Eleanor watched with fascination as Isabelle became bound with the spell of her dream.
“As I breathed in the comforting fragrance from the undergrowth, I remember thinking how foolish I had been to suffer so when the solution to all my problems was right before me. Indeed, I realized, the problem was no problem at all. Then a feeling of great peace coarsed through me. I closed my eyes and just lay there, listening to the sweet twittering of the birds in counterpoint to the delicate hum of insects.
“Then a gentle voice began to sing. The song was ancient, the voice long unheard but so dear I ached to hear it. Nay, I remember thinking, there was no need to feel the old pain. The singer’s arms were open at last, and I could seek the refuge I had longed to find these many, many years. With a cry of welcoming joy, I turned on my back, stretched out my arms, and…” Isabelle closed her eyes. Her face glistened with sweat.
“The body that fell upon me was hard as castle stone. The man’s jagged nails scratched my breasts like dull knives.” She curled one hand between her legs as if protecting herself. “His rough hand bruised me here when he forced my legs apart.” She opened her eyes wide, her gaze shimmering with horror.
“All I could see was black hair, hair heavy with encrusted knots that stung my face like nettles. The man cursed, then grunted as he rammed his sex into me and began to rasp away as if he would cut my body in half.”
Eleanor reached out a hand to comfort her.
Isabelle swatted it away. “I tried to scream but no voice came forth, only a hot liquid flowed from my mouth, metallic and bitter on my tongue. It was blood, blood coming from my mouth. Once again I tried to scream for help. Once again there was only the mockery of silence.” Her voice began to rise in pitch like a woman screaming in her sleep.
“Isabelle…”
“The man jerked, then collapsed on me and was still. I lay without moving. He did not move. I pushed at his body, then tentatively pushed again. He was motionless, his weight heavy as lead and his flesh cold as river ice.” She took a deep breath. “Finally I was able to push him away, and I turned to see his face.” The sweat was now dripping like water onto her robe. “The blood in my mouth was not mine.”
Eleanor turned cold, suspecting what would come next.
“The man’s skull was crushed, you see. The hair I had thought was black was dyed dark with his blood. It was his blood that had flowed from that grisly wound, over my face, and into my mouth.”
Eleanor felt bile rise in her throat. She swallowed hard.
Isabelle closed her eyes again, then bit her lips. “I knew I was cursed. I knew that everyone would blame me for what had happened. And I knew they would hang me for it. Hang me until my tongue turned black as that man’s blood. Hang me until my neck cracked, ever so slowly, in two.”
“But…”
“No!” Isabelle shrieked. “Please, my lords, I did not do this!”
“It was but a dream!” Eleanor shouted, reaching out to grasp the woman’s arm.
At the prioress’ touch, Isabelle blinked as if suddenly awakened. “Don’t you see? I knew then that no one would ever understand. There would be no help, not for me.” Then she laughed with a sound so sharp it cut through the air like a sword. “I lay abed for days after that dream. All I could think about was the pain of my ruptured maidenhead and shattered honor. Soon I had a fever no one could diagnose. It was a taste of hellfire for my carnal sins, I suppose, yet I wanted to die, eternal damnation or not. When the fever left me and I finally did rise from my bed, the pain was supplanted by shame. I lost my will to speak. If this was the pleasure I was supposed to feel from the union of Henry’s seed with mine, then I could understand why many women like you chose the convent.”
Eleanor was still reeling from the shock of what she had just seen and heard. “Henry would have married you,” she said without thinking. “Had you been willing, a lawful union would have banished shame.” Instantly she regretted her words. She should have remained silent.
“And he would have, but do think on this, my lady prioress. Would you have married such a man?” She wiped the salty sweat from her eyes. “I think not. Even you could not spend enough time on your knees in prayer to avoid having to lie on your back when he commanded it.”
Eleanor struggled to regain her calm. “So you would not marry the man who had violated you, a man you had once found too much the brother to be a bed partner and now regarded with repugnance for what he had done to you. That, I can well understand.”
Isabelle shrugged. “How kind of you,” she said, but there was little sting in her retort.
“What I do not understand is why you decided to trick Sir Geoffrey into thinking the child was his. If you would not marry Henry because you thought of him as a brother, how could you bed a man who had reared you like a father?”
“In truth, Eleanor, I meant him no ill. You must believe me. Sir Geoffrey is a good man. He took me into his family as an orphan, and his first wife became the mother I had lost to that horrible fever. Indeed, I love this family, and the lands I brought with me could stay with the Lavenhams for all my caring.” Isabelle’s words were slow, hesitant. “Nor did I expect much bedding. I had overheard tales aplenty about his impotence and much jesting about his feeble rubbings against servant women after his lady wife had died. Whether grief or age withered his manhood, I do not know, but I hoped he would think the child his own and marry me out of gratitude for one night of renewed virility. After a few failures in bed thereafter, I did not think he would demand a husband’s marital rights, but I did hope the child would give him some happiness. Thus I could stay with the family I had grown up with but not have to endure Henry’s coarse assaults…”
“Yet you lost the babe…”
“…to the grief of both my lord and me. It may have been Henry’s child, but it was the only gift I had to give my husband in exchange for my protection. Odd as it sounds, even to my own ears, I loved the babe that grew inside me. Indeed, I had come to think it my child, not Henry’s.”
