Bernard Knight - Figure of Hate

'She was one of the skivvies in the wash house, sirs. A girl no better than she should be, if you get my meaning. Not seen these past few hours, since the poor master was found dead.'

With Ralph absent, there was no one to challenge Odo, and he now rose to his feet and glared fiercely at the falconer.

'Are you saying that she was the girl who was with Sir Hugo last night?' he demanded.

Joel also sprang to his feet and, red faced, confronted his eldest brother.

'Have you no tact, Odo? Think of poor Beatrice having to listen to this!'

Hugo's new widow blushed, but more from the younger brother's chivalrous words than any revulsion or shame at the mention of her late husband's well known carnal pursuits.

'I think it would be best if I retired to my chamber,' she said tactfully, and, with much fussing of maids, both women rose and gracefully vanished up the staircase to the upper floor. Odo resumed his interrogation of the falconer, a grizzled man of forty with skin like the bark of an oak tree.

'Well, was this the doxy that he was covering in the ox byre?'

'So says another maid in the wash hut. Agnes had been with him before, when it seems he had given her a whole penny for her trouble.'

Roger Viel coughed delicately and spoke up.

'I know the girl, she has a face like a pudding, but the rest of her is shapely enough. I fail to see why she should harm our lord, especially when he was so generous to her just for lying on her back for him.'

Odo rasped his fingers over two days' growth of gingery stubble on his cheeks. 'Nevertheless, it is vital that we find her and see what she has to say. If there is no one else forthcoming as a suspect, then maybe she will have to serve as the culprit!'

He waved the falconer out, with orders to search the whole village until she was caught. There was nowhere else she could go, as to leave the manor meant eventual death from exposure or starvation. No other village would take her in, and a girl could not even flee into the nearby forests to become an outlaw.

There was just one place she could go, however, and even though the fugitive was an immature drab of a laundry girl, desperation drove her to take advantage of it.

Sir Richard de Revelle arrived at Sampford something over an hour later, hurrying back with Ralph Peverel to make sure of getting there ahead of his arch-enemy, the coroner.

His keenness to help his neighbours was in part due to the chance of confounding his brother-in-law, but also as a potential lever in securing the desirable parcel of land he wanted. It was a wide tongue of pasture and forest which projected into his manor boundary. If he could acquire it, this land would form a continuous stretch which, when ploughed into strip fields, would form a valuable addition to his estate. Previous offers had been adamantly rejected by both old William and Hugo Peverel, and he had been working on the more amenable Ralph for several months, hoping that he could persuade the family to part with the ground.

Richard marched into the hall as if he owned the whole manor, slapping his soft leather gloves against his thigh as he advanced to the far table, where once again the ladies and all the other brothers were seated.

Ralph ushered him to a bench and beckoned imperiously to a servant to bring wine. De Revelle, with hand on heart, inclined his head courteously to the ladies and murmured platitudes of sympathy on the sad loss of Hugo. His foxy face was triangular, narrowing below his moustached mouth to a small-pointed beard, an affectation unusual among the Norman aristocracy, who were usually clean shaven, Similarly, his fair wavy hair was slightly longer than the usual cropped top above shaven sides that most men affected. A dandified man, he wore a long tunic of fine green wool under his yellow riding cloak, with golden embroidery around the square neck and lower hem. A wide leather belt, carrying a dagger and pouch, was of oriental style, designed to give the impression that he had been to the Holy Land, though in fact he had never ventured beyond France.

'I have told Sir Richard the sparse facts surrounding my poor brother's vile death …' began Ralph, but he was immediately interrupted by Odo.

'Since you left here, there has been more news. The girl has been found — and lost again.'

'Satan's horns, what's that supposed to mean?'

'The wench that Hugo took to the ox byte was one of the wash-house drabs. But before she could be taken, she gained sanctuary in the church!'

Ralph, the most short-tempered of the whole family, stared at Odo for a moment, then laughed. 'Sanctuary. Don't be so bloody foolish, brother. Let's get her dragged out and given a good beating — then have her brought here for us to question.'

Beatrice smacked her small hand on the table in front of her.

'You can't do that! It's sacrilege and I expect it's illegal.'

Joel, who wished to support Beatrice in everything, agreed.

'Besides, if you want to thrash senseless every girl that Hugo ever laid, there'll be little laundry or cooking done in the village,' he added cynically, forgetting his previous concern for Beatrice's sensibilities.

Ralph ignored his facetious younger brother and addressed himself to Odo and de Revelle.

'This is nonsense!. The girl is nothing but a cottar's daughter, the lowest of the low,' he snarled. 'Why the daft bitch wants to seek sanctuary is beyond me, unless of course she did kill Hugo! Send someone to get the damned wench out of that church, before I lose my temper!'

Refusing to acknowledge Ralph's assumption of supremacy, Odo turned to the former sheriff for advice.

'What do you think about this, Richard?' He deliberately used his Christian name to emphasise his own equality in rank with another manor-lord. De Revelle stroked his little beard, an affectation he had when giving the impression of deep thought.

'It's an offence, of course, the breaking of sanctuary,' he said in his rather high-pitched voice. 'There is a rigid scale of penalties set down by law. But it is the Church, rather than the Crown, that sets its face so strongly against it, especially after King Henry's blunder in sending those knights after Thomas Becket.'

'So what should we do?' persisted Odo. 'You are the legal authority here.'

De Revelle scowled. 'Until I am reinstated after the foul conspiracy that deprived me of my shrievalty, I have no authority — but therefore am free to give advice, man to man.'

'And that advice would be?' questioned Ralph, returning to the fray.

'This is your manor,' brayed Richard. 'The slut is your property, the church is yours and no doubt you pay the priest who serves it. So drag the wretched girl out without further delay!'

The reeve led the coroner's team into the village up the last stretch of track that came from the high road to Taunton along the Culm valley. De Wolfe had never been to Sampford Peverel before; to him it was just a name, one of the scores of manors that dotted the county. Many belonged to the bishop, others to abbeys or the Templars or directly to the King himself, but the remainder were held by knights and barons, either as freehold tenants-in-chief of the King or leased from a greater landowner. He knew that the Peverels had been here since the middle of the century, the family having originally come over soon after the Conquest — some said as bastard relations of William himself.

There were Peverels in a number of areas, from the Derbyshire peaks to farther down in Devon. The reeve gave a running commentary on the fertility of the rolling slopes on which the village was sited, local pride evident in his voice as he extolled the abundant crops and beasts that could be grown and tended here in good years. It was his job to organise the tilling of the fields and the ordering of labour that kept the economy of the manor in good shape. He grimly added a caveat — to the prosperity of Sampford, however, as the first dwellings and the church came in sight.