Coda: The Third Albert Mystery (The Albert Mysteries Book 3)

by David Crossman

  They prised this cross away from the stone, and Abbot Henry, about whom I have told you, showed it to me. I examined it closely and I read the inscription. The cross had been attached to the under side of the stone and, to make it even less easy to find, the surface with the lettering had been turned towards the stone. One can only wonder at the industry and the extraordinary prudence of the men of that period, who were determined to protect at all costs and for all time the body of this great man, their leader and the ruler of this area, from the possibility of sudden desecration. At the same time they ensured that at some moment in the future, when the troubles were over, the evidence of the lettering cut into the cross might be discovered as an indication of what they had done.

  ‘. . .it had indicated, so Arthur's body was discovered, not in a stone sarcophagus, carved out of rock or of Parian marble, as would have been seemly for so famous a King, but in wood, in an oak bole hollowed out for this purpose and buried deep in the earth, sixteen feet or more down, for the burial of so great a Prince, hurried, no doubt, rather than performed with due pomp and ceremony, as this period of pressing disturbance made only too necessary.

  ‘When the body was discovered from the indications provided by King Henry through the dwarf Foss, jester of Rye,’”

  “Foss!” Albert exclaimed, something he’d never done in his life. He looked at Gloria Corliss. “Our Foss?”

  “I can’t say with one hundred percent certainty,” said the woman, “but it must be. He was a servant of the King—Henry and, more than likely, his services would have been retained by the King’s son, John, when he became King.”

  “He was a dwarf?”

  “Which, to the thirteenth century mind, would have made him doubly amusing as a jester.”

  “That’s something like a clown?”

  “In effect, yes,” said the woman. “The king’s personal practical joker, you might say. An extraordinary study, in fact, these jesters. Some were known to be impervious to retribution of any kind from the king. They could say things that would have cost even the noblest courtier his head without a second thought.”

  In the half-a-moment during which conversation flagged and thought prevailed, Balfour cleared his throat again. “There is another paragraph. . .”

  “Read on,” said the woman.

  Balfour inclined himself toward her, and concluded his presentation. “‘His most trusted servant, the Abbot whom I have named had a splendid marble tomb built for it, as was only proper, for so distinguished a ruler of the area, who, moreover, had shown more favour to this church than to any other in his kingdom, and had endowed it with wide and extensive lands. By the judgement of God, which is always just and which in this case was certainly not unjustified, who rewards all good deeds not only in Heaven above but on this earth and in our terrestrial Iife. . .’

  “There are some other words, but. . .”

  “Don’t bother with them,” said Gloria Corliss. “Too many lacunae to make sense of them.” She turned to Albert. “Well, to my knowledge, you now know all history has to say about Foss the Dwarf. I hope it’s been helpful.”

  Albert wished he could say that it had but, in fact, it had just added a further unknown ingredient to the soup of his ignorance. “Thank you,” he said. “It’s very interesting.”

  Sensing the interview had ended, the woman got to her feet. “The grave itself was demolished by zealots during the Reformation, and the remains destroyed.” The trio made their way toward the entrance hall, Balfour in the vanguard. “Today there’s a plaque in the ruins of the cathedral marking the place where the bodies had been found.”

  Jeremy Ash was waiting in the hall and watched as Balfour helped Gloria Corliss to her car. She drove away. “What was she all about?”

  “She found out who Foss was,” said Albert, and explained.

  “A jester,” said the boy. “Like me.”

  The tone of Jeremy’s voice tugged Albert by the ears. “You?”

  “Every superhero has a sidekick. Like a jester. Batman and Robin, Holmes and Watson. You and me.”

  Albert couldn’t allow this misconception to stand. “I’mthe jester” he said, and left Jeremy Ash to think about that.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Albert felt the need to walk. Perhaps the motion of his legs could somehow lubricate his brain.

  “Where are you going?” said Angela as she joined him, threading her arm through his. He liked that a lot, but he doubted her presence would help him think.

  “For a walk.”

  “Mind if I join you?”

