‘If it’s her you’re wanting, she is down by the river with the washing today.’ The woman gave Walkelin a sideways glance and her eyes narrowed for a moment. ‘I know you, don’t I?’
‘I am Walkelin, the sheriff’s man,’ he declared, in his new-found voice of authority.
‘Are you indeed. I was just thinking you are the nephew of poor Mildreth Hedger as was sent from life on a knife’s blade.’ The woman did not sound very impressed.
Walkelin frowned. He did not much like being reminded of his aunt’s fate, nor that him being a sheriff’s man had not enabled him to save her from her wyrd. The woman, having made her point, moved on from the fate of Widow Hedger.
‘Report him, did she?’ She gave a nod towards her neighbour’s door. ‘Well, I doubt anything will be done, not when he is so high and mighty. Fine lords like him can do as they please and no notice taken.’ The woman sniffed. Walkelin had the idea she was a woman that sniffed a lot.
‘There was no …’ Walkelin was going to deny any reporting, but caught himself in time, ‘mention that she would not be at home this morning.’ He paused. ‘Did you see anything of what happened?’ It was worth a try.
‘Not saw, but half the street heard, if not half of Worcester. She screamed as if he were tearing her limb from limb, but there, if she takes to selling what she has been selling, it happens, and it is not my fault, whatever Dunstan over the way says. If she was honest there would be none of it.’ The woman looked suddenly guilty. The Walkelin of less than a year ago would have looked blankly at her, but now a more knowing Walkelin made an educated guess.
‘Took in more than one man’s washing, did she?’ The accompanying leer would have made Catchpoll proud, though it sat a little oddly on the fresh and slightly freckled face, and the woman looked momentarily taken aback before answering.
‘Foolish thing to do, dealing with two of the lordly sort, and neither of ’em the charitable kind, and I would have said nothing, not one word, if him with the nose and the sneer had not been rude and dismissive of me. So pleased with himself, he was, he needed that smile wiped from his proud face.’ The woman, whose own nose was turned up and narrow, giving her a very nasal sound, clearly bore the lord Raoul ill will. Walkelin also wondered if she resented her neighbour’s previous more comfortable existence, or whether the Widow Brook, however low she had come, still had the airs of a burgess’s wife.
‘So you told him he was not her only visitor, did you? If neither looked charitable you were setting her up for trouble. You call that neighbourly?’ Walkelin could not quite disguise his disapproval, much as he tried.
‘I could not have thought she would end up like she has though.’ The woman was defensive again. ‘I did not wish it upon her, I swear oath I did not.’
‘And her other lord, what is he like?’ Walkelin was not very interested, but it sounded a good serjeanting question to ask.
‘Shorter, fatter, a bit older. Always wears a red hat with a smart badge on it, leastways till he gets in her bed. I doubt he wears it then.’ The accompanying smile was not a pleasant one, but the young sheriff’s man did not even register it.
‘A badge?’ Walkelin felt his heart thump. ‘What was it like?’
‘Just a badge, copper, which is funny when you think what her late husband was, and with an amber stone set in the middle.’
Walkelin actually felt sick with the rush of excitement, but kept his voice calm and asked where upon the riverbank Widow Brook generally did her washing. She was not the only one at the chosen spot, but she was easily identifiable, for no other woman looked as she did, and they all seemed to be keeping apart from her as if she carried some disease. She was stood, slowly wringing out some sodden clothing.
‘Widow Brook?’ Walkelin did at least make it sound a question, though the answer was obvious. The woman turned to him and merely nodded, looking cowed and wary. The slow and reluctant way that she moved made him think she had been kicked, or beaten with something heavy about the body. Her face was a mess.
Both eyes had dark circles about them that made them seem as if sunken into her skull, and far more than the sort of black eye he might see when two men took a swing at each other to settle an argument. Her right cheek was puffed up, shiny purple and red where it was not sloe-black, and swollen from lower lid to halfway down her face, distorting it so that he could not imagine her as the good-looking woman Catchpoll had described. Her coif hung a little loosely at the neck where she had been bending forwards, and he could just see blue marks. He thought very harsh thoughts about Raoul Parler.
Walkelin had lived a simple life in a household where his mother’s word held sway, even back in the days when his father lived. Until he had been taken under the wing of the sheriff’s serjeant he was in blissful ignorance of just what happened to women in some other dwellings. Serjeant Catchpoll had taught him about the beating of women, women who then denied all but a ‘foolish slip’. Men in drink, men in blind rage, they might lash out at a wife, a daughter, a whore, grab her by the throat, perhaps shake her, bang her
