Hangman Blind

by Cassandra Clark

  Ralph crooked Master Jacques in one arm and paced back and forth, as if unsure what to do next. ‘You must be looking forward to getting out of here,’ he suggested. ‘First Roger, felled by fate, then a young maid, cut down by an unknown hand. You’ll come to Meaux with Roger’s cortège, I assume, before going back to your priory?’

  Hildegard nodded. ‘But the maid? Do you have any views on her?’

  ‘Probably got what she was asking for,’ he said with an abrupt callousness which, even if he did not know the details of her death, took Hildegard’s breath away.

  Edberg was waiting outside Ralph’s chamber when Hildegard came out. William had gone out hunting, he reported. ‘Won’t be back till nightfall,’ he explained. ‘Allus makes a day of it, does Sir William.’

  ‘Nightfall comes early at this time of year,’ Hildegard mused. ‘We’ll curb our impatience.’

  ‘Back to Ulf in the barley store, then, sister?’

  ‘What do you know about all this?’ she asked Edberg as he accompanied her across the courtyard once more.

  ‘She was a smart girl till this one mistake,’ he said. ‘It’s a terrible business. We’re all set on catching him that did it.’ Then he added, ‘We’re loyal to Ulf. When he sneezes, we catch cold.’

  ‘How unfortunate for you.’ Hildegard gave him a glance.

  He nodded but didn’t elaborate as they were already at the grain store and both of them were conscious of the sad and gruesome spectacle that lay within. Hildegard asked him in a lowered voice to wait, then tapped on the door for Ulf.

  He opened it and quickly ushered her inside. His face was haggard. ‘You took your time. Did you find anything out?’

  ‘The midwife has left, or so they claim. All else I heard was Ralph’s opinion of his brother-in-law.’

  ‘I could have told you that for nothing.’

  ‘What was she called?’

  ‘Ada. She’s been with Sibilla since she was eight.’

  ‘That’s interesting. Sibilla pretended she couldn’t remember who was at the birth of her son. And denied any knowledge of a red-haired maid, one, I would imagine, who rather stood out from all the rest. How old was she – sixteen, seventeen?’

  ‘Sixteen.’

  ‘Ralph may have pretended not to know what has happened but I wasn’t convinced. There was something in his manner. He knows something, I’m sure of it. If the midwife has been allowed to leave by your reliable porter, your men should be able to catch up with her quite easily. By the way,’ she added, ‘one of your men has accompanied me ever since I left this scene.’

  ‘Edberg.’

  ‘I thought you would know him.’

  ‘You’ll trust ’em when you know ’em better.’

  ‘I have an entirely open mind on the subject. Did the scullion have anything useful to say?’

  ‘No, he’s half out of his wits with shock.’

  ‘May I take another look?’

  Ulf, who had been attempting to shield the body of the dead girl from view while they talked, stepped to one side.

  Without touching anything, Hildegard inspected everything that might give a clue to the attacker’s identity. Blood, congealed and sticky, had flowed over the stone floor and mixed with the layer of dust from the grain sacks lined against the walls. It made an unpleasant mulch in which several footprints were mixed along with mud from the yard.

  There were the smudged shapes of her own soft leather buskins, and beside those the large and well-defined outlines of Ulf’s round-toed working boots. At the door, but no nearer, were the barefoot scullion’s prints. Near the body was the clear shape of a pair of wooden pattens, and next to them she noticed a soft, elongated shape, narrow and, for that reason, possibly made by a woman: the prints of the murderer.

  She straightened up. ‘If only we could identify them.’

  Ulf followed her glance and nodded. ‘You can trample on them as much as you like. I took their measure while you were gone.’

  ‘That was quick.’

  After she had looked around, noticing the one door in and out and the walls and racks filled with sacks of grain, most new and unopened, she took her courage in both hands and prepared to examine the body more thoroughly.

  ‘What do you make of it?’ she asked Ulf in an unsteady voice as she kilted her skirts and knelt down.

  ‘William in a fit of lust?’

  ‘That was certainly what Ralph was hinting. Lust or rage.’

