by Mel Starr
“Send your clerk to do so. I am off to the castle to see Lord Gilbert. He wishes to be informed of events in his demesne, and the bishop’s lands, also. This is a curious business, and he will be displeased to learn of it second hand rather than from me.”
I bid the priest “Good day,” even though ’twas not, and hurried to the castle. My route took me past Galen House so I stopped to tell my Kate of the discovery of Peter Mirk. She listened open-mouthed, and understood what the news portended.
“This morning you had but to discover a felon,” she said. “Now you must again discover a victim. You believe the dent in the skull is sure evidence of murder?”
“I am not sure of anything,” I replied.
“You may be sure of me,” Kate smiled.
“A constant in an uncertain world,” I said. “But it is of the bones we planted in the churchyard this morning that I speak. Now I am off to the castle to tell Lord Gilbert of this matter.”
I found my employer in the marshalsea. One of his best dexters had gone lame and Lord Gilbert was bent over Adam Marshall’s shoulder inspecting the beast’s hoof.
Lord Gilbert was, before Lady Petronilla’s death, a genial man, much given to mirth and ready with laughter at the antics of entertainers employed in his hall. Now I seldom saw him smile, and for a year no laughter had creased his bluff face. And it seemed to me his beard had begun to turn gray rapidly.
“I give you good day, Master Hugh,” Lord Gilbert said, rising and placing hands behind his back to relieve the strain of his close inspection of the hoof. “What news this day? Have you learned more of the bones found in the St. John’s Day blaze?”
“I have learned less.”
“Less?” Lord Gilbert raised one eyebrow, which he did when puzzled by some matter. This was an affectation I had once tried to copy, but eventually gave it over. “How is it possible to know less of some matter?”
“Peter Mirk, whose bones I thought were found in the ashes, is this moment laying dead in his house in the Weald.”
“How can this be?”
“Lads of the Weald were frolicking in Shill Brook and found him face down in the water, his corpse lodged under a fallen tree.”
“Then who…?”
“Don’t know,” I shrugged. “We have buried a man unknown to all. Well, known to someone, and to God, but not to any of us of Bampton or the Weald.”
“No man of either place is missing?”
“Nay. Tomorrow I intend to visit Alvescot and speak to Gerard. If he knows of none gone missing I will try other places nearby. Whoever the fellow was he cannot, I think, be of some far place. Who would carry a corpse many miles to see it burnt?”
“The man was dead when placed in the wood pile?”
“So I believe… but I have been wrong about this business once already. I am prepared to be wrong again.”
“You will keep me informed?”
“Aye. ’Tis why I have sought you.”
“You will ferret out the truth of the matter, Hugh. You have always done so.”
With that expression of confidence my employer turned his attention back to his beast. The sun was declining in the west, the day warm and pleasant. I might have taken a palfrey from the castle marshalsea and set off for Alvescot yet this day. Gerard is Lord Gilbert’s verderer. He walks the forest every day, and knows all men and their business who live near the village. But tomorrow, I decided, would be soon enough to seek the man.
I left the castle and paused upon the bridge over Shill Brook, as I often do, to watch the flowing stream and gather my thoughts. ’Twas not a significant collection. The brook and Peter Mirk’s death so captured my mind that I did not hear John Kellet draw near. Of course, the man goes about barefoot in all seasons, so can approach silently.
Kellet is priest at St. Andrew’s Chapel, a short way east of Bampton. He once wished me dead, and for his efforts to cause that end was required to go on pilgrimage. He returned from Compostela a changed man and was sent to Exeter to assist the almoner at St. Nicholas’s Priory. There he was so assiduous in seeking the poor that he nearly impoverished the priory. The prior begged the bishop to be rid of him, and as no curate had been found for such an insignificant parish as that of St. Andrew’s Chapel, he was returned. He is uneducated in the Scriptures, speaks the words of the mass from memory, resides in a tiny room in the tower, and goes without shoes so as to devote more of his meager income to the poor. Three years past he was as fat as a prize sow. Today there is nothing rounded under his cassock. He is all angles and boney protrusions.
