Death and the Maiden

by Samantha Norman

  Something was most definitely afoot, and she determined there and then that, before she did anything else, even before writing to Rowley, she would get to the bottom of it.

  The problem, though, was: with whom?

  The obvious person was Gyltha, but she could hardly pester her about something as comparatively trivial as this in the midst of all her worry about Hawise, which only left Penda, whom she automatically ruled out for being so obviously in league with Rowley.

  “Thank you,” she said. “But now, if you’ll excuse me, I must . . . well, get on, I suppose.”

  Nodding graciously at them, she swept out of the hall.

  She returned a little later on, disappointed to find that Lord Peverell had left.

  “Bugger!” she said when Allie told her that she had only just missed them. “I wanted to talk to him—” She broke off, irritated by Allie’s blushing again. “Oh, really, Allie, darling, you’re going to have to stop that, you know,” she said. “It could become extremely annoying, it really could.”

  Allie scowled at her. “You’ve been talking to Gyltha!” she snapped. “Behind my back!”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” Adelia replied. “But you might have spared me a great deal of trouble if you’d had the decency to tell me about this young man of yours in the first place. Why do you want to keep secrets from me all the time?”

  When she had left the hall earlier she had rather fortuitously bumped into Jodi and, with a steely guile, persuaded her to divulge enough information to sate her curiosity for the time being.

  “God strike me! There’s nothing to tell!” Allie said. “And, for your information, he’s not ‘my young man’!”

  “Well that’s as may be,” Adelia sniffed, “and we’ll discuss it later when I’ve written to your father, but in the meantime, perhaps you would be good enough to tell me where I could find some of that vellum.”

  “I’ll fetch you some.” Jodi had been lurking in the shadows. Worried that she had inadvertently betrayed a confidence—although she had been so ruthlessly pumped for it that she didn’t have much choice—she had followed Adelia back into the hall and was now withering under Allie’s reproachful gaze. “And you can come, too,” Jodi said, turning sharply to Lena, who was slumped on a stool by the fire sucking her thumb. “It’d be useful, so I can show you where everything is.”

  “I’ll come as well, if I may,” said Allie, whose enthusiasm to escape Adelia for the moment outweighed her irritation with Jodi.

  Jodi led them out of the hall to a doorway Allie hadn’t seen before that opened onto a narrow staircase leading to the bowels of the building and an inhospitably dark tunnel where the light from their lanterns cast eerie shadows along the walls. All the way along, Lena mewled like a scalded kitten and only stopped when they came out into an enormous arched cavern that smelled of tuns of wine, spices and the faint aroma of cats’ pee.

  The size and scale of this subterranean labyrinth was astonishing. If anything, it felt larger even than the house above, and the dark tunnels punctuating the circular wall reminded Allie of sockets in a skull.

  “Where do they lead?” she asked. Even in a whisper her voice echoed and reverberated around the walls, making her afraid it would wake things that were best left unwoken.

  “Nobody knows,” Jodi replied quite matter-of-factly as she picked up some vellum sheaves from a large pile on the floor. “No one in their right mind goes down ’ere ’less they ’ave to.”

  Allie could see why.

  “All I know is that that one,” she added, pointing at a tunnel to their right, “the one what looks like a giant nostril, goes all the way under the house and comes out at a secret door on the river.”

  Allie peered into a darkness as black as death and recoiled, as though from a cliff edge, terrified that some unseen hand might appear to shove her down it.

  “Do you mean a postern?” she asked. “How do you know?”

  Jodi shrugged. “Lady Penda told me. She’s the only one been down that far.”

  “Did she build it?” Allie asked. After all, she knew Penda’s predilection for security.

  “Don’t think so,” Jodi replied. “I think it was already built when Lady Maud give it to ’er. Don’t know if she told you ’ow she come by Elsford Manor but Lady Maud give it to her as a reward for saving her stepson’s life during the Anarchy.”

