Bone of Contention

by Roberta Gellis

  Bell laughed. “Not too quiet these last few weeks with the king here.”

  He got a shrug and a laugh in answer to that. “Not our kettle of fish. The sheriff told us not to try to manage the men-at-arms. He knows my men ain’t fit for that. Let their own captains do it, the sheriff said, and there hasn’t been much trouble…” His expression changed. “Only that one killed the other day.”

  “Did your people find him?”

  “Not mine, thank God,” the captain said. “That would have been Wessel’s men. He’s on street duty now. If you want him, he should be back here to report to the sheriff—” he pointed, and now that the men were out of the way Bell could see a small but well-built house backed against the wall of the church “—at Vespers.”

  “Will the deputy be there now?” Bell asked.

  “Should be.” The captain shrugged. “But he’s a gentleman and don’t need to show his face according to the hour.”

  Bell made no reply to that, merely lifting a hand in farewell. He walked away uncertain of whether he wanted to see the body first or talk to the sheriff’s deputy A faint taint of foulness in the air, perhaps from some merchant’s midden, reminded him of what the body would be like after two days at the end of June. He turned toward the sheriff’s office.

  The door was open, and he could see several men, one sat behind a good, solid table, the others on benches along the wall, talking idly or working over leather or weapons. Bell walked up to the table.

  Having asked if he addressed the sheriff’s deputy and received a brusque nod in return, Bell continued, “My name is Sir Bellamy of Itchen, and I am looking into the murder of the man called Aimery St. Cyr. His body was found behind The Broached Barrel yesterday morning.”

  Bell had not claimed authority as the bishop of Winchester’s officer. He thought it unwise to associate himself with any bishop at the moment and be did not want to involve his master, or imply that Winchester had any interest at all in the proceedings in Oxford.

  “Looking into it? Why?”

  The man behind the table looked at him almost blankly for a moment. He was portly and heavy-featured, dressed in a sober brown tunic. His shirt, decently white but not as bright as Bell’s—for which Bell paid extra to his laundress—was open at the throat. His voice was flat, neither aggressive nor inviting, but his eyes, glinting past half-closed lids, were surprisingly bright.

  “Mostly because I am a friend of Niall Arvagh’s.”

  That got a reaction. The deputy sat up straight and began to push back his stool. “Where the hell is he?”

  “At Noke, where he has been with twenty witnesses, including the priest who will swear he was in their sight since Sext on Wednesday except for the time it took to piss and shit. He is not the man you want for the crime.”

  The sheriff’s deputy relaxed back into his seat and sighed. “I should have known it would not be so easy, especially when that looby was so sure.” Then his eyes opened all the way and he stared hard at Bell. “You did say you were looking into the killing, not that you came to provide vindication for Arvagh. If your friend is free and clear as you say, why do you care who killed St. Cyr?”

  “Because the accusation was made and Niall Arvagh will never be clear until the true killer is found.”

  “Why should he care? He will leave here with William of Ypres—”

  “No,” Bell interrupted, then temporized. “He may well go with Ypres, but he will be marrying Loveday of Otmoor soon and thus be often in Oxford.” Having said that truth, Bell cleared his throat. He felt his color rise, but went on doggedly. “He has been betrothed to Loveday for a long time, but she was very young and in the king’s ward while he was rising among Ypres’ men. It seemed reasonable to wait.”

  The deputy was sitting more upright again. His face, enlivened with interest, did not seem so heavy-featured. “If she was already betrothed, how come St. Cyr thought he could marry her?”

  Bell shrugged and cleared his throat again, he hated to lie. “Niall has no idea about that. It is true that no big ceremony was made of their betrothal. His sister had aforetime been married to Loveday’s brother, but they both died. The fathers still wished to bind the families, but this rebonding brought back too many sad memories for a large or joyous celebration.”

  After a moment to think that over, the deputy shook his head. “Well, if Arvagh did not do it, I cannot see how you will find the true killer. St. Cyr could have been killed by anyone.”

  “That is why I want to see St. Cyr’s body. It may well tell me some interesting things.”

