The Tavern in the Morning

Death by Drowning
Chapter Seven

Josse discharged himself from Sister Euphemia’s care the next morning.

‘I don’t know!’ she complained, giving the wounds on the back of his head a final inspection. ‘You and the Abbess Helewise, you’re a right pair! You both believe the world’ll come to an end if you’re not around to make sure it doesn’t.’

‘How true,’ Josse agreed. ‘Of myself, in any case. I always was an arrogant fellow, Sister Euphemia.’ He gave her a wink, and she blushed faintly.

‘Go on with you!’

‘I’m going.’

‘You hurry straight back, now,’ she said, trotting along the long, open space between the infirmary’s many beds to keep up with his strides, ‘the moment you start to get head pains, or dizziness, or-’

But, with an acknowledging wave of his hand, he had gone.

* * *

In the crisp morning air, the heavy frost sparkled pure, dazzling white. Horace’s breath hung in clouds, like the smoke of some idling dragon.

Josse met nobody on the road down into Tonbridge. Which was no surprise: it was too cold a day to venture out of doors and go off journeying unless you really had to.

He rode straight for the castle.

He hadn’t really hoped he would find his stranger there, which was just as well since he didn’t. The drawbridge was now fully up and the castle looked, if it were possible, even more abandoned than it had on Josse’s last visit.

A woman passed by, a bundle of kindling under one arm.

‘You’ll get no welcome from them,’ she remarked, nodding in the direction of the castle. ‘They’re away. Gone, they have, and gone they’ll stay, s’long as there’s sickness in the valley.’ She sniffed. ‘Don’t have no truck with the idea of helping the sick and needy, they don’t.’

‘Ah.’ Trying to sound casual — a passer-by venturing a conversational remark — he said, ‘I’m surprised they don’t leave at least a small staff, though. After all, there must be caretaking duties and there’s security to think of…’ He trailed off, hoping she would take up the opportunity of a bit of a gossip.

She did. Putting down her kindling and folding her arms, she said, ‘Security? I don’t imagine that bothers them, not with that ruddy great drawbridge pulled up. I mean, who’s going to try to climb up there?’ She jerked her head towards the castle’s formidable walls. ‘And why bother, that’s what I say! If them grand folks don’t want to associate with the likes of us, then there’s no call for us to go bothering them.’

An independently-minded woman, Josse reflected. ‘Is there truly nobody within?’

‘Oh, there’s your caretakers, all right.’ She sniffed again, then suddenly her face lightened into a smile of genuine humour. ‘You’re not thinking, mate,’ she said. ‘Course there’s got to be someone inside, else how’d they raise the drawbridge?’

He grinned in response. ‘Aye. You’re right there.’

‘There’s any number of them,’ she continued. ‘Caretakers, like. But they ain’t going to come out all the while there’s food and water within. They’ll see the advantages of keeping themselves apart from the sickness, same as their precious lords and masters. You mark my word, there’ll be no comings and goings over that drawbridge till spring.’

‘I did have a faint hope of finding an acquaintance of mine here. I heard tell he lodged with the family…?’

The woman shook her head. ‘Unlikely. As I’ve already told you — ’ she was eyeing Josse suspiciously now, as if trying to decide if he had evil intentions or was just plain stupid — ‘the family’s away. If your acquaintance is in there, he must be a guest of the caretakers, not the Clares.’ Another assessing look. ‘And you’ll be a better judge than me, sir, as to the likelihood of that.’

‘No, no, as you say, he can’t be. I must have been mistaken.’ Keen to allay her curiosity — he didn’t like the idea of her passing on details of her meeting with a man nosing around outside the castle and asking daft questions — he said, ‘I’m for the tavern. A mug of ale and a spell of warming my toes by Goody Anne’s fire sounds just the thing for me. I wish you good day.’ He bowed, swung up on to Horace, and set off down the track towards the river.

When he risked a glance behind him, the woman had picked up her bundle and was striding away.

* * *

The inn was bustling. There seemed to be as many people milling around in the yard as within, Josse thought as he pushed his way inside. And there was a deal of animated chattering going on, too.

