‘No. So?’
‘I promise you, when a man or woman is starving, they will do things that would have seemed unimaginable only a short while before. Imagine that you have no food; that you have not eaten for days; that you have no money; that you have no means of obtaining it; that the cost of food is in any case prohibitive. You have not eaten more than a mouthful of grain a day for three weeks, that you have only rancid butter, no meat, no clean water, no ale or wine. Try to imagine how you would feel after three weeks of that. Then picture your children fading away before your eyes; your wife has perhaps died, and you are still having to work. You have no expectation of long life, this is a means of surviving for a short while. It is foul to think of eating a man, but is it worse than death? The boundaries of fear can become blurred.’
Coroner Roger was about to snort and utter a sarcastic comment, but one look at Baldwin’s face stopped it. ‘You speak from experience?’
‘I have never eaten a man,’ Baldwin said, ‘but I know how terrible a siege can be, and what is famine if not a siege against the whole of mankind?’
Coroner Roger thanked Sir Baldwin, then turned to stare sternly at the Reeve.
‘Normal rules, eh? I shall be sure to report your advice to the King,’ he remarked caustically, ‘but for now, Reeve, you can make amends by telling us all about it. And don’t leave anything out, because if I find you’ve been lying to me, I swear I’ll have you gaoled in Exeter for perjury and waiting for the next Sheriff’s Tourn, and that will be a good year from now.’
Alexander felt his belly sinking still further. It had been hard enough before, but he knew that he must tell the Coroner at least a few of the facts. He closed his eyes and felt himself swaying on his feet. ‘Very well.’ He sighed, opened his eyes and motioned towards a stool. ‘But may I at least be seated?’
The Coroner nodded, and Alexander sat primly on the edge like a woman who feared dirtying her skirts.
‘I can remember that day perfectly. We had just buried my youngest son and we were out in the churchyard watching the men shovel the soil over his poor little body…’
‘How did he die?’ Coroner Roger demanded.
‘Like my second son, from starvation – early in the year, after Candlemass. We had nothing to eat. The crops had failed, the animals died, and wheat was eight times its usual price. What could we do? Even salt cost too much, so the dead animals we had couldn’t be butchered and salted. The meat rotted quickly and had to be thrown away. We all starved together, men, women and children. Not a dog or a cat lived, all were eaten. I can remember finding a rat,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘We were grateful and ate it in a stew.’
Coroner Roger curled his lip and Simon grimaced. Baldwin, who had lived through the desperate siege of Acre, nodded understandingly. ‘They can be tough.’
Alexander shot him a look, expecting sarcasm, and was somewhat confused to see Baldwin was serious.
‘Yes, well,’ he continued haltingly, ‘it was a difficult time. My wife and I waited to see the last spadefuls fall on our son’s grave, and then made our way back homewards through the rain. It fell all the time in those years, from the seventh year of our King’s reign to the tenth. Miserable, constant rain. The river flooded out the vill for weeks on end. All the crops – ruined! Three lads from the village were drowned in the four months after Christmas the following year. You can’t imagine what it was like.
‘While we walked home, we were told that a body had been found up on the moor. I hurried there immediately, because sometimes a man might think that someone is dead, when they are only wounded. On the moor, people can become so chilled that they seem to have died. So I went up there to see whether he was alive or dead.’
He paused at the memory, and glanced about him, looking for the Foresters, but none were in sight. Taking a deep breath, he continued, ‘It was one of the girls from the vill here, little Denise, Peter atte Moor’s daughter. She was only ten years old or so. Such a short life.’
‘Murdered?’ Coroner Roger asked. He was quieter now that the story was finally being told.
‘Throttled. A leather thong was still about her neck, just like the one in the grave,’ Alexander admitted. ‘But we never found all of her. Her thighs, her arms, were missing.’
Simon’s stomach lurched and he unwillingly recalled Baldwin’s stories of the night before.
‘She had been flayed.’
The jury shuffled their feet and Simon rasped, ‘Who could do such a thing?’
‘Many, Simon,’ Baldwin said gently. ‘I know it is difficult to imagine, but if a man’s family is starving, he will go to extremes to save them from death. There were stories of this happening in Kent during the famine, I recall.’
Simon glanced at Houndestail. He felt queasy at the thought of hearing the details, but seeing Houndestail reminded him of the other thing the Pardoner had said. Although he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer, he cleared his throat. ‘And what of the curse? This curse of Athelhard, whoever he might be.’
‘That’s just superstition,’ Reeve Alexander said, but he had blenched.
‘What is this superstition?’ Baldwin asked smoothly.
‘If a child dies here, it’s said to be Athelhard’s curse, but there’s nothing to it. It’s a local thing,’ Reeve Alexander said firmly. ‘So many travellers come through here. If one of them does something and flees, people blame Athelhard, a fictional character.’
Baldwin, watching him closely, was unconvinced, but since Simon had asked the question, and the Reeve seemed to have recovered from his shock, he thought it better to leave the matter for the present.
‘Did you raise the Hue?’ Simon asked.
‘Of course we did! Her father was a Forester, we could hardly ignore the process of law. I had men hunting all over,’ Alexander said. He felt sick having to recall the murder scene. ‘There was nothing to be learned. No one knew who had done it and our worst trouble was, there had been several travellers at that time, all passing along the Cornwall road. Any one of them could have been the murderer, killing her and then keeping pieces of her in his scrip.’
He had no need to continue. Simon felt near to vomiting, and even the Coroner was still, considering this fresh evidence of the evil of men. Only Baldwin appeared to be studying him pensively.
The knight nodded as though to himself. ‘And of course, afterwards you decided to report the matter, but it was already some little while since the girl had been found…’
Alexander looked at him as his voice trailed away. ‘There was nothing to be done. As I said, there had been many people along our road, and any one of them could have been Denise’s killer. In the end, we merely buried her, and hoped that her murderer had moved on or else had met his retribution on the road.’
Baldwin nodded. ‘Yet you knew that would be illegal. Surely you had some other reason to want to hide her?’
Alexander threw his hands wide in a gesture of openness. ‘Sir Baldwin, my Lord Coroner, what would you do if the daughter of one of your friends had been not only murdered, but violated in that sort of way? How would you feel if she had been your daughter? For my part, I saw her body on the same day that I buried one of my own sons and I tell you, it is difficult, terribly difficult, to lose a child. I knew this, I know it today; I had to tell Peter that his girl was dead, I had to show him her remains, so that he could see what had happened to her. My God! By Christ’s own wounds, I swear I couldn’t bear to see him hurt more. The idea that someone could eat your child was so hideous, so appalling, that I wanted to do anything I could to save him any further upset.’