Music of the Distant Stars

EIGHTEEN

We thought he would surely die.

I have rarely seen my aunt fight so hard to save a life. I did not believe him to be a murderer and nor, I think, did my aunt. At the very least, she seemed to be giving him the benefit of the doubt. It was, of course, still possible, still plausible, that he had quietly dispatched Ida so that she did not reveal their secret and prevent his marriage to Lady Claude; that he had been forced to seek out and kill Derman because Derman knew what he had done.

But if that was how it had happened, who had attacked Sir Alain and left him for dead?

To begin with, Edild required two pairs of hands, and I had no choice but to swallow down my squeamishness and do as I was commanded. The swelling on the left side of our patient’s skull had grown alarmingly large now, as fluid of some sort leaked out of his head. Edild applied successive cold compresses, under which she laid a layer of fresh, crushed comfrey leaves and the flowering stems of water pepper, but it was clear she was losing the battle. The bleeding that had so worried me seemed to have lessened, but I could tell from Edild’s grave manner that this was not necessarily a sign that Sir Alain was going to live.

I plucked up my courage and, hoping I was not interrupting some intricate thought process, said, ‘What are you trying to do?’

She wasn’t angry with me; far from it. She turned, gave me a quick smile and said, ‘I am sorry, Lassair. I have been so preoccupied that I had forgotten, for the moment, that a part of my duty is to teach you.’

‘It’s all right, I-’

She ignored the interruption. ‘I have often spoken with Hrype concerning wounds such as this one. It is our conclusion that when someone is hit very hard on the head, there is swelling on the outside of the skull cage, which with luck can be alleviated, but there is also similar swelling inside the head bones.’ She shook her head in frustration. ‘If only we could look and see what causes it! But, of course, that is impossible with a living man. .’ Her words trailed off. She knelt in silence beside her patient, looking at him with an anxious frown. Then, once again turning to me, she said, ‘There is a procedure called trepanation. Hrype has told me of it; he has seen it done.’

Uneasiness crept up on me. I had never heard the word before and had no idea what it meant, but there was something in her voice that told me she, too, was disturbed. ‘What is it?’ The words were barely a whisper, for my mouth was suddenly too dry to speak.

She took a breath, straightened her back and said, ‘It involves making a hole in the skull to allow whatever is causing the swelling inside the head to escape. According to Hrype, relieving the built-up pressure frequently restores a patient to consciousness and quite often they live.’

Frequently. Quite often. It sounded as if this operation was by no means a certain cure.

I said, horrified as the realization swept over me, ‘You’re not thinking of doing this to him?’ I indicated our comatose patient.

Edild, too, looked at him. ‘If there is no other way, I may have to,’ she said gravely. ‘We are healers, Lassair. We have given our solemn oath to save life.’

‘What — how would you do it?’ I asked. I didn’t want to know — the dreaded queasiness was building up, and I was seeing black spots on the periphery of my vision. There was a thundering, drumming sound in my head. But I, too, was a healer; my aunt was an excellent teacher, and it was my duty to learn from her all that I could.

‘Trepanation involves the removal of a piece of the skull,’ she said, her voice eager, as if it was a relief to speak with authority after facing up to her inability to help her patient. ‘You remove the flesh that covers it, then you scrape, saw or bore through the bone and cut away the firm white skin that covers the brains.’

I concentrated on thinking about the healed patient following this dreadful operation. I told myself that the discovery of how to do it was a gift from the spirits to mankind, a gift that allowed lives to be saved.

Some lives. .

‘Hrype has seen this done?’ I asked.

‘So he says.’

‘Did the man live?’

‘The patient was a woman, and yes, she did.’ Her eyes looked suddenly unfocused, as if her thoughts had gone far away. ‘She kept the piece of her own skull as an amulet, and now Hrype has it in memory of her,’ she said softly.

I thought about that. I wondered who the woman had been, but I knew I could not ask. Hrype’s secrets were sacrosanct and, even if he had confided in Edild, she would not tell me. ‘Should I go and fetch him?’

It was her turn to consider. She removed the compress on Sir Alain’s head and put her hand on the swelling. ‘I think-’ she began. But then her frown lifted and her expression changed. She shot me a swift glance of triumph and said, ‘No need. The swelling is going down.’ She grabbed my hand and laid it very gently on the lump on Sir Alain’s head. ‘Feel,’ she commanded.

I let my hand rest softly over the area and then, to confirm my initial impression, felt around the lump with my fingertips. Edild was right. I looked up and met her eyes. I felt like cheering, and not only because I had just avoided witnessing — perhaps helping with — an operation that would have seemed more like torture than healing.

‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

She shrugged. ‘I cannot say. Possibly the cold of the compresses and the power of the healing herbs has done the trick.’ She glanced around and then, lowering her voice, whispered, ‘We should thank them.’

I spun round to look where she had looked. I thought I saw movement, and for the blink of an eye I could see a silver wolf and, right up close behind me, a red fox.

I should have known they were there. They are our spirit guides; my Fox is often with me, and I have almost — but not quite — learned to accept his presence. It was, however, a rare privilege to be allowed to catch a glimpse of Edild’s silver wolf. I have only seen him twice before, and the first time I thought he was a fox. When I told my aunt I had seen him she told me I had been imagining things. I was young then, and I almost believed her. I know better now.

I whispered to Fox, telling him how much I appreciated his presence, especially when I hadn’t been conscious of asking him to come, and for a moment he stood beside me, mouth stretched in what looked very like a grin. Then he faded away.

It was as if the presence of the spirit animals had brought a special, precious mood inside the little room. While they were there, everything had a shine to it; scents were intensified, colours were brighter. With their departure, life returned to normal and, just for a moment, I saw how uninspiring normal actually was.

Then Edild commanded me to go outside and fetch fresh water, and I remembered with a jolt that this was no time for meditating on the spirits. We had a job to do.

Some time later, Edild said there was no need for both of us to watch over our patient, because, with any luck, he would wake up soon and in the meantime it was only a matter of keeping him warm and regularly renewing the compress. ‘We have almost used up our supplies of water pepper,’ she said. ‘Go and gather some more.’

I hastened to obey. I would have to walk right down to the fen edge, but I was glad of it. My mind still kept going back to the images of that terrible operation, and I knew that what I needed was a good, hard walk in the sunshine. I fetched my basket and set off.

I was surprised to see by the sun that it was still only mid-morning. It felt as if my aunt and I had been battling for our patient’s life for days. I turned my face up to the sun’s warmth and silently expressed my gratitude to the spirits who had come to help us. Later, I knew, Edild would slip outside and perform her ceremony of thanks, and I would join her. She frequently reminded me that she and I were but the instruments through which the spirits did their healing work. The power came from them.

I made my way along the water’s edge, gathering as I went. I found that my steps had once again led me to the island, which was hardly surprising since it was there, a presence in the back of my mind, all the time. Putting down my basket, I stepped on to the planks of the causeway. I remembered those cuts in Derman’s shins. I recalled my certainty, earlier that morning, that they had not been caused by his falling against the planks.

I stopped above the place where his body had been found. I stared down into the black water, then I looked at the planks on which I stood. Just beside me there was one of the upright posts that supported the causeway. This one was quite thick — about as wide as my palm — and stuck up about a foot or so above the planking. Could it be this that had caused the cuts on Derman’s shins? I bent down and felt its edge. It was not very sharp, and surely it was too narrow to have wounded both shins. I straightened up again, puzzled. Something had tripped him; the evidence was there on his body. Unless, of course, the trip had happened some time earlier in the day that he had died. . But he had fallen into the water, and how else had that happened? Had he been pushed?

I looked from one side of the causeway to the other, trying to decide if it was wide enough for a man to have got up close enough behind Derman — a big man himself — to push him in. It was, but surely Derman would have seen or at least heard his assailant’s approach?

‘Oh!’ I cried out aloud in frustration.

Then I saw it. My eyes flashed to the other side of the causeway — and I could have cheered.

On each of the two upright posts, right at the spot where Derman fell into the water, there was a faint mark. Each mark was an indentation in the wood, more pronounced on the outside edge of each post, and about three or four hands’ breadths above the planking.

Someone, knowing that Derman visited the island and the place where he believed his beloved Ida still lay, had been waiting. This someone had fixed a trip wire between the two posts. They had hidden until Derman arrived; then, perhaps, had spooked him, so that when he crossed towards the island, he was hurrying. Perhaps in his haste to get to her he always hurried.

The trip wire caught him across the shins, and he fell, down into the mere. His assailant had then leapt out from his cover, raised his weapon and, as Derman lay in the water, the breath knocked out of him by his fall, had brought it down savagely and repeatedly on the back of Derman’s head.

Who was it?

I had thought it was Sir Alain, but now that he had been attacked, bludgeoned in exactly the same way, I knew I was wrong. Was it someone who believed Derman had killed Ida?

I thought about the day I had discovered Ida’s body. Derman had been hiding in the clump of willows that stood on a small area of higher ground between the island and the village. He had been weeping. He must have just seen Ida, dead in Granny Cordeilla’s tomb; I was sure of it. I was equally sure he had put her there. I had talked with Zarina, and she’d told me how her brother had killed a man who was hunting for her.

