Letting the heavy mass of hair fall back so that it concealed the face and neck and part of the skinny shoulders, Josse said, ‘Where are you taking him?’
‘Where d’you think?’ Pelham replied sarcastically. ‘To the Abbey, a’course.’
‘You know that he is dead?’
‘Er — aye, he’s dead all right.’ The sheriff’s brief hesitation seemed to Josse to suggest that he had known nothing of the kind. ‘We found him down there.’ He indicated with an outstretched thumb; it had a blackened nail. ‘In the undergrowth beside the track. One of my men had gone in for a — well, he’d gone in, and there he was. The lad, I mean. The dead lad.’
‘Why take him to the Abbey?’ Josse demanded.
‘Well, er-’ The Sheriff cast around as if for inspiration. ‘To get him washed and prepared for decent burial, a’course! Them nuns are good at all that.’
‘Aye, they are.’ Josse spoke softly, staring down at the dead boy. They will take care of you, he said silently. And, when Sister Euphemia has tidied you up, they will bury you and say prayers for your soul.
He closed his eyes in a brief prayer of his own. Then, standing up, he said, ‘My brother and I will come back to Hawkenlye with you.’
He silenced the sheriff’s protest with a look. And Yves, who appeared to have taken the measure of Harry Pelham and not been overly impressed, nodded and said quietly to Josse, ‘You have made the right decision, Josse. Our business with the Prince must wait.’
Back at the Abbey, Josse directed the men to bear the body to the infirmary while he went to seek out the Abbess. He found her in the herb garden, where she had gone to speak to the herbalist, Sister Tiphaine; as he approached, the two of them broke off their conversation and gave him what seemed momentarily to be guilty looks, almost as if they had been talking about him. .
But he pushed that thought aside and, quickly and with few words, told the Abbess about the dead body.
He accompanied her back to the infirmary. Sheriff Pelham and his men were standing outside, no doubt shooed out by Sister Euphemia; the sheriff greeted the Abbess with a mere nod, then said shortly, ‘We’ve taken him inside and that nurse woman’s taken over. You’ll bury him, Abbess?’
‘Naturally,’ she said frostily.
‘Then I’ll bid you good day.’ He sniffed, hawked and would have spat the product on the ground, except that Josse, predicting what he was about to do, intervened.
‘You stand on holy ground, Sheriff Pelham,’ he said, his voice as cold as the Abbess’s had been. ‘Remember it.’
Pelham shot him a fierce glance. Then he turned on his heel and strode away, his men falling into step behind him. Josse watched until they had gone out through the gates, then he followed the Abbess into the infirmary.
Sister Euphemia had got the men to carry the dead boy to a cubicle curtained off from the rest of the infirmary. In this private corner, she had lain the body on a clean sheet and was already washing it down.
‘Mother-naked, like that other poor soul,’ she was muttering as, sleeves rolled up to reveal her muscular forearms, she continued her work. ‘I suppose someone robbed this sad wretch of his clothes and his possessions, such as they were, while he lay dead.’
‘Perhaps they did,’ Josse said absently.
The Abbess turned to him. ‘Sir Josse?’ she said softly. ‘Do I detect that you have another thought in mind?’
She’s quick, he thought. She misses nothing. ‘My thoughts echoed those of Sister Euphemia,’ he murmured back. ‘I was thinking of that other naked body.’
‘And wondering if there was a connection,’ she finished for him. ‘Yes. So was I.’
They watched as Sister Euphemia washed the dirt and the dust from the corpse. Then, with a gentle hand, she swept the hair back from the white face, gathering it up and twisting it into a knot which she pushed beneath the back of the head where it rested on the clean linen.
She gave a soft exclamation and said, ‘Sir Josse? What do you make of this?’
He stepped forward and she took his hand, guiding his fingers to the back of the dead boy’s neck. He felt an indentation. . Quite deep, and extending from beneath his left ear to just past where the spine made a raised bump under the skin.
‘Could he — is this the mark of a garrotte?’ he wondered aloud.
‘You think he was murdered?’ Sister Euphemia breathed. ‘Strangled with some cord or rope wrapped tight around his throat till it throttled him?
‘I am not sure. .’
‘It is possible,’ the infirmarer said. ‘Indeed it is, for I can find no other mark upon him that can have led to his death.’
Josse stood in silence for a moment. Then he said decisively, ‘I am wrong. He cannot have been throttled. The marks go only around the back of his neck, whereas to throttle someone, the front of the throat must be constricted. And here’ — he lightly touched a finger on to the Adam’s apple — ‘although I see faint discoloration, I see the mark of no garrotte.’
The Abbess had moved forward and now stood at his side, gazing down at the boy. She was holding the pectoral cross that hung around her neck. She said quietly, ‘Sir Josse?’ Then, having attracted his attention, she raised the cross on its cord and pulled at it.
After an instant, he understood.
‘Aye,’ he breathed. ‘Aye.’
The infirmarer said quite sharply, ‘What?’
The Abbess turned to her. She was still holding the cross. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Someone has grabbed hold of this, wishing to rob me of it.’ She pulled hard on it. ‘They tear it from me and, before the cord breaks, it digs into the flesh on the back of my neck.’
Sister Euphemia was already nodding before the Abbess had finished her demonstration. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I see it now.’
She turned back to the dead youth. ‘Murdered for what he wore around his neck?’ she asked, of nobody in particular. ‘May the good Lord have mercy on us.’
Although he did not believe that it would serve any useful purpose, Josse went along with the Abbess’s suggestion that they ask some of the monks in the Vale to come and see if they could identify the corpse. Glad of the chance to get out of the infirmary and into the fresh air, he beckoned to Yves, who had gone to find shelter from the soft rain that had begun to fall, and led the way out of the rear gate and down into the Vale below.
Brother Saul and Brother Augustus were in the shelter beside the shrine, helping a visitor repair a damaged wheel on his handcart. Abandoning the task immediately — Saul muttered something to the disgruntled peasant, who seemed to object at the sudden withdrawal of Saul and Augustus’s help — they leapt up to follow Josse and Yves back to the Abbey.
It was clear, as soon as the two lay brothers stood looking down at the dead boy, that they recognised him.
Brother Saul spoke. ‘It’s the lad that arrived with the old man, the one that had a cough and died. Back in August.’
Augustus looked at Josse. ‘We told you about him,’ he said. ‘When you asked Saul, me and Erse. We thought-’ He swallowed, his distress evident. ‘We all wondered if the body that the little girl found was him. The old man’s servant, I mean. But it can’t have been, because he is.’ His eyes fell back to the boy on the bed and, as Josse watched him, his lips began to move in silent prayer.
You’re a good lad, Augustus, Josse thought.
And, her warm tone suggesting that she shared his opinion, the Abbess said quietly, ‘Be comforted, Brother Augustus. He is out of his pain now, whatever it was. And we will do our utmost for his soul, I promise you.’
Augustus flashed her a grateful look. Then he returned to his prayers.
Saul, too, was studying the dead body. He said tentatively, ‘Was it a natural death, Sir Josse? Only — I don’t like to think of the poor lad, running away when his master died and falling foul of some murderous villain.’