Blood of the South

EIGHT

The slowly receding water revealed a mass of flattened vegetation caked with mud and assorted rubbish. Jack and I realized that it was only by an unlikely stroke of luck that we would come across anything else belonging to our dead woman. After standing silently for some moments staring out over the ruined landscape, Jack turned to me.

‘Did I not hear your aunt mention that you were good at finding things?’

‘It has happened, on rare occasions, that I’ve managed to locate lost items -’ a vision of an ancient crown¹ flashed through my head; there and gone in a blink – ‘but, for it to work, it seems that I have to have a pretty good idea of what I’m looking for.’

He nodded his understanding. ‘Perhaps you have to visualize the item?’

‘Er – well, sort of,’ I agreed. It wasn’t exactly that – I’d had no idea what that crown would look like – but it was hard to explain.

He stared at me a while longer, and I saw interest in his eyes. He had a way of looking at you very directly, as if you held every bit of his attention. He would, I guessed, have loved to pursue the matter. I was surprised. If anyone had asked me, I’d have said that a Norman lawman, with quite an important position in a place like Cambridge, would have been down to earth, pragmatic and totally lacking imagination; a man, in short, to be utterly dismissive of anything he could not detect by sight, smell, hearing or touch.

Again, I began to understand that there was more to Jack Chevestrier than met the eye.

His quiet scrutiny was making me uncomfortable. Carefully I stowed the shift in my satchel, then said, ‘I’ll have a go, though. Just give me a moment.’

He knew exactly what to do. He turned his back and walked away along the bank, catching up with the horses. They were taking advantage of the halt to graze, and I could hear the soft sound of their big teeth ripping through the grass.

I stood quite still, closing my eyes. Normally, when I’m searching for a specific item, I hold out my hands palms down and focus on it, and, with any luck, when I’m near it I feel a sort of tingling in my hands. I think that I must be open to strange forces at such times, because once – it was when I found the crown – I’d been assailed by the most terrifying feeling that invisible lines of power were attacking me, and I’d seen a vision from the past that still haunts me.

I hoped very much that wasn’t about to happen again.

I stretched out my hands. I waited. Nothing happened. I turned in a slow circle. Again, my palms gave no response. Now I was back where I had started, facing out over the swollen river.

It happened so suddenly that there was no time to feel afraid. I saw a huge wall of water, sweeping up the river towards where I stood. It went past me, and I should have been right inside it, helpless as it swept me away; but this was not reality, it was vision, something intangible that originated within my mind, and although I saw myself within a deadly swirl of furious water, in fact I stood, perfectly safe, on firm ground.

I saw a body, its long pale limbs turned over and over in the wild current. A garment still clung to it but, as I watched, it detached, sinking down into the water. Suddenly I was face to face with her, and I could see the devastated eyes, the half-eaten breasts. Nausea rose up, and I heard myself groan as sweat broke out on my forehead. I made myself go on looking, and, as I’d known I would, I saw the poor body thrown against the underside of the bridge. It – she – was battered to and fro by the force of the flow, and then, as the ferocity of the current slowly eased, finally the body came to rest.

The vision faded. I was about to open my eyes when, totally unexpectedly, something else happened: out of nowhere, I was hit with a sense of fear so overpoweringly strong that I gasped. Somebody was watching me from a place of concealment, but in my trance state – if that was what it was – I saw eyes, glittering with malice, narrowed with intent. I felt a surge of malevolence which seemed to roar towards me and break against me like a wave. There was a flash of silver, a whistle as if something was flying through the air, and then I was on the ground, flat on my face, winded from the force with which I’d thrown myself down.

As soon as I could breathe again, I sat up, then got to my feet. Jack was standing a respectful distance away, but with the anxiety easily readable in his expression. Suddenly I wanted to laugh: did he imagine that every attempt at dowsing ended with me flinging myself on the ground?

I didn’t really appreciate it until later, but his first question was actually rather revealing. He must have been desperate with impatience to find out if I’d discovered anything relevant to the woman’s death, but what he said was, ‘Are you all right?’

