Simon Beaufort - A Head for Poisoning

“This is all gross speculation,” said Geoffrey, pacing up and down. “Perhaps she had another lover-Caerdig, perhaps-with whom she wanted to spend time.”

Adrian flinched. “That is what Godric said when I told him that Enide was not at Rwirdin,” he said. “I was worried about her, you see. I was afraid she had been attacked on the roads, and harmed. But, in the middle of August, she came home.”

“Did you ask her where she had been?”

“I did,” said Adrian. “And it proved to be something of an unpleasant confrontation, actually. I told her I had been to Rwirdin to see her, and had found she was not there. She informed me that I was mistaken. When I insisted I was not, she told me I had either visited the wrong manor or that I was drunk.”

“Do you drink?” asked Geoffrey, recalling other priests he had met who were seldom sober.

“I do not!” said Adrian indignantly. “I take only watered ale, and nothing stronger. Not only was I sober, but I have been to Rwirdin before, and know it well enough to be certain that I had visited the correct manor. I recognised the steward, anyway. But Enide would not admit that she had lied. She grew angry. She was not a woman normally given to rage, but, as I said, she was anxious and tense the few weeks before her death. She refused to admit that she had been anywhere but Rwirdin.”

“But that is no reason to suppose it was Brockenhurst, where Rufus was killed,” said Geoffrey.

Adrian played restlessly with the cord that was tied about his waist. “When someone you love lies to you and will not confide, you do not overlook it, you try to discover why.”

“Tell me about it,” said Geoffrey dryly, thinking of Enide’s palsied hand.

“It was so with Enide,” said Adrian. “I thought of little else. I tried to see a pattern in the dates that she was away, and I paid careful attention to whom she met and to whom she spoke.”

“And?” asked Geoffrey. “What did your spying tell you?”

“Nothing at all,” said Adrian, ignoring the jibe. “I thought she was just being careful not to let me see anything unusual. But these notes suggest that I should have been watching her at midnight, not during the daytime. I was a fool to think I could have bested her in such a matter.”

“It would have been difficult to leave the castle at midnight,” said Geoffrey, still not certain that his sister would have been making mysterious assignations with people in the dark. “The guards would not have let her out-or if they had, news that she had gone for some secret assignation in the small hours would have been all over the village by morning.”

But Mabel had entered and left the castle unobserved, he thought, by using the secret passageway that came out by the river. And Enide had insisted that Godric use her room for his romps with his whore-perhaps not, as everyone had assumed, because she was keen for him to use Rohese rather than Mabel, but because she had wanted Godric’s room so she could use the tunnel. Mabel had been Godric’s whore for many years, and it made no sense that Enide had suddenly developed scruples about the fact that her father had a mistress in the village, rather than one more discreetly lodged inside the castle.

And the other business-Adrian’s wild assumptions regarding a link between Enide and the killing of William Rufus? Geoffrey did not believe a word of it.

“Have you mentioned your suspicions to others?” he asked.

Adrian regarded him steadily. “I discussed some of it with Francis the physician after Enide became ill from the poison. Francis believes that her poisoning and death were at the hands of one of your brothers, who wanted her dead for their own reasons.”

“Then I suggest we keep your theory about Rufus to ourselves until we have more information,” said Geoffrey. “If we go round proclaiming that Enide shot Rufus with this withered hand you say she had, we will probably be incarcerated as madmen.”

“I did not say she shot him!” said Adrian quietly. “Quite the reverse. I imagine she would try to prevent it.”

“Well, whatever we think is irrelevant, because we have nothing to back it up,” said Geoffrey. He stuffed the parchments back inside his shirt. “And these tell us very little, despite your association of dates and times with the last months of Enide’s life. They might have had nothing to do with Enide. She might have hidden them away to protect the identity of someone else.”

But why had she hidden them at all, he wondered, when it would have been so very much safer to have burned them?

The next evening, while his family discussed their plans to reclaim Goodrich from the grasping fingers of the Earl of Shrewsbury, Geoffrey sat in Godric’s room alone.

That day, Godric’s body had at last been moved to the chapel, and Geoffrey had asked that the bed be removed from the chamber on the grounds that it made him sneeze. No one seemed particularly surprised by the request, and no one had immediately offered to burn it to rid themselves of incriminating evidence. Indeed, Walter had even asked if he might have it for his own room, and had only been dissuaded by Bertrada’s firm conviction that she would never rest easy in a bed on which a man had been murdered. The others showed scant interest, and did not so much as glance up as two servants hauled it across the hall to take it to a storeroom in the inner ward. Geoffrey saw it safely installed in a shed, and sent Julian to ask the physician to come and inspect it.

Then he had spent a fruitless afternoon riding out to a few of the surrounding villages and hamlets that were scattered in glades through the dense green of the forest, looking for Rohese. No one admitted to seeing her, and all the hiding holes and haunts he remembered from his childhood-a cave near the river, the bole of a rotten oak, an outcrop of rocks near Coppet Hill-were abandoned, and no frightened runaway loitered there. Reluctantly, Geoffrey returned to the castle and headed for Godric’s chamber.

Without the gigantic bed, the room felt empty. Geoffrey threw open the window shutters and sat on the chest for a few moments, looking around the dismal room that had been Godric’s whole world for the past few weeks. Unable to put off the grim business of the tunnel any longer, he went to the garderobe passage, his heart already beginning to thump. He pulled at the shelves until the door slid open, and reached inside for the torch and kindling Mabel had pointed out, careful not to look into the tunnel’s gaping maw. Recalling Mabel’s warning that he would not fit down it wearing his armour, he removed his surcoat, but decided that if he could not squeeze through wearing his mail tunic, then he would not be going at all. Holding the torch aloft, he turned to face the black tunnel.

His nerve was already failing. The flame from the torch shook and wavered on the walls, and the slit of darkness looked about as appealing as a snake-pit. Perhaps Rohese had not escaped down it at all, he thought; and if she had, she would scarcely still be in it days later. He almost convinced himself that he did not have to go, but then there was the matter of Enide. This sinister corridor might hold the secret to her murder, and Geoffrey knew that if he did not explore it, he would spend, the rest of his life despising himself for his cowardice.

Taking a firm grip on the torch, Geoffrey took his first few steps down the passageway. Mabel had been right in that it was a tight fit. Geoffrey was too tall for it, and had to bend his head to prevent it from bumping against the roof. There was barely enough room for him to walk, even turned slightly sideways. His sword scraped along the wall, and was the only sound except for his unsteady breathing.

Cautiously, he edged along the passageway until he came to a steep flight of stairs. The torch was not bright enough to light what lay at the bottom, and it seemed to Geoffrey that the steps disappeared into a pit of nothingness. The air in the tunnel was still and damp, and Geoffrey began to imagine that it was also thin and stale. He started to cough, and only prevented himself from turning and racing back the way he had come by taking several deep breaths, closing his eyes tightly, and resting his head against the cold stone wall. In control of himself once more, he forced himself to take a step down, and then another. His leather-soled boots skidded in some slime on the third step, and he took the next few faster than he intended, coming to a small landing. Beyond, more stairs sloped away into the darkness.