Death and the Maiden

by Samantha Norman

  “‘Lie there, lie there, you false-hearted man. / Lie there instead of me, / For six pretty maids thou hast drowned. / But the seventh hath drowned thee.’”

  She was helpless with laughter and still singing even when he put his hands around her throat and began to squeeze.

  “No trickery . . . ,” he hissed, spitting fury, his grip tightening inexorably. “You promised.”

  “So I did,” Hawise said on what she had to assume was her last breath. “But I lied.”

  Chapter 57

  The tunnel leading to the postern was even less navigable than the one before, the cobwebs thicker, the walls narrower, the ceiling low and becoming lower the further they went, so that by the time they could see the faint chink of moonlight in the distance they were almost bent double.

  Allie stopped dead, cursing bitterly under her breath.

  “What is it?” Danny asked as he narrowly avoided crashing into her.

  “It’s a bloody door!” she said, tears of frustration pricking her eyes.

  She was such a fool! She had been so proud of herself for remembering the postern in the first place that she hadn’t thought beyond it, but of course there would be a door. It had been built during the Anarchy as an escape route. There was bound to be a door . . . and a lock!

  She was peeling a damp cobweb out of her eyelashes, wondering what on earth to do next, when Danny barged past her and disappeared.

  She was about to call him back, take him back to the cavern to think up another plan, when she heard him shouting:

  “Come! It’s rotten. Look, I can kick it down.”

  The door gave almost no resistance; a couple of hefty kicks later and they were gratefully sucking down lungfuls of fresh air in a copse by the river.

  “Now where?” Allie asked, blinking in the moonlight.

  “This way.” Danny set off apace, leading her down a towpath for what felt like miles until he stopped at a landing stage where a coracle was moored. “Get in,” he said, pushing her toward the boat.

  She was reluctant at first; even in the dark it was apparent that the tiny vessel had seen better days. But then she remembered Hawise and climbed in without a fuss.

  She was about to sit on a plank that served as a bench in the middle of the coracle when Danny stopped her.

  “Not there,” he growled, lifting the corner of what looked like an old winnowing sheet that was lying in the bottom and, to her horror, indicating that she should get underneath it. When she hesitated, he glared at her.

  “I told you there were rules,” he said with an expression of implacable hostility. “From here on in you do as I say. Or I’ll throw you in the water.” A moment later she found herself lying in a cold, shallow pool of water at the bottom of the boat that smelled strongly of dead fish.

  Just before he took up his oars, Danny lifted the sheet and peered at her.

  “From here on in you say nothin’ and you see nothin’,” he said, taking an axe from underneath the bench and waving it in her face. “I see that head o’ yours pokin’ out o’ there even once an’ I’ll cut it off. Understand?”

  Allie nodded, pulling the sheet back over her head.

  Chapter 58

  The moment of her death wasn’t turning out quite the way Hawise had expected; on the other hand, ever since her world had turned upside down, all those however many weeks ago it was, nothing had.

  What she had expected, or rather, what she had hoped, was that, having confounded him with the climax of her story, she would have a moment to savor her victory—however Pyrrhic it turned out to be—before he killed her quickly. Allie’s description of the body she had examined had stayed with her, particularly the fact that, apart from the strangulation marks on the girl’s neck, it was otherwise unblemished, with no suggestion of any further violence, so she had rather assumed that her own death would be equally swift and bloodless. What she hadn’t bargained for was the power of his rage at the cuckolding, or, indeed, that he would rape her—Allie had spared her that detail—and that instead of strangling her, he would lose control to such an extent that he would try beating her to death instead.

  How strange, she thought, as she lay at his feet, convulsing with the blows that rained down on her, how much she resented the pain; not the physical agony of it per se—although it was dreadful—but its constant reminder to her that she wasn’t dead yet.

  And yet, surely this pulverizing of her flesh and bone couldn’t last much longer . . . Any moment now and her body must surely succumb to the inevitable . . .

  But she was wrong.

  The beating stopped even though her heart hadn’t quite.

  She lay motionless, for all intents and purposes quite dead, but with the tiny sliver of consciousness left to her, she was aware of him standing over her still patting himself down, rummaging in the sleeves of his cloak, searching for something. When he couldn’t find whatever it was, she heard a gasp of frustration and footsteps running away.

  She tried calling him back, to beg him to finish what he had started, but the searing pain in her jaw locked her mouth shut.

  And so there she lay, not dead but dying, blood oozing from every orifice in great warm gushes, and when, at last, her heart and her breathing began to slow, she felt strangely peaceful, weightless, almost as if she were floating, rising ever upward, except that, when she reached it, heaven wasn’t at all what she was expecting.

  There were voices, shrill and shocking in the otherwise serene silence, that were almost as painful to bear as the beating.

  There was a man’s voice. St. Peter’s, she presumed—although it was a good deal more raucous than she had imagined it would be—and a woman’s voice, the Virgin Mother’s, she thought, that was nagging at her, repeating her name and insisting on her attention.

  She could feel hands on her, too, touching her, pulling her about, reconnecting her painfully with the body she was so desperate to leave and making her weep with frustration because she knew that if she was hurting, she wasn’t dead . . .