Derman killed him and hid his body where it would never be found. He put it in a-

In a grave, I’d thought then. Derman was of very limited intelligence, but one thing he would surely remember was killing a man and hiding the body in someone else’s grave. I had wondered — believed — that Derman had killed Ida and then used the same clever ploy — the one clever ploy of his entire life — again.

What if he hadn’t killed her? Now, all but sure he hadn’t, I thought about it again. What if, having sneaked away from Zarina’s vigilance one night and gone off wandering on his own — perhaps to sit out under the stars and think about his beloved — he had come across her dead body? Oh, poor, poor Derman. My heart filled with pity for him. If it had indeed happened like that, what ill chance that he should have been the one to find her.

I pictured him as I had seen him that morning, his face red, his eyes swollen from weeping. I pictured him some time earlier during that long night, stumbling on Ida as she lay dead. I saw his disbelief turn to certainty; saw him pick her up as easily as if she had been a child, cradling her to him in death as he surely never could have done in life. I saw him bear her to the island, where he knew there had recently been an interment. I saw him place her carefully on the ground, then push aside the heavy stone slab and place her in the ground beside my Granny.

How long had he sat there sobbing? Had it been the first lightening of the sky which heralds the dawn that had finally driven him away, into his pathetic and inefficient hiding place among the willows? I thought of his pain, his grief. It was all but unbearable.

I let myself into the house carefully and quietly, anxious not to disturb Sir Alain. Edild looked up from her place beside him. She smiled at me and said, in a voice only a little softer than usual, ‘Did you find any?’

The water pepper. Of course; that was why I had gone out. ‘Yes, the basket’s half full. I left it outside by the outhouse.’

‘You covered it? The stems should not be left out in the sunshine because-’

‘Yes, I covered it, and anyway it’s in the shade.’

‘Good.’

I crept towards Sir Alain. ‘How is he?’

She glanced at him. ‘Much the same.’

‘Will he live?’ I breathed the words so quietly that Edild must have read my lips rather than heard what I said. If he were conscious, I did not want him to hear the question, which might have sounded callous. On principle, too, it’s usually best not to let a patient know how ill he is.

Edild shrugged. ‘I hope so.’

I sat down beside her, desperate to share my new thoughts with her. ‘Edild, what if it happened like this?’ I began, my voice low. ‘Someone killed Derman’s beloved Ida, and he found the body and put it in Granny’s grave. Someone else saw him do so and, believing Derman had killed her, they killed him too, so that Ida was revenged.’

Edild nodded slowly. ‘And who do you think this second someone might be?’

I had been thinking of little else all the way home. There was really only one possible answer. He had told me he honoured her far too much to try to seduce her when he was bound to a wife he loathed. Then, suddenly and unexpectedly freed by that wife’s death, he had hastened to find Ida, declare his love and ask her if she would be his. Except he was too late, because Ida was in her grave — my Granny’s grave — and he witnessed the moment when a big, shambling, simpleton of a man put her there.

I said, ‘Alberic.’

Edild considered that. Then she said, ‘You may very well be right, Lassair. It would explain, I think, why Alberic also attacked Sir Alain.’ She glanced down at her patient and, as she spoke his name, I thought I saw the tiniest of movements behind his closed eyelids. I watched carefully to see if he would stir, but he lay still.

I believed I understood what Edild had said. ‘You’re suggesting,’ I said slowly, thinking as I spoke, ‘that somehow Alberic discovered that Ida was pregnant. Perhaps he saw her from a distance and noticed she looked different? Perhaps he spoke to her!’

I realized, with some surprise, that it was perfectly possible. When I had met him in the graveyard, I had been so busy trying to prove I’d been right and he had fathered Ida’s child that it had blinded me to everything else. Suddenly, I remembered how he had looked at me when I’d asked if he had been her lover. His expression had been a wild mixture of emotions and, picturing his face now, I wondered if the anger I had seen was because, aware he had not been her lover, he knew that someone else had been. He had told me himself that Ida had admitted no village lad to her bed; the only man who could possibly have fathered her child had to be someone she had met after she went to work for Lady Claude at Heathlands. . He knew who it was.

‘He killed Derman, and he tried to kill Sir Alain too because he knew Sir Alain had seduced her, left her pregnant and abandoned her to marry his rich Lady Claude,’ I said, breathless as the words tumbled out, ‘and-’

‘I did not abandon her,’ a husky, tremulous, but determined voice said. ‘I would never have done that.’

Edild jerked as if someone had stuck a pin in her. Her attention fully on her patient, she crouched over him, her hand on his forehead. ‘How do you feel?’ she asked anxiously. ‘Are you in much pain?’

