Well, she wouldn’t admit it, certainly not to Emma, but she was thinking about it now. Three days’ riding and it was raw to the bone, so that when the boatmen took her arm and helped her into the hull of the boat at last, she vowed that, all things being equal, she would never ride again. Unlike Rowley, she liked boats; something about the enforced confinement suited her. The luxury of time alone with her own thoughts, with no pressure to do anything, was her idea of bliss.
She took a seat at the back, enjoying the rhythmic push and pull of the boat’s passage through the water, and as she looked out at the willows that dotted the banks was reminded of her very first sight of the Fens.
It was thirty years since she and Mansur had been unceremoniously jolted into the marsh on the back of a mule cart. Having lived among the hills of Salerno all their lives, they had expected to find the flatness of the land repellent, and at first they had. But something strange happened and soon she began to appreciate the wonder of its enormous skies and horizons, the lushness and the herbal treasures that grew there, feeling as if she had landed in an apothecary’s Eden. Most precious among her discoveries was the abundance and variety of its willows: golden willows, white willows, gray willows, goat willows, willows for making bats or growing osiers, bay willows, almond willows, all of them beautiful in the way the sun dappled their branches and more beautiful still because, with a concoction of willow bark, you could relieve pain.
Which was exactly what she had done almost the moment she arrived, employing the anesthetic property of the willow to ease the passage of a reed up Prior Geoffrey’s penis to relieve an enlarged prostate.
She smiled to herself, partly at the memory of a job well done but also remembering the dear old prior, who would always hold a special place in her heart, not only for introducing her to her beloved Gyltha but also because he was probably Ulf’s grandfather.
Probably; she couldn’t say for certain because Ulf’s paternal line was never openly discussed. She simply presumed, as everyone else did, that the young Norman priest—as Prior Geoffrey had been then—and the well-set-up young Fenland woman who kept house for him were more than just employer and employee. Whether they were or not, nobody cared; in those days England’s attitude toward clerical celibacy was tolerant—or slack, depending on your point of view—and Rome hadn’t yet begun to shake its fist at “priests’ wives,” as it did now. But for Adelia, at least, it was enough to know that Ulf came in to existence around that time, before the prior died and Gyltha met Mansur.
The willows, the memories, the motion of the boat, gradually sent her off to sleep, and the next thing she knew they were mooring at Elsford and Lena was shaking her awake.
She climbed out of the boat, surprised not to see anyone there to greet them. Emma had sent outriders ahead to organize their accommodation along the route and to alert Elsford to their arrival, so she had half expected to find Ulf waiting for them at the quay on the Delph. When he wasn’t, she automatically assumed he would pop up when they got to Elsford, but when he wasn’t there, either, she began to worry that something was wrong, a feeling that only increased when they arrived at the manor.
For such a well-fortified building, she thought the gatekeeper seemed unusually lackluster and was surprised when he admitted them without fuss or enthusiasm, and that, apart from the odd glance cast by the servants they met in the courtyard, their passage went unchallenged.
There was an undeniable air of disaffection about the place, and although she didn’t usually hold with the likes of feelings and atmospheres—much too whimsical and unscientific for a woman of her education—she found it hard to shrug off the feeling that there was, in fact, something very badly wrong here.
A feeling that only increased when she climbed the steps to the front door and, before she’d even had a chance to knock, saw it flung open by Allie, of all people, who immediately collapsed, weeping, into her arms.
They sank down onto the step, Adelia cradling Allie’s head in her lap, mouthing silent instructions over the top of it to Lena, who was standing idly in the cold sucking her thumb, apparently happy to freeze to death.
“Oh, my darling,” Adelia murmured when Lena got the message at last and ambled inside. “What on earth is going on?”
Her first concern, the one that had nagged at her all the way from the boat, had been that something had happened to Allie, but now that she was obviously safe, her mind had moved on to its next-worst imagining, that something had happened to Gyltha.