“Master Hugh… I give you good day. You are well met.”
I made no reply. If John Kellet was pleased to find me gazing into Shill Brook, who was I to disagree with him?
“I learned this day that bones were found in the ashes of the St. John’s Day fire. ’Tis said they were of a man of the Weald.”
“So it was thought,” I replied. “But I have learned that this is not so. ’Twas thought that Peter Mirk was burned to bones in the blaze. He had gone missing some days past, but this day his corpse was found in Shill Brook. No man knows who we buried this morn in St. Beornwald’s churchyard.”
Kellet was silent for a moment, looked into the stream, then spoke. “There is another man missing.”
“Who?”
“Thomas Attewood.”
“The swineherd?”
“Aye, the same.”
“Does he not reside in the forest with Lord Gilbert’s pigs?”
“Aye, he does. But he always comes to the chapel for mass on Sunday, and yesterday he did not do so.”
“Perhaps some of his charges wandered far and he sought them.”
“Some of them wandered into the tofts of folk who live about St. Andrew’s Chapel. I heard them when I awoke this morning, shouting to drive off the beasts who were rooting about in their tofts. Thomas drives his pigs into a sty each night.”
“He has a hut in the wood where he lives in the summer, does he not? Did you seek him there?”
“I did. He is not there.”
“Perhaps he is pursuing swine who have fled in one direction, and other of his charges took advantage of his absence to seek a meal in the tofts near to the chapel.”
“Perhaps,” the priest said, but I could see that he was unconvinced. “Not like Thomas to be absent from mass.”
“Thomas is a small man, is he not?”
“Aye.”
“Of what age, you think?”
Kellet pursed his lips in thought. “Hard to say. Perhaps thirty years.”
I thought it likely that Thomas Attewood would be discovered gathering his swine, but there were yet several hours of daylight remaining and finding the pig man at his work would eliminate a possible victim of the St. John’s Day fire.
“Show me the man’s hut,” I said.
Kellet led me through Bampton, past his chapel and the cluster of houses gathered about it, thence across a meadow and into the wood. I knew the place well enough. Two years past the priest and I had found a dying chapman’s cart there, and I was yet convinced that somewhere nearby a cache of ancient coins lay buried.
The priest led me several hundred paces into the wood, and so well hidden was the swineherd’s hut and sty that we were upon it before I recognized that the collection of boughs was the habitation of a man and swine.
“Just here,” Kellet said, and walked around the tiny structure to a door made of slender twigs bound together with vines and hinged with the same. The roof was of reeds cut from a nearby marsh and seemed whole enough to shed rain, but ’twould be no place to spend a winter.
“Does Thomas live here year ’round?” I asked.
“Nay. Once pigs is butchered come Martinmas, ’e takes a boar an’ some sows to Lord Gilbert’s barn on the way to Witney.”
I know of the barn, of course, but there are matters regarding Lord Gilbert’s manor of Bampton which I am still learning even though I have been his bailiff for five years. Pigs
are more a reeve’s concern than a bailiff’s.
I peered over the wall of the sty and saw but one pig; a sow with a litter of piglets eyed me suspiciously.
I shouted Thomas’s name. The wood echoed back.
“Tried that,” Kellet said.
I pushed the door of the swineherd’s hut open and entered. Furnishings were few. A crude table and bench, a straw-filled pallet, and a blanket. Upon the table was a wooden bowl and a pewter spoon. There was no chest in which a man might keep possessions. The clothes Thomas owned, he wore.
“Did you seek Thomas in the wood nearby the hut?” I asked.
“Nay. Tried to gather the pigs what was in folk’s tofts an’ bring ’em back here to the sty. They might obey Thomas, but not me. Gave up an’ went to my dinner, then sought you.”
The priest looked about through the long shadows of the sun-dappled wood. “No Thomas, and no pigs around, neither,” he said.