“You have gotten the chaste marriage you hoped for, however.”
“Indeed, Sir Geoffrey’s nights of tilling fields are quite finished.” Her eyes gazed without focus into the distance, then, turning to the prioress, she hit herself sharply in the breast with her fist. “The plowman’s plow has broken and this field of his must remain forever fallow, it seems.”
As true as that might be, she was a field that cried out for seeding and desperately at that. How tortured a mortal’s life could be with so many contradictory desires, Eleanor thought. She considered Isabelle’s lewd playing with her brother the day before compared to her expressed desire to marry an impotent man. She surely hated the rape, but she did not hate the child and resented her current barrenness. She had lied her way into a safe but loveless marriage yet wanted to give Sir Geoffrey some joy for marrying her. Eleanor shook her head. The world was not as black and white as we are taught it should be, nor are decisions so easy to make.
Suddenly one more twist to this already tangled tale came to mind. “Did you not realize that any such marriage with the father would be found void if it became known that you had had sexual relations with the son?” She waited for a reaction.
It came sooner than she expected. Isabelle rushed to the chamber pot and, with hacking gasps, vomited sour wine.
With a touch gentler than some of her words had been, Eleanor wiped the pale face of Sir Geoffrey’s wife with a dampened cloth that lay next to the bedside basin of water. Although she had asked nothing about the murder, she knew that Isabelle was no longer in any state to talk. Indeed, she had gotten all she probably could from the drunken woman for now, but she did wonder if Isabelle knew she had just made herself a suspect in Henry’s death. Had Isabelle’s nightmare come true?
Chapter Twenty
The body of the murdered man lay covered on a trestle bench in the sanctuary of the castle chapel. Thomas looked around on the vague hope that
someone would appear to order him off or perhaps bring him the comfort of companionship. He was, however, quite alone.
He stood quietly beside the corpse for a moment, then pulled back the cover to reveal the butchered body of a man who was once a son, a brother, and perchance even some woman’s lover.
Although the chapel was bitterly cold, the smell of decay was unmistakable. The sickening sweet odor of overripe flesh from the corpse’s pale skin drifted into his nostrils. Thomas coughed. He wanted to vomit but would not allow himself such a weakness.
“Courage, man!” he muttered to himself. “You may have taken monastic vows, but you are no less a man than you were before them.” He shrugged. “And the man you were probably wouldn’t like this any more than the man you are.” Thomas smiled at his weak attempt to draw bravery into his heart.
The corpse lay on its back. Thomas held his breath and bent to examine the body. There were marks on the face. Scratches perhaps. Thomas could count three, perhaps four, jagged lines along the left cheek. There was also a deeper cut on the left side of the face. That wound had bled freely but would not have been fatal unless it had festered. It looked cleanly done. A sharp knife perhaps?
Gingerly, he turned the body over on one side. “Here the killer plunged the knife into Henry’s left side just under his arm,” he noted aloud, the sound of his own voice echoing back at him from the crudely rounded roof over the sanctuary. “A short slice on the face from ear to jaw. Then a blow to the left side? Might there have been two men who attacked him? One behind him who held a knife under his chin, thus cutting him in the struggle, and one who delivered the blow from the front and under his arm?”
Thomas frowned in thought. If Henry had been surprised by the attack from behind, the assailant could have slit his throat easily. There would have been no need for the second wound. Had Henry become aware of the threat in time to struggle free after a slight wound to his face, he would have called out. From the rooms along that corridor, the baron, the priest and Thomas could have rushed to his aid and frightened the assailants off before a fatal wound was struck against a man who was fighting back. Neither sequence of events matched the wounds. Why?
The wound in the side was a strange one as well. If he had been facing his murderer, surely he would have been stabbed in the heart. Had he twisted somehow? Thomas turned this way, then that. No motion quite fit the blow.
Finally, there were the scratches on his face. What were they from?
Thomas flipped the body all the way over. In the back of the corpse was yet another very deep wound. “If he had been killed with the blow under the arm, why stab him again in the back?” he wondered aloud. He bent down and looked more closely at the wound. He made a fist as if holding a dagger and pretended to strike at the corpse. This wound seemed to have been made by a blow from above; the cut was higher on the right and slanted down to the left. Why would someone have faced Henry only to reach around him and stab him in the back?
He looked again at the side wound and compared the size of that entry wound under the arm with the one in the back. The one in the back was large enough to suggest that a blade had been plunged all the way into the body. The smaller wound in the side indicated one of two things: a very small blade had been used or only part of the knife had entered Henry’s side. More likely the latter, Thomas thought. “The knife may have entered Henry’s lung at the side wound, but it would not be deep enough to reach his heart. It surely would have been fatal eventually,” he whispered, “but the one in the back would have killed him at once.”
Thomas spent another few minutes looking over the body but saw nothing else of interest. Then he stood back to get a cleaner breath of air before he turned the corpse over on its back, an act he did with as much gentleness as if Henry had still been alive. He carefully pulled the cover up to hide the man’s body from curious eyes and fell into silent thought.
