Michael JECKS - The Leper's Return

“Yes, Brother. But if it is a gift from God, then maybe He intends honoring me too.”

“We should never presume to look for such things from God,” he said sententiously. “Whatever He decides for you, you must accept it.”

“But it cannot be wrong for me to want to help look after His own selected people.”

“No,” he said uncertainly. It was considered that women were capable of looking after others in certain circumstances, he knew. “Except I really do think you should be considering starting a new life without Quivil. He’s lost to you now.”

“So he is, but that’s no reason why I shouldn’t help you, is it? Especially since by so doing I’ll be helping those whom God Himself has chosen to be a sign to us all.”

“Well… I suppose so.”

“Then I’d better get on with the sweeping.”

Ralph watched her move down the little aisle, rhythmically swaying as she moved the broom. She was the picture of a rough, untutored peasant girl, with heavy body and coarse, grubby hands, and yet she was demonstrating more generosity of spirit and kindliness than many of his brother-priests. The thought made him sigh, but it also gave him a spark of satisfaction. He walked forward and bent at the altar, offering up a short prayer for her and her doomed lover, before leaving the chapel. He might as well go and see to laying out the body of the dead leper.

After all, he reasoned, what harm could come from letting Mary work in the lazar house?

“My God! Simon,” Baldwin gasped. “How could Jeanne have allied herself with that?”

“It can’t have been her fault. She must have been stuck with the woman from an early age,” Simon said.

They were standing at the entrance to the inn, watching the small cavalcade disappear down the street. Edgar was leading the way, Hugh keeping the rear with the packhorse, although from the way he kept throwing appealing glances back at his master, he would have preferred to remain. Baldwin couldn’t blame him.

“She’s a bear, Simon, a ravening, insane beast! How could a frail thing like Jeanne stand to live with something like that?”

As they made their way along the road toward Godfrey’s hall, Simon laughed. “She’s not so bad as she looks, Baldwin. She can even tell jokes.”

“Jokes? I daresay she could, but not the sort I’d want a soldier to hear! And did you see the warts on her chin? And her arms are more strongly muscled than my own, I swear.”

“Baldwin, you can’t deny that she’s eminently capable of protecting her mistress, can you?”

That, Baldwin agreed silently, was the whole point. With a fearsome guard like Emma he would find it very hard to get Jeanne on her own, if the display with Hugh was anything to go by. He had no objection to Jeanne being safe from footpads and felons, but that was very different to her being carefully fenced in from him by her maid. And he had no doubt that Emma would be a most resolute guardian. He had seen it in her eyes as she was introduced to him – cold, astute eyes that seemed to read him with terrifying ease. Little, brown eyes, they were, but without any of that gentle, bovine softness that Baldwin had always associated with the color. Emma’s were sharp and angry, like a small hog’s.

The rest of her bore out the analogy. She was short, but with a massive frame that made her look almost perfectly round. Her chest was carried like some kind of armored buttress – or maybe like the curtain wall of a castle, Baldwin amended, recalling the awesome immensity of her bosom. An army, he felt, could batter itself to death against such a vast obstacle.

Seeing his self-absorption, Simon laughed. “Forget her. You have a murder to solve. So tell me, whom are we to see now?”

“The daughter of the man who was killed. Her name is Cecily, and she was discovered in the same room as her father’s corpse. She was knocked senseless.”

They were soon at the house. Clearly most of the townspeople had accepted the fact that Tanner was not going to be bribed into allowing them to view the corpse or the place where Godfrey was killed, and had left to get on with their work. Tanner stood aside for them to go in, and Simon led the way, but not before Baldwin had caught a glimpse of the men standing well back, almost in the alleyway opposite. It made him frown for a moment, seeing the lepers there, but then he shrugged. Why should he assume that lepers, by mere virtue of their disease, should be uninterested in the fate of others? He knew that old men were always keen to hear of the demise of their peers, or of those younger than themselves. There was a greedy fascination with death among those who were likely to experience it for themselves in the near future, and lepers surely fell into that category.

Yet when he glanced over his shoulder, he was surprised to see how keenly one of the rag-clothed figures was following his progress to the door. It was the new man, the one he had seen with Quivil earlier, and Baldwin made a mental note to ask the leper master about the stranger when he had a chance.

The door was open, and just inside, seated on a stool from which he could see both front and back doors, was a watchman. He stood and nodded to Baldwin, and let the two pass into the hall itself.

“Ugh! You could have warned me, Baldwin!”

“Squeamish, Simon? I had thought you would have been cured of that after looking into so many murders.”

“It’s one thing to become used to the sight of dead men, but quite another to suddenly get presented with a corpse, especially when the stench is so strong!”

The knight had to agree with that. Someone had been in and fuelled the fire, and the room was close, the atmosphere heavy with the sweetness of death. As he moved toward the body, he grimaced. The crushed skull was already feeding the flies. Waving them away as best he could, he crouched down to repeat his investigation of the night before.

Godfrey had been an older man, certainly over fifty, and his hair was thin and gray. From the size of the damaged area, one conclusion seemed obvious. “He can’t have known anything about it.” Something caught Baldwin’s notice as he spoke. The man’s nose was scratched, and as Baldwin peered closer, he saw a series of short, but deep marks on the chin, and more on his left cheekbone. The wound on the back of the head itself was on the right side, a little above the point where it joined the neck. “Yes, we can be quite sure that as soon as this blow struck, he was dead,” he said musingly.

“Fine – you enjoy yourself, and I’ll get some fresh air while you carry on.”

Suiting his action to his words, Simon went to the nearest window, the one toward which the body was pointing. Soon he had thrown open the shutters, and could breathe in deep, satisfying lungfuls. There was something about Baldwin’s eagerness to examine the victims of violent death that had always repelled the bailiff. He took a little too much pleasure in his work. Today was no exception. Even now, Baldwin turned the body to and fro in his search for other wounds, opening the dead man’s shirt and checking the torso, feeling the chilly flesh for the onset of rigor mortis, before prying the lips apart to gaze in at the mouth.

Simon looked away. It was too morbid for his taste. When a body was dead, that was an end to it as far as he was concerned. Simon’s interest lay in people’s motives for killing, and that meant questioning all those concerned; Baldwin’s conviction was that any body could tell how it died, and that might give clues as to who the attacker was. It was a view which Simon had seen demonstrated often enough for him not to dispute the fact, but he was enormously grateful that Baldwin was always keen to take on that part of the investigation himself, and didn’t require Simon’s help. In fact, Simon knew full well that his friend was glad to be left to study any clues alone.