  The deputy drew back a little, his eyes averted. “You are going to…to ask the corpse to speak? To name his murderer?”

  Bell laughed. “No, of course not. I am not a witch, an idiot, or a fanatic. But if I look at the wound, I will know what kind of knife was used, mayhap how hard the blow was.” He shrugged. “Who knows what I may learn? Was he robbed? Was any blow struck other than the stab wound?”

  “Do you know how that body will smell?”

  Bell sighed. “I have been a soldier for fifteen years and have been on more than one battlefield. I do, indeed, know and do not look forward to it. All I can say is that I am glad I have not eaten.” He sighed again. “Where is it? The quicker there the quicker done.”

  “You really mean to do it? To find the killer?”

  Bell lifted his brows. “I suppose once Niall was proven innocent, the sheriff would have preferred to forget about the murder. St. Cyr was only a common man-at-arms. And Niall, although a knight, was scarcely important enough for the sheriff to worry about his reputation.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But he won’t be let forget it, it seems. Here you are nosing around, and that lunatic Manville d’Arras was in again this morning asking whether we had yet taken Arvagh.” He gestured with his head toward the men on the benches. “Peter and William told me that Arras had been in the alehouses, crying that the sheriff wouldn’t seek his friend’s killer.” The deputy stood up. “My name is Sir Rolf de Dowch. I will take you to the body. I am interested in what you think it can tell you.”

  * * * *

  It was a short distance to the church of St. Martin and Sir Rolf led Bell around to the right, toward a dark arch closed by a heavy door. Outside was a stand of torches and a clay pot holding some ashed-over coals. Sir Rolf plunged one of the torches into the pot of coals, and it hissed to life. Bell took a second torch and lit it from the first. Both men took deep breaths, and Sir Rolf opened the door.

  The chamber was small and had no windows, and the odor in it was heavy and sweetly putrid. However, it did not carry the stench of the befoulment of death, which usually added a final sickening effect. Doubtless someone had washed the corpse; that annoyed Bell because he would not be able to judge whether St. Cyr had been standing or already fallen when he was stabbed—unless the stains on his clothing could tell the tale. He glanced around and saw with satisfaction the pile of garments by the body’s feet.

  At least the washing had kept the air breathable—if barely. Bell put his torch into one of the holders on the wall. Then, lips set, he went up to the shrouded body and uncovered it.

  Sir Rolf made an indistinguishable sound, perhaps of protest when Bell uncovered the corpse. After a moment, however, Rolf drew closer, holding his torch over the bier as Bell seized the right shoulder and lifted. It was not easy. The body was flaccid, the rigidity of death gone completely. Bell was not surprised. Although he had known the stiffness to linger as long as two days, it came and went faster in warm weather, and it had been warm.

  The knife wound, as Bell had expected, was to the right of the backbone, where it should be if a right-handed man had stabbed St. Cyr from behind. He looked at the wound and the area surrounding it. The body had been lying on its back for some time and the flesh was very dark, as dead flesh always was on whatever part was lowest. Even so Bell could see that the edges of the wound were smooth, and he could make out two bruises alongside the
wound where something protruding from the hilt of the knife had struck the flesh hard—quillons, downturned toward the blade.

  “You see that?” he said to Sir Rolf. “The blade is ordinary but very well honed, a straight blade about like mine or yours, and it had quillons that point down.” He leaned closer, holding his breath and gesturing to Sir Rolf to bring the torch closer. “Rounded quillons, or maybe part of a double guard, one curve up and one down.”

  “How the hell do you know that?” Sir Rolf asked, sounding annoyed.

  “That the knife was very sharp, because the flesh around the wound is smooth. About the quillons being rounded, because the skin was badly bruised but not broken. A square guard or a pointed one might have broken the skin or left a sharp line at the core of the bruise.”

  Sir Rolf looked at him suspiciously. “You’ve done this before.”

  “Often enough,” Bell agreed absently, looking carefully at the back of the corpse’s head. After a moment he braced the head with one hand and ran the other over it. “No one struck him on the head.” He eased the body down flat and looked carefully at the forehead and nose. “Didn’t fall on his face either…but the stab wound was clean, so he didn’t try to pull away when the knife went in. Why?”