Goody Anne was in the tap room, sleeves rolled up to display her well-muscled forearms, handing out jugs of ale to a band of men.

‘How goes it, Mistress Anne?’ Josse asked when, catching sight of him, she nodded a greeting.

‘Rushed off my feet, as ever.’ She gave him a friendly grin. ‘Thanks to you, sir, people haven’t been scared off.’ She winked. ‘If you get my meaning.’

He did. Standing beside her now, he said softly, ‘Glad to have been of service.’

‘Any news as to who did for poor old Peter Ely?’

‘No.’

‘And now there’s this new business. I really don’t-’ A voice demanded service, followed by a chorus of others, and, interrupting herself, Anne said, ‘You’ll have to excuse me, sir, I’m that busy.’

‘Of course.’

He took his ale and went to lean against the wall. What new business? Tuning in to conversations around him, he tried to find out.

It didn’t take long.

‘… seems she’d been there for days!’ a man beside him said in an awed voice. ‘Well, ain’t no surprise, right out there in the wilds.’

‘Aye, you’re right there,’ agreed another, and his two companions nodded sagely. ‘Reckon she’d her own reasons for keeping herself apart, an’ all.’

A cold hand took hold of Josse’s heart. He said to the man nearest to him, ‘What’s happened? Who are you talking about?’

The man, fortunately, was too fascinated by the tale to worry about why a stranger should be so eager to know. ‘Why, they’ve found a body, in the woods. Dead, she is, found with her head in a foot of water.’

‘Who was she? Does anybody know?’ Josse looked wildly from face to face. ‘Come on, one of you must know something!’

‘Steady on, there, sir!’ one of the men protested. ‘No need to get agitated, like!’

‘It were that old biddy as does the spells,’ another man said, putting a hand up to his mouth and whispering from behind it. ‘Can’t say as I know her name.’

‘Nor I,’ said another.

But Josse wasn’t listening. Grasping the shoulder of the man who had first volunteered information, he said urgently, ‘Old. You said she was old. Can you be sure?’

‘Aye, aye, sir!’ The man gave an uneasy laugh. ‘She were old, all right. Not only my mam but my grand-mam an’ all used to speak of her and her potions.’

A huge relief was sweeping through Josse, so that, inappropriate though it was, he felt like cheering. Instead, he offered to fill each of the men’s mugs, then, having been given directions for how he might find the scene of the drowning — the information was pretty vague, but better than nothing — he was on his way.

* * *

He would not have found the pond so readily had it not been surrounded by a large group of the Sheriff’s men. Might not, even, have found it at all, for it was in a secluded spot deep in the forest, and it was the sound of loud voices that had drawn him to it.

He stood on the edge of the small clearing, surveying the scene.

The pond was about five paces by ten and along its far bank was a row of willows, now quite bare of leaves. On the near bank was a vegetable patch, showing evidence of regular and diligent care. Behind the vegetable patch was a little hut made of a sturdy framework of posts filled in with wattle and daub. The roof — made of reed thatch — looked well-maintained.

On the far side of the hut, in a place where, Josse judged, it had been put so as to catch what sunshine made its way into the clearing, was a herb garden.

The body lay half on its side, with its legs and lower torso on the bank. Its head, shoulders, arms and chest were in the pond.

Josse moved forward and approached Sheriff Pelham, whom he assumed to be in charge.

‘Good day to you, Sheriff,’ he called, still sitting astride his horse. ‘I heard tell of this death while I was at the inn, and came to-’

‘Came to poke your nose in, as usual. King’s man,’ the Sheriff finished. ‘Well, I don’t reckon there’s much to interest you here. She slipped, it seems, fell with her head under the water and she drowned.’

Josse dismounted, tethered Horace to a stout branch, and went to the pond’s edge. Crouching down, he realised straight away why nobody had yet removed the dead woman from the pond.

The water had frozen hard around her.

He said to the Sheriff, ‘Does anything strike you about her, Sheriff Pelham?’

