Death and the Maiden

by Samantha Norman

  When the initial flurry of excitement had died down, the days dragged so murderously that Allie began to wonder whether death by anticipation was a possibility.

  One morning, if only as a distraction, she decided to write to Adelia.

  She had been feeling guilty for not sending news of Gyltha’s recovery and, with little else to do, thought the business of writing a letter might help pass the time.

  Whether she would mention James Peverell or not, she wasn’t sure. Perhaps not quite yet; perhaps it would be better to wait until Christmas, tell her face-to-face. Besides, just at the moment, there wasn’t very much to tell.

  When she finished the letter, she applied the seal and had just risen with a yawn from the desk when the solar door flew open and Ulf, face ashen and breathless, burst in.

  “What is it?” she asked as he pushed past her, his eyes frantically scouring the room for something.

  “We’ll need this!” he said, confusing her even more by snatching up her medicine bag. “Now put on your warmest mantle and follow me, quick as you can . . . Please.”

  She barely had time to wrap the cloak around her before he had hold of her wrist and was pulling her through the door behind him.

  At the head of the stairs he turned to her briefly.

  “I’m sorry, Allie . . . I’ll explain later and you’ll forgive me then,” he said. “But we have to be quick . . .”

  They tore down the staircase and out into the courtyard, where heads turned and tongues tutted as they sprinted past. By the time they got to the gatehouse, Allie was breathless and getting increasingly alarmed.

  She had never seen Ulf in such a panic, nor, come to that, moving so fast, and she couldn’t imagine what could possibly have prompted it. Nevertheless she managed to keep pace with him all the way into the marsh until he made a sudden lurch to the right, taking her down a path so narrow that the bushes on either side snatched at her skirts like wicked fingers and tripped her up.

  “Stop, Ulf! In pity’s name, stop!” she cried out from her hands and knees. “You have to stop!”

  She saw him pull up in the distance and turn back.

  “I’m sorry, Allie, love,” he said, helping her to her feet. “But, the thing is, there’s another body turned up . . . another girl . . . like Martha . . . only this time . . .”

  She nodded. He didn’t have to say any more. She knew what he was asking of her: he had summoned her to examine the girl’s body and determine the cause of her death, which, by necessity, had to be done as quickly and clandestinely as possible. Quickly because, in compliance with common law, he was under pressure to summon the county sheriff to perform his official inquest, and clandestinely to spare Allie the inevitable accusations of witchcraft if she were to be seen defiling a body.

  He helped her put on the boot she had lost when she fell and led her along another path down to the river, where the bowed figure of an old man, dressed from head to toe in moleskin, was standing on the shingle beside what looked, at first, like a bundle of old rags.

  Allie stared at the scene blankly for a moment, trying to conjure the part of herself she had almost forgotten, feeling the gooseflesh rising on her arms as that peculiar but familiar sensation—a mixture of fear and excitement—began to stir inside her.

  Ulf pointed at the old man.

  “Harry the Fish,” he whispered. “The one that found her, poor bugger.”

  Earlier that morning, as he loaded the fishing creels onto his boat, old Harry had heard something bump against the hull, and when he looked over the side saw the sightless white eyes of the dead girl staring back at him from underneath the water.

  When he recovered his wits—although it took a while—he recovered the body, pulling it to the shore and, for decency’s sake, covering it with his sheepskin mantle, and then ran as fast as his eel-skin boots could carry him to fetch Ulf.

  “Nobody else seen ’er, I trust?” Ulf asked when, startled by the sound of their footsteps, Harry spun around.

  The old man shook his head.

  “Good.” Ulf patted his shoulder. “Like I said, fewer that knows about this at the moment, the better.”

  He looked around them furtively but, seeing no one, turned to Allie.

  “You understand why I brought you here . . . in case . . . ?”

  She nodded; she did. He was hoping that, by some miracle, she would be able to find some evidence to reveal the cause of the girl’s death, even though, as they both knew, a body dumped in water would have been washed clean of any long since.

  He turned back to Harry.

  “Thank you,” he said. “You can be on your way now. Mistress Allie’s here to prepare the body.”

  The fiction was a good one. Preparing the dead for burial was a woman’s job. Ulf had explained her presence that morning and preempted further inquiry.

  Harry hesitated a moment, staring hard at Allie, as though deciding whether or not she was fit for the task, and then he made the armor of Christ and set off toward the village.

  As soon as he left, Allie started walking toward the body.

  “Wait,” Ulf said, thrusting an arm out to bar her way until Harry had completely disappeared from view.

  He let her go and watched her make her way over to the body, then turned his back.

  He refused to watch her work, just as he had refused to watch her mother. Despite keeping vigil for Adelia more times than he cared to remember, he had never once allowed himself so much as a glimpse of her while she did whatever it was that she did.

  The very idea of the death investigations made him shiver, not through lack of respect for either them or their expertise—he knew the good that could come of it, had seen that with his own eyes; it was just that he had never been comfortable with the process. Whichever way you looked at it, it was a defilement of sorts, ungodly, unnatural . . . And there had been times, recurrent in his nightmares, when, standing guard over Adelia, he, too, had fancied that he heard the voices of the dead.