  “Too shocked? And sometimes it hardly feels like anything at first. It takes a while to feel a stab wound from a sharp knife.”

  “Yes, I agree, but remember the quillons hit St. Cyr hard enough to bruise him. He should have staggered forward, away from his attacker, maybe even have had time to cry out. He did not.”

  “We don’t know that. Doubtless they were noisy enough in the alehouse to drown any cry.”

  Bell nodded. “A good point, but with the knife in him why didn’t he fall forward? Wait, maybe he did.” Bell walked along the bier and took first one hand of the corpse and then the other. The palms of both were clean and without bruises. “I will have to discover who prepared the corpse and ask whether his hands were dirtied from trying to stop a fall.”

  Bell walked back toward the head again and examined the face even more minutely. He shook his head. “No, he didn’t fall on his face,” he repeated. Then suddenly he bent closer and gestured for Sir Rolf to lower the torch. “Look,” he said. “What are those marks on his neck and under his chin? Did the murderer first try to strangle him?”

  “The mark is too wide for a cord,” Rolf said. “Wait, it might have been a belt with a design carved in the leather.”

  “The carving must have been very deep and the leather very hard. Look how clean the edges of the bruises are. I don’t remember…oh, fool that I am, that’s the mark of chain mail.”

  “But how would a man get bruises from chain mail on the front of his neck? You mean he was wearing his hauberk with the hood raised and someone tried to strangle him or struck him in the neck? No. Impossible. How would the knife go in so smooth and deep? Surely the mail would have stopped it.”

  Bell had been silent, staring down at the gray bruises on the corpse-white skin. Suddenly he turned away, walked quickly behind Sir Rolf, put his left arm around the man’s neck, and jerked him upright. The knight cried out, flailed backward with the torch. Bell released him and jumped out of the way, laughing.

  “Like that,” he said, before Sir Rolf could drop the torch and go for his sword. “It was not St. Cyr who was wearing mail but whoever killed him. He came up behind St. Cyr, put his left arm around the man’s neck—which would hold him still and also prevent him from crying out—and then he used his right hand to stab.”

  Sir Rolf was not amused. He glowered at Bell, who sobered and apologized, adding, “Forgive me. I could not resist trying to see if it would work, and it does. St. Cyr’s attacker might have been waiting in ambush, but it is equally possible that St. Cyr knew the attacker was there and simply did not expect to be attacked.”

  “Very well, I can accept everything you say, although I am not certain I agree completely. But I do not see that it brings us any closer to the murderer.”

  Bell looked at him in surprise then said, “Wait. Let me finish looking at this body. Then we can go outside and talk.”

  There was nothing much else to see, however. Some faint marks indicated how the body had been lying behind the shed, but since it had clearly been moved to that place—there was not room enough behind the shed for St. Cyr to have been stabbed there—those bruises were not significant. With a sigh of relief, Bell drew the worn cloth over the still figure, turned away, and removed his torch from the wall holder. Sir Rolf waited no longer but preceded him out of the chamber and doused his torch in the sand in which the unused torches were set. Bell followed his example.

  Outside the church both breathed deeply several times to rid themselves of the odor of death. A moment later Sir Rolf shook his head and said, “I can still taste it. Let’s go over to The Lively Hop where we can drown the corpse smell in some wine.”

  “Done,” Bell agreed.

  When they had their mugs in hand, Bell sent the serving boy to the nearest cookshop for a pork pasty. By the time it arrived, he had swilled out his mouth, spitting the first mouthful of wine onto the stained earth by his feet, and taken a good second swallow. Sir Rolf did the same.

  “What is there to talk about?” he asked. “The Watchman said St. Cyr had been stabbed in the back and he was. Now you know he was stabbed with a sharp knife with downturned, rounded quillons…so what?”

  Bell had broken off a piece of the pasty, but he held it in his hand instead of putting it in his mouth. “So what? So I know a good deal about St. Cyr’s killer now that I didn’t know before.”

  “You are going to search every man’s belt knife for down-turned quillons?” Sir Rolf asked, his lips twisted. “There are a lot of men in Oxford right now.”