“Is it Gyltha?”
Allie shook her head, saying something garbled that Adelia couldn’t understand, and continued to sob, unleashing a maelstrom of emotion that was almost as much of a surprise to her as it was to Adelia.
At first Allie had been numbed by the shock of Hawise’s disappearance and, in the immediate aftermath, had had too much to do and too many other people to think about to consider her own feelings, but now, in the safety of her mother’s arms, her defenses were crumbling.
“Let’s go inside,” Adelia said, encouraging her gently to her feet. “Tell me all about it in the warm.”
As she stood with her arms wrapped around Allie in the entrance hall, Penda came down the staircase toward them, looking equally stricken.
“Mistress,” she cried with palpable relief, grabbing Adelia by the shoulders and enveloping her in a hug. “And not a moment too soon. Sorry I weren’t there to meet you but somethin’ terrible’s happened.” She released Adelia and glanced anxiously at Allie. “Allie’ll explain,” she added as she dashed through the door.
“And you’re absolutely sure she didn’t just run away, the way you used to when you were cross with me?” Adelia asked when Allie told her about the disappearance.
“No.” Allie shook her head emphatically. “She wasn’t . . . She isn’t like me. Oh, Ma, if only you knew her. She was—is—kind and funny and so happy! She would never just run away . . . She simply wouldn’t! She . . . has . . . been taken. I know she has.”
Adelia, seeing Allie’s lip trembling again, put her arms around her until she had composed herself sufficiently to be able to take her to the solar.
“God be praised!” Gyltha burst into tears when she saw Adelia come in. “Never thought I’d be so pleased to see anyone in me life.”
“Likewise,” said Adelia, sinking into her embrace and holding on to her as though her life depended on it.
When Gyltha eventually let her go, Adelia sniffed, dabbed her eyes and looked around the room, suddenly ashamed of her tears. Judging by the anguished expressions on all the faces in the room, there had been quite an epidemic of them lately.
That evening, when the others retired after supper, Adelia and Allie huddled around the fire in the hall, transcribing Allie’s investigation notes like monks in a scriptorium.
“I’m surprised you haven’t done this before,” Adelia said testily. “Anything could have happened to them. That slate could have been wiped clean for all you knew, and you would have lost all this vital information . . .” Her earlier concern had transmuted into irritation, an emotion she felt more comfortable with.
Allie sighed.
“Well, I’m just telling you,” said Adelia, picking up the piece of vellum they had been working on and backing up to a wall sconce to read in its light. “Now that we’ve got it all written down properly, let’s see where we are, shall we?”
Allie watched her squinting at the page, tilting it this way and that, her mouth moving silently as she absorbed the information and committed it to her formidable memory.
“I’m interested in these wrist marks,” she said, looking up again. “You’re sure they were postmortem?”
Allie nodded. “Well, pretty sure. I couldn’t see any scabbing and the flesh around them had that yellowish tinge to it.”
“Hmmm,” Adelia muttered as she returned to the page. “DV.” She looked up again, this time flapping the parchment against her thigh as though to stimulate her brain. “DV. It means someth
ing, must do, but what? The killer’s initials, perhaps?”
Allie, still sitting at the table, slumped and buried her head in the crook of her arm. “I have no idea,” she said.
“Well, think, woman!” Adelia snapped as she started pacing the room. “It’s no good sitting there all maudlin like that. If we’re going to find Hawise, we’re going to have to come up with something while there’s still time.”
“But I’m beginning to think there isn’t any,” Allie said plaintively. “She’s gone and she’s probably already dead.”
“Allie!” Adelia immediately stopped packing and stamped her foot. “You’re not to talk like that, you mustn’t even think it. Besides, the one thing we do know is that none of these girls were killed immediately. There’s a hiatus, for some reason, between when he takes them and when the bodies are found, but, thanks to your investigation, at least we now know that they were alive in between.”
She lifted the vellum to the light again and pointed at it.