  He shivered, the cruelty of the cold, or perhaps it was something else, seeping into his bones, and yet knew that however uncomfortable he was, he would stand there until hell froze if he had to, watching over that girl just as he had her mother.

  Allie knelt beside the body, feeling the damp of the shingle seeping through her skirt to her knees, adding a physical dimension to the nervous chill she already felt.

  She took a deep breath, steadying herself for what she was about to do, then stretched her hand out toward the body . . . and immediately withdrew it.

  Her hand was trembling; she was losing her nerve.

  In the past there had always been Adelia beside her to guide and prompt her through the process of an investigation. But now, for the first time, she was alone, and the sense of accountability was overwhelming.

  She rocked back on her heels, shaking the nerves and cold out of her hands. As she stared out over the river a breeze picked up, shuddering the surface of the water and rocking the boats by the landing stage into a rhythmic percussion, and then, from somewhere, she heard a blackbird sing.

  She let out the long, deep breath she had been holding; something about the infinite beauty of this strange, mysterious landscape had restored her courage.

  Now just get on with it, woman!

  The voice inside her head was her mother’s. She sat up straight, preparing to address the body with the formula Adelia had taught her.

  “Forgive me for what I am about to do. But permit your flesh and bones to tell me what your voice cannot.”

  At last she was ready.

  Chapter 28

  The first thing she noticed when she lifted the makeshift pall was the small act of tenderness Harry had performed by closing the girl’s eyes—that and the fact that she was very young. She was probably around Hawise’s age, fifteen, sixteen at the most; pretty like her, too, and, judging by the little Allie could see of her complexion—under all the weeds and mud the river had smothered her with—the Fenland air,
while she was still able to breathe it, had obviously agreed with her.

  Allie opened her bag, took out an oilcloth apron and stood up again to tie its strings around her waist.

  “Do we know who she is?” she called out to Ulf.

  “No,” he replied without turning around, for which she was grateful. Even in death the girl at her feet seemed so vulnerable that she couldn’t bear eyes on her, not even ones as kind as his.

  Be careful, Allie. It is not our job to pity the dead but to speak for them.

  Adelia’s voice again, reminding her that if she had taught her anything, it was that pity was an encumbrance to an investigation, the enemy of logic, and, if unchecked, would be an impediment. She had to remember the discipline she had learned.

  Never look at a corpse and see the body of a person; see the cadaver of a pig. It takes practice, darling, but you’ll learn. Always pigs, remember. Never people. Not until the job is done. Don’t allow your feelings to cloud your judgment.

  She knelt back down on the shingle, took her slate and a piece of chalk out of her bag and got to work.

  Use your eyes, Allie. See the wider picture first in case you miss something important. Details come later, remember. Now look! And tell me what you see.

  Allie looked.

  The girl was of average height and build and, now that her hair was beginning to dry, looked to be fair in color.

  As far as she could see, there weren’t any flesh wounds, which implied, at this early stage, that the likely cause of death was drowning. But unless she could defile the body by opening the chest and removing a section of one of her lungs—which she could not—it would be impossible to ascertain whether they contained silt and therefore whether the girl had entered the water before or after her death.

  Allie scribbled down a note on her slate, then returned to the body, this time her focus on the girl’s stomach.

  The abdomen is mildly inflated.

  Good! She was beginning to think with the clinical fluency she had learned.

  And there are indications, from a discernible, if mild, marbling of the skin, that the bloat stage of decomposition has begun.

  She made another note.

  However, there is no maceration of the hands or feet and no loosening of the skin, hair or nails, suggesting that the body has been in the water no longer than a day or two at most.

  She made another note, then put the slate aside for a moment to blow some warmth into her numbing hands. When the feeling returned, she started peeling back the thick, sticky fronds of hair that were plastered around the girl’s neck.

  Allie’s fingers worked delicately around the girl’s skull and face, moving methodically to her throat, feeling the gentle yield of muscle and sinew, the taut skin of her thorax, and then something else . . . something she hadn’t expected.

  A less diligent hand, a sheriff’s perhaps, might have missed it; the fracture was slight but, to Allie, unmistakable.

  She leaned closer to the body and saw the faint but unmistakable mark of a thumb-sized bruise on the front of the girl’s neck.

  The evidence was irrefutable: it wasn’t a drowning. A pair of hands had wrapped around her neck, its thumbs pressing hard on her jugular vein, clamping down her trachea without release even as she struggled to take her last breath . . .

  Nor was Allie in any doubt that the girl had struggled. Clearly visible above the bruise was a set of crescent-shaped marks: defensive wounds that her own fingernails had gouged in her skin as she fought for her life.

  Suddenly she could see the girl alive, her face contorted in terror as an assailant—glimpsed in Allie’s vision like a shadow in the fog—throttled her to death.

  “Everything all right, Allie?”

  She spun around, her heart pounding. She had been so absorbed that, for a moment, she had forgotten that she wasn’t alone and that Ulf had been standing guard so patiently all this time.

  “Yes . . . Yes . . . Just one more thing,” she called back when she had caught her breath.

