Ulfrith’s eyes narrowed. ‘Who is Adonis? And where do you know him from?’
‘If you accept payment for that sort of commission, you will be a common mercenary,’ said Roger, conveniently forgetting that he often sold his talents to anyone who had enough gold. ‘And is it so much to ask that you let me take these women to the abbey?’
Fortunately, Juhel began to chat to the women about the perfumes Adonis was alleged to have used, so Geoffrey took the opportunity to haul Roger away. There was no point in trying to reason with the big knight while Edith had him fixed with great, piteous eyes.
‘We cannot, Roger. Their fathers and brothers will assume we abducted them – and I am a married man. They must stay here, where women of their own status are willing to look after them.’
‘I could look after them,’ said Roger with a meaningful wink.
‘Quite, and it will not do. Besides, what happens if we arrive at this abbey and find it has no facilities for women? It is a community of Benedictine monks, so there is no reason to suppose they can accommodate females. You may be obliged to take them as far as Dover.’
‘I would not mind.’
‘You would, because then you will be forced to stay there until their relatives decide to fetch them. You could be waiting months, and it will be expensive to feed and house them.’
‘Are you ready?’ bawled Roger to the squires, thoughts of extra costs quickly bringing him in line with Geoffrey’s position. He made a perfunctory bow to the women. ‘I am sorry, ladies: my friend is right. We cannot expose you to unnecessary danger.’
He strode out of the bailey, his possessions wrapped in one of the castle’s blankets and slung over his shoulder. Magnus shot after him, determined to walk next to the man he considered his protector. With considerable reluctance, Ulfrith followed, Bale murmuring sympathetically in his ear. Geoffrey went last with Juhel at his side, chicken swinging in the cage next to him.
Juhel chattered incessantly, and since his monologue did not require much response, Geoffrey’s mind wandered. He was brought back to the present when Ulfrith suddenly stopped at an oddly shaped tree that had grown twisted in the coastal winds.
‘This is where Philippa came ashore,’ he said. ‘We should make sure the tide has not washed Vitalis out of his grave. It is a small service, but she may be grateful when she learns I suggested it.’
‘No, we should press on,’ argued Magnus. ‘We do not have time for the dead.’
‘I agree,’ said Juhel. ‘Those black clouds are coming up fast. Can you not feel the tingle in the air as thunder gathers?’
‘No,’ said Ulfrith shortly. ‘But I can manage alone. You go ahead. I will catch up.’
‘I will stay with him,’ said Geoffrey to Roger, suspecting that the lad might take the opportunity to return to Philippa if he was allowed to linger on his own.
‘You want to claim the credit for a good deed that was
my
idea,’ said Ulfrith accusingly.
Geoffrey fought down his irritation. ‘I am offering to help you, boy. I am not interested in your lady. I am married, remember?’
‘But only to big old Hilde Baderon,’ Ulfrith muttered in a sufficiently low voice that Geoffrey could not be absolutely certain he had heard him right. He decided to overlook the remark in the interests of harmony, hoping Ulfrith would soon forget about Philippa and be back to his normal ebullient self.
‘Come,’ he said shortly. ‘We will not have so far to run if we hurry.’
Ulfrith followed him down the beach, Bale trailing behind.
‘I see no grave,’ said Ulfrith, looking around with his hands on his hips.
Geoffrey pointed to a knot of squawking, flapping gulls a short distance away. ‘I imagine it is over there.
Ulfrith gaped. ‘What are they doing?’
‘I thought you grew up near the sea,’ said Geoffrey, advancing cautiously. The birds took to the air, although they did not go far. ‘You must have seen this sort of thing before.’
‘You mean they are
eating
him?’ exclaimed Ulfrith, appalled. ‘But he was a man!’
Geoffrey did not reply but stared at the body in the sand. Vitalis’s wives had made a poor job of burying him. They had interred him below the high-water mark, so the next tide had scoured him out. Their hole had been too shallow, and they had not protected the grave with stones. Moreover, the birds were not the only ones to have ravaged Vitalis; it appeared that the villagers had been at him, too.
Geoffrey indicated that Bale was to help him carry the corpse to the boggy meadow behind the beach. He then set the squires to scooping out a decent hole with pieces of driftwood, while he gathered rocks to make a cairn. Fortunately, the soil was soft, and it was not long before they were able to roll Vitalis into his new final resting place.
‘He has a nice cloak,’ said Bale, fingering it. ‘And I like that ring.’
‘No,’ said Geoffrey sharply. He and Bale had had this discussion before. ‘We do not steal from the dead. Besides, clothes harvested from cadavers carry diseases.’
