Alys Clare - The Chatter of the Maidens

‘Indeed not,’ she agreed. ‘And while on the one hand I should be relieved to be rid of her, can I, in Christian charity, turn her out into the world when she has nowhere to go?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said gently.

Turning her mind with an obvious effort from the problem of Alba, the Abbess straightened up and said, ‘Has Sheriff Pelham made any progress with the murder in the Vale?’

‘None,’ Josse said in disgust. ‘He asked some of the pilgrims a few fairly pointless questions, and he now seems to have settled on the man having been attacked by a traveller on the road who is now miles away.’

‘A typical Sheriff Pelham solution,’ the Abbess murmured.

‘Aye.’ He remembered what it was about the dead man that had struck him as significant. ‘But there is one thing, Abbess.’

Instantly she looked alert. ‘Yes?’

‘He wore a pilgrim badge from Walsingham. Which is only about fifty miles north of Ely.’

‘And so you conclude that he was connected with the girls? With Alba and her sisters?’

‘Ah, not necessarily!’ he protested. ‘I dare say many of our visitors wear such badges. Walsingham is a popular place.’

‘But to have someone from the same area of the land killed, here, where the sisters fled to, must be more than coincidence,’ she insisted. ‘Mustn’t it?’

‘My reason tells me no,’ he said bluntly. ‘But yet it keeps coming back to me, as if some part of me doesn’t want me to forget about it.’

‘That is God’s voice speaking directly to you,’ she said. ‘We must always listen when God speaks, Sir Josse.’

‘Aye, Abbess.’ He felt duly chastened. ‘I’ll keep that in mind.’ She opened her mouth to say something more, but before she could speak, he hurried on. ‘Now, if I may, Abbess, I’ll summarise the picture that emerges when we add your findings to what I have concluded from talking to my ingenuous little friend, Berthe.’

He thought briefly, then began.

‘A bullying man and his gentle, timid wife had three daughters, one much older than the other two. The mother and the two younger ones form an alliance, but they are under the domination of the father and the oldest girl. She, among her other bullying ways, is insistent on the family keeping up high standards in the way they appear to the outside world. Then the mother dies and the oldest girl, no longer having anybody to compete with for the role of her father’s second-in-command, takes herself off and joins a convent. But she is not suited to convent life, and she is asked to leave. In the meantime, the tyrannical father succumbs to illness and dies, leaving the middle sister free to make her own plans for her and her little sister’s future. But, before those plans can be implemented, the big sister comes back from her convent, decides that her sisters’ grief for their father is too strong to be assuaged there, in their former home with all its memories, so she drags them away and brings them all the way south to Hawkenlye.’ He paused for breath. ‘Have I left anything out?’

‘Only that Alba lied to us to make her story more convincing,’ the Abbess said.

‘Aye, she did. She told us both parents had recently died.’

‘And that — Oh! You’ve also omitted something I have thought of; that something had happened in their former home which Alba was desperate to run away from,’ she said. Her voice had dropped to a whisper, and her face, he noticed with a stab of anxiety, had paled. ‘Oh, dear God, Sir Josse, I-’ She put a hand to her mouth, as if physically holding back her words.

‘I had concluded the same thing,’ he said. ‘That the reason Alba showed such an extreme and uncontrolled reaction to Berthe working down in the Vale was because she feared somebody might have followed them from East Anglia and would recognise the girl.’

The Abbess was nodding. ‘Yes, that is true, of course.’ She hesitated. Her hands, he noticed, were trembling. ‘But I’m afraid I was thinking of something far more terrible than that.’

He waited while she got herself under control. She lifted her chin, closed her eyes as if in a brief prayer, then said, ‘Josse, I haven’t yet told you everything. I hope and pray that this last discovery was pure chance, and has nothing to do with the girls. However, I am very afraid that. .’ She broke off. ‘But I must tell you, then you can judge for yourself.’ She paused. ‘We found the farm where the family used to live, as I have said, and it was not at all a cheerful or welcoming place; indeed, we sensed the presence of death quite strongly. We were riding through the woodland which surrounds it, on our way back to the village, when we spotted a cottage deep in amongst the trees. It had suffered a devastating fire.’ She paused again, folded her hands tightly together, then said, ‘The roof had collapsed, and there was little left that was recognisable. Except that we found a human skeleton.’

‘A — what ?’ Great heavens, no wonder she was agitated! ‘You’re sure it was human? Not some animal caught inside when the place went up in flames?’

She was shaking her head. ‘No, no, that’s what I hoped. But Brother Augustine knows about bones. He insisted the skeleton was human. A man, he said.’

Again, Josse wished with all his soul for his usual speed of thought. A dead body, in an out-of-the-way location so close to the girls’ former home? What did this mean ? ‘Perhaps the fire and the death happened years and years ago,’ he suggested.

‘No,’ she said again. ‘We discussed that on the long road home, and Brother Saul remarked that the small degree of regrowth of vegetation bore witness to the fact that the fire can have been but recent.’

‘I was afraid you’d say something like that,’ Josse muttered.

He met her eyes. She was looking at him with an almost compassionate expression, as if about to give him very bad news.

As, it proved, she was. ‘Sir Josse,’ she said very quietly, ‘we cannot even console ourselves with thinking that it was a dreadful accident. This was murder.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘The dead man had been tied to an iron stake set into the floor of the dwelling,’ she said dully. ‘Brother Augustine found what was left of the rope, knotted very securely around the bones of the wrist.’

And Josse, momentarily overwhelmed, dropped his head in his hands.

She let him be for a while, for which he was profoundly grateful. So much to assimilate! There was a pattern behind it all, there had to be, and he kept having the frustrating, nagging feeling that it was there for the seeing, if he could only think !

Presently he heard her get up and move round her table to stand beside him. ‘Sir Josse?’ she said gently.

He raised his head. ‘Abbess?’

‘Sir Josse, there is a further matter I should tell you about,’ she said, face creased in anxiety. ‘I hesitate to do so, since it is but a suspicion, without any real substance. But. .’ She did not continue; she seemed to be waiting for him to invite her to.

‘You had better tell me anyway,’ he said dully.

A fleeting smile lit her face, there and gone in an instant. ‘Try not to sound so eager,’ she murmured.

He managed a grin. ‘Sorry. Go on. What was this suspicion of yours?’

She straightened, took a breath and said, ‘I am almost certain that we were being followed.’

‘Followed? Where? When?’

‘I first sensed it when we were going to Medely — the girls’ old home. I was convinced somebody was watching us in the woods, where we found the body, although that was such a creepy, eerie place that it would have been surprising not to have thought someone was there, hidden away. Then there were times on the road home when I. . Oh, this is silly! I shouldn’t have mentioned it! When I stop to think, of course there were people following us! It’s a warm, sunny April, and the whole of England is probably on the move!’