Season of the Fox (A Servant of the Crown Mystery Book 2)

by Denise Domning

  Watt was squat and short. Although his face was half-concealed by a wild red beard, there was no missing the dislike he felt for his neighbor. The other witnesses all shifted uneasily. Faucon recognized the meaning in their collective movement, having seen it more than once over the past weeks. Those living closest to Garret disliked him and were wondering if they might rid themselves of an irksome neighbor through simple silence or a lie of omission.

  Garret saw the same thing. “Nay!” the weaver shouted. “You won’t do this to me. You have to tell Sir Crowner you heard nothing, because that is the truth. You heard nothing!”

  He took a step toward Faucon, his brows lifted and his arms spread wide in a gesture of innocence. “Sir, they hold their tongues because they don’t like me. They would have heard her cries if I’d touched her last night. They always did. Didn’t Father Herebert always come a-knocking each and every day after we fought, ready to remind me that I must honor my mother even though she had a vicious tongue and rained nothing but complaints down upon my head?”

  “And no doubt your priest also reminded you that Church law doesn’t allow you to beat your family with your fists, only with a stick no wider than your thumb,” Brother Edmund chided under his breath and in his native tongue, his head yet bent over his parchment as he scraped off smeared ink.

  Elsa’s son spoke over the muttered comment. “It’s not my fault that I beat her. She drove me to it, she did. But I never touched her last night. Not last night.” His last words were almost a sob.

  “Did you hear them arguing last night?” Faucon asked directly of his witnesses, shifting into their guttural English. He’d learned the tongue as a babe at his nurse’s breast.

  Once again the assembled folk shifted uneasily, this time glancing between themselves. A woman, one who looked as worn and old as Elsa although far more neatly kept in her faded orange and yellow attire, spoke up.

  “Nay, it is as Garret says. All was quiet in here for a change, thank the Lord. I live right there.” She pointed to the wall behind Garret’s and Elsa’s shared mattress. “The panel between our chambers is no thicker than this.” Now she touched the neatly mended white cloth that covered her grizzled hair and pronounced her at least once married, although her words suggested her life was presently a solitary one. “I heard every word they ever said to each other. There wasn’t so much as a squabble last night.”

  The old woman was right about the thin walls of this structure. Didn’t Faucon’s bones rattle in time to the rhythmic metallic ring of hammer on metal from the next door copper smithy? The pigeons loitering atop the mossy thatch roof above him could have been perched on his shoulders, so audible were their gentle coos. And, although these chambers were a full storey over the lane below, he could hear the squeak of the wheeled cart used by a costermonger hawking ‘best for cider’ apples, which, if Faucon’s guess were correct, meant halfway to rotten. From a distance came the indistinct echoes of a good number of people screaming and shouting.

  “Magda,” hissed the red-bearded man.

  The old woman glanced ruefully at her neighbors. “I cannot lie, not about this, not when I must forever after carry it upon my soul,” she whispered, her tone begging their forgiveness for her forward speech. It was not a woman’s place to give such testimony.

  The tallest of the men, who wore an oft-repaired green tunic sighed. “Nor should you,” he agreed, although his expression suggested he regretted her honesty. He put his arm around the woman next to him, who was nearly as tall as he, then looked at Faucon. “Magda is right. Neither my wife nor I heard anything from them yesterday. We noted it because it was unusual for them not to at least bicker.”

  Faucon expected no other answer, but Elsa’s granddaughter moaned in disappointment. “But he beat her all the time. You can see the bruises. Look at her back! It’s nothing but a great bruise,” she insisted.

  Once again brushing hopefully at his tunic–as if something so simple as a flick of his wrist could actually dislodge any of the fleas that might have found him–Faucon came to his feet. He shook his head to deny her charge. “That is not bruising and well you know it, goodwife,” he told her gently.

  There wasn’t a soul in this world who hadn’t helped wash or wrap a dead kinsman in preparation for burial. If even the smallest children knew such coloring was a natural process that affected all the dead, no matter the cause of their demise, then Ida did as well. He suspected her own guilt was keeping her from admitting it.