That was true enough. But if Thomas Attewood’s bones now rested in a box under the sod of St. Beornwald’s churchyard there might be some sign of struggle near his hut. If some felon struck him down it seemed to me likely that it would have happened where the swineherd spent his days.
But if some man did murder here in the wood, why move the corpse to the St. John’s Day fire? Why not leave Thomas in the forest, and sweep leaves over the corpse to hide it?
I answered my own question. Because when his swine were seen rooting through folk’s onions and cabbages, angry men would seek Thomas to discover why he had not performed his duty. They would find him dead, for the pigs would have discovered him and chewed at his flesh. They would not devour his skull, and the blow which dented his head would be visible to me if I was called to the discovered remains. I began to think that the missing pig man’s bones might indeed be those found in the ashes. But how to know?
The door to Thomas Attewood’s hut was low, and Kellet and I stooped to pass through it. When again vertical I pointed toward the setting sun and told the priest to circle through the trees and see if he could find any sign of struggle.
“I will go the other way. Look for some place where the forest floor is shredded and the leaves displaced, or mayhap a drop or two of blood.”
“Would not swine cast leaves asunder as they rooted for acorns and such like?” the priest said.
“They might, if any acorns remained from those which fell last year. I have no better suggestion.”
“Very well,” Kellet shrugged, and set off to the west, his shadow growing long where the evening sun penetrated the grove. I turned and walked to the east.
A goldfinch chirped in a branch high above my head and a squirrel scolded me for invading his domain. A forest is a pleasant place on a warm summer evening.
I did not really expect to see evidence of murder, and did not. But Kellet did. Or thought he did. I heard him call my name in an urgent voice, and bid me hasten to him. I did so.
I found him standing over a small pile of offal. Whether these were the guts of man or pig I could not tell. It seemed that leaves had indeed been spread over the entrails, but swine had surely found the viscera and consumed much of the remains.
Were these the entrails of man or beast? I searched carefully for bones, but found none.
John Kellet had stood silent as I gazed down upon the guts. “Was the swineherd slain here, you think?” he finally asked.
“I think not. If ’twas Thomas’s bones found in the ashes, why would his murderers slice open his belly before taking him to be burned in the St. John’s Day blaze?”
“Mayhap some other man’s bones were in the fire,” the priest said.
“Can there be a third man gone missing from Bampton and the Weald?”
Kellet shrugged. “Was a pig butchered here, then?” he said.
“So it seems. See, no bones remain. Even the head is gone. Swine might consume the corpse of one of their dead fellows, but they’d leave a skull behind, surely.”
“Then some man has taken one of Lord Gilbert’s pigs for his table, you think? Perhaps Thomas did so, and has fled to avoid the penalty.”
“Where would a swineherd go?”
“Or a man angry that Thomas allowed pigs to forage in his toft killed one to feed his family.”
I agreed that such might be true. June can be a thin month for the poor. If they had a pig of their own to slaughter in the autumn, its meat was likely consumed by Whitsuntide, and the harvest was yet a month and more away. A man watching his children wail with hunger might take a pig. Would he also slay a swineherd if he was surprised at the business?
“What’ll you do about the pigs?” Kellet asked. “Thomas had near thirty in ’is keepin’, what with piglets born recently. They’ve scattered about the countryside now.”
John Holcutt is reeve to Lord Gilbert’s manor at Bampton. I told the priest that I would instruct John to organize men to seek the missing swine in the morning. A fat sow or boar is worth nearly three shillings. Lord Gilbert would not be pleased to learn of the loss, if the reeve could not recover them.
Was it Thomas Attewood’s bones I had assembled upon my table in the toft? I could not be sure unless I found some evidence that he was dead and not away from his hut for some other reason. I told Kellet that I would return to St. Andrew’s Chapel in the morning with the reeve, to search the wood, and I requested his aid.
We passed the swineherd’s hut as darkness began to obscure the place. The priest thought to call out the missing man’s name once more, and so bellowed “Thomas,” then stopped to listen for any reply. ’Twas well he did so.
