A Midwinter Murder (An Elizabethan Murder Mystery), page 16
As Tom climbed into the cart beside the solid body of his brother, he was aware that he would have to be quick about the rest of his investigation. It was all very well for the Lord of the Waste to oversee John’s postmortem swiftly and quietly, slipping him into the ground with a minimum of fuss before sending Eve and Hobbie south; but with Father Little now added to the death-list, it would only be a question of time – and little enough of that – before the Bishop of Carlisle became involved. Then, no doubt, the Arch-bishop of York and all the rest.
Bewcastle fort was an unseasonably gloomy place. Three tragedies within little more than a week, a serious attack by the Kerrs, and the Barguest abroad made everyone tense and jumpy; but all of that was nothing compared to entertaining these three corpses in the chapel – one of them recently exhumed at that.
Having dead men about the place was nothing unusual here. There were other dead men in the chapel now: the dead from the skirmish with the Kerrs. They were laid out reverently, awaiting burial as was due and natural – natural if unfortunately delayed now, given the circumstances. But there was nothing natural about the three corpses Tom needed to examine; and, so the rumour would no doubt go, Tom suspected wisely, there was nothing natural about the things he was proposing to do to them. In fact, all he really needed to do was to use his eyes and his intellect, to call upon the expertise he had to hand, if he found a problem beyond his own experience. To complete a theory – or call upon the Master of Logic to do so; to test it if he could; to prove it true so far as he was able. And to act.
As chance would have it, the recently dead from the attack by the Kerrs would also in their way be of use to him, thought Tom, for they were normally, almost naturally, deceased. There would, Tom suspected, be differences between them and the three he was examining most closely – or two of them at least, certainly – and these would begin with the rigidity of their limbs.
These thoughts filled Tom’s head as he hesitated in the doorway of the little chapel and looked in at the six corpses lying there, the unnaturally dead nearest the altar, the naturally dead at the back. This was nothing to do with superstition. It was how Tom had ordered things. His experiences of the night had taught him – amongst much else – that the brightest part of any church is likely to be beneath the window and therefore above the altar.
Tom’s orders, disseminated via Sir Thomas and the lady Eve, had been obeyed in other things as well – also adding to the sense of outrage in the fort. Father Little lay exactly as he had been found, except that he was lying down, placed here with no reverent preparation such as was fitting in the face of the Lord – fitting especially in such a holy and popular man, so respected, indeed well-beloved in the place. Tom was all too well aware of the cold and angry stares that were being directed at his back; so that when a hand fell on his right shoulder, he actually jumped.
‘Fear not, Tom,’ whispered Eve’s ghostly voice; ‘it is merely myself. And in the flesh, for a wonder.’
‘You’re lucky it’s not her ghost, I think,’ continued the Lady Ellen more robustly on his left side. ‘But we are come to help.’
‘To listen at least,’ said Eve wryly, ‘if I know my Tom.’
Having the pair of them there gave Tom the strength to proceed; but Eve was right, at the outset at least: they had little to do but to listen and to confirm his observations.
‘Let us look at this man first,’ he began slowly. ‘Killed in battle and prepared for burial but not yet in his winding sheet. His name?’
‘Walter Milburn,’ said Lady Ellen.
‘Very well. What might we expect to see about the man? Even with poor Walter thus attired in his best, we have his face and hands available to us, and we may observe without disturbing him too much. His face is livid, you will agree. His eyes, though closed, are black-ringed and protuberant. You can see that more clearly if I lift the pennies here. His cheeks are sunken. We can see, even though his jaw has been bound, for his jaw is slack and prone to fall open... There! We can see that his beard is of two days’ growth or so.’
‘He was clean-shaved as we laid him out,’ said the Lady Ellen.
‘A hairy man like Esau, then, for that’s merely a day since. He has been dead a day and a night.’
‘Even so,’ agreed Lady Ellen, sadly.
