alone in the forest. But what if he had stayed in the woods to walk off his anger, rather than going back to the manor, and had happened on his father and, still in a fury at him, killed him?

That was possible. Someone had told her it had taken a long time to find and bring Father Leonel and Tom after Sir Ralph’s body was found. Although how long “a long time” was to someone frantically looking for someone would be difficult to determine.

And besides his immediate anger, Tom could have been afraid his cheating on the accounts with Father Leonel was about to be found out. Had Sir Ralph lately been growing suspicious? If so, Tom had better reason than a quarrel to want him dead and better reason to kill him if he suddenly had the chance.

Who else had immediate reason or need to have Sir Ralph dead? Hugh? Had he stood to gain anything from his father’s death? Unless he had simply been unable to bear his father any longer, he had already had all he seemed to want—the hounds and hunting. Or was there more he wanted that she had yet to see? Tom had stood between him and inheriting the manor and now Tom was dead, too; but nothing about Hugh told Frevisse he had wanted the manor at all, let alone wanted it badly enough to kill for it. The only other thing that would come to him because of Tom’s death was Philippa. Did he want her that badly? Frevisse had no way to know.

For what it was worth, Lucy claimed it was Miles, not Hugh, who was something more than only friendly with Philippa. From what Frevisse had just seen of them together, they did accord well together; but accord and love were two different things and neither one was enough for murder. Or rather, love could be used as a reason to kill but only by the most desperate or foolish, and Miles did not seem to be either. Not for the kind of murder that had been done on Sir Ralph. Hatred, though, was another matter, and Miles did not in the slightest hide his hatred of Sir Ralph or his pleasure that he was dead. Besides, with Sir Ralph’s death he gained his freedom. Lucy had said he and Philippa were together when Sir Ralph was killed, but if there was love between them, she might well lie for him. But could she lie well enough? And keep up the lie? And if she could, then what sort of person was she, to see murder like that done and not only hold quiet about it afterward, but stay a laughing friend with the murderer?

That was, of course, supposing she had not killed Sir Ralph herself. But the objection to that was the same Frevisse already had against Lady Anneys or Lady Elyn or Lucy doing it: a woman repeatedly smashing a man’s skull could not have avoided such a splashing and spattering of blood onto her skirts as would have been afterward seen and questioned.

For that matter, a man would not have escaped being bloodied either but after a morning spent hunting there had likely been blood on more than one of them already. If no one noted Sir Ralph’s when it was fresh, later it would simply be dried blood along with other dried blood and unremarkable.

Her pacing of the garden had brought her past the arbor again and Sister Johane said, “You won’t come back into the shade and sit?”

Frevisse made a smile whose worth she doubted and said, “No,” and walked on, wishing she had not seen that Miles had shifted onto the bench facing Philippa and was leaning toward her with one hand out to hold a fold of her skirt while she leaned toward him, a hand resting on his knee, the two of them laughing together over something. But she had seen it and she put it with the rest.

The rest of what? What, altogether, did she have? There was Tom, who might have killed his father to protect himself. And Hugh, who maybe wanted either the manor or Philippa or both badly enough to kill for them not once but twice, meaning Tom’s death was not by chance after all. And Miles, who openly hated Sir Ralph and had gained freedom by his death but not Philippa. To have Philippa, if he did want her, which was not certain, he needed both Tom and Hugh out of his way and, true, Tom was dead, but not by Miles’ doing. So far as anyone had yet said, Miles had been altogether somewhere else when it happened.

But they weren’t the only possibilities in Sir Ralph’s death. There were Sir William and Master Selenger, too. Master Selenger could have wanted him dead, to clear his way to Lady Anneys if his interest in her was real rather than a thing made up between him and Sir William for their profit. And for Sir William himself, of course, there was the obvious reason that Sir Ralph’s death put him in reach of profitable control of the Woderove marriages. That did not explain the savagery of the killing, though.

Of course, Sir William might have had an entire other reason for needing or wanting Sir Ralph dead, and the control of the marriages be only an afterthought. Come to that, Master Selenger might have other reason of his own, too. Some old anger or wrong only finally avenged.

If that were it, Frevisse had no thought on how she might find it out, but what did she know about them that day at least? Lucy had said they left the clearing together but that Sir William had come back alone. If he and Master Selenger had separated in the woods, one of them could have come on Sir Ralph and killed him. Or they could have killed him together and then separated. Either way, Master Selenger was Sir William’s man. If Lady Anneys was right in believing his wooing of her was at Sir William’s bidding, it could be supposed he might equally well lie to keep Sir William clear of murder.

Or Sir William could be lying for him.

About what had they been angry and arguing today?