  Allie nodded. The story was familiar; she had heard fragments of it from Gyltha and Hawise, but only fragments, because as usual, when pressed for details about her sister’s past, she had become conveniently vague.

  “Do you know what happened?” she asked, seizing on any opportunity to learn more. But Jodi shook her head.

  “That’s all I know,” she replied, tucking the vellum sheaves under her arm. “But I think it’s time we was getting back, mistress.” And once again Allie had the distinct impression that she was being denied information deliberately. On the other hand, standing in this hellhole beside Lena, who was mewling again, she wasn’t inclined to pursue it.

  They were halfway back when Lena let out a scream.

  Instinctively Allie put her arm around her.

  “What is it?”

  “I . . . I . . . thought I heard something,” the girl stammered.

  “It’s the wind,” Jodi called back without breaking stride. “Makes strange noises sometimes, which is why most people’s too frit to come down ’ere.”

  Just then a thought occurred to Allie: Supposing it wasn’t the wind? Supposing Lena had heard a voice? Perhaps she was clutching at straws, but in the absence of anything else to clutch at, supposing Hawise had come down here for some reason, tripped and fallen and . . .

  “But, Jodi,” she called out to her.

  Jodi stopped at last and turned around. “No, mistress,” she said gently, as if she had read her mind. “Hawise ain’t here. Lady Penda searched the place—first thing she did when you got back after the search on the marsh. No, wherever she is, God bless ’er, she ain’t ’ere.”

  That night Adelia sat at the table in the solar writing to Rowley.

  She kept her facts and directive simple:

  Hawise was missing, the dreaded interdict had been imposed and, in her opinion, he should drop everything at once and come straight to Elsford.

  She knew there wasn’t much even he could do about Hawise, but his influence—still considerable, after all—might help to get the interdict lifted, and time was of the essence now because, according to Peter when he came back from the village that afternoon, another body had turned up on the churchyard wall.

  Two bodies, in Elsford alone! she wrote. And the numbers will only increase if you don’t do something about it.

  Chapter 48

  In the dark, Hawise started to the sound of footsteps and, as he sat beside her, felt the familiar clench of panic in her belly, along with the griping pains of hunger, but she was getting used to those. As time went on he was less assiduous about bringing her food and she was losing weight, developing pressure sores on her haunches.

  “How many?” he asked.

  She took a breath. “Four,” she replied. “Four so far.”

  Just as she had hoped, the story about the errant knight who killed virgins for pleasure enthralled him, but its success had brought mixed blessings; his hunger for each installment was insatiable and yet her imagination was running dry.

  When she had started, she’d intended only to sacrifice one virgin a day, to eke out the telling for as long as she could, but yesterday, for some reason, she had gotten carried away and squandered two in one evening, for which she was now kicking herself.

  She had to be more careful.

  “Where were we?” she asked, bartering for time, and fancied she could feel him thinking as he cast his mind back to the previous evening.

  “Well,” he said at last, “the knight was heading to the northlands on his milk-white steed . . .”

  “Ah, yes,” said Hawise. “So he was . . . or a
t least, so he will be . . . but first, let’s not forget, he has to garland the girl’s body with cherry blossom and bury it in the orchard in the light of the moon, and we also mustn’t forget that time is running out, because the villagers raised the hue and cry when they found out that the maiden was missing and they are coming for him, getting closer and closer and closer . . .”

  She broke off. She sensed him fidgeting beside her and felt an unaccustomed frisson of impatience go through him, which didn’t augur well; usually he sat as still as a rock.

  “Why does he have to spend so much time on the body?” he asked.

  “Because . . .” Oh, sweet Mary, Mother of God! Why? She could feel her heart quicken, the panic rising again. It didn’t help that, as well as hungry, she was desperately tired.

  For the first few days of her incarceration she had slept like a chained dog, but now the interminable darkness had started to play cruel tricks on her body and her mind, depriving her of sleep.

