Searcher of the Dead

by Nancy Herriman

  “Mistress,” the servant nudged.

  They went into the service rooms. A parlor of sorts, where the staff might take their meals rather than in the hall as Joan and Humphrey did, occupied the space between the pantry and the kitchen.

  Another servant girl, who looked to be about Margery’s age, clutched her right hand in her lap. The cloth wrapped around her fingers was red from blood.

  “What have we?” Bess asked, setting her satchel upon the trestle table in the center of the room.

  The girl would be pretty were it not for the pain creasing her face. “I’ve cut my finger.”

  “Come by the window here so I might see better.”

  The girl drew the stool she sat upon over to the light of the unglazed window and held out her hand. Bess slowly unwrapped the cloth. It had stuck to the wound, which took to bleeding afresh. She had more than a simple cut; she had nearly sliced off her finger, and bone showed between sinew and flesh.

  The other servant, the one who’d shown Bess into the room, clapped her hand to her mouth.

  “Fetch me the freshest water available and some clean cloths,” Bess said to the girl before she could faint. She happily scurried off.

  Bess dropped the soiled cloth to the ground and drew the satchel near, taking out the jar of salve and squares of linen. Placing another stool across from her patient, Bess sat and pressed a wad of linen to the wound to stem the bleeding.

  “I’m clumsy, I am,” said the girl, her face averted.

  “I shall try to save your finger.”

  Horror made her blanch. “I might lose it?”

  “Not if I can prevent it.”

  Hearing footsteps on the flags outside the room, Bess turned, expecting to see the servant returning with the water. Instead, a woman in a silver-gray taffeta gown banded with black velvet stood in the doorway. She was tall, with a sweep of auburn hair held in place beneath her coif by pearl-encrusted pins. As she moved, the scent of rosemary lifted from her clothes.

  Bess made to stand.

  “Do not rise, Mistress. And many good thanks for getting here so quickly,” she said, though she’d no need to thank a woman of Bess’s standing for answering the summons of a woman of hers.

  “I would not delay attending to a patient, madam.”

  The other girl returned with a basin of water and a stack of cloths, which she set next to Bess’s satchel, then once again fled.

  Bess dipped a cloth into the water and daubed the servant girl’s cut. Blood dripped onto the tiled floor.

  “You are good to have come nonetheless, Mistress Ellyott,” said Mistress Langham. “And at such a sorrowful time for your family.”

  “What better way is there to mend any sorrow than by striving to heal the living?”

  “That may be so, but I remain astonished you did not refuse a summons that came from Langham Hall.”

  She looked over at Mistress Langham. Why send for me, if you thought I would refuse? Bess had forgotten her Christian name—Ellynor? Helen?—and at that moment it seemed important to remember. “I regret any past ill will between our families, madam.”

  “What of any current ill will?” the woman asked.

  The servant girl whimpered; Bess must have pressed upon her wound with too great of a force. Abashed, she lowered her gaze and collected her stitching quill and thread.

  “I know naught of any current ill will,” said Bess. From beneath her lowered eyelids, she noticed Mistress Langham twisting the emerald ring she wore. She was no more comfortable with this encounter than Bess. “I do fret, though, for my niece Margery’s contentment.”

  Bess suspected, though, that dismay over the affection between Margery and Bennett was not the ill will Mistress Langham referred to.

  “Squeeze your eyes shut,” Bess said to the servant. “I shall be quick.”

  She thrust the threaded quill through the cut, and the girl cried out. Bess sewed rapidly, a few loose stitches to bind the wound closed but not tightly so. If she sealed the cut completely, it might fester, and she did not wish to return to remove a gangrenous finger from the girl’s hand.

  “There. The worst is over,” Bess said, cutting the thread with a knife retrieved from her satchel and tying a knot.

  The servant girl hiccuped a sob as Bess dressed her cut with the salve, her touch light in order to lessen any further pain.

  “You are gentle, Mistress Ellyott,” said Mistress Langham.

