The Way Between the Worlds

NINE

Gurdyman summoned one of the sheriff’s men and told him we were done, and the guard instantly hurried away to fetch his master. ‘You need not stay, child,’ Gurdyman said softly to me. ‘Go on home and wait for me there. One of us will suffice to pass on our findings.’

‘You’re not going to tell him about the mistletoe and the Threefold Death, are you?’ Something in me was rebelling furiously at the very thought.

Gurdyman chuckled. ‘Of course not. I shall say as little as I can get away with. Our sheriff,’ he added, lowering his voice, ‘is not a man blessed with a lively imagination, so I think that a simple account of some unknown, unidentifiable victim who died by drowning, and just happened to get caught up in a rope trailing from a passing boat, will be sufficient.’

I hoped he was right. ‘Won’t he notice that the body’s been cut open and sewed up again?’ I whispered nervously. I was, I discovered, morbidly curious about that aspect of Gurdyman’s inspection. How had he known what to do? Was he even allowed to do such a thing to a corpse? I wanted to find out, but now was not the moment.

‘I shouldn’t think so,’ Gurdyman replied. ‘If he does, I’ll say we found several wounds on the dead man — that we conclude were caused by being dragged through the water — and dealt with the worst of them.’

‘But-’

He put a hand on my shoulder, his touch firm. ‘Enough,’ he said. As if he knew full well what I was burning to ask, he added softly, ‘We will speak later.’ He smiled at me, and I saw the bright intelligence sparkling in his eyes. I wondered what on earth I had been worrying about, for I realized then that the sheriff was no match for Gurdyman. Whatever awkward questions might be posed, my teacher would answer them as easily as if he himself had put them in the sheriff’s mind.

I did as Gurdyman bade me and set off for his house. As I strode along, it suddenly occurred to me that the way our man in the fen had died was uncannily similar to the way in which poor little Herleva had met her death: both had been poisoned, both had suffered a blow to the head, both had a cut to the throat. I was well on the way to deciding that our dead man and the chatty little nun had both been sacrificial victims when I made myself stop and think about it properly, and very quickly I realized I was wrong.

The dead man had been put in the water. He had been offered to the crossing place, that strange zone that is neither land nor water but some potent amalgam of the two. Such places hold their own magic. Like dawn and twilight, like a ford over a stream, they are where two different elements meet and part. Day and night; earth and water.

I knew that Herleva’s body had been found in no such place. I thought hard and brought to mind my sister’s words: she was found behind the stables. There was nothing remotely magical about the stable block of a place like Chatteris Abbey; quite the opposite, I imagined, for surely a stable was a place of animal sounds and smells, redolent with the stench of dung, horse sweat and hard human toil. No man intent on making an offering to the powers of the dark fen would leave his victim behind an abbey’s stable block.

It must, I concluded as I hurried through the shadowy alleyways to Gurdyman’s house, be after all no more than a gruesome coincidence that Herleva and the man in the fen had died in the same manner. There were only so many ways of killing a person. Slitting the throat and strangulation could hardly be uncommon, and I was left with the miserable, discouraging and decidedly worrying thought that not one but two killers were on the loose.

I had not been home for long when Gurdyman arrived. I thought this probably indicated that the sheriff had accepted the shortened version of Gurdyman’s findings concerning the dead man, and so it proved to be.

‘What will happen now?’ I asked. ‘Will they bury him?’

Gurdyman shook his head. ‘No, not immediately. Enquiries will be pursued around the place where the boatmen think the body became caught up with their craft, to determine if anyone answering the dead man’s description has been reported missing. Nobody likes burying a man with no name,’ he added softly, ‘and even our sheriff seems to be no exception.’

I gathered from Gurdyman’s expression that this unexpectedly decent aspect of the sheriff’s character came as quite a surprise. ‘They’ll keep the body somewhere cool in the meantime?’ I said. The weather was mild for spring, and bodies quickly begin to decompose in all but the coldest seasons. The thought of that stomach I’d held in my hands, and its steadily rotting contents, brought on a wave of nausea, but I managed to control it.