  She finished her examination and made her last note, but as she was lifting the girl’s arms to place them across her chest in a last act of respect, she noticed a tiny set of marks on the inside of one of her wrists: scratches, driftwood abrasions from the river probably, which, judging by the lack of blood or bruising around them, were inflicted postmortem.

  She rubbed her eyes, which were now misty with fatigue, and looked again, only this time she saw they were deliberately carved, two distinct letters etched into the skin.

  “DV.”

  She took up her slate again and made another note, then covered the body with Harry’s mantle and stood up at last.

  “I’m ready,” she said.

  Although Ulf was shocked, he wasn’t surprised when she told him about her findings.

  “It’s the devil’s work,” he said.

  Had she not been so tired she might have argued the point. She didn’t believe in the devil. Her life experience, her medical training, indeed, her mother, had taught her enough about human nature for her to know that it didn’t need supernatural help to perform great wickedness. It was simply that, in certain circumstances and certain people, there was an absence of God, a vacuum of morality.

  “Ulf,” she said, taking the hand he had offered to help her up the bank. “When you saw Martha’s body . . . were there any markings on her wrists?”

  He thought for a moment, then shook his head.

  “Can’t say I noticed any. Like what?”

  “Letters, on the inside of one of her wrists. Like a set of initials or something.”

  “Carved there, d’you mean?”

  “Yes,” she replied. “Not deep but deliberately inscribed: ‘DV’ or something like that.”

  Ulf shook his head again, then, seeing how pale and tired she looked, suddenly took his cloak off and wrapped it around her shoulders.

  Just before they set off she turned back for one last look at the body.

  “I don’t like leaving her there, Ulf,” she said. “Supposing . . . ?”

  “Don’t you worry.” He put his arm around her. “Harry’ll be back with the priest soon and they’ll take her to the church.”

  “But who’s going to bury her?” she asked, reluctant to leave the little heap of rags on the shingle, which seemed to her one of the most pitiful, lonely sights she had ever seen.

  Ulf shrugged. “I don’t know, Allie. We don’t even know who she is,” he said. “We’ll ’ave to wait until somebody claims her.”

  She didn’t know why, but she thought the girl looked as though she had been loved, and she was tormented by the idea of a family’s missing her, then remembered the woman with the haunted face who had nearly crashed into Hawise the other day.

  “Aye,” he said when she mentioned her. “I know the one you mean. We’ll find ’er and hope to God it is her daughter and that she can bury her at last. But, don’t forget, there’s more than one girl missing.”

  They walked on in weary silence for a while.

  “When do you think the sheriff will come?” Allie asked.

  “Oh, don’t you worry ’bout that, either,” Ulf replied. “He’s been sent for and ’e’ll turn up in ’is own good time, idle bastard! But don’t get your hopes up; likely he’ll take a look at the body; find nothing wrong, other than that she’s dead—leastways let’s ’ope ’e gets that right; and then say she drowned. Easier that way, see.”

  Allie nodded. For different reasons, she would have found that easier, too. It would have been so much more palatable to believe that there had been no malice, no cruelty, no human hand involved in this girl’s death, that it was simply a case of terrible bad luck. But the evidence to the contrary was irrefutable.

  Chapter 29

  When they got back to the house they found Gyltha and Penda asleep in front of the fire in the hall. A wolfhound sniffing languidly at their feet, searching for scraps, barked when he saw them, waking Gyltha with a start.

 
; “Noisy bugger!” she grumbled, aiming an idle kick at the animal as it lumbered past. “I’ve a good mind to turn you into a mantle for ’er,” she said, glaring at Penda, who was also beginning to stir. “Ooh,” she said, brightening when she saw Allie and Ulf in the doorway. “Back at last. Come on in then, tell!”

  Gyltha’s omniscience was a source of fascination for Allie. There was almost nothing she didn’t know. No snippet of news or secret ever slipped past her unimbibed, and there were times when Allie suspected that she could even interpret the whisper of a breeze.

  Penda drew up a couple of stools for them by the fire.

  “Sit yourself down, bor,” she said, propelling Allie toward one of them. “You’re lookin’ thrawn, if I may say so.”

  Allie sat, grateful for the warmth and a chance to sit quietly for a moment, even though it didn’t last. Even as she closed her eyes, she could feel the pressure of theirs, ravenous for her information.

  “Murdered then,” Gyltha said when she had told them about the investigation.

  Allie nodded.

  “Poor girl,” murmured Penda, almost to herself. She had been exceptionally quiet during the telling and more stricken by it than the others, as though it held some sort of personal resonance for her, reminding Allie of her long-held suspicion that a great mystery lay in Penda’s past that she had yet to get to the bottom of.

  After that they sat silently, staring into the fire, until Ulf sighed wearily and got up from his stool.

  “Best be gettin’ off, then,” he said, resting his hand on Allie’s shoulder.

  She looked up at him, feeling the tears she had been resisting all day prick the back of her eyes. After everything they had been through recently, she couldn’t bear to see him leave.

  “I have to go, Allie, love,” he said, seeing her distress. “I have to make sure they got her body to the church safely and that the bloody sheriff’s turning up. You understand that, don’t you?”