I called next door at the kitchen and requested a meal from the unhappy cook, who until my appearance had thought his work complete for the day.
Alice was sent with my meal. As I ate I thought of shoes and blue yarn and murder. And, yes, of the child Alice also, who, quite disconcertingly, was no longer a child.
Hubert Shillside called for his coroner’s jury to meet Monday morning in the church. As I had no pressing business, I attended. All there had seen the puncture in Henry atte Bridge’s hairy back. No other cause of death was apparent. The jury soon decided that the death was murder, though none who voted so seemed much grieved at the loss. As I left the church I saw Hubert Shillside enter into a solemn conversation with two of the three vicars of St Beornwald’s Church, while a flock of clerks circled nearby.
I had brought with me to the church the shoes from Henry atte Bridge’s feet. I was confident they had once protected the feet of Alan the beadle. As I walked from the churchyard I heard from a distance a thin keening. I stopped and turned to my right where, at the corner where Church View joins Bridge Street, I saw a funeral procession come into view. There were few mourners. A dozen men and women and a scattering of children followed Simon Osbern and the bier.
I made my way down Church Street to the High Street, then walked left on Catte Street until I came to the house of Alan the beadle. Matilda was pleased to see me, or pleased to see the shoes, I know not which. She did not ask how I recovered them, and I did not venture to tell her. We made small talk for a time; she was getting on well, thank you; her son missed his father, did not sleep well for many nights after the funeral. Neither did she. But wasn’t it fine weather we enjoyed? And the early onions and cabbages were sprouting nicely.
I departed Catte Street in a better mood than I had entered. Certainly the warming sun at my face had something to do with my good humor, but a light conversation with an attractive woman had some small part in my rising spirits. I am not well versed in such things, but I believe Matilda might have been flirting with me. Either that, or she had some speck in her eye which caused her to blink uncommonly often.
I intended to return to the castle and seek my dinner, then be about Lord Gilbert’s business for the afternoon. But as I reached Church View while making my way down Bridge Street, I glanced north and saw a clot of mourners just inside the churchyard wall. I turned and walked to the church.
The gravediggers had nearly completed their work as I reached the lych gate. Henry atte Bridge would rest just within the southeast corner of the churchyard, a few paces from Alan the beadle. I entered and watched as Father Simon spoke the final collect and Henry was lifted in his shroud from the plank which formed his bier. The shroud was black, as befits such occasions, but ill made and poorly stitched.
As his brother and another lifted Henry from the plank, the seam of the shroud split, spilling the dead man’s arm from its place. The arm lay in an old, tattered sleeve of faded blue.
I pushed my way to the front of the mourners, a thing easy to do as there were so few of them. And of those in the group I believe few mourned. Thomas atte Bridge and his assistant set Henry down beside the open grave to repair the shroud and replace the drooping arm. Before they could take him up again I reached between them and seized the badly frayed cuff of the blue cotehardie in which Emma had chosen to bury him.
This act caused raised eyebrows, but one advantage of being bailiff to a powerful lord is that one may do such things without feeling a necessity to explain. And I didn’t. Although I did later make plain my motive to Simon Osbern.
My action at the grave produced two threads from the frayed blue sleeve. The tint was familiar. I was eager to compare this find with the blue yarn taken from Alan’s corpse. I turned from the bewildered assembly and hastened back to the castle. The blue wool from Henry atte Bridge’s burial garment matched perfectly the yarn drawn from Alan’s scalp seventeen days before.
I compared the woolen fragments and thought that I knew what had happened to Alan the beadle on the path to St Andrew’s Chapel. He had left the town to investigate the howl of a strange beast; a beast I also had heard. Alan had died at the jaws of that animal, or more likely trying to escape its jaws, along the dark lane. Henry atte Bridge had found him there, wearing nearly new shoes for which the beadle could have no further use. Henry had taken the shoes, then perhaps dragged the body into the hedgerow to…to what purpose? That I could not explain. Who can know the mind of a thief who will plunder the dead?
I thought little more of the matter as I went about my business that day. Lord Gilbert’s sheep were to be moved to a new field, so that the fallow field they had grazed and manured could be plowed. This business took most of the afternoon, for Lord Gilbert has a large flock, and sheep are wont to go in every direction but that which they should. My father thought them the stupidest of God’s creation. When the afternoon was done I found myself in renewed agreement with him.
I could not sleep that night. My mind wandered back to its earlier conclusions regarding the death of Alan the beadle and Henry atte Bridge’s role in that sorry event. Although my bed was warm and the night cool I rose past midnight to walk the parapet and consider that which caused me such unease.
If Alan died on the road, and the beast attacked him there, why the dent in the back of his head? There were no rocks in the path. But if he fell into the hedgerow while fighting a wolf, and lay hidden there in death, how was it that Henry atte Bridge found him? Alan’s corpse was drawn so far into the nettles that he was discovered by a plowman in the field which lay inside the hedgerow. Those who passed by on the road for the day he lay dead did not discover him. And why was Henry atte Bridge walking that path? His work at the new barn would take him north out of Bampton, not east toward St Andrew’s Chapel.
I circled the walls of Bampton Castle twice but my perambulation brought me no nearer a solution to the riddles my mind created. I understood how a thread of blue yarn might fall from the raveled sleeve of Henry atte Bridge and become lodged in the beadle’s dark locks. This find indicated that Henry had grasped Alan by the shoulders and neck at some time. But why? To haul him into the hedgerow? If so, Alan died along the path. Then why the blow to the back of his skull? Perhaps after dragging the corpse into the bushes Henry let the body fall so that it struck the stones hidden there with great force.
No. A fall of two or three feet would not do the damage to Alan’s skull I had found. And there was the blood. Or not enough of it. Henry atte Bridge surely had something to do with the death of Alan the beadle, but what that was I could not determine.
I expected, or perhaps I hoped, to hear a wolf howl that night as I circled the walls of Bampton Castle. I heard no such beast, nor any other sound. The castle and town slept peacefully, although there may have been those who turned uneasy in their beds, unknown to me. I know now there were several who had cause to rest uneasy.
I returned to my own bed, now grown cold, and thought how agreeable it would be to find a wife for such a moment as this. I fell asleep reflecting on the pleasures of such a search and its successful culmination.
Chapter 7
I awoke with grainy eyes as dawn lightened the window of my chamber. I could not sleep longer, but had no wish to leave my bed and plant my feet on the cold flags. I did so anyway. I decided as I lay abed that I would this day visit Emma atte Bridge. My questions might easily be resolved. Surely the woman knew something of her husband’s business. Her response to a few questions might permit me to sleep more soundly.