The Sheriff glanced around at a few of his men to make sure they were listening. ‘She’s dead,’ he said, with an unpleasant laugh. ‘Or didn’t you notice?’ He was rewarded with a few guffaws. ‘People do die, with their heads stuck in ponds. They drown, like.’

Josse said, ‘People drown in water. This pond is covered in a thick layer of ice, and has been, I would guess, for — ’ he paused, calculating, ‘for the last three days, I’d say.’ Yes. That was right. It had been milder, the night he’d slept in Ninian’s camp. Then, the next night, the temperature had gone down sharply and Joanna’s pity had led her to take that great risk of bringing a strange man into the shelter of her secret hiding-place.

The Sheriff said aggressively, ‘So? What of it?’

Josse suppressed a sigh. ‘Then this woman must have been lying here for three days. At least.’

‘How can you be sure?’ demanded the Sheriff.

‘Because she must have gone in when the pond was water,’ Josse said patiently. ‘Which was either three days ago, when the weather relented a little, or some time before that.’ He glanced down at the body. ‘I would doubt, however, that she has been here long.’

‘Got a scrying glass, have you?’ the Sheriff asked nastily, raising a few more guffaws, although Josse doubted very much if many of the men knew what a scrying glass was; he was quite surprised that the Sheriff did.

‘No. I don’t need one,’ he replied. He pointed to the corpse’s abdomen, touching it gently. ‘There’s no bloating, whereas, if she’d been here much longer than three days, she would have begun to swell up.’ He had observed such things in battlefield corpses. It was one reason for burying your dead quickly; corpses became progressively more unpleasant to deal with if you delayed.

‘Got any bright ideas as to how we’re going to get her out, have you?’ Sheriff Pelham asked caustically; he was, Josse noticed, getting more irascible the more his weaknesses were exposed. But it was so difficult not to expose them …

Josse had drawn his sword and, using the point of the hilt as a mallet, was gently cracking the ice around the corpse’s head and shoulders, making attractive star patterns on the smooth surface. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘we might be able to release her fairly easily. The pond’s not frozen solid, it’s only the first few inches.’

Observing what he was doing, one or two of the brighter men came to help. Soon, the ice around the upper part of the corpse was shattered into a hundred fragments and Josse and his two assistants were able to extract the old woman from her frozen tomb.

Her face, Josse noticed as he turned her over on to her back, was badly bruised …

She must have banged her face on the ice,’ Sheriff Pelham observed, leaning over Josse’s shoulder and breathing open-mouthed into his ear.

‘Think again,’ Josse said. ‘If she fell when the pond was iced over, she wouldn’t have been down there beneath the surface, frozen into it.’

Momentarily, the Sheriff was silenced.

Rapidly Josse inspected the rest of the corpse. As well as the bruised face — the nose had taken a direct hit, and, as he gently probed inside the mouth, he saw what looked like a recently-broken tooth — she had damage to both hands.

Josse held the dead hands in his.

Pity surging through him, he realised that someone had deliberately broken two fingers on each of the dead woman’s hands.

He laid her head down again and, on the sloping bank, she rolled over until she was lying face-down.

And Josse saw, on the back of the carefully-laundered white cap, a clear boot print.

Someone had savagely beaten her, then dragged her to the pond and held her head under the water with a foot until she died.

Why the beating? To what purpose had somebody tortured her like that?

Why, he answered himself, were people usually tortured in this wicked world? To make them tell you something that they knew and you didn’t. Something that you badly wanted to know.

Oh, God, Josse thought.

‘When you’ve quite finished,’ the Sheriff said from just behind him, ‘we’d better see about taking this here into town for disposal.’

Disposal.

‘You’ve got a murder on your hands,’ Josse said softly. ‘Didn’t you realise?’

‘Murder my arse!’ The Sheriff spat on to the frosty grass. ‘She went to get water, slipped, bashed her head and fell in the water.’ He put his face up close to Josse’s and added with quiet intensity, ‘That’s what I say. And what I say goes.’

Unfortunately, as Josse well knew, it did.

He said, ‘Aren’t you even going to determine who she was?