  If she joined him any more closely, they’d be fused. He continued walking and she continued holding on.

  “Anywhere in particular?”

  Albert’s mind was elsewhere. “What?”

  “This walk. Are we going anywhere in particular?”

  Albert didn’t know the neighborhood well enough to have anywhere particular in mind. In fact, it occurred to him, he might not be able to find his way back to the Hall from wherever his walk took him. It was a good thing Angela was coming along. She was the type of person who would know. She’d been to prison, and everything. Those people knew how to find their way.

  Of course, Tewksbury had been in prison, but he didn’t seem any wiser for the experience. He was thinking about exceptions to rules when Angela spoke.

  “There’s a lovely little copse just ahead there.” She nodded toward a bundle of trees on the other side of the field. “It’s called the Lady’s Wood.”

  “Is it alright if I walk there?”

  “Of course, why wouldn’t it be?”

  We hold these truths to be self-evident, Albert thought. “I’m not a lady.”

  Angela laughed, beginning on Bb above middle C - a very high starting point - and ending on F# below middle C. “Like the ladie’s loo! No, this isn’t a wood for ladies. It’s assumed that it was created for the enjoyment of the lady of the manor, years ago—back in the day. There’s a larger wood over that way,” she pointed to the southwest, “called Lord’s Wood, for the lord of the manor. He and his cronies would hunt there.”

  The Lady’s wood, a little island of trees in a sea of grass and stone walls that took about ten minutes to circumnavigate on foot, was just the right size for a place to think. But, as he suspected, Angela’s presence interfered with the kind of thoughts he had intended to be thinking.

  They had walked across the wood once and around it twice, in silence, before coming to roost on a little wooden bench that apparently hadn’t been sat upon in a very long time, in proof of which it sighed and creaked in receipt of their bottoms. It overlooked a pond, or puddle just about big enough for a duck to take off from, which a duck attempted to do as they sat. At the last moment, having sized up the intruders, it folded its wings and splotted back into the water, just short of the fringe of reeds marking the pond’s eastern extremity.

  “I’ve learned there’s more to the story,” said Angela, looking dreamily at the water, her voice soft, embroidering rather than disturbing the silence. “Tragic. Sad. Romantic.”

  Albert looked at her.

  “The story goes that there was this trumpeter, an African named John Blanke, who came to England in the household of Catherine of Aragon. He ended up serving in the household of Henrys Seven and Eight. It was as part of the household of Henry the Eighth—somewhere about 1502—that John and his wife came to Oxburgh Hall. By slim accounts, she was a beautiful Spanish woman—probably a Moor—possibly named. . .”

  “Esperanza,” said Albert.

  “Oh. You know the story?”

  Albert smiled enigmatically. “Probably not the same one. Go on.”

  “Well, yes. Well . . . anyway, it seems one of Henry’s drinking buddies took a fancy to her, and forced his intentions.

  “She’d have none of it, though. Well, his nibs wasn’t accustomed to taking no for an answer and, one night, pressed his point, if you take my meaning.”

  It was impossible to tell fr
om Albert’s expression whether he took her meaning or not. A fleeting intuition arched her eyebrows; was it possible, in this day and age, that this man, who must be several years upwards of forty, was sexually inexperienced? So powerful was the thought that it nearly precipitated the question, but at the last minute she drew it in at the insistence of her better judgment.

  “Esperanza cried out, her husband heard and, from wherever he’d been, ran to her rescue. There were shouts, cries, and screams, as you might expect. Anger rose, swords were drawn and, in the melee that followed, Esperanza came between them, presumably to protect her husband who, as a trumpeter, probably wasn’t much of a swordsman. To no avail. John was stabbed through the side and she thought he was dead.

  “You can still see the marks of the swords in several places about the room—the one I’m in. That’s how I came into possession of the story. Brigit, the maid, felt it her duty to explain things to me, in the event I was awaken by ‘strange noises in the night’.” She parenthesized the concluding phrase with her fingers, and spoke it in a very good imitation of maid’s accent.

