‘You were here, then?’ he asked Hoppon.
‘I found him, poor devil. I walked up here because I had a fancy I could see something from my house, a little huddle of something. When I got here, it was him, poor fellow. He’ll be missed, will Bill.’
‘But he was here. You went all the way up there,’ the bailiff said, pointing to the brow of the hill.
Hoppon’s face clouded with suspicion. ‘How do you know that?’
‘Your staff’s easy to see on this soft turf. It penetrated the grasses and stabbed down an inch or so when you used it going up the hill there. You put more weight on it as you use it to help you uphill, I guess. And then coming back, you used it less forcefully.’
‘Oh! Oh well, aye, I suppose so. I think I came here, saw him lying on the ground, and went up the hill at once to see if anyone was still there. I was looking to make sure I wouldn’t be knocked on the head as soon as I crouched at his side. I made sure that he was dead, and said a prayer over him, the Pater Noster, before going to Jacobstowe to fetch help.’
‘Yes, I see,’ Simon said.
Agnes could see that he was making sense of this senseless murder so far as it was possible. The bailiff asked a few more questions, and the coroner demanded to know the details of how the body lay, and what the injuries were.
‘He was lying on his side, with his arms outstretched,’ Hoppon said. ‘He had a great bloody mess on the side of his head just here,’ and he indicated the right side of his head above and in front of his ear. ‘His eye was almost hanging out, he’d been hit so hard.’
There was a great deal more in the same vein, but Agnes was incapable of absorbing it. It was hard enough to come to terms with the fact that her lovely Bill was dead, let alone the reality of how he had been killed, his head crushed like a beetle. It made her sick in the pit of her stomach just to think of it. ‘He was away for so long. To think that he should have died so close here.’
‘Mistress, I am sorry,’ the coroner said. He was a great hulking bear of a man, Agnes thought. The sort a woman would go to for sympathy. From the twinkle in his eye, he might welcome approaches of a different sort as well. But there was nothing in her that would reciprocate any advances. Her womb felt shrivelled. Her soul was dry and unloving. All had gone when her man was killed. She longed for the sight of his killer dangling from a rope, the hemp cutting slowly into his throat as he swung, legs flailing. She could know no pleasure until he was dead, whoever he was.
But she was a mere peasant woman. A widow. She had no means of learning who could have done this.
‘Did you see a weapon?’ Simon was asking.
‘No.’
Agnes saw the bailiff nod and glance about him. It was plain enough that he didn’t expect a man like Hoppon to have seen much in the way of evidence. The hill sloped away from this spot towards the river, and the bailiff wandered down that way, whistling tunelessly, casting about him.
Hoppon scowled, but said nothing as the fellow kicked about some nettles at the bottom. They were old nettles, their leaves brown, their stems withered and very tall, sheltered under a sprawling oak. Agnes watched as he walked around in them for a few minutes, and then began to flatten the stems in a circle, stamping them down with vigour.
‘Here it is,’ he called. ‘Sorry, Coroner! A free weapon.’
‘Hah! So it is too,’ the knight called down. He peered at the clerk, who was standing a short distance away and wearing a look of long-suffering tolerance sorely strained. ‘Hey, Mark, ye see that? The blasted deodand is worth nothing, eh? Oh, sorry, mistress.’
Agnes scarcely noticed his words. As the bailiff clambered up the hill, a heavy, smooth river pebble in his hand, she could not take her eyes from it. It was black and crusted with something in places.
‘This is the weapon,’ the bailiff said, tossing it lightly to the coroner. ‘Someone, I would think, was here behind him, and clubbed him to death with that. It’s good and heavy — it would do the job in no time. Afterwards he just hurled the stone back towards the river, where he probably found it in the first place. Lucky — if he’d dropped it here, in the open, nearer the body, the blood would have been washed away, I expect. Down there, it was partly sheltered by the grasses and overhanging branches.’
The coroner was turning the stone over and over, feeling its weight in his hand. ‘Plenty to break a man’s head there, yes. Odd, though, eh?’
Bailiff Puttock nodded shortly. ‘I think so.’
Agnes asked, ‘What is odd?’
‘The weapon,’ Coroner Richard said, still studying the rock. ‘All the men in the party at Abbeyford were slaughtered with blades — knives, daggers, swords or axes. All of them. And your old man … my apologies, your husband was killed with a rock, such as any man could pick up.’
‘We will need to discuss this, and what we do next,’ the bailiff said. He glanced at Agnes and smiled. ‘Mistress, this is a sore, sad way to spend your afternoon. You will want to be home with your son, I am sure. Let’s take you home, and if there’s a small inn or tavern in the vill, we can sit there and make our plans without troubling you further.’
‘You are good to me,’ she said. ‘But I only want to learn that my husband’s murderer is caught. Do not trouble about me.’
‘Well, mistress, it is like this,’ the coroner said. ‘We could carry on right now, searching all over this hillside and beyond, but if we do, we’ll only make a mess of things because we’re tired and hungry. There’s no point doing that. Soon it’ll be dark, and in truth, we haven’t eaten in half a day. My belly’s almost on fire with hunger, and I need a large flagon of wine to recover my spirits. I know that you’re in a hurry to find the murdering bastard who did for your old- sorry, I mean, your husband, but we need to keep our own bodies and souls together. So we’re going to return to Jacobstowe for now, and tomorrow look at the way to carry on our investigation.’
‘I see,’ she said, and for the first time in the afternoon, she was aware of a heaviness in her throat, as though there was a plum’s stone stuck there. It was a thick, sore sensation, horrible, and suddenly she felt only a hideous lassitude. A realisation of the pointlessness of this attempt to find the killer. He was probably long gone by now. Drinking and carousing in some far-off town like Launceston, or Exeter itself. There was no justice in the world. She would struggle on for some years, while all about her tried to help, tried to aid her and her child, and perhaps some husband of a friend would turn up at her door, offering her the sympathy of the bed in return for a cabbage or a bowl of broth.
She had no life now; she was an empty, futile figure. Perhaps a source of lust in the eyes of a few men, but mainly a pathetic, lonely widow-woman who lived in her memories of what had been, and what might have been. A focus of shame, and perhaps of pity. Nothing more.
Her thoughts were of misery and grim reality all the walk home. She could not switch her mind to any happy subjects. It would be better if she had died, she thought. At least then Ant would have a father to protect him. There was precious little that a mother could do. He would be better as an orphan, for then at least the vicar would see to it that someone in the vill would take him in, and he might have a surrogate family to replace her and Bill. Poor Bill! Poor, darling Bill!
They had left Hoppon at his house, and were almost at the vill already when Agnes suddenly caught at her breast, gasping for breath, desperately moaning in her distress. She was suddenly lost. Hopelessly confused, she could not help herself. She didn’t recognise the road, didn’t know the scene of the vill in front of her, could not discern a single building that she knew. Overwhelmed by the feeling of dislocation, she struggled to get her lungs to work.
It was a shock to the men. None knew what to do. The monk was hopeless. He stood, panicking, flapping his hands, literally. The sight was almost enough to make her mood lighten, for he looked exactly like a young bird experimenting with flight, a stupid, wide-eyed expression on his face; and the coroner wasn’t much better, standing and harrumphing like an old stallion but uneasy about comforting her. No, it was the bailiff who came to her aid. While she thrust out a hand to break her fall, feeling her legs begin to wobble, a loud roaring in her ears, and a most peculiar flashing in front of her eyes, she found herself caught up. Her legs rose before her, and her shoulders were gently borne, and as the world darkened before her, she was aware of floating, carried by the bailiff.