Which was just as well, because with his next breath Gurdyman remarked in amazement that it was long past noon and high time I fetched us something to eat. We do not keep much in the way of supplies in the house — Gurdyman claims he has no idea how to cook, and, beyond a basic ability, it is not in truth among my skills either — but we have the good fortune to live close to a busy market square where people bustle about every day, not just on market days, many of them from out of town. Where there are hungry people, you always find food stalls eager to relieve them of their money, and not a hundred paces from Gurdyman’s front door there is a stall whose proprietor sells the tastiest pies in Cambridge.

When I got back, the delicious smell of hot gravy making my mouth water and my stomach rumble so loudly that it embarrassed me, I found that Gurdyman had opened a stone jar of cool white wine and poured out generous mugfuls for both of us. We settled in the warm, still air of Gurdyman’s little interior courtyard and began our meal.

When I had taken the edge off my hunger, I put down my knife and said, ‘Gurdyman, how do you come to know so much?’

I realized straight away I had phrased my question wrongly, for if my teacher were to begin telling me how he came by all his extraordinary knowledge, we would be there all night and all the next day too. ‘I mean, today I watched you remove a man’s stomach, open it up, inspect it, then neatly put it back inside him in exactly the right place.’ I shook my head in wonder. ‘You must have more skill in your hands, more wisdom in your head, than all the doctors in Cambridge, if not in the whole of England!’ Any of whom, I reflected, would probably have stood over the body, mumbling about death having been caused by an imbalance of the humours, or Mars being in an adverse conjunction with the Moon. .

Gurdyman finished chewing a mouthful of pie and took a considering sip of wine, nodding his approval. Then he wiped his lips with a clean napkin and smiled. ‘Thank you for the compliment, Lassair.’ He paused, his eyes gazing out, unfocused, over the little courtyard. I sensed his thoughts were far away, and I hoped this meant I was about to get a full and satisfying answer to my question.

So it proved to be.

‘I was born a long time before the Conquest,’ Gurdyman began, ‘in a little village on the coast road between London and Hastings. My mother was quite advanced in years, as indeed was my father, and my birth was treated as a miracle. As I grew and thrived, my mother wished to give thanks, and so the three of us set off on pilgrimage to Santiago.’ His eyes flashed to me. ‘Do you know where that is, child?’

‘No.’

‘It is on the north coast of the land called Spain, right out in the west where the land gives way to the great sea. We reached the place safely, my elderly parents and I, but my mother was exhausted by the long journey and we stopped on our way home for her to regain her strength. We put up at a simple hostel — there are many such places along the pilgrim routes — and, since we were poor, my father found work to pay for our keep.’

‘What did he do?’ I had never heard Gurdyman speak of his past before; I was fascinated and quite happy to wait for a while before getting the answer to my original question.

‘My father brewed ale,’ he said with some pride. ‘There is always work for a man who knows his beer. Soon he had more orders than he could manage alone, and he took on an apprentice.’

‘Was that you?’

Gurdyman laughed. ‘No, oh, no. I was far too busy soaking up knowledge from a local man who had spotted my hunger for it. His name was Raymond — ’ I noticed that a look of great love and respect softened Gurdyman’s features as he spoke of this man — ‘and he it was who awakened my mind. But I digress. My parents found that they were happy living in Galicia — that is the name of the land — and my mother no longer suffered from the wracking coughs that had affected her every winter back in England, so they decided to stay. As for me — oh, Lassair, what an exciting place that was to grow up! The Moors held the land to the south, but Galicia was a Christian land, and the atmosphere around me was rich with the best of both cultures. My village teacher had travelled much in the Muslim lands, and, once he had taught me as much as he could, he suggested that I, too, go south, to continue my education. Accordingly, one bright spring morning when I was almost fifteen, I said a loving farewell to my mother and father, promised faithfully to send regular letters for Raymond to read aloud to them and set off for Al-Andalus.’

His eyes had gone unfocused again, and I sensed that his mind was far away in both place and time. Out of respect for his memories — what an amazingly long and interesting life he’d had! — I let him be for a moment. Then I said, very gently, ‘And that is where you learned so much about the body? From the Arabs of the south?’

