The Butcher Bird

by S. D. Sykes

  As we rode towards Somershill, Mary was full of false bluster, hitting out at every low-hanging branch with her sword, and shouting regularly that she was pleased to have left that bitch Clemence behind at Versey. And no matter how many times I told her to be quiet, she only repeated the insult until I began to wish I had indeed left the sisters in the care of my mother. Rebecca, on the other hand, was withdrawn, this being the furthest she had ever travelled from the castle of her birth. She kept lagging behind us, as if we might change our minds and return to Versey.

  When our small party arrived back at Somershill I passed Tempest’s reins over to Piers and was looking forward to my own feather mattress and a bath – a luxury I had avoided at Versey, as it was Mother’s insistent opinion that sitting for too long in a bathtub of warm water only invited the Devil to soak into your skin.

  On reaching my bedchamber I removed my heavy riding gown, pulled off my leather boots, and flopped onto the woollen blanket across the bed. I was so pleased to be back in my own bed that I reached quickly under the mattress to pull out one of my indecent manuscripts. It was the first time I had been alone for many days and I’m ashamed to say that I needed to purge myself of a certain longing.

  I was in the middle of such a purging when Gilbert blew into the room like a blast of cold air. ‘Sire. I cannot tend to that lunatic you are keeping in the tower any longer,’ he announced.

  I quickly pulled up the sheets. ‘Can’t you knock, Gilbert!’

  The old man pulled a face. ‘Didn’t know you were in bed, sire.’

  ‘I’ve had a long journey. And I’m tired.’

  Gilbert merely raised an eyebrow.

  ‘What do you want?’

  Gilbert cleared his throat as if he were about to make a much-practised speech. ‘Barrow has to go, sire. He dirties himself like a ewe. And he wails like a banshee. All of the day and all of the night. I can hear it all over the house. It’s a good job your mother isn’t at Somershill. Her humours would be stirred up into a soup.’

  I heaved myself wearily onto my elbows, the low sun catching my eyes. ‘What would you have me do, Gilbert? Send Barrow back to the village and wait until they’ve torn him into pieces?’

  He shrugged.

  I flopped back onto the mattress with my hands above my head. ‘Perhaps you would prefer it if they burned him?’

  Gilbert heaved a sigh and then bustled about the room, picking up my riding gown and boots and grumbling into his chest. ‘And it’s not just Barrow, you know. Now it seems I’m to look after those two wayward de Caburn girls as well. As if I didn’t have enough to do.’

  ‘Just hire a maid for them,’ I said. ‘You don’t need to trouble yourself.’

  My suggestion was ignored. ‘And there’s been a village boy hanging around here, at your request apparently. Getting in my way.’

  ‘Which village boy?’

  ‘That Hayward boy.’ He gave one of his scornful laughs. ‘Claims you promised to help him with his reading.’

  ‘I did.’

  He laughed again. ‘What? With one of those books you keep under the mattress?’

  This was one impertinence too far. I swung my tired feet off the bed and stood over him – my frame now seeming larger than his stout and square-shaped body. Was Gilbert getting shorter, or was I getting taller? ‘I’m planning to offer Geoffrey some employment,’ I said sharply. ‘In fact, he could become my new valet.’

  Gilbert reddened a little at my threat, though only a little.

  I relented. ‘Come on, Gilbert. Geoffrey might be of some help to you. And the boy could do with some luck.’

  He pulled another face. ‘It will just be more work for me, sire. I’ll have to waste my time training the boy.’

  I looked him in the eye. ‘You’ll do as you’re instructed.’

  We faced each other for a moment, until Gilbert gave in. ‘Very well.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry to speak so plainly. I won’t do it again.’ He bowed solemnly and went to leave – with my folded cape over his shoulder and my dirty leather boots under his arm. At the door he stopped and turned to speak to me, however. His expression now conciliatory. ‘You’ve got John Barrow, the de Caburn sisters and now this Hayward boy under your care. But you can’t save everybody, sire. That’s all I’m saying.’Then he trudged into the darkness before I had an opportunity to answer.