‘Only after they begin to rot, sir,’ countered Bale. ‘Vitalis is relatively fresh. And the ring—’
‘The ring belongs to Vitalis,’ said Geoffrey firmly. ‘And with Vitalis it will stay.’
‘But he will not be needing it where he is going,’ reasoned Bale. ‘And you are about to embark for the Holy Land without so much as a spare shirt. The ring would mean you would not have to borrow funds from Sir Roger. Besides, if we do not take it, those greedy villagers will.’
‘That is why we are burying him deep,’ replied Geoffrey. He looked around uneasily, suddenly assailed with the sense that they might be being watched. ‘Put the ring back, Bale. We are not corpse robbers.’
Bale looked sorry but did as he was told. Geoffrey gazed out to sea, wondering what it was about corpses that Bale so liked. He was one of the least greedy men Geoffrey had ever known, but he seemed unable to resist items belonging to the dead.
‘You should say something, sir,’ said Ulfrith. He was pale, and Geoffrey supposed he had not buried many men who had been half-eaten by birds. ‘We cannot just leave. It would not be right.’
‘Say something in Latin,’ suggested Bale helpfully. ‘That always sounds nice.’
‘Oh, yes!’ agreed Ulfrith keenly, removing his hat in anticipation. ‘Like a priest. Lady Philippa will like that when I tell her.’
‘I wish my horse had not died in this wretched place,’ said Geoffrey in Latin, staring down at the dead, sand-brushed features of the old knight but thinking of the animal he had lost. ‘
Should
I have listened to Roger about the omens? But that is odd! What is that line on Vitalis’s neck?’
‘Amen,’ said Ulfrith and Bale in unison as Geoffrey dropped to one knee to inspect the mark more closely. It lay under Vitalis’s cloak, which Bale’s rummaging had disturbed.
‘Something is tied around his neck,’ said Geoffrey, turning the dead man’s pecked head in his hands. ‘A piece of twine.’
‘It is tight,’ said Bale, squatting next to him and touching it with his forefinger. He took one of his sharp little knives and cut through it, showing where it had bitten deeply into the skin below. Then he leaned all his weight on Vitalis’s chest. Nothing happened. ‘There,’ he said in satisfaction.
‘There what?’ asked Ulfrith, bemused.
‘He did not drown,’ explained Geoffrey. ‘Or Bale would have been able to squeeze water from his lungs. No, he was strangled with that piece of twine.’
‘Not twine,’ said Bale, handing it to Geoffrey. ‘Ribbon. Fine red ribbon.’
‘I have seen its like before,’ said Ulfrith, staring at it. ‘But I cannot remember where.’
Geoffrey frowned. ‘Paisnel used red ribbon to keep his documents in order.’
The documents that had been in Paisnel’s bag, he thought, but that he himself had seen Juhel inspecting the day after Paisnel’s mysterious disappearance.
‘Then Juhel killed Vitalis!’ exclaimed Ulfrith, wide-eyed. ‘Philippa said he killed Paisnel, so he must have strangled Vitalis, too.’
‘There is no evidence to suggest that,’ said Geoffrey, his thoughts whirling. He had red ribbon of his own in the saddlebag he had saved from
Patrick
, but his was coarser. He looked at the stuff in Bale’s hand and tried to assess whether it was the same kind that Paisnel had owned. But ribbons were often used by clerks, and it could belong to anyone.
‘It
was
a long time before Juhel rejoined us yesterday,’ Bale pointed out. ‘He could have been off throttling Vitalis. And Lady Philippa was right to accuse him of dispatching Paisnel, because they were
always
squabbling. Men get a taste for killing, see, and they cannot help themselves.’
‘Well, this is definitely Juhel’s ribbon,’ declared Ulfrith, as Geoffrey wondered uneasily whether Bale had a taste for killing, too.
‘You seem very sure of that. How?’
Ulfrith shrugged. ‘I saw Paisnel reading documents with important-looking seals one night, and I saw Juhel glancing through similar ones after Paisnel went missing. Red ribbon kept them in a neat bundle. It is obvious what happened: Juhel used Paisnel’s ribbon to strangle Vitalis.’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Even if Juhel did take Paisnel’s documents, we do not know if he salvaged them when the ship sank. And you cannot prove this particular piece of ribbon belonged to Juhel. The stuff is not exactly rare – I have some myself.’
‘You did not kill Vitalis, though,’ said Bale loyally.
‘Then who else could it have been?’ asked Ulfrith. ‘The pirates?’
