‘Good,’ said Wat rubbing his hands.
‘I’ve got the head,’ Norbert called from the door of the hall, where he stood proudly holding up Lallard’s head. The man had clearly adopted Wat’s plan with speed and enthusiasm.
Many of the audience groaned at this, there were several shouts of shock and a few “for God’s sake Norbert.” There were also some gasps of amazed interest and fascination, but these came mainly from the children.
Hermitage’s stomach turned over and he wondered whether some of Lord Bonneville’s wine might help.
‘It’s actually the body we need?’ Wat pointed out calmly.
‘Oh,’ said Norbert, deflated, ‘right. The body. Yes. I’ll just go and get it.’
Wat raised his eyes to the ceiling in the familiar expression of those who have asked an idiot to do something stupid, and have not been surprised by the result.
‘Won’t Le Pedvin be unhappy that his men have been killed?’ Hermitage asked, concerned that the man might turn up and wreak a bit of vengeance.
‘Have you ever known him to be concerned about dead people before?’
‘Well, no,’ Hermitage had to admit, ‘but these were his men. The blacksmith and wheelwright his assassins, and Lallard his spy.’
‘As long as he thinks Bonneville is dead, the rest of the world could go hang itself. I suspect he’s got plenty of spare assassins and spies anyway.’
The hall had broken up into little groups of conversation and speculation, with Tancard being passed from group to group to explain why he had his head back. The man seemed to quite enjoy the attention, and took every opportunity to make unfavourable comparisons between the craftsmanship of the blacksmith and what was basically the organised whittling of a wheelwright.
Wat looked around the place and surreptitiously beckoned Cwen over to him.
Checking that no one was watching, Cwen sidled over to Hermitage and Wat.
‘Well done,’ Hermitage hissed in impressed gratitude.
Wat said nothing but Cwen put her hands on her hips and stared.
‘Yes, yes,’ the weaver acknowledged, ‘well done. Now it’s time for you to go.’
‘Go? Go where?’ Cwen demanded fiercely, while trying to look nonchalant.
‘Go home. Get out of here. It’s all under control, and when Norbert comes back with the body, we’ll clear everything up and get out ourselves. If you’re still around people might start to ask questions.’
‘So? If the past is anything to go by you two will end up back in the dungeon for looking at someone the wrong way. You need me here.’
‘Look,’ Wat was struggling to control his emotions, ‘these people are in a pretty fragile state, and they’re undertaking a plan which most of them don’t even understand. If they suddenly discover that their stand-in shepherd, now castle guard, is in fact a Saxon woman with close connections to Le Pedvin, they might just decide to burn you for good luck.’
‘I fear he is right, Cwen,’ Hermitage put in, a sympathetic but resigned look on his face, the one that Cwen said made him look like a birthing cow.
She glared from one to the other and raised a finger in Wat’s face, pointing the way to the start of a very long and painful conversation. ‘I shall wait for you on the road,’ she said very plainly, but she did look around the room and moved slowly away in the direction of the door.
‘Now all we have to do is get out alive,’ said Wat rubbing his hands as if relishing the task.
‘You said we’d be going back to tell Le Pedvin,’ Hermitage felt a shiver of sudden worry rattle his bones.
‘I did,’ Wat admitted, ‘but if I was them,’ he nodded to the villagers, ‘I’d let one of us go and keep the other as a hostage.’
‘Would you?’
‘Oh yes. Makes absolute sense. I mean if they let us both go, who’s to say we wouldn’t tell Le Pedvin the truth and get them all killed?’
‘We wouldn’t,’ Hermitage was disgusted by such a suggestion.
‘We know that,’ Wat explained, ‘but they don’t. They’d have to be completely stupid to let us both walk out of here.’
‘And you didn’t want to explain this bit in front of Cwen,’ Hermitage concluded.
‘Not particularly,’ Wat admitted, ‘but I think there’s one thing on our side.’
‘What’s that?’
‘They are completely stupid,’ Wat nodded towards the door where Norbert had reappeared.
‘Is this the one?’ he asked, dragging a headless corpse into the room to more groans from the population.
Events moved far too quickly for Hermitage’s comfort. He preferred it when they didn’t happen at all, but if they had to, then slowly and carefully was preferred.
The exchange of clothes between Bonneville and corpse was completed in no time at all. Doubtless it helped that the Lord of the Manor remained unconscious throughout, putting up no resistance to the gaggle of village women who leaped to the task with dubious enthusiasm.
It was the funeral that gave him most concern. He realised that it was not Lord Bonneville they were burying and that everyone knew that. He accepted that the fellow being interred was in fact a rogue of the first order, doubtless with a string of sins in the past. He acknowledged that the village had bigger things to worry about and really needed to get on with this. But still. Digging the most rudimentary hole in the ground and throwing the body in was really not acceptable. He’s asked where the family crypt was, but apparently there wasn’t one. He would raise that with Wat later.
There was no service, no Mass, no words for the dead, even from the wife of the body, who didn’t even bother to turn up at the graveside. Hermitage had to call the gravediggers back to finish off one of the feet, which emerged from the ground like a bizarre sapling.
