The Unquiet Bones hds-1

by Mel Starr

  The fallen assistant came out of his swoon as we rolled Alfred to his back and replaced his bed in the hut. I left instructions with his teary-eyed wife, washed my bloodied hands in what remained of the warm water, and departed the house. I have rarely been so glad of leaving a place.

  “Lord Gilbert would see you before you return to Oxford,” Arthur told me as we walked across the castle yard. It was now past the ninth hour, and gray clouds hung low in the autumn sky. It would be dark before I would see the High Street and Oxford. But when a lord wishes to see me, I usually make time for him.

  We found Lord Gilbert in the solar, sitting with his wife before a small fire. It was a picture of connubial bliss. I hoped to insert myself into a more modest version of such a scene one day, but to that point had made no progress toward the goal.

  “You have done with Alfred, then? Did the surgery go well?” Lord Gilbert asked.

  “I am optimistic. I left him resting without pain. Not much pain, anyway.”

  “Good…good; well done. I have directed a room be prepared for you. It is too late to pack you back to Oxford tonight. We will share a light supper shortly. I will send John for you. John!” he called to his chamberlain. “Show Master Hugh to his chamber.” John did so.

  The room was light and airy, or as airy as a room of stone walls can be. The chamber was off the great hall, and lit by several narrow windows of glass. I had rarely slept behind glass before, so this would be a special experience to me. I lay back gratefully on the bed; John had to thump heavily on the door to wake me two hours later.

  A light supper, Lord Gilbert said.

  There was parsley bread and honey butter, cheese, pea soup, a pike, a duck pie, a capon, cold sliced venison, and a lombardy custard.

  When I had eaten my fill and was rested and satisfied, Lord Gilbert steered the conversation to my profession. I see now what he wanted, but at that moment I had no clue to his direction and so was caught off guard. I had been off guard for most of the meal; Lady Joan was in attendance. She was silent while Lord Gilbert questioned me about medical and surgical practice. But when the conversation lagged, she spoke.

  “Where did you train, Master Hugh?”

  Her joining the conversation so disconcerted me that I nearly choked on the capon leg upon which I was at the time gnawing. “Uh…Paris, m’lady. And Oxford.”

  My conversation with Lady Joan was ended as soon as it began. Lord Gilbert retrieved the end of our parley he had momentarily dropped, and Lady Joan returned to her fish, peeling white flesh from bones with dainty fingers.

  “You are, no doubt, engaged in your profession at Oxford?” he asked. It was a question, not a statement. I might have answered, “yes,” to salve my vanity. Then my vanity might have been intact, but my future laid in ruins. It was not the first or last time I found that uncomfortable honesty was a tree which might bear agreeable fruit.

  “No, Lord Gilbert. I am new to my profession, and new, as a surgeon, to Oxford. My clients are few.”

  “Ah. Well…” I saw him smile, and wondered why my lack of patronage should bring him pleasure. “There would be work for you here, in Bampton. The village has no physician, only a barber who draws blood from the ill. But he has not your skill. A house of mine in the town is empty — several houses, to be truthful.” He frowned. “The recent plague has left many empty dwellings. But the town has yet enough citizens that a surgeon would find himself regularly occupied.”

  Lord Gilbert told me he would show me the house in the morning. I told him I would think on the offer and give him an answer then. Truth is, there was little reason not to accept his offer. Should clients prove few in Bampton, I could move back to Oxford, where I would be no more unemployed then than now. Meanwhile it seemed unlikely I could have less custom in the village than in Oxford. But I did not want my services to seem too easily acquired. Hard won is most relished.

  The house Lord Gilbert showed me in the morning was a substantial dwelling, two stories high, of solid timber construction, wattle and daub. The roof was newly thatched, probably before the tenants perished in the returning plague two years before. It sat among others like it, on Church View, but three doors from St Beornwald’s Churchyard. The site was ideal for one who sought business in his trade. Most of the population would pass the house at least once each week on the way to church.