‘Hmm?’ His blue eyes opened widely again, and he looked at me. ‘Yes, yes, that’s right, from the great scientists and doctors of the Muslim world.’ He leaned closer, adding in a whisper, ‘In matters of learning, child, they are as far in advance of Christian men as Christian men are from the sheep in their fields.’ He straightened up again. ‘It was my honour and my privilege that one or two of them shared their wisdom with me.’

There was so much I wanted to ask him that I did not know where to start. I opened my mouth to begin, but he held up a hand. ‘Enough for now, Lassair,’ he said kindly. ‘I do promise you, though, that what the teachers of my youth put into here — ’ he tapped his head — ‘I will do my utmost to pass on to you. Now, eat your food.’

We had almost finished our pies when there was a rap on the door.

I went to get up — it is among the duties of the apprentice to answer the door, and that seems to apply whether your master is a physician, a priest, a scribe or a sorcerer — but Gurdyman pressed a hand to my shoulder and pushed me back down on to the bench. ‘I’ll go,’ he announced. ‘You eat the last of your food before it gets completely cold.’

I heard his footsteps hurry away along the passage, and there was a faint squeak from the hinges as he opened the door to the street. I wondered fleetingly if someone had come from the sheriff, perhaps with a further question or two, but then I heard Gurdyman and the newcomer talking together in low voices and I knew who it was.

Knew, and in the same instant was struck with fear to the depths of my very bones, for the man was Hrype, and there was something about the particular tone in which he was speaking to Gurdyman — so quietly and urgently — that told me without a doubt he brought bad news.

I flung my pie aside and leapt up, running out into the passage and colliding with Hrype as he approached. ‘What’s happened?’ I demanded. ‘You must tell me!’

I should have thought first about my parents and the rest of my family, for Hrype lived in the same village and it was most likely that the dread tidings he brought concerned one of my close kin. But I am ashamed to say that the only person in my mind at that moment was Rollo. How on earth it could have come about that Hrype was the one who first learned of his fate, I did not stop to think.

There were tears streaming down my cheeks, and the heaving of my chest as I sobbed made further speech impossible. Hrype took me in his arms and gently stroked my back, soothing me, steadying me, all the time crooning words in an unknown tongue which, of all things, made me want to go to sleep. .

‘That’s better,’ he said after a while. I had the strange sensation that quite a lot of time had passed, and I came back to myself to find that I was once more sitting on the bench and Gurdyman had topped up my cup of wine. I took a big sip, swallowed it and then made myself look up at Hrype.

The question I both longed and dreaded to ask must have been clearly visible in my face. He said without preamble, ‘I bring news of your sister, Elfritha. She is very sick, and it is feared that she may die. The nuns at Chatteris have been caring for her to the best of their ability, but, knowing of the fine reputation of her healer aunt, they sent word to Aelf Fen, and Edild is now in charge.’

He paused, as if to let the news sink in. For a few moments I could not think at all. A part of my mind registered the fact that no harm had befallen Rollo — none that Hrype had heard of, in any case, which did not say a lot — but before I could even pause to be glad about it, the rest of my thoughts filled with grief for my beloved sister.

She is very sick, and they fear she may die. Oh, Elfritha! First we had feared she was a murderer’s victim, and now this!

Out of nowhere came a tumble of happy memories, of a lifelong companion who, only a year and four months older than me, was as different as a sibling could be. Dreamy, gentle, impractical Elfritha, patient where I was impatient, kind when I wanted to hit out, and always, through everything that we shared in our childhood, full of love for me and my staunchest supporter. The beautiful shawl she made for me became, on the day she presented it, my most treasured possession, and it still is. I missed my sister from the moment she entered the abbey, and I think of her every day of my life.

Now she was sick. She was very possibly dying. I did not know how I was going to bear it.

Gurdyman, perhaps understanding that I could not speak, asked softly, ‘What ails her?’

‘I do not know,’ Hrype admitted.

