Walking quickly, the servant kept up a constant stream of apologies and pleas for pardon until she cut him off with a curt gesture, and he fell silent. Out through the door to the stable he took them, across the snow-covered yard, already trampled and flattened into a red-brown shlush, to an open picket gate in the wall that gave on to the pasturage behind. Here they could easily make out footprints, leading straight to the woods. It was a place where he trees looked to Simon as though they were being cleared for a new assart, or perhaps merely to increase the ands available for the hall. Up at the treeline was another servant, moving from one foot to another in obvious agitation and wringing his hands. They made their way to him without a word.
At first the ground fell away, giving the house a solitary imminence. A small stream lay at the bottom, curling lazily round the house. The snow had not covered this rippling water. It lay with small sheer cliffs at either bank like a miniature gorge, almost, Simon thought to himself, like a tiny replica of Lydford itself.
The servant took them to a bridge built of sturdy planks, wide enough for a wagon, then they were climbing the bank to the figure waiting at the trees. He was a middle-aged man, with a face flushed from the cold. His square, stolid features showed his terror. It was as if he feared even to talk, his muscles moving as if with the ague, mouth twitching, brows wrinkling, eyelids flickering. He pointed wordlessly, then remembered his place and would have fallen to his knees if the knight had not sharply ordered him to take them to his master. With a hesitant glance at his mistress, and seeing her nod, he turned and stumbled in among the trees. It was not far.
The assart was a small semicircular clearing, with stumps cut off a few feet above the ground, and Simon realised it was a coppice. The trees were being cut to allow for regrowth. When the new long-stemmed shoots grew, they could be harvested for fencing, staves or just for burning on the fire.
At the far end, to which the servant now led them, there was a spur cut into the forest like a thin, invasive finger of land thrusting the trees apart. Inside was a recently felled oak, lying on its side waiting to be cut into planks or logs. The man led them up to it, and there, just beside the bough, was a rolled-up form. Baldwin stepped up, a hand held out to stop the others, and then crouched by the figure.
On hearing a small gasp, Simon said, “Wait here!” to the others, and went forward to join him. “Oh, God!”
All around he could see the snow was dappled and clotted with frozen black gobbets of blood.
He stood motionless, his eyes on the ground for fully a minute. Then, though waking, he took a deep breath and let it out in one long jet. Breathing slowly, he peered around the small glade. Baldwin was beside him, his eyes on the figure. Beyond was the thickest concentration of blood, as if it had jetted forward under great pressure, thick gouts lying nearby and thinner droplets farther away.
Studying it, he could see that it was almost as if the stream had all been impelled in one direction. It had not all sprayed in a circle, but started to his left, in a thinnish drizzle, then fanned round to the great thick line ahead. When he looked down he could see that the body pointed in this direction too.
Alan Trevellyn lay partially covered with snow. He was down on his knees, his torso and arms outstretched as if praying, his head on the ground between. Only one side of his body was cleared, the other was still as white as the ground. Simon paused and peered down, then crouched, hands on his knees, and stared.
Standing, he pointed at the agitated servant. “You! Did you find him here?”
“Yes, sir. I was here to collect wood for the log store when I stumbled on something. I thought it was a log… Or a stump… I had no idea it was the master… When I kicked at it, all the snow fell away, and I saw it was… Was…‘He seemed to run out of energy.
“Did you clear away the snow with your hands?”
“No, sir. I kicked, and the snow fell away, and…‘
Simon interrupted harshly, “I know all that. Did anyone else come here to see the body after you found it? Did anyone touch the body?“
“No, sir. I stayed here with the master until you got here just now, sir. I didn’t leave, sir.”
Nodding, the bailiff turned back to the frowning knight.
“What is it, Simon?”
“Look!” He pointed. “There’s snow over the body. But the blood’s on top of the snow.”
“Which doesn’t make much sense,” Baldwin agreed.
“No. He would hardly bury himself in the snow after dying, would he? No, someone else piled the snow around him after he was dead. And there,” he indicated the rows of lines on top of the mound that covered the dead man’s side, “are the finger-marks to prove it.”
“Let’s see what actually killed him.”
Simon grunted assent, and they carefully began to clear away the snow from around the corpse.
“Do you want one of the men to help you?” asked Mrs. Trevellyn.
Looking up, Simon glanced at the two men before returning his gaze to her husband. “No,” he said. “I think we can do this. Could you send one to fetch a wagon, though, to bring the body back to the house?”
“Yes, of course. I’ll be inside if you want me.” She shivered and wrapped her arms around herself. “It’s too cold for me up here.”
Simon nodded, and watched as she began to make her way back to the house, followed by her two servants, who straggled along like confused dogs expecting to be beaten. Turning back, he caught Baldwin’s eye. The knight was watching her too.
To Simon’s surprise, it did not take them long to clear the snow from Alan Trevellyn’s corpse. After only a short time they had wiped it from his back and sides, and now they had a small moat around him. His stance was clear to see now, with the arms reaching up as if in supplication.
“More than likely he just fell down like that,” was Baldwin’s own curtly expressed view when the bailiff pointed this out to him. “Come on! Let’s roll him over.”
Both taking a shoulder, they pulled hard. At first he seemed to have frozen to the earth itself. Simon felt it was as if the ground knew that he would be buried soon and had no wish to give up what it knew to be its own. But then it reluctantly gave up the struggle with a sudden loosening of its grip, and Simon nearly fell back as Trevellyn’s body moved, then toppled over on his side.
Simon stared at the bulging eyes, the blackened tongue, the black and red mess around the mouth where the blood had spurted and frozen or dried, at the deep wound beneath where the murderer’s knife had sliced through the yellowed cartilage of the windpipe before severing the arteries, and found himself swallowing hard to keep the bitter bile at bay. interesting,“ said Baldwin, rocking back to squat on his heels after studying the wounds. ”Just like Kyteler.“
The bailiffs voice was thick as he said. “Yes. Just like the witch.”
The knight took a close look at the face, and Simon could see a series of scrapes where blood had been drawn. It looked as if he had been hit with a heavy weapon of some sort.
“Mace, or maybe a cudgel,” he heard the knight mutter to himself. Apart from that there was little they could learn from the body.
It was not long before the men arrived to carry it back to the house, and Simon relinquished it with pleasure. As he watched the men collect it up, rolling it in a blanket and staggering with it to the cart, he stood well back, away from the gaze of those sightless, dead fish-eyes.
Even last year’s killings had not been quite as bad as this. At least then it had been a series of murders caused by a group of trail bastons, wandering outlaws with no other means to earn a living. Nobody was safe from the increasing prices that made food so expensive, that made lords have to reconsider how many retainers they could afford and threw out those they felt to be a burden. It was not surprising that some resorted to violence to gain what they needed. Especially since now, by law, all men had to own weapons for their defence, and by law must practise using those weapons for the better defence of their communities and themselves. No, it was not surprising that some decided that when their world refused to give them an honest way to earn a living they should resort to violence.