I started to say yes, but then, as I made to move towards him, I stumbled. He was by my side in an instant, strong hands supporting me. Feeling stupid, hastily I straightened up. ‘I’m fine!’ I said with an embarrassed laugh. ‘And I didn’t sense anything other than the shift, which you’ve already found. Oh, except that she was dead some time before she got here.’ My voice didn’t sound quite normal. ‘I saw her poor body, with the eyes so badly damaged and those wounds to her breasts, and she was in that state when the surge drove her here.’

He gave a soft exclamation of sympathy and put his arms round me. He felt as tough as he looked; it was a bit like being hugged by a barrel. When he spoke, the tenderness in his tone came as an odd contrast to his physical toughness. ‘She is at peace now,’ he said. ‘The fear and the pain are all over, and she lies quiet, warmly wrapped in your aunt’s clean cloth.’

In normal circumstances, I’d have treated that remark with a derisive snort. I deal with death pretty frequently, and I know full well that corpses have no feelings, and can’t possibly be aware of being snug in their winding sheets. But these were far from being normal circumstances. For some reason – I had no idea what it was – I had formed a bond with the dead woman. Her awful death had touched me, and her fate affected me deeply. To hear Jack speak those consoling words was like balm to my sore heart.

He went on holding me. He was very close, and his clear green eyes looked straight into mine.

‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’

‘Yes,’ I whispered. Could I tell him? What had I seen, after all? I’d sensed danger, imminent and strong, but I was almost sure it was simply an overactive imagination. We were standing where a woman had just died, and I’d already had a jittery sense of eyes on me on the way here. ‘I’m sure it’s nothing,’ I added.

‘Tell me anyway,’ Jack said.

I drew a breath. ‘I thought I saw – or sensed – that someone was watching us. He meant us harm, and I heard the sound of a weapon as it whistled towards me.’

‘Is that the sort of thing you often pick up when you’re dowsing?’ he asked.

I smiled. ‘No, not really, although there was a time when I felt as scared as I did just now.’

‘And did the danger-’ But he must have felt how violently I was shuddering, and, tactfully, stopped asking penetrating questions.

After a few moments, I said in a small voice, ‘What if she was murdered, Jack? What if whoever did it is still here, watching to see what we discover?’

He was quiet for quite a while, and I guessed he was thinking. ‘Your aunt seemed to be fairly sure that our victim drowned,’ he said eventually, ‘but it need not necessarily have been an accidental drowning.’

‘You mean, somebody could have held her under till she died?’ I said in a whisper.

‘They could,’ Jack agreed, ‘but that’s not to say they did.’

It took me some time to pull myself together. I needed to show him I was all right, and that he could let me go without fearing I’d instantly collapse on him. Gently I disengaged myself, gave him a grin and said, ‘We can go on now.’

Then I bent down to pick up my satchel and, with as much determination as I could muster, strode over to the horses.

We rode on through the day, stopping wherever we saw a village, a hamlet, a collection of houses and even a gaggle of people, to ask if a tall, fair young woman had gone missing in the floods. The going was hard, and at times we had to make long detours to get round inundated ground. My knowledge of the area helped, and once I even tried my hand at finding the safe path across a stretch of marsh, as I’d done at Ely. Jack was impressed at my success, and I felt compelled to admit that I’d been all but sure the hidden path was there, since it was one I use at least twice a year going to and from a place where marsh mallows grow.

It seems to be a factor in our dealings with others, this compulsion to be straight and honest with those who are straight and honest with us.

Nobody we spoke to was looking for a young, fair, blue-eyed woman. They were searching for plenty of other things: missing livestock, doors, bits of fencing, household items; and some, indeed, were frantically hunting for people. Heartbreakingly, one wild-eyed man was trying to find his six-year-old son.

We helped where we could. Jack used his muscle to assist a group of men heave a cart out of the ditch into which the water had flung it. We both joined an old woman trying single-handedly to round up a flock of geese, and, while she and I shut them up temporarily inside her own tiny hovel of a house, Jack repaired their pen. He was, I noticed, well used to dealing with geese. I used quite a lot of the supplies in my satchel patching up various wounds and dispensing remedies for the many aches, pains, sniffles and coughs caused by people having spent far too long out of doors up to their knees or waists in cold water and soaked to the skin.

