Never Trust a Dead Man

by Vivian Vande Velde

Page 2

 

  "Why not take the boys gag off?" someone in the room recommended. "Hard to get a sensible answer out of him otherwise. "

  "Just the boys," Bowden said.

  The gag came out, leaving Selwyns mouth foul and dry. "I didnt do it," he protested. "Yes, I was angry that Anora chose Farold. But I didnt hate him enough to kill him. " Farold wasnt all that bad, Selwyn once again forced himself to think, as though this generous thought could prove his innocence. Farold wasnt as bad as a runny nose when you were trying to impress a girl. Farold wasnt as bad as a case of hives on your bottom.

  Bowden narrowed his eyes. "Youre not saying its Anoras fault for choosing Farold over you?" he said.

  That was all Selwyn needed - to have Bowden fear ing hed go after Anora. Why couldnt the man ask simple questions with straightforward answers? "No," he said. "Im saying I didnt kill Farold. "

  Derian chose then to say, "Farold was always a good boy," which, in other circumstances, Selwyn might have disputed. Which, in other circumstances, a lot of people might have disputed. Still, with Derian, one could never be certain how much of a conversation he actually heard. But the old miller was the one who had raised Farold, whose parents had died young. So if he was distracted, there was grief as well as deafness to account for it.

  Bowden gestured to someone who was standing closer to the table. An object was picked up and passed from hand to hand. "Recognize this?" Bowden asked.

  Selwyn thought surely his heart was going to stop. "I - I - I - " Of course he recognized the distinctive long-handled knife - it was his own. It was a coming-of-age gift from his father, who had brought it back from his time of service in the war, and not another like it in the village. "I lost it, about the time of the harvest. " He glanced anxiously around the room. "Raedan" - he had spotted one friendly face, then another - "Merton. You remember I lost it. I looked around everywhere. I kept asking if anyone found it. "

  "Aye," Raedan said readily, and his brother Merton was nodding, too.

  Selwyn turned to Thorne - even if he did look and act like a rat - whose word should count for more, not being one of his age-mates.

  And Thorne did say, "I remember. "

  But Bowden said, "Harvesttime was when Anora first told you shed chosen Farold. Your conveniently losing your blade at that time shows just how long youve been planning this. "

  "No!" Selwyn cried. Could they misconstrue and twist everything?

  Bowden handed the knife away, and it once more passed from person to person, a circuitous route back to the table, since everyone wanted to see it "Where were you last night?" Bowden asked.

  Selwyn hesitated, knowing the truth would hurt him. "Home," he lied. "Just as my father tried to tell you. "

  There was a reaction in the room to that: an insubstantial sigh that rippled over the crowd.

  Selwyn guessed a moment before Bowden announced: "You were seen, boy. "

  He considered denying it, on the chance that Bowden was bluffing, or that there was only one witness, one who might not be sure, or reliable. But hed already miscalculated and proven to those assembled that he would lie, which was a worse blow than any theyd dealt him. Aware of the pain on the face of his father, whom he had also made a liar of, he nodded. "Yes," he admitted. "All right I was out at night. Early. But I didnt go anywhere near the mill, and I didnt kill Farold. " All of which was true. "Did whoever saw me say I was near the mill?" If they had, they were lying, though he had no way to prove that But it would be good to know exactly where he stood.

  Bowden held his hand up to keep anyone in the room from answering. "Ill ask the questions," he said. "Were you or werent you near the mill?"

  "I was not," Selwyn said. He saw Bowden was going to ask, anyway, so he told all of it, working hard to keep his voice steady: "No closer than we came today, from the farm to here. "

  The ripple that passed through the crowd was more distinct this rime, a murmur of voices.

  "Here?" Bowden asked with a glower at his daughter that said he would speak to her later, if this turned out to be true.

  "I saw Anora at the market yesterday morning. She. . . " He hesitated, not wanting to get her into trouble; and, after all, said was too strong a word. "She indicated that, if I came. . . " He started again, hoping the words would be easier if he came at them from a different direction. "She gave the impression that . . . She seemed to think she might have made a mistake in agreeing to marry Farold. I thought . . . if I could just talk to her privately, she might break off the betrothal. "

  The room burst into an uproar.

