by S. D. Sykes
And so I retraced my steps to the cottage and opened the door. I pulled my chemise over my mouth and crept over to the crib, mustering the courage to look down properly this time. Would his body be covered in the buboes of this cruel disease? Would his fingers be swollen and blackened with plague? But no, as I pulled back the swaddling, I saw only a small child with the pale white skin and red hair of the Eden family. Simon looked up at me and smiled, utterly delighted to see the face of another human being – even one as craven as my own.
I lifted him from his cradle, finding that he smelt strongly of his own filth, but he wasn’t feverish. I removed the linen and then returned him to the crib, so that he could kick his thin legs about freely in the air. There were no obvious signs of illness, and yet I knew better than to trust my eyes when it came to plague. It likes to lurk in the undergrowth, skulking like a wolf. The child might have looked healthy enough then, but I could not have simply wrapped him up and taken him back with me to Castle Eden. This might have appeased my own conscience, but the price of such recklessness could have been the deaths of others – in particular those of my wife and son.
So what was I to do? I could not leave Simon here to die, and yet I could not take him back with me. I stopped for a moment. I looked up and spoke a prayer to the rafters. An apology to Filomena and Hugh, and then I made my decision.
This cottage would be our home now. For at least the next six days. I would care for the boy until he either died, or proved himself clear of plague. My search for the killer would have to wait.
Chapter Twenty-seven
The soil was soft beneath the leaves, but I was so anxious to commit Abigail to the ground, that I dug only the shallowest of graves for her body. However, this was still the Christian burial of which Old Simon would have approved, as Abigail was laid down in the pit with her body facing to the East. At the Day of Judgment, she would be ready for resurrection, able to rise from her grave to face the return of Christ. Such beliefs mattered to her, so I would honour them.
With her burial complete, I took all of her bedding and clothes, and then built a fire in the clearing. Despite the cold, it wasn’t difficult to light this pyre once I’d found Abigail’s flint and iron striker, along with an assortment of her char-cloths. Once the fire was burning brightly, I closed the door on the outside world and looked about at my new home. My first thoughts were of the gloomiest kind. It seemed that I had swapped imprisonment within a castle, for imprisonment within this small cottage.
I built another fire. This time in the hearth. Then I boiled a couple of eggs that I’d discovered in a bowl. It was all that I could find to feed the child, apart from some stale bread that I chewed upon and then poked into his mouth with the end of my finger. I had seen the nursemaids feed Hugh in such a way, when he was being weaned. Typically my son had made a great fuss about this, spitting out the bread as if he were being poisoned, but this infant made no such protests. Simon had a strong and steadfast will to survive, that much was clear.
Over the next two days, I saw no evidence that Simon was suffering from anything other than hunger, and a vague sense of unease that his mother was missing. With nobody else to talk to, apart from this barely weaned infant, I found myself dwelling on the murderer I had left behind with my own family at Castle Eden.
I went over the facts, again and again, hoping to see what I had missed before – wishing that Filomena or Sandro were here with me, to listen to and argue with my theories. I even looked about the cottage, hoping to find some piece of parchment to write upon, but there was little in the way of writing materials, or even books in this home. Godfrey’s love of manuscripts had not extended to furnishing his wife’s cottage with anything more than the simplest of psalters. In the end I chose to commit each sequence of reasoning to memory – and these were my thoughts, such as they were.
The murderer had begun by killing Godfrey, although I still felt that this had been an unplanned act. The weapon had been a mazer – something that the killer had randomly picked up from Godfrey’s desk in a rage. And so, for a while, I concentrated on what Godfrey might have done to anger somebody to the point of murder, knowing, full well, that my friend had a habit of causing offence.
Firstly there was his attitude towards his brother – continually belittling Edwin with menial tasks. Then there was Godfrey’s disagreement with Pieter de Groot over the final payment for the clock, though this seemed like a poor reason for murder to me. And of course, Godfrey had infuriated Hesket regarding his secret marriage to Abigail – though I could easily discount Hesket as the murderer, for obvious reasons.
And then there was this new revelation – Godfrey’s secret translation of the bible. Did anybody else know about this dangerous project? Godfrey had suspected somebody was reading his private correspondence, so it was possible that he had given the secret away in one of these letters. But then again, who might have objected to this bible translation, other than the priest Old Simon? And he had seemed relaxed about Godfrey’s attitudes towards the church when quizzed on the subject, even admitting a little admiration for Godfrey’s youthful dissent. More than that, Old Simon could not have been intercepting Godfrey’s letters, since he had not been at Castle Eden until the day before we arrived.
I put the cause of the attack on Godfrey to one side for a while, to concentrate on the way in which the murderer had disposed of his body. Why had the killer arranged Godfrey’s corpse into such a strange position inside a wooden chest? And what had they hoped to achieve by leaving it in this place? They must have known that a dead body could not have remained undiscovered for long inside the castle walls. And lastly, why had they thrown the key to Godfrey’s library down the well? None of this seemed to make sense.
