And a plague on Edward Burgate for not having some word that would pry the letter loose from his cousin, Joliffe thought; and had another thought and said, "Then do you go yourself to my lady. Take the packet and whatever guard you want from among your people here and go to her at Wingfield. She'll pay your costs and a reward besides."
Sire John at least paused before answering, still staring at him narrow-eyed but considering before finally saying, That I have to think on. Come back tomorrow when I've thought on it."
"The packet ..."
"Has been safe in my keeping and will go on being safe there. I told you, I'll think on it." He jerked a hand toward the door. "Now go."
Neither sense nor greed nor anything short of violence looked likely to shift the man. That was the "benefit" of narrow-minded certainty that one was beyond chance of ever being wrong, Joliffe thought. Sire John would "think on it" and think well of himself for having thought. What Joliffe bitterly doubted was how well the man would think: the difference between "think" and "think well" escaped a great many people.
But seeing no way to shift the man, he jerked a short bow and was only barely careful not to slam the door behind him as he went out, certain that when he came back tomorrow, he'd find Sire John had not shifted an inch from what he "thought" now. Vaughn had come for the packet and Vaughn was dead. Sire John's first thought should be that the thing was likely dangerous and be grateful for the chance to be rid of it, even if it meant going—with his own chosen guard, mind—to Lady Alice. If the man had been thinking, that's what he should have thought.
But even while Joliffe jerked Rowan's reins free and swung into his saddle, he knew his deeper anger was not at the fool of a priest but at Vaughn for being dead. He'd had no business getting himself killed.
And mixed with that anger was a spine-tightening certainty that more than plain robbery was behind Vaughn's death. For Vaughn to come here, ask for the packet, be refused, and be immediately murdered afterward ... to accept his death was chance was a stretch Joliffe was unwilling to make, especially since making it and thereby lowering his guard could get him equally dead very soon.
As he turned Rowan away from the priest's house, there was a growling shout from the alehouse, confirming for him how little he wanted to stay the night in this place. There had been past-counting outbreaks of anger and rebellion all this year and they were likely to go on, because after all there was so far no reason for them to stop. All the ground for men's angers were still there, unchanged—the greed of the lords around the king, the breakdown of justice anywhere the duke of Suffolk's men had held power, the lost French war. If there was yet another uprising in the making here, it was only another reason to be away from here as soon as might be.
But Vaughn was dead, and Joliffe wanted to know more about how he had died than "killed and robbed." Besides, he owed Vaughn at least one prayer over his body, if only because Vaughn had not killed him when he had the chance.
The church's charnel house was easily found, a stone-built shed with reed-thatched roof and wooden door standing in a rear corner of the churchyard. Joliffe tied Rowan's reins to the low withy fence that marked the churchyard bounds without making a barrier, so that he did not bother with going to the narrow twist of stile into the yard but merely took a small leap over the fence. Crossing the humped and grassy ground toward the charnel house, he found that his bitterness at Sire John was growing, the more time he had for it. A more generous priest might have allowed a murdered man's body to lie in the church for better blessing, instead of shoved into the charnel house before its time. The charnel house was where the bones of the faithful departed were kept after being unearthed from their graves when new graves were being made for the more newly dead, since consecrated ground was limited but deaths were not. What Joliffe sometimes wondered on was how that would be at Judgment Day when all the dead were to rise, their bodies restored. The pictures painted and carved on church walls showed a rising up of whole men and women from graves and coffins, never the Jumbled sorting out there would have to be of bones piled at random in charnel houses. Presently, though, he was merely glad the bones were clean ones, the rot of flesh long-gone mm them, the smell as he opened the door into the shed's shadows only of small decay and the damp earthen floor.
Except for the door, the only light came from two small high up windows, one in each side wall, above the bones in their sorted piles—large long bones here, lesser long bones there, jaw bones jumbled in a heap, skulls stacked like rounded rocks one on another against a wall, their blank black eyeholes staring. Vaughn's body lay wrapped in a length of canvas on the bare floor in the middle of the shed, not given even the slight kindness of a candle left burning beside it, to guess from the lack of any puddled wax. Had Sire John bothered himself with a single prayer for Vaughn's soul? Joliffe wondered as he went down on one knee beside the featureless bundle and folded back the outermost flap of canvas to uncover Vaughn's face.
Except—he saw as he turned the canvas back—it was not Vaughn's.
Chapter 19
Joliffe stared, blank-witted. Not Vaughn.
Someone who had come asking for the packet but not been Vaughn.
He threw the fold of canvas over the dead man's face again and stood up, staring down at it, his mind flung back to everything Sire John had said but finding no help in it. The priest had named the duchess of Suffolk but that meant little. Burgate might have finally broken. Or been broken, "ad someone decided torture was needed to have what they wanted from him, after the queen's error in betraying he was there?
If that had been error and not something fore-thought.
Or was it, more simply, that Vaughn had after all returned to Lady Alice first, had been for some reason unable to come onward, and this man had been sent in his stead?