  "Oh, Selwyn," Anora said, her voice little more than a sigh, and immediately the noisy speculation stopped so that people could hear. "I never said that"

  "No," Selwyn agreed. "But we talked, and you . . . you. . . " He thought of her sweet smile and the way she would tip her head up to look at him, for - short as he was - she was tiny. Distracted, he tried to remember exactly what she had said.

  "I was trying to be kind," she said, sympathy in her pale blue eyes. "You looked so sad when I told you I was to marry Farold, and then after he held you down in Oriks tavern and poured ale all over you then dropped you in the midden pile. . . "

  Thanks for reminding me, Selwyn was tempted to say. Id almost forgotten how bad it was.

  Anora finished, "I was always fond of you and I didnt want to hurt your feelings. But I never said to come last night. "

  "No," he admitted, "but I thought. . . " He looked away from her, to the floor. Obviously, he had thought wrong.

  Bowden said to Anora, "So did you see him last night or no?"

  "No," Anora answered.

  Bowden turned to Selwyn.

  "I threw pebbles at the shutter over the window," Selwyn told Bowden, "but I was afraid of waking you or your wife. So I stopped. "

  "I must have been asleep," Anora said. "I never heard. " She added, "But I believe you. "

  Selwyn feared she was the only one who did.

  Bowden sighed in exasperation. "We dont know what time of night Farold was killed," he reminded everyone, "whether or not Selwyn did stop here first. Or after. We only know he was killed sometime between supper - after which Linton left and Derian went upstairs to bed - and before Linton returned at dawn. "

  "Long enough for the body to start to stiffen," Linton explained, self-importantly since hed been the one to discover the deed, "but not to smell. "

  "Well, in this heat it will have started to smell by now," someone in the room commented, a loud whisper that carried.

  Anora gave a wail and ran outside, the only way to get away from all the eyes that turned to catch her reaction. Her mother followed close on her heels.

  "Thank you very much, Orik," Bowden said.

  Orik shrugged sheepishly. No doubt he was cranky that this huge crowd was accumulated in Bowdens house, rather than at Oriks tavern - where he could have been selling food and drink to everyone.

  It went on like that a little longer, people commenting and offering opinions, and few of them believing a word Selwyn said. Perhaps it would have been different if he hadnt started by lying, but there was no way to know and nothing he could do now.

  By midafternoon, those few who professed to be unsure - mostly Selwyns age-mates and, unexpectedly, Holt the blacksmith - were overruled by the majority, who proclaimed that Selwyn was assuredly guilty. Guilty because he had cause to hate Farold, because it was his knife that had done the deed, and because - even though no one had actually seen him climbing through Farolds window - he had been in the village at about the right time. It was enough.

  The law required a life for a life, but no one in the village had been executed in living memory. Some argued that he should be sent to the bigger town of Saint Hilda, where there was a regular magistrate who could oversee the carrying out of the sentence. But it was pointed out that the magistrate would probably demand his own investigation, which everyone agreed was pointless; and hed want to see the body
.

  And that would be dangerous. The village of Penryth was too small to have its own priest and depended on the occasional wandering friar to bless weddings, babies, and the dead. But to leave an unblessed body unburied by nightfall - especially the body of a murdered man - was asking for trouble. No matter what the church said, the people knew there were night spirits eager to make a vacant body their own. Farold needed to be buried soon.

  That was how they got the idea to solve two problems at once: "We will go up to the hills," Bowden proclaimed in his best official voice, which Selwyn had always thought sounded as though he had a pain in his lungs. "We will go to the burial caves, and there we will seal the dead victim in the tomb with his living murderer - Farold and Selwyn together. "

  Chapter Three

  "I didnt do it!" Selwyn cried, the same thing hed been insisting all afternoon. They hadnt believed him yet, but he couldnt just stand waiting quietly while they worked out the details of how best to kill him. All that he gained was that they put the gag back on. His hands, of course, had remained tied all along.

  Bowden was giving orders to tie his father to a chair, saying that he would be easier to control once all was done and over. "No harm will come to you or your wife because of your sons crime," he promised.