Coming to no conclusions whatsoever about Godfrey’s death, I then moved on to the murder of Lord Hesket – a killing that had definitely been planned. This time there had been no attempt to hide the corpse – in fact his body had been left on display, mutilated in a style that deliberately aped the cruel way in which Hans had killed Old Simon’s crow. It had been a clever and successful ploy to divert our attention, since we had all been fooled into believing that Hans was guilty. I felt stupid and angry with myself for also making such a rudimentary mistake. I had been naïve and foolish not to question this assumption.
I tried not to dwell on my error, and moved on to the murder of The Fool, William Shute. It was my conviction that Shute had witnessed something on the night of Hesket’s murder. When the killer had also realised this fact, they had tried to intimidate Shute with a grisly warning – his hat placed upon the beheaded carcass of Lyndham’s dog. But, unlike the ploy to blame Hans for the murders, this plan had failed. Rather than silence Shute, this threat had only made The Fool more likely than ever to talk – especially once he had locked himself inside the storeroom with a never-ending supply of wine.
The murderer must have known that it would not be long before the wine loosened Shute’s tongue and he sang out a name to the whole castle. If Shute could not be silenced with a warning, then he needed to be silenced by death. And so, not able to reach Shute through the door of the storeroom, the killer had then poured birch oil down the ventilation shaft that led into this cellar from outside the castle walls – setting the poor man alight and then burning him to death. But the murderer could only have carried out this plan by knowing how to secretly come and go from the castle – and who knew about the tunnel, apart from Edwin of Eden? The finger was beginning to point back in his direction, except that this man had been locked in his bedchamber when Lyndham’s dog had first disappeared.
I moved on again, as each sequence of thought was breaking up almost as quickly as it formed – deciding to concentrate instead upon the identity of the three victims, searching for a link between them. I could discount the last name at least, for William Shute had merely been an unfortunate bystander – murdered for being a witness. Which left me wondering about Godfrey and Lord Hesket. What was the connectio
n between these two men? Why had the murderer picked this pair out, and not others, as victims?
As yet, it was a riddle that I could not solve.
Chapter Twenty-eight
By the third day in the cottage, I could find little else to eat, other than a handful of oats and a scoop of barley. The child was now fading with hunger. His cries were less urgent and he seemed barely able to kick his legs or turn his head and call for food. For the most part he slept, sucking his thumb for comfort. I feared he would not live for much longer if I stayed here, and yet it was still too soon to leave. I dared not return to Castle Eden yet and risk being the agent of plague.
On the fourth day, our fates changed again for the worse. The child developed a fever, leading me to fear that he was now suffering from something worse than hunger. His skin was pale but sweaty – just like his mother’s on her deathbed. Moreover, his body was limp and he would barely sip at a spoonful of water when I tried to make him drink.
Until this point, I had avoided having too much physical contact with him, always covering my mouth when I fed him and not letting him breathe on me. But we had shared this small cottage for four days now. Whatever was ailing him, would soon ail me. I had always maintained that I could not suffer again from plague, but in those dark hours I began to question that assumption. If the disease had changed since the last outbreak, then perhaps I was no longer resistant to its poison.
When I woke with a headache and stiff limbs the next day, I knew that it was time to write a last testament – a letter that I could leave for Filomena, so that she would know my fate if I died. Looking about the cottage for something to write upon again, I eventually found a letter that Abigail had hidden in the wall beside the bed. It was a sealed square of parchment, identical to the letters that Godfrey had given to me to deliver on that night in his library. I opened this letter without a second thought, since the contents no longer really mattered. Godfrey’s wife was already dead, and it seemed as if his son would soon meet the same fate.
This letter was another addressed to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Islip – so I had been right in one regard. Godfrey had written more than one letter to this man, in order to provide his son with every chance of inheriting his estate. I wrote on the back of the parchment, scratching out the words in ink that I’d made from soot, mixed with my own saliva. Given the shortcomings of this medium, the letter was short and to the point.
December 1361
To the finder of this letter,
If you are reading this, then I am dead. Taken by plague. If your nose does not lead you directly to my body, then look in the chamber beyond the curtain – for this is where I shall go to die. I would ask you to bury me, as this will give comfort to my family, but I shall not condemn you for taking the other option. These are wretched, savage times, and I know why the fires blaze and the bones burn.
If you have the heart to place my body in the soil, then wrap me in my cloak and bury me alongside the other graves in the ground behind this cottage. Elsewhere the soil is hard and icy, and will not yield to the spade.
If you are well yourself, then I beg you to take this letter to Castle Eden, as my wife must know my fate. She will not thank you for this news, but she will reward you for your service. You may look upon my decaying, corrupted body and see a poor man who has died in this lonely place, but you should know this. My name was once Oswald de Lacy, Lord of the Somershill estate.
I folded the letter and tied it with a piece of string – placing it on the table near to the door, in the hope that the person who found it could actually read. After this, I wrapped myself in my cloak and sat next to the infant’s crib, patting his head with a damp rag as he convulsed with a fever. I felt sicker than ever myself. My own body alternated between shivering with cold and then burning up with a sweating heat. My back ached and my head throbbed, but I was determined that I would live long enough to bury this child alongside his mother.