  “Because it’s God’s will, of course!” she said at last, almost crying with relief when the words came.

  In the ensuing silence she held her breath, anticipating the moment, the one she dreaded and knew was inevitable, when she would feel his hands around her throat again.

  But to her surprise, it didn’t come.

  “Deus vult,” he said brightly.

  “Yes,” Hawise agreed, although to what, exactly, she didn’t know.

  Chapter 49

  The next day Allie kept her promise and took Adelia to the place on the river where they’d discovered the second body.

  By the time they got there, although it was still early, the fishermen had already left for the day, their creels neatly stacked, their boats moored aslant on the shingle so that the area was deserted and Adelia was free to stride up and down thinking aloud with impunity.

  Even so, as she watched her, Allie couldn’t help the occasional glance over her shoulder . . . just in case.

  Perhaps it was the vastness of the overarching sky or the infinite horizons of the Fens, but she always had a strange feeling of conspicuousness out here, as though, wherever she was and whatever she was doing, there were eyes on her. Sometimes it felt pleasantly benign, but at other times, like today, for instance, it didn’t.

  She looked back across the marsh. The appearance of a weak sun was gradually clearing away the early morning mist and something was emerging from it, towers formulating themselves from the northwest as though out of thin air, giving the impression that Ely Cathedral, as it became manifest through the haar, was floating above the ground.

  “Allie.” Adelia’s voice pulled her attention back. “How far from here was the first body found?”

  Holding up the hem of her skirts, which were already damp, Allie picked her way through the marsh and the line of rushes that stretched like sentinels along the bank and made her way down to the water’s edge.

  “According to Ulf, it was just beyond that bend over there,” she said, pointing downstream.

  Adelia pursed her lips in thought, quiet for a moment.

  “Which means,” she said, “that, for convenience, and we assume judging from where they were found anyway, both bodies were dumped in the water at roughly the same point, then the person we are looking for is probably local.”

  Allie thought for a moment, feeling her breath soak uncomfortably into the wool of her scarf, freezing her nose and mouth.

  “Well that’s what we think,” she said, peeling it away to speak more easily. “But don’t forget we’ve only found two bodies so far.”

  They stood in thought for a while until the peace of the air above them was rent by a honking, fluting airborne invasion of wildfowl and a thousand beating wings.

  Adelia scowled at the sky, raising her voice to be heard above the din of the birds. “And yet they were both washed up round about here.”

  Allie nodded.

  “So, in the absence of anything else to go on—and let’s face it, we don’t have very much—let us assume that, because the bodies entered the water somewhere upstream from here, then whoever dumped them comes from somewhere in that direction or has some connection with it at least.”

  Allie looked to the east and the innocent pillars of smoke rising from the cottages in the outlying villages, where, perhaps, a murderer was hiding. The thought made her shiver and pull her mantle tightly around her.

  “What I still don’t understand,” Adelia continued, “and what I think is key to this whole thing, is the hiatus between the abductions and the killings . . . I mean, if he simply intended to rape and murder those girls, why not do it there and then? Why go to all the trouble of abducting them and taking them goodness knows where—and risk being discovered in the process—and then wait to kill them? What we need to think about is why he waits.”

  Allie stood quietly for a moment, watching the rhythmic drag of the water against the shore.

  “Do you remember that theory you told me once?” she said. “That the motive for any murder is almost always love, and that to solve one you first have to work out what the object of that love is? Whether a person, a fortune, power? Do you remember?”

  Adelia nodded.

  “Well, supposing our murderer convinces himself that he loves these girls, at first anyway. Don’t forget that the one thing they have in common is that they are young and beautiful.”

  Adelia nodded again.

  “Well, supposing he sees them, perhaps watches them for a time, and falls in love with them and takes them . . . well, to wherever it is he takes them to . . . only to find that they don’t live up to his expectations somehow, and that’s when he decides to kill them, so that he can move on in his eternal quest for the ideal woman—” She broke off, suddenly self-conscious, aware that Adelia was staring at her. “What?” she asked.

