The Butcher Bird

by S. D. Sykes

  She regarded me for a few moments. ‘Are you sure that’s wise?’

  I felt myself redden. ‘Are you doubting my capabilities, Mistress Bath?’

  ‘No. Of course not.’ I wasn’t convinced. Joan poked a strand of hair back beneath her veil. ‘Barrow did open his wife’s grave, you know.’

  ‘Which only proves his madness.’

  She nodded thoughtfully at this, and then took another long slurp of the beer. ‘I expect you’re right. I can’t see him as a murderer. The man has always been kind enough to me.’ I wondered whether she was implying that John Barrow used to be one of her clients, but decided not to ask. ‘But he has no friends in this village,’ she said. ‘If they can find him, they will kill him.’

  ‘That’s why I’m waiting here to stop them.’

  She laughed into her mug of ale. It made a scornful sound. ‘You didn’t stop them last time. When they burned my son to death.’

  I took a deep breath. ‘I know.’

  She laid a hand upon mine, with fingers that were long and delicate, and nails that were pink and clean. These were not the usual hands of a peasant woman, and did not match the masculinity of her face. ‘At least you tried to stop them.’ She squeezed my hand a little. ‘Nobody else did.’

  I wished she had not said this. I did not want to talk about the burning. I did not even want to think about it. It was the reason I avoided Joan, for her face stoked painful memories – abhorrent recollections that I tried to cast from my mind. Now, as I looked into her eyes, these memories ignited before me like a wall of flames, and would not be extinguished. Suddenly I was running towards the pyre beside the church. I pushed aside the crowd to see a great ox burning upon the fire. The heat was ferocious. There was a stink of burning flesh, and strange noises came from within the neck of the beast. When I asked the gawpers about me to explain what was causing these pitiful wails, they boasted that they had sewn a sinner inside the ox. Alive. They wanted to hear him scream for forgiveness as he burned.

  I can never forget what happened next. For this piece of the story is seared into my mind more deeply than any other. Its scar is still raw and will not heal.

  I dragged the burning ox from the flames and threw water over its singed flesh. I cut open the carcass to release what they had sewn inside. It was a boy called Leofwin. A disfigured outcast who lived in the forest. I cradled his poor scalded body and tried to squeeze the life back into his lungs. But I failed. For he had died. In my arms. A withered thing. A victim of their pitiless ignorance.

  Joan stared into her ale. ‘They called Leofwin a sinner, but he was just an innocent boy. My son. And what was his crime?’ She laughed once more into her ale. Now it was not a scornful sound. Instead it was melancholy. ‘To be born with the wrong face.’

  I took a gulp of my ale. I knew not to dwell on this episode for too long, or the nightmares would start again, waking me in the dark hours with their taunts. They had faded a little in their frequency of late, but they still found me, some nights, and the dream was always the same. I reached the pyre earlier. I was more masterful with the crowd. I pulled the ox more rapidly from the flames. But it didn’t matter how quickly I acted, or how loudly I shouted, for Leofwin always died.

  We sat in silence for a while, and then, just as if we needed a cheering diversion, a butterfly landed upon the table and opened its wings – its red and white markings a flash of colour against the grey of the cottage. ‘It’s early in the year to see a butterfly,’ I remarked, trying to cup it in my hands before it flew away into the gloom of the roof timbers.

  ‘They roost in the eaves over winter. I see them all the time.’

  ‘Better than the flies that used to live here.’

  She smiled at this comment and went to the barrel to bring us more ale. We no longer wanted to speak of Leofwin. Neither of us. ‘So. How is it to be a lord?’ she said as she set the mugs of ale upon the table in front of me. ‘Do you like it?’

  How easy it would have been to grumble about the role I had inherited. Had my true mother not passed me off as a de Lacy, then I would have grown up as a Starvecrow – digging fields and droving sheep. If my de Lacy brothers had not died of the Pestilence, then I would be a Benedictine. A nineteen-year-old boy, devoted to a life of prayer and abstinence.

  ‘You will have problems with the men over wages,’ Joan suddenly announced. ‘I’ve heard them talking about it.’