  Someone asked how long it was likely to take - a question Selwyn was desperate to hear the answer to. But by then they were half dragging, half carrying him out the door. He didnt even get a last look at his father. I didnt do it, he thought, just in case the fervor with which he thought it could reach his father. But surely his father already knew.

  Outside, the sun was resting pink and orange on the horizon, it being that time of autumn when afternoons dont last long and theres hardly any evening at all. Torches were lit. Selwyn wondered if one would be left in the burial cavern with him. But even if he was lucky and died quickly, he would certainly last longer than a torch.

  Someone had fetched a wagon - Oriks, judging by the smell of ale that had seeped into the boards from leaky barrels: strong enough that a man hardly needed to go into Oriks tavern to get drunk. Selwyn was hoisted up into the back of the wagon and laid face-down, where hed be the least trouble to those in charge of him.

  But he raised his head at a commotion, and any hope that he could make himself unaware of what was going on disappeared. A second group of people came out from the mill, carrying an ungainly cloth-wrapped bundle that had to be Farold. For a moment he thought theyd made a litter to carry the body. But as they set the corpse in the wagon beside him, Selwyn realized that the millers nephew didnt need a litter: Death had made Farold stiff as wood - and before anyone had been able to fold his arms decorously across his chest. Selwyn closed his eyes and turned his face; but the wagon was too small to get away from Farolds outflung arm, much less the smell of him. The odor was just the herbs with which the village women had washed the body before sewing it into the shroud, Selwyn told himself. The body hadnt really begun to decay - yet. Farold wasnt all that bad, Selwyn tried to tell himself again. He wasnt as bad as . . . as . . . as a skunk dying under the porch? Bad idea, Selwyn chided himself. This was definitely no time to be thinking about dead things.

  Selwyn took short rapid breaths - inhaling the smells of ale, herbs, wood, and his own sweat - and by the time they reached the hills, he was light-headed, but not enough to be groggy and confused, which would have been a mercy. Hands dragged him up out of the wagon, then turned him around and sat him on the edge when it was obvious he couldnt stand on his own.

  Anora was there, crying loudly. Selwyn had been aware of the noise in the background, along with the creaking of the wagons wheels, the clump-clump of the horses hooves on the path, and - above all - the beating of his own heart. Derian Miller had come, too, "To see the boy off," hed said, obviously meaning Farold, not Selwyn.

  But when Thorne asked, "Do you want to say anything . . . before we lay him in?" Derian shook his head.

  "Nothing to say," the miller said. "He was a good boy, with a lot of years ahead of him. "

  "Amen," murmured Linton, willing to take that as a prayer lest he, as another of the dead mans relatives, be asked to come up with a better one of his own.

  "Amen," the rest of those assembled echoed.

  Bowden, as headman, should have been there but wasnt. He had used the excuse of someone having to stay to watch over Selwyns father, though more likely he simply didnt want to make the almost three-mile walk. Bowden was better at giving orders than at doing.

  As usual, Thorne took over in Bowdens absence, having to be quick, to outtalk Linton. "Anybody want to say anything on Selwyns behalf?" he asked.

  People glanced at one another uncomfortably. Nobody looked directly at Selwyn.

  Linton snorted.

  Holt the blacksmith said, "He was a good boy, too, till this happened. "

  Linton snorted again.

  What a glowing testimonial. What a moving summation of his life. Even about to die, Selwyn felt a pang of indignation. If he had been really dead rather than just condemned, would his friends have been able to come up with something? Selwyn, they might have said. . . . He came back to his own earlier eulogy for Farold: Selwyn, his friends might have said, he wasnt as bad as a skunk dying under the porch.

  The entryway to the burial caves was manmade: a barrow of heaped stones, blocked by a rock at least as big as Oriks wagon. It took four men, including Holt Blacksmith, to move it. Beyond lay the cave where people of Penryth had been buried for time out of memory.

  A dusty, musty stench rolled out of the opening - not as bad, in the end, as Farold. But people tied cloths to cover their noses, which was not a good sign - definitely not a good sign - as two men bent to pick up Farold, and several others clustered around Selwyn, ready to guide, drag, or carry him into the barrow, whichever was necessary.