  “Your grandmother clearly passed in her sleep. At her age, her death can hardly be considered sudden, nor was it homicide or a death felonious,” he added, using the term that legally described the mortal sin of suicide. “Against that, there is no point in calling for an inquest, not when the only possible verdict is that our Lord’s angels came to bear your grandmother’s soul away with them.”

  “God bless you, sir!” Garret cried, his voice rising almost to falsetto in his relief as he staggered back to collide with his loom. It clattered as it shifted.

  At the same instant, the apple seller in the lane broke off mid-cry to shriek, “Stop, you! Vandal! You’ve broken my cart and spilled my apples!”

  “Grab him, you! Don’t let him pass! Murderer!” another man screamed.

  A third offered a gasping, “Neighbors, stop him, stop Peter, son of Roger! He’s killed Bernart the Linsman!”

  “Stay here!” Faucon commanded of everyone in the room as he thrust through his witnesses in response to the hue and cry.

  Shoving back the leather door flap, he half-leapt, half-clattered down the narrow wooden stairs–hardly more than a short ladder–that led to the coppersmith’s storage room at street level. Yanking open the storeroom door, he shot out into the narrow lane.

  And was instantly swept into a panting, boiling throng of racing townsmen. Like water around a rock, these men, and they were male to a one, surged around the costermonger, who was draped protectively over his toppled apple cart and what remained of his wares.

  Running alongside a butcher in his blood-stained leather apron, Faucon ducked under a house’s low-hanging second storey, which jettied out halfway over the lane. The mob bore left onto another lane, even more narrow than the first. It was coopers and carpenters here, or so said the barrels set out in display and the tools held by the workmen gawking from the wide openings in the streetside walls of their home workshops.

  This lane ended at the steps of an ancient stone church roofed in slate. It was a tiny structure, as was common for sanctuaries of its age, but not forgotten. Its newest parishioners had been generous with their tithes; a half-built square stone tower covered the apse end of their church.

  An elderly priest with a wild mane of silver hair stood upon the raised porch before the metal-bound door to his church. Of medium height but slight in build, in one hand he carried the shepherd’s crook that symbolized his authority to lead his flock. Like Moses before the sea, he spread his arms. Beneath his cloak, the wide sleeves of his cassock trailed down from his arms, looking like angel wings.

  If he meant to forestall the mob from climbing the three steps and entering the church, he succeeded. Men ebbed back from the steps, stumbling into those yet rushing forward. A great roar of frustration filled the air as the hue and cry went this way and that, Faucon among them.

  Some, like he, ended up pressed against the walls of the shops and stalls which lined the square. The youngest among these–apprentices dressed in the overly large tunics and sagging chausses that were the mark of their position, no matter their trade–as well as the most agile men swiftly sought refuge from the press by climbing the sides of the two-storey dwellings to roost like the pigeons on their thatched roofs.

  Faucon braced himself against the edge of the lower horizontal shutter on the coffermaker’s shop window. The dozen or so tiny wooden boxes displayed on it rattled. Then, pressing forward, he put his shoulder to the pair of tanners’ lads who blocked his path. Burly boys both, they reeked of rotten
meat and the oaken acid that turned animal skin into leather.

  They turned on him with snarls and clenched fists. Faucon lifted his chin. His broad brow and long nose wore the stamp of his uncle’s aristocratic family, and his black hair and beard marked him as among those Normans who ruled this country. Then, to be certain the lads completely understood him, he pushed the edge of his mantle over his shoulder so they could see both his weapon and the silver that chased his sword belt and its sheath. Eyes wide, they opened their hands and fell back, knocking into others who growled with equal displeasure. And so it went, man by man, as Faucon pushed his way steadily toward the church.

  “You will give him to us, Father Herebert!” came a commanding bellow from the far end of the crowd, where the lane entered the small square formed by church and shops.

  Faucon craned his neck wondering who was foolish enough to think he could demand compliance from a priest. In this case, the fool was a heavy-set man, albeit tall and handsome. He wore a closely-trimmed brown beard while his hair, the same dark color, fell to his shoulders, as was the present fashion, one that Faucon also followed.

