Jeanne groaned as the girl made as if to throw herself down the ladder. Edgar grabbed her at the last moment and lowered her back onto the hay.
‘Lady, you should go to bed.’
‘She can’t be left a moment, can she?’
Edgar shook his head.
‘This was all the fault of that Coroner?’
Edgar explained how he had found them and Jeanne scowled angrily. ‘Molest my maid, would he?’
‘I think it would be best to leave the matter,’ Edgar said. ‘If you accused him, he could make life difficult. Better to let things lie. I shall see that Petronilla is safe from him.’
‘He’s my hero. Edgar must love me too!’ Petronilla gurgled happily from the straw.
On the morning of St Giles’s feast, it was a sad little group which attended the church for Sir Gilbert’s burial service. Father Abraham stood before them and began speaking in a quiet, low monotone.
‘Dirige Dominus meus in conspectu tuo viam…’
Baldwin found it was difficult to concentrate. He had decided to attend with Jeanne to represent the Order which he and Sir Gilbert had both served, and yet now he was here he hardly knew why.
He had known Sir Gilbert from the time when the other knight had been at the Temple in Paris. Baldwin had been there as well, and the two men had been on nodding acquaintance. Nothing more than that, but it meant that there was a certain confusion of emotions as he stood watching the priest before the large hearse, the metal frame sitting over the dead bodies with the dark, threadbare cloth of the parish pall hanging over and concealing the corpses beneath.
Standing there at the final ceremony of a man who had once been a comrade in arms, a companion warrior-monk in his Order, Baldwin felt a rush of grief that threatened to overwhelm him for a moment. It was as if the death of this man was symbolic of the end of the Order which they both had served; as if Baldwin himself was the sole survivor of their warrior caste. It made him feel exceptionally lonely.
The service ended before he was ready, his mind still whirling with despair. He wished he could have told Jeanne about his membership of the Templars and about his present desolate mood but it was difficult: although he trusted to her solid commonsense he had never discussed the Templars with her. Many people believed the Church’s malicious propaganda against the Order and Baldwin could not tell how she would respond to hearing that he himself had been one. In any case, one look at her this morning told him that after sitting up much of the night with an inebriated maidservant, his wife was in no mood to listen.
Jeanne and he walked out with the bearers and stood staring down at the hole in the ground. The plot was not far from the church but was not in the yard itself.
Baldwin and his wife waited as the coffinless body wrapped in its cheap winding-sheet was rested in the bottom of the grave. Hick, who today was the gravedigger, wandered over and gazed down speculatively, leaning on his shovel. The priest was still in the churchyard seeing to the similarly shrouded figure of a woman. Baldwin gathered from listening to others witnessing her interment that she had died in childbirth. A woman and many children stood by her hole, staring down into it as the priest tossed soil onto her face. A young girl holding the hand of an older sister burst into shattering sobs.
Meanwhile Father Abraham strode towards Baldwin and Jeanne, the family trailing after him as he walked to a patch of clear ground outside the yard but near the wall. There Baldwin saw a woman standing with a tiny corpse, and he guessed it was this child’s birth which had caused the woman’s death. The priest spoke for a short while, begging God’s forgiveness for the baby’s sins, pleading for the life which had scarcely existed, that God would take his soul up to Heaven.
Baldwin sourly thought to himself that the child could hardly be guilty of many sins.
‘Sad business, that,’ said Hick. He eyed the family weeping at the small graveside. ‘Shame children can’t be buried in the yard with their mothers.’
‘In most parishes the priests allow them to be,’ Jeanne said, and hearing the tightness in her tone, Baldwin smiled and put his hand through her arm.
‘That a fact?’ Hick said, and spat on the ground. ‘Not here. Our Father Abraham, he sticks to the rules, he does.’
Baldwin was hardly listening. He was staring down again at the figure of Sir Gilbert.
Seeing the direction of his attention, the rat-catcher motioned towards the body. ‘You knew him?’
‘Not really,’ Baldwin said. ‘But I helped to find his body and investigate his death. He was a stranger to the town, and I knew he wouldn’t be allowed a grave in the yard.’
‘No, course not. Can’t have strangers buried in a Christian yard. Poor old sod! And he seemed so cheerful.’
‘Yes, poor devil,’ Baldwin agreed absently and then started. ‘What do you mean, “he seemed cheerful”?’
But Hick had no time to answer; Father Abraham was with them. Baldwin swallowed his urgency and concentrated while the priest ran through what sounded like a very terse version of the funeral rite. Finishing, Father Abraham stood looking down a moment, before suddenly hissing: ‘Lie there in great opprobrium, excommunicate! Your heresy at least is finished.’
And before the astonished Baldwin could angrily demand what he meant, the priest had swept around and was marching back to his church.
Chapter Sixteen
After attending a short Mass in the castle’s chapel, Simon went to the buttery and broke his fast with a hunk of bread washed down by a quart of thin ale. Feeling replete, he walked from the hall and stood in the doorway to the yard, idly scratching at an insect bite on his groin while he studied the servants and guests milling about in the yard.
It was a busy place, this castle. Much more so than Lydford, which was little more than a simple gaol now, with its courtroom above. Women hurried past carrying pails of milk; men rolled barrels ready to be stacked in the buttery; a girl walked slowly and carefully from the kitchen, not yet ten years old from the look of her, frowning with concentration, her tongue protruding pinkly as she took an over-full pitcher of cream to the hall; a pair of grooms recently returned from exercising a pair of Lord de Courtenay’s mounts rubbed them down with handfuls of straw; dogs snapped and barked, a pig wandered slowly rummaging through the detritus, and a cock crowed time after time while one of his hens called enthusiastically the loud cry that Simon’s father had once told him meant, ‘An egg, an egg, an egg!’
Simon rubbed at his back. He was one of a few men who had come alone, without a wife to keep him company and, since bedrooms were at a premium even in a castle the size of this he had been forced to find a bench to sleep on in the hall near the fire. Men with wives were allocated rooms with other couples so that the women should be spared the draughty hall and the indignity of enduring the lascivious gazes of other men at night. Simon had spent an uncomfortable night while drunken guests snored, servants giggled, men and maidservants coupled in the dark and dogs scratched flea bites. Gradually, to add injury to insult, Simon came to realise that he too had caught fleas.
But the sun, already high in the sky, was welcome and after his ale he felt a little more comfortable and less snappish. He fetched a new pint of strong ale, and took it outside to a low wall near the stables where he could sit and nod in the clear sunshine.
‘So, Bailiff. Did you sleep well?’
‘Sir Peregrine, a good morning to you. Yes, I slept well, I thank you,’ Simon lied cheerfully. ‘I trust you did too?’