Girl In A Red Tunic

Chapter 11

Josse reported to the Abbess early the next day. She was clearly very relieved when he told her that nothing had turned up at the Old Manor to prove that Walter Bell had visited Leofgar there. Josse did not think it either kind or necessary to add that there had been no sign of a body either, although he was quite sure she had been dreading that there might have been.

‘What will Gervase de Gifford do now?’ she asked. Her appearance of serenity, Josse decided, was costing her considerable effort. Her face was pale and he noticed that her strong hands were clenched so tightly that the knuckles showed white. As if aware of his sympathetic eyes on them, she tucked her hands away in the opposite sleeves of her habit.

‘He has returned to Tonbridge,’ Josse replied. ‘He intends to carry on the search for Walter Bell as he suggests that finding the wretched man would be the best way of answering Fitzurse’s accusations.’

‘But even if Walter Bell should be found alive,’ she said slowly, ‘his brother Teb has been murdered.’

‘By an unknown hand,’ Josse countered swiftly. ‘De Gifford has no suggestions to make on the matter, my lady; at present he has no idea what the motive can have been and therefore he hesitates to speculate who might have killed the man.’

‘That is wise,’ she murmured. ‘I wish that I-’ But whatever she wished was to remain known to herself alone, for she folded her lips on the rest of the remark. Then after a moment she said, ‘And you, Sir Josse? What will you do?’

He had been thinking about this and had made up his mind; it was partly in order to tell her what he had decided to do that he had come to see her. ‘I shall go out into the forest,’ he announced. ‘Aye, I know that Saul and the brothers carried out a thorough search, but I want to see for myself.’ He smiled grimly. ‘They are capable and I do not doubt their diligence, my lady. But the forest has secrets, as you and I well know, and it may be that I can find my way into hidden places that other eyes, no matter how well intentioned, would not see.’

She watched him. Then she said softly, ‘Be careful.’

‘I am always careful.’ He tried to smile at her but he did not think he made much of a job of it.

He bowed to her and turned to go. He thought he heard her say ‘Thank you, my friend’, but he could not be sure.

He decided to walk up to the forest. Horace was a big horse and not renowned for moving silently and, besides, the trees grew low above the lesser paths and tracks and Josse would pass along beneath the bare winter branches more easily on his own two feet than high up astride his horse. He went to collect his sword and dagger and then strode quickly out through the Abbey gates and crossed the track, hurrying across the grass and increasing his pace as he drew nearer to the fringe of trees that circled the main forest. As always, he began to feel the unique atmosphere of the Great Forest reach out to embrace him and he hoped — prayed — that its touch was not hostile.

You could never be sure …

He followed the main track through the trees for some time. Memories sprang up to haunt him. Over there, down that smaller path, was the old charcoal burners’ camp, long disused by the charcoal burners but a refuge for others in times of crisis. Up along that path the ways branched and one led to a clearing where a woman had hanged herself. And dead ahead, deep in the forest’s heart, was the mysterious place that he and the Abbess had stumbled across and where they had witnessed something that he was still inclined to believe had really been nothing more than a disturbing vision.

And then there was Joanna.

He dreamed about her often. But he had not consciously thought about her for some time other than the fleeting images that he always tried to suppress whenever he saw the Abbess riding that beautiful golden mare. For Honey had been Joanna’s horse and she had left the mare in the Abbey’s keeping when she went away. Josse sometimes had the impression that people knew about Joanna but refrained from telling him; there had been one or two hints to that effect and Sister Tiphaine had once muttered that he wasn’t to worry about the lass, she was doing all right, whatever that meant. Sister Tiphaine, it was widely rumoured, had dealings with the strange and elusive Forest Folk, that self-contained band who appeared like the sunrise and vanished like the morning mist. Did that mean that the Forest Folk had taken Joanna in? Or merely that they knew where she was — how she was — and somehow contrived to pass word on to the Hawkenlye herbalist? Josse had no way of finding out; Sister Tiphaine had never said anything further and Josse wondered if perhaps the duty of obedience that she owed to her Abbess made her keep any knowledge she might have had strictly to herself. Sister Tiphaine might, as they often said, have one foot in the pagan past but her loyalty to the Abbess was, Josse guessed, born out of respect and quite possibly love and therefore unbreakable. The Church — and so it followed, went the reasoning, also the woman who ordered the comings and goings of Hawkenlye Abbey — would seriously disapprove of a nun even thinking about pagan forest dwellers, never mind having clandestine dealings with them, and so if indeed it were true that Sister Tiphaine had mysterious ways of contacting them, she was not going to boast about the fact and she would probably do her utmost to make sure her superior did not know.

