Leper's Return

by Michael Jecks

  “Come on, Baldwin! Anyone’d think you were nervous!”

  “Most amusing! I was just thinking about this murder, that is all.”

  “Of course, Baldwin. Naturally. But won’t your guests be wondering why their host is lurking out here in the cold as darkness falls?”

  The knight gave him a look of such pained confusion that the bailiff was tempted to suggest he should immediately resaddle his horse and make for the Cornish border. Instead Simon clapped him on the back.

  “Let’s get inside. You look as if you need a good hot mug of wine.”

  “You know I don’t like too much alcohol, Simon.”

  “Remember your lady’s maidservant?”

  “Perhaps tonight could be an exception!”

  At the door, Baldwin steeled himself and crossed over his threshold resolutely. He was about to enter his hall when he heard a strange noise. Frowning, he crossed to the opposite door, and peered out. In the yard, stacking logs with determined stoicism, was Wat.

  “What is that noise for?” Baldwin demanded.

  Wat wiped his eyes, clearing them of tears, and incidentally wiping green muck from the logs all over his face. This was his master, the man he held in the highest esteem. “Sir, I’m sorry.”

  “What is it? What have you done?” demanded the mystified knight. It was odd enough to see young Wat crying, without hearing him apologizing as well. Neither was in character for the tough youngster.

  “It was Chops, sir. I had him with me in the hall like normal, and then this woman walks straight in. I tried to hold him, sir, but I couldn’t, and she hit me so hard, sir…”

  As his voice trailed off into snivels, Baldwin held up his hands helplessly. “Well, I’m sure you couldn’t help it, Wat. Now stop your sniffing and finish tidying up those logs, all right?”

  Leaving his servant, Baldwin wandered back into the screens, where Simon waited, and thence into the hall.

  “We were wondering where you could have got to.”

  It was Margaret, and as Baldwin walked in, she set aside some needlework which she had been using to while away the time, and rose to greet him. The knight nodded edgily, his attention wavering from Margaret even as he welcomed her once more to his home.

  And the source of his unease stood gravely. “Good day again, Sir Baldwin.”

  “I…er. You are most welcome, my lady. I hope my servant has seen to your comfort?”

  “Oh, he has been most attentive. However, I fear my servant is out of temper with your dog!”

  Baldwin threw a glance at Edgar, who stood near the fire, a large jug of wine held in his hands. “Hippocras, Sir Baldwin?”

  The knight blinked. “Er…yes, thank you.” It was many years since his man had bothered to behave so formally with him, even in public. Simon nudged his elbow as if accidentally as he passed, muttering under his breath, “Go on, man!” and he nodded dumbly.

  “Simon, could you come and help me? I need to prepare for our meal,” said Margaret sweetly.

  Jeanne watched them leave the room with a faint smile. “Edgar, I think I would like a little more wine. This tastes a little too watery. Could you fetch me some more?”

  “My lady, of course,” the servant said suavely, and bowed himself from the room.

  Watching him leave from lowered brows, Baldwin was almost jealous. He had been waiting for a year to be alone with Jeanne, and now he was, he was numb with shyness.

  “Er…What did the dog do?”

  “It was nothing,” she said happily. “He gave her a fright, that’s all. It would be different if he had attacked.” Jeanne could see Baldwin’s embarrassment, and was touched by his shyness. “Sir? I am pleased to have come here at last.”

  “You honor me by being here,” he said.

  The stiffness of his words was belied by the pinkness of his cheeks. Jeanne wanted to laugh out loud at his discomfort, but instead asked teasingly, “So have you invited many widows alone to your hall?”

  “No!” he exclaimed hotly, and then gave a shamefaced grin. “Jeanne, you are the very first woman who has been in here with me alone. I have never known Edgar to trust me before.”

  “He appears most trusting today, sir!”

  “Yes. Don’t worry, I am sure it will not last. But tell me, what about you? Is this the first hall in which you have been alone with a dangerous bachelor?”