Chapter 4
The response was so faint that a footstep in the dry leaves would have muffled the cry. Kellet turned to me with questions in his eyes and furrowed brow, as if unsure that he had heard a human voice. The breeze had died, the forest air was calm. No zephyr rustling through the leaves had made the grove speak, or obscured the sound of a voice.
The priest saw me become alert. I turned to face the direction from which I thought the cry had come.
“You heard it also?” Kellet asked.
“Aye. Had I been alone here I might have thought it my imagination. Two men will not imagine the same fantasy, I think.”
I looked beyond the sty into the darkening wood. “The cry was weak,” I said, “but it seemed to come from the east, toward Aston. If Thomas, or some other man, lies injured in the wood we had best search him out at once. ’Twill be dark soon and we will find no man then.”
In our haste we stumbled over roots and the occasional fallen limb. Of these there were few to impede our progress, for folk had gleaned fallen branches in the autumn to warm themselves through the past winter. When we had travelled perhaps a hundred paces I put a hand upon Kellet’s arm to bring him to a halt, then called out the missing swineherd’s name. The cry echoed through the wood. There was no reply.
“Have we gone the wrong way, you think?” the curate asked.
“We both heard the response come from this direction. If Thomas lies injured somewhere nearby it may be that he is at times insensible. Come. In a few minutes ’twill be too dark to find a man who cannot answer our shouts.”
We plunged on, tripping over unseen snares which clutched at our feet. The way led up a hill, and when we reached the top I shouted Thomas’s name again. The reply was not much more than a whisper in the still air.
But there was now no doubt that we traveled the proper course, and that a man would be found at the conclusion of our journey. We hastened down the eastern side of the hill, and in the gloomy twilight I saw before us a gully perhaps twenty paces across and half as deep as it was wide. I had no wish to scramble into the declivity if it was not necessary, so halted at the top and called out the swineherd’s name again.
It was necessary. A moment after I spoke the name I heard clearly a reply from the dark depths of the gully. “Here… I’m here.”
Kellet looked to me, then scrambled down the slope. I followed. The priest calle
d “Thomas!” once again, and again, close by now, came a reply.
A tiny stream flowed at the bottom of the decline. Thomas told me later that he had been able to reach the rivulet with a cupped hand and so survive. Had he not been able to do so, thirst might have ended his life there in the wood.
Darkness so engulfed the place that I could at first see no reason for the swineherd to be supine and seemingly helpless. Kellet found the cause soon enough.
The priest had gone slipping and sliding ahead of me and so reached Attewood first. When he found the man flat upon the ground he knelt, placed his hands behind Thomas’s shoulders, and attempted to lift the man to a sitting position. The swineherd’s response was a yelp of pain. Kellet backed away, uncertain of what he had done to cause such a cry, and unsure of what to do next.
It was too dark to see what injury or wound had immobilized Attewood. I thought it likely that a broken leg might do so. And the slope was just steep enough that, if he toppled down it, the fall could cause such an injury.
So rather than poke about his body there in the dark, I asked the fellow what hurt he had which brought him to this place.
“Water,” he whispered. “Need water.”
I cupped my hands and lifted some water from the tiny stream to the swineherd’s lips. Kellet saw what I was about and lifted the man’s head, carefully this time, so that he could drink. I brought water to Attewood’s lips three times before he sank back against Kellet’s hand and spoke again.
“’Twas the old boar,” he said.
“What? Did the beast attack you?”
“Aye,” he whispered.
I wished to know the tale and learn from him of his injuries, but a darkening wood was no place to discover either. And the man must not spend another night in such a place with his injuries, whatever they were, untreated.
I instructed John Kellet to return to his chapel and rouse the cotters whose houses clustered about the place. I told him to send one man to Galen House to explain my absence to Kate, and to fetch my sack of instruments and pouches of pounded hemp and lettuce seeds. These the fellow must bring to the chapel and await our return with the swineherd.
