A Murderous Procession (16 page)

“And?” Father Guy asked sharply

“So when she didn’t come up, I come down again to see why, and there she was with her poor head in the tub. Awful it was, master, awful.”

Brune’s body lay on the tiled floor, her soaked cap dislodged so that some of her hair dripped down an already dripping bodice. Her skirt was dry.

“Like this?” Rowley asked. He leaned over the edge of the vat, head down.

The girl nodded. She was clutching a scrubbing board to her chest like a shield. “I couldn’t get her up, master. Tried and tried, I did, but she were too weighty so I ran for help. And him there …” One of the guards nodded, “... he gets her up out of the tub but she were dead then, God have mercy, sweet Mary have mercy”

“Why is the vat full, child?” This was Father Guy, accusatory. “Do you not empty the water out at night?”

Apparently they did, then filled the vats again ready for the next day’s wash. “Very particular ‘bout that, she was. Saves time in the morning, see, all we has to do then is light the fires. Oh, God have mercy, master, she didn’t … didn’t mean to drown herself did she? Say she won’t go to hell, will she, master?” The girl collapsed under the thought of her chief eternally damned for the sin of suicide. Adelia went to comfort her.

Father Guy tapped his long fingers together as he considered. “I see no reason to assume such a thing; she was a God-fearing woman, one of the few amongst us, I fear. Was she in any way distressed today? No? Then cause of death is clear—an accident. Do you not agree, my lord?”

“So it seems,” the Bishop of Saint Albans said. “What does the Lord Mansur think? He’s the doctor.”

Every eye looked toward Mansur, who spoke in Arabic. “What do you say?”

“I don’t like it,” Adelia said in the same tongue. There was a raw, red area on Brune’s upper lip. She lapsed into Norman French for the benefit of the chaplain. “The lord doctor wishes to examine her.”

Father Guy appealed to a higher authority. “Surely it is unnecessary for the Saracen to interfere, my lord bishop. It is obvious that this female had a turn, an apoplexy,
something,
as she bent over the tub, causing her to flop forward unconscious and drown. Let us inform the seneschal of the matter,
ratio decidendi.”

Rowley made up his mind. “Get along and do it, then. And while you’re about it, Father, ready the palace priests for the poor dame’s funeral.”

“You …” Father Guy pointed at the guards, “... take her up.”

“Not yet.” Rowley’s voice was sharp. “There’s an examination to be made before we move her, and prayers to be said.”

The chaplain hovered, casting venomous glances at Mansur, unwilling to leave a Christian corpse to a heretic. “Then let me fetch Doctor Arnulf.”

“If you wish it, and if he’s prepared to get himself out of bed, which I doubt. Now, Captain.” Rowley turned to Bolt. “If you would escort this young lady to the buttery and see she’s given some brandy And you two”—this was to the guards—”bring a litter.”

Before he went, Father Guy confronted Adelia. “I hear this poor woman quarreled with you recently, mistress.”

“Does that matter now?”

“I hope it does not, mistress, I hope it does not.”

Politely but firmly, Captain Bolt urged the chaplain toward the stairs to the hall, his other arm around the little laundress who went, still sobbing, still clutching the scrubbing board.

“Foul play?” Rowley asked when they’d gone.

“I’m not sure.”

“Then
make
sure, and be quick about it.”

Adelia wondered for a moment whether Boggart should leave, too, but, well, the girl was now part of the household and might as well be introduced to the work that it did.

“Prepare yourself Boggart,” she said. “I am going to try and find out exactly how this lady died.”

She went down on her knees by the corpse. She paused to make her supplication to the dead. Forgive me and permit your
poor flesh
to tell
me what your voice cannot.

The jaw was showing early stages of rigor mortis. The red patch on the dead woman’s upper lip had definitely been caused by friction.

Moving swiftly, Adelia began opening Brune’s outer clothing, ignoring Boggart’s horrified intake of breath.

There was deep bruising on both of the upper arms.
“Hmmm.”

“Well?” Rowley asked with impatience.

He also was ignored.

Both eyes were shut—probably had been closed by one of the people who’d gathered around the corpse; there was nothing more naked than the staring eyes of the dead.