‘It is a mystery of nature, My Lady. I have seen it in the unburied dead of battle. I am told that even the nails continue their growth, but that would be impossible to prove here, I fear, in so short a time as this. But let us look at his hand: it is also cold and livid like his face. It is weighty, certainly, but not stiff. See, I can move the fingers with hardly any force applied, and bend the hand back at the wrist – straighten the arm at the elbow, indeed, and rotate it at the shoulder; and I have no doubt that I could do as much for his legs, were that needful. Thus much for our eyes and our fingers. What of our noses next? Is there not about the man a smell of anything untoward?’
‘Of the lye soap with which we washed him, when we had him laid out by the fire in the kitchen,’ said Lady Ellen, ‘and little more than that.’
‘I agree, save that I had no knowledge of the soap. Certainly no stench as might be expected from bodily effusions...’
‘When we lay them out we stop their passages,’ said Eve suddenly, ‘or else they leak and stink, as you observe.’
‘Even so? My own experience in the matter, sadly, consists of throwing dead friends into pits on battlefields; and, I have to observe, they leak.’
‘Then why, pray,’ asked Eve tartly, ‘are ye come hither to lecture us?’
‘Because if that is the extent of my experience with natural death,’ said Tom lightly, ‘my experience with unnatural death is far wider.’
As he said this, Tom led them over to the first of the three corpses by the altar. ‘We see at once a difference with poor Archie, do we not? He has been prepared for burial but not yet fully dressed, for he was a visitor here and died in the one set of clothes he possessed.’
‘Which are being cleaned and mended as we speak,’ said Lady Ellen.
‘With the last of your shirts,’ added Eve with the ghost of a laugh.
‘And he is dead for exactly a day. But from the outset we can observe the differences: the man’s face is full, almost flushed; his eyes bulge, true, but there is no sign of dark rings here; his lips are set and near as ruby as your own, Lady Ellen; his jaw is bound but needlessly so, for see, his teeth are clenched – quite rigidly, even in death. The cloth is damp here, however, below the corner of his mouth; and he is clean. Has he been cleaned? I see he has – which is why we await his clothes. His hands are folded, but again quite rigid – but in a strange position...’
‘He clutched there at his left pap as he died,’ said Lady Ellen.
‘That left pap where heart doth hop,’ quoted Tom thoughtlessly, his mind miles away – and equally far from Will Kempe’s speech as he played Pyramus in The Dream; but he echoed the words nevertheless.
He rolled the rigid Archie on to his side so that he could examine the wounds on his back again. They were still there, of course, just as he remembered them; but this time he had leisure – and strong motive, indeed – for a closer look. There across the darkly furred back of the dead warrior lay the three parallel wounds, stitched at their deepest parts, livid and crusted. ‘I still do not see how this could be done.’
‘You’re holding the only man that could have told you,’ said Eve tartly.
‘Not the only one, no. There is still the man that gave him the wounds; but he is likely to be hidden away in Stob with the Kerrs.’
‘Unless you can think of a way,’ said Eve, ‘to seduce the truth out of your fair captive Janet.’
‘Well, as to that...’ said Tom – and stopped, shocked by how near he had come to confessing all that had transpired in the kirk at Blackpool Gate.
‘And as to that?’ asked Eve, suddenly suspicious.
‘Why, that is an inspirational idea. I stand ashamed I did not think of it myself. She was there. She might well have seen; though what there was to see I cannot think...’
Tom’s voice tailed off as he looked even more closely at the livid back presented to him. ‘Lady Ellen,’ he said more quietly, ‘if laying out involves shaving the face...’
‘Unless it is bearded, of course...’
‘Aye, I see that; but if it involves shaving the cheeks, it does not – does it? – involve shaving any other parts?’
‘Such as where?’ demanded Eve intrigued.
‘Such as the back,’ answered Tom. ‘Look here...’ Sure enough, there, on the hair of Archie Elliot’s back, visible now that the thick black fur was slick and wet, there was a line exactly parallel to the other three wounds where the hair on his brawny back had been shaved away.
