Inside, the house was dim and dusty. But I saw the possibilities: my private room on the upper floor, a dispensary and kitchen on the ground floor. There was but one hair in the soup. The rent on such a house would be more than my thin purse could countenance. I explained this frankly to Lord Gilbert
“I have no income from this house at all now,” he replied. “So I will make you a bargain — four shillings a year, to commence at the beginning of the new year. You will have six months to improve your state before the first rent is due.” We struck the deal with a handshake. I borrowed a horse from the castle marshalsea, rode to Oxford to retrieve my few possessions, and returned to Bampton as night closed on the village.
John had sent two girls from the castle to clean the dusty place, and I found a coney pie still warm on the table. I was home.
In the next weeks I treated village inhabitants for sprains and scalds, tumors and broken bones, fevers, cuts, dislocations, swellings and eruptions. My location was propitious for attracting custom. Many town residents had borne afflictions for years with no treatment, and word soon traveled to neighboring villages that a competent surgeon resided in Bampton. I was on my way to prosperity.
Lord Gilbert suggested another benefit of my situation on Church View Street. My failures had but a short distance to travel to the churchyard. Lord Gilbert has, at times, a ghastly sense of humor.
I was fortunate that but one patient went to the churchyard in that first month. The woman had suffered a cancerous tumor on her cheek for two years. I excised what I could of it, but the malignancy had traveled to her jaw. She perished on St Crispin’s Day.
Now you will understand why I was called to the castle to inspect the bones pulled from the sludge of the cesspit. I had more dealings with bones than anyone else in the town. But my expertise in osseous materials seemed hardly necessary. Word of the find spread through Bampton promptly, and all knew these must be the bones of the missing suitor, Sir Robert Mallory, or his squire.
They were not.
Chapter 3
Digging up a cesspit is not work for the squeamish. It is not done often. Some never do it. But Petronilla Talbot is a particular woman. She demanded the removal of sludge every year or two, and Lord Gilbert knew better than to argue the point. Besides, he could direct others to do the job.
The cesspit had been added to the castle years after its construction was complete. The garderobes were attached to the wall like a giant chimney, with the cesspit at the base of the structure.
Four villeins were assigned to dig, haul up buckets, and cart off the filth. Uctred was assigned the work of hauling up the bucket when the unfortunate man appointed to work in the pit had filled it. He was then to dump the contents in a waiting cart, and send the bucket back to be refilled. When Uctred dumped a bucket, he saw the bones. The man in the pit had seen nothing. It was too dark where he worked.
Swine, he thought, until another bucket came up containing the skull. That is when Arthur was sent to bring me to the castle. I had only a few minutes earlier removed a large splinter from the palm of a plowman whose plow shaft had shattered as he turned over a rock. But when Thomas called I was unemployed and so went straight away to see the curious remains recovered from the cesspit.
I found Lord Gilbert and his reeve, John Holcutt, standing over the small pile of bones. “Ah, Hugh, see here. What do you make of this? I fear we have found poor Sir Robert.”
I could see no reason at the moment to disagree with him, but I wondered how a man last seen leaving town on a horse might be discovered in a cesspit. And what of his squire? Might two sets of bones be revealed?
I knelt to study the skull at my feet and felt a gnawing apprehension that Sir Robert was yet missing. I kept my uncertainty to myself. Each new bucket of sludge generally brought with it more bones. As the pit was emptied, a nearly complete skeleton lay on the cobbles between the castle and the marshalsea. As new bones rose to the light of day I cleaned them, and the putrefying flesh which adhered to some of them, in a tub of water and laid them out. Each new bone justified my first suspicion.
The bones were mostly free of flesh and gristle. Decomposition was advanced. The jaw was barely affixed to the skull. At the back of the skull a small patch of fair hair clung to decaying scalp.
“What color hair had Sir Robert?” I asked.
Lord Gilbert studied the skull as I turned it in my hands. “Very much like that,” he nodded. “A dark blonde, with a flash of red in the sunlight.”
“How tall was Sir Robert?” I asked.
“Quite tall. He had two inches on me,” Lord Gilbert replied. That would have made Sir Robert five feet nine or ten inches tall.
“These are not Sir Robert’s bones,” I told the onlookers. Lord Gilbert’s jaw dropped. “The hair color may suit, but these are the bones of a woman, I think. See how delicate is the skull. And a young woman, a girl, as well. The teeth are not yet beginning to rot, and I see no evidence of wisdom teeth erupting. This is the skeleton of someone barely five feet tall, perhaps less.”
“But…there are no women or girls missing in Bampton,” Lord Gilbert spluttered.
“Well, there is a lass missing from somewhere. Perhaps no one knows of it yet. But I assure you, these bones never held Sir Robert aright.”
Lord Gilbert called Thomas de Bowlegh and Hubert Shillside to the scene. Father Thomas is one of three vicars of the Church of St Beornwald. He spoke the sacrament over the bones in the dying light of a gray autumn day. Hubert Shillside, prosperous freeholder and the town haberdasher, is also the town coroner. He quickly assembled a jury of prominent citizens, inspected the bones in the fading light, and in consultation with his peers pronounced a probable homicide. No deodand could be found, nor could a perpetrator be identified.
Lord Gilbert made arrangements with Father Thomas to have the bones interred in the churchyard next day. I thought this hasty. A closer inspection in better light might yield some clues to identity, or the cause of death. I approached Lord Gilbert with a request that the bones be transferred to my dispensary for examination next day. They had been unburied for many months — at least, not buried in hallowed ground. One or two more days would matter little. Lord Gilbert’s response took me aback.
“No! I’ll not deny Christian burial to…to…to whoever has died in my castle.”
“Did she die in your castle?” I asked.
“How do I know?” he snapped. “I don’t…we don’t even know who she — it — is, much less where or how she died.”
His vehemence surprised me. I wondered why he wished the bones out of sight so soon. I confess to a moment of suspicion. “You make my point readily. Study of the bones in good light tomorrow may yield answers to those questions.”
Petronilla stood silent, listening to our debate. “It seems a small thing, Gilbert, to allow Master Hugh [I never completed my doctor’s degree, so could not properly be called “doctor,” although I was a practicing surgeon] a day or two to learn what he might. It will be of no difference to this soul,” she glanced down at the bones, “and God has waited for her to be buried in consecrated ground. He will not begrudge another day or two.”
Two against one will generally win the day, even against a knight who fought bravely at Poitiers alongside Edward, the Black Prince.
Uctred and his companions had by this time completed their malodorous work. Lord Gilbert reluctantly assigned him and another the work of boxing up the bones and conveying them to Galen House, which name I had given my abode in honor of the great physician of antiquity.
I did not sleep well that night, with a box of bones below me on a table. I tell myself now that my wakefulness was due to curiosity, that trying to sleep over what remained of a corpse was no cause of my insomnia. The truth lies somewhere between, as is often the case.
Behind Galen House was a small walled toft. The house blocked the rising sun to the east, but the diffused light there was better than the pale beams filtered through the small windows of the house. In the morning I dragged the table, box and all, through the door into the toft and set to my work.
Many small bones of feet and fingers were missing, Uctred and his fellows being not so thorough as they might have been. But the great bones — arms, legs, ribs, and most of the spine — were accounted for. And the