Now as he tramped along the forest tracks he wondered if he could find his way to wherever it was that Joanna lived. If, that was, she were still there …

Then he decided simultaneously that there was no possibility of his finding her hiding place and that he wasn’t really sure he wanted to anyway. Squaring his shoulders, he reminded himself what he was doing out there and turned his full concentration to the search for Walter Bell.

It was hard to judge the time when deep inside the forest, for the thickly growing branches and endless network of almost leafless twigs above made it difficult to get a proper idea of the sun’s position. But, judging from the way in which the light was starting to fade, it must have been quite late in the day when Josse finally turned for home.

He was coming to the conclusion that Brother Saul was right: only the animals were at present living in that corner of the Great Forest. He found many traces of the brothers’ passage and he noted, impressed, just how carefully they had searched. My day has been a waste of time, he thought; I should have taken Saul’s word for it and done something more fruitful than obeying my own proud voice telling me to go and check because I know the forest better than the lay brothers. Well, I’ll just have to-

He heard something.

He stopped stock-still, hardly breathing, ears straining.

Nothing.

He began to walk cautiously on. The path just there circled a shallow dell bordered on its steeper slopes by thick brambles and overshadowed by a large beech tree whose roots curled out from the dell’s banked side. There were a few coppery leaves still adhering to the beech’s branches and the ground in the dell was thick with beech mast.

I have disturbed some small creature picking through the beech mast, Josse told himself. Even so small a noise sounds loud in this uncanny silence.

Bracing his shoulders — his hand on the hilt of his sword for good measure — he walked on.

He had gone no more than a dozen paces when a voice just behind him called, ‘Sir Josse!’

Whipping round, drawing his sword, he would have lunged towards his assailant except that the man made no move to attack. Instead he spread his arms to indicate that he held no weapon and, in a voice just tinged with amusement, said, ‘No need for your sword! I am not your enemy.’

It was Leofgar.

Pushing his sword back down into its scabbard, Josse let out his breath and felt his fast heartbeat gradually return to normal. ‘Leofgar,’ he said, ‘oh, that glad I am to see you.’

Then, without thinking about it, he put his arms around the younger man and gave him a hearty embrace. Returning it, Leofgar laughed shortly. ‘I did not expect this sort of a greeting from my mother’s good friend,’ he observed as Josse let him go.

Josse shrugged. ‘You have worried her gravely, I’ll not deny it. But you’ve come back, so I would guess that whatever went wrong to make you run off as you did must either have been put right or cannot have been too serious in the first place?’ He tried to make the remark a statement and not a question, but he did not think he had succeeded.

Leofgar shook his head. ‘Oh, Sir Josse, I wish that were true! But I must first say that I have not come back, if by that you mean that I am on my way to the Abbey to give a full explanation of my actions.’

‘Then why are you here?’ Josse spoke more gruffly than he had intended; to see the happy outcome that he had envisaged for the Abbess disappear without so much as a farewell was hard to bear.

‘I have to talk to you.’

‘To me?’

‘Yes, don’t sound so surprised.’ The note of amusement was back. ‘My mother trusts you absolutely. Here I am, in dire need of a reliable confidant and adviser, so what better, I thought to myself, than to hide away in some place where the great Sir Josse d’Acquin is bound to come looking?’

‘You can’t have known I would search the forest!’

‘I admit I was downcast when the lay brothers made their hunt — very thorough they were too, let me tell you, and one of them almost found me. He would have done had I not climbed up a very large old yew tree and hidden till he had gone. But still I believed that you would come, for I judge you to be a man who is not satisfied until he has seen for himself.’

‘You judge right,’ Josse muttered. ‘Yet it was a dubious plan, for all that.’

Leofgar shrugged. ‘Dubious or not, it was the only plan I had.’

Suddenly Josse thought of something. ‘You have not forced your wife and child to share your vigil, have you?’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s cold, man, and-’

‘Of course not.’ Leofgar’s tone was almost scathing, as if to say, you cannot believe I would do such a thing! ‘They are safe in a warm and welcoming refuge.’

