Alys Clare - The Enchanter's Forest

It was merely a matter of time.

The body was brought to Hawkenlye Abbey because those who found it — three days after the murder and stinking to high heaven — did not know what else to do with it. The men whose unpleasant lot it had been to smell out the corpse were merchants; a trio of Essex men on their way back to the markets of London after a visit to northern France. They had heard of the new attraction in the forest close to Hadfeld and taken a brief detour to go and see it for themselves. People back home loved to hear tales of faraway places and the three men had congratulated themselves on their foresight in making sure that, this time, they would be returning armed with a story good enough to ensure that they would be stood drinks in the tavern on the day they reached home.

And that had been before they found the body.

The tomb they had found in a state of some confusion: queues of men, women and children of all ages and in all conditions stood in a line patiently waiting to be admitted through the gap in the fence, yet as the merchants’ turn approached they detected unease among the stoutly built and mean-looking men who guarded the place. And when the youngest of the merchants ventured a question concerning the discovery of those impressively large bones, one of the guards had shot a nervous glance at his companion and said not to ask him, he wasn’t the one with all the clever answers, to which the other guard had muttered something about their job being to safeguard the tomb, wait to be told what else to do and then collect their wages, and God alone knew when that was going to happen.

The three merchants had dutifully waited their turn and crept forward to look at the giant’s bones in their stony grave, each of them feeling the same sense of shock and, as one of them put it, ‘a sort of trembling on the skin’. All three of them were far from being cowards, each having had his share of the sort of dangers common to the life of a travelling man, yet to a man they were glad to walk away from the tomb and its silent, inert occupant, who somehow managed to emanate a sense of threat, of menace.

The men purchased bread, cheese and mugs of some reasonably tasty small beer. Then, as they finally set off, they decided that the weird things they had experienced might be exaggerated a little when the tale was told; with any luck, they might get their beer bought for them for more than one evening. .

Their noses had led them to the putrefying body quite soon after leaving the tomb. They had hacked their way into the huge clump of brambles and, not without damage to their hands, wrists and clothing, managed to extract it.

One of the merchants had unfolded a blanket out of his pack, which he had nobly sacrificed (nobody, not even a man without a sense of smell, would want to use that blanket again, with all those stains from where the dead flesh was seeping foul liquids) for the purpose of wrapping up the body. They slung the noisome parcel over the man’s horse — he opted for riding pillion behind one of his companions, close proximity to the corpse being best avoided as far as possible — and quickly got on the road. The three knew of Hawkenlye Abbey and, being God-fearing men, decided that it was the obvious place to deposit their unwelcome burden. One of the men half-heartedly suggested returning to the Tomb of Merlin that they had recently left — it was certainly closer — but the others were of the opinion that Hawkenlye was altogether a holier and therefore more honest and trustworthy place. The three men had each gained the impression that there was something distinctly odd about Merlin’s Tomb.

The merchants reached Hawkenlye in the mid-afternoon. The man who had wrapped the body slid down from his friend’s horse and, approaching the nun on duty beside the gate, asked to speak to the abbot.

‘You’re strangers,’ the old nun said, fixing him with sharp eyes.

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘We know of Hawkenlye Abbey, Sister, but not a lot about it.’

‘Then,’ the porteress said grandly, ‘I shall excuse your ignorance and inform you that the person in charge here is the Abbess Helewise.’

The man made a graceful bow. ‘My apologies.’

‘No need for that,’ the nun replied. Eyeing the other two merchants and the blanket-wrapped body, she sniffed and added, ‘Follow me.’

Helewise, her work interrupted by Sister Ursel’s knock, listened to the merchant’s tale as she strode beside him back to the gate. Standing beside him, eyes on the body on the horse, she said quietly, ‘You found him on the southern fringes of the forest?’

‘Yes, my lady Abbess, in the middle of a bramble thicket. It was only the smell that gave him away.’

Helewise was thinking it was quite likely that other passers-by had smelt the corpse but, less Christian than these three merchants, had, in St Luke’s words, passed by on the other side. Turning to the man standing beside her, she said, ‘You could have left the body where it lay and avoided both the unpleasant task of bringing him here and also the delay it has afforded you.’

The merchant looked quite shocked. ‘But, my lady, he might have died unprepared! We could not have left him there to rot in unhallowed ground with his sins heavy on him.’

‘You have done well,’ she said. ‘I will summon some of the lay brethren to transport the body to the infirmary, where the poor soul will be prepared for burial. As for yourselves’ — she glanced at the man’s scratched hands — ‘I will ask my infirmarer to arrange for your wounds to be treated. And will you take refreshment with us before you go on your way?’

The merchant glanced at his companions, then said, ‘Thank you, my lady, but, as you imply, we have already lost time. With your leave, we’ll have our hands bathed and then we will depart as soon as we can.’

‘Of course.’ Helewise caught Sister Ursel’s eye and, as the nun hurried to her superior’s side, quickly gave orders that Brother Saul and two or three of the others be summoned. Then, beckoning to the three merchants and leading them over to the infirmary, Helewise forced herself to gather her thoughts.

She was trying to work out what Josse would have done under the circumstances. A body had been found, on which there might or might not be means of identification. It had been concealed, which in all likelihood meant that the dead man had not met his end by natural means. Unless, of course, he had felt unwell and slipped unconscious from his horse. . But then he would hardly have crawled into a bramble thicket to die, now would he? she reminded herself crossly. The deep scratches on the hands of the merchants who had extracted him bore witness to how dense that thicket had been and, by a natural progression, to the unlikelihood of the body having been in there for any purpose other than concealment. Which meant that the poor soul had probably been murdered and that his killer had hidden the body.

Josse, she decided, would extract every scrap of information that he could from those who found the body. Especially since, in the case of these three merchants, it was likely that they would not be available for further questioning once they had proceeded on their way.

Entering the infirmary, she briefly told Sister Euphemia what had happened, alerting her to the fact that she was just about to have a very smelly dead body to deal with. She added that the three merchants required treatment for cuts to their hands and the infirmarer summoned one of her nursing nuns, who quickly fetched hot water and oils and clean linen cloths and set about her task.

Watching the veiled head bent over the first man’s bleeding wrist, Helewise said, ‘Now, my friends, please relate to me the whole story and omit no detail, however small.’