Hermitage mumbled a few words, sending the soul of the departed on its way, but he thought there must be some special process for those occasions when the whole of the deceased was not available.
None of the villagers seemed at all disturbed by any of this. By the time he got back to the hall, he even noticed Cottrice working her way round, talking to a number of men, including Norbert and Poitron. He supposed she needed to get on with her life, but her husband wasn’t even firmly, or completely buried for goodness sake. And she was the one who’d killed him. Did this place have no shame at all? At least their behaviour gave him some encouragement that they might be released unharmed.
It was Poitron who raised the objection, and Hermitage should not have been surprised really. It was clear that this man was the force of intelligence in Cabourg and he saw straight away that letting them both go was, as he put it, ‘completely stupid.’
Hermitage stood back while Wat explained that what was completely stupid was not letting them go, how Le Pedvin would be expecting them, how if Bonneville really was dead, one of them would not have stayed behind and how much more convincing it would be if they both turned up with the same tale.
It was a good argument, Hermitage was certainly convinced, but Poitron was not. There was wavering in the man’s objections, as if a few more points would win the day, but he said he was absolutely adamant that one of them would have to stay as hostage.
Hermitage wondered about something. A small thought had entered his head and he was about to dismiss it as a disgraceful result of his recent experiences, when he saw that it might have value. He was reluctant to give it voice. This whole place had been atrocious from start to finish and he should not add to the deceitful and corrupt behaviour of a village that was almost certainly damned.
He did want to go home though. And it wouldn’t be as if he was committing a sin himself, rather he was acknowledging the sinful behaviour of others. If encouraging it a bit. Quite a bit really, which wasn’t good.
He looked to Wat, the thought bobbing around behind his eyes, seeking some support from the weaver.
‘And,’ said Wat, leaning forward to Poitron, ‘of course we’d have to tell Le Pedvin who’d been
left in charge. Who the new Lord of the Manor might be now the Bonneville line has come to an end.’ He left the thought to hover invitingly, ‘and I’m sure the King’s Investigator has some influence in such matters.’
Hermitage was relieved that Wat had expressed the idea first, but felt no relief that he’d had the same thought as the weaver, who generally came up with pretty disreputable thoughts.
There was the very slightest raising of Poitron’s eyebrows. A miniscule movement, which Hermitage was very proud to have noticed. And even more proud to understand what it meant. They were going home.
Caput XXVIII
And Rest?
The journey home was far less troublesome and eventful than their journey south, which suited Hermitage down to the ground. Despite all his questions, directed to a large number of people, he eventually had to accept that there was no way of walking from Normandy to Derby. There had to be a ship involved somewhere. At least the one they selected was large and ponderous, which, while it didn’t stop Hermitage’s stomach contents escaping, it did at least reduce the abject terror which had accompanied his previous voyage.
He had crossed the sea now, he had been on a boat and it was something he could say he had done. It was also something he would never do again. If he ever had to put his feet on a boat again, he would have them chopped off and sent there without him.
Protestations that they were travelling for Le Pedvin cut no ice at all and they were lumped in with the cargo, which appeared to comprise entirely of things that had gone off slightly. Meat, cloth, timber and even wine, none of it was pleasant and Hermitage wondered if this was some deliberate punishment for England. Surely no Norman would stand for any of this. Cwen checked most of the food and drink and advised them not to go anywhere near it.
Wat speculated that Le Pedvin probably wasn’t that bothered about how they made it back, or even if they made it back at all. He had sent them off on a mission and that was that.
Surely, Hermitage argued, having sent them to sort out the Bonneville problem, the man would want to know whether they’d been successful or not.
When Wat suggested that Le Pedvin probably had half a dozen plans to get rid of Bonneville, and they were only one of them, Hermitage felt his heart sink. Too often the activities and anxieties he went through turned out to be all for nothing. He had solved murders that no one was bothered about, found killers who walked away and resolved mysteries that people just shrugged at. Why did he bother? More to the point why did people bother him with all of this?
If Le Pedvin came along and asked him to investigate the death of King William at the hands of a flock of disturbed ducks, he would turn away and say “no thank you.”
Except of course, thinking what to say to Le Pedvin and actually saying it were two different things entirely.
Their arrival in England was ignominious and unnoticed. In a grey and chilly dawn, they lumbered ashore over the side of the boat, once it had grounded itself ashore on the shingle. They’d all had concerns about the vessel, its crew as well as its cargo, but when the port of Hastings came into sight their worries were given substance. It rapidly became clear that the captain of this particular vessel was lucky to have hit the island at all. There was no way he was going to be able to direct something as complicated as a boat into something as small as a major port.
They all speculated that this was why the vessel was carrying such a rotten cargo, no one would care, or be surprised, if it vanished to the bottom of the sea.
Hermitage began to understand how people could be found to transport an unaccompanied head.
‘How does anyone so incompetent get to be in charge of a boat?’ he demanded when they were at the top of the beach, well away from the captain and crew who were now unloading their cargo. If throwing things over the side can be called unloading.
‘Probably inherited it,’ Cwen shrugged, ‘and the crew by the look of them.’