Josse studied him. He was well wrapped-up against the weather and he looked clean and, although his face was anxious, he did not have the pinched, shrivelled look of someone who had spent any length of time starving out in the cold. ‘You too have been staying in this refuge,’ he said.

‘I have. My days I have spent here, waiting for you. By night I return to my hiding place.’ His eyes fixed to Josse’s, he said with a smile, ‘And do not try to follow me, Sir Josse. I ask for your word on this.’

Josse hesitated and then said reluctantly, ‘You have it. I shall not follow you.’

Leofgar laughed. ‘The promise was not to try to follow me,’ he corrected. ‘A man should not boast of his own abilities but I doubt that you could pick up my trail if I did not want you to. You missed me in the dell there and I believe that I took you by surprise when I spoke your name just now?’

‘Aye,’ Josse acknowledged. ‘You merge well with the woodland, Leofgar.’

‘I learned when young how to use the cover of the forest,’ he said. ‘So would you have done if you’d had to live with a gang of boys all bigger than you who were intent on giving you a hiding for every real or imagined misdemeanour.’

Josse guessed he must be speaking of the household where he had lived while he learned the duties of page and squire. ‘You were not happy in the place where your mother put you?’

‘Happy?’ Leofgar appeared to consider. ‘I’m not sure that I expected happiness, Sir Josse. I was well fed, well clothed, my duties were no more than those of any other boy. And when I was one of the older ones, I dare say I was not above making some smaller lad’s life a misery from time to time. It’s the way of things,’ he concluded. Then, with a flash of anger in the grey eyes that were so like his mother’s, he hissed, ‘Don’t you dare tell her!’

Josse almost laughed. ‘I won’t,’ he said. ‘You have my word on that, too.’

They had moved away from the dell, walking as they talked, strolling a short distance back down the path that would eventually emerge out from the trees just above the Abbey. Now Leofgar stopped and, putting a hand on Josse’s sleeve, said, ‘I will not come any further. Will you stay here with me while I tell you what I have to say?’

‘Aye, lad. That I will.’ But then a thought struck him; he said, ‘Just now you implied that you expected me to come looking. But I wasn’t looking for you; I’m searching for somebody else.’

‘I know who you’re looking for. My mother told me about the search party.’

‘You know who he is, then?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Leofgar’s face was grave. ‘You won’t find him, Sir Josse. Nobody will, or I pray that they won’t.’

‘But you-’

‘Please,’ Leofgar said urgently, ‘let me tell my story. Then all will become clear.’

With an ironic bow, Josse said, ‘Go on. I will try not to interrupt.’

Leofgar had snapped a length of twig from the beech tree and his long hands were steadily peeling off the bark. Intent on this small action, he began to speak. ‘My wife Rohaise, as you observed, is not well. She suffers from unaccountable miseries and she thinks things — bad and terrible things — that are not true. As I told you at the Abbey, we have sought help from various sources and our parish priest encouraged us to pray. When that did no good, Father Luke decided that Timus was a changeling and must be taken away to the monks, where hopefully the real Timus would miraculously appear to replace the spirit child.’

‘But Father Luke did not really believe that!’ Josse burst out. ‘Your mother and I have been to see him and he told us he made that up to try to help Rohaise! He hoped that if he took Timus away and then brought him back again, explaining to Rohaise that this was her real child, it might just put everything right!’

Leofgar was nodding. ‘I wondered if that might be his thinking,’ he said. With a brief self-deprecating smile, he went on, ‘Perhaps I should have tried to argue with him. But if he made Rohaise believe there was a reason why she felt she was failing with her son — the reason being that he wasn’t in truth her son but a changeling — then she might feel as if she had been offered a new beginning when her so-called real son was returned to her.’

‘Aye, that’s it!’ Josse said eagerly. ‘Almost exactly the priest’s words!’

Leofgar looked questioningly at him. ‘You think Father Luke did right?’

‘No, of course not! He utterly misread Rohaise’s distress and his attempt was at best blundering, at worst deeply damaging. But your mother and I felt him to be more a fool than an intentionally cruel man.’

‘Yes, I agree,’ Leofgar said, ‘although it is difficult to maintain a charitable view when someone is threatening to return very shortly and take your child away.’

