‘Which tale is the true one?’ he asked. ‘Have you any idea?’
She stared at him. ‘Yes. We managed to find the former family home. We spoke to a villager who confirmed that the girls’ mother died long since, and-’ Something in his expression must have alerted her. ‘But I think that you already know that, Sir Josse.’
He didn’t want to interrupt her story, so he just said, ‘Aye. Berthe told me. But I’ll explain when you’ve finished.’
She nodded. ‘Very well. The village has suffered recently from the sickness and many died, including the girls’ father. That part of Alba’s account is true. The farm was abandoned, the house empty. But, Sir Josse, our informant said that Meriel was already planning to take Berthe with her and leave the village, before Alba returned from Sedgebeck and brought them all here!’
‘Was she, now?’ Josse said slowly. That would fit, he thought, wouldn’t it? He wished his brain were not so sluggish; it seemed to work far less swiftly than before his illness. If Meriel’s plans had been torn apart by the bossy Alba, throwing her weight around and dragging her sisters far away into the depths of south-east England, would that not be grounds for Meriel’s subsequent misery?
A misery that, perhaps, was even now being relieved. .
He felt that he was on the very edge of understanding the mystery. If only, if only, he could think!
He gave the Abbess a rueful grin. ‘I wish I were more use to you than simply sitting here saying is that so? and was she really?’ he said. ‘I do believe that we have sufficient information between us to solve this puzzle. Indeed, I feel that I already have the answer, but my mind is so foggy that I can’t reach it.’
She gave him a sympathetic look. ‘Don’t distress yourself, Sir Josse. It is the way with fevers, to leave the brain like a tangle of sheep’s wool. Do not push yourself so hard.’
‘I must!’ he exclaimed. ‘There are matters that cannot be resolved until we know.’
‘Yes, of course.’ A worried frown creased her brow. ‘Meriel is still missing, I am told.’
‘She is safe, Abbess,’ he said softly. ‘I cannot say where, or with whom, but I would stake my life on her being both safe and well.’
And he explained about Berthe.
She nodded slowly. ‘You make good sense, as always, Sir Josse. The child does not appear to be a habitual liar, I agree. And, now that your friendship had progressed so well, I am sure you are right when you say that she does not speak of Meriel because, in the face of your kind-hearted concern, she could not bear to uphold the fiction that she doesn’t know where her sister is.’ She paused. Then: ‘But there is still Alba.’
He had noticed that she no longer referred to Sister Alba; fearing that he might have guessed why, he asked her why not.
When she had told him, he let out a long breath. ‘What do you do with her now, Abbess? If she is no longer a nun, then surely you can’t go on imprisoning her here in the Abbey?’
‘Indeed not,’ she agreed. ‘And while on the one hand I should be relieved to be rid of her, can I, in Christian charity, turn her out into the world when she has nowhere to go?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said gently.
Turning her mind with an obvious effort from the problem of Alba, the Abbess straightened up and said, ‘Has Sheriff Pelham made any progress with the murder in the Vale?’
‘None,’ Josse said in disgust. ‘He asked some of the pilgrims a few fairly pointless questions, and he now seems to have settled on the man having been attacked by a traveller on the road who is now miles away.’
‘A typical Sheriff Pelham solution,’ the Abbess murmured.
‘Aye.’ He remembered what it was about the dead man that had struck him as significant. ‘But there is one thing, Abbess.’
Instantly she looked alert. ‘Yes?’
‘He wore a pilgrim badge from Walsingham. Which is only about fifty miles north of Ely.’
‘And so you conclude that he was connected with the girls? With Alba and her sisters?’
‘Ah, not necessarily!’ he protested. ‘I dare say many of our visitors wear such badges. Walsingham is a popular place.’
‘But to have someone from the same area of the land killed, here, where the sisters fled to, must be more than coincidence,’ she insisted. ‘Mustn’t it?’
‘My reason tells me no,’ he said bluntly. ‘But yet it keeps coming back to me, as if some part of me doesn’t want me to forget about it.’
‘That is God’s voice speaking directly to you,’ she said. ‘We must always listen when God speaks, Sir Josse.’
‘Aye, Abbess.’ He felt duly chastened. ‘I’ll keep that in mind.’ She opened her mouth to say something more, but before she could speak, he hurried on. ‘Now, if I may, Abbess, I’ll summarise the picture that emerges when we add your findings to what I have concluded from talking to my ingenuous little friend, Berthe.’
He thought briefly, then began.
‘A bullying man and his gentle, timid wife had three daughters, one much older than the other two. The mother and the two younger ones form an alliance, but they are under the domination of the father and the oldest girl. She, among her other bullying ways, is insistent on the family keeping up high standards in the way they appear to the outside world. Then the mother dies and the oldest girl, no longer having anybody to compete with for the role of her father’s second-in-command, takes herself off and joins a convent. But she is not suited to convent life, and she is asked to leave. In the meantime, the tyrannical father succumbs to illness and dies, leaving the middle sister free to make her own plans for her and her little sister’s future. But, before those plans can be implemented, the big sister comes back from her convent, decides that her sisters’ grief for their father is too strong to be assuaged there, in their former home with all its memories, so she drags them away and brings them all the way south to Hawkenlye.’ He paused for breath. ‘Have I left anything out?’
‘Only that Alba lied to us to make her story more convincing,’ the Abbess said.
‘Aye, she did. She told us both parents had recently died.’
‘And that — Oh! You’ve also omitted something I have thought of; that something had happened in their former home which Alba was desperate to run away from,’ she said. Her voice had dropped to a whisper, and her face, he noticed with a stab of anxiety, had paled. ‘Oh, dear God, Sir Josse, I-’ She put a hand to her mouth, as if physically holding back her words.
‘I had concluded the same thing,’ he said. ‘That the reason Alba showed such an extreme and uncontrolled reaction to Berthe working down in the Vale was because she feared somebody might have followed them from East Anglia and would recognise the girl.’
The Abbess was nodding. ‘Yes, that is true, of course.’ She hesitated. Her hands, he noticed, were trembling. ‘But I’m afraid I was thinking of something far more terrible than that.’
He waited while she got herself under control. She lifted her chin, closed her eyes as if in a brief prayer, then said, ‘Josse, I haven’t yet told you everything. I hope and pray that this last discovery was pure chance, and has nothing to do with the girls. However, I am very afraid that. .’ She broke off. ‘But I must tell you, then you can judge for yourself.’ She paused. ‘We found the farm where the family used to live, as I have said, and it was not at all a cheerful or welcoming place; indeed, we sensed the presence of death quite strongly. We were riding through the woodland which surrounds it, on our way back to the village, when we spotted a cottage deep in amongst the trees. It had suffered a devastating fire.’ She paused again, folded her hands tightly together, then said, ‘The roof had collapsed, and there was little left that was recognisable. Except that we found a human skeleton.’