Hide, Josse thought. Hide. Aye, that was what the child had said when he’d snuggled inside Josse’s cloak that day. Great God, the poor little lad had seen the man attack his mother! No wonder he’d turned dumb.
‘Then,’ Leofgar was saying, ‘she went for my hounds and let them into the hall.’
‘Your hounds,’ Josse echoed, his heart still overflowing with pity for the damaged child.
‘Yes, my hounds,’ Leofgar sounded impatient. ‘They are big dogs and they are trained to go after wounded creatures that get up and try to crawl away. They go for the throat, you know, as that way the kill is accomplished quickly.’
‘And-’ Josse swallowed. ‘And they attacked the intruder?’
‘Rohaise shut them in the hall and went a little way up the stair, leaving them there with the body. She thought she heard some sounds, although she is not sure what they implied. She waited, but there was nothing more. Then she crept down again and opened the door a crack. The man was lying exactly as she had left him and one of the dogs was sniffing at the blood pooling on the floor beneath his head. Rohaise tiptoed closer, then closer, until she was standing right over him. Suddenly he leapt up and lunged at her with his knife. She screamed and flung herself out of his reach and at the same moment one of the hounds leapt at him and took him by the neck. Great arcs of scarlet flew out all over her as the dying heart beat its last — Josse, she was covered with his blood.’ Leofgar’s eyes were wide with remembered horror. ‘Then the hounds padded off towards the door and she stood staring down at the man.’ Leofgar paused. ‘Soon after that I came home and found them. Rohaise had crept away to hide on the stair, shaking with shock and trying pitifully to pull the ripped pieces of her bodice together to cover herself. Timus was weeping hysterically up in the bedchamber and the man was on the floor of the hall. He was quite dead. He no longer had a throat.’
Josse waited while his shocked reaction abated slightly. Then he said firmly, ‘Your wife was threatened, Leofgar. She feared that this intruder had come to take her child, and furthermore that for some reason he meant to assault or even kill her. When a man armed with a knife attacks an unarmed woman whom he has just tried to rape, anyone would surely agree that she is within her rights to defend herself!’
‘Perhaps,’ Leofgar said dully. ‘But I dared not take that chance.’
‘So you came to Hawkenlye.’ But no, that could not be right, Josse thought, for there had been no bloody body lying in the hall at the Old Manor when he and the Abbess had arrived.
He looked enquiringly at Leofgar and said, ‘What did you do with him?’
‘I stripped him, burned his foul and filthy clothes in a big fire on the hearth and hid him in an outbuilding,’ Leofgar said tonelessly. ‘I buried his knife, his belt buckle and the remains of his boots. Rohaise and I tried to comfort Timus and finally we got him to go to sleep up in our bed. Then we cleaned every inch of the hall and she put her torn and bloody gown on the fire with the blood-soaked rushes from the floor. We had to make sure there was no sign left to give us away when Wilfrid and his family returned and when I asked him — Wilfrid — to mend the broken chest I told him a lie about having lost the key.’ Leofgar looked sad, as if it had hurt to treat his faithful servant this way and he still regretted it. ‘While we cleaned the hall I had worked out what to do with the body,’ he hurried on, ‘and when the light began to fail, I slipped out to make my secret preparations. I penned my swine up in a lonely place where nobody goes, leaving them without any food, and then two days later I took the dead man out into the forest and fed him to them. What was left of him when they were done, I buried.’ His anguished eyes suddenly raised to meet Josse’s, he said, ‘Rohaise tried to stop me. Even after the horror of knowing for two whole days that his — that the corpse was hidden away on our land and what would happen were it to be discovered, still she said it was wrong to deny the man Christian burial. We-’ He stopped, drew a breath and then said softly, ‘We almost fought over it. She was beside herself, but I was determined.’
Josse could well imagine Rohaise’s state of mind. How on earth had she borne it? Great God, but the poor lass had suffered! He was on the point of saying as much but a glance at Leofgar stopped the words before they were uttered; it had quite clearly cost the young man dear to tell his story.
So instead, realising even as he spoke that he already knew the answer, Josse said, ‘And you now know who this man was?’
Leofgar sighed. ‘Yes, for he was very like his brother whom we found hanging from the tree.’ He summoned a very faint smile. ‘I thought for one dreadful moment that he’d survived having his throat torn out and being eaten by my swine and had got up and come after me. But I was wrong.’ He paused, throwing his head back and for a moment screwing his eyes up tight, as if trying to rid himself of the images of violence that he could not help but see. ‘It was Teb who was hanged. The man who died in my hall was Walter Bell.’
Chapter 12
After a long time Josse said, ‘What do you want me to do?’
Leofgar turned to him, his eyes alight with some emotion that Josse could not identify; it occurred to him later that it was probably gratitude.
‘I must find out what Walter Bell was after and why he attacked my wife,’ he said. ‘I want you to help me.’
‘Aye. I will.’
There was silence for a moment. Then Leofgar gave a cough and said, ‘Thank you.’
Josse, who also felt the need of a little recovery time, said after a pause, ‘I may already be able to offer something for you to think about. We have been led to understand that you knew the Bell brothers, moreover that there was some sort of a dispute between you and them and that this was the reason for Walter Bell having sought you out.’
‘Who told you that?’ Leofgar demanded. ‘It is a lie, I swear it! I had never seen him before the moment that I looked down on his dead body in my own hall!’
‘Aye, and I believe you,’ Josse hastened to reassure him. ‘Me, I always doubted it anyway. Said as much at the time,’ he added, half to himself. ‘Earlier you said you had some idea why Bell had gone to the Old Manor. What was it?’
‘Theft,’ Leofgar said simply. ‘Rohaise is insistent that the first thing he did was to have a thorough look at our table, as if it were his aim to search for-’ He gave a helpless shrug. ‘I cannot say. Then, as I told you, he broke open the chest.’
‘Was there anything of value in the chest?’
‘Oh — some pieces of silver. Quite valuable, I suppose, but we keep them put away because the bright shine of the metal is such an attraction to Timus and Rohaise is tired of constantly having to polish off his sticky finger marks.’
Josse waited, and after a moment Leofgar said slowly, ‘Walter Bell must have seen the silver, for he scattered the entire contents of the chest on the floor. Yet he made no move to steal anything …’
‘I think,’ Josse said gently, ‘that we may rule out theft as a motive. Could it …’ But this was delicate ground and he had no wish to arouse the young man’s ready anger again. ‘Perhaps his intention was to do what he tried to do to your wife,’ he said as tactfully as he could.
Leofgar shook his head impatiently. ‘I thought of that too but a man intent on raping a woman while her man and her servants are from home is hardly likely to rummage through the household belongings first. I have always understood rape to be a crime of hot blood and swift implementation.’
The fury was there, simmering beneath the surface, but at present Leofgar was keeping it under control. With a flash of insight, Josse thought suddenly that perhaps Walter Bell’s death had been relatively easy after all, compared to what Leofgar might have done to him had he come home to find the man raping his wife.
‘I think,’ Josse said after a brief silence, ‘that it is my turn to tell you something, Leofgar.’