Vale of Tears

by Sarah Hawkswood

  Father Paulinus looked once again sorrowful, and Hugh Bradecote tried to lessen his misery by repeating what the Abbot of Evesham had said to him about the judgement of the law, and of heaven.

  The sheriff’s men stood themselves down for the evening with new hope, but the priest returned to his church, heavy of heart, to pray for the dead and, he feared, the doomed.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Brian de Nouailles sat in his hall, a cup of wine in his hand, and a flagon at his elbow. His expression was grim, but also haunted. The only explanation he could come up with for Aelfric murdering a girl he had known since childhood, if it was not her refusing his advances, was that she knew something, something which connected him to the killing of Walter Horsweard. Oh, how he wished the pestilence had come upon Evesham and the family of Horsweard had ceased to exist, once Edith was his. All they had caused was trouble, making her wistful, and thrusting their noses where they had no right. He had been glad when the hag of a mother had died, but the brothers, the cripple and the blusterer, had stuck to him like goose-grass.

  If all the wench had seen was Aelfric and the horse trader no harm was done, for neither would leave the churchyard to tell de Beauchamp’s law-hounds any of it. He had no qualms about killing Aelfric, for it was the man’s own fault for returning without permission, and besides, he had killed the girl. The thought niggled, however, that what the girl knew lay deeper in the tale, for Hild’s mother had been Edith’s tirewoman, and women talked together, especially with Edith not so used to keeping her distance, and often deprived of female company. That he had kept her in semi-isolation had been to protect her from the sharp tongues of the more aristocratic dames who would have looked down their noses at her, and spoken barbed words that would have hurt her. He did not care if he withdrew from his neighbours; most he cordially disliked anyway, and for love of his wife he would have eschewed all mortal company for the rest of his days.

  The haunted look grew more pronounced. He would have given every drop of his blood for her, and yet he had not been able to save her. Even his last words to her had been harsh, trying to argue her from her misery, which had come over her like a November fog after that snivelling clerk had dangled from a rope. The toad had tried first to blackmail him, and then made a lewd suggestion to his virtuous wife, and mere dangling was too good for him. From choice he would have strung him up by other than his neck, but to keep it lawful-looking, that is how it had had to be. How could he have guessed Edith would be so overset by it all?

  He emptied the flagon. The sound of her cry as she fell, the ripping of the sleeve as he caught at it, flooded bright and sharp in his mind, and the memory of her limp in his arms, the eyes that had bewitched him, staring and unseeing, twisted in him like a knife. He groaned, picked up the flagon, and threw it with force to smash near the hearth. He cried out, an anguished animal cry, howling her name into the emptiness of his hall.

  For a while his mind was empty, an aching void, and then he picked up the threads of thought. The only real threat to him was if the truth about the mill lease came to light. He would deny any deaths, but that would cost him the mill, which was not only lucrative, but the starting point for all his woes, and he would be damned if he would let some peasant’s bleating see it given back to the grasping Benedictines.

  He would speak with Agatha. That he should see her following the murder of her daughter was not beyond belief, since they had been household servants. If there was any suspicion that she knew too much, then he would make the necessary arrangements. He called, without thinking, for Leofwine, but the steward was still in the church. An underling entered, nervously, from the buttery.

  ‘My lord?’

  ‘Where is Leofwine?’

  ‘He has not come back from Father Paulinus yet, my lord.’

  ‘Fa—Ah yes. Fetch me the woman Agatha. I would speak with her?’

  ‘Now, my lord?’

  ‘Of course now. Why else would I order it?’

  ‘Yes, my lord, at once.’

  Brian de Nouailles was not sober, but he did not care. He was sober enough to out-think peasants, and that was all he needed to do. And when he had finished out-thinking this peasant he would drink until his beloved, beautiful ghost left his head, and he had oblivion.