  I first regretted not listening to Gilbert that very same night, for John Barrow howled from his cell within the north-west tower as loudly as the wicked priests of Baal. If only Elijah himself were here to stop him, for Barrow’s calling was an unpleasant and sporadic noise that woke a person at the very moment of sleep. Right then I wanted the man to leave, but where would he go? I had made a commitment to protect him. A tired mind is neither rational nor sympathetic, so each time Barrow disturbed me with his wailing, I imagined stuffing a length of linen into his mouth and keeping it in place with a firm binding. He made more noise than baby Henry.

  Eventually I placed a bolster over my head to block Barrow’s calling from my ears, though now, when sleep found me, I fell into a bad dream. It was not the burning boy, nor the great ox. Instead I was crawling through a strange forest, where the beard lichen hung in ribbons from the trees. When I looked up, however, it was not lichen, but hair that blocked my path. Human hair – falling from a head hidden amongst the branches above me. I dared not look for this face however, for I knew exactly whose it would be: Catherine Tulley’s.

  I woke with a start. I was sweating and cold. I had neglected my investigation too long.

  With this purpose, the following morning I rode to the village to ask more questions regarding the murder. So far I knew the child had disappeared while her mother, Mary Tulley, had left the cottage to work in the fields. It still seemed slightly odd to me that Mary hadn’t taken the infant with her, as so many other women do, but she already had three children hanging from her skirts, so it was possibly no wonder that she had left her smallest child behind. Deciding to call at the neighbouring cottages along the Long Ditch, I wanted to ask if anybody else had seen anything suspicious on the day of the infant’s disappearance.

  The cottages were lined up along the edge of a narrow waterway, which was full of mud and leaves, as well as the raw sewage that should have been dumped in the woodland, rather than emptied into this gulley right outside these homes. Since the Plague, I had fined people at the manorial court for just flinging their filth into the street, but in truth it had done little to stop the practice, as my argument that foul miasmas would only speed the spread of the contagion did little to convince anybody. Most of the villagers still maintained that the Plague was a punishment from God, and though I wanted to ask them what sort of Father would inflict such cruel punishment upon his own children, I knew such talk would be regarded as blasphemy. So I kept my mouth shut.

  I made for the cottage next door to the Tulleys’, though my presence had already been noticed. The Tulley children had scampered indoors at my crossing of the rickety bridge, to alert their mother, for I soon saw the wan face of Mary Tulley at her door. ‘Did you want to speak to me, sire?’ she asked with a weary curtsy.

  I bowed. ‘No. Thank you, Mistress Tulley. Not today.’ I thought about telling her my purpose, but then decided against it. She didn’t need to know each step of my investigation. The woman looked relieved that she was not about to be questioned a second time, quickly pulling her eldest son into the shadows in the hope that I had not seen the child once again poke his tongue out at me. I should have boxed the child’s ears for such gall, but the scene was so melancholic that his impertinence hardly mattered. There was thatch now missing from the Tilleys’ roof, which I can only assume had been burned on the fire, and the three children were as thin and filthy as city beggars. The smell of boiling cabbage filled the air. Most probably the meal for breakfast, lunch, and supper.

  I felt for a halfpenny in my pocket and held it out to the boy, but he only buried his head into his mother�
��s leg. So, instead I offered it to Mary. ‘Here, Mistress Tulley. Please take this and buy the children a little meat to accompany that cabbage.’

  She held out her hand and then withdrew it. ‘I can’t, sire.’

  ‘Why not?’

  She looked to her feet. ‘Because, Thomas—’ Then she clammed up and tried to shuffle back inside the cottage. ‘I have to go. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Take the halfpenny, Mistress Tulley. Thomas won’t know.’ I held the small silver coin out to her, the relief of King Edward’s head catching the morning light, with the curls of his hair sprouting out from either side of his head like a pair of unravelling scrolls.

  Mary looked over my shoulder in case her husband should jump out from the shadows, and then quickly she seized the coin from my hand. ‘Thank you, sire,’ she said, before firmly shutting the door upon me.

