Season of the Raven (A Servant of the Crown Mystery Book 1) (7 page)

As they crossed the race and made their way around the corner of the mill, the older monk who'd helped free Halbert from the wheel came to kneel at the dead man's side. With the water draining from his habit adding to the already substantial puddle forming beneath the miller, the brother pushed up one of Halbert's eyelids. As it rose a distinct edge to the cloudiness in Halbert's eye was revealed. The monk made a satisfied sound, then, as Faucon watched in surprise, put his face close to Halbert's and pried open the man's lips as if he meant to count the miller's teeth, then turned one of the miller's palms upward to look at it.

"Brother Herbalist!" Edmund protested. "What are you doing? Move back from the corpse. When I agreed to let you accompany me to Priors Holston this morning, it was only to share our devotions while we traveled in the same direction. It was not an invitation for you to intrude in the matters of your betters."

Faucon touched his clerk's arm. Edmund shot him a startled look, snatching his arm close to his side as if the touch pained him in some way.

"Brother Edmund, the miller's son will soon be collecting those who can swear to his father's ancestry," Faucon said. "Where are your quills and ink, your parchment and knife? I thought your purpose was to record all the details of these events. How can you do that without your accoutrements?"

Edmund expression shifted until he looked honestly stricken. "Fie on me! When the sheriff arrived, I left all inside the mill in my haste to stop him from treading where he is no longer allowed to go."

Then he glanced around the small space between the millwheel and the axle wall. "Impossible! I cannot write here, nor can the jury of the inquest witness the miller's body at this place. The space is too small. He'll have to be brought into the mill courtyard. Come with me so you can instruct the miller's servant to fetch his master's body for us," this servant commanded of his own master.

"In a moment," Faucon replied, but Edmund was already across the race and rounding the corner of the mill, all else forgotten save his own errand.

Faucon lowered himself onto one knee into the wet beside the monk and watched the herbalist run his hands over the front of Halbert's tunic. "What are you looking for, Brother Herbalist?"

"Colin," the monk said, sitting back on his heels to eye Faucon from under thick snowy brows. "I am Brother Colin to men who can stomach a lay brother and former tradesman who dares speak as an equal to those of better blood. Am I wrong to suspect you are such a man?" His dark eyes sparked with vibrant, intelligent life.

That made Faucon smile. "Brother Colin it is then," he replied. "In case you did not hear, I am Sir Faucon de Ramis, the newly-elected Keeper of the Pleas for this shire."

"Keeper of the Pleas?" the monk repeated in confusion.

"Brother Edmund might have used 'coronarius' to describe my new position," Faucon replied.

"Crowner, is it?" Brother Colin offered, his easy translation of the Latin word suggesting that he was fluent in both the Church's and his king's tongue as well as his own. "And what is it that a keeper or crowner does?"

"I'm not wholly certain as of yet, having only been elected a few hours ago," Faucon admitted. "I take it I will mostly be counting and recording the fees owed to king and court. This, I am told, is to prevent the sheriff from slipping a penny here and a penny there into his own purse. However, amongst all my counting duties is also the right to hold inquests over the bodies of those who die unnatural deaths."

"Huh. I expect our lord sheriff cannot have been too pleased to hear of your appointment, Sir Crowner," the monk said as he eyed Faucon much as Marian had the previous day. He looked back at Halbert and continued. "As for what I'm doing, I am confirming what I thought I saw when Halbert was lifted from the race—that the miller did not drown, but was dead when the one who killed him put him into the water."

His words took Faucon aback. He studied the miller. No matter how he looked, he saw nothing but a wet dead man.

"How can you tell that from a glance?"

"Hardly a glance," Brother Colin replied. "Let me show you what I see when I look at our miller. We'll start here." He once again maneuvered the miller's left hand so it was displayed palm up.

Faucon shrugged. "I see a hand as empty and as wrinkled as I would expect of one who'd been a night in the water."

"But what is it that you are not seeing?" Brother Colin asked. "Let us say it was you who'd fallen in the race. The water is pushing you toward the turning wheel. What would you be doing to prevent yourself from being dragged to your death?"

At the thought of being trapped under the water, Faucon's stomach turned and his throat closed. Even imagined it stirred panic. "I would grab whatever I could to save myself," he replied.

"So would I," the monk agreed. "Now, look at the wheel."

Faucon did as instructed. The miller had not been rigorous about cleaning his wheel. The paddles and rims were splotched with green moss and slick algae. He took Halbert's sinister hand from the monk to better examine it. It was clean.

"Do you mean that we should see marks on his hand when there are none? But that cannot be so strange. Wouldn't the water have washed all away?" Faucon asked.

As he spoke his gaze returned to the wheel, his thoughts turning as if driven by the water in the race. With Halbert's right shoulder trapped under the paddle, he had only his left hand to use. The most sensible place for him to grab would have been the left side of the wheel's wooden rim. Not that he could have saved himself by doing so. Once his shoulder was between the paddle and the stones, he was doomed. Still, in the desperation of drowning he would surely have torn at the wood with all his might as he fought for his life.

By the same token, the rim of the wheel was the only sensible place for him to have grabbed if he'd tried to save himself before the wheel had caught him. Again, he wouldn't have been able to stop the wheel, not with the greater power of the water turning it and pushing him toward death. Instead, as the miller clutched the wheel rim, it would have torn through his grasp, mostly likely tearing his flesh as well, as it moved.

In either event, if Halbert had battled to save himself, that fight should have left some sort of mark upon his skin. There was nothing on Halbert's palm, no cuts, stains, splinters or blisters, not even smut beneath his fingernails.

"He didn't claw at the wheel. He didn't try to save himself," he said. "Then again, the fuller says he was besotted. In that state he might not have been alert enough to try."