  The servant sent to fetch Agatha found a woman in turmoil. The loss of her daughter was now made the worse by the thought that her killer had grown up with her, was one of the village own. She had not been in the manor when Aelfric’s body had been brought in, but had emerged from her seclusion in her cott as he had been carried to the church, and a neighbour had told her the tale. She recoiled from it at first, another death, another life snuffed out young, and with her daughter laid in the earth but that afternoon. Now another corpse would lie where her Hild had lain last night, and to think it was her murderer was beyond contemplating. She jumped at the insistent knock, and opened the door with a trembling hand. If she was relieved to see only Ansculf, his words made her pale once more.

  ‘Now?’

  ‘He is in no mood to be refused, if ever he has been. Best come and come quick. Sorry I am to disturb you, though.’ Ansculf looked shamefaced.

  ‘No fault of yours, friend.’ She reached out a hand and patted his, and took a deep breath. ‘Best to get it done, then.’

  They arrived suitably short of breath to show that the lord de Nouailles’ command had been obeyed with speed, and just before Leofwine made his way back to the manor, head hung low, and in deep thought. De Nouailles looked up from gazing into the dregs of his wine, and grunted, then pulled himself up from the half-slumped position in which he had been sat.

  ‘You, get out,’ he spat at Ansculf, who began to withdraw in haste, but then demanded that he bring more wine. Turning his attention to Agatha, he sniffed. ‘Your daughter’s death, it was a waste.’

  She nodded, not knowing whether this was his idea of commiseration or, in some strange way, a complaint that it had happened.

  ‘It was not my fault,’ he grumbled, and Agatha said nothing at all, for why should she think otherwise. ‘You will miss her.’

  ‘Yes, my l—’

  ‘Sometimes the dead are so real again you could almost touch them, and yet you know that if you do they will be as the air, and the dream of them gone.’ He was not talking to her, but to himself.

  The peasant woman knew what a man looked like when maudlin with drink, and Brian de Nouailles was a fair way there. She also realised he was not thinking of her daughter at all, but the sweet soul whom she had served. She kept a respectful silence, and wondered why she had been brought to him. Perhaps he wanted to talk about his lady to one who knew her. When he spoke again, she almost gasped.

  ‘If Aelfric did not want her for her body, why might he have had cause to kill her?’

  It took a fraction of a moment to realise he was now back to thinking of Hild.

  ‘My lord?’

  ‘You heard me, woman. You are not deaf. Indeed, I wonder if your ears have been too keen.’ There was an edge of threat in the tone, but he did not say more.

  ‘I … My Hild was a good girl, my lord. She did not give in to sweet words from lustful youths.’

  ‘I care not about her virtuousness-ness,’ he slurred his speech, but the eyes were alert, like a hawk upon a sparrow. ‘I want to know why Aelfric put a knife in her back.’

  At this Agatha stifled a sob, and put her hand to her mouth. He watched, unmoved, and even began to drum his fingers upon his table. It was never a good sign, and Agatha knew it of old. How many times had her poor lady been cast into panic when he had been displeased and started to drum with his fingers. She watched, mesmerised, and fought down the tears. Ansculf returned with more wine, cast her a look of sympathy, and retired without receiving any acknowledgement.

  ‘Is it so certain it was him, my lord?’

  ‘The sheriff’s hounds seem to think so, and … reluctantly I agree with them. It seems that my hot words about Horsweard had him l
eaping off to cast him dead into the Avon. Why he got that in his head we will never know. However, I was wondering if your girl, or perhaps you, were washing by the river that day, and saw something. If she knew and … teased Aelfric with that knowledge, that might have given him cause enough for a killing.’

  Agatha blinked. So Aelfric had killed twice? She crossed herself.

  ‘I am not even sure which day it is you mean, my lord, but I can say for sure I never saw nobody harmed near the river, and my Hild never said aught to me of witnessing anything, and she would have told me. We had no secrets between us.’

  She thought he would be pleased with the answer, but had to repress a shudder as he looked at her with gimlet eyes.

