‘Got any bright ideas as to how we’re going to get her out, have you?’ Sheriff Pelham asked caustically; he was, Josse noticed, getting more irascible the more his weaknesses were exposed. But it was so difficult not to expose them …
Josse had drawn his sword and, using the point of the hilt as a mallet, was gently cracking the ice around the corpse’s head and shoulders, making attractive star patterns on the smooth surface. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘we might be able to release her fairly easily. The pond’s not frozen solid, it’s only the first few inches.’
Observing what he was doing, one or two of the brighter men came to help. Soon, the ice around the upper part of the corpse was shattered into a hundred fragments and Josse and his two assistants were able to extract the old woman from her frozen tomb.
Her face, Josse noticed as he turned her over on to her back, was badly bruised …
She must have banged her face on the ice,’ Sheriff Pelham observed, leaning over Josse’s shoulder and breathing open-mouthed into his ear.
‘Think again,’ Josse said. ‘If she fell when the pond was iced over, she wouldn’t have been down there beneath the surface, frozen into it.’
Momentarily, the Sheriff was silenced.
Rapidly Josse inspected the rest of the corpse. As well as the bruised face — the nose had taken a direct hit, and, as he gently probed inside the mouth, he saw what looked like a recently-broken tooth — she had damage to both hands.
Josse held the dead hands in his.
Pity surging through him, he realised that someone had deliberately broken two fingers on each of the dead woman’s hands.
He laid her head down again and, on the sloping bank, she rolled over until she was lying face-down.
And Josse saw, on the back of the carefully-laundered white cap, a clear boot print.
Someone had savagely beaten her, then dragged her to the pond and held her head under the water with a foot until she died.
Why the beating? To what purpose had somebody tortured her like that?
Why, he answered himself, were people usually tortured in this wicked world? To make them tell you something that they knew and you didn’t. Something that you badly wanted to know.
Oh, God, Josse thought.
‘When you’ve quite finished,’ the Sheriff said from just behind him, ‘we’d better see about taking this here into town for disposal.’
Disposal.
‘You’ve got a murder on your hands,’ Josse said softly. ‘Didn’t you realise?’
‘Murder my arse!’ The Sheriff spat on to the frosty grass. ‘She went to get water, slipped, bashed her head and fell in the water.’ He put his face up close to Josse’s and added with quiet intensity, ‘That’s what I say. And what I say goes.’
Unfortunately, as Josse well knew, it did.
He said, ‘Aren’t you even going to determine who she was?
The Sheriff, grinning, raised his eyebrows at one of his men. ‘No need for that. Hugh?’
The man, stepping forward, said, ‘She were Mag Hobson. She were my mam’s aunt.’
With nothing further to add, Josse watched as a hurdle was brought up, and, with a scant amount of respect which he felt was only employed because he happened to be watching, the men got the body on to it and began the long walk back to Tonbridge.
* * *
Leading Horace, Josse fell into step beside the man called Hugh.
‘Did you know her yourself?’ he said quietly; no need for the Sheriff to know he was asking questions.
‘Old Mag? No, can’t say as I did.’
‘But your mother did, presumably.’ The man didn’t answer. ‘Did she visit her aunt? Your mother, I mean.’
‘Might have done.’
Josse wondered why the man was being so wary. Then, thinking back to what he had already been told — and to that neat herb garden — he said, ‘She was a wise woman. Wasn’t she?’
Hugh shot him a swift look. He muttered, ‘Aye.’
‘That’s why she lived out here all alone,’ Josse went on, thinking out loud. ‘Why people preferred to keep her at arm’s length.’
‘She were good,’ Hugh supplied, as if belatedly prompted to defend his dead relative’s reputation. ‘Fixed things for lots of folk, though they didn’t like to say so. Me, I preferred to keep right out of it.’
Superstition, Josse thought. No, folks wouldn’t want it widely known that they had consulted a wise woman. You never knew, and it was best to be on the safe side where meddling in that sort of thing was concerned.
‘I understand,’ Josse said. ‘And many people wouldn’t want it known that their mother’s aunt was a wise woman.’
Hugh seemed to be battling with some inner conflict. ‘Makes me angry,’ he finally admitted. ‘They jeer at her and say she’s an old witch, but who is it they go running to after nightfall when they want a love potion or a wart charm? Ain’t right.’
‘It’s not,’ Josse agreed. ‘But it’s human nature, I’m afraid, Hugh.’
‘She learned her craft young, they do say,’ Hugh volunteered, As if, having admitted to the fact of his mother’s aunt’s oddness, there was no further barrier to discussing her, he went on, ‘When she were still at the big house, she were trained by an older woman, her what did the heavy washing. That’s the way of it, that an older one passes on the secrets to a young ‘un. Or so they do say.’
‘Aye, so I’ve heard,’ Josse agreed. ‘At the big house, you say? What, she lived in a house of her own?’ It didn’t seem very likely.
‘No, bless you!’ Hugh gave a faint laugh. ‘She were housekeeper. Well, that’s a deal too grand, it were only a small household. But she were their main indoor servant, that’s for sure.’
‘Whose?’
Hugh’s face creased into a frown of concentration. ‘I don’t know as I ever knew their name,’ he admitted. ‘They was old, an old man and an old woman. They lived alone, mostly, only they sometimes had folks visiting. Kin, I reckon. I know that for a fact because she — Mag — would get my mam in to help her with the cooking and that, when the visitors came.’
‘I see.’ Barely daring to ask the question, Josse said, ‘And you don’t know if they’re still there? The old couple?’
‘Lord, no, they’m dead.’ A reflective pause. ‘House’d be empty now, I reckon. Mag, she used to keep an eye on the place. Never could fathom why — maybe in case some long-lost relation came back to claim it one day. Or maybe because Mag weren’t a woman to let any place go to rack and ruin, not if she could help it.’ He sighed.
They walked in silence for some time. Josse, digesting what he had just been told and thinking furiously, was beginning to draw some tentative conclusions when Hugh said, ‘Do you reckon it were how the Sheriff says? An accident, like?’
And Josse said, ‘No, Hugh. I’m quite certain it wasn’t.’
‘Will you see her right?’ It was a whisper that Josse barely heard.
But he recognised the question for what it was. It was a man’s conscience speaking, a man who, stirred to pity by the brutal death of a relative — admittedly a distant one whom he usually preferred to forget about — wanted justice to be done.
‘Yes, Hugh,’ Josse whispered back. ‘I promise that, if it’s in my power, I will.’
Chapter Eight
‘… and I can’t help but think that it was Mag Hobson whom Joanna de Courtenay — Joanna de Lehon — came here to find,’ Josse concluded, having detailed his theory to Abbess Helewise for the last half hour.
‘She being the woman friend of whom Denys de Courtenay spoke? But — ’ Helewise had her doubts, although, at first, she could not put a finger on them.
‘But?’
She thought back to that interview with de Courtenay. What had he said about the woman Joanna might be seeking? Precious little, now she came to think about it. She has a friend hereabouts. A woman. I’m not sure where she lives.
Was there anything in those few words to imply the woman must be a noblewoman, someone from the same station of life as Joanna de Courtenay? No. There wasn’t. The description could equally well apply to a wise woman living out in the forest, although quite how Joanna would have come to know such a person was less easy to fathom …