Adelia forced up one eyelid, then the other. She was remembering two corpses, that of an old man, the other a child, which had been brought at different times to her foster father for examination, both of them with an abrasion similar to Brune’s on the upper lip—both unnatural deaths, as he had discovered.

Rowley and Mansur were talking quietly together, but she paid them no attention. Attempting to pull the woman’s bodice down, she found it too tightly laced at the back. She looked up at Boggart. “Help me turn her over.”

The maid shrank away. “Oh, mistress, it ain’t right what you’re doing.”

Adelia, her nerves always frayed when her concentration on a corpse was interrupted, lost her temper. “Ain’t right? It ain’t right what’s happened to this woman, and I need to find out why it did. She’s heavy
Help me turn her over.”

Shocked—her mistress had never been cross with her before—Boggart did as she was told.

Parting the gray hair, Adelia found blood. After examining the wound, she undid the back of the bodice and pulled it open. Crisscrossed abrasions on the spine showed where the laces had been pressed into it.
Hmmm.
“Now we turn her over again,” she said.

With the body once more faceup, and with Boggart still whimpering, Adelia exposed Brune’s large white breasts. The chest was unmarked.

“In the name of God, hurry, will you?” Rowley was hissing. “They’ll be coming for her soon. What’s the verdict?”

Without haste, Adelia raised Brune’s skirt and spread the legs. No, the vaginal area had been untouched.

Slowly, she sat back on her heels. “I’m fairly sure she didn’t drown, Rowley I’d like to dissect the lungs of course …”

“Oh, yes, necropsy would go down very well,” the bishop said between his teeth. “Of course you can’t dissect her. In the name of God, just tell me what happened.”

Adelia looked up. “I think she was smothered. Somebody hit her head from behind—Mansur, see if you can find a weapon—and then, when she staggered, pulled her down and knelt on her arms—see the bruising, there and there—while he held something over her mouth and nose, something rough … you see where it rubbed against the upper lip?”

“This?” Mansur had found a coarse towel on the floor. One of the pegs that had held it up remained on the washing line, the other was still attached, as if the cloth had been snatched down.

“Quite likely And there is blood in her eyes, typical of asphyxiation.”

“Murder, then,” Rowley said.

There was a squeak from Boggart.

“I’m afraid so.”

“Must have been a strong fellow, she’s a large lady”

“He hit her on the head first with something heavy and sharp, perhaps a sword pommel, something like that, and weakened her …” Adelia looked up at Mansur, who shook his head; he’d found no weapon. “But, yes, he was strong—I doubt a woman could have done it. She struggled, poor thing, hence the mark on her lip where the cloth rubbed against it.”

She closed her eyes, imagining the scene, the frantic turning of the head, the poor, thrashing legs … “And then he lifted her up to prop her over the tub with her head in the water, hoping we would think she’d tipped forward from a sudden apoplexy and drowned.”

“Damn,” Rowley said with force. “Well, put her clothes straight.”

“But the sheriff, somebody in authority must see these injuries first. What’s the procedure in Aquitaine?”

“The procedure is that this woman appears exactly as we found her. So do it.”

She didn’t understand why he was cross, nor why he and Mansur were looking at each other as if they knew something she didn’t. However, it wasn’t decent that the corpse should lie there exposed as it was; presumably the sheriff, a coroner, whoever it might be, could do the examination when it came to laying it out.

Between them, Adelia and Boggart made Brune respectable again.

The guards returned with a litter, lifted the corpse, and took it away with the bishop’s cloak laid over it.

Rowley didn’t go with them. Instead, he took Adelia’s chin in his hand and looked into her eyes. “She drowned, sweetheart. Brune drowned.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Is there any indication as to who killed her?”

Helplessly Adelia looked around. Apart from the towel the killer had dropped, nothing; wet footprints were all around the vat, but so many of them as to be useless. “No … somebody … a man most probably. We must start inquiries.”

“And how many men do you suppose are in this palace?”

Now she was becoming angry; he was frightening her. “More than have access to this undercroft. There can only be a few allowed down here.”

“You think so? Did you notice the steps down to this place? Entrance tucked away, virtually deserted at this time of night? Anybody not just servants, could sneak down here.”