  I groaned. This was currently a favourite complaint about the village, and I felt no more inclined to discuss the matter with Joan Bath than I did with my reeve – particularly as Featherby brought up the subject at every single one of our meetings. ‘What am I supposed to do?’ I said, ‘Break the law?’

  ‘You could think about it?’

  I frowned at such an idea. ‘I can’t.’ I took another gulp of beer. ‘There have to be rules.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because . . .’ I scratched my head, trying desperately to remember the words of the earl’s steward, Hatcher. A man who regularly pored over my accounts to ensure I was paying my dues. ‘If the labourers are able to demand their own rates of pay, then there will be chaos.’

  Joan raised both eyebrows. ‘But you have only half the men you used to have. The Plague killed the other half. Why should your remaining men not charge more? Especially when you expect them to do twice the work.’

  ‘Because . . .’ I hesitated. In truth, I could not think how to end this sentence.

  Joan gave another of her loud snorts. ‘Well you certainly can’t expect men to work for the same wages as they did in 1346. This is 1351, and the world has changed.’

  ‘Did I ask for your opinion?’

  She whipped my mug away, though I had not finished drinking. ‘No. But I gave it to you anyway.’ She smiled deviously. ‘There’s no charge.’

  Another piece of advice. Another helpful word in my ear. Did everybody believe that I needed to hear their opinions? Was I so young and foolish that I could not make my own decisions? Joan had annoyed me, so I stood up to leave. ‘Good day.’

  I strode with, some irritation towards the door, but as I reached the threshold she quickly ran from her seat and stood in my way. Her face had changed – more fluid and gentle than I had ever seen it. ‘These are dangerous times, Oswald.’Then she took my hand in her own again and pressed it tenderly. ‘You must take care.’

  She only wanted to help me. I can see that now. At the time, however, I didn’t want to listen, for she had pricked at my boyish pride. ‘Where do the Tulleys live?’ I asked her, shaking her hand from mine.

  She stiffened. Her face once again turned to stone. ‘They’re your villeins. You should know that already.’

  She was correct, which only served to needle me further. ‘Just tell me.’

  ‘The Tulleys live in the third cottage in the Long Ditch.’

  As I mounted Tempest, Joan leant against her doorpost and watched me leave. I felt scrutinised. Judged. I quickly turned from her, but as I cantered away, she shouted after me. ‘Don’t expect the Tulleys to welcome your interest in their dead daughter. Thomas Tulley speaks the most loudly against you.’

  Chapter Three

  I headed for St Giles, where a track from the churchyard led along an overgrown hedge towards an area of the village known as the Long Ditch. It was a collection of the poorest buildings on the estate and home to the lowest villeins, since few tenants would choose to rent such inferior plots. Most of these homes were now deserted as their owners, by virtue of living in the close conditions of a rabbit warren, had been easily picked off by the Plague. Many of the dogged survivors had taken the opportunity to move into larger, vacant properties away from the Long Ditch, in return for providing more services on the demesne. But not so Thomas Tulley. He kept to his quarter-virgate of land in a field behind his cottage. At the last manorial court I had been forced to fine him for refusing to plough my fields as is the customary terms of his tenancy. Since the Plague, he had become emboldened to r
egularly speak his mind, urging others to follow him. He demanded an end to those duties he performed for free, and better wages for those duties he was already paid for. He claimed that God did not create bondsmen nor servitude, so there was no justification for the abomination of fealty to a lord.

  That was his actual word. Abomination.

  As I reached the Tulley cottage that day, the unmistakeable sound of a woman crying reached me through the thin wattle and daub of the walls. The sobs were low and resigned – not the expressive wailing and weeping that Mother liked to perform, but still passionate enough to make me rethink my visit here. I did not know how to deal with tears at the best of times, but it was too late to retrace my steps. As I crossed a plank of wood over the ditch, avoiding a pile of night soil that had been newly covered with dusty earth, three small and thin faces looked around the Tulleys’ door and then disappeared back inside the darkness of the cottage to alert their mother to my presence. While I waited for the woman to appear, I looked down into the ditch, noticing that the stagnant water was still sheeted with thin ice.