  ‘There have been stories, as I’m sure he told you. It looks as if he can get away with anything, tucked away down there in Holderness. Then there are the women. Nothing proven, of course. And no one can touch him, being who he is. And the women being who they are and often so much down in the dirt of life, half the time they keep quiet, knowing there’ll be more punishment if they speak out.’

  Hildegard ignored the sudden bitterness in his tone until she could give it her full attention later on. ‘There are many reasons why women keep quiet about such matters,’ she told Ulf, biting her lip. ‘But these stitches,’ she said, changing the subject. ‘They’re well made. I don’t have William down as a seamstress.’

  ‘You really believe this was done by the midwife?’ he asked, his voice rising a notch.

  ‘Only because of something she said about keeping the girl’s lips laced. Whoever it was, they’re able to sew a fair seam. Look for yourself.’

  ‘We do have men whose livelihood depends on sewing boots and harness.’

  ‘I do realise it could have been an unfortunate coincidence of words on her part.’

  Hildegard had to keep talking otherwise her stomach, clenched in revulsion, would have released its contents all over the floor. This had been a girl of genuine beauty. That she was also lively and something of a wit Hildegard herself could testify. Maybe somewhere there was a lover, a youth who might walk to the ends of the earth for her. There would be a family. A mother perhaps, brothers and sisters, cousins. People for whom her absence would be a source of unending grief.

  ‘How would she come to be here in the store?’ she forced herself to ask. ‘Is there any legitimate reason for her being here?’

  ‘None that I know of.’

  ‘There must be other ways to persuade a girl to keep quiet,’ she murmured. The girl’s features were distorted by the macabre lacing but, gently, with forefinger and thumb, Hildegard prised forth a short black hair that had somehow become trapped under the stitches. It was so fine as to bend to every breath when she lifted it close enough to examine. ‘Not coarse like beard hair, nor curly, like William’s black locks, but short and straight.’ She held it up so Ulf could see it.

  ‘Could be anyone’s,’ he surmised, peering at it. ‘It’s not Saxon, at any rate.’ He seemed relieved about that.

  Carefully Hildegard placed it in a fold of cloth taken from her scrip for closer inspection and possible matching later on. Now she had two objects taken from two young people, both brutally murdered, the boy in the woods and now a maid. ‘There is no knife here,’ she observed. ‘Didn’t you find one?’

  ‘No, but it looks like they used an ordinary hunting knife. The sort any man carries. One broad enough to gut a hog or a hind.’

  ‘So I thought. With a single edge. Notice the shape of the incisions.’ She rose to her feet. ‘Ulf, do you have a rough plan of the castle?’

  ‘I’ll draw you a plan myself. I know every stone of this place.’

  ‘Perhaps this poor child can be taken to the mortuary,’ Hildegard suggested. ‘Then, when the formalities are over, she can be carried into the church, where her soul may gain some repose at last.’

  Chapter Eight

  THEY WERE SITTING on opposite sides of a table in the kitchen clerk’s office when Ulf placed a slate between them.

  Hildegard took a good look at a chalked sketch then said, ‘If this is a plan of the castle it wants for detail.’

  ‘It’s the shape of a footprint. But whose I don’t know.’

  Sta
ring at it she said, ‘I heard a story once, long ago, told to me by my husband, which he must have got from his grandfather who himself must have got it from a Saracen during the Crusades. It concerned a maiden who left a gilded slipper behind after a great feast. And the prince, finding it, and having become ensnared by the maiden, searched the length and breadth of the kingdom in order to find the one the slipper would fit.’ She raised her glance. ‘Let’s hope we don’t have to travel so far to find the owner of this one.’

  ‘It will be no maiden,’ judged Ulf, ‘seamstress or not.’

  ‘But are we agreed it’s a woman’s print?’

  ‘I can’t say. It’s certainly narrow enough. But it’s long. She must have had big feet. The other prints can be matched with the shoes of folk who had a reason to visit the store. Look at this one.’ He indicated one of the sketches on the slate. ‘These are the kitchen clerk’s wooden pattens. Next are the clogs worn by the baker. This is the only one I can’t match.’