Janet was dressed in a plaid that Tom scarcely recognized. To be fair, it was not the plaid that took his notice but the transformation the woman’s clothing made in the girl. Their eyes met once and hers registered his reaction, then fell. She would not look at Eve or the Lady Ellen. Nor, indeed, would her wide eyes meet Tom’s again, over the breadth of Archie Elliot’s back. ‘I saw nothing,’ she said. ‘I know nothing.’
‘And if you did know something, then you would not tell in any case,’ said Tom, sounding more severe than he meant to. ‘But even your silence can be made to speak, if we will it so, my lady.’
‘Did you just threaten to torture her?’ asked Eve, agog, when the girl was gone again.
In fact Tom had meant something deeper and more devious than that, but he shrugged. If Eve thought he was willing to torture the girl, then any suspicions aroused by his careless tongue earlier were likely to be abeyed if not allayed. It did not at that moment occur to him to think what Janet herself might suppose.
That was hardly surprising, for he was turning to the next part of his task, the one that both he and Eve were going to find the most difficult – if not quite the most unpleasant.
‘We found it hard to dress poor Archie,’ he said as he moved, using inconsequential conversation to cover pain and stress, as he often did. ‘How have we dressed that child so well?’
‘It is an old dress of my own,’ said the Lady Ellen. ‘I’ve not worn it since my husband died.’
‘A lovely thing,’ said Tom. And he might have been talking of the clothes – or of the girl who wore them.
The men who had carried John’s body in here from the cart had taken the winding sheet off it and covered it like the others with a plain blanket. Tom folded this back now and found himself staring into his brother’s eyes; and John was still screaming. As silently as he had seemed to do in Tom’s all-too-vivid dream, John’s face remained frozen in that wide-eyed, wide-mouthed rictus that looked like the most utter, most abject terror; but still of good colour. Still, seemingly, dead so recently that his screams might be echoing somewhere yet; but wilder of hair, thicker of beard than Tom had ever seen him.
Tom folded the blanket back further still. John’s hands seemed to reach up towards him. ‘Dead a week and more, yet still set like marble,’ said Tom quietly. He turned to Lady Ellen, who watched him over Eve’s silently heaving shoulder. ‘Have you ever seen the like?’
‘Never,’ she said.
‘Eve?’
‘Never, Tom,’ she answered, though he had to strain to hear, and he noted she did not need to turn and look.
‘Could it be the cold? I have heard of sheep found up on these very hillsides, gone missing in winter, then dug out of snowdrifts in spring still fresh enough for the dogs to eat.’
‘Aye, and for humans too, these last few years,’ said Lady Ellen, sadly.
‘So it could be the cold that preserves him. But then again...’
Tom turned to the last of his corpses and lifted the blanket from Father Little. Apart from the shapes into which the bodies were frozen, they were identical. Eyes and mouth wide, tongues out, strings from jaws to shoulders stretched taut. Cheeks flushed, noted Tom; flesh full. Except that he was dead of terror, Father Little had never looked so well – except that, at the very corner of his mouth, disturbed no doubt by the process of bringing him here, a finger of foam, slow and slick as the trail of a slug, was winding back across his cheek. Frowning as he did so, Tom folded the blanket back again and the same hands reached out, frozen, clutching at the air as though it were a banister rail.
Frowning still, Tom turned back to John’s hands. What had they been clutching when he died? After a few moments he turned back again. It was impossible to tell.
‘Now, I need you to summon up your courage here, Eve. You prepared John for his laying out and burial?’
‘Of course,’ she answered dully. ‘Immediately after Sir Thomas’s inquest. Who else would do it?’
‘And that was soon after they carried him down from Arthur’s Seat – from the oak where they found him itself?’
‘Hobbie and the others brought him. Sir Thomas held his inquest at once and he was buried within the day. Aye.’
Tom pulled the blanket back off Father Little. ‘Like this?’
‘As you see him. That was all.’
‘But you washed him and you dressed him?’ ‘As well as I could, for he was as you see him now, set like marble even then.’
‘But,’ said Tom, with fearsome concentration, ‘answer this, Eve. Did you have to wash him before you stopped his vents? Wash his body, his face?’