“Yes, you see. Here. According to these notes there was a period of, what, months between Martha’s disappearance and her body being found, and then . . . what . . . several weeks, at least, with the next girl.”
“Two,” said Allie wearily. “Two weeks with the next one.”
“The question is, why?”
Allie decided to get up at last; the fire had gone out, and the cold was almost unbearable. “Perhaps he doesn’t start out with the intention of killing them . . . ,” she said, starting to pace beside Adelia. “Not at first anyway. Perhaps he takes them for some other reason but then, oh, I don’t know, they disappoint him in some way and that’s when he kills them!”
“Good girl,” Adelia said, linking her arm in Allie’s. “Keep thinking and keep walking, it helps.”
“Well,” said Allie, “this might sound strange, and don’t take too much notice of it yet because I’m still working on the theory . . . but perhaps he has some peculiar notion of romance, at least in the beginning anyway, and then . . . Oh I don’t know.” She broke off with a frown.
Besides, they had reached the other end of the hall and were forced to turn around.
“Keep thinking,” said Adelia, giving Allie’s arm an encouraging squeeze. “You might be onto something; after all, some complicated notion of romance might help explain why he leaves their bodies in the river. After all, it would be easier simply to dump them in the marsh or a bog or somewhere like that—plenty of those around, and nobody would ever find them there—but there’s something about a river, isn’t there, when you think about it? Something unsullied about fresh water that might even be construed as romantic, if you were to look at it from the viewpoint of a corrupt mind, that is.”
“Shhh!”
An irritable disembodied voice echoed out of one of the corners of the hall and stopped them in their tracks.
“You two goin’ to be much longer? Some of us is trying to sleep in ’ere, you know,” it said.
“I’m so sorry,” Allie called back, peering into the darkness in an attempt to find the complainant. She had forgotten all about the servants who slept there. “I think we’ve just about finished now anyway,” she added, taking Adelia’s arm and hastening to the door.
Halfway up the stairs Adelia stopped. “You’ve done very well, darling,” she said, “and I don’t want you to think otherwise, but I’m afraid we are going to need more evidence.”
Allie felt a chill running up her spine. Adelia was right; it was exactly what they needed. The trouble, and what terrified her, was that they would find it, but only in the form of Hawise’s dead body.
Chapter 44
Fortunately, the next body to turn up, wrapped loosely in a grubby shroud and left on the graveyard wall, wasn’t Hawise’s.
It belonged, or had done, to an elderly man from the hamlet of Long Willow, about two miles from Elsford, who went to bed one night and didn’t wake up in the morning because he had succumbed to the ague that had been threatening to kill him all winter.
His neighbors, who discovered the body, went immediately to Father Edward, who refused to return with them, wringing his hands and pointing—futilely, as it turned out, since neither one could read—to a notice that had been pinned to the church gate.
“It’s an interdict,” Father Edward tried to explain. “From the bishop of Ely.”
But the neighbors merely looked blankly at it and scratched their heads. “A what?” they asked. They’d never heard of one.
“An interdict,” Father Edward repeated slowly, in case a more careful enunciation would help.
It didn’t, as was apparent from their increasingly blank expressions.
Father Edward ran his hands down his face in despair. Ever since the notice had appeared—only the day before yesterday—he had been dreading this moment: how on earth could he explain the principles of an interdict to his parishioners when he didn’t really understand them himself?
He took a deep breath.
“It means,” he said, speaking in his recently adopted slow and careful manner, which, unbeknownst to him, the neighbors were beginning to find irritating, “that by order of the bishop of Ely”—he broke off and pointed again, this time in the direction of the cathedral—“that, henceforth, I am no longer allowed to celebrate mass or perform the viaticum, or, I fear, offer sepulture in this churchyard . . .”
The neighbors scratched their heads once more.
“Bit late for the viaticum, ain’t it, Father?” one said. “Poor old bugger’s dead. He just needs buryin’. Can’t exactly leave ’im to rot in ’is own bed, now, can we, bor?”