He was trying to put his hand to the bump on his head. Gently, she took hold of it and replaced it on top of the blanket tucked around him. ‘Better not to touch,’ she said. ‘I have a draught ready for you which will ease the pain. Lassair!’ she said curtly, turning to me and bringing me out of my amazed state of shock. She nodded in the direction of the cup she had set ready, and I reached for it and handed it to her. She raised his head a little, supporting it with one arm, and held the cup to his lips while he drank, making a face at the bitter taste. He drained the cup, then she helped him lie back on his pillow.

Edild was watching him. He glanced at her, then up at me. He said, ‘I will tell you the story of my love for Ida, then you shall judge for yourselves.’

Edild opened her mouth to speak — probably to tell him he ought to sleep, not talk — but he made a small gesture with his hand and so she didn’t. I turned to look at him, and he began.

‘My family has long wished for a union by marriage with the de Sees of Heathlands,’ he said, ‘for money is little use without position and influence, and the converse equally applies. It is true that, in the end, money can purchase position, but these things take time, and Claritia de Sees is not a patient woman. The better way, in her eyes, was for her daughter to marry into the de Villequier family, riding high, as we do, in royal favour and destined for great things.’ He paused, drew breath and then said, ‘I was not averse to the match, for, like the rest of my family, I saw the advantage of a sudden influx of wealth into our coffers. I agreed to visit Heathlands and, when I was presented to Lady Genevieve, the elder of Claritia’s two daughters, I saw no reason not to agree to our betrothal. She is very lovely, prettier than Claude and with something wistful in her face. I did not know then, of course, about-’ He broke off. ‘I must tell the story as it happened,’ he muttered.

He paused again, for longer this time. Then he said, ‘Ida sewed for the de Sees family before she was engaged to help Claude, although only on occasions. One day I met her as she was hurrying home to the village. Typically, Claritia had detained her, and it was already growing dark. Ida was scared, although she tried to hide it.’ His expression softened. ‘I saw her to her home. Once she got over her shyness at being with Lady Claritia’s future son-in-law, her true, delightful personality emerged. We started talking. She made me laugh.’ He smiled. ‘I think I fell in love with her that first evening. I give you my word that I did not seduce her — ’ he looked up at me — ‘although, in truth, I know I was wrong to allow our love to develop, bound to marry as I was. But — ’ he made a small, helpless sound, as if at a loss to explain — ‘I could not help myself. I loved Ida, she loved me, and when the opportunity arrived for us to become lovers, neither of us hesitated.’

Two tears spilled over his eyelids and slid away down his face. ‘I must tell you now of Genevieve,’ he said, ‘for of all the tragic things that have happened, it is the suffering that I caused to her that bites the most cruelly. As the days went by and I grew to know her better, I realized with dismay that she was a chronically shy woman, modest in the extreme and very frightened at the prospect of matrimony.’

Suddenly, it was not his voice I was hearing but Gurdyman’s. I was back in the little enclosed Cambridge garden, and the wizard was speaking. Genevieve was an innocent. She had been told by her mother what a wife is to expect on her wedding night — knowing Claritia, who is a somewhat coarse and insensitive woman, I do not imagine she spoke gently or cautiously — and she was fearful and apprehensive.

Poor Genevieve. I was sorry for her — what woman would not be? — but I could not see why Sir Alain should feel responsible for her state of mind. He was speaking; I listened.

‘Genevieve saw me making love to Ida,’ he said baldly. ‘Ida and I used to meet in a glade on the edge of the forest. We thought it was sufficiently far from the house for us to be undisturbed, but it seems that, as her fears and terrors had grown, Genevieve had taken to going out for long walks by herself. By sheer bad luck, she found her way to our grove. She heard Ida’s cries of pleasure, but mistook them and thought I was attacking her. She screamed and screamed.’ His face looked grey. ‘I have never heard a sound like it,’ he muttered. ‘I leapt up, still undressed, and hurried over to her. She was staring at my — at me, and then at Ida, lying naked on the ground with a white shift pulled up over her face to disguise her identity. She wouldn’t stop screaming. I knew she must not be allowed to tell, so I did a terrible thing.’ He paused, drew breath and went on. ‘I told her that the thing lying on the ground was no human woman, but a spirit. A night hag, a succubus.’ He shuddered. ‘Oh, dear Lord above, how many times have I regretted what I did! I told her I had been attacked, wrestled to the ground, my manhood roused by this foul forest spirit. God help me, I played on Genevieve’s frail mental state. I was well aware she was already deeply disturbed about sex and having to be married to me, and to save my own skin I used that knowledge to cover up what Ida and I had been doing.’