  “My brother would be astonished to hear someone say that of me. He thinks me unruly.”

  Mistress Langham smiled, a dimple forming in her cheek. Bess had only ever seen her from afar. From the distance of a few hand-widths, she was not the severe woman Bess had imagined her to be.

  “Does he, now?” the woman asked. “I would not imagine any would say that of you.”

  Bess set aside her pot of salve and collected a square of linen to loosely wrap over the girl’s cut. “You do not listen to the gossips, then.”

  “Sadly, I do,” she murmured, the smile fading.

  Bess’s treatment finished, Mistress Langham bid her servant leave. The girl departed, her damaged hand braced by her good one.

  “You must wonder why I sent for you, Mistress Ellyott.”

  Resealing the pot of salve, Bess placed it, her clean squares of linen, and her stitching quill within the satchel. They had arrived at the topic they had been avoiding all this time. “Was it not to tend to your servant’s wound?”

  “Not solely, as I believe you realize.” She pressed her hands to her waist, the emerald upon her finger winking in the light. “I took advantage of my servant’s mishap to send for you in particular. I would ask you directly if it was you or your family who set the constable upon us.”

  “I would not dare hurt Margery, which is what would happen if I had.” It was an honest admission that Bess would protect her niece’s heart over following some obligation to the law.

  “Yet you sought to question Bennett about some strange fellow seen hereabouts.”

  “Mistress Langham, I have many questions,” said Bess. “For I have reason to believe Fulke did not kill himself.”

  Mistress Langham went ashen. “No,” she breathed. Her gaze was steady, though, as she stared at Bess. “Do you blame us, then, for his death?”

  “Ought I?”

  “Bennett was here with me. All that day. The weather was foul, and we did not leave the warmth of the hall,” she said, her voice strong. The accusations against her family and her husband’s death had not weakened Mistress Langham. “All of us were at home that day.”

  An alibi for Bennett. Though Bess could not conceive how anyone could be certain of another’s movement within a house this large. ’Twould be easy to slip out one of the many doors and then return, unobserved.

  “It is time I go,” said Bess, lifting her satchel. “By your leave, madam.”

  “You have not answered me.”

  Bess looked into the other woman’s eyes. She searched for guilt but could find none. “I do not blame you.”

  Mistress Langham exhaled. She reached into the embroidered purse hung from her girdle and held out a shilling. “Your pay, Mistress Ellyott.”

  “I do not need your coin, madam.”

  Bess left the shilling in the woman’s outstretched hand and hastened for the front entrance. She was but halfway through the screens passage when she heard rustling near the large staircase in the hall’s corner. A man in plain brown robes sped up the steps. Based upon his thin, almost scrawny, frame and how swiftly he ascended the stairs, he was a young man. A young man who acted eager to not be seen.

  Before Bess could act on her impulse to follow him, Mistress Langham stepped into the passageway. She shot a glance at the stairwell, then at her servant, who had scurried across the hall from a far portal.

  She gestured to the girl to see to the front door. “Good day to you, Mistress Ellyott.”

  Feeling the woman’s gaze on her, Bess left and headed for the road. S
he did not look back to see if she was being watched.

  However, no amount of scrutiny from the occupants of Langham Hall could stop the fresh questions arising in her mind.

  * * *

  Kit strode into the draper’s shop. Amice Stamford looked up from her conversation with a customer and frowned. She returned to the woman at her side, who was fingering a length of blood-red wool.

  A young woman hastened over instead. She was lithe, dressed as brightly as Mistress Stamford, and handsome. He recognized her as one of the Stamford children, but he did not know her name.

  “Good sir, how may I help?” She inspected his attire subtly and critically. As her mother might do.

  “I am not here to purchase cloth,” he said. This shop was a woman’s place, among the rolls of material, the lengths of ribbon and lace in colors and textures that drew the eye. The space was scrupulously clean and tidy. Kit wondered if its appearance reflected Mistress Stamford’s character or her husband’s. “I am here to speak with your father.”

