The Leper's Return (13 page)

At his yard, he hobbled to the gate and opened it, leading the horse inside, but as he turned to close the gate, a figure sidled along and into the yard behind him.

“What do you want?” John grumbled irritably.

“Me, John?” Putthe asked slyly, his eyes roving all over the yard as if seeking the missing plate. “All I want is to give you some help—if you’ll let me, that is.”

8

B
aldwin waved to the nearest serving-girl as he walked in, his face smiling as proof of his pleasure. The hall was a large one, with tables scattered haphazardly around the floor, and Baldwin and his servant were forced to take a circuitous route to the one where his friends were sitting.

It was over six months since Baldwin had seen Simon Puttock, the bailiff of Lydford, and longer since he had met Simon’s wife, Margaret, but neither was surprised when the knight offered them only a perfunctory greeting. They both knew he had not spoken to Jeanne de Liddinstone for twelve months, not since the affair of the murders at Tavistock Fair.

Jeanne had not changed over the interval, and to Baldwin she was beautiful. She was tall and strongly built, with long limbs and a slim figure. Her face was regular, with a wide mouth whose upper lip was a little over-full, giving her a slightly stubborn look, but her nose gave the opposite impression, being both short and slightly tip-tilted. Most important to Baldwin, though, were her eyes: bright and clear blue, intelligent, and almost without exception, smiling.

She was wearing a long riding cloak trimmed with gray fur, over a deep blue tunic embroidered with flowers at hem and throat. On her head was a simple coif, which gave the knight a tantalizing glimpse of the red-gold hair plaited and pinned beneath. He took her hand and bowed, and she gave him a mocking curtsey in return.

“Is that enough now, Sir Baldwin? My very bones ache after riding all the way here, and you force me to bend to you?”

“My lady, please…I mean, please be seated,” he said, flustered in case he might have given offense.

To Edgar, the scene carried more than a faint feeling of déjà vu. His master had wooed this woman when they had last met, he knew, and had achieved only moderate success. In Edgar’s view it was in large measure due to the knight’s nervousness and anxiety about hurting the lady’s feelings that he had not won her. Now he saw her smile more kindly on Baldwin, and to his relief, his master relaxed slightly and sat with her.

“So, Baldwin, should we leave immediately?” Margaret’s tone was playful, but there was an undercurrent of asperity.

“My lady, I am confused and blinded by the beauty of two such perfect women. How could a poor knight like me ever dream of being honored by the presence of both of you at the same time? It is as if the sun itself has fallen into the room, I feel so utterly…”

“All right, Baldwin,” Simon interrupted hastily. “You’ve satisfied the greed of these two for compliments—now, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like a cup of good strong wine to take away the taste of all the dust I’ve swallowed on the way here!”

“It is ordered, I think,” Baldwin said, peering over his friend’s shoulder toward the buttery. “Edgar, see if you can hurry them along, will you? I think today I will celebrate with wine as well.”

Nothing loath, Edgar went off, for this was the inn where his Cristine served, and he had the hope that he might be able to corner her for his own purposes for a few minutes.

It was Margaret who broke the short silence. “And how are affairs in Crediton?”

Her words brought Baldwin up with a jolt. He had been watching Jeanne and wondering when he would be able to speak to her privately, but Margaret had unthinkingly reminded him of Godfrey’s body. “Not good, I fear. There has been a murder.”

Instantly Simon leaned forward. He was a strong, hardy man in his middle thirties with brown hair, slightly grizzled. Four years ago he had been a young, ambitious bailiff on his way up; then his face had been free of any wrinkles, but since the death of his little son Peterkin the previous year, he had lost much of his aura of youth. Now he wore deep creases at his brow, like the battle scars of life.

The bailiff waited while Cristine doled out cups and wine, quickly hurrying back to the buttery, then jerked his head in a gesture of interest. “Come along, tell us all about it.”

It took little time for Baldwin to describe the scene he had found the night before, or to summarize the evidence he had been given by the bottler and first finder.

When he was finished, Simon took a long gulp of wine and sucked his teeth thoughtfully. “So you haven’t done too much yet. You’ve only spoken to one neighbor and a wounded servant. There’s still this other neighbor…who is it? Anyone I know?”

Baldwin grinned. Simon had lived in Crediton and the surrounding area for many years before moving out to Lydford with his new job. “It was Irelaunde.”

“That little bastard!”

“Simon!”

“What, Meg? Oh—I’m sorry, Jeanne. But Christ’s Blood, Baldwin, if he lives close, he’s the first man you should question. You know what sort of a character he is!”

