He lay facedown, too neatly for someone who’d fallen off a horse, legs straight, arms splayed above the head, cloak and tunic down over his hams. His cap, like his clothes, was of good but slightly worn wool, and it lay a few inches away, the brave cock-pheasant feather in it broken.
She nodded to Mansur. Gently, he raised the wavy brown hair from the neck to touch the skin. He shook his head. He’d attended on enough corpses with Adelia to know it would be impossible to estimate the time of death; the body was frozen-had begun to freeze the moment life left it, would stay frozen long enough to delay the natural processes.
“Hmm.”
Expertly, acting together, they turned the corpse over. Two half-shut brown eyes regarded the sky with disinterest, and Mansur had to force the frozen lids down over them.
He was young: twenty, twenty-one, perhaps less. The heavy arrow in his chest came from a crossbow and had gone deep, probably being driven farther in by the fall that had broken its flights. Mansur held the lantern so that Adelia could examine the wound; there was blood around it but only a few smears on the snow occupying the space that the body had vacated when it was turned.
She guided Mansur’s hand so that the lantern illuminated the corpse’s neck. “Hmmm.”
A scabbard with a sword still in it was attached to a belt with a tarnished buckle engraved with a crest. The same crest had been embroidered on a gaping, empty purse.
“Come along, Doctor. You can do all this when we take him to the nunnery.” Rowley’s voice.
“Be quiet,” Adelia told him in Arabic. He’d hurried her all the way from Cambridge; now he could damn well wait. There was something wrong here; perhaps it was why Rowley had called for her to investigate it, some part of his mind noticing the anomalies even while part was intent on another murder altogether.
There was an anguished plea from Walt, the groom. “This here poor bugger’s in pain, my lord. Naught to be done. ’S time he was finished.”
“Doctor?”
“Wait, will you?” Irritably, she got up and went over to where the horse and the groom stood, regarding the ground as she went. “What’s the matter with it?”
“Hamstrung. Some godless swine cut his tendon.” Walt pointed to a slash across the horse’s leg just above the hock. “See? That’s deliberate, that is.”
The snow here was bloodied black and showed that the animal had thrashed around before managing to rise on its three uninjured legs.
“Can it be mended?” All she knew about horses was which end you faced.
“He’s hamstrung.” Answering stupid questions from a woman no better than she should be added to Walt’s anger.
Adelia returned to Mansur. “The animal has to be dispatched.”
“Not here,” he said. “The carcass will block the bridge.” And bridges were vital; not to repair them, or to render them unusable, was a hostile act causing such hardship to the local economy that the law came down heavily on those who committed it.
“What in hell are you two about?” Rowley had come up.
“There’s something wrong here,” Adelia told him.
“Yes, somebody robbed and killed this poor devil. I can see that. Let’s load him up and get on.”
“No, it’s more than that.”
“What is?”
“Give me time,” she shouted at him, and then, realizing, “the doctor needs time.”
The bishop blew out his cheeks. “Why did I bring her, Lord? Answer me that. Very well, let’s at least see to his horse.”
Adelia insisted on going first, slowly leading the way past Walt and the crippled animal and down the other side of the bridge, Mansur beside her holding the lantern so that light fell on the ground at each step.
Everything that was not white was black; boot marks, hoof-prints, too jumbled to be distinguished from one another. There’d been a lot of activity where the bridge rejoined the road near the great gatehouse of the convent. A lot of blood.
Mansur pointed.
“Oh, well done, my dear,” she said. Under the shadow of heavy oak branches lolling over the convent wall, clear prints led to others-writing a story for those who could read it. “Hmm. Interesting.”
Behind her, the bishop and groom soothed the jerkily limping horse as they led it, discussing where it should be put down. Would the nuns want the carcass? Good eating on a horse. But butchery and skinning would be arduous in this weather; better to cut its throat among the trees where the convent wall bent into a forest. “They can get it later if they want it.”
“Doubt there’ll be much left by then, my lord.” It wasn’t only humans that appreciated the eating on a horse.
Walt relieved the animal of its tack. There was a roll attached to the saddle protected by oilcloth. “Oo-op now, my beauty, oo-op.” Murmuring gentle equine things, he led it toward the trees.
“Could we hide the body there as well?” Adelia wanted to know.
“If we do, there will be not much left of that, either,” Mansur said.
Rowley joined them. “Will you hurry up, you two. We’ll all be bloody icicles in a minute.”
Adelia, who had shivered from cold all the way from Cambridge, was no longer aware of it. “We don’t want the body discovered, my lord.”
The bishop tried for patience. “It is discovered, mistress. We discovered it.”
“We don’t want the killer to find it.”
Rowley cleared his throat. “You mean, let’s not tell him? He knows, Adelia. He shot a bolt into the lad’s chest. He’s not coming back to make sure.”
“Yes, he is. You’d have seen it yourself if you hadn’t been in such a rush.” She nudged Mansur. “Look as if you’re instructing.”
With Rowley between them, Mansur speaking of their findings in Arabic, and Adelia, on the other side, appearing to translate, they told him the story of a killing as the marks in the snow had told it to them.
“We can’t be sure of the time. After it stopped snowing is all we can guess. Anyway, late enough this night for nobody to be about. They waited for him here, near the gates.”
“They?”
“Two men.” Rowley was pulled into the shadow of the oak. Footprints were just visible in the snow. “See? One wears hobnails, the other’s boots have bars across the soles, maybe clogs bound with strips. They arrived here on horseback and took their horses into those trees, where Walt has gone. They came back on foot and stood here. They ate as they waited.” Adelia retrieved a crumb of something from the ground, and then another. “Cheese.” She held them to the bishop’s nose.
He recoiled. “As you say, mistress.”
Vigils over, the convent was silent again. From deeper in among the trees of the forest came Walt’s prayer, “And the Lord have mercy on thy poor soul, if thee have one.”
A long scream like a whistle, a heavy crash. Silence.
Walt emerged, simultaneously wiping his dagger on his cloak with one hand and his eyes with the other. “Goddamn, I hates a’doing that.”
The bishop patted him on the shoulder and sent him to join the others on the far side of the bridge. To Adelia and Mansur, he said, “They knew he was coming, then?”
“Yes. They were waiting for him.” Even the most desperate robber didn’t loiter in the hope of a passerby in the early hours of a freezing night.
They must have thought themselves lucky that the blizzard had passed, she thought, not knowing they were imprinting their guilt in the resultant snow for Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar, medica of the renowned School of Medicine in Salerno, expert on death and the causes of death, to happen along and decipher it.
For which they were going to be sorry.