That night it was bitterly cold, with a vicious wind howling about the house and lifting the wooden shingles from the roof. I barely had the energy to light a fire, and when I did, I found that the wood was so damp that it would not even heat a pan of watery soup. I had burnt the blankets from Abigail’s bed on the day that I’d buried her body, so there was little more that I could wrap about the child to keep him warm. To compound the problem, his linen napkins were soiled, and the ones that I had washed were still wet.
I had never looked after an infant for long before, and was shocked by the mess Simon made with all his shitting and pissing. When my own son had filled his napkin, I had simply passed him to the nearest woman and let her deal with the problem – whereas now I was forced to manage it myself. I could not wrap Simon in damp clothes, so I stripped him of his bedclothes and then laid him in his cradle. I covered him with my cloak, but he continued to shiver and then look up at me with such clouded, lifeless eyes that I took him in my arms again. I had not touched him properly before, but I could not continue this discipline. He deserved the embrace of another human being before he died.
And so I held him to my chest, removing his clothes and letting his skin rest against my own. The boy felt both cold and feverish, so I clutched him tightly and blew warm air onto his head, hoping to comfort him. I had come to care for Simon in those strange, suffocating days. Almost as if he had been my own child. Our forced isolation had forged a bond between us, and I was determined that he would not die without the loving care of another human being.
I cannot say how long I paced about the meagre fire that night, only that I circled it many times. As I walked, I found myself singing psalms to the child – the hymns that I had learnt in my early years in the monastery. But these chants only brought back unfortunate and even unpleasant memories, so I changed my choice of song to something more cheerful. The nursery rhymes and tunes that I had sung as a child, sitting on my mother’s knee. For a while, I even found myself repeating the song that The Fool had composed about Edwin of Eden. The lyrics might have been crude, but they could hardly offend the ears of a dying infant.
The slow repetition of my steps, and the thumping of the pain inside my head, induced a kind of trance. I had not been thinking about the murders for many hours, as the illness had taken over all of my thoughts. And yet, as I paced the room, ideas about my investigation began to slip in and out of my consciousness. I cannot say that they were intruding, merely that they were swimming in and out of my mind, and in doing so, they began to form patterns that I had not seen before.
Again and again, I found myself wondering about the link between the two victims – Godfrey and Lord Hesket. Why had the murderer chosen to kill these two men? Could this help me to predict the next victim, and if so, who would it be? My thoughts unravelled and reformed constantly, leading me down paths that I had previously ignored, drawing me to conclusions that I had not previously seen. The slow rhythm of my steps set the many cogs of my mind in motion, until they moved together in formation, as smoothly as a cascade of rotations in Pieter de Groot’s clock.
During all this time, Simon slept in my arms. His cheek against my chest. His small, sweaty head of red hair against my skin. I expected to lose him that night, but then, remarkably, as a new day dawned he began to twitch and wriggle. When the light slowly crept into the cottage through the many cracks in the shutters, he opened his eyes and suddenly screamed for food. I nearly wept for joy at the sound, for these cries meant that he had survived the night and now he would live. And then, I realised that I, too, felt a little better. My fever had cooled. My aches had lessened. I still felt weak, but not defeated. Whatever had ailed us both, I knew, with all certainty, that it could not have been plague.
I placed Simon gently back in his cradle, as I looked about the cottage for something to eat – but there was not even a shrunken turnip or crust of stale bread. My first thoughts were that it was time to return to the castle. But even then, I held back. It was still my inclination to wait another day.
I was boiling some onion tops that I’d retrieved from the midden heap, when there was a thump at the door. ‘Who’s there?’ I shouted, placing my hand upon the pommel of my dagger.
Before I could say another word, however, the door flew open and Sandro burst into the cottage. ‘Master Oswald!’ he cried. ‘You’re alive!’
He rushed forward to embrace me, and I was so overjoyed to see his face that I dropped the dagger onto the floor, lifted him in my arms and swung him in a circle. ‘How did you find me?’ I said.
‘Monna Filomena told me how to get here. Turn right at the gallows and then follow the path to a small cottage.’
It was only when I had returned Sandro’s feet to the floor, that I realised the rashness of my welcome. ‘You shouldn’t have come here,’ I said. ‘It’s not safe.’
He looked crestfallen at my words. ‘But we were so worried about you, Master Oswald. Monna Filomena cries all the time. And Hugh is so naughty. He won’t eat his food or sleep in his own bed. Yesterday he even kicked your mother in the leg.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she told him to go to bed.’
I laughed out loud at this. It was so wonderful to hear their names again, even if I was listening to reports of Hugh’s terrible behaviour. ‘Are they safe, Sandro?’
He looked at me curiously. ‘Of course they’re safe.’
‘No more murders in the castle?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said, cocking his head. ‘We thought you had found the Dutchman. That’s why the killing has stopped.’
‘Hans is dead,’ I said.
‘Did you have to kill him?’ said Sandro, his eyes widening at the thought.