We found the little boy. Out in the open ground beyond the village with the geese we heard frantic sobbing, and found the child sitting in the lower branches of a hazel tree. It took quite a long time to coax him down, encourage him to get on my horse and take him back to his father, but the man’s inarticulate joy at being reunited with his son was more than adequate reward.

I don’t think either Jack or I had noticed how late it was until darkness began to fall. We were miles away from Aelf Fen, and we’d had no luck at all in trying to find where our dead woman had come from. Turning to me with a rueful expression, Jack said, ‘It looks as though we’ll have to find somewhere to spend the night, and then continue with the search in the morning.’ I nodded. ‘I’m sorry,’ he added, ‘I hadn’t expected to be away so long. Do you mind?’

Not really being used to people asking if I mind things, I was taken aback. Then – for he was clearly waiting for me to answer – I said, ‘No, I don’t. In any case, I’m here because Lord Gilbert sent me with you to try to help you, so whether I mind or not isn’t really important.

I thought he said, It is to me, but I was probably wrong.

We found a lonely, run-down and desolate little monastery, although monastery implies something far grander than the meagre set of ramshackle buildings and the half-dozen monks in residence. Jack’s status as a man of the law guaranteed their cooperation, such as it was, although I’d like to think that they would have honoured their Christian duty to take us in, whoever we were. The guest accommodation was a draughty barn full of old, musty hay, but at least it was dry. The food was indescribably bad, but, happily, we had plenty of Lady Emma’s supplies left. As we wrapped ourselves in our blankets and settled in the hay for the night, I was extremely glad to be safe under cover, and, hopefully, in a place where those haunting, threatening dark eyes could not spy on me.

We set out again at first light. It quickly became clear that the day would follow yesterday’s pattern. Again, we found plenty of folk needing our assistance, but nobody missing our dead woman.

By noon, we were only a few miles south of Lynn. We stopped at the top of a gentle rise whose summit was crowned with pine trees, and as we ate the last of Lady Emma’s food, Jack broke the silence – I guessed he’d been thinking hard – and said, ‘I have a proposition to put to you.’

‘Oh, yes?’ The shiver of excited anticipation took me by surprise.

He finished his mouthful, swallowed and said, ‘We could be in Lynn this afternoon. Since it’s the first settlement of any size we’ve come to, and since it must have suffered the full force of the tidal surge, it’s quite possible that we may at last trace the kin of our dead woman.’

‘True.’ I knew, even before he drew breath to go on, that there was more.

‘We will, of course, do our utmost to do so, since it is why we’re here. But there is something else we could look into.’

‘The Maid of the Marsh came from here,’ I said. He met my eyes, and he was smiling. ‘She left from Lynn to sail down to Cambridge,’ I went on. ‘This was where Lady Rosaria went aboard.’

‘Indeed it was,’ he agreed. ‘Sheriff Picot told me, you’ll recall, to help her, and I suppose finding out how she came to be separated from her companions could be described as simply following orders.’

‘Also,’ I said, ‘Lord Gilbert would be delighted if we find out something that enables him to locate her kinsfolk, so, in a way, we’d be following his orders, too.’ In a burst of confidence, I added, ‘I don’t like Lady Rosaria. I know she’s making an attempt to look after her child, and I do realize she’s probably suffered some bad experience that’s still affecting her, but-’ I didn’t really know how to put it into words. ‘There’s just something about her,’ I finished lamely.

Jack was busy packing away the remains of our food. I heard him repeat softly, ‘Just something about her.’

There wasn’t really any more to say.

The industrious inhabitants of the small settlement of Lynn had set about clearing up with great energy, and already the place was getting back to normal. A great muddy, sandy, salty swathe had cut through on either side of the river, and there was a very distinctive high-water mark all along the seaward-facing side of the town. Everywhere there was bustle and noise, and the endless sound of dozens of brooms energetically sweeping out water, mud and assorted debris.