  “Dangerous? How interesting! But yes. My dear maid only rarely permits me the opportunity to commit an indiscretion.”

  “How kind of her to risk my safety.”

  She laughed then, quietly so as not to attract the attention of their servants or friends. Serious in an instant, she looked him full in the face. “I am sorry I could not come earlier. It feels like more than a year since we last met.”

  “I had hoped you would have been able to come before.”

  “I know. But it was impossible, what with the problems and the harvest.”

  Baldwin nodded. Jeanne de Liddinstone was a tenant of the Abbot of Tavistock, and it was important to her that she should be seen to be no less efficient than any of the others who lived on his lands. She had accepted Baldwin’s offer of a visit early last spring, but since then her estate had suffered from a succession of disasters. Early in the year rain had devastated the young crops, which had then been subject to a freak storm just before harvest, and she had lost her largest barn in a fire. “I hope the good Abbot was able to help you?”

  “Abbot Champeaux has done everything he possibly could,” she said. “He’s sent men and provided me with materials for a new barn. But I did have to stay.”

  “Yes, of course. And the important thing is, you are here now.”

  “I am glad to be.”

  And Baldwin felt quite certain, when he looked into her eyes, that she was in earnest. “Perhaps we could—”

  “Mistress? Mistress, this man has been keeping me from you! I informed him that you’d need me, but he wouldn’t listen.”

  Jeanne turned discreetly, thereby moving herself to a less compromising distance from the knight, who kept the emotion from his face with an effort as Emma lumbered into the room like a belligerent war-horse.

  Baldwin kept his mouth shut with difficulty. At that moment the maid was the epitome of everything he loathed. Because of her, his attempts to get closer to Jeanne had all come to naught. All the endearments he had rehearsed in his mind were wasted. He could not understand how Jeanne could have been so careless as to have associated herself with such a monster. With that in mind, he gave the maidservant a cold glare before turning to Jeanne once more, and it was with a feeling of relief that he saw a similar anger glittering in her eyes.

  As soon as it was dark, he slipped over the low fence into the Coffyns’ back yard. It wasn’t large, not on the same scale as Godfrey’s, and he had to tread warily to ensure he was unobserved. The moon was a gleam of silver behind the fast-moving clouds, and with the freshening breeze he was confident that there was another storm brewing. It suited his purposes to have the weather deteriorate, for it was hardly likely that any sensible man or woman would be out on such a wild night.

  He skirted the garden, keeping to the additional cover offered by the trees and bushes at the boundary, all the time warily watching the house. He could hear voices, and at one point there was the unmistakable sound of a woman sobbing. It made him pause and listen, but he had business of his own, and he shrugged his shoulders and continued on his way.

  The wall was a barrier of darkness in the night, seemingly as insubstantial as a shadow, but his native caution served him well. Before approaching it, he slowly dropped to a crouch, and listened intently. There was nothing to be seen, but he trusted to his instincts, and they screamed out to him to be cautious. Something before him was out of place.

  It was some minutes before he could see it, but then, as the moon was released from its heavenly captivity for a few moments, and the area was lighted by a sudden white glare, he saw a man leaning against a large
tree.

  The guard stood silently, his attention apparently fixed on the wall. It seemed that he was prepared to stay there the whole night, and the crouching figure behind him calculated quickly whether there was another route for him to take, but none sprang into his mind. He was about to turn and go back the way he had come, when the guard shifted. With a soft grunt, he turned away from the wall. There was a quiet trickling.

  Grinning, and hoping that urinating would take all of his concentration, if only for a moment or two, the trespasser hurried to a section of wall some distance away and silently climbed up. Once there, he lay on top a while, peering back the way he had come. The man by the tree gave a little gasp, settled himself, and leaned back to renew his solitary watch.

  Seeing he had noticed nothing, the shadow rolled off the wall into Godfrey’s land. He fell automatically into a crouch, his eyes darting hither and thither, seeking any new dangers, but he could see nothing to cause him alarm, and soon he was stealthily making his way to the window he knew so well. He never saw the second shape drop from the wall behind him and steadfastly follow in his tracks.