She swiped an impatient hand at a tall borage plant as she passed. All she had were guesses and questions and no thought on how to find answers. Someone had murdered Sir Ralph. That was one certainty. Another was that he had been well-hated by many people, while some of them and too many others stood to profit by his death. Set the question of “who” to the side, then, since it was so wide. What about “why then” and “why there”? Why that time and place for his death?

Those questions told her something anyway—that his killing hadn’t been planned. There had been no way to know the dog would run off and Sir Ralph go after it, no reason to expect he would be alone at all that day. That meant the chance to kill him had merely happened and someone had taken it, probably without thought of afterward. And very likely only blind luck, rather than forethought, had kept whoever it was from being caught at it or found out soon afterward.

Frevisse paused to rub thyme leaves between her fingers, releasing the scent into the warm air. A chance murder, yes. But had it been someone taking the chance when it came or someone forced to it then and there? There was still the possibility that it had been nothing more than Sir Ralph catching someone where they should not have been—someone poaching or a peasant taking wood. Though how could someone have been fool enough to be anywhere near where Sir Ralph was hunting when it was known he favored that place in the woods for his midday rest she did not know.

Hunting. The dog-boy Degory. She had forgotten him but he had been there. He had even said that Sir Ralph had hit him when the dog ran off. Had it been one blow too many?

He had also said Sir Ralph had hit Hugh then, too. Had
that
been one blow too many?

Frevisse found she had stopped and was standing over the same cluster of red gillyflowers that Lady Anneys had looked at so long last evening. They seemed such simple flowers until one not only looked but truly
saw
them; then, with their finely veined, delicately fringed petals, their careful stems and leaves, their rich and subtle coloring, they were not simple at all. Beauty, at its heart, was rarely simple, and yet the world held so much of it, and what Frevisse found forever hard to understand was why mankind so often chose ugliness when beauty was so readily, amply there.

Was it because the ugliness was easier? Because it let a person feel powerful without the cost of being anything but selfish?

She walked on. Sir Ralph, by all that she had so far heard of him, had been that kind of petty, small-hearted man, his life a blight on everyone around him. The pity was that the blight had not been cleansed by his death. It was still here, a blood-tainted shadowing in minds and hearts.

She came to the garden’s rear gate and stopped there to gaze out across the field stubbled yellow from the summer-harvested hay. Come autumn, the cattle would be turned out there to feed and in the spring it would be ploughed and planted, to be harvested when another autumn came and after that left fallow, to be hay again another year.

Year went around into year, the pattern of them repeating and yet never the same. This year had brought murder here. She wished she could forget that. Wished she would let the matter lie, for someone else to take up or leave, as they would. She could do that, she told herself—could just leave it all alone. Guilt and justice were the crowner’s and sheriff’s business, not hers. If the crowner was satisfied and everyone here content, shouldn’t she be, too?

But she couldn’t be. Someone here was a murderer, and even though no one might know who he was, enough of them knew he was here that their denial, their willed unknowing, was a rot at the heart of things—and rot, left to itself, only spread, rotting everything around it.

Chapter 18

The Afternoon had drawn on while Frevisse walked and the others talked. She was thinking she should rejoin them when Sister Johane joined her at the gate, leaned on it beside her, and said, “In spite of Dame Emma and Sister Amicia, I’m not used to this much talking. I’m going to see how Lady Anneys does. Should we do Vespers after that?”

Pleased that for once she need not remind Sister Johane about an Office, Frevisse said, “I’ll come with you and save you coming back.”

As they crossed the silent, empty hall, the hound Baude— stretched out on the cool floor-tiles near the empty hearth— opened one eye as they passed but did not bother to raise her head. Upstairs, they found Lady Anneys just awakened, sitting on the side of her bed trying to pin up her hair. Still slow with sleep, she was not doing well and Sister Johane went to take comb and hairpins from her, asking, “How do you feel, my lady?”

Lady Anneys gave a soft half-laugh. “I’m not sure I’m awake enough yet to know. But my headache is gone. Thank you for that.”

‘You can have the sleeping draught again tonight if you like. It’s a mild one. Having it twice in one day this once will do no harm.“

‘I should like that, I think.“ Lady Anneys sighed and moved her neck from side to side as if she were stiff. ”It’s so tiring when even going to sleep takes effort.“

Still eased from her sleep and maybe from the quieting aftereffects of whatever Sister Johane had given her for the headache, Lady Anneys unprotestingly let Sister Johane finish her hair and then pin on her veil for her. “But not my wimple,” she said. “I know as a properly grieving widow I should go wimpled, veiled, and all but invisible, but the day is hot and I’m not properly grieving and we have no guests to be offended. So just the veil.”

‘Lady Philippa is here,“ Frevisse said.

‘Philippa is family, not guest.“ Lady Anneys made to rise, found herself a little unsteady at it, and thanked Sister Johane for a steadying hand to her back. On her feet, she straightened her shoulders with a visible effort and asked, ”Is Elyn here, too?“