The prospect of being among a crowd of busy people was more attractive than I liked to admit. Although I’d been trying to tell myself it was all in my imagination, still the sense that unfriendly eyes were on me – on us – persisted. Several times that day, the certainty of somebody behind me, careful to stay out of sight, had become so strong that I’d whipped round, trying to catch him, or, I suppose, her, before they had a chance to slip back into hiding.

I approached Lynn with a relieved smile. But, just as we entered the first of its little streets, it suddenly occurred to me that if this was where the drowned woman came from and if, indeed, she had been murdered, then the killer might easily be a local too. Just biding his time for the right moment to get rid of the inquisitive pair who’d come to investigate her death …

But there was a job to do. Ruthlessly I put my fears aside.

Jack found stabling for the horses, then we split up, each taking a different segment of the settlement. I worked my way to and fro, up the narrow tracks leading away from the water and back down again. People had died, I learned; not many, but one fatality would have been more than enough. A few were missing, but none of their descriptions matched our dead woman. After what seemed hours, I met up with Jack once more. He reported much the same story.

‘We may yet find out that she came from Lynn, although the population is small and most people seem to have been accounted for,’ Jack said. ‘Apparently they’re still getting word of the damage in outlying places, and reports of missing people. I’ll ask around again in the morning. I’ve been told about a place we can put up overnight.’ He smiled briefly. ‘It sounds all right; better, anyway, than the monastery.’

I was barely listening. I was seeing that image again, of the body in the water. Briefly I shut my eyes, and I was suddenly very sure of something I’d previously only suspected. ‘She isn’t from here.’

His voice seemed to reach me from a distance. ‘How do you know?’

‘She was a very long way from home,’ I whispered. ‘She-’

But the strange moment had passed. I opened my eyes, feeling awkward. ‘Sorry,’ I muttered.

He shook his head. ‘I don’t think you need to be sorry. What happened?’

I sighed. ‘It was nothing – just a strong feeling that we’re not going to succeed.’

‘We still have to try,’ he said. ‘But, for now, I think we should turn our attention to that other matter. Come on – there are still several hours of daylight.’

He spun round and strode away, and I hurried after him. Quite soon, we emerged from a narrow and extremely smelly little alley out on to the quayside. Here, down at the waterfront, the area had received the full force of the encroaching sea. There was damage everywhere, and the air echoed with the sounds of industry as small groups of people went about repairs. Several smaller craft had been hurled up on to the land and as we stood taking in the scene, a gang of some dozen men gave a ragged cheer as one such vessel was finally shoved back into the water.

Larger boats were at moorings along the quay, and, again, it was clear that few had escaped unscathed. There were quite a lot of vessels; no doubt, alerted to approaching danger, their masters had made for the nearest port, many of them ending up here at Lynn. The captain of The Maid of the Marsh had mentioned a boat out of Yarmouth, The Good Shepherd, which had transported Lady Rosaria to Lynn; thinking that it was too much to hope for that her master would have been one of those who had made a run for this particular port, nevertheless I crossed my fingers surreptitiously behind my back as Jack and I set out along the quay.

I’ve never really had any faith in crossed fingers. This time, the ruse worked. The Good Shepherd was second to last in the line.

She was a much bigger vessel than The Maid of the Marsh; she was a seagoing ship, considerably longer and broader in the beam. Few people were visible on her deck. At the stern, a group of five men stood close together, apparently deep in conversation, and a couple of youngsters lounged on the foredeck, close to where a narrow plank ran up to give access from the quay. Her master, it seemed, had already effected whatever repairs might have been necessary, and the ship looked as if she had just received a thorough clean.

Jack called out to the lads, who jumped to their feet and stood stiffly in response to the authority in his voice. They both looked guilty, and I suspected their master was a hard taskmaster who would not encourage his crew to stand about idle.

‘We’re looking for your master or your mate,’ Jack said. ‘If either is aboard and willing to see us, we’d be grateful.’

The two boys put their heads together and muttered for a while, then the taller one said warily, ‘Captain’s gone ashore. But the mate’s here, only he’s busy, see.’

‘I’m sure he is,’ Jack said politely. ‘All the same, we wish a few moments of his time.’