I wondered how long it was since word was sent to the village. Oh, oh, she might already be dead! I raised my head, trying to put this agonizing suspicion into words, but Hrype did not need words.

He knelt down in front of me and took hold of my hands. His felt very warm, or perhaps that was because mine were icy.

‘She is still alive at this moment, Lassair,’ he said. His voice was firm and cool, and his eyes did not leave mine. I believed him, although I would have liked to ask him how he knew. But he was Hrype, so I didn’t.

Gurdyman was busy with some task, and at first I did not perceive what he was doing. I felt slightly affronted, I think, that he could calmly be getting on with his day when we had just had such dreadful news. Then I realized: he was packing up food and drink, setting it ready with my shawl.

He came over to me and patted my hand. ‘If you set out straight away, you will be at Chatteris by nightfall.’ He glanced at Hrype, who gave a faint nod. ‘Hrype will look after you. He is a swift and canny traveller, experienced in the fastest ways of proceeding both by the track and over the water, and nobody could guide you better.’

I looked up at Hrype and mumbled my thanks. He gave another quick nod. Then, getting to my feet, I gave Gurdyman a low bow. He reached out and took hold of my hands, raising me up again. I wanted to say so much: to apologize for hurrying away and abandoning his teaching as if I did not value it at all; to thank him for being so considerate as to make it easy for me to go; to say even that I appreciated the pack he had so swiftly prepared. Like Hrype, he could read my thoughts as if they were words on a page. He smiled, gave my hands a squeeze and murmured, ‘Good luck.’ Then Hrype grabbed the pack, I swept my sister’s beautiful shawl around my shoulders and we were off.

It was soon after noon when we left Cambridge. There was not much traffic on the road, even less going in our direction, so to begin with we walked. We were both fresh, however, and able to keep up a good pace. My mind reached out constantly for my sister, and once or twice I thought I sensed a response. It was feeble — more like a breath in my face than an actual voice speaking in my head — but nevertheless I made myself take it as a good sign.

It might help to take my conscious thoughts off my fear, I thought, to speak of something else. Breaking quite a long silence, I said to Hrype, ‘Where did you go when you left me at Chatteris in the middle of the night four days ago?’

If he was surprised at such a question out of nowhere, he did not show it. ‘It was in fact near dawn when I got up to go,’ he said calmly. ‘I would not have abandoned you during the night hours, Lassair.’ He glanced at me, the suspicion of a smile on his face. ‘I left you some food and drink, did I not?’

‘You did,’ I conceded. I decided to keep to myself my suspicion that he’d slipped a mild sedative into the herbal brew he’d given me. It does not do, I have discovered, to push Hrype too far.

‘I wanted to try to discover more about the death of the nun, for which I needed to look at the place where she was found,’ he said, after a pause that had lasted so long that I was quite sure he had forgotten the question, or decided not to answer, or possibly both. ‘I recalled the nun who admitted us to the abbey saying that she was looking for the kinsfolk of the dead girl, if indeed they had made the journey to Chatteris, and I also made some careful enquiries to see if I could locate them.’

‘Did you?’

‘No. Nobody had gone to ask about Herleva.’

It struck me as very sad, and I was sure from Hrype’s tone and his expression that he felt the same. ‘Perhaps they haven’t yet heard,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘It is possible. Or perhaps she was alone in the world.’

I did not want to dwell on that.

‘I, too, have been thinking about Herleva,’ I said. ‘In particular, how she died.’

Then I told him about the man in the fen, and how Gurdyman had taken me with him to assist as he inspected the body. I told him how the man had been killed, and what Gurdyman had concluded, and how I’d thought it was similar to how poor little Herleva had met her end. I confessed that, just for a moment, I’d wondered if she, too, had been a sacrificial victim. ‘But she wasn’t,’ I finished, ‘because if she was, she’d have been left somewhere in the marginal places between water and land.’

Hrype was deep in thought. I wondered if he’d heard a word I had said. Then, abruptly, he barked out, ‘Where do you think Herleva was found?’