‘No. I hardly needed change his clothes, and that was lucky as you see...’ She gestured to the arms and legs that might have made it all but impossible for one woman alone to dress and undress the corpse; but Tom had turned away in something like triumph, and was covering the bodies again.
‘What?’ said Lady Ellen. ‘Tom, what is it you have learned? What can you tell us?’
‘This, My Lady: that these three men died as near as I can tell in the same manner and of the same cause – though the force of it was lesser in Archie’s case. They did not die of the Barguest and they did not die of mortal fear; and I can tell you more. I can tell you that, although I can say to within an inch where Archie Elliot died, I cannot say where Father Little or poor John died.
‘The one thing I am certain of is this. Wherever it was my brother died, he did not die in the great oak up at Arthur’s Seat, whether it was clawed by the Barguest or not.’
Twenty: St Thomas’s Eve
Tom watched the Lady Ellen supporting Eve away across the courtyard, then he turned back into the little chapel. He might have finished talking, but he had not finished looking and he didn’t want to lose the light. Swiftly, silently, he pulled back the coverings over John and Father Little. He hesitated as though torn – but really he knew what his priorities must be.
He started with John. Beginning at his brother’s throat he loosened the neatly bowed bindings of his shirt and pulled it wide as far as the first button of the dark jerkin. Then he began to unbutton the horn buttons that held the stout leather closed, pulling that and the lawn of the shirt wider together as he worked. Soon he had exposed his brother’s torso as far to the sides as his armpits and as far down as the corrugated ridges of his belly.
Here Tom paused in his manual labour and leaned forward. Like his own upper body, John’s was only slightly hairy, though less sinewy and more massively developed, as befitted a blacksmith. The skin, in common with many Borderers, was quite fair and almost feminine in its delicate smoothness beyond the lightly forested breast and belly. The armpits were an amalgam. Fine hair sprouted modestly and fair skin stood on either side; and this was particularly important to Tom’s investigation because that fair skin and – when he rolled his brother over as he had rolled Archie Elliot, pulling the shirt out of his belt – the fair skin on his back were very faintly marked.
The marks were so faint that he only saw them because he was looking for them – so faint that the shocked Eve would easily have overlooked them as she washed him ready for burial. Certainly she had never mentioned seeing them. Tom looked further, now that the pale expanse of his brother’s back was bared. He had half-expected to find the same parallel scars that disfigured Archie; but no – not even a close shave. Frowning, Tom turned to examine the shirt more closely in case that had been cut; but again, no.
Because of the closeness made necessary by the rigidity of John’s body, Tom found the lawn of his brother’s best shirt almost wrapped around his face; and so, just for an instant, he caught an odour he was not expecting at all. Surprised, he paused, his mind seeming to tick like one of the new Dutch watches Ugo had shown him a month ago at Van Der Leyden’s house; but he could make nothing of the matter as yet, and so he left it to one side — and would have forgotten it altogether, except that, when he went to rearrange his brother’s clothing and fit him for heaven once more, he noted that the tail of the shirt he was tucking back beneath the belt was very slightly brown.
After John was restored to proper order, Tom crossed to Father Little. He had used a quiet moment in the kitchen earlier to purloin a couple of little pots. Into these, with the point of his dagger, he scraped specimens of the foam that surrounded the dead priest’s mouth and then, crossing to Archie, of the dampness that soiled the kerchief binding his jaw. When they were both full, he stoppered them and cleaned his dagger with equal meticulousness. Then he covered the bodies once again.
He turned, ready to exit the icy little chapel; but then he turned again for one last time. He uncovered his brother’s hands. They were huge, the massive fingers flat-ended and horn-nailed from years of work in the smithy. The growth of nails within the week had clawed them a little, but Tom could still see that the best efforts of Eve’s cleaning had left some blackness beneath them. The point of his knife traced the blackness until little scrapings of soot came out. Tom took these on the ball of his thumb and rolled them with his index finger, squinting at them in the last of the light, sniffing like a gardener judging a rose, easing out the point of his tongue tip to taste and spit before he re-covered the body.
