Alys Clare - Fortune Like the Moon

What a tale, Helewise thought. Dear Lord, what a tale of greed and dishonour.

But it was not all told yet.

‘So your mother ordered that you try to obtain what she felt you were entitled to?’ she prompted. ‘Having told you where to go, she left it up to you to announce yourself? To convince Sir Alard that you were his son?’

‘Yes.’ Milon smiled faintly. ‘Daunting, wasn’t it? I mean, if, as my mother said, he only bedded her the once, would he even remember? I thought it was unlikely. And, if I told him and he refused to believe it, what then? I’d have blown my chances, and, no doubt, he’d have thrown me out and told his damned manservant to make sure I never darkened his door again. I had no proof, you see!’

‘Indeed I do,’ Helewise murmured.

‘The alternative — my plan to marry Elanor — was the best I could come up with,’ he went on. ‘It was her or nothing, I reckoned. Gunnora wouldn’t have looked at another man, and Dillian was smitten with Brice. So I went in search of my father’s niece.’ He paused, and the silence continued for some time.

Then he said, ‘But I fell in love with her, you see. It wasn’t about the money any longer, or not just the money.’ His eyes met Helewise’s. ‘I truly loved her.’

That, apparently, was too much for Josse. ‘Loved her enough to put your hands round her throat and choke the life out of her!’ he burst out. ‘Fine kind of love that is!’

It could have been that Josse didn’t see that Milon was weeping. But Helewise did. ‘Can you tell us what happened, Milon?’ she asked gently. ‘The night Elanor died?’

He raised his wet face to look at her. ‘We’d been making love, like I said. Carefully, because of her being pregnant. But it was as good as it always is. Then, afterwards, she was telling me about him. That Sir Josse.’ It was as if he’d forgotten Josse was in the room. ‘She was frightened of him, frightened of the questions about Gunnora, and she wanted me to let her come away with me there and then. But I said no, it’d only make things look even worse if she did, the only way was to sweat it out and keep denying everything. So she said she couldn’t, that she was tired, and sick, and needed me, and I got angry with her because we were there then, we’d all but done it, my father was on the very point of death and very soon it’d be over, she’d inherit and we could go away and live happily ever after!’

Happily ever after, Helewise thought. Just like a fairy tale. Appropriate, when this man and his wife were a pair of children. ‘You got angry,’ she repeated. ‘Lost your temper with her.’

‘It was frightening, her saying she wanted to tell him everything! I mean, how would it look? He’d never have believed I didn’t kill her, none of you would!’

‘But you did kill her,’ Josse said coldly. ‘You throttled her.’

Milon gave a sigh of exasperation. ‘Yes, I know! I didn’t intend to, my temper got the better of me. I was just trying to stop her crying so loudly. But I didn’t mean Elanor. I’m not talking about Elanor.’

Helewise felt a small — a very small — song of triumph. I knew it! she thought. Knew it! She wondered what Josse was thinking.

‘Elanor,’ Milon was murmuring, smiling and humming to himself. ‘She’s my wife, you know,’ he said to the room at large. ‘My loving, clever, pretty wife. She’s going to have my baby. I’m going to go home to her, very soon now, and she’s going to take me into her bed and make me warm again. She’s going to light all the candles, and drive the dark and the shadow men away.’

Helewise made herself block it out.

Had Josse realised? she wondered. Did he know, before an answer was demanded of Milon, what it would be?

‘Milon?’ she said softly. ‘Milon, listen to me. If you weren’t talking about Elanor, what did you mean?’

‘I meant’ — Milon spoke as if to a dim child — ‘that I didn’t kill Gunnora.’

* * *

Helewise stepped back then, and Josse took up the questioning. I have no heart for this, she thought as she listened, this brutal hurling of words at someone who is already broken. Besides, I know that, even if Sir Josse carries on till Christmas, Milon will not vary his story.

Because he is telling the truth. We have to look elsewhere for the killer of Gunnora.

‘You ask us to believe,’ Josse was saying, with heavy sarcasm, ‘that, although you admit that you and Elanor cooked up a plot to separate Gunnora from her inheritance, yet you are innocent of her murder? When we know you were in the immediate vicinity at the time of her death, and she was killed only yards from your secret hiding place? With the marks on her arms where Elanor held her, and the slit in her throat which you made with that great knife of yours? Milon, give us credit for more sense!’

‘It’s true!’ Milon cried for the fourth time. ‘She was dead when we found her!’

‘You’re telling us that you and your wife — her own cousins, damn it! — found her, lying with her throat cut, yet did nothing for her?’

‘She was dead! What could we do?’

‘You could have run for help! Gone searching for the brothers at the shrine, come up to the Abbey and alerted the Abbess! Covered the poor lass up! Anything!’

‘But you’d have thought we killed her,’ Milon protested.

Suddenly Helewise had a mental image of Gunnora’s body, as they had found her. The skirts, so neatly folded. Without thinking, she said, ‘Elanor arranged her. She tidied Gunnora’s skirts, just as a nun is taught to fold her bedding, and then smeared the blood on her thighs. Didn’t she?’

Milon turned to her. He seemed to have gone a degree more ashen. His eyes held some sort of appeal; he said, ‘Yes, Abbess. She felt bad about it. We both did. But she said if we made it look like Gunnora had been raped, then even if anyone did start to think we’d killed her, they’d soon stop again, because we’d just have wanted her money. If she’d been raped and then killed, it couldn’t have been us.’

Helewise nodded thoughtfully. ‘Thank you, Milon. I understand.’

Josse was shaking his head in disbelief. ‘Elanor did that?’ he said incredulously. ‘Gunnora’s own cousin? Turned back the poor woman’s skirts and spread her own blood on her? Dear God, what sort of a girl was she?’

‘A desperate one,’ Helewise murmured. Who, remembering the instruction she was being given in convent life — always fold your bedcovers like this, fold back, fold back again, just so — had, in some gesture of appeasement, tried to be neat in the arrangement of her dead cousin’s habit.

‘What of the cross?’ Josse demanded. ‘It wasn’t Gunnora’s own, and it wasn’t Elanor’s; hers was smaller. Did you drop it by her body?’

‘Yes.’

‘You brought it with you? Where on earth did you get hold of it?’

‘I didn’t bring it! It was Gunnora’s! It must have been, she was wearing it — she had it round her neck. Elanor said she’d have it, since the rubies were better than the ones in her cross, but I wouldn’t let her. Well, she realised, soon as I said, that it’d be a daft thing to do, it’d lead people straight to us if Elanor was seen with Gunnora’s cross. So we just dropped it.’ He sniffed. ‘That’s what I came back for. Elanor’s cross. She didn’t have it on her when I — She didn’t have it that night, or, if she did, I couldn’t find it. I was going to have another look down near our secret place, then follow the path she’d have taken down from the dormitory, searching all the way. Not that I had much hope of finding it there. I was going to come into the Abbey and try to get into the dormitory, then have a look in her bed.’ He seemed to slump suddenly. ‘I had to get it,’ he said wearily. ‘You’d have known who she was, if you’d got your hands on her cross. And then you’d have come straight for me.’