Brother Colin nodded in agreement. "True enough. What we see on the miller's hand doesn't prove he was dead when he went under the wheel. All it tells us is that he was either senseless when he entered the race or gave up to death without a fight. If either is true, then Brother Edmund will still have his deodand. However, this is not the only sign that dooms my brother to disappointment."

"If Brother Edmund is doomed to anything, it is that someday someone will murder him because he speaks with an 'honest' tongue," Faucon retorted quietly. "And the someone who does it might well be me."

The monk choked on a laugh, then cleared the humor from his throat. "I beg your pardon and our Lord's. It's not meet that I find amusement at my brother's expense.

"Now, look," he said and opened the miller's mouth.

Faucon did as commanded and looked. All he saw was a man's mouth filled with a tongue and a surprising number of fine, strong teeth, although they were a little snaggled in their arrangement. "What should I see?" he asked.

"A bit of foam. Those who drown often have a bit of foam in their mouths or noses, even after being in the water far longer than Halbert was."

Closing the miller's mouth, Colin placed his hands at the center of Halbert's chest and pushed gently, then opened the man's mouth again. "Sometimes doing this will bring up more foam," he said in explanation, "but as you can see, there is nothing. That leaves us one step closer to satisfying the notion that our miller did not drown. Now, we must examine his eyes. What do you see?"

Again Faucon shrugged, this time feeling a little at odds because he had no idea what the monk wished him to see. "That they are half-open, and even though they are cloudy in death, I can see they are the same green color as his son's?"

Brother Colin once more pried up one of Halbert's eyelids. "Now what do you see?"

Once again Faucon noticed the edge to the milkiness that affected the lower portion of Halbert's eye. "The cloudiness ends where the lid was. Why is it like that?"

"When a man ceases to blink, his eyes dry where they are not covered by their lids. That is what happened here. Halbert's eyes began to dry the moment he ceased to breathe and blink. It's this more than anything else that convinces me he could not have drowned. You see, eyes cannot dry while under the water," he finished in satisfaction.

"How can you know all this?" Faucon demanded quietly. "Do men drown so often at your priory that you've learned these signs and can pronounce this without doubt? Perhaps I am wrong, but I somehow took the impression that St. Radegund's is a small place. I cannot think it sees tragedy of just one sort on so regular a basis."

Colin grinned. "For shame, you assuming such about me. Although you're right about St. Radegund's. It is small, with but a dozen men in residence. But neither is it my home," he said. "I work under the infirmarer at St. Michael's Abbey in Stanrudde. During the growing season, I visit all of our daughter and brother houses, helping them to collect and store the herbs needed to heal their sick."

Here, he paused to run his fingers through the feathery fronds that extended out of the top of the pack he'd laid upon the race edge. "There is never enough Mare's Tail, an herb good for treating any ailment, and no place better to find it than along the water's edge.

"As for my lack of doubt over how Halbert died, before I came to the Church, I was Stanrudde's apothecary. So aye, from the time I became a journeyman at eight-and-ten, I have dealt with death and dying, seeing folk move from this vale to the next in more variations than most can imagine. As the years went by, I could not help but notice that each sort of passing has its own distinct pattern. What my experience tells me today is that either Halbert is unique in the way he drowned or he did not drown at all."

Here, Brother Colin paused to cock his head and aim his lively gaze at Faucon. "So, if Halbert did not drown, then the wheel could not have killed him, therefore it cannot be deodand. Now, Sir Crowner, you tell me what follows that, other than Brother Edmund's disappointment."

The monk's expectant question transported Faucon to the abbey school of his childhood and the scholarly monks who had done their best to pound knowledge into his hard head. Only, unlike Brother Colin, there had never been a glimmer of kindness in those men's eyes as they prayed their reluctant student might guess correctly this time. Perhaps if there had been, Faucon wouldn't have been so grateful to become a knight instead of the priest or prebendary his mother intended.

"If the water and the wheel did not kill him, something or someone else did, because he is most definitely dead," Faucon replied like a dutiful student.

But as he gave the monk his expected answer, the thrill of the hunt overtook Faucon for the second time in as many days. The clean mouth, the half-milky eyes, these were spoor, tracks left by Halbert's killer. Just as when Faucon chased game animals, he would read these signs and track down the one who had ended the miller's life.

Now here was something that caught and held his interest. And here was the compensation he needed to make this crowner's job, Edmund included, tolerable. God willing, there would be as much sport in this sort of hunting as there was when he tracked the wily fox.

He grinned. "Brother Colin, if you can discern the means of Halbert's death, I will discover the man."

"Well said," Colin replied, offering the shire's new coronarius a nod of approval. "So now that we know Halbert did not drown, how else could his life have been ended? I am certain in my soul that he didn't die as some men of his age and mine do, simply dropping where they stand. Dead men don't move of their own volition and we know the miller lay out of the water long enough for his eyes to dry. Nor was he throttled or garroted since nothing marks his throat.

"And, unless he was poisoned, it doesn't seem that he was killed in this tunic." Colin once more ran his hands over the front of Halbert's garment. "I can find no blood stain or sign of damage that a weapon capable of dealing out death would make."

"Then we must remove his clothing as the law requires to find what hides beneath it," Faucon replied swiftly. "I need to confirm for myself and Brother Edmund's record that someone truly did murder to him."

"If you can lift him, perhaps I can remove his clothing," Colin replied.

Faucon slid his arms beneath the big man only to discover how heavy and unwieldy the dead Halbert was. That made the ease with which Alf had raised him out of the race a feat indeed. When Brother Colin's second attempt to pull up the man's sodden, knee-length tunic failed, Faucon put the corpse back on the ground and scanned those men and boys standing closest to the race.