  “In Brigit’s telling, Esperanza, defiled, despondent, and believing her husband dead, ran to one of the towers and heaved herself off.

  “As fate would have it, John Burke survived his injuries and went on to serve the King for many years. Very Shakespearean, don’t you think? There’s a picture of him in a famous tapestry somewhere.

  “Anyway, Esperanza wasn’t buried at the local church—which is why they think she might have been a Moor—but here, in what was then a field. This place grew up around her grave. In those days it was called Spanish Lady’s Wood. But over time that was abbreviated to Lady Wood, and people assume it refers to the Lady of the Manor.”

  “But it doesn’t,” said Albert thoughtfully. “It’s her’s.”

  “Esperanza’s.”

  “Yes.”

  Albert’s eyes drifted from one to the other of the little risings and hillocks in the clearing. One of them was probably Esperanza’s grave. And somewhere, in those regions of his mind where theeldil dwelt, the story told itself as music.

  “Tragic,” said Angela after a while. Her legs were crossed and her head was buttressed by a configuration of her elbow, arm, and palm, on which her chin rested.

  It was.

  “Speaking of things long gone,” she said. “Any more news of our little friend Foss?”

  Conery Lane,Nearing Langar, Nottinghamshire, May 8th, 1285

  Foss was not happy. He was hungry. The fog that soaked his leggings made it feel like he was wading through fields of long-tongued cadavers. He was tired. He was sore from one-too-many falls down several of the host of holes that grew legs in the dark and wandered the English countryside seeking whom they might devour.

  The donkey was being even more obstructionary that usual and ignored motivation in any form; cajolery, curses, beatings, beggings, pleadings, trickery, or flattery. Both it and Pike found ample sustenance either underfoot or in the surrounding countryside—in fact, Foss wondered whether it was a trick of the eye, or were they actually growing fatter before his eyes? In any event, their satiety rendered bribery useless.

  He sat on a stone, or stump, or cadaver, he couldn’t tell which and didn’t particularly care, and looked up at the donkey and its burden. The irony did not escape him. He was in sole possession of the greatest treasure in England: not the crown jewels alone—including the scepter which, it might be argued, conferred kingship upon its holder—but a personal horde King John, rest his soul if there was such a thing, had spent a lifetime. . .hoarding.

  He was not more than two furlongs from the village of Aslockton, in fact could see lights in one or two distant windows; one of which, very likely at this time of night, belonged to the Old Grayhound, a tavern of no little renown, the delights of which were not confined to potables and comestibles. He licked his lips. “A nice mug of cider wouldn’t go amiss,” he said in the direction of Pike, who seemed indifferent to the allure of fermented libation. “A bit of cheese, p’rhaps. A slice of bread and butter. A nice egg.” Foss smacked his gums several times. He cast a reproachful eye at the raven “Good thing Elijah didn’t have you to rely on, you black-hearted heathen, or he’d’ve starved.”

  The dwarf turned his attention to the bulging pack on the donkey’s back, and his belly diddled his conscience. “Who’d miss a farthing or two?”

  But there were no farthings amidst the King’s treasury. In fact nothing at all that could be called currency. Only jewels. Should he slap one of these on the counter in exchange for a gulp of cider and a hunk of bread, well, brows would arch.

  “And who might those brows belong to?” He asked himself. “Loyalists or rebels?” That was the question.

  Foss stood up and slapped his hands, as if brushing from them the crumbs of a troublesome conscience, and turned his face toward the south. “Langar,” he said. He drew his sword from its sheath and held it up for the donkey’s inspection. “And if you don’t get a move on, I’ll plant this where flowers don’t grow.”

  Seeing himself reflected in the blade in all his obduracy, the donkey repented and heaved himself up the other side of the ditch with such uncustomary alacrity that Foss was, for a moment, without, and upon, and looking like, an ass. Even Pike, who had been taking in the entertainment from the perspective of his perch between the donkey’s ears, was startled to flight; a frantic little cloud of hypocrisy looking for a place to settle.

