Simon Beaufort - A Head for Poisoning

The priest was silent.

“Go and bury them, Father,” said Geoffrey, reluctant to talk to the priest, whose role in the plotting and subterfuge he had uncovered was still far from clear. “You should not leave heads sitting on your kitchen table-someone might find them, and then you would have some explaining to do.”

“I put them in the charnel house,” said Adrian. “I will bury them later, but today, I am coming with you.”

“No,” said Geoffrey. “You will not be able to keep up with us on foot, and anyway there might be some of that violence that you find so abhorrent.”

“I do not understand all this evil,” said Adrian softly. “Francis the physician has just informed me that he and the woman I loved more than life itself have been plotting murders together.”

“Go home,” said Geoffrey. “Francis will be needing you to give him last rites.”

“He is dead,” said Adrian. “It was when I heard his final confession that I knew I had to come with you. Perhaps I can save her yet. I can speak in her defence to King Henry.”

“Save who?” asked Geoffrey, removing his helmet and rubbing at his hair underneath. He wondered what could be keeping Helbye.

“Save Enide,” said Adrian.

“You would do better burying her decently,” said Geoffrey. “It is too late for anything else.”

“She is alive,” said Adrian.

“But you identified her head only last night,” pointed out Geoffrey, wondering if grief had robbed the priest of a few wits. “She cannot be alive without it.”

“I lied about that,” said Adrian, refusing to meet Geoffrey’s eyes. “It was not hers.”

“For God’s sake!” cried Geoffrey in exasperation. “What is going on? You say you saw her body. Then you say you saw her head. Are you now saying that you saw neither?”

“It was not her body outside the chapel,” said Adrian. He looked down at his sandalled feet. “I lied to protect Enide, and only I know that it was not her body in the grave that bears her name.”

Geoffrey gazed at him, the full implications of Adrian’s claim striking home for the first time. “Enide is alive?” he asked in a whisper. “My favourite sister is alive?”

Adrian nodded, more miserably than he should for a bearer of such glad tidings.

“But I saw her grave,” Geoffrey persisted. “And others saw her dead-Henry and Walter.”

Adrian still said nothing.

“How could she do this?” asked Geoffrey, bewildered. “How could she let those who love her believe she was dead?”

He recalled his grief when he had received the note bearing the news, and the emptiness he had felt when he knew the last and only pleasant tie with his family had been severed. He swallowed hard, and regarded Adrian doubtfully. No wonder Francis had noticed that Adrian’s grief for Enide had been brief and shallow. It was doubtless difficult to grieve for someone who was still alive.

“You used that other woman!” he said, the sudden loudness of his voice making his horse start. “Walter and Henry did not see Enide at all: they saw the body of the poor woman who had died in childbirth the day before-who you told me was in the parish coffin waiting to be buried that day! You said you had left the church later than everyone else on the day that Enide was killed, because you had stayed to say a mass for this woman.”

Adrian nodded miserably.

“And you sliced the head from this woman’s shoulders so that no one would be able to identify her,” said Geoffrey. “Why? How could you do such a thing-you who claim to dislike violence? I am not surprised you felt obliged to pray for her after everyone else had gone!”

“I did it for Enide!” protested Adrian. “She came to me in great fear and said that one of her brothers or her sister was going to kill her. The poor lady had already been poisoned-like Godric-and so I had no reason to disbelieve her. She was so frightened that I decided I would do anything to help her. We agreed that we would use the body of the woman who lay in my church to make everyone believe Enide was dead-so that she would be safe.”

“But chopping the head from a corpse!” said Geoffrey in disgust. “The Crusaders could learn a good deal from you!”

“Actually, the decapitation was not part of the arrangement,” said Adrian shakily. “The plan was that I should bury a shroud filled with earth in the other woman’s grave, and then say that I had found Enide’s body in the churchyard. I was immediately to seal ‘Enide’s’ corpse in a coffin-to stop your family from looking at it. My shock was as great as anyone’s when Henry-against my protestations-dragged the lid from the coffin to look inside. Enide told me later that she knew he, or one of the others, would not be prevented from looking, and so she had hacked off the head to hide the fact that the corpse was not hers.”

“And what of Enide’s hand?” asked Geoffrey coldly. “The one that you told me was withered from her childhood accident? Did they not look at that for identification? Or was that a lie too?”

“That was the truth,” said Adrian. “I suppose they were so shocked to see the body headless, that they did not think of such things. Anyway, the corpse was tightly wound in its shroud, and it would have been some effort to undo it.”

“This is horrible!” said Geoffrey, gazing at the priest in distaste. “No wonder you were surprised when I showed you what I had found in the room at the end of the tunnel. It was the head of that poor woman whose body you so callously used for your own devices, was it not?”

Adrian nodded miserably. “I searched the churchyard for that head so that I could bury it decently,” he said. “But Enide refused to tell me what she had done with it.

Geoffrey took a deep breath. The priest seemed genuinely contrite, but how far could Geoffrey trust him? He had already admitted to weaving a fabric of lies around the events leading to Enide’s death, so how did Geoffrey know he had decided to be truthful at last? Francis had suggested that Adrian might have killed both Pernel and Enide at his masses, but now the priest was claiming that Enide still lived and Geoffrey no longer knew what to believe.

He took a deep breath, oddly relieved that the grisly head he had bundled in the blanket had not been Enide’s after all. And the other skull? Geoffrey himself had already suggested that Ingram would not have been loath to dig up a grave to acquire himself a head that he could use to force Geoffrey to pay for information. And that, thought the knight with sudden realisation, was exactly what Ingram had done.

“Mabel, the buttery-steward at the castle, told me that she was leaving Goodrich because her sister’s grave had been desecrated,” he said to Adrian. “She assumed that the Earl of Shrewsbury had done it, because he has such a dreadful reputation. Walter said it was dogs. But we know different, do we not, Father Adrian?”

“The head Ingram brought does look as if it belongs to Mabel’s sister,” admitted Adrian sombrely. “The poor woman died of an ague about three weeks ago.”

“And that is why you allowed Ingram to escape when I asked him where it had come from,” said Geoffrey. “You did not want me to press him to reveal where he unearthed this poor head-because you intended me to believe it was Enide’s. Or did you charge him to dig it up, unaware that I was bringing you a similar gift?”

“No!” cried Adrian, horrified. “Ingram has been fascinated by this whole business from the start. He has been ferreting about and asking questions of just about everybody. He managed to drag out from your father’s food-taster that Enide had been seen leaving my house after she was supposed to have been dead. Ingram has been obsessed with Enide’s death-just like you.”