Mel Starr - The Unquiet Bones

My conversation with Lady Joan was ended as soon as it began. Lord Gilbert retrieved the end of our parley he had momentarily dropped, and Lady Joan returned to her fish, peeling white flesh from bones with dainty fingers.

“You are, no doubt, engaged in your profession at Oxford?” he asked. It was a question, not a statement. I might have answered, “yes,” to salve my vanity. Then my vanity might have been intact, but my future laid in ruins. It was not the first or last time I found that uncomfortable honesty was a tree which might bear agreeable fruit.

“No, Lord Gilbert. I am new to my profession, and new, as a surgeon, to Oxford. My clients are few.”

“Ah. Well…” I saw him smile, and wondered why my lack of patronage should bring him pleasure. “There would be work for you here, in Bampton. The village has no physician, only a barber who draws blood from the ill. But he has not your skill. A house of mine in the town is empty — several houses, to be truthful.” He frowned. “The recent plague has left many empty dwellings. But the town has yet enough citizens that a surgeon would find himself regularly occupied.”

Lord Gilbert told me he would show me the house in the morning. I told him I would think on the offer and give him an answer then. Truth is, there was little reason not to accept his offer. Should clients prove few in Bampton, I could move back to Oxford, where I would be no more unemployed then than now. Meanwhile it seemed unlikely I could have less custom in the village than in Oxford. But I did not want my services to seem too easily acquired. Hard won is most relished.

The house Lord Gilbert showed me in the morning was a substantial dwelling, two stories high, of solid timber construction, wattle and daub. The roof was newly thatched, probably before the tenants perished in the returning plague two years before. It sat among others like it, on Church View, but three doors from St Beornwald’s Churchyard. The site was ideal for one who sought business in his trade. Most of the population would pass the house at least once each week on the way to church.

Arthur had brought along the key. Lord Gilbert stood back to allow him to twist it in the lock and push open the heavy door. It had been undisturbed for many months, and the hinges squealed in displeasure. Hinges seem to be like many people; unhappy at their lot in life and determined to protest when called to duty.

Inside, the house was dim and dusty. But I saw the possibilities: my private room on the upper floor, a dispensary and kitchen on the ground floor. There was but one hair in the soup. The rent on such a house would be more than my thin purse could countenance. I explained this frankly to Lord Gilbert

“I have no income from this house at all now,” he replied. “So I will make you a bargain — four shillings a year, to commence at the beginning of the new year. You will have six months to improve your state before the first rent is due.” We struck the deal with a handshake. I borrowed a horse from the castle marshalsea, rode to Oxford to retrieve my few possessions, and returned to Bampton as night closed on the village.

John had sent two girls from the castle to clean the dusty place, and I found a coney pie still warm on the table. I was home.

In the next weeks I treated village inhabitants for sprains and scalds, tumors and broken bones, fevers, cuts, dislocations, swellings and eruptions. My location was propitious for attracting custom. Many town residents had borne afflictions for years with no treatment, and word soon traveled to neighboring villages that a competent surgeon resided in Bampton. I was on my way to prosperity.

Lord Gilbert suggested another benefit of my situation on Church View Street. My failures had but a short distance to travel to the churchyard. Lord Gilbert has, at times, a ghastly sense of humor.

I was fortunate that but one patient went to the churchyard in that first month. The woman had suffered a cancerous tumor on her cheek for two years. I excised what I could of it, but the malignancy had traveled to her jaw. She perished on St Crispin’s Day.

Now you will understand why I was called to the castle to inspect the bones pulled from the sludge of the cesspit. I had more dealings with bones than anyone else in the town. But my expertise in osseous materials seemed hardly necessary. Word of the find spread through Bampton promptly, and all knew these must be the bones of the missing suitor, Sir Robert Mallory, or his squire.

They were not.

Digging up a cesspit is not work for the squeamish. It is not done often. Some never do it. But Petronilla Talbot is a particular woman. She demanded the removal of sludge every year or two, and Lord Gilbert knew better than to argue the point. Besides, he could direct others to do the job.

The cesspit had been added to the castle years after its construction was complete. The garderobes were attached to the wall like a giant chimney, with the cesspit at the base of the structure.

Four villeins were assigned to dig, haul up buckets, and cart off the filth. Uctred was assigned the work of hauling up the bucket when the unfortunate man appointed to work in the pit had filled it. He was then to dump the contents in a waiting cart, and send the bucket back to be refilled. When Uctred dumped a bucket, he saw the bones. The man in the pit had seen nothing. It was too dark where he worked.

Swine, he thought, until another bucket came up containing the skull. That is when Arthur was sent to bring me to the castle. I had only a few minutes earlier removed a large splinter from the palm of a plowman whose plow shaft had shattered as he turned over a rock. But when Thomas called I was unemployed and so went straight away to see the curious remains recovered from the cesspit.

I found Lord Gilbert and his reeve, John Holcutt, standing over the small pile of bones. “Ah, Hugh, see here. What do you make of this? I fear we have found poor Sir Robert.”

I could see no reason at the moment to disagree with him, but I wondered how a man last seen leaving town on a horse might be discovered in a cesspit. And what of his squire? Might two sets of bones be revealed?

I knelt to study the skull at my feet and felt a gnawing apprehension that Sir Robert was yet missing. I kept my uncertainty to myself. Each new bucket of sludge generally brought with it more bones. As the pit was emptied, a nearly complete skeleton lay on the cobbles between the castle and the marshalsea. As new bones rose to the light of day I cleaned them, and the putrefying flesh which adhered to some of them, in a tub of water and laid them out. Each new bone justified my first suspicion.

The bones were mostly free of flesh and gristle. Decomposition was advanced. The jaw was barely affixed to the skull. At the back of the skull a small patch of fair hair clung to decaying scalp.

“What color hair had Sir Robert?” I asked.

Lord Gilbert studied the skull as I turned it in my hands. “Very much like that,” he nodded. “A dark blonde, with a flash of red in the sunlight.”

“How tall was Sir Robert?” I asked.

“Quite tall. He had two inches on me,” Lord Gilbert replied. That would have made Sir Robert five feet nine or ten inches tall.

“These are not Sir Robert’s bones,” I told the onlookers. Lord Gilbert’s jaw dropped. “The hair color may suit, but these are the bones of a woman, I think. See how delicate is the skull. And a young woman, a girl, as well. The teeth are not yet beginning to rot, and I see no evidence of wisdom teeth erupting. This is the skeleton of someone barely five feet tall, perhaps less.”

“But…there are no women or girls missing in Bampton,” Lord Gilbert spluttered.