  But after the murder he wasn’t so foolish as to walk straight up to it as before. There could be a trap waiting for him. He moved slowly from the wall to a great elm, and paused, then on to a holly a little nearer, then up to the shelter offered by a laurel almost at the hall’s wall, each time waiting, listening, and staring on all sides. The danger here was almost tangible, and he wasn’t prepared to put his life at risk for no reason.

  At last he was content. He edged forward, until he was at the building, and tiptoed to the window. The shutter was closed, the tapestry drawn, and only a dull glimmer of light escaped. He reached up and scratched softly at the wood of the shutter, making a faint rasp as if a mouse were gnawing.

  He had to repeat the signal three times before he heard Cecily call out, “Go and prepare my chamber. And see to it that my bed is properly warmed. I feel frozen to my very marrow.”

  For a few moments there was nothing, but then the corner of the tapestry was lifted, and he could see her sweet face. “Thomas, are you there?”

  11

  The guard almost jumped out of his skin when William dropped lightly from the wall in front of him. He grabbed for his sword and would have swept it out, if William hadn’t snarled quietly, “Leave that block of metal in its seat if you don’t want me to use it to beat some sense into your thick skull.”

  Leaving the astonished guard, William walked pensively back to the hall. He had learned much tonight, and some of it might well be useful in the future, but he wasn’t sure that it was any business of his master, and William had a firm belief in information: when it was useful, it held value. Coffyn had hired William to be the officer of his men and to guard the house, not to be his informer, but he might still be prepared to cough up for something as juicy as this.

  William went through to the private solar and knocked. Coffyn was awake still, his angry, unblinking eyes pouchy and red-rimmed from lack of sleep. As usual, his wife was nowhere to be seen. If William hadn’t heard her weeping earlier, he might have wondered whether she was still alive—but he didn’t believe in speculating on matters like that, not where they affected his master.

  “Well?”

  “Someone’s been trespassing over your land.”

  “What? Who?” Coffyn leaned forward, peering closely, his swollen and bleary eyes screwing up with concentration. He chewed his nails, and William looked away.

  It was ever the way, the guard thought, that men would be fooled by their women into trusting them too much, only to find that they had been deceived. He could only feel sympathy for his master.

  “Tell me! It was the Irishman, wasn’t it?”

  His words were spat out with as much virulence as if they had been a noxious draft, and it gave William a certain perverse pleasure to be able to shake his head. “Oh no, sir. It wasn’t him. It was a leper.”

  “A leper!” Coffyn sank back in his seat, horrified. “A leper,” he breathed.

  Fifteen minutes later William left the solar and made his way to the buttery to fetch a quart of ale. All in all it was shaping up to be a profitable night for him, and he smiled as he poured his drink.

  Baldwin left his hall not long after Jeanne had departed to change from her travelling clothes. For the duration of her visit, Baldwin had given up his own bedchamber. It was the newest room in the place, and seemed to remain the warmest. The other upstairs room, the one at the opposite end of the hall above the buttery, he had allocated to Simon and Margaret. That left the undercroft beneath his bedchamber. It was to this little room that he now repaired, and as he entered, he found his servant sitting on his chest and watching Uther, who, on hearing his master, instantly left his bowl of food to leap at him.

  “Down, you brute! Edgar, how could you—”

  “Yes, Sir Baldwin, I’d think so,” Edgar said quickly, and strode from the room.

  “I…Edgar?” Baldwin felt his mouth fall open at his servant’s behavior, and hared after him. He found Edgar outside in the little plot that Baldwin had optimistically termed his orchard. “Edgar, what in God’s name are you doing, walking away from me when I—”

  In answer, Edgar glanced back at the building. “I could hear almost everything that Lady Jeanne said to her maid in the room above.”

