“A horse will be ready within the hour. I shall notify Thomas de Bowlegh. We will bury the remains tomorrow.”
“I would not,” I answered.
“Oh?”
“If God grants grace to my labor, and I find the girl’s family, they will want her close by. And perhaps further study will yield another clue to this mystery.”
“Hmmm…yes. As you wish. And Hugh,” he said as I turned to go, “do keep me acquainted with the progress of your search.”
“And if there is no progress, must I inform you of that, as well?”
“You are wrong to disparage your competency.”
“I esteem your opinion. I will return for the horse when I have dined and viewed the bones again.”
Chapter 4
I returned to Galen House and took a maslin loaf and a cold capon breast to the toft where I had, perhaps unwisely as I think back on it now, left my table and its bony burden. I worked my way about the table while I ate, seeking some new knowledge. None readily appeared. I washed down my meal with ale purchased from the baker’s wife, who brewed tolerably well.
After several loops of the table I was no wiser. I set my cup on the cobbles and decided to make one more thorough inspection of the bones before I set off for Aston and Cote. I began with the skull. Had I started at the feet, I might have been home before dark.
I will explain. The skull told me nothing but what I already knew. This was a young person, surely female, who had yet no wisdom teeth, although on close inspection, the rear of the jaw showed just the beginning of a tooth erupting. The long bones and the scarred rib yielded no further clues. At last I reached the feet, and the few small bones which were recovered. There I found what I sought. This girl had broken her foot. Which foot I could not know. One of the metatarses showed sure evidence of a fracture, now poorly healed. This was not much of a clue, but how many maids have broken a foot?
My outlook improved with the discovery. I returned to the castle with more optimism than when I had left it two hours earlier. I exchanged greetings with Wilfred and set off across the yard to the marshalsea. I did not get there; not straight away.
As I rounded the base of the southwest tower, I came face to face with Lady Joan Talbot. There was no one I would have preferred to meet face to face. This was not, however, a meeting for which I was prepared. I fear my wit did not impress the lady.
“Uh, good day, m’lady.”
“Good day, Master Hugh. Do you seek my brother?”
“No. I’ve come for a horse.”
“Do you ride for pleasure, Master Hugh?”
“No, m’lady. I am on your brother’s business.”
“Oh? What business is that?”
“You know of the bones found yesterday?” She nodded. “Lord Gilbert will have me investigate this matter. I am off to visit villages in the shire hereabouts to see if a young woman has gone missing.”
Lady Joan’s brow furrowed. “You are sure it was a woman found in the…waste pit?”
“Aye. I have no doubt. And I know how she died.”
Lady Joan caught her breath and stepped back. “Oh?'
“A rib bears a deep gouge where the knife which killed her glanced from it on its way to her heart.”
She blanched, then spoke softly. “Then I wish you good fortune in your search.”
I thanked her for her good will, doffed my cap, and bowed in what I thought was a graceful sweep of arm and body. I think I overdid it. I heard her giggle softly as she glided on across the castle yard.
I know I am not a handsome fellow. Women do not compete for my attention. But neither do small children run and hide when I appear. I am as tall as Lord Gilbert, although he has thirty pounds on me. He is a warrior. I would not say that I am scrawny; slender would be more apt. Well, some would say I am scrawny. I prefer to think of my form as wiry.
My nose is a trifle large for the adjacent geography, but I have always thought that lends character to a face. To a masculine face, anyway. It seems to depart my brow properly, but then takes a right turn, as if my nostrils were trying to direct my attention to some event on the dexter side. It is inherited. My father viewed the world across a nose of similar size and bearing. My father was also bald. I know that my thick brown locks will soon vanish. I hope I may find a wife before that happens, although I am not sure I want a wife who thinks more of what is atop my head than what may be in it.
Although I am the son of a landed knight — all right, not much land — I hold no manor. Our stations were too far apart for me to hold dreams of holding Lady Joan.
I had seen her rarely in the month I’d lived in Bampton. I heard it spoken about the town that shortly after Sir Robert’s disappearance, she journeyed to Exeter, and there spent the summer with her cousin, Lady Alice Boteler. She returned at Michaelmas, at near the same time my employment in the town began. Village gossips soon had it that the visit to Exeter was a failure, its purpose being to introduce m’lady to available young gentlemen of the appropriate station.
Numerous reasons were given for this miscarriage: Lady Joan was too opinionated, she was too demanding, she was shrewish, she thought too highly of herself. Whether any of this was true, I knew not. But no one ever spoke of her appearance as the cause of her failure to find a husband, if indeed she sought one.
I watched her walk across the castle yard and was reminded again that a wife would be a good thing to have. Any man would think the same, whatever his rank, when he beheld Lady Joan, coming or going.
Mooning over the unobtainable would not get me to Aston or Cote, although as it turned out, I might have remained in the castle yard, for all the good a horseback ride did me that day. Thomas must have recalled my riding skills, for he had the marshalsea prepare for me an elderly gelding of wide back and gentle demeanor.
“Bruce, we calls ’im,” the stableman told me. “Lord Gilbert rode ’im at Poitiers, he did. Took a bolt in the haunch, but never so much as flinched. Lord Gilbert didn’t know as he’d been hurt ’til battle was over.”
The stableman held the horse’s head and scratched his forelock while I mounted. Four hours later Bruce and I ambled through the gate with barely enough light to see that Wilfred had not yet swung it shut nor dropped the portcullis. Waiting for my return, he said, as I greeted him.
No one, male or female, was missing from Aston or Cote. Not missing for unknown cause, anyway. There were so many missing from plague that the old woman who spoke to me in Cote suggested that the families who remained might petition their lord to remove to Newbridge or some other town less decimated by disease.
I planned to visit other villages to the east of Bampton the next day, but this was not to be. Shortly after I rose from my bed, before I completed my morning wash — I know many consider this an unnecessary affectation — there came a pounding at the door of Galen House.
I opened it and peered into the gloom. Before me stood three men, two of them carrying a litter upon which a fourth was lying. Motionless.
The door-thumper removed his hat and explained their mission. The man on the litter was his father. They were foresters in Lord Gilbert’s lands to the northwest of Bampton. At dusk the evening before, they had felled a last oak for the day. The man on the litter had not seen it coming his way as it dropped until it was too late. A large limb had caught him across the head as he ran, leaving him unconscious, and leaving a dent in his skull as well as a laceration. He had regained consciousness briefly, complained of headache and nausea, then, after they got him to his wife and hut, he’d passed out again. And this time remained comatose. I motioned for them to bring him in. Fortunately I had thought to repackage the bones and move my dispensary table to its rightful place. The sight of a surgeon’s table strewn with bones might put off even the most needy client.
“Put the litter on the table there.”
I lit two more candles — one was already burning — and inspected the wound. It was depressed to the depth of my finger and yet oozing blood.