‘I — er, Elfritha. .’ Oh, Elfritha! ‘My sister said Herleva’s body was found behind the stables.’ A very worrying thought struck me. ‘Hrype, you just said you needed to investigate the place where Herleva died, so you must have gone back inside the abbey walls!’ I stopped dead and looked up at him. ‘You did, even though it was so perilous, especially without me there pretending to be your daughter! Oh, what if they’d spotted you and recognized you?’ I felt a chill round my heart. ’They didn’t, did they?’

He waved an impatient hand. ‘No, Lassair.’

‘But how else-’

‘Enough,’ he said, quite sharply. Then, perhaps recalling where we were going and why, he said more kindly, ‘Listen, and I shall tell you.’

I shut my mouth and hung my head.

‘You misheard what your sister said,’ he said after a moment. ‘As, indeed, did I. We both understood her to have said that Herleva’s body was found behind the stables, which we took to mean the big stable block within the abbey where the horses and mules of visitors are cared for. So when I realized that I had to know more concerning her death, I thought I would have to go back inside the abbey, and this was, as you rightly pointed out, quite risky.’

‘I could have gone with you!’ I protested. ‘We could have disguised ourselves just like we did that first time! Why didn’t you-’

Again, he silenced me, this time by raising his hand. ‘It was not necessary for either of us to return inside the abbey,’ he said, ‘as I discovered when I asked the right questions. Lassair, we thought that Elfritha said Herleva was found behind the stables, but she didn’t. She actually said stable, in the singular.’

Stables? Stable? What difference could it make?

But then I understood. ‘The stable where she was found isn’t within the abbey walls, is it?’ I whispered. ‘It’s somewhere else entirely.’

‘It is,’ he agreed. ‘In fact, it is more a shed than a stable: a crude and simple little construction set in the far corner of a field some distance from the main buildings. It’s a shelter for the Chatteris donkey, on the rare occasions when the sisters aren’t using him to help in any one of a hundred tasks.’

I knew without being told what sort of a location this shelter was in. I said — and it was a statement, not a question — ‘It’s down by the water, right at the edge of the land, and sometimes in bad weather that corner of the field floods, almost up to the door of the little shed.’

Hrype looked very closely at me for a moment. Then, sounding like someone trying just too hard to speak in their normal tone, he said, ‘Yes, that describes it exactly.’ His curiosity overcame him, and he added in an urgent hiss, ‘Can you see it, Lassair?’

I nodded. He appeared to think about that for some moments. Then he said, ‘Herleva’s body was found half under water, right on the fen edge. But for her veil, still covering her head, she was naked. Her wrists and ankles were bound to hazel stakes with ropes made of honeysuckle.’

We had been walking for some time now, and the traffic travelling north out of Cambridge was building up as the day drew on and people made for home. Presently, Hrype flagged down a plump young woman driving a cart and persuaded her to give us a ride, on the pretext that his daughter (me) was lame and we still had many miles to go. I had the presence of mind to adopt a limp as the woman’s eyes swept to me to verify Hrype’s words. She didn’t seem to mind helping us, however, and soon she and Hrype were chatting away like old friends. He continued to amaze me; there he was, sounding like some simple peasant whose mind never dwelt on anything deeper than whether his crops would grow or his ewes produce healthy lambs. I would never have guessed he knew so much about farming. .

I sat in silence, thinking.

The plump woman dropped us close to where the boats for Chatteris tied up, and Hrype and I waited until one would turn up to ferry us across. The wait was long.

After quite some time, I said, ‘If Herleva and the man in the fen were killed by the same person-’

Hrype snorted. ‘I think, don’t you, that we can omit the if.’

‘If they were murdered by the same hands,’ I repeated firmly, ‘then we should think about what they might have had in common. Did they, for example, know each other? Were they the last remaining members of a wealthy family who had to be removed so that someone else could inherit?’

‘Herleva wasn’t a wealthy heiress,’ Hrype pointed out. ‘She was a novice nun.’

‘Yes, I know that, but perhaps she was a rich woman before she became a nun,’ I said, but I had to agree, it didn’t seem very likely. ‘Or. .’ I had run out of possibilities.