  “But I…” The knight fell silent. Two possibilities were suddenly opened before him: one was that his servant had just saved him from shaming himself by insulting Jeanne’s maid in full hearing of both women, something which, no matter what Jeanne’s private thoughts about Emma, must surely offend her to some extent; the second was that Edgar had, no doubt unintentionally, become privy to Jeanne’s views on her maid as well as, possibly, Baldwin himself.

  “I hope you didn’t try to listen to their conversation. That would be quite shameful,” he said cautiously as Uther appeared at the door and sat down for a scratch.

  “No, sir, I was careful not to listen,” Edgar said.

  His response irrationally irritated Baldwin. He was of a mind to be insulted—not for any failing on Edgar’s part but because of Emma’s interruption of what Baldwin was already thinking of as his first attempt at romance. The fact that Emma had necessarily made it an abortive attempt made the knight want to share out his bitterness. “I should hope so too!” Uther shook himself, sending a small gobbet of drool flying against the wall. “And Uther—how could you have let Emma get to the door first like that? You know Uther is a guard.”

  “I’d have expected Wat to leave Chopsie tied up. I wasn’t to know the dog would be free. Anyway, since then I’ve had the hound locked up in your room.”

  Some women liked dogs, and Baldwin had no reason to think that Jeanne herself didn’t but there was a great difference between a little lapdog and Uther. There was a brash, confident slobbering enthusiasm about him that was entirely lacking in a gentlewoman’s small pet. Some dogs could subtly work their way into a household without being noticed. One moment there was a space in front of the fire, and the next a small mongrel had filled it. It was that way with old Ben, Baldwin’s farm dog. One day there had been space before the fire, the next the little mutt had inveigled his way in, and it was as if he had always been there.

  Uther, on the other hand, was incapable of insinuating himself into a small gap. If there was a small gap, it soon became Uther-sized as he shoved his way through. When Uther was present, it was impossible to miss him. It wasn’t only the fact that a creature weighing over six stones was hard to ignore, nor the smell of three-week-old damp rags that he invariably carried with him wherever he went. No, it lay more in the fact that Uther had about him a variety of canine devotion that was touching to someone who liked dogs, and intensely repulsive to someone who didn’t.

  But Baldwin wasn’t going to admit that in front of his servant. “This is nonsense!” he snapped. “Uther is my dog, and he always stays in the hall. How else can he protect the place? You’ll
give him the run of the hall again immediately.”

  Edgar raised an eyebrow, and opened his mouth as if to argue, but Baldwin held up his hand. “That is my decision. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, Sir Baldwin,” Edgar said again with that irritating servility that felt like condescension. “If that is what you wish, I will see to it.”

  “Good.”

  “But…”

  Baldwin glared. “What?”

  “I was thinking, sir, that it might be best if we kept Uther from the hall while you’re eating. He might unsettle Emma—or Lady Jeanne.”

  It was a sensible suggestion. Baldwin nodded, absently patted the dog on the head, and began to walk back to his new room. “And now fetch me water and a bowl. I need to wash.”

  The meal was not an unqualified success. Edgar remained on his best behavior, which meant he cultivated an air of suave competence, responding to any orders with a distant politeness. His demeanor left Baldwin disgruntled; he would have enjoyed being able to order his man about, to demonstrate he knew how to keep his servant on his toes.

  Jeanne could see that Simon and his wife were more interested in her and their host than their food, and that was enough to make her maintain a calm reserve. It was easier than trying to make polite conversation in which every subject was analyzed for a possible second meaning.

  Yet she was struck with the knight’s property. The house was a great old cob and thatch longhouse, generously proportioned, but Baldwin had made several improvements, according to Simon and his wife. When they had first visited him here, it had been merely a single-storied hall with a small dairy at the back, a buttery and pantry to one side. Now each end contained upper rooms, areas of privacy from the servants and bondsmen who messed and slept in the hall. That was not all, for the new red sandstone block attached to the rear of the house was Baldwin’s new buttery, where all his brewing equipment was stored. It meant that he now regularly had too much ale for his own people and could sell off his excess. The old buttery was still in use, but like the undercroft was used more as a storeroom than a working area.