  The leather apron he wore atop his orange tunic said the man was a merchant. while the yellowed blotches where the bright color had been leached from his garment suggested he was a pleykster, the tradesman who bleached linen and newly-spun wool so it might better take on the dyers’ hues. Standing alongside the pleykster were three young men dressed in identical green woolen tunics decorated with the town’s emblem. Each wore a common soldier’s short sword, naming them members of the town guard.

  Yet huffing after the exertion of the chase, the pleykster raised a fist. “We, not you, will hold Peter until our sheriff comes,” he panted out. “You will not keep him from us, not when I need to make him pay for slaughtering the man who was my friend, a man who would soon have been his father-by-marriage!”

  The announcement of such a betrayal made the men in the lane roar anew, even though most must have already known who this Peter was and how he was connected to his victim. The angry sound echoed like thunder in the confined space.

  With the guardsmen to carve a path for him, the big man strode easily through the crowd, reaching the church steps well ahead of Faucon. He mounted the lowest step so that he could be seen by everyone in the square. That brought him almost eye-to-eye with the priest. His fists closed in threat.

  “Now open your door, Father Herebert, and give us Peter, son of Roger the Webber!” the big man demanded of the clergyman.

  “You shall not have him, Hodge,” Father Herebert returned calmly. Well-honed after chanting countless masses, his deep voice carried easily to every corner of the square. He paused to glance across the faces of his parishioners. “Peter now sits in our frith stool. As Church law and our ancient traditions require, I have granted him his forty days of sanctuary.”

  Only a few groans of disappointment rose from the crowd at this. The priest’s announcement was no more than Faucon and any other man here expected. A clergyman’s authority in the matter of sanctuary was absolute, and what had been granted could not be retracted.

  Having vented their rage during the chase, the watching men and boys now settled into an uneasy quiet, their attention on the pleykster as they waited to see what the man might next do. They should have been watching their new crowner.

  Although Faucon was too late–or, more rightly, too early–to take custody of the murderer, forty days left him plenty of time to put his hand about the murderer’s estate. To achieve that, he’d need the cooperation of all these men. This time, when he set his shoulder to the men in front of him, he shouted in his native tongue, “Move aside! Make way for a servant of the crown!”

  Startled, those in front of him did as he commanded, while in every corner of this crowded square men shifted to see the newcomer who spoke the Norman tongue and claimed such an august, if unknown, role. On the porch, Father Herebert lowered his arms and leaned heavily on his crook. Relief softened the old man’s round face as he noted Faucon’s expensive weapon and recognized in it the possibility of a knight’s support, if not rescue.

  As Faucon stopped on the cobbled apron at the base of the church steps, the clergyman, speaking for all of Stanrudde, demanded, “Who comes?”

  “Sir Faucon de Ramis, master of Blacklea Village and newly-elected Coronarius for this shire,” Faucon replied, offering the priest the show of humility due his station.

  From his stance on the lowest step, Hodge the Pleykster studied Faucon with narrowed eyes. Subtle dislike tainted the merchant’s well-made features. Such a reaction was hardly unusual among those who earned their coins by the sweat of their brows. More than a few resented their betters, who dared claim a portion of their profits by right of birth alone. Faucon eyed him in return. The pleykster must have come directly from his pots to join the chase. His tunic was damp and reeked of urine, one of the substances he used in his trade.

  “A servant of the crown, are you?” the priest challenged. “Tell me, sir. How is it that you intend to serve the crown in this instance? Charges of murder belong to our sheriff and matters of sanctuary to our Lord.”

  “That is no longer so,” Faucon started to reply.

  “At the command of Archbishop Hubert Walter. it is no longer the sheriff’s duty to attend to the murdered or call inquests,” came Brother Edmund’s frantic shout from the back of the square. “Sir Faucon, I come! Let me pass! Stand aside, I say. You will let me pass!”

  Despite the command in his voice and the authority of his black habit, the men blocking Edmund’s way didn’t move. Raising an arm to catch his employer’s attention, the clerk jumped. His basket of tools, once more strapped to his back, bounced with him, rising above his tonsured head for a brief instant before falling back between his shoulders.