  ‘No secrets. Of course.’ There was silence for a minute or so. She dared not speak, and the lord kept on staring at her as if he could see into her thoughts. ‘Did you see Horsweard the last time he came here to rant at me?’

  ‘I … He wished me good morrow as he passed upon his horse, my lord. He knew me because I had been my la—He had seen me before.’

  ‘And as he departed?’

  ‘Ah, then my lord, I but raised a hand and did not speak to him.’

  ‘So, you spoke when he arrived?’

  ‘Just a few words, my lord.’ Agatha was a very poor liar. Even wine-sodden, Brian de Nouailles could see the pitiful attempt at concealment, but for her part she clung to the hope that he was deceived. This grew as he poured himself another cup of wine, and did not even look at her.

  ‘You may go.’ The dismissal was sudden.

  Agatha bobbed an obeisance and hurried from his presence. She was a worried woman, and would have been even more so had she seen the sneering smile spread across de Nouailles’ face.

  Nobody was surprised that Leofwine was monosyllabic at the evening meal. The cook, shaking her head over what had been revealed even as she stirred the pottage, remarked as how Aelfric had been treated like the son he never saw reach an age even to walk.

  ‘Not that Aelfric deserved such regard. Right cruel he was, at times, about his uncle, and him that good to him. You mark my words, he did them bad things thinking to get advancement from the lord, and supplant Leofwine before he was much older. Wickedness and waste, that is all as has come of it.’

  The girl who had replaced Hild as her aide made suitable ‘agreeing’ noises.

  So Leofwine sat at the head of the rough table with the household, and looked into his bowl as if it might give comfort for the soul rather than just the stomach. He was not known as a cheerful man, but this evening everyone followed his lead and spoke in hushed tones and only out of necessity. He took bread with barely a murmur, refused a second helping with a shake of the head, and when he had drained his beaker of ale, wiped a hand across his mouth and left in silence. As he closed the door behind him, he heard the murmur of voices begin. They would be talking about Aelfric, about him. Let them talk.

  He stalked to his chamber above the gatehouse, where the barest needs of his existence made the room little more than a monk’s cell. There was a narrow bed, a stool, a small chest in which he kept a change of raiment from mouse and moth, a rush light and a soil bucket. In the absence now of a lady of the manor, the keys to the stores hung upon a hook. He sat upon the hard bed and slumped forward, his head in his hands. He was subject to grief, and a growing sense that he was adrift in a situation he did not comprehend.

  Until his lord had raised the issue, he had not considered why it was that Aelfric had come to him when he had found the body of Hild. He had assumed it was because he had been shocked and come to the man he trusted most for guidance, his father figure. Whatever he thought about Walter Horsweard, and it was not much, he was not particularly horrified if Aelfric, in the impetuosity of youth, had charged off to implement his lord’s wish that the man never darken his door again. If the horse trader was such a benighted fool that he did not heed the warnings of a man as irascible and aggressive as Brian de Nouailles, then the more fool him. He had been warned clearly enough, and if his lord had called Leofwine in and told him to do away with the unwelcome reminder of his beloved wife’s origins, Leofwine would have done the deed, and hoped it gave his lord ease, even if he got no thanks for it.

  Leofwine the Steward was a similar age to his lord, had grown up alongside him, if a few paces behind. In his father’s tenure of the stewardship he had railed as the youthful lordling had done against the ‘inactivity’ of the older generation, and used him as a model for a time, until marriage softened him and took his focus, right the way up until the day he buried wife and child, and with them he vowed to bury his heart. He looked to Brian de Nouailles again, cold, aloof, masterful, and itching to succeed to land and title, and whilst master would never stoop so low as to show friendship to one of peasant birth, yet there had been forged an understanding. As soon as he took seisin of the manor, Brian de Nouailles had placed Leofwine in his father’s position, using his steward as his conduit, relying upon him to implement his wishes and impose his harsh rule over his peasantry. They had learnt fast enough that the new steward would never stand up for his neighbours against the lord, but was not otherwise unfair, just unsmiling and unsympathetic. Having no choice, they learnt to live with it.