  Foss jerked upright and, by the reins to which is hands were fused, hauled himself out of the furrow with imprecations that the donkey perform acts in contravention of nature. The trio ultimately settled into the rhythm that had brought them safely thus far and would, if maintained, deliver them to Langar before sunrise.

  “Never give your promise to a dyin’ king,” he instructed Pike. “For one thing. . .” Foss held up one finger in the dark as he stumbled over a hillock of burned hay, “the likelihood that even a livin’ king will remember long enough to repay is remote. Dead, impossible. But it don’t lighten the moral burden by so much as spit. I mean, what if he reallyis God’s chosen? Not likely, I grant, but it’s a strange universe, Pike. And God, as I read ‘im, enjoys using folly to confound the wise. And so, you might find yourself having gone and made a promise that’s as good as to God Himself!”

  He allowed Pike time to digest his soliloquy. “What then?”

  The question trailed off, together with his interest in it, as a distant sound subsumed his attention. “Foragers!” he gurgled, recognizing their signature sound of singing metal, throttled chickens, and screaming maidens. A nearby farm was being raided, probably by Alexander’s men.

  Foss clambered into the cover of a nearby hedge and peeked through the tightly woven branches, to which he quickly tied the donkey. Among the wickerworks of horrors he had witnessed and been party to over the years, and that had become as much a part of him as sinew and bone, the act at which he shied was that of the strong running rough-shod over the helpless. This formed his earliest memory, when the little hovel in which he had been born and raised for five-odd years had been reduced to cinders by a marauding band of mercenaries for the unforgivable crime of having nothing worth stealing.

  He had watched from beneath the hayrick as his father had been cut down in the attempt to rescue his mother and sister, who shared his fate but not until. . .

  In the space of half an hour, Foss’s family had been reduced to Foss. Nothing living remained of those who had loved him neither because of or in spite of his stature, but because he was of them. Their’s.

  The farmhouse was a field away. Maybe two hundred yards. In the vague intersections of men and light, he made out three men, all afoot. One of them held a torch, in the light of which their patchwork armor and swords glinted.

  One of the acts of jesterism King John had always enjoyed most was when Foss affected the airs of a knight on horseback, riding to the rescue of a damsel in distress. Every act of chivalric mimi
cry was lampooned for the vanity that, at heart, it was. The King would howl with laughter seeing in the dwarf’s performance his brother Richard, that Crusading buffoon who had cost the royal treasury nearly all it had in ransoming him from the situations his vanity got him in. That great English king who seldom set foot in his kingdom, and couldn’t even speak the language of his subjects!

  Yet everyone loved him!

  “Poor John,” said Foss, crawling though the hedge, adding “poor Foss.” For he knew what he had to do, as well as the likely consequences. It was a question of whether life would be worth living if he did nothing.

  Of the five year-old dwarf who had emerged from the hayrick to stand over the bloody remains of his mother and sister, bathed in the steam rising from their corpses that cold winter morning, conscience made no demands. There was nothing he could have done but die, and he had been too frightened to present himself to the blade.

  For a middle-aged man with a perfectly good sword and sufficient wits to have outlasted two kings—failure to act would betray him a dwarf within as well as without; a knowledge that would, in time, congeal into a demon of self-loathing from which no angel could rescue him. That he knew.

  Having clawed his way through the hedge, he stood for a moment to consider the situation. From nearby, Pike offered advice that, though untranslatable, conveyed a plan to Foss. “Right you are, Pike!” With the words warm on his lips, he scrambled back through the hedge, quickly loosened the thong that held the bag of the King’s jewels closed and, rummaging therein, felt out two large gems which, as he held them up, sparkled even in the near-absence of light.

  “Three gulls,” he said, smiling to himself. “Two herring.

  “Perfect.”

  Back through the hedge he crawled, scarcely minding the nettles that snatched at his cloak, and ran—or as nearly ran as his tiny, aged legs would allow—across the open field, over the stile, and under the fences to the half-opened Dutch door of the cottage and there beheld the situation was very much as he’d imagined. There were three females, of whom two were being held by a thief while the third was being prepared for ill-use.