  “I don’t need to look at every man. I know St. Cyr’s killer was a knight, not one of his fellow men-at-arms or a common thief who came upon him by accident. Men-at-arms and thieves do not wear mail. I know that either St. Cyr was sitting when he was attacked or the man was taller—”

  “Taller? How can you know that?”

  “Because the mail marked not only his throat but the bottom of his chin. But St. Cyr may have been sitting, waiting for someone. There were tables and benches out in the back of The Broached Barrel. And I know that because I went to look.”

  Sir Rolf cleared his throat. “You are thinking that we were careless, but the sheriff has been very busy, as you can imagine, and it isn’t as if we could have caught and questioned witnesses if we arrived promptly. It was clear that the man had been dead for hours. The landlord and servers at the inn were not going anywhere. I spoke to them and every one swore they had not seen St. Cyr in the place the previous night.”

  “So he didn’t meet whoever it was in the alehouse. I wonder whose idea that was?”

  “Well, but if he wasn’t in the alehouse, the landlord and servers couldn’t have seen him killed, and they hadn’t heard anyone cry out—I did ask that. So what was the point in asking more? So I went back to the sheriff’s office and not a candlemark later in came Arras saying he knew who had killed St. Cyr. Surely the most reasonable thing after that was to question Niall Arvagh?”

  “Yes,” Bell said, smiling as he swallowed his second large bite of the pasty.

  Bell was thoroughly annoyed with the man who clearly did not have the smallest interest in who had killed St. Cyr, but there was no sense pursuing the subject and exasperating the sheriff’s deputy further. Sir Rolf might be too lazy to take a proper interest in his work, but he had not been obstructive—and if angered he might become so. Thus, Bell dropped the subject of St. Cyr’s death and asked about Salisbury’s expected arrival.

  He was surprised to receive not only a repetition of the information the captain of the Watch had given him, but a fulsome litany of praise of Salisbury’s efficiency as justiciar and an indignant rejection of the assumption that Salisbury had any rebel intentions. Bell made no attempt to argue against any of Sir Ro
lf’s claims and in the end they parted pleasantly. As Bell turned north toward The Broached Barrel, Sir Rolf commented that he found Bell’s insights very interesting and it was a shame they could not have been made in a more worthy cause.

  This opinion was close enough to Bell’s own that he wondered as he stepped into The Broached Barrel why he was pursuing St. Cyr’s killer. But he knew the answer…both answers. First, murder, even of such a cur as St. Cyr, was wrong. Killing him would not have been wrong, even if it were the result of forcing a quarrel on him and cutting him down in a fair, if uneven, fight. But to creep up behind a man and stab him without warning…no. A man who did that once was all too likely to do it again, and possibly to someone who deserved killing less. The murderer had to be exposed and punished. And second, of course, because Magdalene wanted the killer found.

  Bell sighed as he took his tankard of ale from the landlord and dropped a farthing on the barrel beside him. Magdalene wanted Lord William cleared of any suspicion of involvement in St. Cyr’s death. Bell himself thought it a waste of time. What was one more suspected killing attached to Lord William’s name? Well, possibly at this time, uneasy as the political situation was, Magdalene was right.

  As he made the grudging concession, Bell looked around at the tables. Before he had decided where he wanted to seek a place, he was hailed by name. At first in the dim light he did not recognize the man whose hand was raised in greeting, but in another moment he recalled the disputed farm and the seller who was trying to extort more money from the buyer.

  “Lord Ormerod,” he said, making his way to the table and sliding onto the end of the bench. “So, did you find Sir Bruno, and was he able to arrange an appeal to the king?”

  “I did find him. I was fortunate enough to run into Sir Ferrau—you remember, the gentleman who fled our company so suddenly in fear that I would ask him to intercede with his overlord for me?”

  “Yes, I remember.” Bell chuckled. “I gather he was more cooperative in introducing you to Sir Bruno.”

  “Yes, he was—at least, he pointed Sir Bruno out to me and would have introduced us but he was called away by a most haughty and elegant gentleman…”