Something she had said caught Josse’s attention. After agreeing with her sentiments — his own view of God was of a stern but just figure, something like an awesomely authoritative but fair commanding officer — he said, ‘Sister, have you any idea how long he might have been down here?’
She said instantly, ‘He was put here when the blowflies were still active — they laid their eggs in him. Also, the flesh wouldn’t rot as badly as this in a hurry, not out here in the fresh air. He’s been partially eaten — foxes, I’d guess — but they’re around all year.’ She paused, considering. ‘I’d say he was slain about five, maybe six weeks ago. We’re now in late September. . I’d guess mid to late August.’
Her guess, he thought, was the best he could hope for. Observant and experienced woman that she was, it was good enough for him.
She had stood up to talk to him but now, bending down again, she was tucking the sacking neatly around the dead man, with all the tenderness of a mother settling her child for a chilly night. When she had finished, she again bent her head and closed her eyes, and her lips moved silently as she prayed. This time, Josse joined in.
When, a little time later, they had both finished, they turned away and, without speaking, walked back along the track and up the path to the Abbey, to inform the Abbess that the burial could now go ahead.
Late in the evening, Josse went soft-footed along the cloister to the little room in which the Abbess conducted the business of the Abbey. He had been told she had gone there; she had not come to the refectory for supper but had remained on her knees in the church, beside the corpse in its hurriedly made coffin. Now one of the monks had relieved her, and she had retired to her private room.
The dead man was to be committed to the ground the next day.
The door to the Abbess’s room was slightly ajar, and a faint light shone out from within. Josse tapped on the door and she said, ‘Come in, Sir Josse.’
He did so. ‘How did you know it was me?’
She smiled briefly. ‘None of my nuns or monks wears spurs that jingle as they walk.’
‘And there was I trying to be so quiet and not disturb you,’ he murmured.
She smiled again, then nodded towards the small wooden stool she kept for visitors. Accepting her invitation to be seated, he pulled it out from its place by the wall and settled himself.
‘You bury him tomorrow,’ Josse said.
‘Yes. We cannot delay, Sir Josse, for all that we do not know who it is we bury.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘Besides, it seems there is nothing further to be learned from his body.’
‘That is what I understand. No reason, then, to deny him Christian burial.’
‘Mm.’ Josse was frowning. ‘Brother Saul and young Augustus found no clue?’
‘No. And, knowing them both as I do, I feel that I may conclude that this means there is no clue to be found.’
‘I agree.’ Besides, he thought — although he did not say so to the Abbess — this murder appeared to be the work of a man who knew exactly what he was doing. Who stripped his victim of his garments and his belongings and who could surely only have made the blunder of leaving his knife behind because there was no alternative. Perhaps it was too soundly stuck in his victim’s body. Perhaps he was disturbed.
As if the Abbess read his thoughts, she said, ‘There is the knife.’
‘Aye.’
‘Sister Euphemia has it still,’ she went on quietly. ‘It is dirty and stained — she says with the poor dead man’s blood — and she has undertaken to clean it thoroughly before we examine it.’ She shot a look at Josse. ‘Before you examine it, if you will.’
‘I?’
‘You know arms, Sir Josse,’ she said gently. ‘More than any soul, man or woman, in this community.’
He had been rather afraid that was what she meant. ‘My lady, I-’ He began again. ‘It is a time since I was a man of war and, even then, no expert on weaponry.’ Her watchful eyes held disappointment. ‘But I shall do my best, nevertheless.’ He tried to look confident.
‘Your best,’ said the Abbess, ‘is all that anyone may ask of you. And now’ — she got to her feet as she spoke and, instantly, he did too — ‘I think it is time that I joined my sisters and retired.’
He stood back as she preceded him out of the room, and closed the door after them. They walked in silence across the cloister and, as she turned to the right to go around the church towards the dormitory, he went left towards the rear gate and the path down to the Vale. He had slept down there with the lay brothers before and Brother Saul, he knew, had prepared a place for him tonight.
‘Goodnight, Sir Josse,’ came the Abbess’s soft voice out of the darkness. ‘May God bless your sleep.’
On such a night, with the memory of a skilled assassin’s ruthless work fresh in his mind, the blessing was very welcome.
3
The burial rites for the dead man took up a large proportion of the morning.
Father Gilbert, the priest of the community, was in sombre mood, and he spoke at length of the sinful state of a world in which a man could lie dead and unclaimed — unnoticed, was the silent accusation — for weeks. Watching the Abbess, on her knees at the front of the church, Josse felt a stab of sympathy. She will take the blame on those shoulders of hers, he thought, and she will embark on some private and surely unnecessary penance until she finds it in her heart to forgive herself for something that wasn’t her fault.
How could he help?
Trying to ignore the effects on his own knees of the hard, cold floor of the church — his joints, he was quite sure, were no longer smooth and unworn like those of the dead man — he put Father Gilbert’s stern voice out of his mind and concentrated on the problem in hand. Then, remembering where he was, he sent up a swift prayer of apology for having ignored such an obvious opportunity, and humbly asked God to help him help the Abbess.
The answer came — at least, an answer of sorts — as they rose to walk with the coffin out to the burial ground.
I must find out who he was, Josse told himself, staring at the coffin. And, with the good Lord’s help, who killed him. I will set off down to the Vale as soon as this business is over, and find out everything I can about visitors to the Holy Water shrine over the past couple of months.
That, it seemed to him, was the best starting point.
The fact that it might also be a great help in proceeding with his own little puzzle — who was Galbertius Sidonius, and why was Prince John searching for him? — was something that Josse tried not to dwell on.
It was not difficult to encourage the monks and the lay brothers down in the Vale to talk; it was, in fact difficult to make them stop.
Although violent death was, sadly, no rarer an occurrence in the sacred environs of the Vale than anywhere else in late twelfth-century England, it was still sufficiently exceptional to get the monks all squawking and clucking away like hens round a split grain sack. Josse wasted quite a lot of time on the likes of Brother Micah, who claimed to have heard a saturnine figure dressed all in black creeping about the Vale (‘And just how did you know he was dressed in black if you only heard him?’ Brother Erse, the carpenter, astutely asked him), and Brother Adrian, who said anybody who went around naked was an affront and just asking for trouble. This time it was Brother Saul who quashed him, quietly telling him that it was far more likely that the murderer had stripped his victim after having killed him, so as to help disguise the dead man’s identity.
After some time, Josse was able to corner Brother Saul, Brother Erse and young Brother Augustus. Leaving the other monks to their thrilled gossiping, he indicated with a nod of his head that he would like a quiet word, and the three brothers followed him off along the path to the pond.
He studied them as they walked.
Brother Saul he knew well; his opinion of the lay brother accorded with that of the Abbess. Brother Augustus he had met but briefly; the lad had borrowed Josse’s horse in order to act as one half of Abbess Helewise’s escort on a trip she had made earlier in the year, and Josse had been impressed with the young man’s sense and quiet confidence. He was the son of travelling folk, and had heard the Lord’s call when his sick mother had been cured by Hawkenlye’s Holy Waters.