As with any man, Henry would have had his faults and perhaps even deserved punishment for them. But this? Thomas looked at the outline of the corpse under the sheet. No man or men had the right to murder him. Indeed, what right had any imperfect mortal to steal another’s life?
His own time in prison might have made him more hesitant than others to conclude that any man had the right to decree how another should die. That Thomas freely admitted. If he were yet more honest with himself, he would acknowledge that he secretly thought that only God, not men, should decide fit punishment for crimes that now required the burning, hanging or quartering of a fellow man. Since one mortal’s idea of fair punishment was another’s definition of excess, or laxity, could either be right?
Last summer, he had seen human judgments rendered. One he had even abetted. Now, looking at Henry’s mutilated body, he wondered if he had been right to do so. Might not severe penance have been the better choice until a natural death took the person to face God’s justice? He hesitated. And should the sinner himself have a choice?
“If the sinner understood the depth of his sin, might he not have the right to seek God’s eternal judgment quickly?” Thomas immediately dismissed the idea in fear. “May God forgive me for such a thought! That path suggests that self-murder would not be sin if it would allow a man to face God sooner, a most heretical idea indeed!”
He turned away from the body. He should not be thinking on any of this. Such questions were better left to philosophers and saints. In too short a time, he had been faced with much violent death, and he had been graced with neither the calm faith of a monk called to the vocation nor the temperament of a soldier hardened to such things.
Thomas walked away from the body on the trestle, then stopped. Surely, he had seen something move. Just in front of him toward the door.
There it was again. He was sure of it. Something had moved in the shadows. Then he heard a light scuffling sound.
Taking care not to let whoever was watching him know that he was privy to their presence, he crossed himself as if he had been in prayer, then bowed his head and walked on, slowly, meditatively, toward the chapel door.
As he reached the place where he had noted the movement, he bent down to examine his shoe, meanwhile shifting his eyes to peer carefully into the darkness. A darker shadow moved once again. Thomas stood up and turned toward the shifting gloom.
“What are you doing here, Richard?” he asked.
Chapter Twenty-One
“My grandson was doing what?” Adam’s mouth twitched with irrepressible glee. Although he ran his hand down his mustache and over his mouth, hoping to hold the laughter back, mirth bested his efforts with ease. “And in the chapel?”
“Indeed, my lord. Hunting dragons in the chapel was what he told me,” Thomas replied.
“Did he find any?” Eleanor asked.
“Only me,” Thomas said with a grin. “I told him it is not in the nature of dragons to be about chapels in winter so he does understand now how profitless such hunts would be.”
“Just how did he escape his room?” The baron’s smile faded.
“It seems he crept out with his hobbyhorse…” Sister Anne began.
“…down the stairs and into the snow and freezing wind.” A flush of anger spread over Adam’s face. “Nay, sister, do not say it was your fault. I said myself that his nurse was responsible and you could leave him in her care. I curse my judgment and place the blame on her. Where was she, I’d ask? Curled up asleep, snug and comfortable most likely, while the boy risked death making his way from the warmth of the hearth to the cold chapel.”
Anne shook her head. “Indeed, my lord, I swear the boy is made of iron. One day he is at death’s door and the next he is racing through the castle corridors like a wild man.”
Eleanor nodded. “Just like his father.”
“Be that as it may, she was too lax and shall be punished for such carelessness in her duties.” Adam raised his hand to beckon a page.
Eleanor reached over and caught his arm. “Be kind, father, and forg
ive. She has been most diligent and loves the boy beyond reason. He has so progressed in health that we all thought him past danger. Her short nap was no abandonment of duty. She had the right to it for Richard himself was sleeping when Sister Anne gave him up to the good woman’s care.”
“Or pretending to do so,” Anne said in a low voice to Thomas.
Having overheard them, Adam glanced at the two and smiled with concurrence.
“Any of us might have made the same mistake,” Eleanor continued.
“That I doubt, my child, but I will be merciful for your sake. Indeed, he came to no harm.”
“At least he did not see the corpse,” Thomas whispered with more care into Sister Anne’s ear. “My first fear was that, but he told me he had just come to the chapel as I was leaving.”
Eleanor nodded in the direction of the monk. “Brother Thomas has, I believe, frightened him off from further adventures in the chapel, or anywhere else unattended.”
“I did my best, my lord. I told him that he had endangered Gringolet’s safety by taking such a young horse into unknown territory without proper training. I allowed him to ride forth only with proper attendance and within the living quarters until his steed has gained some experience in the skills of hunting dragons in dark places.”
“When will Gringolet have gained such prowess?” The baron’s smile had regained a hint of amusement.
“Your grandson asked the same question, and I told him he could ride unattended when I have done the proper training and confirmed that the horse was skilled enough in such pursuits.”
Adam nodded. “That may work. My grandson has heard tales of the warrior monks and thus has no difficulty accepting a cowled man with knowledge of horses and battle strategies. Were I Richard’s age, I would find the argument sufficient, albeit hard to accept.” Then his face lost all joy. “Setting that aside, you had something to tell me, daughter, something about this foul murder?”
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