  “He readies for a visit to his weavers in Chippenham,” she said.

  “I insist.”

  She dipped a hasty curtsy and consulted with her mother before scurrying up the stairs visible just beyond the shop’s rear door.

  Mistress Stamford watched him out of the corner of her eye but did not cease attending to her customer, who had moved on to another length of material of a finer weave. And no doubt more expensive.

  Footsteps sounded upon the stairs, and Arthur Stamford entered the shop. He was a tall man, thin to the point of being composed of angles and lines, and had to duck to enter the room. Stamford often dressed to conceal his thinness, and today was no exception. The fellow’s velvet doublet was padded more than was warranted for the needs of warmth.

  “Constable Harwoode?”

  “I would speak to you in private, Master Stamford,” said Kit, nodding toward the man’s wife and daughter. And the customer, whose interest in the shop’s woolens had noticeably waned.

  “I am a busy man. I leave within the hour and need make ready.”

  “Then I shall keep my queries about Fulke Crofton brief.”

  Glowering, Stamford strode out of the shop. He stopped several feet distant from the door. “What of Master Crofton?”

  “I have learned of your dispute with him.”

  “Of what import is our disagreement?”

  “You had learned the night before his death that he intended to go Devizes to go to suit against you,” said Kit. “Witnesses have said you were … irate.”

  He flushed. “As you have spoken with people who are willing to gossip, you must also be aware of Master Crofton’s attempt to cheat me. I was angry that he wished others to believe me at fault. That is all.”

  “The day he died, where were you?” asked Kit.

  “Am I to also be faulted for his desire to take his own life?” asked Stamford. “Preposterous.”

  The customer bustled out of the Stamford’s shop with a paper-wrapped roll of cloth and a pinched look upon her face, as though she might burst if she did not disgorge the tittle-tattle she had collected while buying wool. Beyond the windows, not as hidden in shadows as she believed herself to be, Mistress Stamford spied upon Kit and her husband. Across the way, Marcye at the Cross Keys repeatedly whisked a broom across the threshold stones while she stole glances at them.

  “I have asked a simple question, Master Stamford, and I am certain you have an excellent answer.”

  “It was market day. I was at my shop. Many people saw me there,” he said. “Though I suppose you have heard from the Croftons’ servants that I came to inspect the wool at his warehouse that day.”

  This was news. “You knew he had gone to Devizes. Why would you go to inspect his warehouse at such a time?”

  “To avoid Fulke,” he said. “My weavers complain that the quality has been inferior of late. I will not sell poor cloth in my shop. I would see for myself.”

  “You did not attempt to stop him upon the road, keep him from his mission?” asked Kit. “Perhaps allow a quarrel to get out of hand?”

  “What mean you by such a suggestion? This is absurd! Fulke Crofton killed himself.”

  Kit leaned toward him. “But what if he did not?”

  Stamford blanched. “I will speak to the other burgesses about these questions, Constable. And see you dismissed.”

  He turned on his heel, nearly colliding with the costermonger’s daughter who had wandered too near, and stormed into his shop.

  Kit nodded at the wide-eyed girl and took off for a copse of trees south of town. If the constable had overlooked two lines upon Fulke Crofton’s throat, what else might the fellow have missed?

  * * *

  There was one possible answer to the question of the identity of the man at Langham Hall. An answer that greatly unsettled Bess.

  She trudged homeward, scarcely heeding the dairyman’s boy moving cattle from one meadow to another. Or the farmer and his family spread out across a hedged-in field in the distance. They slowly moved across the furrowed dirt, dipping their hands into sacks slung across their bodies, then casting the seeds of winter wheat upon the ground.

  Certes, she could be wrong about the man she had seen. Bess did not know how many servants the Langhams employed or who might be visiting them. She was permitting Constable Harwoode’s suspicions to taint her judgment.

  But what if the brown-robed fellow was a Jesuit? And what if Fulke had learned of his presence and come to once again believe the worst of the Langhams? Perhaps his journey to Devizes had been not to attend to his lawsuit against Arthur Stamford but to inform the Crown of the Langhams’ new crime, which would have presented a grave danger to them.