“Someone might have seen him, Rowley We must ask.”

“No, we mustn’t.”
He took her by the shoulders and shook her. “Do you know how long that would take? What it would entail?”

She was bewildered. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t want a delay either, but there’s a killer loose….”

“There isn’t. Is not. This is a case of drowning pure and simple, an accident.”

He stiffened; the sound of voices was coming from the stairs beyond the curtains of washing; officialdom was arriving. “Quick, get her out of here, Mansur. Explain it to her. I’ll stay Go with them, Boggart.”

Boggart and a still-bemused Adelia were dragged away to a dark corner and made to stand behind a sheet. Several people were blundering through the forest of washing toward Rowley and the lanterns. She heard the deep voice of the seneschal and then Lady Beatrix’s as the lady-in-waiting passed her:
“Oh, I
agree,
absolutely frightful. Drowning herself, so careless of the woman. Joanna will be inconvenienced, there was nobody like Brune for getting stains out of embroidery. . . .”

And Lady Petronilla:
“What is that smell?”

Adelia, who feared they’d scented Ward crouching at her feet, held her breath, but the ladies went past without seeing her.
“Oh, my lord bishop, there you are. Is this where it happened? How terribly, terribly ghoulish.”

“We go,” Mansur whispered.

They went. Rowley had been right; the stairs led to a deserted passageway

Nobody was in Eleanor’s garden either, and it was there that Adelia refused to go any farther. “Are you going to alert the authorities or am I?”

Gently Mansur steered her to a bench and sat on it beside her. Boggart crouched nearby, holding on to Ward for comfort and looking nervously around at the bushes for murderers.

The Arab’s voice was a bat’s squeak in the darkness. “She insulted you. They will say you had her killed. Or made her kill herself.”

Adelia’s mouth fell open. “What are you
talking
about? I wasn’t here. The guards saw me come in. Captain Bolt . . .”

Mansur went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “That you wished her dead, perhaps inspired her or someone else to see it done.” He took her hand. “We are strange to them, you and I. There has been misfortune on this journey; the Bishop of Winchester talks of little else. I can listen because they think I do not understand them and I hear disquiet. Three times now you have been angry, first with the horse Juno …”

“I wasn’t angry with her. . . .”

“And then with the Sir Nicholas . . .”

“I wasn’t . . .”

“More recently with Brune.”

“She was angry with
me.”

“And all three have died in circumstances that are odd. A horse eats poison, a knight is shot while hunting, a woman is drowned.”

“They can’t think I killed any one of them. Each time I was somewhere else.”

“You did not have to be there. You engineered it. Or I did. The horse, the knight, both were murdered. If this time, Brune’s death is deemed an accident, they may regard the fact that she offended us as a coincidence, but the Bishop Rowley does not want attention drawn to her killing. It will be bad enough as it is; there will be talk, superstition.”

“That’s nonsense. Why would we want her dead? For what reason?”

“Why would anyone want her dead? And therein lies the reason. Publicly, she offended only us.”

She was following his remote, high voice as if through a fog, unable to see which direction its meaning came from. “And how are we supposed to have made someone kill her for us? Or have her put her head in the tub from a distance?”

“Witchcraft.” It was said mildly as the Arab said all things mildly but, for Adelia, it was a blast of putrefaction into the night air. It felled her so that she put her arms over her head to shield herself just as the little laundress had held the scrubbing board between her and evil.

Witchcraft.
Always,
always,
since she’d left Salerno, where they knew what she was, and what she did, and appreciated her for it, superstition had attached itself to her heels so that the skill she’d been granted to benefit mankind must be hidden by stratagems so wearying that she was sick of them.

But there was one thing it could not do. She brought her arms down and sat up.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Somebody killed Brune, they took away her life, her
life,
Mansur. Her body cried it out to me, her soul cries it. I cannot, I
will not
allow murder to be ignored.”

“She was not a nice woman,” Mansur said stolidly.

“She was murdered. She was alive. The span God allotted to her has been taken away Whether she was nice or not has nothing to do with it.”

“They will think that anyone who crosses us is cursed.”