  Hildegard repeated her uneasiness about the midwife and her threat.

  ‘But you can’t believe a woman with so sacred a calling would commit murder?’ Ulf objected.

  ‘Belief isn’t required. Only facts will suffice. Do you happen to know the woman?’

  ‘No. I thought Ralph brought her in with his retinue.’

  ‘If that were the case I would have noticed her when they stopped in the forest.’

  ‘When was that?’

  She reminded him how, on her journey here, she had seen Ralph’s party on the way. Then she told him how she had watched as Sibilla had been helped down from her horse and went to recline among the furs on the sled with that strange remark about prying eyes. ‘The midwife must have arrived separately,’ she suggested.

  ‘I’ll see if I can discover more about her. Somebody must know who she is and where she’s from.’

  ‘So you agree, it’s important to find her?’

  Ulf picked up the slate with the chalk drawing of the unidentified print on it. ‘I suppose so.’

  As she turned to leave a thought struck Hildegard with sudden force. It sent a flood of ice down the length of her body. The scarlet tippets. She had noticed them twice. Once in the woods on the way here…and again in the kitchen yard this morning. No time to work out what it meant. She put out a hand to steady herself.

  Ulf had quizzed his staff. It emerged that the midwife had been engaged by Lady Sibilla herself some time ago and had arrived alone, riding on a pony, the previous afternoon. She had supped privately in the chamber set aside for the birth, done her work and left without anyone taking much notice. The blacksmith’s lad mentioned something about the pony but couldn’t say for sure when it was there and when it wasn’t. She could have set off at any time after the birth – and in any direction.

  ‘That means we have the whole county to scour.’

  ‘By hook or by crook,’ Ulf vowed, ‘we will find her whose foot this slipper fits.’

  They went back to his office and had the servants parade their footwear and once more ruled them out. Hildegard judged the girl to have been stabbed only two to three hours before she was found. The clerk of the kitchen ran a tight ship and prided himself on knowing everybody’s whereabouts at all times of day and night. ‘Not one of my folk,’ he told her. ‘Impossible. I had my eye on ’em all till break of day.’

  Hildegard realised that they only had this one set of footprints to go on, that they were unaccounted for was a mystery they had to solve. Too narrow to belong to any of the men and too long for a boy’s print, they had to belong to a woman, but none of the women servants had been near the grain store for days, apart, that is, from Ada and the wearer of the shoe. The print suggested soles of unpatterned leather. They had picked up the surface dust and chaff of the storeroom floor, leaving a clear trail. Whoever had been wearing such shoes had walked over to the sacks where Ada must have been standing. A skirmish had taken place at some point. That was all they knew.

  ‘What business had Ada in the storeroom?’ Hildegard asked Ulf.

  ‘None that I can see.’

  ‘Unless she had an assignation with her killer.’

  ‘You’re thinking of Sir William.’

  ‘Could he have arranged to meet her there? It fits with what Ralph was hinting about them spending the night together.’

  Hildegard inspected the drawing of the footprints again. The footsteps of the kitchen servants in their wooden pattens had ridged soles to keep them dry above the stinking mesh of the hall and could be tracked in and out of the grain store and even, if they had wished, across the bailey until they merged with others on the trampled cordings. But these? Hildegard stared at Ulf’s sketch and tried to work out what they reminded her of. Who would wear such footwear?

  ‘They must have had very long, narrow feet.’ She frowned, remembering how the midwife had beetled across the floor in that obsequious bobbing motion. It was the gait of someone with small, probably painful feet. They had reached stalemate.

  One of the ladies of the bedchamber appeared and, looking nervous, stood in the doorway of Ulf’s office with one hand protecting her throat. ‘You were asking about that midwife,’ she began. It was strange none of them knew her name. ‘Well, I do know something. Not that it’s much. It’s just that she wanted some barley grain to make a posset and,’ she lowered her eyes, ‘I directed her to the store myself.’ Her glance flew to Ulf. ‘I hope I didn’t do wrong, my lord?’

  When questioned further the maid could not say whether the midwife had found what she was looking for.