  And then she heard river sounds—water lapping against wood, the cloop of moorhens, bulrushes crackling in a breeze—and above it all the man’s voice again, only this time it was raised against the woman’s, who raised hers back.

  And then more pain! As a single pair of hands this time picked her up and half dragged, half carried her—muttering with the most uncelestial profanity—only to put her down again on a cold, wet surface that stung her skin and smelled of fish. Then more watery sounds and the woman’s voice again, only this time swearing and blaspheming in a way she knew the Virgin Mary never, ever would.

  And then . . . Oh, at long last, just when she thought she couldn’t take any more, a blissful nothingness.

  Chapter 59

  She woke eventually to a cocoon of warmth, the scent of lavender and a row of blurred faces peering down at her as though from a distant parapet.

  Somebody up there spoke, and she cowered until she realized that it wasn’t his voice.

  “Her eyes are open!” the voice shouted, making her flinch again and prompting even more faces to appear over her.

  She was floating toward them, squinting into the unaccustomed light, and then, as she got closer, the oval halos took form and she recognized her mother’s face, then her father’s, Gyltha’s, Penda’s and Allie’s all clustered around her like a dazzling ring of light.

  She tried to reach out to them but her arm wouldn’t move and she whimpered with the pain and the light and the confusion.

  “Hush,” Rosa whispered softly, stroking her cheek. “That ol’ arm’s broke but it’ll mend, mistress seen to that.”

  “With Allie’s help.”

  She turned to a voice she didn’t recognize and saw a small, slim, plainly dressed woman standing slightly apart from the others, but although they had never met, she knew her instantly, and for the first time in an awfully long time, she smiled.

  Adelia smiled back, taking a step closer to the bed.

&nb
sp; “You won’t remember very much, I hope,” she said. “But you were very badly hurt. You’re in good hands now, though,” she added, “and you’ll make a good recovery. The important thing now is to rest as much as you possibly can.”

  Hawise nodded and, with that sanction—and perhaps also the help of the poppy-head tea Adelia gave her—closed her eyes and slept peacefully for the first time in a very long time.

  Chapter 60

  That afternoon while Hawise slept, Allie took herself off to her herb garden, the only place she could think of where she would find the necessary peace and quiet to reflect on what had happened and try to make sense of it.

  Her relief at finding Hawise alive was surprisingly short-lived, overshadowed by the knowledge that the nightmare still wasn’t over; that her abductor and the murderer of at least two other girls was still at large. Even as praise was heaped on her for her part in the rescue, she berated herself, because, although she could describe the bottom of Danny Wadlow’s coracle and the underside of that stinking winnowing sheet in minute detail, she remembered nothing of the return journey. All the time she had spent wrestling with the oars on that moonless night she had been too intent, too focused on survival to think about anything else. And now, of course, Danny, the key to the mystery, had vanished completely.

  He had stayed with her long enough to help carry Hawise out of the cavern.

  “Elsford’s that way,” he had said, pointing downriver. “The current’ll take you most of the way but you’d best hurry afore ’e comes back.” Then he had thrust a set of oars into her chest and run off, leaving her in the middle of God only knew where with a waterlogged boat and a precious cargo who, by the look of her, was as likely as not to bleed to death in the bottom of it . . .

  She remembered screaming like a demented fishwife at his retreating back, but after that, the rest of that dreadful night was a blur. She swore a lot, she remembered that: first as a sort of catharsis of her anger with Danny and then, as the habit formed, a rhythmic cue for her oars. In the end, of course, it was a good thing she had; her invective had served as an auditory beacon for the search party long before the coracle bobbed into view in the dawn light.

  Rowley, of course, was leading the party.

  Something had woken him in the night and his mind, as it did so often these days, had automatically turned to Allie.

  Lying in the dark, gazing at the ceiling, with Adelia snoring beside him, he had thought about the banquet and Lord Peverell and how well everything seemed to be auguring, and then, just as he was enjoying a rare moment of complacency, he remembered poor Ulf and his desolation and how dreadful his situation must have been. It was an unconscionable idea, but his mind refused to leave it, which was when, in this chaotic jumble of thoughts, he remembered that he hadn’t heard Allie follow them to bed and panicked and got up to look for her.

  When, several of the most grueling hours of his life later, he had heard shouting from the river and saw the coracle with Allie, head down, tugging furiously on the oars, he had wept with relief.

  “Mistress!”

  Allie started at a voice from somewhere behind her. She had been so wrapped up in her thoughts that she had lost all track of time, but she noticed that the light had changed; a low sun was dappling the garden with shade, making it hard for her to see the person who was approaching her.

  “Mistress,” Peter said again.

  She stared blankly at him as she recalled an image from the night before, when she had seen him plunge into the river behind Ulf and Rowley, wearing, as he swam toward her, an expression of conspicuous concern . . . perhaps a little bit too conspicuous, she remembered thinking even at the time.

  Where do you get to? she wondered, continuing to stare at him. Stalking the marshes with those birds of yours, a license to vanish for hours on end, accountable to no one.