The boy, perhaps recognizing that Jack wasn’t going to give up, dipped his head in a sort of bow, and hurried off down the deck towards the five men. Waiting until one of them deigned to notice him, he spoke some urgent words, pointing back at Jack and me. The man who had addressed him – he was short and wiry, with a soft cap pulled down over curly dark hair – studied us for a few moments. Then, muttering something to his companions, he detached himself, strode up the deck and ran nimbly down the plank.

‘Thomas Gournay,’ he said. ‘You wanted to talk to me?’

He was looking intently at us, the deep-set brown eyes flashing from one to the other. But his expression was pleasant; he seemed more curious than hostile.

Jack introduced us – Thomas Gournay gave me a courteous nod as Jack spoke my name – and said, ‘I understand from the master of The Maid of the Marsh that you recently carried a passenger here from Yarmouth? She was a noblewoman, dark-eyed, well-dressed and-’

‘She had a baby with her – a little boy,’ I interrupted. It was the most distinguishing feature about Lady Rosaria.

Thomas Gournay was shaking his head slowly, his expression puzzled. ‘We didn’t pick up anyone in Yarmouth,’ he said. ‘We only stopped to unload some cargo. Wine,’ he added, ‘from Spain, for the lords and ladies up at Norwich Castle.’

‘You’ve come up from Spain?’ I asked. Maybe that was where Lady Rosaria came from! Gurdyman had told me a lot about Spain, and its dark-eyed, olive-skinned inhabitants.

‘Oh, no!’ Thomas said with a short laugh. ‘We don’t venture much further away than northern France, and it’s only very rarely we go down to Bordeaux, although that’s where we’ve just been. We picked up our cargo of wine, as well as a party of pilgrims on their way back from Santiago. But, like I said, no passengers came aboard at Yarmouth.’

I remembered something that the master of The Maid of the Marsh had told us. She’d underpaid the cost of her passage, and one of the crew came after her to collect what she owed. ‘She didn’t pay her full fare,’ I said. ‘One of your crew had to follow her to The Maid of the Marsh and ask her to settle with you.’

Thomas Gournay’s eyes widened in understanding. ‘Her!’ he exclaimed. ‘Oh, yes, I remember her, all right.’ He frowned. ‘She maintained it was a mistake, apparently. Said she didn’t understand the coinage. A likely tale,’ he added in a mutter.

‘Where did she board your ship?’ Jack asked. Although you couldn’t have detected it from his voice, I sensed that he was suddenly very tense.

‘She was with the pilgrims waiting at Bordeaux,’ Thomas replied promptly. ‘There was quite a party of them, all glowing with the joys of Saint James’s shrine, and eager to get back home and tell everyone all about it. And that showed just how impressive the place must be,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘when you consider they had bad weather all the way from Corunna.’

‘Do you recall the lady’s name?’ Jack went on.

Thomas grinned. ‘We don’t usually bother to ask,’ he said. ‘It’s all the same to us as long as they pay, and when people do volunteer a name, very often it’s not the one they were given when they came into this world.’

‘Did she have servants with her?’ I demanded.

But Thomas was shaking his head. ‘Now that I can’t tell you,’ he said. ‘They all came pushing on board, and it was pelting down with rain, so they were shoving each other out of the way so as to get to the best spots. Not that there’s much to choose one place from another,’ he added, glancing up at the exposed deck, ‘especially when there’s a south-west wind blowing hard. You don’t notice the rain so much once the spray hits you!’ He laughed. ‘And then most of them started being sick, which added to the confusion. You’d be amazed how many folk don’t know not to vomit into the wind.’

‘You didn’t notice if-’ Jack began.

But Thomas Gournay, evidently, had just experienced a flash of memory. ‘Seasickness!’ he cried. ‘Now then, that does recall something to mind. She did have a maid with her, that haughty woman, and the maid was poorly. She’d been fine on the run up from Corunna, apparently – and usually, if you can survive those conditions without losing your breakfast, you can survive anything – but she started being sick maybe half a day after we left port, and the lady rigged up some sort of a shelter for the pair of them and the baby. Folk quite often do that; anything that keeps even a part of the wet off them is welcome. It wasn’t much, just a heavy cloak and a bit of blanket fastened to the rail above them and stretched out to the deck so as to make a little private space underneath. Now you’re likely to find rough seas anywhere in the Bay of Biscay, even hugging the shore, and normally the sickness eases once you find calmer water. That poor maid, however, went right on suffering, and her lady was forced to roll up her sleeves and look after her.’