The Sheriff, grinning, raised his eyebrows at one of his men. ‘No need for that. Hugh?’

The man, stepping forward, said, ‘She were Mag Hobson. She were my mam’s aunt.’

With nothing further to add, Josse watched as a hurdle was brought up, and, with a scant amount of respect which he felt was only employed because he happened to be watching, the men got the body on to it and began the long walk back to Tonbridge.

* * *

Leading Horace, Josse fell into step beside the man called Hugh.

‘Did you know her yourself?’ he said quietly; no need for the Sheriff to know he was asking questions.

‘Old Mag? No, can’t say as I did.’

‘But your mother did, presumably.’ The man didn’t answer. ‘Did she visit her aunt? Your mother, I mean.’

‘Might have done.’

Josse wondered why the man was being so wary. Then, thinking back to what he had already been told — and to that neat herb garden — he said, ‘She was a wise woman. Wasn’t she?’

Hugh shot him a swift look. He muttered, ‘Aye.’

‘That’s why she lived out here all alone,’ Josse went on, thinking out loud. ‘Why people preferred to keep her at arm’s length.’

‘She were good,’ Hugh supplied, as if belatedly prompted to defend his dead relative’s reputation. ‘Fixed things for lots of folk, though they didn’t like to say so. Me, I preferred to keep right out of it.’

Superstition, Josse thought. No, folks wouldn’t want it widely known that they had consulted a wise woman. You never knew, and it was best to be on the safe side where meddling in that sort of thing was concerned.

‘I understand,’ Josse said. ‘And many people wouldn’t want it known that their mother’s aunt was a wise woman.’

Hugh seemed to be battling with some inner conflict. ‘Makes me angry,’ he finally admitted. ‘They jeer at her and say she’s an old witch, but who is it they go running to after nightfall when they want a love potion or a wart charm? Ain’t right.’

‘It’s not,’ Josse agreed. ‘But it’s human nature, I’m afraid, Hugh.’

‘She learned her craft young, they do say,’ Hugh volunteered, As if, having admitted to the fact of his mother’s aunt’s oddness, there was no further barrier to discussing her, he went on, ‘When she were still at the big house, she were trained by an older woman, her what did the heavy washing. That’s the way of it, that an older one passes on the secrets to a young ‘un. Or so they do say.’

‘Aye, so I’ve heard,’ Josse agreed. ‘At the big house, you say? What, she lived in a house of her own?’ It didn’t seem very likely.

‘No, bless you!’ Hugh gave a faint laugh. ‘She were housekeeper. Well, that’s a deal too grand, it were only a small household. But she were their main indoor servant, that’s for sure.’

‘Whose?’

Hugh’s face creased into a frown of concentration. ‘I don’t know as I ever knew their name,’ he admitted. ‘They was old, an old man and an old woman. They lived alone, mostly, only they sometimes had folks visiting. Kin, I reckon. I know that for a fact because she — Mag — would get my mam in to help her with the cooking and that, when the visitors came.’

‘I see.’ Barely daring to ask the question, Josse said, ‘And you don’t know if they’re still there? The old couple?’

‘Lord, no, they’m dead.’ A reflective pause. ‘House’d be empty now, I reckon. Mag, she used to keep an eye on the place. Never could fathom why — maybe in case some long-lost relation came back to claim it one day. Or maybe because Mag weren’t a woman to let any place go to rack and ruin, not if she could help it.’ He sighed.

They walked in silence for some time. Josse, digesting what he had just been told and thinking furiously, was beginning to draw some tentative conclusions when Hugh said, ‘Do you reckon it were how the Sheriff says? An accident, like?’

And Josse said, ‘No, Hugh. I’m quite certain it wasn’t.’

‘Will you see her right?’ It was a whisper that Josse barely heard.

But he recognised the question for what it was. It was a man’s conscience speaking, a man who, stirred to pity by the brutal death of a relative — admittedly a distant one whom he usually preferred to forget about — wanted justice to be done.

‘Yes, Hugh,’ Josse whispered back. ‘I promise that, if it’s in my power, I will.’