Edward Marston - Ravens Of Blackwater

“That is true.”

“It was in its hiding place.”

“Then why give it to me at all?” asked Gervase. “If he was the killer, he would do everything to conceal the crime and not assist me in solving it. You said yourself that the man is completely harmless. Can you see that gnarled old warrior committing a murder?”

“Frankly-no.”

“Then put the whole idea aside.”

“I fear that I cannot,” said Oslac tenaciously. “I love Tovild as much as I pity him. He is in the grip of some benign madness that makes him play the soldier. Tovild could never commit a murder because that needs sanity and a degree of premeditation.” He pointed to the knife. “But he could kill a man by accident in the heat of battle.”

“By accident?”

“You have seen the way he hacks the air with his sword and jabs at his unseen enemy with his spear.” Oslac shook his head slowly. “His very harmlessness may be the key to it all here. Guy would not have been troubled by his approach.”

“But why should Tovild approach him?”

“Because Guy came to laugh at him. Because Guy was there to taunt a ridiculous old man in rusty armour.” He developed the idea with a growing belief in its virtues. “That must have been it, Master Bret! Do you not see? Guy FitzCorbucion was trespassing. He was treading on the sacred battlefield where Tovild worships each day. It was sheer sacrilege. A young Norman Knight was goading a decrepit old Saxon. Is it not conceivable that Tovild lashed out at him? He has been killing imaginary invaders all these years, why should he not cut down a real one? Guy did not have time to defend himself because he was taken unawares.” Oslac was talking with great intensity now. “I viewed the body and it had been cruelly disfigured. Such mutilation happens in combat. We may smile at Tovild the Haunted because of his strange antics, but there is a lot of wanton violence in a man who fights a bitter foe every day of his life.”

Gervase had to concede that it was within the bounds of possibility.

He also saw that a murder committed in such a way would not be recognised by Tovild as a crime. It would be one more brave action in the eternal battle that he waged. Handing over the knife to Gervase was a circuitous way of boasting about his triumph. Somewhere in that final riddle Tovild might even have hidden a form of confession. It was all possible and yet Gervase could not somehow accept it. What really puzzled him was why Oslac was so ready to incriminate the old man. From the moment he saw the murder weapon, the priest had been speaking with a defensive urgency that Gervase had never heard before. He slipped the knife back into his belt and nodded.

“I will think on it,” he said, “but now I must go.”

“One second more, please.”

“They have sent for me. I am needed at Champeney Hall.”

“You have not heard my tidings yet,” said Oslac. “You have at least made progress. I have only found setback.”

“Setback?”

“Wistan. He spent the night in my house.”

“Was he discovered?”

“Worse than that.” “What has happened?”

“He has run away.”

“When they are still out searching for him?” said Gervase in dis-belief. “He might just as well give himself up to Hamo. What chance has an unarmed boy against all those soldiers?”

“He is not unarmed,” said Oslac solemnly. “There was a sword at my house. Wistan took it along with a supply of food. The boy has plans.” He pointed to the knife thrust into Gervase’s belt. “You have found a murder weapon-and I have lost one. Wistan wants revenge.”

It was the last place that they would dream of looking for him. Northey Island had given him a temporary refuge but they had flushed him out with dogs in the end. No hounds would sniff him out here. For the first time since he had been a fugitive, Wistan felt supremely safe. Gervase Bret had shown him unexpected kindness and Oslac the Priest had even taken the boy into his own house, but neither man understood the imperatives that drove him on. What they had done was to create some time for him in which to find his bearings before he moved on elsewhere. Gervase had used a word that had had no real meaning for him before. Sanctuary. He had spoken of the church as offering sanctuary to the runaway boy. Wistan learned quickly. Oslac’s house was a comfortable enough hiding place but there was only one building in the town that could provide true sanctuary and that was why he had made his way to Maldon Priory.

When he thought of the priest, he felt both guilty and relieved. Oslac had taken a great risk in protecting the boy and had shared his own home with Wistan, but the hours he had spent there had troubled him as much as they had restored him. The priest had a wife and four children who lived happily together in the cosy humility of their little house. They drew him to them and gave freely of what they had. Wistan was washed, fed, dressed in clean apparel, and shown to a mattress under the eaves. Their love had revived him but their very togetherness had pushed him apart from them. He was sorry that he had to hurt them but he was also helping them by leaving. His presence there put them in danger and they would now be safe. Oslac had created a well-knit family but Wistan had nobody else now, and it underscored another difference between the two of them. The priest had a reason to live: The boy was ready to die. It gave him an inner strength, which would sustain him through his last few days on earth. All he had to do was to stay alive long enough to avenge his father’s murder and then he would happily join him in the grave. That was the only kind of family reunion that was now open to him.

Wistan had sneaked out of his bed in the night and stolen the sword and the food. Running to the priory in the dark, he had shinned up its wall and dropped into the garden. Shrubs and bushes ran along one side and there was thick cover for him. He was even sheltered from the worst of the rain. Wistan resolved to stay in his place of sanctuary until nightfall, then make his way to Blackwater Hall to see if there was any hope of gaining access. In the meantime, he would lie low at the priory while the hunt still continued for him outside. He was in a most privileged position. He could watch.

The first thing he noticed was the bell. It was chimed at regular intervals and its doleful clang called the holy sisters to the chapel for the sequence of offices. Wistan could hear faint voices raised in song but the Latin words were indecipherable. When the nuns eventually came out into the garden, he drew back into the burrow he had scooped out in the soft earth behind the bushes. They did not even throw a glance in his direction. He was thirty yards or so from the priory and his corner of the property held no interest for the women that morning. They were too busy with their appointed tasks.

Wistan was enthralled. He had never even seen a nun before. When the priory was first erected, there had been a lot of crude jokes made about its occupants by the slaves on the demesne, and he had duly sniggered at things he only vaguely grasped. One leering peasant had even boasted what he would do to all eight women if he could spend a night at the convent. Wistan’s experience of a night there was very different. Climbing into the place out of necessity, he found a haven of peace and was given a brief insight into a world that was utterly spellbinding.

They actually worked. Saxon noblewomen, who had always had servants on hand in the past to perform any chores, were now doing those same chores themselves without any sense of shame. They brought wooden buckets and filled them from the well, they set up a line between two posts and hung up their washing, they even picked up tools to labour in the garden. Wistan was moved. He had watched his own mother engaged in constant toil in their tiny hovel, but they were slaves on the estate of a Norman lord and drudgery was the lot of such women. The holy sisters had been exempted by social position from such mundane work, yet they were doing it with apparent readiness. Wistan could not have been more surprised if he had seen Matilda FitzCorbucion felling a tree or hauling in fishing nets from the river. Ladies did not do such things.