  When Brian de Nouailles had wed, not just for an heir, but besotted by a beautiful face, Leofwine had been disappointed, even vaguely jealous, but the lady had charmed him as she had her lord, and seeing the depth and rawness of loss at her death, Leofwine understood, remembered, and would do almost anything to ease it. If that had included killing Horsweard himself, for the crime of rubbing salt into the unbearable wound, he would have done so, just as he had been happy enough to accuse the interfering sheriff’s man, just to please de Nouailles. He had not thought it likely any sentence would have been carried out, but if it had, then so be it.

  That was a very different thing to murdering Hild, daughter of widow Agatha, with whom Leofwine had worked more closely in the years of her service to the lady de Nouailles. Never by so much as a look had the woman shown less than total respect for the lady, never mentioned her origins. Leofwine understood loyalty. If Aelfric had killed the girl, then it was fitting that their lord had dealt out justice, and in his own way, though it pained the steward that it should be needful for him to do so, for Aelfric was − had been − his hope for the future. The lord of Harvington had never believed in the King’s Justice, only de Nouailles’ Justice.

  But … There was a ‘but’ worming itself, unbidden and unwelcome, into Leofwine the Steward’s mind. Since his lord knew of his loyalty, why had he not spoken to him, knowing he would be grieved at the necessity, when he had gone to deal his justice? Why had he made up so complicated a tale about brigands and caps and horses? He need only have said that he had confronted Aelfric with his guilt already, guilt the undersheriff already suspected, and dealt with him as the law would have done, but to show his own people there was justice, not some distant code. Surely he would not have feared repercussions from merely acting precipitately? But he had gone out of his way to distance himself from anything to do with Aelfric.

  The ‘but’ grew, and like the maggot in the apple, changed, so that it became a ‘what if’, and that what if made Leofwine go cold. What if his lord had simply decided that Aelfric was a liability, and had no idea whether he had killed Hild, but did not want him found by the sheriff’s men? It would have been easy enough to meet him, send him away not just to one of his manors, but perhaps to lie low in a town like Coventry or Warwick. He did not need to kill him, unless there was something more, something he had never trusted his steward to know. That lack of faith, of trust, was a betrayal after so many years. Was that why he had not given him the task of removing Horsweard? Had he actively ordered that killing, after all? And if not just an angry outburst, why?

  There were too many questions, and no good answers. Leofwine lay upon his bed, eyes open, and his mind in the dark.

  It was a trembling Agatha who headed not for
her own hearth, but for the church, and there she flung herself upon the cold stone of the chancel step, despite the clear sight of the shrouded form that had been Aelfric. She prayed devoutly for forgiveness and for aid. Her tears fell in sorrow, in guilt and in fear, and she did not hear the soft footfalls of the priest as he entered his church to pray once more for the soul of one he feared was in great need of prayers. He was not surprised at Agatha’s weeping, but her penitential position made him frown and step forward to lift her to her feet. She cried out in alarm at his touch upon her shoulder.

  ‘Agatha, it is only me. What cause have you to prostrate yourself in this way?’ His voice was very gentle. He suddenly thought of her seeing the shrouded body on the bier. ‘If you have uncharitable thoughts over Aelfric, God will understand, even as He wants you to be forgiving. With your loss so very fresh—’

  He did not finish the sentence. The woman took his arm in a vice-like grip, and raised a face that was all desolation. It shocked him.

  ‘You do not understand, Father, you cannot even guess. It is my fault my girl is dead, my fault all three are dead. God Almighty has shown me I will pay for the sin, but if I die unshriven, what hope have I of ever gaining absolution and escaping the Fires of Damnation?’

  The priest blinked in consternation.

  ‘These are but the wild imaginings of grief. You are overwrought. Let us sit quietly, and—’