‘Father, where have you been?’ she demanded with all the seriousness of her six years.
‘I have to earn a living, little heart,’ he said. ‘You know I have to go out on business.’
‘Do you want to know what I’ve been doing?’ she asked, and began to talk of the games she had been playing with her nurse.
There was no defence against a little girl who wanted to take her father’s time. He couldn’t quite understand the idea of men and women loving each other, but this, the affection for a child who had sprung from his own loins, was different. She was all his, and entirely perfect in this foul world. She took his hand, squirmed her way into his lap, and began to tell him, with expansive hand-movements, about her day. Her utter self-absorption was a source of amusement to him, but if she wished to describe her doings to him, that was fine so far as he was concerned.
However, while she talked, only a small part of his mind was engaged with her prattle. Most of his thoughts were fixed on the house where Daniel had died. The place where Daniel’s widow would now be living alone with her children. There was some satisfaction in knowing that the danger posed by Daniel was removed — and if Juliana threatened to accuse him, he could still kill her and her children. It would be a great deal easier to do so now that her husband was dead.
As Jordan listened with half an ear to his daughter’s chatter, Estmund was thinking of Emma.
Such a lovely smile. That was what everyone said about her when they first met her. She had that sort of childishness about her. Like a girl who was only just a woman, with the slight clumsiness that came with youth, and the beauty of that wide, appealing, open, innocent smile.
‘Oh, God! Why did You …’
No, he couldn’t frame the question. There was no justice in God’s stealing her away. The priest had tried to explain that her act was sinful, that she was forever damned for her criminal decision to take her own life, but while he spoke all Est could see was the way the smile had faded over time, just as their child faded and died in front of their eyes. Est had lost a piece of himself when his only babe had breathed her last. A scrawny little bundle of bone and tight, starved flesh, she was part of him, and when she was buried a part of Est had died at the same time. He had thought nothing could possibly be worse than that dreadful emptiness.
And then Emma killed herself.
Ach, the horror of that night would never leave him. It never could. And now he longed so much for the family he had once possessed that he would sometimes go and see other folk’s. Not to hurt anyone, just to look. To see what his little darling girl might have been like now, had she lived. She would have been nine or so now. A little girl like that one of Daniel Austyn’s. Perhaps if Emma had lived, they might have made another child, a boy this time. He could be like that lad of Reginald Gylla’s — Michael. He was a good-looking little fellow. And then there was the Carters’ boy down in Stepcote Lane. All of them so perfect, especially in their sleep. He would go sometimes to look at them, just to watch them as they slept, so perfect, so beautiful, so unbearably alive and fit, when his own precious little petal was nothing now, only yellowish bones in the red soil of the cathedral’s yard, unbaptized, a soul wandering lost in the wilderness, never to find her way to Heaven …
‘Christ Jesus!’ he groaned, curling into a ball with the pain and grief. God had decreed this fate for him, and he had no idea what crime he could have committed which merited so unkind a punishment.
A priest had once told him that he shouldn’t be concerned, because those who suffered most on earth would be the first to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Est had looked at him in horror. What purpose would there be in his walking through those gates if he could never see his two loves? None.
There was a fresh sensation. It was like a lion’s claw in his belly, the nails raking his stomach from within, and the pain wouldn’t leave him. He had to eat something. He had felt this before; many times before. It began as a griping like this, and soon he would be curled up on himself, unaware of anything but his grief. One day, perhaps, if he was brave enough, he would leave it a little too long, and his pain would overwhelm him, and at last he would leave this cruel world.
But not today. Today he needed food. Slowly, he unwrapped his arms from about his body and forced himself to stand. He was lonely, so lonely … and so scared.
He kept seeing the look in that little girl’s eyes as he ran away. It terrified him.
Chapter Eleven
‘How does he live? Does he beg?’ Sir Peregrine asked.
‘He has a house of his own, and he still works when he needs the money. I think that most butchers at the fleshfold use him often enough, and they’ll let him take a cut of meat to keep him going. But he can’t work all the time.’
‘What else does he do, then?’ Baldwin pressed him.
‘He walks and he mutters to himself,’ Saul said stolidly. ‘He has been wrecked by the loss of his wife.’
‘Is it he who has entered other men’s houses?’ Baldwin asked.
Saul looked away as though unwilling to respond, but then nodded. ‘Who else? He means no harm, though.’
‘He’s killed a man,’ Sir Peregrine grated.
‘Nah! That wasn’t Est killed Daniel.’
‘You have even told us why,’ Sir Peregrine said. ‘Because Daniel was arse enough to try to beat him when all he wanted was a patch of ground to bury his poor woman!’
Saul looked at him, but it was Baldwin who voiced his thoughts. ‘Why, though? Why wait all these years and suddenly attack the fellow just now?’
Saul nodded. ‘I know him well. All of us do. I found him in my place a couple of times. Last time, I sat down with him and gave him some wine. He didn’t speak, just wept silently. Not for himself, but for his daughter, I think.’
‘He wanted to rape your child and you let him stay there?’ Sir Peregrine asked, appalled.
‘I don’t know where you get ideas like that, Coroner,’ Saul said with quiet contempt. ‘Est is no rapist, nor is he a sodomite. He just wanted to see my lad. I think that the only peace he ever knows is when he sees healthy children sleeping. He can’t cope with them awake, but he is entranced by the sight of them asleep — and scared too.’
‘Why scared?’ Baldwin asked.
‘I think because he hates to think of them alone in their chambers with no one there to guard them.’
‘You put locks on your doors after he got in the second time, though?’ Sir Peregrine asked.
‘Why’d I do that? No, as soon as we moved our son into our own bedchamber, Est knew my lad was safe. From that day on, he never tried to break in again. All he wants is to see children safe and well. He would never hurt them.’
‘But he might carry a knife to protect them from others,’ Sir Peregrine guessed. ‘And if a man appeared suddenly, carrying a weapon, Est might be shocked into thinking that it was a murderer come to harm the children, and strike first. I think that explains the whole matter, Sir Baldwin! Where does this Est live, Saul?’
‘Take us there, please,’ Baldwin said, but it was not a request.
Saul stood reluctantly. ‘I won’t see you hurt him. He’s no harm to anyone.’
Baldwin said soothingly, ‘I wouldn’t wish to see him hurt either. All I wish is an opportunity to talk to him, and find out whether he was there that evening. Someone was in there, and did kill Daniel.’
As he made that statement, he suddenly wondered again. He was assuming that the evidence of Daniel’s wife was truthful, but what if it wasn’t? What if she was lying? In that case, it might mean that there was no intruder, that the murder was a treasonous attack by a woman on her husband.
As they left the inn and made their way eastwards along the road towards the alley where Estmund lived, Baldwin could not but ask, ‘What of Daniel? Was he a good father? If Est was in there and saw Daniel beating his children, how would he have reacted?’