‘You are, I imagine, just speculating on a possibility, which we are to treat as a hypothesis rather than an attempt at the truth,’ Hrype said, his voice kind.

I wasn’t sure if I was, but I nodded anyway. ‘Or perhaps they were both involved in somebody else being killed,’ I went on, my imagination coming to life again, ‘and it became too dangerous to let them live.’

‘Hmm,’ said Hrype.

‘Herleva was killed just a few days ago,’ I went on, ‘and Gurdyman thinks the man in the fen died within the last few months. It couldn’t have been any longer because the honeysuckle used to bind him was still quite fresh.’

‘Hmm,’ Hrype repeated.

I was thinking very hard. There was something, some relevant fact, right on the edge of my mind, and I just couldn’t pin it down. I ordered my thoughts, summarizing what I knew.

Who? I asked myself. Answer: a chatty little nun and a middle-aged man.

When? One within a week or so; one within a few months.

Where? One on the island of Chatteris, over on the western side of the fens; one over on the eastern side, in the maze of channels that wind through the marshes to the north of Aelf Fen and up towards Lynn and, eventually, the sea.

Then I knew what it was that had been niggling at me, trying to catch my attention.

‘Hrype?’ I said softly.

He turned to look down at me, his strange silvery eyes catching the gleam of the slowly falling sun. ‘Yes?’

‘I think there is a connection between them.’ I was speaking too quickly, breathless in my excitement, and I made myself slow down. ‘The dead man was found in the water over towards the fens’ eastern margin, above where the two rivers flow down from the higher ground and below Lynn,’ I said.

‘What of it?’ He spoke quite sharply, but there was a faint smile on his face. He knew already, I was sure, what I was going to say; it would not have surprised me if he did, for he is adept at reading other people’s thoughts, and what was on my mind just then must have been shouting out at him.

‘Herleva came from over that way,’ I said, despite everything smiling back at him. ‘I spoke to an old Chatteris woman who sells cheese to the nuns. She told me Herleva was from up beyond Lynn. She and the dead man might have known each other!’

‘And they might not,’ I thought I heard him mutter. He took my hand and patted it. ‘That’s a start, I suppose,’ he said kindly. He could have added, even if it’s not much, but he didn’t.

We went on standing there. In time, we saw a boat approaching, and the ferryman agreed to take us across. I sat down in the stern, wrapping my shawl tightly round me against the chill air rising off the water.

My brief excitement had leaked out of me, and now I felt even lower than before. Hrype was right to be dismissive; so what if Herleva’s home was roughly in the same area as the place where the man in the fen had died? It really didn’t amount to very much and barely qualified for Hrype’s it’s a start.

And there was so much more I had to worry about. There we were, moving steadily across the misty water, and my poor sister lay deadly sick on the other side. Was she still alive? Again, I sent a tentative thought in her direction, and this time I received no reply at all. I buried my face in my shawl; I did not want Hrype to see my tears.

There was Rollo, too. I no longer heard his summoning voice in my dreams, and in my waking mind I knew, with no room for doubt, that something had happened to him. He had called to me for help, and I had failed him. Now he was gone: out of my head, out of my life, out, perhaps, of this world.

The sky was darkening as the sun finally set. All around the little boat, the water was dark and sinister, no glimmer of light on its black depths. Despair took hold of me, and for a dreadful moment I was tempted to give up on the horrible struggle of my life and throw myself into the fen’s cold embrace.

Then there was a gentle bump as the boat came alongside the little quay. The ferryman jumped out to make his craft secure, and Hrype climbed ashore after him. He turned back to me.

He said, so softly that I hardly heard him, ‘Nobody is dead yet, Lassair.’ And he held out his hand.

If he was telling me my dearest sister was still alive, that was, of course, something to rejoice over, although if she was as sick as we had been told, life could turn to death in the blink of an eye.

He could not be speaking of Rollo. He didn’t know Rollo was in danger; nobody did except Gurdyman and me, and I was all but sure now that the danger, whatever it was, had overcome him.

I thought about it for a couple of heartbeats. Go on? Give up? Then I took Hrype’s hand, jumped out of the boat and on to the Chatteris quay.