face was strained, his dark eyes full of consternation. He tugged on Bascot’s sleeve, and made a quick flurry of movements with his hands, rubbing the skin of his forearms and face and pointing at Bascot.
“What’s troubling the lad?” Ernulf asked.
“He is frightened of the leprosy,” Bascot replied.
“But why? He has not been in contact with the lepers and neither have you.”
Bascot gave a short laugh. “No, but he knows I soon will be.”
The serjeant looked at the Templar enquiringly. “Sometimes I think the boy knows me better than I know myself, Ernulf. I must go to the leper house. It is possible that one of the inmates or the monks that tend them saw something that may help us in our enquiries. I do not imagine your men stayed in the area long enough to ask many questions.”
“No, and nor do I blame them,” Ernulf replied. “They came at the monk’s request, got the girl and left Brunner’s body to be disposed of by the Priory. No one in his right mind would go into a leper house if he didn’t have to. And neither should you. Lady Nicolaa would not ask it of any man, nor will she of you.”
“I am a monk, Ernulf, just as those who go to care for the lepers. Few of them take the disease, for God gives them his protection. I must trust that He will do the same for me.”
“Sometimes it doesn’t pay to stretch the Good Lord’s patience too far,” Ernulf muttered.
Bascot laughed. “I will be careful not to take unnecessary risks, I assure you.”
The Templar looked down at Gianni, saw the boy’s eyes were filled with tears. He knelt down beside the lad, clumsy on his ankle. “Do not fear, Gianni. God has led me into this mystery, I must believe that he will protect me while I try to unravel it. Stay with Ernulf until I return. I will not be long.”
Twenty-two
Unfortunately, Bascot did not learn any more about Brunner’s assailant at the leper house. At the lazar community he was directed in his visit by the monk who had found Brunner, a Brother Thomas. The monk was a rubicund man with a rolling gait, who looked as though he would have been more at home on the deck of a ship than tending the sick. His face was broad and fat, and his tonsure left the remainder of his hair sticking up like stubble in a shorn field. He had a ready gap-toothed smile and pudgy, capable hands. Only the gentle expression in his dark grey eyes belied the roughness of his exterior, along with the caring manner in which he treated his patients.
The lazar houses were within a low-walled enclosure and were of simple construction, but clean and dry. On the south side, at the far end of the main buildings, the enclosure opened out into a field in which there was a vegetable and herb garden and a byre which housed a few cows. Chickens clucked in a small coop and some sheep grazed in a walled pasture beyond the garden. Other monks were in evidence, tending to the chores of caring for the garden and animals helped by one or two inmates who were still well enough to do so, their diseased limbs wrapped in clean linen and large hats of straw shading their faces from the heat of the sun.
“The shack where the murdered man was found is beyond the pasture,” Brother Thomas told Bascot. “There are a few tumbledown buildings there, which were once all that the lepers had to shelter them. When Hugh of Avalon became bishop of Lincoln some few years ago he was much distressed at the terrible state in which these poor unfortunates were living, so he chivvied the people of the town into giving enough material and alms to build the new hospice which you have just seen. He is a saintly man, the bishop. Would that all men were as good as he.”
Brother Thomas led Bascot to the place where Brunner had been discovered. Gillie had been right, the buildings were hovels, most with caved-in roofs and insect-infested walls.
“It was I who found the dead man,” Brother Thomas explained. “One of the sheep had strayed during the night and I was looking for it when I saw what I took to be a bundle of clothes in the grass. I thought perhaps some kind soul had left them as a gift for the community and went to examine them. It was then that I discovered the terrible deed that had been done.”
“And the girl?” Bascot enquired. “How did you know she was in the shack?”
“I did not. I merely went in to see if the dead man had perhaps left some clue to his identity in there. Inside I found the girl, lying on the floor, bound hand and foot and too frightened to cry out for help. She was much distressed, poor creature.”
Brother Thomas’ face became solemn as he showed Bascot the interior of the shack. There was nothing inside, just a dirt floor on which was a pile of mouldy straw and the length of rope with which Gillie had been tied. There was no sign, either inside or out, of the blade that had ended Brunner’s life.
“Do you have much trouble with beggars or other unfortunates using these shacks?” Bascot asked Thomas.
The monk’s wide face creased into a smile. “No, we do not. There are few desperate enough to intrude so near the inmates of the hospice and risk infection. Besides, as you can see, there is little to make use of.” He looked down sadly at the spot where he had found Brunner. “The slain man must have certainly been in dire circumstances to have sought refuge here.”
“He was, Brother,” Bascot replied. “And whoever killed him must have been just as desperate.”
Bascot did not enter the hospice where those lepers too sick to leave their beds were tended by the monks. However, he still took the precaution of washing his hands in a laver of wine which was kept near the entrance. “We do not know how the disease is spread,” Brother Thomas had told him, “but the ancient Greeks thought much of the cleansing properties of wine and so, under Bishop Hugh’s instruction, we always wash our hands in it before we leave.”
Bascot had thanked him and ridden slowly back to the castle, oblivious to the crowds in the town and conscious only on the periphery of his thoughts that his new boots made the effort of sitting in the saddle much easier. By the time he got back to the hall, tables were being set up for the evening meal and Gianni was waiting for him anxiously at the east gate instead of in his usual place among the dogs. Ernulf was nearby, talking to one of his men.
“The lad would not leave the gate, even when I tried to tempt him with something to eat,” he told Bascot with a smile. “I reckon he thought you would be struck with the lepers’ disease the moment you entered the hospice and be instantly confined there, never to return.”
Bascot told the serjeant that he had discovered nothing helpful and asked if it had been confirmed that Lady Sybil and Conal had spent all of the evening and the night before within the castle walls.
“It has,” Ernulf said with some satisfaction. “Conal kept company with Richard Camville until late, and then they both retired to the same chamber together, along with another male guest who is staying here. Conal’s mother went to the room she shares with Lady Petronille and, unless she be a wraith that can vanish through walls, never left it ’til the morning. Because the chamber is cramped, Lady Petronille’s maid had a pallet across the door. If anyone had left the chamber in the night, she would have been woken.”
“Then we know that they, personally, are innocent of Brunner’s death.”
“It would seem so,” Ernulf replied.
Alan de Kyme sprawled in a chair by an unlit hearth in his small manor house, drinking a cup of weak ale, his foxy face set in concentration. His wife sat nearby, repairing a rent in one of her husband’s old tunics while keeping a watchful eye on their three children, who were playing with a ball on the other side of the room.
“You’ve heard that the Templar has evidence that neither Sybil nor Conal were involved in this latest crime,” Alan said to his wife.
“Doesn’t mean they weren’t involved in the other one,” his wife responded shortly. She was like her husband in features, with a similar pointed nose and sharp eyes, but instead of the flaming red hair that he possessed, hers was dark, and her skin was sallow. She also had a less humorous temperament than her husband.
“The Templar believes it does. He thinks the murders are all connected-de Kyme’s son, the priest and the stewe-holder.”
“If he knows so much, why doesn’t he know who did it?” his wife retorted sourly.
Alan de Kyme laid his finger alongside his nose in an artful manner. “Knowing is one thing, proving is