He paused to draw breath. I saw Lady Rosaria in my imagination, all alone with her infant son in an alien world except for one single maid so ravaged by seasickness that she had become a liability rather than a help. I began to feel very sorry for her, and I experienced a sharp stab of guilt at the way I’d judged her so harshly. She-

Jack’s quiet voice broke into my thoughts: ‘What happened to the maid?’

I understood the importance of his question even as my mind raced to catch up. The maid had gone aboard at Bordeaux with Lady Rosaria, but by the time the veiled lady and her baby reached Cambridge, she had been alone. We knew the servant hadn’t boarded The Maid of the Marsh; had she actually left The Good Shepherd, or had something happened to her on the journey up from Bordeaux?

Thomas Gournay was screwing up his face in his efforts to remember. ‘We’d been disembarking passengers all along the coast, and we dropped off a handful here,’ he said, ‘and then there was only a couple left who sailed on with us to Boston, and that was the end of our run. I wouldn’t swear to it, but, as far as I can recall, the lady enlisted the help of two of the other pilgrims to get her maid ashore. Well, I can tell you that two men carried someone on to the quay, and I’m guessing it was the maid, because the lady was fussing about and giving orders. It was raining again, like it had been in Bordeaux, and they all had their hoods up.’

‘Do you recall what the maid looked like?’ Jack asked.

Thomas frowned. ‘I’m trying to remember if I ever noticed,’ he admitted. There was what seemed like a very long silence. ‘Yes,’ he said eventually. ‘She approached me at the start of the run, soon after they’d all boarded and had finished elbowing each other out of the way. She said her lady needed fresh water, and complained because all that was available in the barrel was brackish. I told her it was the best they were going to get, and she sniffed and turned on her heel.’

‘And?’ Jack prompted.

‘And, what?’

Jack gave an almost inaudible sigh, which I thought was remarkably restrained of him. Personally, I felt like screaming with frustration. ‘What did the maid look like?’ he asked again.

Was she fair-haired and blue-eyed? I wanted to shout. Was she tall and strongly built? Surely she must have been; suffering terribly, exhausted from prolonged seasickness, our poor dead woman had been carried off the ship that had brought her so far, only to succumb to death once she was back on dry land. Had she fallen into the water? Had her body lain somewhere in the complex system of river estuaries here at Lynn, to be dislodged and swept far inland with the flood? Oh, it must be so! At last we would be able to establish who she was, even if not her name, and we could go back to Lord Gilbert and-

Thomas Gournay, after another pause to assemble his recollections, was speaking. ‘Like I say, they were cloaked and hooded most of the time, both of them, lady and maid,’ he said slowly. ‘Muffled up with veils and scarves, too, like the other passengers. But I noticed the way the maid moved – she was nimble, and quick on her feet. She wasn’t very tall, and I remember thinking that people like her seem to do better on a rolling deck than tall folk.’ He smiled sadly. ‘Shows how much I know, when the poor lass ended up being sick all the way home.’

She wasn’t very tall. Oh, no …

‘Do you remember anything else?’ Jack asked, although I could tell from his expression that he was as disappointed as I was. ‘Was she fair and light-eyed, like a northern woman?’

‘No, oh, no,’ Thomas Gournay said, shattering the last of my hopes. ‘I reckon she was probably a Spaniard, or some such. She was dark as they come.’

Something was niggling at me, and I couldn’t seem to pick it out from the tangle of my thoughts. It was something to do with what the mate of The Good Shepherd had just told us. As Jack led the way up into the settlement and towards our lodging for the night, I almost had it. But then abruptly the rain began again, and the problem of trying to keep at least a bit of me dry in the downpour drove everything else from my mind.