‘Genevieve saw me making love to Ida,’ he said baldly. ‘Ida and I used to meet in a glade on the edge of the forest. We thought it was sufficiently far from the house for us to be undisturbed, but it seems that, as her fears and terrors had grown, Genevieve had taken to going out for long walks by herself. By sheer bad luck, she found her way to our grove. She heard Ida’s cries of pleasure, but mistook them and thought I was attacking her. She screamed and screamed.’ His face looked grey. ‘I have never heard a sound like it,’ he muttered. ‘I leapt up, still undressed, and hurried over to her. She was staring at my — at me, and then at Ida, lying naked on the ground with a white shift pulled up over her face to disguise her identity. She wouldn’t stop screaming. I knew she must not be allowed to tell, so I did a terrible thing.’ He paused, drew breath and went on. ‘I told her that the thing lying on the ground was no human woman, but a spirit. A night hag, a succubus.’ He shuddered. ‘Oh, dear Lord above, how many times have I regretted what I did! I told her I had been attacked, wrestled to the ground, my manhood roused by this foul forest spirit. God help me, I played on Genevieve’s frail mental state. I was well aware she was already deeply disturbed about sex and having to be married to me, and to save my own skin I used that knowledge to cover up what Ida and I had been doing.’
He stopped talking. The silence seemed to hold the shadow of his words. I risked a glance at him. He was still deathly pale, his face full of pain, grief and, I now knew, guilt.
‘My shameful ruse worked, too well,’ he muttered, ‘and she never really recovered. I thought for one wonderful moment that I might not have to go ahead with the marriage to unite my kin and the de Sees. I dared to hope that, somehow, somewhere, there might be a chance for Ida and me. But I reckoned without Claritia. As soon as she realized there was no hope for Genevieve, she came up with another plan.’
No hope for Genevieve. Once more I heard Gurdyman’s voice, speaking sadly of the poor girl. She was found one morning wandering outside in the cold dressed in nothing but a thin shift. She had seen something that had terrified her, but she was unable to say what it was. Her nervousness concerning the proposed marriage turned to abject horror. Then, when her mother attempted in her robust way to bring Genevieve to her senses, the girl fainted dead away and could not be revived for two days. Since then she has been a slight, silent shadow who flits on the periphery of her family’s life and, in the main, is left alone.
‘I know what she did,’ I whispered. ‘She made Lady Claude give up her vocation to be your wife.’
‘She did, she did,’ he sighed heavily. ‘And, weakling that I am, I agreed. But you must believe what I said just now: in truth, and I swear it upon what little honour remains to me, I would not have abandoned Ida. I could never have done that. Ida and I have always been discreet; Claude knows nothing of what we are to each other, and I would have made sure she never found out. I had formed a plan to acquire a little cottage for Ida where she could bear my child and raise it in safety, where I would have visited when I could.’ He turned to Edild, sitting so still and silent as she listened. ‘I would have supported them, my Ida and my child!’ he said urgently.
‘On your wife’s money,’ Edild said neutrally.
She was right, and there was no denying it. All the same, I felt a stab of pity for Sir Alain, for as my aunt spoke those four damning words, he flinched as if he had been stabbed.
I said, wanting, I think, to save him further pain, ‘Alberic’s motive for attacking you must, then, have surely been jealousy, for Ida, whom he adored, had given her love to you and not to him.’
He frowned. ‘Yes. Perhaps, yes.’
I thought of something that might confirm that it had undoubtedly been Alberic who hit Sir Alain. ‘Did you notice anything unusual just before the attack?’ I asked.
The frown intensified as he tried to remember. ‘I heard something very odd,’ he said eventually, and I knew I’d been right. ‘It was a sort of humming, and the very notes were enough to make a listener feel so sad, as if all the happiness had been sucked out of the world.’ I sympathized; I, too, had suffered the same reaction.
Unless there had been two men skulking around and humming in the graveyard, we had our proof of Alberic’s guilt.
I thought about it, extending the image of Alberic’s furious attack to encompass another killing. ‘It must have been Alberic who killed Ida,’ I said slowly, for all that I knew I had originally decided he was innocent. ‘He came here full of hopes to claim her and marry her, now that his wife’s death had left him free, and when he approached her, she told him she was pregnant by another man who loved her, and she loved him too, so there was no hope for Alberic, after all he’d been through, and he strangled her. Then he had to kill Derman because he thought he’d witnessed the murder, and then finally he tried to kill you, Sir Alain, for despoiling Ida.’
My tumble of words was followed by utter silence. Edild was studying me closely, but her expression told me nothing, and I did not know if she agreed with my suggestion of what had happened or if she believed I was quite wrong.
Tentatively, Sir Alain said, ‘It could, I suppose, have been as you say. .’ His voice tailed off as if he could not quite convince himself.
The silence fell again, enveloping us all. Then at last Edild spoke. ‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘But consider this.’
She stood up, gracefully, in one single movement. She crossed to the place in the corner where we store firewood and, selecting a length of birch as long as her arm, held it in both hands. She swung it through the air, first from right to left, then from left to right.
‘I am right-handed,’ she said, ‘and it is natural for me to swing a weapon this way.’ She swung the wood again from right to left. ‘My right hand and arm are the stronger, because habitually I use them more, and swinging this way lets the stronger arm dominate.’
She put the wood tidily back in its place and sat down once more beside Sir Alain. She reached out and touched the swelling on his head, hidden under its compress. ‘You were hit on the back of your head on the left side,’ she said. ‘Derman, whom Lassair suggests was felled by the same man, was hit on the right side of his head.’
She looked at me, at Sir Alain, and then back at me. Neither he nor I spoke, so in the end she did.
With a faint sigh, she said, ‘One attack was by a right-hander, the other by a left-hander. You and Derman, Sir Alain, were assailed by two different men.’
NINETEEN
The effort of talking seemed to have exhausted Sir Alain, who was lying back on his pillows with his eyes closed. ‘He should sleep,’ Edild whispered to me.
I nodded. ‘Can you spare me for a while?’ I asked.
‘I can, yes. If you are going out, you can take this tonic round to William for his old mother.’ She took the small vessel down from the shelf and handed it to me.
I put it in my satchel. ‘What’s in it?’
Edild gave a wry smile. ‘Little that will do her any good, I fear, for she is dying. It is mainly honey and water, with some cleansing herbs that will give a bitter tang and make the medicine taste sufficiently unpleasant for the old soul to believe it must surely be beneficial.’ She had suggested to me before that even a mixture that was mainly water might persuade a patient that his symptoms had been reduced if the healer presented it with sufficient conviction.
I was turning to leave when my aunt caught my sleeve. ‘Don’t accept anything in payment,’ she said. ‘It would not be right, for what I am sending is worthless.’
I nodded my understanding. Worthless, I thought as I strode away. I would do as my aunt commanded and take no payment, but I did not agree with her assessment of her remedy. She may not appreciate it, but the people of our village believe in her, and indeed they are right to do so. Even a bottle of water has worth when it comes from Edild’s hands.