Baldwin leaned back with a beatific smile. “It is a wonderful relief to have you here, Simon. Up until now I hadn’t realized how much I relied on your judgment and fair-mindedness. I was thrashing around and going through the motions without thinking about the crime itself.”

“So you’ll go and see him immediately?”

“No. I’ll go and speak to the man’s daughter. You’ve just told me how the locals will all think, and I’d better get my hands on the real killer before some fool decides to take the law into his own hands and lynches the wrong man!”

Simon gave a short laugh. He knew that he was often prone to leap to conclusions, and overall he was content with the trait. In the main, while he worked out on the moors, settling disputes between miners and landowners, it was a useful ability, to be able to see who was the most likely culprit, or who was probably at fault. With simple arguments, such as who should be permitted to change the flow of a stream, or whether a tenement-holder had the rights of pasturage over a particular plot, there was little analysis required. It was more a case of applying common sense and maintaining an attitude of fair play. For that, Simon’s brand of quick intuition often saved a lot of time.

“I’m glad you’re here, Simon,” Baldwin continued more seriously, and Simon felt his smile broaden. The knight’s words carried too much sincerity for him to be doubted.

“So when are you to go and speak to this young woman?” Jeanne asked. “Is there time for us to get to your house first?”

“With your permission, lady, I will send you off with my servant. Simon, you have brought Hugh with you?” The bailiff nodded. “Then, Jeanne, you will have two good men to protect you on your way.”

“Jeanne has better protection than you realize, Baldwin,” said Margaret lightly.

The knight threw her a baffled glance, but had no time to ask what she meant, for there was a sudden commotion from the buttery. Muttering under his breath, Baldwin rose to his feet, but before he could discover the cause, the cause discovered him.

Edgar fell back from the doorway, his arm round Cristine’s waist, staring at the door with a smile of sheer delight. There was a short silence, then Baldwin watched with astonishment as Simon’s servant, Hugh, hurtled out, slipping on a patch of wet rushes and falling over. He sat up, rubbing a sore elbow and glowering ferociously as a massive shape filled the doorway.

“I said you’ve had enough!” the shape boomed. “That means you won’t have any more ale. I’ll not have a drunk escorting my lady.”

“Baldwin,” Jeanne said sweetly, “my maid didn’t join me at Tavistock, so you haven’t met her, have you? This is Emma.”

Ralph crossed the small yard to the chapel, and stood at the entrance, wiping a hand over his forehead. The night before he had sat up with one of the older inmates while he slowly faded, dying just before dawn. The monk sighed. It was a hard duty that he had taken up. The only certainty was that his flock would diminish faster than any other.

Opening the door, he walked inside, and was about to reach for his broom when he heard the regular sweeping. It brought a tired smile to his lips. “Mary?”

“Oh, Brother Ralph, I didn’t worry you, I hope?”

He could see her face now, vaguely anxious, as if her taking on the cleaning could be construed as an insult to his own cleanliness. “No, my dear. No, I am very happy that you should help me, but…Surely you have other things you could be doing?”

“No, sir,” she said, leaning on her broom-handle and speaking with a calm certainty. “I want to help the men here.”

“Mary, you are young. You will find another man to marry. It’s not right that you should stay here, among all this disease.”

“I know my man has always been a good soul. It was my intention to marry him, and if I can’t, I won’t marry at all. Anyway, I can do more good here, for you, for your lepers, and for my soul, than I could by becoming a farmer’s wife. No, I was prepared to wed Edmund Quivil, and if he’s going to die, then at least I can see he dies easy in his heart. He’ll know that I’ve always been loyal to him.”

Ralph sat at a stool, and gestured for her to follow suit. “But perhaps your presence is not so beneficial?”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“Well, you see, he can watch you every day here, and that must be unsettling for him. He was to marry you, as you say. If he loves you, how would he feel knowing you are here with all the other lepers?” He held up a hand to prevent interruption. “Your being here, near him, must always be a sore temptation.”

At this she laughed. “Oh, Brother! You think he might rape me? My Edmund?”

“You may find it hard to believe, but worse things have happened to young women in lazar houses. And even if he doesn’t, don’t you think it might be cruel to remind him of what he is missing?”

“Like letting the bull see the heifers but keeping him fenced off?”

“Well, er, yes. Something like that.”

“I suppose it’s possible. But I think my Edmund would prefer to see me here and know I care for him still than wonder what I was doing outside. And if you’ve heard the talk, I don’t care what people say!”

This last was said with a sudden passion, and Ralph nodded slowly. “The people of the town can be very cruel, but try to forgive them. They don’t understand—all they know is, they’re scared of the disease that we hold in here.”