‘I understand,’ Josse said gently. ‘Your troubles have been grave, but-’

‘You have not,’ Leofgar cut in, ‘heard the half of them yet.’

‘Oh.’ His heart sinking, Josse said, ‘Very well. Tell me the rest.’

Leofgar went back to his bark stripping. ‘I have explained all this,’ he said, ‘as a prelude for what follows, because it is a reason for- Well, hear it for yourself and judge. When Father Luke had gone, I left the house and went out. I was angry with the priest and also, I am ashamed to confess, angry with Rohaise. God forgive me, I should have stayed there with her, comforting her, but I feared for a time that my anger would spill out and I would shout at her, the last thing I should have done. So I saddled up my horse and went for a ride until I was calm again. Then I went home.’

His face had paled, Josse noticed. Whatever he was remembering clearly had lost none of its power to distress.

‘Someone else had come to the house in the short time that I was away,’ he said, his voice low. ‘I think now that the man was waiting his chance and entered the hall soon after I had ridden away. I am not sure what he was after — although I can make a guess — but poor Rohaise, in her distress, believed that he had been sent by Father Luke to take Timus away. She heard him coming and hid behind the hangings at the far end of the hall.’

‘Were not your servants there?’ Josse broke in.

‘No. We were enjoying a bright spell of weather and Wilfrid and Anna were in the habit of taking Simeon out into the forest most days to collect wood. Again, the man who sneaked into my hall must have seen them go out that morning and known that his chance had come. Nobody at home but a frightened woman and a little child. How brave, not to be scared off by them!’ Anger coloured Leofgar’s voice but after a moment he calmed himself and resumed. ‘Rohaise peered round the wall hanging and saw a short, scrawny man creep through the doorway and across the hall. She was puzzled because at first he looked at the big table at the end of the room, feeling underneath it and up and down its legs as if looking for something. Then he went to the chest and, finding it locked, took out a knife and forced the clasp, splitting the wood. He rummaged through the contents — there were some blankets and some clothes of Rohaise’s — throwing them on the floor.’

‘I recall that chest,’ Josse murmured, half to himself. ‘I remember noticing a recent repair.’

‘You keep your eyes open,’ Leofgar observed. ‘Rohaise was too terrified to ask herself why this man who had come for Timus should be searching through our furniture. She stood there, trying not to breathe, trying to keep Timus calm, but, understandably, he was as frightened as she was and he let out a sob. The man heard and came lunging across the hall with his knife in his hand. Rohaise was beyond any coherent thought but instinctively she did the best thing that she could have done. As he approached she leapt out at him screaming at the top of her voice and he was so shocked that he stepped hastily back. She kicked out at the hand holding the knife and managed to knock it out of his grip, then threw herself on him, punching his face and raking him with her finger nails. He recovered very quickly and got hold of her hands, then ripped open her bodice and threw her on the ground, pulling up her skirt. But she wriggled out from beneath him and got to her feet, racing off down the hall and away from Timus, still hiding behind the wall hanging. She could hear the man thudding after her and she turned to look at him. He was holding the knife and it was aimed at her. She picked up a silver jug that he’d found in the chest and cast aside and she flung it at his legs. It caught him right on the knee and he tripped and fell heavily, cracking the side of his head on the stone flags.’

‘The fall killed him?’

‘No,’ Leofgar admitted. ‘Better for him had it done so,’ he added in a murmur. Then, eyes at last meeting Josse’s, he said, ‘Rohaise feared for her life, Josse. She believed this man had come to take Timus away but it seemed to her that for some reason he wanted to rape and kill her. I say this not to gain your sympathy’ — he must, Josse thought, have noticed the instinctive compassion that the story was arousing — ‘but to explain what she did next.’ He paused, took a breath and said flatly, ‘She fetched Timus from behind the wall hanging and put him safely away up in the bedchamber, telling him that he must hide, he’d got to hide and not be found, and she barred the door so that he could not get out.’

Hide, Josse thought. Hide. Aye, that was what the child had said when he’d snuggled inside Josse’s cloak that day. Great God, the poor little lad had seen the man attack his mother! No wonder he’d turned dumb.

‘Then,’ Leofgar was saying, ‘she went for my hounds and let them into the hall.’