  “I hope I haven’t disturbed you, mistress,” he said, frowning, disconcerted by her strange, unflinching gaze. “But I wanted to inquire after Hawise.”

  “Oh,” said Allie. “Thank you. She is . . . as well as can be expected.”

  “I am glad to hear it,” he replied. “Perhaps you would be so kind as to tell her that I was asking after her.”

  “I will,” she replied crisply. “And now, if you’ll excuse me . . . I must . . .” But without finishing the sentence—partly because she didn’t know quite what she was going to do next and partly because she was beginning to feel uneasy—she turned and walked away.

  “Mistress Allie!” Jodi ambushed her on her way back through the courtyard. “Been lookin’ all over the place for you!” she said, flapping her apron in excitement. “Hawise just woke up ’n’ she’s asking for you.”

  Allie ran up the stairs and burst into the solar to see Hawise, propped up on a cloud of pillows, looking like a fledgling that had fallen too early from its nest.

  “Poor darling,” she said, climbing onto the bed beside her. “Does it hurt?”

  Hawise shook her head. “Not much. It’s just a bit hard to see properly, that’s all.”

  Allie took her face in her hands and turned it gently to the light.

  “Hmm,” she murmured, examining the innumerable welts and bruises covering it. “I’ll make a cold compress for those, which’ll help with the swelling and make you a bit more comfortable.”

  She was about to get up when Hawise grabbed her arm.

  “Don’t go yet,” she said so plaintively that Allie felt a lump rise in her throat.

  “Of course I won’t,” she said. “I’ll stay for as long as you want me to, of course I will.”

  Hawise began to cry. “It’s just that . . . It’s just . . . I can remember everything now and I . . . I wanted to tell you what happened.”

  Allie froze. It was the moment she had been dreading ever since she found her, when her relief at finding her alive had faded as she began to realize the extent of her ordeal.

  She tried keeping a brave face, for Hawise’s sake, but when she heard the details of the rape, she also began to cry, stopping only when the others came back into the room and Hawise went quiet.

  As the other women swarmed around the bedside, competing with one another to minister to their patient, Allie noticed that Penda was unusually quiet and distant.

  She had behaved strangely all day, barely able to look at Hawise or speak to anyone, or indeed, do anything other than stand at the window reciting passages from the Bible under her breath. In fact Allie was so distracted by her that she missed the opportunity to intervene on Hawise’s behalf when Adelia picked that moment to launch her brusque interrogation.

  “Hawise, dear,” she said before Allie could interrupt, “I realize it’s the last thing you want to do at the moment but you must understand that it’s very, very important that you think back and tell us as much as you possibly can about the man who took you.”

  Allie glanced nervously at Hawise, who surprised her by appearing to take it in her stride.

  “Of course,” she said amiably. “Trouble is there’s not much I can tell you. I don’t know what he looked like because I never saw his face, it was always so dark and he wore this hood . . .”

  “What sort of a hood?” said Adelia, pouncing on the detail like a cat on a mouse.

  Hawise thought for a moment, frowning. “Like a monk’s,” she said. “Pulled low down over his face.”

  “But not a monk?”

  Hawise shook her head. “I don’t think so. But then I don’t know why I think that.”

  “So it was a disguise of some sort then?” Adelia asked. “Do you think he wore it because he thought you might recognize him otherwise—?” She broke off for a moment as she thought some more. “But then, if he was planning to kill you anyway, why would it matter whether you recognized him or not?”

  Allie blanched and took hold of Hawise’s hand for comfort, all too aware that when her mother thought out loud she was capable of saying the unsayable.

  “But I didn’t recognize hi
m,” said Hawise, unperturbed by the robust line of questioning. “He needn’t have troubled himself. If I’d known him, I would have recognized his voice, but I didn’t.”

  Adelia, who was pacing up and down, stopped abruptly and turned to the bed.

  “Would you recognize it if you heard it again?”

  “I don’t know . . . ,” Hawise replied, frowning. “I might . . . but I’m not sure.” The frown deepening, she broke off for a moment and then brightened as another thought occurred to her. “But I would definitely recognize his laugh. That was very distinctive.”

  “Hmm.” Adelia made a mental note. “And why do you suppose he didn’t just kill you?” she asked, only this time the gasp of shock from the crowd around the bed was audible. After all, it was the question they had all been asking, yet nobody but Adelia dared voice.

  Once again, to Allie’s enormous relief, Hawise took it in her stride. “God only knows,” she said, smiling, actually; she found Adelia’s audacity rather refreshing. “But it might have had something to do with the fact that I amused him . . . At first, anyway.”

  “How?”

  “I entertained him, I suppose . . . told him stories,” she replied simply.

  “What sort of stories?” The question was unanimous, all the bodies in the room bent toward the bed.

  “Anything that came into my head,” Hawise replied, disconcerted by the rapt attention of the faces peering down at her. “It was a forfeit. He never said anything but somehow I knew that as long as I could entertain him he wouldn’t kill me. So I made things up.”

  Chapter 61

  The next day Rowley, Ulf, Penda and Allie set off in a boat to look for the cavern where Hawise had been held, hoping to find clues that might lead them to her captor.