‘How on earth do they make any money?’ Hermitage asked. He had wondered about one of the crew who appeared not to have moved at all since they left Normandy. He had been going to offer some assistance in case the man was ill, but everyone else on the boat took great pains to avoid the fellow and give him considerable distance.
‘Probably by taking things no one else will take, to places no one else will go,’ said Wat in a very cautious tone.
Hermitage puzzled over this, wondering what on earth such a cargo could be. He was about to ask, when he looked back at the boat and noticed that the fellow who had not moved during the voyage was just being cast over the side with the rest of the goods.
‘See what I mean,’ Wat nodded to the incident then quickly turned his face inland.
Hermitage’s mouth was open and his head was full of questions, many of which he wanted to ask, very few of which he wanted answered.
‘So how do we find Le Pedvin?’ he asked instead, as he followed Wat and Cwen away from the beach and through the hillocks of rough grass to the sparse woodland beyond.
‘I suspect if we just head for Derby, he’ll find us,’ Wat replied over his shoulder.
‘You there!’ a voice called through the dank air of an English summer.
They paused in their ascent from the beach and saw a Norman soldier on horseback, silhouetted against the cloud where the rising sun would be.
‘Oh great,’ Wat muttered, ‘back ten minutes and straight into a Norman patrol.’
‘You are to report to Le Pedvin immediately,’ the Norman patrol announced when they were within earshot.
‘We’re what?’ Wat replied in surprise.
Hermitage looked from Norman to Wat to Cwen and back again. Surely the man didn’t have patrols on the coast waiting for their return.
‘Report to Le Pedvin,’ the Norman repeated slowly and in an accentuated Saxon accent, ‘him nearby, you go there.’ The soldier indicated with his arm which direction Le Pedvin was in, and made it clear he was going to accompany them.
‘What’s he doing here?’ Hermitage had to ask.
The soldier shrugged. ‘Whatever he likes.’ He gestured peremptorily and they swung into line behind him.
It wasn’t a long march. A collection of tents occupied a piece of land just behind the rise of the land, which was busy with comings and goings of carts, horsemen and peasants moving things about.
‘What’s going on?’ Hermitage asked, puzzled at such activity in what was basically the middle of nowhere.
‘We can ask Le Pedvin,’ Wat suggested, ‘I’m sure he wouldn’t tell us.’
They were escorted past outlying tents and collections of goods. Sacks of something or other were piled high, barrels of this or that were stacked in order and biers of things were lined up. It looked like a pretty major expedition was either about to set off, or had just come back from somewhere.
In the middle of it all Le Pedvin’s tent stood aloof and quiet. It was obviously Le Pedvin’s tent as it looked large and comfortable, and had a regular stream of worried looking people coming out of it, hurrying on some mission or other. Some of them were rubbing ears or backsides, which had clearly been vigorously encouraged.
They all stopped outside the tent but their Norman escort indicated that they should go straight in.
With a deep breath Hermitage prepared to enter.
Wat turned to Cwen. ‘You wait here and hopefully we won’t be long.’
Cwen looked at him.
‘Look,’ Wat explained fiercely, ‘we are going to see Le Pedvin, who may not be terribly happy at our news and may decide to make his unhappiness roundly felt. No need for you to get involved. As far as he knows you’re still a serving girl.’
Cwen looked at him some more.
‘It’s madness,’ Wat hissed, ‘stay out here. We may need you if things get out of hand.’
The look just went on.
‘All right, but stay out of sight and listen through the canvas. We may need you to come and get us.’
Look.
&n
bsp; ‘Come in then but just stand by the entrance and don’t say anything.’
The look accepted that Wat had made the right decision and the three of them entered the tent.
Le Pedvin was at home, and was sitting in a camp chair in front of a warming fire, which threw its smoke up through a hole in the centre of the roof. There was a table to his right, on which sat a crude map of the country, which Hermitage could see from here was wrong. Parchments were strewn about the floor in a most haphazard and careless manner, which gave the monk the shivers, and two men waited at Le Pedvin’s shoulder, presumably for the next order to run somewhere.
The man looked up from a parchment he held in his hands, which was scrawled with Norman French, too far away and too small for Hermitage to read upside down.
‘About time,’ said Le Pedvin, appraising them all with little interest.
Hermitage and Wat stood side by side before the man with Cwen just slightly behind. Certainly not back by the entrance.
Hermitage gave a slight nod of the head. His natural urge to fill the space and time with all the words that were in his head was tempered by the presence of the Norman, who didn’t actually seem that interested in them.
‘Bonneville sorted then?’ Le Pedvin asked, turning his attention back to the parchment, which he then threw to the floor before directing his gaze to them.
‘Absolutely,’ said Wat with confidence, before Hermitage could start a full explanation.
‘Good,’ said Le Pedvin. He bent over in the chair and started to search through the pile of documents on the floor, clearly looking for something specific. He cast several aside, muttering to himself as he went.
‘Good?’ Hermitage was at a loss. Wat tugged his sleeve, urging him to leave it at that, and it was true, he could see the sense of it. If Le Pedvin was happy to leave the whole business at “good” then they should walk away and be grateful for it.
Hermitage, Wat and Some Murder or Other Page 28
