Alys Clare - The Enchanter's Forest

A thought occurred to her. She was reluctant to accept it but then, in the absence of both Josse and Gervase, it was for the moment up to her to work on this problem on her own. Filling her stylus with ink, she wrote The Forest Folk , underlining it and then adding They are disturbed by the Tomb of Merlin .

If the Domina’s people resented the presence of a commercial and probably fraudulent enterprise so close to the forest lands which they held sacred, Helewise thought, then might not one of their number take matters into his or her own hands and quietly dispatch the man behind it? The forest people had been known to kill when something or someone treated their holy places with contempt, as Helewise well knew, for she had once discovered a body with a flint-tipped spear in its back. The dead man had disturbed something that he should have left alone and seen something that he was not supposed to see; the forest people had not allowed him to live to tell the tale.

But the Domina had, after consultation with Helewise, agreed on a very different and far less violent method of stopping Florian’s activities. In the midst of her preoccupation, Helewise paused to send some thoughts Josse’s way, wondering how he was getting on over there in Brittany and praying — without very much hope, she admitted to herself — that he would not even now be storing up great sorrow for himself when the time came, as it inevitably would, for him and Joanna to part.

Making herself return to her notes, she thought, but this killing might have been done without either the Domina’s knowledge or consent. There must surely be other powerful figures among the forest people; might not one of them have decided that this business of going across to Brittany to view and verify the true Merlin’s Tomb was taking altogether too long? And in any case there was no guarantee that Josse and Joanna’s mission would be successful. Joanna might not succeed in finding the place, or Josse might not actually be able to convince himself that Merlin was buried there any more than he was in the forest near Hadfeld.

The bones. Those giant bones. . Her mind slipped away and she found herself imagining them, wishing she had yielded to the temptation to go and have a look while she had been at the tomb. If they were not Merlin’s, then whose were they?

They give off a force , Josse had said. He told her he had felt he was in the presence of a great power that he did not understand.

Were they the bones of a saint? Helewise wondered. It was unlikely that a saint would have been buried out in the forest, but then Josse believed Florian had found the bones elsewhere and reburied them at the tomb site. Had he robbed a churchyard? Broken into a reliquary? But no — if some church was missing its valuable relic — and she had never heard of a whole skeleton, only a finger bone or perhaps a couple of ribs; in rare cases, a skull — then surely word would have spread of the outrage?

Perhaps the bones were those of some holy man whom the church had not recognised but who nevertheless had power. . But that was sacrilege, she told herself firmly, for to worship bones — or anything else for that matter — without official sanction surely must amount to raising false idols.

A giant. Josse said the man would have been taller than him by a third of his own height.

Do I believe in giants? Helewise asked herself. Again she wished she had seen the bones with her own eyes, for she was struck with the idea that the huge skeleton might be nothing but a clever fraud; Florian might have cobbled together the bones of more than one man, perhaps also including animal bones.

She flung down her stylus in frustration; she was getting absolutely nowhere.

She made herself set out on a different approach. What other facts did she know of Florian of Southfrith?

She made a new heading — the dead young man’s name — and then wrote down all that she could recall of the facts told to her by Melusine. He was the youngest of three with two elder sisters, one a nun somewhere in north Kent, one well married and living in France; Angers, wasn’t it? No — Poitiers. She wrote it down. He had been married to Melusine’s daughter Primevere — her only daughter — for two years. He had boasted of wealth in order to win the young lady’s hand in the face of stiff opposition; his means later proved to have been exaggerated and he had further impoverished himself by hurrying to give his contribution towards King Richard’s ransom before he was even asked. Primevere was an heiress — Helewise heard in her mind Melusine’s haughty tones as she said My late husband was Theobald of Canterbury; I am from Angers and I am an heiress in my own right . So Primevere would never have been a pauper, even had Florian not come up with his great money-spinning scheme, for the doting and wealthy mother would have swooped down and rescued her precious child long before Florian spent the last of his pennies on her.

The vague idea that had been growing in Helewise’s mind — to do with the possibility that Primevere, on her mother’s own admission bored with her new husband, might have had him killed in order to enjoy his money without having to endure him — faded away and died. It just did not work for, if Primevere had in truth been ready to leave her husband, she could have gone to her mother, explained simply that she was tired of Florian and the two of them could have moved away and set up home together elsewhere. Not being in need of her husband’s money, why on earth would Primevere want him dead? And anyway Helewise only had Melusine’s word for it that Primevere no longer loved her husband; to Helewise, the young woman’s grief had seemed only too real.

Perhaps Melusine had reasons of her own for claiming that her daughter’s marriage was dying, if not dead. .

Something suddenly occurred to Helewise. She saw again the pretty picture of Primevere lying on her bed, apparently sick, with her pale face supporting the claim. Yet there had been that fall of luscious, extravagant, gleaming hair. And, now Helewise came to think of it, the young woman’s eyes had been bright, the whites shining and clear; apart from the pallor, Primevere had looked the picture of health.

Supposing — just supposing — she had only been pretending to be sick? It must be possible to create the image of pale cheeks; why, a small amount of flour would surely do the trick.

Although she simply did not know why Primevere, lucky enough to be well, might wish to pretend she was sick, nevertheless Helewise wrote down Primevere: what ails her and is she genuinely unwell?

Then she sat back and stared at her list.

And she realised that, a considerable time spent in deep thought notwithstanding, she didn’t seem to have come up with anything very helpful. Also, that she had absolutely no idea of what to do next.

I have spent far too much time on this already, she rebuked herself sternly. In order that my musings shall not be entirely wasted, I must worry my thoughts to a conclusion and then leave the matter alone and get on with my work.

She tried to still her whirling mind, hoping that a moment’s serenity would allow some sense or pattern to emerge from the chaos. She laid down her stylus, folded her hands, closed her eyes and, deliberately relaxing the tension in her neck and shoulders, laid her head back against her tall chair.

After some time she thought, but I have been making this far more complicated than it is, for surely by far the most likely answer is that someone — a visitor to the tomb, or, as I was beginning to suspect when I was with Primevere, one of the guards — knew that Florian would be alone when he carried away his takings that night, followed him until he was well away from anybody who might hear him cry out and then hurried on ahead to set up the rope that broke his neck. Why, I have only to look around me to see what poverty there is in this land of ours. People are desperate, as is demonstrated by the way in which they are flocking to the so-called Merlin’s Tomb in the hope of some miracle that will give them a helping hand. Why, then, should I seek to complicate what is almost certainly murder for gain, the gain being a good horse and several bulging bags of money?