‘Your hounds,’ Josse echoed, his heart still overflowing with pity for the damaged child.

‘Yes, my hounds,’ Leofgar sounded impatient. ‘They are big dogs and they are trained to go after wounded creatures that get up and try to crawl away. They go for the throat, you know, as that way the kill is accomplished quickly.’

‘And-’ Josse swallowed. ‘And they attacked the intruder?’

‘Rohaise shut them in the hall and went a little way up the stair, leaving them there with the body. She thought she heard some sounds, although she is not sure what they implied. She waited, but there was nothing more. Then she crept down again and opened the door a crack. The man was lying exactly as she had left him and one of the dogs was sniffing at the blood pooling on the floor beneath his head. Rohaise tiptoed closer, then closer, until she was standing right over him. Suddenly he leapt up and lunged at her with his knife. She screamed and flung herself out of his reach and at the same moment one of the hounds leapt at him and took him by the neck. Great arcs of scarlet flew out all over her as the dying heart beat its last — Josse, she was covered with his blood.’ Leofgar’s eyes were wide with remembered horror. ‘Then the hounds padded off towards the door and she stood staring down at the man.’ Leofgar paused. ‘Soon after that I came home and found them. Rohaise had crept away to hide on the stair, shaking with shock and trying pitifully to pull the ripped pieces of her bodice together to cover herself. Timus was weeping hysterically up in the bedchamber and the man was on the floor of the hall. He was quite dead. He no longer had a throat.’

Josse waited while his shocked reaction abated slightly. Then he said firmly, ‘Your wife was threatened, Leofgar. She feared that this intruder had come to take her child, and furthermore that for some reason he meant to assault or even kill her. When a man armed with a knife attacks an unarmed woman whom he has just tried to rape, anyone would surely agree that she is within her rights to defend herself!’

‘Perhaps,’ Leofgar said dully. ‘But I dared not take that chance.’

‘So you came to Hawkenlye.’ But no, that could not be right, Josse thought, for there had been no bloody body lying in the hall at the Old Manor when he and the Abbess had arrived.

He looked enquiringly at Leofgar and said, ‘What did you do with him?’

‘I stripped him, burned his foul and filthy clothes in a big fire on the hearth and hid him in an outbuilding,’ Leofgar said tonelessly. ‘I buried his knife, his belt buckle and the remains of his boots. Rohaise and I tried to comfort Timus and finally we got him to go to sleep up in our bed. Then we cleaned every inch of the hall and she put her torn and bloody gown on the fire with the blood-soaked rushes from the floor. We had to make sure there was no sign left to give us away when Wilfrid and his family returned and when I asked him — Wilfrid — to mend the broken chest I told him a lie about having lost the key.’ Leofgar looked sad, as if it had hurt to treat his faithful servant this way and he still regretted it. ‘While we cleaned the hall I had worked out what to do with the body,’ he hurried on, ‘and when the light began to fail, I slipped out to make my secret preparations. I penned my swine up in a lonely place where nobody goes, leaving them without any food, and then two days later I took the dead man out into the forest and fed him to them. What was left of him when they were done, I buried.’ His anguished eyes suddenly raised to meet Josse’s, he said, ‘Rohaise tried to stop me. Even after the horror of knowing for two whole days that his — that the corpse was hidden away on our land and what would happen were it to be discovered, still she said it was wrong to deny the man Christian burial. We-’ He stopped, drew a breath and then said softly, ‘We almost fought over it. She was beside herself, but I was determined.’

Josse could well imagine Rohaise’s state of mind. How on earth had she borne it? Great God, but the poor lass had suffered! He was on the point of saying as much but a glance at Leofgar stopped the words before they were uttered; it had quite clearly cost the young man dear to tell his story.

So instead, realising even as he spoke that he already knew the answer, Josse said, ‘And you now know who this man was?’

Leofgar sighed. ‘Yes, for he was very like his brother whom we found hanging from the tree.’ He summoned a very faint smile. ‘I thought for one dreadful moment that he’d survived having his throat torn out and being eaten by my swine and had got up and come after me. But I was wrong.’ He paused, throwing his head back and for a moment screwing his eyes up tight, as if trying to rid himself of the images of violence that he could not help but see. ‘It was Teb who was hanged. The man who died in my hall was Walter Bell.’