  Adelia smiled and put her arm around her. “Not the fool you look,” she said proudly. “But on the other hand, I suppose, you do have rather a good tutor. So, to recap then, what we’re looking for is a clever, romantic, idealistic murderer?”

  Allie grinned. “And literate. Don’t forget the markings on the second body!”

  “Yes indeed,” said Adelia. “Which might narrow things down a bit.”

  Geoffrey scuttled out of the gatehouse as soon as they appeared on the drawbridge.

  “This come for you, Mistress Allie,” he said, handing her a scroll.

  Allie took it and, having read it, under the watchful gaze of Geoffrey and Adelia, rolled it up and stuffed it into her sleeve.

  “Well?” said Adelia. “What does it say? . . . Although, I have to warn you that if it’s from a certain person and you start all that blushing nonsense again, I shall have to kick you.”

  “It’s an invitation,” said Allie, smiling for the first time in what felt like an age—perhaps for the first time since Hawise’s disappearance—and trying desperately hard not to blush. “For you and me and Penda . . . to a banquet at Dunstan.”

  “Oh.” Adelia raised her eyebrows. “He seems to have an awful lot of banquets, this Lord Peverell. Are they all in your honor?”

  “Of course not!” Allie snapped. “Besides, I thought you wanted to meet him again.”

  “I do! Of course I do. It’s just that, oh, banquets!” Adelia grimaced. “All that food, and dressing up . . . it’s so unutterably dull.”

  “And there’s visitors,” Geoffrey interrupted them.

  “Who?” Adelia spun toward him.

  He shrugged. “Dunno, bor, two gen’lemen’s all I know,” he said. “Not expected neither.”

  The mystery, however, was short-lived. Halfway across the courtyard Adelia spotted a familiar figure leading two horses toward the stable block and started waving frantically.

  “It’s Walt!” she cried, turning to Allie, beaming with delight. “Oh, darling, your father’s here.”

  Chapter 50

  “But how, Rowley? How did you get here so quickly?” Adelia asked him over supper, absentmindedl
y popping yet another piece of chicken from the trencher they were supposed to be sharing into her mouth. “After all, I only just sent the letter.”

  She had been delighted, quite beside herself with joy, when she saw him, but hadn’t told him so. She had always felt it important to maintain an element of mystery, perhaps even opacity, in their relationship, to foster his enthusiasm, which, bless his heart, had never waned. The trouble was that as she got older, she found concealment more difficult as their separations became harder to bear and was reluctant to admit it even to herself.

  “Funnily enough,” Rowley replied, watching in dismay as his food dwindled before his eyes, “I heard about the interdict from Eleanor and decided to come the moment I got back.”

  Nor would he admit to her that he probably would have come anyway, because it wouldn’t hurt her to believe that she wasn’t always his first thought and priority.

  “The question is: what are you going to do about it?” Adelia asked.

  “There’s not much I can do,” he replied, slapping the hand reaching for the plate again. “The only person who can influence the Pope is Eleanor herself. All I can do is report to her.”

  He waited until after supper, when the others retired for the evening, before broaching the subject of Hawise.

  He had noticed how her name had been conspicuously absent from any conversation and that although when he had arrived, Penda and Gyltha had welcomed him with as much enthusiasm as they could muster, even the air around them was so palpably despondent that, while he was anxious to hear news of her, he had been reluctant to raise the subject in case it added to their distress.

  “What about Ulf’s daughter?” he asked when he was sure they were alone and couldn’t be overheard.

  “Hawise,” Allie said sharply. “Her name’s Hawise.”

  “Hawise,” Rowley said, correcting himself. “Well, is there any news?”

  Allie shook her head, fighting back the tears that were never far away whenever Hawise was mentioned.