Joliffe lifted the canvas from the dead man's face again this time meaning to see more than simply that he was not Vaughn.
Several days dead, his skin was gray and sunken over the skull, and because no one had bothered with binding his jaw decently shut, his mouth hung gaping open. A several-days-dead man was not good to look on but Joliffe did and after a few moments knew that he did know the man. Not by name, no, but knew him. He had been one of the men with Vaughn in Alderton.
That he was here had to mean Vaughn had gone to Wingfield instead of straightly here. Why? Had he been hurt? Fallen ill? Whatever the reason, he must have gone to Lady Alice because he could not come here, and so she had sent this man in his place. And now this man was dead.
Joliffe suddenly felt the open door of the charnel house at his unguarded back and took a long step aside and turned enough to let him see it as well as the corpse.
He had too many questions now and too many possible answers to them, and much though he wanted to be out of here, he also wanted to see how the man had died, and leaned over and folded back the canvas from the rest of the body. Because the crowner had yet to view it, the body was still fully clothed. In the shadows of the charnel house Joliffe at first saw only the dark, spread stain of dried blood on the man's doublet-front but when he leaned nearer, holding his breath against the smell of beginning decay, he could make out the black slit where a blade had gone through the doublet into flesh under the left ribs. A well-placed blow that would have reached the heart for a quick kill, leaving a man no time to argue about his fate.
That might have been the murderer's good luck, but Joliffe doubted it. He suspected there had been both skill and purpose to that stroke, that it had been made by someone who knew how to kill.
He sat down on his heels and felt in the leather purse still hanging from the dead man's belt. It was empty not only of any coins but of even the lesser things everyone gathered in a jackdaw-way—slight things that mattered to no one but the gatherer and of no worth to anyone else. Whoever had emptied this man's purse had been thorough. Not that that told much. It might have been done either by whoever killed him, the better to make it seem a robbery, or else by those who d
ealt with his body afterward, taking anything they could get and afterward throwing away whatever they decided was worthless.
Thankful he could see no reason to go through the man's clothing in search of anything else because whoever had so completely emptied his purse would have been thorough there, too, Joliffe stood up and away from the body. Plain robbery with murder might be the way of it, but he could not bring himself to accept that, because even though the duke of Suffolk was four months dead, the circles of trouble he had caused were still spreading outward, with this accumulation of deaths around his household only part of it and no reason to think they were the end. Men who had known too much about Suffolk's part in losing the French war were being killed, and Sire John was a great fool not to be rid of that packet at the first chance given to him. Even knowing nothing else about it, his cousin's desperation in sending it to him should have been warning enough the thing was dangerous. Nor did Joliffe see he was to be honored for reusing to give it up. His grip on it looked less to be keeping kith with his cousin than pleasure at his power to thwart and anger anyone who wanted it.
So what to do next?
Face down Sire John and have the packet from him one way or another, or else set him on his way to Lady Alice. Either would do, and Joliffe found himself favoring the latter, not wanting to have the thing himself unless he could acquire a full suit of armor to wear while he had it and someone to guard his back for good measure.
He re-covered the body, wished the man's soul well with a brief prayer, and went out of the charnel house, closing the door behind him. The setting sun was large and orange above the spread of trees that edged the western sky here, but the storm clouds that had been climbing black out of the east were now sweeping overhead and would likely overtake it before it set. One more trouble and one more bar to him being away from here as soon as he would have liked. To add to his unease, no one had come to ask what he was doing in the churchyard or charnel house. A village usually knew everything that went on within it, with someone always ready to ask questions of any stranger. That no one had come to question him was warning of how awry things were here.
As he untied his reins, Rowan raised her head from grazing what grass there was along the fence and looked at him with what seemed a suggestion that a dry stable and oats would be well bethought.
"Maybe," he told her, swinging into the saddle. "Maybe not. This isn't going as easily as we could hope."
With a great-heaved horse-sigh, she gave way to his tug on her reins and headed down the road toward the priest's house. As they crossed the lane by which he had come from the alehouse he saw at its far end what looked to be the men from the alehouse clotted in a tight bunch, crowding into the lane and shouting at each other with the rabble-growl of men gone past thinking into blind, ugly doing. Yet they didn't look to be quarreling and readying to fight each other. Whatever they were angry at, they were at one about it and it was for someone else.
A few women were standing in their own doorway along the lane, some with tightly crossed arms, others with a huddled look, many with a hand out to keep a peering child or children behind them, but all of them staring toward their angry men. Joliffe stopped Rowan near one of them with a baby on one arm, a toddler by the hand beside her, and a frightened look on her face. With a nod toward the men, he asked, "What is it?"
"The priest," the woman answered, fear in her voice, too. "They're all stirred up against him."
"For what?"
"For everything." For a moment anger joined her fear. "He's not a good man. He won't leave off about 'his rights', wants his full tithes and heriot no matter how hard things have maybe gone with someone. He ..." Several of the men at the lane's end made a sudden start away from the others, yelling and gesturing for the rest to follow them along the lane.