  Father Herebert frowned as he glanced from the stymied monk to his master. “If it is true that murderers are no longer the concern of Sir Alain, then why do I and these men,” he indicated the townsmen filling in the square, “know nothing of you or your appointment, sir?”

  “The position of Coronarius is new. Command them to let my clerk pass and you will have your answer. Brother Edmund carries with him proof of my right, given to me by Bishop William of Hereford,” Faucon said.

  After confronting this same question at every turn since taking up his duties, Faucon had parted with precious coins to send a man to Bishop William, who was his great-uncle. The uncle’s private clerk, a man who was also one of Faucon’s cousins, had returned the requested proof at the same swift speed.

  When Father Herebert raised his hand in command, the crowd parted for Edmund. The monk pressed his elbows close to his sides, and keeping a hand curled tightly to the strap that held his basket on his back, he lowered his head and drove straight through the press, not caring whom he jostled as he passed.

  Once he stood beside Faucon, he opened the leather scrip hanging from his belt and brought forth a packet wrapped in soft cloth. Folding back the fabric, he held up the parchment that testified Faucon rightfully claimed his special relationship to court and king. That parchment said nothing at all about Faucon’s duties. That wasn’t something that could yet be done, mostly because the archbishop hadn’t specifically named his duties.

  Not that anything scribed on the bit of skin mattered to any man in this crowd. Nay, what convinced them and other folk in this shire that Faucon served those who ruled this land was the large red wax disk that hung by threads sewn to the edge of the parchment. On its face was the imprint of the bishop’s seal.

  Edmund climbed the steps to offer their proof to the priest. Father Herebert took the parchment and wax disk, holding it aloft for all to see. Faucon climbed to stand on the step above the pleykster and faced the men in the square. To a one, they watched him in return.

  “At the Michaelmas court just past, our Archbishop of Canterbury did decree that Sir Alain will no longer keep the pleas of this shire or call your inquest juries,” Faucon told them
, his voice raised to reach every corner. Then he hesitated and drew a bracing breath.

  “Thus, it is now my duty in this shire to investigate all murders and other unnatural deaths, and my responsibility to determine who did the deed so I may confiscate the king’s portion of the wrongdoer’s estate, as the law allows.”

  That wasn’t precisely a lie, but it was a dodge, one that Faucon daily became more adept at offering. Even he thought it far more likely that the archbishop intended his new Coronarii to do no more than make note who died and how they passed, as well as noting any fees or fines to be collected from the wrongdoer. But to Faucon’s way of thinking, if the king wished to profit from the estates of those who committed murder, then someone had to deduce whose property needed to be attached. And in this shire, that someone was going to be him.

  The priest moved his jaw as if he chewed on this information and found it unpalatable. Faucon continued, giving the clergyman no chance to question or pry.

  “If you doubt the proof that we have presented here, call for Abbot Athelard. It is at his behest that I am presently in Stanrudde. He sent for me so I might investigate the death of one of his tenants.”

  “This is true,” Brother Edmund seconded as both he and Faucon retreated down the steps. Having retrieved their precious seal and parchment from the priest, Edmund came to a halt directly beside Faucon rather than slightly behind his master as was proper for a servant. After tucking their proof back into his scrip, he looked up at the priest. “At the command of Archbishop Hubert Walter you must cede all authority in the matter of the linsman’s death to Sir Faucon. He, and only he, will arrest the one who did this deed.”

  As always, Edmund’s natural arrogance ran roughshod over the good he intended. The old priest’s eyes narrowed. He freed a harsh sound.

  “I care nothing for the duties you claim or your authority to claim them, or even the authority of our archbishop in this matter,” he shouted out, announcing his defiance to all who could hear him. “They are matters belonging to the world of Man. I have granted Peter the Webber sanctuary. No one, not you”–he lifted his crook and swept its base forward until he pointed at the three men of the guard who stood on the far side of the steps, “nor you”–the tip now aimed at Hodge the Pleykster–“nor you”–he pointed the crook at Faucon–“has the right to remove him from these walls. Not even the sheriff’s men speaking in our king’s name can do this.”