Father Edward groaned. Of course they couldn’t, but what else were they going to do?
“But that’s just it,” he said, a note of hysteria rising at the impasse. “That’s what ‘sepulture’ means, you see; no burial by dint of the bishop of Ely.”
He started backing away, inching imperceptibly over the threshold of his cottage, until, once safely inside, he slammed the door.
He leaned against it, breathing hard. He felt wretched, but what else could he do?
“Go away,” he begged them through the door and gritted teeth. “I can’t help you. I’m very sorry.”
Pressing his ear hard to the door, he listened until he heard their sighs of resignation and their footsteps shuffling away.
They came back though, after dark, trundling the old man’s body in a wheelbarrow to the churchyard, where they laid it carefully on the wall, far away from the predation of foxes but not, they hoped, the eye of God.
Chapter 45
“What do you suppose that is?” Adelia asked Allie, stopping abruptly to point at a grubby-looking bundle lying on the churchyard wall.
They were on their way through the village to see Rosa and Ulf in the unlikely event that they could do anything for them.
“And also,” Adelia had whispered as they were getting ready to leave that morning, “I want you to show me where the second body was found, just in case—”
“In case I missed something, you mean,” Allie had said sharply, interrupting her. “Well I didn’t.”
“No, of course you didn’t, I didn’t mean that.” Adelia had sighed wearily. Allie was so easily riled these days, especially, it seemed, by her. “It’s just that I thought a fresh pair of eyes might see things differently, that’s all.”
Adelia’s response to the prevailing atmosphere of despondency was to meet it with energy. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel for them all, or sympathize to her very core with their suffering. It was simply that she found crises invigorating; rising and responding to them was what she did best. Besides, if Hawise was to be found alive—God willing—it wouldn’t be done mooching about in the solar.
That morning, as she followed Allie down the track to the village, she had been muttering to herself under her breath, ruminating on the little information they had, hoping inspiration might strike as she did so.
“DV . . . ,” she had kept repeatin
g. “DV . . .” Allie was beginning to find it unbearably irritating when, to her relief, Adelia had stopped and asked: “Are there any Davids around here that you know of?”
Allie had thought for a moment but shook her head.
“No. No Davids. There’s a Daniel . . . Daniel Wadlow . . . but that would be a ‘W,’ not a ‘V,’ and those markings were very precise. Besides, I doubt if the person I’m thinking of can read or write.”
“Hmm.” Adelia had continued chuntering for a few more yards until she was distracted by the bundle on the wall.
“Looks like a body,” Allie said, peering at a set of toes poking through one end.
“So it does,” said Adelia. “But what’s it doing there?” She looked around, scanning the vicinity for clues regarding the mystery, until she spotted the notice pinned to the church gate.
She walked over to it.
“Oh, no!” she said when she had read it, clapping her hand over her mouth. “Oh, Allie.” She turned to her, ashen faced.
“What is it?” Allie asked, unable to imagine how such an innocuous-looking piece of parchment could be the cause of such distress.
“Oh, it’s dreadful, darling. That bastard Longchamp’s only gone and passed the interdict he’s been threatening. It means the diocese will be knee-deep in bodies before the winter’s out.”
They looked back at the body and saw that a small crowd had already gathered around it and that Father Edward was scurrying out of the church to see what all the fuss was about.
“Do you suppose we ought to do something?” Allie asked.
Adelia shook her head. “Nothing we can do,” she said. “But it’s a wicked thing. It’s a punishment for the innocent to manipulate the guilty, that’s what it is! It’s just too awful and too unfair for words.”
They sidestepped the crowd and continued on their way to the cottage, only this time with Adelia chuntering about the interdict, the injustice of ecclesiastical politics and the folly of male pride, all of which Allie ignored, until they had almost reached the cottage garth, when she decided to put a stop to it.
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