"Oh, blessed Saint Edmund," the woman gasped. "They're going to do it."
Joliffe swung Rowan away from her. Sire John's house stood blank-faced, with no one heading that way with any warning, and Joliffe did not mean to be seen doing what none of the priest's own people would do. He cared too much for his own neck, but he set Rowan into a trot along the cross-street, toward where he thought—hoped—there would be a gate into whatever rearyard the priest's house had.
There was, and it was standing partly open. Dismounting, he drew Rowan's reins hurriedly through the gate's round handle and went into the small yard. There were a barn and sheds on one side, a small garden of herbs and vegetables and a grassy square with a bench to the other, with a path through the garden to the house's back door. Joliffe went for the door at a run and on the threshold came almost into collision with the priest's lean servant going out.
"The village is up!" Joliffe said at him. "They're after Sire John. He has to get out of here!"
"That's what I've been telling him," the man snarled. He had a bundle clutched to his chest with both arms and shoved Joliffe out of his way with an elbow. "He won't go, But I am."
And he did, breaking into a shamble-legged run for the rear gate.
Joliffe opened his mouth to call after him, gave it up as useless, and went into a kitchen that showed Sire John's devotion to his comfort and belly. Pots, frypans, sieves, ladles, and other kitchen gear hung about the broad cooking hearth, a heavy, wooden-topped work table sat in the room's middle, and a closed chest with a large lock against one wall probably held such costly things as spices. The villagers would make short work of the lock, Joliffe thought as he crossed the room. As for Sire John . . .
The priest was standing at the streetward window of his parlor, had opened one shutter and was looking out and along the street with no sign of alarm or fear about him, only—as he looked around at Joliffe—dawning anger. "You," he said. "Why are you . . ."
Joliffe pointed toward the rabble-sound of men coming along the street. "They're coming for you. Against you. You have to get out of here. Quickly. Before someone among them thinks to block the back way."
Sire John drew himself up straight, his thick neck holding his thick head high. "Let them come. I'm their priest. They'll not dare raise one hand against me."
"They mean to raise more than one hand against you,' Joliffe snapped, shoved him aside, slammed shut the shutter, and dropped the bar across the window. At least the servant had bothered to bar the front door before he fled. "Have you ever seen what happens when men give up being men and turn into one great, vicious beast? That's what's coming up the street for you!"
Sire John disdained that with, "They're my people. I'm their priest. They'll not dare to . . ."
"Have you ever given them one single cause to love you? Even one?" Joliffe snarled. "Whatever else they do, they're going to burn down your house and everything in it, and it will be over your dead body they do it if you don't get out of here!"
That got him what he wanted more than Sire John's escape. He had already given up hope he could shift the priest fast enough to save him, too fool-pleased with himself as he was to believe he could ever come to harm. Joliffe, on the other hand, had a strongly set sense of his own mortality and wanted out of here. But he also wanted what he had come for, and at his deliberately said threat of burning, Sire John's gaze snapped sidewise toward the closed doors of the aumbry against the end wall, telling Joliffe what he wanted to know. On the instant he let the priest go and went to snatch open both the aumbry's doors, ignored Sire John's outraged cry, and knelt and began roughly pulling out the piled scrolls that mostly filled it. Not pious books but records of property and income. Sire John advanced on him with thunderous anger and intent to hurt, but a sudden smashing at both the shuttered window and barred door stopped him and turned him half around with—finally—alarm.
That was no idle pounding and demands, Joliffe thought. Those were axes being wielded against the wood, and he had reached the back of the cabinet without finding any packet. The shutter started to splinter. Sire John was caught in the middle of the room, unsure against which outrage to move first. Joliffe drew his dagger and dug
the point under the bottom board of the cabinet, prying upward, certain that somewhere here there was a hidden place but without time to find the catch to open it. The door, hacked off its hinges, was giving way and hands were through the broken shutters, shoving aside the bar there. The board gave to Joliffe's dagger and he flung it up to show the expected hollow underneath, with a velvet pouch, a wooden box with painted lid, and an oil cloth-wrapped packet that had to be Burgate's.
And too bad if it wasn't, Joliffe thought, snatching it up.
Men were climbing over the windowsill, shoving at each other to be first. Sire John was going toward them, crying out in outraged protest. Joliffe thrust the packet down the front of his doublet. For good measure, since it was there, he grabbed up the velvet pouch, too, feeling the shape and weight of coins through the thick cloth, and thrust it after the packet, trusting to his belt at his waist to keep both pouch and packet with him, leaving his hands free for his dagger as he sprang to his feet.
At the broken front door men were elbowing and pushing at each other, crowding to be in. Sire John, too late frightened, was backing away with nowhere to go because men were coming in from the kitchen, too. From there came the first crash of something being thrown down, and Sire John half-swung around toward the sound, mouth open in more useless protest unheard in the shouting all around him.
The Traitor's Tale Page 24