  A strange, but not unpleasant perfume drifted through an open window as I made my way across the muddy gap towards the cottage next door. It was the scent of camphor and rosemary and reminded me perversely of both the almond comfits that I’d eaten at wedding feasts, and the ointment we used at the monastery to dab upon the gums of a brother with toothache. I knocked at the door, which unlike Mary Tulley’s was neatly boarded without any holes for the cold air to creep through. I knew the owner of this cottage – a widow named Agnes Salt – a woman the village often visited in place of a physician. Though, given that the only person in this part of Kent to qualify as a doctor was my old friend Roger de Waart, who could blame them? Especially as Agnes charged little more than the cost of her ingredients.

  There were some, however, who were wary of Agnes and her cures, calling her a meddler and a pest. A woman who should leave the study of medicine to men. Agnes spoke against the teachings of Galen. That was well known. But there were some who said she also spoke against God.

  Agnes opened the door to me, her face red and sweating, and I wasn’t quite sure where to look, for the woman was dressed only in a tight-fitting chemise, with a breast band across her scrawny chest. A pan steamed away on a trivet over the fire, and the heat of the chamber quickly escaped into the street. I would tell you she looked flustered to be opening her door to her lord in nothing but her undergarments, but she simply wiped her brow with a square of linen and curtsied as if this were the most ordinary of occasions. I looked past her to see that the room was completely bare, other than the fire pit, a rolled mattress and a single stool.

  ‘Good morning to you, sire,’ she said, with a smile revealing most of her upper gums. ‘I’m sorry that you find me busy, but I’m brewing this morning’

  Agnes wasn’t known as an ale-wife and the smell that billowed out of the cottage was certainly not that of beer. ‘What are you brewing, Mistress Salt?’

  Her smile waned a little. ‘It is a special kind of ale.’Then she opened her eyes widely and fixed me with such an unnerving gaze that I didn’t feel inclined to enquire any further.

  I looked away and cleared my throat. ‘I would like to ask you some questions regarding the disappearance of Catherine Tulley.’ I then waited for Agnes to invite me into the cottage, but she remained in the doorway, still smiling at me with a set of gums that would shame a horse. After clearing my throat a second time and nodding towards the fire, the woman still did not take my hint, so I had no option but to push past without waiting for an invitation.

  Agnes took the pan from the fire, so that the steam would abate and we might see each other properly. She then disappeared into a dark corner of the room and returned with a mug of mead, which I accepted in the hope it was not flavoured with the same herbs as the special kind of ale that had been heating on the fire. Agnes offered me the stool, before perching on the rolled-up mattress.

  From her position beside me, she stoked the fire and then looked at me expectantly, and for a moment I felt as tongue-tied as a child asked to recite a rhyme at the supper table. Her eyes were large, and whereas I was sure they had been blue when we stood by the door, they suddenly appeared as dark and peculiar as two great blood blisters.

  I shook myself. ‘Mistress Salt.’

  She answered slowly and softly, which only made me feel more heavy-eyed. ‘Yes, sire.’

  I stood up quickly, in the hope of becoming more alert. ‘Please. Take my place on this stool.’

  ‘As you like.’

  She shifted her lithe body onto the stool, and I now made sure to stand behind her, so that she couldn’t look into my eyes. Feeling unsettled, I sipped too eagerly at the mead, but only succeeded in choking myself.

  ‘Are you unwell, sire?’ she asked me.

  I coughed and wiped my running nose upon my sleeve. ‘No. I’m perfectly well.’

  ‘Let me fetch you a posy.’ She went to stand up, but I put my hands upon her shoulders. ‘Stay where you are, please.’ She tensed. Her body as bony as a carcass stripped of meat.

  I released my hands quickly and she remained on the stool. ‘Were you at home the morning baby Catherine was taken?’ I asked her.

  She nodded. ‘I was, sire.’

  ‘Did you see anybody approach the Tulleys’ cottage?’

  ‘I saw only Thomas leaving at dawn, followed by his wife and sons soon after.’

  ‘Did you see Mary Tulley leave her child outside their cottage, before she left?’