  Arthur had brought along the key. Lord Gilbert stood back to allow him to twist it in the lock and push open the heavy door. It had been undisturbed for many months, and the hinges squealed in displeasure. Hinges seem to be like many people; unhappy at their lot in life and determined to protest when called to duty.

  Inside, the house was dim and dusty. But I saw the possibilities: my private room on the upper floor, a dispensary and kitchen on the ground floor. There was but one hair in the soup. The rent on such a house would be more than my thin purse could countenance. I explained this frankly to Lord Gilbert

  “I have no income from this house at all now,” he replied. “So I will make you a bargain — four shillings a year, to commence at the beginning of the new year. You will have six months to improve your state before the first rent is due.” We struck the deal with a handshake. I borrowed a horse from the castle marshalsea, rode to Oxford to retrieve my few possessions, and returned to Bampton as night closed on the village.

  John had sent two girls from the castle to clean the dusty place, and I found a coney pie still warm on the table. I was home.

  In the next weeks I treated village inhabitants for sprains and scalds, tumors and broken bones, fevers, cuts, dislocations, swellings and eruptions. My location was propitious for attracting custom. Many town residents had borne afflictions for years with no treatment, and word soon traveled to neighboring villages that a competent surgeon resided in Bampton. I was on my way to prosperity.

  Lord Gilbert suggested another benefit of my situation on Church View Street. My failures had but a short distance to travel to the churchyard. Lord Gilbert has, at times, a ghastly sense of humor.

  I was fortunate that but one patient went to the churchyard in that first month. The woman had suffered a cancerous tumor on her cheek for two years. I excised what I could of it, but the malignancy had traveled to her jaw. She perished on St Crispin’s Day.

  Now you will understand why I was called to the castle to inspect the bones pulled from the sludge of the cesspit. I had more dealings with bones than anyone else in the town. But my expertise in osseous materials seemed hardly necessary. Word of the find spread through Bampton promptly, and all knew these must be the bones of the missing suitor, Sir Robert Mallory, or his squire.

  They were not.

  Chapter 3

  Digging up a cesspit is not work for the squeamish. It is not done often. Some never do it. But Petronilla Talbot is a particular woman. She demanded the removal of sludge every year or two, and Lord Gilbert knew better than to argue the point. Besides, he could direct others to do the job.

  The cesspit had been added to the castle years after its construction was complete. The garderobes were attached to the wall like a giant chimney, with the cesspit at the base of the structure.

  Four villeins were assigned to dig, haul up buckets, and cart off the filth. Uctred was assigned the work of hauling up the bucket when the unfortunate man appointed to work in the pit had filled it. He was then to dump the contents in a waiting cart, and send the bucket back to be refilled. When Uctred dumped a bucket, he saw the bones. The man in the pit had seen nothing. It was too dark where he worked.

  Swine, he thought, until another bucket came up containing the skull. That is when Arthur was sent to bring me to the castle. I had only a few minutes earlier removed a large splinter from the palm of a plowman whose plow shaft had shattered as he turned over a rock. But when Thomas called I was unemployed and so went straight away to see the curious remains recovered from the cesspit.

  I found Lord Gilbert and his reeve, John Holcutt, standing over the small pile of bones. “
Ah, Hugh, see here. What do you make of this? I fear we have found poor Sir Robert.”

  I could see no reason at the moment to disagree with him, but I wondered how a man last seen leaving town on a horse might be discovered in a cesspit. And what of his squire? Might two sets of bones be revealed?

  I knelt to study the skull at my feet and felt a gnawing apprehension that Sir Robert was yet missing. I kept my uncertainty to myself. Each new bucket of sludge generally brought with it more bones. As the pit was emptied, a nearly complete skeleton lay on the cobbles between the castle and the marshalsea. As new bones rose to the light of day I cleaned them, and the putrefying flesh which adhered to some of them, in a tub of water and laid them out. Each new bone justified my first suspicion.

  The bones were mostly free of flesh and gristle. Decomposition was advanced. The jaw was barely affixed to the skull. At the back of the skull a small patch of fair hair clung to decaying scalp.