  ‘Why would she need barley for a posset?’ asked Hildegard after she had left. ‘That sounds most unorthodox. I wonder if it could have been an excuse to get in somewhere she shouldn’t have been?’

  ‘Helping herself to grain, no doubt. These itinerant servants are the very devil with their light fingers.’

  Hildegard went to ask Sibilla whether she had been given barley cup after the birth. She was vague and insisted that she remembered little of the entire event.

  ‘Convenient,’ grumbled Ulf, when Hildegard returned. When she questioned him more closely about what he meant, he didn’t know. He furrowed his brow and tapped his skull. ‘But there’s something trying to surface.’

  ‘You know the workings of your own mind best,’ suggested Hildegard with a patient smile. ‘If it’s a nudge, explore it, but, nudge or no nudge, we need to talk to the midwife.’

  Owing to a private understanding between Ulf and one of Melisen’s ladies of the bedchamber, vague gossip about the midwife’s possible destination eventually filtered through. His informant was called Celota. ‘I want you to hear what she told me,’ Ulf said to Hildegard.

  They found her in the wash-house amid the steam from a dozen tubs of boiling water, where laundresses with red arms were pounding the garments for the entire household. Celota was there to keep an eye on three delicate silk chemises belonging to Melisen.

  When asked about the midwife she confirmed that she saw her arrive by herself on the same afternoon as Ralph’s party. ‘She’d come from another birth,’ Celota said. ‘I’ve become friendly with some of Sibilla’s maids on their visits here so I was looking forward to seeing them again. They’re a gossipy bunch and always spice things up. But they were all of a dither about the birth, though not pleased at being told to keep out of it. Then right from the moment the baby popped into the world they started saying there was something wrong with it. I mean, you can understand it, for why else wouldn’t it be presented for everybody to see? But no! It was kept in Lady Sibilla’s private chamber, with only the midwife, the wet-nurse, Ada and another maid permitted entry. Even the family were only allowed in for a few minutes, though that might be put down to the death of Lord Roger,’ she added as an afterthought.

  ‘And did you get to speak to the midwife herself?’ Hildegard asked.

  Celota shook her head. ‘I only know what Ada told me, that she was a tough old bird and didn’t suffer fools.’
>
  ‘I suppose you knew Ada well?’ asked Hildegard as gently as she could.

  ‘Everybody knew her. She was good company. We’ll all miss her.’ Celota wiped a tear from her face. ‘She didn’t hold with all the secrecy around the new baby, though, and, being her, she said as much. “It’s all my arse and Uncle Toby” – that’s the way she talked, sister,’ Celota apologised. ‘She said, “Don’t they think you’re good enough? What’s the game? I’ll get you in to see him,” and she did her best, poor love, but they kept the door of the birth-room locked.’

  ‘Did anybody know why there was this secrecy?’

  ‘Rumours fly as they will. They said there was summat wrong with him. Said he’d been born with the head of a cat. That he had five fingers on his left hand. Or that he got up in the night and roamed the castle accompanied by the Devil and six hellhounds. We thought that last one a bit far fetched. Probably the poor little thing has nothing more than a crooked back.’

  ‘Poor mite,’ said Hildegard. ‘And what about the midwife? Did Ada tell you what she thought?’

  ‘Well, yes, and it added fuel. She declared she’d never known anything like it.’ She leaned closer. ‘They do say she was afeared to be brought to account and that’s why she left in such a hurry.’

  ‘She must have been annoyed with Ada trying to get you all in to see the baby?’ suggested Hildegard.

  Celota sketched a brief, sad smile. ‘Said she’d rue the day if she didn’t keep her trap shut. But nobody could be mad at Ada for long.’

  ‘You mean there was no real falling out between them?’

  ‘No! Not with Ada! You could never hold a grudge against her.’

  ‘Celota, do you have you any idea where the midwife went after she left Hutton?’

  ‘Not really. Everybody assumed she’d be going on to another birth. As I told the lord steward, a place twelve miles distant was mentioned, where she had kin.’

  ‘Twelve miles. Well, that’s not far. We’ll soon find her.’ Despite his words Ulf did not look confident.