“Saying I’m no better than a whore!” she declared hotly. “They ought to know better.”

“Well,” he sighed, “some misguided people believe that leprosy is an evil brought about by lust. They think it’s transmitted by intimate relations, and therefore lepers are especially libidinous.”

“You don’t?”

“No, Mary, and even if they were, that would be no reflection on you. I think my charges have more important things on their minds than fornication. They have their eyes firmly fixed on the life to come, or on how their poor, tortured bodies will be eaten up and destroyed by their disease. Anyway, I don’t believe that leprosy is sexually transmitted. It’s a gift from God, and the sufferers should be honored. I agree with St. Hugh of Lincoln, that the more deformed they are, the more they suffer here on earth, the more brightly their souls will shine in Heaven. They have been sent their diseases to teach us all how we shall be tormented with pain in Purgatory. Their Purgatory is here, now!”

“Yes, Brother. But if it is a gift from God, then maybe He intends honoring me too.”

“We should never presume to look for such things from God,” he said sententiously. “Whatever He decides for you, you must accept it.”

“But it cannot be wrong for me to want to help look after His own selected people.”

“No,” he said uncertainly. It was considered that women were capable of looking after others in certain circumstances, he knew. “Except I really do think you should be considering starting a new life without Quivil. He’s lost to you now.”

“So he is, but that’s no reason why I shouldn’t help you, is it? Especially since by so doing I’ll be helping those whom God Himself has chosen to be a sign to us all.”

“Well…I suppose so.”

“Then I’d better get on with the sweeping.”

Ralph watched her move down the little aisle, rhythmically swaying as she moved the broom. She was the picture of a rough, untutored peasant girl, with heavy body and coarse, grubby hands, and yet she was demonstrating more generosity of spirit and kindliness than many of his brother-priests. The thought made him sigh, but it also gave him a spark of satisfaction. He walked forward and bent at the altar, offering up a short prayer for her and her doomed lover, before leaving the chapel. He might as well go and see to laying out the body of the dead leper.

After all, he reasoned, what harm could come from letting Mary work in the lazar house?

“My God! Simon,” Baldwin gasped. “How could Jeanne have allied herself with that?”

“It can’t have been her fault. She must have been stuck with the woman from an early age,” Simon said.

They were standing at the entrance to the inn, watching the small cavalcade disappear down the street. Edgar was leading the way, Hugh keeping the rear with the packhorse, although from the way he kept throwing appealing glances back at his master, he would have preferred to remain. Baldwin couldn’t blame him.

“She’s a bear, Simon, a ravening, insane beast! How could a frail thing like Jeanne stand to live with something like that?”

As they made their way along the road toward Godfrey’s hall, Simon laughed. “She’s not so bad as she looks, Baldwin. She can even tell jokes.”

“Jokes? I daresay she could, but not the sort I’d want a soldier to hear! And did you see the warts on her chin? And her arms are more strongly muscled than my own, I swear.”

“Baldwin, you can’t deny that she’s eminently capable of protecting her mistress, can you?”

That, Baldwin agreed silently, was the whole point. With a fearsome guard like Emma he would find it very hard to get Jeanne on her own, if the display with Hugh was anything to go by. He had no objection to Jeanne being safe from footpads and felons, but that was very different to her being carefully fenced in from him by her maid. And he had no doubt that Emma would be a most resolute guardian. He had seen it in her eyes as she was introduced to him—cold, astute eyes that seemed to read him with terrifying ease. Little, brown eyes, they were, but without any of that gentle, bovine softness that Baldwin had always associated with the color. Emma’s were sharp and angry, like a small hog’s.

The rest of her bore out the analogy. She was short, but with a massive frame that made her look almost perfectly round. Her chest was carried like some kind of armored buttress—or maybe like the curtain wall of a castle, Baldwin amended, recalling the awesome immensity of her bosom. An army, he felt, could batter itself to death against such a vast obstacle.

Seeing his self-absorption, Simon laughed. “Forget her. You have a murder to solve. So tell me, whom are we to see now?”

“The daughter of the man who was killed. Her name is Cecily, and she was discovered in the same room as her father’s corpse. She was knocked senseless.”

They were soon at the house. Clearly most of the townspeople had accepted the fact that Tanner was not going to be bribed into allowing them to view the corpse or the place where Godfrey was killed, and had left to get on with their work. Tanner stood aside for them to go in, and Simon led the way, but not before Baldwin had caught a glimpse of the men standing well back, almost in the alleyway opposite. It made him frown for a moment, seeing the lepers there, but then he shrugged. Why should he assume that lepers, by mere virtue of their disease, should be uninterested in the fate of others? He knew that old men were always keen to hear of the demise of their peers, or of those younger than themselves. There was a greedy fascination with death among those who were likely to experience it for themselves in the near future, and lepers surely fell into that category.

