Simon Beaufort - A Head for Poisoning

“Now what?” cried Geoffrey, bewildered. “Pull yourself together, Julian, for God’s sake. My brothers will be here in a minute, thinking I am committing another murder!”

“This room is haunted!” whispered Julian, beginning to shake uncontrollably. “Sir Godric’s ghost walks here!”

“Are you sure there was nothing wrong with that milk?” asked Geoffrey doubtfully. “Because something seems to have addled your wits. It is not-”

He broke off as a slight but unmistakable thump came from the chest. Taking his sword from a peg on the wall, where he had hung it two nights before, he stepped forward and flung open the lid.

Two hostile eyes greeted him, glowering out from among Godric’s motley selection of mended shirts and well-patched cloaks.

“Mabel!” exclaimed Julian, startled.

“Of course it is me!” snapped Mabel, glaring at the girl. “Who else did you expect?”

“I thought you might be Sir Godric,” said Julian in a small voice.

“Sir Godric is dead!” snapped Mabel, standing, and putting her hands on her ample hips. She was a large woman, well past the bloom of youth, and her thick golden hair was dull and coarse. Her skin, which might once have been soft, was tough looking and leathery from an outdoor life.

“Mabel, the dairymaid?” asked Geoffrey, searching distant memories for a youthful face that might have weathered into the one that glowered at him now.

“Mabel, the buttery-steward, actually,” she replied tartly. “I have not been a dairymaid for many a year. And I will have you know that my butter and cheese is sought after as far away as Rosse.”

“I trust you do not usually make them in the presence of corpses?” asked Geoffrey mildly, lowering his sword and regarding the angry woman steadily.

She flushed. “I came to lay him out,” she said, waving a strong red arm at the bed.

“Then why were you in the chest?” asked Geoffrey. “Looking for a shroud?”

The woman held up her hand, and Geoffrey saw she held a sheet-grey from use and frayed in parts, but clean, nevertheless. “I brought one with me. I hid in the chest because I thought you were one of them-one of those others.”

Geoffrey appreciated the sentiment, but her explanation still left many questions in his mind. He said nothing and waited.

“I see you do not believe me,” she said, but not in a way that suggested she was particularly concerned. She pushed past him, and made for the bed. Julian leapt back with a cry.

“Foolish child!” said Mabel, although not without kindness. “There is nothing to fear. Come here and look. See how peaceful his face appears? No one can poison him now. Dear Sir Godric is far from the reach of his evil kinsmen at last.”

Julian declined to look, and instead fixed her gaze on Geoffrey. “Mabel was your father’s whore before Rohese became his chamber maid.”

“I was not his whore!” objected Mabel loudly. “I was his companion. For years-ever since his wife died. I came to his chamber almost every night to …” She gestured expansively.

“Discuss cheese and butter?” asked Geoffrey, beginning to see the humorous side of the situation.

One of Enide’s letters had mentioned that his father had a penchant for one of the dairymaids years before, and it seemed as though his affection had been a long-term proposition-until Mabel had been displaced in favour of the younger, and distinctly more attractive, Rohese.

Mabel glowered at him. “Sometimes we talked about dairy products,” she said, arching her eyebrows haughtily. “Sir Godric was fond of my cheeses.”

And so here was another potential killer, thought Geoffrey, his amusement fading: Mabel, the rejected lover of many years, who fed her master the cheeses he so liked. Had Godric been mistaken, and it had been Mabel, not his offspring, who had been slowly poisoning him?

Julian fled to the far side of the room when Mabel hauled away the sheet that Geoffrey had placed over Godric. On the floor, Geoffrey saw a bucket of clean water and some cloths.

“Did you bring those?” he asked, pointing to them.

“Of course I did,” Mabel snapped. “How else am I supposed to wash his poor murdered corpse?”

“I still do not understand why you hid in the chest when we came,” said Geoffrey. “If your intentions here are honourable, why should you feel the need to flee?”

“I told you,” sighed Mabel. “I thought you were one of the others. They never did approve of the fondness your father entertained for me, and they would have thrown me out.”

“What makes you think that I will not?”

“You at least covered him with a sheet, which is more in a few moments than that brood managed over an entire day. Anyway, they might have accused me of stealing his ring. And I do not have it. You can search me if you like,” she added with a sway of her hips.

“Thank you, no,” said Geoffrey hastily. “And if you refer to the ring that he wore on his right hand, Henry has it.” He recalled vividly Henry wresting the ring from what he had believed to be Godric’s corpse some days before.

“Has he, now?” said Mabel harshly. “I might have known! Sir Godric always said he wanted me to have that. But no matter. I want nothing from the Mappestones anyway. Come nightfall, I will be away, and I will never return to these parts again. There is nothing to keep me here now. One sister died in childbirth at the end of last summer, and the other died of an ague just a month ago. Her poor corpse was not left in peace, though. Walter said it was dogs, although around here, who knows?”

“Your sister’s grave was desecrated?” said Geoffrey, bewildered by her wide-ranging monologue.

“I do not know about that, but it was disturbed, and it looked as though someone had been poking around in it a few days ago-since you returned, in fact.”

“Well, it was not me,” said Geoffrey firmly.

“Did I say it was?” demanded Mabel, hurling Godric’s stained nightshirt on the floor at his feet. “But I have heard strange things about you-that you read books and make secret signs on scraps of parchment with inks. Master Helbye told me about it.”

“It is called writing,” said Geoffrey. “And literacy does not automatically lead to grave-robbing.”

“I said nothing of grave-robbing,” said Mabel belligerently. “I said that my sister’s grave had been disturbed, but I did not dig it up to make sure she was still in it. Walter said he thought some dogs had scratched up the surface.”

It was not an uncommon occurrence, especially if a family was poor, and unable to pay a grave-digger for a sufficiently deep hole.

“Or maybe it was that Earl of Shrewsbury,” said Mabel darkly. “I have heard even worse things about the likes of him than of you. It is said that he dabbles in the black arts, and he may have needed to rob a grave for some wicked spell he was casting.”

“So, what will you do if you leave here?” asked Geoffrey, not wanting to pursue that topic of conversation when the castle was full of people who might inform the Earl that nasty things were being said about him. “Where will you go?”

“I have been offered the position as cheese-maker at Monmouth Castle, and I intend to leave as soon as Godric is laid out. My roof leaks and that miserly Walter will not pay to have it mended.”

Geoffrey sat on the chest and watched her, while Julian wrapped her arms over her head and crouched against the wall, out of hearing and out of sight.

“You are fond of him still?” he asked, noting the gentle way in which her rough, red hands stripped the corpse of its bloodstained hose.

She sighed softly, and would not look at Geoffrey. “I will always be fond of Sir Godric,” she said. “No one understood him like I did. And that Lady Enide was worst of all. She hated the arrangement I had with him.”