That news had brought a black scowl to his face. It was Iwan, an old smith, who had volunteered the fact that Serlo the miller owned Athelina’s cottage and had told her to pay more rent or go. The miller didn’t deny it, but blustered that he had no responsibility to the chit. It was her problem if she’d podded two children and couldn’t feed them. If the Church wanted her saved, the Church should have donated enough to see her remain in her home, rather than accuse an honest man who tried only to make a living.
Simon wondered whether he was an honest man. To his mind, Serlo looked a brute; the dead bodies like so many chickens slaughtered in a yard by a fox. The vision of this man threatening the woman, clenching his fist and demanding more money, repelled him. How could a man cause so much suffering and death, yet show no remorse? If anything, he seemed intent on proving that he didn’t care a fig for the dead.
‘She and her children were useless mouths,’ Serlo was blustering now. ‘Can we afford to keep a house for her sort, when decent men and women are struggling to find a room of their own?’
‘Her boys would have grown to be men,’ Baldwin observed with a tone that could have frozen the pond.
‘Perhaps. How long would we have had to feed them before they grew?’
‘Is it your place to assess the value of another’s life, miller?’
‘Sir Baldwin,’ Sir Jules said with a note of some petulance, ‘I think you can leave the questioning to me. I am the Coroner.’
Baldwin subsided with a poor grace, turning his back on Serlo. Simon was disappointed. He would have liked to see Baldwin launch into a verbal attack on the miller.
Serlo appeared amused by Baldwin’s discomfiture. He grinned broadly until Sir Jules snapped, ‘Don’t smile in the presence of death, churl!’
Simon wondered how the man could smirk like that when his greed had led to these three deaths, but as he told himself, there were many unscrupulous people who were equally greedy. If Baldwin was right, the King’s own advisers were among the most avaricious men yet born. The Despensers were capturing highborn women and holding them prisoner in gaol until they agreed to sign over their inheritances. It made Simon very glad to be living under the protection of the Abbot of Tavistock, Robert Champeaux. ‘God Bless Abbot Robert,’ he muttered quietly to himself.
‘Bailiff?’
The quiet voice of Lady Anne brought him back from his reverie. ‘My lady?’
‘There is something I feel is odd — something about the woman. Surely, yes, she was desperate …’
‘Go on.’
Anne’s face was troubled. ‘If she was utterly without hope, if she was convinced that she had no reason to live longer … I can comprehend her despair although I know self-murder is a sin. Yes, but to kill her sons? I met up with Athelina many times, and never saw her show anything other than love and affection to her children. She adored them both individually, and also as the last remaining vestige of her husband. I find it hard to believe that she could have killed them.’
Simon wanted to pat her hand, but restrained himself. It would be presumptuous. Instead he lowered his voice. He could all too easily remember his own wife, Meg, failing to understand human cruelty when she had been pregnant.
‘Lady, it is often hard to understand how a woman’s mind works when she is deranged. As we have been told, she was in a frenzy and that was why she killed the boys.’
‘Who saw her in a frenzy, though? I did not, and I have not heard anyone else say they did. It sounds like an assumption: Athelina is dead, the children are dead, so she must have killed them. If she did, she must have been mad, so she was in a frenzy.’
‘It makes some sense,’ Simon said soothingly. Women weren’t as rational as men. Well, apart from his Meg, of course, who was brighter than many men of his acquaintance. This wife of Nicholas’s wasn’t in Meg’s league, though. She was a pretty thing, but clearly she was upset because she was close to giving birth herself.
‘And another thing,’ she said.
Simon turned a patronising smile upon her. ‘Yes?’
‘You must have seen many dead bodies — as a bailiff, I mean?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Is it normal for a hanged woman to have those marks on her throat? What would have made them?’
Simon’s smile grew a little stiff as he wondered what she meant. But then he peered down at Athelina’s neck once more and decided it would be rash to dismiss this woman’s intuition. ‘Baldwin. Look at this!’
The knight was still smarting from the Coroner’s rebuff, but hearing Simon’s urgent tone, he glanced down, but just then there came the sound of sobbing, and all present turned towards the gate. There, walking slowly, holding in her arms the sobbing figure of Aumery, came Letitia, followed by her distraught sister-in-law, cradling her second little son in her arms.
‘I congratulate you, Serlo,’ Letitia spat as she neared him. ‘You looked after your sons so very carefully, so very well!’
Baldwin had nothing but sympathy for the miller. The man stared as though disbelieving, and then he put out a hand as though to touch his son’s face, but his wife drew Hamelin away from him. She stood staring, eyes wild, a woman driven insane, and Baldwin was shocked to see how blood coursed down the side of her head from a raking cut.
Suddenly she screamed again, a high, wordless shrill sound that tore at the hearts of all who stood there.
‘He was your son! All you had to do was give him to another woman to protect him, but you left him playing in our home, with no one to look after him! No one,’ she sobbed, falling to her knees, still holding her scalded son. ‘No one …’
She bent her head to his little body, and wept again for Hamelin.
Serlo said, ‘But I don’t understand … what happened? What’s wrong with him? Letty, for God’s sake tell me what happened.’
‘I offered to take both the little mites off your hands, but you refused to let me! You killed your son! You left them alone with their mother when she was in her bed, unable to care for them. Look at her! She ought to be there now, but because of you she’s here, bleeding, with a broken heart. All because of you.’
The Coroner stepped forward and glanced at Baldwin. The knight saw the indecision in his eyes, and quickly shook his head. While Serlo stood uncertainly, his eyes brimming and a single tear falling down one cheek, Baldwin moved to Sir Jules’s side and whispered a few words into his ear.
‘Wife, your child needs to rest in the church’, the Coroner said compassionately to Muriel. ‘Take him there, and pray for his soul.’ He looked at Letitia. She gave him a stiff nod, ignoring her brother-in-law, who stared after them in deep shock. Baldwin was relieved to see Iwan, as well as Alex the Constable, go to Serlo’s side and gradually draw him away.
‘I think, Coroner,’ Baldwin said quietly, ‘that we’ll have to leave this matter until later.’
‘Perhaps so,’ Sir Jules said, and he seemed glad of the fact. ‘And I shall have to remain here a little longer in order to hold an inquest on the child, too.’ He looked about him. ‘Nicholas, it would be cruel to ask that poor woman what happened now. She is in no fit state to speak. Will you have the jury come here again tomorrow morning, and we shall review this matter and hear the cause of this latest tragedy, too?’
‘Certainly.’
Simon, Baldwin saw, was staring at Athelina’s body, and now he caught the knight’s eye and beckoned. ‘Look,’ he said.
Baldwin followed his pointing finger. ‘What? Her neck?’
‘Scratches,’ Simon said bluntly.
Baldwin peered closer. When they had cut her down, they had left the rope about her neck, and until now he had not been near enough to study her flesh too closely. The murder of her children and her own subsequent suicide had seemed so convincing, he hadn’t deemed it necessary to look further. Now he cursed himself for a fool.