  She should also consider the possibility that Fulke had encountered the vagrant, flushing him from wherever he was hiding like a bird in the brambles. He might have killed Fulke in desperation. But she had not noticed bruises upon her brother-in-law other than those around his neck. And why such an elaborate ruse as to counterfeit a suicide, rather than merely leaving Fulke in the nearest ditch?

  Jesu. I know not what to think.

  Bess noticed one of the nearby husbandmen’s daughters, a willow basket in one hand, hurrying along the high road. Aside from the sound of a plowman coaxing his oxen forward to plow over stubble and the chirrup of a swallow, the fields were quiet. Soon the snows would arrive, muffling all in a blanket of white. Bess hoped she would have the answers to her questions by then. If she did not, she might never.

  The girl turned off onto a path between a break in the hedge, leaving Bess to survey the gentle straw-colored swells of the harvested fields, the trees releasing their golden leaves and baring their branches. Her eyes were drawn to the copse where Fulke had been found, as she feared they always would.

  Upon the rise beyond that place stood Highcombe Manor. From here, Bess could not see the narrow lane that led to the front door, concealed as it was by intervening undergrowth. She knew, though, that Sir Walter’s house stood hard by the far edge of the trees. The home of the man who had gained from Fulke’s death so near to the place where that death had occurred.

  A blur of brown caught her eye, moving quickly from the copse to another stand of trees to its west. Before good sense forestalled her, Bess secured her satchel firmly over her shoulder and took off running in the fellow’s direction.

  “You there!” Bess cried out, crashing through the stubble, which poked and jabbed her exposed ankles, tearing at her stockings. She gave a brief thought to Joan’s unhappiness that she would need to mend them again. “Halt!”

  He did not slow but continued to rush along, shoving branches out of his way.

  At the field’s edge, Bess leaped across the shallow ditch that separated it from the roadbed and shouted again, “Halt!”

  This time, the fellow paused and looked over his shoulder. Bess could see by the bend of his shoulders he intended to take off running again.

  “Halt! I would speak t
o you!” she cried.

  To her surprise, he did halt and turned to face her. Bess cautiously approached across the field. She doubted he was the fellow she had just seen at Langham Hall, for he would have had to pass her upon the road in order to arrive at the trees before she did. He also did not appear as tall as that man, and the color of the hair that poked from beneath his cap was redder than that fellow’s.

  “What d’you want?” the fellow … the boy asked, his chin going up.

  When she drew nearer, Bess saw that his was a familiar face. “You are Goodwife Anwicke’s son, are you not?”

  “Who is it wants to know?”

  “I am Widow Ellyott.” She stopped well short of the shadowed thicket where he stood. “I treated your sister’s burn the other day. Do you remember me?”

  He nodded, and his eyes slanted toward the trees behind him. How curious.

  “Do you come to this place often?” she asked, gesturing at the field and the woods, so near the copse.

  “My mother does not mind,” he answered defensively. “I’ve done my work for the day. She’s happy to see me away.”

  “And your father? Is he happy to have you gone from the cottage?” She was curious about the treatment this wandering lad—with his greasy red hair and worn frieze coat, which was too narrow for his shoulders and held closed at his waist with a scrap of thick cord—received. If she searched, might she find burns or bruises upon his body, as she had upon his sister’s?

  He made no reply to her question.

  “I would ask you something. Did you come here the day I treated your sister for the burn she had upon her palm?”

  The boy blinked, once, twice, and shrugged. “May have done. Cannot say for certain.”

  “You must remember the day, though. It cannot be often that a stranger, such as myself, comes to your house,” she said, keen to uncover another witness.

  “I said I cannot remember.”

  “For if you were near these woods that day, you may have seen the fellow who murdered a man. The victim was a merchant in a fine, fur-trimmed green cloak and wearing a tall, be-feathered hat. He was astride a fawn-colored Spanish horse.”