  She shrugged. ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘And you didn’t go to the fields yourself?’

  ‘No, sire. I stayed behind all morning.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Brewing ale.’

  I looked over at the pan she had taken from the fire, noting that a dried plant was now floating on its surface. Having been soaked in water, this plant, a summer flower, had taken on something of its previous shape, with a spray of feathery leaves and a cluster of small-headed blooms that might once have been yellow.

  I turned back to Mistress Salt. ‘So you heard or saw nothing that morning?’ I said.

  ‘I heard only the beat of a bird’s wing.’

  An anger welled inside me. ‘What sort of bird?’

  ‘The butcher bird, of course.’

  Now I walked around to look directly upon Agnes’s face, taking my chances. ‘Don’t lie to me.’

  Her chin tilted forwards, obstinately. ‘I’m not.’

  ‘So you would have me believe that a bird took Catherine Tulley from her cradle?’

  She nodded, but the gesture was curious. Ambivalent. ‘It’s certainly true that a butcher bird haunts this parish.’

  ‘It does not.’

  She pulled some of her greasy hair behind her ear. ‘As you say, sire.’ Then she smiled with such a gum-filled grin that I quickly withdrew my gaze to the edge of the room, where my eyes once again fell upon the pan of ale. ‘Is it Tansy in that brew?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s correct,’ she said.

  ‘But there’s another herb in there, I think. I can smell mint, perhaps?’

  Her voice returned to its soft slowness. ‘It’s only pudding grass.’

  I’d never heard of such a plant. ‘It seems a strange combination for flavouring ale,’ I said, nonetheless.

  Agnes stretched a hand towards the pan and stirred the ale with a long pole that moved slowly through the mixture, like a washing bat in a tub of soaking fleeces. ‘As I said before, sire. This is a special brew,’ she told me. ‘I call it dull ale.’

  ‘Dull ale?’

  She nodded and fixed me with her eyes. Now they had returned to a shade of blue. ‘A glass of this brew and you won’t notice that you haven’t eaten for a whole day.’ She leant her head to one side, but did not break her stare. ‘It dulls the appetite.’

  I tried to look away, but it was impossible. ‘I’ve not heard of such a thing,’ I said, but suddenly my words sounded distant, as if they were the voice of another person on the other side of the room.

  Agnes laughed. ‘No. I don’t suppose you have. I doubt there is any call for such ale in your castle.’

 
I suddenly felt faint, with the consuming desire to sit down again upon the stool. Even to flop onto the floor. I bit my teeth into my tongue in the hope some pain would wake me from this stupor, but could not shake myself fully from the trance. Whether Agnes had enchanted me with her eyes, or whether there had been some noxious sedative in the mead, I could not say. And had I not argued so vociferously on so many occasions against the existence of witches, I might have accused this woman of sorcery. But what is sorcery, other than deception? And I had been tricked in some way – of that I am in no doubt.

  ‘Why do you think the poorest people of this village drink my dull ale?’ she asked me. Her face loomed in and out of focus and she did not wait for an answer. ‘Then I’ll tell you. They’re starving, sire. They might have survived the Plague, but what for? Not everybody has profited from this new world. Not everybody has been lucky enough to inherit a larger field, or been able to buy up their dead neighbours’ flock of sheep. What about those people?There’s plenty of them who continue to suffer. Two years of rain. Two bad harvests. It might not matter, if they could earn a decent wage. But instead you insist upon paying them the same as you did five years ago. What good is that? When the price of grain rises daily?’

  ‘It’s not my doing,’ I said. ‘It’s the king’s law.’

  ‘Then break the law.’

  I can t.

  She leant in closer. Her words now undulating like a mother’s song, lulling me to sleep. ‘It would be just a small transgression. Nobody would find out.’

  I felt dazed and unsteady. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Or why not grant your villeins their freedom? So they might find an estate where the lord will pay more.’

  I bit my tongue a second time to stop myself from falling against the wall. ‘What was in your mead, Mistress Salt?’ ‘Nothing, sire. Apart from honey and water.’