Forsaken Soul

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Cuthbert’s mind was not on murder. The air was hot, and he slashed away at the lush underbrush with minimal enthusiasm. A soft spray of dampness misted his face from the cut greens. With unconscious pleasure at the unexpected coolness on such a warm day, he stopped and listened for a moment to the rushing of the nearby stream and hum of lazy insects. Nay, he no longer fancied rousting out thieves and murderers, although he knew he would continue to do whatever the crowner wanted.

Ralf was a good fellow. Unlike his one arrogant brother, Sir Sheriff, and the other, lordling of the Church, the crowner cursed those who protected their own while condemning the evil of others with sanctimonious ardor. He also told good tales of the soldiering life, while drinking at the inn like any other man, and never arrested someone just because he was the popular choice for hanging. Querulous the crowner might be, but Cuthbert would take an honest, bad-tempered fellow any day over a sweet-smiling hypocrite.

And hadn’t Ralf just told Cuthbert that he needed a bailiff, then asked if he would take the job even though the sergeant could barely read and could not write? “I need someone who knows how to run a farm, and your father tells me you’re as good as your elder brothers at that,” Ralf had said to him and slapped him on the back. As a landless man, Cuthbert would have been a fool to refuse-and foolish he most certainly was not!

Due to bad stewardship in the past, the land, now owned by the crowner, had brought little enough good to the village. If he ran it well, the farm would be more fruitful, and Ralf would be pleased to hire more poor men at harvest time. Given time and hard work, Cuthbert would also gain much status in the village for his success.

His mind more on his new position than where he was walking, the sergeant stumbled and his foot dropped through the forest floor into an invisible hole. Cursing from the pain, he fell awkwardly to the ground, then lay still, praying that the sharp stabbing in his ankle meant the injury was only a sprain.

“Aie!” he groaned, and then let his thoughts go back to happier things. Might he not even seek a wife, he wondered, swatting at gnats as they swarmed in a beam of light. He would have position enough now, and there was one lass he had always fancied, even as a boy, taking her nosegays of forest flowers until her father had chased him away.

Smiling at the thought of her, Cuthbert stared through the leaves above him to the pale blue sky of an East Anglian summer afternoon. She was a pretty one too, that girl, and not married yet, although rumors had circulated that her father wanted to marry her to the tanner’s son.

The pain eased and the sergeant pulled himself upright with care. Testing his ankle, he decided it was not broken. “But no reason to chance a break,” he muttered. “I’ll quit the forest and find the clearing where I won’t injure myself again.”

Tanner’s son? A good match if one discounted the stench, Cuthbert thought as he found a clear path without things to trip him up. But wouldn’t marriage to a bailiff be a finer one? The crowner might even sell him a bit of land in time. With some work, that would suit a wife and a few babes. If she was even half the woman he knew her to be, she would work alongside him with as much eagerness as he to build a home and some standing in Tyndal village. And he had always thought she liked him well enough even when he was just a peasant’s younger son with no land and few prospects.

The pain in his ankle eased with the balm of sweet imaginings, and Cuthbert now thrashed more eagerly through the lesser brush, keen to finish searching his assigned area so he could return to the village and seek out that father who had once scorned his blushing attentions to the daughter.

At least his heart was filled with joy until he burst into that clearing and found a corpse swelling in the summer heat.