  Mary Tulley came quickly to the door and curtsied. Her face was as gaunt as a cadaver’s, her eyes red from crying. Her ragged children, three boys, hung at her legs like bats in their roost, digging their hands into her gown until she picked up the youngest child and rested him on her hip. He was a boy with blond curls and the defiant eyes of her husband.

  I lowered my head to the woman, expressed sorrow at her loss, and then asked if her husband were at home.

  ‘No, sire.’The tallest boy pulled a face at me and she chastised him in a whisper. ‘Stop it Robert. This is Lord Somershill.’ The boy hid his face behind the folds of her dress, only to peep around her skirts and stick out his tongue when his mother wasn’t looking.

  Given the circumstances of this interview, I tried to smile at this foolery, though the boy was now opening his mouth so widely to insult me that I could see the lopsided bulge of a swollen quinsy at the back of his throat.

  I looked away. ‘I’m sorry to intrude Mistress Tulley, but I need to ask you some questions. About Catherine.’

  She moved uncomfortably from foot to foot. ‘Could it wait, sire? Until Thomas is home.’

  ‘I only need to confirm the simplest of details.’ I looked over her shoulder. ‘May I come in?’ The cold air was dank in this shaded corner of the village and I was anxious to be inside.

  ‘But my home is so dirty.’

  I pushed past her to enter. ‘It’s no worry to me.’ She followed me inside, moving as one entity with her children still hanging from her body. The youngest was trying to delve inside her gown and fix himself to her breast. When she dropped him to the floor, he squealed like a piglet.

  ‘Please. Nurse the child,’ I said. ‘If it comforts him.’ She looked uneasy, but settled herself upon a bench and bade the older children to stoke up the fire. As with every other cottage on the estate, this was a shaded and small place. The unpleasant smell of dirty swaddling and wood ash filled the room. I wondered that Thomas Tulley did not swallow his pride and move to one of the larger cottages. There were good terms on offer, if not the free status he was demanding.

  I cleared my throat, as the smoke was biting. ‘Can you tell me who found the body of your daughter?’ I asked the woman.

  She took a deep breath. ‘It was a boy who lives nearby. Geoffrey Hayward.’

  ‘When did you last see your baby?’

  She suddenly sobbed. ‘It was yesterday morning, sire. I fed her, put her in her cradle and then left her outside, by the door. A baby needs fresh air.’

  She continued to cry, but I felt it was important to persist. ‘Were you inside the cottage when she disappeared?’

  Mary looked up sharply and wiped a puffy eye. ‘No. We were all needed in the fields to weed. Even young Robert here.’

  ‘Would you usually leave a newborn infant alone? I’ve seen other mothers bind their babies to their backs.’

  My implied criticism was met with a further, even more hostile stare. ‘We were only in your demesne field near the cottage.’ Then she lost her nerve and looked away. ‘I’ve always left my babies at home while I work. I thought she would be safe.’

  ‘You saw nobody come or go to the house?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And how long were you away?’

  ‘As long as it takes to weed one of your fields, sire.’

  I took her meaning well enough. Perhaps there was more than one agitator in this household? ‘Where is Catherine’s body now?’ I said.

  Mary took a deep breath. ‘What do you mean, sire?’

  ‘Has the infant been buried yet?’

  Her bottom lip began to quiver. ‘No.’

  ‘Where is her body then?’

  Mary Tulley dropped the child that she was nursing to the floor, where he sat on the dirty reeds looking wholly appalled at the interruption to his meal. Sensing the boy was about to roar, I took Mary by the arm and led her to the door of the cottage, where a fresh and cold draught of air blew the oily hair from her head, revealing patches of bare skin across her scalp. ‘I would like to see the infant before you bury her,’ I said.

  I could see she was thinking about shaking me off, but didn’t have the nerve. ‘But why, sire? I don’t want Catherine messed about with. She’s with God now.’ As her hot tears steamed in the cool of the air, I found myself guessing the age of this woman – if indeed she was a woman, and not still a girl? She might be not much more than twenty. It was difficult to tell if her blue eyes had ever looked out from a pretty face, as she now seemed as exhausted as a breeding bitch.

  I would tell you I put my arm about her shoulder and allowed her to cry, but time was short and my compassion was neither expected nor welcome. Instead I demanded to see the child’s body with an abrupt voice that was hardly recognisable as my own.