Yet when he glanced over his shoulder, he was surprised to see how keenly one of the rag-clothed figures was following his progress to the door. It was the new man, the one he had seen with Quivil earlier, and Baldwin made a mental note to ask the leper master about the stranger when he had a chance.

The door was open, and just inside, seated on a stool from which he could see both front and back doors, was a watchman. He stood and nodded to Baldwin, and let the two pass into the hall itself.

“Ugh! You could have warned me, Baldwin!”

“Squeamish, Simon? I had thought you would have been cured of that after looking into so many murders.”

“It’s one thing to become used to the sight of dead men, but quite another to suddenly get presented with a corpse, especially when the stench is so strong!”

The knight had to agree with that. Someone had been in and fuelled the fire, and the room was close, the atmosphere heavy with the sweetness of death. As he moved toward the body, he grimaced. The crushed skull was already feeding the flies. Waving them away as best he could, he crouched down to repeat his investigation of the night before.

Godfrey had been an older man, certainly over fifty, and his hair was thin and gray. From the size of the damaged area, one conclusion seemed obvious. “He can’t have known anything about it.” Something caught Baldwin’s notice as he spoke. The man’s nose was scratched, and as Baldwin peered closer, he saw a series of short, but deep marks on the chin, and more on his left cheekbone. The wound on the back of the head itself was on the right side, a little above the point where it joined the neck. “Yes, we can be quite sure that as soon as this blow struck, he was dead,” he said musingly.

“Fine—you enjoy yourself, and I’ll get some fresh air while you carry on.”

Suiting his action to his words, Simon went to the nearest window, the one toward which the body was pointing. Soon he had thrown open the shutters, and could breathe in deep, satisfying lungfuls. There was something about Baldwin’s eagerness to examine the victims of violent death that had always repelled the bailiff. He took a little too much pleasure in his work. Today was no exception. Even now, Baldwin turned the body to and fro in his search for other wounds, opening the dead man’s shirt and checking the torso, feeling the chilly flesh for the onset of rigor mortis, before prying the lips apart to gaze in at the mouth.

Simon looked away. It was too morbid for his taste. When a body was dead, that was an end to it as far as he was concerned. Simon’s interest lay in people’s motives for killing, and that meant questioning all those concerned; Baldwin’s conviction was that any body could tell how it died, and that might give clues as to who the attacker was. It was a view which Simon had seen demonstrated often enough for him not to dispute the fact, but he was enormously grateful that Baldwin was always keen to take on that part of the investigation himself, and didn’t require Simon’s help. In fact, Simon knew full well that his friend was glad to be left to study any clues alone.

The window was quite low. This place was not designed for defense like so many others. Standing here, Simon could see the stableyard to his left. In front was the edge of the kitchen’s wall, which stretched on to the right, out as far as the wall between Godfrey’s and Coffyn’s.

If someone was to try to rob the place, they wouldn’t try to escape through any of the windows at the front of the place. Only a fool would run away through a busy street, surely—but then many felons were fools, he reminded himself. Intelligent men rarely turned to crime. But if that was the case, and if plates had been stolen, then the best escape route was through the back, and perhaps over one of the walls.

The idea caught his imagination. From what Baldwin had said, Godfrey had shouted at someone trying to defile his daughter. That implied the drawlatch was at the window. Why else should Godfrey have tried to cross over to this window? Yet if the thief was inside, and Godfrey thought he was trying to rape or harm his daughter, did that mean the man had taken the plate with the woman’s agreement? Or had he struck her down and then removed it—in which case, what on earth had Godfrey meant when, according to Coffyn, he had shouted: “So you’d defile my daughter too, would you?”

“Baldwin,” he said, “tell me again where the three bodies were.”

“Hmm? Godfrey was here, as you can see. Arm held up, as though he was instantly killed by the blow to his head. I think that is quite likely—the blood flowed freely, as you’d expect, and although there was a light spray under his arm, the main flow of the blood followed the line of his arm. This other arm is interesting, though. Very!”

“Come on, tell me where the bodies were.”

“You see, the knuckles of his hand have been barked, as if he managed to thump one of the men before he was killed.”

“That is not a surprise.”

“No, but at least we know that one assailant might have been wounded. It might help. Oh, very well, Simon, don’t fret! The servant was there, nearer the door, as if he was going to his master or Cecily.”

“The girl?”

“She was here,” said the knight, getting to his feet with a groan and cracking of bones. “Here, Tanner said, between the body and the window. Why?”