  “What color hair had Sir Robert?” I asked.

  Lord Gilbert studied the skull as I turned it in my hands. “Very much like that,” he nodded. “A dark blonde, with a flash of red in the sunlight.”

  “How tall was Sir Robert?” I asked.

  “Quite tall. He had two inches on me,” Lord Gilbert replied. That would have made Sir Robert five feet nine or ten inches tall.

  “These are not Sir Robert’s bones,” I told the onlookers. Lord Gilbert’s jaw dropped. “The hair color may suit, but these are the bones of a woman, I think. See how delicate is the skull. And a young woman, a girl, as well. The teeth are not yet beginning to rot, and I see no evidence of wisdom teeth erupting. This is the skeleton of someone barely five feet tall, perhaps less.”

  “But…there are no women or girls missing in Bampton,” Lord Gilbert spluttered.

  “Well, there is a lass missing from somewhere. Perhaps no one knows of it yet. But I assure you, these bones never held Sir Robert aright.”

  Lord Gilbert called Thomas de Bowlegh and Hubert Shillside to the scene. Father Thomas is one of three vicars of the Church of St Beornwald. He spoke the sacrament over the bones in the dying light of a gray autumn day. Hubert Shillside, prosperous freeholder and the town haberdasher, is also the town coroner. He quickly assembled a jury of prominent citizens, inspected the bones in the fading light, and in consultation with his peers pronounced a probable homicide. No deodand could be found, nor could a perpetrator be identified.

  Lord Gilbert made arrangements with Father Thomas to have the bones interred in the churchyard next day. I thought this hasty. A closer inspection in better light might yield some clues to identity, or the cause of death. I approached Lord Gilbert with a request that the bones be transferred to my dispensary for examination next day. They had been unburied for many months — at least, not buried in hallowed ground. One or two more days would matter little. Lord Gilbert’s response took me aback.

  “No! I’ll not deny Christian burial to…to…to whoever has died in my castle.”

  “Did she die in your castle?” I asked.

  “How do I know?” he snapped. “I don’t…we don’t even know who she — it — is, much less where or how she died.”

  His vehemence surprised me. I wondered why he wished the bones out of sight so soon. I confess to a moment of suspicion. “You make my point readily. Study of the bones in good light tomorrow may yield answers to those questions.”

  Petronilla stood silent, listening to our debate. “It seems a small thing, Gilbert, to allow Master Hugh [I never completed my doctor’s degree, so could not properly be called “doctor,” although I was a practicing surgeon] a day or two to learn what he might. It will be of no difference to this soul,” she glanced down at the bones, “and God has waited for her to be buried in consecrated ground. He will not begrudge another day or two.”

  Two against one will generally win the day, even against a knight who fought bravely at Poitiers alongside Edward, the Black Prince.

  Uctred and his companions had by this time completed their malodorous work. Lord Gilbert reluctantly assigned him and another the work of boxing up the bones and conveying them to Galen House, which name I had given my abode in honor of the great physician of antiquity.

  I did not sleep well that night, with a box of bones below me on a table. I tell myself now that my wakefulness was due to curiosity, that trying to sleep over what remained of a corpse was no cause of my insomnia. The truth lies somewhere between, as is often the case.

  Behind Galen House was a small walled toft. The house blocked the rising sun to the east, but the diffused light there was better than the pale beams filtered through the small windows of the house. In the morning I dragged the table, box and all, through the door into the toft and set to my work.

  Many small bones of feet and fingers were missing, Uctred and his fellows being not so thorough as they might have been. But the great bones — arms, legs, ribs, and most of the spine — were accounted for. And the skull. In this better light I could see that fragments of ligament and flesh held the mandible to the skull, and most of the vertebrae were yet connected. How long, I wondered, would it take for all flesh and connective tissue to dissolve? Would this happen slowly or quickly in a cesspit? Instinct told me that decomposition would occur rapidly in such a place, but I cannot verify this assumption. Such observations were not part of the curricula in Paris.