‘Possibly,’ said Geoffrey. ‘But they were not with Vitalis when he died. Nor did they try to bury his corpse.’
‘Philippa and Edith dug the grave,’ said Ulfrith. ‘And they were with him when he died. Philippa told us herself that Vitalis’s last words were that he had spoken the truth when he accused you of . . .’ He trailed off when the implications of what he was saying dawned on him.
‘Yes,’ said Geoffrey soberly. ‘It very much looks as though Philippa and Edith are the prime candidates for their husband’s murder.’
‘This is monstrous!’ yelled Ulfrith, tears of rage and distress rolling down his flushed cheeks as he followed Geoffrey and Bale along the beach. ‘You have no right to make such accusations.’
‘I accused no one,’ said Geoffrey calmly. ‘I merely outlined the evidence.’
‘You will see Philippa hanged,’ shouted Ulfrith. ‘How could you? I thought you liked her.’
‘I do like her.’ Geoffrey saw that was the wrong thing to say, because Ulfrith’s eyes narrowed.
‘You intend to hold it over her,’ he said, white-faced. ‘To force her to lie with you.’
If it had not been for the promise Geoffrey had made to his sister, Ulfrith would have been flat on his back with a blade at his throat. Seeing his master’s hand twitch towards his dagger, Bale turned quickly and rested a warning hand on the younger man’s shoulder. Ulfrith shrugged it off.
‘I am going back to her,’ he said. ‘I want to be at her side if she is accused of terrible crimes.’
‘No one will accuse her,’ said Geoffrey, struggling to be patient. ‘The only people who know Vitalis did not drown are us and his killer – who may or may not be Philippa.’
‘Or Edith,’ added Bale helpfully.
‘And we will say nothing, so they have nothing to worry about,’ Geoffrey went on. ‘But you cannot ignore the facts. We all saw Vitalis alive as we abandoned ship, and Bale has just proved he did not drown.
Ergo
, he was strangled on the shore.’
‘But not by Philippa,’ persisted Ulfrith.
Geoffrey continued with his analysis. ‘Philippa said Vitalis reiterated his accusations about my family before he died. She also said there was water in his lungs and that he gurgled as he spoke. We know that was not true, because we just saw for ourselves that his lungs were dry. She lied.’
‘She was mistaken!’ cried Ulfrith. ‘She must have heard the gurgle of waves in the pebbles and assumed it was her husband.’
That was highly unlikely, even with Philippa’s dim intellect. ‘You explain what happened, then,’ suggested Geoffrey.
‘Juhel was late in joining the rest of us,’ began Bale when Ulfrith could not rise to the challenge. ‘And some of the pirates wandered off to look for their contraband. Any of them could have killed Vitalis.’
‘How?’ demanded Geoffrey. ‘Philippa stated quite clearly that she was with him when he died – which means she was with him when he was
strangled
. As I imagine she would have noticed someone else choking the life out of him, the only logical explanation is that she and Edith did it.’
‘Perhaps they
thought
he was dead when they buried him, but someone else came along, dug him up and strangled him later,’ suggested Bale, doing his best for Ulfrith.
Geoffrey shook his head. ‘The truth is that Philippa and Edith either killed him or were complicit in his death. The facts simply do not allow any other conclusion.’
Unwilling to debate the matter further, he turned away and began to walk again. But he had underestimated the intensity of Ulfrith’s feelings, and, with no warning, the squire attacked. Geoffrey had never been assaulted by a servant before and was taken off guard by Ulfrith’s ferocity. Ulfrith was a powerful lad, and the weight of his body knocked Geoffrey from his feet. He began to pummel the knight with his fists, the dog racing around them, barking frantically. The battering did not even stop when Geoffrey pressed his dagger against Ulfrith’s throat: the lad was in such a rage that he was oblivious to everything.
‘No!’ Geoffrey yelled as Bale jumped forward with one of his knives. Bale might be Ulfrith’s friend, but protecting Geoffrey came first.
Bale hesitated, giving Geoffrey just enough time to drop his dagger and scrabble for a rock, which he brought up sharply against the side of Ulfrith’s head. Ulfrith slumped, dazed, and Geoffrey struggled out from underneath him.
‘God’s teeth!’ he muttered, not sure which had unnerved him more: Ulfrith’s blind fury or Bale’s readiness to kill a comrade. He ran his hand over his face and found Ulfrith had scored a scratch on his cheek, which would soon probably be joined by bruises. He grimaced in annoyance, thinking he would hardly be hired by a pilgrim if he looked like a man who brawled. He prodded the squire with the toe of his boot, watching impassively as he regained his senses.