He stopped talking. The silence seemed to hold the shadow of his words. I risked a glance at him. He was still deathly pale, his face full of pain, grief and, I now knew, guilt.

‘My shameful ruse worked, too well,’ he muttered, ‘and she never really recovered. I thought for one wonderful moment that I might not have to go ahead with the marriage to unite my kin and the de Sees. I dared to hope that, somehow, somewhere, there might be a chance for Ida and me. But I reckoned without Claritia. As soon as she realized there was no hope for Genevieve, she came up with another plan.’

No hope for Genevieve. Once more I heard Gurdyman’s voice, speaking sadly of the poor girl. She was found one morning wandering outside in the cold dressed in nothing but a thin shift. She had seen something that had terrified her, but she was unable to say what it was. Her nervousness concerning the proposed marriage turned to abject horror. Then, when her mother attempted in her robust way to bring Genevieve to her senses, the girl fainted dead away and could not be revived for two days. Since then she has been a slight, silent shadow who flits on the periphery of her family’s life and, in the main, is left alone.

‘I know what she did,’ I whispered. ‘She made Lady Claude give up her vocation to be your wife.’

‘She did, she did,’ he sighed heavily. ‘And, weakling that I am, I agreed. But you must believe what I said just now: in truth, and I swear it upon what little honour remains to me, I would not have abandoned Ida. I could never have done that. Ida and I have always been discreet; Claude knows nothing of what we are to each other, and I would have made sure she never found out. I had formed a plan to acquire a little cottage for Ida where she could bear my child and raise it in safety, where I would have visited when I could.’ He turned to Edild, sitting so still and silent as she listened. ‘I would have supported them, my Ida and my child!’ he said urgently.

‘On your wife’s money,’ Edild said neutrally.

She was right, and there was no denying it. All the same, I felt a stab of pity for Sir Alain, for as my aunt spoke those four damning words, he flinched as if he had been stabbed.

I said, wanting, I think, to save him further pain, ‘Alberic’s motive for attacking you must, then, have surely been jealousy, for Ida, whom he adored, had given her love to you and not to him.’

He frowned. ‘Yes. Perhaps, yes.’

I thought of something that might confirm that it had undoubtedly been Alberic who hit Sir Alain. ‘Did you notice anything unusual just before the attack?’ I asked.

The frown intensified as he tried to remember. ‘I heard something very odd,’ he said eventually, and I knew I’d been right. ‘It was a sort of humming, and the very notes were enough to make a listener feel so sad, as if all the happiness had been sucked out of the world.’ I sympathized; I, too, had suffered the same reaction.

Unless there had been two men skulking around and humming in the graveyard, we had our proof of Alberic’s guilt.

I thought about it, extending the image of Alberic’s furious attack to encompass another killing. ‘It must have been Alberic who killed Ida,’ I said slowly, for all that I knew I had originally decided he was innocent. ‘He came here full of hopes to claim her and marry her, now that his wife’s death had left him free, and when he approached her, she told him she was pregnant by another man who loved her, and she loved him too, so there was no hope for Alberic, after all he’d been through, and he strangled her. Then he had to kill Derman because he thought he’d witnessed the murder, and then finally he tried to kill you, Sir Alain, for despoiling Ida.’

My tumble of words was followed by utter silence. Edild was studying me closely, but her expression told me nothing, and I did not know if she agreed with my suggestion of what had happened or if she believed I was quite wrong.

Tentatively, Sir Alain said, ‘It could, I suppose, have been as you say. .’ His voice tailed off as if he could not quite convince himself.

The silence fell again, enveloping us all. Then at last Edild spoke. ‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘But consider this.’

She stood up, gracefully, in one single movement. She crossed to the place in the corner where we store firewood and, selecting a length of birch as long as her arm, held it in both hands. She swung it through the air, first from right to left, then from left to right.

‘I am right-handed,’ she said, ‘and it is natural for me to swing a weapon this way.’ She swung the wood again from right to left. ‘My right hand and arm are the stronger, because habitually I use them more, and swinging this way lets the stronger arm dominate.’

She put the wood tidily back in its place and sat down once more beside Sir Alain. She reached out and touched the swelling on his head, hidden under its compress. ‘You were hit on the back of your head on the left side,’ she said. ‘Derman, whom Lassair suggests was felled by the same man, was hit on the right side of his head.’

She looked at me, at Sir Alain, and then back at me. Neither he nor I spoke, so in the end she did.

With a faint sigh, she said, ‘One attack was by a right-hander, the other by a left-hander. You and Derman, Sir Alain, were assailed by two different men.’