  I assembled the bones, one by one, on the table. I had observed dissections and studied skeletons, so I could compare this human frame with others I had seen. I was more convinced than before that it was female. And young. The bones were small, and light. I visualized a young, delicate girl. Perhaps I romanticized. But I was right. More of that anon.

  Would not the person who did such a murder expect the bones to be found? Perhaps not. Lord Gilbert was unusual in his sanitation habits, and then due mainly to the diligence of his wife. Most nobles, to the gratification of villeins to whom the task would fall, never evacuated their castle cesspits. Human remains in such a place might never be discovered. Bad luck, for someone.

  There was another question. How did this young woman die? I peered at the bones again, all of them, turning them over, one by one, in my hands.

  I nearly missed it — the scratch on the third rib — for traces of flesh and some skin remained on the bone. But I had no doubt of what I saw. A knife had glanced from that rib, and gouged out a fragment of bone as it passed on its way to her heart.

  Who was she? Did she know her attacker? From where did she come to be here, in Bampton? Why should I care, or need to know?

  Because someone was dead. Made in the image of God; a child of His. I felt bile rise from my stomach, and it was not because of the putrid flesh yet attached to the bone I held.

  I walked south on Church View, turned right across Shill Brook, passed the mill, and entered Bampton Castle yard. Wilfred, Lord Gilbert’s porter (he whose horse had spooked in Oxford on the High Street some months before), greeted me at the gatehouse. He’d been promoted. Or perhaps Lord Gilbert thought he worked more effectively on foot.

  “I would see Lord Gilbert. Tell him I have news of the bones.”

  Wilfred was at his post at the gatehouse when the bones were found, so had not seen them as they were brought from the cesspit. But he knew of them. By dawn this day all the town would know. By the morrow Oxford would know — those who care about such things, or have nothing better to speak of.

  Wilfred was a tall man, who could walk quickly without appearing to do so. Moments after he entered the inner gatehouse, he reappeared. “Lord Gilbert will see you,” he puffed, “in the solar. The chamberlain awaits you and will take you there.”

  I told Lord Gilbert what I had learned. “You have no doubt of murder?” he queried.

  “None. She was killed, and put in your cesspit to hide the crime.”

  “Would it not have been easier,” Lord Gilbert wondered aloud, “for her slayer to have buried her in the country hereabouts? There is much uncultivated
land now, since the plague. This place was once called Bampton in the Bush for its wild situation. The bushes are reclaiming what was once theirs, I have so few tenants and villeins to work the land.”

  “I have considered that,” I replied. “Were I the killer, I would seek the easiest, most secure place to dispose of the body. Why would your castle be more convenient, or more secure than, let us say, the nearby forest?”

  Lord Gilbert scratched the stubble on his chin. It was an affectation I had seen before when he was lost in thought. “Perhaps whoever did this evil was more familiar with my castle than with the surrounding country.”

  “Perhaps,” I agreed.

  “Or,” he scratched again, “she was killed here and to remove the body would risk discovery.”

  “Do folk enter the castle grounds without someone, Wilfred or Arthur or John, or you, knowing of it?” I asked.

  “No. Except, perhaps, at market time. The town is overrun at the Feast of the Assumption. We sometimes find folk wandering through the gate, usually so drunk they think themselves at the inn. And, of course, some poor reside in the forecourt huts.”

  “But such as these,” I asked, “do not pass the inner gate?”

  “Not any more! Wilfred is scrupulous about his duties, as well he might be. He fears yet I will put him in the fields for his defective horsemanship.” Lord Gilbert chuckled: “Wilfred will be a loyal servant for all that.”

  “So if she was killed inside the castle, the deed was done by someone who did not arouse suspicion for being here.”

  “I do not like to think of that,” Lord Gilbert admitted. “I fear she was done to death in my castle.”

  “I agree.”

  We remained silent with our thoughts for a moment, then Lord Gilbert put voice to my reflection.

  “She was smuggled in, then?”

  “Aye. But could that happen if she was unwilling?”