  Mary wrapped her thin cloak about her body and led me towards a small shelter on the fringes of the curtilage. It was bitterly cold now in this shadowy vale and the earth was still hard in the vegetable beds about me. A bank of yellow celandine flowered along the ditch, but other than this shock of colour, the Tulleys’ garden remained a desolate square of turned soil.

  On reaching the shelter, I could see Tulley’s selection of tools. He was also a carpenter – though he might have earned more if he hadn’t wasted so much of his time giving speeches in the taverns of Somershill and Burrsfield, complaining that he was bound to the estate. We entered the shelter and Mary pulled back a rough blanket to reveal a small wooden box upon a bench.

  ‘Thomas made the coffin himself,’ she told me, pulling her hood over her head.

  ‘Is the child inside?’

  She nodded.

  The box had been nailed shut in three places, and I found myself yet again questioning Thomas’s reason. He had used valuable tinned nails, when he might have spared the money to buy his family some bread or better clothes. ‘Pass me your husband’s chisel,’ I said.

  She hesitated, then took the tool from a shelf and handed it over to me with a show of reluctance. ‘Please don’t mark the coffin, sire. Thomas used oak. He’d be angry to see it damaged.’

  As the nails lifted gently and the lid began to loosen, my anticipation gave way to fear. The last time I had looked inside a coffin it had been to find the body of Thomas Starvecrow. On that occasion I had found instead a wooden effigy of the Christ child – a baleful object with blank eyes and pointed edges. This time there would be a real infant – a body that was sure to have begun putrefaction. I held my breath, for there is little in this world to exceed the stink of a decaying human body.

  As the lid came away from the sides, Mary asked my permission to leave the shelter, clasping her hands tightly about her chest and rocking as if she were comforting an invisible baby. At that moment I was tempted to insist that she stay, as I had the sudden wish to study the woman’s reaction to the body. But then I thought better of this scheme. The cadaver was Mary’s daughter, and my idea
was cruel.

  Now alone, I took a deep breath before summoning the courage to look inside the coffin, finding a mass of cloth that had been rolled over and over to create a small mattress for the little girl’s dead body. Putting my hands into the folds and pulling them gently apart I uncovered the baby, so tiny she could have been a corn doll. Thankfully, because of the cool winter air, there was little in the way of an unpleasant odour, only a certain staleness.

  I lifted her limp body from the coffin and laid her upon the bench, next to the tools that her father had used to make her small and eternal chamber. She was naked beneath the swaddling and I could see scratches upon her skin – probably from the barbs of the blackthorn bush where she had been discovered, but nothing so cruel as the gaping punctures that had been described to me.

  Mary called to me from outside. ‘Please don’t disturb poor Catherine, sire. I couldn’t bear it.’

  ‘I’ve nearly finished,’ I told her, in my softest and most reassuring voice. ‘I will not desecrate her in any way.’ In the distance some birds that were roosting in the bare trees made their ugly and rasping call, and suddenly I felt as vile and abhorrent as a carrion crow, jabbing at something dead for its supper.

  I wrapped the baby up again in the cloth, and for the first time in many months I missed my old tutor, Brother Peter. He had been infirmarer at Kintham Abbey and could have inferred more from this wretched little corpse than I was able. But then the longing for him passed. It turned into a shadow, an unwelcome memory, and I put all thoughts of Peter out of my mind. I could only rely upon my own expertise and powers of deduction to investigate this mystery.

  And Catherine’s death was a mystery. There was no obvious cause of death on her body, but as I placed her back into the soft folds of cloth inside the coffin, I noticed an odd smell about the corpse. Lifting her as close to my nose as I felt able, I detected a scent. An odour that was not typical of a dead body, with its usual pungent and foul sweetness. It had a sour taint. Both acid and bitter. Both familiar, but difficult to place. But perhaps the smoking fumes of the Tulleys’ cottage had ruined my sense of smell? Unable to come to any conclusion, I replaced Catherine in her fine cloth with every care I could bestow upon her small body, before turning to see that Mary Tulley was now sitting on the frosty soil with her back to me.