Muttered agreement followed this assertion.
“How did you find him?” Shillside asked.
“Face down,” I said. “Arms outstretched.”
“As if he was struck down while running,” one of the clerks added.
“Then let’s turn him and see what may be invisible to us now.”
Henry atte Bridge was rolled face down again, and I placed his stiffened arms above his head as they were when we discovered him. The coroner knelt beside the body and motioned for me to join him on my knees on the forest floor.
“I see no cause for death. There is much about this I do not like,” Shillside said softly as we examined Henry’s broad back.
These words were barely spoken when I saw, as I scrutinized the prone form, a mark on atte Bridge’s back which caught my attention. This had escaped me when I first saw the corpse, for the man’s cotehardie was old, frayed, torn in many places, and stained with age and mud.
I touched the edges of a small tear in the cotehardie. This break in the fabric seemed clean, unlike other rips, the fringes of which were raveled and uneven. I brushed dirt from this opening and saw, obscured by soil and debris, a dim russet oval, a nearly invisible stain against the weathered brown of the garment.
Shillside saw my interest and bent to examine the torn fabric. “What have you found?” he asked.
“Perhaps nothing,” I replied, but as I spoke I pulled up the hem of the cotehardie and reached a hand under the kirtle and across the dead man’s back. I felt there what I suspected. When I withdrew my hand the fingertips were dark with congealed, drying blood.
“He has been stabbed,” Father Thomas said softly.
“I fear so,” I agreed. Had the vicar not suggested a cause of death I might have been more thorough in my examination. If a similar matter should arise in the future I must not allow others to plant suggestions in my mind, for I am too willing to allow them to take root.
I turned the body onto its back again, and with the aid of a clerk I stripped off the cotehardie and kirtle. We turned the hairy fellow to his stomach once again, and the wound was plain.
There had been little bleeding. I believe this was so because the injury penetrated to the lungs and heart, and so atte Bridge died quickly. The blade which struck him down was not large. The wound in his back was the size of my little finger. Perhaps this limited the flow of blood. The wound was just to the left of the man’s spine. Perhaps he tried to run from this attack, but his hurt was too great and he fell headlong where we found him.
The clerks found several fallen branches, broke them to appropriate lengths, and created a litter upon which we transported the body from the wood. Worshippers had gathered before the porch of St Beornwald’s Church, awaiting evensong. They watched in open-mouthed silence as our company passed. Simon Osbern and two of the clerks left us at the gate to the churchyard, and several members of the coroner’s jury, their duty completed for the moment, dropped away as we made our way down Church View Street and turned on to Bridge Street.
As our somber cortege approached the bridge over Shill Brook I remembered the shoe I still carried. Its mate was yet fixed to the left foot of the corpse, bobbing in step with the rhythm of those who carried Henry atte Bridge home. I increased my pace, stepped behind the corpse, and slipped the other shoe from the cold, pale foot. Hubert Shillside walked beside me and watched me do this, but said nothing.
The six men who carried Henry atte Bridge home deposited their burden at the door of his hut in the Weald. Our approach was silent. None of the inhabitants heard us draw near and no face appeared at the door, which was open to the warm spring afternoon. To be truthful, I felt a chill as I stood in the shadow formed by the house as the sun sank low in the western sky. Father Thomas rapped on the doorpost. The knock brought a pale, frowning woman to the door.
Henry atte Bridge’s widow — though as yet she did not know her condition — was a worried woman. After a long winter we were all a bit waxy, but she was ashen, with dark shadows under her eyes from a sleepless night. There would, I thought, be more nights like that in the woman’s future.
Hubert Shillside stood beside the vicar at the door. Neither man held aloof from a dinner table, so Emma did not at first see the object of our visit lying in the dirt behind them.
Father Thomas came quickly to the point of our call. When his words were complete he stepped back so the woman could see clearly the lifeless form of her husband. She choked out a brief wail, which brought her children to the door, but then became silent. She raised one hand to her mouth, and with the other restrained her eldest son, who would have pushed past her to better view his father.
Thomas de Bowlegh remained with the woman to arrange her husband’s burial while Shillside and I and the others but for one clerk drifted away toward Mill Street and the town.
“’Tis a murder the bishop must deal with,” the coroner said as we approached the bridge.
“Aye, which means the vicars of St Beornwald’s will have added duties,” I agreed. I was relieved. Searching out Henry atte Bridge’s slayer would not be my obligation, for he was the bishop’s man.
I parted from Hubert Shillside, and those of the coroner’s jury who remained, at the Mill Street and headed for the castle. I had eaten nothing this day, and hunger burned my belly. But I had another task first, before I could consume a cold dinner.
I sought Alice in the scullery, and found her finishing her work for the day. She looked up enquiringly from under a stray wisp of hair, which she swept aside with the back of her wrist.
“Were you told that your brother was missing?”
The girl shook her head. “Nay…which one? Henry or Thomas?”
“Henry. He has been found.”
Perhaps it was the tone of my voice, or the manner of my speaking, but the girl stopped her scrubbing at a pot, wiped her hands on her apron, and watched me intently, waiting for an explanation.
I told her what had happened, or so much of what had happened as I knew, omitting only the fight along the road the night before.
“So ’e was murdered, then,” she concluded. This was a statement, not a question, as if the manner of her brother’s death was not a shock to her.
Although he was not Lord Gilbert’s man and was no concern of mine, I had many questions about this death, and thought I might assist the vicars in their search for a killer. It did not seem to me at the time unnatural to be curious about the fate of one who had tried to do me harm.
“Had your brother enemies?” I asked. I thought I knew the answer to that question.
“Had better ask had ’e any friends,” she replied.
“There were many, you think, who wished him ill?”
“More’n would’ve wished ’im well, I think.” The girl looked away and silently focused on the scullery window, now glowing bright from the setting sun. “’E learned young ’e was stronger’n most an’ could ’ave ’is way of weaker men…so I’ve ’eard.”
“Even a weak man is strong enough to plunge a knife into another,” I said.
“A weak woman, also,” the girl added, and returned to her pot.
Her assertion got my attention. “Think you there are women who wished your brother dead?”
“Ask Emma,” the girl sighed.
“He beat his wife?”
“Aye. More’n most. When I was with me father, livin’ at the Weald, before you brought me ’ere, I heard ’er yellin’ an’ gettin’ smacked about.”
“Often?”
“Reg’lar, like…’specially when ’e was drunk.”
“He was drunk often?”
“Ev’ry Saturday, reg’lar like. None in the Weald could sleep ’til ’e had done knockin’ Emma about an’ she stopped screechin’.”
The killer of a man who has made many enemies may successfully elude apprehension. It is the killer of a man with few enemies who, it seems to me, is most likely to be caught. The vicars faced a daunting task.
Alice curtsied and smiled thinly as I turned to go. The girl really had grown quite fetching, though far beneath my station. Well, whether a woman is beautiful or not has little to do with her rank. Consider the number of gentlemen who take a mistress from the commons while wed to some ill-favored lady whose attractions of land and dowry could not for long make up for her appearance or demeanor.