Кэндис Робб - The Nun’s Tale

“I am not judging you, Dan. Who brought you the ale?”

“’Twas Jaro, Master Longford’s man.”

“Do you remember filling the grave while you sampled the ale, Dan?”

A dirty hand crept back up to the bald head, scratching. “Now there’s the problem, you see. I can’t say as I remember the filling in, but I’ve been digging graves all my life and I’m sure I did it right.”

“Did anyone help you? Longford, perhaps?”

Old Dan shrugged. “To speak truth, I can swear to naught once I tasted that wondrous brew.”

“You know what you’re to do now, Dan?”

“They spoke true, then? You want it dug up?”

“It must be done. Have you the stomach for it?”

“Don’t know till I do. But if it must be done–” Dan shrugged. “Can’t say as I wouldn’t welcome company.”

“I shall accompany you.” Ravenser wished to keep this incident quiet if possible. “And Sir Nicholas, also.”

It had rained in the night. The morning was dry but overcast, the air heavy. Old Dan and his son fell to the task in silence, but soon they cursed the saturated earth. As they dug, water seeped in to fill the hole and make the soil heavy to lift.

Ravenser slipped into his own thoughts. What if they found the real Dame Joanna rotting in her shroud? Then who was the woman at Nunburton who claimed to be resurrected? The abbess of Nunburton had noted that the woman’s French was genteel and her clothes, though travel-stained and torn, were new, not mended, and of costly wool. She also noted that the supposedly ancient, sacred mantle looked like good Yorkshire wool. Why would someone claim to be a dead person? What was to be gained? Was she dangerous? Or just confused?

“They have reached the body,” Louth said quietly.

Ravenser apologised for his inattention. “I have been pondering this strange case.”

“Here we are,” Old Dan called out. “Knotted up in her shroud, just as I remember. Shall we lift her out, Sir Richard?”

Ravenser knelt down and slipped his knife through the upper knot, blinking back the tears the odour brought to his eyes. “I should think we can come to a conclusion with a peek.”

“Lord ha’ mercy!” Old Dan covered his mouth and nose with a dirty kerchief as Ravenser peeled back the sheet. “Don’t like the looks of ’em when there’s still flesh. Nor the stink.”

“What have we here?” Ravenser muttered. “Much too much flesh for a year-old corpse, and it is not Dame Joanna, but a man with a broken neck. A huge man.”

Louth held a scented cloth to his plump face and leaned down, examining the face and body. “Unmistakable. That is Jaro, Longford’s man.” Louth pointed to an amulet on the chest. “The tooth of an animal he killed in the Pyrenees. Proud of it, he was. But his girth is enough to identify him.” He turned quickly away.

Ravenser’s gut burned. How in God’s name had Will Longford’s man wound up in this grave? He rose. “Fill it back in, Dan, and say nothing to anyone. I must notify the mayor, the coroner, the bailiffs–” he passed a hand over his eyes, sighed “–and the Archbishop of York.”

As they walked away, Louth asked what Ravenser meant to do with Dame Joanna.

“I shall ask my uncle to allow me to escort her back to her convent. Perhaps she will be more coherent with her Mother Superior, someone familiar. But after all this, the escort must be well guarded.”

“I shall attend you. With my men.”

“You, Nicholas?”

“I feel responsible.”

As well he should. Ravenser agreed.

Five days later, Ravenser, Louth, and company set off on a slow journey to York. Dame Joanna was still weak, so she rode in a cart with two sisters who would see to her needs along the way. Travelling with a cart slowed them, but June had begun with fair, mild weather that almost made Ravenser glad of the excuse to go journeying. As the sun warmed him and the smells and sounds of the countryside cheered him, he grew more confident that the prioress of St Clement’s would find a way to reach Dame Joanna and learn her story, and that the archbishop’s men would soon discover who had killed Maddy and Jaro. The mayor of Beverley had been relieved to hear that Archbishop Thoresby had offered his aid.

Ravenser fell back behind his companions, thinking about his uncle and the one-eyed spy he had met at Bishopthorpe. He wondered what sort of inquiries Archer made for a man as powerful as his uncle, Archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor of England. Was he watching Alice Perrers and William of Wykeham? Or would Archer consider helping out on a matter such as this? Ravenser gazed about him, focusing on nothing, until a movement off to the side of the track, in a stand of trees, caught his eye: two horsemen, riding neither towards nor away from the road, but pacing Ravenser’s company. Ravenser reigned in his horse. So did the horsemen.

“Ho, there!” Ravenser called. Two of Louth’s men turned at his cry. Ravenser nodded to the still figures in the trees and Louth’s men took off. So did the horsemen, who had the advantage of their own plan.

It was not long before Louth’s men came riding back to the shady knoll where the rest of the company waited. “We lost them,” John, Louth’s squire, said, “but we did see that they had friends with them, waiting for them farther back. I counted five more. And well armed.”

Dame Joanna stared about her, agitated, clutching at the tattered blue shawl she insisted on wearing over her habit. “Who? Who follows?”

Louth lounged in the shade near her. “I thought you might tell us, Dame Joanna. Your lover, perhaps?”

“My lover?” She laughed, an odd, hysterical sound. Her eyes were wild, haunted. “Oh, indeed, if Death be now my lover. Yes. Death shadows me. Only my lover Death can come for me now.”

Ravenser raised an eyebrow in response to Louth’s puzzled glance. So Dame Joanna saw her dilemma as a moral allegory. It did no harm. “Shall we continue?”

Louth ordered his men to prepare to move on. They fell back to guard the rear of the party. It was a much subdued, anxious company, aware of the armed men behind them, unseen. The women did not protest the armed guard that accompanied them when they washed or relieved themselves.

The wind from the arrow’s flight ruffled Owen’s hair. Much too close for comfort. He’d seen the trainee’s aim go astray when the messenger entered the yard. Owen had stood his ground, wanting to make a point, that lives were at stake. But he had not meant to make it so dangerously – he had miscalculated the arrow’s trajectory. It had happened time and again since he had lost the use of his left eye.

Gaspare yanked the bow out of the trainee’s hands and hit him across the stomach with it. “What are you, a dog after a hare? Captain Owen comes all the way from York to teach you how to save yourself in the field and you’d be killing him? Because a messenger caught your eye? What manner of cur has Lancaster sent us?”

The young man clutched his middle and said nothing.

Gaspare crossed the castle yard to retrieve the arrow, slapping Owen on the back as he passed. “You’ve not lost your nerve, that’s clear.” He grinned crookedly because of a scar that puckered the right side of his face from ear to chin, creasing the corner of his mouth. “So what am I doing wrong, old friend? Why can’t the cur resist gawking at the world?”

“You’re right to call him a dog after a hare,” Owen said. “If he cannot ignore everything round him and see only the arrow and its target, he cannot be an archer.”

Gaspare slapped the arrow shaft against his leg, a motion that the young man in question watched anxiously. Broad-shouldered and well-muscled, when Gaspare acted on his anger, he caused considerable pain. “I need to know. Is it me, or has Lancaster sent us a pack of fools?”