Alys Clare - The Tavern in the Morning

‘Steady on, there, sir!’ one of the men protested. ‘No need to get agitated, like!’

‘It were that old biddy as does the spells,’ another man said, putting a hand up to his mouth and whispering from behind it. ‘Can’t say as I know her name.’

‘Nor I,’ said another.

But Josse wasn’t listening. Grasping the shoulder of the man who had first volunteered information, he said urgently, ‘Old. You said she was old. Can you be sure?’

‘Aye, aye, sir!’ The man gave an uneasy laugh. ‘She were old, all right. Not only my mam but my grand-mam an’ all used to speak of her and her potions.’

A huge relief was sweeping through Josse, so that, inappropriate though it was, he felt like cheering. Instead, he offered to fill each of the men’s mugs, then, having been given directions for how he might find the scene of the drowning — the information was pretty vague, but better than nothing — he was on his way.

* * *

He would not have found the pond so readily had it not been surrounded by a large group of the Sheriff’s men. Might not, even, have found it at all, for it was in a secluded spot deep in the forest, and it was the sound of loud voices that had drawn him to it.

He stood on the edge of the small clearing, surveying the scene.

The pond was about five paces by ten and along its far bank was a row of willows, now quite bare of leaves. On the near bank was a vegetable patch, showing evidence of regular and diligent care. Behind the vegetable patch was a little hut made of a sturdy framework of posts filled in with wattle and daub. The roof — made of reed thatch — looked well-maintained.

On the far side of the hut, in a place where, Josse judged, it had been put so as to catch what sunshine made its way into the clearing, was a herb garden.

The body lay half on its side, with its legs and lower torso on the bank. Its head, shoulders, arms and chest were in the pond.

Josse moved forward and approached Sheriff Pelham, whom he assumed to be in charge.

‘Good day to you, Sheriff,’ he called, still sitting astride his horse. ‘I heard tell of this death while I was at the inn, and came to-’

‘Came to poke your nose in, as usual. King’s man,’ the Sheriff finished. ‘Well, I don’t reckon there’s much to interest you here. She slipped, it seems, fell with her head under the water and she drowned.’

Josse dismounted, tethered Horace to a stout branch, and went to the pond’s edge. Crouching down, he realised straight away why nobody had yet removed the dead woman from the pond.

The water had frozen hard around her.

He said to the Sheriff, ‘Does anything strike you about her, Sheriff Pelham?’

The Sheriff glanced around at a few of his men to make sure they were listening. ‘She’s dead,’ he said, with an unpleasant laugh. ‘Or didn’t you notice?’ He was rewarded with a few guffaws. ‘People do die, with their heads stuck in ponds. They drown, like.’

Josse said, ‘People drown in water. This pond is covered in a thick layer of ice, and has been, I would guess, for — ’ he paused, calculating, ‘for the last three days, I’d say.’ Yes. That was right. It had been milder, the night he’d slept in Ninian’s camp. Then, the next night, the temperature had gone down sharply and Joanna’s pity had led her to take that great risk of bringing a strange man into the shelter of her secret hiding-place.

The Sheriff said aggressively, ‘So? What of it?’

Josse suppressed a sigh. ‘Then this woman must have been lying here for three days. At least.’

‘How can you be sure?’ demanded the Sheriff.

‘Because she must have gone in when the pond was water,’ Josse said patiently. ‘Which was either three days ago, when the weather relented a little, or some time before that.’ He glanced down at the body. ‘I would doubt, however, that she has been here long.’

‘Got a scrying glass, have you?’ the Sheriff asked nastily, raising a few more guffaws, although Josse doubted very much if many of the men knew what a scrying glass was; he was quite surprised that the Sheriff did.

‘No. I don’t need one,’ he replied. He pointed to the corpse’s abdomen, touching it gently. ‘There’s no bloating, whereas, if she’d been here much longer than three days, she would have begun to swell up.’ He had observed such things in battlefield corpses. It was one reason for burying your dead quickly; corpses became progressively more unpleasant to deal with if you delayed.

‘Got any bright ideas as to how we’re going to get her out, have you?’ Sheriff Pelham asked caustically; he was, Josse noticed, getting more irascible the more his weaknesses were exposed. But it was so difficult not to expose them …

Josse had drawn his sword and, using the point of the hilt as a mallet, was gently cracking the ice around the corpse’s head and shoulders, making attractive star patterns on the smooth surface. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘we might be able to release her fairly easily. The pond’s not frozen solid, it’s only the first few inches.’

Observing what he was doing, one or two of the brighter men came to help. Soon, the ice around the upper part of the corpse was shattered into a hundred fragments and Josse and his two assistants were able to extract the old woman from her frozen tomb.

Her face, Josse noticed as he turned her over on to her back, was badly bruised …

She must have banged her face on the ice,’ Sheriff Pelham observed, leaning over Josse’s shoulder and breathing open-mouthed into his ear.

‘Think again,’ Josse said. ‘If she fell when the pond was iced over, she wouldn’t have been down there beneath the surface, frozen into it.’

Momentarily, the Sheriff was silenced.

Rapidly Josse inspected the rest of the corpse. As well as the bruised face — the nose had taken a direct hit, and, as he gently probed inside the mouth, he saw what looked like a recently-broken tooth — she had damage to both hands.

Josse held the dead hands in his.

Pity surging through him, he realised that someone had deliberately broken two fingers on each of the dead woman’s hands.

He laid her head down again and, on the sloping bank, she rolled over until she was lying face-down.

And Josse saw, on the back of the carefully-laundered white cap, a clear boot print.

Someone had savagely beaten her, then dragged her to the pond and held her head under the water with a foot until she died.

Why the beating? To what purpose had somebody tortured her like that?

Why, he answered himself, were people usually tortured in this wicked world? To make them tell you something that they knew and you didn’t. Something that you badly wanted to know.

Oh, God, Josse thought.

‘When you’ve quite finished,’ the Sheriff said from just behind him, ‘we’d better see about taking this here into town for disposal.’

Disposal.

‘You’ve got a murder on your hands,’ Josse said softly. ‘Didn’t you realise?’

‘Murder my arse!’ The Sheriff spat on to the frosty grass. ‘She went to get water, slipped, bashed her head and fell in the water.’ He put his face up close to Josse’s and added with quiet intensity, ‘That’s what I say. And what I say goes.’

Unfortunately, as Josse well knew, it did.

He said, ‘Aren’t you even going to determine who she was?

The Sheriff, grinning, raised his eyebrows at one of his men. ‘No need for that. Hugh?’

The man, stepping forward, said, ‘She were Mag Hobson. She were my mam’s aunt.’

With nothing further to add, Josse watched as a hurdle was brought up, and, with a scant amount of respect which he felt was only employed because he happened to be watching, the men got the body on to it and began the long walk back to Tonbridge.